In Fond Remembrance of Me
Part I
WOMAN TYPING ARCTIC
WOMAN TYPING ARCTIC
One evening when I stepped into her room in the Beluga Motel, where, from the dock, beluga whales could be sighted feeding in the Churchill River, Helen looked up from her typewriter. "Just now I saw myself in the mirror and noticed that my illness has turned my face into the face of my old aunt's," she said in her slight British accent. "My old aunt hunched over her big sewing machine in Japan. Of course, it's my own face. And I'm obviously not bent over a sewing machine but my typewriter. Typing up the arctic, as usual, right? That's all I've really done with my life, if I'm honest about it … except for my brief marriage. Except for my brief marriage, all I've done is type up the arctic, and so have I had a useful life, then? You tell me. Go from place to place and type up my reports and my translations and write all those letters. Look at all the pages! Type, type, type."
"Feeling sorry for yourself, or just philosophical, or what?" I said.
"The philosophical ones naturally get the saddest, don't they? I see a particular faraway look on a child's face, on a back road out in nowheresville"—Helen loved picking up the odd American slang—"and I can tell what she's in for her whole life. Oh, sure, I recognize the look. Some days I wish I hadn't thought so much, you know? But I've wished that since I was a little girl."
I looked around the sparsely furnished room, standard motel fare, I suppose. White walls. Helen had draped colorful Buddhist prayer flags over her bed; I had to ask what they were. There were stacks of Japanese novels bound in twine, placed on the floor and bedside table. The Underwood typewriter on the desk. Linguistics notebooks bound in twine. Diaries. Correspondences. Foreign postage stamps steamed off and glued in a ledger. Rubber-tipped glue dispenser. Steamer trunk with torn silk lining, secured by a buckle and length of leather belt. Notebook after notebook of ornithological jottings, birds seen when and where, the neat columns. Latin names in parentheses. Field guides in French, Japanese, English, Dutch. I think that I recall a German-language guide, too. She seemed to have set up this room as a kind of garret—except not in a Parisian attic under a sloping tiled roof, but in a motel surrounded by tundra and arctic sea—dedicated to thinking and writing.
It was already cold in August. "I seem to sleep better in cold climates," Helen said. "I can't say why, really."
Taped to Helen's typewriter was a quote in Japanese (which she translated for me) from Ryunosuke Akutagawa: What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?
I then thought—right as I was looking at her—that Helen has a kind of unrequited love with the world. In a letter dated March 19, 1978, and sent from Kyoto, she writes: "I've been blessed in getting to work with dignified peoples in remote and beautiful parts of the world. I got to ‘dwell in beloved chill sunrises,' as Basho said. I have heard wonderful stories. I have seen birds far from where I was born. But I wasn't given enough time. I simply wasn't. I do not feel forgiving about that. I'm referring to Fate. This dying, it's an insult. I'm grateful for what I was given. But I feel insulted."
Copyright © 2005 by Howard Norman