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Authors: Howard Norman

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WOMAN TYPING ARCTIC
One evening when I stepped into her room in the Beluga Motel, where, from the dock, beluga whales could be sighted feeding in the Churchill River, Helen looked up from her typewriter. “Just now I saw myself in the mirror and noticed that my illness has turned my face into the face of my old aunt's,” she said in her slight British accent. “My old aunt hunched over her big sewing machine in Japan. Of course, it's my own face. And I'm obviously not bent over a sewing machine but my typewriter. Typing up the arctic, as usual, right? That's all I've really done with my life, if I'm honest about it … except for my brief marriage. Except for my brief marriage, all I've done is type up the arctic, and so have I had a useful life, then? You tell me. Go from place to place and type up my reports and my translations and write all those letters. Look at all the pages! Type, type, type.”
“Feeling sorry for yourself, or just philosophical, or what?” I said.
“The philosophical ones naturally get the saddest, don't they? I see a particular faraway look on a child's face, on a back road out in
nowheresville”
—Helen loved picking up the odd American slang—“and I can tell what she's in for her whole life. Oh, sure, I recognize the look. Some days I wish
I hadn't thought so much, you know? But I've wished that since I was a little girl.”
I looked around the sparsely furnished room, standard motel fare, I suppose. White walls. Helen had draped colorful Buddhist prayer flags over her bed; I had to ask what they were. There were stacks of Japanese novels bound in twine, placed on the floor and bedside table. The Underwood typewriter on the desk. Linguistics notebooks bound in twine. Diaries. Correspondences. Foreign postage stamps steamed off and glued in a ledger. Rubber-tipped glue dispenser. Steamer trunk with torn silk lining, secured by a buckle and length of leather belt. Notebook after notebook of ornithological jottings, birds seen when and where, the neat columns. Latin names in parentheses. Field guides in French, Japanese, English, Dutch. I think that I recall a German-language guide, too. She seemed to have set up this room as a kind of garret—except not in a Parisian attic under a sloping tiled roof, but in a motel surrounded by tundra and arctic sea—dedicated to thinking and writing.
It was already cold in August. “I seem to sleep better in cold climates,” Helen said. “I can't say why, really.”
Taped to Helen's typewriter was a quote in Japanese (which she translated for me) from Ryunosuke Akutagawa:
What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?
I then thought—right as I was looking at her—that Helen has a kind of unrequited love with the world. In a letter dated March 19, 1978, and sent from Kyoto, she writes: “I've been blessed in getting to work with dignified peoples in remote and beautiful parts of the world. I got to ‘dwell in
beloved chill sunrises,' as Basho said. I have heard wonderful stories. I have seen birds far from where I was born. But I wasn't given enough time. I simply wasn't. I do not feel forgiving about that. I'm referring to Fate. This dying, it's an insult. I'm grateful for what I was given. But I feel insulted.”
Before Billy Umiaq stepped into the Hudson's Bay Company store to buy cigarettes, he turned to his friends and said, “Don't forget me.”
How long might such a purchase take, five, ten minutes? His friends waited outside. Roughly ages thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they smoked cigarettes, struck various postures of self-doubt and self-adoration, agitated cool, as though alternating between conformity and sudden alienation that no doubt animates teenagers most anywhere on the planet. For these Inuit young people it was, I suspect, an average night in Churchill, Manitoba, whose chamber of commerce advertises it as “The Polar Bear Capital of the World.” They had all been to a showing of
Phantom Lady
, a film noir starring Ella Raines, Alan Curtis, and Franchot Tone. Drenched in moodiness, rain-slicked streets, and shadowy atmosphere—a classic noir thriller—the story revolves around the attempts by a character named Carol Richman to clear her boss of a murder he did not commit. His alibi, a woman who was with him at the time of the murder and has since disappeared, falls apart when no one who saw them together will admit it. As she stalks suspects to save the man she loves, Carol faces danger at every turn. There is a bartender killed
in a street brawl, a jazz drummer strangled as he is revealing information, an insane woman, and the psychopathic friend of her boss. In other words, just about as urban and therefore opposite a milieu as possible from Churchill, Manitoba.
Helen and I had front-row seats (two shipping crates) for the grainy print of
Phantom Lady
