The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  July 12, 1980

  This afternoon I saw my father standing beside the river. He had something in his hands and he was fiddling with it: a tiny motor. He set it on the ground, adjusted the belts, took a can of oil from the breast pocket of his jacket and squeezed a drop or two, then pulled the cord and the miniature pistons lurched into motion. What the motor was meant to drive or accomplish, I couldn’t tell. There it sat, attached to a plank of wood. Papa was dressed in a three-piece suit, and, having cleaned his fingers on his handkerchief, he adjusted his necktie and collar. My mother came along the path, one hand holding down the skirt of her dress as the breeze kept lifting the hem. My father took her by the hand but then he let go of her hand; he extracted an envelope and the stub of a pencil from his pants pocket. On the envelope, he began jotting down explanations, sketching diagrams, until he’d covered both sides. All the while, he was speaking to Mama, but I could not hear what he said, nor could I make out her intermittent responses. She listened attentively or appeared to do so, sensing perhaps that if she denied Karl her attention, his abandonment would be complete. When he’d covered both sides of the envelope with his jottings, she took it from him and saw that it contained a letter she’d written long ago. Papa sat down on the ground and covered his face with his hands. She crouched beside him and spoke at length, but again I couldn’t hear what she said. He started loosening his necktie, unbuttoning his shirt, but she stopped him. Meanwhile, beside their feet, the little motor nailed to its piece of wood continued to splutter and cough. I walked toward them, but, naturally, once I reached the place where they’d been standing, they were gone. Even as I write the word “hallucination,” I feel convinced it does not accurately name what occurred.

  In his next entry, which is undated, Heinrich makes no mention of his parents.

  The sound of water is constant. The glaciers only appear to be motionless. Their silence is untrue. They speak in ropes of blue water. When the water reaches the edge, it falls straight down the mountainside, crashes whitely, plunges farther, lower, babbles, soft-edged at last, between mossy, flowering banks; it spreads out over vast beds of gravel. As for the Weasel River, I walk beside its green and milky width but cannot hear it flowing, my ears full of the roaring mountainside.

  Suddenly, Heinrich wondered if, upon his return to Frobisher Bay, he ought not to ask Jeremy to help him find a job. That way he could stay a bit longer on Baffin Island and delay going back to Germany. The idea startled him. He lay in his sleeping bag, listening. Outside his tent, water was gushing, and gravel inaudibly shifting. To ask a favor of Jeremy Burton would be humiliating, though doubtless Jeremy would leap at the chance to redeem himself, calling up friends, setting things in motion. Already, Heinrich was using Jeremy’s camping stove and cooking pots. These would be simple to return. To repay Jeremy for finding him work would not be so easy. On the other hand, a job would mean that Heinrich could stay in one place and attempt to understand what was expected of him. Here, nothing was expected of him. He lay on his back, listening.

  July 14? 1980

  Immensity is a form of silence. The movement of shadows is the closest I’ve had to a conversation in days. There are, of course, the conversations in my head.

  Happily, after only one day of fog and intermittent rain the fine weather resumed. The sky cleared and the mountains returned. He hoped to spot a hare or a fox. The complete absence of trees in no way bothered him. He felt disloyal, however, for not missing the presence of trees. Surely it was ungrateful of him to forget them so easily? He tried to remember all that trees had given him—shelter from the wet, the pleasurable sound of leaves rustling, the relief of shade, the beauty of dappled light. His efforts met with resistance. If he conjured a general idea of a tree it felt unconvincing. If he started to recall a particular tree, one he knew well, its presence became too real and intruded.18 In this valley, no tree belonged. Did he belong? He felt he did until he lifted his backpack and its new lightness reminded him that his supply of food was diminishing. How many days had he been walking? He tried to line up the precise areas of landscape through which he’d passed; he attempted to arrange in chronological order the exact locations where he’d pitched his tent each night, and to count the number of nights, to enumerate the meals he’d eaten, but failed.

  In his journal he noted:

  Survival requires that we remember, but adaptability demands that we forget. There are moments when I hear Jeremy Burton’s voice without particularly wanting to.

