The Chukchi Bible (43 page)

It appeared that the Whites had been victorious over the Reds.

On the face of it, nothing had changed in Uelen's daily routine. Mletkin healed the sick, augured weather and spoke with the Greater Forces at the holy place atop the Crag. Yet a strange unease was never far from his heart – what now? He was haunted by the idea of broken time: the measured flow
that ordered life on earth had somehow been curved out of shape, leading the Luoravetlan and their neighbors into a time and a life that were not their own.

The one unalloyed pleasure in Mletkin's life, and his wife's, were their sons. They were growing up hale and strong, not too precious to turn their hand to any kind of work. Kmol', the eldest, was starting to glance sidelong at girls, especially the ones from the neighboring Eskimo village of Nuvuken. His younger brother, Giveu, grew closer and closer to his childhood playmate, black-eyed Tuar, the giggly girl from the Aiye extended family, whose yarangas spread down the bank of the lagoon, occupying almost the entire span between the schoolhouse and the stream. Mletkin did not have to hunt anymore, if he chose: both his sons turned out to have luck, and rarely returned from the sea empty-handed.

In the summer of 1923, one year after Swenson's schooner – usually the first to return – had departed, Mletkin caught a whiff of the half-forgotten tang of coal smoke from atop the Crag. A gigantic black steamship appeared from beyond the Senlun cliffs, its tall chimney belching a dense black column of smoke into the clear sky.

“A steamer! A steamer!”

“Looks like a Russian ship,” Mletkin said to himself, as he noted the name stenciled on the ship's side:
Stavropol
.

Slowly, as if blindly feeling its way, the ship approached, then came to a halt some way from the shore. There was the clang of an anchor being dropped, and the black smoke thinned. Several whaleboats and skin boats were immediately launched from the shore, headed for the steamer.

Even at a distance, Mletkin had noted the red flag and its emblem of a
hammer crossed with a curved knife. Rudykh and Bychkov had erected an identical flag over the schoolhouse, though it had long since been carried off by a winter blizzard.

The Tangitans crowded on deck, peering down with undisguised curiosity at the approaching boats.

“
Amyn yettyk
!” someone shouted up to them.

“Hail, Uelen-men!” came an answering shout from a Tangitan clad in a leather jacket belted around with straps, and a small shotgun tucked inside them.

These were more representatives of the new Soviet government, and chief among them was the leather-clad Tangitan, who introduced himself as Khoroshavtsev. The new Russians lodged themselves in the empty school, stoked the ovens and generally behaved as though they had come to stay.

Parts of a prefabricated house were unloaded from the ship, but the house turned out to be so long that they had to erect it across the shingled spit rather than down its length. One end of the house seemed to push at the bank of the lagoon while the other looked out onto the sea. A single one of its long walls held twelve windows, and there were twenty altogether! Even the schoolhouse was dwarfed by the new house of the Soviet government.

The
Stavropol
raised anchor and sailed off to the northwest, toward the mouth of the Kolyma.

It soon came to light that, once again, there was no teacher among the new arrivals.

Khoroshavtsev came to Mletkin's yaranga uninvited. This man bore no resemblance to the new Russians whom Uelen's shaman had encountered
before. He was an imperious man with an air of command and self-confidence. His cold eyes had the blue tinge of freshwater ice. His harsh, ringing voice matched his appearance perfectly.

“So you're the shaman, Frank Mletkin?”

He'd somehow found out Mletkin's American name.

“Yes, that is what destiny and my ancestors have willed,” Mletkin calmly replied.

“Well, you couldn't tell by the look of you that you deal with spirits and other manner of deviltry.” Khoroshavtsev curled his lip. “They say you're literate, too?”

“My knowledge of those matters is scarce.”

“Now, now, don't be so modest. Here's what I've got to say to you, mister shaman, or whatever you're called . . . A literate man, especially one who knows Russian and English, is a great, rare thing among your race. We, the new people in charge, could really use a man like that! Not to mention someone who has limitless authority among the locals. That is why, on behalf of the Soviet government, our government, I offer you the opportunity to work with us, and to help us to build a new, just way of life among the Chukchi people.”

“What is it that you don't like about our way of life?”

