The Search for Heinrich Schlögel Read online

  11 After I left for Canada, my parents’ habits, I assumed, underwent little change. I was the one embarking on a new life. They carried on, engineer and doctor, inspecting and diagnosing, admired for their expertise at work and, in their spare time, for their talent at drinking and dealing cards. Then, without warning, they died within weeks of each other, he from bone cancer, aggressive and undiagnosed, she from a heart attack. Together my meteor parents fell burning from the sky. I was stepping back to catch my breath when I opened the paper and there was Heinrich Schlögel.

  7

  The Importance of a Plan

  The time came for Heinrich to enroll at the university, but he could not decide what to study.

  I can sympathize all too well. It’s not easy to select a path. Until a passion finds you, all is speculation. Had anyone, when I was nineteen and an architecture student at the University of Munich, suggested that one day I’d devote my spare time and resources to doggedly piecing together the life of a stranger named Heinrich Schlögel, I’d have laughed or wept. I might even have leapt on my bicycle (in Munich I had a beauty, a red one with perfect handlebars) and pedaled away, in the manner of Heinrich.

  The year was 1979 and Heinrich wondered who he was about to become. Karl Schlögel assured his son he would make an excellent historian. Heinrich’s mother happened upon a box of his photographs and urged him not to waste his artistic talents. Heinrich, lying on his back in bed, stared at the ceiling fan’s slowly rotating blades. Then one morning he got up and went to see his neighbor, the hops farmer, Herr Glück. Heinrich hired himself out as a picker. It was late July, and, the hops having ripened early that year, the harvest was about to begin.

  “Like a Greek or an Italian,” remarked Helene.

  “Yes?” Heinrich asked.

  “My son.”

  “Yes?”

  “My son,” Helene repeated, and smoothed the skin on the back of her hand.

  “Work,” he told her. “Haven’t you always said work is what matters?”

  In the ensuing silence, she removed the bread crumbs from the table. She did so using a small silver-handled crumb brush that had belonged to her grandmother, who’d hated her.

  At age seven, Helene had stood outside her grandmother’s bedroom door, listening.

  “You could easily have made a better marriage. If you’d picked a more capable man, you wouldn’t have these worries, would you?”

  Behind the closed door, silence gave way to sobbing.

  Helene slipped into the bedroom. Her gaze traveled from her mother’s damp and reddened face to her grandmother’s pursed lips. She stared into her grandmother’s eyes—eyes that fixed her in her place. Helene tossed her loathing across the room and it burrowed like a tick into the old woman’s flesh. Between the young girl and the old woman no affection was possible from that moment onward.

  “When I die,” Helene’s grandmother specified in her will, “my silver-handled crumb brush is not to be given to Helene. It must be given to someone else.”

  Helene’s younger brother inherited the crumb brush, which he did not want. He offered it to his sister. Helene accepted the crumb brush, so as not to forget the crime she’d committed against her grandmother, a crime of knowledge.

  The painful knowledge now confronting Helene concerned neither her mother (long dead) nor her grandmother (even longer dead). It concerned her son, whose entire future lay ahead of him, her son who had no intention of going to university, who was choosing instead to work in the hops fields and then to risk a pointless, solitary trek into the Canadian North. Helene watched her son leave the room. She could feel her grandmother’s eyes observing both her and Heinrich. Helene put aside her cleaning, went into the garden, and read from Krishnamurti, “Truth is a pathless land. . . . Knowledge is always in the shadow of ignorance.”

  His first day on the job, while anxiously waiting to receive his instructions, Heinrich spotted a pamphlet left lying on the window ledge in the farmer’s office, a pamphlet that Heinrich took without thinking and did not read. Distractedly, he rolled the pamphlet into a tight tube between the damp palms of his hands. Had he read the glossy text, he would have learned:

  According to our sources the first reliable mention of hops growing in Tettnang dates from 1150 AD, though commercial use did not commence before 1844. Today, hops growers elsewhere in the world use the name “Tettnang,” but only those hops labeled “Tettnang Tettnanger” may safely be assumed authentic. Rich, flowery, and spicy, true Tettnanger hops contain alpha acids from 3.5 to 5% and are used for bittering, aroma, and flavor.

