Nikolski (4 page)

Jonas hiked his bag onto his shoulder once again, took a deep breath, vaulted over the Rockies, changed river basins and plunged into Vancouver headfirst, amid the torrential rains that then enveloped the Pacific Ocean.

Noah made his entrance nine months later.

Legend has it that he drew his first breath in Manitoba, somewhere between Boissevain and Whitewater, near the railroad tracks, in a spot that, according to the road maps, is located at the exact geographic centre of Canada. The truth is that it was the exact centre of nothing at all: an immense forest of spruce stretched to the east, blackish peat bogs to the north. To the south, the Turtle Mountains, and to the west, a plain that appeared to end in China.

One thing was certain—the nearest ocean was two thousand kilometres away.

However unlikely this may seem, Noah learned to read from road maps.

Sarah had appointed him chief navigator, a job that involved keeping an eye on the cardinal points, the magnetic north and, incidentally, the contents of the glove compartment. He therefore spent the long prairie hours exploring that tight space smelling of dust and overheated plastic. Besides small change, unpaid traffic tickets and cookie crumbs, it contained dozens of road maps: Ontario, the Prairies, the Yukon, North Dakota, Montana, the West Coast and Alaska.
Grampa’s
glove compartment enclosed the entire known universe, carefully folded and turned in on itself.

Over the years the maps had become almost transparent, riddled with little gaps along the seams. By dint of deciphering this paper topography, Noah came to understand the alphabet, then words, sentences, paragraphs.
Road Information, Federal Picnic Grounds
and
Weather Broadcast
were the first words he was able to read. Sarah soon added the names of some Indian reservations—such as Opaskwayak, Peguis or Keeseekoowenin—while pointing out which of his great-great-uncles or second cousins lived there. Strangely, she never suggested they go visit their invisible kin. Noah did not press the point. His family tree
was, like everything else, a transient thing that receded with the landscape.

The day came when the maps were no longer enough to slake Noah’s curiosity, and he turned to the only tome in the family library: a battered book forgotten by Jonas when he had left in haste.

The book had followed an unimaginable trajectory. After several decades on the shelves of the library of the University of Liverpool, it had been stolen by a student, been passed from hand to hand, escaped two fires and then, left to its own devices, returned to the wild. It had crossed thousands of kilometres in various bags, travelled amid the cargo in damp crates, been thrown overboard but continued on its way in the acidic belly of a whale, before being spat out and retrieved by an illiterate deep-sea diver. Jonas Doucet finally won it in a poker game in a Tel Aviv bar one intemperate night.

Its pages were brittle, spotted with countless small rust-coloured specks, and if you buried your nose in it you could detect vegetation patiently endeavouring to colonize the depths of the paper. Not only was this Noah’s one book, but it was also one of a kind, bearing a host of distinctive signs. In the middle, for instance, there was a large, brownish bloodstain. Between a fossilized mosquito had made its home, a tiny stowaway flattened by surprise. And scribbled in the margin was the mysterious word
Rokovoko.

It was called the Book with No Face, because its covers had been torn away since the dawn of time. It was a kind of anthology of sailors’ yarns, whose first page reproduced a map of the Caribbean that never ceased to amaze Noah. How could such a mass of water coexist with such a small amount of land? It resembled a negative of the map of Saskatchewan, where there was a lake for every island, and oceans of grain instead of the sea.

The Prairies gave way to shipwrecks, sordid tales of pirates and the promise of yellow gold buried beneath distant coconut trees. The book was written in English and French, and sprinkled with bizarre nautical jargon and archaic expressions. Noah refused to be impressed. Though terms like Wa-Pii and Moos-Toosis escaped his grasp, nothing could prevent him from tacking among royal sail rudders, main topsail hatchways, and assorted bowline tackle.

It took him nearly a year to get through the Book with No Face, and that heroic reading left an indelible imprint on him. Never again would he be able to separate a book from a road map, a road map from his family tree, or his family tree from the odour of transmission oil.

