“Come all unhinged—that’s nice. I’m going to write that down.”
“Suit yourself.”
“No, you’re right, I do love those moments. Noah unhinged.”
“I doubt the train’s going to be very crowded.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Helen, we’re not talking out loud about what we’re really thinking, are we? Or am I wrong about that?”
“This thing. My ‘condition,’ you mean—well why talk about it, here and now? I will say this. Illness tends to turn you inward; it makes you eccentric in ways you never wanted. It’s hard to explain.”
“Will you see your doctors in Japan again?”
“Of course—but the news won’t change. I’ve had diagnoses in America, England, and Japan. Same news, same news, same news.”
“You’ll be with your family. That’s good.”
“Stop trying so goddamn hard. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“I think I’m taking the train to Montreal.”
“You, Howard Norman, are not invited.”
“Can you sleep on airplanes, Helen?”
“On a long flight, yes.”
“Not me. I’d be awake staring at the seat in front of me. I’m a bad flier. I don’t have a good time.”
“Too bad. That’s really a shame.”
“Still, you know what? I’d go—I’d fly to Japan, you know, just to see where you live.”
“Write me a letter over there. We’ll see what happens. The thing about flying is, you have to look down and think of painters like Cézanne. High over farmland, think of Cézanne and then you see things nicely. Then you’re glad for the view.”
“I’d have to study up on Cézanne’s paintings first.”
“Yes, go in that order.”
“Maybe later I’ll fly to Japan.”
“I wouldn’t be able to give you the Grand Tour, you know. I’d be able to give you some advice on where to travel in the country, though.”
“I guess we start with letters.”
“If you feel like walking around outside, go ahead. I’ll wait here.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Can you see if they sell tea?”
I bought a cup of tea and delivered it to Helen in a paper cup. Arrivals and departures were clicking in on the overhead panel. Montreal was now fourth down. The first three were local, that is, had destinations within Nova Scotia. When I next looked at Helen I saw that she had fallen asleep, the cup of tea still clutched in her hands, though precariously tilted. I managed without waking her to slip the cup from her hands and set it on the bench.
Over the next five or so minutes Helen leaned left in her sleep until finally she was lying down sideways; I woke her ten minutes before her train was called for boarding.
“Why’d you let me sleep?” she said, quite annoyed.
“I just watched it happen. You looked peaceful.”
“Dumb excuse, if you think about it.”
“Come on, it’s Gate Two.”
“Wait, I’ve got something for you.” She opened her satchel and took out a manila envelope and handed it to me. “Please don’t open this until—Let’s be direct, all right. My brother, Artie, will let you know when. He’ll telephone you.”
“Helen—”
“In Fond Remembrance of Me—that’s what I’ve titled my little missive.”
“For safekeeping, that’s for sure. Maybe I should buy an actual safe for it.”
“A desk drawer will suffice.”
“All right, then. It’s Gate Two.”
We did not speak on our way down the stairs. Her trunk had been brought on directly from the luggage room, but I carried her suitcase onto the train. Helen looked around and found a seat about halfway on the left side. I slid her suitcase onto the overhead rack. She put her satchel on the seat. There were only two other people in Helen’s car, an elderly woman and a teenage boy. I could hear the low staticky buzz of his transistor radio. Then Helen changed her mind and said, “Would you carry my bag up front a little way?” She moved to near the front of the car. Now she seemed pleased. She set out her notebooks and magazines. We held hands, in the manner of two children about to skip rope, I mean, and almost immediately let go. She nodded sharply and sat down, but I stayed standing near her seat and looked out the window.
A conductor stepped into the car at the far end and said, “Tickets.” Helen turned to the window; possibly she saw my reflection in the glass, possibly not. “Don’t forget me,” she said.
BAD TEMPER
In church I heard about Noah’s Ark. In the place it was built there were bad people. God caused a flood, and Noah—this man named Noah—was sent floating away on the boat with his family. They traveled around, and what happened was, they got lost.
