The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  black slab-mountains of Slab-Land, halfway up which swam cloud-spears as the birds sang and new storm-clouds rushed in and the cold wind screamed and grey clouds fell as low as Elder Brother's head, with more clouds behind them, and it rained, and storms trapped the man and woman and tortured them without meaning to or not meaning to, and as the rain began to fall in earnest the stream-tones increased in pitch and boulders stirred in the riverbeds and the rivers began to groan as the birds sang and the cold rain fell, sometimes freezing as it fell, sometimes not, and Elder Brother could not hunt, and for days they had no food, and the air was so cold, so frightening, so beautiful. - Presently summer came. Pink and yellow flowers sprang up

  along the sides of moss-cushioned waterfalls, and other waterfalls played in rock-clefts, and the moss embroidered itself with spiderwebs. It was sunny on the ice. The seals lay on their backs and folded their wet black flippers over their bellies. The great slab-landscapes of sea-ice were stitched with white seams and stamped with fine blue granule-lines, as if they had been yards of calico. Elder Brother and his wife sat on the steep and rocky shore, watching the melting of the last dirty drifts of ice, which were weak and rotten, speckled with dead leaves, sun-wrought to treacherous pointed ridges along which it was almost impossible to walk without mishap. Water dripped fi*om them and gathered in dirty puddles underneath them and ran into the clear brown water of

  the ^ord with its light-lines and ripples that softened the greenish-brown outlines of reflections of peaks of the blue knife-slab ridge across the Qord, and little floes drifted across the image. A gull stood on a rock in the water for a long time. A floe broke in two. On the northern horizon lay a white line of seemingly solid ice, in which was reflected a mountain made blue by the storm-cloud over it; and Elder Brother and his wife saw themselves reflected in each other's faces. The sunshine warmed them, and they were very happy. Stalks of golden grass moved in the breeze in stiff increments, their seed-crowns a precious but heavy burden. Closer to the moss, the little plants with penny-shaped leaves did not move.

  Sometimes when he was away hunting. Elder Brother pictured to himself his wife's firm buttocks, which he liked to grip in his hands when he was making love to her. But then he would think to himself My buttocks are also like that. And this thought would throw him into confusion. He could not understand the otherness of his wife.

  The Ctoud'Sfiirt

  There were musk-oxen on their island, and many low, rolling mountains. Sometimes mornings were hot and golden, with the mosquitoes not yet bom and the wind in abeyance, and fi-om a meadow-bluff the river in all its braids seemed but a neighborhood of mild and silvery streams, and there were no clouds in the sky; and then there was one, lying on a soft snow-shoulder, and then a few more white rabbity puffs, and then the wind-sound came out of a mound of black-and-rusty boulders, so that for the first time it seemed possible that maybe the wdnd came from the darkness underground; and the bar of cloud upon the glacier had widened until it spanned the notch of the pass, but overhead there was still nothing but clear blue sky; so the man and his wife never knew how the weather was going to be.

  When a storm first came into the sky, the grass and the moss seemed yellow in that light. The glaciers became a glassy grey, fi-etted with waterfall-stairs. The wind increased in tentatively stronger gusts. The noise fi-om it seemed to emanate fi-om the riverbeds, groaning through those long corridors of rock, and fi-om somewhere beneath the wings of the Faceless Mountain, and the grass trembled (though the little tundra plants stood perfectly still), and the sky got darker and darker, the white sun a pale poor face now in comparison to the many snow-faces that smiled so much more brightly than the day. When the storm-weather was bad Elder Brother sometimes felt listless, doomed. He

  could not say why. As for her, she became restless. Something had begun to beat its wings inside her, something bright and shiny and hard. When the sky was overcast the mountains were exceedingly grim, and she did not like to look at them. She did not like the way that the Spirit Woman had changed her. She ought to have a new name, having become different, but though he was still Elder Brother, her guardian, her brother, she had lost her name. Now she was only a wife.

  The Hermapfiro£te-Sfiin

  Was a woman something she was supposed to be? But she had not started out being one, and she did not want to be one. She did not necessarily want not to be one, but she wanted to be several things. A woman was not all she was.

