Part of the transgression in Frankenstein is the recycling of corpses and their resurrection or reanimation by the doctor playing both God and grave robber. Atagutaluk resurrected herself by feeding on human corpses, a transgression by which she set herself apart from the rest of her people—she had to live alone for a year before she could fully return to her community. We are all resurrected in a way by food every day; we live off life, plant or animal. And one of the unmentionable facts of everyday life is that we’re all made out of meat, as I remember when I walk alone, regularly, in the territory of mountain lions. The carnivorous Inuit sometimes say, “The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls,” which doesn’t lessen the trauma of anthropophagy, of eating human flesh, but deepens that of everyday consumption of other sentient beings.
There’s a version of an Inuit story that’s been making the rounds in recent decades as “Skeleton Woman.” A father throws his daughter into the sea, where the sea creatures devour her until nothing but a restless skeleton is left. Or a woman marries a handsome stranger who turns out to be a bear and she follows him under the ice where he’s at home and she drowns. The underwater creatures nibble away all her flesh and leave a living skeleton. In some versions a fisherman catches the skeleton and hauls it out of the sea; in others she wakes up in her home.
Young men run away from her. An old man comes and sings and drums the flesh back on her bones. It is told as a story of the emotional self withered and starved away and then resurrected by kindness and attention, a therapeutic story like “The Juniper Tree,” in which catastrophe is wholly overcome and bodily resurrection is possible, where time runs backward as well as forward, what is suffered can be undone. Even death retreats so that the chance at happiness is given twice.
The story of Skeleton Woman bears a family resemblance to the many versions of the story of the genesis of the arctic sea goddess Sedna, the principal or one of the principal deities of the western arctic. Her story is as varied as Atagutaluk’s, though since it’s an ancient creation myth, not a report on a century-old calamity, the variations are less vexing. It’s about a woman who would not marry. In some versions her father in fury wed her to a dog. Or it’s about a woman who went off with what looked like a handsome man who turned out to be a raven. Often the husband she ends up with is a fulmar, a seabird that looks like a gull but is more closely related to shearwaters, petrels, and albatrosses.
In the version Atagutaluk’s husband told one of his children, the woman married a fulmar, though people nearby had it that the woman was married to a storm petrel. The dog, the raven, the petrel, the fulmar is a cold husband. In the version Atagutaluk’s great-granddaughter Alexina Kublu tells from the stories her father heard from his grandfather, “kipinngullakpak&unilu, ugguaqtualuugalualiq&unilu.” That is, “she was extremely lonely, and very regretful.” In all the versions of the story, the father takes the daughter back in his kayak and the abandoned husband pursues them with strong wind and turbulent waters. The small craft begins to capsize.
The father, never very kind to begin with, throws the daughter overboard, and when she tries to climb back in, he chops off her fingers. “As the parts that were chopped off fell into the water, they became the sea-mammals,” recites Kublu. “There now were seals, and square-flippers [bearded seals], and beluga. But because the woman whom they called Takannaaluk [the horrible one down there] had no fingers she wasn’t able to [use a] comb, and so her hair became tangled. Whenever her hair got tangled, sea-mammals became entangled in it.”
When the animals that were once her fingers got tangled in her hair, they did not swim up to where the hunters could get them. People went hungry. When this happened, a ritual was held; everyone gathered in an igloo; the shaman was tied up, the lights extinguished; and he began to sing in the darkness. Eventually he went under the sea to comb her hair and restore hunters’ access to the game. Freuchen went to one such ritual in Greenland, and he describes an agonized, ecstatic, frenzied, writhing group of people inside a great igloo, drumming, singing, and a shaman who despite being tightly bound disappears bodily and then after darkness is restored, returns. The light is lit; Freuchen sees him there sweating, exhausted, and the shaman says with what seems to be standard Inuit diffidence, “Just lies and tricks. The wisdom of our ancestors is not in me. Don’t believe in any of it!”
In the skeleton story, time runs backward and things are restored to what they were before; the woman lives and gains a kinder lover. What is broken can be mended, but what was human remains human, what was personal remains personal. In the story of the goddess of the sea, the heroine’s needs are not met, but the walruses and seals are created, and the needs of the humans who tell her tale are addressed instead. It’s not a fairy tale in which the wants of the individual are paramount. Damage and death are not undone, her fingers do not return to her body as flesh returned to the skeleton’s bones, but out of them comes life and sustenance.
Atagutaluk’s story is more like Sedna, in that the terrible things that happened are not undone, but she generated more life. Or it’s more like Skeleton Woman because she became a skeleton near death and was then brought back to life. She was loved, was valued, was respected for surviving, because of the bounty that came from her. It’s a story with some of the resonance of a myth, and it seems as if of events from long ago, from the dreamtime and the heroic age, though Atagutaluk’s grandchildren are online and old acquaintances are on videotape.
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient. Maybe Freuchen spoke too soon. Or maybe he mistook Atagutaluk’s reluctance to distress a guest for blitheness about her ordeal. He seems to have even gotten the date wrong, because all other sources date the events not to 1921, as he does in his Book of the Eskimos, but to 1905. The woman who survived was very young, at the beginning of a long life with many more episodes to come.
