Nikolski (5 page)

Twelve years had gone by since the postcard from Nikolski. Noah was now eighteen—the time had come to leave the trailer. All he was waiting for to set his escape plan in motion were the results of his Manitoba Department of Education exams. Once he had secured his grade twelve diploma, he would be off to university.

He was far less concerned with choosing his field of study than with the location of the university itself. It was out of the question for him to take up residence in Winnipeg or Saskatoon; Noah wanted to climb out of the glove compartment and vault over the horizon. But which horizon exactly?

South? The United States did not interest him.

North? Not a viable option so long as there were no plans to open a Central University of Baffin Island.

West? The West was riddled with holes, as trans parent and greasy as the road maps in the glove compartment. West was his father, that far-off and mysterious man who lived with an Aleutian tribe on an island lost in the Bering Sea, who ate raw salmon and heated his yurt with dried sheep turds—not the most edifying father figure to look up to.

So Noah would go east.

He wrote on the sly to a Montreal university. The registration papers arrived a week later at Armada General Delivery.

Noah was afraid to reveal his plan to his mother. He anticipated a tirade against Montreal, the port city, gateway to the St. Lawrence Seaway, frenzied metropolis— neither more nor less than a man-eating leviathan. What took place was nothing like that. Puckering her lips with indifference, Sarah watched him rip open the envelope.

“An
island,”
was all she bothered to mumble.

Rather than wasting his energy on futile rebuttals, Noah withdrew to the trailer to study the contents of the envelope, especially the program directory, a thick atlas of the various trajectories that now offered themselves to him. He began by looking for the Diploma in Applied Nomadology or the B.A. in International Roaming, the only disciplines for which he felt he had some talent, but there was no mention of any such degrees. He would have to make do with whatever other options were available.

Noah set about reading the directory from cover to cover, leaving nothing out, from Abstruse Sciences to Zenology, taking in Abyssometrics, Opinion Machining and Studies in Applied Mercantilism along the way. Overcome in short order by this soporific reading material, he keeled over with his face in the directory.

He resurfaced an hour later, feeling nauseous. He looked about, hoping to recognize his surroundings.

The kettle reflected a distorted image of his face. In the very centre of his forehead the cheap ink had stamped a puzzling word:
Archaeology.

Noah shrugged his shoulders, and surmised that there was no denying the force of destiny.

When Sarah finally emerges from her sleeping bag, the fog has lifted and Noah has prepared the breakfast table. They eat in silence, amid the herbicidal fumes rising from the drainage ditch. Noah takes a halfhearted bite out of his toast with honey and then leaves it practically untouched. Sarah is content with two scalding cups of tea.

Breakfast ends abruptly. Sarah scoops up the jar of honey and the teapot and folds down the table as though she feels a sudden sense of urgency.

While she organizes the departure, Noah checks his pack one last time; it contains the strict minimum, each item carefully considered. From the kitchen table, the Chipewyan ancestors follow the tiniest gesture with their usual incomprehension.

Then, sitting on his bunk, Noah slowly scans the interior of the trailer in the hope of finding a detail that by some miracle may have escaped his attention over the last eighteen years. He finds nothing, and ends his stock-taking with a sigh.

He tightens the straps on his pack, slings it over his shoulder and steps out of the trailer.

Sarah is already sitting in the car, hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road, in an attitude of both impatience and denial. Noah opens the other door and begins to get in, one foot in the car, the other on solid ground. He holds this position for several minutes without speaking, his gaze turned westward.

“Should I drop you off at the Trans-Canada?” Sarah finally asks.

Squinting, Noah contemplates tiny Route 627. Not much traffic in these parts, but what does it matter? There’s no hurry. Sarah reluctantly starts up
Grampa’s
engine. She listens to the low rumbling of the V-8, on the alert for any suspicious noises, while Noah searches for a memorable phrase to close this chapter of his life.

Suddenly, Sarah reaches over to the glove compartment, punches it open and grabs the Book with No Face.

“Don’t forget this.”

Noah wavers for a moment, partially opens his pack and squeezes the old book between two sweaters. The binding is as brittle as bone and the old map of the Caribbean comes loose, orphaned in his hands.

After this, everything happens very quickly: Sarah, without a word, hugs him with all her strength, and then boots him out of the car. Before he has time to add another word, she puts the car in gear and tears off in a clatter of gravel, with the passenger door still open.

A minute later Noah finds himself alone on the side of the road, backpack agape, an old map of the Caribbean in his hand and a ball of asphalt in his stomach. He breathes deeply, folds the map and slips it into his shirt pocket. Then he adjusts his backpack and starts walking east, eyes squinting directly into the sun, which is still suspended on the horizon.

