In Fond Remembrance of Me

by Howard Norman

  Now Noah was crazed by grief, sadness, and confusion—he had hunted a seal wrongly, he had seen his family sink away—so, now, he walked to the seal breathing-hole and tried to climb down through it!

  The hunters hurried out to Noah, knocked him down, and dragged him across the ice back to the village. He had ice burns on his face. When they dragged him into the village, a woman said, “What happened to him?”

  A man said, “He saw his family drop through the ice.”

  The villagers tied Noah up for days, to keep him from crawling out over the ice. In the meantime, they fed him bits of fish and seal, and kept him warm by seal-oil lamp. They took care of him; he howled often—He wept and said things that made no sense.

  Everyone saw many animals from the ark walk out over the ice; they saw brightly colored birds fly away from the ark. “I wonder how those birds taste?” a few villagers said.

  During the ice-break-up the ark sank. Noah was sent walking in the southerly direction—but when he got a ways from the village, he dropped to his knees and started to crawl. Nobody followed, they left him alone. “How far does he have to travel?” a village boy asked.

  “I don’t know,” an old woman in the village said.

  Later, some planks of wood from the ark rolled onto shore. The villagers set them out to dry. Later, when some villagers sat by the ark-wood fire, one said, “Noah might’ve killed his first seal, if only he hadn’t stood up.” They talked about that awhile.

  TREATISE ON CHOKING

  By the time I entered Helen’s life and vice versa, she had for five years been working on her treatise, “Incidents of Choking in Inuit Folktales.” She kept separate notebooks for this writing.

  The central paradox of the treatise as a whole was that within the vast arctic landscape which, as ship’s captain Alfred Rohrem McCally said in 1890, “seems to have more air to breathe than any place on earth,” many Inuit folktales depict people choking to death or frightfully close to it, either as the result of a shaman’s malevolent reprisal or out of some sort of tremendous anxiety, or during a fight with a spirit who uses choking as a strategy of attack.

  “I think I started noticing this first in Greenland,” Helen told me. “I was having some respiratory problems of my own—so I might’ve been naturally preoccupied and drawn especially to such motifs, but who can say, really? Anyway, I started to ask about stories in which people choked, and started to think about the subject, and then about three years ago really began to work on this thing. I’ll never finish it, of course, and in a way it’s too academic for my tastes. Just another way to type up the arctic, isn’t it?”

  “Your chapter titles are—I guess I’d call them melodramatic.”

  “It went down the wrong pipe,” Helen said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard someone say that, at the dinner table, or in a restaurant. You know, when a person starts to cough and taps their chest, and has a slight worried look on their face? You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure.”

  “What I’m saying is, that’s a fairly dramatic moment, and what I started to notice in folktales was that it was described—choking—as happening to a person both alone and out in nowheresville—I’ve always loved that word. I heard it in London. I was eavesdropping on some kids, musicians, I think, and one looked around, bored, and said, ‘This place is nowheresville.’ Boy, was I pleased to hear that—So, anyway, I was collecting stories where some man would be standing out in the middle of nowheresville, and begin choking. Or he’d be standing among a lot of people choking in public. Some shaman or other showing off his wares—a very nasty scene. ‘Take that!’” Helen, sitting on her bed, thrust out her arm as if it was a fencing foil.

  “Kind of a morbid subject, huh?”

  “Breathtaking subject, actually.”

  “I give that a D minus, Helen.”

  “Deservedly so.”

  We were just sitting around shooting the breeze as usual. While she was writing a letter, I was looking through her notebook. Some of the chapter titles were “Gasping for Air,” “Bird Bones in Windpipe,” “Blacking Out,” “I Need Some Air,” “Dizziness—or, Feeling Dizzy.” Each title was in reference to a specific incident in a folktale discussed in an ongoing chapter in the treatise, but also it was apparent that Helen was in a way collecting American slang, phrases that delighted her—like “nowheresville.” Captions of life.

