The Faraway Nearby (17 page)

In the version Atagutaluk's husband told one of his children, the woman married a fulmar, though people nearby had it that the woman was married to a storm petrel. The dog, the raven, the petrel, the fulmar is a cold husband. In the version Atagutaluk's great-granddaughter Alexina Kublu tells from the stories her father heard from his grandfather, “kipinngullakpak&unilu, ugguaqtualuugalualiq&unilu.” That is, “she was extremely lonely, and very regretful.” In all the versions of the story, the father takes the daughter back in his kayak and the abandoned husband pursues them with strong wind and turbulent waters. The small craft begins to capsize.

The father, never very kind to begin with, throws the daughter overboard, and when she tries to climb back in, he chops off her fingers. “As the parts that were chopped off fell into the water, they became the sea-mammals,” recites Kublu. “There now were seals, and square-flippers [bearded seals], and beluga. But because the woman whom they called Takannaaluk [the horrible one down there] had no fingers she wasn't able to [use a] comb, and so her hair became tangled. Whenever her hair got tangled, sea-mammals became entangled in it.”

When the animals that were once her fingers got tangled in her hair, they did not swim up to where the hunters could get them. People went hungry. When this happened, a ritual was held; everyone gathered in an igloo; the shaman was tied up, the lights extinguished; and he began to sing in the darkness. Eventually he went under the sea to comb her hair and restore hunters' access to the game. Freuchen went to one such ritual in Greenland, and he describes an agonized, ecstatic, frenzied, writhing group of people inside a great igloo, drumming, singing, and a shaman who despite being tightly bound disappears bodily and then after darkness is restored, returns. The light is lit; Freuchen sees him there sweating, exhausted, and the shaman says with what seems to be standard Inuit diffidence, “Just lies and tricks. The wisdom of our ancestors is not in me. Don't believe in any of it!”

In the skeleton story, time runs backward and things are restored to what they were before; the woman lives and gains a kinder lover. What is broken can be mended, but what was human remains human, what was personal remains personal. In the story of the goddess of the sea, the heroine's needs are not met, but the walruses and seals are created, and the needs of the humans who tell her tale are addressed instead. It's not a fairy tale in which the wants of the individual are paramount. Damage and death are not undone, her fingers do not return to her body as flesh returned to the skeleton's bones, but out of them comes life and sustenance.

Atagutaluk's story is more like Sedna, in that the terrible things that happened are not undone, but she generated more life. Or it's more like Skeleton Woman because she became a skeleton near death and was then brought back to life. She was loved, was valued, was respected for surviving, because of the bounty that came from her. It's a story with some of the resonance of a myth, and it seems as if of events from long ago, from the dreamtime and the heroic age, though Atagutaluk's grandchildren are online and old acquaintances are on videotape.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient. Maybe Freuchen spoke too soon. Or maybe he mistook Atagutaluk's reluctance to distress a guest for blitheness about her ordeal. He seems to have even gotten the date wrong, because all other sources date the events not to 1921, as he does in his
Book of the Eskimos,
but to 1905. The woman who survived was very young, at the beginning of a long life with many more episodes to come.

No one ever stopped telling the story of the woman who survived somewhere near Igloolik after a terrible thaw in 1905. Freuchen didn't name the wife of his friend Patloq, or Palluq, who discovered the starving woman or women. Patloq's wife was named Tagurnaaq, and she told the story herself, powerfully, with the sense of tragedy and oration of a great dramatist or a saga-teller, to Freuchen's traveling companion, the part Greenlandic-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen. Tagurnaaq's version begins with her husband, who had the gift of prophetic dreams, dreaming of one of his friends being eaten by his nearest kin. They were out traveling, and their sledge kept getting stuck all day, which she viewed as ominous. They arrived at a country of deep snow.

“Then we heard a noise. We could not make out what it was; sometimes it sounded like a dying animal in pain, and then again like human voices in the distance. As we came nearer, we could hear human words, but could not at first make out the meaning, for the voice seemed to come from a great way off. Words that did not sound like real words, and a voice that was powerless and cracked. We listened and kept on listening, trying to make out one word from another, and at last we understood what it was that was being said. The voice broke down between the words, but what it was trying to say was this: ‘I am not one who can live any longer among my fellows; for I have eaten my nearest of kin.'

