The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  “A while ago, when you weren’t around, before you came back from out on the land, three guys I know were in a tent sniffing propane and a fourth guy, he came looking for them. He was smoking a cigarette and he blew them all up. They were hurt real bad. Today they came back from Iqaluit, from the hospital, and I went with my friends to see them. Two of them were in my class at school, until they dropped out. And one of them, he was burned real bad. He’s got new skin on his face but it’s all shiny and sort of puckered and weird. They don’t look so good, but they’re going to be okay. One of my friends had a bottle of vodka, and she said we should celebrate. The whole bottle got drunk up real fast, and things got crazy, but I didn’t want to celebrate, and everyone was asking if anyone knew where we could get another bottle. But I wasn’t in the mood, Deadman, I just wasn’t into it.” She hesitated. “You better not tell my grandma or my mom. Well, you won’t tell my mom, ’cause she’s in Iqaluit, but you better not tell my grandma. Heinrich Schlögel. That’s what I should call you. That’s your name, in the file that says you disappeared. Heinrich Schlögel, what happened to you?”

  “I don’t know, Vicky Pitsiulak. I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “How do you know my last name?”

  “I saw it written in here.”

  Heinrich got up from the sofa. From the kitchen he brought the book of recipes that he’d seen beside the sink when he was clearing the table after supper. Cupcakes for Every Occasion. He opened the book and showed Vicky her name: Vicky Pitsiulak, scrawled in pink marker.

  “Did you burn my cookies, Deadman?” she asked.

  “No. I ate them.”

  “All of them?”

  “I ruined one tray, the bottom tray. I am sorry. I can make you cupcakes instead, Vicky. I am sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t stay here, burning cookies, Deadman. You should go looking for your sister. I’m not gonna stay. There’s a lot you don’t know about what happens here. You should be thinking what you’re going to do next. Next year, I’ll be in Iqaluit, at college. My mom wants me to train to be a ranger like her, but I’m going to study office administration. I don’t like going out on the land. If you’re a ranger, they teach you to shoot. At first my mom wasn’t too good at it, but she’s got better. Now she’s a good hunter. My cousin Jennie, she loves to hunt and my uncle taught her, and she goes with him and they bring us back country food. That makes my grandma happy. I like eating country food, but I don’t hunt. Not me. That’s not for me. The land scares me. My mom, she’d be working if her back didn’t hurt all the time. When her back gets better she’ll work as a ranger again, but the doctor says she’s gotta lose some weight. My mom, she put on lots of weight when she left my dad. Last year a woman, a friend of my mom’s, she asked her boyfriend to make some homebrew. It was Christmas and she wanted to celebrate. So he made some and they got drunk together, then he wanted to have sex with her and she didn’t want to, so he took out his knife and he stabbed her in the thigh and he made her do it for three hours and the next day when my mom saw her friend, she couldn’t recognize her, her friend was beat so bad. Her friend went to the police. People said she shouldn’t have done that. It was her fault for asking him to make her homebrew and getting drunk with him. If she didn’t want to have sex with him, why did she do that? My mom said he shouldn’t have beat her, even if he was drunk. My mom said her friend was right to go to the police. My grandma wouldn’t say anything. Usually my grandma always has something to say. My grandma went to her room and closed the door. So you see, Deadman, this is what sort of place you’re in. Just so you know, and you don’t get in trouble. But it’s easier for me to get in trouble than you. Sometimes I want to get in big trouble. When I’m at college, in Iqaluit, I’ll take classes in Inuktitut, ’cause my Inuktitut isn’t too good. That’s what my grandma says, she says my Inuktitut is like I’m five years old. After, I’ll go to Ottawa, but only for a year and then I don’t know, maybe to Yellowknife. The thing is, at college, in Ottawa, the Inuktitut is different from how we speak in Pang and Iqaluit, it’s hard to say, so I might come back to Iqaluit or even to Pang, one day, but not for a boring job like what I do at the parks office. I’m beat. I’m going to bed, Deadman.”

