Just then our hostess, the wife of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, sweaty and breathless, inserted herself between us with the demand that we all come down to the lower level, where the music, she said, was pounding and the beat was catchy. She pulled at our arms, pushed, nudged, dabbing the sweat from her forehead at the same time, until most of the people around us relented. So Daniel Atijas and I ended up suddenly alone in the big living room. The music was louder, the sound of the bass guitar and the thump of the drum crept into our feet, while quiet spread around us. The tenderness was gone from Daniel Atijas’s gaze — it had lasted longer than I could have hoped for anyway — and in its stead dawned curiosity. I reminded him of our first encounter in the dining hall. I’m the guy, I added, who made the claim that cities are like women. Daniel Atijas said that he remembered, but that then, as now, he could think of nothing except how different everything was here from the world in which he lived. He said it was as if he’d come from another planet, not from southeastern Europe. In his world, he said, there is only the present, and in the present one is actually living for the past, which everyone wishes they could change, while here, if he had understood correctly, the present is only an antechamber to the future, and the past, as it should be, is as unchanging as the mountains around us.
Or the prairie, I added, for if there is something unchanging, it is the prairie. What followed was a rambling conversation about nature, about a soul driven to despair by a longing for change, about love from afar, Chinese and Western astrology, the sacred sites of the Native Americans, the slava celebration as the crux of Orthodoxy among the Serbs, painting techniques, postmodernism, the cuisine of India, Borges’s Aleph, Wittgenstein’s fragments, Beckett’s silence, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, the day when all this would seem like a dream. Whether or not you were dreaming, said the wife of the director of the Literary Arts Programs when she crept up behind us, obviously having caught a few of our last words, I want you to be wide awake tonight and dancing. She grabbed us each by the hand and drew us toward the stairs leading down to the lower level of the house. Here we parted ways: our hostess took Daniel Atijas off to a corner where Mark Robinson and the two Japanese women were bouncing, and I was grabbed, as it later turned out, by a poet from Calgary, whom I immediately loathed, though it was hardly her fault that there was no way I could see Daniel Atijas between the sweaty heads and waving arms. I used a moment when someone was changing the tape or record to thank the poet for dancing with me and went up the stairs and out the door. The night was clear, the sky full of stars, the mountain peaks pale in the moonlight. At the fence by the front gate, as if waiting to come in, stood three deer. They call them elks, I told Daniel Atijas the next day, or wapiti, which in the language of the Aborigines means “white” or “whitish,” and that is usually the color of their rumps and little tails.
They wander around Banff, I said, like the sacred cows of India, but when they are provoked, I said, they can kill a man. I am like that, too, said Daniel Atijas. I am white, he said, I wander around Banff, and I have a nasty temper; the only thing I’m missing is the tail. Did that mean, he asked, that he might refer to himself as a wapiti? We had finished our descent down the steep path by the cemetery and were on our way along Lynx Street. That would be something to ask an Aborigine, I said, but I doubt they’d call a white man by the name they use for a noble beast, and while we’re on the subject of beasts, I said, we should first visit the Museum of Natural History. I had intended to play the role of guide that day and take Daniel Atijas through the most important buildings and parks in Banff. The Museum of Natural History is the place I always liked the most, so I suggested that it be our starting point, but had I known then of everything that would transpire and what sort of complicated trajectory this would propel us along, I would have taken him somewhere far, far away, maybe to the other side of town, or high into the mountains to a lake, though I’m not sure there is a distance or an altitude that can alter fate. I did not know all of that then, I knew nothing at the time, and I was the first to step into the building, which felt pleasantly cool after being in the June scorcher outside. I paid the entrance fee and immediately steered Daniel Atijas to a glass display case of stuffed birds. There was a long-eared owl I wanted to show him, but he was drawn, as I had been when I first visited, to a group of mountain goats and sheep, and almost like a child, he pressed his nose to the glass to have a closer look.
After that we visited the gray wolf, the buffalo, the bat, the golden eagle, the swan, and the hummingbird, and Daniel Atijas told me that the collection reminded him of a similar natural history museum in Belgrade, which he hadn’t thought of for years, and, come to think of it, he hadn’t been there for ages, for so long, in fact, that he wasn’t even certain whether it was still up and running, but when he’d last visited, probably on a school trip, he had wanted to stay there forever, and had even cooked up a scheme to hide in a corner somewhere because he had been so moved by the beauty of the animals and saddened, he said, by seeing them in such an unnatural setting, as they were at this museum, stuffed like so many empty sacks and before that, of course, slain by human hands. We went up to the second floor. We stopped before a display case with a lynx and then, in awe, went over to the grizzly. When we turned to look at the collection of fossils and minerals, we breathed a sigh of relief. And when we passed by what had been the office of a former director of the museum, now itself an exhibition space, and a display case with a musk ox, Daniel Atijas stopped before glassed-in shelves on which documents about the history of the museum were laid out. Never during all the years I had been coming to Banff had I even glanced at them, because I have never believed that history lies in documents and archival material and yellowed photographs. But Daniel Atijas was, by all accounts, different. Perhaps this is why he writes and I paint, and besides, history must be much more akin to the relation between word and silence lying at the heart — this I can surmise — of literature than to the relations between forms and volumes lying at the heart — and this I know — of the fine arts.
Whatever the case, Daniel Atijas stopped before the glassed-in shelves; for a time he didn’t move at all, and when he finally did, he said: Ah, I see. And added: Things never begin in a single point; a beginning must be an array of points. Then straight to my face he said: A single point means staying put; movement begins when the points proliferate. Had he not looked so much like someone who is not given to ranting, I really would have thought he’d gone mad. He saw that I hadn’t understood, and he drew my attention to the guest book that was open, propped against a corner of the shelf, and pointed to a specific name at the bottom left. It was someone’s signature, a little smudged in spots but legible. Ivan Matulić, it read, and next to that: Globetrotter from Croatia. And then came the date, June 22, 1924. The signature was beautiful, flowery, quite distinct from the indifferent signatures of the American tourists that followed, but it told me nothing except what was obvious at a glance: that many years before, also in the month of June, a man from Croatia had visited the spa at Banff. The ornate signature, I said, would give one to think that he really enjoyed his time at the hot springs. No, said Daniel Atijas, his enjoyment and the hot springs were not what mattered; what mattered was that Yugoslavia had already been a country by then for five or six years, yet this man was not disposed to refer to it as such and instead wrote that he was from only one part, which for him, for Daniel Atijas, was conclusive evidence that things were already beginning to unravel even before they had properly come together. From this very spot, he said, perhaps from right where we are standing, he said, stretches one of those lines, which, when sufficiently taut, he said, pulled the country apart as if it had never been there to begin with.