  Of Inge he makes no mention. Page after page of his journal excludes her from his thoughts. Or perhaps she was such a constant presence in his mind that he felt no need to comment?

  Late one afternoon, his grandfather appeared from behind a rock. The old man’s shoes were impeccably polished, his pants carefully ironed. He pointed to his shoes and said something to Heinrich, but Heinrich could not hear him properly. Again the old man tried to make himself understood and the effort caused a small vein to pulsate in the side of his neck. Heinrich stared at him, uncomprehending. His grandfather removed his shoes and tossed them into the Weasel River.

  Later, Heinrich wrote:

  His shoes were riding the water, one in the lead, the other spinning, caught in a whorl of the current. I turned, gathering my courage to speak to him, but he was gone. I ran along the bank. The spinning shoe sank. I watched the other shoe shrink smaller and smaller, then disappear where the river bent.

  In his next entry, the word “Inge” appears, and her name leaps off the page. He is pressing down hard, his pen digging into the paper. He writes:

  Her exacting eyes, the clarity of her gaze—I can feel these always, they accompany me without her being here. Eider ducks have landed in a flurry on the seamless water.

  He stared and stared at the ducks drifting on the river.

  Boulders thundered down the rock face in a balletic shroud of dust, and at the sound he rushed from his tent. The dust continued dancing in the air. The following day, farther along the path, he found a thick, stiff snowmobiling glove left over from winter. It lay on the ground behind a rock. This second event did not relate to the first. When he found himself trying to connect the falling rocks and the appearance of the glove, he wanted suddenly, fiercely, to speak with someone.

  To walk was not enough. He wanted to see animals. For animals, he had chosen the wrong valley and it was too late to turn back. He’d assumed that the North would be full of animals—caribou, wolves, fox, and bears. He’d been misled by Jeremy Burton, who’d confidently assured him: “There will be animals. Hey, man, it’s the wilderness.”

  July 1980

  Jeremy Burton was wrong about the wildlife, but he was right in accusing me of not having enough ego, not having enough independence of will. I should have followed Hearne’s route, gone to the Western Arctic. But Hearne’s path would still not have been my own path. How am I to find a route of my own?

  He had a path and it was under his feet, and for the most part clearly marked by inuksuit.

  The snowmobiling glove that he’d spotted a while back—why hadn’t he photographed it? He’d wanted to. He should have taken the time and done so. Each step forward now took him farther away from the glove that he’d not photographed. Quickly, almost running, he retraced his steps, followed the path back to the exact spot. The glove lay where he remembered it. He fished out his camera and removed the lens cap.

  The curled, rigid fingers he brought in and out of focus, playing with the composition. Without touching the glove, he moved around it, hoping that each new shot would better express the glove’s abandonment and endurance. The setting obstinately refused to provide any clues as to why the glove had been removed or what had prompted it to be forgotten. Nonetheless, he tried to make these questions present in his shots.

  He was about to return the camera to its place of safety in his pack when he experienced a strange sensation, as if the device in his hands no longer belonged to the present but was a vestige of some earlier er
a. He examined his camera carefully, touching but not opening the little door at the back that concealed the film. He ran the tips of his fingers over the narrow sliding panel that kept the batteries in place. In none of its features had the camera changed. He continued his examination, which served only to intensify his impression that in some invisible yet irrevocable way the familiar object had become a relic. Confused, he wanted all the more urgently to speak with someone.

  He wrote:

  Soon, I’ll reach Mount Asgard, but how soon? Unless I’ve been misreading the map, Glacier Lake can’t be more than two days away. Of course it all depends on the river crossings.

  The land had much to communicate. There were times when he allowed its vastness to reach a scouring hand inside him. But its details, the stories it articulated, he couldn’t read. He’d become illiterate.

  He observed with curiosity the position and shape of a stamen or leaf, the presence or absence of lichen, the texture and distribution of rock and sand. Behind each plant’s structure and presence, in the positioning of every stone, lay a story, a long sequence of delicately hinged events leading to the present and pointing to a possible future, yet none of these botanical and mineral narratives could he comprehend. He lacked knowledge. He walked beside the river, unable to read its movements. Never had he imagined he would so intensely miss the act of reading.