  “You think it’s strange, my interest in these choking stories?”

  “A whole treatise, Helen, that’s dedicated.”

  “There are a lot of stories to be dedicated to.”

  “How many choking stories are you writing about, for instance?”

  “Oh, I’d say thirty or so.”

  “Somebody gets choked in each story?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t hear very many stories in which someone actually died. A few.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because choking is persuasive. Like in that Noah story of Mark’s, when Noah starts choking on a piece of blubber and the only word he can manage to speak is ‘Yes.’ That way he agrees to everything he’s asked!”

  “Are you adding that story to your treatise?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “I’m having a lot of difficulty translating that story. But now that you mention it, when Noah is choking, it’s both terrifying and funny at the same time!”

  “The villagers want some of those animals and some wood, and he won’t, as usual, give them anything, so they make him choke and he says, ‘Yes—yes—yes—yes,’ and so he has to then give them some wood.”

  “I’m having a lot of trouble getting that story right.”

  “Boo hoo.”

  “What do you mean, choking is persuasive?”

  “Whoever is causing a person to choke usually gets his way.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “As simple as that.”

  One evening—Helen had gone to sleep at about 8 p.m.—I read a section of the treatise more carefully than I previously had; her notes, her impressions, her folkloric anecdotes, extended disquisitions and queries, all were fascinating. And of course it’s a gift to be able to read what a person has been working on for so long, anyway. On the bed Helen was breathing easily, and I hoped she was a world away from pain. To this day I recall a passage in her treatise, from a story she had translated into both English and—on the facing page—Japanese. (Reading it, I realized that Helen could most definitely have translated Mark’s Noah stories more deftly—and accurately—into English than I could, let alone into Japanese. Probably into French, too!) It was a piece of dialogue between a devious shaman and an Inuit hunter who had become his adversary:

  “I’ve just stuck a guillemot in your throat,” said the shaman. “Now, give me all of your best sled dogs!”

  With this, the man opened his mouth to speak, but only the voice of a guillemot came out, “O-waahk O-waahk—” squalling voice of a guillemot!

  The shaman, who could understand the language of guillemots, said, “You have made a good decision.” He took all the dogs and flew with them out to the horizon. Then the guillemot flew out of the man’s throat and the man took a lot of deep breaths. He was worn out. He went to sleep—right there, on the ground, he slept. As he slept he took deep breaths. When he woke he took deep breaths.

  As I was reading along Helen woke and said, “Not reading my diary, I hope.”

  “I was just waiting for you to wake up so we could listen to the radio awhile,” I said.

  “Because if you read my personal diary, I’ll ask Mark Nuqac if he knows somebody to put a curse on you, and bad things will befall you.”

  “Tea?”

  LAUREL AND HARDY

  The motel office had a television, and on a few nights Helen and I watched. On one of those nights, Mark and his ten-year-old grandson joined us, along with Mark’s half sister, if I got the family configuration right. Also pres
ent were a few other children. Everyone ate chocolate bars during the Laurel and Hardy movie, I have forgotten the title. Mark’s half sister’s name was Sarah, and while everyone else was talking all through the movie, she remained absolutely silent, while Thomas, the grandson, translated now and then whatever Laurel or Hardy was saying on-screen. The only words he didn’t have to translate for her were “Stan” and “Ollie.” The plot took place in medieval times. Laurel and Hardy were dressed in ridiculous, frilly costumes. At one point, Ollie falls into a pond and Stan paces the bank anxiously vigilant, waiting for his pal to pop up for air. More time passes than any man, not even Houdini, could possibly stay underwater holding his breath. Stan now is quite agitated in his face-scrunched-up, inimitably comic and heart-wrenching way. Still, Ollie has not surfaced—he does not come up, he does not come up—until finally Stan squeaks the wonderful line, “Ollie, oh Ollie, come up, you’ll catch a cold!”

