Elle (10 page)

When I tell Itslk about my old life, he lapses into polite silence, as if my flights of fancy embarrass him with their un-reality. He is as imprisoned in his world as Richard was in his. Though he has saved me, he cannot save himself from the swirl of words, inventions, ideas and commerce that will one day overwhelm him. At some point, he will face a choice: die in the torrent clutching his beliefs like a twig in a storm, or persist in a wan state beside the raw, surging, careless proliferation of the new. He was right to worry at the solstice. There will come a time when time itself refuses to turn back, when his magical powers will be insufficient to restart the universe exactly as it was.

When I see this, the character of our lovemaking begins to change. I gain weight, my cheeks take on a healthy sheen. Itslk admits that I am edging out of the category of extreme ugliness. He likes the sly convexity of my belly as it slides up and over the baby. But more than anything, the change is in me. I begin to cherish him, to feel myself cradling that frail, comic, gentle creature whose death I foresee as he thrusts into me. And I perceive that being a shallow and frivolous girl might have its advantages.

Itslk grows restless. Sometimes he looks at me as if he expects an answer to an unspoken question. What? I say, and he hisses through his teeth. He stares out at the ice, looking for seals to hunt, he says. But then I have to shake him to get his attention, as if he were in a trance or the deepest dream, though his eyes are open.

One day he collects his weapons, packs strips of dried bear in his bag, calls the dog and announces he is going home. He says he misses his wife even if she is a terrible woman. This sends me into a panic. I beg him on my knees not to abandon me (as so many others have). I crawl a hundred yards along the ice after him, whimpering that I love him. (It is my impression that men are natural hysterics and, deep down, enjoy this behaviour in a woman.) He keeps whistling for Léon, who sits immobile, though alert and curious, by the hut's doorway. I scream at Léon to stay with me, although evidently he has already made that decision on his own. Two hours later Itslk returns shamefaced and apologetic.

One night I wake to find him kneeling above me with a stone knife I have never seen before poised over my heart. I say his name, and he seems to wake and wonder what he is doing threatening me with a knife. He says he dreamed I had turned into a cannibal and was going to eat him. Part of me grows impatient with the melodrama. Beneath his garrulousness and
constant activity, he is a man troubled by ungovernable impulses and strange visions.

He never kisses me — just manages a weird nose rubbing business. I never get used to it (though at other times and places I have not been backward in the practice of sexual perversity).

To pass the time, he tells me stories. He tells me of a mysterious phantom, an immense, hairless, red-eyed dog that chases real dogs, which die of convulsions at the sight of him. He tells me about Sedna, mistress of the nether world, and her father, to whom the dead belong, how in the late fall Sedna walks upon the earth and must be driven back by powerful wizards called
angakok.
And how when an
angakok,
in his capacity as a doctor, pronounces a sick person beyond hope, the People withhold food and throw water on the patient to hasten the end (this happened to Itslk's brother). He tells me about a famous
angakok,
a distant relative of his, who fell through the ice off Degrat Island and floated in the sea for five days. When he was recovered, his clothing was still dry, and it is said that the freezing water turned to steam when he thrust his hand into it.

He tells me about a girl who, in the dead of night, would receive a mysterious lover into her bed. One night she blacked her hands with ashes in order to discover his identity. In the morning she saw the prints of her hands on her brother's back. Disgusted, she grabbed a lamp and fled into the sky. Her brother ran after her, and we see them still, the sun with the moon chasing her.

He tells me about the animal mother, a malicious woman who is always hiding game from the People. When she was a girl, her brothers rowed her out to sea and tossed her overboard. The girl clung desperately to the gunwale, pleading with them to take her back. But they chopped off her fingers, which turned
into seals and walruses, and the girl sank to the bottom of the sea, where she reigns to this day. Now, when she hides the animals, Itslk says, it is up to an
angakok
to make the long underwater journey to her kingdom and trick her or otherwise convince her to let the animals go so that the People can eat.

