A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  Pyl’mau would poke the seal with her finger and, if it seemed ready to be butchered, she’d take out her woman’s knife, one with a wide sharp blade. Making a few preliminary slicing passes, as though marking out a pattern, she’d begin taking the seal apart, pulling off the skin together with its layer of blubber. To someone unused to it, the seal looked a lot like a person stripped naked, and John used to have to turn away at first. Dividing skin from flesh, Pyl’mau would then slit open the stomach cavity and joint the carcass. She was well versed in the beast’s anatomy, and her knife never hit bone.

  At times there was no fresh meat for a while, and a fruitful day’s hunt would be celebrated with an impromptu feast, featuring much bone-picking. And at the end they’d slurp up thick, delicious broth until they were about to burst.

  Often enough, while a carcass was being butchered, the chottagin rang with light footsteps – that was how a visitor indicated his presence to the hosts. Then someone’s tousled head would poke into the polog. Usually a woman. Some chatter would follow, sometimes even a simple piece of gossip, something even women of high latitudes can’t do without. The visit would end with Pyl’mau placing a sizeable piece of meat and blubber into the visitor’s hands. At times, there came so many such visitors to Toko’s yaranga that only some trifling bits of a whole nerpa were left, barely enough for two or three meals.

  But this was a fair and magnanimous tradition. It did not occur to either Toko or Pyl’mau to let a neighbor depart empty-handed.

  John had tried to explain to his hosts that even if there were no choice in the matter, one could at least reduce the quantity given to each visitor.

  “Each person wants to eat his fill,” Toko would answer. “If you can feed a hungry person, then feed him.”

  “But a person doesn’t live one day at a time. You need to save something for the future, for yourself,” John would counter.

  “And when I have no luck, and come back empty-handed, I will not be ashamed to go to those I have fed,” Toko would return.

  Everyone would go to sleep pell-mell on the deerskins, heads toward the polog’s entryway. A long, well-sanded log served as a pillow. John’s ears constantly ached, until he figured out how to sleep on his back.

  Pyl’mau retired last of all. Dampening the brazier’s flame, she’d feed little Yako his evening meal and sing to him, rocking gently in rhythm with the simple melody.

  The fire would die down, the lullaby would fade away, the thoughts milling in John’s head would run together, and he’d sink into a deep sleep.

  9

  John had arranged his own corner in such a way that it somewhat resembled a ship’s cabin. The discovery prompted him to turn to Toko, who understood the white man’s wish and cut a round “porthole” in the wall, stretching a walrus stomach, normally used for making yarars, over the window.

  Orvo paid John a visit every day. He was crafting leather attachments for John’s stumps. At first, Orvo had made some from lakhtak skin, but it turned out to be too soft, and he had to replace it with walrus hide. The walrus attachments had holding loops and hooks for a variety of instruments. Now John could use a knife with relative facility and neatly spear food with a three-pronged fork.

  On a little table, fashioned from an old retired sled, John spread out the uncomplicated remains of his former life. These included a few thick woollen socks knitted by his mother. He held them in his stumps and silently buried his face in them. He wasn’t aware of the sailor’s sweat permeating them; for him, they were his home, the image of his living room, the flicker of coals in the fireplace, the dull shine of a silk-upholstered armchair, the aroma of ancient perfumes, powder, and his mother’s bluish-gray hair, her fingers with their carefully polished fingernails . . . A wall barometer – his brother’s gift. And here was his watch, with its massive cover. The hands have stopped long ago. Strange, but in the whole time he’d been living in Enmyn, John had had no need for a time-measurement more precise than the change of night to day. Gingerly hooking the watch with his holders, John wound it up and brought it to his ear. The clock ticked loudly and brassily, and the plaintive ring of its coil echoed a distant, departed era. Needless to say, the ones left behind in Port Hope may have been living differently now, but for John, their way of life was forever engraved in his memory.