They drifted into Hudson Bay, is what happened. They arrived at the beginning of winter, is what happened. And—oh, oh, oh—this Noah had a very bad temper. One day, just when the ark was caught in the ice for the rest of the winter, some villagers went out to talk to Noah. They found out his name and found out that the big wooden boat was called “ark.” “Come on, come on,” a man said to this Noah, “come on, come to our village with your family.”
“No, you’ll kill us,” Noah said.
“Why?”
“To get the animals I have on my ark,” Noah said.
“If you give us some, we won’t have to kill you to get them.”
“Let’s go into the village,” Noah’s wife said.
“No,” said Noah.
“We work hard to get animals to eat—we could go out on the ice—hunting is dangerous—we get out there—we fall through the ice—and here you only have to turn around and there’s big animals to eat—why don’t you?”
“My family eats other things—we don’t eat these animals,” Noah said.
“That is stupid—oh, hey, what about if we help you? We’ll show you how to hunt seals. We’ll show you how to fish through the ice.”
“No, we’ll stay on the ark,” said Noah.
Villagers gave Noah’s wife, son, and daughter some winter bundling. In their bundling, they went with the villagers out on the ice. Noah wasn’t happy about this. He got into a bad temper. He fell to the deck, wailed, and spit—a bad temper.
Out on the ice, Noah’s wife, son, and daughter were taught. They caught some seals. They pulled in some fish. They cleaned them. Seeing this, Noah ran out on the ice. He crammed his hand down a breathing-hole and a seal bit him—it bit his thumb.
“Look at those teeth marks on your thumb,” a man said. “Noah, you have angered the seals. Now they’ll go away. Let’s go to another place to hunt them.”
Noah went back to the ark. His family went with the villagers. They were gone many days. When they got back, Noah’s son said, “Good hunters taught us well. We caught many seals and fish.”
“Look at both your thumbs,” Noah’s wife said.
“Yes, while you were away out on the ice, I stuck my hands in breathing-holes. Seals bit them.”
“Your husband is the only one we’ve ever known to show his bad temper in this manner,” a man said. “Look at his thumbs—look at them!”
With that, Noah’s thumbs fell off. They were plucked up by gulls. Noah fell to the deck of the ark. He wept. He spit. His family stayed, then, on the ark—all the rest of the winter. Noah was instructed not to cram hands into seal breathing-holes—he tried a few times when he got angry, but his family caught him at it and dragged him back to the ark. They looked at his hands for teeth marks of seals.
This happened a long time ago, but it happened as I tell it. When the ice-break-up arrived, Noah and his family floated away on the ark. But ice had cracked the bottom of the ark. The ark leaked in water and it sank. Some village men paddled kayaks out—the ark was gone and they couldn’t find Noah, Noah’s wife, Noah’s son, or Noah’s daughter.
“Maybe they reached shore somehow,” a man said. “Maybe they reached a villag
e to the south, somehow,” another said. “Maybe they are drying their clothes out somewhere,” another said.
“Maybe,” another said.
THE SEA AND CLIFFS
In early August 1978, a few weeks before I returned to Churchill, Manitoba, I stood on a cliff near Cape Freels, Newfoundland, and scattered Helen Tanizaki’s ashes to the wind. There were a lot of seabirds around. Cape Freels is located between Newton and Lumsden, reached by tributary road off the Trans-Canada Highway. A decade earlier Helen had watched seabirds from pretty much this same spot, according to a letter she sent from Kyoto. She and her Dutch husband, Cees, had spent “a relatively calm,” as she had put it, final week of their turbulent marriage visiting outports in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Having flown to Halifax from London, they drove to Trinity Bay, where they spent the night in a village called—ironically, considering the dilapidated state of their marriage—Salvage. The next morning they drove to Cape Freels.
In Cape Freels they spent two days walking and bird-watching. “And nothing much else to speak of,” Helen wrote. They had intended an additional day of hiking but instead decided to turn back. “I look back on it as the saddest of belated honeymoons possible. Still, we were friends.”
