Yasmeen Read online

  “Just keep swallowing.” He turned and extended his hand. “I’m Elliot, by the way.”

  “Yasmeen.”

  “Teacher?”

  She nodded.

  “Same here. Second year and ready to roll.”

  She shifted anxiously, never having flown in anything so small in her life. Even though Frank had reviewed the specs with them, seating for nineteen passengers only, it still came as a shock, flying in it for real. She couldn’t imagine how cramped it would be with an overload of cargo or a patient on a stretcher with a slow-dripping IV. For its size it had an impressive name, the De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter. But it was really just a small plane, a compact carrier with a colourful striped marking.

  All Yasmeen could think about was stretching her legs, shaking out the cramps. Trying to get the blood circulating again. She could have used a glass of water or the light touch of ginger ale to settle her stomach. But there was no meal service on these planes. There were no flight attendants. It was just the passengers and the cockpit with a ratty curtain between them.

  The curtain was pushed open. Yasmeen could see straight through to the pilot (white) and co-pilot (Inuit) shifting levers and flicking buttons and switches on the illuminated control panel. The view through the panoramic window was a murky cocktail and she wondered how they could see where they were going.

  Something thudded against the floor of the plane. It was like driving in a car and accidentally running over something, either a cat or the branch of a tree. Engrossed in his book, Elliot didn’t even bat an eye. Inuit passengers across the aisle either snoozed or stared out the window, unfazed, as though they were riding a city bus at rush hour. As though their shuttle service up and down the coast had always existed, as much a part of their lives as dogsleds and kayaks.

  Elliot offered her a stick of gum from his shirt pocket. “Helps the ears.” He smiled and tugged his lobe like he was talking to a child.

  “Sure. Thanks.” She closed her eyes again, trying to envision her feet firmly planted on solid ground. Her mouth flooded with the sweet, starry burst of gum. She thought of the floured pink kind of her youth, how hard her jaws and teeth had to work to soften it enough to chew. She and Morgan had once collected over a hundred Bazooka Joe comic strips to send away for sea monkeys and a pair of X-ray glasses.

  Elliot bumped her arm as he snapped the book shut with a portentous whistle, followed by a drawn-out soooo …

  “So?” She repeated absently, not bothering to open her eyes.

  “So it’s looking like it might be a lemming year,” he said.

  “Lemming?” It sounded vaguely familiar. “Oh, you mean those brown mousy things. I’ve heard of them. Don’t they commit mass suicide, or something?”

  “Yes, but no. I mean, that’s actually a myth.”

  “Oh. Interesting.”

  He continued without taking note of her reaction. “Every four years or so the population goes through the roof, so a bunch of them pack up and move on. Great swarms travel over huge landmasses to the sea and then plunge off cliffs to their death by drowning. But researchers … now what would they be called?” He paused for dramatic effect. “Lemmographers? Lemmologists? Anyway, whoever they are, they claim that it’s not suicide, it’s just an accident of nature. It’s the way it is.”

  It wasn’t the most stimulating topic. Yasmeen didn’t know why people always felt compelled to make small talk with a perfect stranger on a plane or train or bus. What was the point when they would probably never see each other again? Now she had all this business stuck in her mind, rodents falling off the face of the earth, a solid wave of flailing, doomed creatures. She opened her eyes.

  “Yasmeen, Yasmeen, that’s what kind of name?”

  Here it comes, she thought. Now he was going to tell her how much he loved Lawrence of Arabia, how nothing beat seeing it on the big screen. She was used to it. “It’s Persian for Jasmine,” she said, trying to be agreeable. “But I’m not Persian, I’m Arab. Syrian, actually.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  She waited for him to bring up the movie. He didn’t. There was nothing out of his mouth about Peter O’Toole or the extraordinary desert scenes.

  Instead, his eyes grew wide. “I know some Syrians in Montreal, maybe you know them?”

  “I doubt it.”

  •

  Yasmeen’s mother had a habit of blurting things out during a lull at a party. She liked the attention. It didn’t matter that whatever she said might embarrass her daughter, who was usually present in the room wearing some fancy dress she’d been made to wear. It didn’t matter that she always told the same old story, that everyone had heard it a thousand times already.

