A Blanket against Darkness
CATHERINE HARTON
A Blanket against Darkness
A collection of stories
Translated by Renée Masson
University of Ottawa Press
Literary Translation Collection
2019
The University of Ottawa Press (UOP) is proud to be the oldest of the francophone university presses in Canada and the only bilingual university publisher in North America. Since 1936, UOP has been “enriching intellectual and cultural discourse” by producing peer-reviewed and award-winning books in the humanities and social sciences, in French or in English.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: A blanket against darkness : a collection of stories / Catherine Harton ; translated by Renée Masson.
Other titles: Traité des peaux. English
Names: Harton, Catherine, 1983- author. | Masson, Renée, 1990- translator.
Series: Literary translation (Ottawa, Ont.)
Description: Series statement: Literary translation collection | Translation of: Traité des peaux.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2018903632X | Canadiana (ebook) 20189036338 | ISBN 9780776627472 (softcover) | ISBN 9780776627489 (PDF) | ISBN 9780776627496 (EPUB) | ISBN 9780776627502 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8615.A7738 T7213 2019 | DDC C843/.6—dc23
Legal Deposit: Second Quarter 2019
Library and Archives Canada
Originally published as Traité des peaux by Catherine Harton.
© Éditions Marchand de feuilles.
English language translation © 2019 University of Ottawa Press
Printed and bound in Canada
Copy editing
Proofreading
Typesetting
Cover design
Cover image
Robbie McCaw
Michael Waldin
CS
John van der Woude
Bison Boy by Anne Siems, 2012, acrylic on paper with beeswax
The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, and by the University of Ottawa.
Table of Contents
Greenland
Memory in the Snow
Winning the Bird’s Heart
Ulu, the Woman’s Knife
A Blanket against Darkness
Nunavik
Uri, the Dog, and the Guns
Whales Are the Fingers of the Sea
Quebec
Gulping Down the Storm
The Great Forest
A Chapel of Sorrow
With Folded Hands
Greenland
Memory in the Snow
The light crumbles beneath a relentless flurry of snow that the ancestors called the breath of death. Pavia undoes the day with his long arms, he draws the curtains; he shuts out the sight of the accumulating snowflakes, imagines their peculiar geometry. In the past few days, the wind has become an enemy, it extends its decisive power over the hunting, fishing parties; the slightest activity becomes a struggle, to let down one’s guard is to perish. It’s the most dreaded time of the year, Pavia likes listening to the wind, feeling it force its way across the wooden slates, the window frames; he likes its howls, its long moans, its dramaturgy. He likes feeling nature grumble, it calls the people to order, imposes its strength. For eighty years, Pavia has felt that this strength has always been a stranger to him, despite his repertoire of storms, each one is a different experience: a wrenched roof, a lost dog, a death.
A sort of spasm slowly spreads over his body; his head reels, Pavia senses that an end is coming, his hands tremble, hardly manage to keep hold of his cup of coffee. The only sight outside: a shining, bluish icefield, an ice phantom, the only landmark, the rest is just a vast desert of snow, the first accumulations of winter. Pavia thinks he notices a polar bear, a heavy shape, ready to be toppled over and to disappear in the flurry of snow. The bears have taken to migrating south, the north is no longer rich enough in food. In the south, they are sometimes carried away by a thin icefield, the glaciers are melting at breakneck speed. There’s no longer a place for them, he thinks. A spasm brings him back to his memories of hunting, of the fragile child, of the haunted man. These are the memories he relives each time the wind takes hold of his body; the first seal killed when he was still very young, the skinning and the carving, the patience he had to show, his father’s smile, the greedily gobbled seal’s eye, the children’s expression the first time they tasted this little treat. Pavia remembers very well the day he became a child hunter, a mature boy, accomplished.