“Yes, we came to that shelter, and looking in, we saw a human being squatting down inside, a poor woman, her face turned piteously towards us. Her eyes were all bloodshot, from weeping, so greatly had she suffered. Palluq and I looked at each other, and could not understand that she was still alive and breathing. There was nothing of her but bones and dry skin, there seemed indeed hardly to be a drop of blood in all her body, and she had not even much clothing left, having eaten a great deal of that, both the sleeves and all the lower part of her outer furs.”

The skeleton spoke: “‘I have eaten your fellow-singer from the feasting, him with whom you used to sing when we were gathered in the great house at a feast.' My husband was so moved at the sight of this living skeleton, which had once been a young woman, that it was long before he knew what to answer. At last he said: ‘You had the will to live, therefore you live.'” In this telling, her fathomless distress comes through as it does not in Freuchen's versions.

The story recalls extermination camp narratives of extreme starvation, of how it warped and weakened the mind, made food an obsessive thought, drove the body like a demonic force, made the sufferer into something other than his or her ordinary self. Possessed by emptiness, Atagutaluk had starved alongside the frozen corpses of her family, she told Patloq and Tagurnaaq, and then one morning when the sun came out and a little warmth was in the air, the desire to live seized hold of her. “It was much worse than dying. . . . It could not hurt the dead, she knew, for their souls were long since in the land of the dead.” In this version there is no one with her; and her solitude is part of her suffering.

Patloq and Tagurnaaq, the couple who rescued her, had a daughter who says she too was on that grim expedition. Many decades later, she told a harsher version of the story than her mother and charged Atagutaluk with killing the other survivor. She describes the same kind of omens, the halting journey, a white partridge that called to them, and then she describes Atagutaluk as “a horrid sight! She was like a bird in its egg. She seemed to have a beak and some sort of miserable small wings because she no longer had sleeves.” She had eaten them. “She was the very image of an embryo in the egg.”

Atagutaluk's family told the story too. The story changed, and changed, and changed again. They went out in summer, not winter. There were no children with them. They were hunting caribou. The husband instructed her to eat him, his flesh a willing gift, like organ donation, like the sacrifice of Christ, like the story of the Buddha who took the form of a rabbit and leaped into the fire to feed his hungry guest.

Rose Ukkumaluk, a woman who knew Atagutaluk, told the story as she remembered it to a video camera fifteen years or so ago. Grief and empathy come through as she speaks in her own language with subtitles, her old woman's voice grave and a little gravelly. In this version, Atagutaluk survives alone, and there are no sleds or thaws. Ukkumaluk says, “She used to tell people to eat whatever was available. I used to eat with her. She also fed my children.”

Atagutaluk's great-niece Apphia Agalakti Awa, who was born about a decade after Freuchen came through the region, remembers her well. “She was the one who handed out the meat. If people were hungry, if they didn't have any food, she would split her food with those people and make sure they had some of whatever she had. She would make up little teas, little sugars, she would share with all the people in her camp and give them each a little something. She didn't want anybody to be poor. . . . She didn't want anybody to ever be hungry and she made sure that everybody got the food they needed. That is how she became a leader.”

No one died as a result of her actions, and many people lived. She was a benefactor to her own second crop of children, but also to the community. Baptized a Catholic in 1931, she took the name of Saint Augustine's mother, Monica. She became an emissary between the white Christian world and her own people. This might be why she became known as “Monica Atagutaluk, the queen of Igloolik.” She wore an actual copper crown of sorts, a band that went under her braids, and in the best available photograph of her, also holds a cigarette in the corner of her mouth rather jauntily. The caption on a photograph of her in one of the volumes of Rasmussen's
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition
says that the crown was made from the band around a telescope's tube.

Both the elementary and the high school in Igloolik are named after her, so she is a strong presence now. The people who knew her saw a long and rich life with a brief, terrible incident early on. Freuchen saw only a corner of the picture. The picture always gets bigger; there is always more to tell; one thread is tangled up with all the others; even when it stops, other threads carry the story onward, beyond the horizon. Though which version was true I do not know: sometimes I think Freuchen got an earlier version before the embroideries and enhancements entered in; sometimes I think Atagutaluk's kin were better listeners.

I had begun by being fascinated with a sled that may not have existed, and certainly did not exist as it was described in the contemporary account I read first in that room in Iceland. I kept reading, bought Freuchen's books, was drawn by him into his cheerful version of the arctic, learned a lot, became enchanted by him, then disenchanted, found his three versions, went further, found several others, found in the end that much of the story fell apart like that sled. Beyond it was a remarkable woman whose life was only accessible in the most general outlines. She was stranded, suffered, survived, begat, sustained, was remembered with gratitude and admiration. It was a life.

