The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  22 Why was Heinrich plucked from the year 1980 and deposited in the year 2010? Was it so that he might bear witness? To our collective madness? Through my wall I hear music. My neighbor’s niece has been found and taken to a hospital. They predict that she will recover well from her injuries. Yesterday, my neighbor knocked on my door to bring me the good news. Impulsively, I threw my arms around her and felt my neighbor’s unfamiliar body pressed against mine, the warmth of her happiness. Then I closed my door and washed my dishes.

  23 After I left home, my parents acquired gambling debts of which I was unaware, debts that more than devoured their estate. Am I becoming as compulsive as my parents, and will I end by owing as much as they did? Soon we will all have to pay off our debts.

  24 My Schlögel archive includes ten photographs of Sarah Ashevak’s living room. Naturally, I have my favorites—three in particular. Their eloquence moves me. Do they express Heinrich’s uneasiness? I think so, yes, something about the composition. But I am no judge of photography. I do wish that he’d taken a shot of Sarah. Perhaps his shyness prevented him. Possibly Sarah expressed a desire not to be photographed. If such a shot does exist, I’d very much like to acquire it for the archive. But that would mean yet another temptation to spend money that I don’t have. It may be best if such a shot does not exist.

  25 Though the Library and Archives Canada possesses thousands of photographs of Inuit, dating from the late 1800s to the mid-twentieth century, very few of the Inuit in these images were identified at the time the photographs were taken. Nunavummiut (residents of Nunavut, Canada’s largest, northernmost territory) have never had a chance to assist in identifying these people. Before digitization there was no inexpensive and easy means of transporting the photographs to Nunavut. This is the official reason no consistent effort was made sooner. The naming of these anonymous people has now become urgent. Today’s Inuit elders are probably the last people able to identify the individuals, whose names may otherwise remain lost forever. The Naming Project began in 2001.

  26 “My grandma, she was born in 1940, out on the land. It was April or May, sometime before the ice breakup. I could tell you the name of the place but it’s not on your map. She didn’t know, when they sent her south, she wasn’t going to see her parents for three years. She was lucky, though. It could have been a lot longer. But her parents left the land and settled in Pang when she was ten. They had to, if they wanted to get her back. There was a day school in Pang. Lots of people didn’t move, not until the dogs died, about ten years later, lots of them from disease, and since people couldn’t hunt they were hungry, so they got moved to Pang. Also the RCMP shot dogs. They had lots of reasons. If you don’t behave, I’ll shoot your dog. Your dog wasn’t chained up. We told you to keep it on a chain. I was born April 6, maybe the same day as my grandma, but I’m not much like her. I wouldn’t mind being more like her.”—Skype conversation with Vicky, June 18, 2013

  27 When the CBC first showed footage of people crowded on top of the wall, I called my parents. “Is it a trap?” I asked. “Are they going to suddenly start shooting? What is really going on?” Divided Germany—it feels like an invention now, a blurred fantasy, as brief a fabrication as I, some mornings, feel that I am. Yesterday, quite by chance, I came upon a website about two Canadian artists traveling across North America tracking down large and small pieces of the Berlin Wall, bits that have landed this side of the Atlantic: http://www.freedomrocks.ca.

  28 I don’t know which silence is worse, the one that spreads from a severed telephone connection or the silence that slides into place the moment a computer screen goes blank. Again, last night, I spoke with Vicky on Skype, and again I annoyed her with my hunger for information about Heinrich Schlögel. Abruptly she went off-line. I climbed into bed but couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and poked about my Schlögel archive, not knowing what I hoped to find. I pulled out a folded slip of paper. The grease stain that spread down from its upper corner pleased me.

  PART FIVE

  Toronto

  1

  Inge

  Young men and women were perched on countertops, on chairs and sofas and the backs of sofas. There was talk of a bargain plane ticket, the cleverest way to avoid crowds at the Parthenon, how to board the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls without paying for the boat ride, and how to skip the queue at the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. Heinrich stood and listened, trying to decide whether to take off his backpack.

