Kunuk and Nuka, meanwhile, opened a tiny échoppe on Rue Saint-James: Chez les Eskimoz . They sold smoked eel (which they called “river seal”), pickled lingonberries imported from Sweden at great expense, and a fermented tea made from local heather that tasted, as one critic wrote, “like a peat fire wrestling a flower.” It became fashionable. The poet Francis Jammes wrote an ode to Nuka’s savon au phoque —seal fat soap—though no seal was ever harmed in Bordeaux for its making.
Léo laughed. A typo, surely— Eskimos with a Z, stranded in Bordeaux? But the log wasn't alone. Over the following weeks, he found fragments: a customs officer’s note about “seal-fur mittens traded for a cask of claret,” a wedding certificate from 1914 for a “Kunuk Sivuk” and a fishmonger’s daughter named Céleste, even a faded photograph of a stocky man in a thick parka standing before the Tour Pey-Berland, looking utterly unfazed by the summer heat. eskimoz bordeaux
The story that emerged was stranger than fiction. Kunuk and Nuka, meanwhile, opened a tiny échoppe