“I haven't got the time to explain it all to you. Suffice it to say, the old life has come to an end. Our rule is the rule of the workers, the rule of humanity's front ranks. We're realizing the great teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who showed us the way of ridding humanity of injustice and oppression. We're bringing their tenets to life. The Chukchi will live differently from now on!”

“How?”

“Without the rich and the deceiving shamans!” Khoroshavtsev said firmly. “So then, are you going to help us?”

“Helping people is my calling,” said Mletkin, “and that is what I always do.” Then he added, “But no one needs to make me.”

“If such are the needs of the revolution,” Khoroshavtsev said curtly, “we can make you. We have the right.”

“So what are you going to do?” Mletkin asked.

“First of all, we'll elect a soviet, a council. Then we'll organize a hunting cooperative, open up a school, start to teach the children to read and write. And we'll eradicate without mercy anyone who opposes the Soviet government, especially the rich and the shamans.”

“I'm not rich, but I am a shaman,” Mletkin told him proudly.

“When you come over to our side, to the Bolsheviks, you'll forget your shaman ways in an instant. As for riches,” and Khoroshavtsev ran his eyes over the chottagin's interior, “no, you're not exactly a man of wealth.”

Khoroshavtsev departed, leaving Mletkin greatly perturbed.

He received his first order from the new government the following morning: he was to drive Khoroshavtsev to Keniskun.

The dogs ran gamely along the wet tundra. The Bolshevik sprawled imposingly atop the sled, like a great lord, and could barely sit up when the steel runners got mired in the wet sand and clay of the occasional sandbar. As they traveled, the Bolshevik expounded on the future of the Chukchi nation. According to him, within a mere few years all of Uelen's children would be literate, people would go to doctors to be healed, they would hunt together, sing Russian songs, wash themselves in a
banya
, and travel to Moscow and Petrograd by airplane.

Carpenter greeted the Bolshevik boss with an attitude of abject servility.
His table groaned with bottles of spirits, caviar freshly prepared in the Tangitan style, smoked salmon, boiled deer tongue, and platters of young walrus flippers in aspic.

“Mr. Carpenter,” Khoroshavtsev's voice was stern as he took in the sight of the festive table, “from now on you will trade under the supervision of the representative of Chukotka's Revolutionary Committee. I am that representative.”

Mletkin kept a keen eye on both Tangitans as he relayed each man's words to the other. How strange it was, that the two aliens, newcomers to his motherland, behaved like its masters, taking no account of him, the native. Khoroshavtsev and Carpenter were negotiating the lines of power – and, by right of strength, Khoroshavtsev was letting the trader know that from now on he would be under a new master's gimlet eye.

“My own boss, Mr. Olaf Swenson, is on excellent terms with the Soviet government,” Carpenter politely enjoined. “We are here to supply the native population with necessary goods at the lowest prices we can offer, short of bankrupting ourselves.”

“But you do understand that eventually you'll have to get out of here.”

His patronizing discourse with the trader did not impede Khoroshavtsev from sampling the food and drink that had been laid out.

“Why aren't you drinking?” He suddenly turned to Mletkin.

“I don't drink.”

“Not at all?” Khoroshavtsev drawled doubtfully.

“Not at all.”

“But I've been told that the Chukchi are very susceptible to fire-water and would give the shirts off their backs for a mouthful of spirits.”

“Unfortunately that is true,” Mletkin sighed.

“You see!” Khoroshavtsev hectored their host. “Your countrymen have been plying the natives with alcohol for decades!”

“Russians also traded vodka,” interjected Mletkin.

“Those were the old Russians,” a visibly inebriated Khoroshavtsev dismissed the point with a flick of his hand. “Whereas we, the new Russians, the Bolsheviks, won't put up with it anymore!”

“Our firm does not sell alcohol to the natives,” Carpenter reminded him. “It is strictly forbidden and against our policy.”

“Well, we'll see about that . . . But you, Mr. Carpenter, I would request that you help us open a store in Uelen. And let the trader be a native man, not some American! In fact, let's have Comrade Mletkin here be the first Soviet tradesperson in Uelen. He answers to every requirement: literate, temperate, honest . . .”

