On July 2, 1980, Heinrich Schlögel boarded a plane in Munich, and seven hours later arrived in Ottawa, Canada. From there he flew farther, in a smaller plane, to Frobisher Bay.
12 According to his aunt, Heinrich’s hands were smooth and delicate for a boy, his skin very soft. She mentioned this to me twice, when we spoke. I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t stand to have his ears touched. When I think of Heinrich’s skin and Inge’s skin touching, of Inge’s vulnerability and confusion, the image of this boy’s ear flashes through my mind.
PART TWO
Iqaluit
(Frobisher Bay)
Place of Many Fish
1
The Fox Stepped Back into the Fog
The two friends met at the airport—a single, low structure, at the edge of the sea.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” said Jeremy, as they walked along the wide dusty road leading out of the airport; and Heinrich wanted to listen but he could not take his eyes off the town, a haphazard scattering of squat buildings that gave the impression of waiting to be removed, to be replaced by something better.
“My plans have changed. I would have called you, but it all happened just two days ago. Nothing was definite, then it kinda fell into my lap. Shit. It’s just that opportunities up here . . .”
Heinrich turned his attention to his urgent friend.
“A chance to do research and production, and be on the air, the whole fucking thing, all of it. This would never have happened to me in Montreal. And then there’s this girl, Lisa. I keep thinking I’m dreaming, man. I’m gonna wake up and she’ll be gone. But it’s not about her, it’s about the radio station. Honest to God, I’d have been crazy to turn them down. I couldn’t say no. Shit. I’m really sorry, man. I never, honest to God, shit, I was so looking forward. You’ve gotta just do it. Just take my equipment and go on your own. My friend who went two years ago, he did it solo. The hike will be astonishing, right up the valley, all the way to Mount Asgard and the Turner Glacier, there’s no reason for you not to do it, just because of me screwing up, shit.”
They stood, side by side, in the middle of the broad road. The young man named Jeremy Burton leaned eagerly into the wind, hands thrust deep into his pockets, as if to anchor himself while waiting for a response.
So, thought Heinrich, nothing is going to happen as planned. I have come all this way. I have abandoned Hearne and his route for the sake of this person who is telling me to hike alone. Now it is my turn to say something. This person whom I thought I knew, he hopes I’ll forgive him, but just in case I don’t forgive him he’s already forgiven himself. He needs nothing from me. He’s not the person I came here to meet.
“I have nothing to say. Not right now,” said Heinrich.
“Fair enough. I understand. I fucked up our plans. Look. Do you want to dump your pack? We can go grab a bite to eat?”
“Later. Maybe later. I’ll see you.”
Heinrich walked away, his large knapsack on his back. Leaving the main road, he followed a smaller one, equally dusty, that led down to the sea. He came to a gathering of wooden crosses that faced the open water. The rough crosses were painted white, their austerity alleviated by gaudy wreaths of plastic flowers. At the edge of the graveyard, a path enticed him out along the rocks, climbing; the bay widened and across the water there was no visible end to the folds in the treeless land, no end to the barren, brown slopes and deep pockets of snow. The buildings of Frobisher Bay fell behind him.
The sound of a stone landing in water made him turn. A raven stood perched on a large rock. It released from its throat the noise he’d just heard, followed by a series of scrapings, clickings, and tappings.
“Ravens have an extraordinary vocabulary,” Heinrich noted in his journal. Then he walked back into the town to speak with Jeremy Burton, who he’d imagined was his friend.
The next day he wrote in red pen:
I have lost my blue pen. That’s not all I’ve lost. According to Jeremy, I “need more ego.” I don’t allow myself to act on my desires. He says that I shouldn’t have changed my plans to fit with his, not if what I really wanted was to follow Hearne’s route. “Look, I wanted to travel with you. I asked you to come. But hey, life changes. Nothing’s ever certain. That’s why you’ve got to go for what you want most. Sometimes, you’ve just got to go for it.”
