They drove up alongside a child squelching through the mud with his head down and his coat flapping open. Sarah stuck her head out the window and called out to him in Inuktitut. When the kid refused to look up, she dismissed him with a wave of her hand and rolled up the window. Yasmeen guessed he was probably one of theirs. And yet, instead of disciplining him like her own mother would have done, they left him alone. It impressed her.
Paulussie navigated the road carefully, expertly, shocks absent, every part of the truck squeaking, grooved tires sinking into the muck as they passed a nondescript cemetery and a dump of scrap metal and broken Skidoo parts on the outskirts of town. He slowed to acknowledge a decrepit pickup approaching them from the opposite direction. It had a punched-out headlight and a loud exhaust pipe. Tooting the horn, he scooched over, cracked his window and shouted something to the other driver, whose bronzed arm was dangling over the door, a half-smoked cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He was wearing a yellow hard hat. The guy smiled and nodded at them.
“That’s Tommy,” Paulussie announced to everyone and no one in particular. “You’ll meet him.”
They bounced past a giant satellite dish, a scatter of rusty oil drums and ramshackle sheds in varying stages of decomposition. There were no street names or sidewalks or civic numbers. The village seemed haphazard and improvised, as though lumber and nails had been parachuted from a plane and wherever they landed, something got built. As far as she could tell, Saqijuvik was just a treeless expanse of flimsy wooden houses curled around a grey stretch of water. Nothing had a basement, everything stood on footers because of the permafrost.
“Look, there’s my church!” Sarah shouted. She pointed to a building of yellow corrugated metal. A sign above the door read “Jesus Saves—Pentecostal Church.” Across the road, facing it, was an older, dome-shaped structure that resembled an igloo. “That other one, that’s the Anglican Church,” she added.
The waning drone of the distant plane caught Yasmeen’s attention. She stared out the window, following its solitary white trail until it dissolved into nothing. Her heart sped up. She thought of how far away she was, how isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. She thought of her father, two years gone, and how he would have shouted Yahoo, Yasmeen! Hold onto your hat!
“You’re stuck here now,” Paulussie shouted over his shoulder. He laughed and winked at Sarah, who returned his smile. “Everybody okay back there?”
Sam nodded.
Paulussie dug around in his pocket until he pulled out a crumpled pack of Export As and a lighter. Knees bracing the steering wheel, he poked a cigarette into his mouth.
Sarah shooed him with her hand. “You smoke too much, old man.”
“Izzat so?” He spun around with an impish grin, enjoying the extra attention. He lit the cigarette and took back the wheel with both hands. Sarah sighed in defeat. They vaulted past another few shacks and abandoned warehouses, the radio station, the municipal office, a lopsided building he called the Pool Hall, and the pell-mell grounds of a rambling construction site. The skeletal structure at the center looked like the titanic ribcage of a blue whale.
“Check out the new school,” said Iris, with what sounded like cautious enthusiasm. Her lips hardly parted when she spoke. Though she’d been in the North three years, it was her first in Saqijuvik and her first as principal of a school.
“If all goes well, it should be done by December,” said Paulussie. “And then we’re gonna have a big shindig.”
Sarah gave his shoulder a tender squeeze.
Yasmeen tensed up. A feeling of panic came over her. She felt fraudulent. Had she merely deluded herself, thinking she could teach these children what they needed to know for life in the North? They, after all, were the ones living here. It was their home. They knew every inch of the place. What did she know by comparison, a girl from the city with her books and theories? She remembered some of Frank’s lectures about what her role was, what she could do to enlighten them. The modern world was at their doorstep. At best, she could make it navigable. That she could do.
“In the meantime,” said Paulussie, butting his cigarette into the ashtray, “you’ll use the old portables as your classrooms.” Although it was meant as an apology, Yasmeen was glad to hear that for at least a couple of months she’d get a taste of the old system. Not a single, centralized school operating on a schedule of bells but a makeshift space embracing a looser concept of time. Closer to the Inuit way.
Paulussie took a wide turn and stamped on the brake. “First stop,” he called. “Yasmeen.”
Her heart surged. She marvelled at the view. A house. There.
A small clapboard bungalow a dozen steps from the rocky beach.
A house with a hunter-green door.
Hers.
Yasmeen barely waited for Paulussie to shift into park. She hopped out and ran through the rain for a closer look while Elliot and Paulussie ferried her things into the house. The paint on the front door was peeling off, but it didn’t matter to her in the least. The point was the house. Her own tiny piece of the North. All she wanted was for the rest of her life to start. Here, in this place, more than a thousand kilometres from everyone and everything she knew. She wanted it to start right now.
THREE
Her mother would have had a field day with Mr. Clean.
The house had the shut-in smell of dust and stillness like the summer cottages her father used to rent for them in Maine, where no one could touch anything or use the toilet until Samiyah ran around with bleach and disinfectant. The walls were naked except for a calendar opened to the month of June with a picture of a gleaming Harley-Davidson, the days crossed off in red. She found a glass and twisted open the kitchen faucet but only rusty water gurgled out of the tap. She let it run while she made the rounds, taking inventory.
