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Overview
Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men—a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, and a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum’s guest book—become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, and guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle. Albahari seizes his reader’s attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300210279 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/28/2014 |
| Series: | Margellos World Republic of Letters Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Globetrotter
By David Albahari, ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 David AlbahariAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21027-9
CHAPTER 1
Cities are like women, I said to Daniel Atijas when we met at the Centre in Banff on June 11, 1998. You like the way some look, I said, and others you like for what they are on the inside. Some cities are neither, I said, and you are indifferent when you find yourself there, just as you are indifferent, I said, by the side of certain women. They are colorless, I said, like air. I thought he'd say air is not colorless—he struck me as that type of person, the kind who always, without being overbearing, states things as they are—but he only sipped his soup and glanced out the window from time to time. Banff, I continued, is something else again, though this is not obvious at first, especially if you spend only a day or two here the way most people do, but if you stick around longer, I said, for a week, say, you will see what has intrigued me here for years: the special knack Banff has of appearing in two forms at once, as two extremes, one of which, if I dare pursue my parallel with women, I said, expresses the eternal virgin; the other, the lusty strumpet. Here I stopped. I had expected him to blink when he heard that last word—he struck me as the type who would be ready to blink, who'd feel no compulsion to hide honest embarrassment —but he merely set down his spoon and reached for the salad. Someone else might have been discouraged by having their expectations trounced twice, especially those who dread unpredictability, in which group I do not, I am glad to say, count myself, so in Daniel Atijas's refusal to be candid—sure as I was of my appraisal—I could recognize and relish this degree of unpredictability, for it is exactly what challenges us and attracts us to a person. I rubbed my hands together under the table and said: This is why every time I come to Banff I start by thinking I'll write a book about it, though I know I never will; I am a painter, not a writer, and if I were a master of words, I would discard my paintbrush and paints straightaway because being a writer is so much better for the health than being a painter, because despite all the warnings about the dangers of computer and monitor radiation, at least a writer needn't inhale toxic fumes, poison himself with his work—and here I stopped, not knowing how to get myself back to the writing of a book about Banff. But Daniel Atijas, as if he had been waiting, set down his knife and fork, coughed, and said: I have never been this high up in mountains; I am a child of the plains. I could have fallen straight off my chair, I was so surprised, not because he had finally spoken—after all, I had been chatting away precisely to draw him out—but because this hadn't even occurred to me, and it should have, for I, too, am a child of the plains, born in Saskatchewan, where, by the way, I live, so I should have recognized in him the reflection of his plains, which, I later learned, are called Vojvodina, for that makes us more similar than either of us might have reckoned. I did not, however, fall off my chair, though just in case, I firmly gripped the table edge, but then Daniel Atijas stood up, said he had to leave, and left. There are people who, when they go, take something with them. Hard to say just what. Something opens in a person, and then something is gone: I don't know if I can say it any better. Daniel Atijas left and I sat there, choking on emotions in which I had ceased believing long ago. I repeated to myself several times, Steady now, then I took a deep breath and dropped my hands into my lap. After all, Daniel Atijas had struck me as the type who ups and goes like that, just as he had the evening before, when, excusing himself and blaming jet lag, he left the reception, held in his honor, after giving his talk and responding to questions for twenty minutes. I had sat in the second row during the talk, right behind the president of the Banff Centre and his wife. The president's shoulder was specked with flakes of dandruff. Daniel Atijas waved his arms frequently as he talked, as if short of words, though he spoke readily in English. His pronunciation was hard-edged, Slavic, but still easily understood. He did not hide his feelings, and his voice quavered quite audibly several times, cracking before he reached the last lines. The president's wife took out her handkerchief each time and dabbed the corners of her eyes as if to console them. Continuing to gesticulate, Daniel Atijas spoke of the relationship between history and literature in his country, in his former country, he said, or rather in the five countries that came out of the one that no longer existed. His voice quavered. Several days later, when I reminded him of this, I added that I, too, had trembled while listening to reports about the referendum on the secession of Quebec. We each have our own hell, replied Daniel Atijas. Had I known, at the talk, he would say this, I would have better understood his behavior; I would have known that his hell was public speaking. Despite his emotions, quavering voice, and pointed humor, Daniel Atijas was forever digging in with his defenses. Instead of