The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  Greenland "is a stark, bare, treeless land, with naked rock predominating everywhere," said Rockwell Kent (1932); but reindeer ran and leaped in the hills, and eagles swooped in the air, and everything was green and full of flowers. - Bjom had the trolls build him a house on a soft mndra shoulder full of fuzzy-budded plants. The lichen was ankle-deep. The troll-boy was very strong, and did most of the work. When he threw himself down among the grasses and mosses to rest, his sister squatted behind him, catching the mosquitoes in her hands before they could torment him.

  In Frost-Month, when the white streams fi-oze on the faces of black cliffs, Solveig bore a baby. The troU-giri loved most of all things to carry this newbom son. When Bjom and his wife were not there she whispered to the baby in her Skraeling tongue, pretending that he was hers, for she was very imitative. But she seldom had a chance to do this, because her mistress never tmsted her. - "Stop whispering into his ear, you troll-carline!" Solveig

  cried. "I know you!" Then the little Skraeling giri had to give the baby back to her. To Solveig and her husband, the troll-speech sounded like this: -'Im-a-nitn-a-mim. - Like so many Icelandic women, Solveig resembled an angel in appearance, with blonde-red bangs cut very short so that her face looked boyish.

  Oh, how hard the Skraelings tried to wear the White-Shirt! - "Give me back my son now, you troU-carline!" cried Solveig. But they would have done anything to be Icelanders. - Often the troll-boy killed seals, and his sister skinned them so quickly with her ulu that Bjom blinked, and even Solveig, who was an impatient mistress, could find nothing ill to say. - The troll-girl loved Solveig's wifely headdress, and wanted to wear it, but Solveig would not lend it to her, so she made herself one out of whale-guts. Of course she still looked like a Skraeling, for that long, lush, blue-black hair fell around her oval orange face, accentuating the high cheekbones, the glossy black eyes. - "You are two queenly wives!" cried Bjom in his good humor, and Solveig smiled, and the troll-girl smiled very very quickly.

  On the short winter days, while Bjom and Solveig lolled at their ease, the troll-boy set out across the ice, and wandered among the low snowy islands which reflected themselves as clouds in the grey sky. Soon the blackness came. Solveig sat dispiritedly by the fire, giving her baby suck, while Bjom lay asleep, and the litde troll-sister sat waiting for her brother all night, until when the cold pink sunrise glowed against the snowy mountains she went mnning out to meet him. He never returned without meat slung over his back. -''Tuttur she'd hear him call. ''Puisi! Sava!" - Those were the Skraeling words for animals. - "No," said his sister gravely. "You must say the Icelandic words. You must say 'reindeer'; you must say 'seal' and 'sheep.'" And her brother did his best to articulate the strange words. For he did not want to be a troll any longer. -- "Yes," said Bjom to his wife, "they are good trolls."

  In the month of Winter's Wane, Bjom said that he must be retuming to Iceland, and they begged to accompany him and serve him forever. - "You are very plausible," Bjom told them, "but the tmth is that you are trolls, and I know you will never be able to change your nature. For this reason I cannot bring you back to Iceland, for I do not want to be called Troll-Bringer or Death-Bringer." - The truth was that Solveig had forbidden him to take them. She scomed and distmsted them, knowing as she did that they were the Skrcelings with their gutskin bags, their sealskin mittens, their golden sealskin dog hamesses, their caribou skin mittens, bone needles and punches, black skull skin-scrapers to clean new furs: - they were the Skin People, the Bowl People. Every household had its tub of urine to tan skins.

  The day of parting soon came. Bjom bid die Skraelings return to dieir people, if diey had any. His wife stood beside him. The Skraelings stood and waited. - When the ship began to sail away, Solveig came to die side and gestured contemptuously to the Skraelings to remm to die hills. They thought her very beautiful. - The ship began to recede upon the sea. But the troll-children could see it for a very long time, because diey stood on a high rock on the edge of Greenland; so they stood diere and die wind blew their long black hair and when Solveig finally shrugged and turned her back to them forever (this is not even the first of the Seven Dreams), they killed themselves by jumping into the sea.

