I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (14 page)

He jammed his thumbs up into my nostrils and pushed me so hard that I stumbled backwards. This was shockingly painful. I took this to mean that my request had been denied. He said, “You walk backwards well. Why not walk backwards home now.” I told him that my home was thousands of miles away. He said, “Start now before the bad weather.” Later I was told by a bystander that I had misinterpreted what the
angakok
had muttered. What he actually said was, “Start now before I bring in bad weather.”

In Pangnirtung I worked with storytellers in the morning and spent the afternoons transcribing tapes, getting help with vocabulary, filling notebooks, and walking around town and its outskirts. I especially enjoyed visiting the cemetery, where simple white crosses were bowed daily by wind off the sea. Every time I visited late in the afternoon, I saw an elderly woman dressed in winter bundling who would walk from cross to cross, setting them upright again, tapping them down with a hammer.

Though I never asked, I assumed this was her daily task, perhaps self-appointed. What is more, she was the only Inuit person I had seen being accosted by the
angakok.
I observed him walk up to her in the cemetery, mumble something, and push her down. She rose to her feet and spit at him. This struck me as a scenario borne through the ages—it could have happened a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or a hundred years from that afternoon, a timeless confrontation with no discernible reason behind it, though I did not know what personal history there was between the old woman and the
angakok,
nor whether it had anything to do with her association with the Christian cemetery. No matter. This
angakok
was a nasty piece of work. He had arrived at Pangnirtung a menace and built on that daily. I saw this unfold.

In the few Inuit villages I had worked in before Pangnirtung, recording, transcribing, and translating oral literature had given me a lens into the mental culture and mythic history of a community, although that is putting things in too academic a light. But in Pangnirtung it didn't work out that way. Every moment in that village seemed off-kilter somehow; I could not get any real purchase on life there. In Pangnirtung, the stories themselves seemed natural forces to be dealt with. They had put my nerves on edge.

Fairly early in the translation process I began to feel that despite an increasing fluency in the language, I was ill equipped to perform my work with any semblance of poise or competency. Still, I was being paid a decent salary and all of this was a unique experience. I wanted to see it through.

But night after night in my dreams I reprised the Inuit narratives. It got to the point where I imposed insomnia on myself, preferring not to sleep in order to avoid that endless loop of stories. This was my situation; I had to look at it directly. Finally a person has to sleep—but I wasn't sleeping, not really. Brief naps here and there, no more than fifteen minutes at a time, for six, seven, eight days running. It was not so much my drinking too much black coffee as it was that the characters in my dreams—the characters in the Inuit folktales—were constantly drinking black coffee.

Strange but true. Sometimes they ate coffee grounds.

Stenciled in outsize black lettering on the side of the convenience store,— in both Inuit phonetics and English, were the words
Blessed Be the Cheerful Buyer.
Accompanying the words was the painted figure of Jesus handing some Canadian dollar bills to a merchant. On closer inspection, this Jesus had an uncanny resemblance to the rock-and-roll legend Jim Morrison (perhaps the sign painter was a fan). The store carried all manner of goods and necessities: winter clothing, canned foods, rifles, ammunition, pharmaceutical products. At the back of the store, on a chair next to the coal-burning stove, I often sat and worked on the stories.

One late afternoon, Michael Pootgoik, who was about forty and who managed the store, showed me some snow globes he had just unpacked from a shipment delivered by mail plane, along a route that originated in Winnipeg and serviced many Arctic villages, including Churchill. The pilot's name was François Denny; he had gone into the store to take a nap on a cot in the supply room. “He snores like a walrus,” Michael said. “I have to put the radio on.”

