The Blue Sky
Page 15
Khylbangbaj was proverbially kind and above all, open-handed and generous. Anybody who no longer knew how to carry on in life struggled to reach his ail, threw himself at his feet, and asked for permission to call him Father. Khylbangbaj would immediately have the prostrate person stand, would have him fed, and would ask the members of his tribe who happened to be around to come and give witness about the person: Did he steal? Lie? Smoke? Drink? Was he violent? Was he known for any other vice? If all questions were answered in the supplicant’s favour, my grandfather would say: Take him or her into your midst; let him be a brother or a sister to you; and treat him or her well. Only once or twice is he known to have rejected a supplicant. Everybody else was taken in and treated by him and the whole community like a child of the daamal. They would share shelter, kettle, and, of course, duties with the rest of the family, and receive their inheritance when they got married. Yes, daamal—that was his title, which eventually replaced his name among the Tuvans altogether. But by then the Kazakhs had arrived, and they kept calling him Khylbangbaj. Daamal probably meant chieftain in another, fancier language. It might have been Chinese because I have heard that da means ‘grand’ in Chinese, as in Grand Chief.
As the richest man’s first-born son, my father must have entered adulthood as a powerful man. His most glorious stories dated back to those years. But then times changed, and anybody who had fat floating on top of the broth in his kettle was declared a kulak and thus an enemy of the people. Overnight, outsiders renamed my grandfather’s many foster children his laborers. Kulak, from Russian, originally meant ‘fist,’ but carried the contemporary political meaning of ‘wealthy landowner.’ This punishing label was given to a herder-nomad who lived outside the contemporary world and its sense of time, and understood neither Russian nor politics. In this new world, a man, who some time earlier had been rejected by my grandfather because he had beaten a horse to death, now ran alongside omnipotent foreign revolutionaries and exposed people right and left with his two pricking and poking index fingers. Now this man was allowed to beat to death not only horses, but also people. Or shoot them. The phony little revolutionary soon carried a gun on his belt and used it extensively. But he never got the daamal. The daamal, already humiliated and frightened enough by what he had heard, escaped from him by dying just before the other showed up at his yurt to drive him, together with others, to their place of execution.
This is the setting of The Blue Sky. It was the time of greatest scarcity for our tribe and for nomads in general. The Thirties with their many arrests and executions still vividly gnawed at people’s memory. The Forties, with the great World War and its wounds and consequences, were still with them—never before had people lived in such poverty and desperate straits as in those years. My father had donated the last remnants of his once large herd of horses to the front. It had turned a wealthy man into a poor one, but this gesture had given him some peace of mind. No longer could he be suspiciously eyed as a kulak. Yet his name retained the disastrous baj. Once he tried to drop the ending, but the newly powerful would have none of it: “Surely you aren’t trying to cover over the tracks of your disgrace?” they shouted, and then: “These tracks will continue to give away who you are, who your children are, and then your children’s children!” This referred to the fact that anybody who went to a government office with some request had to provide in writing his life story as well as his father’s and grandfather’s. Today—more than a decade and a half after the rule of terror ended—this infamous description of three life stories is still a requirement in any transactions with the government. Thus it was a given that I would have to thread my way painfully through accelerated times and different worlds.
Then slowly, but inexorably, and materially, life improved. The bitter, burning needs were alleviated. More and more often we got to eat flour. It was increasingly finely ground, and whiter. Millet was gradually replaced by rice. We came to know granulated sugar. First blue and green, then white cotton fabrics arrived in the yurt. We got to see banknotes, were allowed to carefully touch and even sniff them, and learned that we could get anything in return for them. And we were told how to get the crinkling blue and red notes: by hunting wild animals and birds and delivering the kill to the district. Or by cutting tall, straight trees and rafting them down the river to the district center. Anybody wanting to get rich this way found that he could easily get whatever was needed to bring death to foxes and wolves, to rock partridges and gray partridges, to larch trees and pine trees: a gun, trap, poison, rope, saw, or axe. All these could be had unbelievably cheaply; they cost next to nothing. No doubt, the superpower’s interests lay behind this easy availability, and invariably it was to that superpower that the spoils would go. Some found this situation beautiful, others ugly. Even those who found it beautiful thought: Killing animals—why not if it pays? But killing trees? No, never! So they left that to the Kazakhs, who had long mowed down the larch and pine forests closest to them.
As it turned out, people got rich quickly. But while the animal murderers were dealing in morsels, the tree murderers found themselves with such piles on their plate that they must have lost their senses: Overnight, they seemed to change into different people. Some modest socialist affluence—or, put more modestly, some appetizing whiff of it—had arrived in the remotest corner of the Mongolian state. But this judgment is based on a comparison of the present time with that in which The Blue Sky is set. Compared to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, time in the mountains stands still, dates back quite a few decades; and compared to the industrialized part of the world, even centuries.
This was the cost of the transformation: Gone were the forests. Gone the herds of moufflons, mountain goats, and other animals, and gone the coveys of rock partridges and gray partridges and other birds. The people stood as if changed from small and big children into small and big adults.
Nevertheless, one important point gives me comfort: That corner of the world that is my home, a full two thousand kilometers, an hour of the sun, five days by car, and decades if not millennia of progress removed from the capital Ulaanbaatar, has remained not the Wild, but the Gentle West of the Mongolian empire.
Ernst Meier
GALSAN TSCHINAG, whose name in his native Tuvan language is Irgit Schynykbajoglu Dsurukuwaa, was born in the early forties in Mongolia. He is the author of more than thirty books, and his work has been translated into many languages. In 2009, Tschinag created the Galsan Tschinag Foundation with the goal of planting one million trees in Mongolia and the Altai Mountain region. The author divides his time between Ulaanbataar, the High Altai, and Germany.
Jonathan Rout
KATHARINA ROUT is a literary translator of contemporary German-language fi tion. She grew up in Germany and received a Ph.D. in German literature before moving to Canada, where she became a professor of English literature.
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