David Albahari - Globetrotter

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.

So there we stood on Bear Street watching the tourists and the cars and then staring at a robin working a worm up out of the soil on the lawn out in front of the museum. Just when it had tugged out the worm, nearly tipping over onto its back in the process, Daniel Atijas appeared. The worm has nothing to do with it, I said to the grandson as Daniel Atijas was approaching the museum, though one never knows for sure, and who knows where my friend would be now had the worm stayed stuck in the ground. The grandson shot me a baffled look. He had no clue what I was talking about, and he did not, as I saw, realize that Daniel Atijas was heading toward us for he didn’t know Daniel Atijas; he had never seen him and probably wouldn’t even know his name. Perhaps, at the end of their meeting, Guy Fletcher had told him to step outside, that there would be two men out in front of the museum who would like a word with him. The grandson was indecisive at first, for he had counted on getting back to Calgary as soon as possible, but Guy Fletcher was adamant, persuasive, chatty, and the grandson stayed. Guy Fletcher was relieved, I was sure he was, when all that grief left his office. He sped to the window, cranked it open, and took a deep breath of the warm, dry, heedless mountain air. I couldn’t blame him, if that is, indeed, what he did, for that much grief, or whatever it was on the grandson’s face, might choke an unwary onlooker, and having in mind what it felt like here, where we were standing in the open by the river, I could only imagine its horrific effect indoors. Later, however, when the three of us, Daniel Atijas, Ivan Matulić’s grandson, and I, were indoors, in Daniel’s room, I noticed that my misgivings had been unwarranted.