“But still a shaman!” Mletkin cut in, with an ironic smile.

“Mmm, I haven't forgotten that,” Khoroshavtsev slurred thoughtfully. “But what kind of a shaman are you, anyway? Wouldn't think it to look at you. Perhaps you're having me on. How can you prove it? They say that real shamans aren't afraid of bullets.”

With those words, Khoroshavtsev reached down and unholstered his pistol. Mletkin had never before seen this particular kind of weapon, invented to shoot at live people. It had been well oiled and gleamed darkly.

“Not in here, Mr. Khoroshavtsev,” squealed Carpenter. “Not in my house!”

“Outside, let's go!” Khoroshavtsev barked.

The American trader's home and warehouses were situated on a shingled beach, well away from the yarangas, which topped a green, turfy hill. Waving his revolver to and fro, Khoroshavtsev set off for the shore, gesturing for
Mletkin to follow. The Bolshevik swayed a little, but was more or less steady on his feet.

Carpenter followed behind, wringing his hands and whining like a puppy. “Mr. Khoroshavtsev, Comrade Khoroshavtsev, don't do this! I ask you! I'm begging you!”

“Shove off, you bourgeois scum,” Khoroshavtsev shrugged him aside. He then ordered Mletkin to halt.

Mletkin stopped by the water's edge and turned to face the Bolshevik. He was suddenly filled with a wonderful sense of peace and contentment, and he couldn't manage to contain a smile, which played lightly upon his lips. When had all this begun? This fracture in time? Perhaps at the moment he first began to think that the words writ in the Holy Scripture and declared by the Tangitan gods and wise men to be truths really served only to narrow the horizon, to circumscribe men's imaginations and thought processes. It was as though they caught man in a net of rules, tenets, unshakeable truths, and made a servant out of him. And here was another set of rules, declared by a new wise man by the name of Lenin. Man's mind was being harnessed, the workings of his mind ordered not by his own reason but by another man's truths. It was the end of spiritual freedom. And it had all begun with the Holy Scripture . . . A persistent sea breeze buffeted him from behind, and heavy clouds stretched over the horizon. Mletkin knew that no matter how hard he tried, the Bolshevik would not hit him with the bullets from his little gun. This shaman's trick, taught to him by Kalyantagrau, was not a difficult one. The main thing was to look straight into the shooter's eyes.

Khoroshavtsev took several steps back, raised his revolver, and fired.

Carpenter shrieked, as though he'd been hit.

And Mletkin stood there by the water's edge. He was smiling.

The Bolshevik swore a filthy oath in Russian and fired again. Mletkin stood there still.

“This can't be happening.” Khoroshavtsev muttered, peering intently at his revolver. “I can't have missed!”

“Comrade Bolshevik, enough! You've had your fun now. Come along, we'll have a drink and a bite to eat,” wheedled Carpenter.

Khoroshavtsev's fingers refused to obey him as he struggled to holster his gun. He walked up to Mletkin and laid a hand on the other man.

“Alive!” he muttered. “I don't get it. What did you do with the bullets? Where did they go?”

He shook Mletkin by the shoulders.

“They did not exist,” came the shaman's unruffled reply.

Khoroshavtsev sobered up immediately after that, and had nothing more to drink. He was suddenly in a hurry to return to Uelen, but demanded that Carpenter accompany them back.

The Bolshevik remained silent for the entire journey. Several times he raised his eyes to Mletkin's wide back, as the other man led the sled, and each time a nasty, strange, nauseating feeling would rise up from the depths of his belly.

From that day on, Khoroshavtsev behaved with marked politeness toward Mletkin and never called him a shaman to his face.

In the meantime, a new building in Uelen was finished; they moved the various offices inside and also fitted out a store, which was run by Tegrynkeu, Carpenter's former assistant.

One bright summer day Carpenter arrived with an unusual cargo. He drove the sled himself, and instead of the normal load of goods, the sled was laden with two large, porous boulders, the kind that usually served to
weigh down the walrus-hide walls of the yaranga. Carpenter silently tied them to Mletkin's yaranga, neatly wrapping them around with hide thongs, and hoisted them high enough to prevent the dogs getting at them.