The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  “I won’t say anything. I’ll leave soon and look for my sister, I promise.”

  “Your sister will be old. Are you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  On his way to the hotel, to say goodbye to Monsieur Pierre, Heinrich crossed paths with Johnny Ugalook, the printmaker who worked best with a radio playing and who, even when not working but walking along a road in the freezing dark as he was doing now, held his small radio pressed to his ear.

  Heinrich’s ears, as he walked along, were filled with a rushing sound that he could not explain. It was early October, little lakes were freezing over and smaller streams acquiring a skin of ice. The noise in his ears made no sense. It was very particular—not unlike that of a brook or small stream, yet different. Hearing it, immediately he pictured the blue ropes of twisting meltwater that he’d seen carving brilliant troughs into the ice of the Turner Glacier.

  Seduced by the color of the glistening flow, months ago or decades ago, he’d knelt on the glacier’s gritty surface, ignoring the intense cold piercing his knees. The sun burning the nape of his neck, he’d stared into the racing water. For an indefinite period of time he’d remained kneeling. When he’d stood, it was not to admire Mount Asgard, or the view of the mountains and valley, but to follow, in a state of ecstasy, first one gorgeous, liquid vein, then another, as these led him across the vast frozen surface.

  He’d felt no fear, wandering across the glacier, surrounded by its beauty and magnitude. Now, however, as he walked along the frozen road uneasiness grew in him, his ears filled by a relentless rushing. He nodded to Johnny Ugalook, and the sound in his ears intensified. He stepped off the road into the light snow between the houses. Even the act of plugging his ears with his mittened thumbs did not reduce the rushing. He fixed his gaze on the vinyl siding of the nearest house, but doing so did not free his inner eye from a vision of frenetic blue veins carving channels into a broad body of ice.

  All the way to the hotel, the sound in his ears persisted. He climbed the steps; the door was locked and he banged on it. He peered through the glass, and a large figure in a white apron came hurrying slowly toward him.

  What did Heinrich and Monsieur Pierre speak of on the day of their last encounter?

  “Ah, mon ami. It’s good to see you.”

  “Monsieur Pierre, in less than a week I am leaving Pang. I am going to Toronto to find my sister.”

  “Viens. I have a recette for you.”

  And Heinrich followed Monsieur Pierre up the four steps at the back of the lobby. Together they walked in silence past the freezer, up three more steps into the lounge, with its picture windows looking out on the sea, and down the hall and into the gleaming kitchen. Monsieur Pierre handed Heinrich a paper with a grease stain descending from its upper-left corner, then busied himself slicing onions. Heinrich thanked Monsieur Pierre for his precious crêpe recipe, tucked the paper in his pocket, and left.28

  “Are you going to take her a present?” Vicky asked, biting into a slab of bannock. “When my mom goes someplace, she brings me back a present, and gets my grandma a clock. For my grandma, she always brings a clock. For me, last time, she chose a T-shirt that said, ‘Whitehorse,’ and had a picture of a guy panning for gold. You could get your sister a Pang hat or one of the scarves they weave at the craft co-op. Or from my aunt you could buy directly. She’s working on a pair of green felt mittens. They have a head of a seal that she’s embroidering on each of them. Her embroidery’s the best, except for Sarah’s. My grandma’s mittens are super gorgeous.”

  “Thanks, Vicky. To take my sister a present is a good idea. I would like to give my sister an ulu.”

  “What would she do with an ulu? I guess she could put it on a shelf and say, ‘My brother brought me this knife from up North. He got lost for a long time but found his way back.’”

  “Couldn’t she chop vegetables and meat with it?”

  “Yup, she could do that.”

  “I like the Pang hats and your aunt’s mittens are beautiful. I’ve seen them at the co-op. But I haven’t seen my sister in a long time. I don’t want to choose something for her to wear.”

  “My cousin, he has three ulus almost ready. I could call and ask if he’s finished making them. It would be a lot cheaper than if you buy one from the co-op.”

  “Yes, please.”

