I also could have tossed it into the river and made paper boats out of the sheets of paper with writing and set them sailing after it. I could have gone into the woods, found a hollow tree, and thrown all the papers into it, including the unopened letter. A squirrel, I thought, would have been glad for such a cozy nest. Then I got up, went into the kitchen, found matches, and slowly, over the sink, burned everything: the photographs, the sheets of paper with writing and the notes, and finally the little white envelope. The paper burned quickly, easily; flames of different colors flickered up from the photographs; the envelope twisted, puffed, and stretched, then suddenly burned all at once, as if the fire were eating it from the inside. I turned on the faucet and rinsed the sooty remains down the sink and off my fingers. I remembered the box and the paper that everything was wrapped in, so I burned that, too, piece by piece. The only things I didn’t burn were the rubber bands, which I left in the drawer with the eating utensils, though just in case I wiped them off well with a towel, first a damp one, then a dry one. I opened the window, carefully inspected the sink and the whole kitchen, and then sat again at the table. I was satisfied. I could breathe more easily: aside from the smell of smoke that was still on my fingers, which wouldn’t last long, there was nothing that said there had ever been a package from Ivan Matulić’s grandson. My head drooped again, and, a little faster this time, I rested my forehead on the table. I will not fall asleep, I remember thinking, and then I woke up in pitch-black darkness, in the middle of the night, with a crick in my neck and dry lips.
At first I was convinced that I had found myself in a sea of absolute silence, but then, gradually, I was able to discern the nocturnal sounds, the crunching, scratching, panting, humming, so in the end I had to wonder how I had ever been able to fall asleep, and after that, of course, even when I lay down on the narrow cot, against the rules that forbade sleeping in the studios, sleep did not come easily. At exactly seven forty-five Daniel Atijas knocked at my door. He was in a white shirt, jeans, and sneakers, freshly shaven, neatly combed, ready to travel. I invited him in, and he reminded me as he entered that he had only fifteen minutes because at exactly eight he had to be at breakfast. He did not say who he’d be seeing there, but to be frank, that had ceased to interest me. I was tired, underslept, nervous, and I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, to see him leave, travel away, and show up finally in that unfortunate country of his. Before this it had already occurred to me that my vision had been the result of his visit, and that he should be held in quarantine, stripped of his right to move about freely — not only he but everyone from there — until the world was sure they had stopped spreading the contagion of conflict and destruction. Several days ago, I know, such a thought would never have crossed my mind, but now everything was different, including me. We could waste no time, however, since both he and I were in a hurry, and fifteen minutes is not much, so I stepped back from the door, let him in, offered him a seat, put a cup of coffee in front of him, along with a sugar bowl and a dish with honey, and then, almost in the same movement, without losing a moment, I continued to the other side of the studio, where I brought the pad with the pile of drawings from.
Until then I had thought it would be enough just to set it down on the table and have him look through the drawings, but as I came over clutching the pad tightly, our eyes met, and I saw that he was expecting me to say something. He hadn’t struck me as the type of person to whom one needed to explain one’s actions, but that was when we’d first met, and now, after everything that had happened, there was nothing I could be certain of. I looked at my watch: thirteen more minutes until eight. I told him I would like his opinion on the drawings I was putting in front of him, drawings I had spent many hours on over the past weeks, so in a multitude of different ways, which I would not go into now, I said, they were connected to his presence in Banff, and I felt it was important to show them to him despite the pressure he was certainly under as he prepared to go, for during these last days, I said, I had come to value the aptness and subtlety of his ability to gauge things, and an appraisal such as his, as he must know from his own experience, could be decisive motivation for further work or, indeed, for giving up altogether, since it would allow the artist to jettison needless ballast. I had not meant to sound like such a sycophant, but sometimes words say what they want to say, and there is nothing we can do about it. I looked at my watch again: eleven minutes to go. I opened the pad with the drawings and sat across from him. On the first drawing, a gently curving line depicting a furrowed brow, he spent almost a minute. Then he leafed through the drawings faster and faster, halting at those that drew his attention — for instance, one I had called Thirteen Views of the Left Ear—though a little later, when the drawings became more complete and the figure on them more visible, he slowed the rhythm of his leafing, and perhaps just when he had come to the drawing on which all the individual elements first formed a whole, at that moment, he seemed to stop breathing altogether.
It was five to eight, and a minute later, at four to eight, he glanced at his watch and said that soon he would have to be going. The face was still disintegrating within the space of the drawing, sometimes it even slipped off and then reappeared, full of empty spaces, but in the next two or three minutes it became quite clearly defined, though this was maybe only my impression, since I was sitting across from Daniel Atijas, and the whole time, despite the angle at which I was looking at his real face, I could compare the elements of the drawings with details of the model. At precisely eight o’clock, Daniel Atijas raised the last drawing, studied it while holding it to the light, as if looking for the watermark in the sheet of paper, and then turned it and laid it on the pile with the others. He looked at me over the table, and for a moment I thought he might reach over and put his hand on mine. He did not, of course, do that. He is waiting, I thought, for me to say something first, but I really did not know what to say. I looked at the clock and saw the big hand shiver and move a notch. As if he had been waiting for this, Daniel Atijas got up, lifted the drawings, and flipped over the bundle so that the wavy furrow was on top. He touched it, cautiously, as if it were piping hot, and then he turned, mumbled that he was late, and headed for the door. I didn’t have to look at the clock again.