His childhood memories bring him back to memories of his first child, he entertains the phantom, a troubling legend. This first son fought a few hours for his life, his breath, his mark, his name. The man wanted to remember the premie's cry during storms and let the flurry of snow grimly do the reaper’s work. Pavia does not permit himself to think of the lost child except when he is alone, so that no one can approach this thought of death. He had had time to rock him a few hours, to feel his little heart wildly beat against his own warm body. The baby was tiny, fragile like the frost. He drank milk only once, without any greedy gulps, he was giving up, blind but already sensitive to sounds and warmth. He crinkled his nose, tried to form his first connection with the world. He was convinced this child would have been a great beauty, he already had an impressive head of hair at birth and a perfect little rosy body. Pavia strokes the sofa’s armrest, a little like baby skin, the memory, the last probe. He draws the blanket over the armrest to tuck it in. Several watery pearls hang, suspended, in his eyes, his lower lip quivers; despite it all he buries himself in the painful memory. A first gust rattles the house. Pavia ensconces himself in his sofa and waits for the storm to strike.
He rummages through his memory, searching for his first happy recollections of his children, the first times fishing together. His daughter, her coat too big, he could hardly see her eyes, she laughed each time a fish landed on the ice, its plump body flopping all about; each time, she jumped with a start, then laughed. On sunny days, she wore pink sunglasses, all fancy dancy, so simple in childhood, meanwhile she devoured the countryside: the icefield, the frozen sweep prickled with holes, the sled, the dogs—that look of wonder every second of her little life. Each time the fishing was good, she brandished her sunglasses as a sign of triumph, she already had a theatrical way of taking part in her world.
This was before, before the iron curtain of adolescence, before the black lipstick, the eyelids smothered in kohl, before the recurrent grimace, before she left to live with her aunt in Nuuk. The child became insolent, rude, listened to gothic litanies, heavy metal, as she put it. That’s all she talked about and she rejected the traditions. She glowered in her black chrysalis. Communicating with her became impossible; from then on, there were no more sunglasses. Only a face—a melancholic face—bent toward the floor. Two years later, she washed off the make-up, came back home; Pavia became her father again, the one who drew out her smiles.
Pavia gazes at his memories hanging on the wall, tacked up like sad lives, yellowed and marvellous portraits, a fortune on full display. His daughter in black wagtail feathers, then his daughter so pregnant she could scarcely see over her belly, his little family, still so young, they had had Angi late, he was already old. She was the miracle, the star in the black sky. It was for her that he came back.
An enormous gust, he remembers the noise of the blades, the propel
lers, the helicopter, the speed at which he had to board. Still remembers the echo of his wife’s cry, his children’s, the father leaving, there is no compass, no guide, only the flurry of snow that blinds the little brood, and a question: What man will return? It was just before Henry’s first steps, he was wobbling but managing to stand on his own, drawing his strength from all the applause and words of endearment. A little tyke, precocious, intelligent, and quick, he mimicked the adults’ ways, the sofa became a motorboat, his prattle the sounds of the sea. This was before, before a chapter worth forgetting, but Pavia forces himself to remember those unhappy days so that he can remember the children bursting with ecstatic joy when he came home. When Henry was five years old, he remembers arriving home late that time, the flurry of snow was too great and landing on the runway was very risky. Henry was waiting for the old man with a party hat on his head, balloons here and there, a few having deflated over time, the child had drawn his father on a big card, the grubby clothes and the bulging muscles. That night, Pavia cried himself to sleep, trying to wipe his lie away with sobs. Henry had no idea what his father did in this mine. Pavia remembered all too well, remembered with shame.
So the flurry of snow swallowed the man, his face turned toward the sky, the helicopter swallowed the man, his life, his clothes. To his wife and children, he was the man the mine devoured, the foreign mine on their territory. He was one of privileged Greenlanders, the plunderers from the inside. He never went down to the bottom of a mine, he never experienced the underground temperatures. He stayed at the surface, he scrubbed the men’s shirts, dirtied with sweat and ore, he scrubbed, like a washerwoman, the stains of those sad days. Never would he want the truth to come out, he preferred for his children to picture a man who staked his life deep in the belly of the earth. He played the stakes with the image of the miner for a long time, preferring the lie over the shame, he didn’t want the scummy nicknames the others fixed on him. He knew that sooner or later, once enough money was saved up, he would go back to the primal scream, hunting, his body once again a harpoon or a knife. He hadn’t forgotten anything from those years of mockery and humiliation, the miners had little respect for those who mopped the floor, who scoured, the poor man’s job.
