But over the weeks I did not leave that quote alone. Finally, I realized that I had a specific curiosity about it. I wondered to what extent the quote (“What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?”) vindicated Helen’s previously existing melancholia—as she described her “normal” state of mind—or did her adoration for Akutagawa require her to adopt his epigrammatic philosophy. Of course, when I finally mustered up enough courage to ask her, my inquiry lacked, to say the very least, sophistication: “Helen, why’s that quote so important to you? I mean, it’s on your typewriter, so you read it every day, don’t you.”
“It’s haunting, that’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t entirely explain it. I won’t try—but, well, you read that story ‘In a Grove,’ didn’t you?”
“Yes. And I’d like to read it again before giving it back.”
“Well, the ghost’s testimony is from the afterlife, you remember? The quote is like that, I suppose. My beloved Akutagawa is dead and gone. But—and I can only imagine how this might sound—he speaks to me.”
NOAH AND THE FLOOD
One day just before winter arrived, some villagers saw a lot of seagulls swirling up from a big wooden boat. “Hey—look—let’s go out and see why the gulls landed there! Let’s go look at this boat close-up.”
“Should we bring spears?” a man said.
“Yes,” another man said.
The villagers paddled out in kayaks to the boat. When they got there, a man appeared on deck. “My name is Noah,” this man said. “Go away!”
“What’s this boat called?”
“It’s called an ark—go away!” this Noah shouted down.
“Is your family with you?”
Three people stood next to Noah now—“This is my wife, my son, my daughter,” Noah said. “Go away!”
“Why are you here?” a village man asked.
“Where we come from, there was a big flood,” said Noah’s wife. “We got on this ark and floated away in the rain.”
“Who built this boat?” a man said.
“My husband,” said Noah’s wife.
“Why did you have to leave home?”
“People all around us were behaving badly—doing bad things. Our strongest spirit—God—caused a flood and they drowned. Everybody drowned except us and all the animals on the ark.”
“What kind of animals?” a village man said.
With this, a lot of big animals—and colorful birds—appeared on the deck of the boat. “It’s good we brought our spears,” a village man said. “Push those animals into the water, we’ll get them before they sink away—we’ll catch some, kill them, and eat them.”
“No,” said Noah.
“What did people do, where you came from—what made this God so angry?” a man asked.
“They were greedy,” said Noah. “They killed each other. They stole things from each other.”
The villagers all were laughing hard—they laughed hard, and the laughing went on a long time. “In a village north of here,” a man finally said, “somebody stabbed somebody else, but we didn’t have a flood. In a village north of here, somebody took somebody else’s wife—they ran off together. We didn’t have a flood. In a village north of here, somebody hit somebody else on the head with a rock, he died. But we didn’t have a flood.” In a village north of here, a man reined up his dogs badly, the dogs got away and choked and died, but we didn’t have a flood. In a village north of here, a woman poisoned her husband and ran off with the man who had provided the poison. No flood—no flood.”
“Where we come from, there was a flood,” Noah’s wife said.
Soon winter arrived. The ark was stuck in the ice. “Noah,” a man called up, “bring your family to our village. Give us a few animals, a few planks of wood, we’ll get you through the winter. Otherwise, you’ll starve.”
“No,” said this Noah.
“All right,” a villager said, “but at least let your family come with us.”
“All right,” said Noah.
The villagers set out with Noah’s family. But instead of going to their home village, they traveled to a village to the north. When they arrived, a man said, “Did you see that big wooden boat out to sea?”
“Yes,” said a man in this new village.
“Noah—that’s his name—is on the boat. This is his wife, his daughter, his son. We’re leaving them with you for a while.”
