The heartbreaking, indelible resonance of those two simple sentences, “Don’t forget me,” and, “Hey, how you been?” spoken scarce few minutes apart—words of departure and reunion; alas, Billy had come back from a journey safe and sound.
“Don’t forget me” did not strike a cynical note but rather evoked the philosophy of precariousness. This is logical; life is precarious. That was useful knowledge. All one needed to do was to listen carefully to traditional Inuit stories to learn how suddenly life can change.
No single story can be said to epitomize this, but many share certain basic conundrums, narrative trajectories that move from order to chaos, from joyfulness to mourning. In such stories, for example, a man says good-bye to his wife and children. The day is sunny, the air crisp, life is fine and hopeful. A person can see far into the distance. “Good-bye, husband,” he hears. “Good-bye, father.” And this man sets out on his sled. The dogs are behaving well. The man has prayed for a successful day of hunting or fishing, the ability and luck to provide for his family.
Yet ill fate may well lie in ambush. In folktales the possibilities are endless. A ten-legged polar bear maligned or insulted long ago may choose to enact revenge on human beings—this one—not an hour’s walk from the village. The ice may crack open and the hunter plummet after his dogs into a fissure. The arctic hosts a vast repertoire of spirits, some benevolent, others who would readily half-orphan the children of that hunter at whim. Most often the hunter makes it out and back and lives to tell the tale. Still, it is always a good idea to say, “Don’t forget me.”
Each journey, as Buddhists say, begins with the first step, such as Billy Umiaq’s step into the Hudson’s Bay Company store. It is not paranoia to say that life is unpredictable; unpredictability is part of quotidian life. You temper it with a shrug, “Hey, how you been?” You acknowledge it and move on. Neither the actual amount of time that has passed nor the distance traveled points to the central meaning. It was that Billy Umiaq had disappeared from view, and now he was back. Life had worked out for the best.
Helen could not afford to catch a cold or, worse, pneumonia; she had had pneumonia twice in eighteen months. We should have gone directly back to the motel. For some reason, however, I began a disquisition, replete with halfbaked theories, about the movie’s larger themes and implications. Being someone who had difficulty disguising her immediate responses to almost anything, Helen grimaced slightly. “Where did this come from?” she said. “What are you talking about?” Helen was of small physical stature and yet responses registered on her face in big ways—I equated it to the outsized expressions required by background characters in an opera, as if the audience is keenly observing only them. Her face could fall into solemn disappointment, it could squinch up in disgust, it could submit to a rubbery pout as if gravity itself were forcing a clownish frown. There was a huge full moon flooding the tundra. I just kept talking—“ … I mean, the way she just knew from the beginning her boss didn’t kill anybody. Plus, there were no—what? normal people in that movie. I guess it’s all about how sinister life is, huh?”—until Helen finally interrupted me. “Howard Norman,” she said—she always used my full name—“you’ve taken a simple plot and …” She stopped, exasperated, scarcely able to catch her breath. We stood in silence a moment, breaths pluming ghostily into the night air. Perhaps from a distance we seemed to be squaring off. We heard a burst of laughter from near the store. “That’s all,” Helen said. “That’s all. I guess I’m not up to discussing this now. I really enjoyed the movie, that’s all.”
In memory it is a still life, “The Argument,” call it. Was it that, an argument? I think, yes, because our voices must have carried a certain pitch of annoyance. The Inuit teenagers kept looking over. Maybe they were expecting something more. They lit up cigarettes; they lit each other’s cigarettes. Helen and I escorted each other to our separate rooms in the Beluga Motel.
Around 5 a.m. the next morning when I woke, I saw that a note had been slid under my door: The movie was about a woman who did not give up on love. Life’s gotten away from you—if you cannot see that!
“Looking back on it”—this is from Helen’s letter of March 27, 1978—“I consider our friendship lovely, hermetic, difficult.” Helen had a way with words; besides which, I don’t contest her opinion.
