Elle

by Douglas Glover

  In one story they accuse her of sleeping with a dog, Itslk says, glancing narrowly at Léon. She had babies that came out looking like puppies.

  We have many enlightening and curious conversations like this.

  On fair days we stretch in the sun on the skin of the white bear before the hut, with the gleaming ice extending to the horizon, which is like the blade of a steel knife. The blue sky seems to vibrate, empty, beautiful and useless. And it is easy to imagine how insignificant we are in the scheme of things (whether it is God’s scheme or Cudragny’s or the god of the Lutherans, I cannot tell, though I suspect the god of the Lutherans wouldn’t waste time on anything so beautiful and useless as the scene before me). Léon nestles against me, chews ice from his toes, licks his balls, yawns, closes his eyes, then rises, circles, tries another position. My baby describes a like motion inside my belly.

  Léon has adapted to life in Canada with surprising ease. I don’t know what to conclude from this. He has forgiven me (or forgotten) the disastrous events on shipboard. (I have often thought how wonderful it would be if God had the personality of a dog, that infinite love and forgiveness, though all evidence points to a man with a long memory and a vengeful, judgmental heart — something like the General.) In the sun, the dog’s black fur is hot to the touch. The baby swims inside me like a fish. Itslk slips off his skin shirt, baring his shoulders and chest to the sun despite the cold and the ubiquitous and infernal ice. I am reminded of Dicuil’s charming phrase in his narrative of St. Brendan’s voyage: “and the sea stiffened (concretum) around them.” He listens to M. Tyndale’s Bible, which he regards with immense curiosity since I told him how we burned the man who made the book. He fashions a second tennis racquet (are we going to play a game, or is Richard taking over his soul?), then shows me how to strap them to my feet so I can walk about without sinking into the snow.

  He splits a tree trunk, carves two runners and builds a small sled, which he says is to carry what’s left of the bear meat to his village. This village is far to the north, past the place the French call Blanc Sablon and on up the coast. (From internal evidence, I gather that his village consists of his wife, his cousin and six children, four of mixed race. One plan is for me to become his second wife. My refusal astonishes Itslk no end, and he sulks for a day.)

  Every day I think we are leaving, but he delays. He says this is because he cannot bring himself to abandon any of the bear meat. We have to eat all that we cannot carry. But I think there is another reason: Some trouble with his wife, or it has some-thing to do with me, with seeing me tumble out of the bear, covered with blood and goose down, and the strangeness of my speech.

  He frets because he can’t seem to catch any game or under-stand why this is so. The ice teems with sea cat and walrus, and caribou come down to the beaches to call him. But when he walks out with his bow, nothing is there. I have to admit this is a riddle. When I look, the land is empty. There are no animals in sight.

  Sometimes we have the air of people who have encountered one another in a dream.

  In the old days, when the storms came in the fall and spring and the game disappeared, a wizard would make a whip out of seaweed, go down to the shore, raise his whip in the direction of the wind and shout, It is enough. He tells me his people are ruled by their dreams, that they seek dreams as answers to questions they have when they are awake. He says the soul is the same shape as the body but of a more subtle and ethereal nature. (In this, they agree with Aristotle and the ancients. When I try to explain, Itslk hisses at me.) He tells me of the war between the ducks and the ptarmigans, summer and winter, and how his people enact this war during their festivals, tugging a sealskin rope between them to see which side wins.

  One day he tells me the story of a young man who lived with his wife by the seashore. He was the best hunter in the village. Plenty of his relatives and his wife’s relatives came to live with him, and he was happy because he was able to support them all. Presently, strange men came to their country, borne along on the largest canoe the hunter had ever seen. At first, he thought the canoe was an island with three tall trees in the centre, inhabited by bears. But the bears came ashore, and soon he realized his mistake and went to meet them.

  The new men cut trees to build their settlements, wooden racks covered the beaches, roofed landing stages stretched like fingers into the sea. They sent out little boats each day (at first they seemed to him like children of the larger ship), and each night the boats returned brimming with cod. They gutted, split and salted the fish and left them on the racks to dry. The hunter watched from a distance for a while but soon was helping in return for food, bits of metal and trinkets for his wife. The men made free with his wife when she visited, but the hunter did not mind because there was a custom in his land about sharing wives. Though the visitors seemed not to understand the custom and laughed at him and abused his wife.

