by Chi Zijian
Once when mother was feeding salt to the reindeer, Lena and I hid Luni outside the shirangju in a big grain barrel. Mother came back and discovered that Luni was missing. She became frantic. She looked everywhere, but Luni was nowhere to be seen. When she asked Lena and me, we shook our heads and said we didn’t know. She broke down in tears.
It seemed that Luni and Mother were connected at the heart. At first he lay quietly in the barrel, basking in the sunlight. But when she cried, he began to wail. Luni’s cry was laughter to mother’s ears. She followed that sound to its source, held him close and gave us a fierce scolding. That was the first time she lost her temper with us.
Luni’s arrival forever changed the way we spoke about our parents. Before, like other obedient children, we addressed Mother as Eni, and Father as Ama. But because Luni was our parents’ favourite, Lena and I grew jealous, and we secretly ridiculed them by referring to them as Tamara and Linke. Sometimes I still forget to correct myself when I mention them now. May the Spirits forgive me!
In our urireng, every adult male had a woman at his side. Linke had Tamara, Hase had Maria, Kunde had Yveline, and Ivan had his blue-eyed, golden-haired Nadezhda.
But Nidu the Shaman was all alone. I figured that one of the Malu we prayed to inside the deerskin bag must be female. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he want a woman of his own? The fact that Nidu the Shaman was together with a female Spirit didn’t seem strange, but since they couldn’t have a child, it was a pity. A camp without children was like trees short of rain – a bit cheerless.
Ivan and Nadezhda, for example, were always teasing their son and daughter, Jilande and Nora, and laughing. Jindele, the son of Kunde and Yveline, wasn’t particularly lively but he was like a mid-summer cloud that brings a hint of coolness, and this calmed their spirits.
But Hase and Maria were childless, and their faces were always covered in dark clouds. When Rolinsky the Russian anda came to our camp, liquor, tea and sweets weren’t all he brought to Hase’s shirangju; there were medicines, too. But after Maria took them to treat her infertility, her tummy still looked the same. This upset Hase so much that sometimes he looked as helpless as a cornered elk bull.
Maria often covered her face in a scarf, lowered her head and went to Nidu the Shaman’s shirangju. It wasn’t a human being to whom she was going to pay her respects; it was the Malu. She fervently hoped that They would favour her with a child.
Yveline was Father’s sister, and she was keen on storytelling. She’s the one who told me all of our folk tales, and about the bad blood between Father and Nidu the Shaman. Of course, I heard the legends when I was very young. But the stories of romance and revenge between adults were recounted to me only after Father died, when Mother and Nidu the Shaman went mad, first one, then the other. By that time, I was almost a mother myself.
***
I’ve seen many a river in my lifetime. Some narrow, others wide; some winding, some straight; some swift flowing, others free of wind and wave. And it is we Evenki who bestowed names upon them: the Delbur Béra, Hologuya Béra, Bischiya, Bistaré, Iming Do and Talyan. Most are tributaries of the Argun, or tributaries of tributaries.
My earliest recollection of the Argun has to do with the winter.
That year the snow fell until it obscured the sky and blanketed the earth at our northern campsite. The reindeer couldn’t find food, so we were forced to relocate to the south. We hadn’t caught any game for two days, and one-legged Dashi sat atop his reindeer cursing those men blessed with a pair of good legs for their uselessness. He announced he had fallen into a dark world where he was going to starve to death. We had to approach the Argun, he said, and bore an opening in the ice cover with an ice pick in order to catch fish.
The Argun was immense. Frozen over, it looked like a massive, freshly made snowland.
A skilled fisherman, Hase drilled three ‘eyes’ in the ice, and waited, spear in hand. The big fish that had kept their distance from the ice now assumed that spring had returned at last. Their heads and tails wiggling, they briskly approached the holes where natural light was pouring in. When Hase saw the water whirling around the holes, with his sharp eyes and nimble hands he thrust his spear and quickly pierced fish after fish. There were black-spotted pike and even Siberian salmon with fine stripes.
Each time Hase speared a fish, I jumped up and down for joy. But Lena, Jilande and Jindele were afraid to gaze down into the holes. Those ice-eyes exhaling steam looked like traps, and all three kept their distance.
