Yasmeen

by Carolyn Marie Souaid

  She climbed over a sprawl of children playing with action figures in the lambent light of the television. She followed the vapoury trail of boiling food straight to Joanasi’s mother hunched at the kitchen table, cleaning and scraping some meat with her ulu. Pasha cocked her head up.

  The sight of his mother carrying out her household chores without a single worry reassured Yasmeen. She wanted to fall apart right there, wanted to sob uncontrollably so that Pasha could comfort her, the woman who had made Joanasi for this world, who had carried him in her womb and fed him her milk. She wanted Pasha to hold her, wanted to feel the woman’s flesh against hers, this woman who had finally made her understand her role as a nurturing force, something her own mother had never been able to do. She needed to inhale Pasha’s winter skin.

  Pasha laid down the knife and wiped her fingertips on a dishcloth. She opened her bearish arms to Yasmeen as the flood of her emotions took hold. “Sulirqit?”

  Yasmeen wept. “Anaana.” It flew out of her mouth before she realized it. The word for mother. She wept and wept, while Pasha stood as still as a mountain in a hurricane. She rubbed Yasmeen’s back and combed her hair with her fingers. She sniffed Yasmeen’s neck the way Joanasi did before they made love. After a while, Pasha said “Shhh,” and released Yasmeen, brushing away her hot tears.

  Yasmeen didn’t know how to communicate. She repeated random phrases in Inuktitut, not quite sure what they meant or whether she’d made them up. Sivanirumavunga, she said. Pasha nodded and brought her the telephone. Yasmeen didn’t know what she was expected to do with it. How could she call Joanasi when she didn’t even know where he was? She tried another word. Natsiq. Pasha pointed to the inert mound on the floor and then to the pot of boiling water on the stove. But Yasmeen wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been able to eat anything since Paulussie’s call. She kept thinking of Joanasi dead on the ice somewhere. Everyone knew that Skidoos weren’t as reliable as dogs. They could break down or run out of gas. They were useless in an emergency.

  She resorted to English, speaking in a very loud register as though somehow her message would get through to Pasha. “Joanasi!” she shouted. “Where? Where?” She articulated like a teacher speaking to an ornery child, moving her face very close to Pasha’s. “Where’s Joanasi?” she repeated. “You must know something.”

  Just then the light in the room turned rosy-gold. The sun they hadn’t seen in days was pouring through the window. Pasha smiled, revealing each of her decayed teeth.

  “What’s going on here?”

  The familiar voice was coming from behind her. Yasmeen spun around. Her tears were unstoppable. They soaked her face and neck and reduced everything to water.

  “Ullaakut,” said Joanasi, leaning against the wall, freshly showered, a towel knotted around his waist. The light hitting him in a way that made him look almost otherworldly.

  •

  Joanasi sat her on the edge of his bed and wiped her face with the tips of his fingers. He pulled her head gently toward him. “Do you really think that I would ever leave you?” he said. “Do you? You’re all I care about, you and the babies we’re going to make together. Tukisiviit—do you understand?”

  After that she didn’t want him to say another thing, she just wanted their bodies intersecting on the bed and never coming undone. She wanted to seal the space between them until it was nonexistent, until they were interlaced and nothing could pry them apart.

  His voice dropped an octave. “You’re a bad girl for thinking what you thought. Don’t ever doubt me again. I know about the land. I know how to judge things by watching the moon and the tides. I know how to find the right animals to keep our bodies warm in winter.” She could smell the sweat along his hairline. He pulled his shirt up over his head.

  The vast relief that he loved her, the certainty of it, woke her desire. It made her want to push further, whatever that could mean. She slid his belt off and touched the cold leather lightly to her neck. She coaxed him to lie on top of her. She put an end of the belt in each of her hands and pressed down against her throat. Her breathing quickened. She took his hands and signalled for him to take the belt from her. She liked its hard edge against her throat. She liked how he held it there, how easily he agreed to her terms. “Keep going,” she told him. “Do whatever you like.” She wanted him to take her to the brink. She wanted to free-fall. He drove his fingers into her cunt and carried them back to her mouth.

