I took it carefully, as if it were a hot iron, put it in my backpack, tightened the cord and tied it in a double, lopsided bow, and finally said I was ready for us to go. All of us are ready, said Daniel Atijas, and suddenly a thrill shot through me as if I were part of an expedition to the North or South Pole. I could see it all so clearly: Ivan Matulić’s grandson and Daniel Atijas and the people who, having finished with their breakfast, were leaving the dining hall and crossing the street and the whole Centre and myself, all of whom I saw from behind, as if I were watching everything from a foot or so behind my back. There was a harsh light emanating from everything, but the light didn’t disperse or spread; it remained as an inch-or-two-wide edging around the contours of the bodies and buildings, reminding me of stories of auras and photographs of plants surrounded by a golden glow. Daniel Atijas and Ivan Matulić’s grandson had already walked away, and all I could do was take several unsure steps, but then I had to stop. I needed to go up the dozen steps that led to Saint Julian Road, but I didn’t dare move my foot forward and guess where each step ended and the contour of its glaring edge began. I was convinced that if I took just one more step, I would fall, perhaps even tumble into the crack between the real edge and the glaring edge, and no one would be able to fish me out, as if I’d fallen into a crack in a glacier. I took this as the last warning to abandon the hike up Tunnel Mountain and opened my mouth to shout, to call Daniel Atijas and Ivan Matulić’s grandson to come back, but when I looked up, I could see that they had already made it to the curve in the road, and, engrossed in their conversation, they couldn’t have cared less where I was.
I cannot pinpoint exactly what it was I was feeling then. Words like “rage” or “letdown” or “desolation” express nothing to me. Besides, I had no feeling then for words: I was staggering under the weight of pure emotion. Whatever the case, just then the harshly glaring auras faded, and I could mount the stairs and hurry after Ivan Matulić’s grandson and Daniel Atijas, that is, hurry to the place where they’d disappeared from sight. And while I was trotting along and my backpack was bouncing on my back, I swallowed saliva full of bitterness, as if I had been chewing a bad-tasting plant from the plains. When I caught up to them, I was so out of breath that all I could do was listen to what they were saying. Only Daniel Atijas was speaking. He was talking in a didactic voice without pause, as if reciting something he knew by heart, and Ivan Matulić’s grandson was nodding in assent, though it was immediately clear to me that he gave no credence to what Daniel Atijas was saying. By all indications they were resuming the conversation that had started out in front of the store, or who knows when, for as time passed I was increasingly convinced that Daniel Atijas was leading a different life from the one I had allotted him or attempted to define. At one moment, a few days ago, I had been so certain that he was spending nearly all his free time with me, that he was every bit as devoted to me as I was to him, but now I knew that my attempts to take over his life completely had not worked and, furthermore, that he may not even have noticed what I was up to, and that, in other words, he had never for a moment seen in me someone who was different in any way from the other people he met at the Centre.
This was a horrible thought, but sometimes there is no other option, and horror is all, or only, what we get. I should, it seems, have said something about that then, because it might have been more understandable to Ivan Matulić’s grandson than what Daniel Atijas was telling him. He was talking about the past, speaking of the need for forgiveness, insisting on the value of truth, but there was nothing practical in it; he was not showing a way to heal, the necessity of acknowledging defeat as the only way to move toward victory. Ivan Matulić’s grandson nodded earnestly, which, out of the corner of the eye, in passing, might appear to be a sign of genuine confirmation and rapport, a sign of readiness to embrace the words as they reached him. However, had Daniel Atijas taken a closer look, had he stopped, looked face-on at him, in the eyes, he would have seen that nothing of what he had been saying stuck, that his words were crumbling as soon as they left his lips, and that now, like a fine dust, and of this I was convinced, they were scattered on the ground behind us, coating Saint Julian Road the way leaves cover it in autumn. There is nothing so pathetic, I thought, as a speech by someone who has no faith in words. Perhaps I should have said this aloud; maybe everything would have played out differently had I done that, but I didn’t, in fact, want to get embroiled in something which, I was convinced, was in no way mine, and which, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t really understand. I remember that during one of our first walks, Daniel Atijas had told me how I should picture a civil war raging in Canada and how my country was disintegrating into noise and fury, but those images, no matter how horrible they were when I pictured them, were not authentic, they did not teach me anything, because in imagined, unlike genuine, experience, the knowledge that what is happening is not real is ever present: there is always an exit.
In real experience, I’d said, nothing helps, not dreams or illusions, not shutting one’s eyes, and that is where we left it. Daniel Atijas had dismissed this out of hand, I’d shrugged helplessly, a cloud scudded across the sky, an elk rubbed against a tree, tourists clicked their cameras. Remembering that is when it occurred to me that we had never had our picture taken, so I went over to Ivan Matulić’s grandson and Daniel Atijas and told them it would be a good idea for me to run back and get my camera, as this would be our last chance to get a picture of us together. Had I known how true this was, I probably would have chosen other words, but at the time, driven by the additional thought of the necessity of destroying all my drawings, I was thinking of the document, of the actual presence of a photograph, of something that could remain as a trace of Daniel Atijas beyond the administrative records of the visit, his lecture, and expenses, and I was therefore poised to race back to my room and even, if need be, to the studio, for I wasn’t sure where I had left my camera. But the two of them were adamant. No pictures, they said, no way. And besides, added Daniel Atijas, once a person departs, it is a bad idea to return. That confused me because he did not strike me as the type of person who would buy into such superstitions, though, I thought, if people do come to Banff to become somebody else, maybe this simply confirms the subversive power of the Rocky Mountains.
What I mean to say is that from the very start I believed Daniel Atijas to be an extremely rational person, which is why, after all, and this I knew, he could not understand the collapse of his country, which was irrational and defied all logic. It is easiest, he had said at the lecture, to refer to the inevitability of history, but history, like fate, is not inevitable; exactly like fate, it is the result of free choice. When I asked him several days later to explain what he’d meant, he refused, justifying himself with the claim that no matter what we may think of history, once it runs its course, it can never change, which means, he added, that any conversation about it is spurious, as is conversation about fate. I told him I didn’t believe in fate, at which he laughed and answered that belief doesn’t matter, because lack of belief in fate can’t touch fate itself. Fate, he added, is what happens, and since our existence is strung together of things that happen, that means that we exist only in fate, never outside it. This, it seems to me, was when we were standing by the cemetery wall, not the first time but later, when, if I’m not mistaken, we were on our way up the path leading to the Centre. Now all the days seem like a cluster of fleeting moments, but at the time they had length and fullness, and I believed they would never end. The story about fate seems fateful to me now, my disbelief notwithstanding, but isn’t that the way it always is? Future events, things that have not yet happened, always imbue the events that have passed with meaning; they become confirmations of something we could never have predicted but which afterward, after the events that are their consequence, seems crystal clear.