I could no longer look him in the face. Gasping for breath, I stared down at my feet. There was a hole in the ground, and someone was inside the hole. I knelt. It was Inge, at the bottom, her legs folded like a grasshopper’s. Razor in hand, she was slicing gashes across her thighs. She staunched the immediate flow of blood with a piece of torn sheet. I felt sickened, and did not want to see more, and lifted my head. Sounds were coming from the hole. She was talking. I held my breath and listened:
“If I bandage this carefully, and pull on my jeans, will they know? Let them know. They won’t dare speak. Each time I cut, I can feel. First comes the pain, quick and precise, then the warm wetness spreading. They’ll know, but they won’t dare ask. Will they find it painful to be unable to speak about what they know? Let them see how that feels. Do they feel anything? Do they see anything but what they want to see?”
I looked up at Hearne.
“She’s talking,” I told him. “She’s describing what she does. How do you suggest I help her? Have you any suggestions?”
I grabbed a large stone from the ground and hurled it into the Weasel River. I grabbed another stone and threw it with all my strength, then another. Each rock that flew from my hand vanished into the milky flow of the broad river.
I took hold of my notebook. I would have tossed it into the water but Hearne reached out and stopped me. I turned and saw the exhaustion in his face.
“Have you ever been shown something you weren’t ready for?” I asked. “A violence and a suffering you’ve tried to run away from ever since? A part of you stops and can’t go forward. You’re too busy pretending everything’s normal. It happens to all of us. It happens very early on. We discover the taste of ruthlessness, the cold arbitrariness of the world. But we have to continue. We all know far more than we want to, and so we create elaborate schemes.”
I looked down at the ground. The hole was gone. I raised my head and already Hearne had reached the steep moraine farther upriver, the moraine we’d planned to climb together on the following day. When he arrived at the top he did not look back but started his descent down the other side, the side not visible to me, and he was gone. I lowered myself onto a mossy hummock and held my head between my hands.
The mosquitoes gathered quickly, both at the back of my head and on my face and arms. I swatted at them hopelessly as I unpacked my cooking stove and supplies. I busied myself preparing my evening meal. Mosquitoes settled on my nose; they landed on my forehead and cheeks. I tried to brush them away, but needed one hand to hold my bowl and the other to lift my fork. I ate, barely taking the time to chew, then cleaned my bowl in the nearest stream and at last slipped into my tent. I lay on my back undisturbed, and through the thin fabric observed the luminosity of the outdoor world.
After this entry, for many pages Hearne and Inge go unmentioned. At what pace Heinrich’s days elapse is hard to say—no dates delineate them. His days are neither placed in a clear order nor prevented from flowing into each other. Past and present tense become interchangeable. He seems to be approaching Mount Asgard, his arrival at the base of the Turner Glacier feels imminent, and then nothing happens; both landmarks vanish from his map. He deliberately or unconsciously shrinks his handwriting, perhaps in an effort to conserve space within his journal. I assume that he fears running out of paper.
He writes:
If this is a photograph, I am that tiny detail that serves only to reveal the overwhelming proportions of the whole. I am part of the composition. As soon as a composition makes itself clear, everything stops moving. If a composition is less than perfect, however, the picture quickly fills with expectation; we eagerly anticipate a shift, a return to movement. A perfect composition, on the other hand, makes motion hold still in such a way that we do not need to see the movement to know it exists and to sense its presence; the elements do not yearn for a better or different alignment, as they are already in a state of ideal balance, and this lack of yearning creates a calm, a calm that brims over with energy. Such utterly harmonious compositions I could stare at forever; forever lasting several seconds or several years; a perfect composition allows the experience of time as indivisible.
I continue along the path, go a few feet farther, and immediately I long to recover what I’ve just left behind. Sometimes I go back to look for it. But it is never there. Perfection is loyal only to itself.
He had to contend with river crossings and did not always time these crossings well. The best and safest spot to cross was rarely self-evident. It could be where the river braided out, separating into several strands, or higher up, before this dividing occurred. Very early in the morning, when the day had not yet warmed, or on a cloudy day, the volume of melted glacier pouring into the river was less and the river less forceful.
He thought he heard thunder, but it was the rumble of concealed rocks being carried toward him by the silty white current. He placed a foot blindly. He remembered to undo the chest and waist straps of his backpack so he could escape from its weight, were he to lose his balance. His second foot touched the stony bottom. The rumbling that wasn’t thunder continued. But the loose rocks being carried by the current did not touch his legs or feet as they passed. He forgot that he mustn’t look down, and he glanced at the churning surface. Dizziness overtook him. Quickly, he redirected his gaze to the solid bank.
I rested on the gravel and ate, surrounded by carpets of purple flowers. This is more than happiness—this shout of purple, reverberating in all directions. The river is a verb, Inge, and so are the flowers. Knowing this, would you agree to come here? Rock and ice are verbs. The weather, at times, settles heavy as a noun. Would you feel at home in this grammar, Inge?
