Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  The next two days were among the most bizarre experiences of his life up to that point. The family appeared to be the elderly grandmother, a pair of middle-aged parents, an uncle, three grown children around Charlinder's age, a daughter-in-law, and a girl toddler. The house consisted of a common area including kitchen and a room at either side filled with beds. Charlinder brought in a pot filled with Lacey's milk that evening, and it was their beverage with the night's dinner, so the Russians were presumably not allergic. He spent most of his time sitting in the common area with the grandmother, who cooed and petted him. While she was a very likable old lady, she still left him to wonder what on Earth she found so interesting about him. The surreal part of his stay with them was not the inexplicable affection but the communication problems. One would have thought that after the first three attempts, the family would have accepted that he could not work with them in verbal communication, but the family members kept talking to him and then expecting him to talk back in a way that would make sense. He lost count of how many times he had to tell people, "I really don't know what you're saying." He did a lot of knitting during his stay, which set the men to looking at him like a strange animal, but he was not concerned with their reaction; he needed new socks and mittens. Thus he spent several restful hours knitting with Grandmother, who was fascinated with how he held the needles, part of it also with the daughter-in-law while her baby scampered around the room. This was his favorite part of his stay with them. It was the only time he could exhale. When the entire family was in the house, he kept waiting for someone to ask something of him, to attempt communication with him in which he would fail to respond appropriately and they would become frustrated with him. On the afternoon of the second day, Charlinder took Lacey and kissed Grandmother goodbye. Then he had to wait while she summoned all the family over to show them that he was taking his leave. He hoped that he looked grateful enough in his departure, but was relieved when they let him go.

  "I like having you around, Lacey," he said to his ewe that night as he prepared to turn in. "You're very simple company."

  As was customary, Lacey gave no reaction except to flop down next to him. He took a moment to savor the quiet night, with stars glowing steadily above and no sound except the sheep's breathing. "This is going to be a very long journey," he mused out loud.

  The next family to take him in was not quite as affectionate as the first, but he had the presence of mind to have them mark his map. It turned out he was already well on his way down a peninsula he'd planned to avoid. He headed west until he reached the land's edge, turned north and kept to the coastline until he found another village and another family to mark his map, which placed him back on the proper mainland. He often had bizarrely disturbing dreams in which he tried to speak, but no sound came out, while people all around him sounded like saws going through wood. Some families he found perhaps too hospitable. He wanted to stay no more than a day and a night, while they wanted to keep him longer, and of course he couldn't very well explain his reasoning with no language in common. Often being too exhausted to argue further, he found it easier to let them keep him longer than to leave a trail of offended hosts in his wake.

  Meanwhile, the weather grew colder and his latest pair of shoes sewn from sampled cow hide were thin and sprouting holes. He'd also stopped shaving after he left Alaska, but he still did not grow a decent beard. The patchy growth didn't keep his face any warmer. He woke up one morning and ranted to Lacey, "the beard, it does nothing!" His existence was quickly becoming untenable, and he needed to stop somewhere and get his bearings.

  He came to another settlement the next day, and it reminded him somehow of the North American town where he'd met Randall and Cleo. It was smaller than the Hyatts' settlement, and the obvious use of metal in their construction was ubiquitous in the Siberian territory, but this was clearly a more organized community than most and also a more obedient set of people.

  Charlinder was still working on the execution, but he had more or less developed an efficient formula to find a place to stay. He found an understanding-looking person and showed himself as a foreigner, in case the unusually dark coloring, conspicuous hair texture and narrow facial structure didn't tip them off. Then the explanation followed with a lot of sign language involving his world map until his audience caught on. If his mark wasn't keen on receiving a guest, they would find somebody else to take him. Thus began a day or two of him sleeping in their house, eating their food, and not understanding a word they said.

  This time, there was an extra layer to the process. Charlinder introduced himself to a woman slightly older than Vilma by looks, and she was sympathetic. She took him inside and showed him to her family to get their approval; her husband, an elderly father, her children, a sibling and spouse, their children; and no one raised any objection. Before he could put down his baggage, then, the woman and her husband pulled him and Lacey off to another part of the village and showed him to someone else.

  There was a large building where his new hosts led Charlinder and Lacey to a room that bore the same air as the Paleola village’s council room, only more polished. The woman waited with Charlinder while her husband excused himself. He shortly returned with a scowling, ornately dressed middle-aged man who took a seat at the head of the table. His hosts then bowed to this man--Charlinder decided to think of him as the Grand Poobah--and proceeded to talk to him about Charlinder. He listened to them, sometimes nodding but never smiling, and only looked at Charlinder when they'd finished. He nodded, said a few more words, and took his leave.

