by Yuri Rytkheu
The captain of the Belvedere and Panliu the interpreter stayed sober and managed to hold a serious conversation with Mletkin amid the noise and chaos. The subject of their discussion was the whalebone that had been stripped from a recent kill, which, according to ancient custom, rightfully belonged to the head boatman, the ytvermechyn – literally, “boat-boss.”
The captain was offering two Winchesters with cartridges, four rolls of white cloth, a copper set of plate, a trunk of variously sized nails, a carpenter’s plane, and a handsaw. The price suited Mletkin, and the trade culminated with copious tea drinking and the breaking open of a large dark bottle of fire-water in Tynemlen’s yaranga.
Mletkin listened attentively to Panliu’s stories of service on the Tangitan ship, about last year’s wintering at Port Clarence among several dozen icebound ships, and what people who suddenly had many hours of leisure on their hands had found to amuse themselves.
“They even tried to teach me to read and write,” Panliu recounted, “but I refused: what use do I have for such learning? We don’t have a single book back at home in Unyyin. I did learn to play cards, and I often won. But I spent everything on fire-water. It’s very dear when you’re in port for the winter, and there were people who gave their last possessions for a sip of it.”
Mletkin was no stranger to the magical brew. The fire ran swiftly down your body and spread its warmth through your very sinews. Then your limbs went numb, and what followed was a strange kind of excitement. It was as though you were suddenly stronger, and your thoughts fluttered about your head, each more fanciful than the one before. Everything seemed possible, effortless. Cherished dreams were achievable and long distances became easy to cross. Under the influence of the fire-water, men sometimes hitched up their sleds and set off on long journeys. There were known cases already of drunk men freezing, stupefied, their hungry dogs bringing home a sled with a stiff, gnawed-on corpse atop it. Mletkin distrusted the artificial clarity of thought that the drink produced, and stopped drinking as soon as he reached that point. But most of his countrymen would drink until they lost all faculties, and their memory besides. The women imbibed somewhat less than the men, though an unquenchable thirst for the fire-water suppressed all sense of shame, and they would give themselves to any who could offer so much as a mouthful of the magical liquid.
“The captain promised to repay me with one of the whaleboats,” Panliu boasted. “One side’s been holed by a walrus, but it’s easy enough to fix. I might get to be the first man of these shores with his own wooden whaleboat. I just need to find a man who can replace me.”
The last traces of inebriation vanished from Mletkin’s mind. Cautiously, he inquired whether the captain might not take him? He was an unmarried man, strong and hale, a steady hand with a harpoon when it came to whale or walrus, a good shot, too. The only thing was, he didn’t know American speech . . .
“Oh, that you can learn! That’s the easiest thing! Hardest is getting used to being away from your home . . .”
Apprised of Mletkin’s wish, the captain looked him up and down appraisingly, then clapped him on the shoulder:
“Good!”
When Mletkin first set foot aboard the whaler Belvedere he carried with him a leather satchel; inside was a pair of high waterproof torbasses, a pair of nerpa-skin mittens, and a warm kukhlianka. It was July 1897.
The Belvedere raised sail and slowly headed for the Bering Strait. Mletkin stood on deck, overcome by conflicting emotions. He was glad that his longtime dream of getting close enough to the Tangitans – still known as hairmouths in these parts – to learn about their way of life, seemed to be coming true. Yet as the low yarangas, which from a distance looked like so many pebbles scattered along the shingle beach, grew smaller and disappeared from view, he felt a rising sense of sadness and unease. When might he return to his native shore? And what lay in store for him in the unknown lands? What kind of life awaited him on board this man-made wooden island, with its gigantic, birdlike wings?
They passed Forever Grieving, the wife of a hunter who had gone out to wait for her husband who’d been lost at sea, and who turned to a cliff, still waiting. And there, that was the grave of Nau, the First Woman, who had borne to Reu the Whale the first sea hunters. It was marked with a tall arch of whale jaws atop a green mound. Each promontory, each fold of the crags that lined the shoreline was marked and remembered in Luoravetlan history. Beyond the next capelet he could see the yarangas of Nuvuken, half hidden among piles of rock. You would have to know that the cove was inhabited, and that the rock conglomerations were in fact human dwellings, to find the people who had been Uelen’s neighbors since time immemorial.
