The Chukchi Bible (23 page)

 

As they pulled away from Rentyrgin's camp, Mletkin saw Givivneu, pressed forlornly against the wall of the yaranga, and his heart felt the sting of it. He walked back and told her quietly, standing very near:

“I'll come back for you.”

“I'll be waiting,” Givivneu said, swallowing back her tears.

 

Veyip postponed visiting Uelen until the spring and set a course for the swathe of tundra that trimmed the Chukchi Peninsula coastline, to visit the reindeer people's camps. Each evening, after finishing his own work of filling several notebook pages with notes, Veyip would motion for Mletkin to join him by the fire and the lesson would commence. The lessons took place not just in the late hours, inside the yaranga, while the others were fast asleep, but even as the convoy of sleds was on the move. Mletkin might
perch on Veyip's sled or run alongside the pack, all the while reciting Russian poems, repeating Russian words.

Veyip was amazed by the young Chukcha's persistence and hard work. Little by little he pried the story of Mletkin's exile from Uelen from the young man, and learned of Kalyantagrau's harsh, cruel schooling of a would-be shaman. Mletkin saw that the Russian wanted to understand the root and meaning of the shaman's craft. He seemed to find shamanic incantations especially fascinating, and all but forced Mletkin to disgorge them from his memory, first taking rapid notes on paper and then repeating what he'd written in his own accents, singsong fashion, which made Mletkin smile to hear.

Human speech turned out to be built out of relatively few elements, sounds for which there were corresponding marks in the Russian tongue. By putting the sound marks together you could make words. And though it seemed a simple enough idea, it was one man among all of the Tangitans who thought of it! Mletkin began to wonder whether the same principle might be used to create a Chukchi system for writing and reading. He shared the idea with his teacher, to which Veyip replied by taking out several pages filled in with different marks.

“I've noted down Chukchi speech here. Want to hear me read it back?”

Veyip brought the page closer to his eyes, and Mletkin heard the first phrases of the well-known legend of his own ancestor, the brave warrior Kunleliu, who had vanquished the Russian Yakunin, told in his own tongue, to his utter astonishment.

“So Chukchi letters already exist?” he exclaimed excitedly.

“It isn't a writing system yet.” His teacher curbed his enthusiasm. He then explained the difference between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. “This is my own way of noting down Chukchi speech.”

“So the same person can possess both Russian and American letters?”

“And Hebrew, and Arabic, and Chinese, too!” Veyip laughed, astonished at the young shaman's thirst for knowledge. Mletkin did not seem like the type of Chukcha “Inspired from Above” – as the shamans called themselves – that Veyip-Bogoraz had encountered before.

“Amazing,” Mletkin whispered quietly, again and again, not daring to voice the audacious idea of learning several languages and alphabets.

After a long trek into the Vankarem tundra, complete with a blizzard endured in an open field, they reached the outlying yarangas of the camp belonging to a certain Nokko, the master of herds and grazing grounds that reached all the way to the river Chaun.

Having had their fill of deer meat and tea, they climbed inside the warm fur-lined polog and lay down side by side. Tonight even Veyip had not the strength to open his notebooks.

The dying fire by the polog's far wall flickered in the close darkness. Despite their overwhelming fatigue, sleep just wouldn't come. Mletkin cleared his throat and confided to Veyip:

“My family's been keeping a Russian book.”

“What book?” Veyip was instantly curious.

“A sacred book. My grandfather got it in trade at the Anui market fair.”

“Have you read it?”

“How could I have read it when I didn't know Russian?”

“I forgot!” Veyip chuckled. Then he grew serious:

“I don't believe in God, myself.”

“The Tangitan God?” Mletkin queried.

“Any kind. It's all made-up, anyway. The world, the whole universe is not made as the shamans, Russian or Chukchi, would have us believe.”

“So why are you always so curious?” said Mletkin. “Setting down our rituals, our incantations?”