Why did they throw her overboard? I ask. I naturally identify with the unwanted female whose ambiguous and tragic fate so clearly parallels my own. Was her other name Iphigenia?

In one story they accuse her of sleeping with a dog, Itslk says, glancing narrowly at Léon. She had babies that came out looking like puppies.

We have many enlightening and curious conversations like this.

On fair days we stretch in the sun on the skin of the white bear before the hut, with the gleaming ice extending to the horizon, which is like the blade of a steel knife. The blue sky seems to vibrate, empty, beautiful and useless. And it is easy to imagine how insignificant we are in the scheme of things (whether it is God's scheme or Cudragny's or the god of the Lutherans, I cannot tell, though I suspect the god of the Lutherans wouldn't waste time on anything so beautiful and useless as the scene before me). Léon nestles against me, chews ice from his toes, licks his balls, yawns, closes his eyes, then rises, circles, tries another position. My baby describes a like motion inside my belly.

Léon has adapted to life in Canada with surprising ease. I don't know what to conclude from this. He has forgiven me (or forgotten) the disastrous events on shipboard. (I have often thought how wonderful it would be if God had the personality of a dog, that infinite love and forgiveness, though all evidence points to a man with a long memory and a vengeful, judgmental
heart — something like the General.) In the sun, the dog's black fur is hot to the touch. The baby swims inside me like a fish. Itslk slips off his skin shirt, baring his shoulders and chest to the sun despite the cold and the ubiquitous and infernal ice. I am reminded of Dicuil's charming phrase in his narrative of St. Brendan's voyage: “and the sea stiffened
(concretum)
around them.” He listens to M. Tyndale's Bible, which he regards with immense curiosity since I told him how we burned the man who made the book. He fashions a second tennis racquet (are we going to play a game, or is Richard taking over his soul?), then shows me how to strap them to my feet so I can walk about without sinking into the snow.

He splits a tree trunk, carves two runners and builds a small sled, which he says is to carry what's left of the bear meat to his village. This village is far to the north, past the place the French call Blanc Sablon and on up the coast. (From internal evidence, I gather that his village consists of his wife, his cousin and six children, four of mixed race. One plan is for me to become his second wife. My refusal astonishes Itslk no end, and he sulks for a day.)

Every day I think we are leaving, but he delays. He says this is because he cannot bring himself to abandon any of the bear meat. We have to eat all that we cannot carry. But I think there is another reason: Some trouble with his wife, or it has some-thing to do with me, with seeing me tumble out of the bear, covered with blood and goose down, and the strangeness of my speech.

He frets because he can't seem to catch any game or under-stand why this is so. The ice teems with sea cat and walrus, and caribou come down to the beaches to call him. But when he walks out with his bow, nothing is there. I have to admit this is
a riddle. When I look, the land is empty. There are no animals in sight.

Sometimes we have the air of people who have encountered one another in a dream.

In the old days, when the storms came in the fall and spring and the game disappeared, a wizard would make a whip out of seaweed, go down to the shore, raise his whip in the direction of the wind and shout, It is enough. He tells me his people are ruled by their dreams, that they seek dreams as answers to questions they have when they are awake. He says the soul is the same shape as the body but of a more subtle and ethereal nature. (In this, they agree with Aristotle and the ancients. When I try to explain, Itslk hisses at me.) He tells me of the war between the ducks and the ptarmigans, summer and winter, and how his people enact this war during their festivals, tugging a sealskin rope between them to see which side wins.

One day he tells me the story of a young man who lived with his wife by the seashore. He was the best hunter in the village. Plenty of his relatives and his wife's relatives came to live with him, and he was happy because he was able to support them all. Presently, strange men came to their country, borne along on the largest canoe the hunter had ever seen. At first, he thought the canoe was an island with three tall trees in the centre, inhabited by bears. But the bears came ashore, and soon he realized his mistake and went to meet them.

