by Yuri Rytkheu
At dawn, Mletkin pulled on his trousers and barefoot, so as not to wake his hosts, he tried to find a way outside. He had only the foggiest idea of where among the stone houses he might relieve himself. Nelson, who was a light sleeper, guessed his friend’s difficulty and led him to a tiny room, only big enough for one person, which contained a metal pot with a wooden seat that was screwed into the floor. Having done, Mletkin peered around, discovering a chain with a small wooden pull hanging from a metal box on the wall. At home in Uelen Mletkin had always gone to the seashore. Nothing was more conducive to deep thought than a long crouch by the ceaselessly churning surf, with the birds’ shrill cries as a backdrop. The perpetually hungry dogs were quick to gobble up any solid excretions, or they would be washed to sea in the first storm, all of which kept Uelen’s beach quite clean. They used smooth pebbles to clean themselves. Studying the little pile that sat in the nickel-plated vessel, Mletkin was at a loss as to how to dispose of his own waste. Nelson, kind man that he was, once again came to the rescue: handing his guest a piece of soft tissue, he gestured toward the pull-chain. A noisy torrent of water rushed into the bowl, and Mletkin shot out of the lavatory in fright. With considerable tact, Nelson suppressed a smile and calmed Mletkin down, saying:
“Don’t worry, it’s meant to be like this.”
Still, for a long time Mletkin couldn’t help but wonder where the shit and piss of the city’s countless multitudes went after being flushed. Nelson had explained that all the waste was gathered into big underground pipes which carried it out to sea; thereafter, walking the San Francisco streets, Mletkin imagined rivers of human waste flowing under his very feet.
Two days flew by in an instant and it was with relief that Mletkin boarded the Belvedere once more. Even from a distance, he caught the familiar smell of blubber and rotting whale meat and rejoiced at the prospect of the impending voyage up to the northern latitudes, to the cold waters of the Chukchi Sea. The city had depressed him; he did not know how he could have survived those days, the hardest of his life, had it not been for Sally and Nelson’s kindness and care. He had discovered a young, attractive woman beneath Sally’s black skin and she, in turn, had clearly seen the strong, virile young man in him. But there had been too little time for any serious relationship to develop. As she saw the men out Sally sniffled a little, and Mletkin could still feel the heat of her kiss, sweet as licorice, on his lips.
Around August 20, 1897, the Belvedere set a course for the Bering Strait.
Among the Hairmouths
On September 14, 1897, the Belvedere crossed the Bering Strait. It was now apparent that John Forster had miscalculated; the second expedition he was trying to squeeze into the season would be far less successful than the first, if not an outright failure.
Mletkin had learned the basics of sailing and now stood on the bridge near the helm. Even before they reached Irvytgyr he could sense the approaching ice fields. He could even pinpoint their location to the Enurmin Cape, and one day warned the captain to expect them.
On the following morning the ice appeared. The air chilled noticeably and the dense sea fog sporadically congealed and fell onto the deck in wet clumps of snowflakes that had painted a slippery, icy skin over the deck. There was a real threat of being caught and crushed between two ice floes; John Forster decided that they must turn back and wait for the southerly wind to drive the ice farther to the north.
They sailed past the Pe’ek promontory at daybreak – and although Uelen lay concealed on the other side of the Great Crag, in his mind’s eye Mletkin clearly saw its two rows of yarangas strung down the shingled beach, and heard the dear voices of his loved ones, his heart aglow with a sweet, sad yearning.
On September 28 the ship came into Emma Bay, which the locals called Guvrel. Yarangas clustered on its low southern banks near a shallow little lagoon.
No sooner had the ship dropped anchor than a small skin boat left the shore. The man inside it managed to both row furiously and shout. His exhortations rent the air:
“ Voomen, viski! Voomen, viski! Baba, vodka! Baba, vodka!”
By a series of eloquent gestures the man – clad in a torn summer kukhlianka, whose gaping holes afforded glimpses of grimy skin – made it quite clear that he was keen to trade the delights of the woman who sat in the boat next to him for a quantity of vodka.
He made to climb aboard, but the captain forbade the crew to lower the rope ladder and would not allow the Eskimo on deck.
Mletkin looked down on his countryman with pity for what the fire-water had done to him.
The woman tried to help her man. She shrugged off the top part of her kerkher and thrust out a pair of large breasts, nut brown and not at all youthful.
The captain asked Mletkin to tell their uninvited guest that there would be no trade aboard the ship, all negotiations would take place on land. Mletkin translated this into Chukchi and then into the Eskimo tongue. The man in the boat gaped at him in amazement.