Now Noah’s wife, son, and daughter were living in this new village. That very night, Noah’s wife took out some pieces of food from an animal on the ark. A haunch and neck, from a strange animal. These new villagers weren’t giving them anything to eat, so they ate this, from the ark. Right away this happened: Noah’s wife ran off with a man from the village; but first, she knocked the man’s wife out with a rock. Noah’s son stabbed a man, then tried to run off with that man’s wife, but the man knocked Noah’s son down. Noah’s son ran out and didn’t return. Noah’s daughter found her brother half dead on the ice a few days later. Soon after, Noah’s daughter fed some sled dogs pieces of her clothes soaked in seal oil, the dogs choked and a few dogs died. The next morning, Noah’s son and daughter were sent to the next village to the south—but there was no flood.
When the ice-break-up arrived, Noah’s wife paddled a kayak back to the ark. “Where have you been?” asked Noah.
“I ran off with a man from a village to the north,” she said, “but, finally, I choked him a little and ran off again, and now I’m here.”
“What about our son, what about our daughter?”
Noah’s wife told Noah all that had happened, in that village to the north. “Oh—Oh—Oh” said Noah, weeping. “Oh—oh—oh.”
In a few days the ark was floating free of ice, and Noah’s son and daughter paddled out in kayaks. They all floated in the southerly direction. But the ice had cracked the hull planks wide open and the ark sank away. “Which village should we paddle to?” asked Noah’s wife.
“Not the village to the north,” said Noah’s daughter.
The village to the south took them in. “What will you do now?” a man asked.
“We’ll walk in the southerly direction,” Noah said. “Yes,” said Noah’s daughter. “Yes,” said Noah’s son. “Yes,” said Noah’s wife. The next day, they did that. They never came back. They didn’t come back to the village to the north—or the village to the south.
Part III
TO BECOME A BIRD OF THE SEA AND CLIFFS
REINCARNATION
Now here was an unusual sentence: “I’ve decided to become a bird of the sea and cliffs.”
Calendar-wise it is difficult to recall just when Helen first introduced the subject of reincarnation into our conversations. I think it may have been the first week of October, a little more than a month after our first meeting. However, once such a thing is mentioned, from that moment on it becomes a presence if not a preoccupation. It was for me, at least; Helen is thinking about this.
We had walked out to Cape Merry, the rocky promontory at the mouth of the Churchill River. From this point you can scan the river, look out at old Fort Prince of Wales, or out over Hudson Bay itself. The tides are wild, the waters of sea and river commingle turbulently and, especially in summer, there’s an impressive exhibit of wildlife. In June, for instance, after the ice-break-up flotillas of ducks and loons drift in and out of the tides. Also, pods of seals and beluga whales arrive to feed on schools of the small fish called capelin. Squalling flocks of terns, gulls, and jaegers wheel above the whales and ride on icebergs and ice floes. The river and bay, as early nineteenth-century naturalist Robert T. Capmore wrote, “constantly reconfigure their surface,” breaking into jigsaw pieces of ice, one of the world’s great floating sculpture gardens. In summer, when the sun sets around 10 or 10:30 p.m., it is an especially dramatic time to watch birds and whales at Cape Merry. (Since 1977 I have taken photographs at midnight or 1 a.m., though, at its darkest, the light is crepuscular.)
At
1 p.m. we had met, Helen and I, at the Churchill Hotel and set out walking with an Inuit man named George—I never learned his last name—driving a dilapidated dark green pickup behind us. Helen, it turned out, had arranged this, “in case I get too tired.” George had a rifle in the front seat with him; one had to be alert for polar bears. Helen had paid George twenty dollars Canadian. He kept about thirty yards or so behind us. “Today—at least right now,” Helen said, “I have an unusual amount of stamina and want to take the longest walk possible.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“If you get eaten by a bear, who should I telephone with the news?”
“Come to think of it, nobody.”
“That would simplify things.”