From Helen’s letters and our conversations in Churchill and Halifax, I gathered that Helen and Cees suspected that they had been far too impetuous in getting married and felt they had aged badly within marriage. Helen had married Cees, an architecture student in Paris, when she was studying mythology and linguistics at the College de France. The marriage lasted not quite two years. “Cees was a nice man,” Helen had said, “but too fearful.” Ending the farewell honeymoon, they returned by ferry to Halifax, stayed near Historic Properties, and a few days later Cees left for San Francisco, where he joined an architectural firm. In order to finish her doctorate in linguistics Helen returned to Inuit communities in Greenland, Baker Lake, and other locales throughout the arctic. “Now and then,” she said, “Cees and I exchanged letters. Basically we got divorced through the mail. The letters were very formal. Then they stopped altogether, by mutual agreement, I suppose, but never declared.”
Helen’s mother was British, her father Japanese—Clare and Seicho. Clare was a school nurse, Seicho an engineer specializing in bridges; they had met when seated by happenstance next to each other’s table in a Kyoto teahouse. Clare had traveled with two other women on holiday to Japan; the other two women had stayed behind in Tokyo while Clare visited Kyoto. Helen was in fact born in London but raised from ages three to fifteen in Kyoto. She had a brother two years younger named Arthur, whom Helen called Artie-san. A week before her sixteenth birthday her family returned to Europe, where they had houses in London and Scotland. (Her father preferred Scotland.) “We took a family trip once to the Hebrides,” she said. By age eighteen Helen was fluent in Japanese, English, and French. “I was drawn to languages.” Arthur met and married Susanne and settled in Kyoto, where he completed a three-year apprenticeship in bookbinding and set up his own business, which included the buying and selling of rare editions. Susanne eventually became Helen’s closest friend. Susanne and Arthur had two daughters, both of whom were receiving a British education, in boarding schools.
In legal papers Helen had instructed Arthur, whom I had never met, to allow me to disperse her ashes specifically “off the Newfoundland coast at Cape Freels.” By telephone I suggested to Arthur that Helen’s ashes be sent to the central post office in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and I would retrieve them there. I was in Toronto at the time and said that I would immediately leave for St. Johns. Arthur and I spoke for ten or so minutes, that is all. Within the first moment of conversation, however, I could tell he wished to settle things quickly. That is, he got directly to the point. I intervened with condolences. He replied with a curt “Thanks very much,” spoken with an accent that so resembled Helen’s it caused me a veritable déjà vu. Anyway, my suggestion about where to send Helen’s ashes was accepted as logical and expedient, given, as Arthur put it, “the narrow consideration of my sister’s request.” I said, “Okay, then, Arthur. Thank you for calling me.” He rang off.
I knew from Helen’s letters that she had certainly mentioned to Arthur a number of things about our friendship, what things, however, I’ll never know. In my own letters I kept Helen apprised of my whereabouts. The long and short of it, though, was that I was not tied to any schedule; it was easy for me to set right out for St. Johns. Besides, what could possibly be a more pressing commitment? Still, when I hung up the phone I wondered if Arthur perhaps wasn’t bewildered, even angered, by Helen’s posthumous assignation with me and Cape Freels—I wondered, too, what if anything she had shared with her brother about her imagining of the afterlife. Perhaps Arthur had preferred for Helen to remain in Japan.
In St. Johns I rented a car at the airport and drove to the post office. I signed all the customs forms and was handed a small package. Then I drove to Cape Freels.
The wind that day was truly wild. It literally whistled in one’s ears. The sea air was ventriloquial: the keening of gulls seemed to ricochet off an invisible wall far to my left, whereas the actual gulls were sailing off to my right. Sailing and keening and crying and wheeling. In what seemed no more than a mile offshore, I viewed through binoculars Cory’s shearwaters eddying in great numbers around an iceberg. Icebergs in August were not all that uncommon a sight in these waters. Every so often as I stood there a gust of cold wind seemed to directly sweep in from the berg, which looked capable of producing its own weather system. On the flight up from Halifax our pilot had in fact circled above this iceberg on behalf of tourists on board, taking us “just a little bit out of our way.” From the air it looked like a white planet floating in blue-black space. Now, standing atop a cliff, I could distinguish the darker blue of the current, but such was the iceberg’s enormous illusion of fixity that I had to study it through binoculars to determine that it was actually drifting. Waves lapped up against it.