  While in Pangnirtung, Heinrich Schlögel did not record the frequency with which the rushing sound in his ears occurred. At least, I can find no written evidence that he made any attempt to document its patterns. I assume that he hoped it would just go away. Did the intensity of the sound fluctuate with the local weather? Was it more persistent in the evening or morning? Did it subside or grow in strength when he was in the presence of others? I have asked Vicky. But even to her he did not mention that his ears were troubling him.

  “Except, one time. Yup, he did. And I thought it was a joke.”

  In her bright, compact, far-off kitchen, which I look into when we have our conversations, Vicky paused, then added in a tone so low that I barely caught her words, “Oh, shit, I had no idea he was really hearing things. I thought he was teasing me.”

  Heinrich chose the largest of the three uluit. In the corner of the room, a battery-powered wheelchair stood beside the TV, and on the sloping sofa sat Vicky’s cousin. He was a heavy man. His smooth face had the closed expression of someone unavailable, of someone accustomed to the company of his own thoughts—or that is how Heinrich understood him to be, and he thanked the maker of the ulu for the ulu, and the maker of the ulu nodded.

  A bulky worktable, with a jigsaw and an array of smaller tools, occupied the center of the plywood floor. These tools were full of intent and purpose. Much handled and well cared for, the hammers, the files, and the pliers spoke one language, and the raw poverty of the room, with its few pieces of battered furniture, its sink full of dishes, its old stove and peeling countertop, spoke another language. From the middle of a glossy poster pinned to the dull green wall, a benevolent Christ smiled upon the scene.

  A skinny girl wearing sweatpants appeared from a back room. Heinrich had seen her with her child in the Northern Store and also in the visitors’ center. He’d seen her standing in the road with the other young mothers, talking and laughing, and he’d walked past them, shyly. Now, she glanced at the ulu that he was buying from her father.

  “I made the handle,” she remarked as she pulled on her winter jacket.

  He touched the wood and wanted to respond but couldn’t think what to say.

  “It’s very nice,” he managed, and smiled, but she was opening the door to leave.

  Questions were buzzing like flies in his mind. How old is your baby? When Vicky’s with you, does she miss her lost baby, the one she miscarried? Do you like hunting? How did your father lose the use of his legs? Did his snowmobile flip over, or was it from illness? Do you regret having had to quit school? But she was gone, her boots thumping down the outside stairs, and the room became swollen with silences.

  Each silence, Heinrich imagined, held an answer to a question, but perhaps not to any of his questions. He listened as hard as he could, but felt uncertain how to separate one silence from another, so instead he fixed his gaze on the tools laid out on the workbench; he stared at the metal shavings swept into a small heap on the floor, and he observed the pieces of wood waiting to become the handles of uluit, and he avoided looking at the craftsman, whose home he’d entered and who he supposed was suffering because of his ruined legs, though perhaps the craftsman wasn’t suffering, or not in the ways that Heinrich guessed?

  Heinrich heard more flies buzzing. Then the rushing in his ears returned, drowning the buzzing of the flies. He glanced over at Vicky.

  “You ready?” asked Vicky, taking the car keys from the pocket of her jacket. “I gotta get back. I promised Sarah, I’m gonna take her to the Northern Store, then over to her sister’s place.”

  They left. With the ulu for Inge in a paper bag, they drove away. Vicky pressed
on the gas pedal and the tires of the car raised fine clouds of dry snow.

  “Do you hear water flowing?”

  “Nope. Not me, Deadman.”

  Over the next few days, in his journal, in addition to noting the time he got up and the time he went to bed, Heinrich jotted down new words in Inuktitut. Memorizing distracted him from the rushing in his ears. He wished he’d made the effort sooner and that he’d acquired a larger vocabulary. Sewing, he wondered. How do you say “sewing”?

  The soft whirring of the sewing machine stopped as Heinrich stepped into the back room, where Sarah sat working.

  “Sarah.”

  “You like getting in the way?” she asked, turning to eye him with amused irritation.

  “How do you say ‘sewing’ in Inuktitut?”