“There is a science that is concerned with general knowledge of mankind. I study the Luoravetlan so that knowledge of them can be added to the general store of human knowledge,” Veyip answered. “It's important to know about people's misconceptions, too.”

Mletkin fell silent for a long while, absorbed in his own thoughts. Then he spoke:

“No, God does exist. It's only that different nations call him by different names. There is much in the world and in life that can only be explained by the existence of Higher Powers . . . Miraculous healings, for one . . .”

“So you have healed?”

“I have,” Mletkin answered calmly, thinking of young Givivneu. “And how else can we explain the miracle of a person's conception and birth? His death? The dead have to go somewhere, haven't they?”

“Where do they go, then?” Veyip's tone was mocking.

“We believe that some go to the sky, to the regions around the Polar Star, and others go to the underworld, an underground, waterless land.”

“Have you been there? Have you been and returned?”

“Shamans have been there . . .” said Mletkin.

“What about you?”

“Not yet . . . But I've dreamed of many who have departed from this life. They came to speak with me. They couldn't have come from Emptiness, out of Nothing.”

Veyip was quiet for a time, and when he spoke it was with a different tone of voice.

“I don't intend to break you of your faith. If you believe in spirits,
kel'eht
,
Enantomgyn – go ahead, believe. But remember that there are other faiths beside Chukchi shamanism, and there are people like me who don't believe in anything at all.”

Hearing this made Mletkin sigh. He said sympathetically:

“It must be hard to live without faith . . .”

 

Not far from Vankarem, Veyip's caravan was overtaken by another Tangitan traveler, a priest named Venedikt. The scientific and religious parties mingled at the camp of Gyrgolkau, a deer herder of large means – which meant that the travelers were given use of a spacious guest yaranga, hung inside with three separate fur-lined pologs.

Mletkin noted that Veyip, who had recently been so forthcoming about his lack of faith, met the holy father amiably and spent a long time talking with him by the dying fire.

“I've been voyaging around these parts for almost two years,” Father Venedikt related. “God's word comes to the Chukchi with difficulty. They're only willing to be baptized in exchange for gifts. Give them knives, shirts, needles, tobacco. Some have grown so shameless, that they demand a bottle of vodka as payment for being baptized. And when you perform the rite you've got to keep a sharp eye out! Many of them try to go a second time, even a third to get more gifts out of it. In the early days I made mistakes – they all seemed to look the same to me. Now, with the Lord's help, I can tell them apart.”

Father Venedikt was about the same age as Veyip-Bogoraz. He ate with gusto and noisily slurped strong tea from a saucer. Noticing Mletkin, he asked:

“You understand what we're talking about?”

“Not everything,” Mletkin said modestly, “but I can follow a bit.”

“He's learning to read and write in Russian,” Veyip informed the priest with some pride.

“You don't say!” Father Venedikt was thunderstruck. Reaching for a small travel volume of the New Testament, he opened it and offered it to Mletkin.

Mletkin leaned closer to the firelight and haltingly read out:

“In the beginning was the Word, and God was the Word, and the Word was God . . .”

“Extraordinary!” the priest exclaimed. “You know about our Lord, about Jesus?”

“My grandfather Tynemlen used to tell me the tale of your God, which he himself had heard in his youth, at the Anui market fair. He brought back a Russian shaman book and it has been kept safe inside our yaranga to this day.”

“How curious . . .” mused Father Venedikt. “And what did your grandfather tell you?”

“The Russian God, he was born in the family of a craftsman who could work all manner of things from wood . . . The craftsman wasn't really the father, the real father had secretly slept with the man's wife, and begot a male child. Who was then born in a cattle pen and started to walk around from camp to camp, like you, and tell people about God, about how you shouldn't steal, kill people, look at other men's wives . . .”

Mletkin stumbled here, pierced by the realization that the Son of God himself had been born of the Father-Spirit sleeping with another man's wife!

“Go on, continue!” Father Venedikt encouraged him. “Go on!”

But Mletkin said:

“I don't remember the rest.”

