The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  “I dunno.”

  “But you were here. What was Pangnirtung like? I passed through so fast. How was it different from now?”

  “Ask someone else. I don’t know.”

  Without another word, Sarah walked down the hallway, went into her bedroom, and closed the door. A qallunaaq, she thought, as she rested on her bed, is someone who demands answers, but who doesn’t want the answers that you give.

  “Vicky?”

  “Yup.”

  On the screen of my computer, Vicky, head bent in concentration, was applying tiny strokes of lavender nail polish to the toes of her left foot, her toes reaching away from each other.

  “What’s the likelihood I’ll succeed in tracking down Heinrich Schlögel?”

  “Not much.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t want you to find him.”

  I waited for her to explain.

  “He’s never met you. He doesn’t know anything about you.”

  “And you? Doesn’t he want to find you?”

  “He knows where I am. Maybe he doesn’t have anything he wants to tell me right now.”

  She dipped her brush in the little bottle of silky color.

  “I gotta go,” she said, and went off-line. Darkness filled the screen of my computer.

  The ticking of fifty-seven clocks. On her living room sofa, Sarah sat, listening to their chorus. Take away fifty from fifty-seven, what do you get? A seven-year-old girl, a girl who got sick and was taken south to the hospital, then put in a school. A man has fifty apple trees and he plants seven more, how many trees grow in his orchard? An apple is a fruit. It does not grow close to the ground. An apple is much bigger than a blueberry. Once a woman picked an apple because of a snake. She obeyed the snake and bit the apple and gave it to her man to eat and they both were punished for being naked.

  At seven years old Sarah had never held a book in her hands.26 She knew how to read, but not books. Sky and water, faces and the actions of people, the behavior of dogs, of seals, of fish, and of ravens—these she knew how to read. She knew how to read stories that do not hold still, stories that go away and sometimes come back, pretending to be a new story. In the hallway of the school, the school where she was sent to learn, a round, gold disc caught her eye and she walked over to it. She stood in front of the grandfather clock and the clock’s steady ticking swallowed the voice behind her, a sharp voice telling her something she did not understand; she fixed her eyes on the gold disc and the ticking grew louder.

  A man has twelve cows. If he sells half his cows, how many does he have left?

  In the classroom they sat in rows. She asked, “What is a cow?” She asked, “Do people hunt cows?” She received no answers. She asked, “Why does the man want to sell his cows?” She asked these questions in Inuktitut because she did not know what to expect of English words, what they might turn into if she mixed them together. Sometimes English words were thrown at her; other times they drifted by, and some of them she caught and even savored. But she thought in Inuktitut. She did not invite her ideas and her questions; they arrived of their own accord, and they arrived in Inuktitut. She turned and spoke her thoughts aloud to the girl seated beside her.

  The teacher scrubbed her mouth clean of Inuktitut. He told her, “If you behave badly, you will be punished—there’s a nice simple equation even you can understand.”

  Her head filled with more questions. If the teacher could have seen inside her head, he would have scrubbed away all her thinking, scraped out the dirty Inuktitut words that were constantly forming new equations and more questions inside the safety of her skull. How many apples did the woman in the garden eat? Was it because the snake gave her the apple that she was punished for eating it, or were all apples bad? If apples were bad, why did a man with fifty apple trees plant seven more? When is a garden called an orchard? If the woman in the story was not allowed to eat an apple, why am I given an apple at lunch and what will happen to me if I eat it? Will I lose my clothes? If the story about the garden isn’t a warning, why tell it to me in such a serious voice, in the sort of voice used to tell someone not to walk on the ice in that place where it is too thin?

  Though she was hungry, and the apple was the first piece of fruit she had been given since her arrival at the school, Sarah refused to eat it. She received a lesson. She received it with open hands. She held out her palms and a wooden ruler bit her skin.

  From that day on, when given a piece of apple, she pretended to eat, hiding bites of apple in her cheeks, to be spat out later, to be swallowed only as a last resort. And she hid her language under her tongue. When a word wanted to wriggle out, like a worm, she swallowed it quickly and clamped her lips shut. Words slithered back up her throat and into her mouth. She kept her teeth pressed tight together, so the wriggling words wouldn’t show. When it was over she stood in the front hallway and stared at the golden disc. When she received a lesson for breaking a rule, she hid her throbbing hands in the slow and steady ticking of the tall clock.