Nora was a few years younger than me, but just as daring. She bent down and stuck her head over the holes. Hase warned her to stay back: ‘If you slip and fall in, you’ll be food for the fish!’
At this, Nora took off her deerskin hat, shook her head energetically, stamped her feet and cursed. ‘Throw me in right now,’ she said, ‘and I’ll swim here every day. When you want fish, just knock on the ice and call “Nora”. I’ll butt through the ice and give you a live one! And if I can’t, then just leave the fish to eat me up!’
Her words didn’t bother Hase, but they spooked Nora’s mother Nadezhda who came galloping towards her, making the sign of the cross over her chest again and again.
Nadezhda was Russian. Her union with Ivan not only produced two golden-haired, fair-skinned children, it also brought us Eastern Orthodox doctrine. In our urireng, Nadezhda prayed to the Malu and worshipped the Virgin Mary too.
This made aunt Yveline look askance at Nadezhda. I didn’t mind that Nadezhda believed in an extra Spirit or two, for back then I believed they were invisible, but I didn’t like it when she made the sign of the cross over herself. For all the world it looked like she was about to cut out her heart with a dagger.
***
At dusk, we lit a bonfire on the frozen Argun. We fed the pike to the hunting dogs, but we sliced the meaty Siberian salmon into sections, sprinkled them with salt, skewered them with birch branches, and rotated them over the fire. The aroma of roasted fish spread quickly throughout the camp.
The adults ate fish and drank while Nora and I raced each other along the shore, leaving queues of dense paw prints like a pair of hares.
I still recall how Yveline called us back when Nora and I reached the opposite bank. ‘You shouldn’t just go over there like that,’ she warned me, ‘that’s not our territory any more.’
But gesturing at Nora, Yveline added: ‘She can go because that’s her homeland. Sooner or later, Nadezhda will take her and Jilande back to the Left Bank.’
To me, a river was a river and there was no distinction between a right and a left bank. Just look at the bonfire: it was burning on the Right Bank, but its flames tinted the snowy wilderness of the Left Bank scarlet too.
Nora and I paid no heed to Yveline and kept right on running from one side of the river to the other. Nora deliberately relieved herself on the Left Bank, and then returned to the Right Bank and told Yveline loudly: ‘I took a pee back in my homeland!’
Yveline threw Nora a scornful look, as if eyeing a newly born deformed fawn.
That night Aunt Yveline told me that the Left Bank of the Argun was once our territory – our homeland – and that we had been the masters of that land.
More than three hundred years ago, Russian soldiers invaded our ancestral territory. They provoked war, and stole the marten pelts and reindeer of our forefathers. With their swords they chopped in two the men who resisted their violence, and used their bare hands to strangle the women who wouldn’t submit to rape.
The once tranquil mountain forests, shrouded in dark smoke, descended into chaos. Quarry became less abundant year by year, and our ancestors were forced to migrate from the Lena River Valley in Yakutia, cross the Argun, and begin their lives anew on the Right Bank. So we became known as ‘Yakuts’.
When we lived by the Lena River, we were twelve clans strong, but by the time we relocated across the Argun, we were just six. Many clans scattered as the years flowed and the winds blew. And so I do not wish to utter the n
ame of our clan. That is why the people in my story have only first names.
The Lena is a blue river. Our legends say it is so vast that even a woodpecker cannot fly across its expanse. Upstream from the Lena is Lake Lamu, known to others as Lake Baikal, a blue-green lake fed by eight great rivers. Because it lies close to the sun, sunlight floats atop its waters year-round, turquoise aquatic grasses grow thick, and pink and white water lilies abound. Towering mountain peaks surround Lake Lamu. Our Ancestor – a long-braided Evenki – once dwelt among them.
‘Does winter come to Lake Lamu?’ I once asked Yveline.
‘The birthplace of our Ancestor has no wintertime,’ she replied.
But I couldn’t believe that there was a world where it was forever springtime, forever warm, because each year brought a long winter and bitter cold.
So after Yveline recounted the legend of Lake Lama, I went straight to Nidu the Shaman to get to the bottom of it. Nidu the Shaman didn’t confirm the legend, but he attested to the fact that we once hunted freely throughout the Left Bank. He even said that the reindeer-herding tribe that lived in Nerchinsk presented marten pelts as an annual imperial tribute to our Manchu court.
