Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  It was called the Book with No Face, because its covers had been torn away since the dawn of time. It was a kind of anthology of sailors’ yarns, whose first page reproduced a map of the Caribbean that never ceased to amaze Noah. How could such a mass of water coexist with such a small amount of land? It resembled a negative of the map of Saskatchewan, where there was a lake for every island, and oceans of grain instead of the sea.

  The Prairies gave way to shipwrecks, sordid tales of pirates and the promise of yellow gold buried beneath distant coconut trees. The book was written in English and French, and sprinkled with bizarre nautical jargon and archaic expressions. Noah refused to be impressed. Though terms like Wa-Pii and Moos-Toosis escaped his grasp, nothing could prevent him from tacking among royal sail rudders, main topsail hatchways, and assorted bowline tackle.

  It took him nearly a year to get through the Book with No Face, and that heroic reading left an indelible imprint on him. Never again would he be able to separate a book from a road map, a road map from his family tree, or his family tree from the odour of transmission oil.

  Sarah and Jonas Doucet exchanged letters for several years. Their correspondence constituted a massive tongue stuck out at the most elementary logic, since Jonas, like Sarah and Noah, never stayed put very long. After spending a few months in Vancouver, he once again headed north, constantly travelling from village to village, from job to job, working his way up the West Coast toward Alaska, never very far from the sea. Meanwhile, Sarah and Noah zigzagged across Saskatchewan, stopping to work in Moose Jaw, before returning to the suburbs of Winnipeg for the winter.

  The combined effect of these two vagrancies made any exchange of letters highly improbable, and Sarah had to develop a special postal system.

  When the time came to mail a letter, she spread the road maps of western North America out on Grampa’s hood and tried to guess where Jonas might be. For example, if he had just spent a number of weeks in Whitehorse, she figured she could pin him down in Carmacks. Then she would change her mind; Carmacks was too far from the sea. Instead, Jonas would continue along Route 1 toward Anchorage, and was probably about halfway there. She therefore addressed the letter to General Delivery in Slana, and put down Assiniboia General Delivery by way of return address, as she planned to be passing through there in the next few weeks.

  With any luck, Jonas would receive her letter and send a postcard to Assiniboia; otherwise, the envelope would be lost in the void and Sarah would chalk up a miss on the road maps.

  Plain common sense dictated that not a single missive sent out according to this hare-brained system would ever reach its target. Nevertheless, year in, year out, they managed to exchange a letter a month. This absurd correspondence lasted until the arrival of a mysterious postcard. Thirteen years later, Noah would still recall that day in minute detail.

  They had stopped in Mair, a hamlet huddled around the parking lot of a thresher-harvester dealer. In the middle of the village, the three usual institutions marked out an equilateral triangle: the farmer’s co-op (Founded in 1953), the post office (SOC OR1) and Brenda’s Restaurant (Today: Fish n’ Chips, Dessert, Beverage, $3.95).

  Having cast a suspicious eye on the restaurant’s menu, Noah and Sarah crossed the road in the direction of the post office.

  In any one year, they would visit several hundred post offices, and Noah never tired of these brief stopovers. He loved the glint of the steel postal boxes, the worn counters, the faded posters celebrating the subtle joys of stamp collecting and, more than anything, the air of those rooms, redolent with crushed paper, ink stamps and the rubbery aroma of elastic bands.

  While he soaked in the atmosphere of the post office, Sarah asked the clerk if a letter had come for them. The old man took out the box containing the letters addressed to Mair General Delivery—undoubtedly one of the planet’s most underused addresses—and was amazed to find a postcard in it. He examined it unhurriedly before finally turning it over to see who the addressee was.

  “Sarah and Noah Riel, right? Got any ID?”

  As Sarah fished about in her pockets for an old health insurance card—she never had owned a driver’s licence—he nonchalantly studied the postcard. Noah, clutching the edge of the counter, stamped his feet impatiently and with mute rancour eyed the ungainly clerk’s burgundy tie and yellow, nicotine-stained moustache. As soon as Sarah presented her ID, Noah snatched the postcard from the man’s fingers and darted toward the exit.

