Then the phone rang. I reached over, picked up the receiver, said hello. There was still a chance that something might change, that some little wheel might slip from the pre-set trajectory of the world. For a moment there was nothing audible in the receiver, and then a man’s voice apologized, said it was the wrong number, and hung up. I was convinced that the voice belonged to Ivan Matulić’s grandson, that he had found a way to persuade the staff members at the Art Centre switchboard to connect him so early to one of the guests but by mistake had given my room number instead of Daniel Atijas’s. I put the receiver back in the cradle, pressed my left hand to my chest, and did what I could to calm the pounding of my heart. To no avail, of course, because the heart does what it will, regardless of what we offer it as a measure of love or hope. I longed for the phone to ring again, to have the voice make the same mistake; and this time I’d listen carefully to be sure it was Ivan Matulić’s grandson. Nothing happened except my eyelids growing heavy, so I had to get up to escape slipping back into sleep. On my way to the bathroom my heart stopped pounding, which made it possible to urinate in peace, though afterward I had to wipe two drops of urine off my left thigh with a tissue. Our agreement from yesterday had been to meet for breakfast at nine o’clock sharp. Ivan Matulić’s grandson needed less than an hour and a half to drive from Calgary to Banff, which meant, as I confirmed with a quick glance at the clock, that he would be setting out soon. I looked at myself in the mirror, tucked my hair behind my ears, then stuck out my tongue and examined it carefully.
Someone told me or I read somewhere that the tongue is the most reliable indicator of changes in the functioning of the human organism, but though I had been staring at its reflection for years, I had learned nothing from it yet. I remembered how one of Nabokov’s characters had arrived at similar insights after carefully studying his excrement, but I had never been able to persuade myself to do that, and I always lowered the lid on the toilet bowl before I flushed. I laced up my hiking boots, packed a light jacket in my backpack, tossed in a pair of clean socks, and though all that didn’t take long, I was late by the time I got to the dining hall. Daniel Atijas was already seated at the table eating cornflakes and leafing, as I later saw, through a book with descriptions of mountain trails in Banff and the surrounding area. Without taking off my backpack I took two rolls, a pat of butter, and a little packet of honey, put them on a tray, took them to the table where Daniel Atijas was sitting, went back for coffee and again for sugar, and then sat down. All that time Daniel Atijas hadn’t looked up from his book. He’d lick his finger, turn the page; sometimes he’d flip to the index at the back or to the table of contents at the beginning. I sliced open the roll, spread the left half with butter and the right half with honey, then put them back together and took a bite. Crumbs dropped to the table, some floated to the floor, one bounced as far as the edge of Daniel Atijas’s book. A voice behind me mentioned stars, but when I turned, I didn’t see anyone. Daniel Atijas lifted his hand slowly up and behind his head, thrust it under his collar, and scratched. The dining room filled, it got noisier, and just as I had begun to hope that Ivan Matulić’s grandson wouldn’t show, there he was.
He was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, walking shoes, and a cloth hat. He refused the breakfast that Daniel Atijas offered him. He said he had had a coffee with a lot of milk on his way while driving, and that would hold him until noon, and then, he said, he’d have the sandwich he’d brought. In fact he’d brought two sandwiches, he said, but he was sure he’d only be able to eat one, and if that was the case, he said, he’d be glad to give one of us the other. As he was saying this he was looking at me as if everyone knew I was the one with the voracious appetite. If I’m not mistaken, Daniel Atijas only then looked up from reading his guidebook. Ivan Matulić’s grandson did not sit. He stood by the table, shifting from foot to foot, and every so often he raised his shoulders to keep his backpack from slipping any further. He did take off his hat and crumple it up in his hands. The waiter raised the coffee pitcher high in the air as if he were selling it at auction, and when the three of us shook our heads, he moved over to a table where artists from Mexico were sitting. Ivan Matulić’s grandson asked what trail we had chosen. He kept looking at me, though I was not the person who should be answering. I didn’t know anything either, though I did realize a little later that he must have known something, since he had come all ready for mountain climbing, which he could have known only if he had spoken earlier with Daniel Atijas. Never, I thought, is one act of betrayal enough; it is merely an introduction to a whole series of other betrayals, perfectly tucked one inside the next like those little Russian dolls that create a semblance of an endless series. Nothing told me what I should do, or rather whether I should do anything.
Perhaps it would have been easier for me if Ivan Matulić’s grandson had taken a seat, but he kept stubbornly standing, so I got a crick in my neck. The waiter went in the opposite direction, muttering something under his breath. He had thought for a long time, said Daniel Atijas, about where it would be best for us to go and had been torn between Johnston Canyon and one of the trails near Canmore, and he finally realized, he said, that in a day or two he’d be leaving here and he might never, hard as it was for him to say this, return to Banff, so this outing of ours into the mountains was a perfect chance for him to see once more, probably for the last time, some of the scenes that had made the greatest impression on him. Neither Ivan Matulić’s grandson nor I said anything. And besides, Daniel Atijas went on, he realized that so far he hadn’t, as is so often the case, seen what was nearest: Tunnel Mountain, on whose slopes the Centre stood, and so he’d decided, he said, that we would hike to its summit, where, the guidebook said, there was a beautiful view of the valley of the Bow River and the popular geological formations, the hoodoos, which, from the moment he first had seen them, had stayed with him. I was the first to nod, and then Ivan Matulić’s grandson said he agreed and that, faced with the same dilemma, he, too, would have chosen that trail. He had also read, said Daniel Atijas, that there was no tunnel through the mountain despite its name. When they were laying the plans in the late nineteenth century for a route to connect the eastern, Atlantic coast with the western, Pacific coast, said the guidebook, the first version of the plans included boring a tunnel through the mountain, but a better route was found, longer but much less expensive and less arduous to build.
The tunnel, it said, was never broached, yet the mountain kept its name, so in a symbolic sense there was some sort of passage there, though no one could traverse it. I interjected that this was the best possible outcome because Tunnel Mountain was sacred to the local Indians, who called it Mountain of the Sleeping Buffalo, and we could only imagine, I said, how much desecration would have resulted from boring such a tunnel. It would be tantamount, I said, to boring a hole through Buddha’s belly. The world is a crazy place, said Daniel Atijas, but luckily for all of us, it is not that crazy. I disagreed. I didn’t believe this to be a case of the triumph of reason; it was mere coincidence, and if no one had come up with an alternate route or had discovered such a route too late, we would now have a hollow mountain, and the whole region would look completely different. But how would I react, asked Daniel Atijas, to the claim that coincidence is the only true trajectory of fate, that fate is not determined by repetition and inevitability but by sudden departures from the predictable, by the addition of things that are new? Ivan Matulić’s grandson was still standing there; he had even begun scraping his shoes on the floor, making no bones about his impatience. I said I wouldn’t be able to answer that question, especially not right now, so early in the morning, and just when I smiled at Ivan Matulić’s grandson, we were getting ready to go. Daniel Atijas replied that he could not believe I was dismissing so lightly something that, he was profoundly convinced, lay at the heart of artistic creation, of inspiration itself.