Uri is putting his bag together, smoothing down the clothes, an ultimate escape plan for himself and his animals, he fears a second carnage. He has let Issi come back inside, he needs a reassuring presence, the dog has stopped barking, she is standing on the mattress and watching the pack from inside. Uri wraps meat in old newspapers, thinks about his escape plan, wonders how long he should be gone, when things will calm down. He sharpens his knives, sorts his tools and memories at the same time, outside a storm is well under way, they should leave tomorrow morning, it wouldn’t be wise to leave with such strong winds. Uri looks at Issi, she is still standing on the mattress and watching the other five dogs from a distance. Uri thinks about that crusty old man he sometimes runs into when he’s out on a trip, he would like him to be there, he would leave his five dogs with him to keep them from being killed but would keep Issi inside, with him. He wonders if the police will search the houses, to what extent they will interfere in their lives. The night wraps its way throughout the village just like the wind and the odd bark.
Dawn, pink and peaceful, is but short-lived, Issi is very much on edge, she’s sensed something. She scratches at the doorframe, twitches her tail, she’s growing impatient. Outside, the dogs are curled up next to one another and not a one howls. The sound of pruning shears, helicopter blades rip through the air. Four police officers climb out of the aircraft, guns to their shoulders, they set out for the houses, no one confronts them outside, the village is still sleeping. The helicopter has landed, there’s talk in low voices, they are trying to decide whether they should wake the villagers or not. The youngest police officer intervenes, we should give them a final warning, it’s heartless to kill their dogs while they’re sleeping. But the other officers don’t listen to him, they begin their funeral march. The dogs at the first house are tied up, keeping each other warm—one of them sounds the alarm and the concert strikes up like never before.
Uri hardly has time to open the door before Issi dashes outside, she races toward the village entrance, Uri can’t catch her, the canine tempest is far too fast, he hears the other dogs barking as they clamour for food, Uri goes back, he’ll go after Issi as soon as he’s fed the others. The village is asleep but Uri has a strange feeling that trouble’s brewing, he can’t shake the fear anymore, he knows it. He runs for several blocks, he races here and there, calls Issi. His heart is about to explode, a time bomb, he doesn’t find her, all around the houses, the other dogs begin to fly into a panic. He has the miserable impression that he sees Issi as he comes around each corner, but it’s not her. The villagers are calling their animals, the village is submerged in noises of all kinds, none of them can be distinguished at all. Gunfire rends the air, the sound of a body collapsing. Uri heard it distinctly. A man leaves his house and runs toward the village entrance. Uri follows him, panic seizes him and his legs refuse to obey. He sees four police officers far off around a shapeless black mass and the man yells. The seconds that separate Uri from the dog seem like an eternity.
She is still breathing feebly, a wheeze scraping through her heavy body, stiffened, paralyzed by the bullet. They shot her in the side, but she is still breathing, she musters her strength and fights, no one is paying attention to her, the police are too busy checking the anger of the man, mad with rage, who has planted himself in front of them. She hears footsteps on the ground, she recognizes her master’s steps, this wobbly step, the squeaking insoles. She tries to move her left paw but suffers tremendously. Her breath is now a death rattle that makes him shiver. Slowly, very, very slowly, she pushes her paw forward, wriggles a bit, there’s no point, the muscle doesn’t respond anymore. A police officer sees her moving, he aims at the dog’s head. Uri collapses a few metres from the scene.
The grandson’s eyes are filled with tears, he can’t speak, only his upper lip quivers. The memory is always as fresh for Uri, he still remembers how he brought the dog back home, remembers the grave he dug for her. Uri had many other dogs afterwards, but never a canine tempest, not one had been worthy of her name.