  I understood then from Sarah’s Inuit that she had asked Thomas what Stan was so worried about, and instead of translating, Thomas faked a sneeze. Sarah caught the absurdity and laughed very hard.

  HIS MAJESTY’S SHIP ROSAMOND

  Helen had read extensively in the ethnography, linguistics, and history of the Hudson Bay region—in Japanese, French, English—whereas I had lacked industry. I quote my zoology professor, Arvin Williams, who said, “You don’t lack know-how or IQ, you lack industry.” When I saw Helen’s arctic bibliography listed in one of her notebooks, I could only manage a feeble understatement, “You really did your homework, didn’t you?” though of course, considering her years in the arctic, she was far beyond being a student.

  How had I prepared? Only by reading a few nineteenth-century explorers’ journals, a few ethnographic monographs (I had one on Inuit kayaks with me in Churchill), and a general history of northern expansion. I had listened to several “instructional” tapes in Inuit, to at least apprentice myself to the sound of the language, if little else. And I’d worked with an Inuit speaker, Mrs. Roy Barnes, the wife of a schoolteacher in Toronto; Mrs. Barnes was an Inuit woman, age fifty-four, who had been born in Rankin Inlet but partly raised in several Caribou Inuit communities. I met with Mrs. Barnes for five hours four days a week for three weeks at my apartment on Ulster Street in Toronto, during which time she did not speak English at all. She always brought cookies or carrot cake. She had constructed actual lessons, stuck assiduously to her lesson plans, the result of which was that I gained a basic Inuit vocabulary and perhaps tentative confidence in my potential ability to speak it. But after our last lesson, as we shared cookies and coffee, when Mrs. Barnes smiled and said, “You have a good ear for this language,” it seemed less a compliment, or encouragement, than what was left below the line in an old-fashioned vertical arithmetic: subtract all that I wasn’t or perhaps would never be, what remained was that I “heard” with some accuracy. “You shouldn’t expect too much from just three weeks.”

  Hidden in this kind advice, I felt, was a forecast of linguistic doom.

  “Plainly stated,” Helen said, “it’s a very, very difficult language.”

  As for my lack of intellectual preparation, Helen did not mince words. “Unprofessional, really,” she said, wagging a finger like a schoolmarm. On the other hand, it was instructive and even solacing when Helen acknowledged that the actual experiences one has in a place to a great extent displace research. “I’ve noticed this time and again,” she said. “No matter how much you read, no matter how many people you talk to in advance, so much flies out the window within a few hours. I’m not suggesting you don’t consider research part of being a good linguist, or translator. I’m only saying that the minute you step off the airplane much of it—what’s the right American phrase?—takes a backseat. For instance, you can read every study in existence about polar bears, but when you first see one—”

  “I feel pretty stupid, though, not reading ‘every study in existence.’”

  “Look at it this way,” Helen said, laughing a little, “no research—no preconceptions. Blank mind, good mind—as Buddhists might say, or something close to that.”

  Given the vast discrepancy, however, between Helen’s and my “book knowledge,” as she put it, I was absolutely thrilled to discover that indeed we did have one book in common. When I saw it on her desk I said, no doubt with unbridled glee, “Hey, I own that! I’ve read that!”

  “Oh, I’ve read it any number of times,” Helen said. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

  The book was Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson’s Bay in His Majesty’s Ship Rosamond (subtitled on the cover, containing some account of THE NORTH-EASTERN COAST OF AMERICA AND THE TRIBES INHABITING THAT REMOTE REGION), written by Lieutenant Edward Chappell, R.N., and published in London in 1817.

  “Where did you find it?” Helen said.

  “In a used-book store in Toronto. In a stack of things. You?”

  “Less, uh, accidentally.”

  “I like the written language, the sound of it, you know. It reads like a novel.”