  Sarah caught up with him on the stairs of the post office, where he sat in the dust contemplating their thirty-five-cent miracle. The picture on the postcard showed a humpback whale in full flight, huge fins spread wide, a thirty-ton bird striving in vain to break loose from its element. In one corner of the photo, the graphic designer had added I Love Alaska in red italics. On the reverse side, Jonas had scrawled three rambling sentences that Noah tried unsuccessfully to decode— mainly because he was as yet incapable of reading anything except the words printed on a road map. Instead, he fell back on the stamp, which bore a seashell striped with the post office seal.

  He cast a questioning glance at Sarah: “Nikolski?”

  They eagerly opened the map of Alaska on Grampa’s scorching hood. Noah’s finger slid down the index, found the coordinates for Nikolski—E5—traced a long diagonal across the map and stopped on the island of Umnak, a remote chunk of land in the endless vertebral column of the Aleutians, far off in the Bering Sea.

  He circled in blue ink the tiny village of Nikolski, at the western tip of the island, and then stepped back to survey the map in its entirety.

  The nearest road ended at Homer, eight hundred nautical miles to the east.

  “What on earth is Jonas doing there?!” Noah exclaimed, raising his arms skyward.

  Sarah shrugged. They folded the map and went on their way without saying anything more.

  After Nikolski they received no more postcards from Jonas. Sarah continued to write regardless, believing this was merely a turn of bad luck, but the months passed, the post offices filed by and the radio silence persisted.

  There were a number of hypothetical explanations for Jonas’s silence, the most plausible being that the fragile miracle of their correspondence had run its course and that each letter exchanged throughout the years amounted to an intolerable loophole in the immutable laws of chance, which had quite simply regained their sovereignty.

  But Noah had the stubborn personality of a six-year-old nomad, and couldn’t be bothered with the immutable laws of this or that. Fixing his gaze on the horizon, he mulled over many kilometres of grim thoughts, trying to imagine what in the world Jonas might be concocting in Nikolski. He must have become infatuated with an Aleutian girl and was trying to start a new life by obliterating all his previous endeavours. Noah imagined a flock of slant-eyed half-brothers and half-sisters, grubby little village-dwellers who might be monopolizing his father’s attention.

  He repeatedly proposed to Sarah that they pay Jonas a surprise visit and catch him red-handed. Rather than returning yet again to Medicine Hat, why not go up the Alaska Highway all the way to Anchorage, and from there take the ferry to Nikolski?

  Sarah evasively dismissed the idea. When pressed to explain why, she claimed that Jonas had already left Nikolski. Sometimes she went so far as to specify that he had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks. Usually, however, she said nothing and turned up the radio, pretending not to hear him.

  Noah, who was not lacking in insight, suspected this was a bad case of cold feet—a chronic inability to go near the ocean. He was able to confirm his diagnosis through expert interrogation.

  Had she ever been to Vancouver?

  Pout of indifference.

  Had she ever happened to leave the middle of the country?

  She had never seen the point.

  Didn’t she feel like seeing what there was on the far side of the Rockies?

  Sarah’s uninspired response was that it made no sens
e to go see for themselves, since they had several road maps allowing them to answer that question, which was of no interest anyway. Noah, who had long ago exhausted the possibilities of the glove compartment, decided to put the question directly:

  “You’ve never had the urge to see the Pacific Ocean?”

  Sarah was content to answer, no, she had never really wanted to whiff seagull droppings or rotting seaweed. The reply, a clever blend of contempt and indifference, betrayed a poorly disguised tremor of panic.

  Noah shook his head. In his miniature inner atlas he crossed out Nikolski.

  Time rolled on to Grampa’s oceanic rhythm. Nothing seemed to have changed, other than the distribution of rust on the sides of the 1966 Bonneville. Sarah piloted, Noah grew and the trailer appeared to be forever in the grips of a circular curse. It was sighted in July near Lake of the Woods, on the Ontario border; on Christmas Eve it was caught unawares in southern Alberta, in the empty parking lot of a People’s store; in March it showed up at the far northern edge of Lake Winnipegosis, trapped by a blizzard at a truck stop; in May it was criss-crossing southern Saskatchewan. Come July, it could be seen once again at Lake of the Woods, having returned to its point of departure with the migratory punctuality of a sperm whale.