  The Troit-Children 1987

  The boy clambered down the cliff-rocks (although there were stairs), whirling stones fi*om his slingshot. There was a tense purring in the air, and each s one vanished fi-om sight before it hit the ground. - "Can you kill birds with that?" -"Not for birds," he smiled. "Sometime to kill the Danish people!" -1 pointed politely fi-om his weapon to the center of my forehead, and he nodded and was happy. - "This pouch for stone, it should be made fi*om seal," he said. "But I have to make it fi*om this." He pointed to the sole of his shoe. -"He is always practicing," his fiiend said. "But only in summer. In winter there is so much ice, we cannot find stones."*

  Cfvrisiian and Marqethc

  The name of the boy was Christian. He was my fiiend. He lived in one of the older sections of Nuuk, by the harbor, where Htde A-fi-ame houses of vertical planks - red houses, green houses, black houses, each with its chimney, its little square windows - marked the winding margins of dirt roads, which dodged between outcroppings where nothing grew but grass and crevice-moss. These streets ended abrupdy at the edge of the §ord, whose grey wave-lines served only to emphasize its flamess in distinction to the rugged sky (which was a strange bright color - maybe blue, maybe pink or grey - suggestive of an

  * The friend had never seen his fadier. His father was a Dane who had known his mother for a mondi. The friend found out his fadier's name and called Denmark on die phone. "Daddy, it's your son from Greenland," he said. - The fadier said, "I don't want to know you. I don't want to talk to you again." - The friend knew nodiing about hunting or fishing; he had no family to show him.

  The Ice-Shirt

  impending bursting-forth: perhaps of snow, or of some brilliant light behind the clouds, a light never before seen), and in distinction to the grey snowy precipices which soared all around, their cylindrical storage tanks for petrol, with stairs winding around their faces; on the ground were fishing-nets. At eight-o'-clock on a spring morning, a single motorboat could be seen in the fjord. A yellow dog wandered behind the houses, sniffing at trucks, boats and dirty snow-patches. A flatbed truck rushed down the street, with a dozen Greenlanders* sitting in the back. The men had wide nostrils, and smiling lines around their eyes. They wore sunglasses and windbreakers. Sometimes they carried ghetto-blaster radios, and sometimes rifles. - A fisherman clambered down the cliff-steps in his parka and rubber boots. He had his bedroll under his arm. Danish schoolgirls went off to their lessons, carrying their books; and men and women walked to work. When the women's hair was cropped, they looked very Western. - At the roadside near the dock lay fresh-dead seals, shotgun-killed, with a hole in each stomach to display the intestines to the sun; they lay belly-up, small seals and big seals, and their little teeth were bloody, and blood dripped from their whiskers.f - The house where Christian lived was green. He lived with his sweet Margethe, who was fairhaired and faimamed Hke a Dane, but who hated Danes, as he did; and mornings they sat at the kitchen table by the sugar bowl, while Christian's little brother stalked the walls with bow and rubber-tipped arrow, while the snot ran down his face, and Christian got up and put some loud Greenlandic rock and roll on the stereo.

  * That is, the real Greenlanders: - Inuit.

  f Seal meat has a beefy, fishy, bloody sort of taste, which is gready improved by the use of mustard.

  Christian was a fisherman. His motorboat had a hole in it; he had struck ice in the §ord. Now he was waiting for the money to repair it.

  Christian and Margethe set out for the center of town, past the grassy cliff-ledges that were piled with beer cans and broken glass, and came to where the Bloks rose high and white. Christian sharpened or rather dulled his knife against a lamppost; Christian walked down the street twiriing his knife and yelling, "I KEEL all the Danish people!", and the Danish people went about their
business, ignoring him stonily, and Margethe saw an Inuit woman lying on her side in the snow, groaning, with her hands over her face. - "Maybe she think it's night," said Christian, highly pleased widi his joke. Margethe bent over her. "She's drunk," she said. "We can do nothing for her." - Christian found a fiiend, and the two young men went into a Danish grocery and Christian whirled his knife while his friend leafed through a pornographic magazine, and then they bought packaged sausages. Margethe stood outside like a sister, spitting placidly in the street. They went down to the beach to look at Christian's boat, and the sea-waves crunched against the rocks, and the sea-birds screamed, and Christian and his friend bent over the upended boat, one in parka, one in jean-jacket, their elbows touching as they played a game with five Danish kroner, trying to move the bigger coins fi-om the middle to the edge in five moves or less, exchanging two adjacent coins per move; and Christian's smiling face was bent low over the coins and he rubbed his moustache thoughtfiilly, while his fiiend, who had Inuit eyes but light-colored hair, watched and spat and counted his moves in Danish. Later, they tied knots with dazzling speed to show off to each other, and Christian kept embracing and teasing his Margethe, whose chesmut hair and fair skin and blue Caucasian eyes made her look so Danish, but she spoke Greenlandic best and hated the Danes because they thought the Greenlanders Uved in igloos. She stood in her white parka, looking at the ocean and playing with the feather of an appa-hird.