Whales Are the Fingers of the Sea
Leena, anchored in the present
Whales are the fingers of the sea, so the legend goes, Sedna clung to a boat, only her fingers were still hanging on, her father chopped them off, and so they became the fingers cast into the water: whales. Sedna still dwells at the bottom of the sea and sometimes she burns with anger because she can no longer comb her hair, she punishes men so that they can no longer fish. The legend accompanied Leena throughout her childhood, she saw the whales as gleaming, unflagging fingers, she imagined them forever searching for Sedna at the bottom of the sea.
Leena muses over this legend, which, since her childhood, has haunted her every time she’s brushed her hair, with each stroke, the brush’s bristles scratch her scalp, the tangles in her hair wrest a few tears from her eyes, Leena sends the brush flying against the wall. Today, the Great River is ugly, despite its sky of cotton balls, its diving board to the sea, its invisible hand seems to lie heavily on the villagers’ fragile bodies, the wads are grey, the wind repels the water birds, prevents them from landing. Leena promised herself she would leave the curtains open, not to savour the dismal scene but simply to let a little light in, the shadows always settle her into the grey armchair, this is how she watches the minutes going by while the body lies slumped over the kitchen table.
Leena talks to the red face pressed against the table. The eyes are closed; the face is blank, hears nothing, but Leena fancies that the head must hear, somewhere between two misty dreams, swallowed up in the greyness of the day. She raises her voice, commands the body to rise, demands that duties be taken up, she grabs hold of one of the arms, which flops right back. Leena wants to hear the sound of bones cracking as dinner is made, the sound of potato peels tumbling into the sink, she wants the house to smell like soup, doesn’t want to hear the slow tread of the kitchen clock anymore. She gazes at the motionless body, there’s only her breath scuffing against the walls, she stifles her sadness, her desire to scream.
She opens a book, her encyclopedia on marine mammals, the bedside book of her childhood, now stained, the cover detached from the binding, inside, the humpback whales are now green, the seals yellow, Leena used to enjoy changing the animals’ appearance, used to invent distant cousins for them, used to change the name of the ancestors, the name of the sperm whale’s became Sedna, the sperm whale is reddish and enormous. This is the one Leena loves most of all, the biggest of all, the strongest of all, the one who brushes the whalers aside, its extraordinary strength lies in its solidarity; sperm whales form a circle shaped like a flower, a fortress fashioned with their bodies, to protect a weak little whale. Leena has contemplated the sea flower a long time, the ten petals they form, she remembers a presentation she once gave at school, she carefully drew the configuration on the blackboard, from then on her notebooks were full of kind-hearted whales, full of protective fretworks.
She reads a passage out loud, it describes how the animal’s fat was used for oil lamps, Leena had read somewhere that whale fat was used to make lipstick, she found that sickening, she never applies lipstick to her lips. She reads louder and louder, the body in front of her barely moves, a faint twitch at most. The whole house reeks of dark beer and last night’s tobacco, the walls have trapped in the smell and Leena’s mother. She’ll keep sleeping until two o’clock, it’s been like this every day, for months, for years, dreams are buried at the bottom of the sea.
The mother, the past
Pauline exalts between two misty dreams, memories of hunting, fishing, plump bodies that jostle against each other in the cooler, the silver glint off the bodies of the fish, the same silver glint off the surface of the water, Pauline cherishes these glimmers, her veritable jewels. She remembers the morning’s trek, the pink and golden moss that smothered the sky, the first stirrings of the day, Jo and she would push the angya down to the open sea, their boots would sink into the sand, a pebbly sand, they could feel each of i
ts imperfections beneath their feet. And there would be Jo with his foot on the edge of the little boat, Jo with the concentration of a tiger awaiting his prey, he would spot a salmon streaking by a few watery metres below.
Pauline had her own spectacle to watch: a procession of whales that came up to the surface for air, she would rarely catch sight of anything more than the dorsal fin, but the sight was all her own, her husband was too concentrated on what was happening beneath the water to watch the peaceful gliding of the whales. The moment they shared together they lived on land, when they emptied the cooler, together they would filet the fish, would make every effort to ensure they cut perfect rectangles, which, like little silver cloths, clumsily dried in the wind. Pauline relives her memories of fishing in her bottle, stops up what she can of summers with Jo.
