Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [106]
They had a confabulation between them that seemed to last forever. They spoke too quickly for Gabriel to make sense of the very few words that he happened to grasp. He overheard qavaq, though, the word Inuit used to refer to southerners and idiots.
“Where you get it?” eventually asked Tuluk.
“I found it at the Inuit People’s Ice Palace.”
They observed him attentively and, he thought, cautiously. Maybe they recognized him, although he doubted that they had paid much attention to him in the heat of that moment. He did not know if it was a good idea to tell them that he had seen them being caught red-handed and then harassed by the guards, as he had no idea of what they would think that made him: a kind of accomplice sharing a secret or a cumbersome witness to their embarrassment. He decided he needed their complicity and he went for it.
“The same day that you were there.”
This triggered another animated discussion. Uitayok said something that quieted everyone, although the angakoq kept casting side glances at Gabriel that did not reassure him. Tuluk eventually explained what troubled them.
“It happens that this little Inuit group is just out of qallunaq prison. For this little knife. But the qallunaat have the little knife back and the Inuit have nothing and they go to prison,” he said, darkly.
Gabriel remembered how difficult it had been for the Inuit to get used to the qallunaq idea of justice. The Eskimos were not the teddy bears some well-meaning Whites thought they were. They were about as good savages as any other human beings, that is, they were good as long as they weren’t savage. They knew about violence and retribution, of course, mostly in the ancient, time-honoured way. They had vendetta stories that would shame a nineteenth-century Corsican mountaineer’s, and under the conditions in which they lived, even Jesus Christ would have been liable to jump at some apostle’s throat, knife in hand, sooner or later. But why strangers had to meddle with such personal business as justice remained a mystery to them. They submitted to it in most cases, surrendering either to strength or to symbolical showmanship, but they seldom seemed to really get the point, or they reacted to it strangely. The first two Inuit murderers who had been sentenced to death in Canada, Gabriel had read somewhere, had carved little figures out of walrus tusk as presents for the executioner’s wife. Gabriel had never understood if this was meant to excuse themselves for the trouble the hangman was taking on their behalf—as the Whites would have liked to think—or as some subtle way to pass on the guilt to others. He was not sure if the four Inuit that surrounded him now had learned any lesson from their prison stay except that the less you deal with those dangerous qallunaat bastards the better it is for your fur-wrapped behind. But as Tuluk plodded through their story, it was clear that there was more to it than a simple misunderstanding about the Philosophy of Right. In fact, it smelled even fishier than the igloo did.
“They let these Inuit go yesterday. ‘You’re free,’ they said. ‘Go away.’ Then these Inuit buy a sled and they buy dogs and they buy food. It’s to go home. But they go home and the qallunaat follow us. Like hunters. So the Inuit turn and turn, and the qallunaat are always behind us and in front of these Inuit. So Uitayok says that these Inuit go through the sea to Kalaallit Nunaat. (“Greenland,” Gabriel translated as he listened.) And it happened that these Inuit find you lying in the snow.”
“I am very thankful that you stopped on your way.”
Tuluk hesitated before he went on.
“It happened that they did not find you on their own …,” he said, obviously struggling with some notion he could not convey to Gabriel, because he either could not or did not really want to.
“Kiggertarpok. He brings these Inuit for you,” Uitayok cut him off.
Tuluk looked uncertain, then continued. “It is like Uitayok says. It is the dogs. These dogs they do not obey well to bad sled drivers like these Inuit. These dogs do not fear the whip and they