  My first night in Greenland, in a snowstorm in June, I did not know what the Bloks were, and they seemed very dreamy, with the snow swiriing through the shine of the lights, and these vast rectangular buildings laid out in grid-rows upon the snow, everything white. The stairs stank of garbage. There was rotting garbage in bags at every landing. Most of the graffiti, being in Greenlandic, I couldn't read; however, I made out the words ? LOVi. tfOU over and over, and the name AhhilHAk^^; I saw the words HOI^Ah^hOUl - "They are at a very low level," said the Danish administrator, eamesdy. "They often do not speak Danish." (And I diought, how remarkable that he spoke no Greenlandic!) "It is hard for them to understand us," he said.

  The Ice-Shirt

  "If they do not, we must try another method." - It was getting cold. The low sun glittered on the white exoskeletons of Bloks 1 through 5, each Blok four storeys high, each storey containing twenty-five flats, with laundry and rugs hung out on the terrace-railings, and the muddy courtyards full of puddles and Carlsberg beer cans and broken glass. There were many mothers with babies who smiled, and young loving couples who nodded, and old Greenlanders in their flats who would give you tea or beer or fish or seal-meat, and giggling girls in their ski jackets, and occasionally a young man drunkwalking unseeing, moving his fist in the air. Sometimes the older women still wore their trousers of fur, which had long colored stripes running down them.

  BLOKS X'S

  Amortortak ondAngangujunqoaq^

  One night Christian's Mommy and Daddy were playing cards, laughing with friends in the kitchen and crying, ''Ehhhr They usually played for hours. Christian said. He loved them. In the living room. Christian and Margethe sat watching an opera on TV, but with the volume low because it was in Danish, and his Mommy and Daddy didn't like to hear the Danish language. Many old

  Greenlanders were like that, he said. For his comfort and relaxation he also had the radio going, with a sports program in Greenlandic, and he leaned back on the sofa with his arm around Margethe, who was smoking a cigarette, at which Christian decided to smoke a cigarette, too, and so they sat there smoking while Christian stroked Margethe's hair and she smiled at him, and I asked Christian to tell me a story, so he poured three cups of Danish coffee for us and Margethe put sugar in it. - Once upon a time. Christian said (and Margethe smiled and yawned and put her head down on his shoulder), the Greenlanders had been at constant war with a race of giants* named the TunersuiU who dwelled in the inland ^ords amidst the fog and mist, surrounded by the cruel black mountains of the interior beyond which only the ice-wall rose; and Christian said that the Tunersuit were Danish people, for all bad people were Danes to him, but I was sure that the Tunersuit must have been the Icelanders, who settled up the ^ords because only there could they find pasturage for their cattle, and it was very strange to be listening to this story of the fairhaired giants sitting in this living room on the ruins of the West Bygd, while outside in the sunny evening the children played ball and called to each other in a language I did not understand, and fairhaired Margethe, who hated the Tunersuit so faithfully and in whose veins the blood of the Tunersuit so surely rushed, lay fast asleep on Christian's shoulder; and I thought how sad it was that when we were in the National Museum together she loved to look at the ancient Greenlandic woman-faces with their lustrous blue-black hair and black eyes, and Margethe would exclaim at how pretty they were, and although she was just as pretty in her smiling Danish way, she could never look like that; and I was glad that she was asleep as Christian told the tale of the giant monsters who must have been her great-great-grandparents. - Now Christian said something especially disturbing. He said that the Tunersuit had BLACK HANDS. I had read old legends of die Greenlandic demon AMORTORTAK, who came in the winter darkness when the shaman summoned the people to the ceremonial house and the candles were extinguished and the shaman invoked this horror as the snow blew hard outside and the wind-scream rose and everything was black, and presently a new scream rose above the vdnd-scream and giant AMORTORTAK rushed among them in the darkness, yelling, ''A-mo! A-moF', and everyone was very still because he

