Daniel Atijas wanted to know exactly what the giants were called, and I had to repeat the name several times: hoodoos, hoodoos, hoodoos. Hoodoos, said Daniel Atijas. Yes, I said, we would describe the hoodoo as the result of erosion, the effect of water and wind, while for Native Americans, as with all else in nature, they were yet another life form. For me, too, said Daniel Atijas, and that is when he launched into his story of dawn and dusk, transformation and cross-fading. For me it’s different, I told him, because for me everything needs to be measured and outlined with precision — there can be nothing without edges. I have to know, I said, where one thing begins, whatever it may be, and where the next thing, whatever it is, ends. The world is a mosaic, I said, and every stone is distinct, yet meaning accrues only to the whole. Outside the whole, I said, each little piece is nothing, or, at best, an enigma. Or a secret, said Daniel Atijas, gesturing at the hoodoos, just as these formations are a secret, or an enigma, because if we declare them to have come about by happenstance, we strip nature of all its meaning, which, he said, sounded undoable to him, but if we call them a secret, or perhaps an enigma, then we are fully equating nature with sentient beings just, he said, like us. I stopped and asked whether he was sure he had come from the plains, because I found his thinking so startling. He answered that he most definitely had; he was from the region of Vojvodina, which is actually a southern stretch of the Pannonian Plain, which used to be covered, long ago, by sea, and where the Romans, the Huns, the Ostrogoths, the Slavs, and the Avars, among others, had lived, while today Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians, Romanies, Jews were living there, so the ferment begun in the sea depths hadn’t stopped, he said, on dry land.
But, he said, he wasn’t sure why his remarks had startled me, for he felt that in me, since I also came from a place that had once been a sea floor, he had an ally, and he even saw in me, to be frank, a kindred spirit such as he hadn’t encountered in some time. My heart pranced, my eyes welled with tears, but I pretended nothing was happening and stared fixedly at the rock figures. I had something different in mind, I said, the fact that on the plains most people do not see beyond the perimeter of their property, and anything that begins beyond where their field of wheat or rapeseed ends doesn’t exist for them. One might expect plains to expand one’s horizons, but instead, I said, they shrink them, circumscribe them, impoverishing a person to the extreme, limiting him to only as far as he can see, so the person of the plains, I said, is always at a loss, regardless of where he happens to be. Mountains, on the other hand, I said, mountains are strange, and instead of imposing limits, they are the most freeing, so a person of the mountains, who surely must have his limitations, has more breadth than a person of the plains, which at first glance sounds highly illogical and which no one would ever say, I said. He himself certainly would not have said that, said Daniel Atijas, because he had always been convinced of the exact opposite, and he even mentioned an Austrian writer who wrote dark books about selfish and narrow-minded Austrians obsessed with prejudice and who kept repeating that this was all because they lived in mountains, while he, he said, could think of no one who had written anything like that about people from the plains.
This is not proof, of course, he said, but it sounds pretty convincing, with which I had to agree, especially because I couldn’t come back to him with any examples from the history of painting; I could only say that there were many fine artists who had left behind them paintings of plains and mountain peaks in which there were often human figures, but these offered no hints of the impact that the plains or mountains might have had on the figures or whether those from the mountains would have been depicted differently had they been shown mid-plain, or vice versa. I asked myself that same question at the studio late that night, the same night I dreamed of the president of the Banff Centre. I was looking over the sketches and drawings, adding a line or shade in places, and wondering whether everything would have been different had I met Daniel Atijas on the plains, in Saskatchewan, and whether the endless breadth of prairie would have made the features of his face, in that earthly sea, crumble and blanch like animal bones. Outside, day was already breaking, the birds were starting to chirp, a squirrel scampered across the roof, and when I opened the door, I saw an elk sniffing the branches behind the neighboring studio. I went off to my room, took a shower, resisted the temptation to lie down again, sat in an armchair to wait for them to start serving breakfast, and here I was woken by the ringing of the phone. It was nine sharp, and at first, as I lurched out of my dream, I didn’t recognize Guy Fletcher’s voice. I’ve found it, he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about, I couldn’t even figure out how to tell him so, but the words slowly moved into the right places and finally I remembered what it was he was aiming to say. He had found, he said, the slip of paper with the name and address of Ivan Matulić’s grandson, and not only that, he said, he hadn’t stopped there; he went right ahead and called the man, which was, he said, last night, as soon he had found the slip of paper, which, until that very moment, he had been absolutely convinced he would never lay hands on. In brief, he said, Stephen had agreed to come and meet us, and that is what he wanted to let me know, why he’d called, and it’s not that he had waited this late to call, he said, no, he had tried to find me the night before, but no one had picked up, not even at midnight, so, he said, he had begun to fret, for the number of tourists over the years who had miscalculated how far away something was or who had come too close to a cliff edge was not small, and had I not picked up the phone this time, he said, he was poised to call the police, but now he was relieved, he could feel himself regaining his composure and feel his good mood returning, and now he could, he said, await Stephen’s arrival calmly, which they had set for two in the afternoon, and after that, for instance at four, we, Daniel and I, could meet up with him, he said, but before he was able to continue, I quickly thanked him, confirmed that we would be waiting for Stephen at four out in front of the museum, and hung up. Daniel Atijas, however, did not come down to breakfast, or he might have gone before I got there, nor was he up in his room when I knocked a little later at his door. I scribbled a message on the back of an old receipt and pushed it under the door.
Banff is not a large town, and the Centre is even smaller, but when you don’t know where to look for someone, size is moot. I glanced into the restaurant, walked through the gallery, went to the beginning of the path running by the cemetery: nowhere did I see Daniel Atijas. I returned to the tennis court, went down to the Sally Borden building, leaned on the railing of the little terrace, and peered through the glass wall of the pool. Two women were floating in the water, two men were dozing on deck chairs: none of them Daniel Atijas. I left and set out up the hill toward the wooded area where the studios are. At the beginning of the path between the clusters of the practice huts for the musicians I stopped and listened for a few minutes to the muted strains of a cello. The sun was already high in the sky: it was looking as if today would be warmer than yesterday. The cello fell silent, and when it sounded again, I crossed the little wooden bridge and headed toward my own studio. If nothing else, I thought, at least I’ll be able to get out of the baking heat. In my message to Daniel Atijas I had written that I would be in my room at three, and if he hadn’t turned up by then, I would be waiting for him at four in front of the Whyte Museum, and I reminded him to wear a hat and bring lip balm. I could have written so much more, since he struck me as the type who pays no attention to his needs, someone who is heedless of himself, though I also knew I should tread carefully, for he also looked like the type who does not like to be told so, and who in his apparent, or perhaps genuine, neglect sees a kind of attention. This attitude sounds complicated, but it was simple — much simpler, in any case, than my efforts to find the right line for the right face in the space delimited by the perimeter of a sheet of paper.