The Chukchi Bible (33 page)

“The shamanic séances,” Hrdlička elucidated, “are scheduled to begin at midday.”

“Perhaps Mletkin might perform a little preview for the president?” asked the governor.

“Go on, Mletkin,” Bogoraz put in.

“I only work according to my contract,” Mletkin's English words rang out clearly. “My séances begin after midday, every day except weekends. And today is a Saturday!”

The president laughed wholeheartedly and exclaimed:

“I like this shaman!”

The crowd moved on. Mletkin retreated into the yaranga and tore off his shaman's garb, furious. Perching on a log, he was soon deep in thought. It was possible that after such a brazen refusal to perform for the most important man in America, the fair's organizers might try to get rid of him. Let them! It would be for the best. To hell with the money. There were many ways of making money, better than being paid for humiliation and loss of face. And he, the chief shaman of Uelen! These were his thoughts as he gazed, with an almost unconscious pleasure, at the bright fireworks that concluded the first day of the Chicago World's Fair, and the cascading falls of rainbow light bursting into starlike, blazing shards seemed to him a man-made echo of the aurora borealis.

To his surprise, Mletkin's rude behavior brought no negative repercussions. On the contrary, Bogoraz – who came by after the fair had closed for the day – invited him to dinner at one of Chicago's restaurants. Aleš Hrdlička joined them. Both Tangitans praised Mletkin to the skies, and predicted that the incident would be especially marked out in the forthcoming first-day reviews.

The next morning Mletkin bought some newspapers.

One article doubted Mletkin's provenance, deeming him to be “visibly spoiled by civilization.” It went on to conjecture that some of the other exhibits might also be falsified. Mletkin smiled as he read on.

“What do you think you're doing?” came a bellow from Hrdlička, as he went past. The anthropologist was already under the influence, judging from his crimson face. “Reading the papers, when you should be eating your meat!”

Mletkin recollected himself with a start. It did look absurd – a so-called savage, an aboriginal, sunning himself over a morning paper!

Mletkin stashed the newspapers, got comfortable atop a whale vertebra, and slid the wooden dish of meat toward himself.

The first visitors duly appeared. Most came with children, shouting, chewing, spitting, and examining the exhibits with unabashed peering and pointing.

A couple with two children in tow halted in front of Mletkin's yaranga. The paterfamilias stooped to read the explanatory note and, pulling a piece of brightly wrapped candy from a paper twist, tossed it on the ground in front of Mletkin.

“Take it! Take it!”

The two children, a boy and a girl of about eight, smartly dressed, joined in:

“Take it! Take it!”

Mletkin concentrated on chewing his meat, though it tasted stale and bitter now. Had he not been holding himself in check, he would have thrown his knife, the one he used to cut boiled meat, at the portly, pink-cheeked couple.

“He only eats meat!” exclaimed the wife, pleased with her guess. “Show him, children, that candy is good to eat!”

The boy and then the girl unwrapped their candies slowly, with exaggerated gestures. Grimacing pleasure and delight, they proceeded to chew the sweets, while their parents droned, “Take it! Take it!” without a pause.

Mletkin, eyes down, chewed his meat and was unable to swallow it down.

“Oh, blast him,” said the man suddenly, his voice dripping with irritation and disappointment. “Let's go see the Papuan.”

“Let's go see the Papuan!” trilled the children, and clapped their hands.

Most of the visitors came up, read the explanatory notes attentively, watched the vacant-looking, chewing exhibit for a little while and went on their way. Mletkin dreaded those who stayed and tried to chat.

Children threw sweets, which Mletkin gathered and tidied into a sack inside the polog, while the adults tossed small change, and occasionally bills. Mletkin collected the money at the end of each day, having noticed that when there was a mound of money in front of him other visitors were more likely to add their own contribution.

Photographers and journalists came often. The former would set up tripods topped with an apparatus that had a dark glass eye and a metallic cup of flammable powder, then aim for a long while before they finally clicked the device, upon which a plume of instant fire would rise up like a little cloud. The journalists prompted him endlessly about life in Uelen and Chukchi customs. Most of them were tediously obsessed with the ancient custom of wife sharing and quizzed him greedily about this practice of welcoming a particularly favored traveler with a loan of one's wife for the night. “So if I come and visit you, say,” one of the hacks feverishly consulted, “I'll also be offered the chance to lie with the host's wife?”

Hrdlicka and Bogoraz came by each day to say how pleased they were.

“You're a great success!” the anthropologist told him. “You're a real star of the fair! We're proud of you.”

“What do I do with these?” Mletkin pointed to a heap of crumpled dollars and coins.

“Why, that's your money!” said the anthropologist immediately. “Your honestly earned pay.”

“They toss it to me as though to an animal,” Mletkin sighed.

“You'll just have to be patient.” Bogoraz shrugged. “I'll tell you frankly,
the public is rather uncouth and uneducated around here. So don't you mind them.”

For his first shamanic séance, Mletkin had risen early and prepared his garments, shaking out and moistening the dry chamois, and wetting the tambourine.

He'd had trouble falling asleep that night, tossing and turning for a long while as he lay listening to the noises drifting out of the various dwellings in the multihued global village. He heard snatches of conversation, a woman's weeping, children's cries, and dogs barking; but over all of this, he heard the thrum of a big city that spread over the shore of a lake as big as the sea. His thoughts flew to Uelen, to his native shore and the ceaseless murmur of the summer ocean's surf. The only real silence came in the depths of winter, during those brief lulls that come at the thick of a blizzard, and falls of the northern lights overhang the yarangas, flaring down from the sky. Here at the fairground, there was never a moment of true silence to be had.