In July, nights in the Bering Strait are still light, as the sun dips but briefly below the horizon. Mletkin stood on the deck for several hours, saying goodbye to his home.
He had heard much about Tangitan cleanliness, and their custom of washing their faces daily and even cleaning their teeth with a special brush. But what he encountered when Panliu led him down to the orlop was beyond description. The smell of rendered blubber was barely perceptible in the thick haze of various smells that assaulted his senses. The miasma was chiefly made up of the reek of unwashed bodies, strong tobacco fumes, rancid feet, and over it all another, unfamiliar stink. The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, load into buckets, and throw overboard, yet the sailors who inhabited the orlop – grudgingly illuminated by a grease lamp that fairly cured the ceiling with its black smoke – seemed perfectly comfortable. Music emanated from a far corner, accompanied by monotonous singing. The performer was a gigantic black man. Bare to the waist, he resembled a tough old walrus bull. His white teeth and large, perceptive eyes gleamed in a wide, round face. Setting aside his banjo he stretched a large hand out to Mletkin and introduced himself: “Nelson!”
Mletkin answered the greeting with a faint motion of his own hand, all but lost in the other man’s powerful grip, and pronounced his name. Nelson, mishearing his new acquaintance, exclaimed: “Frank!”
Mletkin did not correct him. He accepted this new name meekly, reckoning that it would be easier to be called that here on the Tangitan ship. The skipper gave the new crewman a thin mattress, a flat pillow, and a gray blanket. Mletkin took his place beside Nelson.
After a sleepless night on his strange bedding in a sailor’s berth, Mletkin managed to snatch a bit of tense, patchy sleep just before dawn. He dreamed he was inside a fur-lined polog, and he was suffocating, running his hands about the darkened wooden ship’s side as he searched for the flap, and an opening into the chottagin and fresh air.
He opened his eyes and saw Nelson’s wide, smiling face.
“Time to get up!” Nelson said, and to his own surprise, Mletkin understood him perfectly.
After a speedy breakfast of cold meat and hardtack, which they dipped in their coffee mugs, the hunting crew made for the whaleboats. Through gestures Nelson explained to Mletkin that today he would go along to observe and learn how the Tangitans hunted. The Belvedere was a sizable whaler, with four whaleboats, two hanging over the starboard and port sides. Each whaleboat carried two coils of extremely sound hemp rope, several adjustable harpoon sleeves, a few spears, a baby cannon with lethal charge, an ax, a knife, a spade, hooks, and a supply of fresh water. The full complement had to be kept in perfect condition and ready to use at a moment’s notice.
The whaleboats headed toward the blowhole jets spouting some distance from the ship. And the chase was on. The whales appeared to pay little notice to what were, at least from their point of view, tiny vessels; had the case been otherwise it would not have been hard for the creatures to far outpace the slow whaleboats. They only sought to avoid collision with their stubborn pursuers. The chase lasted for several hours. Mletkin manned the oars alongside his crew and were it not for his nerpa-skin mittens, he would surely have rubbed his palms to bloody blisters.
Finally, after a long and strenuous chase, they managed to harpoon one of the whales. The
harpoon line was affixed straight to the middle section of the whaleboat, and now the little craft sped after the retreating whale, its nose constantly dipping deep below the waterline. Now and again the oarsmen set their oars aside and reeled the line in hand over hand, darting up close to the whale and stabbing it with sharply honed spears. You had to have true courage to continue in close proximity to the gigantic, enraged animal. This was where the coxswain’s skill showed, in his being able to foresee the wounded animal’s sudden movement and steer the boat aside. The chief coxswain shouldered a little brass cannon and, picking his moment, shot to kill.
The giant creature dived so deep that the coxswain barely had time to disentangle the line, and then knifed upward, most of the not inconsiderable length of its body hurtling above the water’s surface. The resultant splash soaked the hunters to the bone.
