In Fond Remembrance of Me

by Howard Norman

  When next time the ice-break-up arrived, the villagers decided that Noah had lived with them long enough. They went with him in the southerly direction. Then they gave him packets of food and sent him on his way. Planks from the ark washed up for a lot of summers. Not every time after a storm, but still there was driftwood, driftwood—driftwood. From that ark.

  THE STUFF OF NOAH’S CHARACTER

  Mark Nuqac was about five feet four inches tall, stocky. I thought he had a dignified bearing. Helen told me that Mark had never been to a dentist (how did such subjects come up in their conversation? “He joked about it,” Helen said); his teeth were bad, the best front ones crooked, one of those seemed to push slightly at his lip. He had close-cropped black hair. His roundish face was most deeply etched on his forehead, a veritable light-brown earth-map of latitude lines. He had pronounced “crow’s-feet” wrinkles at each eye, a broad aspect to his cheekbones, a taut, thin-lipped smile, a notched and scarred left ear, the result of a sled-dog bite when he was a boy. Though he generally held a solemn expression, focused, not preoccupied, his face could truly brighten—I witnessed this every time Helen stepped into his kitchen. He was both gruff and cordial in equal measure, it seemed, to his wife, Mary, whom he had been married to for forty-six years. Mary did not at all strike me as long-suffering; as much as I understood their occasional bickering, she gave as well as she got, and I never saw them apart, except once, when Mark and Helen were walking by the river, or when Mark, with somewhat alcohol-emboldened entitlement, took it upon himself to stumble into Helen’s motel room, “unannounced,” as Helen put it, and hold forth on this or that subject. More than once Mary had to fetch him back home; Mary and Helen had a cordial relationship—Helen spent considerable time with Mary Nuqac, and Mary provided certain clarifications about any number of sentences, let alone entire stories, Helen was translating.

  Mary Nuqac was a few inches shorter than Mark. She had reddish brown skin, darker than Mark’s, and her eyes were darker brown, too. Her rather long face—most notably the sides—were mottled with age spots, like a map of islands. Her hair, gray-flecked black, was cut close except for one braid bobby-pinned in a haphazard coil at the back of her head. Neither Helen nor I learned where Mary was born, but she once allowed that she had spoken a different dialect of Inuit when she was a child. She married Mark when she was seventeen; I was surprised, for reasons having to do with Mark’s cynicism toward “church,” that they had had “a Christian wedding,” and that both Mark and Mary had indeed been baptized. “I still don’t mind church,” she said. You definitely could call Mary “stout”; she wore sweaters too small for her physical stature, and often they were buttoned unevenly. She wore tennis shoes and sweat socks, and a few times she had on what she called “nurse shoes”—her sister, Maude, was a nurse in a small clinic near Lake Winnipegosis, Manitoba, and had sent her these white shoes in her size. Mary could read and write in English, and for some years clerked in a store. I did not get to know Mary well at all, but on one occasion we had a somewhat lengthy conversation in English, which centered on the Beluga Motel’s plumbing. Years earlier, Mary had watched the original plumbing being installed, and went into great detail about how people went every day to observe the motel’s construction from the ground up. It was a rather odd topic, I thought, but I was happy to be speaking with her alone; she ended by confessing that she had regretted not becoming a plumber. “I saw how everything fit,” she said. “I even asked a fellow if I could help out, but he didn’t want me to. I could’ve helped out—no question.” (One other thing: that was an oft-used phrase, “no question”—it meant no question about it.)

  Helen promised to send Mary a kimono; Mary had seen women wearing kimonos in a National Geographic magazine and thought their colors and design were beautiful. Mary had a National Geographic map of the world thumbtacked to the kitchen wall and had circled Japan with a black crayon.

