Authors: Howard Norman

In Fond Remembrance of Me (5 page)

BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me

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“I'm following my daughterâlook!âup aheadâshe's lost,” he said.

On another day, Noah said, “I'm out on the ice becauseâlook!âup aheadâit's my sonâhe's lost. I'm going after him to help.”

Each time the villagers would tie Noah up with gut string and haul him back sliding over the ice. When they untied him in the village, he ate and got some strength back. Then he swept with the
broom. He seldom slept. He swept and the villagers heard that sound. “No arkâbut he sweeps,” a woman said.

When next time the ice-break-up arrived, the villagers decided that Noah had lived with them long enough. They went with him in the southerly direction. Then they gave him packets of food and sent him on his way. Planks from the ark washed up for a lot of summers. Not every time after a storm, but still there was driftwood, driftwoodâdriftwood. From that ark.

THE STUFF OF NOAH'S CHARACTER

Mark Nuqac was about five feet four inches tall, stocky. I thought he had a dignified bearing. Helen told me that Mark had never been to a dentist (how did such subjects come up in their conversation? “He joked about it,” Helen said); his teeth were bad, the best front ones crooked, one of those seemed to push slightly at his lip. He had close-cropped black hair. His roundish face was most deeply etched on his forehead, a veritable light-brown earth-map of latitude lines. He had pronounced “crow's-feet” wrinkles at each eye, a broad aspect to his cheekbones, a taut, thin-lipped smile, a notched and scarred left ear, the result of a sled-dog bite when he was a boy. Though he generally held a solemn expression, focused, not preoccupied, his face could truly brightenâI witnessed this every time Helen stepped into his kitchen. He was both gruff and cordial in equal measure, it seemed, to his wife, Mary, whom he had been married to for forty-six years. Mary did not at all strike me as long-suffering; as much as I understood their occasional bickering, she gave as well as she got, and I never saw them apart, except once, when Mark and Helen were walking by the river, or when Mark, with somewhat alcohol-emboldened entitlement, took it upon himself to stumble
into Helen's motel room, “unannounced,” as Helen put it, and hold forth on this or that subject. More than once Mary had to fetch him back home; Mary and Helen had a cordial relationshipâHelen spent considerable time with Mary Nuqac, and Mary provided certain clarifications about any number of sentences, let alone entire stories, Helen was translating.

Mary Nuqac was a few inches shorter than Mark. She had reddish brown skin, darker than Mark's, and her eyes were darker brown, too. Her rather long faceâmost notably the sidesâwere mottled with age spots, like a map of islands. Her hair, gray-flecked black, was cut close except for one braid bobby-pinned in a haphazard coil at the back of her head. Neither Helen nor I learned where Mary was born, but she once allowed that she had spoken a different dialect of Inuit when she was a child. She married Mark when she was seventeen; I was surprised, for reasons having to do with Mark's cynicism toward “church,” that they had had “a Christian wedding,” and that both Mark and Mary had indeed been baptized. “I still don't mind church,” she said. You definitely could call Mary “stout”; she wore sweaters too small for her physical stature, and often they were buttoned unevenly. She wore tennis shoes and sweat socks, and a few times she had on what she called “nurse shoes”âher sister, Maude, was a nurse in a small clinic near Lake Winnipegosis, Manitoba, and had sent her these white shoes in her size. Mary could read and write in English, and for some years clerked in a store. I did not get to know Mary well at all, but on one occasion we had a somewhat lengthy conversation in English, which centered on the Beluga Motel's
plumbing. Years earlier, Mary had watched the original plumbing being installed, and went into great detail about how people went every day to observe the motel's construction from the ground up. It was a rather odd topic, I thought, but I was happy to be speaking with her alone; she ended by confessing that she had regretted not becoming a plumber. “I saw how everything fit,” she said. “I even asked a fellow if I could help out, but he didn't want me to. I could've helped outâno question.” (One other thing: that was an oft-used phrase, “no question”âit meant
no question about it.)

Helen promised to send Mary a kimono; Mary had seen women wearing kimonos in a
National Geographic
magazine and thought their colors and design were beautiful. Mary had a
National Geographic
map of the world thumbtacked to the kitchen wall and had circled Japan with a black crayon.