Freuchen nearly died of a sled that did not melt, not far from where Atagutaluk lived. He was traveling in the Igloolik region in the early spring of 1923, when he went out alone to pick up cached supplies and got stranded in a blizzard. He dug a hollow, covered it with his laden sled, and crawled in to spend the night with the skin of a bear's head for a pillow and a sealskin to cover the entrance. Later, in the darkness he found that the sealskin would not budge—ice and a snowdrift had accumulated over it—and he was buried in a small, very cold space.

At a loss for a tool he shat, fashioned a tool from his own excrement, waited the little while it took to freeze solid, and then used it to chip away at the ice. Finally, he used his lungs, emptied and filled, to heave the heavy sled away, inch by inch, breath by breath. Outside at last, he could only crawl, and he crawled for three hours to where the others were. One of his feet had frozen solid, and he lost it, and he describes the pain, the gangrene, and the nightmares.

It's a gruesome story in which he inhales his way out of a cave even more confining than the one he exhaled into being at the beginning of his life in the arctic. He continued traveling in the arctic and elsewhere, joined the Danish Resistance against the Nazis, worked on movies, wrote memoirs of his adventures and novels, but nothing ever compared to his youth in the arctic. He had two children by his first wife, a Greenlandic-Inuit woman who died of influenza in 1921, and his grandson, Peter Freuchen Ittinuar, was the first Inuit person to become a member of parliament in Canada, not so many decades ago.

There are stories that close in on you like the ice of his solidified exhales in that little house in eastern Greenland, stories you escape with inglorious tools and inhales, as he did the cavern under the sled, stories that fall apart on you like the melting sled that might not have ever existed, stories that help you navigate in storms and the dark, as the stories of others' lives often do. The versions of Atagutaluk's tale say as much about the tellers as their putative subject.

Though it was a vision of coldness and whiteness that drew me north, I found there the darkness inside a labyrinth and stories of warmth, including the story of a sled that melted, a story that itself became a labyrinth that had at its center questions about how to tell and how to listen.

T
here is a man who has been reading a book for more than five hundred years. He holds it open so that individual pages are splayed out, separated from each other. The big book requires both of his hands to hold it, and his head is bent down to study the pages, so his whole body inclines toward his reading, the way a mother's body curves around a child. The book is not wide open but open enough to search through, and so perhaps the reader has been searching for a passage for half a millennium. That the book is pure white and wordless doesn't matter, for his robes are white, and his hands, and in the pale face that looks upon the pages the eyes are pure white too. Or rather a warm creamy color that is alabaster after centuries of exposure, like a white dress after a long journey.

The reader is one of forty surviving figures of mourners from the tomb of Jean Sans-Peur, John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy (other figures were lost or destroyed during the French Revolution). They mourn a grasping man who died in 1419 and whom no one has mourned in earnest since before the stone was quarried from which they took shape, though the Carthusian monks at the charterhouse the Burgundian dukes established prayed for their souls as a matter of course. Surely the artists who carved the figures were happy at the chance to practice their art at its fullest and highest expression. It is themselves they've made immortal, their ability to speak fluently in stone, so that the material can say cloth or flesh or hair, can say sadness or contemplation or strength.

The small mourners—they're each about the height of my forearm—were exhibited in my city, and I went to see them repeatedly, thinking about my mother, about the chapter to be written, wondering about the draw of that whiteness, which was the whiteness that first captured my imagination in the Frankenstein footage of the man and his creation chasing each other across the ice. White like this, the color of mourning in much of Asia, is a kind of peace that is a little fatal, a little stark, the white of bones without flesh, of deserts, of the poles and cold, of the page without the words. It's the landscape of beyond, of before, and of after.

There is a joy in writing about or painting or sculpting pain or loss. The pleasure of seeing into the life of things is one of the least celebrated and most important of the panoply of satisfactions. These tomb figures whose broad faces suggest kinship or a single model and whose draperies are simple and flowing all convey something about the nature of stone, of gravity, of emotion, and though they are supposed to be grieving they seem instead to feel the solemnity of death. Some of them are actually reading, the only employment other than marching in procession that the mourners' figures have.

The several blank books for alabaster eyes are there to tell ours that the readers and mourners have access to a story—probably the religious story at the center of life in the late Middle Ages. The here always exists in reference to the there, the there in this case that is bound up in books—handwritten in those days on vellum, the skins of calves, so that a large book was a herd of animals transformed, in our era printed on wood-pulp paper in vast numbers so that softwood forests are laid up in the libraries for those who have eyes to see. Vellum lasts longer.