He remembered the callous face, the frozen-hearted man, the likes of whom he had never known before, the man was maybe a Canadian or an American, a foreigner anyway. This man took pleasure in making Pavia’s life miserable, he spit in his soup, peed on his duvet, like a cat, he marked his territory, humiliating the man just because he was Inuit and because the Inuit—well, because this man hated the Inuit. Loathed them. To him, they were like stains on a white shirt. This man went so far as to beat Pavia up, during a night of drinking, he was mocking the Greenlanders—the savages, he said—imitating their somewhat heavy steps, he was making himself hoarse, uttering loud guttural cries, imitating the aboriginal language. Pavia had had enough, for years this man had been poisoning his life, every winter for too long, he grabbed a cold bottle of beer and dealt a heavy blow to his head. But the drunk man was heftily built, he got up and tripped Pavia and then gave him a pounding. That was Pavia’s last day, he was dismissed. He learned much later that this man was a Canadian and that had he died a few years afterwards, on his way down to the very bottom of the mine. Pavia didn’t shed any tears over his passing, but he didn’t rejoice either. He told himself this man must have had a family, a family stricken by the news of the death of one of their own.
Pavia pours himself another cup of coffee despite his trembling hand; this time—there she goes—she’s a full-out storm.
He thinks of his own father, that sidelong glance, the bowed head, fisher of nothingness, of emptiness, always at the brink of that sadness that they could never put a name to. He loved his father, the nomad often out wandering when the feelings swelled, he preferred a friendly slap on the back to hugs. The memory of winter nights, the resounding drums calling the living to order, the dance that left the villagers intoxicated, in the middle of this scene, his father, wild for a moment. He loved this man who cried at the top of his lungs: dansemik! He inherited this flair for celebration, for oblivion, children and their adult guides, exchanging roles, outpourings of joy—to hell with arctic nights!
It was during a dansemik one arctic night when he was in his twenties that he met Lilian, his wife, she was laughing at every one of his acts of tomfoolery, the antics of a man too drunk and already in love. She was wearing traditional dress and her hair was braided, she stood out from the rest with her sometimes startled air. She was sitting on a chair, stiffly, as bashful as a thirteen year old, she was waiting for someone to ask her to dance. It was only after a few beers that she loosened up, threw her whole heart into the waltz. That was the night the first lot of promises tumbled out, and he had kept them all, from the first to the very last one: to love her as long as he lived, perhaps a seemingly impossible pact, but the old man had never wavered, he had loved this woman and he would love her until his very last breath. His own flurry of snow. He still remembers their first outing together, alone, in love, the field of cotton grass, Lilian mimicked the flowers’ nimble dance, graced every moment with her charm. He is surprised to find himself handsome in this memory. Maybe it’s his smile or his lithe, robust body. Maybe his youth. Or maybe just the fact that he was in love.
Because he was in love, sometimes as the colour reflected off the water, sometimes on the lazily stretching afternoon. He loved his children, his mornings when he and Henry, he and Abel, he and the little one scribbled drawings of their own lives into the sand, a few seconds to sketch them out, and then, the waves erased everything. The waves rolled out a fresh white page, Abel would run into the water, ordering the sea to give him back his drawing. One day, he exclaimed, “It answered me!” Abel found an old amber-coloured bottle along the shore—there was a message inside. A child was looking for a friend. He had left the address of a trading post at the bottom of the paper. Ever since that day, Abel has corresponded with that boy from Uummannaq. He’s fifty-four now and is still faithfully writing his monthly missive. He called this friendship “the gift from the sea.” Abel never fished; the sea sent him friends, not fish. Abel is different, dreamy, reticent, he takes everything in, draws everything he sees. He rarely communicates with people except through drawings. The Nuuk museum bought a complete set of his most recent creations, he had always known they would. He spent hours and hours at home, preferring obscurity, his world of sombre colours, he created a singular and bizarre beauty out of this Greenland which sometimes drove him crazy. It was Pavia who drove to Nuuk to buy bundles of paper, pencils, ink, erasers, always with the hope that, one day, his son would be happy.
