You understand me? I ask.
A little, he says. How did you get inside the bear?
Uh —
I thought you were a magical being, he says. He starts to laugh. He seems to find me hilarious. I thought I was dreaming and that I saw the birth of a bear-woman, he says, between gales of laughter. It gave me a fright. I was trying to figure out how to kill you. He yanks off a gauntlet, reaches for my pubic hair, gives a little tug and snorts. He walks around me, muttering to himself in some guttural language. I notice how nimble he is despite the tennis racquets. I feel suddenly naked, shy.
Why have you got feathers on you? He plucks a piece of down from my chin. How can you stand to be naked like that in the cold? He drops to his knees by the bear’s head and clucks his tongue. How did you kill the bear? I have been tracking her. See where the dog wounded her leg? He’s a good bear dog. He likes you, I don’t know why. He doesn’t like many people. Once he went after a seal. I had to grab his hindquarters when he dove down an ice hole after it. He chuckles at the memory. I found him swimming in the sea. He had this in his mouth. He produces the tennis ball from a bag slung over his shoulder. It was like a dream, he says. The grandfathers sent him to me to help in the hunting. I think my wife and he have become lovers.
Where did you learn French? I ask.
Every summer I work for the French at the drying station at Brest. I take the iron when they leave. He produces a knife and a handful of square-head nails. I am rich. My wife sleeps with the French. We have many children. In the winter, I hunt. But I don’t need to. I can speak a little Basque. Not so much. You speak Portuguese? We could practise together. I don’t like the Spanish, always making the sign of the cross. He makes the sign of the cross, presses his palms together, and looks soulfully up at the stars. The fishermen have offered to take me to France, but I always say no. I like it here. It’s nice when the French go away and I have my wife to myself.
He pauses for a moment of amorous retrospection, then continues. By the way, I don’t like to mention it, but you are so ugly it will be difficult to sleep with you. (Laughter.)
Pardon? I say, and collapse. I go down with a thump. Look up at the stars. The Great Bear, the Little Bear, the dogs, Andromeda (another girl left on a rock to die). Yes, it is like the little man says, all a dream.
He jumps up with a hiss of breath through his teeth. I think he is about to do something helpful, but instead he hastily un-straps his tennis racquets, scrambles up the rocks of Richard’s grave mound and begins to wrestle with the scarecrow woman in the court gown. What is it? he asks, dragging her down beside me. Her seams leak dried kelp, which he tries to stuff inside. Is it your spirit? You shouldn’t leave it out in the open. Bad people, savages, will come and steal it. We’ll find someplace better to hide it.
I start to weep in frustration. I’m very cold, I say. I haven’t eaten anything. If you don’t do something for me, I’ll die. I am really going to die. I say the last sentence slowly, enunciating the words as clearly as possible. But my strength is gone, and he must bend down to hear me, letting another hiss escape between his teeth.
You should get up and cook some of this fine bear you killed for us, he says. Can you start a fire?
I raise a languid hand and let it drop beside me.
I hope you are not one of those lazy women, he says. It is difficult being lazy and ugly. You could starve.
All right, I say, now I am dying. May God have mercy on my soul.
The little man grunts a word in his own language, then begins strapping on his tennis racquets again. I think he is about to abandon me, but he shuffles over to an open space where the snow is deep and begins walking in circles, packing the snow down. He reminds me of Richard scraping his tennis court out of sand. I will myself to die. I close my eyes. I hold my breath. Nothing. He is trying to cut the snow into blocks with his knife, but every time he picks one up it falls apart in his hands. He comes back over to me and says, I’m not very good at building snow houses. My cousin usually does it.
Next thing I know he is poking his head into the hut, Bastienne’s burial mound. He grasps her corpse by the feet and drags it to the door. He seems unaware of the indignity. But I wince when my old nurse snags a finger against the doorjamb and he yanks her through, and again when he bangs her skull on the ice and tosses her over a snowbank. He has the air of someone cleaning house.