  The hosting couple, looking relieved, took Charlinder outside again but did not go straight home. They parked Lacey in a barn full of cattle before returning to the house. During the walk, Charlinder noticed that, though he'd only been introduced to a few people in the community in general, there were some who were not happy to see him. News of outsiders spread rapidly, it appeared, and there were two communities to be seen in this village. One was composed of the friends of his new hosting family--healthy-looking, warmly clad and mildly timid but friendly people who came to ask about this odd-looking newcomer. The other showed signs of a very different quality of life. Gauntly thin, shabby and conspicuously not socializing with their better-off neighbors, they did not approach. Whether engaged in grueling labor involving frozen animal dung, or merely loitering around and letting the other community ignore them, they all had eyes for Charlinder, and those eyes were not smiling. The women beheld him bitterly, maybe even fearfully, just long enough to let him see them look pointedly away. The men fixed him with a stare that was positively menacing, and the children simply looked blank, thoughtless. Charlinder waited for his hosts to indicate to him that the unhappy ones were to be avoided, or perhaps disregarded. In fact he waited for them to do anything to acknowledge their attention, but the first community's policy toward the second was to give them a wide berth and otherwise pretend they weren't there. He was shown back to the house, where he enjoyed the luxuries of a wood stove, a filling meal, and children to climb on him.

  As his stay wore on, Charlinder had to think seriously about when he might leave the village. Unlike his usual visits, in which he endured the stress of everyone speaking Russian to him in exchange for solid food and sleeping indoors, he was now caught between the tedium of staying and the uncertainty of leaving. The house was comfortably warm and dry and remarkably tidy for a residence housing so many people. It was so cozy, in fact, that Charlinder, with his perpetual struggle against the cold, regularly fantasized that he really didn't need to remove himself from the family's hospitality until the end of winter, not concerned that such a span would likely take most of the year. Creature comforts aside, he would periodically flee from the awkwardness of the family's double-brick-walled conversations with him and escape to visit Lacey at the dairy barn. This meant much walking through a good-sized portion of the settlement, during which he could not escape the continued attention from the miserable lower stratum. Their interest in him
did not flag, and their emotions did not soften at his continued, though wholly innocuous presence. At every route he took between the barn and the house, he would encounter several of these unfortunate people who clearly despised Charlinder for whatever crime he'd committed in entering their village. Still none of them extended so much as a hand in his direction, but he soon began to doubt the wisdom of leaving the village, as some of them might follow him to a place where no one could hear him scream.

  While they apparently wanted nothing for Charlinder except death, he wanted nothing except to know more about them. Having no one to talk with and nothing to do except spin and knit, he had abundant time to think. Why did they look upon him so angrily?, he kept asking himself. Were they so hateful towards every outsider they saw? Did they think he was taking something from them? Did he disturb them because he looked different? Did they think he was evil because he couldn't speak their language? Then there was the reality of their condition. They obviously endured a miserable existence, having no work except the most degrading of tasks, from which followed little to eat, ragged clothes to wear, and little acknowledgement with no compassion from their neighbors. Though Charlinder had grown up in a very different area, he could imagine that being inadequately fed and clothed was especially dangerous in a part of the world that was already so cold in September. He didn't like to think about what they had for shelter. That the upper stratum did their best to ignore them must have made their existence only more frightening. This left him to wonder how they became the village's bottom rung. Had they committed serious crimes, and this was their punishment? Did the village naturally produce a certain number of people in every generation who were mentally abnormal and fit for nothing but drudgery on the margins of society? Was it the village's religious system to create a class of untouchables, who were invisible at best? Or did their economic structure simply not offer room for everyone, and those who fell through the cracks ended up like this? These were the questions that kept running through his head, with no one to give him the answers.

  Whatever the reasoning for their dislike, Charlinder was not about to judge them, if at all, unless he could find out the story behind the divisions. Since he had no reason to believe there was anyone within a hundred miles who spoke English and could answer any of his questions, he let his puzzlement spread to the higher caste, including his host family. No matter what had created their class structure, the upper stratum was, whether by action or inaction, complicit in their neighbors' suffering. On the second day of his visit, he was on his way back from visiting Lacey when he saw a grown man, clearly in the better-off category, beating an underclass boy of maybe seventeen with a belt, shouting at him the whole time. No matter what the boy had done to deserve this, the part that disturbed Charlinder the most was how the other upper-stratum people on the street shielded their children's eyes and rushed away from the scene. Charlinder watched until the man was finished whipping the boy and barked one last order, and the boy went back to work.

  He couldn't look at his host family the same way after that. If he could ask them what the story was behind these miserable people among them, what would they say? They were nice enough people, of course, but then, how difficult was it to be "nice" to a foreigner on his way to somewhere else? How did they treat their neighbors, who were a part of their community every day, year after year? What would happen to their village if all the underclass suddenly disappeared?, he wondered. Who would do the odd jobs then, and how would they be treated? Would the village simply create a new underclass, or would they start thinking about how they treated their subordinates?