In the morning the breakfast trolley came – a bacon omelette, milky coffee, bread with butter and jam. And separately, a heap of meat for the wooden platter, both boiled and raw. This was the first relatively cool morning after a succession of hot, sunny days. There was a light breeze, moist from skimming the surface of the lake. But toward midday, when the séance was to begin, the air thickened and tensed.

Some fair officials appeared, among them a rumpled, hungover Hrdlicka and the ever-spruce Bogoraz, sporting his little beard and metal-rimmed spectacles.

He examined the shaman, who was already garbed in the ceremonial garments, nodded with satisfaction and curtly asked:

“Ready?”

Mletkin nodded yes. Already he was retreating into himself, into those regions of the soul that slowly attune themselves to communion with the Great Forces. He had not expected that inspiration would come, and had almost decided to trick the crowd a little, show them a kind of practice trance. And then it came to him, that state when every nerve and every fiber of one's being is stripped bare and open to the Great Forces.

He picked up the tambourine, grazed the tightly stretched surface with his hand, and began to sing softly:

Mletkin did not see the crowd thicken and coagulate around the yaranga. Nor did he hear them; all were silent, watching the shaman slowly moving around the fire. The fire that licked and devoured the dry firewood was invisible in the bright glare of the sun, and only a thin plume of smoke streamed upward, snaking around the dancing shaman.

Bogoraz was watching Mletkin carefully from his place beside Hrdlička. He had witnessed the mysteries of the shamanic trance several times during his years of traversing the Chukchi lands, but he figured that, for the most
part, they had fobbed him off with mere tricks. It was very seldom that he had been privileged to see what he believed was now taking place before his eyes, and before the throng of visitors to the fair.

Mletkin had mesmerized the large crowd; it watched with bated breath as the shaman spun faster and faster in his whirling dance, as though drawing a mantle of streaming smoke about himself, turning into a pillar of smoke. The tambourine pealed ever louder; the sound seemed to fill the entire space, muffling the noise of the many-tribed village and the enormous city of Chicago that lay outside the fairground. The sky darkened and, suddenly, a silence fell over the watchers. The shaman was gone.

A wispy column of smoke still rose to the ceiling, but there was nothing to be seen in or beyond it. Bogoraz and Hrdlička eyed one another, both men ready to spring in search of the disappeared shaman, but then a tambourine thrummed from the far corner of the fur-lined polog and Mletkin appeared from the darkness. He took a few steps toward the fire, still banging the tambourine, and a distant thunderclap, soon followed by another, was heard in the spaces between each beat, portents of a quickly approaching storm. It was growing darker by the second. The fire rose higher and brighter. Wind lashed the air above the spectators' heads.

Mletkin raised the tambourine high over his head and, with a final few beats upon the instrument, collapsed beside the fire. Rain crashed down like a wall of water and thunder. The crowd was instantly soaked to the bone, but no one moved. The receding thunderclaps were all but drowned in deafening applause, shouts of encouragement and shrill, appreciative whistling.

Bogoraz knelt beside Mletkin, still prone by the fireside, and asked him gingerly: “You still alive?”

“I think so,” Mletkin replied wearily, “but I'm very tired.”

“Rest, rest up now,” Bogoraz counseled sympathetically, as he helped the
shaman into the polog and off with his clothes. He lowered the fur-lined curtain as Mletkin succumbed to a deep sleep.

The crowd was dissipating. Thunder still rent the sky, and the drought-hardened earth soaked up the longed-for, beneficent, generous, warm rain that poured from the heavens.

The following day's papers all ran gushing reports about the miracle wrought by the Chukchi shaman from the Eastern Cape – Mletkin, who was also called Frank.

“The Uelen shaman disappeared before the very eyes of the astonished fair visitors – and then he brought down rain!” “A heavenly miracle, wrought by man!” “Could this shaman from the Eastern Cape be a visitor from another world?” and “Skeptics, raise your hats to this extraordinary savage,” were just some of their conclusions.

Mletkin acceded to Bogoraz and Hrdlička's pleas, then outright insistence, and performed three more séances. But the inspiration that had visited him on that first occasion did not return. He would disappear from sight, then return, and the public roared their appreciation – though each time there were more and more shouts for new, fresh miracles. One time, to the shock and delight of the crowd, Mletkin sliced his arm from wrist to shoulder. Rivulets of blood ran down to the green grass and dropped, sizzling, into the fire. Then Mletkin showed them the same arm, intact, unblemished. It was a simple trick his grandfather Kalyantagrau had taught him. The crowd roared and frothed, and would have broken through the protective rope cordon, if not for the police guards who had been set to keep order by Mletkin's yaranga after the first performance.

With each passing day Mletkin found it more and more difficult to spend hours in the public eye. There were moments when he had to marshal all
his will, to refrain from throwing something into the peering, babbling wall of red-and-white faces. The children were worst of all. They could be counted on to throw something that would stain his face or clothing. Sweets and ice creams were the preferred missiles, as well as pebbles. If tossing a coin, they'd try to hit him in the eye, or in the face at least. Teenagers with slingshots were the most dangerous. They did not confine themselves to firing wads of chewed paper or bread pellets, but loaded their weapons with pebbles and even ball bearings.

Finally, closing day arrived, bringing another crowd of very important persons. This time the main attraction was another president – the president of the National Geographic Society. There was another round of fireworks and more music from a woodwind orchestra, but none of it held any interest for Mletkin, who couldn't conceal his joy at the freedom that awaited him.

He purchased some decent clothing and a small leather-bound suitcase, and spent his last night before departing for San Francisco in a hotel.

Vladimir Bogoraz saw him off early on the morning of August 23, 1898. He noted down Sally's address in San Francisco and said, in parting:

“You'll hear from me. Maybe we can make our way back to Chukotka together.”