Hector and the Search for Lost Time

by Francois Lelord

  ‘And what do you think is happening when you see the future?’

  Madame Irina hesitated. ‘Actually, Doctor, I think that future, present, past . . . it depends on the point in time we happen to be in. Just now, we’re in the future for the children we used to be, but in the past for the people we will be in ten years. Every moment is at once the past, the present and the future. But we’re all stuck on our own little time train, and the countryside always rolls by in the same direction.’

  That reminded Hector of his dream about time with the train he couldn’t escape from.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ said Hector, who was beginning to see where Madame Irina’s extraordinary explanation was going.

  ‘I just think, Doctor, that some of us are able to escape our own time train and jump now and again onto other trains which all run to different timetables.’

  ‘That would mean there’s more than one flow of time at the same time? Parallel universes?’

  ‘Call it what you want,’ said Madame Irina.

  And she leant forward to stroke Hector’s cheek.

  At that point, Hector told himself he really must be dreaming.

  But no, it was a tongue licking his cheek, and suddenly he was nose to nose with a big panting husky, and Édouard’s voice was saying, ‘Noumen! Outside, now!’

  Hector woke up completely just as Noumen was getting ready to cock his leg against Hector’s bed. Édouard took him outside.

  Outside, it was still dark, and Hector wondered if he’d slept for a whole day, but he noticed that there had been some change – the sky had gone from pitch black to bluish black, and even to a slightly washed-out inky blue at the horizon. Hector remembered what he’d learnt at school one day when he’d been listening: in this place at the north of all maps, night lasted a very long time.

  ‘We’re going to see the Inuit!’ said Édouard while Noumen ran in circles around him, barking with joy.

  Hector thought to himself that people who lived through a three-month night every winter and a three-month day every summer would surely have some interesting things to say about time.

  He took the time to make a note in his notebook, and it was difficult because his fingers were very numb:

  Time Exercise No. 9: Take some time to think about things. The past has gone, so it doesn’t exist. The future hasn’t happened, so it doesn’t exist. The present doesn’t exist, because, as soon as you talk about it, it’s already in the past. So, what does exist?

  Seeing this whole landscape at night, Édouard still playing with Noumen, and the lights of the Eskimo village in the distance, Hector thought it seemed as if he was still dreaming.

  Time Exercise No. 10: What if your life was just someone else’s dream? In that case, where are they sleeping?

  HECTOR LEARNS TO SPEAK ESKIMO

  HECTOR had expected an igloo made of snow, but they were all sitting in a big stone igloo, which is a little like a house for the Inuit, whereas a snow igloo is more like a tent they put up just for the night.

  Hector, Édouard, the village chief and three other younger hunters were all sitting on a very beautiful bearskin rug, and wearing fur themselves. All of this reminded Hector of days gone by, except that it was lit by small electric bulbs which were very modern and used very little power.

  ‘That’s the whole problem,’ Édouard had told him. ‘How do we help them without destroying their way of life? Here, they’re the last nomadic Inuit in the area, maybe in the world.’

  The Inuit women stayed a little in the background with the children and one or two babies that were being breast-fed, and they looked at Hector and Édouard from time to time and smiled. Some of them were very pretty with their lovely faces framed in fur, but Hector avoided looking their way, because he remembered reading that, for some Eskimos, it was good manners to offer a passing stranger a woman for the night. If that happened, what would become of his resolution not to get up to mischief ever again?

  ‘Jourgoodhel!’ said the Inuit chief, raising his glass, or rather his plastic cup.

  Hector thought it was an Inuit word, but in fact Édouard had just taught them to say ‘Your good health!’ And the Inuit had taken to this word straight away.

  Hector wondered what they were drinking. It was bitter, sweet and salty all at once, with an aftertaste of rocks, and perhaps a bit of bird too, but not the best bits.

  ‘It’s made with the lichen they gather in spring,’ said Édouard.

  ‘And is it strong?’

  ‘No, not unless you drink five pints of it.’

  Hector saw that the Inuit were looking at him, and he smiled to show that he was really enjoying the lichen beer.

  ‘Drink up,’ whispered Édouard.

  Hector noticed that everyone else had finished their drink, so he quickly did the same.

  The Inuit people smiled again, and straight away they poured him another and said, ‘Jourgoodhel!’ and Hector understood that they were going to drink those five pints after all.

  Time continued to go by very slowly for Hector. He wondered how the Inuit could stand time being so slow, and especially how Édouard, who was always in a rush, coped with it.

  ‘I’ve got used to it,’ said Édouard. ‘In fact, this is what it’s like during the long night of winter. All they can do is stay in their igloos – they can’t hunt, and they live off the reserves they built up in spring. Whole tribes used to die of hunger when their reserves weren’t enough to see them through to spring. Now we help them. But if we help them too much they stop hunting and begin living on handouts. Add alcohol, TV, porno films, and then you soon need psychiatrists.’

  Édouard explained that elsewhere, further south, there were villages of prefab houses where Inuit people had all the comforts of modern life and almost never hunted any more. The result: a psychiatrist came by every week to work with youngsters who drank, sniffed petrol or got into fights, especially in winter, because now, winter had become boring for them, as had life in general, since they were even more bored at school than Hector when he was little.