  “That was the language of the time it was written in. Educated, formal, somewhat—what? Florid.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean, even a very ignorant, even a bigoted observation can be obfuscated—hidden a bit—because of the flair of the writing. Some terrible stupidities in these old journals, condescensions, toward Esquimaux—you know, the French derivation. The sound of the language, the style, is all intimate and full of astonishment in some of those journals. Part of it might’ve been historical naivete, but part, I think, tries to convince a king or someone, a reader, of the superiority of the writer’s culture. France or England, et cetera. My literature professor said style is suspect; you want it to serve clarity, to serve actual intent.”

  “I’m a bit over my head with that, Helen.”

  “All I’m referring to is: the old explorers’ journals are sometimes written by men of great vision and sympathy and understanding, but sometimes there’s an arrogance and narrow, belligerent philosophy that doesn’t allow for actual experience—you know, what is right there in front of you—to have any effect whatsoever.”

  “Did you find this true of Chappell?”

  “Not usually, no. And his report is full of wonderful descriptions and events. And some lovely passages; you could almost recite them like a poem.”

  I picked up her copy and read from a middle page at whim, which, ironically, had to do with Churchill: “‘Whilst we were at York Fort, we received information that the factory at Churchill had been burnt to the ground, in the month of November, 1813. The miseries which the people of that place suffered during the remainder of the winter were very great. As there were seventy-three chests of gunpowder in the warehouse at the time the conflagration took place, their whole attention was occupied in removing away the powder to prevent an explosion; and by the most strenuous exertions they succeeded in this undertaking; but the time lost prevented their being able to save a mouthful of provisions, or a single utensil, from the flames. An old outhouse that had escaped destruction, and a few tents which they erected of reindeer skins, served them as habitations during the remainder of the winter; and, as if Providence had taken especial care to provide for their necessities, partridges abounded to a greater degree than had been known for many years before. Of course, these birds proved a seasonable supply to the sufferers; particularly as the partridges are so very tame, that they suffer themselves to be driven into nets, by which means large quantities are taken at one time.

  “‘A family in England would be justly esteemed objects of great pity, if they were burnt out of their home in the midst of winter, although many friendly habitations might be humanely open for their reception. What then, comparatively speaking, must have been the situation of the Churchill people—driven out by the flames in the middle of a November night, on the shores of a frozen ocean, with the thermometer meter 78° below the freezing point, without any shelter save that of a decayed outhouse, no bedding, no c
ooking utensils, no immediate nourishment, and no final prospect of relief, except from a reliance on the adventitious aid of their fowling-pieces! Such a night must surely be allowed to have had its share of horrors. But heroic strength of mind is the characteristic of the European traders to Hudson’s Bay; and this alone enabled the people of Churchill to escape all the evils attendant on such a calamity.’”

  Helen nodded and said, “I wonder if those ‘people of Churchill’ asked the Esquimaux for help.”

  “There seems to have been a lot of wood to trade for help, huh?”

  “Not if Noah was mayor of Churchill. Isn’t that what the head of a town, or town council, was called, ‘mayor’?”

  “It might have been magistrate, I don’t know. It could have been mayor.”

  “I wonder if the memory of that explosion got handed down to Mark Nuqac’s generation.”

  “Why don’t you read him that section of Chappell’s report, Helen?”

  “I just might.”

  “Tell me his reaction if you do, okay?”

  Helen took the book from me, paged through it, and found the passage she was looking for. “You just reminded me of something Lieutenant Chappell wrote—listen to this; it’s where some native people have got aboard the Rosamond: ‘On board the ship, they were exceedingly curious in viewing everything: but however astonished or delighted they might appear in the first sight of any novelty, yet ten minutes was the utmost limit of their admiration. The pigs, cats, and fowls, attracted their attention in so remarkable a manner, as to indicate a certainty of their not having seen any such animal before.’”

  “That sounds familiar!”

  Helen improvised, “The giraffes, hippopotamus, gazelles, and lions attracted their attention …”

  “Yep, it’s important to see it from both points of view. The Esquimaux’s and Noah’s. I mean, in order to maybe understand the stories better.”