He ducks his head and disappears into the hut. I can hear him in there, rearranging things between disgusted hisses. He comes out once to retrieve his bag and weapons. A light appears through a crack in the logs, a tiny flame. He rushes out again, this time without his coat, bare to the waist, and begins to carve the bear, stripping slices of meat off a haunch.
If you’re not dead yet, he says, you should come in and eat. Everything is ready.
Certain Anxieties Occasioned by the State of My Soul
By the grace of God, who may or may not be someone named Cudragny, and the benevolence of the white bear who chose to die upon my breast (possibly in the act of trying to kill me), I am alive and pregnant in the New World, without a husband, with no family to call upon, without any clothes to speak of and nary a vegetable or a beef pasty in sight. I am alive, in short, with nothing to live for.
I blame everyone for this, but especially the General, my uncle, the dealing-with-upstart-girls expert, the man without a sense of humour, the man with the inaccurate knowledge of mythic lore, the inept dog owner, the schemer, the political back-stabber. (Had not he and M. Cartier been squabbling from the start? Had he not abandoned M. Cartier that first winter, instead of showing up on schedule with the guns and ammunition, so that M. Cartier would fail and he, the General, could achieve the glory of founding Canada? And, of course, didn’t he realize, when he saw all the fish-drying stations up and down the coast, that, whatever he wanted to believe, it had been found long before? I mean, my Aunt Geseline’s ass!)
I have conceived an immoderate hatred of him, and this hatred has replaced my former desire for mild intoxicants, good sex, witty conversation, cheap printed books and a front-row seat at public executions (what everyone wants). And I tell myself, I swear it to myself in fact, that before the last bell tolls, the last trumpet calls, when the Beast walks and the dead rise from their graves, I will hunt the General down (or walk over to his house, whichever is easier), and slaughter him, preferably in some diabolically uncomfortable manner.
Of course, there is the baby. But without Richard or Bastienne to talk to and without any hope that I shall actually persist long enough to deliver myself of this unhappy burden, I find it difficult to get excited about the prospect of motherhood. I already do have a child back in France (his name is Charles, by the way; in my mind I have always called him my little Carlito), though we have never been close. And it’s not as if I can ever imagine this new one eating pancakes with beet sugar before the fire in the nursery or skipping off to the priest’s school or throwing horse apples at the scullery maid hanging up the laundry. I try as much as I can to put it out of my mind.
Instead of all the appurtenances of civilized life, I have Itslk (as close as I can come to spelling his name), my fat, bustling, talkative savage paramour. I use the words “savage” and “paramour” ironically. Itslk insists that all the savages live south of us, up the Great River. His people live to the north and call themselves the People, as if they were the only ones. They are all gentlemen and ladies, albeit with a peculiar sense of chivalry and hospitality. And, though he gallantly forces himself to make love to me through the long nights, hopping up beside me on the sleeping platform he has erected at the back of the hut with the air of one about to perform a domestic chore, he cannot be said to have entered upon a romantic attachment. I could never have imagined a person so free of sentiment. I have only to go outside to relieve myself next to Bastienne’s snow-covered corpse to be reminded of his simple and pragmatic approach to life. On the whole, I find this endearing.
A month has passed, maybe
more. At the winter solstice, Itslk sat in the doorway, sang songs to the stars, to the she-devil under the ice, to a girl he once knew (apparently, he has known a lot), pounded his medicine drum, chatted with a collection of tiny ivory creatures he carries in a pouch, and generally did what he could to assist in delivering the new year. This was his job, much as having sex with me was his job, and he took it very seriously (that night we abstained). There was always a chance that things could go wrong, that time would not come back, that the general trend of the old year — cold, lengthening nights, shorter days, more cold — would continue, that all life would disappear, frozen in the immutable dark. Always a chance, he would say, cheerily. Then he would lose himself in a debate about which animals would last longest in the infinite night. Fish, he thought. He had found live fish frozen in the ice before, though he didn’t know how long they could survive like that. Bats, I said.