  “I still can’t get over how much you looked like an Eskimo baby when you were born.”

  Yasmeen would shrug and stare at the floor.

  “You have to admit it.” And then, as though her word weren’t proof enough, Samiyah would pull the colossal family album from the credenza and flip to the hospital photo taken just minutes after the delivery, the ugliest record of Yasmeen that existed in the world. In it, she had a black comb of hair and dark, squinty eyes set too far apart.

  When she was in elementary school, Yasmeen checked out pictures of Eskimos in the encyclopedia her father had picked up for a song—he liked picking things up for “a song”—and tried to imagine what it would have been like rubbing noses in an igloo as cold as a refrigerator. As it happened, her third-grade teacher, Mrs. Fishwick, had a thing for the Eskimos. She read aloud their myths and legends to the class in their spare time before recess. She stuck little coloured flags on a large wall map of Canada to show the isolated, faraway places where they lived.

  One Friday, Mrs. Fishwick spooled a black and white film into a projector and warned them with her taut lips that if the bell rang before they were through, they would stay in for lunch to finish watching. The movie followed a tribe of nomadic, prehistoric-looking people in furs and caribou skins through a typical day. It showed how they chopped, filed and shaved whatever they found to make the tools and weapons they needed to survive. It showed them in their crowded igloos gumming down blubbery spears of walrus and smiling with their horrible teeth. Their mouths reminded Yasmeen of the neglected piano by the boiler room in the school basement, a wretched keyboard of stained and chipped ivories. The film jerked and jumped and had long spidery hairs wiggling through it.

  Soon after that Mrs. Fishwick arrived with a heavy coffee- table book from the local library and placed it in their special display case at the back of the classroom. Only students who finished their math stencils first were permitted to sit on the shag carpet and flip through its glossy pages. Yasmeen, the teacher’s pet, could often be found there.

  After Mrs. Fishwick corrected her work with a red pen and pasted the sticker of a bright butterfly on her page, Yasmeen would trot back to her desk to tidy up her books, flinging her hair behind her importantly before making her way to the Reading Corner. She took great pleasure in walking past the idiot kid, Brian, the one the French teacher called Brain because of a misspelling on the attendance list that went uncorrected. Yasmeen lifted her chin in a superior sort of way and stuck her tongue out at him. Brian snivelled his complaint.

  “For heaven sakes, you again?” Mrs. Fishwick loathed tattletales.

  Yasmeen glanced sheepishly at Morgan as the teacher led him by the ear and out the door, where she continued to make a federal case of his whining in a voice that bounced off the walls and echoed down the hallway all the way to the principal’s office. Yasmeen smirked into her hand.

  She relished her little pranks far more than the serious business of sitting down with the book, although once the chaos died down she took pleasure in leafing through, examining the pictures. Her favourite was an antique photograph of an Alaskan village, a cluster of seaside dwellings perched on a
cliff of patchy vegetation. No matter how many times she stared at it, she couldn’t get over how people could live in such a rugged, perilous place and survive. It was everything her parents’ solid brick house, with its cozy furnishings and gleaming appliances, was not.

  •

  They descended through a veil of fog, the plane fishtailing, rain hammering at the fuselage. Fingers interlaced in her lap, Yasmeen stared unblinkingly ahead, the hypnotic effect of the sped-up windshield wipers taking her mind off the nausea. The dense atmospheric soup was beginning to thin out. Through strands of cloud she could make out the driving spray of Hudson Bay and a haphazard cluster of modest dwellings at the mouth of an estuary. The middle of nowhere, her mother had said.

  The plane took another air pocket.

  Yasmeen wondered about her personal items, the ones she had neatly arranged in her knapsack, twist-tied Baggies of almonds, Peruvian wool socks with leather heels, snow goggles, Scrabble tiles in a purple Crown Royal bag, the brass compass that had belonged to her grandfather, the 35-mm camera her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday, snagged at a fire sale. She supposed that everything was every which way by now.

  The surf in her ears intensified as the little lozenge of a plane tilted and levelled out again. She felt the wheels release. They bumped down onto the airstrip and sped along with a force that propelled her head backwards against the headrest. She swallowed as though a golf ball were stuck in her throat.

