The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  “Goodbye, Vicky.”

  She caught his eye but said nothing. He was like all qallunaat and said “goodbye” even when he was going to be seeing you again in a few hours. A qallunaaq, her grandmother said, is a person too busy talking, not seeing what is going on. A person who only sees himself, and has lots of breath to waste.

  If my Schlögel archive were of value to anyone but me, would I have the courage to sell it? My financial worries are becoming acute. I have been spending far too liberally since my search for Heinrich began.23

  Last night, not for the first time, I dreamed of Heinrich.

  He was on his way to Sarah Ashevak’s house, and stopped in at the fish-processing plant. I watched him climb the steps, open the door, and go inside. So, I thought, he’s as worried as I am about how to make ends meet. Straightaway, someone appeared and outfitted him with rubber boots, rubber gloves, and a large apron, which was also made of rubber. He was shown through the plant, a noisy place of metal surfaces, knives, and refrigerators.

  Water gushed from taps and hoses; everything was neon bright and bustling. A smiling woman demonstrated what to do with a cold, stiff portion of fish. She showed Heinrich how to take it in his rubber-gloved hand, and how to wield his knife so as to cut away any excess bone that the filleting machine had missed. Every few minutes more arctic char and turbot, piled on plastic trays and carried by a conveyor belt, rolled toward Heinrich and the woman. She was deft at her job and Heinrich hoped he would soon become proficient and not disappoint her. The manager stepped forward, assigned Heinrich to a workstation, showed him where to hang his apron, where to store his boots and gloves, and told him to return the next morning. After thanking the manager and promising to arrive punctually, Heinrich went on his way, and I woke from my dream, smiling.

  However, I did not smile for long. By the time I’d showered and dressed, the weight of my financial troubles pressed in on me with renewed intensity.

  I do not want to be forced to sell what little I own. I’ve noted down my dream and dropped it into a file marked “Miscellaneous,” cross-referenced “The necessity of earning a living.” Who would buy my Schlögel archive? Who will take my research seriously? After all, here I am including in my archive a dream that I had last night of Heinrich, as if a dream of mine could constitute solid evidence of his experiences.

  But am I not justified in including a dream? Who is to determine what constitutes valid evidence? For better or worse the archive at the moment belongs to me, and I am free to introduce any evidence that strikes me as valuable.

  Sarah wore a flowered dress; her sewing glasses hung from her neck as she came shuffling toward Heinrich in her slippers. Just that afternoon she’d gone to her cousin’s and had her hair curled, and she smiled at the young man on her doorstep, and felt pleased that her hair was looking its best. In the living room she sat her new guest down, her paying guest, with a cup of tea, and showed him her collection of knives. The ulu is a woman’s knife, she explained. She had a dozen uluit of various sizes. Each consisted of a blade in the shape of a half-moon, with a short handle protruding from the center of the side not used for cutting. She removed her glasses, set them safely on her coffee table, and selected a medium-sized ulu. “This is how to hold it. This is how to sharpen it.” She drew the blade back and forth, swiftly, more swiftly, without losing precision, across the iron braced between her clenched knees; she paused and threw Heinrich a mischievous look. “This is how a qallunaaq sharpens an ulu.” The blade jumped in awkward spasms against the iron. She set aside her sharpening tool and uluit, slapped her thighs, and rocked with laughter. Her eyes began to water. Pulling a Kleenex from the pocket of her dress, she dried her eyes.

  “Now I see you better.”

  She settled deeper into her sofa, wriggling her stiff toes inside her slippers.

  “They hire you at the fish plant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then you can pay me for your room.”

  Again, laughter rippled through her flesh.

  “You want more tea? A cookie?”

  The ticking of clocks surrounded Heinrich. Clocks occupied every available surface, their chorus making it impossible for him to know if he wanted more tea and a cookie or not. He counted them. At forty-five he stopped. A clock mimicking a hockey stick, one in the shape of a fire engine, a woman’s fancy lace-up boot clock, a pale blue porcelain cat clock, another posing as an open Bible, as a potted flower, a postal box clock, a dog’s head with eyes that rolled and a tongue that protruded on the hour, a pig clock missing an ear, a Niagara Falls clock, a ticking cowboy from Calgary. In every corner of the room, clocks were dicing and distributing time, some loudly, others softly.