  The Bear-Shirt

  Some women you penetrate; others milk you: thus Elder Brother generalized to himself, for he was now a man of experience. It seemed to Elder Brother that the latter was what his wife did to him; he did not like it. It reminded him of her as she had been before her sex had changed, when she used to question him endlessly about the different kinds of animals, as if once she knew enough about the habits of seals or foxes she could become one, and then be forever free of him. So he soon lost his appetite for making love to her.

  "Judge a girl by her kamiks,"* runs the Greenland proverb, "a woman by her husband's kamiks." She sewed pretty kamiks for him, but he always found fault with them. After all, what could Younger Brother know about anything that he did not know better?

  The rocks on the hill beyond were white because there had been a fire there. Elder Brother said. He showed his wife things at almost every step. - Here was the kayak-leaved plant. - This heap of stones, which formed a ruined cave, had once been a trap for foxes. The bait was attached to a heavy slab exquisitely balanced so that when the fox gnawed, the slab fell and imprisoned it. - This pile of white fluff was reindeer hair. A Dane had shot it the year before, and left most of the carcass there to be wasted. Now only

  * Skin-boots.

  the hair was left. It was soft and dry, and would have filled a good pillow. -But his wife did not care in the least.

  Sometimes she would get so angry at him that she felt a deep dull pain behind her heart, as if an icicle had lodged there. Then she would abuse him until he clapped his hand over her mouth, at which she would try to bite him. They had scenes that lasted all night and all the next day. Afterward she would feel somewhat satisfied, but he, exhausted and lacerated, despised her precisely when she attempted once again to be a good wife to him, for to him she seemed to be displaying a triumphant magnanimity, her attentive kindness a silky self-satisfied quality: I am content because I have made you suffer. So the more extreme her efforts became to propitiate him, the more sullen he became, until she flew into another rage and it all began again. He could not understand how she could so easily enter these states of feeling so intensely that he must always be reacting to her, as opposed to having feelings of his own; and the image of those winter nights which he preserved when he closed his eyes was of her lying motionless beside him on the skins, her body drawn as far away from his as possible, glaring at him, a single anger-tear rolling dovm her round cheek, as she told him endlessly of her hatred, smiling bitterly. She could have rolled back upon those buttocks that he admired so well, and done something to herself, and presently given birth to fishes, so that he and she would never be in hunger, but she would not do it because she did not want to help him.

  In his resentment at this, he began to tease her. Jokingly, he said he knew that she was no woman at all, but just his Younger Brother who had carelessly lost his penis. - "You think that having your red slit is all there is to being a woman," he said. "Well, that's not so. Remember that I am your Elder Brother. I know about those things. If you want to learn how you should be, you must be more obedient to me." - He meant it only as a GAME, of course. He did not mean to hurt her feelings, for what would be the use of that? - But she took it badly. - "You don't know anything!" she cried. "You don't see anything! If something were to change in front of you, you wouldn't see it!" - After this. Elder Brother kept a watch everywhere for new things. One day he even saw a black birch twig upthrust in an iceberg.

  The Ice-Shirt

  His hunting often took him north, where
there was still ice. What a feeling of freedom to walk along the shore-ice! Every step took him further away

  from her. After the agony of clambering up and down steep ridges of loose boulders with a sheep or a reindeer on his back, what a relief to walk upon that flat surface, which aflforded good traction thanks to the snow that covered it, and it was white and beautiful to look at, and a refreshing coolness rose from it as he marched along it in the hot sun. From time to time he must leave it -a wide lead of emerald-hued water barred his way, or the drift itself came to an end - and then it was back to walking on stones, on the loose stones of fan-shaped streams, on the great boulders bridged by moss-tussocks which he was sometimes compelled to use as stairs, climbing cliffs of them to dodge some inlet of the sea, then descending other cliffs equally steep, clinging to the stems of dwarf willows for support, with his face in that wall of fragrant moss as he went down - but what a relief and joy it always was to be back on the ice! (For, unlike his wife, he had no striving to ascend for the sake of ascending.) - No matter that the ice might still be dangerous. It was nonetheless the child of beauty and ease. Sometimes the beached ice-drifts were covered with sand, and it almost seemed that he was walking on soUd earth, except for the cold hardness which he could feel underneath at every step; and when such drifts came to an end and he must step down, he sometimes looked back at that wet white underbelly, dripping, dripping silver droplets on the stones -and then the first brown moth of summer flew out from underneath, resting on a sunny rock to dry her striped wings; and then she went off about her short life.

