Consumption (49 page)

“He can be a little humourless.”

“Oh my God, yes,” Pauloosie said, shaking his head. “Humourless Kablunauks. It kills them to laugh, sometimes.”

“Why did he come here?” Riri asked.

Bernard and Pauloosie looked at one another. Pauloosie answered. “To bring my mother to me.”

“It would resolve something that has been left suspended,” the old priest said.

“I don’t care one way or the other, if she wants to come, she can come. If she doesn’t—I’ve been happy until now, I’ll stay happy,” Pauloosie said, rising to pour more wine into Bernard’s cup. The baby was asleep long ago and Riri’s fish stew had each of them sated and at ease.

“How much longer will Balthazar stay?”

“I’m not sure. It has been what, a month now?”

“Six weeks.”

“I suppose he’s waiting to hear from your mother.”

“It seems like she isn’t interested in what he has to say. He could take a hint.”

Bernard shrugged. “He goes fishing with the men in the morning, and walks back into the mountains in the afternoons. He looks like he has more peace of mind than I’ve known him to have in thirty years. He’s getting so thin.”

“Well, it isn’t like he causes trouble,” Pauloosie said.

“And he always brings presents for Iguptak when he comes to supper,” Riri added. “You Americans. If I were as far from home as you are and someone I had known well showed up to visit I wouldn’t be pushing for his departure. He is very kind, which is the other thing that neither of you are saying.”

Balthazar’s letter had ridden the boat back to Papeete and then had flown to Paris, where its semi-legible address had caused a series of Gallic snorts, and then it was finally sent to Canada, where it made its way up to the Arctic after a series of layovers—and all the while Balthazar was sleeping, eating, swimming, and fishing six thousand miles away and wondering why she hadn’t answered even this news. But she hadn’t known the news, had only continued her life in Rankin Inlet, and gone to the meetings of the Ikhirahlo Group and listened to the plans that Okpatayauk (who had been paroled and was now back in the community) and Tagak proposed. She knew better than to cede her control of the company to her brother or anyone else, but neither was she interested in the details of the bookkeeping. What she thought about instead was Justine, who lived in Toronto, a production assistant at MuchMusic television. She spoke to her daughter on the telephone every day. And she thought about her father, now lost in his own memories, and her mother, dying slowly of lung cancer.

When she saw Balthazar’s name on the envelope she almost threw it out, assuming it would be another apology or, worse, one
of his periodic attempts at self-justification. She did not have the strength to address either. This is why she looked around for the garbage can as she removed the envelope from her box in the post office. Then she noticed the unfamiliar stamps, and the return address:
Poste Restante
, Hiva Oa, and these intrigued her and so she opened it. And as she read his words, in that crowded bustling little post office, it was as if she had inhaled a breath mint once again and she felt like she could not breathe.

She ran home, almost blind with emotion, and found the doorknob to her house and turned it and stumbled to the kitchen table, and pulled a roll of paper towels off its dispenser and blotted her eyes dry and read the letter again. She had a granddaughter.
Iguptak
. A little bumblebee.

As if he had any right to lecture her on maintaining
her family
—which had been cared for by him until half of them were dead. But what he said about Pauloosie was probably right. He was alive and it had been years since she had spoken with him, years more since she had held him. What had happened between him and his father was not knowable, she thought, and anyway what had been knowable was not understandable. Least of all, she suspected, to those two.

Simionie knocked on the kitchen door then and came in. He nodded at Victoria, sitting at the kitchen table. He sat down across from her and removed a whetstone from his pocket and then he took out his fishknife. He dropped a long glob of saliva on the whetstone and began running the knife over it in a blurred figure eight until the steel blade sang; he looked up then, at Victoria. “What’s up?”

“Balthazar has written again.”

“You should write him back, Victoria.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“What does he say?”

“He found Pauloosie.”

“Where?”

“French Polynesia.”

“Where is that?”

“I’m not sure. He wants me to come see him.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s way farther away than Winnipeg.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you think I should do?”

“You’re asking
me
?”

“Yes.”

He raised his eyebrows and looked back at his knife, swirling across the whetstone in his hand. “You have to go. I’d come with you, if you wanted.”

“I don’t want you to come.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know if Pauloosie wants to see me.”

“One way to find out.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I got call display.”

“What’s that?”

“My phone knows that it’s you calling and tells me.”

“You’ll have to explain to me sometime how that works.”

“I’m not sure I could.”

“Balthazar wrote me a letter saying he found Pauloosie.”

“…”

“Did you hear me?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go there.”

“Where?”

“French Polynesia.”

“Tahiti.”

“Near there, I guess.”

“I was there last winter.”

“What?”

“One of the producers took me, for a week.”

“Did you see him?”

“We never left the hotel pool. It was a music industry bash. And anyway, there are a lot of islands there, Mom. Like, thousands.”

“This one’s called Hiva Oa.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I’m going to get a passport.”

“Mom, I would have told you if I had seen Pauloosie, for Pete’s sake.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to be okay with the long flight?”

“That will be hard.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. Simionie offered to too.”

“Why?”

“We’re good friends.”

“To say the least.”

“Never mind.”

“You’re so restrained.”

“So you wanna tell me about your producer boyfriend?”

“I get your point.”

“Okay, then.”

“Well, you tell me when you’re back, okay?”

“I will.”

“And give my love to my brother.”

“Yes.”

Victoria got on a hired truck at the airport, the landing strip of which was comprised of a ledge of barely level earth dug out of the top of a mountain ridge overlooking the island like a hunting knife stood on edge. It had been twenty-two hours of flying and hotel rooms in Winnipeg and Tahiti but she was there. She knew how to
ask directions. When she was disoriented in Faaa, in Tahiti, she wished Père Raymond were accompanying her on this trip, with his effortless French and imperturbable demeanour. She tried to remember that language, stumbled, and was steered back into English by an officious gendarme, and was eventually led onto her airplane, a lumbering propeller-driven cargo craft that could have as easily been bound for the gravel runway beside Repulse Bay.

The islands swept past her: the myriad Tuamotos, rings in the sea, low atolls around turquoise lagoons, and then Nuku Hiva, the first of the Marquesas, and finally Hiva Oa. She stood the moment the airplane stopped moving, to the hissing of the attendant, and walked stiffly off the airplane with more relief than she had felt since disembarking from the government ship in Montreal.

The truck took her into town. The driver asked her where she was staying, and she asked him if he knew Pauloosie Robertson.
L’esquimau?
the man asked and she said yes.

She stepped down from the truck and the driver handed her her enormous suitcase. She dragged it over the dirt path that led into the low concrete structure that was the home of her son. Chickens scratched in the dirt and mangoes and papayas lay split on the ground, fallen from the trees overhead. Fragments of coral lay scattered all around. She knocked on the door. Riri opened it. There was a long moment of assessment and then Victoria introduced herself.

The two women sat down. Riri was carrying Iguptak and she handed her daughter to Victoria. Victoria hadn’t held such a small babe in her arms since her second son. At gatherings, when the children were passed around, she had long ago got into the habit of excusing herself. She lived in a sufficiently small settlement that everyone understood—better, arguably, than Victoria did herself, who had simply concluded that she had never been comfortable with babies. But there was no gracious way to decline her granddaughter, and as the child turned to her breast she caught herself even starting to offer what she could not provide, and she smiled at
herself and lifted her to her face, and smelled the top of her scalp and then sat back, smiling, looking at her son’s daughter.