The Search for Heinrich Schlögel Read online

  4

  Soon My Life Will Begin

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go there?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  The way she shifted in her seat strongly suggested she did not want to answer any more of his questions. He continued with his questions, all the same.

  “But why?”

  “You go. You’ll love it, Heinrich.”

  “But you’re the one learning Inuktitut. I don’t speak Inuktitut.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. I don’t want to go there. You’re the one who’s meant to go somewhere. You’re the adventurer. I’m not.”

  He wanted to believe in her vision of him.

  “Why don’t we go together? Wouldn’t you learn the language faster if you went there? How do you know I’m brave?”

  He wanted her to answer. He felt certain she was capable of answering any and all of his questions about anything and everything, if only she’d choose to do so. She turned around and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “I want to learn Inuktitut, the language. That’s all. The rest doesn’t interest me. Just the language.”

  “What about it?”

  “How it functions, its patterns, its sounds and rhythms, how its various pieces act upon each other, that’s it, that’s all.”

  “What makes this language so special?”

  “Why do you read about animals? Why hedgehogs in particular?”

  He blushed. A hot shame spread through him. His only answer was desire. He desired to read about them. Desire was not intelligence.

  “Anyone can read about animals,” he muttered.

  “So?”

  “You’re the only one learning Inuktitut. There’s probably nobody in Munich either.”

  “So? Don’t listen to everyone. They’ll poison your mind. You don’t need to be better than anyone else.”

  The subject of the verb.

  In English, we often use pronouns to tell us whom we are talking about in a sentence: I ate. Who are you? He left yesterday.

  In Inuktitut, we indicate whom we are talking about by using an affix that appears (usually) at the very end of the word:

  Nirijunga: I eat.

  To make pronunciation easier, when -junga is added to a stem ending in a consonant, the j changes to t:

  Uqalimaaqtunga: I read.

  Here is a list of the verb endings that indicate who the subject is:

  Nirijunga: I eat.

  Nirijutit: You eat.

  Nirijuq: He / She eats.

  Nirijuguk: The two of us eat.

  Nirijugut: We (three or more) eat.

  Nirijusik: You two eat.

  Nirijusi: You (three or more) eat.

  Nirijuuk: The two of them eat.

  Nirijut: They (three or more) eat.

  Remember: The j of all of these endings changes to t when they are added to a root that ends in a consonant:

  Isiqtuq: He enters.

  Samuel Hearne and Heinrich Schlögel—Heinrich allowed himself to believe in such a pairing. Heinrich hadn’t the patience to learn Inuktitut but he could walk, and far, without complaint. In his imagination, the two companions walked, they ran, they strapped on snowshoes, they paddled, they fished, they shot, they measured latitude and longitude, they chewed moose flesh, swallowed, then spat.

  The flesh of the moose is very good, though the grain is but coarse, and it is much tougher than any other kind of venison. The nose is most excellent, as is also the tongue, though by no means so fat and delicate as that of the common deer. . . . All the external fat is soft, like that of a breast of mutton, and when put into a bladder, is as fine as marrow.

  —A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean

  “Have you got a girlfriend?” Inge asked.

  Her question hit Heinrich in the side of the head, unexpected as a piece of chalk flung across a classroom. He shook his head.

  “Does that mean no?” she insisted.

  “It means none of your business.”

  “All right, all right. I just wondered.”

  “Well, you can stop wondering. I don’t.”

  But he did. He’d kissed a girl exactly one hour and thirty minutes ago and he could still taste the girl’s tongue, which had poked around the inside of his mouth as if determined to find something he kept hidden. Perhaps she wasn’t his girlfriend but merely someone whose mouth he’d wanted to feel pressed against his own. How did Inge, so often, know what he’d just experienced, without him telling her?

  It was winter when Inge stumbled on the diary of Abraham Ulrikab, an Inuk who was brought, along with seven other Inuit, from Labrador to Germany in 1880.

