Books by Margret Berendes
The Arabic Anka Pendant and Where Time is Round

 
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Where Time
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(Chapter 9 from Where Time is Round)               

          The windblown design on the tundra had not changed for several days. Thousands of identical little hummocks, evenly covered with snow, sparkled in the light of the moon. Vren had stepped out to the deck and felt the bitter cold descending from the sky into the white silence around her. She wistfully remembered the magic promise of this very night as a child in Germany: It was Christmas Eve.
          New friends had invited her over for the evening and she looked forward to meeting them. The car was already warmed up. She opened the house door, ready to drive off, when the telephone rang. Would she mind coming to help in an unusual emergency situation? A visiting friend was in an emotional shock since the news about his wife's suicide this morning. Vren was on call tonight. She didn't give this unexpected delay much thought and let her friends know that she would be late.
          She drove the several miles along the road which led across the tundra to town. After passing the last house she followed the Kuskokwim River for another mile until she came to the described onestory house, standing all by itself, and surrounded by a beaten-up truck, two snowmobiles and a boat, turned over and covered with snow. Right behind the house a yellow Piper Cub was parked on the bank of the frozen river.
          An older American man with a gray beard, in blue jeans and a purple wool sweater, opened the door, his wife, a much younger, pretty Eskimo woman with long black hair, behind him.
          "Thank you for coming," the man said. "A terrible tragedy. Lucy found dead in the village, shot herself this morning. Our friend flew in yesterday in his plane to visit us and this afternoon, ready for home, his son called from the village. Hasn't said anything since he learned about his wife's death, sits on the table, the same position without moving."
          "I am scared," the wife added. "He does not respond to anything, does not want to eat or drink. An old friend of ours, this is isn't him at all."
          "She is right," the husband said. "He usually copes with any situation better than everybody else."
          The couple led Vren through the kitchen to a cold, dimly lit room. A little spruce tree was leaning against the wall. The man pushed it over to the floor and shuffled it with one foot toward a wide open door, which framed complete blackness.
          "It's a shame, we did not get around to decorate it because, you know..." the man mumbled.
          She vaguely could make out a man on a chair, lying with his upper body across a table, both arms stretched out.
          "He didn't want to be in the kitchen with us, insisted on staying here," the woman apologetically explained.
          "I think we should let you be alone with him," the man said.
          His wife brought another chair for Vren and pointed to the open door where the tree was lying: "I'll leave it open for some warmth from the utility room."
          The couple had left without introducing her to their friend; his name had not been mentioned either. But what did names matter in this chilly darkness of nameless mourning with one table, two chairs and a stranger whose face she could not see?
          Vren moves with her chair close to the table opposite to the man, whose face is buried between his arms. His body does not move, she hardly can hear him breathe. She is reaching out for his hands and as she is holding them, a strangely familiar apprehension takes hold of her. And immediately she knows: it is the same bewildering sensation which had overwhelmed her in a bizarre, never resolved encounter with a red-haired patient some years ago.
          Vren wishes she could get up and walk around to ease this mystifying tension and warm up her feet, which are ice cold in spite of her heavy felt-lined boots, but she does not dare to move.
          Her eyes are now fully adjusted to the dim light of a little lamp somewhere in the background and she becomes aware of his beautiful parka. Skins of ground squirrels, mink and muskrats are pieced together and decorated with stripes of white caribou hide; the hood, loosely fallen over part of his head, is trimmed with brownish wolverine fur. He appears tall for an Yup'ik Eskimo and she wonders what the face of a man may look like, who flies his own plane and, unlike Eskimos, has curly gray hair.
          His silent sadness, filling the empty room, becomes unbearable and something pierces her heart. Yes, she has lived all this before: a door wide open and not, as typical for a German Christmas Eve, mysteriously locked until last minute; instead a dark room, yawning at her and filled with despair, no splendor of a decorated tree with countless burning candles, only an ordinary spruce, as if knocked over and hurt, helplessly lying on the floor. She is that child again who waits in terror for her mother, for somebody, just for anybody, to explain and make it all go away like a bad dream. But nobody comes. And then there are all of a sudden all these people, huddling around her mother, who is crying.
          "You have to be brave," somebody says, "he is dead." And somebody else: "Yes, it's terrible, he shot himself," but nobody pays attention to her, lost and all by herself helplessly crouching on the floor.