No one ever stopped telling the story of the woman who survived somewhere near Igloolik after a terrible thaw in 1905. Freuchen didn’t name the wife of his friend Patloq, or Palluq, who discovered the starving woman or women. Patloq’s wife was named Tagurnaaq, and she told the story herself, powerfully, with the sense of tragedy and oration of a great dramatist or a saga-teller, to Freuchen’s traveling companion, the part Greenlandic-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen. Tagurnaaq’s version begins with her husband, who had the gift of prophetic dreams, dreaming of one of his friends being eaten by his nearest kin. They were out traveling, and their sledge kept getting stuck all day, which she viewed as ominous. They arrived at a country of deep snow.
“Then we heard a noise. We could not make out what it was; sometimes it sounded like a dying animal in pain, and then again like human voices in the distance. As we came nearer, we could hear human words, but could not at first make out the meaning, for the voice seemed to come from a great way off. Words that did not sound like real words, and a voice that was powerless and cracked. We listened and kept on listening, trying to make out one word from another, and at last we understood what it was that was being said. The voice broke down between the words, but what it was trying to say was this: ‘I am not one who can live any longer among my fellows; for I have eaten my nearest of kin.’
“Yes, we came to that shelter, and looking in, we saw a human being squatting down inside, a poor woman, her face turned piteously towards us. Her eyes were all bloodshot, from weeping, so greatly had she suffered. Palluq and I looked at each other, and could not understand that she was still alive and breathing. There was nothing of her but bones and dry skin, there seemed indeed hardly to be a drop of blood in all her body, and she had not even much clothing left, having eaten a great deal of that, both the sleeves and all the lower part of her outer furs.”
The skeleton spoke: “‘I have eaten your fellow-singer from the feasting, him with whom you used to sing wh
en we were gathered in the great house at a feast.’ My husband was so moved at the sight of this living skeleton, which had once been a young woman, that it was long before he knew what to answer. At last he said: ‘You had the will to live, therefore you live.’” In this telling, her fathomless distress comes through as it does not in Freuchen’s versions.
The story recalls extermination camp narratives of extreme starvation, of how it warped and weakened the mind, made food an obsessive thought, drove the body like a demonic force, made the sufferer into something other than his or her ordinary self. Possessed by emptiness, Atagutaluk had starved alongside the frozen corpses of her family, she told Patloq and Tagurnaaq, and then one morning when the sun came out and a little warmth was in the air, the desire to live seized hold of her. “It was much worse than dying. . . . It could not hurt the dead, she knew, for their souls were long since in the land of the dead.” In this version there is no one with her; and her solitude is part of her suffering.
Patloq and Tagurnaaq, the couple who rescued her, had a daughter who says she too was on that grim expedition. Many decades later, she told a harsher version of the story than her mother and charged Atagutaluk with killing the other survivor. She describes the same kind of omens, the halting journey, a white partridge that called to them, and then she describes Atagutaluk as “a horrid sight! She was like a bird in its egg. She seemed to have a beak and some sort of miserable small wings because she no longer had sleeves.” She had eaten them. “She was the very image of an embryo in the egg.”
Atagutaluk’s family told the story too. The story changed, and changed, and changed again. They went out in summer, not winter. There were no children with them. They were hunting caribou. The husband instructed her to eat him, his flesh a willing gift, like organ donation, like the sacrifice of Christ, like the story of the Buddha who took the form of a rabbit and leaped into the fire to feed his hungry guest.
Rose Ukkumaluk, a woman who knew Atagutaluk, told the story as she remembered it to a video camera fifteen years or so ago. Grief and empathy come through as she speaks in her own language with subtitles, her old woman’s voice grave and a little gravelly. In this version, Atagutaluk survives alone, and there are no sleds or thaws. Ukkumaluk says, “She used to tell people to eat whatever was available. I used to eat with her. She also fed my children.”
Atagutaluk’s great-niece Apphia Agalakti Awa, who was born about a decade after Freuchen came through the region, remembers her well. “She was the one who handed out the meat. If people were hungry, if they didn’t have any food, she would split her food with those people and make sure they had some of whatever she had. She would make up little teas, little sugars, she would share with all the people in her camp and give them each a little something. She didn’t want anybody to be poor. . . . She didn’t want anybody to ever be hungry and she made sure that everybody got the food they needed. That is how she became a leader.”
No one died as a result of her actions, and many people lived. She was a benefactor to her own second crop of children, but also to the community. Baptized a Catholic in 1931, she took the name of Saint Augustine’s mother, Monica. She became an emissary between the white Christian world and her own people. This might be why she became known as “Monica Atagutaluk, the queen of Igloolik.” She wore an actual copper crown of sorts, a band that went under her braids, and in the best available photograph of her, also holds a cigarette in the corner of her mouth rather jauntily. The caption on a photograph of her in one of the volumes of Rasmussen’s Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition says that the crown was made from the band around a telescope’s tube.