This person, called Jeremy Burton, has accused me of having no faith in myself, of distrusting my desires. Perhaps he is right. I will go on my own. I will prove him wrong. If hiking alone into the wilderness has anything to do with ego, I’ll show him. Is it ego that I lack, or character? What is it I’m missing?
Heinrich set down his pen and flipped backward through the pages of his journal. Paragraphs about animals greeted him—sentences that preceded Jeremy Burton: facts taken from an informative text posted beside a display of mammoth tusks in the Munich Paleontological Museum and a detail lifted from a descriptive label beside a gibbons “exhibit” in the Hellabrunn Zoological Gardens of Munich.13
At the Hudson Bay store, he bought nearly weightless, dehydrated food, one plastic bowl, one cup, a spoon and fork, bottles of liquid fuel for the tiny camp stove that he was borrowing from Jeremy, who was also lending him a tent and two cooking pots that nestled inside each other.
“These pots are fucking fantastic,” Jeremy promised. “It’s amazing what a difference a lid makes, I mean a really good, tight-fitting lid. The water boils in seconds. I’m envious, honest, man. I wish I were going with you.”
Between two racks of clothing, at the back of the Hudson Bay store, Heinrich came upon the closest thing there was to a bookstore in Frobisher Bay: three unsteady shelves, attached by crooked brackets, supported a small selection of paperbacks and hardcover volumes. He examined a few of the titles, wondering if his English was good enough to make purchasing one of the books worthwhile and, if so, which one. Stories and Legends from Cape Dorset. Never Cry Wolf. One Man Alone: A Kayak Journey. An Introduction to the Geology of Ellesmere Island. Weather Station: Memories of Resolute Bay. People of the Deer. Land of the Midnight Sun: An Inward Journey.
A photograph on the cover of a slender paperback caught his eye. It showed a group of children seated stiffly behind wooden desks. Not one of them was smiling. A Brief Study of Residential Schools in Northern Canada: Evolving Approaches to Educating Indigenous Populations. New Critical Perspectives Series: number 67. Copyright 1975. University of Chicago Press.14 He took the book to the cashier and paid for it.
Outside the store, he opened his new book and, turning the pages, he started to walk. What he read landed like a stone in his belly. He stood still, wondering if he could trust his English, hoping his English was at fault and misleading him. The children were beaten for speaking Inuktitut. They were underfed and housed in overcrowded dormitories, where disease spread easily. They were taken, against their parents’ will. Some escaped and froze to death trying to find their way home. Were these schools still in existence? He flipped ahead a dozen pages but saw no mention of them being shut down. He continued to walk until he came to the sea and the wind slapped him, and he could taste the salt in the air. He looked down at the photograph on the cover of the book, at the faces of the children behind their desks. They all had dark hair and eyes, identical haircuts, and were dressed in similarly shabby clothing.
That they are individuals, easy to distinguish from each other, is not what the photograph wants to say, thought Heinrich.
The children stared at Heinrich, or rather through him. Their individuality was a secret that hovered. Who they were seemed to leak into the picture despite the picture’s intentions. Again, Heinrich opened the book. It began to rain. He slipped the small paperback under his jacket, not knowing what else to do, and continued to walk, aimlessly. With each step, his thoughts acquired if not an order at least a rhythm.
A sign read FROBISHER BAY CAFÉ. Heinrich climbed six wooden stairs, pulled open a door, and stepped into the tea-colored dimn
ess of a room furnished with several tables and chairs, a room with a bare plywood floor and a low ceiling. On these hard, straight chairs, people sat with a loose yet decisive heaviness. Heinrich, glancing about the room, felt that he ought to know what he intended. Glued to the tops of the tables, newspaper clippings overlapped, yellowing under several coats of varnish. He would have liked to try to read the stories contained in the clippings but his discomfort would not allow him to approach, to intrude on those seated at the tables. From a man standing behind a makeshift counter at the back of the room, he bought a dense ring of deep-fried bannock, and, still not knowing what he intended, he went back outside into the steady, gentle rain.