There were two dozen glass snow globes in the shipment. Each contained a diorama of an indoor or outdoor scene in miniature. As he dusted each globe with a moistened cloth and inspected it for hairline cracks, Michael also turned it upside down and then right side up so that the fabricated snowflakes inside fell like confetti on the interior tableau. There was a Christmastime village, perhaps somewhere in New England, with a Christmas tree in the town square decorated with angels; children sang carols on the porch of a house. There was a hunter wearing a checked flannel shirt, black trousers, snow boots, and a thick fur hat, aiming his rifle at a buck with its head turned upward to the falling snow. There was a line of three hula dancers wearing grass skirts and no blouses, their breasts hidden by extravagant leis (seeing these Hawaiians in the snow made us both laugh). There was Little Red Riding Hood pursued by the Big Bad Wolf. There was—my favorite—a string quartet sitting in individual chairs on a bandstand in the middle of a tree-lined park. There was a blacksmith shaping a piece of iron in his shop, which was shown in cutaway relief, complete with bellows and hammers and tongs. There were ice-fishing shacks on a pond. There was a cluster of stars and planets on the ground, as if fallen from the heavens in their original array. There was a rural schoolhouse with children on its playground. And there were others I cannot recall.

“Most every family in Pangnirtung has one of these,” Michael said.

The next day, I decided to purchase a snow globe as my going-away gift in reverse, for Mary, the five-year-old daughter of my host family. The moment I stepped into the convenience store out of the cold slanting rain that was forming black ice on stretches of road, I saw the
angakok
curled up in the fetal position on the floor near a shelf that contained power tools. I hoped that he was asleep.

Michael was working the counter as usual. I told him I wanted to buy a snow globe for Mary Pootgoik and asked to see the inventory. “I already sold four,” he said, “but I'll set out the rest.” He lined up the globes on the counter. I took my time looking them over. “Which do you think Mary might like best?” I asked.

“Why not bring her in and have her pick one out?” Michael said.

“Except that would ruin the surprise.”

“A surprise is over quick and then you still have to hope you made the right choice, eh?”

“Okay. Good idea.”

I left the convenience store purposely avoiding the
angakok.
I found Mary, and as she and I walked into the store she pointed at the shaman and said, “That man stinks. I'm not afraid of him. He can hurt me and he stinks but I don't care.”

Mary, a chubby little kid with the sweetest face and the brightest, most stalwart disposition on earth, should have been my teacher in all things having to do with that miserable
angakok.
At the counter, she was delighted to be able to pick out a snow globe. “I think you're giving me a present because I put a lot of sugar in tea when I make it for you,” she said. She sat on the counter, dangling her legs, and picked up snow globe after snow globe, studying each one with the utmost seriousness. Finally she said, “I want this one.” She held up the snow globe with the hula dancers inside.

I paid for the gift and handed it to Mary, who then walked out of the store. The
angakok
shouted something at her and she burst into tears and fled. She dropped the snow globe just outside the store and kept on running. I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket.

Back in the store now, I glared at the
angakok
and he glared right back. “Okay, got to deliver some boxes to the clinic,” Michael said. “Be back in a short time.” He lifted two boxes and a somewhat larger one, balanced them in his arms, and left by the back door. If I had been in my right mind, I would have followed him. But I just stood there next to the remaining snow globes.

Then I heard the transistor radios. This creeped me out no end.

I turned and saw that the
angakok,
whom I could smell from across the store, was sitting up and leaning against the wall. He was holding a screwdriver with the sharp end right up against an electric wall socket, as if he were about to jam the screwdriver into it. He was madly grinning, many teeth gone, and bobbing his head back and forth as if he alone could detect a lively tune inside the cacophony of radio static. Perhaps most arresting of all, he was holding a teddy bear. The store carried a variety of stuffed animals: owls, bears, tigers, walruses, seals, ravens.

The
angakok
stood, dropped the screwdriver on the floor, walked over to a shelf, and took up a sewing kit. He retreated to his corner, where he removed his mangy overcoat and began to sew the teddy bear to it by its four legs. Then he turned up the volume of each of the transistor radios. When finally he slid to the floor, a number of radio batteries fell from his coat pockets.

