Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  “Well, not exactly,” replied Aiza, “but they are related. The raven god, Uluu Suorun Toyon, lives in the fifth layer of the upper world. His sons are the shaman and the smith, the armament maker, both of whom are connected with fire and with the sun god, Urun Ajyy Tojon. The smith or algyschyt, the blessing maker, connects people with the goodness of the upper world.”

  She beckoned us to follow her to an electric piano she had set up in the centre of the shamanic area of the museum. “The power of the shaman is legendary,” she explained as she sat down and her practised fingers touched the keys. “Normally a shaman’s dream journey to heal a person would last several hours, maybe all night long. I have written a composition for piano that is much shorter, but it is meant to take you into the shaman’s journey. I would like to play it for you now.”

  As if she were entering some kind of trance, Aiza paused, and we watched as she gathered herself physically and mentally before starting on the lower registers of the piano. First she created rumbling sounds with her left hand that were answered with much lighter chatter in the upper register played with the right hand, as if her two hands were talking to each other. Notes in the lower register increased in volume and intensity and became more dissonant. As the energy of the piece built even further, her right hand began beating like a bird’s wing on an oval drum sitting on the upper deck of the piano, where sheet music might have been.

  With her eyes closed, her body swayed from side to side, sometimes rhythmically, sometimes spasmodically, as the walking beat of the music accelerated to a jog and then a run, broken by splashes of discordant notes played with fingers together on flat hands. High crashes followed by low crashes were joined with occasionally melodic chords and ascending or descending notes in the middle octaves of the piano. The tempo by now had accelerated to a sprint, and the sound was so loud that it was banging off the glass cases in the museum and making the skin-covered drum dance on the upper deck of the piano. As I rested my eyes for a brief moment on that drum, it occurred to me there was something more going on here than a strictly musical performance.

  With the music at panic pace, her fingers ran up and down the keys, like some kind of a cross between the scary bits of Mozart’s Magic Flute and the scratchy underworld fiddle talk of the Charlie Daniels hit “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The mix of chords, discords, and chaotic tonal jumps up and down was building, intensifying. Her whole body was now driving the performance. Finally, at the end of an intricate glissando that emerged from the continued deep rumbling from the bowels of the instrument, there was a percussive filigree of high notes that sounded like a shriek, and she finished by drawing both hands from high notes to low, black notes and white, in a cascade into silence that left even the usually talkative Ruslan speechless.

  “In the end, the shaman loses consciousness,” Aiza said after she opened her eyes and returned to the verbal storytelling. “Now that he has identified the evil spirit hiding in the great tree of life, he instructs his assistants to make sparks using stones. Lightning then seeks out and kills the evil spirit. And when he returns to consciousness, the shaman would usually describe to the sick person what he has seen, what he has done about it, and what he has seen of your future in the other world.”

  Aiza continued and Ruslan started to laugh, which seemed somehow incongruous with the intensity of the tone of the musical storytelling that had just happened. “Aiza says that while she was playing, she was thinking that your travels will be very fruitful for you and useful for us.”

  Having beheld this remarkable performance, I began to wonder if this pianist-cum-composer might be as much shaman as museum director.

  There was no doubt, however, when Slava set up a meeting a couple of days later with a man he called “the last of the Evenk shamans.” “He has agreed to meet you in his worshipping place down near the river. He has a wedding to attend in the middle of the afternoon and one in the evening, but he has some time between.”

  At the appointed time, Ruslan and I walked past a number of sergey (ceremonial Sakha horse hitching posts) and up the steps of a handsome wooden building, which, like Dom Severa, appeared to have been inspired by the multi-sided Sakha birchbark-covered summer houses we had seen in the countryside around Yakutsk.

  When the wedding party moved to a more informal grouping for photos, Maxime Duran, a wisp of a man, much younger than I’d expected, approached us. He wore baggy grey flannels, a baby-blue cable-knit sweater, and wire-rimmed tinted glasses that he was forever pushing up the bridge of his nose. Around his neck on a lanyard was a wooden stick, like a little canoe paddle, with a hole burned through its distal end. We shook hands. He pointed to a table with paper plates, plastic cups, bread, cake, and jugs of what looked like rancid whey or curdled milk, and then suggested that we enjoy some refreshment while we waited.