The rain stopped but the wadding of thick clouds remained. The clouds were the same gray as the sea and inhabited by a same stillness. Heinrich sat on a rock, in the company of ravens, and wrote in his journal:15
I have bought a book. It is surrounded by silence. The ravens keep talking. I cannot think of anything to say. I am adding to the silence. My friendship with Jeremy, if it ever existed, is over. He liked me. In Tettnang, he told me: “I like you, man. You’re kinda different, but you’re a good guy.” He told me stories and I mistook his stories for friendship. He described his grandmother’s hands. They were always busy and covered in liver spots. She drove recklessly, backing away from the sidewalk without looking. She died in bed. The sheets went up in flame when her cigarette dropped from her mouth. Jeremy suffered from fits of anger, the year that his grandmother choked on the smoke from her burning bed. They sent him repeatedly to the principal’s office or kept him after school and he became known as “that one.” He destroyed another student’s work. The student had seen him crying. Jeremy’s parents moved him to a different school and his behavior improved. He told me all this, as if it were natural that his parents had had the power to rescue him, as if all parents are able to protect their children. I listened to all his stories. I did not think such openness could exist in the absence of friendship. But there was no real openness. Does his endless need to perform make him feel exhausted? I will return his equipment in three weeks’ time. That is our understanding. That may be all we understand of each other. I believed that someone called Jeremy Burton was my friend. There was a Jeremy Burton who worked in the hops fields, and he used to grin at me, and insist I had nothing to worry about. This radio commentator with his gorgeous girlfriend also grins, and tells me I have nothing to worry about; and at the same time he informs me that I “need more ego,” that I am an incomplete person. Does he think his beautiful girlfriend makes him gorgeous? The Jeremy I met in Tettnang knew all about the North. I wanted to believe the North existed. Now I am in the North, and this radio commentator is lending me his stove and tent, his cooking pots.
The night before leaving Frobisher Bay, before boarding the small plane that would carry him to Pangnirtung, Heinrich woke from a vivid dream and composed a letter to Inge. It was the first and last letter he would send to her. He experienced pleasure as each word took shape. He had the distinct sensation that she was present in the same room and reading his sentences as quickly as they appeared on the paper:
In the dream I just had, it was summer, Inge. There were no trees. I wasn’t ready. The wind blew and daylight spread. The sea came in and out. The length of the fjord doubled, under the authority of violent weather. That the fjord’s length was measured in hours, not kilometers, I didn’t question. Fog erased the high hills in minutes. So, I thought, this is Pangnirtung. I was quite sure that I’d at last arrived in Pangnirtung. A truck, spitting dirt and gravel, veered into the yowl of generations of dogs; children ran, kicking something in the road.
“Ajiliurut?”16
I turned to see who was speaking.
“Ajiliurut?”
The word wasn’t coming from a tape, playing in your bedroom, Inge, but from the mouth of a young boy dressed in jeans and flip-flops, gesturing to indicate that he wanted me to take his picture. I reached for my camera but couldn’t find it. The fog was thickening. The fog stank of burning garbage.
“The dump fire at the end of the bay,” the young boy’s sister explained. She’d come along the road and now the two of them formed a pair. “When the wind blows in this direction,” she said, “it stinks, for days.”
An arctic fox trotted out of the fog and lifted its leg on a stop sign. The girl and boy went home to get a gun, so they might shoot the fox and give it to their mother to skin. As soon as they’d gone down the road, the fox stepped back into the fog and disappeared.
I found myself in a quiet room with a large window. I’d been waiting for two days in this room. It was open to anyone who wanted to come in but nobody came, and it was peaceful. I remained there, quite alone, and content to be alone. I looked out the window, which had a fine, unobstructed view of the harbor.
In the harbor a boat was ready to leave, and I watched everyone clamber on, including a girl who could not find her parents. The boat set off. Perhaps the girl had no parents. The others, seeing that she was alone, pushed her overboard to make more room. She held on to the side of the boat. With a knife someone cut off her fingers. She sank, rose to the surface, then sank deeper. Her severed fingers bobbed on the waves. They became ringed seals, and her thumbs two larger seals. So, I thought, this is Sedna. I knew the girl’s name.