  Count to ten, she reminded herself. Breathe. She closed her eyes.

  When the plane finally ground to a halt, Elliot nudged her, his mouth flapping.

  “What?” she shouted. She leaned in closer.

  His reedy voice trickled through her ear canals. “As I said, no need to get your knickers in a knot. See? We made it, all in one piece.”

  The engine shut down. She was relieved; the tension whistled out of her, pfffft like a balloon deflating. Though her chewing gum had lost its flavour, Yasmeen chomped on it maniacally, trying to clear the passageways of her ears. A sudden pop produced the highway sound of whooshing tires on a rain-slick road. The world flooded back with crystal clarity; voices, coat zippers, seat belts releasing with a shutter-like click.

  Headset horseshoed around his neck, the pilot spun around and grinned, his voice clear as gunshot. “Welcome to Saqijuvik, population 346. Bienvenue à tous.”

  The co-pilot climbed out of the cockpit to lift the exit door. A grey midday light welcomed them. Immediately the aisle filled with passengers rushing to deplane, Inuit women toting babies on their back, fidgety children, another pair of teachers—one, a stout, bubbly girl with short, strawberry hair; the other, older and more matronly, wearing a trench coat buttoned to her chin. As the line inched forward, a seasonal worker in a plaid flannel vest and steel-toe boots doled out his unopened snacks, single servings of peanuts and Dad’s cookies, to other people’s cranky toddlers. He pulled his ears and made silly faces at them, waiting for their expressions to brighten. A wave of excitement rippled through Yasmeen, the reality of having arrived and the realization of the important role that she was about to play. There was no gloating on her part. From the very start she made sure her intentions were pure, a far cry from previous generations of whites who came north to effect change but who had brought dysentery, smallpox and tuberculosis instead, decimating entire populations.

  Yasmeen joined the long line headed for the exit. Through the tiny windows of the plane she took stock of life on the ground, wet, disorganized, a whirlwind of activity, as though the Barnum & Bailey caravan had just blown into town. Villagers were gathered around the plane in rubber boots and slickers, their welcoming faces glazed with rain—boys with baseball caps drawn over their eyes, girls wearing too much lipstick, construction workers, old ladies with twisted spines and hardly a tooth in their heads, kids with runny noses scurrying everywhere. A thousand things flashed through her mind at once. She was struck by how many of them were diaper age or younger. The true people of the earth, she mused.

  She felt Elliot nipping her heels from behind. “Move along, move along, let’s get the show on the road,” he insisted. She threw her knapsack over her shoulder and hastened down the steps to solid ground.

  Mangy, mat-haired dogs flew past her, pushing their noses into the offloaded cargo—cardboard boxes stamped Kraft and Pepsi, jumbo-sized cases of Pampers and toilet paper, Gerbers, Royale. Most of the year’s bulk goods, she knew, had arrived earlier in the season on a large ocean-going vessel called the Sealift, non-perishables and heavy machinery, boats, Skidoos, electrical appliances, mechanical equipment. It boggled her mind to think of all it took to run a place, especially a remote, fly-in village without any access to roads, all the planning and foresight required to ensure they were well stocked for the year.

  Yasmeen noticed the pilot checking the time on his watch as the co-pilot prepared to board a line of departing passengers eager to escape the rain. Elliot was already chatting with one, a guy wearing a black leather jacket and gloves with the fingers cut off. “Yasmeen Haddad, meet Joanasi Maqaittik, one of the big celebs around here,” he said. “Best radio host in town.” Elliot clapped him on the shoulder. “This guy really knows his music.”

  Joanasi shrugged. He hardly looked at Yasmeen.

  “Where’re you headed?” said Elliot, slapping the rain out of his hair.

  “Kuujjuaq. I have a radio course.”

  “How long you gone for?”

  “Maybe two or three days, or one week. Aatsuuk, I don’t know.”

  “Radio. Cool,” said Yasmeen. She noticed his boots were unlaced, the way people in the seventies used to wear their Kodiaks. She wondered whether it was a fashion thing with him as well.