NOAH BECOMES A GHOST
There’s different stories you hear about this fellow, Noah—in church and other places, you hear stories. Here’s what I know happened. It happened a long time ago. One day, a big wooden boat floated into Hudson Bay. People from the village nearby paddled out to it in kayaks. Ice was just forming along the edges—it was almost winter.
They paddled out, and when they got to the boat, a man shouted, “Who’s on this boat? Whose boat is this?”
“My name is Noah,” a man shouted down. “My wife, son, and daughter are with me. It’s too cold here—we’re going away.”
This made the villagers laugh in their kayaks—“No, no, no—here comes winter!” With this, winter arrived and the big boat was surrounded by floating pieces of ice.
“What?—What?—What?” said Noah. “Get us out, get us out.”
“Not until the ice-break-up,” a village man said.
“Take us into your village,” said Noah’s wife.
“How can you say that—how can you say that?” Noah said.
With this, Noah’s wife, daughter, and son jumped into kayaks and were paddled to the village. Paddled past pieces of ice—pieces of ice were all around, bumping against the kayaks. When Noah’s wife, son, and daughter turned to look back, they saw that the ark was now stuck in the ice!
In the village, Noah’s wife, son, and daughter were given a place to live. They were given food to eat. They were given warm clothes. One night, Noah’s wife said to the villagers, “On our travels, we had a lot of big animals on the ark. But then we got hungry. Our other food ran out. It was raining hard. The rain didn’t stop. We ate some animals. Then we arrived at this place. We didn’t know how to get home. We got lost up here. That’s what happened.”
“Did any of the animals taste good?” a village woman asked.
“Some did—some didn’t,” Noah’s wife said.
“Give us their names,” a man said.
“Giraffe”-this made everyone fall to laughing. “Hippopotamus —” this made everyone fall to laughing.
But each day, Noah’s wife was deep in worry and sadness. She stood at the edge of the ice to see if her husband was walking from the ark. Then one morning she called out, “Look—!” Everyone saw a polar bear walking across the ice. Following the bear was a fox. Following the fox was a raven—walking, hopping along, flying a little. Following the raven was Noah, crawling. “What is my husband doing?” Noah’s wife cried out.
A village man said to Noah’s wife, “A bear walks along—it kills a seal, it drags it up and eats some. The fox might run in fast and grab a scrap or two. Then—next—next—the raven can fly in fast and grab a scrap or two.”
“Oh—oh—oh!” said Noah’s wife. “So lastly my husband might get something to eat.”
“At least he’s found a way to get something to eat,” the man said.
“If I pry off plank of wood, will you leave my husband some food?” she said.
“Yes,” the man said.
With this, Noah’s wife walked out to the ark. She pried off a plank of wood and carried it back to the village. The villagers used it to start a fire. Everyone sat by it—and then some men went out on the ice and left scraps of seal meat and fish for Noah. First, the fox grabbed a little—it ran off. Then a raven got some—it flew off. But Noah got some food, too.
Then it happened that the bear went a long time without killing a seal. It got very hungry. One day, it turned and chased the fox, but the fox knew how to get away. The bear scattered off the raven—and then it caught this Noah, killed him, out on the ice. When news of this reached Noah’s wife, she wept—her daughter wept, her son wept.
More planks were taken from the ark. One night, Noah’s wife stood by the sea ice and saw the ghost of her husband walking in the southerly direction. “Where are you going?” she shouted out to him.
“Home,” he said. “Get our son and daughter—all three can come with me.”
“No,” said Noah’s wife, sadly, but she said it. “You leave—I will stay here with our daughter and son. That is how it must be. That is how it will be.” Noah kept walking—a ghost going in the southerly direction over ice.
Noah’s wife told everyone in the village what had happened. On her long travels, Noah’s wife had seen many things. Her husband’s ghost was one of them.