  Mary and Mark had had five children. Their second son was lost to suicide; a daughter, born with a weak heart, died of complications from scarlet fever at age two. A daughter was living in Winnipeg; a son lived in Vancouver and was married to a Chinese woman. Their eldest son had died at forty of natural causes in Padlei. If the face, as Akutagawa wrote, is “the registry of all we experience,” then I could fully imagine that Mary could decipher much of Mark’s emotional biography each time she looked at him—and, no doubt, Mark could “read” Mary’s face for joys and griefs as well. One morning, when I saw Mark holding Mary’s face with his hands, massaging it as if to slightly realign the past, it struck me as some age-old form of literacy, the reading of a husband’s or wife’s face, because Mark was concentrating the way a person reads and rereads a particularly astonishing passage in a book.

  I want to describe a typical afternoon of working with Mark Nuqac, not that there was such a thing. Typical, I mean. Each working session was different in small and large ways, subtle or outlandish, and each day we never really got along that well. On October 4 Mark seemed quite willing, in fact insisted on speaking about the character of Noah himself. For one thing, he informed me of the “origin”—I took this in part to imply a source of inspiration—for the story “Why Woolly Mammoths Decided to Flee Underground.” (My title—Mark did not title his stories.)

  I could not for the life of me figure out why Mark set aside his highly impersonal manner to speak about the chief antagonist of his Noah stories, Noah himself, but I was grateful for it. For it was otherwise all too clear that the wider context of our work together—that he was paid, as it were, for being a raconteur (he once emphatically remarked, “You can’t put these stories into a museum, even though you work for one”)—made him somewhat uneasy. Helen pointed out that the Japanese language was so outside of Mark’s experience that having his stories reside in Japanese might, in ways we perhaps could not fully comprehend, be less distasteful. “He likes the sound of Japanese more than the sound of English,” Helen said. “He asks me to speak it all the time. He closes his eyes and listens. There’s nothing rational about any of this—it’s just the way it is. He doesn’t much enjoy speaking English, either, have you not noticed? Maybe it’s because you’re—what does he say—European? White—whereas I’m not, completely. Some sort of affinity there perhaps. It’s impossible to figure it all out, to have it make perfect sense. There’s many parts to it, Howard Norman.”

  I suppose it took a few weeks not to feel hurt by Mark’s intolerances, his edginess, at times his outright hostility—I took it all quite personally, and I brooded out loud about it to Helen. “It’s not that I’m a rival for his affections,” she said. “I’m a woman, he’s a big flirt, he says very sexual things to me, sexual innuendos, sexual jokes. He clearly enjoys his own crudeness of that sort—Mary says, ‘My husband likes to get your goat.’ I can’t imagine where she picked that phrase up. I’d like to know, actually.”

  “Look, Helen, I’m not very good at this work yet. That’s got to be crystal clear to Mark. He’s impatient with me, and I can tell there’s disappointment. It’s all over his face. He must be thinking, ‘They’ve sent an incompetent.’ If I’m honest about it, I think it’d take me twenty-five years to get this language. And even then—”

  “Now look who’s feeling sorry for himself. It’s a beautiful language, though. You must feel that.”

  “Of course I do. So far I speak it like a kindergartener.”

  “Not quite up to that, I’m afraid.”

  “Besides, Helen, you just have this facility. An ear for it.”

  “I think those lessons you had in Toronto served you well, though.”

  “I bet you dream in Inuit. Does that ever happen?”

  “Does what happen, people in my dreams speaking Inuit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only when the people in my dreams are Inuit.”

  “Funny.”

  “You can’t expect to be a native speaker unless you put in twenty-five years. In that you are quite correct. I mean, look around yo
u: there’s a lot of young people up here who don’t have the language, right? So even not every native is a native speaker.”

  “I’m just worrying these translations to death, that’s my problem.”

  “They’re beautiful stories, though, don’t you think?”

  Back to October 4. I spent the better part of the day in Mark’s kitchen. Except for a brief lapse into whiskey, Mark and I stuck to drinking coffee. I had the big tape recorder on his splintery wooden table. Mary served us each a bowl of chicken noodle soup out of a can for lunch. When we finished our soup, I took out my spiral notebook and pen. (Helen had taped to its cover an illustration of Noah on the ark, big billowing clouds threatening rain, Noah’s wife with a worried look on her face—Helen said she’d cut it out of a children’s collection of Bible stories.) “Go ahead, use the machine,” Mark said. Ravens were squawking loudly—also emitting clicks as if speaking in Morse code—outside the house. I switched on the reel-to-reel and Mark started right in—his voice was raspy, he had a sore throat, he was sucking on a Smith Brothers cherry-flavored cough drop.