She was the only person with whom he wanted to speak—once more the only one who he imagined might understand him. As for the burning rage that had raced through him earlier, as for her presence at the bottom of a hole in the ground, and the accusations he’d hurled at Hearne—of these disturbing matters he said nothing to her in his journal. He stared at the purple expanse of fireweed growing out of the gravel, a shimmer of blossoms that seemed to hover in the evening light, and he no longer felt charred inside but capable once more of supple emotion.
Inge, again the river has widened. The mud has cracked into reptilian patterns, so that I’m advancing across a huge skin. I’ve been walking with this magnification under my feet for hours; mud is a story that begins: “Once, long ago.” In places, the mud unexpectedly gives, sucks, and grips my foot, its silky mouth pulling hungrily at my ankle. I move away from the river, return to the hummocks of resilient moss. These sink and rise with each step I take, so that my knees ache. My camera lies buried in my pack. You understand? A picture would transform all of this into some sort of trophy, a sign of victory. Do you agree, Inge? You do, don’t you? Victory wants to make everything stand at attention and salute. It is hateful. But nothing in this valley salutes. Honor is for humans to figure out—an honorable relinquishing. Rocks break off and crash down the mountainsides, every hour or so, raising huge flags of dust that twist and drift without honor. My watch has stopped, and yet I persist in thinking in hours and minutes. It’s as if I were a blind person sticking stamps on an envelope. To whom am I sending my envelope stuffed full of time? My dear Inge, when I next see you, I will be carrying a thin layer of the North inside me. You, who have always understood my thoughts and feelings better than I could, what will you make of me, of this immensity from which I can no longer separate myself? I hope I am altered. Will you strike me as very small, seated at your desk, with your dictionary beside you?
Late one afternoon, he arrived at the base of the Turner Glacier, and he pitched his tent on a high moraine of stones that were mortared together by ice, then covered in sand. The slightest breeze lifted a delicate gray powder into the air, a powder that clogged the zippers of his tent and found its way up his nostrils, a powder that coated his tongue and settled on his clothes and boots. When he stepped out of his tent and brought his foot down ha
rd, a deep reverberation revealed that the great mound of ice-mortared stones and gravel supporting him was hollow.
Not one single plant had succeeded in taking hold. Out of the opaque, green waters of the lake emerged a steep pyramid of stones heaped upon stones. This construction culminated in a summit, which Heinrich, having scrambled up, found he could balance upon. He looked across the lake, and Mount Asgard came into view—a square tower of brown rock jutting out of the Turner Glacier. He stared at the peak’s improbable shape; only the blade of a knife could explain such squareness. The tower felt intentional and therefore human. Yet its gigantic indifference made it godlike. Ice, several hundred meters thick, advanced upon it from behind and spread out in front of it.
Heinrich reached up to scratch a mosquito bite at the back of his neck, and the movement of his arm caused a shift in his balance. His foot nudged a stone that gave way. The stone rolled fast, then faster, unstoppable, down the steep incline. He watched the stone slip silently into the cloudy waters of the lake. Ice had scraped out, then filled the lake; ice had pushed into shape the structure of stones upon which Heinrich perched and from which he looked nervously down; ice had acted with seeming neglect yet according to precise rules of resistance and force, of angle and weight, rules unknown to Heinrich. He felt troubled by his ignorance of certain rules, and the more visibly the stones shifted around him the more uneasy he became, his ignorance of physics an ache inside his belly.
He noted:
I am camping in a construction site. It is neither beautiful nor welcoming. This is a place of difficult austerity.
Under the banks of sand, the walls of ice were melting; ice-turned-to-water went hastening into the lake; every day the shoreline shifted, the lake acquired a subtly new shape. The tongues of the glaciers were becoming smaller. How much smaller? At what pace were they diminishing? Heinrich couldn’t say for sure. He wanted to leave. He craved moss and flowers. Grit and sand surrounded him. He wrote in his notebook quickly, brushing the gray powder off the page with the side of his hand.
Hearne appeared.
I ran down the sand bank to speak with him, but before I could reach the place where he stood, I came upon an old woman busily trying to catch fish. I approached and saw that she was blind. Immediately I knew who she was. I’d read Hearne’s description of her suffering more than once. I urged her to leave. She showed no sign of having heard me. I turned my back on her and scrambled up the moraine to where my tent stood.
Already I could hear the old woman screaming in agony. Looking quickly behind me, I saw that she lay crumpled in the sand, pinned in place by several spears. They’d plucked out her useless eyes. Blood trickled from her ear also. Farther along the shore stood Hearne. He was no longer alone. A young Inuk, a woman, clung to his ankles. Spears were being thrust into the flesh of her arms and legs, great care being taken not to strike any internal organ. Clearly, Hearne’s Northern Indian companions, her torturers, were playing with her, denying her the relief of death, for however long their amusement lasted. Hearne tried to move his leg, to lift his foot. The young woman, in her writhing, tightened her grip on his ankle. Hearne shouted above her moaning, demanding that her tormentors finish her off more swiftly.20
I turned away from the scene and started to dismantle my tent. Laughter came from the lakeshore. I tried to block the sound from my ears. It was the triumphant laughter of those inflicting suffering. I wanted to escape the churning landscape that surrounded me—a landscape of broken rock and melting ice that was releasing sickening events from the past, events that did not belong in this valley. I packed my gear as fast as I could.