  Among the multitude of things that had become useless, and even out of place in John’s new life, there were a few pencils and an almost unused notepad bound in thick leather. Once, John had dreamed of filling it with the tales of his own adventures and then publishing the notes somewhere like the Daily Toronto Star, maybe even turning them into a whole book, like the volumes kept behind thick glass in the university library in Hart House.

  With a condescending smile, John picked up the notepad with two holding hooks and blew on the pages to open them. The first page was emblazoned with scribble:. . . I’ll probably never get used to alcohol. It’s something shameful: empty posturing, cockiness, cynicism. You look at someone like that in the morning and can’t even believe that you were just like them, and even thought that this is the only way to be . . . And that woman who left my room this morning. Who was she? Had she let me know her real name? She was crying as she told me that in my stupor I’d called her “Jeannie.”

  On reading this John turned around, as though someone could have stood reading over his shoulder, then managed to grasp the page with his grips and somehow tear it out with an audible crackle. The sheet fell to the ground. John bent down to get it, but just then Orvo squeezed into the “cabin.” He never knocked.

  “Tyetyk,” he proclaimed loudly.

  “Yetti,” John replied, recalling with chagrin that by Chukchi custom it was the yaranga’s owner or occupant that must be first to offer a greeting.

  “Tyetyk,” Orvo repeated, and deftly scooping up the sheet of paper, placed it on the table.

  “Written-down talk,” said the old man with respect.

  “It’s not needed anymore,” John said. “I was going to throw it away.”

  “Throw it away?” Orvo was astonished. “Throw away written-down words? How’s that?”

  John, himself surprised, said, by way of explanation:

  “I don’t need them anymore.”

  The old man looked at him sideways. He had always imagined that the whites only wrote down the most important, most sacred words. That’s why they write them down, because they want to save them. Just like all those chants and prayers a shaman learns by heart, weighty words that are needed in difficult times.

  “If you don’t need them,” Orvo said slowly, “then let me take them.”

  “What good are they to you?” John smirked. “You’ll never be able to read them, anyway.”

  “Maybe never,” Orvo humbly agreed. “But I’m thinking: You can’t just take written-down words and throw them away. To my mind, it’s a sin . . .”

  There was something unusual in the old man’s voice. John looked at him, wavered for a moment, then nodded:

  “All right, you can take this paper.”

  Orvo smoothed out the page and began scanning the lines with concentration. And John was struck by his expression. It seemed that the old man was reading the words and understanding what was written.

  “You know what,” John said, reaching for the sheet of paper, “maybe you’re right. It’s not good, throwing away what’s written. Let me have that bit of paper back, and if you really want to have a written note, I’ll write you another one.”

  “As you like,” Orvo immediately agreed, and handed back the sheet.

  Placing it back inside the notepad with some difficulty, John suddenly remembered that writing another word was unlikely now that he had no fingers. Orvo caught his glance and said uncertainly:

  “We’ll try to make holders for a pencil. Yes, we will try.”

  “You think we’ll manage something?” John was doubtful.

  “You learned to feed yourself with the little fish-spear, you can wield a k
nife, dress and undress yourself,” Orvo enumerated. “Maybe you will learn to write.”

  John looked at the notepad and pencil and uttered with some passion:

  “If I can do that, I’ll write you words that are truly worth keeping!”

  Orvo didn’t like to leave things undone. The very next day he brought over an assortment of leather holders and tacked them onto one of John’s stumps.

  “How many do I need?” John teased him with a grateful smile.

  “If something doesn’t work, we’ll take it off,” Orvo answered.

  Following John’s instructions, he sharpened a few pencils and attached one to a leather loop. The notepad lay open on the table. John looked steadily at the sheet of paper and drew a line. It came out crooked, and the pencil tip skidded off the edge of the sheet and broke.