“So you’re not one of the hairmouths! How did you get aboard that ship? What are you doing there? Hey, why don’t you help me out? Look, Keynina is willing to lie with anybody for a bottle. If you can’t spare that, how about half a bottle? A mug would do.”
“Didn’t you hear? No trading aboard ship,” Mletkin told him once more. “Only on the beach! Go back and get your wares ready.”
“You’re all mean bastards, you hairmouths,” cursed the Eskimo, “and you who work for them, you’re just the same.” He turned his boat and was soon rowing energetically back to shore.
The crew brought two wooden casks of cheap, strong rum up from the ship’s hold, packed them into a whaleboat, and headed for the beach, where a crowd of locals was already milling about. Depositing the casks on land, the whaleboats returned to the ship.
At first Mletkin could not understand the captain’s actions; the apparent generosity caught him by surprise. The Belvedere proceeded to raise anchor and leave the bay. The ship rounded the cape and stayed for a while in another bay, which would subsequently be named “The Horseman” in honor of a Russian hydrographic vessel.
As evening twilight fell, the Belvedere returned to the bay, coming in as close as the shallow waters would permit. This time three whaleboats carried crewmen ashore, toward a maelstrom of drunken shouting, incontinent singing, the yowling of dogs, and the crying of children.
Something strange was happening in the village: people were running from one yaranga to another, torches aloft.
Mletkin had been told to stay behind; now he stood on deck peering into the darkness.
The rest of the night was ruled by lust, brute force, and intoxication. It was only toward dawn that the whaleboats, laden with well-tanned fawn skins, sable and fox furs, walrus tusk, and warm, fur-lined clothing, returned to the ship.
Those few sailors who had, evidently, retained a shred of conscience had difficulty meeting Mletkin’s eye, and disappeared below deck as quickly as they could. Nelson stood beside him, a taciturn black mountain, only sighing from time to time like a wounded whale.
The longed-for wind had finally picked up around first daylight, and when the Belvedere was on its way back through the Bering Strait John Forster reappeared on the bridge. Checking their course with map and compass, he turned to Mletkin:
“Didn’t my boys have a good time last night! I’m sure they’ll be all the better for it when they’ve got to work hard once we get to the Beaufort Sea. By the way, we’ll be passing near Uelen soon . . .”
“I’d like to be set ashore,” Mletkin requested.
“Landing at Uelen isn’t in my plans. Now that the ice fields are getting so close, every minute counts.”
“I don’t want to be on the ship any longer.”
“What has that got to do with it? You signed a contract, and you have to obey your captain’s orders.”
“What’s a contract?” Mletkin was taken aback.
“A contract is a deal between you and me, agreed and sealed on paper.�
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“But I never did that.”
He vaguely recalled now that when they had first met and Mletkin had drawn Chukchi hunting methods for the captain, he had also made some squiggles and even a thumbprint on a sheet of paper covered in English writing. Could that have been a contract?
Whenever John Forster smiled, he revealed a startlingly even, very white row of teeth.
“The contract is for a year’s service. When it expires, then we’ll see . . .”
After his watch was over, Nelson sat on a bunk next to Mletkin and tried to explain what a contract was. According to him, this slip of paper – so easily torn up or blown from the table with a single breath – had enormous power. It could bind a man to his work more strongly than iron chains, and could punish contract-breakers with grave consequences, including incarceration in the “house of twilight,” the Chukchi phrase for prison. Mletkin had only heard of this punishment. A man who had been judged guilty by a group of empowered Tangitans was locked up in a house of thick walls, where daylight could not penetrate. They fed him like a captive animal – through a slit in the door. Sooner or later a person held in such captivity would lose his mind, or else end in suicide. The Luoravetlan never used such punishment; they never took away a person’s freedom. At worst, an offender might be sentenced to death and executed. But most often, they simply exiled him from his native village. The offender might have to make a long and arduous journey before he found a village willing to take him in. But the story of his transgression would always fly before him – and no matter where he came to rest, after the hosts’ duty to a traveler had been fulfilled, the guest was given to understand that he was not welcome as a permanent addition. The wanderings of such an exile might last for years.
Uelen was soon left behind, and the Belvedere now ran over the Sea of Chukotka. The wind was fierce and raging, but on the rare quiet day Mletkin would climb down into his whaleboat to chase down successive whales. The captain had not been mistaken in his choice. While other boats might return empty-handed, Mletkin always made his kill.