“You see?” Father Venedikt turned to Veyip-Bogoraz. “How can anyone be sure that the true word of God reaches the minds of these savages?”

“What language do you use to preach?” asked Bogoraz.

“I've got an interpreter, a Lamut from Markovo.”

The interpreter, as it turned out, knew barely a word of Chukchi; moreover, his Russian was the ancient dialect of the Anadyr Cossacks, much of which was by now comprehensible only among themselves.

“Listen!” Father Venedikt was suddenly pleading. “Let me have your Mletkin! I'll pray for you! And you'd be doing a godly deed!”

“Mletkin must decide for himself,” said Bogoraz.

Mletkin did not answer right away.

He was discomfited by the discovery that the Tangitans could be so different in their attitudes to faith. Two men of the same breed – Veyip and Father Venedikt – were quite different people when it came to God; one might even say they were opposites. Not that the Tangitan faith itself was free from confusion and doubt. If one of the main commandments of the Tangitan Enantomgyn-God was to abstain from desiring another man's wife, how could he himself have broken it so egregiously? The literal fact of this divine-human union did not trouble Mletkin at all: there were plenty such occurrences in Chukchi myths and legends. It had happened that women gave birth to animal children, as in the case of Mletkin's own ancestors, the children of the forefather whale, Reu. Nau, the first woman, had given birth first to baby whales and then to human children. No, Mletkin was uneasy about God's puzzling behavior in breaking one of His own commandments. Or did the one who made laws have the right to overstep
them? Mletkin's chief discovery, however, was one he kept to himself: that people create gods in their own image . . .

In any event, Mletkin elected to remain with Veyip-Bogoraz. Mainly because Veyip enthusiastically tutored him in the Russian language and letters; this Tangitan also had a wonderful knack of breaking Chukchi words into separate components and finding the links that held them together. Mletkin had never dreamed that his native language could be disassembled into parts, like a portable tundra yaranga, and then be stacked together again.

Veyip was hungry for ancient legends, and by his side Mletkin was learning much that was new to him about his people's past, and also about their present life.

When the long spring days set in and the sun had emerged from its winter hiding place, Veyip's team turned east along the coast.

Veyip's conversation consisted of more that just Russian practice. The Tangitan scientist often reminisced about his past. He had been born in Taganrog, in southern Russia; as a young man he had traveled to St. Petersburg, Tirkerym's main camping place, where he studied at the university. Veyip described the tsar's camp as a vast collection of stone dwellings, each dwelling set on top of another, and so several times. The people who lived on the highest of these levels had to climb ladders to get there. A river called Neva flowed through the camp and into the sea, where neither whales nor walrus lived. The camp was ringed with forest, and there were also pastures for short-horned cattle, and for growing plants from which flour was made. Veyip made a vague reference to being exiled to Chukotka as a punishment by the decree of Tirkerym himself. In answer to Mletkin's query as to
whether he had made up with Tirkerym after his long sojourn in the cold tundra, Veyip said noncommittally, like a true Chukcha:

They arrived in Uelen one spring night, when the first of the duck flocks were taking wing over the spit of land. Adults and children alike, armed with
eplykytet
– a sling made out of hide with rocks attached, used to bring down birds in flight – had lain low behind the outermost yarangas on the west side of the village, waiting for the low-flying birds. Ensnared in thin nerpa-skin ribbons, the ducks hit the earth and the sea ice, riven with spring meltholes, with muffled thuds.

Mlatangin greeted his son as though the other had left his home only yesterday. Mletkin's grandfather Tynemlen was a touch warmer. In a quiet voice he told the young man:

“Your grandfather Kalyantagrau is waiting for you. He wants your help to go beyond the clouds.”

Mletkin's heart missed a beat.

When you enter a gloomy chottagin from the brightly lit outdoors, your eyes need a moment to become accustomed to the half darkness. Mletkin could hear a muffled moan and raspy coughing as soon as he stepped inside.