  When his body declared it was night, he crawled into his sleeping bag. Once, when he opened his eyes a violent, rainless wind was tearing at his tent. The cloth walls pressed down on him, the poles bent. He lay in the center of his own howling fear, listening to every note. A rope snapped free. The rip-resistant, synthetic lung that contained him collapsed. He remained motionless, and a silence grew inside him.

  The storm passed. In his journal he noted:

  To my relief the tent has not suffered any permanent damage. My supplies are intact. I am able to continue.

  Before packing it away, he photographed his collapsed tent, as it comprised his only evidence of the storm’s occurrence. In a second shot, he documented the nonexistence of the storm’s passage: the absence of fallen trees or broken branches. He ate, reorganized his supplies, swung his pack onto his back, and walked.

  The weather shifted; the air reeked of rain.

  Jeremy Burton is with his girlfriend, in Frobisher Bay, and when he’s not in bed, fucking her, he’s producing radio shows. Inge is delivering mail, and when she’s not doing that, she’s shut in her room studying Mandarin or Ancient Greek or some other language she’s fallen in love with, and that she finds less distressing than Inuktitut, than Abraham Ulrikab’s language. A lost snowmobiling glove, the broken runner of a wooden sled, a scrap of rope—the Inuit travel this valley only in winter; right now they are out on the sea, fishing, or collecting the eggs of shore birds. Everyone except me is busy, purposefully occupied.

  Rain and more doubt arrived together. He sat down on a rock. To remove his pack for even a few minutes brought a sense of relief, but to keep warm required motion. He waved his arms about. If he allowed his neck and shoulders too much freedom, the constraint of the pack and its weight when he put it back on felt all the more oppressive. Keeping up a good steady rhythm was essential.

  He berated himself for not pushing hard enough, for ambling forward, admiring the flowers, delighting in the shocking red of a stretch of moss. A quicker pace, a clearer focus on what lay ahead, on what waited around the next bend, and his sense of purpose would return. He was on an adventure, after all.

  The rain though steady was not heavy. Rain meant no mosquitoes. He should have reached Mount Asgard days ago. Thor Peak was long behind him. He’d passed a tiny lake that was not on his map. There were errors in his map. The curves in the river did not precisely correspond, nor did the moraines. His supplies were dwindling and every day his pack felt lighter. Possibly, by tomorrow, Mount Asgard would come into view. He pressed on.

  Hearne appeared.

  This afternoon, I came over a rise and saw a figure on the path ahead of me. I knew him immediately, though he did not recognize me.

  This statement is followed by several lines that have been scribbled over. The next legible sentences express an irrational disappointment:

  All that time, when I was reading his diary, Hearne did not feel me devouring his descriptions and his courage, my admiration and sympathy going out to him. For him, I did not exist.

  Two blank pages follow; then he writes:

  I introduced myself. Hearne asked about my life.

  Heinrich and Hearne walked along a narrow path beside the Weasel River, Hearne in front and Heinrich following.

  I told him that my sister had given me his book to read. Then quite without warning he wanted to know if I’d ever seen a soldier run through with a bayonet. I hadn’t. Had I been forced to drink my urine? Had I received a lashing? No, none of these. He gave me a searching look, as if I were, perhaps, a woman disguised as a man. He was, I think, assessing how reliable a traveling companion I might make.

  The rain stopped. We climbed another rise and came to a lovely spot, suitable for making camp. To have pressed on would have meant crossing a large moraine likely to prove tricky underfoot, and we agreed to save that challenge for the following day. While I pitched my tent, Hearne brought out his pipe. We smoked, and the smoking relaxed me. I hadn’t felt so lighthearted in days. He promised that if we sighted a hare or a fox, he’d teach me to shoot and would show me how to skin an animal. I excused myself and walked off, a short distance, as I needed to urinate. I hoped that no hare or fox would show itself. Behind a large rock, I relieved myself. I imagined killing and eating a hare and, to my surprise, the hunger in my gut became more insistent.

