The Chukchi Bible (44 page)

“What is this?” Mletkin asked him, when the trader finished his unaccustomed exertions, and caught his breath.

“Let these stones hang in your yaranga,” said the trader, and then added: “This is between you and me.”

 

The following season brought two teachers to Uelen. Not just the children, but the young men and women went to learn from them, among these was Giveu, Mletkin's youngest son. The teachers praised him, especially for his excellent penmanship and for his quick mastery of Russian letters. His childhood friend Tuar was never far behind. She was sixteen now, and flirted terribly with all the Tangitan arrivals – which caused Giveu, smoldering with jealousy, to forever be after her to marry him as soon as possible.

The students were taught that their former life was wrong. Belief in shamans, adhering to the ancient customs and possessing wealth were the cardinal sins. The teachers had cut down the figurines of protective spirits from the yaranga of the shaman woman Pe'ep. They tried to rip out a watch post that stood beside Gemauge's yaranga but succeeded only in bending it slightly. All the wooden whaleboats and skin boats were requisitioned as collective property, though the former
ytvermechyn
remained in charge of their hunting bands. In protest, Tynesken ferried his schooner to the deepest part of the lagoon and sank it there.

August 24, 1926, saw Uelen's very first summit of the candidates and members of the Bolshevik Party, the group of men who would eventually
compose the Chukotka party organization. For its secretary, the group elected Khoroshavtsev, the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee.

 

Giveu married Tuar in the fall of 1929, and Mletkin erected a second polog inside his chottagin. His eldest son, Kmol', also took a wife, an Eskimo woman from Nuvuken. In the spring of 1930, when the first icicles dangled from the southern side of the roof, Tuar gave birth to a son.

Giveu was not entirely certain of the child's paternity. But among the Chukchi, every new child is a blessing to cherish, a generous boon from Enantomgyn. No matter what preceded the baby's birth, no matter who had lain with the mother, the child's father was the woman's husband, the head of her household.

His grandfather peered at him, after wiping the infant clean with fresh snow. Who was the child to become? If the new life heralded by the Bolsheviks was truly to become universal, then this child's life would be very different from Mletkin's own. His father would not hear of the ancient ritual of Naming. Instead, he expressed his intention to give his son the name of the revolution's leader, Vladimir Lenin.

“But Lenin is dead!” Mletkin had objected.

“The Bolsheviks say that he lies as if alive, in a special yaranga they built on a big Moscow square,” Giveu countered. “They say this, too: Lenin is dead but his work lives on.”

When news of Lenin's death had reached Uelen, Mletkin had experienced a faint stir of hope: maybe now that their leader was dead, the Bolsheviks might go away and give up on trying to bend local ways to their own. But indeed it turned out that though Lenin might be dead, still his work lived on.

The new life came in an inexhaustible, unstoppable torrent, like some natural disaster, trampling everything underfoot, changing people before one's very eyes. The new Russians who called themselves Bolsheviks, or else Communists, were singular in their indestructible self-confidence. Nothing was impossible for them. From the outset, they had declared the Chukchi's past history, their faith, their ancient wisdom and experience, nothing more than superstition born of the natives' extreme lack of learning, their utter unawareness of the great life-wisdom they called Marxism-Leninism, after the names of its first teachers. Most bitter of all, they declared that all of Mletkin's knowledge was to be of no use in the new life. But if his countrymen were to live according to the new laws, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism, they would be Luoravetlan no longer! They would be slaves to unearned truths; they would be a wholly different people, whose only resemblance to their ancestors would be a physical one. And how could one view this as anything less than a bloodless genocide of a nation?

In his desperation to preserve some shred of a swiftly disappearing world, Mletkin at first looked to his children. But they were too involved in the new life; they only chuckled indulgently at their father's tirades. Even the quiet, sensible Kmol' signed up for adult night school.

Perhaps his grandchildren would be the ones to wake from this terrible spell? A gnawing sense of unease, a dark forboding of doom was ever-present with him now. What would they find beyond the horizon of Bolshevik promises? It was there, in the sweet promises of the new Russians, that Mletkin saw the greatest danger. Sure, promises of a life without hunger and toil seemed attractive – but the man who promised paradise on earth would soon have the weak and the ne'er-do-wells for his allies, those who
would wait with bated breath for blessings to fall into their laps without their lifting a finger.

On the Day of Naming Mletkin rose at dawn and ascended the Crag, stealthily bringing along the sacrificial dish with its offering of finely chopped deer meat.

Back inside his yaranga he brought a walrus-hide sack out from a storage bin where it had been hidden and carried it out into the light of the chottagin.

It took some effort to pull apart the dried-out hide, which was entirely glued together in places. The sack smelled of mold and antiquity. Reaching inside, as though feeding his arm into the gaping mouth of a strange beast, Mletkin brought out a thin, ribbonlike coil of nerpa skin, which had hardened into a clump, and then Outstretched Wings, carved from walrus tusk cured in seawater.

Tuar watched her father-in-law with curiosity.

“What's that?”

“Tonight, before the sun sets, we'll learn the name of your firstborn.”

“It's too bad you don't want to give your grandson some revolutionary Tangitan name.”

“He's no revolutionary yet, and certainly no Tangitan,” Mletkin observed. “In our family, the eldest gets to name a new addition.”