  At high volume, a nervous girl and a bald man with a glittering earring were comparing regrettable eating experiences. Then eating was forgotten, overtaken by cramped Nepalese bus rides along the edges of cliffs, and by a mugging at knifepoint in Capetown; a young man, muscular and blond, recommended cures for mouth sores; the kettle boiled, cups appeared, socks were removed, books left in a chair, emotions typed into iPhones, necks massaged, dance moves practiced, songs hummed, advice texted, abbreviations sent skipping across the world. Heinrich slid his backpack off his shoulders and lowered it to the floor.

  In the days that followed, companionable conversation nearly always greeted Heinrich when he stepped into the common room of the Canadian Adventure Youth Hostel, and he looked about unsuccessfully for a quiet corner. The furniture, utilitarian, a bit battered, was neither dirty nor uncomfortable. Sunlight fell through two tall windows well into the late afternoon. Not one voice spoke in the rhythms of Inuktitut.

  The absence of Inuktitut felt abrupt and sweeping to Heinrich. A linguistic wind had lifted away Sarah and Vicky, as well as others who’d become more familiar and important to him than he’d realized. This sudden auditory erasure unnerved him. He tried to recall as many faces and voices from Pang as possible. All around him, English was being caressed, truncated, perforated, or yanked on. But Vicky’s English was not present.

  His own English three Germans immediately recognized, and he succumbed to their eager interrogation: How long had he been traveling? Where had he visited? Where did he plan to go next? With each German word that crossed his lips, he wondered if he sounded like someone who’d been traveling abroad for a few months or for thirty years. When he told them that he’d briefly visited the Arctic and was now headed home, they nodded, and did not look surprised. Perhaps, he thought, I will be able to conceal indefinitely the truth of what has happened to me.

  A slender young man with a ring through his eyebrow announced that he’d lost a bishop from a portable chess set. A female voice, in response, asked who had left the pack of condoms beside the sink. An arm covered in tattoos handed Heinrich a cup of tea. The arm belonged to a tiny woman, one of the dancers. She advised him that when the computer provided in the corner of the common room was being monopolized by “you’ll-soon-find-out-who,” the best option was to try the nearest public library, which was at College and Spadina.

  The sound of rushing water returned. Heinrich glanced at his watch. Five o’clock.

  “Water noise in my ears, 5:00 PM. October 12, 2010,” he jotted in his notebook. Tracking the evolution of the disturbance in his ears felt less daunting than searching for Inge. Yet he wanted more than anything to find her.

  The doors of the Lillian H. Smith Library were guarded by two winged and imposing griffins cast in bronze. One had the head of a lion, the other the head of an eagle. Both sat back on their haunches, claws exposed, necks arched, fierce eyes staring down. Heinrich passed between them, entered the library, and continued the online search for Inge that he’d begun in Pangnirtung.

  He discovered nothing new. As before, Inge’s old address surfaced. And when he clicked on the link that read “League of Interpreters and Translators of Ontario,” the warning “lapsed membership” appeared.

  He typed “Helene Schlögel.” Several women smiled at him from the screen but none of them was his Helene Schlögel. He resented these women for stealing his mother’s name. He busied himself retrieving decades of world events that he’d missed.

  Next to him, a florid man, humming loudly, began rocking back
and forth in his chair. Two computers over, a woman wearing a headset shouted, “Fucking right. Dead on. You know dick all,” addressing her disdain to the face on the screen in front of her. To the left of the reference desk stood the “Push-Up King.” “Anytime you want, I’m ready to show you,” he told the librarian.

  Even on wet, cold days, Heinrich moved from one library to the next in his restlessness. He walked, tracing a zigzag route through the core of the city. Inge, he reasoned, was likely using the public libraries also, but which ones? If earning her living gobbled much of her time, for her the criteria of convenience would dominate. But perhaps she was out of work and wandering the city, as he was?