  She entered a used-books store, and there on a shelf stood Abraham’s diary, translated into German by a Moravian missionary.9 She brought it home. After reading a few paragraphs, she got up, crossed her room, and retrieved from her underwear drawer the scrap of old newspaper that she’d found inside the seat of a sleigh. The scrap of newspaper announced: “Saturday, May 5, 1880. Family of savages from the Frozen North draws large crowds at Berlin Zoo. On Tuesday last, the youngest Eskimo, a girl, six years of age, caught in her mouth and swallowed a raw fish tossed to her . . .”

  The fact that it was winter when Inge read Ulrikab’s diary contributed to what later happened, or so Helene Schlögel imagined. Winter, common and unstoppable, was not particular to Inge. Winter could happen to anybody. Only when Helene pictured her daughter’s turmoil as a winter of the soul, a naturally dark but transient season, was she able to experience her daughter’s pain as bearable.

  The question remained: How was it that this diary that Inge had stumbled upon could cause her such anguish?

  A painting says: I am. A photograph says: I once was. The small book included a portrait of Abraham Ulrikab, taken with a camera, which is to say a moment removed from the natural flow of time and made to point backward.

  Abraham Ulrikab, flanked by his wife and children, smiles into the camera. That he is holding a violin to some extent explains why he is smiling. Not only does he hope to pay off his debts with the money he’s to receive for crossing the ocean, but he has been told that he is on his way to Europe to visit the art galleries and museums that abound there, several of which have been grandly described to him. On the other side of the ocean, he will attend concerts in halls with balconies trimmed in gold, and he will hear musicians perform on the violin, the very instrument that he has been learning to play. He has not been informed that in Europe he is to be displayed in a zoo, holding a spear and releasing a savage roar from the depths of his chest.

  The twentieth century is approaching. It is only two decades away. The Berlin Zoo will sell many tickets; over sixteen thousand curious citizens will pay the entrance fee to stare at Abraham, his young wife, and their two small children. From Berlin, Abraham and his family will travel by train to Prague, where Kaufmann’s Menagerie will experience a pleasing rush of financial success until the untimely death of their new exhibit.

  First Inge papered the walls of her bedroom with the face of Abraham Ulrikab. Next she focused on his shoulder, his arm, his fingers wrapped around the neck of his violin; these she increased in size with the aid of the school photocopier. She wanted him and his family present when she fell asleep, and witness to her unjustified waking in the morning. She had not earned her right to wake in the morning. Abraham had not earned his untimely death. A brief paragraph on smallpox, provided by her parents’ encyclopedia, she pasted on the headboard of her bed. After that, there seemed no point in going downstairs. Clearly, little could be gained from leaving her room.

  Last week, I drove from Munich to Tettnang, where I spent a languid and rather futile day, not yet adjusted to German time. I was once again poking about for information regarding Heinrich. The orchards surrounding the town were in full bloom and their delicate beauty made me lazy. I learned nothing about Heinrich that I did not already know, and I got in my car and left.
r />   As the evening was mild and luminous, when I arrived back in downtown Munich I parked my car and wandered with aimless pleasure. In a shop window, a bolt of thickly ribbed cotton fabric was displayed—it made me stop. It was pale green with a pattern of white leaves, and I’d seen it before. But where? In one of Heinrich’s snapshots of Inge’s bedroom, a curtain hung, half drawn. I recalled the snapshot perfectly. Here on display in a Munich shop window, in the glow of a spring evening, April 13, 2013, was a bolt of the exact curtain fabric Inge’d so often tugged upon to shut the world out, the cloth that had so often prevented Heinrich from seeing into her room as he approached the house, coming home at dusk.

  I went into the shop and bought a snippet of the fabric. With my thumb I caressed the very texture of Heinrich Schlögel’s childhood—what unbelievable luck. I continued along the sidewalk, wondering if the word “luck” could be applied to a life like Heinrich’s. My thumb worrying the bit of fabric, feeling the many threads of its weave, by the time I reached the corner (and had to decide in which direction to further wander), I’d started to hate the word “luck” and its many divisive accomplishments. How easily luck becomes virtue, and there is no end to what virtue allows. The light changed and I crossed the street. I thrust the snippet of cloth deep into the pocket of my dress.

