Banff, Alberta, Canada

A Fantasy Travelogue

"A travelogue is a sentence", flashes through my thoughts as I descend a steep path through a forest of conifers into Banff. The evening before we'd watched The Shining in one of the studios with beer and an occasional joint. Seven writers confronted with white paper and writer's block. All of us know it, we nod. At times like this, the axe is best. The beer was mild, Canadian; even I was able to down two cans worth. The grass was strong, of unknown origin, rolled in a thin, wrinkled joint of a kind that has never stirred in me any sort of passion. "A travelogue is a sentence; the words are scenes from a journey." On the left side, an orderly city cemetery. I come out on the road, cross it, and take a short cut to the main street. The words 'short cut' hardly seem to apply to a town of six-seven thousand inhabitants with streets named after local animals: Beaver, Otter, Grizzly, Fox, Wild Cat. Be that as it may, the short cut takes me by several wooden houses overgrown with lush vegetation, through a little parking lot, and by a small, two-storey shopping mall. On the first floor and part of the second is the local bookstore. When I discovered it on my second day in Banff, I closely perused the shelves with books of prose and poetry, and, by habit, pulled out the books I wanted to own. Then, one by one, I put them back on the shelves where I'd found them. The rest of the books had already begun to expand, taking over the newly emptied space, but I was persistent, I repeated this ritual which I have developed over the last two or three years, denying myself any opportunity of bringing a book home with me from a trip. It took the war for me to understand the futility of all property; despite my intentions to 'wander free as a bird', I accumulated belongings, I hoarded, I stuck to things as a caterpillar sticks to a leaf, but when I'd welcomed Jewish refugees from Sarajevo each one spoke of 'his' books, of despair at the thought that 'someone else's foot' was kicking them around or 'someone else's hands' were tossing them into flames. A group of Japanese tourists was strolling long the Banff main street, more numerous, no doubt, than the population of Banff itself. Signs in the store windows and shops were in two languages: English and Japanese, announcing: 'don't touch', 'made in India', 'genuine Canadian honey'. We went out for sushi several times: in the heart of the Canadian Rocky Mountains every other restaurant was Japanese. The warmed sake made me feel confused, stupefied, but the sushi slid right down my throat. We sat on the terrace of the Banff Springs Hotel which, when it opened on June 1, 1988, was the largest hotel in the world; we stared at the perfect scene of the river valley and surrounding mountains ("like a picture postcard") and wondered whether Kubrik's movie was filmed here. Later that same evening, as we lay around the round studio on pillows, "drunk" and "stoned", watching The Shining, we no longer thought about it. Blood gurgled through the hallways, a little boy spun his pedals, the black guard watched his heart disintegrate. We went out of the studio into the soft night. The sky was full of stars, deer moved through the woods, someone in the art center was still playing, and a night bird hooted at regular intervals. Every pebble shone on the path like a jewel; the smoothly worn railings on the wooden bridge were reminiscent of frost. At 5000 feet above sea level all things are clearer, especially art. On the lawn in front of the recreation facility an elk was waiting for me, a cow. The mating season was over, though warnings were still posted. Now I could walk by her, almost brush her flank, and she wouldn't stop chewing. I walked slowly, one foot in front of the other, as if I wasn't coming from anywhere. I could stay there forever, in a 'sentence' as if in a 'travelogue', as a mere quotation mark, a mark of punctuation, a pause after a period. The Banff art center was founded sixty years ago, and today it is one of the finest art colonies in the world, allowing uninterrupted interaction among artists. In the morning I listened to the rehearsal of a string quartet, in the afternoon I watched run-throughs for a ballet performance, in the evening I took part in a conversation about drama fragments we had heard. Sometimes I wrote a bit: the letters on the screen of the Apple computer were small, rectangular, repellant; I went back to my room and wrote by hand, something I haven't done for a long time, at a desk, in the bathroom, on the little terrace. They weren't real texts, only word clusters, 'travelogues' generated by the rarified air. The air in Banff is so dry you have to use humidifiers sometimes. When you inhale deeply, the air crackles as if it is static. Maybe that comparison doesn't quite work, I muse as I walk along the steep path, through the woods, by the cemetery, toward the city streets. At the end of the main 'avenue', before the bridge, stands the Natural History Museum, founded at the turn of the century, a two-storey wooden building later reconstructed according to its original design, half-lit, full of minerals, fossil remains, samples of rocks and gravel, stuffed animals, archival photographs. The old visitor's book is displayed under glass; in it was the name of one who was, as he described himself, a 'globetrotter' from Croatia at the turn of the century. I could live in that museum forever, sensing the eyes of the wolves and bears in the dark, wings fluttering, grass rustling, branches snapping. The evening lasts long here, and the day, like a spider-web, remains in the sky despite the clocks. The next day we went to a spring of hot, medicinal waters. The writers floated on the surface like paper boats, while their shadows floated over the tiles on the floor of the pool. Clouds rushed across the sky like a stampede. "A travelogue is a sentence; words are scenes from a journey." The saleswoman in the bookstore asks me whether I might not buy a book after all; for two hours she has watched me as I took books off the shelves, heaped them in little piles, and then put them back in their places. No, I tell her, they are better off here than they'd be where I'd take them. Where is that? she inquires. Japanese tourists peer in through the store window, they glue their flattened noses and slanted eyes to the glass, then move quickly on. Nowhere, I say. While I walk back by the cemetery, I hear a rustling in the bushes, but I don't turn. A deer, a moose, a coyote, a wild cat, what difference does it make? At the top of the path and steps I halt to catch my breath. And that is where I stay, bereft of breath, bereft of place, bereft of animals ready to receive my spirit, to save my world. Every departure is only part one of a return, that's the thing.

English translation: Ellen Elias-Bursac