  Outside the school, she was not much safer than inside the school. Outside, trees grew, trees full of leaves that made an awful sound, the sound of something approaching, and of something trying to free itself.

  Sarah sat, now, in the depths of her own sofa, which she’d chosen from the catalog, and she read the time on the clock nearest to her, a bright-red mounted policeman clock from Edmonton, and she wondered: What lessons is Vicky learning right this minute? What rules tell Vicky who she is? Does she know what rules she’s following?

  In the tiny library at the back of the visitors’ center, Vicky grinned and gestured for Heinrich to sit down.

  “Here, Deadman,” she said, “you can go on the computer now. Nobody’s using it, and the library doesn’t shut for another two hours. Besides, I have the keys. Just go to Google and type in what you want. You remember how to find it?”

  Heinrich promised her that he’d be fine.

  He typed “1989” and clicked the mouse. He’d intended the last nine to be a zero, for 1980, the year he’d left home, but he’d never been good at typing. The words “1989 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” appeared on the light-filled screen. He clicked on the line of words and landed on a set of four photographs. As he dragged the small black arrow over each image, labels sprang into existence—one per picture. The rubble became: “Iran-Iraq War.” The sea-birds coated in a black substance: “Exxon Valdez Spill.” The two smiling men: “End of the Cold War.” The group of women and men balancing on a wall became: “Fall of the Berlin Wall.” Each label vanished as quickly as it had popped into existence. Heinrich wriggled the mouse frantically on the picture of figures crowding the top of a wall, and the same mocking caption resurfaced: “Fall of the Berlin Wall.” Vicky’d warned him, “People post anything, all sorts of made-up shit.”

  What sort of encyclopedia was this? He double-clicked, causing the photo to grow. Some of the people were drinking straight from bottles, beer by the look of it. His eyes wandered down the screen and read: “In 1989, soldiers stood by as citizens gathered in increasing numbers . . . the gate formerly known as Checkpoint Charlie . . .”

  Most of the women and men on the wall were standing, but a few had made themselves comfortable, legs dangling. They wore raincoats or leather jackets, and these were zipped or buttoned against the damp of the over-cast evening. Heinrich clicked, found more text, and kept reading. There was no end of photos to examine.27 Eventually, he pushed his chair back and went to find Vicky in the visitors’ center.

  “You don’t look so good, Deadman. Did you find your mom or your sister?”

  “No. The Berlin Wall.”

  “They tore that down ages ago. Before I was born. I read about it, though, and I’ve seen pictures. I think it all turned out okay. That’s what I read. You’re not so happy they got rid of it? You okay?”

  He sat down on the floor, the way he had the day she’d given him Inge’s letter, in the parks office.

  “Can yo
u help me get some fake ID, Vicky? Something they’ll accept at the airport?”

  “I can’t get you a passport, but I know someone who makes good fake student IDs. You want to go to the University of Alberta or British Columbia? My friend, he’ll need a photo of you. We can take one with my boyfriend’s camera. Then you gotta choose which university. Don’t look so worried, Deadman. My friend does good work. It’ll look real. It’ll get you to Toronto, no problem. I’ll tell my friend why you want it, and he won’t ask you to pay too much.”

  Heinrich became a hunter who had no wife. He was lying in bed, listening for the back door, for feet in the mudroom, when he fell asleep. Unlike all the other men, the men who had wives, he prepared his own meals and sewed his own clothes from the animal skins that he himself scraped clean and softened. One evening, upon returning from hunting, Heinrich found a fire lighted and the kettle boiling. The next day, a meal was cooking. Not only that, but a skin that he’d barely begun preparing had been scraped entirely clean and stretched out to dry. Heinrich felt very pleased and decided to return even earlier on the following day. Just as he arrived, he glimpsed a person wearing white fur boots slipping into the entrance of his house. It was a woman. He married her. In the winter, he took her to live with his parents and his extended family. This is not a good idea, Heinrich thought. I should not be taking my wife to live with my relatives. But he ignored his intuition.