  ‘Down there, we took them out of their own time to put them into ours, the white man’s time,’ said Édouard. ‘So no wonder there’s trouble.’

  Hector suddenly felt that even though the seconds on his watch were the same everywhere in the world, time didn’t go by in the same way for people from different parts of the world. The numberer and the numbered, as Aristotle would have put it, and he’d never even seen an Eskimo.

  ‘Then, in winter, everything goes even slower,’ said Édouard.

  ‘And what’s it like in spring?’

  ‘Well, it’s the opposite of now. Everyone’s on the go, they hunt, they travel around, they migrate to other settlements, they have parties. And . . . they never stop making love. What’s more, women start having periods again, because they don’t have any in winter.’

  Hector wished he’d come in spring: time would certainly have seemed less slow.

  Édouard began to talk to the chief, because, like all the subjects he had taken long ago at school, Édouard had learnt how to speak Inuit quite quickly.

  The chief said, ‘Oh,’ and gave Hector a worried look.

  ‘Damn,’ said Édouard, ‘I told him you were a psychiatrist, so he thinks you’re bringing a curse upon them, like all the other tribes.’

  ‘Tell him I’m on holiday,’ said Hector. ‘And that I’m interested in time.’

  Édouard started talking to the chief again. He listened, looking at Hector the whole time, and then he smiled and said something to Édouard.

  ‘He’s asking if you think Inuit time is the same as Kablunak time. Kablunak is their word for us,’ said Édouard. ‘If our world began at the same time as ours, I mean theirs . . . anyway, if the Inuit world got started at the same time as ours,’ said Édouard
.

  No one’s told you, but all the while lots of ‘Jourgoodhel!’ had been going on, and now even Édouard was having a bit of trouble saying what he meant.

  Hector replied that, in his country, some people thought that time was the same for everyone, but others (he was thinking of Hubert or Madame Irina) wondered if there weren’t different times going on more or less simultaneously.

  The chief smiled and spoke to a young hunter who got up and left the igloo. This let in a terrible draught which seemed to Hector to last a very long time.

  At the same time, he was watching the little naked Inuit children playing and laughing on the bearskin rug, and he thought that to be a good Inuit you had to start very early.

  The young hunter came back with a very old Inuit man dressed from head to toe in Arctic fox fur, and you didn’t have to be a great expert in furs to work that out, since his entire outfit was almost covered in fox heads. Hector noticed that the old man could only see out of one eye. The other was pure white, and down that side of his face he had a rather frightening scar. Put it this way, if you’d bumped into him in the middle of the night in your flat on your way to the toilet, you’d have let out a scream that would have woken the whole building.

  ‘I know who he is, but this is the first time I’ve seen him,’ said Édouard. ‘You’re lucky . . . His eye – a bear did that when he was young.’

  The old Inuit looked at Hector with his one eye for a very long time, and Hector also felt all the other Inuit looking at him. Finally, the old Inuit came and sat down in front of him and took Hector’s hands in his. Hector thought they felt as icy as . . . but then he tried not to think about it. The old Inuit began to speak to him in Inuit, or at least that’s what Hector assumed, because he didn’t understand anything. The Inuit carried on looking at Hector, but Hector felt as if it was the pure white eye that was looking at him, and he began to feel sleepy. He told himself he’d drunk too much, and at the same time he felt very light, and then he fell asleep.

  At least, that’s what he thought.

  HECTOR TRAVELS IN TIME

  HECTOR was walking on a great snow-covered plain, or perhaps an ice field, he didn’t know. All around, there was such an expanse of nothing that on the horizon he almost thought he could see the slight curvature that reminds you the earth is round. As he was walking, he could see himself: his hair had turned as white as old François’s and his face was wrinkled too. He wasn’t cold, and yet he was dressed as he would be at home, in old trousers, an old shirt, and worn-out shoes that he used to wear a long time ago to go boating. There was total silence – all he could hear was his own breathing and the beating of his heart, which, as it was, he could feel straining a little.

  Hector didn’t know where he was going, but he really wanted to get off this ice field, because even though he knew it was a dream he was beginning to feel the cold.

  Just then, houses began to appear. There were log cabins and, every so often, chalets, which were a little bigger and had fires burning inside. From the doorway of each house, women watched him going by. Hector recognised some of them – ex-girlfriends who stared at him with surprise or, sometimes, a little sadness – and others he had never seen before. There were women of every colour under the sun, and some of them were very, very lovely. Each time Hector went past one of these houses, he thought about stopping there, telling himself that the woman would welcome him with open arms and warm him up. At the same time, he wanted to keep walking. Perhaps he would find an even more welcoming chalet and an even lovelier lady-friend than the ones before. Thinking of Clara, he had a vague thought that he wasn’t supposed to get up to mischief, but she wasn’t there and, anyway, cheating in a dream . . . did that still count?