  The Bird-Sfiirt

  As for his wife, in his increasing absences she thought of the Spirit Woman and longed to fly away like her. She lowered one shoulder, she bent one knee; she raised her arms, as if she were a gull banking in the wind; but nothing happened. Once two little birds alighted on a boulder and sang to one another, looking into each other's unwinking eyes. She rushed upon them to frighten them, so that she could watch them fly away. She noted a certain quality of tensely sweeping flexion in their flight; she strove to bring this into her arms. When the black-and-gold flies, more beautiful than jewels, alighted upon her hands, she did not crush them, but watched their throbbing wings. -One day she found that she could leap and leap without a sound. She concealed this from her husband; he had never told her anything. Often, however, she stretched her arms in the night with languid, self-satisfied movements, so that he wondered what she was doing. In solitude she bird-walked backwards,

  BLACK HANDS

  99

  stepping lightly on the balls of her feet; she raised her arms as she lowered her hands. Her arms became wings.

  She built a fire in a circle of stones. When she threw a loaf of moss on it, it glowed like a tree in autumn. It was evening, and the dwarf willows cast their shadows on the rock. The flames flickered at her like wings. -Yes, yes, she told herself She could do that. She could fly away whenever she chose.

  That vAnter, when Elder Brother teased her until the tears came, she raised her hand; she pointed at him with her hand-edge. She whirled her hands around her like knives. She took her w/o-knife and she flailed at his face.

  She took her bone-needle; she poked him again and again. - He drew his arms into his stomach and was silent, like a nothing, a worried little icicle. - Oh, she was contemptuous! - Then she saw that she had poked him full of holes. - Elder Brother was dead! She had killed him!

  She bent his knees; she put his face against his thighs; she curled him into a ball and buried him beneath the snow. Presently the Spirit Woman came down fi-om the sky and said, "Where is your husband?" - "Oh, he is out hunting," said the woman indifferently. She no longer cared much for the Spirit Woman; she had her own powers. - "You're certain he is out

  hunting?" said the Spirit Woman. - "He didn't say," the woman yawned. -The Spirit Woman paced upon the snow. She sat down. "What's this sharp bony thing I'm sitting on?" she cried. - The woman watched her and chewed a piece of dried meat. - "Look!" cried the Spirit Woman in horror. She scooped away the snow. "It's your husband! You've killed him! See how he's full of little holes!"

  The woman gazed straight ahead; she whirled with outflung hands; she leaped into the air. Now she was rising, rising, among the whirling snowflakes. The snow and the sky were both white.

  The Spirit Woman cried in anguish, because she could not follow Younger Brother.

  A number of millennia later. Dr. W. S. Bruce, the Scot, disturbed a congregation of ivory gulls off Franz Josef Land. "The cries became louder and louder," he wrote, "and in a few minutes we were in the midst of a host of terrified yet defiant birds. Again they swooped down upon us, and it seemed quite likely that at any moment they might dash into our faces. So we passed from gullery to guUery among many thousands of birds. It was a magnificent sight: the sun was shining brightly in a blue sky, the air was clear, and these handsome birds in their pure white plumage added brilliancy to the scene."

  Birds on a Roof 1987

  And so we were sitting idly, backs to the wind, while the Eskimo crew re-bound my runner to the frame with tight nylon rope.