When the days began to grow longer, he went around beaming, pleased with himself for having once again saved the world for the People. He wasn’t cocky, just brisk and businesslike, as if to say, I saved the world, now I’ll cut some meat and sew up that hole in my gaiter.
He had built that sleeping platform and outfitted the hut with a stone lamp that burned scraps of fat and piled snow around the walls to keep the heat in. He butchered the bear after feeding me that first night, kept the skin and threw the offal to Léon, who seemed happy to sleep in the snow and gnaw the bear’s innards. That first night I was in agony from the sudden warmth. My gut rebelled against real food in contrast to the water and air I was used to. But Itslk kept coming in to show me things he was discovering. He brought in an arquebus. I have seen these work, he said. A man could run up and kill you before you got it to shoot. He peered down the barrel. I will take it apart for the iron.
He brought me my English Bible. What’s this? he said. These are words, I said, pointing to the text. He put his ear to the pages and listened intently, looked disappointed. Later, I would see him walking about with the book held to the side of his head. He would grow frustrated, throw the book down, lecture it, and try again. I tried to read to him, but he took the book away. Let it speak for itself, he said.
He brought in Richard’s tennis racquet. And this? he asked. He pointed to his snowshoes (I am not stupid; we had quickly cleared up that misunderstanding). There should be two of them, he said. I hefted the racquet, tossed Léon’s leather ball in the air, and whacked it across the hut. Itslk gazed at me, mystified, hissed through his teeth and went out again.
When I showed him how I wore what was left of my down bags (found flattened beneath the bear), he seemed puzzled. If you want to look like a bird, he said, you should put the feathers outside.
He dragged my scarecrow woman into the tangled under-growth and laid her in a hollow, carefully concealing the spot with a screen of branches. In truth, I felt relieved. His anxiety on this point had proved infectious. (Yes, yes, I know. It’s all a dream, or love. As I have said, there had been a definite drift toward insanity or mystical experience, I was not sure which. I believe it all went back to books and the two gods and the New World — things just weren’t the same any longer. And who said being saved would ever turn out the way a person expects it to?)
About the baby, Itslk is anxious and solicitous in his own way. It bothers him that there are no women around to help me and give advice. He says he must pretend to be a woman him-self sometimes in order to give proper support. He says women in his village chew hides to make them soft. They warn each other not to let a mermaid see them pregnant because mermaids like to steal human babies. Geese also, he says. They like to steal little boys and fly them to their own land in the south. There were many stories about this. When I fail to master the hide-chewing thing, he says, You have to take the hair off first.
We eat the bear. Have I mentioned this? My diet goes from water, water, water and air to bear, bear, bear and bear. We have so much bear we use frozen bear meat for pillows, chairs and footstools. Itslk chops a hole in the ice and tries fishing, but his luck is bad. He says he can’t understand this. He is the best hunter and fisherman in his village. I say I feel sorry for the people in his village. I say, Good thing I killed the bear.
Nights, I gaze into the flame of the stone lamp and imagine a feast day in France. To begin: beef and mutton, ham and tongue, soup, calf’s head, venison with turnips, strained peas, roast veal, hot swan, gosling, turkey, udder pâté. Second course: breast of veal, roast sausage, tripe, cutlets, venison stew, roast pheasant, roast capon, plover, heron, partridge pâté. Third course: peacock, teal, fox, pork jelly, hot pigeon pâté, cold heron pâté, blancmange, aspic, roast duck. Fourth course: cold turkey pâté, cold venison pâté, hare pâté, boar’s head, cold swan, bustard, crane, pheasant pâté. And to finish: three kinds of jelly, dried fruit, preserves, nougat, a flan, a tart, aniseed, raw and cooked pears, medlars, chestnuts and cheese. All washed down with white wine, claret and malmsey.