  Just as Sir George had done, though not from plastic cups, we drank kumys, fermented mare’s milk. The taste was as I’d imagined it to be, acidic like yogourt or sour cream, though thin and nearly clear as vinegar as it rolled over my tongue. It was the lumps and other particulates in the mix that brought on an almost instant gag reflex.

  Twenty minutes later, Maxime reappeared and beckoned us into the sanctuary of his animist church. Inside was a large real tree with branches reaching up to a skylight in the top of a rotunda at least three stories above our heads. On many of the branches were beautifully carved white cranes. Spring sun streamed in through the skylight, highlighting wisps of smoke lingering from the wedding ceremony. He invited us to sit down on carved stools beside a small round table.

  Taking a seat himself, he snapped a lighter and lit a mixture of herbs in a small bowl. Bending forward, he laid his head sideways on the table and for several minutes breathed quietly on the embers, nurturing them to continue burning with smoke but no flame.

  The purification ritual complete, we began our conversation. Although I was full of questions, with the air thick with sweet smoke, it seemed an unlikely time to begin any kind of inquisition. Not knowing what Slava might have told Maxime about the Canadian visitor, Ruslan started in with a bit of an explanation about my journey around the world and my interest in peoples of the circumpolar world. There was a long pause after Ruslan had finished. Maxime put his head down again and encouraged the smudge with his breath.

  After another awkward pause, he took the burnt stick on the lanyard around his neck in his right hand. He put it up to his eye like a jeweller’s loupe. Looking through the hole, he leaned down again and examined the tendrils of smoke. Then he sat up and looked above and beside me on either side but not directly at me.

  As he was doing that, Ruslan said, “A shaman is called a person with an open body. They are open to what is in the air and they are able to see things that we can’t.” But as quickly as he had taken up his shaman’s loupe, Maxime let his tool fall back down onto his sweater and picked up the smallest of four or five ceremonial wooden drinking vessels.

  “The choron tells us many things about our culture,” Maxime began. “It is made of birch, our sacred tree. It is used most often for drinking kumys, our sacred beverage. It has three legs, which reminds us that a man has three parts to his life, three worlds, three souls, three parts to his beliefs.”

  Running his fingers along and around the ornate vertical and zigzag patterning around the cup, he added, “These circles remind us that all nations are eternal. The choron is open on the top, reminding us that all blessings come from above.” He launched into a version of the story Aiza had told us about the sacred tree and the middle world joining the nine layers of the upper world and the nine layers of the lower world. But then things got personal.

  “People have had this wisdom for a long time,” he continued. “First the Christian church came, and at that point much of traditional spirituality was pushed out of the mainstream. After the Revolution, these teachings were forbidden. My great-grandfather was killed by the Bolsheviks. He had a choice of either breaking his dru
m or forfeiting his life. He would not break his drum. My grandmother and my mother were healers too, although in their day shamanism was still forbidden. No one talked about it in the open.”

  “So how did you learn to do what you are doing here?” I asked.

  “First, I studied to be a doctor in the Russian system. Then I did studies in Evenk and Sakha culture. I learned Chinese medicine and other alternative healing techniques like herbal remedies and leech therapy. I also learned the skills of a cashier, so that I could get enough money to keep my studies going. I am thirty-seven now. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been possible to practise more traditional spirituality right here in Yakutsk.

  “Since the days of the Cossacks and the first Orthodox priests coming into our area, people have kept almost a double belief system. These young people getting married this afternoon were doing what they are now free to do. They got married officially in the Orthodox cathedral in Yakutsk, but they came here for a traditional Sakha ceremony.” At that point, Maxime had to take a call on his cellphone.