It was those big-nosed, blue-eyed Russian soldiers who forced us over to the Right Bank. I didn’t know the exact locations of the Lena River and Nerchinsk, but I did grasp that those lost lands were all on the Left Bank – a place where we could never again go. This filled me with hostility towards big-nosed, blue-eyed Nadezhda when I was young. She reminded me of a she-wolf tracking a reindeer herd.
Ivan was Egdi’aya’s son, the son of my great-uncle, that is. He was rather short, his face very dark, and he had a reddish mole that stood out like a ‘love-pea’ on his forehead. Black bears adore eating those sweet red peas. Whenever Father spotted bear tracks on a hunt, he joked with Ivan to be extra careful for fear a bear would attack him. But there was something to Father’s words. For some reason, the sight of Ivan agitated bears more easily than other people, and he had two narrow escapes from a bear’s mammoth paws.
Ivan’s teeth were rock-hard and he loved to eat raw animal flesh. Whenever we went without game, Ivan was the most miserable one in the clan for he wouldn’t eat jerky and turned his nose up at fish. Fish was for children and old people whose teeth weren’t in good shape.
Ivan’s hands were gargantuan. When he spread them over his lap, they wrapped around his knees like thick tree roots. And those hands of his were mighty. They could crumble a cobblestone and snap larch trunks in two, so we could construct a shirangju without an axe. Yveline said that it was Ivan’s uncommonly powerful hands that made Nadezhda his woman.
Over a century ago gold deposits were discovered in the upper reaches of the Argun. Knowing there was gold on the Right Bank, Russians often crossed the border to prospect illegally. Back then Emperor Guangxu was on the throne. How could he watch as the grand Qing Dynasty’s gold poured into the hands of blue-eyed foreigners?
So the Emperor ordered Li Hongzhang to put a stop to it, and Li dreamed up the idea of operating a gold mine in Mohe City near the river. But six months of every year snowflakes fall on this desolate and sparsely inhabited land, so Li Hongzhang, a Senior Minister in the Court, wouldn’t deign to set foot here. In the end, he selected Li Jinyong – the Jilin Deputy Magistrate demoted for opposing Empress Dowager Cixi – to establish a gold mine here.
Once the Mohe Gold Mine opened, stores appeared left and right. But just as fruit follows where there are flowers, brothels also popped up. Those gold-miners located south of the Great Wall hadn’t set eyes on a woman all year, and when at last they did their eyes glowed brighter than when they saw gold.
In exchange for an instant of intimacy and pleasure, they’d sprinkle nuggets of gold over a woman’s body, and so the brothel business abounded like raindrops in the summer. The Russian anda realised that the whorehouses paved the way to riches, and so these merchants brought their women – some hardly more than girls – and sold them into prostitution.
Yveline said that one year when they were hunting on the move in the Keppe River region and the autumn frost had already dyed the forest leaves in patches of red and yellow, a Russian anda crossed the Argun with three young ladies in tow. Riding through the dense forest, they proceeded towards Mohe City.
Ivan came across them while hunting. They had caught a pheasant, lit a fire and were eating and drinking. Ivan had seen that bush-bearded anda before, and he knew that whatever the trader had with him was for sale. It looked like the gold mine needed more than goods and foodstuffs – it needed women too.
Thanks to years of contact, most of us can speak basic Russian, and the anda can understand Evenki. Of the three young women, two had winning looks, big eyes, high noses and slim waists, and they laughed raucously as they drank. They looked like experienced women of pleasure.
But the one with petite eyes was different. She drank quietly, her gaze fixed firmly on her grey-chequered skirt. Ivan surmised she must have been forced into prostitution or she wouldn’t appear so despondent. The thought of men lifting up that grey checked skirt, again and again, made his teeth chatter. Never had a girl made his heart ache so.
Ivan returned to the urireng. He rolled up two otter, one lynx and a dozen or so squirrel pelts, mounted a reindeer and set out in pursuit of the anda and those three young ladies. When he caught up with them, he set the pelts on the ground, pointed to the maiden with the petite eyes, and told the anda: the girl belongs to Ivan, and the pelts belong to anda.