“Russian teachers say that the old customs have to be discarded, that they prevent us from moving forward.”

“Forward to where, exactly?”

“Into the bright future, into Communism,” Tuar replied.

“And what do you know of life in Communism? What does it look like?”

“All the Luoravetlan will live like the Tangitan.”

“Tangitans all live differently. The ones you've seen are all big chiefs, so they live well. They don't go out to hunt, and even their stoves are stoked by hired hands.”

“That's how we'll live, too!” Tuar said dreamily, casting a fond eye on her peacefully slumbering son, as if to promise him this sweet Tangitan life for his own.

“Not everyone can be a big chief,” Mletkin observed. “Somebody has to work . . . I've seen all kinds of Tangitans.”

But Tuar refused to be beaten:

“You only saw the bad Tangitans,” she reasoned. “The fat-cat American capitalists, the ones who make the poor do all the work . . . Teacher Skorik says that there is to be a world revolution. The working people of America will take power into their own hands, drive out the capitalists, take away all their riches, and start building Communism like us.”

Listening patiently to his daughter-in-law, Mletkin could only wonder at the speed with which she'd soaked up the Bolshevik ideas. He suspected that for her, too, the most attractive bit of ideology was the opportunity to appropriate others' wealth.

“That's all well and good, but since we haven't got much of our own, and we don't live like the Tangitan chiefs, we'll just stick to our own ways for now.” Tuar heard the immoveable firmness in his voice, as clear as a bell.

 

Toward evening, all the inhabitants of the yaranga gathered inside, looking with equal parts curiosity and surprise at the strange artifact Outstretched Wings, which was hanging down below the central smokehole.

“Like an airplane,” Giveu muttered.

Mletkin believed that a name, a name's root meaning, had the power
to transmit something of great importance from one era to the next, like a charge for one's descendants, unclear and unconscious though the transmission may be. Through the family legends, he could trace the meaning and origin of his own name far back into the past, back into the dark dawn of his family line's existence in Uelen. He was hoping, too, that the ritual would return a sense of life's deeper meaning to the family, would light up a guiding star, as it were, to show the way through this complicated epoch, so full of unexpected, unfamiliar dangers.

Slowly, Outstretched Wings made a swinging circle among the low beams of the setting sun that filtered through the smoke.

Mletkin asked Tuar to sit closer to the fire, right underneath Outstretched Wings, and to hold the infant so that he could see the sacred object.

Mletkin did not need the tambourine to enter a trance. He focused and opened himself to the Outer Forces, exposed his very soul to the sky. Eyes half-closed, he chased away all inappropriate thoughts by the sheer force of his mind. The first thing he felt was a kind of rhythmical shiver, a state familiar to him since youth. There was a ringing in his ears – weak at first, like a mosquito buzzing, then steadily deepening and growing louder. He began to sing in a low voice:

This last, Mletkin had shouted out so loudly that he startled the chottagin's collected assembly. The dogs began to bark, and fled. The newborn burst into tears and clutched at his mother's milk-swollen, naked breast with his tiny fingers.

Mletkin did not take his eyes off Outstretched Wings as they slowly rotated in the beams of light that penetrated the smoke. Suspended, they hung true and had not moved toward the baby as he'd expected. If the name Mletkin had chosen had been approved by the gods, Outstretched Wings would have swung markedly toward the child being named.

Tuar gave the baby her breast and he took to it noisily.

Mletkin pondered for a while and then sang again, naming another ancestor whose name contained the Mlen/Mlan root – Mlakoran, this time. There was no answer to this name either. Maybe the newborn was so far away in time from his ancient ancestors that it was hard to link him with the more distant forbears. He would have to find someone closer. And then it struck Mletkin that he must give his grandchild his own name, the name Mletkin – which meant “at the crux of time.” Could Mletkin's own father have known that his son would experience the very breaking of the old life on the crux of the new? All through his American odyssey, his long journey down the endless iron tracks, had he not marveled at his father's foresight, to have given him such a meaningful name? And had not his grandson, too, been born at the crux of time?

Mletkin changed his tone of voice. Now he repeated the song quietly, for the ears of the child alone, who slumbered in his mother's arms, a dark nipple with a drop of white milk still held in the corner of his half-open little mouth.

Mletkin's eyes were fixed on Outstretched Wings as they continued their indifferent circular motion, glinting dully with the reflected light of the dying fire.

“Let your name be Mletkin!”

The room stilled in anticipation as he loudly repeated his words. Outstretched Wings stilled for a moment, as though thinking, and began to rotate backward, still hanging true. They did not swing toward the sweetly sleeping infant.

Mletkin rose from the whale vertebra on which he'd been sitting and spoke deliberately to his grandson:

“Since the gods will not hear my pleas, from now on you shall be called Rytkheu – the Unknown!”

The baby woke enough to work his mouth until he found his mother's breast again and his tiny face glowed with satisfaction.

And that is how I got my name.

 

The misfortune of his grandson's naming ceremony took its toll on Mletkin. It was as if he'd lost his zest for life. He agreed to accompany Khoroshavtsev on a visit to Moscow. He stopped at Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square, where the dead leader of the world's proletariat lay in state as though still alive, and was received by the chairman of the All-Union Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin himself – but he refused point-blank to join the Bolsheviks.