  While he was on the phone, Ruslan whispered, “Shamans are healers. They have always been responsible for people’s health. Shamans also perform rituals and ceremonies, like what happened here today with the wedding and what is going on now. Sometimes the healers who do that are called white shamans. The shamans who get involved with the evil spirits and work themselves into a trance and a situation like the one Aiza described in her music are called black shamans, brought by Raven. Many Sakha believe all diseases and human problems are caused by invasions of evil spirits or the escape of one of their souls. For that, they come to Maxime. In a contest in Khabarovsk a while ago he was recognized as one of the best seers, one of the people with the best extrasensory perception in Russia.”

  Maxime finished his phone call, but before he could start in again with his teaching, Ruslan decided that what should happen next was a little demonstration. After a somewhat lengthy conversation with Maxime, during which the shaman looked to be protesting and looking at his watch, Ruslan turned to me on his little carved stool and said, “Maxime has agreed to look into your future to see what’s in store for circling the midnight sun.”

  Maxime gestured for me to stand and then crossed the wooden floorboards to the centre of the room. He flicked the lighter, fired up the smudge another time, and wafted sweet smoke all around me. Then, with his loupe, he started examining the air around me, circling, moving closer and then farther away.

  This went on for perhaps ten minutes. Different positions. Different places in the room. Eyes open. Eyes closed. And then we all returned to the little round table.

  Maxime sat silent on his stool with his eyes closed.

  “What did you see?” asked Ruslan impatiently.

  “I didn’t see anything, really,” replied Maxime. “You are closed.”

  “Perhaps it is a cultural difference,” I suggested.

  “No,” said Maxime, “I didn’t see much at all. All I saw was a line.”

  He drew an imaginary line on the table with his finger. “There are dots along the line like this,” he added. “And then there is another line here, and another straight line here, touching the first line here. There are more dots here. And then here, there is a wavy line,” he said, again making an imaginary mark on the table with his finger. “This may be the shore of a lake.” Retracing with his finger the lines and dots he had drawn, he stopped his finger on a particular place and said, “Do you live here?”

  Ten thousand kilometres from home on the dark side of the circumpolar moon, as it were, the man in the blue cable-knit sweater had drawn an almost perfect map of the roads, laneways, and scattered houses in the village where I live in eastern Ontario, right down to the odd angles of intersection of various streets, the relative distance between houses, and the proximity to a lake—Cranberry Lake in the Rideau Waterway between Kingston and Ottawa.

  Totally unfazed by my surprise and incredulity, Maxime persisted with his contention that he had not seen much of anything in my aura. I, however, was absolutely intent to hear what might come next from his mouth.

  “I see a big blue mountain. You might be climbing a mountain backwards. What you are doing is challenging. And somehow,” he added after yet another pause, “I see the number thirty-five as significant in your life.”

  “Does any of that make any sense to you, James?” Ruslan asked.

  “The map for sure. The blue mountain, the backward mountain climbing, and the number, not so much. Perhaps time will tell.” In truth, however, the words didn’t come easily, as I was still more or less speechless from having watched a total stranger halfway around the world draw a detailed map of my hometown with nothing more than information gathered “in the air.”

  11: ROAD OF BONES

  All too soon, the winter visit to the Sakha Republic came to an end, forcing me to scuttle home to tend to other things. But the following summer, with Slava’s continuing help, I returned. I found myself squeezed in with two strangers in the back seat of a battered and dusty four-wheel-drive mud buggy barreling down a dirt road in central Siberia—a road that is smooth only when it’s frozen.

  It was August and the road surface was definitely not frozen. A couple of decades ago, summer permafrost could be found eighty centimetres below the surface at that time of year. Thanks to a warming climate, the lower limit of this “active layer” had crept farther below the surface year by year to nearly twice that distance. That night, the only thing the adjective “active” modified with any accuracy was the surface of the road, alive with mud where rainwater had pooled and seething desert dust everywhere else.

  Driving as fast as fate would allow on either surface caused the knobbly tires to swoon and the vehicle to twitch unpredictably. Had there not been three of us shoehorned into this minuscule back seat, providing onboard padding for one another, this would have been an impossible ride.