Both the elementary and the high school in Igloolik are named after her, so she is a strong presence now. The people who knew her saw a long and rich life with a brief, terrible incident early on. Freuchen saw only a corner of the picture. The picture always gets bigger; there is always more to tell; one thread is tangled up with all the others; even when it stops, other threads carry the story onward, beyond the horizon. Though which version was true I do not know: sometimes I think Freuchen got an earlier version before the embroideries and enhancements entered in; sometimes I think Atagutaluk’s kin were better listeners.
I had begun by being fascinated with a sled that may not have existed, and certainly did not exist as it was described in the contemporary account I read first in that room in Iceland. I kept reading, bought Freuchen’s books, was drawn by him into his cheerful version of the arctic, learned a lot, became enchanted by him, then disenchanted, found his three versions, went further, found several others, found in the end that much of the story fell apart like that sled. Beyond it was a remarkable woman whose life was only accessible in the most general outlines. She was stranded, suffered, survived, begat, sustained, was remembered with gratitude and admiration. It was a life.
Freuchen nearly died of a sled that did not melt, not far from where Atagutaluk lived. He was traveling in the Igloolik region in the early spring of 1923, when he went out alone to pick up cached supplies and got stranded in a blizzard. He dug a hollow, covered it with his laden sled, and crawled in to spend the night with the skin of a bear’s head for a pillow and a sealskin to cover the entrance. Later, in the darkness he found that the sealskin would not budge—ice and a snowdrift had accumulated over it—and he was buried in a small, very cold space.
At a loss for a tool he shat, fashioned a tool from his own excrement, waited the little while it took to freeze solid, and then used it to chip away at the ice. Finally, he used his lungs, emptied and filled, to heave the heavy sled away, inch by inch, breath by breath. Outside at last, he could only crawl, and he crawled for three hours to where the others were. One of his feet had frozen solid, and he lost it, and he describes the pain, the gangrene, and the nightmares.
It’s a gruesome story in which he inhales his way out of a cave even more confining than the one he exhaled into being at the beginning of his life in the arctic. He continued traveling in the arctic and elsewhere, joined the Danish Resistance against the Nazis, worked on movies, wrote memoirs of his adventures and novels, but nothing ever compared to his youth in the arctic. He had two children by his first wife, a Greenlandic-Inuit woman who died of influenza in 1921, and his grandson, Peter Freuchen Ittinuar, was the first Inuit person to become a member of parliament in Canada, not so many decades ago.
There are stories that close in on you like the ice of his solidified exhales in that little house in eastern Greenland, stories you escape with inglorious tools and inhales, as he did the cavern under the sled, stories that fall apart on you like the melting sled that might not have ever existed, stories that help you navigate in storms and the dark, as the stories of others’ lives often do. The versions of Atagutaluk’s tale say as much about the tellers as their putative subject.
Though it was a vision of coldness and whiteness that drew me north, I found there the darkness inside a labyrinth and stories of warmth, including the story of a sled that melted, a story that itself became a labyrinth that had at its center questions about how to tell and how to listen.
12 • Mirrors
There is a man who has been reading a book for more than five hundred years. He holds it open so that individual pages are splayed out, separated from each other. The big book requires both of his hands to hold it, and his head is bent down to study the pages, so his whole body inclines toward his reading, the way a mother’s body curves around a child. The book is not wide open but open enough to search through, and so perhaps the reader has been searching for a passage for half a millennium. That the book is pure white and wordless doesn’t matter, for his robes are white, and his hands, and in the pale face that looks upon the pages the eyes are pure white too. Or rather a warm creamy color that is alabaster after centuries of exposure, like a white dress after a long journey.
The reader is one of forty surviving figures of mourners from the tomb of Jean Sans-Peur, John the Fearless, th
e Duke of Burgundy (other figures were lost or destroyed during the French Revolution). They mourn a grasping man who died in 1419 and whom no one has mourned in earnest since before the stone was quarried from which they took shape, though the Carthusian monks at the charterhouse the Burgundian dukes established prayed for their souls as a matter of course. Surely the artists who carved the figures were happy at the chance to practice their art at its fullest and highest expression. It is themselves they’ve made immortal, their ability to speak fluently in stone, so that the material can say cloth or flesh or hair, can say sadness or contemplation or strength.
The small mourners—they’re each about the height of my forearm—were exhibited in my city, and I went to see them repeatedly, thinking about my mother, about the chapter to be written, wondering about the draw of that whiteness, which was the whiteness that first captured my imagination in the Frankenstein footage of the man and his creation chasing each other across the ice. White like this, the color of mourning in much of Asia, is a kind of peace that is a little fatal, a little stark, the white of bones without flesh, of deserts, of the poles and cold, of the page without the words. It’s the landscape of beyond, of before, and of after.
There is a joy in writing about or painting or sculpting pain or loss. The pleasure of seeing into the life of things is one of the least celebrated and most important of the panoply of satisfactions. These tomb figures whose broad faces suggest kinship or a single model and whose draperies are simple and flowing all convey something about the nature of stone, of gravity, of emotion, and though they are supposed to be grieving they seem instead to feel the solemnity of death. Some of them are actually reading, the only employment other than marching in procession that the mourners’ figures have.
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