Sarah and Jonas Doucet exchanged letters for several years. Their correspondence constituted a massive tongue stuck out at the most elementary logic, since
Jonas, like Sarah and Noah, never stayed put very long. After spending a few months in Vancouver, he once again headed north, constantly travelling from village to village, from job to job, working his way up the West Coast toward Alaska, never very far from the sea. Meanwhile, Sarah and Noah zigzagged across Saskatchewan, stopping to work in Moose Jaw, before returning to the suburbs of Winnipeg for the winter.

The combined effect of these two vagrancies made any exchange of letters highly improbable, and Sarah had to develop a special postal system.

When the time came to mail a letter, she spread the road maps of western North America out on
Grampa’s
hood and tried to guess where Jonas might be. For example, if he had just spent a number of weeks in Whitehorse, she figured she could pin him down in Carmacks. Then she would change her mind; Carmacks was too far from the sea. Instead, Jonas would continue along Route 1 toward Anchorage, and was probably about halfway there. She therefore addressed the letter to General Delivery in Slana, and put down Assiniboia General Delivery by way of return address, as she planned to be passing through there in the next few weeks.

With any luck, Jonas would receive her letter and send a postcard to Assiniboia; otherwise, the envelope would be lost in the void and Sarah would chalk up a miss on the road maps.

Plain common sense dictated that not a single missive sent out according to this hare-brained system would ever reach its target. Nevertheless, year in, year out, they managed to exchange a letter a month. This absurd correspondence lasted until the arrival of a mysterious postcard. Thirteen years later, Noah would still recall that day in minute detail.

They had stopped in Mair, a hamlet huddled around the parking lot of a thresher-harvester dealer. In the middle of the village, the three usual institutions marked out an equilateral triangle: the farmer’s co-op
(Founded in 1953)
, the post office (
SOC OR1
) and Brenda’s Restaurant
(Today: Fish n’ Chips, Dessert, Beverage, $3.95).

Having cast a suspicious eye on the restaurant’s menu, Noah and Sarah crossed the road in the direction of the post office.

In any one year, they would visit several hundred post offices, and Noah never tired of these brief stopovers. He loved the glint of the steel postal boxes, the worn counters, the faded posters celebrating the subtle joys of stamp collecting and, more than anything, the air of those rooms, redolent with crushed paper, ink stamps and the rubbery aroma of elastic bands.

While he soaked in the atmosphere of the post office, Sarah asked the clerk if a letter had come for them. The old man took out the box containing the letters addressed to Mair General Delivery—undoubtedly one
of the planet’s most underused addresses—and was amazed to find a postcard in it. He examined it unhurriedly before finally turning it over to see who the addressee was.

“Sarah and Noah Riel, right? Got any ID?”

As Sarah fished about in her pockets for an old health insurance card—she never had owned a driver’s licence—he nonchalantly studied the postcard. Noah, clutching the edge of the counter, stamped his feet impatiently and with mute rancour eyed the ungainly clerk’s burgundy tie and yellow, nicotine-stained moustache. As soon as Sarah presented her ID, Noah snatched the postcard from the man’s fingers and darted toward the exit.

Sarah caught up with him on the stairs of the post office, where he sat in the dust contemplating their thirty-five-cent miracle. The picture on the postcard showed a humpback whale in full flight, huge fins spread wide, a thirty-ton bird striving in vain to break loose from its element. In one corner of the photo, the graphic designer had added
I Love Alaska
in red italics. On the reverse side, Jonas had scrawled three rambling sentences that Noah tried unsuccessfully to decode— mainly because he was as yet incapable of reading anything except the words printed on a road map. Instead, he fell back on the stamp, which bore a seashell striped with the post office seal.

He cast a questioning glance at Sarah: “Nikolski?”

They eagerly opened the map of Alaska on
Grampa’s
scorching hood. Noah’s finger slid down the index, found the coordinates for Nikolski—E5—traced a long diagonal across the map and stopped on the island of Umnak, a remote chunk of land in the endless vertebral column of the Aleutians, far off in the Bering Sea.

He circled in blue ink the tiny village of Nikolski, at the western tip of the island, and then stepped back to survey the map in its entirety.

The nearest road ended at Homer, eight hundred nautical miles to the east.

