The Gray Earth

by Galsan Tschinag

  “As I said, help yourself,” she replied. Brother hesitated, but in the end he got up and walked over to the chest. The women watching the scene trembled and held their breath, retreating into themselves. Brother sensed the quivery silence and the women’s oppressive gaze. He lifted the narrow lid and reached inside with his right hand the way one reaches into a sheep’s belly during slaughter. Just as one’s index and middle finger feel their way forward to find the animal’s throbbing thread of life, so did the delegate’s hand blindly feel its way forward, eventually snatching a ball of fabric and pulling it out. Then, with his other hand, he seized a corner of the shaman’s dark-red cloth. He hurriedly unwrapped the bundle, rummaged through its contents with his rough hands, and said without turning his head: “I’ve got the headgear and the shawyd. Where’s the mirror?”

  The shaman didn’t reply initially. She looked at the hole in the yurt’s roof for a long moment, then screwed up her eyes and wiped her palm across them as if to check that her eyelids remained closed. Finally she said, “If you think you need the mirror as well, it sticks in an eye of the grid behind the chest.”

  The delegate leaned forward, reached across the chest, and helped himself.

  Brother Dshokonaj returns home late in the evening, just as we are getting ready to go to bed. We’re so happy to see him that all three of us fire questions at him. But we soon realize that he is in no mood to tell us about his excursion. Disappointed and discouraged, Brother Galkaan and I give up and go to bed. Sister, on the other hand, is more persistent and presses on until she wrings some details from him. The odd fragment reaches Galkaan and me through the veil of sleep that sinks down on us like an anesthetizing cloud, showering us with waves of bright light.

  That night my dreams are intense and vivid. I feel as if I am dragged repeatedly through the same dream about my shaman aunt. Naked and bare, she stands surrounded by a roaring, scornful mob. I wake up when I hear her call for me, but even after lying in bed for a long time, my ears still ring from her deep raspy voice calling my name. I have to get up.

  The following morning, I am sent to fetch aarshy from the shed for tea. I discover Brother Dshokonaj’s tack in a corner. He must have lifted it off his horse and dropped it there without gathering in the bridle’s long rein and lead, and his half-filled goat-leather bag is still tied to the saddle. I can’t help but wonder what is in the bag and so, with snatches of last night’s conversation still in my mind, I undo the knots in the saddle strings and open the bag. I immediately recognize the headgear, with its eagle-owl feathers, cowrie shells, and black fringes. My heart begins to pound. Next I pull out the shawyd and wave it about silently a few times. The last thing I find is the mirror. It almost bowls me over. As I stand and hold the perfectly round, brightly polished brass mirror with both hands, I see before me the naked shaman, the shape of her body cruelly distorted. And I hear her call again. Then I calmly hide the mirror under the aarshy, and tie the goat-leather bag with the headgear and the shawyd back to the saddle.

  In the evening Brother Dshokonaj asks if anyone outside our family has borrowed the key to the shed. With one voice we say no. Beginning with that moment, an odd change comes over him. He broods, casting a shadow over all of us. We talk little, and life in our yurt becomes quiet. But we make an extra effort with our schoolwork. Even Brother Galkaan, the problem child when it comes to learning, brings home mostly excellent grades.

  One day, during the last class of the afternoon, the teacher hands me a small package about the length and diameter of a finger: “Deliver this to my yurt, please. You’d better take your schoolbag with you.”

  His words leave me feeling curious and excited. The teacher’s wife is kind and lively again. She welcomes and feeds me, and remembers to ask about Gök. The memory of that time makes me melancholy and opens the door to my soul. Once again their young daughter is sick in bed. “Dear little Brother! You helped her so much before,” says the beautiful woman. “Could you take another look at her?” I agree, and the girl starts coughing as soon as she sits up. I can tell she is suffering from whooping cough. Having had it myself, I recognize the symptoms. I also know a few remedies: in the spring one must swallow a marmot’s warm gallbladder just as it comes from the animal’s body. In the summer one must eat wild sweet onions, boiled in the milk of a white goat, and stand with one’s mouth wide open into the wind; or, better still, ride fast to create one’s own wind.