  She got up from the sofa and started down the hallway but turned and came back.

  “Have you got a grandma?” she asked.

  While she waited for his answer, she flopped back down on the sofa and let herself sink again, into its soft depths.

  “Yes, I have a grandma,” he told her.

  But it wasn’t true. Thirty years had disappeared and he was pretty sure that he didn’t have one anymore. Should he describe his grandmother as he remembered her? He wanted to tell Vicky something important, but couldn’t think what.

  “When I was little and couldn’t fall asleep, my mother would trace the paths inside my ear with the tip of her finger,” he told her.

  “You’re weird, Deadman. Do you know that? You are so weird.”

  One afternoon, drawing on courage that he did not know he possessed, Heinrich offered Vicky his camera.

  Her response floats, jotted on a loose page:

  You need your camera more than I do. And anyway, film costs too much, and I’d have to wait so long to see the pictures. Until I get my own camera, I can use my boyfriend’s. You ever seen a digital camera? You want me to show you some of the pictures I took with his? Your camera’s pretty cool, but you should keep it. Thanks for offering it to me, Heinrich Schlögel.

  I found the loose page tucked in a book on caribou migration, a slender volume into which he wrote his name. I’ve filed it, her response, under the heading “Vicky,” cross-referenced “Photography,” cross-referenced “Unobtainable.”

  Yesterday afternoon, I pulled from my archive a snapshot of an Inuit girl wearing a caramel-colored T-shirt with green stripes. She is four or five years old. Her serious eyes assess the photographer cautiously while she presses her small self into the blurred legs of a teenage girl standing at a kitchen counter. The teenager is cutting pale dough into rounds. The teenager is missing her head. She exists only from the shoulders down. There are no names written on the back and no date given. If I am forced to sell my Schlögel archive, this photo I intend to keep.

  Vicky Pitsiulak volunteered to teach Heinrich to navigate the Internet. She told him he should use the computer in the library, at the back of the visitors’ center. It was free. It was for everyone. He should keep looking for his sister. Giving up was too easy. That’s what Sarah always said. Didn’t he want to find out everything that had happened in the world while he was out on the land? He might discover where his mother had gone. He could stumble on a video clip of her playing golf or shopping for groceries, that sort of thing happened online; you came upon people you were convinced you’d lost.

  “I have to go to work,” he told her. “They’ve given me extra hours.”

  “Tomorrow? Tomorrow I could show you.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure I want to go looking yet. I’m not sure I’m ready.”

  “You look ready to me, Deadman.”

  The polished surface of Sarah’s coffee table, the little glass bowl filled with hard candies, the tidiness of her overheated, overstuffed living room inflicted upon Heinrich the same unease he’d felt as a child in the irreproachable living rooms of his aunts’ houses in Tettnang. There he’d perched on the edges of chairs and sofas that refused to bestow comfort. He’d held his breath, surrounded by objects that demanded submission to unspoken rules of correct conduct. Sarah’s rules were different, her living room less forbidding, the ticking of her fifty-seven clocks almost soothing, but he did not know her rules and could not guess what they might be, and there were moments when he wanted to plead with her to tell him how to behave.

  “Lots of children in Iqaluit,” said Sarah, “they don’t speak Inuktitut too good. The young people make this TV teach them.”

  “Minguarsit,�
� said the woman on the screen. “Minguarsit,” the children repeated after her. She set down the paintbrush and held up a pair of scissors for everyone to see. “Anglerouyait.”

  “Anglerouyait,” recited Heinrich.

  “Good thing only I hear you,” said Sarah, grinning. “You gonna be in school a long time.”

  “Anglerouyait,” he tried again.

  “Before, long time ago, I was a teacher,” said Sarah. “Everyone always asking, ‘Sarah, you can do this, we need you to do this.’ I work lots of places, in the hotel, in the hospital. Now the hospital they moved to Iqaluit. They say, ‘Now, you work in the school, Sarah. You speak good Inuktitut. We need you.’ But I am tired. The young people they make this TV their school.”

