Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [109]
The three o’clock idea was that he was somehow paying for having toyed with the Inuit’s beliefs. His brain had wanted to play at being a shaman, and now he would see what being an Eskimo really meant. At some point he even had the feeling that the angakoq was not asleep but was staring at him in the dark, but that must have been his own sleeplessness going to his head.
Then, four o’clockish, he started worrying about Brentford. Helen, he remembered (sometimes taking for the truth what at other moments he considered a fit of delirium), was not going to help him. Gabriel had ruined his friend’s wedding, denounced his bride, and now had let him go to the North Pole on what was nothing but a suicide trip. He reassured himself by thinking that he would ask the Inuit to help him find Brentford, if it was not too late.
When, lulled by the wind softly scraping against the igloo, he eventually fell into a rumble of unfettered pictures, the whole icehouse woke up.
He knew the reputation that some Inuit people had for throat singing, but their throat clearing was not to be underestimated either. For what seemed a half hour they grunted, snorted, coughed, hawked, and spat on the walls and on the floor, scratching themselves all the time, while Gabriel pretended to sleep a little longer, just as an excuse to keep his eyes shut. As he opened them tentatively, he perceived Tiblit passing through his hair the hand he had just dipped in the piss-pot, but he must have hallucinated that. At some point, though, they seemed to remember that they were fugitives, and hastened a little, leaving their iglerk regretfully in order to prepare some tea that had been left on the lamp to be heated. As Gabriel had done nothing to help—this was, at least, his interpretation—he was the last to be served.
He was as hopelessly useless when it came to packing for their departure. Contrasting with the Inuit’s rather sloppy domestic manners, strict rules and maniacal attention to detail prevailed when they loaded the sled. Gabriel, not knowing what to do with his hands, which were still unusable and burning, trampled on the ice a few feet away, trying to ignore what he felt were reproachful looks.
He was cold as well, with his best-man clothes still a little damp, and so ridiculously smart that they made him look like some lost miniature groom standing on an endless white wedding dress. It was a foggish, greyish day, and it froze him down to the marrow of his bones, even though the igloo had been built between hummocks a few yards off the coastline to protect it from the winds as well as from being seen. The dogs were still around the igloo and Gabriel could see they had collars with little medallions hanging from them that tinkled as they moved, but although such ornaments were rather unusual for Eskimo dogs, he did not dare to come closer and check. He contented himself with exchanging looks with the lead dog, and it was a sort of relief for him to face eyes with no human intent or expectations he could not rise to. Maybe it was because the dogs were family.
The Inuit had forgotten something and were unpacking and then repacking. They were unhurried and cautious in a way that meant that they