A little farther along, three crows are pecking at the carcass of an animal. Noah shoos away the birds, which caw indignantly as they take flight, only to perch on the far side of the road.

Beached on the gravel, eyes turned skyward, a large sturgeon, a casualty of the road, watches the clouds sail by.

JOYCE OPENS ONE EYE.
The alarm clock says a quarter to five. She dresses in silence, without turning on the light. She pulls her duffel bag from under the bed, hoists it onto her shoulder and tiptoes out of the room. Her uncle’s snoring upstairs blends with the purring of the refrigerator.

Outside, a cloud of mist rises from her mouth. To the west, the moon has just gone down and the faint winking of the last stars can just be made out. Joyce sets out at a brisk pace and avoids looking at the neighbours’ houses.

A few minutes later, she reaches the high school.

She glances blankly at the schoolyard—orange gravel under the mercury arc lamp—and realizes she feels nothing anymore, neither disgust or contempt. She is surprised at how quickly the past and forgetting have fallen into step behind her. Twelve hours ago she was still a prisoner of this enclosure, yet now the place seems completely foreign to her. Not even the despicable Frost fence bothers her now. Of course, the
appearance of a fence changes considerably depending on which side of it you are standing. And on this side, the latticework is reminiscent only of the harmless grid of a geographic map.

She lengthens her stride.

When she was six years old, Joyce used to slip furtively into her father’s office. She would close the door without a sound, weave her way among the piles of Fisheries and Oceans Department publications, the boxes full of government forms, the catalogues of buoys, and withdraw from the cabinet some long rolls of paper. She would remove the elastic bands and unfurl on the floor dozens of nautical charts of every scale and colour, most of them covered with notes, calculations and hastily delineated fishing zones.

Joyce developed a particular preference for chart 274-B, an immense projection on a scale of 1:100,000 of the coastline of the Lower North Shore with, at its very centre, the tiny village of Tête-à-la-Baleine. She had unrolled this chart so many times that its edges had turned a parchment colour. When examined against the light, the blue of the sea revealed an intricate archipelago of greasy finger marks interspersed with currents, depth markings, buoys, seamarks, lighthouses and channels.

In one corner of the chart, near the legend, was this printed warning:

And, indeed, the local topography displayed an astonishing number of islands, islets, reefs, peninsulas, mirages, wrecks and buoys, as well as innumerable rocks that surfaced here and there at low tide.

While the nautical charts of the region showed an abundance of islands, there was at the same time a glaring lack of roads. This might have been put down to an omission intrinsic to nautical charts, whose primary function is to facilitate navigation, but the reason was much less obscure; the maps showed no roads quite simply because there were none. The 138 stopped at Havre-St-Pierre and resurfaced briefly at Pointe-aux-Morts. The stretch between those two points— 350 nautical miles strewn with the aforementioned shallows—was serviced by ship and airplane.

This dearth of roads produced two significant effects.

The first was that the people of Tête-à-la-Baleine travelled very little. They were content to practise a
seasonal variety of nomadism known as transhumance, which involved spending the summer on Providence Island, a few miles from the coast. This collective migration had in times past made it possible to move closer to the cod shoals during the fishing season. Which raised a question: Now that the cod fishers moored their boats at the Tête-à-la-Baleine municipal wharf, why had no one thought of establishing a summer village of their own on another island farther out, somewhere beyond Providence? After all, there were plenty of islands nearby.

The second effect—no doubt the most important—was that Joyce, absorbed in her father’s nautical charts, did not set foot outside her village before the age of twelve.

Joyce’s mother had died a week after giving birth, reportedly because the head of a capelin had got trapped in her bronchial tube. The details of the story were subject to minor variations. At times it was said to have been a cod vertebra in the lungs, or a herring bone in the windpipe—but one thing was beyond dispute: she had been a victim of the sea.

As Joyce’s father had never wanted to remarry, she remained an orphan and an only child, captain and commander under God, in other words, in charge of preparing the meals, cleaning the house and doing her homework by herself, all of which she performed as a
matter of course by the time she was six. Cooking meant boiling or frying the incidental catches her father would bring home. As for the housekeeping, Joyce botched this job shamelessly. Her father looked with forbearance on the abiding mess.

But the most gruelling of all these chores was putting up with her father’s family, an assortment of inquisitorial aunts, rowdy cousins and boisterous uncles who were apt to drop in at the slightest opportunity. Joyce’s father, a big-hearted man, could not bring himself to turn out his brothers and brothers-in-law; they entered the house as if it were theirs, invited themselves for dinner, railed loudly against the cod quotas and the offshore inspectors, discussed the latest Japanese dietary trends and stayed to watch
Hockey Night in Canada.
(They were avid fans of Guy Lafleur.)