The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  Heinrich returned to the alley where he’d heard the sawing. The same garage door stood open. He stepped inside but the man with the ponytail was nowhere to be seen. Stacked on the floor, more neatly than Heinrich expected, lay the white, sawed-off arms and legs, the seats and backs, of plastic garden chairs.

  He looked up and caught his breath. It hung from the rafters—the completed skeleton of a whale, immense, intricate, and graceful. He walked beneath it, marveling at its elegance and its huge fluidity. He stepped through the beautiful shadows it cast on the garage floor and stared up through its pattern of curves and joints.

  A smaller door at the back of the garage swung open and the tall, ponytailed man, the whale-maker, walked in, visibly preoccupied. He spotted Heinrich, and his expression changed to one of pleasure.

  “Good to see you.”

  “It is amazing, your whale.”

  “Now I have to find somewhere to put it.”

  “Could you sell it? To an art gallery, maybe?”

  The man laughed, then indicated the thermos in his hand.

  “You want coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I was thinking of leaving it in a park, but it wouldn’t last long with people climbing on it and kicking it in the ribs. Trouble is, it takes up too much room. I can’t work on anything new, not until I get it out of here. You any closer to finding your sister?”

  “I am starting to think I won’t find her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve been looking every day, and every day I see women everywhere but not her. And my money. I am running out. I don’t have a work permit.”

  “They’d hire you to wash dishes in the restaurant where I work. Pay’s pretty shitty but regular. Or I know a guy who moves stuff. He has a truck. He can sometimes use help.”

  “Thank you. If you have the names and the numbers so I can call?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m Heinrich.”

  “Andy.”

  “The whale. It is magnificent.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “You have spent a lot of time looking at whales?”

  “Some. Your sister in trouble?”

  “I don’t think so. No, I am the trouble, the problem.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  Andy fished a stub of pencil from his shirt pocket.

  “You got a piece of paper?”

  He wrote two names and some phone numbers into the notebook that Heinrich handed him.

  “When you call the restaurant, ask for George. Tell him you’re a friend of mine. I’m the cook. He owns the joint. If that doesn’t work, try Boris, the guy with the truck. I’ve given you his number too.”

  “Thanks.”

  Andy rummaged in his toolbox. He located the drill bit that he’d come looking for. Bending, so as not to knock his head, he left through the small door at the back of the garage.

  Heinrich’s new life began, a life of dishwashing at the Argos Grill; and his old life of searching for Inge continued also, and every day the rushing of water in his ears surged and subsided with no discernable pattern or verifiable meaning.

  “George is a crocodile,” commented Heinrich, between sips of coffee. Above his head hung the whale’s skeleton, while on the garage floor a new project was under way. In the corner stood a black leather sofa missing most of its skin. Andy had hauled out a sewing machine. Shoulders hunched, foot on the pedal, needle racing, he was stitching together the final panel of a black leather teepee.

  “Have you got tent poles?”

  “Yup.”

  “George sits behind the counter and looks like he’s sleeping, but he is not. He grabs his victim—usually a waitress but sometimes a waiter—and drags this person to the bottom of the river to soften in the mud, to make this person easier to digest.”

  The whirring of the sewing machine stopped. Andy looked over at Heinrich and grinned.

  “George can be a real shit.”

  The whir of the machine resumed.

  On a Sunday afternoon, at the Toronto Reference Library, Heinrich glanced up and there she was, rising inside a glass elevator, soundlessly, to the next floor. She wore a turquoise raincoat, and a voluminous book bag hung from her shoulder. Heinrich took the stairs two at a time. She was being whisked upward faster than he could climb. On the fourth floor, she stepped lightly out of the elevator and walked off into the stacks. Heinrich, arriving several minutes later, raced between the bookshelves. He made his way frantically along the rows, and emerged just in time to see the elevator carrying her down, the silent glass tube dropping her from floor to floor.

  At each level the tube paused to let people on and people off. Passengers crowded into its transparent confines. A large man, whose paisley necktie threatened to cut off his breathing, was pressed up against her—the woman in the turquoise raincoat.

  She was perhaps not Inge after all. She kept her head bent, looking down through the glass, as the long study tables, the plants, computer terminals, and people wandering in the atrium raced up from below to greet her.

  Bounding down the stairs, Heinrich reached the ground floor. At the security counter, the guard was asking the woman in the turquoise raincoat to open her capacious shoulder bag. She complied, and the guard fished, languid, indifferent, removing several books, subjecting each to his inspection. Heinrich joined the line.

  A toad-shaped man clutching a swollen briefcase preceded him, also a stern, gray-haired woman who resembled a stork. Stork woman raised an unlit cigarette to her lips, as if in a meaningful gesture. No matter the direction in which Heinrich leaned, he could not get a clear view of her—the woman in the turquoise raincoat.

  “These ones are all marked out on my card,” a female voice assured the guard, a voice so familiar that Heinrich felt the blood drain from his head. So as not to lose his balance, he fixed his eyes on the floor and concentrated on the air entering and leaving his lungs. Several immeasurable seconds later, feeling less faint, he looked up and there she was.