  “Now taste yourself,” he said. “Taste how good you are.” She licked the offering, listening to the far-off sounds of his little brothers in the kitchen. A baby was crying.

  He rose and stepped away from her and said, “Get up, we’re going to finish this later.” He dressed her in his mother’s fringed amautik and told her she should take his cousin Maggie’s baby for a walk before lunch. His taking their sex away, withdrawing it abruptly and replacing it with a rigid directive, appealed to her sense of pleasure. She’d never known the thrill of being compliant, bound to a man who laid down orders and expected you to follow them.

  “You’ll just want it more later,” he said.

  She liked his understanding of her body, his control over it, the power he exercised over her. It made her want more of him. She wondered whether he would give in if she teased him, camisole purling off her shoulders. If she pushed his buttons. A part of her wanted to test him, this virility, she wanted to know her own capacity to seduce him. She wanted to take him to his point of no return, weaken him all over so that all he could think about was rising like a serpent inside of her.

  “Hey,” he said snapping his fingers. “Let’s go.”

  Wearing the coat was like wearing the sacred skins of the past. They walked side by side, Joanasi smoking a cigarette, leading the way. She realized he was right about waiting. This brief interlude, sharing a baby so tiny for this world, would be just the thing to open her up, to moisten her enough for him to push deeper inside of her. She felt an absolute joy walking with him on the land that belonged to everyone and no one. There was only this.

  Maggie appeared at the door in sweatpants. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Little seeps of milk had leaked through her cotton top. She went to get the baby from the crib.

  The child was naked. He was crying. Yasmeen could see the soft spot of his head that hadn’t closed over yet. Maggie jiggled him in her arms, the mauve nub of his penis rubbing against her neck. She cooed in his ear. She stooped over and cranked a music box, trying to soothe him, but nothing would.

  Joanasi ordered Yasmeen to kneel, bearing down on her shoulders until she was on her knees. From her position on the floor she watched him wrap a blanket around the fussy child. Joanasi kissed him on the forehead and walked behind Yasmeen to settle him into the spacious hood. It gave her a flutter of excitement, the newborn’s pattering heart against her back, the little hot breaths at her neck. Joanasi came around the other side, reached for her hand and pulled her up. He waited for her to find her balance.

  They stepped out into the stark white snow. Yasmeen couldn’t get enough of the sun’s brilliance on her face. Her forehead tingled. The village looked different than it had on the walk there. Even the old shacks and neglected outbuildings were singularly beautiful. Her eyes registered everything they passed as though they were miracles from on high—boys slapping around a hockey puck, the idling sewage truck, the dog nipping at her heels that Joanasi kicked away. Through the soles of her feet she felt the drifting sea creatures under the immense cathedral of ice. Whether it was true or it was her mind playing tricks, she had the odd sensation of seeing the thumbprint of creation in every snowflake. It helped her see that when it came right down to it, everything was about skin and bone and the tides of the blood, everything was either life or death, nothing more. Nothing less.

  The baby’s cry flattened out until it stopped altogether. Through the duffel of the amautik, Yasmeen detected the small, sucking muscl
e of the baby’s mouth, like the pull of the moon on the tide. She understood that if she had had the right anatomy, a darkened nipple and a mother’s aureole, she could have nourished him. She could have taken him to shelter and given him her milk. “I think he’s hungry,” she announced to Joanasi. It was the first time in her life she had said anything so meaningful. It was a sign. Her body was supple. It was ready.

  •

  March 30

  Dear Yasmeen,

  I got your letter about Annie, and you know something? It scared the shit out of me. Do you have any idea what you’re dealing with? I don’t think so.

