by James Raffan
Heading for the outhouse, I spied a large dish antenna and two other antennas that gave the impression that television, Internet, and probably phone service came to this remote Siberian village by satellite. Stepping past a curious black-and-white cow that had ambled down to investigate the stranger, I was on my way back from the privy when Mandar appeared from an outbuilding with a huge smile. He shook my hand and greeted me in Sakha, communicating with the firmness of his grip and through hazel eyes sparkling in an open face. His day, it appeared, had begun much earlier than mine, even though we had both travelled the same long hours to get here. Oblivious to the language barrier, in the warmth of an Arctic summer sun that had not really set through the night, he gave me a tour of his place. He pointed out the family’s first house, a dung-covered vertical log byre or winter balaghan, where Sakha families traditionally lived, sharing warmth and living quarters with their stock, mostly cattle. I gathered that he and Fedora had lived here before they built their present place. And, most importantly for the purpose of my visit, he pointed to another log outbuilding, the 160-year-old blacksmith shop where he practised his ancient craft of forging armaments, mostly knives these days.
Standing maybe five foot one and already a grandfather, Mandar still had the shoulders and upper arms of a much younger man. “Welcome, traveller. You are welcome in my home,” he said as we moved inside and sat down for breakfast, Slava translating through mouthfuls of hot tea and deep-fried bannock. “I am a traveller too. I have spent my life travelling and learning. It does not surprise me that you have come here, because we are both part of something bigger that is happening in the North along the countries of the polar belt,” he said. “Today, we will work in the smithy. I will show you how to make a knife the Sakha way. And we will share stories about our travels.”
He picked up the last piece of buttered waffle and led us out. In minutes a hemlock fire was crackling away in the forge and Mandar fed the food to the fire, mentioning that the spirits always had to be thanked before the work could begin. Then he led Kassiean, Slava, Sergei, and me to an anteroom off the smithy where he picked out a couple of rusted tines from what looked to be a fork on a mechanized hay mower. These would be the raw material from which our knives would be heated and hammered.
For the next several hours, we took turns heating the steel in the fire and hammering it into shape, guided by Mandar’s instruction. During pauses in the process, when the metal was heating or cooling or when someone was resting from the hot work of hammering, Mandar would sit down on a stool beside his workbench and talk. It was as if the whole thing had been scripted as a trimodal tutorial involving head, hand, and heart; food, fuel, and fire; underworld, middle world, and upper world; stranger, shaman, and smith, to teach the visitor the answers to the questions he had brought to the master’s door.
“I am a lucky man,” he began with a twinkle in his eye. “I have a good life, a good wife, and a good knife. That is all a man needs.” He then situated what we were doing in the biggest possible frame: nine layers in the upper world, nine layers in the lower world, just as Aiza’s diagram had shown at the folklore museum. “The place where light and dark, good and evil, come together is the middle world,” he explained. “This is where humans live with the spirits of nature. The shaman is the only person who can travel in all three worlds, the smith somewhat as well. Both know how to work with fire. The shaman and the smith are related that way: they are both sons of Uluu Suorun Toyon, the raven god, who inhabits the fifth level of the upper world.”
“So both the shaman and the smith are related to the raven?” I asked, testing what I had learned from Aiza.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “The raven is a very spiritual bird, a very important animal in Sakha teaching.”
“A very important bird throughout the North,” I said, explaining how the raven had been a seemingly constant companion in my Arctic travels.
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” Mandar replied. “It doesn’t surprise me that you come here either, really, circling the midnight sun.”
“Why is that?”
“A long time ago, I had a dream. Maybe fifty years ago. But I remember this dream. It is a dream about uniting peoples of the northern belt—maybe the Arctic Circle, or maybe the belt of stars in the galaxy that can be seen by peoples of the North. It is a dream about a day when northern peoples will have to come together to be heard. I think that day is near.”
“Tell me about your dream.”
“I was climbing the side of a big mountain.”
“Was it a blue mountain?”
“No, it was just a mountain as we have to the east in Sakha country. I discovered an opening in the side of the mountain that led to a cave. Inside the cave, it was very dark, and wet and cold. As I made my way back into the recesses of the cave I could only go by feel. I had to see with my hands. Eventually, I saw a tiny light far away at the back of the cave. I went toward that light for a long time, and when I got close I saw that there were eight people sitting around a fire. They were all elders from different northern peoples: Chukchi, Eskimo, Evenks, Yukaghirs, Sami—all indigenous elders. There was one empty place at the circle. They invited me to take that place.
“I was a young and foolish man at the time. I thought they were just sitting there at the fire doing nothing. But they were talking, and I listened. They were saying that one day there would come a time when peoples of the Arctic belt would be struggling to be heard, and that the only way for their individual voices to be heard would be to unite and speak with one voice. And then I woke up. But I remember that dream always. In hard situations in my life, I remember that circle of elders, and the light circle, and that image helps me in harsh situations. But I think what you are doing is related to this somehow, travelling around the world at the Arctic Circle, bringing northern voices together.”