  At the wheel, with his thinning dark hair sticking up on top and cropped right to the skin about his ears, was Kassiean, driving as if he were in an armoured personnel carrier or possibly a tank. Hands at ten and two on a custom steering wheel the size of a dinner plate, he saw no rut too deep to enter at speed. If you can drive into it, then you can drive out of it, either on the ground or in the air, with most of your rattling bits still attached.

  Apparently, Kassiean had once driven roads like this, and some rough tracks too, for his job as a military driver. That was before the Soviet Union collapsed and left thousands of military jarheads to their own devices with little but the uniforms on their backs and a few rubles for bus fare home. For Kassiean, the device of choice was a tired old right-hand-drive Nissan Safari Granroad, which, with a little tinkering and some new tires, reconfigured the unemployed soldier into an occasional cross-country taxi driver.

  In the other front seat was my loyal confidant and research convenor Slava Shadrin, who had orchestrated my winter visit a few months previous. This second Sakha sojourn had started a week ago with a discussion in a classroom in Yakutsk with Sakha leaders from all walks of life, to see where my research might go from there. There were a couple of college professors, a publisher, an artist, and others who listened intently as Slava spoke of my quest to understand how northern peoples are responding to shifting climate and the other forces of change that are affecting their lives.

  At one point, as the group mined their own contact lists to see who could help answer the kind of questions I was asking for my book, two or three of the group got on their cellphones and called people across the region. It was an almost comical scene, these well-dressed, confident people, stuffed into 1950s-era student desks that we’d pulled into a circle for this meeting, talking on the latest digital devices.

  It was through this collective investigation that they realized the revered Sakha cultural leader Boris Fedorovich Neustroev—affectionately nicknamed Mandar Uus, Mandar the Artist—was in town for a teachers’ conference, and he was looking for a ride
home. A few more calls and everything was settled. Mandar was keen to return to his village, Bayaga, in the Tattinsky district of central Yakutia, right on the Kolyma Road. So if the visiting traveller would like to find a vehicle and pay for its hire, Mandar would be happy to go with him and host the traveller at his home.

  This was a win-win situation, with one small catch, which everyone thought would be just fun. Mandar had been asked in his capacity as an algyschyt, Sakha blessing maker, and something of a cultural celebrity, to say a few words at a wedding in Churapcha, an agricultural community of seven thousand people about halfway along our journey. The Canadian traveller would be welcome there too, he told the group over the phone.

  I overheard a couple of people in the group talking and nodding enthusiastically as this call was going on. “They are saying that they might like to spend such time with Mandar as well. They are saying you are fortunate to have this opportunity,” said Slava.

  So in the back of the Nissan, behind Kassiean, was this character Mandar, a diminutive man who seemed bothered not at all by the limited space for legs and feet behind the driver’s seat. Between the two of us was Sergei, Slava’s young cousin who had just graduated with a degree in English literature from Yakutia University. A skinny kid in pointy black leather shoes, skintight stovepipe pants, and a T-shirt that said “Abercrombie NY” in bold red letters, he seemed a bit ambushed by Slava’s offer of temporary employment as a translator. Ruslan, alas, was translating at a conference at a resort on the Black Sea and was unavailable. It soon became clear that Sergei had not done much in the way of oral practice to get his English degree. He seemed to know how words and concepts flipped from one language to the other, but he couldn’t quite get them out of his mouth. What was clear, and quite charming, was his excitement about being with Mandar.

  I caught Mandar’s dancing eye from time to time as he chatted with Sergei and Slava in the car, his sun-livened face and expressive hands speaking volumes about his role as a revered member of the Sakha community. Mandar’s trade, handed down to him by his father, who had received it from his father before that, was smithing: making armaments on a forge. Fitting, I thought, as the story of this polyvalent vocation unfolded, that the one who makes breastplates, swords, and helmets is also one of the principal keepers of culture in the Sakha tradition. In truth, the algyschyt is only one rung down the Sakha spiritual hierarchy from the shaman. Mandar was a man of very considerable influence.