In the last few years, life with Jo has come down to the warmth of his back, their dizzying heaps in bed, when night comes, Pauline ensconces her body into his bony frame, holds his hand in the early hours of the morning, while the fragments of dream still cling to her skin, she wishes he would take a day off to stay with her, to keep her from foundering once again. Instead she listens to the sound of his boots on the gravel and then silence, the man will come back when he’s accumulated enough overtime, overtime allows him to pay the week’s grocery bill, pay the rent at his mom’s place a few blocks away, but, most of all, overtime allows Jo to escape; to escape the grey sky, his wife’s alcoholism, the guilt he feels when he looks at his daughter.
Most of the time, Pauline is alone in the middle of her field of empty bottles, she waits for Leena to come home from school, to tell her about her day, she, always drunk, inquires about what her daughter studied that day. She’s sorry Leena doesn’t fish, she doesn’t have the money to pay for her daughter’s licence, or her own for that matter. In her last dream, she imaged that Leena was little again, taking in with her the sight of the majestic whales coming up to the surface. She was hugging her daughter close, taking her little hand, unfolding her delicate fingers like the petals of a flower.
Leena, mammal murmurings
Leena continues reading out loud; at birth, sperm whales are both female and male. She tells herself that sperm whales, only newborns themselves, are already both father and mother. She watches her mother from the corner of her eye, the head still pressed against the kitchen table, the beer bottles form a circular defense around her, alone, Leena cannot act as her fortress, her sea flower. She thinks back to when she was five, her mother was a midwife, delivered hundreds of babies, enabled life to be born, she was the last one in the village. A kind and compassionate woman, she would stay a few days with the new moms to help them with their newborn, kept a watchful eye on the contractions, on the pain of others. There was an accident one day, a woman died in childbirth, her pelvic bones fractured. Leena’s mother was the one attending the birth, she never could get over it, she stopped practising, now buries herself at home encircled in by her glass fortress.
Leena remembers a hot day a few months ago, they were going to run errands, her mother had been drinking heavily but insisted she should get out of the house for little while. Her mother looked at the price of every item, swore away, took to ripping moldy lumps off a broccoli.
“They want to kill us with this food! Look! There’s mold on every single broccoli. How can they expect anyone to eat something like that!”
“You don’t have to buy any! It’s not a big deal! Of course people are going to see that the food’s no good anymore.”
Pauline persisted in minutely scrutinizing every single item of food, she tore sprouts from the potatoes, hurled a bag of mushy onions down an aisle. Leena begged her to stop, but her mother kept rioting, loudly and fiercely, against the terrible quality of the food. Coming up to a cooler with whole pieces of fish, she grabbed one, dangled it in front of Leena’s nose.
“See this? Did you see the price? This fish—your dad and I would have caught it for nothing.”
The manager accosted them, sharply demanded to know who this woman was who was hollering in his grocery store. Pauline was clutching onto the fish and stuffing it under her coat right in front of the furious manager.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?”
“I’m taking this fish. It’s mine. Before you came here with your grocery store, we could still fish and the fish were ours.”
“Excuse me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And in any case, you had better give me that fish!”
Leena’s mother spat in the manager’s face, and a few seconds later he was dragging her to the head office. Leena hadn’t had time to react before the manager was phoning the police.
She remembers the horrid discussion that followed with the police, docile, Leena explained that her mother had been drinking a little, that this wasn’t like her, and that ordinarily she always paid for her purchases. She remembers not speaking a word to her mother for more than a week. She was super angry and vowed never to go out with her again. It wasn’t until her mother explained to her that they used to be free, free to fish without permits, without quotas, that at that time they could still provide for themselves from the sea—then Leena’s attitude toward her mother changed. She hadn’t lived through these radical alterations, she hadn’t experienced this fishing that ensured their survival for months at a time, the days of smoking fish.
