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Authors: Howard Norman

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BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me
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“Yes”—and it was agreed. They paddled back to the village.
Winter arrived, seals gripped the ice near their breathing-holes. Noah saw polar bears hunting seals—Noah saw villagers hunting seals. Ice was all around the ark. During a blizzard the villagers didn't visit the ark, but when the weather cleared, they visited.
“Hey—Noah!” a village man shouted. “How many of your animals have you eaten?”
“I can't eat them,” Noah said. “When we're done floating around, we're going back to where we came from. Then I'll let the animals go. I promised my God—he runs things. I promised I'd let the animals go.”
The villagers on the ice fell to laughing. The sound of their laughter echoed out over the ice, and seals slipped through their breathing-holes, back into the water. “There's other spirits running things up here!” a village man shouted. “Ha, ha, ha!”
“Look—there!” another village man said. Everyone turned to look, and there, out on the ice, a black-and-white-striped horse was running. It did not know how to run on ice. It fell and slid, got up, fell, slid—then it fell through the ice.
“Now it's lost,” a villager said. “It would've been better to have eaten it.”
“I wonder how it tastes,” said Noah's wife.
“I wonder how it tastes,” said Noah's daughter.
“There's another one on the ark, here,” said the son. “I'm going to kill it and cook it.”
With this, Noah said, “No!”
“I wonder how it tastes,” Noah's son said.
“Give us a few animals,” a villager said. “Give us a few planks of wood from your ark. In return, we'll hunt and fish for you, and you will make it through winter. You can even live in our village with us—all winter, all winter. When the ice thaws and breaks up, we'll paddle you out to your ark, though the ice might crack it before then.”
“No,” said Noah.
“Why not go on a seal hunt with us, then?” a man said. “We'll take you along. What you learn you can use to help feed your family.”
Noah went to the bottom of the ark, then he stepped out onto the ice. He fell a few times, then got his footing—much laughter. “Here's a sealskin parka,” a woman said. Noah put it on.
Then they told Noah how to hunt a seal—quiet—crawl forward, don't speak loudly—they told him some things, they said, “You stand back, we'll go on ahead.” They gave Noah a spear.
Soon they saw a seal up ahead—it was facing away from the
hunters, and the wind was blowing toward them—all for the good. “Now, stay back,” a hunter whispered to Noah—but this hunter saw that on Noah's face was hunger and sadness, Noah had gone crazy in his head—Noah dropped to his knees and started to crawl toward the seal. “Stay back—stay back”—but Noah crawled toward the seal.
“At least don't stand up,” a hunter said. But Noah stood up and the seal slid into the water.
Noah looked over at the ark. He saw his wife, daughter, and son crawling over the ice. They had been crawling in a proper manner toward the seal. As he watched, this happened: his wife, son, and daughter fell through the ice. This happened, this happened, and his family disappeared.
Now Noah was crazed by grief, sadness, and confusion—he had hunted a seal wrongly, he had seen his family sink away—so, now, he walked to the seal breathing-hole and tried to climb down through it!
The hunters hurried out to Noah, knocked him down, and dragged him across the ice back to the village. He had ice burns on his face. When they dragged him into the village, a woman said, “What happened to him?”
A man said, “He saw his family drop through the ice.”
The villagers tied Noah up for days, to keep him from crawling out over the ice. In the meantime, they fed him bits of fish and seal, and kept him warm by seal-oil lamp. They took care of him; he howled often—He wept and said things that made no sense.
Everyone saw many animals from the ark walk out over the ice; they saw brightly colored birds fly away from the ark. “I wonder how those birds taste?” a few villagers said.
During the ice-break-up the ark sank. Noah was sent walking in the southerly direction—but when he got a ways from the village, he dropped to his knees and started to crawl. Nobody followed, they left him alone. “How far does he have to travel?” a village boy asked.
“I don't know,” an old woman in the village said.
Later, some planks of wood from the ark rolled onto shore. The villagers set them out to dry. Later, when some villagers sat by the ark-wood fire, one said, “Noah might've killed his first seal, if only he hadn't stood up.” They talked about that awhile.
By the time I entered Helen's life and vice versa, she had for five years been working on her treatise, “Incidents of Choking in Inuit Folktales.” She kept separate notebooks for this writing.
The central paradox of the treatise as a whole was that within the vast arctic landscape which, as ship's captain Alfred Rohrem McCally said in 1890, “seems to have more air to breathe than any place on earth,” many Inuit folktales depict people choking to death or frightfully close to it, either as the result of a shaman's malevolent reprisal or out of some sort of tremendous anxiety, or during a fight with a spirit who uses choking as a strategy of attack.
“I think I started noticing this first in Greenland,” Helen told me. “I was having some respiratory problems of my own—so I might've been naturally preoccupied and drawn especially to such motifs, but who can say, really? Anyway, I started to ask about stories in which people choked, and started to think about the subject, and then about three years ago really began to work on this thing. I'll never finish it, of course, and in a way it's too academic for my tastes. Just another way to type up the arctic, isn't it?”
“Your chapter titles are—I guess I'd call them melodramatic.”
 
“It went down the wrong pipe,” Helen said.
“What?”
“I'm sure you've heard someone say that, at the dinner table, or in a restaurant. You know, when a person starts to cough and taps their chest, and has a slight worried look on their face? You know exactly what I'm talking about.”