  Soon the hunter wanted to leave, but he found that he and his wife had grown attached to the new way of living. His old tools and weapons were broken or lost. When he needed to replace the new ones, he had to return to the fishing station where the strange men returned every summer. The animals he was used to hunting now failed to show themselves in his dreams. He no longer killed enough to feed his relatives, who began to move away to other villages and hunting grounds.

  At last he consulted his cousin, who was a wizard of their people. The cousin said he would have to instruct the young hunter in wizardry so he could rid his country of the bad people. The hunter paid in seal meat, iron nails and a bronze drinking cup he stole from the visitors. The wizard made him stay away from the fishing station one long summer, filling the days with instruction, storytelling and dreaming. Then he bade the young hunter leave the village and spend a period apart, seeking through abstinence and dreams a vision of some tutelary spirit who would guide him further into the mystery of life.

  The hunter gathered his belongings, said goodbye to his wife and set out, heading west toward the bare-topped mountains inland. He passed like a ghost among the frozen swamps and snow-choked forests, stalking animals with his bow bent but with no thought of killing, for his purpose was to find wisdom. He went without food, waiting for his vision. Then one night he dreamed a white bear, bigger than any bear he had ever seen, walked right past his sleeping place, pausing only to sniff, taking his scent before it moved on. Once the bear glanced back as if to see if he would follow. When the hunter awoke, he found bear tracks next to his bed.

  He travelled far beyond his usual hunting grounds, trailing the white bear, which indeed acted like no other bear in his experience, which, like himself, seemed less interested in food than in getting somewhere, as if it had a purpose. Starving, it loped down from the mountains toward the sea and then west again along the endless boreal beaches. Day and night it ran, pausing only now and then to look back and see that the hunter was still following. Keep up now, the bear seemed to say. Don’t fail. And as bear and hunter ran, winter deepened around them. Wolves howled after starving deer. Birds froze in the trees. Wind shrieked across the ice, filling the air with a thousand anguished voices, the voices of ghosts and weirds rising with Sedna from her kingdom beneath the waves.

  One day, to his surprise, the hunter stumbled upon his bear already dead, stretched next to a grave mound on a lonely beach. On top of the grave stood the statue of a woman dressed in strange clothes and the skull of a seal. As the hunter approached, the bear suddenly seemed to give birth. Out of its belly slid a naked woman, slick with blood, speckled with bird down, a walking skeleton. Beneath the blood, her skin was bone white, like the men who sailed from across the sea, like the ghosts who rose from the depths with Sedna.

  The hunter remembered how the wizard had told him he was to seek his vision on some isolated shore, beside a grave. The Great Spirit Tongársoak himself would approach the aspirant in the form of a white bear who would kill and eat him, transforming him into a skeleton. Three days later he would regain his flesh, awaken, and hi
s clothes would come flying back to him. Everything turned out as the wizard had foretold, except that the hunter found a white woman in his place. The bear had eaten her, and the power belonged to her. He would never be able to save his people. The bear had led him all that way to witness and to understand.

  Itslk seems relieved when the story is done, as if it were a burden he could finally put down, or as if in telling the story he has worked out some knotty problem of logic. He confesses that he believes this sequence of events, his recent past — the coming of the white men, the bear, the grave, me — is a nightmare. In the morning he will awake next his wife on that far shore beside the infinite sea, walk outside and kill two seals who will be waiting for him beside an air hole. The seals will greet him in their normal seal voices. They will say, Come, Itslk, slay us and eat. And be careful not to damage our bones, but send them whole back to Sedna that she might continue to feed you and your family.