Leena had never known anything of this life that existed before her or at least had known next to nothing, long days spent hanging the fish in the smokehouse, yet one day she had wondered: Why pay so much when the sea could still feed us? She knows that her grandparents also fished, for every whale story Leena knew, her grandpa had another fishing story to tell, he used to describe in detail how Leena’s grandma would make fish soup on Sundays, how its taste was second to none. Leena remembers that soup, the comfort it brought, her grandma would make it every time Leena surprised her with a visit, always with unbelievable slowness, Leena believed that such slowness was a requirement for making such incredible soup. It’s been a long time since her mother’s made soup, Leena often takes on the task of making dinner and, try as she might, she has never made a soup quite like her grandmother’s.
She studies a brochure about a year-long school exchange in Montreal next year, a friend went there for a year of immersion, he told her about the forests around the city, the autumn colours, the sultry summer, the streets full of people, the coffee shops and libraries, Leena could read as much as she wanted about marine mammals. She hesitates, smooths out the front of the brochure, an image of a street bursting with people, mostly Asians: Chinatown, she wonders if the Inuit have their own neighbourhood, what they do there in Montreal. Right now, it’s the autumn colours that draw Leena the most, she looks out the window, studies the bitter grey tapestry of the Great River. She longs to be somewhere else, feels trapped between these desires for freedom that promise to be saviours and her life here with her mother, she wonders what would become of her mother if she were to decide to leave. A year, both a very long time and a very short time, her mother would certainly lose all notion of time. She sighs, tucks the brochure away in her dresser. She’ll talk to her dad about it when he gets home.
Pauline, Sedna’s fury
A fine rain begins to patter against the bottom of the boat, Pauline lifts her head, droplets bead down her face, Jo is still focused on his fishing. It must be noon, a little later even, Pauline feels a thunderstorm approaching, the wind suggests it. She fell asleep, curled up at the bottom of the boat, she almost regrets waking up now, they’re alone on the water, they’ve drifted out a fair way. Jo doesn’t move a muscle, the rain doesn’t make him budge, Pauline wonders if he’s even aware that she’s there. The waves begin to swell, the boat pitches, the sea shakes itself, Pauline grips the boat and begs Jo to listen to her, but the man is elsewhere, he wants to catch enough fish for everyone, just one or two more and then they’ll go.
The sky tries on every shade of grey, Pauline can hardly see the shore,
she can’t see the villagers scrambling to moor their boats, the life jackets, she can’t see the mothers who hurry their children inside where it’s dry, the dogs run behind them, taking the wind’s beating for the children, balls lie littered on the bank, everything’s forgotten and everyone heads inside. Pauline zips up her life jacket, begs Jo to do the same, but heavy swells seize the boat, the sea carries them even further away from shore. Pauline begins to yell, she’s scared, of the sea, of Jo who’s frozen in his fisherman role in the rain that is now falling thick and fast, of the metres that separate her from land. She hurls Jo’s line into the sea, urges him to do something, he gets angry but reluctantly turns the boat around anyway, he takes in the storm looming up before his eyes.
An enormous wave strikes the hull of the boat, Pauline is frozen to the bone, she wonders if they aren’t done for. They’re getting closer to the shore even though they’re still a long way off, Jo revs up the motor, he doesn’t look back, Pauline eats up every centimetre, her hair flies in the wind, the sea crashes even louder, waves slink beneath them. The wind is violent and cold, a stinging slap in the face, the waves voraciously mouth the prow of the boat, Pauline yells at Jo to speed up, but the wind swallows her words, transforms them into a kettle’s whistle, Pauline can’t hear anything anymore, she loses her balance, spills headlong over the boat, her head strikes the mast. Jo cuts the motor in the middle of the storm, panicked, he tries to find his wife.
A Blanket Against Darkness Page 6
