In Fond Remembrance of Me (15 page)

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Authors: Howard Norman

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In early August 1978, a few weeks before I returned to Churchill, Manitoba, I stood on a cliff near Cape Freels, Newfoundland, and scattered Helen Tanizaki's ashes to the wind. There were a lot of seabirds around. Cape Freels is located between Newton and Lumsden, reached by tributary road off the Trans-Canada Highway. A decade earlier Helen had watched seabirds from pretty much this same spot, according to a letter she sent from Kyoto. She and her Dutch husband, Cees, had spent “a relatively calm,” as she had put it, final week of their turbulent marriage visiting outports in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Having flown to Halifax from London, they drove to Trinity Bay, where they spent the night in a village called—ironically, considering the dilapidated state of their marriage—Salvage. The next morning they drove to Cape Freels.
In Cape Freels they spent two days walking and bird-watching. “And nothing much else to speak of,” Helen wrote. They had intended an additional day of hiking but instead decided to turn back. “I look back on it as the saddest of belated honeymoons possible. Still, we were friends.”
From Helen's letters and our conversations in Churchill and Halifax, I gathered that Helen and Cees suspected that
they had been far too impetuous in getting married and felt they had aged badly within marriage. Helen had married Cees, an architecture student in Paris, when she was studying mythology and linguistics at the College de France. The marriage lasted not quite two years. “Cees was a nice man,” Helen had said, “but too fearful.” Ending the farewell honeymoon, they returned by ferry to Halifax, stayed near Historic Properties, and a few days later Cees left for San Francisco, where he joined an architectural firm. In order to finish her doctorate in linguistics Helen returned to Inuit communities in Greenland, Baker Lake, and other locales throughout the arctic. “Now and then,” she said, “Cees and I exchanged letters. Basically we got divorced through the mail. The letters were very formal. Then they stopped altogether, by mutual agreement, I suppose, but never declared.”
Helen's mother was British, her father Japanese—Clare and Seicho. Clare was a school nurse, Seicho an engineer specializing in bridges; they had met when seated by happenstance next to each other's table in a Kyoto teahouse. Clare had traveled with two other women on holiday to Japan; the other two women had stayed behind in Tokyo while Clare visited Kyoto. Helen was in fact born in London but raised from ages three to fifteen in Kyoto. She had a brother two years younger named Arthur, whom Helen called Artie-san. A week before her sixteenth birthday her family returned to Europe, where they had houses in London and Scotland. (Her father preferred Scotland.) “We took a family trip once to the Hebrides,” she said. By age eighteen Helen was fluent in Japanese, English, and French. “I was drawn to languages.” Arthur met and married Susanne
and settled in Kyoto, where he completed a three-year apprenticeship in bookbinding and set up his own business, which included the buying and selling of rare editions. Susanne eventually became Helen's closest friend. Susanne and Arthur had two daughters, both of whom were receiving a British education, in boarding schools.
In legal papers Helen had instructed Arthur, whom I had never met, to allow me to disperse her ashes specifically “off the Newfoundland coast at Cape Freels.” By telephone I suggested to Arthur that Helen's ashes be sent to the central post office in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and I would retrieve them there. I was in Toronto at the time and said that I would immediately leave for St. Johns. Arthur and I spoke for ten or so minutes, that is all. Within the first moment of conversation, however, I could tell he wished to settle things quickly. That is, he got directly to the point. I intervened with condolences. He replied with a curt “Thanks very much,” spoken with an accent that so resembled Helen's it caused me a veritable déjà vu. Anyway, my suggestion about where to send Helen's ashes was accepted as logical and expedient, given, as Arthur put it, “the narrow consideration of my sister's request.” I said, “Okay, then, Arthur. Thank you for calling me.” He rang off.
I knew from Helen's letters that she had certainly mentioned to Arthur a number of things about our friendship, what things, however, I'll never know. In my own letters I kept Helen apprised of my whereabouts. The long and short of it, though, was that I was not tied to any schedule; it was easy for me to set right out for St. Johns. Besides, what could possibly be a more pressing commitment? Still, when
I hung up the phone I wondered if Arthur perhaps wasn't bewildered, even angered, by Helen's posthumous assignation with me and Cape Freels—I wondered, too, what if anything she had shared with her brother about her imagining of the afterlife. Perhaps Arthur had preferred for Helen to remain in Japan.
In St. Johns I rented a car at the airport and drove to the post office. I signed all the customs forms and was handed a small package. Then I drove to Cape Freels.
The wind that day was truly wild. It literally whistled in one's ears. The sea air was ventriloquial: the keening of gulls seemed to ricochet off an invisible wall far to my left, whereas the actual gulls were sailing off to my right. Sailing and keening and crying and wheeling. In what seemed no more than a mile offshore, I viewed through binoculars Cory's shearwaters eddying in great numbers around an iceberg. Icebergs in August were not all that uncommon a sight in these waters. Every so often as I stood there a gust of cold wind seemed to directly sweep in from the berg, which looked capable of producing its own weather system. On the flight up from Halifax our pilot had in fact circled above this iceberg on behalf of tourists on board, taking us “just a little bit out of our way.” From the air it looked like a white planet floating in blue-black space. Now, standing atop a cliff, I could distinguish the darker blue of the current, but such was the iceberg's enormous illusion of fixity that I had to study it through binoculars to determine that it was actually drifting. Waves lapped up against it.
In its transport south to Canadian waters, wind had
eroded, gouged, and hollowed the iceberg; near the center of its upper tier were three vaguely human shapes; it all resembled a Henry Moore sculpture of an amorphous parent sitting with two amorphous children. Shearwaters, perhaps having hitched a ride for days, swirled from their shoulders.
Through bincoulars I noticed, too, puffins, the comical pudgy, gaudy-billed birds, excellent divers which old-time fisherman called “parrots of the sea.” However, the puffins mostly kept to the opposite side of the iceberg, now and then catapulting up into view, looping crazily, then dropping below the horizon of ice again. I looked at the puffins awhile. I thought about Helen:
Which bird
—
what type of bird are you
? Then I was aware of someone and turned to find an old scruffy-bearded fellow standing next to his battered pickup about twenty meters from where I stood. He was casting me a hard stare and had left his truck door open. He was lanky, slightly stooped, and wore a double layer of sweaters, black rough trousers, fisherman's galoshes, one buckled up to the top while the other was flapped open. Both of his thumbs were bandaged. Finally he sidled up beside me, nodded hello, leaned over the cliff, and in a thick Scottish accent said, “Dizzy down sheer.” Without another word he walked back to his truck, climbed in, and drove off. Yet he had struck a useful note of caution; indeed it was a harrowingly steep line of vision between the overhang and the sea where, in between floating woven rugs of slick kelp, I occasionally glimpsed a shadowy whale.
After an hour or so of mindlessly gazing at seabirds, I remembered a letter in which Helen wrote, “The Ainu people
of Hokkaido in northern Japan are capable of what they call ‘travel off the earth,' or something like that. They have shamans who stare at birds until their minds fly out of their bodies. Enviable talent, don't you agree?”
Of course I did agree, and right then and there at Cape Freels I wanted to attempt it, just somehow to show Helen that I wasn't afraid of the experience. To fly out of myself. But the sad truth was, my new hiking boots were hurting and blistering my feet; I was stuck in the quotidian world, the earthly domain.
Not so Helen, though. I unwrapped the brown paper. Tucked inside the cloth wrapping was a small envelope. I slid out its note. In her elegant English cursive Helen had written: “As long as you are there, you may as well look at birds. Try for a moment to set me apart from the others.” I opened the beautiful black lacquer box on which was depicted a flight of three Japanese cranes, then held it at arm's length above my head. Crosswinds scooped out the ashes, casting them like charcoal confetti every which way, and some even flew back into my face and across my shoulders. Gulls came by for a look; nothing they could use, nothing, for that matter, they probably could even catch.
Quite an unusual moment, I felt, delivering Helen's ashes to the place she had foreseen as the plausible afterlife for her, should it work out that she became a bird of the sea and cliffs. It was gratifying, surprisingly not sad. In my life I have regretted nothing less. What could be more of a gift than to follow dear Helen's instructions, to follow through on what, in a letter, she referred to as “my attempt at reincarnation.” I
myself did not believe in it, not just then, at least, but was privileged to convey Helen into her belief. Once all the ashes had disappeared, once I had brushed ashes from my face and jacket and boots, I read Helen's note again and then did something I had never done before or have done since, laughed until I cried.
 