In its transport south to Canadian waters, wind had eroded, gouged, and hollowed the iceberg; near the center of its upper tier were three vaguely human shapes; it all resembled a Henry Moore sculpture of an amorphous parent sitting with two amorphous children. Shearwaters, perhaps having hitched a ride for days, swirled from their shoulders.
Through bincoulars I noticed, too, puffins, the comical pudgy, gaudy-billed birds, excellent divers which old-time fisherman called “parrots of the sea.” However, the puffins mostly kept to the opposite side of the iceberg, now and then catapulting up into view, looping crazily, then dropping below the horizon of ice again. I looked at the puffins awhile. I thought about Helen: Which bird—what type of bird are you? Then I was aware of someone and turned to find an old scruffy-bearded fellow standing next to his battered pickup about twenty meters from where I stood. He was casting me a hard stare and had left his truck door open. He was lanky, slightly stooped, and wore a double layer of sweaters, black rough trousers, fisherman’s galoshes, one buckled up to the top while the other was flapped open. Both of his thumbs were bandaged. Finally he sidled up beside me, nodded hello, leaned over the cliff, and in a thick Scottish accent said, “Dizzy down sheer.” Without another word he walked back to his truck, climbed in, and drove off. Yet he had struck a useful note of caution; indeed it was a harrowingly steep line of vision between the overhang and the sea where, in between floating woven rugs of slick kelp, I occasionally glimpsed a shadowy whale.
After an hour or so of mindlessly gazing at seabirds, I remembered a letter in which Helen wrote, “The Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan are capable of what they call ‘travel off the earth,’ or something like that. They have shamans who stare at birds until their minds fly out of their bodies. Enviable talent, don’t you agree?”
Of course I did agree, and right then and there at Cape Freels I wanted to attempt it, just somehow to show Helen that I wasn’t afraid of the experience. To fly out of myself. But the sad truth was, my new hiking boots were hurt
ing and blistering my feet; I was stuck in the quotidian world, the earthly domain.
Not so Helen, though. I unwrapped the brown paper. Tucked inside the cloth wrapping was a small envelope. I slid out its note. In her elegant English cursive Helen had written: “As long as you are there, you may as well look at birds. Try for a moment to set me apart from the others.” I opened the beautiful black lacquer box on which was depicted a flight of three Japanese cranes, then held it at arm’s length above my head. Crosswinds scooped out the ashes, casting them like charcoal confetti every which way, and some even flew back into my face and across my shoulders. Gulls came by for a look; nothing they could use, nothing, for that matter, they probably could even catch.
Quite an unusual moment, I felt, delivering Helen’s ashes to the place she had foreseen as the plausible afterlife for her, should it work out that she became a bird of the sea and cliffs. It was gratifying, surprisingly not sad. In my life I have regretted nothing less. What could be more of a gift than to follow dear Helen’s instructions, to follow through on what, in a letter, she referred to as “my attempt at reincarnation.” I myself did not believe in it, not just then, at least, but was privileged to convey Helen into her belief. Once all the ashes had disappeared, once I had brushed ashes from my face and jacket and boots, I read Helen’s note again and then did something I had never done before or have done since, laughed until I cried.
YES AND NO
When a wooden boat floated into Hudson Bay, villagers went out in kayaks to it. When they got there, they heard coughing-choking noises. Then they heard “Yes—yes—yes” choked out of a man’s throat, and saw a man stumble to the railing of the big wooden boat.
This man choked out “Yes” again, and suddenly gull feathers flew from his mouth and he spoke clearly, “Go away!”
“What is your name?” a villager asked.
In Fond Remembrance of Me Page 11