The Chukchi Bible (30 page)

The captain bade his guest sit in a comfortable chair, the one that could spin around, and offered him coffee.

Forster was clean-shaven and neatly dressed; despite the slippery coating of grime up on deck, even his boots gleamed.

“I hear that you're making progress in your efforts to learn reading and writing,” he said.

“It interests me,” Mletkin replied cautiously.

“Back in Uelen I was told that you were an unusual person, a shaman.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Mletkin, and then added, “In Uelen. Here I am just another crewman.”

“It's one thing to be a good whaler, but quite another to be a shaman,” the captain mused.

“No,” Mletkin contradicted him. “Sometimes the two things are linked. The things I know have been passed to me by my grandfather, the shaman Kalyantagrau, and the things I can do, my skills, were taught to me by my father.”

“Can a shaman do magic?” asked the captain forthrightly. He had the sky blue eyes so prevalent among the hairmouths, like a thoroughbred husky's.

“Perhaps,” answered Mletkin. “I haven't tried, myself.”

“What if you tried right now?” The captain's dog eyes crinkled at the corners.

“I fear that nothing would happen,” said Mletkin.

“So you couldn't do magic, not even if you tried?” There was a sour, sarcastic ring to the captain's question.

Mletkin simply did not know how to explain to the other man that miracles and magic did not happen by a shaman's own doing, but rather were sent down as needed by the Outer Forces. He could only ask them, but with no certainty that his request would be fulfilled.

“I couldn't,” he answered.

The captain changed the subject. “So what do you need to be literate for?”

“To be able to read my contract with you, if nothing else,” replied Mletkin.

At this, John Forster gave a hearty laugh.

“I'm liking you more and more!” he declared. “I'll teach you to read and write myself, and some other things too!”

The captain's teaching methods were somewhat different from the crew's, more like those of Veyip-Bogoraz. Like Mletkin's first teacher, the captain would slice words into their component parts, unclothing the rules and structures of English for his pupil like the ribs of a boat before they were concealed by their walrus-hide casing. He also taught Mletkin arithmetic – but Mletkin's favorite lesson, a constant source of wonder, dealt with the Tangitan version of the creation of the universe, and the enormous sun around which the planets moved in a circle. The two of them pored over the globe, and Mletkin now understood why his homeland's summers were so short and its winters so long and cruel. From a geographical standpoint, the unbearable heat Mletkin had encountered in San Francisco, the first large city he'd visited, was easily explained.

The makeup of the universe turned out to be elegant and rather simple. It was this simplicity that surprised Mletkin most of all. Often, he would grab a pair of binoculars and head for the deck, to observe the heavily star-laden skies. What the eye could see could not be compared with the countless lights that, as they receded from the earthbound viewer, turned into the glittering banks of the Sandy River. On closer observation, the Sandy River itself, which the Tangitans called the Milky Way, turned out to be a host of stars. John Forster had explained the trajectories of planets and the movement of the heavenly bodies by the spinning of the earth itself, and it was hard to argue against the earth's being round in the face of his teacher's reasonable explanations. Mletkin had nothing against this description of his home planet, but ventured that he found it inexplicable that the seas and
oceans did not spill out, and that the people who lived on the downward curve did not fall off but clung to the globe like flies to a chunk of smoked walrus meat or the underside of a yaranga's hide walls. The captain shooed him up to the deck and ordered a crewman to bring a bucket of water and a rope. As he swung the full bucket around by the rope, barely missing Nelson, who'd been passing by, the captain shouted:

“You see! The water doesn't spill. And the speed of the planet is so great that it creates a force strong enough to keep everything from falling off its surface.”

The crew watched the captain's antics with wonderment, and kept an ear out for his explanations. Belowdecks they quizzed Mletkin about his long conversations with the captain. He shared what he was learning with them, discovering to his surprise that on the whole these Tangitans knew a good deal less than he about the universe and the movement of the stars. And this left a kind of disappointment in him, who had once been convinced of the white man's superior knowledge.