The rest was relatively straightforward, though still hard work; it took them a long time to tow the whale back and secure it to the side of the ship with several sturdy ropes. Then they butchered it, extracting the blubber and baleen plates along with some meat. The other three whaleboats also returned with a fresh kill and the butchering went on until midnight. Mletkin was surprised to discover that the Tangitan whalers happily snacked on itgil’gyn; that evening the ship’s cook served a large dish of boiled whale skin at dinner.
This time Mletkin barely noticed the foul miasma inside the orlop, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep as soon as his head hit the flat, greasy pillow.
The season proved a good one. Soon all of the Belvedere’s holds were filled with barrels of whale blubber, which had been rendered on the spot, in huge cauldrons on the deck, each set in a cradle of fireproof brick. Nelson turned out to be the chief renderer, and the grease and soot were far less noticeable on his dark skin than on that of the other pale Tangitans.
The Belvedere set a course for San Francisco. Her captain was in a hurry, thinking to squeeze in some hunting on the Chukchi Sea, where the whale pods migrated for the second part of the summer.
Once more Mletkin was called to the captain’s cabin. It wasn’t hard to guess that the captain wanted to learn about the Chukchi whaling methods, so he could use them on the Belvedere.
With a soft pencil Mletkin sketched a whale and a whaleboat, making an effort to render them realistically. The captain, whose name was John Forster, grunted his encouragement:
“Good! Good!”
You had to approach a Greenland whale from the head, almost perpendicular to his course, and get in close enough to disappear from the animal’s widely spaced eyes’ field of vision. Nor should the line be fixed to the middle of the whaleboat – Mletkin demonstrated the danger of this practice with a picture of the little wooden boat dragged into the deep – when one could employ a Chukchi invention, a pyh-pyh, which was a buoy made of an inflated nerpa hide and attached to the end of the harpoon line to keep it buoyant and easy to spot.
Captain Forster made some positive noises, then asked Mletkin to press an inked finger to the page, which he folded neatly, and called for drinks. Mletkin refused a large glass of fire-water, but drank two mugs of coffee, sweetened with condensed milk, with real pleasure.
As the ship neared southerly latitudes Mletkin noted the rising warmth in the air and the different species of birds and marine animals that appeared on the water. Whale sightings grew scarce and walrus herds disappeared altogether.
At the port in San Francisco the Belvedere docked in one of the berths specially allocated to whalers. Within a day’s time the holds and deck were cleared of cargo and the crew was given shore leave.
Mletkin had intended to remain aboard, as he had nowhere to go and no one to visit. Most of all, he felt frightened by the huge city, which seemed to the young man some kind of giant beast, one that could swallow him whole as soon as he ventured from the warmer but still familiar sea. Who knew what might happen to a person amid this conglomeration of stone buildings, some of which seemed to rise toward the sky. A human voice was immediately lost in the ceasless hubbub of noise, clanging metal, and blaring sirens. Mletkin often found himself deliberately choosing the starboard side, which looked out to sea. Steamships, large and small, scuttled among the sailing ships in the port. Their smokestacks belched black haze and Mletkin wondered uneasily whether one day the blue sky, blazing sun, and nighttime stars might be completely obscured. Above the city lights the night sky seemed starless and leached of color.
The captain had handed Mletkin a small sum as an advance on his future wages, and Nelson was firm about getting his reluctant comrade off the ship: he had a sister who lived here. Keenly aware that he was about to set foot on Tangitan land for the very first time, Mletkin meekly followed the strapping black man ashore.