Mary and Mark had had five children. Their second son was lost to suicide; a daughter, born with a weak heart, died of complications from scarlet fever at age two. A daughter was living in Winnipeg; a son lived in Vancouver and was married to a Chinese woman. Their eldest son had died at forty of natural causes in Padlei. If the face, as Akutagawa wrote, is “the registry of all we experience,” then I could fully imagine that Mary could decipher much of Mark's emotional biography each time she looked at himâand, no doubt, Mark could “read” Mary's face for joys and griefs as well. One morning, when I saw Mark holding Mary's face with his hands, massaging it as if to slightly realign the past, it struck me as some age-old form of literacy, the reading of a husband's or wife's face, because Mark was concentrating
the way a person reads and rereads a particularly astonishing passage in a book.

I want to describe a typical afternoon of working with Mark Nuqac, not that there was such a thing. Typical, I mean. Each working session was different in small and large ways, subtle or outlandish, and each day we never really got along that well. On October 4 Mark seemed quite willing, in fact insisted on speaking about the character of Noah himself. For one thing, he informed me of the “origin”âI took this in part to imply a source of inspirationâfor the story “Why Woolly Mammoths Decided to Flee Underground.” (My titleâMark did not title his stories.)

I could not for the life of me figure out why Mark set aside his highly impersonal manner to speak about the chief antagonist of his Noah stories, Noah himself, but I was grateful for it. For it was otherwise all too clear that the wider context of our work togetherâthat he was paid, as it were, for being a raconteur (he once emphatically remarked, “You can't put these stories into a museum, even though you work for one”)âmade him somewhat uneasy. Helen pointed out that the Japanese language was so outside of Mark's experience that having his stories reside in Japanese might, in ways we perhaps could not fully comprehend, be less distasteful. “He likes the
sound
of Japanese more than the sound of English,” Helen said. “He asks me to speak it all the time. He closes his eyes and listens. There's nothing
rational
about any of thisâit's just the way it is. He doesn't much enjoy speaking English, either, have you not noticed?
Maybe it's because you'reâwhat does he sayâEuropean? Whiteâwhereas I'm not, completely. Some sort of affinity there perhaps. It's impossible to figure it all out, to have it make perfect sense. There's many parts to it, Howard Norman.”

I suppose it took a few weeks not to feel hurt by Mark's intolerances, his edginess, at times his outright hostilityâI took it all quite personally, and I brooded out loud about it to Helen. “It's not that I'm a rival for his affections,” she said. “I'm a woman, he's a big flirt, he says very sexual things to me, sexual innuendos, sexual jokes. He clearly enjoys his own crudeness of that sortâMary says, âMy husband likes to get your goat.' I can't imagine where she picked that phrase up. I'd like to know, actually.”

“Look, Helen, I'm not very good at this work yet. That's got to be crystal clear to Mark. He's impatient with me, and I can tell there's disappointment. It's all over his face. He must be thinking, âThey've sent an incompetent.' If I'm honest about it, I think it'd take me twenty-five years to get this language. And even thenâ”

“Now look who's feeling sorry for himself. It's a beautiful language, though. You must feel that.”

“Of course I do. So far I speak it like a kindergartener.”

“Not quite up to that, I'm afraid.”

“Besides, Helen, you just have this facility. An ear for it.”

“I think those lessons you had in Toronto served you well, though.”

“I bet you dream in Inuit. Does that ever happen?”

“Does what happen, people in my dreams speaking Inuit?”

“Yes.”

“Only when the people in my dreams
are
Inuit.”

“Funny.”

“You can't expect to be a native speaker
unless
you put in twenty-five years. In that you are quite correct. I mean, look around you: there's a lot of young people up here who don't have the language, right? So even not every
native
is a native speaker.”

“I'm just worrying these translations to death, that's my problem.”

“They're beautiful stories, though, don't you think?”