  “You like my clocks?” Sarah asked.

  Heinrich nodded nervously. The thought crossed his mind that if he kept on nodding, soon he’d be nodding in time with the clocks. “How long have you been collecting them?” he asked.

  “For a very long time. My friends, my family, they go somewhere and they bring me back a clock. They know Sarah loves clocks. You know how many I got?”

  Heinrich shook his head.

  “Fifty-seven. You want to see your room?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “How long you’ll stay here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay. You tell me when you know.”

  Sarah heaved herself from the depths of the sofa and Heinrich stood as well. He stood in the overheated, ticking room, the thick pile of the wall-to-wall carpeting soft under his stocking feet. On the coffee table lay a catalog, a glossy photo of a living room on the cover. Outside, a cloud of dust drifted, raised by a passing pickup truck. The dust from the road hovered in the picture window, framed by pleated velour curtains. The heavy curtains reached down to the broadloom carpet. Heinrich, staring out into the suspended dust, wondered whose dream he was caught inside of. Perhaps, like the living room furniture, he’d been ordered from a catalog? Maybe Sarah had selected him to go with her sofa and coffee table?

  He wondered if, whenever he sat in this living room, his long hike beside the Weasel River would play itself over and over inside his chest, like a story on a broken tape recorder. He heard his father repeating, “I’ve read about people like you in the paper. I’ve heard about people like you on TV.” What did he, Heinrich, know for certain? At the edge of town the broad unpaved road ceased to exist, and footpaths spidered out across the bald land.

  Day after day, the blade of Heinrich’s knife sliced through the resistance of frozen fish flesh. The exhaustingly bright din of the processing plant and the numbing monotony of standing in one place became familiar. How many days elapsed? Many more than several, and Heinrich promised himself that soon he would buy a plane ticket, that somehow he’d obtain up-to-date papers, solid proof of a credible identity to present at the airport, and then he’d be off. But the more intensely he imagined his reunion with Inge the less attached their reunion became to any particular moment in time. Despite her letter tucked in the innermost pocket of his backpack, he started to wonder if he had a sister or if he’d invented her. In the remaining pages of his journal, every day he wrote the hour at which he got up and the hour at which he went to bed. These tiny entries framed the muteness invading him.

  In the hotel lounge, where he often went during his off-work hours, to say a quick bonjour to Monsieur Pierre and to watch the ocean through the picture window, he became known as a shy but attentive listener. From the hotel’s varied guests—the prospectors and their helicopter pilots, the literacy consultants, the specialists in psychosocial dynamics, the retired biologists, the civil servants on holiday, and the men dredging the harbor—he concealed his true circumstances. He was afraid of becoming an object of interest, a phenomenon—the German Who Slipped through a Hole in Time.

  The carvers who came looking for tourists with money to spend on sculptures of dancing bears and reclining seals had already heard about Heinrich from Sarah, how he’d spent
years out on the land before returning, and they did not try to sell him their carvings, not even the miniature kayaks and inuksuit that they silently slipped from their pockets onto the hotel coffee table.

  Some of the women who cleaned the hotel rooms and served at mealtimes smiled at Heinrich with a shyness and reticence that he felt was similar to his own, and when he found the courage to ask them about their work or about the weather they answered him warmly.

  “I’ve been to Montreal,” one of the women told him. It was early in the morning and they’d crossed paths where the road widened above the harbor. A light rain was falling. She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail and had a beauty mark on her left cheek. “I went for an operation. When I got better and could go outside, I was scared. I didn’t walk around much because of the squirrels and the sound the trees made. The leaves moving so much. Everything scared me. I was young.”