  * This odd myth of the relative sizes of the two peoples has been perpetuated on both sides. Caudius Clavus referred to the Greenland Skraelings as "small dwarves of an ell's length." In fact the Eskimos were not particularly small, but it is always easier, when dehumanizing our enemies, to convince ourselves that they are odd in size or shape. Perhaps diis was the reason why the Eskimos were happy to let the Norsemen be giants.

  was known to have BLACK HANDS that killed with a touch. How, then, had the fairhaired giants come to have the BLACK HANDS? - I cannot convey the sense of horror and mystery that I felt. - Once upon a time. Christian said, in the time of the wars with the Tunersuit, there lived a little boy named Angangujungoaq. Angangujungoaq was the only son of his father; he was a much-loved child. They told him to be careful, but he wouldn't listen. One day he was out gathering shrimp upon the beach, and the Tunersuit kidnapped him. They were always stealing children. Angangujungoaq's father returned from a seal-hunt and said, "Where is my only son?" - He was so angry and sad that his only son was gone that he gathered his friends together and they went rushing up into the mountains, ascending the green ridges between §ords, fording brooks without stopping to drink, and they went up another ridge, and another, a higher, steeper one, and the other men were tired but Angangujungoaq's father glared around so fiercely that they said nothing, and they climbed a mountain but they could not see the ice, so they descended into a valley whose lake reflected the rosy clouds of impending summer sunrise, and then they climbed a higher mountain, clambering up steeply sloping slabs of rock set into the hillside, and one of the men looked down and saw that the lake of the sunrise clouds was itself at the edge of a vast cliff, at the foot of which flowed the creek by their camp, and beyond their camp was a great white §ord that was white with snow-mountains and glacial silt, and he wondered if the Tunersuit might live that way but he did not dare to say anything to Angangujungoaq's father, who in fact was being guided well by his need and urgent rage, and the men climbed higher and higher, and the mountain became rockier, and every ridge-crest above them seemed as if it must be the knife-edge that stood alone beneath the red clouds, from which they would be able to see the ice, but there was always another crest above, and it got rockier and there were snowdrifts melting into little streams between banks of black rocks and white rocks; and the men ascended through the snow for a long time until at last Angangujungoaq's father pointed to a low mountain on the horizon and cried, "See, the ice!", and the men l
ooked and at first saw only sky, but when they strained their eyes they saw a line going across the sky, and they realized that the line marked the top of the sky-colored ice-wall, that the sky was made of ice! Toward that sky-blue cliflfthat was banded with white they now made their way, and Angangujungoaq's father pointed and they saw a single giant footprint in the snow, and they went higher and higher up into the mountains, into the mist and the ice, until at last they came to the house where the Tunersuit lived. Quietly, so quietly, they peered through the windows, and saw the Tunersuit

  touching the boy with their BLACK HANDS . . . Angangujungoaq's father bit his lip for grief, and wanted to rush in to fight with the Tunersuit, but his friends restrained him and sat down in the snow with him beneath the gables of that horrible house, whispering in his ear that they had best wait until the Tunersuit were asleep, and this they did. When at last the giants lay snoring, they broke into the house and took the boy away. Presendy the Tunersuit awoke, and were very angry that the boy had been stolen back. They set out in pursuit, but a fog came up to blind them, and Angangujungoaq's father ran and ran with his friends, dovm the snow-mountains to the knife-ridge mountain, down the knife-ridge mountain to the cloud-lake valley, over the low mountain and down the green ridges, and in his terror that the Tunersuit might capture his son again, Angangujungoaq's father ran faster and faster until he had outdistanced his friends, and he came to the end of the mist and ran down the last grassy-green slope to the beach where their home was and the orange sun-rays shot very low across the water, which was icy and mirror-clear (but past the mouth of the ^ord the water went inland, toward the Tunersuit, and vanished into blue-grey icy darkness), and Angangujungoaq's father threw himself down on the sand and looked at his only son. - The boy now had the BLACK HANDS! The father cried and did not know what to do. At last he understood that it would never be safe to live with Angangujungoaq anymore, so, said Christian, he had to kill his son.