  Her chin was Inge’s chin and her nose also belonged to his sister. The profile was hers. She wore glasses. If only he could see her mouth better, and her eyes better. She was, of course, older, her cheekbone more pronounced, her neck vulnerable in a way that he couldn’t define. Already the guard was nodding her through. The toad-man unlatched his bursting briefcase for inspection.

  “Please,” Heinrich heard himself cry out. “My sister. That woman, just going out the door, I must catch up with her. I’m sorry. Please.” His right hand trembled as he unzipped his day pack while he pushed forward with his shoulder, shoving both the unexpectedly forgiving stork-woman and the indignant toad-man out of his way. The guard serenely nodded him through and Heinrich ran for the exit. He burst onto the sidewalk and stared in all directions. She was walking briskly south, her back held very straight, her steps small but vigorous. He dodged between pedestrians. A finite expanse of cool autumn air separated him from her elbow.

  “Inge.”

  Her name broke free of him, sprang from his mouth. The woman turned, startled. Her eyes filling with confusion, she stared at him. He did not dare move or speak another word.

  The woman’s arms hung at her sides. She examined him with her eyes, counting on her eyes, it seemed, to tell her something more, something that might set her mind at rest. Her glasses had simple black rectangular frames. Other pedestrians, preoccupied, hurried around Heinrich and the staring woman. The wind blew a thick strand of graying hair across the woman’s face and she lifted her hand. With her fingers she pulled the tip of the strand from the corner of her mouth.

  “Inge?”

  Was it her? He could no longer be sure. Should he trust himself? Was his intense longing, or perhaps some malfunctioning of his mind, misleading him into believing that this person planted on the sidewalk was Inge?

  The woman’s hand tucked the intrusive strand of hair behind her ear. It was an oddly boneless and pale hand. Heinrich
remembered that these were two qualities that Inge’d always disliked about her hands and feet: their pallor and their fleshy lack of visible structure. “My fat feet and hands,” she used to complain, though the rest of her, however smooth and pale, could never have been construed as fat—on the contrary.

  Heinrich wanted to reach with the tips of his fingers and explore the softness of this woman’s cheek. Only around her eyes had her skin noticeably aged.

  “Yes?”

  The voice was indisputably Inge’s. A single word in the form of a question, “Yes?” He waited to hear what she would say and to see what she would do next.

  “I’m sorry to be staring at you in this way. But you remind me of my brother. Forgive me.” Her words tumbled with a nervous quickness.

  “Inge.”

  “I feel we’ve met before.” She paused and swallowed, clearing her throat. “But I’m afraid I can’t pinpoint where?”

  The worry in her eyes was intensifying, the set of her mouth expressed unease. He thought he saw her fingers curl in on themselves but she slipped her hands into her pockets and he lost sight of her fingers.

  “We met the day I was born. You were two years old.” He continued in German, the words flowing easily. “When you were seven, you went out in the fields and collected dead birds. We met in Tettnang.”

  Her hands flew to her face, covered it, then the fingers of her right hand spread apart and her terrified eye peered at him. Her book bag started to slip from her shoulder but immediately she lowered her hands, reached over and stopped its progress. She wrapped her arms around her rib cage, holding herself.

  “When you were fifteen,” Heinrich pressed on, “you started studying languages.”

  Slowly she began to sway, rocking back and forth on her feet, from toe to heel, from heel to toe.

  “Two years later, you found a kit for learning Inuktitut, and sometime after that you came down the hall and knocked on my bedroom door and gave me the diary of Samuel Hearne and told me to read it.”

  “Stop.”

  He said nothing more. He held perfectly still.

  They went into the nearest coffee shop and sat down at a small table. How did they get from the sidewalk into the café? Who led, who followed? Did they walk quickly or slowly? Later, neither of them could remember. They sat across from each other. She wrapped her hands around a cup filled with hot coffee. On the middle finger of her left hand she wore a large opal ring. She began twisting this ring and continued doing so, which he found unsettling to watch. The fine creases in her skin, those fanning out from the corners of her eyes, fascinated him. Her actual eyes, the iris and the pupil, had not changed, nor had their message, one of hunger and insistence, a look that invited precision, that demanded logic prevail. It was a look Heinrich remembered perfectly. And yet it was the way she cradled her cup, lifting it to her wide mouth, then drinking in a series of urgent sips, that most deeply convinced him of who she was. Inge, my sister. My sister, Inge, he repeated to himself, while they sat in silence.

  At last, she spoke, and Heinrich felt grateful, his own mouth parched and wordless.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  He drank some water and told her.

  He described his hike, which had felt timeless but could not have lasted more than twelve days, as he’d brought with him only twelve days’ worth of provisions. All that he’d witnessed, how their grandfather had appeared from behind a rock, the scene between their parents, how he’d encountered Hearne and argued with him, all of this he told her, and that he no longer knew if any of it was true. He paused, waiting for her to respond. He asked if she believed his story.

  “What choice do I have? Here you are, and you’re barely any older than when I last saw you.”