  He would have liked to speak with her longer, but the rain was falling more heavily with every passing minute. The child riding in the hood of the woman’s amautik continued to sleep, despite the drops of water landing with increasing frequency on its forehead and cheeks. The woman said that she would be late for work if she stayed, talking in the road, and with an amused smile she walked away.

  The end of August arrived and it was dark by eight, the sun setting earlier every day, and the weather becoming rapidly cooler. “High of seven degrees today. You’re lucky,” teased Vicky.

  Once or twice, in the privacy of Sarah’s house, Heinrich pulled out his empty camera and looked through the lens. He had no film. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t take any more pictures. The day of his panic and despair behind the hotel, over a month ago, the day he’d intentionally ruined an entire roll of images, made it hard for him to trust himself with a camera. He might act as destructively again. He hesitated to spend money on a new roll of film. He shoved his camera deep into his pack, angered by the apparatus’s mixture of power and impotence. Was it logical of him to hold his camera somehow responsible for the strange behavior of time and the alienating predicament in which he found himself? Always a moment came when he would reach down and yank his camera back to the surface. One afternoon, he went into the Northern Store and asked for a roll of film. To his relief and surprise they pulled an old roll out of a drawer and sold it to him.

  Sarah’s living room became his first subject. While shooting, he experienced a sensation of reciprocity. The scene he was composing was also composing him. This fleeting impression of connection with his surroundings relaxed him. Then the click of the shutter put an abrupt end to his delight, and once more his solitude overwhelmed him—he was a young man alone, clutching a device for capturing and removing moments from one flow of time to deposit them in another.24

  Only in Vicky’s company did he come close to feeling at ease for more than a matter of minutes.

  At dinner, Heinrich offered to set the table but Sarah refused his help.

  “That’s Vicky’s job. If she’s not here, I do it.”

  They ate bannock, grilled char, and boiled broccoli, while on the large television screen that faced the kitchen table, a man with a handsome jaw drove through the dim labyrinth of an underground parking lot. Without turning his head, the man explained to the woman seated next to him that he couldn’t leave his wife, not yet. Somewhere an orchestra was playing, and the woman burst into tears.

  “You like my bannock?”

  “It is delicious.”

  Sarah smiled with pleasure.

  “Good. I am happy you like my bannock. I make the best bannock in Pangnirtung. Everybody tells me my bannock is best. I don’t know. If people tell me, sometime I believe them. Vicky, she should come home for dinner. I don’t like it when she comes home late. We will save a plate of food for her. She’ll warm it in the oven when she comes home. All the young people come home late, even now, when summer is finished. I don’t like it. It’s no good.”

  On the television screen, the woman’s glistening eyes examined her lover’s profile. Her eyes searched his jaw and nose for some clue to his true feelings. His heavy, competent hands guided the car around each grimy curve. As the luxurious vehicle approached the exit, she told him, “I’m pregnant,” and he put his foot on the brake.

  Sarah plugged in the kettle for tea and brought a plate of cookies to the table.

  “You help Vicky bake?”

  “Only the last batch,” said Heinrich. “I took them out of the oven.”

  “Vicky asked you?”

  “Yes. She didn’t want to be late for work, and she had to take her cousin home first.”

  “I know. She called me. She said she hopes you won’t burn the cookies.”

  “I am sorry. I am not good at baking, Sarah. When I smelled them I ran back down the hall.”

  Sarah grinned. “The burned ones I throw out. I tell Vicky it’s her problem. She asks you to do her work, that’s her problem. She is a good girl but she is late. I am tired. I am going to bed. No tea for Sarah. You want me to leave the TV on?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t lock the door when you go to bed. You lock the door, Vicky can’t come in. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Heinrich poured water into the teapot and took the pitcher of milk from the refrigerator. He put their dinner plates in the kitchen sink.

  “You leave the dishes. That’s Vicky’s job. Only your room is your job. And the door, you don’t forget. Don’t lock the door.”

  “I won’t lock it, I promise. Good night, Sarah.”