One of my tent poles fell and immediately vanished beneath a layer of gray dust. I snatched up the nearly weightless pole and cleaned it off as best I could on the dusty sleeve of my shirt. The slaughter at Bloody Falls, on the Coppermine River, had occurred on Hearne’s route through the Western Arctic, not here beside the Weasel River. What was the meaning of such geographic illogicality? Was the purpose of these scenes to reinforce my distrust of reason and order? Perhaps these apparitions had no purpose and were the random offerings of an ongoing and violent confusion—my own. I wanted only to walk, to walk quickly away, to hurry back down the valley, to be among hummocks of moss and babbling brooks edged with purple flowers.
The screaming by the lakeshore ended as I stuffed the last of my gear into my pack. Considerably lighter than at the start of my long walk, it swung up easily onto my back. I took one last look at the lake. I surveyed the shoreline. No trace remained of the old, blind woman, murdered while fishing, or of the younger woman being pinned to the ground by spears while she grabbed at Hearne’s ankles. The tortures endured by these two women had left no discernable mark on the landscape. My eye traveled from the lake to the Turner Glacier.
A line of schoolchildren was crossing the glacier’s pale expanse, herded by a man dressed in a dark suit. Though they were far away, I could see them as clearly as if I were looking through a pair of binoculars. The man wore a clerical collar. The children’s hair had been cut short and their faces scrubbed. The boys were dressed in work shirts and shapeless pants held up by suspenders, and the girls wore woolen dresses. Their scuffed shoes were either several sizes too big or else fit so tightly that they splayed open. Some had no laces. So as not to slip on the ice, the children stepped with evident caution and precision, none of them glancing right or left or speaking a word.
I made my way down, off the gravel moraine, and entered an area of large boulders through which I had to navigate slowly. Midway across, I paused, turned, and looked back at the Turner Glacier. The children had stopped walking and were kneeling on the ice.
I continued to pick my way between the massive boulders until I reached the base of the next moraine and began climbing. Once I’d reached the crest I turned again and looked back. The children were now naked from head to toe. While they knelt, bare-kneed on the glacier, the priest, fully clothed, paraded back and forth in front of them, his hand clutching his exposed, erect penis. Despite the violent wind, which must have made it difficult for him to aim with precision, he was depositing from the tip of his penis onto each child’s waiting tongue a drop of ejaculate. “With this holy milk, I anoint you,” he repeated. “With this holy milk . . .”
The wind died suddenly. The sun beat down on the small area of the glacier occupied by the kneeling children and the officiating priest. Their parcel of ice, without warning, broke free from the body of the glacier and advanced down the mountainside, grinding and churning the stone beneath it, carving a trough in its wake. A slab of brilliance, the ice entered the lake at the base of the mountain and floated. The children got up from their knees and started to hop from one frozen foot to the other, while the priest, having put away his penis, stood in silent prayer. The great slab tilted, and the children slid into the frigid, opaque waters of the gray-green lake. One by one, they disappeared beneath the surface, while the priest continued to drift on his island of ice.
A sound formed. I could feel it in my belly and I opened my mouth to hear what might emerge but not even a small cry came out. To stop myself from numbly staring at the lake I turned my back on it, put one foot in front of the other, and walked.
Heinrich made his way across a second expanse of boulders. An entombing silence surrounded him. For the first time in days, he could hear no waterfalls, no brooks or river. He looked in all directions for an inukshuk but there was none. He proceeded in what felt like the right direction. A boulder shifted under his boots, the tip of his metal walking stick struck against stone. Dryness and silence closed around him. When at last he stopped to rest, questions poured out of him. He searched urgently in his pack for a scrap of paper. He addressed his questions to Inge in the form of a letter that he would never send, and that would remain tucked into his notebook.
July 1980
Dearest Inge,
There’s a book I bought in Frobisher Bay. I read through part of it before beginning this lo
ng walk, from which I’m about to return, unless I don’t succeed in returning. The book discusses conditions in boarding schools. Many Inuit children were and are sent to these schools. The book was published only five years ago. I’d recommend it to you, but I’m not sure I’d want you to read it. The cruelty that Ulrikab experienced, it continues taking on new forms. But perhaps you already know this? Perhaps, a long time ago, you found and read a similar book? Perhaps you were aware of far more about the North than you told me? Perhaps you wanted me to come and see for myself? You stayed at home with your dictionaries and sent me to Canada in your place. What is it you want me to figure out, Inge? How all these terrible actions, this cruelty and suffering, relate to you and me, and what we are to do about them, or if we are free to do nothing? I can only think the obvious. Pain, however cleverly stored away, will find its way out. Suffering, like water, cannot be frozen permanently. But when anguish escapes its confines, who is to be held accountable for the violence of its release? Is it all a question of timing, of what we choose to ignore and for how long? You didn’t want to come here, did you? Have you any answers for me? It is good that you stayed home. I am good at walking. You sent me to Canada hoping that adventure would bring me the relief that you find in studying grammar. That is the best story, Inge: your desire for my happiness. That is the story I’m selecting as the truth.
The Search for Heinrich Schlögel Page 10