Cape Merry is about three kilometers from Churchill proper. We walked northwest on Kelsey Boulevard—the main street—then out toward the grain elevators. At the outskirts of town we turned left over the railroad tracks, the wind picked up and there was the slightest confetti of snow as we took the road to the area known as the Flats. The spare, makeshift houses, the poverty was striking, and could only be somewhat sentimentally dignified by a phrase such as explorer-bird-artist Mark Catesby used in the late 1700s to describe a seaboard shanty community, “perhaps a place where history hoards its cast-aways, houses its most terrible and beautiful secrets.” We looked out over the stretching mudflats. Scarce few birds remained past late August or early September, but, happily, we caught a glimpse of a snow bunting plus lots of common ravens and herring gulls. In another moment we saw two dunlins, which surprised us, because we had read that dunlins were a rare sighting this late in the year. “I know how they feel,” Helen said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, everybody else has gone off, haven’t they? But you just can’t quite get yourself to leave.”
“There’s no reason you couldn’t stretch your stay in Churchill another few weeks, is there?”
“That wasn’t what I was talking about, really. But no matter.”
Then we saw a group of five or six common eiders, perhaps slightly more likely to be seen in early October, though most eiders had already left. With each bird sighted Helen checked her watch, marked the time, and noted the place in a small notebook.
Gazing at the mudflats empty, for the most part, of birds, Helen quoted Tabuboku Shinoda, a thirteenth-century artist she was particularly fond of, who had lived in a small house by the sea:
I have been drawing shorebirds. Each evening when they fly off to their secret haunts for the night, I am not merely a little forlorn. The cries of the birds I have drawn echo in my heart, as though my heart was the beach itself.
George accidentally honked the truck’s horn, a raspy blurt, which startled us. When we looked back he shrugged apologetically, his wide red-brown face, unkempt hair, exaggerated smile like a mischievous child’s. “Just wanted you to know where I was, eh?” he shouted out the driver’s-side window. Then he tapped the horn a moment, rusty erratic beeps.
Then, an unexpected confession. “How George just honked the horn like that,” Helen said. “It sounded like Morse code, and my mind went back to the movie we saw the other night. The one we had our little disagreement about. You can’t help how your mind connects things up, can you? So just now I was thinking how that one woman character—I can’t remember her name—said that her heart felt like it was shouting ‘Mayday! Mayday!’”
“I went to a psychiatrist once, Helen, and she called that a panic attack.”
“That’s not it exactly—what I’m feeling. But it has qualities of it, I suppose. I think I might have just about had enough of this bleak landscape, beautiful as it is. You know what a French phrase for melancholy is?”
“What?”
“Something like ‘black butterflies.’ A dark—fluttering. Interesting phrase, I think.”
I did not know how to follow up on this so I said, “This is a nice little walking tour, isn’t it?”
“I’m enjoying it,” she said.
Just past the railroad tracks we reached the first of the Granary Ponds, which had ice along its margins. The Granary Ponds comprised a sequence of shallow pools with muddy borders and erratic placement and configurations of boulders, and are a fine place in season to see arctic terns, Bonaparte’s gulls, and—in early June—Sabine’s gulls. During migration season the ponds are absolutely a cacophony, a cornucopia of birds—ducks, for instance: northern pintail, green-winged teal, American wigeon, northern shoveler, greater scaup, old-squaw, mallard, black duck, gadwall, bluewinged teal, lesser scaup.
However, this was October and turning out to be a day of darkening clouds and temperature drop and on occasion gusting snow, when it had begun with sharp sunlight glinting off the water.
“I’ve done my homework,” Helen said, “and I bet you haven’t.”
“How so?”
“Can you name the local shorebirds—even though we aren’t going to see them for the most part?”
“I can name a few.”
Helen closed her eyes and recited, “semipalmated plover, Hudsonian godwit, yellowlegs—no, that would be lesser yellowlegs, ruddy turnstone, red-necked phalarope, snipe, short-billed dowitcher—”
“I get the hint, Helen.”
“—dunlin, semipalmated and least and stilt sandpipers. Those are the most common.”
