by Yuri Rytkheu
A great deal had been achieved in a short while, from both the Asian and the American sides. The base camp for the American builders of the telegraph line was in Port Clarence, Alaska, where American whaling vessels often wintered. Two seventy-meter metal masts were erected at Anadyr.
At the same time, another company was laying cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a vicious race – and it was won by the cable men.
The work to raise a terrestrial telegraph line to America through northeast Asia came to a halt. Eventually, all that remained were scattered clumps of telegraph poles and the two metal masts.
Vague rumors of people roaming the tundra and erecting poles had reached Uelen, but Mletkin had paid them little attention and certainly never imagined he would come across evidence of the strangers’ activities.
“The Tangitans bring many wonders to our land,” he remarked.
Far more curious was this casual mention of a round earth. Mletkin’s puzzlement grew as he wondered how the lakes and the sea itself did not overflow their rims.
“I also don’t think it is possible to talk to Tirkerym across such a distance. How loud a voice would you need! Even a wolf’s growling dies out if you walk away far enough,” Rentyrgin said.
So as not to be a burden on his hosts, Mletkin volunteered to watch the herds alongside another of Rentyrgin’s sons, a strapping boy named Rinto.
Each time he left the yaranga in bright, clear weather, Mletkin would stand for a while on the nearest hillock and watch the horizon intently, slowly turning so as to scan all around. One morning he had a revelation: in order to look around him, he had to draw a circle with his eyes, and this could only be possible if he were standing atop a giant ball. Otherwise, he would keep coming up against corners.
The deer were eating up the last of the moss and grass in their summering meadows, and the camp was making ready to move to its winter grounds on the shores of Lake Ioni, far beyond the Kytryn Strait, in the far reaches of the Chukchi Peninsula.
The girl was coming back to life before his very eyes.
One morning, on waking, Mletkin poked his head inside the chottagin to find Givivneu beside the burgeoning fire. She was not a woman yet, for sure, just a girl on the cusp of her teens, but she was already learning how to be a woman and knew it well. She smiled warmly at her savior and, each time, her eyes held so much tenderness and love that Mletkin’s heart brimmed with warmth and a tenderness that echoed hers.
That morning, treading gingerly on the new ice, Mletkin walked across a little tundra lake which, even yesterday, he’d had to walk around.
Winter pastures differed from summer ones in that the deer would quickly trample the fields of deer moss, and had to be constantly on the move. Yet their migration routes were centuries old, and the herds with their accompanying humans made the same journey year to year – careful, however, to avoid the exact same pastures of the year before.
Before they set off, Rentyrgin performed the navigation ritual that would determine their path by placing the cleanly picked shoulder blade of a deer in the fire.
Immediately, the bone darkened and fractured into a network of tiny cracks.
The master of the camp fished it out of the fire with a little stick and left it to cool beside his feet. Meanwhile, the women were already stripping the retem, the deer-hide chamois used to cover the yaranga roof, from the tent poles and rolling up the polog, after beating it thoroughly with batons of deer horn in the snow.
“We’ll head for the south bank of Lake Ioni,” Rentyrgin announced after a thorough examination of the cracks, and tossed the shoulder blade back into the fire.
Some of their belongings would be left in the summer camping place, but the greater part was carefully loaded onto a long caravan of freight sleds. Mletkin helped Rentyrgin’s sons chase down the harness deer and get them into their straps, then took up a place in the middle of the caravan, driving a pair of the most docile, so-called women’s deer.
“These are my deer,” Givivneu told him proudly, pointing out their branded ears. “When we marry, they’ll belong to us both . . .”
Mletkin smiled and said:
“You’ve got to grow up first.”
“I’ll grow fast from now on,” Givivneu promised.
