The Chukchi Bible (35 page)

In that moment Mletkin realized that he could not stay here forever, that he must return to Uelen and to Givivneu, his betrothed.

Help came from an unexpected quarter, in the form of a letter from Vladimir Bogoraz, which arrived from New York.

It was an invitation for Mletkin to join a large scientific expedition that aimed to sail to Chukotka in the spring.

 

Many of the American capitalists of the nineteenth century were not simply businessmen and entrepreneurs; they also founded major institutions such as museums, universities, and scientific societies, acting as the generous benefactors of culture and science in their homeland. The railroad magnate Morris K. Jesup was one such man. Having retired from his thriving business, Jesup founded, with others, the American Museum of Natural History
and served as its president for many years, devoting the remainder of his life and considerable resources to amassing a unique collection of artifacts of aboriginal Arctic life and other so-called primitive nations, and to funding research expeditions and the publication of ethnographic works.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition of 1900 – 1901 is yet to be rivaled in importance. This is especially true where it concerns the peoples living on either side of the Bering Strait. Jesup had made a bold move in inviting, among others, the former political exile Vladimir Bogoraz – a man already renowned among the learned circles of the Russian Academy of Sciences for his linguistic studies of the dialect of the Kolyma Russians, descendants of the first Cossack explorers of the far north. His works, published in Russian and English and translated into the major European languages, remain unparalleled in the field, all the more so due to his excellent knowledge of local languages and the extraordinary trust he inspired in the aboriginal people.

After a difficult parting from Sally, which was accompanied by tears, reproaches, and protestations of love, Mletkin slept for almost the entirety of the long journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, such was his feeling that a burden had been lifted.

New York turned out to be much bigger and noisier than San Francisco, and Mletkin, mindful of his late friend Nelson's account of what happened to human waste in a city, could not help but imagine the enormous metropolis adrift upon an ocean of piss and shit.

For several days he slept in the basement of the Museum of Natural History, where he had been preceded by a group of polar Eskimos, brought over from Greenland as living museum exhibits by Robert Peary, the famous polar explorer.

Here Mletkin met not just with Bogoraz, but with another familiar face – his old acquaintance Aleš Hrdlička, who had just taken up the post of chief anthropologist at the museum.

 

The New York winter was both changeable and unpredictable. It might be buried one day under an avalanche of snowfall that seemed as though it would smother the city until spring, and the next the weather would turn so dramatically that warm rains would flush all the snow away. Frosty days alternated with the kind of sunny weather that, back in Uelen, would pass for summer.

Mletkin was counting the days until his departure. He often pored over a large map of the United States, imagining the train journey from New York back to San Francisco, and there embarking on the ship that would take him north, toward the Bering Strait. The thought of returning home dominated his waking hours.

In the meantime he did some odd jobs at the museum, saving every penny to purchase items which would be of use to him back home in Uelen. Among them, he invested in a kit of dentistry equipment and a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He also realized his old, secretly cherished dream of buying a Victrola.

It was May by the time they finally managed to set sail from San Francisco. They would be boarding a Russian vessel at Nome.

Standing at the ship's prow as it moved into Norton Bay, Alaska, Mletkin found the familiar shingled coastline – littered with white camping tents and fanciful agglomerations of crates, barrels, sheets of corrugated iron, and walrus hides – all but unrecognizable. From among the profusion of smoking metal pipes he could hear assorted mechanized clanging, people
shouting, the squealing of unseen animals, and even horses' neighing. This was not the Nome where Mletkin had buried his friend Nelson only two years ago.

The population had exploded, for a start. There were a dozen large vessels anchored in the port, among them the Russian ship
Yakut
, which Bogoraz and Mletkin intended to join in order to cross the Bering Strait.

The discovery of gold along Nome's shingled beaches had been completely accidental, as no geological or prospecting survey work had ever been done there. True, back in 1866, one Daniel B. Libby, had found unmistakable traces of the precious metal at the mouth of the small local river while digging telegraph pole shafts. But it would be another quarter of a century before the Yukon gold rush prompted him to return to the Seward Peninsula and take up prospecting in a serious way. The year 1898, when news of Nome's gold deposits reached the Yukon, brought on the great gold fever. Hordes of gold prospectors swarmed to Norton Bay, many of them armed with nothing more than a spade and bits of primitive gold-panning equipment. Among them were a great number of scoundrels, con men great and small, violent criminals, and the mentally disturbed, possessed by the idea of easy riches. Mletkin had a hard time locating Nelson's grave among the dozens of new burial plots, little mounds of tundra turf littered here and there with human bones that had been unearthed and gnawed by starving stray dogs, wolves, and gigantic polar crows. Owing to the dearth of lumber, the dead of Seward Peninsula were buried without coffins, at best wrapped in a piece of sackcloth.

As evening set in, the bustle and jangling subsided, and the prevailing noise became that of drunken shouting, curses, and even gunshots.

Neither Bogoraz nor Mletkin, both of whom had by now moved their
belongings to the Russian ship, dared go ashore at night and only observed the feverish goings-on of the prospectors' encampment on shore. It resembled nothing more than a vast madhouse, and during this time there was not a single human face in Nome that bore a normal expression; every man wore an anxious, predatory look. When they heard that Mletkin hailed from Chukotka, they demanded to know about gold-bearing veins along the Chukchi Sea and the particulars of mining for gold in Uelen and its environs.

The very thought of how easy it would be for this horde to cross the Bering Strait and swarm onto Uelen's beach was enough to make him shudder.

“I doubt the Russian government would allow strangers to prospect for gold on our coastline,” Bogoraz opined. “They'll do the digging themselves.”