  I was doing research for a paper (that’s my excuse, I was actually checking up on you) and I stumbled on an old myth from the Kivalliq region. It was very telling, especially after hearing all that Annie business. Basically it’s the story of a cannibal who kills and eats his wife’s parents and then goes after the rest of the community. The wife is afraid he wants to eat her too, so after a few choice manoeuvres she gets the hell out of there and takes off for her brother’s village. Meanwhile, the cannibal is so hungry he rips off a piece of his own leg and eats it. Of course it doesn’t even occur to him that others must have felt that same pain while he was gorging on them. After a while, he tracks her down. She’s playing a tightrope game with her family and he joins in. When it’s his turn and he’s hanging from the rope, the wife’s brother rams a harpoon through him.

  I won’t go on except to say the other stories are equally horrific. People are mercilessly clubbed to death, there’s absolutely no logic behind any of what they do. Their actions are guided by pure emotion, jealousy, anger, despair. Action-reaction. I’m positive that their violent temper where alcohol is concerned is built into their genetic code. Annie and the rest are probably used to it by now. But, you? Come on. What are you thinking?? Come home. I’m afraid for you.

  Love,

  Morgan

  Morgan,

  You have to stop this lunacy. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. These incidents are isolated cases; they can and do happen everywhere, and in the South too! Check out the statistics on violence against women perpetrated by entitled white men.

  Consider the snowflake, small but unique, that lands between your eyelashes, liquefies and changes the look of everything. One of those touched me and now things are different. People change. I never thought I would say it (or even think it) but I kind of see now what my mother’s been trying to tell me all these years.

  About Joanasi. There will never be anyone else for me. Every day I thank God that I found him. How would we have ever met if I’d stayed in Montreal? What would the chances have been? We always said that half measures were for everyone else. Remember?

  I ask again for your understanding rather than your judgment. If you feel you can’t accept what I’m doing, I don’t know if we can stay friends and that would really suck.

  Be happy for me instead.

  Y

  SEVENTEEN

  After their walk with Maggie’s baby, Joanasi said, “Come and be with me, I haven’t had enough of you today.” He popped the buttons of her shirt and loosened her jeans. He removed each of her socks and all that she was wearing, until she was down to her underwear. It was quick rather than erotic. His eyes travelled up and down. She crossed her arms in front of her. He pushed them away. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  She was vaguely aware of Pasha in the kitchen, preparing the seal he had killed for their supper. She didn’t care what his mother could hear of them. She wanted Pasha to know that she had surrendered her body to him. It felt like the perfect gift to give a mother, the knowledge that her son was with a woman wholly devoted to his needs.

  Yasmeen wanted to make him promise never to leave like that again unless he took her along with him. But she knew she had no right. Saying it would have been selfish, childish even. This was what it meant to live in a place where one mistake can send a hunter off course. This was how it would be to wait for him at home with their children while he fought for their subsistence. If she stayed, she would have to get used to it. Joanasi was a hunter. He was made for the weather. He was made by it. The spirit of his ancestors pulsed through his blood and gave him the resources to adapt his rhythms to the shifting seasons.

  He led her to the dresser and slid down her briefs. He stood behind her and swept her hair aside and murmured something into her ear. “I don’t understand,” she said. He knocked her into the dresser with the back of his hand. His jeans were already pooled around his knees and he was rubbing himself up and down the back of her. She slit her legs apart in a yes.

  He nodded. His dry, rough fist entered her. It left a fire burning along her tiny infolds. She thought about feigning a whimper, partly to make him stop and partly to incite him to push harder. He pulled out his hand and dropped his pants completely. She gripped the dresser, preparing for the pain she endured whenever they did it this way. He grunted and slid his arms around her waist and drove his full weight into her, forcing a widening rent. He kept at it without a break, her forehead thumping against the mirror until all she could see in front of her was a jeweled zap of stars. She tried to whisper for him to go easy on her, but he covered her mouth with his hand.

  “No talking, I said.” He pushed harder. She wanted it to stop but he didn’t seem to be reading her and she began to understand that this was what it was like to be treated like a northern woman. The man doing what he had to for satisfaction. The woman accommodating. She wanted to cry out with happiness. She wanted him to flip her around and press his face against hers and say her name very, very slowly before doing it to her again from the front. For an instant, while he was still shoving into her from behind, their eyes locked in the mirror. She grunted her pleasure like an animal. His bone stiffened inside her and then he released everything he had with a moan, falling on top of her, holding a fistful of her hair. They remained that way in an exhausted heap, limp, exposed, sated, until Pasha called them in to eat.