How did I know her name? Was she in one of your books, Inge, and you told me about her, about a spirit called Sedna, who rules the ocean’s movements and the animals that live in it? I’m sure that I am not inventing her. Two stories about her arrived in my dream from somewhere, and the first story kept repeating itself, the boat carrying the little girl leaving the shore, over and over. Each time I wanted to warn her to hide her fingers, to make fists of her hands. A scream climbed in my chest. But if she hid her fingers, then there would be no seals.
In the room, where for days I’d been waiting, a thermos of coffee and a package of crackers sat on a small table. I helped myself. I felt grateful for the coffee. When I’d drained my cup I bent down, reached under the sofa, and pulled out a box of books. The one that I opened and started to read had a picture of a girl on the cover. It told a second, slightly different, Sedna story. A young woman had just come of age. The young men from her camp, and from neighboring camps, approached her openly, but she couldn’t love any of them. Though they were kindhearted she couldn’t forgive them their awkwardness. Her imagination had promised her a different sort of man, confident and well-spoken.
She waited, and sure enough, one afternoon just such a young man glided close in his kayak, paddling effortlessly. As he slipped near to the shore, he called to her. “Beautiful furs and many other riches will be yours, if you come with me to my home across the sea.”
She hesitated.
“You will never know another day of hunger,” the young man promised.
His words rippled across the smooth surface of the water as he paddled closer. The young woman climbed into his kayak and for three days she and her lover traveled over the sea, blissfully happy together. Farther and farther they went.
Land appeared, the land where she’d agreed to live as his wife for the rest of her days. The moment their kayak touched the shore, a giant bird snatched her up in its beak and flew with her.
I tried to close the book, Inge, I didn’t want to be exposed to more suffering. I slammed the covers shut. But the story, of course, continued, and I could see you smiling, Inge, amused at my attempt to change the course of events.
As the ground fell far below, the young woman called desperately for her husband. “I am your husband,” declared the bird and he placed her in a nest made of sharp sticks and branches. The nest in no way resembled the home that he’d promised her. Leaving her in her new and uncomfortable dwelling, which perched on the edge of a cliff, her husband flew off, saying that he’d soon return. She cried bitterly but no one could hear her.
Across the water, in her village, her father paced the shore. “She’s gone off with a stra
nger,” people told him. “We saw her climb into a kayak. She has been taken to the land of the birds.” Her father, hearing this, got in his kayak and paddled without rest until, on the third day, he heard his daughter wailing. Her anguish fell into his ear from a place high above him. He climbed up into the nest, and he took her back down to his kayak.
You do own a book with this story in it, Inge. Now I remember. I took it without telling you. You didn’t care about the book (it was only a story, not grammar), but you were furious that I’d gone into your room. I felt ashamed, and then, when you wouldn’t forgive me, when you persisted in not forgiving me, I felt angry. I felt you were incapable of ever entirely forgiving me, and that was an unbearable feeling.
When the bird in my dream, in that part of my dream that I took from a book, which I took from you, returned to find his nest empty, his fury was terrible. He flew swiftly and soon caught up with the kayak. “Your daughter is my wife and has agreed to live with me. She has given her word,” he warned the girl’s father. The father refused to relinquish his daughter.
The bird, seeing that he had lost his wife, flew far away. But first he made his rage felt. The sea gathered into towering waves that tossed the kayak, as if it weighed no more than a feather or a blade of grass.
The father regretted having angered such a powerful bird. Fearing for his life and determined to calm the sea, he tried to push his daughter out of the kayak. She resisted. Again, he attempted to force her out. This time she fell into the water, but would not let go of the boat. Her father took out his knife and cut off her fingers. As the girl sank to the bottom and became Sedna, her severed fingers floated to the surface, and each finger became a seal. The girl’s father reached the shore, exhausted. He pulled his kayak up onto the beach, staggered home, and fell into bed. While he slept, Sedna, his daughter, lifted the sea into an immense wave that crashed down on the village, sweeping away him and his house, and the houses of many others.
The Search for Heinrich Schlögel Page 7