“Sure.”
“What I'm saying is, that's a fairly dramatic moment, and what I started to notice in folktales was that it was described—choking—as happening to a person both alone and out in nowheresville—I've always loved that word. I heard it in London. I was eavesdropping on some kids, musicians, I think, and one looked around, bored, and said, ‘This place is nowheresville.' Boy, was I pleased to hear that—So, anyway, I was collecting stories where some man would be standing out in the middle of nowheresville, and begin choking. Or he'd be standing among a lot of people choking in public. Some shaman or other showing off his wares—a very nasty scene. ‘Take that!'” Helen, sitting on her bed, thrust out her arm as if it was a fencing foil.
“Kind of a morbid subject, huh?”
“Breathtaking subject, actually.”
“I give that a D minus, Helen.”
“Deservedly so.”
We were just sitting around shooting the breeze as usual. While she was writing a letter, I was looking through her notebook. Some of the chapter titles were “Gasping for Air,” “Bird Bones in Windpipe,” “Blacking Out,” “I Need Some
Air,” “Dizziness—or, Feeling Dizzy.” Each title was in reference to a specific incident in a folktale discussed in an ongoing chapter in the treatise, but also it was apparent that Helen was in a way collecting American slang, phrases that delighted her—like “nowheresville.” Captions of life.
“You think it's strange, my interest in these choking stories?”
“A whole treatise, Helen, that's dedicated.”
“There are a lot of stories to be dedicated to.”
“How many choking stories are you writing about, for instance?”
“Oh, I'd say thirty or so.”
“Somebody gets choked in each story?”
“Yes, but I didn't hear very many stories in which someone actually died. A few.”
“Why do you think?”
“Because choking is
persuasive
. Like in that Noah story of Mark's, when Noah starts choking on a piece of blubber and the only word he can manage to speak is ‘Yes.' That way he agrees to everything he's asked!”
“Are you adding that story to your treatise?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“I'm having a lot of difficulty translating that story. But now that you mention it, when Noah is choking, it's both terrifying and funny at the same time!”
“The villagers want some of those animals and some wood, and he won't, as usual, give them anything, so they make him choke and he says, ‘Yes—yes—yes—yes,' and so he has to then give them some wood.”
“I'm having a lot of trouble getting that story right.”
“Boo hoo.”
“What do you mean, choking is persuasive?”
“Whoever is causing a person to choke usually gets his way.”
“As simple as that?”
“As simple as that.”
One evening—Helen had gone to sleep at about 8 p.m.—I read a section of the treatise more carefully than I previously had; her notes, her impressions, her folkloric anecdotes, extended disquisitions and queries, all were fascinating. And of course it's a gift to be able to read what a person has been working on for so long, anyway. On the bed Helen was breathing easily, and I hoped she was a world away from pain. To this day I recall a passage in her treatise, from a story she had translated into both English and—on the facing page—Japanese. (Reading it, I realized that Helen could most definitely have translated Mark's Noah stories more deftly—and accurately—into English than I could, let alone into Japanese. Probably into French, too!) It was a piece of dialogue between a devious shaman and an Inuit hunter who had become his adversary:
“I've just stuck a guillemot in your throat,” said the shaman. “Now, give me all of your best sled dogs!”
With this, the man opened his mouth to speak, but only the voice of a guillemot came out, “O-waahk O-waahk—” squalling voice of a guillemot!
The shaman, who could understand the language of guillemots, said, “You have made a good decision.”
He took all the dogs and flew with them out to the horizon. Then the guillemot flew out of the man's throat and the man took a lot of deep breaths. He was worn out. He went to sleep—right there, on the ground, he slept. As he slept he took deep breaths. When he woke he took deep breaths.
As I was reading along Helen woke and said, “Not reading my diary, I hope.”
“I was just waiting for you to wake up so we could listen to the radio awhile,” I said.
“Because if you read my personal diary, I'll ask Mark Nuqac if he knows somebody to put a curse on you, and bad things will befall you.”
“Tea?”
The motel office had a television, and on a few nights Helen and I watched. On one of those nights, Mark and his ten-year-old grandson joined us, along with Mark's half sister, if I got the family configuration right. Also present were a few other children. Everyone ate chocolate bars during the Laurel and Hardy movie, I have forgotten the title. Mark's half sister's name was Sarah, and while everyone else was talking all through the movie, she remained absolutely silent, while Thomas, the grandson, translated now and then whatever Laurel or Hardy was saying on-screen. The only words he didn't have to translate for her were “Stan” and “Ollie.” The plot took place in medieval times. Laurel and Hardy were dressed in ridiculous, frilly costumes. At one point, Ollie falls into a pond and Stan paces the bank anxiously vigilant, waiting for his pal to pop up for air. More time passes than any man, not even Houdini, could possibly stay underwater holding his breath. Stan now is quite agitated in his face-scrunched-up, inimitably comic and heart-wrenching way. Still, Ollie has not surfaced—he does not come up, he does not come up—until finally Stan squeaks the wonderful line, “Ollie, oh Ollie, come up, you'll catch a cold!”
I understood then from Sarah's Inuit that she had asked Thomas what Stan was so worried about, and instead of translating, Thomas faked a sneeze. Sarah caught the absurdity and laughed very hard.
BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me
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