Bisque broadloom carpet, worn in patches;
Black rotary-dial telephone with flaccid, floor-length cord;
Standard-issue maple furnishings: couch, loveseat, bed, dresser, table and chairs, several with cigarette burns;
Avocado-coloured kitchen appliances and grease-coated backsplash;
Mismatched utensils, cookware banged and chipped with age, whistling kettle, coffee maker with glass carafe and cracked filter basket, spice jars smudged with fingerprints.
She saved the bathroom for last, the cruddy bathtub and the infamous nineteen-litre honey bucket installation that Frank had almost had an orgasm describing, essentially a metal garbage can with a replaceable plastic liner and the accessories to go with it: a year’s supply of industrial garbage bags, one full canister of chemical deodorizer. The next best thing to a water-borne sewage system. Finn had nicknamed it the “makeshift shitter.”
She hauled her bag and her cardboard boxes into the middle of the living room and moved the couch so that it faced out onto the storm-tossed estuary. She flopped into it and watched the slanted rain, the slapping green waves capped in foam.
•
One morning, when Yasmeen was six, the semitones of her parents’ voices woke her. It was dark in her room, like it was still night. Curious, she pulled on her bunny-ear slippers and tiptoed down the stairs. The front door was wide open and her father’s brown valise, the one he took on summer vacations, was standing upright by it. A taxi was waiting in their driveway with its roof light on and the windshield wipers going. She noticed her mother leaning against the wall rubbing her temples the way she always did when she had a headache. Her father was by the door lifting the collar of his trench coat. Before he walked out into the rain he turned to Yasmeen as though he’d just remembered something important. Winking, he pulled a quarter out of her ear and handed it to her, saying, “I’ll be back soon, Habibti.” She didn’t see him for a whole month after that.
After his funeral two years ago, Yasmeen recalled that rainy morning in detail, how he left without an umbrella, sho
oting down their walkway without looking back. She remembered the months and years after he returned from that mysterious trip, how every day after work, for the rest of his life, before her mother even had supper on the table, he opened the liquor cabinet and poured himself a straight shot of Scotch. Sometimes he poured a second or third, or turned in early, taking the glass with him to bed. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Like most fathers he worked hard. Like most he had a drink after work. Then he got sick and it was too late by then to pack his bag and send him back to the place that made him well the first time.
The day of the funeral, they all drove together in a limousine that smelled of sickly sweet ladies’ perfume, up the grave-dotted mountain—she and her mother and her sister and brother, without a word—until Samiyah rolled down the window to let some air into the car and blurted: I had three children to think about, did I need another? Yasmeen knew it was just her grief talking. The relatives sent funeral wreaths dyed unnatural colours, turquoise and lime green, horrible shades. One was in the shape of a clock with its hands stopped at the time of his death. Everyone huddled together as a family by the pyramid of loosened earth while the priest sprinkled holy water and praised her father’s “great journey into the undiluted light, returning him to the beginning, to the lake of pure calm.” Yasmeen never knew her father to be a great swimmer. She didn’t understand what the priest meant by it. She couldn’t tell if it was real or if she’d imagined it, but in a quiet lull she heard her father’s booming voice in her ear. Don’t be sad, Habibti, he was saying. Forget the lake, I’m headed for the stars. It put a smile on her face.
•
Elliot expounded on his theory at dinner. Most whites who come north, he argued, have something big to work out, something in their past or present that isn’t sitting right. They aren’t normal by southern standards. They’re wanderers, dreamers, deviants, misfits. They’re social outcasts or borderline depressives seeking refuge from the emotional turmoil of their lives.
He spoke disdainfully, excluding himself and the other teachers from his categorized pathologies. According to him, none of them fit the profile of the marginal type, someone “a little off,” as he put it, underscoring his words with air quotes. Yasmeen was skeptical. She wondered how he knew this with such certainty. He’d only just met her. And what did he know of Iris and Sam, the other new teachers?
Yasmeen was cocooning in her new place when Sarah’s supper invitation came. She hadn’t unpacked a single thing. The storm had subsided. The shrill ring of the telephone startled her. Who even knew she was in town? Tonight? Oh, sure. Sarah instructed her to bring nothing but herself, she’d see to the rest.
Now night was peering in through the dining room window, a radiant sky swept clean by the rain. Absent was the dim, sulphury afterglow of the city. Yasmeen couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen so many stars.
Sarah made her grand entrance with a steaming bowl of caribou stew. She blushed as everyone around the table applauded. Hair scooped into a high ponytail, she looked almost too young to be the mother of two. Yasmeen jumped up to offer a hand, but Sarah gestured for her to sit, she had everything under control. She disappeared again into the kitchen and returned with a medley of soup bones marbled in fat. She set it down in front of Paulussie and took her place across from him, fanning herself with a napkin. She poured everyone a glass of water from a plastic pitcher, which had a peeling decal of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and lifted hers in a toast. “Well, then, welcome to Saqijuvik, everybody. The new guys and the old.”
