In Fond Remembrance of Me (6 page)

Authors: Howard Norman

BOOK: In Fond Remembrance of Me

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He screwed on the top, which was connected by a necklace-thin chain soldered to the main body of the flask. He set the flask on the counter near the sink. “Okay, more coffee for me, I guess,” he said.

“The story of the woolly mammoths just disappearing under the iceâyou heard that one from your father?”

“Yes, go ahead, write that down. He watched me write,
Mark heard woolly mammoth story first from his father.
Staring at my notebook a silent moment, Mark finally said,”I'd read the Bible, I guess. But I wouldn't learn to read just to do that!” He laughed.”My grandchildren read their books to me, eh? That's a very nice thing. That's a very good thing.”

“Is it”âI searched for the right word and couldn't find
itâ
“strange,
hearing your stories read back to you, in English?”

“I think my grandchildren might like to read them. They like to read Eskimo stories in books. Other kinds, too. They go to a library.”

I showed him the depiction of Noah on the cover of my notebook. “This picture of Noah is from a book for children,” I said. “But how did anyone really know what he looked like?”

This, for some reason, made Mark laugh harder than I'd ever seen him laugh before or since.

“This Noah fellowâin all the storiesâhe'sâ(Mark used a phrase, which, with assistance from Helen and an early twentieth-century vocabulary list, I learned meant, roughly,
lost his human bearing).

“Yes, in your stories, Noah does seem very lost.”

“He drifted lost up here, and when that happens, it is a hard thing. When I was a boy I often heard of people getting lost. Lots of ways to get lost, eh? Some people fell right through the ice. Others got caughtâlostâin blizzards. That's how it was. I often heard about such things. You wait and try to think of a way out of it. You wait for some help to come along. Or you wait to die. Lost, eh? This Noah, I have him get lost in all my storiesââWhere am I? Where am I?'âhe don't know. He don't understand how to live up here, eh?”

“No, he doesn't.”

“A little like
you
! Youâhey, you remind me of this Noah fellow!” He drank some coffee.

To extend the metaphor, I was indeed adrift. First, not
knowing a language spoken in a household means in a basic sense you are infantalized; you can't tell what people are saying about you, you are adrift in a constant haze of doubt, the most familiar object (say a teapot) is unfamiliar until you know how to refer to it in a simple sentence. Secondly, I was adrift between occupations. I was constructing a frightfully useless resume: freelance articles on every subject imaginableâI even wrote about polar bears for a Florida newspaper, book reviews for a newspaper in Reykjavikâobtained a small grant here and there to collect folklore in Nova Scotia, was briefly in the employ of the World Wildlife Fund (to help interview Chippewa and Cree Indians in Ontario and Manitoba about the poaching and illegal export of bear livers for aphrodisiacs!), managed to get a high school lecture now and then, wrote several narratives for children's films about arctic animals. I was exhaustingly peripatetic. When all the while I wanted to sit in a hotel room and write novels. That was my big secret. At the time I was definitely without literary prospects. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the protagonist of my first novel,
The Northern Lights
, was named Noah.) Thirdly, I was adrift between an absence of romance and meeting my future wife, Jane, in 1981, though in Churchill there was no way to foresee that I would have such good fortune. Yet I knew I wanted a family of my own someday. Most immediately, of course, I was adrift in the desireâit felt like an enormous sea-of-desireâto comprehend as much about Helen Tanizaki as posible. To get my human bearing in relation to Helen. Because she was dying; this fact required that I more memorize her than slowly “get to know” herâthere was to be no
slowly
allowed.

“Maybe I am lost,” I said to Mark, “but at least I'm working with you right here and now at this table, right? I'm asking for help all the time, right?”

“I'm happy to be paid, working with you.”

“I know that.”

“That's good. That's good.”

“For instance, Mark, there's parts of the woolly mammoth story I need to listen to with you again, on the tape recorder, all right? Maybe five or ten times over again. I need help with it.”

“Helen can help.”

“Yes, she can, but I need to work with you on it more. What the museum is paying you for, remember?” I immediately regretted saying that.

I played the story and we worked on it for two hours; the notebook pages filled, we went through two more pots of coffee. Mary left the house twice, returning each time with something from the grocery store. Mark and I went outside for a piss a few times. It felt like a very productive day of work.

Then, toward suppertime, things went bitterly awry. Perhaps it was partly due to the exasperating work itself, no matter how much real progress was made; perhaps our ration of civility had been used up; there could have been any number of reasons. I had one more item to discuss with Mark, so I ventured forth. “Mark, when you say”âand I attempted to pronounce a passage in Inuit concerning the actual moment when the woolly mammoths are insulted by Noah and make the
decision
to flee underground (see “Why Woolly Mammoths Decided to Flee Underground,” p. 62)â“does that
mean that
one
woolly elephant went under the ice because it was insulted, or does it mean â¦?”

I was startled by the suddenness with which Mark scraped his chair back, rose with a fierce look of indignation on his face, and walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, his head hung like he had just received terrible news. Looking through the open doorway (there was in fact no door), I saw Mary sit next to Mark, all the while looking at me, offering two quick shrugs,
What happened?
Mary, I noticed, was wearing a brown button-down sweater over a pale yellow button-down sweater; the brown one looked to be directly buttoned to the yellow one, which was also buttoned its entire length. Mary turned off the radio, then spoke in low tones to Mark in their language. She must have convinced him of my best intentions, because Mark soon returned to the kitchen table. He sat down, sipped cold coffee without meeting my eyes. I grew quite anxious within this silenceâit felt like a standoff, but over what, I had no idea. I too stared away.