“Is it your experience that bird-watchers can be the most competitive people on earth?”
“I’m not competitive,” Helen said. “With you, for instance, how challenging might that be? No, I’m just saying the names out loud for enjoyment’s sake.”
“Guess what? You forgot the buff-breasted sandpiper.”
“That is really what you would call ‘uncommon’ up here. I was naming common shorebirds.”
At the end of the first Granary pond, we turned left and followed a road back up to the railroad tracks leading out to the docks. The river was moving rapidly here, great, shifting eddies. “I’ve been here in summer, you know,” Helen said.
“You mentioned that. I’d like to come back some summer, too. Maybe next summer.”
Helen winced at my obtuse reference to the future, then, generously, somewhat made light of it. “Well, try to find me in the afterlife and give me a report.”
“What’s French for ‘Sorry I said that’?”
“Anyway, as for birds, the summer here is quite remarkable.”
“I have a feeling you won’t have to refer to your note-books.”
“Parasitic jaegers, arctic loons …”
We started to laugh, and Helen said, “And I once saw a Ross’s gull out here.”
“Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing, for most bird-watchers, I bet.”
“Well, I have this goddamn disease! So it might have to be.”
“Have you been in a lot of pain lately?”
“I’ve just been thinking—”
Helen stared at the river through binoculars and now preferred to talk while studying the river.
“Thinking about what?” I said.
“Thinking about … you know, what comes next. Is there anything next. Which I do not believe in, exactly. Reincarnation. But I have begun to think about it quite a bit. To see if I might find it useful to believe in. You know—what is the right word? Engaging. Could I locate myself in the whole concept of it.”
“Nothing to lose by thinking about it.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not all black butterflies. It’s just—what’s the phrase you Americans use all the time? Trying to ‘get my mind around it.’”
“You look tired. Let’s go back. It’s getting cold, let’s go back.”
Helen kept looking through the binoculars.
“In a minute,” she said.
The wind whipped in from the river; I regretted that we hadn’t worn scarves. “See anything out there?” I said.
“A duck of some sort, I think. Stayed late, stayed late.”
Five or so minutes of silence; I looked back to see Geo
rge smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the truck. His rifle was racked against the rear window.
“Birds—a bird,” Helen said, “strikes me as an option. Becoming a bird seems a good choice, don’t you think?”
“I don’t have much understanding of it, Helen. But I’m not sure reincarnation is a matter of choice.”
“I’ve studied up on this. I’ll study up a great deal more. But so far, I like Buddhist notions of predestination—I like that a lot. But, still, I can’t accept traditional systems of belief. In reincarnation, I mean. You won’t know anyway, will you, if you were right? Because if you become a cow or a tree, you won’t have human memory. So—this is my point—why not choose? Choose what you’d most prefer to become.”
“Well, I have a lot of days as a human being I’d like to forget,” I said. “And I mean, now, while I’m still here on earth!”
“That’s quite funny, I think,” Helen said.
There was a sudden ferocious gusting of wind and in unison, like some kind of evolutionary survival tactic, ten or eleven ravens about twenty meters downriver each bent slightly forward, almost as if nailing their beaks into the hard ground, an impressive balletic display of synchronicity. They held that position for a good two minutes, then flapped and squawked off every which way.
“What a weird dream I had last night,” Helen said.
“Tell me walking back to the truck.”
“It was from a God’s-eye view—or, maybe, a bird’s-eye view. And all it consisted of was my damn typewriter on the ground. In the snow. And that was it. And then I woke up.”
“Maybe you’d already—”
“—become a bird. I know. I’ve thought of that. But I’m not good at interpreting dreams, you know. I can’t somehow place trust in it. That’s just me. But I’d allow for that interpretation, sure, why not?”
“No sense of which bird, though.”
“I think I’ve decided.”
“Decided which bird you were in the dream, or decided which bird you’d like to become?”
In Fond Remembrance of Me Page 9