. It was shown on the cracked alabaster wall of the luggage room in the Churchill train station. There were about forty people in attendance. All the alienation and morally compromised obsession of the main characters seemed only to confirm suspicions of city life and put, as far as I could detect, the audience in good spirits. Throughout the movie, the old-fashioned crank-and-sprocket school projector had broken down only twice. That was luck. People sat on luggage of all shapes and sizes. Leaning against the back wall, Billy Umiaq and his pals were in constant banter, once in a while making a real show-off ruckus of catcalls and laughter. Everyone put up with everything. The movie ended and then it was time for a smoke.
“Don't forget me,” Billy said. The stars were out but it was not dark; September, daylight lengthening out into the night hours, a kind of crepuscular light presiding. I was standing with Helen near the store. I wanted to get back to my own typewriter. When Billy emerged he was already tapping a cigarette from the pack onto the palm of his hand. “Hey, how you been?” he said to his friends.
The heartbreaking, indelible resonance of those two simple sentences, “Don't forget me,” and, “Hey, how you been?” spoken scarce few minutes apart—words of departure and reunion; alas, Billy had come back from a journey safe and sound.
“Don't forget me” did not strike a cynical note but rather evoked the philosophy of precariousness. This is logical; life is precarious. That was useful knowledge. All one needed to do was to listen carefully to traditional Inuit stories to learn how suddenly life can change.
No single story can be said to epitomize this, but many share certain basic conundrums, narrative trajectories that move from order to chaos, from joyfulness to mourning. In such stories, for example, a man says good-bye to his wife and children. The day is sunny, the air crisp, life is fine and hopeful. A person can see far into the distance. “Good-bye, husband,” he hears. “Good-bye, father.” And this man sets out on his sled. The dogs are behaving well. The man has prayed for a successful day of hunting or fishing, the ability and luck to provide for his family.
Yet ill fate may well lie in ambush. In folktales the possibilities are endless. A ten-legged polar bear maligned or insulted long ago may choose to enact revenge on human beings—
this one
—not an hour's walk from the village. The ice may crack open and the hunter plummet after his dogs into a fissure. The arctic hosts a vast repertoire of spirits, some benevolent, others who would readily half-orphan the children of that hunter at whim. Most often the hunter makes it out and back and lives to tell the tale. Still, it is always a good idea to say, “Don't forget me.”
Each journey, as Buddhists say, begins with the first step, such as Billy Umiaq's step into the Hudson's Bay Company store. It is not paranoia to say that life is unpredictable; unpredictability is part of quotidian life. You temper it with a shrug, “Hey, how you been?” You acknowledge it and move
on. Neither the actual amount of time that has passed nor the distance traveled points to the central meaning. It was that Billy Umiaq had disappeared from view, and now he was back. Life had worked out for the best.
Helen could not afford to catch a cold or, worse, pneumonia; she had had pneumonia twice in eighteen months. We should have gone directly back to the motel. For some reason, however, I began a disquisition, replete with halfbaked theories, about the movie's larger themes and implications. Being someone who had difficulty disguising her immediate responses to almost anything, Helen grimaced slightly. “Where did this come from?” she said. “What are you talking about?” Helen was of small physical stature and yet responses registered on her face in big ways—I equated it to the outsized expressions required by background characters in an opera, as if the audience is keenly observing only them. Her face could fall into solemn disappointment, it could squinch up in disgust, it could submit to a rubbery pout as if gravity itself were forcing a clownish frown. There was a huge full moon flooding the tundra. I just kept talking—“ … I mean, the way she just knew from the beginning her boss didn't kill anybody. Plus, there were no—what? normal people in that movie. I guess it's all about how sinister life is, huh?”—until Helen finally interrupted me. “Howard Norman,” she said—she always used my full name—“you've taken a simple plot and …” She stopped, exasperated, scarcely able to catch her breath. We stood in silence a moment, breaths pluming ghostily into the night air. Perhaps from a distance we seemed to be squaring off. We heard a burst of laughter from near the store. “That's all,”
Helen said. “That's all. I guess I'm not up to discussing this now. I really enjoyed the movie, that's all.”
In memory it is a still life, “The Argument,” call it. Was it that, an argument? I think, yes, because our voices must have carried a certain pitch of annoyance. The Inuit teenagers kept looking over. Maybe they were expecting something more. They lit up cigarettes; they lit each other's cigarettes. Helen and I escorted each other to our separate rooms in the Beluga Motel.
Around 5 a.m. the next morning when I woke, I saw that a note had been slid under my door:
The movie was about a woman who did not give up on love. Life's gotten away from you—if you cannot see that!
“Looking back on it”—this is from Helen's letter of March 27, 1978—“I consider our friendship lovely, hermetic, difficult.” Helen had a way with words; besides which, I don't contest her opinion.
 