  I am supporting the gasping child’s back and waiting for the attack to pass when the teacher enters the yurt. Now I can show off my knowledge. The family is impressed and grateful, which pleases and emboldens me. At that moment I remember the mirror and quickly decide to make a move: “I strongly recommend that you check with my aunt first. I could be wrong, and I don’t want to give you bad advice. Your daughter seems to be a very serious case.”

  “Do you think your aunt might see us? We’ve always heard she’s hard to reach. And particularly now that even the last of her tools were taken from her ...” The teacher is concerned.

  “You could take me with you,” I say, adding, “I grew up more in my aunt’s lap than in my own mother’s.” This is a gross exaggeration, to put it mildly, but I get what I want when the wife says to her husband, “Go to the boy’s aunt right now, and take him with you!”

  We leave shortly afterward. The teacher has a good horse with good tack, which makes me think more highly of him. I sit behind him on a rolled-up lambskin coat, which makes for a wonderfully soft seat. So I put my arms around his stout and surprisingly solid waist. Could we ride past our yurt, I ask, so I can drop off my schoolbag and tell the others? “Don’t tell them where we’re going,” he replies. “Tell them we’re going fishing.” I agree, and fetch the mirror and a handful of aarshy in case anyone notices I am carrying something in my breast pocket.

  Uncle Know-It-All and my aunt’s yurt is within walking distance at Saryg-höl, the Yellow Lake. Earlier I had wondered if I shouldn’t just walk over to take the mirror back, but I decided against it because Brother Dshokonaj would have noticed. To welcome me, my aunt sniffs and strokes me as usual, but she is less friendly than I would have expected. She is clipped and gloomy while exchanging greetings with my teacher, and I have to use a trick to lure her out of the yurt. Once we are outside, I take her hand and lead her off into the steppe. “Do you know what I’ve brought you?” She has no idea, which is somewhat disappointing. But I stay cheerful: “Close your eyes!”

  When she indulges me, my initial disappointment wanes. My left hand hangs on to hers, but my right hand reaches deep into my breast pocket, fishes out her mirror with two pieces of aarshy, and drops it all into the palm of her other hand. “Open your eyes!”

  She begins to tremble even before she looks. Her trembling grows more intense until I, too, begin to tremble. For some time her green eagle-owl eyes stare at the mirror. Then she closes her fingers around it and stares at her fist. Finally she speaks: “Did your brother make you bring it back?”

  “No, I stole it.”

  “You stole it?” She looks incredulous. “Why did you steal it? Why would you do something like that?”

  “You were standing there naked, calling me,” I say.

  “I stood there naked, you say? And I called for you?” She sounds hoarse. “What did I say?”

  “First you called out Dshuruunaj,” I say. “And then you said ‘My dear little lamb!’”

  She puts her fist with the mirror on my left shoulder and her other palm on the part in my hair. With her hands on me, I can feel that she is still trembling. Then she asks about the two pieces of aarshy.

  “Three were stolen from you,” I say, “and three should return.”

  I can feel her hands press harder into me, and the trembling grows stronger.

  Back in the yurt, she is nicer to the teacher. Together we drink tea and eat meat. In the end the teacher casually asks our host for permission to get up from the special mat for guests so we can leave. The shaman repl
ies similarly, making light of the situation and not referring at all to his daughter. In fact, the sick child has remained in the background throughout our visit.

  “Oh yes, the whooping cough,” says the shaman suddenly. “It’s been bad again this year. Almost all the lambs have had it. If the poor marmots hadn’t provided any fresh gallbladders, no one would have known how to get rid of it. Actually, some of those unfortunate lambs are still coughing and gasping. We can only hope that once summer rolls in and the wild sweet onions grow again, they’ll finally recover.”

  Then they talk about the uphill battle against people who continue to resist seeing doctors. What can the poor shamans and fortune-tellers possibly achieve empty-handed, while a doctor has his knowledge and listening piece? “Nothing!” she says.