  Colony of Dreams

  Next morning Léon wakes me with his joyous barking. I am aroused (nothing unusual), half-dreaming of a bear lover, or a man in a bear suit, or perhaps it is something else entirely — a priest or a dolphin. My hand is tucked between my legs. But Léon’s eager yips drag me abruptly from this access of sensuality beneath my bearskin coverlet. The interruption feels like a punishment. It reminds me of my uncle, the General, with his vexed moustaches and wounded fingers. I think, this is the difference between men and women: My uncle has conquered Canada by brandishing a sword over the bodies of his companions; I have conquered Canada on my back. In either case, the long term effect on the inhabitants is the same.

  I think of Sedna’s maimed hands and her perpetual malevolence. One story tells of an enterprising angakok who swims to her underwater realm and earns her gratitude by combing the lice out of her hair, a homely task she can no longer perform for herself.

  I think, oddly enough, of Guillemette Jansart and her evil consort. Perhaps he isn’t evil, only misguided, the product of a difficult childhood; perhaps she sees correctly into his heart. Though what good does it do her? He is not guided by his heart.

  These are waking thoughts, not to be trusted.

  There are two dead seals, fat as pigs and still warm, lying on the bloody snow in front of the hut. They seem asleep but for the tears the harpoon made in their flesh and the blood. Where did they come from? I shade my eyes and peer at the surrounding ice. Nothing. Perhaps I have not yet learned to read the country aright. Or perhaps they are dream seals. Léon nuzzles them, then prances away, trying to get them to play. He looks suddenly bear-like.

  Itslk, as I expected, is nowhere to be found, though my expectation and my knowledge of his reasons do nothing to soften the blow of his absence. At least he left me well provided, I think, as I sob over the carcasses of his seals. I can barely catch my breath. My breasts ache. My belly burns. I have cramps which at first are diarrhea (a common symptom, in women, of a broken heart), but then are something else. What? It is March. Almost spring. I’ve never seen anything less springlike than the current landscape. What was supposed to happen in the spring?

  I feel a little damp down there, touch myself with my fingers, which come away red with a drop of blood. Fresh panic. I am counting on the little fish to keep me company for, what, the next forty-five years, give or take. Every day I promise the fish I’ll be a better mother than I was to Charles, better than my mother was to me, a better mother than has ever been. (At least, I’ll try; I am very unclear, technically, on what is required, it being the custom of my class to send infants to the villages to be fostered by ignorant nurses with tarnished backgrounds. Peace, Bastienne.)

  Itslk has given me a turn, I whimper to Léon, clutching his menacing collar and burying my face in the folds of his neck. I can’t bear to think of the other. Léon thinks I want to play. The older he gets, the more puppyish he seems. Poor me, I squeak. Poor little me.

  The night before I had said to Itslk, It was not magic. I don’t know why the bear died. I didn’t kill it. I never killed anything in my life except for my playmate Lucille’s kitten when I was three and dropped it out a window to see if it would land on its feet. I crawled inside the bear because I was cold. It didn’t eat me. I am not an aspirant. I have never aspired to anything except a little fun. I am pretty sure this is not a dream.

  But he did not believe me, and I can see why, of the two accounts, he would prefer his own. In his version, he is the tragic hero and I am an ambiguous female, both good and evil, somewhat in the mythic mode (is every woman a sister of Sedna?). At least it’s a story. In my version, things happen by chance or bad luck. We wander in a fog, lacking a true explanation of events. Even the soul and its reasons are inscrutable. The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside. I like to imagine he bore me some affection, but the evidence, on the whole, is against it. Our lovemaking had a certain neutral quality, part ritual, part personal hygiene.

  He could do worse than return to his wife, living out his days as he has always done, perhaps retreating into the hinter-land, following the old ways, forgetting his French, forgetting the colour of his children, forgetting that I have entered his dream world and established a colony there. Though, of course, he will not forget, and life will always have a poignant as-if quality, the wistful nostalgia that is the temper of the future. From this time forward, I predict, no one will ever be completely himself. (This is the point in history where we are transformed. Before, we had a word and an explanation for everything; henceforth, we shall only discover the necessity of larger and larger explanations, which will always fall short. What we know will become just another anxious symbol, a code for what we do not know.)