  All through the month of August, Heinrich cut and loaded vines, heaving them in awkward armloads into a cart pulled by a tractor. The vines were four meters long, and heavy with hops that made his hands itch whenever he pulled off a cluster of the sticky cones. The tractor spluttered slowly through the heat, squeezing between the rows of towering, leafy growth. Left behind were bare, vertical wires, and the sky—a sky made newly visible, at once shocking and familiar.

  Heinrich also worked in the vaulted hangar, feeding the ravenous picking machine. In the hangar, the sun could not beat down on him, but the dense and biting scent of hops crammed itself up his nostrils and filled his mouth. Into his ears, the machine stuffed its voluble grinding.

  After twelve hours of labor, interrupted by one brief hour of rest at noon, his legs and arms carried him home on his bicycle, as if his body were an awkwardly shaped parcel that his exhausted limbs had discovered in a ditch and didn’t dare leave behind.

  Heinrich had a plan. By living at home, he could set aside most of his pay and in September, the harvest over, he would drive a brewery truck delivering crates of beer. Midwinter, he’d buy a plane ticket for Canada, and in July he’d fly away. This was his plan. To have a plan frightened him. By imagining the future, surely he was inviting fate to obstruct his desires? Yet in order to see beyond his present days of repetitive labor in the stagnant heat he required a plan. His plan was a good plan, as far as it went. How he’d proceed once he reached Fort Prince of Wales remained to be seen.

  According to the atlas in the Schlögel living room, Fort Prince of Wales stood across the river from Churchill, Manitoba. Would there be marked trails indicating Hearne’s historic route? Might he be required to travel by canoe, shooting rapids and crossing wide lakes? He kept intending to do the necessary research, to send away for maps and information. He wanted to act but did not act. He dreamed he was already there, in Canada, and walking.

  Then, without warning, one afternoon, in the hops hangar a Canadian appeared.

  “Jeremy!” shouted Jeremy.

  “Heinrich!” yelled Heinrich.

  They were each holding a rake. They leaned toward each other in an effort to hear over the gnashing of the machinery. Around their feet lay the scraps of leaf and vine they’d been assigned to gather and remove from the smooth, concrete floor of the hangar.

  “Where are you from?” Heinrich shouted.

  “Canada!” yelled Jeremy.

  “Canada?” asked Heinrich, wanting to hear Jeremy say it again.

  “Yeah. From Montreal.”

  Jeremy Burton, twenty years old, was crisscrossing Europe by rail. Several days earlier, he’d struck up a conversation with a local farmer while waiting for a train in the industrial town of Friedrichshafen, birthplace of the zeppelin. Jeremy’s cash was running low and soon he would have to find work. He told the farmer that he’d be happy to land any kind of job. By the time the train pulled in, the man had offered to speak with his neighbor, who might need more pickers. The following day, Jeremy caught a bus to Tettnang to start work in the hops fields. He caught a bus because train service to the small town had been permanently suspended by the railway administration the previous year, in an effort to eliminate those routes considered underused and particularly unprofitable.

  Jeremy, raking vines from the concrete floor of the hangar, was not surprised by his luck. That he’d so easily found work, in
a country he was merely passing through, did not cause him to reflect on his good fortune. Wherever Jeremy went, people took pleasure in helping him. Perhaps doing so gave them the impression that some small portion of Jeremy’s physical ease and glowing confidence might become theirs? He looked as if good luck followed him about, and it did.

  “How long will you be staying in Tettnang?” asked Heinrich, shouting over the machinery.

  “Another few weeks. I dunno. Something like that.”

  Jeremy grinned, reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out a packet of chewing gum, and offered Heinrich a stick, which Heinrich accepted and unwrapped carefully—it was the first gift he’d received from a Canadian. With the back of his arm, Jeremy wiped the accumulating sweat from his forehead.

  “Lugging these vines around from six in the morning, it really sucks,” he yelled. “But I get why you keep growing this stuff. Fantastic beer. Really fucking fantastic.”

  “I have also plans to travel,” declared Heinrich.

  “Cool. Where you headed?”

  “To Canada.”