  I returned to find Hearne examining the zippers on my tent. Next he ran his fingers along the fabric and touched the netting in the doorway with fascination.

  “A most singular notion,” he announced, “to construct a tent from silk and veils.” He tapped the taut surfaces with his fingertips. “If indeed this fabric is silk, it sorely lacks in sensuality and yet it does possess, I think, surprising strength.”

  I assured him that his assessment was correct, that the tent had withstood several violent storms and was of excellent quality. We smoked a second pipe. I brought out the last of my whiskey. He spoke with admiring affection of his guide, Matonabbee, to whom he owed the success of his third and final expedition.

  The next few pages of this notebook have gone missing, with the exception of one half page, which I’ve recovered.19 I can only hope that I’m inserting this half page correctly. It is filled to its very edges with a single word repeated over and over: “Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge inge Inge Inge . . .”

  After his obsessive inscribing of his sister’s name (if my chronology is correct), Heinrich’s next entry reads as follows:

  The wilderness is perhaps the worst place to risk complete honesty, though ultimately it demands it. I turned and confronted Hearne. If what I said caused a falling-out between us, I’d again be alone—I knew this. I addressed him more loudly than I wanted to. Some regulating valve inside me had ceased to function. “During your third and successful journey,” I shouted at him, “the native women accompanying your expedition were treated little better than pack-horses.” I did not want to be shouting and I tried to calm my breathing, but my leg began to tremble. I waited for Hearne’s response. He indicated his agreement with a sorrowful smile and a slight, sideways movement of his hand. The shaking in my leg increased. I felt a painful pressure behind my eyes, as if someone’s fist were thrust inside my skull. I yelled at Hearne, gesticulating: “When a deer was shot, it was the women who were sent running to haul back the kill. They prepared the animal, they gutted and skinned it, they rubbed the animal’s brains into the hide to keep the hide from stiffening, and they cooked the flesh and stuffed, then boiled the bladder. After all this work, they were give
n nothing. They had to wait until every man had eaten his fill before they were allowed a scrap to chew on, and if no scraps remained they went hungry. For any defiance they were beaten.” I was panting, as if I’d just run up a hill. Sweat was pouring from my skin. I could feel another wave of rage advancing through me, a rage too large to contain, a rage I did not feel belonged to me. Was this Inge’s rage? Did she need or want me to express it for her? I tried to calm my breathing. The muscles in my neck throbbed.

  Hearne leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs, making himself comfortable before offering his thoughts. At last he spoke:

  “As it was their primitive practice to use their women in this fashion,” he stated, with composure, “they saw no error in their actions, and upon those occasions when I gave expression to my concern, they laughed outright at my dismay. I thought it wise not to further interfere, lest their amusement turn to anger. And yet, to conceal my pity proved most difficult at times. A young wife was forced to change husbands against her will. I bore mute witness to this barbarity. I could do nothing to alter her circumstances. Nor could I lessen the suffering of a woman obliged to slog through snow and water up to her knees, only days after giving birth, and this with a heavy load on her back and her infant strapped to her.”

  With a few deft gestures Hearne refilled his pipe. I stared at him, my neck throbbing and the ache in my brain threatening to split my head open. I felt as I imagine a tree must feel when another tree is struck by lightning and fire travels underground to lick the roots of the tree not yet in flames. Fire was traveling up my legs, filling my chest. Words and spit flew from my mouth: “Who do you think you are? What about women in Germany and England? Isn’t brutality a European specialty as well? Have you seen the women in your fields and alleyways and stables and bedrooms? You disgust me. I despise your arrogant certainty that you’ve been somehow chosen to understand the world, to brutalize the world with your self-interested understanding, to ram your laws in place, here, there, and everywhere you like. You’re so busy making sense of the universe, aren’t you? Have you looked behind your haystacks or lifted the bedroom sheets? What ground do you have to stand on? I’ve walked for miles with you. I’ve tried to see through your eyes. You’ve noticed everything: the details of plant life and the behavior of animals. What have you done to me? Where are the answers you promised?”