But in a moment I began more or less studying Mark's face in its repose. Because now he didn't appear angry at all; he looked at ease, if anything, lost in thought, as though some sort of erasure of conflict had occurred. Still, he did not look at me. But then he caught me studying his face. I must have been holding a blank stare, because he said, “Are youâaâ
hypnotist
fellow?”

“I apologize for staring, Mark. I think you mean that I looked
hypnotized.”

Mary sat down at the table. “We had a hypnotism fellow up here to visit at schools one time,” she said. “I mean to
Churchill, then up to Eskimo Point, a few other places, too. A magicianâhe was funny. He tried to hypnotize my sister. It didn't work.”

Mark now imitated a metronome by tocking his pointer finger back and forth, then affected his own “hypnotized” blank expression, a man asleep with his eyes open. Outside of the formidable verbal comedy of incident and dialogue in his Noah stories, this brief miming was the boldest humor I'd yet to experience from Mark. (Helen said, “He's one of the funniest people I've ever met.” We knew in Mark two different people. “He often makes me laugh. Perhaps you have to understand the language a bit more. Sorry.”)

Helen simply walked into the house without knocking. Mark said, “Helen, my daughterâwe were just telling this man, here, about something.”

Helen kissed Mary on her forehead, kissed Mark on the top of his head. She looked at the flask. “Having fun?” she said to me.

“We've been working all day,” I said.

“How did it go?” Helen said, directing her question to Mark.

“He caught a little,” Mark said. He half whispered something to Mary; they both abruptly left the house.

“I feel like shit,” Helen said. “Excuse my French.”

“I don't suppose you'd want coffee. It tastes like mud with sugar in it.”

“No thank you.”

I shut off the reel-to-reel, closed my notebook, put the pen in my shirt pocket. “Well, that's that.”

“Mark suddenly looked pissed,” Helen said. “Why, do you suppose?”

“I really don't understand it,” I said. “Things were going along nicely.”

“How nicely, Howard Norman?”

“More nicely than usual.”

“Of course, that's not saying much.”

“Thanks, Helen.”

She looked around the kitchen. “Oh, chicken noodle soup. The specialty of the house.”

“I actually had a meal with Mark. I didn't care if it was canned soup or not. Things were going really well. We were going through a passage, in that woolly mammoth story, you know the one.”

“Indeed, I do know it. It absolutely explains why we won't be seeing any woolly mammoths on the horizon. It absolutely explains it.”

“âand the mood changed.”

“Mercurial, that man. Wouldn't you say?”

“Sure, that's it.”

“But, look: you and Mark simply do not get on well at all. But I'm quite bored discussing the whys and wherefores of your situation. I wish to offer two words:
Boo hoo.
He sits with you most every day, doesn't he? Probably, you shouldn't expect much more than you're already getting from Mark. That's my word to the wise.”

We sat a moment not talking. Helen took a sip of my coffee and spit it out, “Pfwooo!” Spit it all over my trouser leg.

“Helen, you want to listen to the CBC after supper?”

“I'll have to type. But when I'm done, sure.”

We did listen to the radio for quite a while. An opera, then a documentary about a Jewish Dutch cellist murdered during World War II, including testimonies from people who actually knew him. Then we talked awhile. As usual, we discussed our work with Mark, dissecting it from every possible angle. I guess I was still a bit bruised from what had occurred that afternoon; Helen picked up on this. “If it helps any,” Helen said, “Mark asked me what I thought of your work and I said good things.”

“Yeah, but what does Mark himself think? Do you know, really?”

“Next subject, please.”

“Come onâconsider it gossip. You know how much Mark loves gossip.”

“He said you try very hard. He added that a baby fox tries very hard when it's learning to piss in the snow. But it often pisses on its own leg.”

WHY WOOLLY MAMMOTHS DECIDED
TO FLEE UNDERGROUND

I heard about Noah while sitting on a pew in church, but later, from an old man in our village, I found out what really happened.

Noah and his family were starving. By the time their ark had drifted up here, they had eaten many animals, but still there were a lot left. First, the ark drifted far north of Hudson Bayâfar, far north, up where walrus live. One day the ark bumped up against an ice floe. Noah looked out and saw walrus on the ice. He somehow
managed to kill a walrus. He somehow managed to get more walrus on his boat, too. The Bible says two, two of each animal, but by the time Noah got here, his family was so hungry, he forgot all about two. He got as many walrus on the ark as he could. He got a few seals on the boat. Seagulls, too.

It was said that all the people drowned where Noah had come fromâall of them! But up around here, there were many of us, many people.

The ark drifted into Hudson Bay. People saw it floating out there. They were curious. Some people quickly got into kayaks and paddled out.

“Hey, what kind of boat is this?” one hunter asked.

“What do you mean?” Noah said.

“What's it made of?”

“Wood.”

“We get wood that washes up after a storm. Driftwood.”

“Are you going to kill us?” Noah said.

“No.”

“What is the best way to leave this place?”

“Go back to where you came from.”

“I can't do that.”