  “No shit.”

  “I hope to follow part of the route of Samuel Hearne.”

  “Hearne?”

  The name Hearne meant nothing to Jeremy. The North, however, he knew quite well, a small corner of it. Heinrich could not have encountered a Canadian better suited to his needs.

  “When I was twelve years old, my father got posted in a place called Frobisher Bay, on Baffin Island. We stayed there two years. At first I thought I’d die of boredom, and it was so fucking cold. I took my model helicopter, my favorite one, outdoors. The plastic froze and split. Then I started making friends. They got me eating raw seal meat.”

  “What was the taste?”

  “Thick and bloody. When you cut a seal open, steam pours out. It stinks. But I got to like it, even the stink.”

  Heinrich nodded and listened.

  “All summer,” said Jeremy, “we never came inside or slept, we ran around all night. Or that’s how I remember it. Nobody’s parents really cared. By the time we left I didn’t want to go back south. So, July, next year, I’m headed north, Frobisher Bay, here I come. I would have gone this summer, but I wanted to see Europe. It was one or the other.”

  “And I,” interjected Heinrich, “next summer, I will visit Churchill, Manitoba, on Hudson’s Bay. Also Fort Prince of Wales, from where Hearne began his expeditions overland. I am hoping there will be trails for hikers to follow along part of his route.”

  “Could be. I’ve never been to Hudson’s Bay. You should check out Baffin Island. Come to Frobisher Bay instead. We could fly to Pangnirtung together. There’s this hike out of Pang that I’ve heard is amazing. You should forget Hearne and Hudson’s Bay. I’m telling you, Baffin Island’s the best.”

  Next to the two young men, the picking machine continued its violent chewing and spitting. First it tore the hops free, rolled the sticky clusters aside; next it dropped the hops into the drying-and-sorting room. And all the while, with a vigor and indifference that Heinrich envied, it ejected malodorous mulch into the yard behind the hangar, a spew of leaf and vine that accumulated in a mountainous heap called the “reek.”

  “Tettnang,” said Jeremy, leaning his rake against the wall and stretching his arms. “It’s straight out of a fairy tale. Not this big metal monster we’re feeding, but the rest, the streets and houses, the castle. I keep expecting a donkey to appear with a dog and a rooster, balancing on each other’s backs. ‘The Musicians of Bremen,’ right? I always loved that story. Wasn’t there another animal? A cat? I should check out Bremen. If there is a real Bremen?”

  They both stood there, laughing, and not until a year later would Heinrich wonder if they’d been laughing for the same reason.

  The blue jay is a songbird that has no song. Native to North America, it has a wide variety of calls. Its most frequent call sounds both harsh and jeering. The blue of the jay’s wings does not result from pigmentation, but from the internal structure of its feathers, which causes a particular light refraction. If crumpled, its feathers lose their striking color. The blue jay sometimes attacks the eggs and the young of other birds. Captive blue jays have been witnessed using strips of newspaper as a rake to draw scraps of food closer to their cage.

  —Raach’s Illustrated Birds of the World, sixth edition

  In addition to this information about the common blue jay, Heinrich jotted in his notebook, “I have made my first Canadian friend.”

  The two friends labored side by side, cutting, hauling, and loading the vines. A flow of questions poured from Heinrich. Jeremy, in response, provided stories. A snowmobile sailed over a rise, broke through the ice on a frigid river, and the boy who was killed was the cousin of a school friend of Jeremy’s. It was this same friend’s older brother who taught Jeremy how to track and shoot a fox. It was summer and Jeremy and his girlfriend were out on the land. They lay down on the moss, and she was fantastic. A polar bear wandered into town; Jeremy stepped out his front door, then stepped back inside. The father of Jeremy’s best friend shot the bear. Jeremy was out on a boat, his friend’s cousin steering between drifting slabs of ice, when a dense fog rolled in. By the time they found their way back, the engine had so little gas it could barely push the boat through the dark waves.