  The friendliness of the staff, the carpet pattern, a certain study table near a window, the height of the ceiling, the number of computers made available to the public—these details determined which libraries Heinrich visited most often. Whenever possible he sat in a central spot, where Inge, were she to stop by to return her books and borrow new ones, couldn’t help but notice him.

  54 Raglan Avenue, Inge’s old address, proved to be a three-story brick apartment building, located on a side street lined with parked cars and aged, ailing maple trees, many of them missing limbs. As Heinrich stood looking at the building, wind moved through the branches above his head, bringing down more leaves. Strewn at his feet, the leaves disconcerted him. He had not anticipated their beauty.

  In Pangnirtung when he’d imagined trees, he’d pictured them obstructing his view of the sea and the land. In Pangnirtung, he’d most often conjured images of trees because he was thinking of his father, remembering how, together, they’d strolled through an orchard in bloom or they’d entered a well-tended woods that smelled coniferous. When he opened the door of the fish-processing plant, and stepped inside, and sliced with his knife, cutting away any bits of fish bone missed by the filleting machine, often his father appeared beside him, unfolded his knife with the walnut handle, and joined him in his work. Of his father’s frequent presence Heinrich spoke to no one, not even to Vicky. To no one did he admit the degree of his longing.

  Now, the leaves lying on the sidewalk at his feet made him want to weep and call out his father’s name. Instead he walked quickly away from number 54.

  The second time Heinrich approached 54 Raglan Avenue, he resolved to press the buzzer marked “Superintendent,” but he did not do so.

  A third time he approached, and, now, he pressed the buzzer. A white-haired woman opened the door, a glass of wine in one hand, cell phone in the other. She wore a shimmering, oyster-gray jogging suit and her flamboyant earrings matched the red laces of her running shoes. Heinrich tried to imagine Helene with white hair and dressed in a jogging suit, a miniature phone in her hand, and he wanted to kick someone, or to swing his fist. The person he wanted to kick was his father, for refusing to give him any information about his mother.

  “Please,” he asked the woman in front of him (the superintendent?), “my sister used to live here, and I am trying to locate her. I wonder if you might help me. Her name is Inge Schlögel. I can show you proof of who I am.”

  “Inge Schlögel?”

  “Yes. I am her brother, Heinrich.”

  He extracted his wallet from his back pocket.

  “I don’t need to see your ID. Don’t bother taking it out. I don’t know where your sister’s moved to, because she didn’t leave no forwarding address. I told her, someone’ll want to get in touch with you. I asked her more than once, but she didn’t listen. Not that your sister wasn’t a good tenant. Quiet’s something I like in a tenant. But her, she was more than quiet. Aloof, that’s the word I’m looking for. Your sister was a bit aloof, not the easiest. You don’t mind me saying so?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “Listen, honey, I hope you find her. You got a number where I can reach you, just in case?”

  Heinrich tore a page from his notebook, copied out his name and the hostel’s phone number. The woman in the oyster-colored jogging suit took it from him.

  “If I hear from your sister, I’ll let you know.”

  Heinrich discovered the city’s network of alleys and it pleased him. The bottoms of narrow gardens, laundry flapping against a chilly sky, unruly shrubbery, slits in fences, a garage door thrown open, another closed to conceal a motorcycle, a lawn mower, or something more private.

  The rhythmic whine of a saw caught his attention, the noise escaping from a garage a few meters away. Heinrich approached. The door was open. He looked in. White plastic garden chairs lay toppled on the floor. At a workbench, a broad-shouldered man with a dark ponytail was sawing through the leg of a garden chair, which he’d clamped in place.

  “Hello,” said Heinrich.

  The man stopped sawing and glanced up. His expression was neither inviting nor hostile. Heinrich stepped closer. On the floor behind the workbench, a large skeleton was taking shape; the curved white plastic of several dismembered chairs had transformed into immense ribs. Knobby bits, taken from the same sawed-up furniture, were becoming colossal vertebrae.

