The Waiting Woman

A Greenlandic taxi driver picked me up for the ten minute drive into town. On the way I gazed at the calm water and commented on how beautiful it was. He looked across the the bay to the colourful new apartments and related to me a story of their construction, around a decade ago. The story continued in his broken English as we drove on. Here is my interpretation of his words.

“When they first started building these houses, strange things kept happening. Eventually the builders called in a clairvoyant, who found that there was a Greenlandic woman there, carrying a young baby. She was dressed in very old-style sealskin, clothing of a kind that he hadn’t seen in his lifetime, or even heard of. She was distressed. He began talking to her, asking why she was there. She was waiting for her husband, she replied. He had gone out to sea, hunting, and she was waiting for him to return. She was worried. He had been gone a long time.

The clairvoyant continued talking to her. Had she heard of God, he asked? God? What is God? she replied. From this he understood that she came from a time before Christianity reached Greenland. What about Sedna, the Mother of the Sea, do you know her, he asked? Who is she? she asked, bewildered. Now he knew that she came from a very ancient time, before the time of the Sea Mother, perhaps a thousand years ago, or more. Do you understand that you are in a different time now, he asked? No, what do you mean, I don’t understand? she replied. Look across the water, he said. Can you see the lights of the city? What do you mean, she replied, I see no lights.

He asked her to think more and to try to remember what had happened to her. She began to remember. Her husband had gone hunting. But he was gone a long time, a very long time. Now she remembered. He never returned. She waited and waited, but he was lost. She lived with her extended family, but her husband was the last of the hunters. There was another family living nearby, with their own hunters, but they could not feed them all. Without her husband there was noone. She decided there was nothing else to be done and she threw herself from the cliffs into the cold water, her baby in her arms. Her soul stayed here, waiting and waiting for her husband to come home.

The clairvoyant asked her where her home was and she pointed across the water to the peninsula beyond, where the town now stood. He asked her to come with him and he would take her home. Together they crossed the water. Now she no longer wanders restless and waiting, looking out to sea, but has returned home with her child.”