  The third day began inconspicuously enough. No one found anything amiss when the family woke up that morning. Charlinder decided to try another, this time longer, route to the barn for the day's first visit to Lacey. He smelled something familiar on his way; burning wood, like the Yu'piks' bonfires at the end of the summer. But this was something much bigger than a bonfire: he saw a gigantic column of smoke rising into the sky. Because he hadn't learned from seeing Bruce pulverize Kenny, he let his curiosity lead him to the source. The closer he came to the fire, the more people he saw running around, yelling at each other and scooping up buckets full of snow. The underclass people he saw along the way did not look at him. As soon as Charlinder came close, they turned their faces away. He contemplated their sudden change of behavior as he proceeded toward the fire, but all thoughts of them were gone when he drew close enough to see that it was the barn up in flames.

  Cows were pouring out through a burned-out gap in the wall, bellowing furiously, while people beat at the flames with wet sheets of cloth. Charlinder ran around the scene, but didn't see Lacey. Two pairs of hands gripped his arms as he ran towards the blaze, but he wrenched free of them and didn't give them a glance, as he could hear ovine bleating from inside the building.

  He dove in through the biggest gap in the flames, inhaled smoke, and dropped to his hands and knees. He crawled over numerous embers, and the air stung his eyes. He kept moving, still in search of his sheep. Around a corner now crumbling into hot coals, there she was, pressed to the floor. Charlinder tried to call for her, but his lungs responded by hacking up the soot he'd just inhaled. Lacey must have recognized him through the coughing, as she then stood up and crept to his side.

  They were in a room that used to be filled with heaps of grassy matter, now occupied by mounds of flame. Charlinder began to navigate a path out of the barn that wouldn't inflict fatal injury on him or Lacey, when he heard a new, unmistakably human whine that didn't come from him. In a distant corner sat a dark shape; he could make out crouched arms and legs and just a hint of a face. While not understanding how he'd become so foolhardy, Charlinder crawled over to that corner and pulled a hand away from the face. It was a tiny, elderly woman, and she didn't appear coherent enough to do anything as determined as crawl after him. So Charlinder pulled her onto his back, and in that much, she was cooperative. With this new weight pressing his hands into the ground, Charlinder led Lacey for the nearest exit. He told himself it's like swimming in a deep pond and going for the surface. The end is right there, if you just keep moving your arms and legs. The doorway singed his sides, but he plowed through, and then he was outside, with Lacey close behind.

  Someone immediately pulled the old woman off his back, someone else lifted Charlinder to his feet. They were both marched straight to the Grand Poobah's office. As Charlinder was busy hacking up a lung, he went where he was pulled. He didn't see when she arrived, but Charlinder's hostess also appeared by his elbow to accompany him to see the Poobah. He continued to walk where he was directed, and then they were at the office. Someone left the room and quickly came back with the Poobah, who swept the old woman into a lung-squeezing hug. Someone else tried to tell their story, but the Poobah would listen to no one but the old woman. As she was also coughing, she could not speak coherently, but she managed something that involved a lot of gesturing at Charlinder. Before she finished her piece, the Poobah grabbed Charlinder and hugged him in a similarly strong-armed fashion, and then he understood: the old woman he'd taken from the fire was the Poobah's mother.

  More discussion followed while Charlinder worked the soot out of his lungs. Then he began to wonder whether he would be able to find Lacey. The man who'd summoned the Poobah came in from another errand, now followed by an underclass boy flanked by a girl at each elbow. The Poobah snarled ominously at all three of them. The girls cringed and looked away from the boy, who stared at the Poobah like a deer looks at a hunter. When the Poobah had finished his tirade, the messenger took the boy by the arm and led him out through the opposite door. The girls stared after him disbelievingly, until the Poobah barked furiously at them, at which they jumped and scurried out the way they'd come.

  After he'd had his way with the urchins, the Poobah turned benevolently back to Charlinder. He asked something of Charlinder's hostess, who replied while pointing to his poorly shod feet.

  He was out of their village,
with Lacey unharmed and at his side, by the late afternoon. The Poobah had been generous to him. For his troubles in bringing the village head’s elderly mother out of the fire, Charlinder was well-provided for. He was gifted with a thick fur hat, a long, tough wool coat, and sturdy leather boots. He now had a large quantity of salted meat in his pack. He had also picked out two pretty lace shawls that looked more suited to a woman’s back, but would probably be helpful in winter, and since when had he ever worried about not appearing manly enough? He draped them over Lacey’s back until nighttime, and would wear them under his coat when the weather became colder still. All this made him feel, in the purely physical sense, heavier, but that added weight was fine.

  Also weighing on him was the fact that a young boy had probably just been hanged from a pine tree, and the village would have to build a new dairy barn. No matter how much he told himself about how much was not his doing, the fire would ultimately not have been set had Charlinder not been present in their village. The barn would have been intact, the cows would not have been put in harm’s way, and the defenseless old woman would not have had to be rescued had he walked another day before a stop. Roy was more right than he knew; there were cultures that Charlinder could not expect to understand, and his ability to cause problems, or not, was under his control far less than he liked.

  At the same time, his imagination did not stretch quite far enough to widen the limits on his sympathies. "Someone was trying to kill you just to spite me," he ranted toward Lacey as they marched south. "I guess maybe they’ve got nothing to lose, but really? Why not just pack up their nothing and leave that place?"