  As he was walking, it was getting dark. Little by little, the houses petered out. He wanted to turn back the way he’d come, but he’d gone too far and he could no longer see the houses he’d passed. Besides, with daylight fading over the perfectly flat horizon, he couldn’t tell which direction he’d come from any more. Even his tracks had disappeared. He might very well have been going round in circles already. The wind whipped up, darkness was falling, and Hector couldn’t go forward or back. Suddenly, he wanted the old monk to appear. That would have made him very happy. But instead it got darker and darker, and Hector only had the noise of the wind and the beating of his rather overworked heart to keep him company in the middle of the plain.

  The next thing he knew, Hector was back with the old Inuit, who was speaking to him as he held his hands; Édouard, who was watching them; as well as all the other Inuit, even the babies, who looked a little frightened. Hector saw the whole thing from above, as if he was a bird who could see through the stone and snow of the roof, and then he flew up and away, and everything was dark.

  Hector woke up. He was lying in the big stone igloo, and he saw that everyone was asleep, even Édouard, who was lying nearby and snoring quite loudly. There was only one oil lamp burning, which lit the stone ceiling with a gentle orange glow.

  Hector began to think about his dream, saying to himself that perhaps it was time he married Clara.

  HECTOR DREAMS UP THE WORLD

  THE next day (if that word means anything, because, remember, it was always dark), Hector and Édouard came back to their camp for lunch. Inside a big tent, everyone – Hilton, his friends and the pretty pilot – was sitting around a canteen table, and the atmosphere was quite cheerful. It reminded Hector of summer camps when he was a child.

  ‘So, you getting used to it?’ Hilton asked him.

  ‘You look very rested,’ said the pretty pilot, whose name was Éléonore.

  ‘My friend here met the shaman,’ said Édouard.

  Éléonore looked very interested.

  ‘Did he show you your future?’

  ‘It scared me.’

  He didn’t really want to say any more about it. What he’d seen – was that his future? Was he going to grow old all alone on an endless plain, or could his future still be changed?

  ‘In any case, you can’t predict the future,’ said Hilton.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Éléonore. ‘What about the weather forecast? That wouldn’t be predicting the future, now, would it?’

  Hilton admitted that you could perhaps predict what the weather would be like one or two days in advance, but not people’s lives.

  ‘And why not?’ said Éléonore. ‘It’s just more complicated: there are more factors at work.’

  ‘In my old job,’ said Édouard, ‘we would try to predict stock-market prices. It was just as complicated as the weather.’

  ‘It’s simply that, in order to predict people’s lives, you’d need even more data than you would to predict a storm coming,’ said Éléonore. ‘But in theory it’s not impossible. The future is always determined by the present. The problem is that we don’t know all of the present well enough to predict all of the future.’

  What Éléonore said reminded Hector of a word he’d heard at school one day when he wasn’t bored: ‘determinism’. He remembered that a philosopher with a nice wig had said that if someone knew absolutely all of the conditions of the past and present, they could predict the future exactly. Yet another question to ask old François . . .

  ‘There are some people who think you can find out your future from a horoscope!’ said Hilton. ‘That’s always made me laugh.’

  ‘And what if there was some truth in it?’ said Éléonore, looking quite annoyed.

  ‘Pah!’ said Hilton. ‘Thinking that people can predict the future using astronomical data from ancient times . . .’

  ‘It’s easy to dismiss what you don’t understand,’ said Éléonore.

  Hector guessed that Éléonore read her horoscope. She flew a plane in dangerous conditions, taking into account the weather forecast and the position of the stars calculated in an entirely scientific w
ay, but she still checked her horoscope beforehand. Like Clara, for that matter. It fact, it was the first thing she looked at when she bought a women’s magazine. And Clara could do some very complicated calculations on her little computer. Surprising, isn’t it?

  ‘Anyway,’ said Hilton, ‘you can interpret horoscopes any way you want – it’s the opposite of science.’

  ‘Not at all. It depends which ones you read.’

  Hector wanted to stop a conversation he could tell was going to end badly, because he could see that it was really secretly about something else, as all conversations that end badly always are. He had a feeling that Hilton had been in love with Éléonore and she’d wanted none of it, and that now Hilton liked to annoy her a little, because she had snubbed him. Or else he wanted to show that he was a real man, and not the obedient little lapdog that he’d sometimes been before.

  ‘The future’s already happened,’ said Hector.

  Everyone sitting at the long table looked at him. He hadn’t realised that he’d spoken so loudly. He tried to explain himself better.

  ‘What you call the future, it’s already in the past, somewhere else, in another time.’

  Everyone kept looking at him without saying anything. Hector felt a little embarrassed. He tried to make up for it by saying something funnier.

  ‘The life we’re living, here, now, might be someone else’s dream. And this dream might depend on what that person had for dinner before going to bed . . . A good day for you is thanks to that person having some nice vegetable soup and sole with boiled potatoes for dinner, and having sweet dreams; a bad day is down to too much sauerkraut and white wine before going to bed.’

  ‘Let’s get some fresh air,’ said Édouard.

  Once they got outside, Édouard gave Hector a worried look.

  ‘You feeling all right?’ he asked Hector.

  Hector said he felt perfectly fine, and then, all of a sudden . . . he passed out.