  I touch myself again. Nothing. My heart jumps. A little scare. My body always overreacts to moody men. I think too much, talk too much and never know how attached I am until the object of my attachment has disappeared. I am always having to read myself like a book, like a lover, like a new country. Poor Itslk, I think, trying to walk home out of a bad dream. There is never any escape from a bad dream.

  (One of mine: A caravel sails into view from the east — French by her design, by flags and ensigns I see she is out of La Rochelle. She lets down a shallop and a water party. They row straight to my lonely beach. I am saved. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I am redeemed. I begin to pack my belongings and a squirrel I keep in a cage — a symbol of the baby, I think. But the sailors go about their business as if I were not there. They do not hear my joyous cries of welcome and gratitude. They fail to notice the slices of seal meat I put out for their refreshment. They walk right through me.)

  I take stock. I have a little bear meat remaining, plus the two seals, enough to live on till the birds return to the rookery. Itslk has left me the lamp, his hand drum, a stone knife of cunning and graceful design, a necklace he made of the old sow-bear’s claws and a tiny carved image of same. He placed the knife and the bear at the foot of the sleeping platform in a way that suggests to me they are propitiatory offerings and not gifts. I am being conjured away, asked to leave.

  I use a mussel shell sharpened against a rock to butcher the seals. I treat the skins as Itslk taught me and store the fat for fuel. The bones I lay aside to return to the sea (when there is a sea again, water instead of this infinity of ice). I lick the blood from my hands as I work, gnawing the liver and offering tidbits to Léon. What was supposed to happen in the spring? When I pee, I leave little pink spots in the snow.

  When I was little and afraid, Bastienne would sit up whole nights in a chair next to my bed with a candle burning. I was afraid of the dark, afraid of lightning, afraid of my dolly Jehanne, who had black hair like Mama. Once I ran screaming back into the house when Bastienne tried to take me for a walk. When I calmed down, I explained that the sight of the flowers along the path had frightened me. I was three. I always had a candle in my room, though my father forbade it. I wet the bed till I was twelve. I don’t know why. Even now I go twice before I sleep, just to be sure. Bastienne sat with her feet under m
y covers for warmth, and we would talk in whispers, or I would read to her until she fell asleep.

  That evening the spring storms begin. At first, the air is still, though heavy, oppressive and ominous, with a light snow falling. The snow increases through the night, drifting down in enormous feathery flakes. By morning snow chokes my doorway, and the place where Léon slept outside is like an anchorite’s cave. Clouds form a vast spiral with its centre over the Isle of Demons. The wind picks up, then swings to the northeast, driving sleet in stinging gusts. It shrieks in the trees, throwing the new snow into sinuous drifts like stationary waves, turning the land into a white sea. I invite Léon inside, though at first he is suspicious and sniffs everything five times before settling on a corner of the bearskin. The stone lamp flickers. My belly feels like a stone. The wind sounds like the legions of Sedna’s ghosts.

  Something nags at my heart like a whisper from the grave. I hug my belly beneath the bearskin, snuggle closer to Léon. Nothing avails. When the pains come, my terror is unspeakable.

  The Speaking of the Dead

  Memory comes now as if from the Land of the Dead, where the inhabitants speak in despairing whispers of their rage against the living, where the pale shades tilt their faces to the sunless sky and huddle close to fires that give no heat and cover their ears to shut out the muffled cries of the unborn. Their murmurs are like the constant iteration of the sea upon the shore or the sound of loose snow blowing across the ice crust. The baby comes a day or two later. I cannot be sure how long, for the storm lashes around me like an angry god, turning day to night, and I lose all sense of time in the agony of my delivery. I only know that Léon cowers in the furthest corner with his hackles raised, that my screams and moans, prayers and entreaties drown out the storm, that once I try to crawl out the door to die in the snow and another time think of using Itslk’s stone knife to cut the baby out, not caring if I live or die. From the first, something is wrong. I know because of Charles, who was born with the help of Bastienne and a midwife and came out in an hour, slippery as butter. This time the fish is stuck in my entrails, and I know I shall die of some internal insult, that we shall both die in a torrent of blood.