  “What animal is it?”

  “Whale,” answered the man.

  “When it’s all put together, how many meters do you think it will be?”

  “I dunno. Can’t exactly say, not yet. Close to four meters, maybe.”

  “What do you plan to do with it?”

  “Get it out of this garage,” the man answered with a grin.

  “Thank you for letting me look.”

  “You live around here?”

  “No. I am only a visitor. I’m looking for my sister.”

  “You lost track of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Inge. Inge Schlögel. You may know her?”

  “Nope. Afraid not.”

  “Have you made other skeletons besides this one?”

  “Nope. This is my first.”

  “Best of luck with the whale.”

  “Good luck finding your sister.”

  Heinrich continued down the alley, avoiding the potholes and broken glass. Soon a light rain began to fall and he pulled up the hood of his jacket. All afternoon he walked under the delicate rain that continued to fall.

  On a Tuesday, at the intersection of two congested streets, each bursting with vehicles, Inge shot past on her bicycle, then came to an abrupt stop. A parked car was blocking her way. Her hair, streaked with gray, hung longer than he remembered, but her alert posture, the tension in her slender torso, gave her away. He ran up to her and she turned. Her eyes and mouth were wrong, her entire face a mistake.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  Though the woman smiled and did not appear to mind being mistaken for someone else, Heinrich walked off as quickly as he could. He headed south down a street called Bathurst, unsure where he was going but eager to lose himself in the noise of the traffic.

  During the course of the next week, Inge stood waiting on the northbound subway platform of the Yonge line, she was buying a loaf of bread as Heinrich stepped into the Harbord Bakery, the lights dimmed in the Bloor Cinema and she slipped into the row of seats in front of him, on Dundas Street across from a large public park, she drove up in a small beige car, a German shepherd on the seat next to her; and always, the moment he hurried forward or leaned closer to greet her, she changed into a stranger. It became clear to him that he might never find Inge, and the pain of this realization intensified his determination to locate her.

  Will I find Heinrich Schlögel? I do not think so. But I must keep searching. I have no choice. “Nope,” says Vicky. “You’ve got a choice. You could stop.” I could have chosen to visit my parents more often; my parents could have resisted when their card-playing took over, not gambled away everything save the dining room table. Time is short. Time runs out. If I do meet Heinrich, I’ll ask him about choice, about how to choose what to ask of others, and what to ask of myself—I said this to Vicky, yesterday, and she slapped her thigh an
d laughed at me. “You think he’ll hear you? His ears are full of rushing water.”

  Whenever a telephone rang or yelped, shivered or sang, instinct made Heinrich turn. In Pangnirtung there had been no tiny phones that you could slip into your pocket. Now, all around him, people dove their hands into their purses or jackets. He imagined people shouting and laughing into tiny telephones while hurrying along a Munich sidewalk, or while strolling in the tranquility of the Englischer Garten, and these images struck him as so absurd that he laughed aloud. Not one person turned, curious to know the reason for his laughter.

  In the confines of streetcars and buses, voices announced to invisible, intended listeners, as well as to anyone nearby, the sudden blindness of an uncle, a boss with a sexual hunger, the loss of a dog, the spread of evil, the purchase of real estate, the crumpling of a marriage. Heinrich took out his journal and noted the return of the rushing sound in his ears.

  For over a week he’d been free of it. Now the racing imposed, as before. His mind filled with images of water twisting in ropes of luminous blue that carved channels in a body of ice. He wrote down the hour, then he shut his notebook, as if doing so might put a quick end to the rushing and delay its return. But when the rushing of water did cease, he caught himself eagerly, perversely, anticipating its resurgence. Nothing in his surroundings felt as real. Across screens on subway platforms slid snippets of world news—terrorist attacks, company mergers, floods, infestations, and droughts. Cars were being wrapped in tissue paper for Christmas, and tiny pills promised libido.