Mandar took his seat by the bench once again. The light of a noon sun detailed the symmetrical movements of his compact hands. It was as if his fingers were tools. They were short and tapered toward trimmed, dirty nails. Muscles and sinew bulged between the joints. The flat surfaces were more or less clean, but the creases and lines in the palms were darkened from years of handling charcoal and black carbon steel. As he spoke, each point had a gesture and a rhythm that made his body and hand movements an integral part of the communication.
“We have three types of language. This you need to understand, if you are to understand what climate change is doing to peoples of the North. First is our inner language. This comes from the heavens and attaches us to a particular place. People from the Sahara Desert have a different inner language than the Sakha. In frost, we will do better. In the heat, the Bedouin will do better because of that inner language. You might think of the inner language as the language of the salgyn-kut, the air soul that grows from and into the natural world. The sounds we make are connected to our physical body, which in turn is connected to our breath, and our breath is connected to the heavens. This is why the sounds of language vary in different places on the earth. The earth is different, so the inner language is different.”
The crackling of the fire had given way to the glow of coals. “The second language,” Mandar continued, “is our mother tongue. The mother tongue is the voice of a nation, the voice of a particular people, like the Sakha, or the Yukaghirs, or the Eskimo, all of the elders around that northern circle of light.
“And the third language appears when nations have relations with other nations. They connect and influence each other. When the Russians came here for the first time, we took words from their language into our language, and they did too. This is called the language of time. In the days of our ancestors, time language was under control of the mother tongue. But now, since contact with the Cossacks, since the Revolution, this time language comes to our mother tongue like a master. And what happens when a guest comes to your home and directs you to live by his rules? Is it possible to be a family under those conditions? I ask you.
It is very difficult,” he told us.
“So to climate change: the world has been changing since the Sakha have been on the earth. Our inner language has been changing with the changes in the earth that have happened during that time. But the changes are happening more quickly now. Where there was pasture, there are now shrubs. Where there were small trees are now big trees. The birches used to push against the frost and create the burls I use for my knife handles right at ground level. Now the frost is farther down in the ground and the burls are not as common. Global warming is affecting our inner tongue. And as our children live lives that are less connected to nature, that affects their inner tongue as well. Without a strong inner language, we are less able to defend our mother tongue against the forces of globalization and the mastery of the time tongue. I am concerned.
“In our nation, only the person who knows his own language in its three dimensions can be a great person. The most famous people in Sakha come from the countryside. Why is that? Very few famous Sakha come from cities. Why? It is the inner language that is connected to the land. This makes them strong and wise. Inner language allows a person to receive new information and create new ideas. This is why every person in town needs to visit the land from time to time. That connection to nature is critical to keeping and developing the inner voice.”
By afternoon, we were finishing our knives, as much as they would ever be finished, and Fedora had come into the smithy with a pan of freshly cleaned sabo, little fish that looked like perch about the size of one of Mandar’s expressive hands. She set them in the coals where the steel had been heating, and the fire baked them until their skins were crispy and black. We followed her in for the evening meal: fire-roasted fish, boiled fish soup, pickled fish, more whipped cream, condensed milk, yogourt and whole milk, smoked horsemeat, and fresh bread. After dinner Mandar performed on a khomus (also called a vargan, or jaw harp). He could hardly wait to finish so he could ask questions about what else and who else I had met on my travels.
We moved to the main room, where Mandar had set out examples of twenty-four styles of knives he made, based on the traditions of a Sakha smith. “They are not weapons,” he explained. “Each has its own purpose, for cutting, for carving, for skinning. If they were weapons they would have finger grips cut into the handles. Each of these comes with a purpose and a teaching that was passed on to me by my ancestors.” I sat listening, captivated, but then started to smile: all this earnest traditional teaching was courtesy of a set of authentic Sakha props laid out on a pink tray illustrated with Disney images of golden-haired Cinderella. Too funny.
Next, Mandar extracted a dog-eared folder filled with a sheaf of art paper. To my utter astonishment, he launched into a two-hour explanation of a series of visual interpretations of dreams he had experienced. At the bottom of each drawing was one of the classic Sakha patterns that you might find on a choron or on the wall of a winter balaghan or birchbark summer house. But on the main body of each sheet of heavy white paper were pen and black ink sketches of the most fantastical series of images I had ever seen. Planets, stars, galaxies, drums, faces, skins, horses, people, each one the vision of a particular dream he had had sometime in the past.
One of the recurring motifs in this remarkable set of drawings was hands, the most beguiling of which showed hands with facial features in the creases: eyes, ears, noses, and sometimes mouths. “In some fairy tales,” he explained, “people use their hands to see and to hear. All of the earth’s cosmic waves are invisible to our normal senses. It is only with the eyes and ears of the hands that they can be truly felt and understood. You can’t smell a person’s cosmic waves. You can’t hear them. You can’t see the devil. You can only feel them with your hands.” And there they were, the smith’s hands, gesticulating in perfect harmony, while Prince Charming and Cinderella looked on from under the knife collection.