The new men cut trees to build their settlements, wooden racks covered the beaches, roofed landing stages stretched like fingers into the sea. They sent out little boats each day (at first they seemed to him like children of the larger ship), and each night the boats returned brimming with cod. They gutted, split and salted the fish and left them on the racks to dry. The hunter
watched from a distance for a while but soon was helping in return for food, bits of metal and trinkets for his wife. The men made free with his wife when she visited, but the hunter did not mind because there was a custom in his land about sharing wives. Though the visitors seemed not to understand the custom and laughed at him and abused his wife.

Soon the hunter wanted to leave, but he found that he and his wife had grown attached to the new way of living. His old tools and weapons were broken or lost. When he needed to replace the new ones, he had to return to the fishing station where the strange men returned every summer. The animals he was used to hunting now failed to show themselves in his dreams. He no longer killed enough to feed his relatives, who began to move away to other villages and hunting grounds.

At last he consulted his cousin, who was a wizard of their people. The cousin said he would have to instruct the young hunter in wizardry so he could rid his country of the bad people. The hunter paid in seal meat, iron nails and a bronze drinking cup he stole from the visitors. The wizard made him stay away from the fishing station one long summer, filling the days with instruction, storytelling and dreaming. Then he bade the young hunter leave the village and spend a period apart, seeking through abstinence and dreams a vision of some tutelary spirit who would guide him further into the mystery of life.

The hunter gathered his belongings, said goodbye to his wife and set out, heading west toward the bare-topped mountains inland. He passed like a ghost among the frozen swamps and snow-choked forests, stalking animals with his bow bent but with no thought of killing, for his purpose was to find wisdom. He went without food, waiting for his vision. Then one night
he dreamed a white bear, bigger than any bear he had ever seen, walked right past his sleeping place, pausing only to sniff, taking his scent before it moved on. Once the bear glanced back as if to see if he would follow. When the hunter awoke, he found bear tracks next to his bed.

He travelled far beyond his usual hunting grounds, trailing the white bear, which indeed acted like no other bear in his experience, which, like himself, seemed less interested in food than in getting somewhere, as if it had a purpose. Starving, it loped down from the mountains toward the sea and then west again along the endless boreal beaches. Day and night it ran, pausing only now and then to look back and see that the hunter was still following. Keep up now, the bear seemed to say. Don't fail. And as bear and hunter ran, winter deepened around them. Wolves howled after starving deer. Birds froze in the trees. Wind shrieked across the ice, filling the air with a thousand anguished voices, the voices of ghosts and weirds rising with Sedna from her kingdom beneath the waves.

One day, to his surprise, the hunter stumbled upon his bear already dead, stretched next to a grave mound on a lonely beach. On top of the grave stood the statue of a woman dressed in strange clothes and the skull of a seal. As the hunter approached, the bear suddenly seemed to give birth. Out of its belly slid a naked woman, slick with blood, speckled with bird down, a walking skeleton. Beneath the blood, her skin was bone white, like the men who sailed from across the sea, like the ghosts who rose from the depths with Sedna.

The hunter remembered how the wizard had told him he was to seek his vision on some isolated shore, beside a grave. The Great Spirit Tongársoak himself would approach the aspirant in the form of a white bear who would kill and eat him,
transforming him into a skeleton. Three days later he would regain his flesh, awaken, and his clothes would come flying back to him. Everything turned out as the wizard had foretold, except that the hunter found a white woman in his place. The bear had eaten her, and the power belonged to her. He would never be able to save his people. The bear had led him all that way to witness and to understand.

Itslk seems relieved when the story is done, as if it were a burden he could finally put down, or as if in telling the story he has worked out some knotty problem of logic. He confesses that he believes this sequence of events, his recent past — the coming of the white men, the bear, the grave, me — is a nightmare. In the morning he will awake next his wife on that far shore beside the infinite sea, walk outside and kill two seals who will be waiting for him beside an air hole. The seals will greet him in their normal seal voices. They will say, Come, Itslk, slay us and eat. And be careful not to damage our bones, but send them whole back to Sedna that she might continue to feed you and your family.