I entered the studio, put water on for coffee, took out the file with the information about Daniel Atijas, spread my papers and photographs around on the floor, stood up, sat down, stood up again, flipped open a sketch pad, poured the coffee, sat again, arranged the photographs in a series, arranged the drawings in another, shook my head, rubbed my face, propped my elbows on the edge of the table, and when I looked up at the clock, it was already noon, nearly twelve thirty, so there was still time to hope, to fend off despair. After all, even if Daniel Atijas had not shown up, if he had perhaps gone with someone to Calgary, which would have been ridiculous in the extreme, since Ivan Matulić’s grandson was on his way from Calgary to Banff, even then I would have gone to the museum alone, though, to be frank, I didn’t know what I would have had to say to this grandson or how I would have kept him there until Daniel Atijas showed up. I went on shuffling through the papers on the floor. Of the four stories of his that I had, I knew two nearly by heart, one of them I didn’t like, and one I didn’t understand at all. In the story I didn’t understand, made up of four long fragments, a young writer, never named, wakes up in the middle of the night after having a dream in which he has clearly seen and read the best story that could ever be written, but when he wakes up and sits at his desk to write it down, he makes no headway. What he writes is more like gibberish than a story, and after many attempts, which turn his entire life into a futile stab at re-creating the story of his dreams, he finally recalls the first sentence — and instantly loses all desire to write any further.
This is the gist of the first fragment. In the second, the world has stopped turning; the whole cosmos stands still; eternal day begins on one hemisphere, eternal night on the other. No one pays attention, but when the temperature starts rising on one hemisphere while steadily dropping on the other, chaos ensues, about which the story says, “Never, especially now, have there been any words that would suffice.” The fragment ends, “In any case, we did not vainly believe in silence.” The third fragment was a meticulously kept record, catalogue-like, of a young woman’s stroll down a main street in the pedestrian zone of a large city. She goes down one side, then crosses over and comes back to where she started. Along the way she stops at every shoe store — there are nine of them in total, four on the first side, five on the other — and in each of the seven store windows she sees at least one pair of shoes dear to her heart. She pays no attention to any of the other stores, except a kiosk where she purchases cigarettes and a pack of condoms. In the last fragment, the longest, the writer appears again, but this time he is old and decrepit; he can barely remember the titles of the books he has written, and when he does remember, he is no longer sure what they are about. Outside it’s night, late, but he cannot fall asleep. “He stopped sleeping,” the story reads, “a long time ago” and sits out on the terrace of his apartment above the main shopping street in the town where he lives. The sky above him is dark, and the darkness may be as dense as it is precisely because the street is brightly lit by the reflection shining off the store windows, particularly the stores where they sell Italian shoes.
“If this were a dream,” thinks the writer, “and if I were to wake up now, maybe I would be able to write the world’s best story.” But no matter how tightly he shuts his eyes, he cannot make himself fall asleep. This is how the story ends, though it would be better to say that here it only begins. No matter how I tried, I wasn’t sure I had understood it fully; no matter how many threads I found among the fragments, I still had the sense that the central thread was eluding me; no matter how I tried to discover the right pathway between the many layers of waking and sleeping, at the end the story left me beyond its perimeter, as if I were a person knocking at an open door, able to glimpse a slice of the scene inside but lacking the strength to push open the heavy door and enter a space that might be himself. Who knows how many times I had read the story over the past five-six days. I never asked Daniel Atijas for its true meaning and probably never will, because I knew what he would say — the same thing I say when asked a question like that: artists do not explain, they create. For an artist to start explaining his work is a sure sign that something is wrong. Faced with a work, why should we believe words about it? And when a work is fashioned of words, that is when one should least believe the words, for if the work does not speak outside the medium in which it was created, then it is stifled and constrained by its physical qualities. Worst of all is when I hear people speak of the “masterful strokes” of my brush, when critics hold forth on the way I apply paint, as if the painting is nothing more than canvas, paint, brush, and frame.
So when they ask me, I say nothing, I am at a loss. Someone will say I am no good at speaking, but this is not true. The only thing I desire is not to explain my painting in words, because I haven’t conceptualized it in words. A painting begins as a painting, in images, just as a story, I presume, begins as a story, in words, though not in the words themselves but in the spaces between, somewhere between silence and articulation. A story is not a simple collection of words, just as a painting is not a simple collection of visual elements. And a painting, one could say, comes about in the space between the images. Our works, I said to Daniel Atijas one evening, exist precisely because there are always those blank spaces between the words, between the visual forms, and when the day comes when the interspace is filled, writers will stop writing and painters will jettison their paintings and drawings. He merely shook his head and, addressing no one in particular, including me, said that the apocalypse never comes alone. I turned to look at the door of his room as if the apocalypse were in the doorway. It wasn’t, just as there was no one, a moment later, at the door to my studio when, driven by the thought that someone was knocking, I raced over to open it. I stepped outside and looked down the path, then up it. Near the neighboring studio I saw a squirrel, that was all, but squirrels, which may be aggressive, have not yet reached the point of knocking on people’s doors in search of hazelnuts and peanuts. I went back into the studio, fiddled with rearranging a few of the pages and two-three photographs, then put everything back into the file and briefly focused on the drawings, adding yet another line, not entirely necessary but still appealing, and then I slipped them quickly into the sketch pad.
Three o’clock arrived very soon, and it was high time for me to be off. I waited until almost three thirty: the phone didn’t ring, no one knocked, no one called my name, and soon, when there was not a moment left to lose, I had to go back along the same path, the one that ran by the cemetery, where I had once tried to explain to Daniel Atijas that some people are forever outward bound, as was he, while others are forever inward bound, as am I, though I didn’t tell him that part at the time. I went down Wolverine Street, cut across Grizzly, went through a few back alleys and then down Buffalo, and headed toward the river and the Whyte Museum. I don’t know what I was expecting when Guy Fletcher informed me of the meeting with Ivan Matulić’s grandson, probably nothing, for meeting him held no interest for me, but even had I harbored any expectations, the man I saw waiting in front of the museum steps could not have met them. I didn’t think this because he was small, gaunt, with sunken black eyes and thin lips, but because of the layers of grief or a similar emotion that were dripping off his face, which he made no effort to conceal. I couldn’t say that he was relishing the grief or similar emotion, but it was clear, or so it seemed to me at least, that the pain didn’t bother him, and that, as an attitude, had always bothered me. I went over, introduced myself, and said my acquaintance was running a bit late, I was sure he would be here shortly, and we could see where to take it after that. The grandson shrugged. I didn’t know what more to tell him, and he, obviously, didn’t know what to ask me.