Unloading his goods in Seattle, the captain gave some of the sailors their final pay and, with a smaller crew, set out for Port Clarence, Alaska, where they would winter.

 

At that time, Port Clarence was a rather busy place, where several dozen whaling ships might winter during any given year. It was situated on a bight, one that cut deep into the continent and afforded shelter from the winds; not even the fiercest of gales could whip up its calm waters. The ice here was homegrown, so to say: the bay water froze evenly, without the inescapable ice hummocks raised by the shifting waters of the open sea. It was only by the shoreline that a ridge of icy humps marked the surf's comings and goings.
They proofed the ship against the winter, casing it in heavy tarpaulins from bow to stern, and when the first snow fell, they did not clear it off the deck but rather let it pile up a foot or so. The orlop and the captain's cabin alike were furnished with cast-iron stoves on fireproof brick pediments.

In addition to the captain's lessons, Mletkin now began to take banjo instruction from Nelson. Familiarizing himself with the instrument, he would sit and test the melodies of his land on the strings, humming and murmuring to himself. Nelson, a man of no mean musical abilities, often sang along, and then the orlop would fall silent, entranced by the strange and ancient melodies of the Bering Sea.

Even though there was no polar night at that latitude, leisure and laziness ruled the day in the assemblage of men and ships. Each man entertained himself as best he could. The captain spent his days listening to the Victrola and reading. Mindful of his health, he did morning callisthenics and sluiced himself down with cold seawater from a hole in the ice they always kept open in case of fire.

The sailors' main responsibility lay in chipping ice off the hulls of the steamships, keeping the underwater propeller and the steering column from the hazards of the ice floes that shifted with the tides.

Mornings on the
Belvedere
began with a wake-up call – a piercing scream from the first mate's whistle. They breakfasted in a stateroom next to the galley. As the rendering vats were in storage, Nelson took charge of cooking the meals, and held his own admirably. Instead of the hardtack everyone had come to loathe, he fried up thick, greasy pancakes. True, they reeked of rendered blubber, but everyone was so used to the smell that had it disappeared, the inhabitants of Port Clarence would have been uneasy. When Mletkin went to shore to restock their supply of ice for drinking water, he
could orient himself unerringly by following the stench of blubber that emanated from the ship. In his new role as ship's cook, Nelson treated the crewmen to delicious powdered omelettes made with egg and milk, and supplemented their diets with raw frozen seal meat purchased from the local Eskimos. Nerpa liver was considered a delicacy, and although not everyone felt this way, all of the experienced whalers and polar explorers were well aware that such food provided a good defense against scurvy. And they all drank a vast quantity of coffee.

Each day, after his tasks on deck were done, Mletkin would visit the captain's cabin for another lesson. He had noticed that John Forster took a great pleasure in these meetings. Eventually, the captain made a confession: in his youth, he had been a schoolteacher in Bethesda, a small town on the outskirts of Washington, the American capital.

“My whole family were teachers: both my parents, and my grandfather too.” There was pride in his voice, and he glanced with unconcealed tenderness at a yellowing group photograph, glassed and framed, that hung on the cabin wall.

Mletkin experienced a strange, contrary effect as he delved further into his studies: the more he learned, the more he questioned.

This was especially true where religion was concerned. The captain professed himself an atheist, a man free of religious convictions and a proponent of scientific, rational facts. He would often launch into merciless critiques of the Bible, which always made his pupil very uncomfortable, while shamanism he mocked outright as evidence of a dark and sordid instinct in an uncivilized people.

At this last Mletkin took offense:

“So you consider me a savage?”

“You personally – not anymore.” John Forster grinned. “But the rest of your tribesmen have not moved far beyond living like the animals that surround them. They dwell in filthy hovels and never wash themselves, both home and hide stinking of the devil knows what, clothes swarming with legions of bugs. Once I saw an old woman plucking lice from the fur lining of her overalls and popping them into her mouth by the handful! It was revolting!”