  John Hussar, Chicago Tribune, "An Arctic adventure on snowmobiles and sledges" (San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, 6 July 1986, section T)

  o

  ne rainy day the wall-shingles of the adjoining house grew spotted and stained with the wet, but the black roof-shingles looked just the same as ever; they were so dark that rain could not darken them. A single black bird came and landed on the roof-ridge. It waggled its tail and puffed its black chest out; it strutted in the rain. The tall chimney beside the bird made it seem indescribably small and ridiculous. It took wing; it flew through the grey air; and then it returned to the roof (Meanwhile a little fly clung to the inside of my windowpane; the fly had been trying for days to escape, because it did not know that rain was falling. If I had let the fly out, would it have died?) - Suddenly dozens of other birds came and landed on the roof, and the single black bird was lost.

  Brothers and Sisters

  We found a few small willows, about three inches in height, and clusters of a small white flower, name unknown.

  Oliver L. Fassig, reconnaissance diary for Greenland islands (ca. 1905)

  N

  ow that Sister had murdered her own Elder Brother, snowflakes blew from her sky-shoes to make the constellations, and the mountains thought that they heard her rushing overhead (but sometimes it was another Presence that hummed so blackly); and the dead man transformed himself steadily into ice, but the Spirit Woman who had made them one for the other was left behind. Caribou streamed down the fells, searching hopelessly for a hunter to whom they could give themselves. And the Spirit Woman gazed ever upward, envious and grieving. She desired Sister; that was why she had made her so. Now she was gone. When her grief had fully ripened, she gave birth to packs of wolves and dogs, who scoured the island and grew restless, who pulled down the musk-oxen. And the Spirit Woman blessed them. - "Go where you please and marry as you please," she told them. "But only do not take your sisters in marriage; that is forbidden after what has happened." - Hearing this, they began to fan out across the sea-ice, looking shyly back over their shoulders at her until a creamy mist boiled up over the forsaken island and their Mother was gone forever, dissolved in her own moumfulness. Then they loped voraciously toward the Sun -not that they misliked the night-shaded places below the ridges of snow, but something called them, although they could not know what it was, so they followed that excruciating beauty-circle which indeed led them round and round; they whined and lapped up puddles where the ice was bluest, cocking

  back their ears and listening anxiously for the sound of rock against rock, sniffing for the new lands; at long last they found diem, and paired togedier in the crackling grass: their children were humans. - At once their shamans learned how to change themselves, singing, "Qangattarsa! Qangattarsa! AyaP'* Their ivory-carved ice-bears could come alive; their women's knife-severed fingers fell into the water to become the t
eeming seals.f Quickly they came of age and married. On their spears were carved round eyes, gaping mouths.

  They wandered east, naming the islands, which then became alive, but they themselves had no name; diey had not yet become Inuit - the People: - their nature was not fixed in them. They followed the animals, singing their songs, fleeing their old villages whose death-mists hid the hungry ghosts that thrummed like bow-strings, bending themselves on all fours like reindeer when they shot their bows. They crossed the ice without fear, brothers and sisters helping each other, never taking each other.

  Now they learned to chip stones to make sharper tools. Their flint-points were pink, yellow, blue, notched into beautiful crystal-faces. They dug their houses into the ground and lined them with stones; over their doorways they placed whale-skulls to keep watch. They paddled their kayaks east, and at last they arrived in Greenland. Then they found that once again the Sun had led them in a circle, for Greenland was First Island, where the Spirit Woman had made them. - Unlike the Bear-Games in Norway, the Sister-Games were just beginning.

  Where GreenlandWas ca. 1390 -1646

  The Frenchman Isaac de la Peyriere in his Relation du Groenland (1646) reports of the island many marvels and enigmas, until in its very existence it seems to be a trembling Thing v^thout a face, heaving its breast with many pangs to give birth, at last, to Eirik the Red's bastard daughter Freydis, whom he brought home to Thjodhild without a word, and Thjodhild said, "Where did you get this babe from? Is she yours?" and Eirik said, "Yes," and Thjodhild said, "I see that there is no help, and I must rear her," to which Eirik replied, "I thank you, wife, for you are very generous." Freydis cried for her milk, but Thjodhild had none to give her, Thorstein being already weaned, and diey