ODDLY ENOUGH
Fate constructs memory in unforeseen ways. Given a certain compression of circumstances, a give-and-take honesty, a modicum of good cheer and sociability, and if you are able to embrace each other’s take on life, you can learn quite a lot about a person in a short period of time. Late one morning, just a week after I had arrived in Churchill and set up in the motel, I stopped by Helen’s room. I had not seen her that morning at breakfast at the Churchill Hotel, already an unusual absence since we had begun a routine of meeting for breakfast from day one. I knocked on her door and heard a weak “Come in.” I opened the door and saw Helen curled up on the bed, clutching her stomach. She looked pale and there was a white film along her lips. She was fully dressed, including her green parka with plaid lining and what she told me was her favorite item of clothing, black buckle-up galoshes she had bought in Halifax. The shades were drawn; the sedatives Helen took sometimes made her eyes excruciatingly sensitive to light. “You okay?” I asked.
“I have stomach cancer,” she said. She said it matter-of-factly. “So, there, now you know.” I might have expected something else here. Some further explication. Even some judgment of my blank expression. But I soon realized that unembroidered self-assessment was an expertise of Helen’s. She closed her eyes a moment, took a drink of water. Rub my feet, will you?” she then said.”Sit and listen to the CBC for as long as you like, okay?” In discussing novels, Helen appreciated when a plot unfolded or a truth was revealed by indirection. This was paradoxical. Because in her own life, in conversations, she did not suffer indirectness.”Come to think of it, an hour listening to the radio will do.”
I do not, here, want the fact of her cancer to import sentimentality into these recollections. Helen, I am convinced, would have despised that, chastised me for doing so even unwittingly. She would, I believe, have considered it a failure of character. In a letter she wrote, “I hate that my illness put such boundaries on elation.” That sentence—! Given what was no doubt her mind-boggling pain and frustration, that sentence so characteristically bespoke Helen’s writerly self. Elegant in restraint.
Upon her own arrival in Churchill, Helen had immediately set up a routine. She worked with Mark Nuqac all morning as her stamina allowed, beginning directly after breakfast. That is, if Mark was available—he was unreliable in this regard—taping, transcribing, discussing the Noah stories. Now and then I sat with Helen in Mark’s cramped kitchen, with children and adults coming and going, this cousin or that, tea or coffee being prepared, potatoes being fried, the radio on, and on certain occasions such a pervasive air of distraction that it was difficult to imagine getting any translation work done, though Helen was stringent in her attempt to keep things on track. (Domestic chatter, radio music, and, in one instance, a child jumping on a bed with squeaky springs is background noise on several tapes of my own working sessions with Mark.) But more often than not, Helen visited Mark on her own, and early on Mark informed me he preferred it that way. My own work with Mark was altogether a less predictable arrangement. Mark really kept me on my toes with scheduling, seeing that he didn’t much want to work with me at all, or did so grudgingly. We might work all afternoon and late into the night, and subsequently not work for three or four days on end. “I know where to find you,” he was fond of saying. In Mark and his wife Mary’s house food was always offered. (Mark liked snacking on chunks of raw carrot or boxed breaksticks with peanut butter. Also, he enjoyed black coffee with half a dozen teaspoons of sugar.) But Helen’s appetite—her ability, that is, to keep down food—was meager. Her personal pharmacy was always close at hand, eight or nine vials of pills were either on her night table or stuffed into her parka pockets or backpack. And as for generally bearing up, over tea one morning she said, “Despite my medical circumstances, most days I don’t feel life is rushing by, oddly enough.”
THE NOAH STORIES
Indelibly, every mental snapshot I retain of Churchill contains a raven or a group of ravens; the same with my dreams of Churchill. Ravens simply crowd into the picture. The proper terminology, I believe, is “a parliament of ravens.” (It is “a murder of crows.”) Ravens on the taiga, on the tundra, on the ground, in the black spruce of the bogs. Ravens along the railroad tracks. Ravens at the grain silos, out at the granary ponds, along the river. Then there is a kind of slapstick comedy one sees: raven dive-bombing polar bears foraging at the Churchill garbage dump, or nipping at a bear’s genitals as it lolls on its back along the rocky beach of Hudson Bay.