Pavia examines the last drawing his son gave him, a watercolour, a blue-tinged icefield, strikingly realist, absolutely splendid, the same one he sees out the window. Today he understands this longing to reconstrue nature. The drawing puffs as wind gusts through the room, Pavia had not noticed that the little window in the kitchen was still open. The doctor did tell him that his heath was very fragile, a mere cold could keel him over, but he has the cure, the end draws near, he can feel it. He would like to go to the cemetery one last time, to offer a final prayer over his parents’ grave, his legs give him atrocious pain. He would like to take his favourite dog into his arms one last time, a big friendly beast, that he adores, a silent confidant. He’s incapable of going more than three steps without tumbling. He drinks the lukewarm coffee from the thermos and the soup that’s grown cold. But he’s not hungry anymore anyways, the memories are all he needs. They’re what’s keeping him alive.
What keeps him alive are his three children, four for the memory, the scattered barrettes of little girls, a little wooden boat that a boy wished would grow, a second little boy who gazed out the window hoping to see the trading post’s delivery boat; all that mattered—it wasn’t the new arrivals, the fruit, the soft drinks, but a letter, a simple letter. What keeps him alive is the memory of that little girl wi
th rosy cheeks who tried to blow harder than the wind to get her multicoloured pinwheel spinning, that useless thing she called her “wind flower.” What he treasures in his memory is that little boy in a boat, bent over the sea, hoping to catch some fish with his bare hands and to become the world’s greatest fisherman. What presses against his chest are the landscapes sketched by his second son, these absolutely faultless landscapes, he can sense all those feelings of suffocation. What keeps him alive is the image of that woman with braided hair who races through the fields of cotton grass, who laughs her heart out during the dansemik. His last thought is for the polar bear.
He survived this attack, Pavia had spotted a bear on the prowl, it stole too close to the houses and the children. It had caught a whiff of the odor of dried fish, seal carcases, leftovers for the carnivore. Pavia had patiently waited for the bear behind an abandoned cabin, he waited for it to come. The cold was numbing, it blazoned the start of a storm, the bear was out there somewhere in all this snow. The man had remained there, waiting for the bear for several hours, the few hours of light the day afforded. First he heard a faint crack, followed by a grunt. No doubt about it, here was the animal, lumbering forward, he saw it at last. The bear surveyed the village at the foot of the mountain, it had waited for dusk to emerge. His fur was yellowed, stained with blood, his claws, at such close distance, were like gleaming knives in the sunset. Pavia knew full well he must not miss his mark, a bullet to the heart. He raised his rifle, without making a sound—the slightest noise and he would be spotted. He waited for the bear to move. The bear was massive, it would not spare his life. The man waited a few seconds more, put his finger on the trigger; he was shaking a bit, because he was cold but mostly because his motility had taken a beating in the last few years; only his vision was still excellent. The longer Pavia waited, the more he shook. He pulled—bang! An enormous roar was heard throughout the whole village. The bullet hadn’t gone to the bear’s heart but to its paw, it was still moving. It tore after Pavia. The cabin’s old door no longer shut all the way, it was frozen stiff. Nothing to it, one blow from that paw and bear would take it down from the other side. The bear took possession of the cabin, it delivered a mighty blow to Pavia’s legs, which instantly felt the pain. He shot in the air, just before blacking out, his legs tattered and wet red, the floor splattered in blood.
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