The anda judged the pelts too few, and announced he couldn’t engage in unprofitable business.
Ivan strode over to the anda. He extended his big hand and plucked the iron flask from the anda’s chest. Ivan placed it in his palm, squeezed it hard, and it bent. When he gripped it more forcefully, the liquor squirted out in all directions. Now the flask formed an iron sphere.
The anda’s legs turned to jelly, and he let Ivan go at once with the petite-eyed girl. That was Nadezhda.
***
Yveline said that Ivan enraged Egdi’aya, my great-uncle, to the point of death. Early on he had chosen a marriage for Ivan and planned to welcome the bride into their family that winter. Who’d have imagined that Ivan would bring his own bride back in the autumn?
Ivan’s assumption was not wrong. Nadezhda had indeed been sold by her black-hearted stepmother. Along the way she had tried twice to escape, and when the anda discovered this, he raped her to force her to accept her whore’s fate. So when Ivan took her off with him, she went willingly but with a guilty conscience.
She didn’t tell Ivan about being violated by that anda, but she revealed it to Yveline. Telling Yveline a secret was like recounting it to a songbird; no one in the urireng remained uninformed. At first my great-uncle was ill disposed towards Nadezhda simply due to her Russian extraction, but when he learned that she was a soiled woman, he ordered Ivan to banish her from the mountains. But Ivan didn’t. He married her and the following spring she gave birth to a son, Jilande.
Everyone suspected the child was the offspring of the bush-bearded anda. As soon as blue-eyed Jilande was born, Egdi’aya began spitting blood. He ascended to the Heavens three days later. It is said that when he passed away, the morning clouds turned the east bright pink. He must have taken the blood he coughed with him.
Nadezhda had no experience of living in the mountain forests. At first she couldn’t sleep inside a shirangju and often wandered about in the forest. She couldn’t tan hides, smoke meat-strips or knead thread from tendon. She couldn’t even make birch-bark baskets. Ivan noticed that, unlike Yveline, Mother was not hostile to Nadezhda, so he asked Tamara to teach her how to do chores. Among the woman of our urireng, Nadezhda was closest to Tamara.
This woman who liked to make the sign of the cross over her chest was clever. In just a few years’ time, she mastered all the tasks that our people’s women do. And she was extraordinarily good to Ivan. When he came back from the hunt she was always waiting ther
e in the camp to welcome him, hugging him tightly as if she hadn’t seen him for months.
Nadezhda was a head taller than Ivan. When she hugged him, it was like a big tree embracing a small tree, a mother bear hugging her cub. It made us laugh. But Yveline said that she acted like a whore.
It was Nadezhda who least liked the sight of the Argun. Each time we arrived there, Yveline addressed her with icy sarcasm, as if she were dying to transform Nadezhda into a gust of wind that would blow back to the Left Bank. Nadezhda eyed the Argun’s waters as if she were looking at a greedy master, her face filled with angst, terrified of being exploited again.
But we were unable to leave this river. We always treated it as our centre, living alongside its many tributaries. If the Argun is the palm of a hand, then its tributaries are five open fingers. They extend in different directions, illuminating our lives like flashes of lightning.
***
I’ve said that my memories began with Nidu the Shaman’s Spirit Dance for Lena’s umai, when a fawn went to the dark realm on her behalf. So my earliest recollection of reindeer began with the death of that fawn.
I remember holding Mother’s hand when I saw it lying motionless under the stars. I felt so terrified, so heartbroken. Mother picked up the fawn that had ceased breathing and cast it on a south-eastern slope. The infants of our people who don’t survive are usually tied up inside a white cloth bag and thrown onto a hillside that faces the sun too. The grass there is the first to sprout in the spring, and wild flowers open the earliest. Mother treated the fawn as her own child.
I still recall the next day when the reindeer herd returned to the camp how that doe couldn’t find her offspring. She lowered her head and kept looking at the tree trunk where her fawn had been tied, and her eyes were filled with grief. From then on, this doe – whose milk had been the most abundant – just dried up. It was not until later, when Lena went to the dark realm in pursuit of that fawn, that the doe’s milk gushed forth again like water from a spring.