Gradually, Mletkin became accustomed to the nomadic lifestyle. He lived in Rentyrgin’s yaranga as though he were a full member of the family; no one ever asked him how long his visit was to last, how long he expected to stay with the camp. He tended the animals alongside the deer herders. Returning from a long sojourn in the cold, windy tundra, he’d enter the clean, snow-beaten, fur-lined polog, divest himself of clothes and stretch out atop the deer skins in the anticipation of dinner, blissfully naked but for a scrap of chamois between his legs. Before sleep came, while the last tongue of flame in the stone lamp still flickered, he’d listen to Rentyrgin’s tales from history, noting that many of them – despite being well-known to him from his father and especially his grandfather Kalyantagrau – had some unfamiliar aspects in Rentyrgin’s telling.
The onset of winter in the Chukchi tundra is rife with blizzards. This is a time when few dare to travel; so everyone was surprised to encounter a large caravan of deer sleds slowly moving up the hillock that housed the camp’s yarangas.
There were four sleds in all, and one carried a Tangitan who sat swaddled in furs, his wolverine-trimmed hood pulled forward over his head. He leaped nimbly from the sled and, unlike his tribesmen – who insisted on thrusting forward their bare hands on meeting – merely replied to the traditional Chukchi greeting of “Yettyk,” with:
“Ee-ee, myt’yenmyk. Gymnin nynny Veyip.” 18
Mletkin had never before heard his native speech trip off the lips of a Tangitan.
Once inside the yaranga, Veyip continued to behave like a genuine chauchu, using his hands to pick up meat from the wooden dish and then cutting it up with his own knife, handily smashing up deer leg bones in order to extract the sweet, tender marrow, and to top it all, comfortably conversing in the Chukchi tongue.
Noticing Mletkin’s unabashed curiosity, he asked:
“So then, you’ve never seen a Tangitan who could speak the true language ?”
“This is the first time,” Mletkin confessed. “I’d come to think our tongue was totally inaccessible to the Tangitans.”
“Even a Tangitan can speak Luoravetlan, as you can see.” And Veyip smiled.
“How I’d love to learn to speak Russian!” This was Mletkin’s old secret hope.
“But with whom will you speak Russian here in the tundra?” Veyip was skeptical.
“I’m not a tundra person,” said Mletkin. “I’m from Uelen.”
“So what are you doing here?” It was Veyip’s turn to be curious. “Working off the price of a bride?”
“No, I haven’t come here of my own free will, so to say,” Mletkin demurred.
“What brought you here, then?” Veyip persisted. His sharp, deeply set eyes had a penetrating quality. His demeanor, his whole being, gave off the impression that he was an inquisitive person. Mletkin realized that the man would not leave him alone until he had ferreted out the whole story.
“I’ve got to stay away from Uelen and my family for a while.”
“I hope you haven’t committed a crime? Haven’t killed anybody?”
Who knew how many in Uelen would starve to death this winter because of him? Then he would really be a murderer, though an unwilling one.
But he still answered:
“I haven’t killed anyone.”
Veyip spent the entire evening by the fire, hunched over his notebook, marking the tracks of the words he’d heard onto the white paper with quick, jerky movements, like the tracks of a mouse on white snow. He was very interested in the names of the various components of a tundra sled, the ways of securing its smallest parts. He was keen to learn about every little detail, as though he were planning to build a sled from scratch. He already knew a great d
eal about Luoravetlan life and you had to talk to him as an equal, as an experienced chauchu.
The next day Veyip made an unexpected proposition: “One of my porter-guides has to go back home to the Kurupkan tundra. Would you like to come along with me? Until the spring thaw. There won’t be many long treks, we’ll be spending most of our time in deer-herding camps and coastal villages. I’m collecting Luoravetlan speech, their tales, legends, all manner of sayings. It’s true I can’t pay you much, but I won’t stint you, either.”
The flash-fire of Mletkin’s next thought made him tremble inwardly.
“You wouldn’t have to pay me at all,” he said – slowly, careful not to drive off his luck. Who knew if the Tangitans were even willing to share this knowledge with those not of their own tribe? “What if you could teach me how to make out the tracks of speech on paper?”
Veyip was slow to answer. Perhaps the young Luoravetlan’s request was something of a shock.