At long last the
Yakut
raised anchor and set a course for the East Cape of the Bering Strait, known to the Russians as Cape Dezhnev.

Mletkin did not go to his bed. He spent the night on deck, hungrily scanning his beloved, slowly approaching native shores.

They approached the Diomede Islands from the south and swung around. On their left, they now saw the nynliu dwellings of the Nuvuken Eskimo settlement, hiding among the rocks, and then the Senlun crags, standing apart from the shore, as though they had walked into the sea. One more promontory and there it was, Uelen's dear and familiar shingled spit and the two rows of yarangas stretching out to the east, toward the narrow strait of Pil'khyn.

As he gazed intently at his native shore, scanning the small assembly gathered by a foamy surf line littered with dried seaweed, crushed crustaceans, and pieces of tree bark, Mletkin began to feel a rising sense of alarm, like a cold wave within him rolling up inexorably toward his heart; he could not find the faces of his parents among the crowd. Other familiar faces were missing too, people without whom his home seemed unimaginable. The crowd had many women in it, wearing bright multicolored kamleikas, and few children.

No sooner had Mletkin set foot on shore than Pe'ep, a husbandless, childless woman of the village, and one much respected as a skillful healer, expert in herbal lore, and unwavering guide to all those whose time it was to depart to the clouds, ran to him and threw herself on his chest. Her face streamed with tears, her body shaking as she wept inconsolably.

“Oh, poor, poor Mletkin!” she wailed. “No one near and dear to you to welcome you back from your long travels! Ah, what a bitter, joyless return!”

“What happened?” Mletkin put his hands on the woman's heaving shoulders and gave her a slight shake.

“All your kin have gone forever!” Pe'ep finally managed through her tears. “Their bodies have long lain on the Hill of Hearts' Peace. Ah, woe to us, woe to us all!”

Mletkin pushed the sobbing woman away. Slowly, he climbed up the shingled spit. His father's house faced the spot where Mletkin had disembarked. The door, a scant few thin planks nailed together, was barred with a stick of wood, which meant that the inhabitants were not at home. There were no dogs tied up outside.

Mletkin kicked the stick aside and stepped inside the chottagin. It takes a little while, when you enter a gloomy yaranga, whose only illumination steals down through the smokehole, for your eyes to adjust after the brightness of day.

A roiling, smoldering sob rose up in Mletkin's throat and he trained all his will on keeping it inside, driving it back down. Everything was gone – the people, their voices. All that remained was dead silence, a bottomless black pit into which we all go, forever. They now dwelled in another world, they could talk among themselves and perhaps could even see him, Mletkin, but they could never again speak to him, not a single word . . . And if they came to him, it could only be in dreams. Mletkin wanted to fall asleep, to drop into unconsciousness, to cross that dark curtain which separates this life from the other existence which is death, where his father and mother had now made their final home.

The front end of the fur-lined polog had been raised and propped up with a polished staff normally used for tanning hides. At the far end, he could make out the long-extinguished stone braziers still cradling bits of dried
moss, and a deerskin laid out like a pale stain beside a log headrest. Mletkin lay down on this bed and shut his eyes.

He was asleep in a heartbeat and did not wake until evening. “He has gone to see his kinfolk,” Pe'ep said meaningfully.

Mletkin awoke as night began to fall. He had not seen his parents in his dreams. Instead he had dreamed of Sally, squatting naked at the far end of the polog as she stirred the flames inside the stone brazier with a small stick, her ample black breasts resting on her knees. But when he woke his first thought was of Givivneu, and like a cold breath of wind, his stomach clenched with worry. What if the plague that had struck Uelen had also reaped the tundra camps of the Chukotka Peninsula?

Pe'ep informed him that the death toll among the tundra dwellers was smaller than that of the shore dwellers. The village of Keniskun, their neighbor on the Pacific Ocean coast, had lost all but three of its families. Hardest hit by the disease were the elderly and the children.

Mletkin paced around through Uelen, riven with the sense of an enormous, insurmountable loss. The old folks had liked to sit on the sunny side of the village, on top of the huge sun-warmed boulders to which the yarangas' walrus hide coverings were tethered. There was no one on the rocks now. The dogs' number, too, was reduced. The sled huskies had died of hunger, and the strays who had begun digging up the recently buried dead had had to be killed.

He came across the skeleton of a skin boat, still sitting on its high whale-jaw struts – a little canoe, which Mletkin had rowed up and down the lagoon as a small boy. Next to it lay the remains of a sled, its hide straps and thongs marked by dogs' teeth.

Returning to the yaranga, Mletkin sat down on the log headrest. How
to go on? He could not live alone in the empty yaranga, he had to bring Givivneu home and begin a family. Fix the boat with a new hide shell, lay new hides atop the roof... Life went on, regardless of all that had passed.

A weak whining came from just outside the door, and then a dog crawled across the threshold into the chottagin. It was Lilikey, the last remaining dog from a large sled team that had been Uelen's best. She was of the famed lineage of Kolyma huskies, highly prized for their stamina and strength.

Lilikey licked Mletkin's hand; she had recognized her master. She went on whimpering plaintively, as though telling him, in her own language, about the vast misfortune that had befallen Uelen.

Two weeks later Mletkin, together with Bogoraz, set off along the coastline. They were accompanied by Gal'mo and Seny, Mletkin's old friends and childhood companions.

Their first stop was in neighboring Nuvuken. It too had been touched by the epidemic. One out of every three had died, and the absence of old people and children was striking. Bogoraz was primarily interested in Chukchis, though, and so after a night's stop in Nuvuken they went on to Keniskun.