Authors: Howard Norman

In Fond Remembrance of Me (16 page)

BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me

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“Get back down there, get a few birds!” a man said. “Let's see if they taste as good as ptarmigan!”

“Noâno!” the feather-choked men said. They climbed back down onto the ice.

It went on in such a way for the rest of the winter. Villagers brought food out to the ark for Noah and his family. But the shaman kept choking all of themâNoah, his wife, his son, his daughterâWith gull feathers, raven feathers, colorful bird feathers from the ark, the shaman choked them. And each time, Noah said, “Yesâyesâyes.” The shaman had a very good winter.

When the ice-break-up began, the ark looked like a big animal with its ribs sticking upâa big dead animalâthe ice was breaking apart around Noah and his family. Some villagers paddled out to help. When they got there, Noah's wife said, “Before he left, the shaman choked us.”

“If you come back on another ark, he'll choke you again,” a
man said. Because they did not want to be choked by raven feathers, colorful bird feathers, or gull feathers, Noah and his family did not come back to Hudson Bay. They paddled kayaks to the southâa few colorful birds above the kayaks, a few trailing behindâgone into the horizon. That is my story.

EPILOGUE: THE KIMONO

The following year, 1978, I returned to Churchill, again toward the end of August. It was not without trepidation that I had signed back on to work with Mark Nuqac, this time to translate stories containing a variety of motifs, from shamanism to hunting to vengeance, especially that of the omnipresent goddess-spirit of the arctic sea, Sedna, who is almost continually agitated at the behavior of human beings. (Sedna, of course, now has a planet named after her, the coldest in our solar system.) I was also to work with two other Inuit storytellers at Eskimo Point. Hired by a now-disbanded concern called the Native Canadian Oral History Project out of Winnipeg (at one-quarter the museum's salary), I hoped to transcribeâand at least begin translatingâten of Mark's stories in the month of September. Once again I flew with Driscoll Petchey (who, if anything, was even more talkative; in his three-seater I was a captive audience) to Churchill. Once again I set up in the Beluga Motel, this time in Room 2. I was the motel's only resident. Still, I consciously avoided checking into either Room 1 or Room 10, vigilant, almost superstitious, about how immediate Helen's and my conversations still felt, the CBC programs
we shared, the sound of typing. Rooms may be interchangeable, not memories of rooms.

Predictably enough, my work with Mark Nuqac proceeded in fits and starts. I vowed to take nothing personally, either in his attitude or behavior toward me. Often, at a potentially incendiary point in our working session, I feigned composure, offered a patient nod, and smiled till the storm passed. Noting this, Mark seemed irked. This time he couldn't “get my goat.” (Though he did rouse me once or twice.) It was pretty much the same old Mark that I had known a year earlier; the same Mark that Helen saw through a clearer lens, with more empathy, with far more know-how in working one-on-one with native speakers, and with the awareness, I suppose, that Mark was all but mesmerized by her very presence, which I don't to this day think an exaggeration. Autumn 1978, the few times Mark spoke of Helen, he did so in a rather cursory manner. But I knew he harbored deep feelings. “I got a letter from my daughter Helen,” he said. “My wife read it to me.”

One good thing, I got to know Mary Nuqac better. She and Mark were sharing the same house with Mary's youngest brother, William, and his French-Canadian/Cree wife, “Josey,” short for Josephine, and their three young children. (The oldest, an eight-year-old boy, slept in the kitchen.) Mary had become, it seemed, more sullen. She had had another operation in January She was drinking more. I had two meals with herâwe just ate sandwiches sitting outdoorsâand we had some lengthy conversations; it was by unspoken agreement that we did not discuss my work with
Mark. She did offer a tidbit of encouragement: “Mark told me you got a little better at hearing how we talk.”