  •

  “Kaapaa,” said Yasmeen, cross-legged on the floor. Pasha showed her how to cut with the ulu. The blade had blood from the animal on it. Yasmeen made a ritual of bringing the silky, glistening chunk of meat to her mouth, grateful for what nature had brought them. She tore its flesh with her canines and ground it into a mash, chewing and swallowing until it found its warm place in her belly. She put her hand there. “Mamartuuaq.” She smiled at Joanasi, picking the gristle out of her teeth. “Aliappunga.”

  •

  Yasmeen woke with a start, pain spearing through her lower back. She curled into a ball, squirmed around and straightened out again. Rolling onto her side she pressed the cold soles of her feet into Joanasi’s thighs, unable to get relief. She wondered if maybe the seal at supper hadn’t agreed with her.

  Lifting her head off the sweaty pillow, careful not to wake Joanasi, she reached her toes down onto the cold floor. She eased off the bed and groped her way through the darkened house. A rancid animal smell coming from the kitchen made her gag. She lifted her pyjama and sat on the chill seat of the honey bucket, trying to pass whatever was pressing on her organs. She hoped it wasn’t a kidney stone. Her Uncle Ramzi was always ranting about how painful that was.

  When she saw the livery-red discharge in her underwear it shocked her the way her first menstrual blood had the night Harrison tried to have sex with her. For weeks afterwards she blamed him for setting off her ovaries. But this was different. She didn’t blame Joanasi. She had wanted their intimacy, the boundaries dissolved, nothing separating them. She had wanted their rough sex.

  She fashioned a pad out of Kleenex and stuffed it like gauze between her legs, trying to soak up all that was draining out of her. Rising, she turned to see what she had left in the honey bucket. It was worse than she imagined: a veined sac the size of a small plum. Her heart sank. She pressed her thighs together and tottered back to the bedro
om.

  Joanasi cupped her face in his hands. “Suviit? What’s happening?”

  “Nothing, go back to sleep.” She didn’t want to tell him what she had seen in the honey bucket. The cramps were intensifying. She felt the downward pull of gravity as though her borders were wide open and life was flooding out of her, taking everything with it, like a powerful river tearing the trees from their roots.

  Joanasi insisted on waking his mother. “No,” she winced. “Let her sleep. I’ll be fine.”

  He lifted her head to fluff the pillow and laid her back down, stroking her hair. His eyes lit up. “Maybe we have a baby in there.”

  She had to admit the thought had crossed her mind. Earlier in the week she had gone for a pregnancy test but an emergency came up at the nursing station and Jacqueline told her to come back another time. Then things got crazy at school and she never got around to it. Now she wondered whether she had been negligent.

  Joanasi guided her back to the bathroom. She leaned into him, terrified at what was raining down through her. “I’m gonna pass out,” she kept repeating. Joanasi eased her down onto the floor where she choked up a river of mucus and something that resembled the tip of a sausage. She tried but couldn’t slow down her breathing. A droplet of perspiration slid down the side of her face into the folds of her ear. The last thing she heard was her head against the cold tile, like the muted whump of a melon hitting.

  •

  Yasmeen opened her eyes. They skirted left to right, left to right. People were hovering over her but they seemed very distant, as though a cloudy windowpane were separating them from her. They all had lips like duckbills and they were talking to her with their hands on their hips. The one she took for her mother pointed a single, scolding finger at her. Her duckbill was flapping. “That cat belongs to someone. We can’t just keep it.” The man beside her with a baritone voice said, “Dear girl, you have a big heart but you can’t be inviting every damn animal into the house.” At first she thought it was her father but then she saw it was her Uncle Ramzi in his holiday sweater with the Scottish Black Watch pattern on it.