  Orvo had been carefully observing the white man’s movements. Unhooking the broken pencil from its holder, he looked the whole attachment over and declared:

  “Needs to be made a different way. Now it’s as though you’re trying to shave with a spear. The pencil should be shortened, and the holder attached at the wrist. Then it will be more like a finger.”

  Upset at the setback, John was listening to Orvo’s words without much interest, as the familiar bitter malice welled up inside him, directed at no one in particular. He blamed his own sometimes too-lavish imagination that painted his future in lively colors each time he considered it. He saw himself in a university lecture hall, bent over a desk. Instead of hands – ugly stumps, and aided by the mechanisms that kind old Orvo made for him, he was writing. He was writing, and all those around him were gazing at him, their eyes harboring pity . . . Pity, and maybe even contempt.

  His heart trembled, and he turned away.

  But all you needed to communicate in the present circumstances could be done with plain human speech. Simpler and better. It would be laughable if, for example, he, John, had sent a love letter to Pyl’mau and she answered him on a pink scented sheet. Picturing Pyl’mau with an envelope rather than the woman’s knife in her hands, John let out a chuckle and told Orvo:

  “No need to do anything about it. It would be better if I learned to shoot.”

  “Well now, that’s true enough: that will be easier than writing words again,” Orvo replied. “But maybe we should give it another try.”

  “But tell me, Orvo, what use would that be to me here?” John responded. “Maybe I don’t even intend to go back to the world where they read and write – and here with you, what use is there in being lettered?”

  “At this time, probably no use,” Orvo slowly uttered. “But I have a feeling that a time will come, and our people will need the paper-talk, and our own language will need signs like yours.”

  “I doubt you’ll ever get there,” John persisted. “And anyway, what for? What is the point? Your way of life doesn’t require literacy or books, so why not go on living as you’ve always lived? Maybe that really is the best and most sensible way of living . . . Even though you won’t fully understand me, I’ll tell you this: The closer man is to nature, the more free and untainted he is in his thoughts and in his actions. When I was studying at the University of Toronto – that’s a big school, where a person is pumped full of all kinds of knowledge, mainly useless – I had a friend who would say that the appearance of man was an evolutionary mistake, since man brings discord into nature’s biological equilibrium . . .”

  John glanced at Orvo, and cut his own speech short:

  “I’m sorry, Orvo. I can see you don’t know what I’m talking about.” And he laughed. “The further your people stay away from the white man and his mores, the better it will be for you.”

  “Maybe that is true, and maybe not true,” said Orvo, with his usual candor, and added: “Yet, the gun you’re intending to shoot again, that was thought up by white people.”

  The day came when Orvo, Toko, and John set off for the fast ice, bringing the Winchester along.

  A hundred or so steps, and the yarangas disappeared from view. In the north, as far as the eye roamed, ranged an ice-bound sea. Monstrous conglomerations of ice rose to dozens of meters in height. Here and there were bluish iceberg splinters.

  Close to the horizon, the craggy shore stretched up toward the sky, and its steep sides, eaten away by the tides, stood out blackly against the snows. In a few spots, the gloomy crags were vertically laced with frozen waterfalls, and the snowcaps shadowing the crags’ bulges promised future avalanches.

  The steep shoreline turned into gently sloping hills on the continent. Against the otherwise solid backdrop of snow, one hill was crowned with a set of whale jaws, firmly anchored to the earth.

  “What’s there?” John asked, motioning toward the dark bones.

  “The grave of the White Woman,” Orvo answered him.

  “White Woman?”

  “Not really white,” the old man amended. “She’s called that because she was born and lived on a shore that was white with ice and snow. It is said that all who live on this shore are her children. That means we are too.”

  Moving a little further down the sea ice, the men halted and began setting up targets. There were three – in descending size order.

  Orvo dragged a knot of ice and trimmed it with his hunting knife, fashioning it into a shield with a window and rest for the Winchester barrel. Toko took up a battle position and tried out the weapon. The smallest of the targets exploded into tiny pieces at his first shot.