getting closer to his listeners, he pulled away, so at one point I felt like standing up and drawing him to me, to all of us. He looked, after all, like someone who is always inward bound, regardless of where he is headed. I told him so once: we were on the path running down by the city cemetery, and I stopped a little theatrically and, spreading my arms, said he struck me as someone who, no matter where he went, was always inward bound, to which he replied with a chuckle that it made no difference, since all of us end up in the same place. No doubt, I said, but not at the same cemetery. I have spent my whole life, I said, in Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, and I won't be changing towns in death. Daniel Atijas laughed again. At the talk, however, he was serious, even when he interjected humor, always at an apt juncture, to ease the tension of his impassioned narrative. I didn't for a moment take my eyes off his face at the talk or on the path by the cemetery. After the talk I was barely able to hold my focus on the words the president's wife was saying, and suddenly I wanted, right there in front of everyone, to thrust my tongue between her plump lips and shiny teeth. Before going to bed I had to rinse my mouth out twice with a mint-flavored mouthwash. I looked at myself in the mirror, gargled, and thought of Daniel Atijas. The first time I had seen him was actually in a photograph on a small poster announcing his talk. The posters were up, I saw over the following days, on all the Banff Centre buildings, but I had noticed one on the bulletin board by the reception desk when I was waiting for the young woman behind the counter to give me the keys to my room and studio. The bulletin board was plastered with announcements, and the photograph of Daniel Atijas was partly obscured. I only glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye, but that did it. I left the young woman at the desk in mid-sentence, her sentence—never would I have interrupted my own—and went over to the bulletin board. Hard to say what I could compare that moment of recognition with, perhaps with the afternoon when, walking along a stream in Kananaskis, I came across a pebble that I still carry with me after all these years. I showed the pebble to Daniel Atijas, when what I was really wanting to do was to hold it up next to his face, though in the end I didn't. So there I was staring at the face in the picture and feeling the tiredness from the morning's early start and all the travel drop away as if I were donning some altogether-new clothes. The young woman tapped me lightly on the shoulder and handed me the keys. I was given a room on the second floor and studio number eight. When she had her back turned, I ripped the poster right off the bulletin board, folded it, and put it in my pocket. The room looked out on the craggy peak of Cascade Mountain. Mountain peaks always soothe me, as if I weren't a person of the plains after all. That was how Daniel Atijas felt, too, he told me as we stood by the window in his third-floor room. At that point I knew much more about him than I could learn from the handful of terse sentences on the poster. I read them only later that evening when I got into bed, the tiredness back: I had spent the whole afternoon at the studio, rearranging the furniture, canvases, and painting supplies, and all I'd wanted to do was to plunk my head onto the pillow and sleep, nothing more, but then I remembered the poster, got up and looked for it in the pocket of the jacket that was hanging in the closet by the entryway, climbed back into bed, switched on the bedside-table lamp, and began to read. Daniel Atijas, it said, is a writer from Belgrade; he has published four novels and two collections of short stories; his work has been translated into a dozen languages; he will be speaking on history and literature in the Balkans; date, time, place. Then I fell asleep. It was two days later that I came away from a conversation with people I knew in the administration with, in my hands, a full file of material on Daniel Atijas: his complete biography, reviews of his books that had been translated into English and French, the transcript of a BBC interview, stories published in American literary magazines, two essays (one, "A Vanishing World"; the other, "Writers and the Collapse of Yugoslavia"), news items on his appearances at various literary gatherings, the schedule for his stay in Banff. In short, I was ready to welcome him, and while I was waiting for his talk to begin, I studied the flakes of dandruff on the shoulders of the president of the Banff Centre. When Daniel Atijas entered the room, I didn't recognize him, so while he was taking his place at the podium by the microphone, I turned, thinking I would catch sight of the Daniel Atijas I was expecting to see as he approached through the rows of seats. Afterward I attributed this misapprehension to my nerves, which kept me from observing clearly, and immediately after that I explained it away as his nerves, which made the lines of his face harsher, and I had to remind myself that photographs always deceive, because no matter how unskillful the people who take them, the pictures always capture what the photographers mean to see through the camera lens. This was June 10. We met on June 11 in the dining hall during lunchtime. Though everything up to that point may have been deliberate, this really was a chance encounter. I was sitting alone at a large round table, poking at noodles I had chosen for no obvious reason, when Daniel Atijas stopped by and asked if there was a free place for him to sit. He was holding a tray with a bowl of soup and a salad. Nobody here but me, I said, and even I am not here at times. Daniel Atijas smiled fleetingly, as if uncomfortable at intruding on my solitude. He struck me as the type who was more concerned