  Noah had made friends with no one—an unpleasant but necessary decision. When their trailer whisked past a schoolyard he contemplated the throng of potential companions. There were hundreds of them on the other side of the chain-link fence, playing basketball, complaining about their teachers, clustering in circles to puff on a cigarette. Some of them gazed yearningly at the road. The old silvery trailer exerted on them a strange magnetic force, like a Mongol horde galloping across the suburbs of a large city. With their fingers threaded through the grid, the captives envied the nomads.

  Noah considered the possibility of throwing himself out the window.

  He did not share in the Glorious North American Motoring Myth. To his mind, the road was nothing but a narrow nowhere, bounded on the starboard and port sides by the real world, a fascinating, inaccessible, unimaginable place. Most of all, the road bore no relation to Adventure, Freedom or the Absence of Algebra Homework.

  Every fall, Sarah bought the appropriate school-books, and he would lock himself in the trailer to study zealously, in the belief that algebra and grammar represented his only hope of one day joining the real world.

  Twelve years had gone by since the postcard from Nikolski. Noah was now eighteen—the time had come to leave the trailer. All he was waiting for to set his escape plan in motion were the results of his Manitoba Department of Education exams. Once he had secured his grade twelve diploma, he would be off to university.

  He was far less concerned with choosing his field of study than with the location of the university itself. It was out of the question for him to take up residence in Winnipeg or Saskatoon; Noah wanted to climb out of the glove compartment and vault over the horizon. But which horizon exactly?

  South? The United States did not interest him.

  North? Not a viable option so long as there were no plans to open a Central University of Baffin Island.

  West? The West was riddled with holes, as trans parent and greasy as the road maps in the glove compartment. West was his father, that far-off and mysterious man who lived with an Aleutian tribe on an island lost in the Bering Sea, who ate raw salmon and heated his yurt with dried sheep turds—not the most edifying father figure to look up to.

  So Noah would go east.

  He wrote on the sly to a Montreal university. The registration papers arrived a week later at Armada General Delivery.

  Noah was afraid to reveal his plan to his mother. He anticipated a tirade against Montreal, the port city, gateway to the St. Lawrence Seaway, frenzied metropolis— neither more nor less than a man-eating leviathan. What took place was nothing like that. Puckering her lips with indifference, Sarah watched him rip open the envelope.

  “An island,” was all she bothered to mumble.

  Rather than wasting his energy on futile rebuttals, Noah withdrew to the trailer to study the contents of the envelope, especially the program directory, a thick atlas of the various trajectories that now offered themselves to him. He began by looking for the Diploma in Applied Nomadology or the B.A. in International Roaming, the only disciplines for which he felt he had some talent, but there was no mention of any such degrees. He would have to make do with whatever other options were available.

  Noah set about reading the directory from cover to cover, leaving nothing out, from Abstruse Sciences to Zenology, taking in Abyssometrics, Opinion Machining and Studies in Applied Mercantilism along the way. Overcome in short order by this soporific reading material, he keeled over with his face in the directory.

  He resurfaced an hour later, feeling nauseous. He looked about, hoping to recognize his surroundings.

  The kettle reflected a distorted image of his face. In the very centre of his forehead the cheap ink had stamped a puzzling word: Archaeology.

  Noah shrugged his shoulders, and surmised that there was no denying the force of destiny.

  When Sarah finally emerges from her sleeping bag, the fog has lifted and Noah has prepared the breakfast table. They eat in silence, amid the herbicidal fumes rising from the drainage ditch. Noah takes a halfhearted bite out of his toast with honey and then leaves it practically untouched. Sarah is content with two scalding cups of tea.

  Breakfast ends abruptly. Sarah scoops up the jar of honey and the teapot and folds down the table as though she feels a sudden sense of urgency.