They bought some city clothes and shoes at the nearest shop, and then each man had a hot-water wash. Mletkin had briefly bathed in natural hot springs back home, but the clean, rejuvenated feeling he experienced after a thorough scrub with a scratchy sponge and a quantity of stinging soap was something he had never felt before. Dressed in his brand-new, spotless clothes, his feet in a pair of tight leather shoes instead of broken-in torbasses, Mletkin suddenly felt unsure of himself; he worried about tripping and falling down on the flat cobblestone street. For a final flourish, they visited a barbershop. After his haircut, Mletkin looked in the mirror and saw a young Tangitan, who only faintly resembled an Uelen Luoravetlan. It made him unaccountably sad. It felt as though, together with the washed-off grime and the change of clothes and shoes, he had also lost some essential part of himself. He was certainly uneasy about what would happen to his snipped hair: who knew what the Tangitan might do with it. At home they collected cut hair carefully and stored it in special sealskin pouches.
Mletkin could barely keep up with Nelson’s huge stride. His new shoes were very hard and tight, and his feet, used to soft insoles of tundra grass, felt every cobblestone painfully. Mletkin tried to keep a distance not just from the walls of the tall stone houses, in case of falling debris, but from the middle of the road, too, where a house with windows and doors stuffed full of people hurtled down two endless, shining metal strips at a frightful speed. Whenever the house came to a stop, some people would clamber out and others would get in. Nelson dragged his companion into one of the houses. A mustached man with a leather satchel slung across one shoulder met them by the door. Nelson paid their fare. You had to pay for everything here – food, clothes, haircuts, bathing, and transport.
Nelson’s sister greeted him as though he’d returned from the underworld at the very least – with earsplitting screams of joy. Indescribably dark-skinned, just as her brother was, and with a set of gleaming white teeth like a healthy young walrus doe’s, she exuded wonderful energy and zest. Her vigorous embraces gave Mletkin some concern for Nelson’s safety. When she finally noticed her guest she stretched out her hand and said, simply:
“Welcome. My name is Sally.”
“Frank,” said Mletkin.
Her kindly look and her smile made it clear that the welcome had been sincere.
That night, stretched out on a blindingly white sheet that Mletkin almost feared spoiling, he toted up the experiences of his first day in the city. His mind teemed with impressions that refused to line up in an orderly fashion. There was much to wonder at, but he found that, interestingly enough, nothing he had seen resembled miracle or magic. Upon a close look, every instance of the so-called Tangitan magic turned out to be no more than the product of man’s inventive brain and the labor of his hands. One could only marvel at the resourcefulness and adaptability of people who created a bearable standard of living while coexisting with so many others. Nothing fell on pedestrians’ heads, no one got mowed down by the mobile houses, which ran along strictly marked routes. Mletkin had noticed a young boy shouting at the top of his lungs without cease as he waved large sheets of paper in the air. Having bought one of these sheets, Nelson explained to his friend that the paper contained not just local, city news, but tid
ings from faraway lands. Mletkin was impressed by the Tangitans’ practical inventiveness: no need to wait for a guest to eat and drink his fill, rest and get warm, before he would offer the news he had heard on his journey to Uelen. Mletkin could well remember his tribesmen’s hunger for news – so much so that having a guest in one’s yaranga was an event to be viewed with considerable envy.
Sally had laid the dinner table with so many unfamiliar and delicious dishes that Mletkin could barely stand up at the end of the meal. He didn’t like the beer, however, finding that it tasted like piss and smelled of a child’s wet bedding. Orange juice, on the other hand, he thoroughly enjoyed. Nelson regaled his sister with tales of whale hunting and of Uelen, their guest’s homeland, and Sally exclaimed with surprise, rolled her eyes, and clicked her tongue, utterly absorbed. She radiated a marvelous kind of warmth, even at a distance, and each time her hand or thigh grazed Mletkin he felt a burning heat. He wondered whether all Tangitan women had this quality or whether it was unique to Sally. Mletkin’s very first glimpse of white women was here in San Francisco, and was brief at that. Wary and deafened by the city’s roar, he had been very focused on danger from falling objects from the tops of the stone buildings, the speeding automobiles, and the traveling houses that clanged as they turned. Now he remembered Uelen, where the only sounds one heard were natural: the whispering tide, the moaning wind, the snow rustling across the stretched walrus-hide walls of the yaranga, birds calling, children crying, dogs barking, the sounds of native speech . . . The last thing he saw as he fell asleep was Givivneu’s fair young face and shy smile.