Back to October 4. I spent the better part of the day in Mark's kitchen. Except for a brief lapse into whiskey, Mark and I stuck to drinking coffee. I had the big tape recorder on his splintery wooden table. Mary served us each a bowl of chicken noodle soup out of a can for lunch. When we finished our soup, I took out my spiral notebook and pen. (Helen had taped to its cover an illustration of Noah on the ark, big billowing clouds threatening rain, Noah's wife with a worried look on her faceâHelen said she'd cut it out of a children's collection of Bible stories.) “Go ahead, use the machine,” Mark said. Ravens were squawking loudlyâalso emitting clicks as if speaking in Morse codeâoutside the house. I switched on the reel-to-reel and Mark started right inâhis voice was raspy, he had a sore throat, he was sucking on a Smith Brothers cherry-flavored cough drop.

“They find woolly elephants in the ice,” he said. “Bet you didn't know that, eh?”

“Mastodons, I think they call them,” I said. “I don't actually know if woolly mammoths and mastodons are the same thing, but they might be. You call them âwoolly elephants' sometimes, right?”

Mark set on the table a magazine article he'd clipped out. It contained photographs showing paleontologists on scaffolding. They were excavating a mastodon from a wall of ice, using ice picks and what looked like welder's torches. One of the paleontologists had a belt festooned with scrub brushes and toothbrushes. The mastodon loomed ghostlike behind the partly transparent surface, which was like smoked glassâone of the mastodon's curved tusks had broken off and floated a tusk's-length from the hollow-eyed shaggy face.

“Look, here,” Mark said, pointing to some men at the base of the glacier. “Those are Eskimo. I don't know where from. The article don't say.”

I looked at the photographs and read the captions. When Mark figured I'd had enough time with them, he put the article in his front trouser pocket. “When they got the animal out,” he saidâhe had obviously had the article read to him a number of times, since Mark himself could not readâ“it smelled very bad, but they tossed some meat to the dogs! Now, it must've not been completely rotten, eh, 'cause they wouldn't want to poison dogs.” Mark looked incredulous, at the phenomenon of still-edible meat from the age of mastodonsâ!

“Do you remember when you first heard about Noah?” I said, trying to not sound like I was participating in some sort of academic-style Q&A.

“I first heard about Noah because I sat in church a few times,” he said without hesitation. “I asked my father about this Noah. He told me some things. He told me the Bible story, what a lot of people believe.”

Mark's spoken English was definitely stilted, he was never less than tentative with it. You could almost feel the physical process of translation, the delay, the search for words, the inadequate vocabulary, brilliant storyteller that he was. I certainly identified with the essential difficulty; after all, I felt quite inept in Mark's language. When he spoke, even in our informal dialogues, he often articulated a thought in Inuit first, then did his best in Englishâin other words, he became his own translator out loud. Helen said that Mark had a “slurring English,” by which she meant that the thick-tongued consonant sound of Inuit was somewhat reprised in Mark's English pronunciations. (Several ethnographic reportsâand one explorer's journalâfrom the nineteenth century attest to the fact that the neighboring Cree Indians thought Inuit around Hudson Bay sounded like they had “stones in their mouths when they talked.”) One morning I outright apologized for my poor spoken Inuit. Mark said, “Okayâwell. When you and Helen leave, I will earn twenty-four hundred dollars Canadian for this work,” a guarded, elliptical reply, which I took in part to mean suffering a linguistic fool such as I was truly earning his keep. Which I fully agreed with.

Hard to know for sure, but it felt like Mark was enjoying our discussion, perhaps especially speaking about his father, whom he clearly loved and admired. “My father knew the Bible pretty goodâhe knew the Bible stories
pretty good,” Mark said. Out came a small flask of whiskey, which had an eagle etched on it. It looked just like a flask I had seen for sale in the Hudson's Bay Company store. “My father liked going to the church talksâ”

“The sermons?” I said.

“The sermons. He used to sit front pew and laugh out loud. He'd say to the clergy fellowââHey, hey, get it right, get it right. That's not how it happened!' Like with this Noah fellowâmy father got his own way to understand it, eh?”

“So, you heard some of the Noah stories from your father?”

“A few. Not too many. But most of 'em came fromâ” He pointed to the side of his head, then took two healthy swigs.

I immediately poured myself more coffee and said, “More coffee, Mark? I think it'd be a good idea.”

BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me

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