The Chukchi Bible (19 page)

Only last night, they had stretched a fresh walrus hide over the roof of the shaman's yaranga. It was still somewhat translucent, and the chottagin filled with warm yellow light.

The shaman sat upon a walrus vertebra not far from the fire, where there was the most light from the smokehole above. A large, smoothly polished walrus tusk balanced across his knees.

“
Amyn etti
, Mletkin,” Kalyantagrau greeted him kindly, gesturing to another whale vertebra. “Have a seat there.”

“What are you going to draw,
epei
?”
¹⁶
Mletkin lowered himself comfortably.

In recent times the American traders had started to pay well for painted walrus tusks, which could fetch up to three times the price of raw ones. The gleaming surface of the tusk would usually depict scenes from Luoravetlan life – yarangas, sled dog teams, walrus, lakhtak and polar bear hunts. Sometimes carvers would inscribe the reverse with scenes of life in the tundra: reindeer herds, catching and culling deer, conical, portable camp yarangas. Or tundra animals such as red and silver foxes, wolves, and birds.

This time, it was a strange, surprising image that took shape on the walrus tusk. A gigantic man held a whale by its fin, looking as if he were about to bite off the whale's head. His huge mouth was full of teeth, but otherwise he looked like a normal man. Looking more closely, Mletkin realized that he was looking at Pichvuchin – a fairy-tale creature in the guise of a human, who could turn into a dwarf or a giant so enormous that he could use the nearest mountaintop for a pillow.

“Recognize him?” said Kalyantagrau, turning the walrus tusk toward the light.

“Yes.” Mletkin nodded. “You've drawn him so perfectly, how could I not?”

“And to my mind,” Kalyantagrau told him thoughtfully, “the contents of the Sacred Book of the Russians, the one your ancestor brought back from the Anui market fair, are not at all the same as my drawing. It's something else. It's a recording of speech. Not images, but speech! Watch!”

Kalyantagrau brought two crumpled paper wrappers from one of the storerooms. One came from an American packet of loose tea, and the other from a Russian tea brick, hard as a rock, which had to be scraped with a sharp knife.

“Both papers designate one and the same item,” Kalyantagrau said. “But the marks are different. You get some that are the same, like this one – A – which looks like the rack for drying pelts. There are similar sounds in human speech, so there's nothing surprising in that. And so we can tell that Tangitan writing is different among the different Tangitan tribes, just as Americans speak one language and Russians speak another.”

“If only we could learn to understand the marks!” This was Mletkin's secret wish voiced aloud. He knew that his grandfather Tynemlen had had the same dream.

“First we would need to learn the Tangitan speech,” Kalyantagrau told him pointedly.

The shaman poured a little tea into a cup and offered it to his grandson. Mletkin drank the bracing brew with pleasure. He'd been literally run off his feet since morning. Already, he'd jogged up the steep slope to the mouth of the stream, carrying a bundle of metal rods, then down again to the lagoon and back to the village via a boggy tundra path.

Still, sheer physical exertion didn't count for much: the other young men his age – his cousin Atyk, Vamche, another relative, and their young visitor Gemal'kot from faraway Tapkaran – would have been doing much the same. Mental exercise was always the toughest, especially creating incantations on the spur of the moment, being ready for any exigency of life.

“Unlike the Tangitans, we don't have a store of ready-made incantations,
set in stone forever,” Kalyantagrau had taught. “He who dedicates his life to serving man and Enantomgyn must learn to respond to life's twists and turns with his soul and his reason. And not with just the first words that come to mind, but words that are precise and appropriate to the time and place.”

Mletkin already knew that in the future, much would depend on the context of events, but Kalyantagrau never tired of reminding him.

Mletkin always left his shaman grandfather thirsting for solitude and peace. He would ascend the Crag by way of the steepest footpath, and with each step he sensed the horizon widen around him, fill with space and air. From the peak, Uelen's two rows of yarangas, strung along the shingled spit, looked just like a walrus-tusk drawing. But Mletkin's eyes wandered out toward Imeklin and Inetlin, the islands in the middle of Irvytgyr Bay, which looked like a single island from where he perched, so close were they to one another. He would look out at the bluish, barely visible stripe that was the shore of Rochgyn – America – and onward, over the sea's expanse to the north, into an endless unknown.