“What on earth is Jonas doing there?!” Noah exclaimed, raising his arms skyward.

Sarah shrugged. They folded the map and went on their way without saying anything more.

After Nikolski they received no more postcards from Jonas. Sarah continued to write regardless, believing this was merely a turn of bad luck, but the months passed, the post offices filed by and the radio silence persisted.

There were a number of hypothetical explanations for Jonas’s silence, the most plausible being that the fragile miracle of their correspondence had run its course and that each letter exchanged throughout the years amounted to an intolerable loophole in the immutable laws of chance, which had quite simply regained their sovereignty.

But Noah had the stubborn personality of a six-year-old nomad, and couldn’t be bothered with the immutable laws of this or that. Fixing his gaze on the horizon, he mulled over many kilometres of grim thoughts, trying to imagine what in the world Jonas might be concocting in Nikolski. He must have become infatuated with an Aleutian girl and was trying to start a new life by obliterating all his previous endeavours. Noah imagined a flock of slant-eyed half-brothers and half-sisters, grubby little village-dwellers who might be monopolizing his father’s attention.

He repeatedly proposed to Sarah that they pay Jonas a surprise visit and catch him red-handed. Rather than returning yet again to Medicine Hat, why not go up the Alaska Highway all the way to Anchorage, and from there take the ferry to Nikolski?

Sarah evasively dismissed the idea. When pressed to explain why, she claimed that Jonas had already left Nikolski. Sometimes she went so far as to specify that he had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks. Usually, however, she said nothing and turned up the radio, pretending not to hear him.

Noah, who was not lacking in insight, suspected this was a bad case of cold feet—a chronic inability to go near the ocean. He was able to confirm his diagnosis through expert interrogation.

Had she ever been to Vancouver?

Pout of indifference.

Had she ever happened to leave the middle of the country?

She had never seen the point.

Didn’t she feel like seeing what there was on the far side of the Rockies?

Sarah’s uninspired response was that it made no sense to go see for themselves, since they had several road maps allowing them to answer that question, which was of no interest anyway. Noah, who had long ago exhausted the possibilities of the glove compartment, decided to put the question directly:

“You’ve never had the urge to see the Pacific Ocean?”

Sarah was content to answer, no, she had never really wanted to whiff seagull droppings or rotting seaweed. The reply, a clever blend of contempt and indifference, betrayed a poorly disguised tremor of panic.

Noah shook his head. In his miniature inner atlas he crossed out Nikolski.

Time rolled on to
Grampa’s
oceanic rhythm. Nothing seemed to have changed, other than the distribution of rust on the sides of the 1966 Bonneville. Sarah piloted, Noah grew and the trailer appeared to be forever in the grips of a circular curse. It was sighted in July near Lake of the Woods, on the Ontario border; on Christmas Eve it was caught unawares in southern
Alberta, in the empty parking lot of a People’s store; in March it showed up at the far northern edge of Lake Winnipegosis, trapped by a blizzard at a truck stop; in May it was criss-crossing southern Saskatchewan. Come July, it could be seen once again at Lake of the Woods, having returned to its point of departure with the migratory punctuality of a sperm whale.

Noah had made friends with no one—an unpleasant but necessary decision. When their trailer whisked past a schoolyard he contemplated the throng of potential companions. There were hundreds of them on the other side of the chain-link fence, playing basketball, complaining about their teachers, clustering in circles to puff on a cigarette. Some of them gazed yearningly at the road. The old silvery trailer exerted on them a strange magnetic force, like a Mongol horde galloping across the suburbs of a large city. With their fingers threaded through the grid, the captives envied the nomads.

Noah considered the possibility of throwing himself out the window.

He did not share in the Glorious North American Motoring Myth. To his mind, the road was nothing but a narrow nowhere, bounded on the starboard and port sides by the real world, a fascinating, inaccessible, unimaginable place. Most of all, the road bore no relation to Adventure, Freedom or the Absence of Algebra Homework.

Every fall, Sarah bought the appropriate school-books, and he would lock himself in the trailer to study zealously, in the belief that algebra and grammar represented his only hope of one day joining the real world.