Yasmeen’s eyes drifted upward to the poster taped on the wall behind Sarah, an electric orange sunrise with the words Jesus is Coming Back scrawled across it. It suited the décor of the house, every surface cluttered with trinkets and mementos from various trips down south: assorted plastic figurines, religious icons made in China, fake gold crucifixes, ashtrays of all shapes and sizes, silver-plated spoons engraved with city names.
“A bottle of wine would have been nice tonight,” said Paulussie, slurping the marrow from a bone.
Sarah glared. “You’re not so nice when you drink.”
A chilly silence fell over the room as everyone retreated into their private rituals of eating—chewing, swallowing, drinking, stirring, salting and peppering food. For a long while no one spoke. Yasmeen glanced across the table at Jacqueline, the village nurse, whom Sarah had also invited. When they were introduced at the door, Jacqueline said “Enchantée,” and kissed Yasmeen once on each cheek the way French girls do. She wore a long loose top over leotards and gold-toed sandals that seemed more appropriate for the city. Jacqueline was practically a local, having lived and worked in the village for four years already. She arrived at Sarah’s arm in arm with her six-foot-tall Inuit boyfriend, Tommy, the one they had passed earlier in the truck.
“It’s good to be back,” said Elliot, rotating the ice cubes in his water.
Paulussie murmured something in Inuktitut to Tommy. Tommy lifted his eyebrows in reply. Sam, the heavy-set girl with the strawberry hair, thanked Sarah for inviting them, which set off a crossfire of thank-yous from everyone at the table.
The conversation resumed. For hours they talked over the tinkling glassware and clattering cutlery, through the din and thickening haze of cigarette smoke, companionably, as though they’d known each other for years. Based on her few hours in the village, Yasmeen could already tell that she’d enjoy her life in the Far North, where the distances between people evaporated.
“I have a nice bottle of red, but it’s back at the house,” said Iris with a regret that sounded insincere.
Yasmeen swallowed her mouthful. “I might have one too, at the bottom of a box somewhere. I’m not quite done unpacking.”
“I thought this was a dry community,” said Sam.
“Yeah, no booze allowed. At least that’s what they told me at the interview,” said Yasmeen.
“That rule’s for us, not for you guys,” said Paulussie.
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Maybe not to you. Actually, we made that decision together as a community. We thought it was best for us.”
“Best?”
“Some of the other villages have social clubs.”
“What, you mean like a bar?”
“Yep. Saturday afternoons you can line up there to get a drink or buy a six-pack.”
“There’s one like that in Fort Chimo,” said Iris.
“Kuujjuaq.” Tommy glared as he corrected her. “Fort Chimo is your word.”
Iris blushed. “I stand corrected.”
“Not to change the subject, but I, for one, just love the fact that I can look up and actually see stars.”
“Speaking of which, I can’t wait to see the northern lights.”
“Oh, my god, yes. I’ve heard they’re stunning.”
“You can’t even imagine.”
Elliot wiped up the last of his stew with a crust of bread and held it by his mouth. “I once read somewhere that the reason why natives can’t hold their liquor is because their genetic constitution isn’t programmed for it. They don’t have the something or other it takes to break it down. Apparently, in another few generations it might not even be a problem anymore.” He popped the morsel of bread into his mouth.
“Elliot!” Jacqueline’s face was redder than a tomato.
“What?? What did I say?”
“Yeah, maybe we should just change the subject.”
“Don’t Elliot me, I’m just repeating what I read.”
“You Qallunaat, you really love your books, don’t you? Well, here I am, me, a real live Inuk, and I just want to say once and for all— ”
“That’s enough, Tommy, ça suffit. I mean it.”
“Yeah, cut it out, Tommy. They just arrived, give them a break.”
“And you. T’es vraiment con! Why do you even bring it up?”
“What did I do?”
“You and your stupid theories. Gros tata.”
Tommy reached over and pecked Jacqueline on the forehead. “Aukaa. You know I’m only kidding.”
She pouted and rolled her eyes. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
Elliot shot Jacqueline a playful look. “Don’t be so serious.”
“Put it this way, white people would rather read than have sex. Inuit people would rather have sex than read.”
“Paulussie!”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“Talking about missing the connection, my mother thinks I’m actually going to be living in an igloo up here.”
“And that surprises you? Just listen to the news. Americans still think that regular Canadians live in igloos.”
Tommy stiffened. “What do you mean regular Canadians?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean … you know what I mean.”
“Gros tata.”
“Okay, let’s just say once and for all, for the record, we’re all of us, in this room, every one of us, regular, equal Canadians. Is everybody happy now?”
“Wô, minute là! Tu me niaises? Moi, je me considère Québécoise.”
“Let’s not go there either, Jackie. Not tonight.”
“Câline, and here I thought we were going to have an argument! You know how much I love tripping you up.”
“Hold your horses, mam’selle! Who won the last one? I believe it was me, n’est-ce-pas?”
“You’re a legend in your own mind, mon ami.”
Sarah reached for the empty plates and piled them in front of her. “I’d like to hear from the new people for a change. Yasmeen, your name, it’s so beautiful.”
“My mother wanted to call me Noor, the Arabic word for light.”
Yasmeen Page 4