 

At these moments of deep introspection Mletkin sometimes felt as though he had left his body and were looking at himself from outside. Looking at a young man who stood at the edge of a cliff where no other dared to stand. For him – who had trained himself not to fear heights, not to feel dizzy and light-headed as he looked at the ground below, at the white foaming tide and the suddenly minuscule birds and humans – this was no trouble at all. On the edge of the Crag he felt as steady and confident as he did standing atop the level tundra or the surface of a sucking, boggy lake. And
if he pushed off gently with his feet, would he stay rooted to the ground or crash to the jagged rockfall littering the slopes below? It was as if he were walking around his corporeal body, peering inside and wondering at the way the regular Uelen Luoravetlan in him merged with a person to whom the secrets of the true nature of things, the commingling and relationships of what seemed like random events, were slowly being revealed. Already he knew how a person's behavior alters with the phases of the moon, how suggestible a person is, how like a child, with a heart that is sensitive and easily wounded. He knew how powerful a plain, single word may be when spoken at the right time, in the right place, and to exactly that person for whom it was meant. “Many people are afraid of the
uivel
, a curse that can be sent across a distance,” Kalyantagrau had told him. “I have this power, I can even kill a person in another village. There's no need to send anything material to accomplish this, concentrating strongly on that thought would be enough. I should say though, sometimes it takes me a few days to recover . . .” “And did you kill many people this way?” asked Mletkin. “A fair number,” Kalyantagrau answered calmly, as though they had been speaking of nerpas or lakhtak and not people at all.

Such revelations made the young man uncomfortable, and more than once he had doubts about his chosen path. If a man was given the power to do evil unpunished, would he always be able to use reason to hold back malice, anger, or the desire to harm another? This happens often in life. How many times had Mletkin himself felt it? Now of course he remembered it with a smile, but when his parents had denied him sweet tea or limited his water, many times he had caught himself thinking: I hope they choke on that tea! As he grew up, he began to envy the other boys if they outstripped him in
something. And then, instead of trying with all his might to do better, the desire that bubbled up inside him was to see his rival stumble, fall, sprain his foot.

 

“So how do you get there?” asked Mletkin that day, as he watched Pichvuchin's heroic deeds come to life on the polished walrus tusk, beneath a sharp, wood-handled awl that looked like a bird's beak.

“Hard to say,” Kalyantagrau said after a pause. “One day you will just feel it, you'll know that you can. Something inside will tell you.”

“And if it doesn't happen?”

His grandfather put the awl aside and blew the residual bits from the walrus tusk. His answer was slow and measured:

“It will certainly come to you . . . But I want you to understand, this power is not the most important thing. The main thing is to want to do good. Doing good, helping to ease another's pain and hardship – that is the shaman's chief task. Each of us comes to this life in order to do a small part of Enantomgyn's work. It's as though we humans are all little bits of the Higher Being, we represent him on earth and in this life. And his main concern is to make a person good, worthy.”

“But what about the Tangitans?” came Mletkin's burning question.

“All people – Tangitans, Aivanalin, Kaaramkyn, Koryaks, the hairmouths – they are all Enantomgyn's creatures,” answered Kalyantagrau.

“So why do they have a different God?”

“There's only one God,” the shaman answered. “It's only that they see him in their own way. Different nations speak their own languages, but does that mean that they are not all the same? They are all still human.
Human language – regardless of whether it's Russian, American, or our own Lygevetgav
¹⁷
– it isn't animal speech, but human.”

Mletkin thought of the Tangitans' Sacred Book. Who could teach him Russian? Would he have to volunteer himself into captivity? After all, Daurkin – whom Yakunin's soldiers had captured and taken to their own lands – was taught not only their language but also the skill of marking paper with and recognizing the traces of human speech . . . Russian speech!