  We are already outside tightening the saddle girth when she walks up to me to tie around my neck a piece of white cloth that she has just cut off some larger piece. “When I was young, elegant people carried handkerchiefs. They were made of silk and embroidered along the edges. I don’t have any silk. This is the best I can give you, little one. Use it as a handkerchief or, if it’s not elegant enough, as a foot cloth or, if you prefer, to wave in front of the marmots to hypnotize them so you can shoot them from up close.” She bursts into loud laughter and turns to the teacher. “Brother, I’m sorry I don’t have candies for your little one. It’s too early in the year; we’re short of everything. But here’s a little bone for her, a white kiddie for her toy flock. Once she’s grown up and become a lady of thirteen, she can come see me and exchange her toy for a real nanny goat.”

  The teacher receives the gift with both his hands, touches it to his forehead, and then plunges it deep into his breast pocket.

  The evening is mild beneath a glimmering wide sky. The stars and the waxing moon bounce along with the horse’s trot. The girl will grow out of her illness, I think happily. And I, too, will grow. In fact, by the time we get home I will have grown a little more. My Grandma with the Shaved Head used to say that each day I would grow the width of a blade of grass. Perhaps Galbak will embroider the borders of my cloth with red and yellow yarn. Either way, I have to become a big strong man. The horse is carrying me toward the place where, with great impatience but even greater confidence, the man I will become is waiting for the child I still am.

  DAY WITHOUT SKY

  Spring still resembles winter, but some of its rough gray days leave behind gifts to the storm-weary steppe—mild evenings that feel like tasty morsels, affectionate winks, and gently teasing swats on the nose. These balmy spells stay with us, along with the Brant geese and the gray ducks that have arrived too early once again, and now have to find and re-create in snow and ice the path that will point toward summer. These mild moments that the gray days have drizzled over the world of the Altai—out of negligence or forgetfulness perhaps, or as thoughtful rewards for our unfailing patience—must stay and swell, nibbling away at the winter as incessantly and tirelessly as mice.

  One day hairline cracks show up in the stark, aweinspiring tableau of the mountain range. Its icy armor is cracking. The steaming fissures darken, and the glistening shards shrink. In the end it takes only a few days for the pallid ocean of ice and snow and its islands of black rocks to give way and let the gray-yellow steppe reemerge, with its roiling, gray-blue streams, rivers, and lakes. The land, on the other hand, stubbornly clings to the vanishing world’s last remaining white stripes and patches.

  The fifth month opens with a storm. A fiery-red sun starts to simmer early in the morning, its rim erupting into glowing red-veined rings that ripple across the sky before billowing into clouds. They remind me of the epics, in which glowing waves puff and blow over a simmering ocean. I can’t help but think of summer bursting onto the scene with great powers. And I like to believe that my bright anticipation is confirmed by the nights that are now filled with the rushing of the migratory birds’ return.

  Soon the school year will end, says the teacher. His voice is quiet and composed. Then he tells us we have survived the most important but also the most difficult year of our lives. He is speaking from experience; first grade was unbelievably hard for him. He was homesick in the worst possible way, and during the nights both his pillow at the top of his bed and his mattress farther down got wet. “Mind you,” he groans, moved by the memory, “that was during the war. And besides, I ended up way too far away from home, torn away from everything familiar. At the time, there was not a single school in this corner of the country. If you wanted to learn how to read and write, you had to go to the provincial capital.”

  The room falls quiet as we listen with bated breath, but the teacher does not continue. He finds it hard to think back. Gazing into the distance above our heads, his familiar dreaded eyes don’t see us for a change.

  The son of a single mother, I think. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Given the look of his eyes and the body he was born with, he probably endured a lot of teasing. Who can say how his life would have turned out if he hadn’t been fortunate enough to choose the path of knowledge? Could he have married that beautiful woman? Hardly. A bit of gossip that Big Lip told us flashes through my mind, something the teacher’s wife supposedly said about her husband, the father of her child. I feel deeply hurt on his behalf. “Still,” the teacher whispers as if awakening from a deep sleep or returning from a long journey, “there is not much difference between what I once was and what you are now. A child is a child, and a school is a school. I am telling you: You have survived the most difficult and the most important year of your lives, and you have survived it well. Better, in any case, than I did some thirteen years ago. And I was a lot older than you. I didn’t have to start school until I was twelve.”