  Weeks elapsed and the harvest was nearing its end. Jeremy spoke of his grandmother and of how he’d been nearly expelled from school the year that his grandmother died—“Old history,” he said. He pulled out a map. “Here’s where I’m headed next.” He planned to hitchhike to Bremen, check out the North Sea, possibly cross over to Denmark, or head east to Berlin. Had Heinrich been to Berlin? No. Had he been to Denmark? He hadn’t. Once more, Jeremy urged Heinrich to join him on Baffin Island the following summer.

  “You gotta come. It’ll blow your mind. I’ll get the gear together. It’s not like we’ll need much. So long as you know what to take, that’s what counts, knowing what you need, not loading yourself down with all sorts of extra shit. All we do is follow the Weasel River. A friend of mine did it last year. You gotta come. Glaciers, moraines, waterfalls, caribou, fox, lots of animals. You’ll love it, man.”

  Heinrich traveled to Munich, and opposite the opera house he entered a narrow café where Inge sat waiting for him. Having arrived early she’d immersed herself in a novel, but she got up and embraced her brother warmly. She hoped he wouldn’t stay long. If there was a person she loved, it was Heinrich; nonetheless the unpredictable rhythms of his breathing and his indecisiveness made her nervous. She could feel her edges becoming murky as soon as the skin of his cheek touched hers.12

  “I’m going to Canada next July. To the North, Inge. I’m going to do it. I’ll have the money by then. But I’m not going to follow Hearne’s route.”

  He sounded as if he’d been running. She felt sure it was fear not exertion that caused him to be out of breath. Or, she wondered, was the fear inside her?

  “Where will you go instead?” she asked.

  “Baffin Island. Pangnirtung, Mount Asgard, the Penny Ice Cap.”

  “Because?”

  “I’ve heard it’s wonderful, and a friend of mine is going, a Canadian. We met working in the hops hangar. Jeremy Burton. I think I told you about him the other day, when we spoke on the phone?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Well, his name is Jeremy, and I’ve agreed to meet him in Frobisher Bay, on Baffin Island.”

  “You’ll have a fantastic time.”

  Heinrich felt his throat tighten. He had half hoped that Inge might experience a twinge of regret, a part of her yearning to go with him. But it was his journey, not hers, he knew this. Travel didn’t interest Inge. Travel was only what she wanted for him, and her eyes and mouth expressed neither regret nor longing.

  “You’ll love it,” she insisted.

  “Jeremy and I are going to meet in Frobisher Bay and buy supplies, before
flying farther north.”

  “You’ll have an incredible time.”

  “Will I? I’m abandoning Hearne.”

  “I expect he’ll survive without you.”

  “It’s a year away. But I’ve said I’ll do it. I’ve agreed. Does this make sense?”

  “Heinrich. Just go.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m staying here.”

  He caught the evening train from Munich, then the bus to Tettnang. Upon arriving home, he went directly upstairs to his bedroom and pulled Reise vom Fort Prinz Wallis in der Hudsonsbay nach dem nordlichen Weltmeer from his bookshelf. The heavy blue volume fell open at page 185.

  He sat on the floor and read how Hearne’s native guides had walked quickly and steadily, days on end, stopping neither to rest nor to eat. The soles of Hearne’s feet bled, small stones lodging themselves in his raw flesh. He staggered on, as best he could. He feared being left to die if he could not keep up with his guides, who pressed on, impatient to rejoin their wives. The wives had been instructed to wait at a certain campsite. Hearne hobbled on, a lacerating pain shooting up from his feet.

  On seeing a large smoke to the Southward, we immediately crossed the river, and walked towards it when we found that the women had indeed been there some days before, but were gone; and at their departure had set the moss on fire, which was then burning, and occasioned the smoke we had seen.

  Heinrich pictured Inge crouching, setting dry moss on fire, signaling to him her presence and imminent absence, sending by means of smoke her wordless decision to move on and the direction he must take to find her. He continued to read:

  By this time the afternoon was far advanced; we pursued, however, our course in the direction which the women took, for their track we could easily discover in the moss. We had not gone far, before we saw another smoke at a great distance, for which we shaped our course; and, notwithstanding we redoubled our pace, it was eleven o’clock at night before we reached it; when, to our great mortification, we found it to be the place where the women had slept the night before; having in the morning, at their departure, set fire to the moss which was then burning. [July 25, 1771]