  “Mirsuk. Saara mirsutuq pualuuniq. Saara mirstuviniq pualuuniq.”

  “Pualuuniq?”

  Rather than answer, she applied her foot to the sewing machine’s pedal, causing the motor to whir. It wasn’t loud enough to overwhelm the rushing inside his head. Heinrich watched the needle fly up and down.

  “Sarah.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Do you hear the sound of ice melting?”

  “Winter is coming, not spring.”

  “So you don’t hear it? I am scared, Sarah.”

  Again, she pressed down with her foot and the needle shot up and down faster and faster, the machine humming urgently.

  “I came to tell you, my flight is at ten tomorrow morning, Sarah.”

  “I know that. You already tell me. You are a good boy, but you talk too much, and sometime you forget and don’t take your boots off when you come in from outside. Why you tell me again that your plane goes tomorrow? You want me to say to you: ‘Don’t leave tomorrow’?”

  “No, Sarah. I know that I have to leave.”

  She laughed.

  “You think water is running when no water is running. But you hear good. The cold is not like before. My brother, he shoots a seal and it went under the water, hard to pull into his boat. The skinny seals do not float good in the warm water. You want me to tell you? Be scared, don’t be scared? Men come here and shoot sled dogs. Some men come and not shoot the dogs. Anyway, dogs are dead now. They get very sick. Not enough food and bad sickness. Do men kill dogs? I don’t see, I don’t hear nothing, but the dogs are gone. I hear men walk on the moon. I don’t see them walk. Do they walk on the moon? Men talk lots. You decide what you better believe. Good idea, sometime, to be scared. Sometime, scared not a good idea.”

  “I will miss you, Sarah.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you miss me. You find out.”

  He stood where he was. He waited.

  “I got work to do. Why you standing there? You want me to give you work?”

  His legs took him outside and made him walk. He followed the icy road down to the harbor, where he picked his way along the shore, a portion of his thoughts calculating the safety of his footing, and the rest of his ideas disappearing into the darkness and the smell of the sea.

  He was standing at the airport. There were passengers coming and going through the glass doors, and people waiting for family to arrive, and other people stepping outside to have a smoke in the cold wind. Sarah Ashevak presented him with a pair of blue felt mittens.

  “I thought I wasn’t gonna finish. You watch, and not let me sew,” said Sarah, frowning.

  “Thank you, they are beautiful, Sarah.”

  “You put them on. I see if they fit you okay.”

  He slipped the mittens on and they fit perfectly. They were the most beautiful mittens he’d ever seen.

  “They are wonderful, Sarah.”

  Sarah grinned with pleasure.

  He looked anxiously about the terminal to say goodbye to Vicky. Without saying goodbye to Vicky, he couldn’t leave. There were passengers sipping coffee from plastic cups, and passengers wandering to and from the wash-rooms. There were people hanging around who weren’t passengers but who perhaps wished to become passengers one day. A call had come from the airport in the early morning to say that due to a fast-approaching storm, Heinrich’s flight would leave early. Vicky had driven at top speed, which she’d greatly enjoyed but Sarah had not enjoyed. Now he couldn’t find Vicky. There were people eagerly watching for the arrival of the next plane, and people opening their luggage to readjust the contents. Vicky threw her arms around him from behind.

  “Did I scare you, Deadman?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you going to forget me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Send me an e-mail, when you find your sister?”

  He nodded, still not daring to speak, too much emotion caught in his throat.

  “Goodbye, Deadman.”

  “Goodbye, Vicky Pitsiulak.”

  In his journal he wrote:

  Today, I walked out onto the runway, clutching the most beautiful mittens I’ve ever owned. The plane rose in the air. Pangnirtung shrank below, and the sea widened.

  In Iqaluit I changed planes for Ottawa without difficulty. Now I am hanging above the clouds, through which I will soon drop, to land in Toronto.

  “Did I tell it well, Vicky Pitsiulak? Is that how Heinrich left Pangnirtung?”

  “You told it pretty good.”