As he contemplated eternity, Mletkin often felt not just estrangement from quotidian life, but more often, an almost unbearable, piercing overflowing of feelings and ideas. There were times when his inner exultation was so strong he wanted to step forward, into the abyss. How he then wanted to soar above the measureless expanse of the sky, to walk on water, or, best of all, to fly like a bird, skimming the foamy waves with his wings! Better still to dissolve into the air, and become not just weightless and invisible but omnipresent, all pervasive.

These moments of turbulent feeling heightened Mletkin's senses, and he could hear voices both near and far as sharply as if they were inside his own head. Birdcalls took on meaning and though it was not human speech he understood it, and marveled that he could. In his mind's eye, he would arc over the horizon and see the neighboring Eskimo village of Nuvuken, beyond the Crag; Rochgyn, the American shore, and its village of Kymgyn, would come through more sharply amid the islands of the strait.

As he neared manhood erotic fantasies began to mingle with Mletkin's 's visions, sometimes so potent and realistic that they caused him to spill his seed. Every single Uelen beauty had visited Mletkin's dreaming embrace at one time or another and he had to lower his eyes when meeting them,
mortified, lest they guess that in his mind he had not only desired but possessed them.

Nowadays he was counted among the hunters. He had killed walrus, polar bear, and whale, not to mention small pinnipeds such as lakhtak and nerpa. He was equally successful in hunting for furs, the chief and most precious goods in the trade with the Tangitans, who would descend from big wooden boats that had gigantic machines hidden deep in their bellies and would trade for whalebone, walrus tusk, hides, and tanned leather, fur-lined clothes. Most of all, though, they wanted Arctic furs and soft fawn skin.

They were also interested in old things – ancient bows and arrows, spears; they might even buy a skin boat. Animal figurines carved from walrus tusk were becoming popular. Kalyantagrau had been the first to start carving whole scenes, such as a nerpa hunt comprising the hunter and the animal, or a boat with its Uelen crew, and many of the tiny figures were recognizable by their faces, deer harnesses, or dogsleds. Kalyantagrau also made walrus-tusk engravings, which he cleverly filled in with ochre and green mud, rubbing the pigment into the outlines to give the image depth and expressiveness.

Mletkin first noticed the ship as it curved around Senlun, a rocky outcrop in the strait. There was no wind, and in the silence and stillness the beating of the enormous metal heart prisoned within the vessel could be heard clearly.

He ran down the Crag to bring the news to his village.

The ship was only just dropping anchor not far from shore, but already the villagers had lowered five boats onto the water. Mletkin rowed with all his might, trying hard to outrun Gemal'kot's boat. Neatly strung bundles of fox, sable, and ermine, decorated fur-lined clothing, packets of whalebone and walrus tusks lay neatly stacked at the bottom of each boat. Apart from
these useful goods, almost every hunter also had walrus-tusk figurines of birds and beasts tucked into his coat.

Kalyantagrau, of course, had the richest haul of these. He and Mletkin were the first on deck, joining a screeching, squawking, thrusting crowd that roiled like birds at a breeding ground. Nearly every other man dangled a pungently smoking pipe from his lips; this aromatic smoke was scarce in Uelen due to dwindling tobacco supplies.

This was Mletkin's first time on a Tangitan deck. It was already strewn with the trade items: saws, axes, knives, large and small cauldrons, kettles, packets of tea and tobacco, ten-pound bags of flour, smaller bags of sugar, boxes of army hardtack, colored beads, spools of thread, needles, condensed milk in metal tins, and, slightly off to the side, glinting like dark, sea-bottom ice, bottles of the evil joy-making drink. The same drink also came in small wooden casks.

The Tangitans offered them some of the evil joy-making water from the casks, but only the middle-aged and elderly men drank, and then only a mouthful apiece, as they were well aware of the dangers of losing one's head and getting swept up in foolish trades. After the trading was done, well, that was another matter!

Mletkin picked up two expertly tanned and scraped bearskins, his main winter kills. Sighting the music box, his resolve faltered, and he almost changed his longtime plan to exchange the bearskins for a real Tangitan firearm – an American Winchester.