  She reached down to the coffee table and pushed her bowl of candies toward her young qallunaat guest, the one who’d stayed out on the land too long and now couldn’t find his way home. Her guest who liked Vicky, who maybe liked Vicky too much, and now he didn’t want to find his way home. Her guest she might still have in her living room when the days became short, the sun gone before noon.

  “Take one.”

  “No, thank you, Sarah.”

  She pushed the bowl closer to him.

  “Take one. I am your teacher.” Her smile became mischievous. “Anglerouyait.”

  “Anglerouyait.”

  “Bit better. You practice more, later you come show me your good work. Now, you take a candy.”

  Her pupil did as he was told and reached into the bowl. She leaned back into the softness of her sofa and admired her curtains. It was late afternoon and still there was light outside. Every day the darkness arrived a little faster. Inside, she could always have light, the blue light from the TV.

  She remembered choosing her curtains from the Hudson’s Bay catalog. After ordering them, she’d waited six months for the curtains to arrive. They’d traveled north in the hold of a sealift.

  During her period of waiting, she had opened the catalog repeatedly, always to the page with the picture of her curtains, anticipating the ship’s arrival, foreseeing how the sealift would glide into the harbor, how it would disgorge its contents into the fishing boats and other smaller vessels that rode out to meet it, while on shore more and more people gathered to watch as the crates were brought in and piled on the rocks and mud. Possibly her curtains would not resemble those in the catalog?

  The risk of disappointment added to her excitement. Ordering from a catalog was like falling in love. You saw what you wanted but couldn’t touch it, not yet. You waited. As soon as it became yours, you ran your hands up and down the length of it and sniffed and pinched it, and straightaway you knew if you’d loved wisely or foolishly.

  From the catalog, she’d selected her coffee table, her dining room chairs, and her sofa. Most of what she’d ordered had turned out just as the glossy photographs had promised. What she’d bought had not disappointed her. People disappointed her. They said one thing and did something else. “You expect everyone to be as strong as you are,” her daughter had told her once. “You want everyone to be obstinate like you, but people aren’t all the same. You don’t want your clocks to be all the same as each other, you want each one different, but you want everyone to be like you, and when they are, then you wish they were different.”

  Through her living room window, Sarah watched a woman she knew race by on a four-wheeler, raising a cloud of dust. Would my life be more easy, she wondered, if I knew less about everyone? That woman, Elisapee Aglukkaq, she was born feet first, she sings beautifully in church, but her bannock is not good like mine, it comes out dense and heavy.

  Sarah knew that Elisapee’s miscarriages outnumbered her living children, that a year ago her eldest son, who was an excellent hunter, had died when his snowmobile sank through thin ice; and now Elisapee raced by Sarah’s window, on a four-wheeler, and all of Elisapee’s life raced with her.

  The four-wheeler disappeared down the road. Elisapee, the woman driving it, did not own beautiful curtains. If you married a man who drank, if you married a man who was not a good hunter, if you could not find work for yourself, if your husband lost confidence, if your mother became forgetful and could not remember to turn off the stove, if your sister had to go south to have her breast removed and needed someone to keep an eye on her children, these were all good reasons for wanting soft curtains that hung in deep folds and reached all the way to the floor; these were also reasons why you could not afford to order such curtains.

  Sarah turned to the young qallunaaq seated beside her on her sofa.

  “Good coffee. You want more?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. It is very good, but I don’t want more.”

  “Okay.”

  She clicked up the volume on the television.

  Heinrich Schlögel sat there, watching television with Sarah. He did not try calling Tettnang again. Why did he not make another attempt to communicate with his father? There are two obvious answers. He couldn’t face the anguish of hearing once more, “You aren’t my son,” or he did not want to again startle his father, whose heart was possibly weak. Neither of these answers stops me from questioning the wisdom of his decision not to call. I feel he ought to have taken the risk. He could so easily have dialed that familiar number one more time.

