The Chukchi Bible (36 page)

They marveled at the strange building from afar – an incongruous hybrid of a yaranga and a Tangitan dwelling that towered above the camp. A tall, red-bearded, bareheaded man greeted Bogoraz in English from the doorstep, and introduced himself:

“Carpenter, trader, representing Swenson's merchant firm.”

He invited the travelers inside his home.

A spacious chottagin, divided in two; the left side functioned as a real trading post, its shelves groaning under the weight of assorted goods. There was all manner of merchandise to be found – colorfully wrapped packets of tea, both American and the black kind in bricks from China which had to be
whittled down with a knife, sugar lumps, glass jars of molasses, rolls of fabric both white and patterned, and one of tarpaulin cloth, several Winchester rifles, lengths of chain, steel traps, knives, axes, adzes, assorted tools, metal spades, tobacco in tins stickered with the portrait of Prince Albert, dry tack, condensed milk, pound-weight sacks of flour, yellow tin canisters of potato flakes, and even rubber footwear.

A fur-lined polog was visible deep inside the murk of the chottagin, and to the right of it a door. Their host motioned for them to enter, and they found themselves in a room furnished with a wide leather sofa, a table and chairs, and a small cast-iron stove that radiated heat. A window looking out to the sea had been set into the sidewall. There was a small separate table holding the same type of Victrola as Mletkin had bought in America.

“Make yourselves at home!” Carpenter waved them toward two large, cozy armchairs. “Elizabeth! Bring coffee, the bottle, and some fish!”

A woman appeared from within the yaranga's depths. She wore a calico dress and embroidered torbasses. Pretty and neatly turned out, she was smiling at the guests.

“Your wife?” Bogoraz inquired, as he gallantly half raised himself from his seat.

“Sit, sit down!” flapped Carpenter. “She's only a native. My wife, so to speak, in some respect. Mind you we didn't register our marriage, and didn't marry in a church. But you must admit that in the current conditions life here without a permanent woman is positively dangerous, never mind unwise.”

“Dangerous how?” Bogoraz was curious.

“The thing is that, of late, there's been a good deal of venereal disease among the local population. The Chukchi and Eskimo women are quite
willing to associate with the various sailors passing through, not so much for pleasure as for trinkets. So it makes much more sense to have a permanent woman whose health you can be certain about. It has to be said, they are always happy to serve the white man, or hairmouths, as they call us. And it doesn't take long to teach them domestic tasks and basic hygiene. Believe me, Mr. Bogoraz, life here does have some advantages.”

“And what would those be?”

“First and foremost, you get to feel yourself an absolute master here. Everyone loves you, respects you, tries to please. There are no police, no bosses of any kind . . . You know, the Chukchi totally lack any ruling body. They give their respect to the strong and the lucky, but no more than that. There's no question of obedience. In that sense, the locals are rather freedom-loving.”

Mletkin drank his coffee quietly as he listened to the American trader hold forth. Occasionally he caught Bogoraz looking uncomfortable when Carpenter grew overly frank or brusque in his appraisal of the native populace. But the trader, in his complete confidence that Mletkin could not understand a word he said, grew warmer and warmer in his tirade:

“The Russian government has only just recollected that they have subjects living in the extreme northeast of their empire . . . But have a look at the map: where is St. Petersburg and where is Chukotka? By the time a reasonable dictum manages to reach these parts it loses both its relevance and its force. Take the limit they set on trading alcohol. Every summer the Russians send a cruiser to patrol the waters and stop contraband and unlawful trade. But all the merchant captains know its schedule perfectly well and time their arrival on Chukotka to coincide with the cruiser's absence. The
question of annexing Chukotka to the United States is going to arise, sooner or later. A dram of whiskey?”

“And you,” asked Bogoraz, “do you yourself sell spirits?”

“No,” Carpenter replied with some force. “Olaf Swenson, my boss, believes in honest trade with the locals. No spirits, and nothing that is not practical and useful for the natives to own. Everything ought to be of high quality. Each aboriginal has the right to a reasonable amount of open credit. He orders the goods, which we deliver on the following season's freight ship, and then he gradually pays off the debt in furs, walrus tusk, carvings, and the like . . .”

Mletkin's declining of the whiskey took Carpenter by surprise.

“I've never seen a Chukcha say no to a drink before,” he said, puzzled.

“I never even take a drop of beer,” Mletkin informed the man in English, to Carpenter's obvious discomfiture.

“Wait, so you understand English?”

“Yes, that language is known to me,” Mletkin said politely. “But we should be going, if we're to make it to Poueten before dark.”

“There is only one yaranga left in Poueten,” Carpenter told them. “All the rest of the village has perished.”

There was a northerly wind to help them on their way, and the skin boat moved swiftly under sail. Water burbled as it passed under the prow. Mletkin, the tiller securely under his armpit, was thinking about the American trader's speech. The hairmouths were settling down in the deer-herding camps, building hybrid dwellings, taking native women for wives. Before long there would be cohorts of light-haired children running about. On the one hand, Mletkin knew well that it was impossible to put up a barrier
against the new life that was encroaching so relentlessly on his native parts, or for the native populations to circumscribe themselves rigidly within their ancient, ancestral way of life. And yet he could not but see the grave danger that threatened that way of life. It was only a matter of time before the Luoravetlan began to speak a different tongue, and to forget their own forever.

As his eye fell on Bogoraz, sitting in the middle of the boat, head bent, Mletkin mulled over what he'd heard that evening. The Tangitans would always take one another's side against the natives. They understood each other from the first, and it was easier for the scientist Veyip to chat with Carpenter than with Mletkin, who spoke three languages. Even for a singular man like Bogoraz, Mletkin was more of a subject of study than a fellow human being. Carpenter would always be closer.