          And here is this man, frozen and motionless like she was long ago, overwhelmed by the agony of loss, which he cannot comprehend.
          Vren's unease has subsided, she suddenly feels one with him and though she had not seen his face, he is no longer a stranger. She spontaneously acts on what her heart tells her to do. She slowly loosens her hands from his, walks around the table, bends over and gently embraces him. His body starts to tremble and like a thunderstorm he breaks into uncontrollable sobs.
          She holds him and the child of long ago silently weeps with him, weeps for her own father, the woman she is now cares and consoles him like a mother.
          Time has moved along slowly and there is stillness in the room again. The man awkwardly lifts his upper body from the table, removes Vren's left hand from his shoulder and turns his head towards her. Their eyes meet and, unprotected and vulnerable for a split second, he allows her to look into his innermost self.
          She is taken with awe. She only sees his mysterious eyes and senses the complexity of a world of his own making: the Eskimo hunter of an ancient culture on the distant tundra and icy ocean, the modern man with a bush plane, a father and husband, mourning for his dead wife.
          But his pride interferes, in his loneliness of this dark hour he rejects her compassion, invisible curtains suddenly veil his eyes and disrupt their intuitive communication of moments before. He wants to ignore her and be ignored, he wants them to be strangers again.

          He abruptly stood up: "Please leave." His voice was shaky and rough. He walked away from her to the window on the other side of the room and with his back toward her he said: "Go now!" This was an order.
          Deeply hurt, Vren left the room, left the house and without talking to the couple, entered the street. She looked up to the moon and tears came to her eyes. Christmas Eve had turned into gray nothingness.

          Vren did not join her friends. She drove straight home. After a bath to warm up her shivering body she sat down next to the big window in the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine and followed the silvery line of the tundra into the fleeting distance. The night was crystal clear and as her eyes outlined against the black sky the little white hill with the two spruce trees, that pingo she loved so much, she remembered the first poem she ever wrote, more correctly her and her father's poem. She must have been five years old or so when just three lines seemed to have created themselves in her little mind and beckoned for completion by her father.
          It had become their poem. A few years later he took his life. Her linden tree had stood innocently on a hill, gently lowering its branches; the leaves of his linden tree started rustling in darkness, a raging storm scattered his dream and left his tree naked in bleak emptiness. As a child Vren had been oblivious to her father's sadness, woven into the poem and foreshadowing his early, self-inflicted death. They had worked on this poem together and that made it an indelible memory.
          With this in mind Vren finally went to bed and as she falls asleep the linden tree comes to life in full splendor:
          No longer barren, its branches are covered with moonlit frost and decorated with thousands of delicate droplets of ice, which sparkle in all the rainbow colors like Christmas lights.
          An Eskimo man with curly red hair rides on his snowmobile around and around the little hill with the illuminated tree on top and then takes off over the tundra towards the horizon. She has lost her left shoe somewhere in the snow. Her foot is cold and numb and she must catch up with the snowmobile. A huge thunderbird with mighty wings picks her up and drops her on the rear seat of the snowmobile. The Eskimo wears a most colorful fur parka and announces:
          "I usually don't give a white woman with only one shoe a ride in the winter. But hold on to me tightly, I'll make an exception and get you safely home."
          The snowmobile takes off into the air and the Eskimo shouts, "Let go, let go, you can fly!
          He is transformed into a black raven and disappears into the sky. But she can't; she drops to the ground which is no longer hard and white but soft and green like the tundra during the summer, with innumerous little spring flowers between the wet tussocks.
           Vren woke up with the vivid dream still blurring with her surrounding reality. She inexplicably felt reconciled and at peace with herself again.
          She had distanced herself from the emotionally charged situation on Christmas Eve and considered her vulnerability as exaggerated. The embarrassment of the Eskimo man and his brusque reaction to her, a total stranger, seemed retrospectively quite understandable. He did not live in town, but came from a village somewhere in the Delta and it was unlikely she would ever see him again.


Last update: Monday, April 19, 2004 at 8:12:23 PM.