“It’s not that simple,” he said at last. “Provided I could teach you anything at all, it would only be to read and write Russian. And to learn those things, you’d first have to learn Russian speech.”
“I’m willing!” Mletkin’s answer had the ring of a challenge.
“You would need much hard work and patience,” Veyip went on dubiously. “Do you have what it takes?”
“I do!” came Mletkin’s firm reply.
As they pulled away from Rentyrgin’s camp, Mletkin saw Givivneu, pressed forlornly against the wall of the yaranga, and his heart felt the sting of it. He walked back and told her quietly, standing very near:
“I’ll come back for you.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Givivneu said, swallowing back her tears.
Veyip postponed visiting Uelen until the spring and set a course for the swathe of tundra that trimmed the Chukchi Peninsula coastline, to visit the reindeer people’s camps. Each evening, after finishing his own work of filling several notebook pages with notes, Veyip would motion for Mletkin to join him by the fire and the lesson would commence. The lessons took place not just in the late hours, inside the yaranga, while the others were fast asleep, but even as the convoy of sleds was on the move. Mletkin might perch on Veyip’s sled or run alongside the pack, all the while reciting Russian poems, repeating Russian words.
Veyip was amazed by the young Chukcha’s persistence and hard work. Little by little he pried the story of Mletkin’s exile from Uelen from the young man, and learned of Kalyantagrau’s harsh, cruel schooling of a would-be shaman. Mletkin saw that the Russian wanted to understand the root and meaning of the shaman’s craft. He seemed to find shamanic incantations especially fascinating, and all but forced Mletkin to disgorge them from his memory, first taking rapid notes on paper and then repeating what he’d written in his own accents, singsong fashion, which made Mletkin smile to hear.
Human speech turned out to be built out of relatively few elements, sounds for which there were corresponding marks in the Russian tongue. By putting the sound marks together you could make words. And though it seemed a simple enough idea, it was one man among all of the Tangitans who thought of it! Mletkin began to wonder whether the same principle might be used to create a Chukchi system for writing and reading. He shared the idea with his teacher, to which Veyip replied by taking out several pages filled in with different marks.
“I’ve noted down Chukchi speech here. Want to hear me read it back?”
Veyip brought the page closer to his eyes, and Mletkin heard the first phrases of the well-known legend of his own ancestor, the brave warrior Kunleliu, who had vanquished the Russian Yakunin, told in his own tongue, to his utter astonishment.
“So Chukchi letters already exist?” he exclaimed excitedly.
“It isn’t a writing system yet.” His teacher curbed his enthusiasm. He then explained the difference between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. “This is my own way of noting down Chukchi speech.”
“So the same person can possess both Russian and American letters?”
“And Hebrew, and Arabic, and Chinese, too!” Veyip laughed, astonished at the young shaman’s thirst for knowledge. Mletkin did not seem like the type of Chukcha “Inspired from Above” – as the shamans called themselves – that Veyip-Bogoraz had encountered before.
“Amazing,” Mletkin whispered quietly, again and again, not daring to voice the audacious idea of learning several languages and alphabets.
After a long trek into the Vankarem tundra, complete with a blizzard endured in an open field, they reached the outlying yarangas of the camp belonging to a certain Nokko, the master of herds and grazing grounds that reached all the way to the river Chaun.
Having had their fill of deer meat and tea, they climbed inside the warm fur-lined polog and lay down side by side. Tonight even Veyip had not the strength to open his notebooks.
The dying fire by the polog’s far wall flickered in the close darkness. Despite their overwhelming fatigue, sleep just wouldn’t come. Mletkin cleared his throat and confided to Veyip:
“My family’s been keeping a Russian book.”
“What book?” Veyip was instantly curious.
“A sacred book. My grandfather got it in trade at the Anui market fair.”
“Have you read it?”
“How could I have read it when I didn’t know Russian?”
“I forgot!” Veyip chuckled. Then he grew serious:
“I don’t believe in God, myself.”
“The Tangitan God?” Mletkin queried.