  9 From the Toronto Public Library, I’ve borrowed, repeatedly, an English translation of the German translation of the diary of Abraham Ulrikab, but I would like to read the very words that Inge read. I’ve contacted Antiquariat Axel Grass and several other used- and rare-books stores in Munich, with no positive result to date. I wish that I possessed Inge’s knowledge of Inuktitut and could read Ulrikab’s diary in the original. Doubtless she wished that the original were available to her. The challenges I’m facing in translating excerpts from Heinrich’s and Inge’s journals and letters into English make me painfully aware of how much is lost, no matter the efforts of the translator. How tempting to leave all Heinrich’s thoughts (and Inge’s) in German! Some of his words and expressions are so typically Swabian (“Geschwätz” for “gossip”). But with every sentence of Heinrich’s that I translate, I feel I am pulling him out of himself, planting him in the Canada that he came here hoping to discover. Am I? Possibly, of the three of us, Inge knew Canada best, shut in her room in Tettnang, the sounds and rhythms of Inuktitut trickling from a cassette tape, and her mind diligently scrutinizing Inuktitut grammar.

  5

  The Art of Survival

  Every weekend, Heinrich trained for his journey from Hudson’s Bay to the Arctic Ocean. Some days he went on foot; other days he cycled. On the days when he cycled, he went the farthest. In the Far North he would not, of course, have the luxury of a bicycle, but for now he allowed himself this small indulgence.

  He photographed the footprints of animals—rabbits, fox, deer—and, when possible, he photographed the animals themselves and he hoped they did not realize what he’d done, that he’d stolen a part of them. At home, a thief examining his loot, he arranged their portraits on his bedroom floor, and the more photographs he’d taken during the course of the day, the less vividly he dreamed at night.

  He could not ask Hearne if Hearne approved of photography, since the camera did not exist in Hearne’s time. He questioned the explorer on other subjects. He asked if Hearne approved of Heinrich Schlögel, and Hearne answered, “Yes.” Emboldened, lighthearted, Heinrich cycled farther into the countryside.

  “Anyone with information regarding Heinrich Schlögel or his whereabouts is asked to contact the police.” The article accompanying the picture in the newspaper (the first photo I ever saw of Heinrich) ended with this request. There was no overt suggestion that Heinrich was a criminal. The police simply wished to locate him.

  Would it anger Heinrich to know that my fascination with him was first ignited by a snapshot? This evening, scrutinizing the photo yet again, I catch myself imagining that Heinrich is one of the anonymous “Just Men” whose existence, according to Jewish mystical belief, is preventing the world from being destroyed. There must be, at all times, thirty-six of them. If one of the “Just Men” learns that he is one of the righteous, he ceases to be one, and immediately his role must be assigned to someone else or the world will end. This story appealed to me when I read it many years ago, in a volume of essays on religious myths. The difficult demand of anonymity; the virtue of undeclared virtue. Were I to find Heinrich tomorrow, he could not confirm being one of the “Just” without forfeiting his righteousness. Might Inge be one of the “Just”? Why must the thirty-six “Just Men” be men?

  All over Germany, the honeybee is suffering from memory loss. This is caused in large part by exposure to pesticides. Only with increasing difficulty are honeybees able to find their way home. They leave the hive to feed in a field then forget how to return to where they belong.10

  —Der Spiegel

  Heinrich, after reading the tiny article, rolled up the newspaper, which he stuffed into his bicycle pannier. He pedaled furiously.

  Soon humans, like honeybees, would be unable to find their way home. Soon he would have to shut himself in his room, as Inge was doing, to keep out the terribleness of the world.