  While she organizes the departure, Noah checks his pack one last time; it contains the strict minimum, each item carefully considered. From the kitchen table, the Chipewyan ancestors follow the tiniest gesture with their usual incomprehension.

  Then, sitting on his bunk, Noah slowly scans the interior of the trailer in the hope of finding a detail that by some miracle may have escaped his attention over the last eighteen years. He finds nothing, and ends his stock-taking with a sigh.

  He tightens the straps on his pack, slings it over his shoulder and steps out of the trailer.

  Sarah is already sitting in the car, hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road, in an attitude of both impatience and denial. Noah opens the other door and begins to get in, one foot in the car, the other on solid ground. He holds this position for several minutes without speaking, his gaze turned westward.

  “Should I drop you off at the Trans-Canada?” Sarah finally asks.

  Squinting, Noah contemplates tiny Route 627. Not much traffic in these parts, but what does it matter? There’s no hurry. Sarah reluctantly starts up Grampa’s engine. She listens to the low rumbling of the V-8, on the alert for any suspicious noises, while Noah searches for a memorable phrase to close this chapter of his life.

  Suddenly, Sarah reaches over to the glove compartment, punches it open and grabs the Book with No Face.

  “Don’t forget this.”

  Noah wavers for a moment, partially opens his pack and squeezes the old book between two sweaters. The binding is as brittle as bone and the old map of the Caribbean comes loose, orphaned in his hands.

  After this, everything happens very quickly: Sarah, without a word, hugs him with all her strength, and then boots him out of the car. Before he has time to add another word, she puts the car in gear and tears off in a clatter of gravel, with the passenger door still open.

  A minute later Noah finds himself alone on the side of the road, backpack agape, an old map of the Caribbean in his hand and a ball of asphalt in his stomach. He breathes deeply, folds the map and slips it into his shirt pocket. Then he adjusts his backpack and starts walking east, eyes squinting directly into the sun, which is still suspended on the horizon.

  A little farther along, three crows are pecking at the carcass of an animal. Noah shoos away the birds, which caw indignantly as they take flight, only to perch on the far side of the road.

  Beached on the gravel, eyes tur
ned skyward, a large sturgeon, a casualty of the road, watches the clouds sail by.

  Tête-à-la-Baleine

  JOYCE OPENS ONE EYE. The alarm clock says a quarter to five. She dresses in silence, without turning on the light. She pulls her duffel bag from under the bed, hoists it onto her shoulder and tiptoes out of the room. Her uncle’s snoring upstairs blends with the purring of the refrigerator.

  Outside, a cloud of mist rises from her mouth. To the west, the moon has just gone down and the faint winking of the last stars can just be made out. Joyce sets out at a brisk pace and avoids looking at the neighbours’ houses.

  A few minutes later, she reaches the high school.

  She glances blankly at the schoolyard—orange gravel under the mercury arc lamp—and realizes she feels nothing anymore, neither disgust or contempt. She is surprised at how quickly the past and forgetting have fallen into step behind her. Twelve hours ago she was still a prisoner of this enclosure, yet now the place seems completely foreign to her. Not even the despicable Frost fence bothers her now. Of course, the appearance of a fence changes considerably depending on which side of it you are standing. And on this side, the latticework is reminiscent only of the harmless grid of a geographic map.

  She lengthens her stride.

  When she was six years old, Joyce used to slip furtively into her father’s office. She would close the door without a sound, weave her way among the piles of Fisheries and Oceans Department publications, the boxes full of government forms, the catalogues of buoys, and withdraw from the cabinet some long rolls of paper. She would remove the elastic bands and unfurl on the floor dozens of nautical charts of every scale and colour, most of them covered with notes, calculations and hastily delineated fishing zones.

  Joyce developed a particular preference for chart 274-B, an immense projection on a scale of 1:100,000 of the coastline of the Lower North Shore with, at its very centre, the tiny village of Tête-à-la-Baleine. She had unrolled this chart so many times that its edges had turned a parchment colour. When examined against the light, the blue of the sea revealed an intricate archipelago of greasy finger marks interspersed with currents, depth markings, buoys, seamarks, lighthouses and channels.