He continued, “If we spoke a common language, if we found a time language we could share, describing and explaining what is going on in each of these images would take two or three days. Speaking to you now, through translation, the message is much shorter. But you, traveller, should understand that we are all connected through the cosmos, through the land, through who we are. When we lose connection to the land, to the cosmos, we stop being who we are. We must look after those connections. That is my job within Sakha culture.”
By then, it was nine o’clock at night and all of us were dogtired. Having started at noon the day before, we had crossed the river, driven along the Road of Bones, attended and officiated at a wedding, and carried on along the road until six in the morning; then we’d all had a nap, made knives, eaten handsomely, and travelled the cosmos. I, for one, was exhilarated but exhausted. But Mandar had one more thing to do. At his urging, we sat down, and he presented each of us with a finished knife in a handmade leather sheath. “These you must take, with the ones you made here, as a souvenir of your visit. We are so glad you came. Be careful, though: they are sharp.” Taking one of them out of its sheath, he made the point by slicing a piece of paper he held in the air into thin strips that cascaded one by one onto the floor.
“I have written a note on yours, traveller,” he said. Slava took the knife and read the inscription that was etched into the polished steel along the spine of the blade. “It is written in Sakha,” he said. “It says, ‘May the rich god of the forest give you the best animals and send them to your path of life,’ and it is signed ‘Mandar Uus.’”
“I don’t know how to thank you for what you have taught me in the last twenty-four hours, Mandar,” I said. “This knife, and the terrible one that I have made, speak to lessons I will be pondering for a long time.”
“We should go,” said Slava. And as quickly and unceremoniously as we had arrived in the morning, we left in the twilight, at ten. Back on the Kolyma Road, we headed west for the lengthy return trip to Yakutsk.
Without Mandar in the vehicle, leaving just two of us in the tiny back seat, I was just getting used to the idea of having a little space to stretch out when, out of the dust and darkness, appeared the taillights of a disabled vehicle. As we were in the proverbial “middle of Siberia,” it made sense that Kassiean would stop to see what he might do to help out. The driver of the disabled vehicle knew exactly what was broken. There being no such thing as an auto club to call for service in this remote corner of the world, the best option for repair was for one of the occupants of the disabled vehicle to go with us to Yakutsk to get a replacement part. And so we were again three in the back seat, me against the window; Kassiean was chain-smoking at the wheel, and the thump, thump, thump of the same twelve songs from the techno-punk hit parade squawked from the speakers beside my head.
All things considered, however, I was in a very different state and frame of mind on my return from Mandar and Fedora’s home. Exhaustion, dust, and the onset of some kind of gastrointestinal insult that had turned my bowels to water notwithstanding, we were now driving down a road with coordinates in three dimensions instead of just two. After Mandar’s cosmic tutorial it felt as if, instead of being on a road heading west through Siberian taiga, we were now travelling through the cosmos, complete with a hitchhiker from some other galaxy. We bumped along, heads bobbing, the music blaring, the smoke and dust circulating, until we crested a hill and before us saw the Lena River bathed in the golden light of six in the morning. Eh-Beh the Mother River had never looked so good.
After a couple of weeks together spread out over several months, I had become very fond of Slava. On both my visits, on the strength of the initial RAIPON connection from Moscow, he had dropped everything and made my education his priority, arranging interpretation (although Slava had a strong command of English, not as good as Ruslan’s but better than that of some of the stand-in translators like Sergei), smoothing logistics, setting up drivers and meetings, and generally making sure that this project of mine would be as well served as possible through his agency as host and fixer of all things.
With cof
fees in hand, being careful not to crush the flimsy cups, we walked through the loose dry clay down the bank, boarded the ferry, and sat on a bench on the port side of the wheelhouse looking out over the Lena. As we waited to cross, we talked about Mandar and language and revisited the many topics of discussion during our whirlwind knife-making tutorial and Sakha cultural immersion experience.
“What about Mandar’s notion of genetic memory?” I asked. “Can language and tradition be maintained that way?”
“Maybe,” he replied with a sigh. “Yukaghirs believe in reincarnation. We don’t speak of genetic memory. We believe that humans come back as animals who perhaps come from spirits or who, in death, transcend to the spirit world. As such, the world we inhabit is, in a sense, what one ethnologist called a ‘hall of mirrors’ where spirits, animals, and people are all doubles of one another through the process of reincarnation. This is why I believe Mandar was right when, somewhere back in our conversation, he said that teachers don’t really teach, they only help students remember what they may know from a previous life. They know it. The knowledge is inside them. And language is part of that knowledge. But in the case of my people, the Yukaghirs, it may be too late.”
As deckhands loosed the lines and the ferry slipped into the sinewy reflections of the calm river waters, Slava relaxed into yet another story. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, he began, a Lithuanian Jew called Vladimir Jochelson had run afoul of the czar because of his activities with the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya, which was intent on overthrowing the monarchy. He left Russia to study anthropology in Switzerland but kept involved by editing the newspaper of the organization. As a result, when he returned to Russia in 1884 he was arrested and imprisoned, and after three years in Petropavlovsk Prison in St. Petersburg he was sentenced to ten years of exile in Siberia—near the Arctic Circle in Yakutia.