The skin boat slowly entered a narrow channel and then Poueten's small bay, where the water was calm and still. There were three yarangas squatting on the shore, but only one had people spilling from it to investigate. Some dried fish hung like red stains from a wooden rack. Though they were feeble and ragged, the villagers fairly glowed with pleasure on seeing the new faces.

On hearing Mletkin's name, one of them was moved to exclaim:

“So you're alive?”

“Why wouldn't I be?” said Mletkin, nonplussed.

“There was this rumor,” the man explained. “That you'd been fried alive and eaten, on a whaling schooner, in America.”

This made Mletkin laugh out loud.

Their next stop was Nuniamo village, which perched atop a high crag. The south side of the promontory was home to a little river in full flood, its mouth a haven from the inclement weather out on the sea. The barometer kept dropping, and Mletkin began to feel alarmed each time he glanced at the device. To himself, he noted that his own body and soul were aware of the falling pressure, so much so that he might have dispensed with the barometer altogether.

The folk who had come out to greet them helped to beach the hide boat and stand it on its side, creating a sheltered place to bed down for the night in the rising wind. Bogoraz erected a cloth camping tent nearby and then, armed with a thick notebook and pencils, set off for a tour of the yarangas.

Einev, the head of a large local family, invited Mletkin to his home.

“Many, many people died,” he told his guest flatly, as he sucked on a pipe. “The old people and the small children just kept on leaving this life. It wouldn't have been as bad if the sickness hadn't come in the dead of winter, when the
uverans
, underground meat stores, were depleted, and the meltholes in the sea's ice cover were thick with winter ice . . .”

This kind of winter epidemic, which could carry away a great part of the population, was not unknown on Chukotka. But Mletkin had come to believe that they were now a thing of the past, and that these days – when there was plenty of hunting in the sea and more opportunity to lay in stores for the hard winter months – they just shouldn't happen. He was guessing now that these illnesses were a direct result of closer contact with the Tangitans. Working in the hospital in Nome, and later in San Francisco, Mletkin had learned of the existence of minuscule living organisms, microbes that could not be seen by the eye but were highly contagious and spread disease.
One of the doctors at the San Francisco charity hospital had let Mletkin peer through a special doctor's kind of binoculars, something called a microscope. After he saw the ordinary drop of water swarming with tiny creatures, it took Mletkin a long while to be able to drink unboiled water again. Microbes teemed in the fluid samples of syphilitics and gonorrhea patients. Mletkin remembered the spirochaete bacterium, source of syphilis – a sickness that was already ravaging many of the women and men of the Chukotka coast, especially well. Covered in weeping sores, their rotting noses caving inward, the sufferers were revolting to see.

When the wind died down, the boat set a course for the southern bank of Kytryn Bay, marked as St. Lawrence Bay on Bogoraz's map. Mletkin could not help but notice that all of his homeland's major geographical landmarks bore Tangitan names on Tangitan maps, names given in honor of exploring sailors, saints, monarchs, and various unknown persons. But whenever he heard the Chukchi name for a place Bogoraz would note it down next to the Tangitan name with a sharp pencil.

There was a single large yaranga upon the shingled beach at Kytrynkyn. Pakaika, the yaranga's master, was widely known to all the people of Chukotka. His grandfather Tro'ochgyn was more famous still.

On the vast coastal expanse between Yanranai settlement and Uelen, all travelers' paths eventually came to intersect at Kytrynkyn. This was especially true in winter. From ancient times, this place was known to belong to Tro'ochgyn's family and encompassed the lands from the bay that ran like a deep gash up the continental plate to the little inlet of Pynakvyn. Tro'ochgyn became famous for robbing travelers, ambushing them en route through his demesne, although he spared those who spent the night in his yaranga, obeying the strict rules of tundra hospitality. This went on for several
decades, until the people were goaded beyond their patience and killed him. As the tale went, Tro'ochgyn had been run through with a spear right on the ice of Kytryn Bay and for a long while after, his name was used to scare fractious children. But his family had not been harmed. His descendants still lived in his large, sumptuous yaranga. They hunted the plentiful whale and walrus in the bay and, in winter, set traps for the furry animals on land. They had several uverans that never lacked for kopal'khen and nowadays, as though to expunge the evil reputation of his forebear, Pakaika treated all his guests with lavish generosity, his many sons and daughters from his two wives all rushing to care for the traveler, feed his dogs, dry and mend his clothing. There were rumors that the daughters did not shy away from offering a more tender sort of hospitality, too.

No sooner had the skin boat touched the beach than Pakaika's tall, strapping sons pulled it up on shore; the passengers never even had a chance to get their feet wet. Meanwhile their father, the master of this place, gave hearty greeting:

“
Amyn yettyk
!”

“
Ee-ee
,” Bogoraz replied, then introduced himself.

“I've heard a good deal about you, even a long time ago,” Pakaika said. “But you, Mletkin, I've never met, though the rumors of your demise in America had reached even us here.”

The guests were led inside the yaranga, which was spacious enough to contain three pologs with enough space left for them to spread themselves out comfortably on whale-vertebra stools. They were much impressed by their host's solidly organized and well-to-do household. As they approached the yaranga, Mletkin had taken stock of the whale-jaw struts that propped up three skin boats – a large one, a slightly smaller model, and finally a
single-person canoe. A pack of sled dogs was tied up beneath, surrounded by a goodly number of yelping puppies. Several walrus, nerpa, and lakhtak hides hung from drying racks, and there were four polar bear skins stretched to dry on tall poles. Next to these were black hunks of cured walrus and whale meat, and a garland of cleaned walrus intestine that would be used to make waterproof cloaks.