about others than himself, but I didn't say so. I waited for him to sit, and then I introduced myself, courteously, slowly, though I still couldn't believe he was sitting across from me, and said, no secret, that I had been at his talk and that I had enjoyed his evenhanded presentation, particularly, I remarked, when he spoke of the interaction, or rather clash, between urban and rural writing in contemporary Serbian literature. Daniel Atijas nodded and started to eat his soup. I couldn't, I said, help but notice that a similar relationship, at times even to the point of intolerance, existed in western Canada—in other words, here, I said, where the rural experience still defines its spirit, though, I said, nine-tenths of the population are living in greater or smaller urban areas. Cities are like women, I said then, but Daniel Atijas only sipped his soup and glanced from time to time out the window. Once he reached for the salad I had almost given up, but I mustered the strength to continue, which did not happen once he'd left, for despite my desire to get up right then and there and follow him out, I could not quiet the trembling of my thighs, and sank back into the chair. The noodles still lay on the plate, the fork groaned under caked ketchup, the spoon was flat on its back, iceberg-like the napkin rose toward my lips. Everything was the same, yet it was all different. The next few days, I carefully studied the schedule for Daniel Atijas's stay at the Centre; I amassed more information, followed his movements, always from afar, kept an eye in the dining room on what he ate and with whom he sat, eavesdropped on conversations two or three times. I felt like a spider spinning its web, not the web of children's stories, of course, which invariably symbolizes something evil, not at all—in fact, spiders are always welcome at my studio in Saskatoon; as far as I'm concerned the spider is a marvelous architect, an artist of space. Were I a spider, my web would have been an artwork in progress—in rapid progress, no doubt, for, judging by his schedule, I saw that Daniel Atijas was going to spend a total of thirteen days in Banff: he had arrived on June 9 and was leaving on June 22. No time to lose, I told my face in the mirror as I shaved the next morning. If I am not mistaken, that was a Sunday, June 14. I was one of the first down for breakfast; Daniel Atijas was one of the last to arrive. Hidden behind a newspaper spread wide, I watched him serve himself scrambled eggs and orange juice. He sat at a table at the other end of the dining hall, where two Japanese women were already seated. They soon struck up a lively conversation, which infuriated me, though I don't anger easily, but after four cups of coffee I was having difficulty sitting still. Several times my feet seemed to be walking away from the table all by themselves. I was beginning to start in again on articles I had already read when Daniel Atijas finally stood. The Japanese women rose and bowed at the same time, and then, releasing me from the horror of the thought that they might all be leaving together, the women sat down. Daniel Atijas walked through the dining hall and up the stairs. I put the newspaper down and went after him. At the exit, however, I lost sight of him, and just as I was about to break into a run, someone grabbed me by the shoulder: Mark Robinson, a poet from Regina. If I had had it in me, I would have decked him then and there—I had never liked his poems anyway—but he was a whole head taller than I, with a broader girth, so I had to allow him to draw me close, press his cheek to mine, and thump me on the back. I, meanwhile, peered over his shoulder in hopes of catching sight of at least a patch of Daniel Atijas's jacket. I regained my composure much later—drinking coffee again in the same building but now at the little restaurant off to the side—when Mark mentioned a party that evening at the home of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, to which all the writers had been invited, he claimed, and I believed him immediately, who were resident just then at the Centre. Thrills shivered through me. Sometimes, I thought, losing sight is better than seeing. And besides, I was acquainted with the director of the Literary Arts Programs, and his wife, what's more, was from Saskatoon, so I was always welcome to show up at the front door and knock, even though I am not a writer and hadn't been invited. All the while I strained to keep all this from showing on my face, but eyes, as they say, are the mirror of the soul, and Mark, whether I liked his poems or not, was a poet nevertheless, and he suddenly looked hard at me and grumbled: You are on to something, admit it. At first I dug hurriedly through my mind for what I could admit—that the Banff Centre president had dandruff?—then I realized the cloaked meaning of his words, and I said there were plenty of hot-looking babes at the Centre this year, no kidding. Sure thing, said Mark, sure thing. I had no idea, in fact, of who was there, because when I hadn't been following Daniel Atijas or inquiring about him, I had been spending every free moment in my studio working at drawing a face that I had been forever seeking. Not just the features, but its shape and the interrelation of the parts, especially where they defied an anticipated symmetry. I shook off Mark Robinson, but before I did, I had to promise that we'd spend an evening getting drunk together—like old times, said Mark—meaning that we'd reminisce about the years we had spent at the University of Saskatchewan at Saskatoon.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Globetrotter by David Albahari, ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC. Copyright © 2001 David Albahari. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Globetrotter, 1,Afterword: Only Banff Is Real, by Ellen Elias-Bursac, 201,