  Owing to a technical difficulty, when I spoke with Vicky Pitsiulak this morning I could not see her, though she could see me. The video function on my computer had never failed before. It was in this context of inequality that our conversation took place.

  “And Toronto?” she urged.

  “I’ve told you all of it, I’ve already described Toronto and everything that happened there to Heinrich. Telling you took me close to an hour and left me exhausted.”

  “There was a bit missing. You kept hesitating. Tell it to me again.”

  “If you want to know more, the Schlögel archive is for sale.”

  “I don’t want your archive, I want you to tell it, the whole story.”

  “An archive is a story.”

  “I’d have to search and piece it together. I’m not in the mood for that.”

  “Are you sure that you’re the Vicky Pitsiulak that Heinrich Schlögel knew in Pangnirtung?”

  “Yup.”

  “She liked to decide things for herself. She didn’t ask other people to do her thinking for her.”

  “She liked stories too.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you again what happened to him in Toronto.”

  “You should see your face.”

  “What about my face?”

  “You look so self-important.”

  But she didn’t go off-line; she lingered, invisible, listening, wanting to know something that I couldn’t tell her. Or maybe this time, I would succeed in telling it better.

  To meet the expectations of someone who matters deeply to me, how unfamiliar that would feel.

  When I returned to Munich nearly three years ago to empty and sell my parents’ apartment, to pay off their gambling debts, I found a box full of snapshots in the hall closet. The snapshots were of my childhood.

  Until my parents passed away I’d remained unaware that their love of card games had mutated into a destructive compulsion. I lived on another continent. Had I lived close by, still their gambling might have consumed them.

  I laid out several of the snapshots on my parents’ dining room table. It was the first piece of furniture they’d purchased as a married couple, an oval table, sleek, modern, with no sharp angles.

  Staring into the photos, I searched for what portion of reality each one contained. How differently might my parents’ last years have played out if I’d returned more often to visit them? Quickly, I dismissed this question as childish. Only children see themselves as central to every event. I put away the photos and poured myself a small glass of schnapps.

  Now, arranging these same snapshots on my desk in Toronto, I feel tempted to
fire off an e-mail to Vicky suggesting that we Skype. My search for Heinrich Schlögel is not over.

  21 I may be exaggerating the shock expressed by the hotel’s cook and manager at the sight of Heinrich’s outdated money. If I’m exaggerating, it’s because I’ve not been sleeping well. My neighbor is in a state of distress and I wake, worrying about her. When my nerves are on edge my sense of proportion becomes distorted, or so I’ve been told. The Schlögel archive contains limited descriptive evidence of Heinrich’s exact experiences on his return to Pangnirtung. Documentation has been difficult to come by. During his stay in Pangnirtung, Heinrich failed to make substantial entries in his notebooks. I don’t blame him. He had a great deal to contend with, and the act of keeping a journal presupposes a degree of trust—perhaps not trust in others, but in the possibility of imposing order on the flow of days and weeks. A person who records regularly and meticulously believes in the desirability of pinning something down by careful notation. A person who records events is often (and I confess that I am generalizing) a person who believes that time can be relied on to abide by certain rules of chronology, and Heinrich, shortly after arriving in Pangnirtung, ceased to be such a person. Through the wall I hear my American neighbor talking on the telephone. Her tense voice pleads for news of her niece. The officials or volunteers on the other end of the line have no precise information to give her. Information is trickling out of Moore, Oklahoma—24 dead, 377 injured, and 1,150 homes destroyed—but none of it mentions her niece in particular. I turn on the radio and the morning news repeats, “Winds of unprecedented strength reached 340 kilometers per hour. Rescue efforts continue . . . cars lifted and tossed . . . six minutes’ warning, then the elementary school collapsed . . . the number of dead uncertain . . . a boy pulled from beneath the rubble . . .” Oklahoma is the name of a musical. My parents saw it performed on their one trip to North America. This was before my birth. It was their first extravagant holiday. They flew to New York, stayed there a week in a fancy hotel. When I was a child, my father would often hum the melodies from Oklahoma but knew none of the lyrics.