And I suppose I had. In December 1977 I had moved back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had recently completed an intermittent residence in the Society of Fellows, affiliated with the University of Michigan. But I kept my one-room apartment in Toronto and frequently stayed there. (In fact, I still hadn't entirely made up my mind if I should become a Canadian citizen since it seemed I was having better luck finding work in that country.) Anyway, Helen had put me in touch with a native Inuit speaker, Michael Smith (he had given up his Inuit name) from Eskimo Point. He was working part-time in a shoe store, part-time in night security at the University of Michigan. Michael Smith was fifty-one, living in a room above a garage on State Street, not far from my own small apartment on Elm Street. I paid him ten dollars an hour for three-hour “language lessons” and was insistent on fitting in as many as our schedules allowed. (I didn't have much of one.) In fact, he was quite organized as a teacher. What's more, he always wore a suit and tie for our lessons, this Inuit man who in February of that year had been named “Employee of the Month” by the shoe store's manager. Though he had forsaken much of his native identity (his fiancÃ©e had asked him to convert to Catholicism), he voiced strong opinions about his culture. “I think about where I am from every day. I think about my parents and my brothers and sisters. But I cannot live there.” He wasâin his
own wordsâ“dead set” against the translation work I had done and hoped to continue, as the opportunity afforded itself. When I pressed him on this point, he only said, “So much gets taken.” I asserted that Western cultureâapparently I felt I could speak on its behalfâ“needs the entirely different sensibility of Inuit stories.” “Needs them for what?” he said. Just that brief exchange and we were at a tense impasse. We cut the lesson short. From then on we kept exclusively to vocabularies and contexts and exercises he invented, which I found challenging and useful. In late March 1978 Michael Smith dropped by my apartment to say that he had gotten married and was moving to Minneapolis. He gave me a soapstone sculpture depicting a seal disappearing through the ice; just the rear third and tail of the seal was present, the rest of its body had to be imagined. I was surprised at his giftâit might well be considerd “taken” from the Inuit culture, though art cooperatives all over the arctic exported soapstone sculptures.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I was going to give you one of a seal just coming up for air.”

“Well, this one is fine. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“No matter what you think, I need this. It'll get me to think about things.”

“What things?”

I thought we might be headed into bad weather again. “Sculptureâfor one. What else? What it might feel like to dive under the ice.”

“Okay, I get it,” he said. “Stop before you make a worse fool of yourself.”

“Congratulations on your marriage,” I said. We shook hands; my language lessons of that sort ended. They had cost me $1,200.

On the morning of September 27, 1978, my last day in Churchill (I would not visit again until the summer of 1981), Mary Nuqac showed me the kimono that Helen had sent from Kyoto. We were standing in the kitchen. She unfolded it from the box it had arrived in and held it up for my appraisal. “It's beautiful,” I said. It was white silk, with magnificent embroidered flowers which looked like you could lean over and actually smell their fragrances.

“When did it get here?” I said.

“November.”

“Have you tried it on yet?”

“Yes. I wore it one day. Over my sweaters.”

Mary folded the kimono again and set it in the box. “Helen wrote a letter to me,” Mary said. “She wrote one to my husband. We each got one.” Mary looked pensive. “Do you have a picture of Helen?”

“A photograph? We never took anyâof each other, I mean. I didn't even have a camera with me.”

“I wanted to ask since you got here.”

“Helen did send me a photograph from Kyoto. She was in bed.” (I didn't mention that, unless I was greatly mistaken, it was a hospital bed.) I touched both of my shoulders. “She
had the blanket pulled up to here. Behind her on the wall was a beautiful Japanese scroll.”

“Aâ
scroll
?”

“Yes, it's a tall picture. Probably very old. Someone painted it with special brushes and ink. Black ink. It showed a person beginning a journey. A long walk.”

“What else was in the picture?”

“Flying birds.”

ALSO BY HOWARD NORMAN

The Northern Lights
The Chauffeur
The Bird Artist
The Museum Guard
The Haunting of L.
My Famous Evening

Notes

This last line, naturally, evokes a sense of urgency without source.

North Point Press
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781429930222

First eBook Edition : April 2011

First edition, 2005

Some portions of this book appeared in
TriQuarterly
and the
Princeton University Library Chronicle
, vol. LXIII.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Norman, Howard A.

In fond remembrance of me / Howard Norman.â1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-680-6

ISBN-10: 0-86547-680-2 (alk. paper)

1. Tanizaki, Helen, d. 1978. 2. FolkloristsâCanadaâBiography. 3. FolkoristsâJapanâBiography. 4.tnuitâFolklore. 5. TalesâManitobaâChurchill. 6. Inuit literatureâCanadaâTranslations into English. I. Title.

GR55.T26N67 2005

398'.092âdc22

[B]

2004056097

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