  “They find woolly elephants in the ice,” he said. “Bet you didn’t know that, eh?”

  “Mastodons, I think they call them,” I said. “I don’t actually know if woolly mammoths and mastodons are the same thing, but they might be. You call them ‘woolly elephants’ sometimes, right?”

  Mark set on the table a magazine article he’d clipped out. It contained photographs showing paleontologists on scaffolding. They were excavating a mastodon from a wall of ice, using ice picks and what looked like welder’s torches. One of the paleontologists had a belt festooned with scrub brushes and toothbrushes. The mastodon loomed ghostlike behind the partly transparent surface, which was like smoked glass—one of the mastodon’s curved tusks had broken off and floated a tusk’s-length from the hollow-eyed shaggy face.

  “Look, here,” Mark said, pointing to some men at the base of the glacier. “Those are Eskimo. I don’t know where from. The article don’t say.”

  I looked at the photographs and read the captions. When Mark figured I’d had enough time with them, he put the article in his front trouser pocket. “When they got the animal out,” he said—he had obviously had the article read to him a number of times, since Mark himself could not read—“it smelled very bad, but they tossed some meat to the dogs! Now, it must’ve not been completely rotten, eh, ’cause they wouldn’t want to poison dogs.” Mark looked incredulous, at the phenomenon of still-edible meat from the age of mastodons—!

  “Do you remember when you first heard about Noah?” I said, trying to not sound like I was participating in some sort of academic-style Q&A.

  “I first heard about Noah because I sat in church a few times,” he said without hesitation. “I asked my father about this Noah. He told me some things. He told me the Bible story, what a lot of people believe.”

  Mark’s spoken English was definitely stilted, he was never less than tentative with it. You could almost feel the physical process of translation, the delay, the search for words, the inadequate vocabulary, brilliant storyteller that he was. I certainly identified with the essential difficulty; after all, I felt quite inept in Mark’s language. When he spoke, even in our informal dialogues, he often articulated a thought in Inuit first, then did his best in English—in other words, he became his own translator out loud. Helen said that Mark had a “slurring English,” by which she meant that the thick-tongued consonant sound of Inuit was somewhat reprised in Mark’s English pronunciations. (Several ethnographic reports—and one explorer’s journal—from the nineteenth century attest to the fact that the neighboring Cree Indians thought Inuit around Hudson Bay sounded like they had “stones in their mouths when they talked.”) One morning I outright apologized for my poor spoken Inuit. Mark said, “Okay—well. When you and Helen leave, I will earn twenty-four hundred dollars Canadian for this work,” a guarded, elliptical reply, which I took in part to mean suffering a linguistic fool such as I was truly earning his keep. Which I fully agreed with.

  Hard to know for sure, but it felt like Mark was enjoying our discussion, perhaps especially speaking about his father, whom he clearly loved and admired. “My father knew the Bible pretty good—he knew the Bible stories pretty good,” Mark said. Out came a small flask of whiskey, which had an eagle etched on it. It looked just like a flask I had seen for sale in the Hudson’s Bay Company store. “My father liked going to the church talks—”

  “The sermons?” I said.

  “The sermons. He used to sit front pew and laugh out loud. He’d say to the clergy fellow—‘Hey, hey, get it right, get it right. That’s not how it happened!’ Like with this Noah fellow—my father got his own way to understand it, eh?”

  “So, you heard some of the Noah stories from your father?”

  “A few. Not too many. But most of ’em came from—” He pointed to the side of his head, then took two healthy swigs.

  I immediately poured myself more coffee and said, “More coffee, Mark? I think it’d be a good idea.”

  He screwed on the top, which was connected by a necklace-thin chain soldered to the main body of the flask. He set the flask on the counter near the sink. “Okay, more coffee for me, I guess,” he said.

