excerpt
“Do you like it there?”
“No. It’s not where my heart wants to be but it is where I have to be.”
“I was in Toronto once. I married Hilu’s father and he was from Ottawa,
so I’ve been to Ottawa too.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know how you people can live in a place like that. It’s soulless.
It’s like people living in caves up in the air. It’s just not human. How is it
that someone who isn’t born here, who doesn’t live here, and only spent a
few years here, can love this place and these people so much?”
“I don’t know,” Ken said. “I don’t know how that happened. We can
have a lot of ideas and we can say a lot of things, but the reality is that we
don’t know these things. We don’t know the first thing about love – we
haven’t a clue. We have all sorts of feelings and all sorts of passions. We
call it love and hate, but that’s just a lazy way of expressing something
we know nothing about. I think love is something that is lived. It doesn’t
have very much to do with the other person although we focus the idea
on one person. I think it’s a life lived in a particular way. It encompasses
all the things that are in that life and it depends on how that life is lived,
whether the invitation to love will be heard and accepted. I don’t think
there is any language, including Inuktitut, that truly expresses what that’s
all about. The only conclusion I can come to is the one I’ve given you.”
Joan let a long silence hang between them. Ken finally asked her again,
how she knew this was the place where he had witnessed so much death.
“It’s not just you knowing,” he said. “There’s something more concrete to
it. This is a specific place where a specific thing happened.”
“I know this is the place because my mother knew these people and
knows their story and she knows about you,” Joan said. “This was the
time of my grandmother, and my grandmother knew you. My grandmother
found you very interesting. They called you the quiet Kabluna
– the mysterious white man who had the capacity of silence. That’s how
I know about you.”
“Would it be possible to visit them in Baker Lake?” Ken asked.
“Yes.”
“Could we visit now?”
“They’re away.”
“Away?”
“Visiting.”
“Family and friends?”
“Yes – very far away.”
“So we can’t go and see them?”
“No.”
Manolis Aligizakis 