“Any kind. It’s all made-up, anyway. The world, the whole universe is not made as the shamans, Russian or Chukchi, would have us believe.”
“So why are you always so curious?” said Mletkin. “Setting down our rituals, our incantations?”
“There is a science that is concerned with general knowledge of mankind. I study the Luoravetlan so that knowledge of them can be added to the general store of human knowledge,” Veyip answered. “It’s important to know about people’s misconceptions, too.”
Mletkin fell silent for a long while, absorbed in his own thoughts. Then he spoke:
“No, God does exist. It’s only that different nations call him by different names. There is much in the world and in life that can only be explained by the existence of Higher Powers . . . Miraculous healings, for one . . .”
“So you have healed?”
“I have,” Mletkin answered calmly, thinking of young Givivneu. “And how else can we explain the miracle of a person’s conception and birth? His death? The dead have to go somewhere, haven’t they?”
“Where do they go, then?” Veyip’s tone was mocking.
“We believe that some go to the sky, to the regions around the Polar Star, and others go to the underworld, an underground, waterless land.”
“Have you been there? Have you been and returned?”
“Shamans have been there . . .” said Mletkin.
“What about you?”
“Not yet . . . But I’ve dreamed of many who have departed from this life. They came to speak with me. They couldn’t have come from Emptiness, out of Nothing.”
Veyip was quiet for a time, and when he spoke it was with a different tone of voice.
“I don’t intend to break you of your faith. If you believe in spirits, kel’eht, Enantomgyn – go ahead, believe. But remember that there are other faiths beside Chukchi shamanism, and there are people like me who don’t believe in anything at all.”
Hearing this made Mletkin sigh. He said sympathetically:
“It must be hard to live without faith . . .”
Not far from Vankarem, Veyip’s caravan was overtaken by another Tangitan traveler, a priest named Venedikt. The scientific and religious parties mingled at the camp of Gyrgolkau, a deer herder of large means – which meant that the travelers were given use of a spacious guest yaranga, hung inside with three separate fur-lined pologs.
Mletkin noted that Veyip, who had recently been so forthcoming about his lack of
faith, met the holy father amiably and spent a long time talking with him by the dying fire.
“I’ve been voyaging around these parts for almost two years,” Father Venedikt related. “God’s word comes to the Chukchi with difficulty. They’re only willing to be baptized in exchange for gifts. Give them knives, shirts, needles, tobacco. Some have grown so shameless, that they demand a bottle of vodka as payment for being baptized. And when you perform the rite you’ve got to keep a sharp eye out! Many of them try to go a second time, even a third to get more gifts out of it. In the early days I made mistakes – they all seemed to look the same to me. Now, with the Lord’s help, I can tell them apart.”
Father Venedikt was about the same age as Veyip-Bogoraz. He ate with gusto and noisily slurped strong tea from a saucer. Noticing Mletkin, he asked:
“You understand what we’re talking about?”
“Not everything,” Mletkin said modestly, “but I can follow a bit.”
“He’s learning to read and write in Russian,” Veyip informed the priest with some pride.
“You don’t say!” Father Venedikt was thunderstruck. Reaching for a small travel volume of the New Testament, he opened it and offered it to Mletkin.
Mletkin leaned closer to the firelight and haltingly read out:
“In the beginning was the Word, and God was the Word, and the Word was God . . .”
“Extraordinary!” the priest exclaimed. “You know about our Lord, about Jesus?”
“My grandfather Tynemlen used to tell me the tale of your God, which he himself had heard in his youth, at the Anui market fair. He brought back a Russian shaman book and it has been kept safe inside our yaranga to this day.”
“How curious . . .” mused Father Venedikt. “And what did your grandfather tell you?”
“The Russian God, he was born in the family of a craftsman who could work all manner of things from wood . . . The craftsman wasn’t really the father, the real father had secretly slept with the man’s wife, and begot a male child. Who was then born in a cattle pen and started to walk around from camp to camp, like you, and tell people about God, about how you shouldn’t steal, kill people, look at other men’s wives . . .”