  “The story of the woolly mammoths just disappearing under the ice—you heard that one from your father?”

  “Yes, go ahead, write that down. He watched me write, Mark heard woolly mammoth story first from his father. Staring at my notebook a silent moment, Mark finally said,”I’d read the Bible, I guess. But I wouldn’t learn to read just to do that!” He laughed.”My grandchildren read their books to me, eh? That’s a very nice thing. That’s a very good thing.”

  “Is it”—I searched for the right word and couldn’t find it—“strange, hearing your stories read back to you, in English?”

  “I think my grandchildren might like to read them. They like to read Eskimo stories in books. Other kinds, too. They go to a library.”

  I showed him the depiction of Noah on the cover of my notebook. “This picture of Noah is from a book for children,” I said. “But how did anyone really know what he looked like?”

  This, for some reason, made Mark laugh harder than I’d ever seen him laugh before or since.

  “This Noah fellow—in all the stories—he’s—(Mark used a phrase, which, with assistance from Helen and an early twentieth-century vocabulary list, I learned meant, roughly, lost his human bearing).

  “Yes, in your stories, Noah does seem very lost.”

  “He drifted lost up here, and when that happens, it is a hard thing. When I was a boy I often heard of people getting lost. Lots of ways to get lost, eh? Some people fell right through the ice. Others got caught—lost—in blizzards. That’s how it was. I often heard about such things. You wait and try to think of a way out of it. You wait for some help to come along. Or you wait to die. Lost, eh? This Noah, I have him get lost in all my stories—‘Where am I? Where am I?’—he don’t know. He don’t understand how to live up here, eh?”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “A little like you! You—hey, you remind me of this Noah fellow!” He drank some coffee.

  To extend the metaphor, I was indeed adrift. First, not knowing a language spoken in a household means in a basic sense you are infantalized; you can’t tell what people are saying about you, you are adrift in a constant haze of doubt, the most familiar object (say a teapot) is unfamiliar until you know how to refer to it in a simple sentence. Secondly, I was adrift between occupations. I was constructing a frightfully useless resume: freelance articles on every subject imaginable—I even wrote about polar bears for a Florida newspaper, book reviews for a newspaper in Reykjavik—obtained a small grant here and there to collect folklore in Nova Scotia, was briefly in the employ of the World Wildlife Fund (to help interview Chippewa and Cree Indians in Ontario and Manitoba about the poaching and illegal export of bear livers for aphrodisiacs!), managed to get a high school lec
ture now and then, wrote several narratives for children’s films about arctic animals. I was exhaustingly peripatetic. When all the while I wanted to sit in a hotel room and write novels. That was my big secret. At the time I was definitely without literary prospects. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the protagonist of my first novel, The Northern Lights, was named Noah.) Thirdly, I was adrift between an absence of romance and meeting my future wife, Jane, in 1981, though in Churchill there was no way to foresee that I would have such good fortune. Yet I knew I wanted a family of my own someday. Most immediately, of course, I was adrift in the desire—it felt like an enormous sea-of-desire—to comprehend as much about Helen Tanizaki as posible. To get my human bearing in relation to Helen. Because she was dying; this fact required that I more memorize her than slowly “get to know” her—there was to be no slowly allowed.

  “Maybe I am lost,” I said to Mark, “but at least I’m working with you right here and now at this table, right? I’m asking for help all the time, right?”

  “I’m happy to be paid, working with you.”

  “I know that.”

  “That’s good. That’s good.”

  “For instance, Mark, there’s parts of the woolly mammoth story I need to listen to with you again, on the tape recorder, all right? Maybe five or ten times over again. I need help with it.”

  “Helen can help.”

  “Yes, she can, but I need to work with you on it more. What the museum is paying you for, remember?” I immediately regretted saying that.

  I played the story and we worked on it for two hours; the notebook pages filled, we went through two more pots of coffee. Mary left the house twice, returning each time with something from the grocery store. Mark and I went outside for a piss a few times. It felt like a very productive day of work.