When I tell Itslk about my old life, he lapses into polite silence, as if my flights of fancy embarrass him with their un-reality. He is as imprisoned in his world as Richard was in his. Though he has saved me, he cannot save himself from the swirl of words, inventions, ideas and commerce that will one day overwhelm him. At some point, he will face a choice: die in the torrent clutching his beliefs like a twig in a storm, or persist in a wan state beside the raw, surging, careless proliferation of the new. He was right to worry at the solstice. There will come a time when time itself refuses to turn back, when his magical powers will be insufficient to restart the universe exactly as it was.
When I see this, the character of our lovemaking begins to change. I gain weight, my cheeks take on a healthy sheen. Itslk admits that I am edging out of the category of extreme ugliness. He likes the sly convexity of my belly as it slides up and over the baby. But more than anything, the change is in me. I begin to cherish him, to feel myself cradling that frail, comic, gentle creature whose death I foresee as he thrusts into me. And I perceive that being a shallow and frivolous girl might have its advantages.
How Tongársoak Appears as a White Bear (and Eats the Aspirant)
Itslk grows restless. Sometimes he looks at me as if he expects an answer to an unspoken question. What? I say, and he hisses through his teeth. He stares out at the ice, looking for seals to hunt, he says. But then I have to shake him to get his attention, as if he were in a trance or the deepest dream, though his eyes are open.
One day he collects his weapons, packs strips of dried bear in his bag, calls the dog and announces he is going home. He says he misses his wife even if she is a terrible woman. This sends me into a panic. I beg him on my knees not to abandon me (as so many others have). I crawl a hundred yards along the ice after him, whimpering that I love him. (It is my impression that men are natural hysterics and, deep down, enjoy this behaviour in a woman.) He keeps whistling for Léon, who sits immobile, though alert and curious, by the hut’s doorway. I scream at Léon to stay with me, although evidently he has already made that decision on his own. Two hours later Itslk returns shamefaced and apologetic.
One night I wake to find him kneeling above me with a stone knife I have never seen before poised over my heart. I say his name, and he seems to wake and wonder what he is doing threatening me with a knife. He says he dreamed I had turned into a cannibal and was going to eat him. Part of me grows impatient with the melodrama. Beneath his garrulousness and constant activity, he is a man troubled by ungovernable impulses and strange visions.
He never kisses me — just manages a weird nose rubbing business. I never get used to it (though at other times and places I have not been backward in the practice of sexual perversity).
To pass the time, he tells me stories. He tells me of a mysterious phantom, an immense, hairless, red-eyed dog that chases real dogs, which die of convulsions at the sight of him. He tells me about Sedna, mistress of the nether world, and her father, to whom the dead belong, how in the late fall Sedna walks upon t
he earth and must be driven back by powerful wizards called angakok. And how when an angakok, in his capacity as a doctor, pronounces a sick person beyond hope, the People withhold food and throw water on the patient to hasten the end (this happened to Itslk’s brother). He tells me about a famous angakok, a distant relative of his, who fell through the ice off Degrat Island and floated in the sea for five days. When he was recovered, his clothing was still dry, and it is said that the freezing water turned to steam when he thrust his hand into it.
He tells me about a girl who, in the dead of night, would receive a mysterious lover into her bed. One night she blacked her hands with ashes in order to discover his identity. In the morning she saw the prints of her hands on her brother’s back. Disgusted, she grabbed a lamp and fled into the sky. Her brother ran after her, and we see them still, the sun with the moon chasing her.
He tells me about the animal mother, a malicious woman who is always hiding game from the People. When she was a girl, her brothers rowed her out to sea and tossed her overboard. The girl clung desperately to the gunwale, pleading with them to take her back. But they chopped off her fingers, which turned into seals and walruses, and the girl sank to the bottom of the sea, where she reigns to this day. Now, when she hides the animals, Itslk says, it is up to an angakok to make the long underwater journey to her kingdom and trick her or otherwise convince her to let the animals go so that the People can eat.
Why did they throw her overboard? I ask. I naturally identify with the unwanted female whose ambiguous and tragic fate so clearly parallels my own. Was her other name Iphigenia?
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