  Again the teacher pauses. Lost in thought, he stares into space. Then he collects himself and says quickly under his breath, “I tell you: You’ve been good, and you’ve become very dear to me. You’ve been a good collective, almost exemplary. You’re lively but disciplined, and you get along. That’s not a given, I must say; not every class becomes a collective. I hope those of you who’ve been in other classes will agree.”

  Sürgündü and Ombar agree. “Right!” the teacher continues, visibly encouraged. “Everyone worked hard. Not with the same results, of course. How could that be? Everyone’s different. But I am especially happy that five of you will finish the year with a final grade of Five. And that one of these five will attend Pioneers’ Camp for three weeks with three other students from our school. Only the very best of the top students from all the provincial districts get to go to that camp.”

  I am startled and think: this very best student, that’s me! It makes me dizzy. Because of the sudden buzzing and rushing in my ears, I can’t hear what the teacher says next, but I do see his lips continue to move, and I think I can read his lips: the youngest one, who arrived late but caught up so quickly and effortlessly, working his way up to the very top of the class, you know who I’m talking about . . .

  Then his face goes gloomy. Now he can’t possibly be talking about the chosen one. I hear his voice again: “I really don’t know what else I could have done for that girl.” He looks to be suffering, as if he is about to cry, and then out come the words I thought I heard before: “You know who I’m talking about.”

  Suddenly a screeching wail rings out from the center of the classroom. It is Sürgündü. I can see her back shake violently and hear her sob more miserably than ever before. Then her lamentations pour out in the familiar hoarse voice with the familiar lisp: “How could an old woman like me sit for another year among the first grade Tom Thumbs next fall? This is my life? This is not a life! Some evil spirit is mocking me! Oh, Blue Sky! Why did you make me so stupid? I wish I could disappear in the Black Earth! Oh, oh, oh ...”

  No one interrupts her. Having triggered this terrible outburst, the teacher, who is normally so strict, just stands there silent, doing nothing. He is watching passively as his student humiliates herself, and looks as if he
would let her destroy herself.

  “Teacher!” I move quickly. “Teacher! Please, please do not make Sister Sürgündü repeat first grade. We want to have her with us in second grade.” Stunned, the teacher stares at me. I realize I have to be fast and continue: “A girl with such skilled hands and such a big heart couldn’t possibly be so stupid that we’d have to give up on her. We’ll help her. I’ll help her. I will do the same as I did for Gök.”

  The teacher quietly shakes his head, but he appears to be undecided and at a loss for words. I fish for more to say. “I’m willing to move into a yurt with her!” While the words fly out, I am unaware of their consequences. But I am aware enough to notice the shock—or mockery—in the teacher’s eyes. Quickly I add, “Next year my sister will no longer live here, so Sürgündü can move in with us. Or if my big brother gets married, I may move into the dormitory.”

  The teacher doesn’t say a word. My words fail to move him to a response that would relieve Sürgündü’s suffering. Nothing! Entangled in a hopeless battle, I continue the fight. “Teacher!” My voice sounds funny because I am scared he might not be able to hear me, just as I could not hear him before. “Teacher! Please send her to Pioneers’ Camp. Just for once send someone who is miserable, someone who has failed. Let her spend time with all the lucky and successful students. If she could just spend a few days in close touch with what’s called good luck and success, maybe she would find her way, who knows ...”

  Tears threaten to drown my voice. But I still haven’t managed to say the most important thing, and so I push myself to find the right words: “She needs this more than I do. She has a very strict stepmother at home. I have both my parents, and they spoil me day in and day out. Please send her instead of me, please . . .”

  The rims of my eyes are hot, but I am determined not to cry. Clenching my jaw, I give myself a good shake. At that moment my eyes meet the teacher’s and I see his shock abruptly become a question. Only then do I begin to realize that he never said I was the one who would be sent to Pioneers’ Camp.