  “Works,” he said with satisfaction, and motioned to John. “Now you.”

  Yesterday, there had been a new addition to the many implements on John’s leather cuff – a small loop, angled so that he could use it to hook the Winchester’s trigger. Settling comfortably behind his shield and bracing his feet against the ice, John took aim. Aboard the Belinda, he’d been considered a good shot. But now his heart beat so violently, it was as though there were suddenly much more room in his ribcage. The sight line kept wavering. John lowered the barrel and took a few deep breaths. Meeting Orvo’s eyes, he caught a sympathetic and encouraging look.

  Regaining his breath, John took aim once again. The shot rang out. His eyes swimming with tears from the strain, John couldn’t make out a thing.

  “Try not to move your shoulder,” he heard Orvo’s calm voice say.

  “The bullet went a little high,” Toko clarified. “Your aim was right, it was only that you moved your shoulder.”

  With his fingers, Toko showed him the margin of error. And although it was rather dubious, exactly how his eye could have caught the bullet in midflight, John believed him, and this time aimed more steadily.

  He could tell from the sound that the bullet had hit home.

  “Got one nerpa!” Toko enthused.

  John’s heart filled with a hot wave of pleasure: He can shoot! He will no longer be a freeloader in the eyes of these savages. He can procure food independently, and will be able to look not just Pyl’mau, but Toko, Orvo, and the acid-tongued, mocking Armol’, in the eye.

  “Try again?” he asked Toko.

  “We shouldn’t waste the cartridges,” Orvo said, collecting the Winchester. “Come summer, the white men’s ships will come and you’ll get a gun of your own.”

  On the way back, John’s stride was firm and confident. Once again he was a real human being! And maybe his dreams of returning to his own people were in vain. If he stays here, he’ll become a provider just like Toko, Orvo and Armol’, and all the other Enmyn people. His life will be measured by the filling of his stomach. The time will come, and he’ll marry a woman of this tribe, breed a litter of kids needing nourishment and clothes, and when his hunter’s luck runs out, they’ll quietly die inside the polog, without light, without fire. He’ll learn the tribe’s traditions and possibly even grow to believe in their spirits and gods . . . And no more will his eye be ravished by a green forest hue, nor warm water caress his body, nor his heart stutter in the presence of a beautiful woman. He will take on a Chukc
ha’s appearance, and his inner world will be no different from the polar animals inhabiting these parts . . .

  But who can say what manner of life is right for a man? The life of that left-behind, almost unreachable world where Hugh had sailed, abandoning his countryman, one to whom he’d sworn loyalty and friendship?

  Or this life, the one John first touched in his misfortune, and the one he is living right now, sometimes even forgetting that he is not a complete man. Would he be content, returning home far different from the man who is awaited there, and for the rest of his life hearing words of consolation, words of pity . . . A cripple?

  Clearly, there’s no need to be too enamored. It’s more than possible that life in these parts only seems attractive from an outsider’s point of view, and only at first glance. Maybe, delving more deeply, John will learn unpleasant things, too. But on the other hand, he’s lived here long enough to be sure of the wholesomeness and sincerity of these children of snow and frost . . .

  The days were spent in labors. As soon as Orvo or Toko returned from hunting, they would pick up John and set off again for the icebergs off the shore for some shooting practice. One after another, the ice masses shattered, the winter silence was rent by the blasts of the gun’s report, and each shot imbued John with a feeling of self-confidence.

  In the evenings, he would sit down at the rickety little table and try to write. The letters came out huge and tried to climb one upon the other, but already they were letters rather than senseless scrawl.

  And when he managed to trace the name Jeannie on the sheet of paper, he was so transported that he shouted into the chottagin:

  “Look, Toko, look at what I did!”

  Toko stuck a worried face through the door flap.

  John showed him the piece of paper with large childish letters, upon which the beloved name was crookedly inscribed.

  “See, I wrote that! With these two hands I wrote it, understand?”