The centuries have not done much to the alabaster reader. I often wonder at the endurance of the inanimate. The stylish suit in which my mother got married is dark blue, with white piping and strong lines. With its shoulder pads and jaunty cuffs that come to angular points, it looks like a naval uniform, and like a uniform it made its wearer look more formidable, much more so than the faintly rumpled army khaki and cap my drafted father was wearing at their city hall wedding. In their military uniforms they began twenty years together in which he won most of the battles, though she won the war. Or they both lost the struggle for love and subsided into war. Or won it, since they begat four more people to continue the experiments. But the man she married has been dead a quarter century; the woman who wore that suit has not fit into it in nearly half a century.

Human beings have come in and out of existence, metamorphosed, declined, and the excellent midnight blue wool serge is virtually the same as it was more than five decades ago. She wore it with a white fur muff in place of a bouquet since the wedding was in winter, and the animal pelt was a ferocious substitute for flowers. The tall, slender, dark-haired young woman who wore it is now stooped over, an ancient whose hair is whiter than the statues of the mourners, whiter than milk, white as snow.

Even memory of that day is gone; no one else who was there is yet alive; but the photographs show them as they were, everyone young, hale, ignorant about what the next half century would bring them. The photographs have curled a little but they are otherwise unchanged and unfaded. The pale pansy of her face under a jaunty little veil: if I could have warned her, I might have canceled my own existence.

The wedding ring she wore, gold with tiny round turquoises like the sugar jimmies that go on cakes and cookies, vanished long ago, but the gold must still exist even if the muff fell apart or was thrown away. Things that never lived don't die, and even the objects made out of the living—the paper from trees, the vellum from calves—can last for centuries. We wear out. The wool suit threatens to outlive everyone who knows or cares about it. And it is only wool and silk. Stone, metal, wood are far more enduring.

The whiteness of the page before it is written on and after it is erased is and is not the same white, and the silence before a word is spoken and after is and is not the same silence. Snow falls before and after the growing season; the era of my harmonious relationship with my mother flourished before my memory begins and after hers faded. She was herself being erased, a page returned to whiteness on its way to nonbeing.

She had long told a happy story, undoubtedly true, in which she wanted to have four children and did, and another one, equally true, in which she wanted to be independent, educated, emancipated, adventurous, and was full of bitterness and regret that all this had not transpired as she had imagined it. It had, in fact, mostly taken place, within the limits of her timidities, for she was fearful as well as furious and maybe the latter because of the former. She added up her life over and over, but the sums were never quite the same. Whose are? It's like measuring your shadow.

She seemed unable to hear me for so many long years but I spoke elsewhere; I wrote; I became someone else, someone audible, I filled up pages, trees fell for my books. I never heard her describe a dream, and I don't know what she dreamed of. Did she know herself in this way I didn't know her? What were some of the other stories of who she was? Could she have told it another way, and would that have given her another life? I can take this other self of hers on faith, because there are depths everywhere, but I didn't come into contact with it much and wonder if she did.

Ours was a game of chess in which she had made the first move and from there everything went forward. Or at least certain moves were made possible. And others impossible, or at least unimaginable then. It's always easy for outsiders to instruct one on what should've been done—directions for being fearless or saintly are likewise easy to issue, a little harder to execute. Like chess, there are rules, and breaking them takes momentum or confidence or a vision of other ways of doing things or all those things at once. Knights fell, pawns crawled, decades passed, then finally the chessboard went white, the pieces lost their names, the game came to a halt.

There's a chess set by the conceptual artist Yoko Ono in which all the chess pieces and the board are white, like those mourners five hundred years before. The two arrays of pieces mirror each other: the army at war with itself. Or not. Ono's was an artwork about the cold war but also about the way you can erase the very notion that there are two sides and merge, and surely we two who were so alike could have been one side. Or were. Sometimes people endeavored to play chess, that game of medieval warfare, with Ono's pieces anyway, struggling to keep track of whose piece was whose, so that the game resembled one of those autoimmune disorders in which the body attacks itself. The monochromatic set called for another game, one in which there was only collaboration or contemplation or that other kind of play that is anarchic, with improvised and evolving rules.