  Her response ought to have pleased him, but it didn’t. Underneath, she was no more satisfied than he was with what he’d conveyed. A crucial element was missing: the essential detail that might make sense of what had happened to him. His explanation could not make her any happier than it made him; she, the smart one. But instead of challenging him she smiled. It was a gentle smile. Part true happiness, part pretend, he decided. He shook his head. This was not what he wanted.

  Heinrich and Inge, reunited in a small café. They contemplated each other. In a state of suspended disbelief, they examined one another.

  “I nearly didn’t go to the library today, I almost didn’t find you,” he told her.

  “I feel ancient, sitting opposite you. You look so young. Your body isn’t about to fall apart the way mine is.”

  “No, it’s not, you look wonderful.”

  She had no real answers to offer him—he knew this now. She understood no better than he did. Yet he’d counted on her for an explanation.

  “Why don’t you ask me where I really was?”

  “Fine. Where were you really, Heinrich, while I was living here all these years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sat where she was, her face unreadable, and twisted the ring on her finger.

  “I . . .” she started.

  He waited.

  “When you disappeared,” she said.

  She stared down at the hard surface of the table, perhaps trying to make sense of all that had occurred, perhaps going over and over a set of feelings or images in her mind. Under the table, her leg began to shake. It shook until she stopped it with her hand. Then she looked up at him.

  She spoke of her work. She earned her living as a translator, freelance for the most part, English into German. It could be invigorating, challenging, though much of it she found exacting in a tedious way. Washing-machine manuals, instructions for software. Once she’d been asked to translate industrial performance reviews of prosthetic limbs. He smiled as she spoke. My months, her thirty years, he thought, and a vast unimpeded sadness spread inside him. He wanted to weep but pushed the feeling down.

  She went on telling him about her work. There was rarely a shortage, not often a break, and the worst was when her clients needed their text ready by the following day. She was talking more than he remembered ever hearing her talk, talking as if talking might save her from drowning or perhaps stop him from disappearing again. Listening to her voice intensified the ache inside him, and listening to her voice softened the ache. His ache acquired the rhythms of her speech.

  “But I do like it,” she said. “Once I find the right words, when they fall into place, neatly, when I know that I am good at it.”

  She didn’t dare turn down a job. She lived alone.

  Suddenly, he wondered about the friend she’d mentioned in her letter to him, the woman she’d met in Pangnirtung, who’d told her to come to Toronto. Inge’s letter, folded small, was tucked in his wallet. He reached for his wallet, then hesitated.

  “Not even a cat?” he asked.

  She smiled. “A few plants. No cat.”

  Heinrich pulled her letter from his wallet.

  “This is how I knew to come to Toronto.”

  She stared at the paper, which he held between his finger and thumb.

  “Didn’t you make friends, in Pangnirtung, with a woman, studying weaving?” he asked.

  He reminded himself how long ago that was for her, how long ago it was for everyone but him, and again he wanted to cry, and a sob formed in his chest, but he realized there was no point in crying, and he pushed the feeling farther down. It did not occur to him that he was lucky to have been given an extra thirty years; this thought did not cross his mind. He felt only his loneliness, and the chafing weight of inexplicability that had wrapped itself around him—the impossibility of his presence.

  “Yes, she was my friend. We met when I came to Pangnirtung to look for you. She was there to study weaving. She was adventurous, like you. We did become friends. But once I arrived here, in Toronto, it was different. She had lots of friends and wanted to introduce me. I couldn’t say much. I’ve never been good at conversation. I’m not like you. I stopped being able to speak, even with h
er. I wrote to her. I sent her a letter, telling her what I wanted to say. I sent her so many letters, and I knew I wasn’t behaving the way other people would, that they’d just go out for coffee, sit like this, the way you and I are now, but I couldn’t. She’d call. She never answered my letters. She’d say into the phone, ‘Let’s have coffee. We live in the same city.’ But what would I have said, once she was sitting across from me? I stopped answering my phone.”

  Heinrich let go of the letter, her letter to him, and it lay on the small table between them. She took it. Reading it made her frown.

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

  She returned the letter to him.

  “Karl is not well. I’ve been meaning to go and see him. I had planned to be there, in Tettnang, now, this month, but so much work came along, jobs that I couldn’t afford to turn down. Or maybe I just didn’t want to go.” She paused. “Isn’t it amazing?” she told him. “You wouldn’t have found me, if I’d gone. And we wouldn’t be here together.” Her mouth curved in a sudden smile, as if finding each other outweighed everything else.

  “Yes, it’s amazing,” said Heinrich, and, reaching across, he placed his hand on hers. She waited several seconds before withdrawing her hand and slipping it under the table.

  “I really should go to see him much more often,” she said. Her hands reappeared and she began twisting her ring.

  “I spoke with him.”

  He told this woman, this woman who was Inge, his sister, of his futile conversation with their father, Karl; how he’d sat in the lobby of the Pangnirtung hotel, talking hopelessly into a pay phone.

  “Yes,” she said. “He told me that someone had called pretending to be you.”

  “Cruelly pretending? Did he tell you that the person who called him was cruel?”