David Albahari - Globetrotter

If this was a warning, I thought, then it warned of a void; if it was advice, it was also warning of a void, but between the two voids the difference was vast. The first void spoke of absence, of the absence of absence, while the second spoke of presence, of absence as fullness. I was convinced that this was the meaning of the blank sheet of paper, just as I was convinced that Daniel Atijas had slipped it into my room, and then, driven by that unconvincing thought, I dropped onto the bed and straightaway, fully clothed, fell fast asleep. I am more inclined, however, to believe that I wasn’t sleeping, because what I saw when I dreamed might be better termed a vision, events observed with eyes wide open. There is always a moment in a dream or immediately after waking when a dreamer’s consciousness alerts him to the fact that what he was seeing was a dream. A vision is more real than a dream, and instead of playing with events from the past, a vision is nearly all focused on the future. A dream is guesswork, and a vision is a warning, which means that they are in no way similar. What I saw, flung as I was across the bed like a bedspread, was about the future, no doubt about it. When the vision ceased, I was overcome by an exhaustion one never feels after regular sleep and by a longing to tell Daniel Atijas about all of this, even though he was leaving soon, but I knew that after everything that had happened, I had to wait for morning, just as I knew that I should show him the portraits in the sequence in which I had laid them out in the studio, no matter what. This didn’t mean that I saw any connection between the drawings and the vision, but if there was something they had in common, it was how they were different.

The portraits spoke of calm and superiority, while the vision expressed agitation and debacle, the only similarity being that I perceived the vision as a sequence of scenes, just as the portrait was a sequence of drawings. The vision, in brief, showed my country in flames. I was surprised, frozen, and resisted with every ounce of my being, because everything in me said something like that could not happen. Canada in flames! When Daniel Atijas mentioned the possibility, I had dismissed it flatly, but now I saw, clear as a bell, how buildings in Montreal were toppling, how Indians battled the Quebecois, or rather fought a detachment of Quebec police who appeared from somewhere, apparently having trained for years, and I saw the fresh scalps of white men and Indians hanging from the branches of century-old trees, and then clashes broke out within the Quebec police, Quebecois against Anglo-Quebecers, and then volunteers from Ontario and Manitoba joined the fray; at the same time, in the left corner of my field of vision, Indians from British Columbia declared their reservations to be free territory, white racists from Alberta shot the first Arabs and Chinese, the prairie was ablaze in Saskatchewan, and only in the Atlantic provinces was there a deceptive calm, though the first skirmishes had begun on the streets of Halifax and in the rural areas of Newfoundland. The sky was glowing red over the North Pole, the polar ice cap was melting, and no one knew what to do, especially when the tower on the parliament building in Ottawa swayed slowly, then faster and faster, until it fell. Then I awoke, or maybe it’s that I fell asleep, or lay there confused in the dark as it grew lighter.

Who can say? Perhaps all of it happened at once, perhaps it is happening still, perhaps the past comprises all possibilities, and we, at an easy arm’s length, choose the options that suit us best? I hadn’t had a chance to talk about this with Daniel Atijas, though I meant to tell him about the dream, to hear what he’d have to say, and to put forward the ideas prompted by the vision, if it was a vision. When I finally wrenched free of the labyrinth of visual impressions just as the room was growing visible, I realized I should paint this vision of mine as a triptych of vast dimensions, with many allusions to William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. I also resolved to read Dante again, though I am not sure why. In that, I thought, Daniel Atijas was the person who could have helped, but the day, the last day he spent at the Art Centre, was too short, he told me when I called him, for all the things other people had planned for his departure. He was to have lunch with the director of the Literary Arts Programs and the director’s wife, dinner with the president of the Art Centre and his wife, and he hoped to make the rounds of the places he liked, do his last shopping, return books to the library, and then, around ten in the evening, he was going to get together with Mark Robinson and the other artists he had become close to one way or another and have a farewell drink. It wouldn’t be bad, Daniel Atijas remarked, for me to join them, which I refused with disgust, of course, though I tried to keep the disgust from showing, claiming that I was tired and upset. Then breakfast is all we have left, said Daniel Atijas, because shortly after breakfast, as he had been informed by the office of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, someone would be shuttling him to the Calgary airport.

Would he be able, before he went to breakfast, to stop by my studio? I asked, explaining that I had something to show him. He was not keen, I could hear that in his voice, but he agreed. He was planning for breakfast at eight, he said, and he could stop by my studio fifteen minutes beforehand if that suited me. Suits me, I said, and hung up. Maybe I was wrong not to accept his invitation to attend the send-off with the artists from the Art Centre, but I didn’t regret it. I’d see Mark Robinson after Daniel Atijas left whether I wanted to or not, and the others I didn’t care about anyway; they, at any rate, cared nothing for me. And after all, I knew they’d be getting together at the little restaurant in the Sally Borden building, and I could have gone over to join them had I wanted to. I got myself ready, therefore, for a very long day, figuring it would be best to spend it completely dedicated to making sense of my vision. I also decided I would eat nothing that day, which seemed appropriate for one intending to devote oneself entirely to the spirit. The cleansing of the body can only contribute to the elevation of ideas, no doubt about it. I intended to drink just water and, when I went to bed, mint tea. During the afternoon, using the side stairs and moving from one tree to the next, I left Lloyd Hall and went to my studio. The day was sunny and warm, and a man and a woman only in bathing suits were playing tennis. A squirrel was sitting on a chain-link fence. When I was near the practice huts for musicians and thought I was finally safe, Guy Fletcher stepped out in front of me. He turned up like a ghost, though ghosts do not usually turn up in broad daylight, and it transpired that, like all ghosts, he was bearing news from the other side.

When he had heard yesterday, said Guy Fletcher, of the tragedy on Tunnel Mountain, he was almost sick, because only the day before in the early afternoon, Ivan Matulić’s grandson had stopped by to see him at the museum and had left something there for Daniel Atijas. He extended to me a small package wrapped in white paper and secured with crisscrossed rubber bands. He had tried to find Daniel Atijas in his room, he said, but Daniel Atijas wasn’t there, so he thought he’d come over to my studio, figuring it would be best to give me the package, but there was no one there either, he said and it was a lucky thing, he said, that we’d met, because he was beginning to despair, convinced that he would not be able to fulfill the last wishes, he could say that now, of the deceased. I stared at the white package in his hands as if it hid some sort of time bomb. I reached out slowly and touched it with my fingertips; then I took it and drew it in to myself. It was light, much lighter than I’d expected, and Daniel Atijas’s name had been written on it in the right lower corner in uneven letters with a thick felt-tip pen. He was almost sick, Guy Fletcher told me, because of the words that Ivan Matulić’s grandson had said at the time, and which only later, when he learned of the accident, revealed themselves in their true meaning. The grandson, Guy Fletcher continued, had said he was leaving things he knew he would not be needing anymore, since he no longer needed anything. Sometimes, the grandson told him, it is great to be stripped bare. And only when the bad news reached him, said Guy Fletcher, did he grasp the meaning of these words, the meaning of the nakedness.