Finally, the war ended. She forgot the stories that fueled her wrath, and when they were gone, everything was different. When I was in my thirties and things with her were at their worst, I'd considered never seeing her again, walking away from the chessboard. I think quitting then would've frozen our relationship at its worst point. In this late era, well down the road labeled Alzheimer's, my mother lit up at the sight of me. I wryly said to one of my brothers at this juncture, “It's like we're in the same family.” It wasn't just that she was more pleasant for me to be around; she seemed to be more pleasant for herself. She had achieved something of the state people strive for through spiritual practice: a lack of attachment to the past and future and a wholehearted participation in the present. It had come as part of a catastrophic terminal illness, not a devotional pursuit, but it came.

•   •   •

There was an era in which my mother was a happy child. Perhaps there had been another one before my time. When that season came around again, the autumn after the apricots, it was hard to tell what caused it. I had put her on medications to calm her conduct and soothe her agitation, but it may not have been the medications. She had a degenerative brain disease that was rearranging her memory and her personality.

Whatever the cause, she lost her stories. They seemed to go quite suddenly—at least the stories about me. Nearly all the grudges, comparisons, expectations, resentments, ancient histories, and anxious anticipations seemed to disappear in that second spring of her life when she seemed to have lost as many bad as good things and achieved a new equilibrium and a new joy. Occasional odd things surfaced. But mostly she was festive, even if her jokes that I was her mother had an edge—as well as an edge of confusion about how this world was organized and how we were related. With Alzheimer's time runs backward, and given that, maybe I was her mother, and certainly I sometimes played a mother's part.

Liberated from the burden of her past, things became incomparable, each slice of cake the most delicious cake ever, each flower the most beautiful flower. She took pleasure in a great many things in the life that she was leading as a resident in a dementia facility and was often almost giddy with enthusiasm. Sometimes she spoke of how terrible the disease of Alzheimer's was, but mostly she didn't bring it up and seemed unconcerned and unself-conscious about her condition and circumstance.

There must have been terror and dismay early on, but I didn't see much of it, and showing up and steadying her ability to function must have reassured her even if we didn't go to the heart of the matter. I grew adept in handing her back her information about what she'd done, where she was, who she'd been, and who she was connected to, without breaking the surface of ordinary conversation, got used to covering the same ground repeatedly with aplomb, and eventually became competent at mostly one-sided conversations that weren't too off balance.

She was living in a safe place with assistance and attention always hovering, with art and music and exercise programs and meals and more help as her condition advanced. The caregivers were mostly immigrants, and in her early days there she often advanced a theory that emotional warmth could be equated to the warmth of one's country of origin. It was not a very tactful notion, but the mostly brown- and black-skinned people who worked there were infinitely patient and kind. It was, in one light, a gracious bedlam and in another a place staffed by hosts of angels and saints performing miracles for the benefit of the disintegrating beings in their charge.

She clung for the first year or so to a black-and-chrome radio about the size and shape of a large book, which she hid behind her bed for fear someone would steal it and listened to up close, sometimes holding it almost as though it were a pet or an amulet. Perhaps she hoped the radio would pour back into her some of the information that was leaking away. And then the radio was swept away in the journey downstream and was no longer part of her life. I remembered it with a pang myself, a pang that she changed so fast and that I myself adjusted without always remembering that she had been someone else not long before.

Occasionally I'd realize that her condition would have been shocking if it had arrived suddenly, but she traveled so slowly it often seemed imperceptible until we reached another milestone. During the early stages, she felt more like a parent than she ever had, in that she was affectionate and enthused about me. She was also a child who needed help with many things. And everything was vanishing, more or less literally. She was increasingly impaired not in her eyesight but in her brain's ability to interpret what her eyes saw, an effect of Alzheimer's called “agnosia,” or not-knowing. She told me early on that she recognized people by their voices, not their faces. Faces were gone. Reading had vanished long before.

She could not tell a change in the color of the pavement from a hole in the ground, or a carpet pattern from objects she might trip over, so she became a tentative walker, and we took to holding her hand or her arm when we walked her. It was impossible to know what remained visible. She often could not see what was waved in front of her face or set before her on the table, but once when one of her nieces had come to visit and was walking with us, she noticed a geranium petal on the ground and exclaimed over it. I was surprised she saw that tiny scrap of pink after months and years of hardly recognizing anything and picked it up for her.

For a while I would take her to an Italian restaurant in a shopping plaza where the staff was indulgent about the eccentricities of our dining. She thought their salads were the best salads ever and enjoyed the excursions. On one such outing, she wanted a lipstick; she often did in that era. I bought them regularly and they vanished regularly. We went to the plaza's drugstore, and I tried to show her some shades of pink. She didn't seem to see them even when I waved them under her eyes, so I handed the uncapped lipstick to her and cautioned her that she couldn't try it on but should look at it.