The Chukchi Bible (31 page)

A man pushed his way through the crowd, saying he was a doctor.

He bent over Nelson, asking something, but received only a groan in response.

“Help me!” shouted the doctor.

Mletkin was by his side in an instant.

“Bring a stretcher!” the doctor ordered.

Very carefully and gently, they rolled Nelson onto the stretcher and carried him away.

As he was about to board the
Victoria
, Mletkin looked back. The
Belvedere
was slowly sinking into the melthole its fiery hull had made in the ice. Burning fragments of the ship were winking out as they floated on the surface of the melthole's vast mirror. Soon the whaling camp was shrouded in darkness once more, and the moon, stars, and Christmas tree candles aboard the ships returned to undimmed luminosity.

Nelson was carried into the ship's infirmary with great care. He was unconscious and raving, with the names of his God and of Sally on his lips. The doctor asked Mletkin to wash his hands thoroughly. They had to get Nelson free of his charred clothing, which had stuck fast to his skin. Mletkin lifted a small leather pouch of papers and money from Nelson's breast. His body was a horrific sight, its entirety an open wound, raw and seeping. They covered the injured man with a thick layer of creamy whale blubber, strained pure, and wrapped him in clean white linen.

Because Nelson's skin was black, it was hard to tell where it ended and the charred fabric of his clothes began. A few times Mletkin had lifted a piece of his friend's skin together with cloth, and so made the grim discovery that a black man's flesh was as pink as the flesh of Tangitans, as pink as his own.

The doctor jammed Nelson's clenched teeth open and poured a bit of liquid inside. Nelson swallowed convulsively, but did not open his eyes.

“I've given him some opium,” the doctor explained. “It will lessen his suffering. That's all I can do for him now.”

He walked to the sink and began washing his hands.

“But he'll die,” said Mletkin.

“That is more than likely. We can only alleviate his pain, though we would have to take him to the hospital in Nome to do even that.”

The sailors of the wintering whaling flotilla made a collection among themselves and gathered together enough money to buy a sled and a team of huskies in a neighboring Eskimo village. Piu, a local Eskimo who knew the way, was hired as a guide, and Mletkin set off with his wounded friend on a sad, strange journey.

The blizzard crashed down even before the ships' lights had ceased to twinkle at their backs. The already short winter day swiftly thickened and grew dark, so dark that they were forced to stop. Nelson came to, moaning. Piu hastily erected a snow shelter and they bedded the dogs in a circle around the shelter, with Nelson on the sled at its center, wrapped in warm clothes and heavy blankets.

Mletkin's large flask of warm, sweet coffee lay against his stomach, tucked inside his shirt. This was how the Chukchi kept their drinking water and the water used to spray and defrost the sled runners from freezing on long winter journeys. The gusting wind made it impossible even to attempt a fire.

“I want to live!” Nelson groaned.

“You will,” Mletkin's voice rang with conviction. “I'll do everything I can to save you.”

“I have this feeling,” gasped the other man, “that I'm right inside this hideous pain, in the heart of it.”

“I hear you, Nelson.”

After feeding him a few sips of coffee, Mletkin walked out of the shelter. He took a few steps forward, into the phosphorescent maelstrom of the raging storm, and shouted against the wind:

Mletkin was shaking, not from cold but from a superhuman intensity, an incredible concentration of his spirit and will. It almost seemed to him that the wind itself was blowing
around
the emanation of this force, around his convulsively tight, snow-spattered face.

There were only the sounds of Piu snoring peacefully in the snow-hide, the dogs whining quietly in their sleep, and Nelson's labored breath.

“Don't leave me, Frank, all right?” His voice was barely audible. After a while, he said: “You know, I think it's hurting less . . .”

“You'll feel better soon,” Mletkin told him. Then he surprised himself with a confession: “I was asking my gods to help you.”

“Thanks . . . It hurts less when I'm talking to you . . . I should have doused the candles myself, and then that drunken MacPherson wouldn't have toppled the Christmas tree. And the deck wooden, soaked in rendered blubber. A dropped match would have been enough . . .”

As the blizzard raged all through that uneasy night, Nelson told Mletkin the story of his people, his family. His ancestors had been forcibly brought over to America from a faraway, sweltering African land. The sun there
burned so brightly that it charred your skin, which was why Nelson's kinfolk were all so black. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of black-skinned slaves toiled from dusk until dawn under the watchful eyes of their white overseers, who were armed with whips and guns, or else dogs, on the great cotton plantations. Runaways would be shot mercilessly, or torn apart by dogs. The white plantation owners bought and sold people like cattle, tearing children from their parents, wives from their husbands. The black slaves rebelled, but each revolt was brutally suppressed. And yet the day came when the black people united with those whites who were opposed to slavery. There was a war, which ended with slavery being abolished by law, though the whites' haughty and superior attitude to blacks – even among those opposed to slavery – prevailed to this day.

“Even now we, the citizens of the mighty United States, are treated as second-class people. We don't even have our own names. We were christened with the names of our owners; my name belongs to the man whose fields my ancestors once worked. We have to take the most badly paid, backbreaking labor . . . But we work as hard as we can, to show the white man that God loves us, too . . . And now I'm begging the Lord to be merciful and spare my life . . . What would Sally do without me? My poor little sister, she's always relied on my help.”

Cloudy tears rolled down from between his singed eyelashes; then he lost consciousness once more.

Nelson came to on the third and last day of their voyage when the scent of coal smoke already hung upon the air, and Mletkin was able to give him the good news:

“I can see the rooftops of Nome from here. We are very near our goal. Be strong, my friend!”