  But who am I to judge? I’ve recently learned that Heinrich’s loneliness in Pangnirtung was even greater than I thought, and that one afternoon he contemplated going back out on the land to look for the exact place where “it” had happened. Vicky Pitsiulak found him in tears, on a path just outside of town. He described to her a large rock, split in two, and a lost snowmobiling glove. He couldn’t decide, he said, in which precise location time had shifted. Through the split rock he’d followed a giant hare. But while staring at the snowmobiling glove, he’d felt his camera become a relic. As he dried his tears and asked Vicky for her advice, already the idea, fully articulated, of searching for the split rock or the lost snowmobiling glove (both of which he remembered with perfect clarity) began to frighten him; and when the idea of such a search stopped frightening him, it struck him as futile and absurd, and he dismissed the project.

  It is from Vicky Pitsiulak that I’ve learned all this. I’d stopped hoping that she and I would ever speak. No one in Pangnirtung, despite or because of my determined efforts, during my brief visit in July 2011, was willing to put me in touch with her. And then about ten days ago Vicky stumbled on the picture of Heinrich that I, near the start of my search, posted on the Internet. She sent me an e-mail and suggested that we Skype. I hesitated. An irrational fear took hold of me. I’d imagined for so long speaking with her. I’d savored in advance her knowledge of Heinrich. I’d imagined her in detail. I’d read what Heinrich wrote about her, in his few journal entries that included more than a record of the hour at which he went to bed and the hour at which he got up. Yesterday, we spoke. Already her directness and acuity I greatly like. I am, she says, the only person she’s come across who is attempting to discover what’s become of Heinrich Schlögel.

  Skype allows us to see each other while talking, at minimal cost and from a considerable distance. Yesterday evening, I watched her moving about her orderly, compact kitchen in Calgary, while she observed me in my study in Toronto. During our conversation, I learned a great deal about Heinrich Schlögel. Then she had a question for me. “What exactly happened to him in Toronto?” I jokingly offered to sell her my archive, but she assured me that I need it more than she does. Then she asked, “Aren’t you going to tell me if Heinrich ever found his sister, or don’t you know?”

  “Later, when I’m not so tired,” I promised. “Later I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Yup,” she said, “I believe you. You’re gonna tell me everything.”

  And with a click of her mouse, she caused herself to vanish from my computer screen.

  While Heinrich was in Pangnirtung, often he tried to recall the sound
of Inge’s voice but his ear remained empty of her exact intonations; these refused him. And yet, when he examined a towering slab of ice that had washed up on the shore or when he stood on a lip of frozen earth and stared straight down into the sea, it was Inge who caught her breath; it was her curiosity and awe that pulsed and gathered inside him, along with his own.

  It was late September; by six in the evening the sun had set. A few more weeks and it would be dark by four in the afternoon. Temperatures were dropping rapidly; five degrees was an exceptionally warm day. Very soon, two degrees would be the best that Heinrich could hope for.

  Increasingly, he hungered to grasp his own visibility. How, he wondered, did he appear to Sarah and to Vicky? In the hallway that led to the bedrooms, a framed black-and-white photograph hung on the wall. It showed a young woman caught off guard, radiant. She was glancing sideways, her smiling gaze drawn to something just outside the picture. The photographer’s presence did not seem to disturb her. She wore an amautik, and from over her shoulder, a pinch-faced infant (of indeterminate sex) grimaced at whoever was holding the camera.

  “Who is this woman, Sarah?”

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother is beautiful.”

  “And me?”

  “Maybe someone gave you a lemon to suck? Look at you! Or you don’t like the photographer?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But your mother? You remember her?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who took this picture?”

  “I dunno. My children find it. In a museum, in Ottawa, someone from the museum asked them and they show it to me. I say, the woman is my mom, and they give it to me.”25

  “What was Pangnirtung like thirty years ago, Sarah? I maybe walked by you on the road, perhaps on my way to the parks office? I was preparing for my long hike. Maybe you saw me get in the fishing boat to go up the fjord? Are you sure you didn’t see me?”