Globetrotter by David Albahari

Author:David Albahari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A coffee sip, I remember thinking, is like a snake hiss, though I was startled as soon as I thought it by my readiness to liken myself to a viper. I would have loved to hear what Daniel Atijas had to say about that, but the women were tenacious, unrelenting, and only the director of the Literary Arts Programs managed to wrest him free, though Daniel Atijas had to promise he’d be back once the readings were done. Daniel Atijas was first to perform in the second half, and again his voice quavered as he reined in his emotions, though this time he was reading a story instead of an essay on the fate of his country: former country, as Daniel Atijas always added. The story he read—which he announced was brand-new, only recently translated into English—this story spoke of nothing. There was no storyline to it, no events, no central or marginal characters; it seemed to have no beginning or end. It was all about passage, about language itself—endlessly beautiful and powerful—and if it sounded this good in translation, I had to wonder what it had sounded like in the original.

I doubt anyone but I was interested, because when I turned around, I didn’t see a single radiant face, and the president of the Banff Centre did nothing to stifle his yawns. For me the evening ended when Daniel Atijas’s story came to an end, but I stayed on to hear the other participants, an essayist from Winnipeg, a novelist from Mexico, and a poet from Calgary, though I didn’t really hear them, for I was still hearkening, though now only within myself, to his story’s cadence. After lukewarm applause that marked the end of the reading, the director of the Literary Arts Programs invited everyone to have coffee and dessert and to mingle with the authors, who, said the director, had shown us once again that without words there would be no world, or that the world is words, regardless of the language in which they are spoken or written. All that was left to ascertain, added the director, was whether in their world there was room for confections, which, as everybody knows, are spun not of words but of sugar and chocolate. He chuckled as if he had said something witty. The people in the audience stood up, chatter filled the hall, several women, perhaps the same ones, flocked again to Daniel Atijas, and I tried to find a spot right behind Mark Robinson, checking out as I did so the angles with which to gauge the precise angle of my invisibility, and bumped into the poet from Vancouver. A plastic glass wobbled in her hand, but nothing spilled, and even if it had, said the poet, she was holding ordinary tap water. She never drank anything else, least of all carbonated beverages, which are often dyed with chemical substances and can leave nasty stains for which there is almost no remedy, whereas tap water leaves no stains at all, regardless of the kind of fabric.

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