He would not, however, he said, want me to think he was now going to moan and groan; the wheel of time is a primitive device, and unlike all other wheels, it can turn in only one direction, forward, but he could not, he said, resist the allure of speculation, of imagining what if this or that had not happened — for instance, what if Ivan Matulić had written “Yugoslavia” in the book instead of “Croatia.” A word created the world, and a word can destroy it, he said, as the kabbalists knew full well, and every lapse is costly, so when Ivan Matulić, probably without a second thought, wrote what he wrote, he gashed the soil of Yugoslavia, which never later healed. Who knew, said Danijel Atijas, that he himself would take such a long trip only to arrive where he’d begun? Symbolically speaking, of course, he said. He was not so crazy, though he might seem crazy, as to claim that the collapse of Yugoslavia had begun in Banff on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Misery and defeat so coursed through him that this was the first time I thought of reaching out and touching him. There are diseases, he continued, that we never recover from; they stay inside us, he said, as a necessary counterbalance to health, and as time passes, he said, we become more and more convinced that without it, without the disease, we would never be well, and so it was with him, he said: he was carrying within him his former country like a kind of troth, like a disease that kept returning, though now, he said, he knew that the country had been condemned from the start to a fragile existence and that one day, sooner or later, it was bound to fold.
He gestured toward the glassed-in shelf and said that he held nothing against Ivan Matulić; for that matter, he envied him for having been in Banff so long ago, at a time when there must have been fewer tourists and cars and, he assumed, more, many more, birds and wild beasts. I know a host of facts about the development of tourism in Banff, but I felt this was not the right moment to share them, and I could see that though Daniel Atijas seemed to be regaining his composure, it was only a mask that would drop from him with a thud as soon as he was by himself. So I suggested that we get a cup of coffee somewhere and take a break, remarking that many people’s first visit to Banff leaves them feeling irritable, unaccustomed as they are to the rarefied, dry air, and that this irritation is, in essence, exhaustion, but they don’t realize it. Daniel Atijas wouldn’t hear anything of the sort and demanded that we keep to our plan, which we had spent a full two hours mulling the previous evening at the small bar in the Sally Borden building. The plan had, of course, been my idea, and it was designed so that Daniel Atijas would spend almost a whole day with me, touring the museums, galleries, bookstores, and historical monuments, but now I was prepared to give up on all of that, which I told him, despite the anguish with which I uttered the words. Fortunately, Daniel Atijas was more stubborn than I. If the plains connect us, he said, we won’t allow mountains to keep us apart. We went outside. The heat was waiting for us like a trusty dog. Daniel Atijas’s lips were chapped from the dry air, and from time to time he would peel off crisp flakes of dry skin.
We walked in silence among the conifers, carefully dodging bird and deer droppings. Sometimes, said Daniel Atijas, he felt like an animal from a zoo or a nature reserve, particularly when he had a chance, as he did now, to travel somewhere, because all the years spent more or less in isolation must have left their mark, and that, in his opinion, was the main reason he had reacted with such passion. In a way, he said, he was forever choked by the feeling that he didn’t know how to behave properly; bereft of all contact, he had lost nearly every chance of comparing himself to others, to the rest of the world, yet, he said, every time he was in a new setting, he could not fend off the impression that everyone was watching him as if he were a sort of weird beast, staring at him, he said, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes in disbelief, and sometimes with unconcealed hatred. Finding oneself in a disconnect like that, he said as we were coming out onto the riverbank, a person cannot maintain his balance forever, and sooner or later, sooner more often than later, he will begin to stagger, and ultimately, he’ll fall. Before he came to Banff, he said, he had been in a permanent state of free fall; he could barely stand on his own two feet. The last time he’d walked upright had been three or four years ago, during demonstrations in Belgrade, but now that he was here, he said, he was feeling again that he had a spine, that he was standing on his feet without teetering, without a nagging sense of doubt, without a hunched back, which was probably, he said, owing to life in the mountains, because the mountains force you to always gaze upward at the peaks, to throw your head back until something clicks in your neck, to think of courage, ascent, risk, challenge.
I felt I should rise in defense of the plains and said that things aren’t so bad on the plains, either, and that a person can also lift his head skyward there, especially at night, when the heavens groan under the weight of the stars. Daniel Atijas accepted this, but quickly added that the difference lies in having to fling your head back to see the peaks when you are in the mountains; when you are on the plains, you can look straight ahead, be indifferent, yet still see sky — and stars, he added. He asked me what the name of the river was where we were standing, so I told him it was the Bow, but I didn’t know why, just as I didn’t know who had named it. Sometimes remaining nameless is better, I said, because then every name can be yours. Daniel Atijas agreed, or at least I thought he did, for he didn’t say anything and went on staring at the facing riverbank. The river was shallow, quick, and, as we found when we crouched and dipped in our fingers, very cold. It is time, Daniel Atijas said, for us to keep moving. He shook his hand and flicked drops of water in all directions. We followed the same route back among the conifers and, by the animal droppings, crossed the street, where again I tried to persuade him to call it a day and have a cup of coffee, and we turned into Bear Street, which took us over to the Whyte Museum. Here on the wide steps I made a new mistake, without meaning to, of course, but a mistake it was, and once it was made, nothing else mattered. So, while we were on our way to the entrance, I recalled that a man I knew, Guy Fletcher, worked at the museum archive, and that he, as I immediately told Daniel Atijas, might know something about that Croatian globetrotter.