“Promise me you'll deliver this money to Sally . . .”

“You can do that yourself,” Mletkin told him, but his voice no longer carried hope.

The Nome hospital turned out to be nothing more than a long wooden barracks, subdivided into smallish sickrooms. The doctor on duty looked over the ill man and gave him a sleeping draft. Taking Mletkin aside he said:

“I'm amazed, frankly, that he's lasted this long. According to every law of medicine he should have died long ago.”

Nelson died the following morning. He regained consciousness, briefly, and gave Mletkin's hand a weak squeeze.

“I'm so glad you are here with me . . . I am going now . . . I am going to God.”

Mletkin could not hold back his own tears. He closed his friend's eyes before walking out of the room.

Mletkin buried his friend in full accord with the Tangitan tradition. He made a wooden box, into which he pressed the dead man's body, and carried it by sled to the dour cemetery on the opposite bank of the frozen river. It took half a day's work to hack a cavity large enough in the rock-hard, permafrost soil. He used the heated point of a nail to singe a legend into the plain wooden cross: “Nelson Crawford Jackson 1870 – 1898.”

After the funeral of his friend, Mletkin found it hard to know what to do with himself. Until the start of the sailing season there would be no question of fording the Bering Strait and getting over to Chukotka. He was saved by Dr. Hutchinson's offer of a spell of work at his hospital, in exchange for a small salary, his meals, and a bed on one of the wards.

Mletkin stoked the ovens and carried blocks of freshwater ice from the river to melt in the huge iron cauldron embedded in the stove of the hospital's kitchen; he also cooked meals for the hospital's few patients, having handily picked up a few things from Nelson. At times he was called upon to change bandages, apply compresses, smear frostbitten body parts with whale blubber, and even assist Dr. Hutchinson with the more complex surgeries – removing the appendix, for example, or treating gunshot wounds. One time he had to help perform an autopsy on an Eskimo who had died for no apparent reason. On the whole, a man's innards were very much like those found inside nerpas, lakhtak, and walrus. Mletkin was rather taken aback to find that the differences were so slight.

In the evenings, Dr. Hutchinson liked to invite Mletkin to sit with him over coffee. He was curious to hear about Chukchi ways, about shamans.
Like John Forster, the captain of the perished
Belvedere
, the doctor was most interested in the magic shamans were alleged to perform.

“A shaman doesn't work magic,” Mletkin asserted strongly, as if to say he did not like this turn of conversation.

“But I have heard so much about miracles, about men changing into animals and swapping bodies. Is it not true that shamans can do these things?”

Mletkin felt his chest constrict. In those long-ago days of his testing, he had turned himself into a bird, into a walrus and a nerpa, even into a fly crawling over a hunk of walrus meat that had been set out in the sun. But to talk about those experiences, just like that, would be no different than to turn himself inside out before Dr. Hutchinson, to pull out his own hot and bloody beating heart and hand it over to the other man.

“A shaman doesn't work magic,” Mletkin repeated. “A miracle comes from the Outer Forces, if they will it. Or they can ask me to make one happen.”

Mletkin couln't tell whether the doctor was a man of faith or an atheist like the captain of the unfortunate
Belvedere
.

“So what does the shaman do, then?” asked the doctor.

“First and foremost he heals, as you do, doctor. He heals with medicinal herbs and roots, which he must collect in the tundra. My grandfather Kalyantagrau, the famed great shaman of Uelen, taught me this. I can heal frostbite with a special salve of herbs in a whale-blubber suspension, or work the knife when black flesh needs paring off. That's what we call it when the flesh dies and poisons the blood black . . . The patient himself does the rest. I try to awaken his own inner strength, and that strength is what can work the true miracles.”

One day a steamship sailed into Nome. The chimney stack protruding from between the vessel's two masts belched dense black smoke, whose acrid smell was apparent to Mletkin from the moment the
Bear
entered the head of Norton Bay. He picked a tall man out from among the disembarking crowd; the man was appraisingly scanning the natives who milled about the dock. This was the renowned anthropologist and ethnographer Aleš Hrdlička, a fellow of the American Museum of Natural History. He was collecting exhibits for the ethnography section of the forthcoming World's Fair in Chicago, tasked with presenting to the public members of the world's yet uncivilized tribes in a setting as realistic as possible. Hrdlička was in charge of gathering up the living artifacts of the Arctic.

To entice Mletkin, the anthropologist sketched out the global village that was already being built by the side of a lake and promised a good deal of money just for sitting on the grass in front of visitors.

Mletkin was quick to agree, with the thought of making his way from Chicago to San Francisco, to carry out Nelson's last wishes. There he would see Sally, tell her about her brother's last days, and hand over the money Nelson had left her.

He stood by the railcar window and watched the villages, grazing camps, and herds of domesticated deer and horses blinking by. Every so often, the train stopped and the passengers had a chance to stretch their legs. The cars would be surrounded by hawkers with trays strapped to their necks, who offered sweets, cooling drinks, and cigarettes. Mletkin usually bought sugared water. His traveling companions – a man named Galyargyrgyn from St. Lawrence Island and an Eskimo family – preferred beer, which both assuaged thirst and gave a pleasant feeling of light-headedness. Three times a day Aleš Hrdlička would shepherd his charges to the dining car for a
good meal. He paid special attention to Mletkin, always quizzing him about Chukchi ways. The learned anthropologist always reeked of alcohol, but the fire-water only seemed to enhance his boundless energy.