  Elliot shot the breeze with Joanasi, catching up on village news, dropping names she didn’t know. Yasmeen stood there, trying to look interested.

  She was relieved when she spotted her luggage about to be tossed from the plane, a couple of duct-taped boxes and her brother’s old hockey bag. It gave her an excuse to bow out of the conversation. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around sometime.”

  Joanasi looked curiously at her.

  She pointed toward the plane. “I really gotta go, my stuff is here now … It was really nice meeting you. Joanasi, right?”

  He didn’t answer. It was Joanasi, wasn’t it? She was pretty sure.

  He chucked his cigarette and shook hands with Elliot. As an afterthought he reached for Yasmeen’s. He had a firm grip, but not bone-crushing. “See you,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay then, see you.” An airline employee lobbed her bag onto the mounting heap of crates and containers on the muddy ground. She made a beeline for it, hair flapping like a horse’s tail, and dragged it, along with her boxes, to the sidelines where there was a little less confusion.

  A woman caught her eye, someone with a polka-dot kerchief folded in a triangle over her hair and knotted at the chin, the way 1950s housewives wore them. She was snaking excitedly through the crowd, waving her arms at Yasmeen. A stocky man with thick forearms and a poor complexion lagged behind her, smoke trailing from his nostrils. He flicked his cigarette butt.

  The woman’s hand shot out to shake Yasmeen’s. “Qanuippiit … I mean, how are you?” she said, her face sheened in the mist that was making everything feel moist.

  “Qa-nu-ingi-tunga.” Yasmeen was glad she’d made the effort to learn some of their simple greetings. She didn’t want to arrive sounding like an ignorant tourist. She wanted to make a good first impression, demonstrate that she had the character to live in such a cold place.

  “Kinauvit?”

  “Pardon?”

  “She wants to know your name,” said the man. His helmet of hair and the sprouts of wiry stubble on his chin glistened from the rain. He had a warm but official demeanour. Yasmeen recognized the school board emblem stitched to the pocket of his windbreaker. She cl
asped his hand with inflated enthusiasm, avoiding direct eye contact as Frank had instructed. They all smiled at each other.

  “You must be the centre director,” she said. “I’m Yasmeen.”

  “Yasmee-ngai,” said the woman, sounding out the syllables of her name like a child learning a new vocabulary word.

  “Yasmee-ngai,” she repeated, embarrassed when she remembered the correct response was just aah.

  The woman giggled.

  “I’m Paulussie, the school commissioner,” said the man. “And this here nosy woman is my wife, Sarah.”

  Sarah elbowed him playfully in the ribs. There was a familiarity about the way they kibitzed, a hint of something that reminded Yasmeen of her own parents in the good old days, the way her mother always criticized her father’s driving, his foot too heavy on the brakes, his own complaints that with Samiyah around he could never get a word in edgewise.

  Paulussie continued: “I’ll be filling in for Sarah’s brother this year, the real centre director. He’s down south for a medical issue … I guess you could call me a jack of all trades.”

  “Jack of all trades and master of none,” mocked Sarah.

  The plane was finally loaded up, the door snapped tight. A brawny wind from the propellers lifted the hair and coat tails of everyone still standing around.

  Paulussie tossed Yasmeen’s luggage into a scarred pickup truck with a spider-leg crack across the windshield that looked like it had been there since the year one. He gestured for her and the other teachers to pile in. Elliot was still milling about shaking hands with people when Paulussie caught him by surprise with a friendly sucker punch. They began sparring like old-time boxers. Sarah giggled and told them to quit horsing around, she wanted to get out of the rain. Elliot saluted and hopped onto the back of the truck with the luggage. The rest squeezed into the back seat as Paulussie revved the motor.

  Yasmeen sat on a spot of ripped upholstery patched with crisscrossed pieces of duct tape. She made small talk before officially introducing herself to the others, Sam (the heavy girl) and Iris (the matron). Slowly the truck shifted forward over the terrible ruts and puddles of the dirt road, rubbery wipers wheezing back and forth, swishing the rain away. A pine-cone air freshener jiggled from the rear-view mirror, too subtle for the robust mix of diesel and cigarette smoke permeating the truck.