 
 
NOAH BECOMES A GHOST
 
There's different stories you hear about this fellow, Noah—in church and other places, you hear stories. Here's what I know happened. It happened a long time ago. One day, a big wooden boat floated into Hudson Bay. People from the village nearby paddled out to it in kayaks. Ice was just forming along the edges—it was almost winter.
They paddled out, and when they got to the boat, a man shouted, “Who's on this boat? Whose boat is this?”
“My name is Noah,” a man shouted down. “My wife, son,
and daughter are with me. It's too cold here
—
we're going away.”
This made the villagers laugh in their kayaks
—“
No, no, no
—
here comes winter!” With this, winter arrived and the big boat was surrounded by floating pieces of ice.
“What?—What?—What?” said Noah. “Get us out, get us out.”
“Not until the ice-break-up,” a village man said.
“Take us into your village,” said Noah's wife.
“How can you say that—how can you say that?” Noah said.
With this, Noah's wife, daughter, and son jumped into kayaks and were paddled to the village. Paddled past pieces of ice—pieces of ice were all around, bumping against the kayaks. When Noah's wife, son, and daughter turned to look back, they saw that the ark was now stuck in the ice!
In the village, Noah's wife, son, and daughter were given a place to live. They were given food to eat. They were given warm clothes. One night, Noah's wife said to the villagers, “On our travels, we had a lot of big animals on the ark. But then we got hungry. Our other food ran out. It was raining hard. The rain didn't stop. We ate some animals. Then we arrived at this place. We didn't know how to get home. We got lost up here. That's what happened.”
“Did any of the animals taste good?” a village woman asked.
“Some did
—
some didn't,” Noah's wife said.
“Give us their names,” a man said.
“Giraffe”-this made everyone fall to laughing. “Hippopotamus
—”
this made everyone fall to laughing.
But each day, Noah's wife was deep in worry and sadness. She stood at the edge of the ice to see if her husband was walking from the ark. Then one morning she called out, “Look—!” Everyone saw a polar bear walking across the ice. Following the bear was a
fox. Following the fox was a raven—walking, hopping along, flying a little. Following the raven was Noah, crawling. “What is my husband doing?” Noah's wife cried out.
A village man said to Noah's wife, “A bear walks along—it kills a seal, it drags it up and eats some. The fox might run in fast and grab a scrap or two. Then—next—next—the raven can fly in fast and grab a scrap or two.”
“Oh—oh—oh!” said Noah's wife. “So lastly my husband might get something to eat.”
“At least he's found a way to get something to eat,” the man said.
“If I pry off plank of wood, will you leave my husband some food?” she said.
“Yes,” the man said.
With this, Noah's wife walked out to the ark. She pried off a plank of wood and carried it back to the village. The villagers used it to start a fire. Everyone sat by it—and then some men went out on the ice and left scraps of seal meat and fish for Noah. First, the fox grabbed a little—it ran off. Then a raven got some—it flew off. But Noah got some food, too
.
Then it happened that the bear went a long time without killing a seal. It got very hungry. One day, it turned and chased the fox, but the fox knew how to get away. The bear scattered off the raven—and then it caught this Noah, killed him, out on the ice. When news of this reached Noah's wife, she wept—her daughter wept, her son wept.
More planks were taken from the ark. One night, Noah's wife stood by the sea ice and saw the ghost of her husband walking in the southerly direction. “Where are you going?” she shouted out to him
.
“Home,” he said. “Get our son and daughter—all three can come with me.”
“No,” said Noah's wife, sadly, but she said it. “You leave—I will stay here with our daughter and son. That is how it must be. That is how it will be.” Noah kept walking—a ghost going in the southerly direction over ice.
Noah's wife told everyone in the village what had happened. On her long travels, Noah's wife had seen many things. Her husband's ghost was one of them.

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