  He and his young wife lived peacefully until one afternoon she stepped close to one of his uncles, and the uncle asked, “What is that fox smell?” Everyone present advised this uncle not to be rude. But some days later, a cousin burst out laughing and exclaimed, just as Heinrich’s wife walked past, “The air reeks of fox.” Covering her face with her hands, Heinrich’s young wife ran out the door, a thick, white tail protruding from under her parka. Heinrich pursued her. Crying out her name, he followed her far into the hills. When he could no longer make out her shape in the distance, her tracks showed him the way. At last, he came to a mound of stones with a round hole for an entrance. Stomping his foot above the entrance, to let her know that he’d caught up with her, he shouted, “I am cold! Let me come inside.”

  “Come in then,” his wife answered.

  “But the hole is too small.”

  “Breathe on it, and it will get bigger.”

  He breathed on the hole, slipped through it, and she lifted him onto her lap. She rocked him back and forth until he fell asleep. This was the song she sang to him: “Do not wake until the summer comes, do not wake until the flies buzz, and you hear the flowing sound of water and the fox barking in the hills.”

  For a very long time, Heinrich slept.

  When he woke up, he went outside. It was summer, the flies were buzzing, and he looked around for someplace his spirit might inhabit. He entered a blade of grass and lived peacefully until a wind came. The continuous swaying exhausted him, so he left the blade of grass and slipped inside a raven. Ravens never go hungry. Inside the raven he felt content, until his feet grew chilly. It was time for a change. He left the raven and entered a caribou.

  “I am hungry. What is there to eat?” he asked, and the other caribou showed Heinrich how to loosen moss from the ground, using his front hoofs. He ate so much moss that he became fat. Though he moved with the herd, from one place to the next, he was always falling behind.

  “Look up at the stars, not down at the ground,” the other caribou instructed him. “That way you won’t trip so much.”

  From then on, he kept his eyes on the stars instead of the ground and was able to move more quickly. But a wolf spotted the herd and attacked, causing the herd to run into the sea. Heinrich saw his chance for another change and slid out of the caribou into a walrus. He was hungry and his stomach rumbled loudly. He dove to the bottom of the sea, but the clams lying in the sand refused to open their shells. He returned to the surface and complained: “The clams won’t open for me.”

  “Swim to the bottom and call out ‘yok, yok, yok,’” the other walruses advised him.

  He did as he was told, and the clams opened their shells and were eaten by Heinrich and the other walruses. After feasting, he and the walruses lay on the rocks in the sun, resting. But when the others slid back into the sea he did not go with them. He wanted a change and pondered what to become next. A seal swam past. He entered the seal. For many days and weeks his spirit lived well inside the seal. He enjoyed his new existence but curiosity drew him close to the shore and he spotted a camp. One of the women in this camp had no children. Heinrich waited and watched for her husband. When her husband crouched down, right by the water, Heinrich poked up his head for air and the man grabbed his harpoon. Heinrich laughed when the harpoon struck. He was dragged along the ground and into the camp. When the woman’s relatives began cutting him into pieces, he left the seal and entered the husband’s mittens, which the husband removed and threw to his wife. The mittens landed in her lap. Heinrich slipped inside the woman and after some days and weeks she gave birth to him. His human life began again, and he woke with a start.

  Heinrich climbed out of bed. In the hallway he looked about. Light was leaking from under Vicky’s bedroom door. He went into the kitchen, plugged in the kettle, took a mug and a tea bag from the cupboard, and sat down to wait for the water to boil. As steam rose from the kettle’s spout he yanked the plug from the wall. I could become steam, he thought. I could forget entirely who I am if I stay here much longer. I must leave.

  Crackling static leaked from the high-frequency radio on the sideboard. Sarah heaved herself up from the sofa’s soft depths, crossed the room, snatched up the hand-set, and spoke loudly. The radio continued its voluble, indiscriminate capturing of sound waves, and every few seconds released a string of clear words to which Sarah responded.