Mletkin listened in silence, thinking to himself that the small Chukchi lice were by far less offensive than the gigantic lice and cockroaches that teemed in the hairmouths' cabins. And what about the rivers of shit that ran underfoot in every city? But he did not argue with his tutor. The contradictions in the very lifestyle of this pale-skinned society were far more material, a prime example being their absolute certainty of their own superiority. The things they had done in the Chukchi village of Guvrel did not cause them any moral qualms. On the contrary, as they streamed back aboard they boasted openly of trading only a bottle of cheap whiskey for a fabulous polar bear pelt, or a brace of walrus tusks. One of the men gulped and spluttered excitedly through the story of how, having had a woman for the price of a swig of cheap whiskey, he discovered her young daughter, who gave herself to him as her parents commanded, in exchange for the dregs of the bottle. And yet these same sailors dealt scrupulously with one another, and never locked their trunks.

Twice a week, weather permitting, they played basketball down on the ice, on a court cleared of snow, with two baskets stuck fast into the ice. Nelson, who was the
Belvedere
's forward, soon had Mletkin playing with gusto.

Despite the seeming monotony, the days passed by quickly.

The Tangitans' chief festival arrived, the day of the birth of their god, Jesus Christ. Almost every ship turned out to have stowed a tree in its hold, its green needles preserved by the cold weather. The devout Nelson managed to decorate the tree as he prepared the Christmas feast. The delicious aromas emanating from his cook's galley masked even the habitual stink of the whale blubber, for a time.

There was a priest among the wintering company, who conducted the holiday mass on the
Victoria
, the largest of the ships in port. They had erected an altar on the tarpaulin-covered deck, and fluffy white gusts billowed up from the mouths of the caroling choir.

Those present at the service often joined in with the singers, praising God and his relatives, especially his mother, who was the wife of the carpenter Joseph.

When the service was over each of the participants returned to his vessel for the Christmas dinner.

Now Nelson lit the candles that dotted their Christmas tree. Despite the rising wind, he contrived to keep the little flames steady.

The ships' merrymaking went on through the night. The
Victoria
even had a string of electric lights. The ships fired their cannons, and the sailors fired their revolvers and guns into the air.

Mletkin helped Nelson clear the table in the officers' wardroom and in the sailors' galley, and washed the dishes. He got to his bed in the dead of night, but had barely closed his eyes when he was awakened by shrill screams of “Fire!”

He could see neither flame nor smoke in the sailors' berths. The screams had come from above, from the top deck. Half-naked, half-drunk men clustered around an open hatch, getting in each other's way, shouting curses.
Mletkin was one of the last to climb up from the orlop. Instantly, he felt the heat singeing his hair and the tops of his ears; he jumped down onto the ice and ran from the ship. The
Belvedere
was roaring with flames like a giant Christmas tree, illuminating the icebound ships in the port, the stars themselves dimmed by the raging firelight.

The entire wintering company gathered by the burning ship. John Forster gazed at his ship, not blinking, tears coursing down his cheeks. Someone was attempting to lower the fire hose into a melthole, but it was already covered with a crust of new ice. It took a long while to find the ice picks, and besides, it was clear to everyone that no amount of water would save the flame-engulfed vessel. It creaked and groaned, something in the hold – probably the harpoon cannons' dynamite charges – banged explosively, fiery blisters erupting high over the deck, showering sparks everywhere. The fat, greasy flames were shot through with dark red stripes of burning blubber, which saturated the ship from mast to keel. Stumbling farther back, Mletkin wiped his streaming eyes just in time to see a flaming figure of a man leap from the deck onto the ice.

“That's Nelson!”

And so it was. Astonishingly, he was the only man to be seriously hurt in the blaze. His clothes fell from him, smoking and guttering as they hit the ice. Nelson rolled in the snow, moaning, not letting anyone near. Sometimes he howled like a wounded wolf.