  He lay on the sofa, listening for the back door, and soon he fell asleep. In his sleep, a sudden curiosity made him turn his attention to the kitchen. Two sober gray eyes that belonged to a slender little girl with a wide mouth were watching him. It was Inge, and she was no more than four or five years old. While eyeing him carefully, she pressed her small self into the pillar of warmth that was Vicky’s leg. Standing at the kitchen counter, Vicky was rolling out sugar dough.

  “She’s my cousin. I’m looking after her, we’re making cookies.”

  No, thought Heinrich, she’s not your cousin, I recognize that dress, it’s the one that Inge was forced to wear on Sundays, until she hid it so that she wouldn’t have to go to church anymore, and nobody said the word “Gypsy” but she knew she could get away with making her dress disappear because the circus was in town.

  The story of his sister’s dress rushed through him at such speed that he could hardly get the words out. Then he realized he wasn’t speaking.

  Vicky glanced at the clock above the stove, a clock in the shape of a sunflower. She was cutting the dough in a hurry, cutting it into increasingly sloppy discs.

  “Shit, I am so in trouble. If I’m late for work again and Sarah finds out, she’ll be real mad, she’ll go crazy on me.”

  Vicky yanked the oven door open and slid in the two trays.

  “Hey, Deadman, can you do me a favor, a super big favor? Can you take these out when they’re done? Only leave them in for five more minutes and you gotta remember to turn the oven off.”

  “Yes, of course,” he promised. He peeked through the window of the oven door. One of the cookies was so large that it occupied an entire tray.

  “Eat as many cookies as you like. I gotta go, I gotta drop my cousin at her house and I was supposed to be at work fifteen minutes ago. Fuck.”

  Vicky rushed out of the kitchen to get her car keys and purse. Heinrich could hear her in the mudroom by the back door, urging Inge to hurry and pull on her shoes. She was speaking Inuktitut, explaining that they couldn’t wait for the cookies to cool, that the qallunaaq was going to watch and make sure the last ones didn’t burn. How is it that I can understand her? Heinrich wondered.

  He stood absolutely still, the way he used to hold himself at home, in the upstairs hall in Tettnang, listening to two recorded voices coming from inside Inge’s bedroom, a man’s voice and a woman’s, carefully, deliberately uttering incomprehensible Inuktitu
t words.

  “Thanks, Deadman,” Vicky called to him from the mudroom. “You’ve saved my life.” And the back door slammed shut.

  There was a bit of raw dough left in the mixing bowl. Heinrich scraped it out with his fingers, rolled it between his palms, then put it in his mouth. The little planet of buttery sweetness softened, coating his tongue.

  He picked up his camera from the kitchen counter. It contained a photograph he regretted, a photograph of which he felt ashamed. He didn’t remember taking the photograph but knew that it was of Inge, and that she hadn’t wanted him to take it.

  I’ll give my camera to Vicky, he decided. That way, I won’t be able to take any more pictures. It will be a great present. But perhaps she already has a camera.

  He ran from the kitchen, along the hall to his bedroom, where he took the envelope that contained his money from its place in his dresser drawer. He needed something to count, a means of measuring. It reassured him to feel the dollars between his fingers. Their increasing number meant fewer days separating him from Inge. Soon he’d have enough to buy his plane ticket. From the kitchen came the smell of burning cookies.

  He was running down the hall to the kitchen to save the cookies from being ruined when a cramp in his side woke him. He sat up and saw Vicky standing in the kitchen, a can of Coca-Cola in one hand and a glass in the other. How long ago had she let herself in the back door?

  “Hello,” he mumbled, as she came into the living room.

  His hair was a mess, and the left side of his face pink from being slept on. He felt her eyes slide over him as she crossed the room. He’d go to his bedroom, so as not to be in her way. That was his immediate plan. But he made no move to leave the sofa.

  “Did you come in long ago?” he asked.

  “Nope. Not long.”

  Vicky, having set her drink on the coffee table, flopped down on the sofa beside him. She started talking and did not want to stop. A stream of words poured out of her.