  Heinrich took a candy from the bowl on the coffee table, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

  “My sister,” said Sarah, her radio conversation over. “She’s on her boat, fishing. She says my brother, he can’t go out this morning. Before, he can tell from the wind and the clouds how it’s gonna be. Now, he can’t tell so easy. The weather, it behaves different.”

  “And you, Sarah?”

  She raised her eyebrows, inquiringly.

  “Do you get out on the land, sometimes?”

  “Sure, I go. My brother, he takes me in the summer. Last year he put a big window in my camp. The sea is outside my window. Beautiful, more beautiful than here, better. I go there and I am very happy. But you know what?”

  She grinned at him.

  “What, Sarah? I don’t feel like guessing.”

  “No more window at my camp. A bear broke my window.” She burst out laughing. “No more window.”

  “Can you still go out? Is it fixed?”

  “Oh, yeah. My brother puts big boards over the hole.”

  Heinrich got up from the sofa.

  “You don’t want a candy? You don’t want to sit down? You take a candy, if you want.”

  “No, thank you. I’ve had one already.”

  “You going somewhere?”

  “Yes, Sarah. I am going out. I won’t be late.”

  “Deadman, I’ve got something for you,” said Vicky, setting down a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. She opened the fridge and put away a carton of milk, then she reached in the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  Heinrich stared at the plastic card that she dropped on the counter for him to admire. A snapshot of himself, the words “University of Alberta,” the institution’s coat of arms and motto, his student number, every detail convincing. Date of birth: March 3, 1990.

  “My friend, he did a crazy good job.”

  Heinrich picked up the student ID.

  “Thank you, Vicky.”

  He set the ID down again and pulled his wallet from his pocket.

  “How much do I owe your friend?”

  “He doesn’t want you to pay. You don’t owe him anything. It’s a good thing Sarah can’t hear you. We have this
word, inuuqatigiitsiarniq. I’d tell you how to say it in English, but I don’t think it exists in English, not the same.”

  “Maybe it exists in German?”

  “It’s looking after each other, no matter what. If someone really needs something, doesn’t matter who they are, you gotta help. If you don’t, nobody’s gonna survive. It’s not like you get to choose.”

  Heinrich slipped his new identity card into his wallet. He was searching in his mind for the right German words. “Sich um jemanden kuemmern” meant looking after someone. But he knew that what she meant was different. What she meant smelled like the steam that pours out when you cut open a seal; it came from a particular reasoning, it was a word that belonged to a place where the floor of a house mustn’t touch the ground or the heat leaking out will melt the permafrost and the house will start to sink.

  If “sich um jemanden kuemmern” had a smell, it was of potatoes cooking. He could see his mother’s hand, she was wiping the windowsill clean of dust, using an old tea towel that had become a rag. Embroidered on the towel were the words “Fuenf sind geladen, zehn sind gekommen, giess Wasser zur Suppe, heiss alle willkommen.” “Five were invited, ten came, add water to the soup, and welcome all.” Words embroidered a long time ago, used now for dusting windowsills and legs of chairs.

  “Please, thank your friend for me.”

  “What if you don’t find your sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to leave soon, too.”

  “You’ll be in Iqaluit, with your mom?”

  “Not with my mom. I’ll get a room at the college, and my mom might come back here to be with my grandma. It depends if my mom can get a job, here, in Pang. If she moves back here and goes hunting, then Sarah can eat more country food and have skins to sew, and she’ll be happier.”

  “And you?”

  “I sew pretty good, but not as good as Sarah.”

  “I meant, and you in Iqaluit. You won’t be lonely?”

  “My boyfriend, he’s coming with me. It won’t be until next fall. I say it’s soon ’cause I want it to be soon. Anyway, this time, I’m not getting pregnant. I don’t want to do that again. When I had the miscarriage, last year, I had to quit some of my classes. I couldn’t concentrate. I had to work real hard to catch up. In the spring, I’m gonna graduate. Now I’m older, I gotta be more serious. Sarah doesn’t know my boyfriend’s gonna come and live with me.”