There were two ravens as a greeting party when I stepped off the airplane on my first day at Churchill. Helen had arrived on August 22; I had arrived on August 27. Helen had taken the “Muskeg Express” train up from Winnipeg. My pilot’s name was Driscoll Petchey (I used this name for a pilot in a novel, The Haunting of L., set partly in Churchill), a real chatterbox. Setting my one suitcase on the ground, Petchey said, “Good luck every minute from now on,” then walked ahead of me to the airstrip’s small office.
Mark Nuqac’s nephew Thomas drove me to the Beluga Motel. Not more than ten minutes after unpacking, there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there stood Helen.
“I have a very Japanese face, as you can see,” she said, “but I’m English on my mother’s side.”
“What’s your name? Why did you knock on my door?”
Helen was dressed in her green parka, a black turtleneck sweater underneath, blue jeans, those galoshes buckled to the top. Her black hair was tied up in back; she also had a kind of topknot, just on the very top of her head, which made me almost laugh. Stray hairs spilled out from the knot like a fountain.
“I’m Helen Tanizaki,” she said, taking my hand in hers and shaking it. She let go of my hand and said, “Come on, I’ll take you over to see Mark. He’s in a very bad mood. He can’t wait to meet you.”
“Just a minute. How did you even know I was assigned to work with him? With Mr. Nuqac.”
“Because I’m working with him, too. He mentioned you. Then you got here.”
“You’re working with him—in what sense?”
“Same as you, as it turns out.”
“Same as me how?”
“Well, it’s my understanding—am I mistaken?—that you’re going to try and translate some of Mark’s stories. And you’ve been hired by some museum or other. And that’s why you’re here.”
“Correct.”
“So—you are translating into English, right?”
“Yes.”
“Me, I’m translating the same stories into Japanese. For a journal, and later possibly for a book.”
“Nobody told me this would be the situation.”
“Me either, Howard Norman.”
“Mr. Nuqac had to agree to it, though.”
“Of course. It was his idea.”
“Why would he do that?”
“For one thing, he makes twice the money.”
She shook her head side to side, as though I was the most naïve person on earth. “Okay, ready?”
“Yes.”
“Put on your coat, then.”
When we arrived at the small shack-like house Mark had borrowed for his stay in Churchill (Mark and his wife, Mary, had arrived from Eskimo Point via Winnipeg, where Mary had had a minor operation in the hospital), Helen said, “This part of town is called
‘the Flats.’” The Flats was where some of the original parts of Churchill still remained; one brochure, or reference guide, said, “If you want to see how the Indians used to live in Churchill [referring mainly to the Cree], go have a look,” euphemistic, I suppose, for declaring this area a kind of shantytown. My knock on the door was answered by Mary, who announced, without being asked, that Driscoll Petchey was, as we spoke, flying Mark the short distance to Padlei “to visit some cousins.”
I killed time for two days, sizing up the town of Churchill, eating breakfast and dinner with Helen at the Churchill Hotel, going for walks carrying a rifle borrowed from Thomas, “in case of bears.” When Helen told me that Mark had returned, I walked over to finally meet him. We did not shake hands; we just nodded hello. Mary just stood there observing this interaction without the slightest look of surprise. “Okay, I’ve met you,” Mark said. “The museum already sent some money. Ask Helen, here, when to see me. We can start working pretty soon, eh?” It was clear I was then to leave, which I did. I ate dinner with Helen at 7 p.m. at the Churchill Hotel, arctic char, potatoes, thawed vegetables, coffee. Just like every other night so far.
Here is a drawing of Churchill Helen made for me:
CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAYS
As I have mentioned, Mark referred to his stories as “my Noah stories.” Generally, they each had these four things in common:
1. Noah’s Ark drifts into Hudson Bay as winter is fast approaching.
2. Inuit villagers offer a bargain, or strongly suggest that Noah give up some of his unusual animals—and/or planks of wood from the ark—in exchange for their keeping Noah’s family alive through the winter.
In Fond Remembrance of Me Page 2