I do not know to this day what reckless impulse compelled me to deepen the antagonism between us, except that I wanted something to happen, something to end once and for all. I walked to the shelf that held the stuffed animals, found an identical teddy bear, looked at the price tag, and said, “Don't forget to pay the nine dollars for that bear.” I pointed to the stuffed bear he had sewn to his overcoat.

“You know how I'll pay for this bear?” he said, as if choking on the English words, as if he had rocks in his throat.

“No.”

“I will tell Pootogik I'm not going to put him inside one of those,” he said, pointing to the snow globes. “He will give me as many bears as I want.”

I did not know how to respond. He said, “But you choose—
you
choose which one you want to live inside. Right now—choose!”

“Keep the fuck away from me!” I said with all the force I could muster.

I walked along the side of the store opposite him and out the front door. Mary was standing not more than twenty yards away; she had been watching the store. I handed her the snow globe with the hula dancers inside. I attempted a little joke: “I wouldn't mind being in there with those hula dancers.” Which of course hardly registered at all with Mary, and she did not laugh or even crack a smile; she ran off toward her house.

Then I saw Michael returning empty-handed from the clinic. He walked up to me and said, “Did he steal anything while I was gone? I know he did. What did he take?”

Humiliated, dispirited, hapless, infantilized—you name it—my catalogue of despondency seemed endless in my interactions with this
angakok.
Maybe this is how it should be, I thought, this is what I deserved, representing as I must centuries of colonial intervention, or something like that, though I was in Pangnirtung only as a kind of stenographer for elderly people who told folktales that I fully understood to be indispensable and sacred to Inuit culture and history.

But this
angakok
couldn't care less what I knew or didn't know, or if I did or did not harbor good intentions. He wanted me to walk backwards two thousand miles south. So far he had followed me from grave marker to grave marker in the cemetery, muttered at me, spat at me, jammed his thumbs up my nostrils, and threatened to imprison me in a snow globe. I had to admire his inventive tenacity even while wanting him to disappear. Even knowing he might kill me. Part of his résumé as an
angakok
was that he had killed people.

He had won. Whatever battle we were having, he had won it. I could already feel myself leaving Pangnirtung. Such a beautiful place, really, but it had become impossible for me. Let's face it, I thought, I have become unhinged. In the convenience store Michael said, “This
angakok
won't leave until you leave.”

So I arranged for a flight out. The morning before I left, however, I recorded a story, which when typed out amounted to only a couple of pages. A woman named Jenny Arnateeyk—she was the elderly caretaker of the cemetery—told it, and I gave it the title “The Visitor Put in a Snow Globe,” which pretty much sums up the plot.

 

The Visitor Put in a Snow Globe

 

A visitor arrived and an angakok arrived at about the same time and things got bad right away. The next day the angakok put the visitor inside a snow globe. He got right to it. He didn't hesitate. Then the angakok dropped the snow globe through the ice.

The snow globe floated up again and could be seen just under the ice if you rubbed the snow away with the side of your hand. A lot of people did this, mostly children.

Some days passed by. The angakok said, “Have you noticed how much better the weather has been since I dropped that snow globe through the ice? Have you noticed how many fish have been caught? How much better everyone is eating these days?”

When children looked at the snow globe, they saw that the visitor was keeping busy. He had a little house in there. He had a fireplace that never ran out of wood, so he kept warm. It didn't seem so bad except he was under the ice. That had to be strange for the visitor. Children visited him every day—that must have been good for him.

One day the angakok said, “I'm going a long way to visit some ravens. Then I'm going even farther to visit some other ravens. When I'm gone, don't take pity on the fellow inside the snow globe. If you let him out, the weather will be terrible and all the fish will swim great distances away.”

But when the angakok left to visit ravens, the people in the village took pity, and they got the snow globe out from under the ice. Then the visitor was his normal size again, and he said, “Thank you. I was only visiting.”