  He imagined a world stripped of honeybees and memory: the name of every village and road forgotten, people wandering in circles, examining photographs of faces that others posted in bus shelters and in the windows of restaurants and on the doors of cars as aide-mémoire; everyone, old and young, would consult these faces in the hope of remembering someone or something, some crucial event or person in their life.

  Heinrich got off his bicycle, yanked his camera from its case, and shot the fields of tall and trembling hops, shot his feet laced into their shoes and planted on the road; he shot a pebble to the left of his left foot, and a crow in flight; he kept shooting, began running as he shot, breathless, zooming in, retreating, randomly snapping until his film ran out.

  At home, in the upstairs hallway, Heinrich tried to photograph Inge but she refused, just as she had the last time he’d asked. She hid her face. She hadn’t washed or brushed her hair in several weeks. Her skin had acquired the brittle, translucent appearance of an old person’s skin. Even to him she did not look beautiful, not until the lens of his camera told him what to look for. Between her raised shoulder and the knuckles of her hand, which covered her face, a fine tension traveled. He saw it quiver. He caught it. She separated two fingers, and her eye stared at him.

  Was his motive to expose her? To pin her temporally into place? He did not know his motive but suspected that he had no moral right to photograph her against her will. He wondered if his desperation diminished his guilt. What he desperately wanted was to know what she was thinking and what she felt.

  To Inge, the fate of Abraham Ulrikab sent a single message: How could she trust herself? She was both Abraham and those who profited by him—those who bought tickets to stare at him and, equally, the entrepreneurial German businessman who spared himself the expense and inconvenience of inoculating his Inuit “guests” against smallpox. In her new identity, as everyone and nobody, Inge could not continue and yet there was nowhere to go. Silence refused to let her in. Language performed its mischief in the recesses of her brain. Unwanted sentences kept forming. Voices argued. She could cover her ears but language inhabited her.

  “Why did none of my students complete their assignment?” asked Karl Schlögel. He set down his fork and provided his family with an answer. “‘Hotel California.’ They were out at some party listening to a song called ‘Hotel California.’” To Inge, her father’s fork became an object of fascination; a trident, a devil’s tail, it refused to declare itself definitively. Though it rested on his plate in a state of benign repose, it could not mask that its truest function was to stab, and to do so with beautiful efficiency. In her father’s fork, efficiency and beauty of form achieved a harmony that she, herself, could never hope to attain.

  When Heinrich was informed that Inge lay in a hospital bed, havin
g attempted to take her own life, he wanted to kill her. This was his first and most immediate desire. He was seventeen. If her aim was to desert him, then let her succeed and get it over with. He’d gladly help her. Live or die; she’d better make up her mind which of the two she wanted most. It wasn’t fair to keep him guessing.

  Heinrich went to visit Inge in the hospital and found her sleeping. He sat beside her bed. As long as he could remember, he’d believed that Inge knew something she wasn’t telling—an important answer to a question he couldn’t articulate and therefore couldn’t ask. But what did Inge know? Perhaps she knew only that she did not want to live. He stared at her hip. Underneath the blanket it formed a solid mound. How could he have listened to her all these years? She’d been lying to him, pretending everything mattered when really she didn’t believe anything was worthwhile. He reached to pull the blanket off her hip, to expose her, but stopped himself. He hadn’t the right to touch her. But he’d brought his camera and he took off the lens cap. She mustn’t be allowed to escape, to ruin everything, to destroy the tenuous balance that held their family together. He photographed her feet, the shape of them under the blanket. She was awake now and she curled up tighter, hiding her face from him. He shot her hip, her shoulders, and the back of her head. She shouted at him to stop but he refused. In his fury, he continued to pin her into the world by means of his lens. Her shouting changed to a scream. Her scream continued. The nurse arrived, and Heinrich was ushered out.

  Once safely home, and the door of his bedroom closed, he opened Brehms Tierleben. Midway down the page, the word “Mole” caught his eye. M. He’d always found the letter M comforting. Its two solid arches looked capable of supporting considerable weight. The letter M could not be easily knocked over.