 
 
YES AND NO
 
When a wooden boat floated into Hudson Bay, villagers went out in kayaks to it. When they got there, they heard coughing-choking noises. Then they heard “Yes—yes—yes” choked out of a man's throat, and saw a man stumble to the railing of the big wooden boat.
This man choked out “Yes” again, and suddenly gull feathers flew from his mouth and he spoke clearly, “Go away!”
“What is your name?” a villager asked.
“My name is Noah.”
“What's your boat called—what kind of boat is this?”
“An ark.”
“Why were you choking, why were you choking and saying ‘Yes'?”
“A man made white bird feathers fly down my throat.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He wanted planks of wood from my ark for a fire. He wanted the big animals below deck. He wanted to marry my wife.”
“Where is your family?”
With this, Noah's wife, son, and daughter stepped into view. “Here they are,” this Noah said.
“What sorts of animals are below deck?” a village man asked.
“Many kinds,” Noah's wife said.
“It's the shaman—a very powerful man—who made feathers fly down your throat. He's around here now. He stays for as long as he wants,” the village man said.
“That man took planks of wood and a few animals,” said Noah's daughter.
“Yes,” said another man, “when his fire has gone out—when he has eaten all the animals he took—he'll come back.”
“Will he go after my wife?” said Noah.
“Yes,” a man said.
“Better bring your family to our village,” a man said. “The shaman won't trouble you there. But he'll take all the planks—he'll eat all the animals.”
“No—I'll stay here,” said this Noah.
“Winter is here soon,” a man said. “That means snow. That means ice. That means bitter cold.”
The villagers returned home and winter arrived. The ark got stuck in the ice. The shaman came by once—he came by again—he came by again—he stole planks. He stole animals. He choked this Noah with gull feathers—he choked this Noah with colorful bird feathers from the ark. Each time Noah choked, he choked out “Yes—yes—yes” the shaman then had permission to take planks, to take animals. That is how it went. That is what happened.
One day, when some villagers visited the ark, they saw a few planks fly off the ark out into the distance over the ice. Then they saw two big striped horses tumble out over the ice into the distance. “What are those animals called?” a man said to Noah.
“Zebra.”
“
Zebra—zebra—zebra—zebra,” villagers said, trying out the word.
Out on the ice, the shaman killed the two zebras and made a fire with the planks. He ate some zebra meat.
“My ark is getting smaller—I'm losing my animals,” cried Noah.
“Give us a few planks, we'll take you to our village,” a man said.
“No,” said Noah.
Just then, some village men climbed onto the ark. They went below deck. When they came back up they were choking. They were spitting out colorful bird feathers. When they spit them out, one man said, “There's many strange birds down there—we choked on their feathers.”

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