They first saw the ice on the twenty-eighth of September. They might have guessed at its coming from the way the sun bathed in a blood-tinged ocean the night before, and from the crimson horizon – as red as if countless killed whales were being butchered at once – where the gleaming, setting sun was reflected up from the ice fields. The ship sat low in the water, its holds brimming with rendered whale blubber, bundles of baleen strips, walrus tusks. The spoils from Guvrel, the Eskimo village in Emma Bay, belonged to the raiders outright, and the sailors’ orlop deck heaved with pelts.
Mletkin did not like to waste time, and whenever his time off-shift coincided with Nelson’s, the pair of them would sit beneath the guttering oil-lamp and plumb the depths of Tangitan writing. The conscientious and curious pupil was quick to grasp the connection between the markings on the paper and sounds of speech, though thoroughly puzzled by the huge number of divergences between written and spoken syllables. These might have had a deeper meaning, but here Nelson was no wiser than Mletkin. Eventually almost every inhabitant of the cramped orlop participated in the educational project, waving bits of printed paper in front of him and exclaiming encouragingly whenever he pronounced something correctly. At one point he’d read every bit of printed matter on board, including the name of the ship as written on the life buoys and the various shipboard signs that urged or forbade. Learning to decipher handwriting proved a difficult next step, but Mletkin managed that, too.
One day a sailor named Jack MacPherson opened his trunk and lifted out a book whose dark binding still showed a trace of an embossed crucifix. Mletkin opened the book, scanned the first lines, and exclaimed, surprised:
“I know this book!”
“How can you?” MacPherson was surprised in turn. “This is a Bible. My grandmother’s Bible, which I bring along on every voyage.”
“I’ve read it in Russian,” Mletkin explained. “We have another such Holy Book back home, my father brought it back from the Anui market fair many years ago.”
“So you’re a Christian, then,” concluded MacPherson.
“I am not,” Mletkin contradicted him calmly. “I hold to my native beliefs.”
Word of Mletkin’s unusual leisure activities reached the captain himself, who invited the Luoravetlan to his cabin.
Mletkin remembered two things from his first visit to the captain’s cabin: a shelf lined with books and a Victrola gramophone with a set of records. The captain did not share his music with the crew, but every so often, the sounds of singing and strange instruments would float down to Mletkin on his night watch. The captain’s music was not at all like Nelson’s banjo playing, with which he accompanied his own rough-edged, evocative singing voice.
The captain bade his guest sit in a comfortable chair, the one that could spin around, and offered him coffee.
Forster was clean-shaven and neatly dressed; despite the slippery coating of grime up on deck, even his boots gleamed.
“I hear that you’re making progress in your efforts to learn reading and writing,” he said.
“It interests me,” Mletkin replied cautiously.
“Back in Uelen I was told that you were an unusual person, a shaman.”
“Yes, that is true,” said Mletkin, and then added, “In Uelen. Here I am just another crewman.”
“It’s one thing to be a good whaler, but quite another to be a shaman,” the captain mused.
“No,” Mletkin contradicted him. “Sometimes the two things are linked. The things I know have been passed to me by my grandfather, the shaman Kalyantagrau, and the things I can do, my skills, were taught to me by my father.”
“Can a shaman do magic?” asked the captain forthrightly. He had the sky blue eyes so prevalent among the hairmouths, like a thoroughbred husky’s.
“Perhaps,” answered Mletkin. “I haven’t tried, myself.”
“What if you tried right now?” The captain’s dog eyes crinkled at the corners.
“I fear that nothing would happen,” said Mletkin.
“So you couldn’t do magic, not even if you tried?” There was a sour, sarcastic ring to the captain’s question.
Mletkin simply did not know how to explain to the other man that miracles and magic did not happen by a shaman’s own doing, but rather were sent down as needed by the Outer Forces. He could only ask them, but with no certainty that his request would be fulfilled.
“I couldn’t,” he answered.
The captain changed the subject. “So what do you need to be literate for?”
“To be able to read my contract with you, if nothing else,” replied Mletkin.
At this, John Forster gave a hearty laugh.
“I’m liking you more and more!” he declared. “I’ll teach you to read and write myself, and some other things too!”
The captain’s teaching methods were somewhat different from the crew’s, more like those of Veyip-Bogoraz. Like Mletkin’s first teacher, the captain would slice words into their component parts, unclothing the rules and structures of English for his pupil like the ribs of a boat before they were concealed by their walrus-hide casing. He also taught Mletkin arithmetic – but Mletkin’s favorite lesson, a constant source of wonder, dealt with the Tangitan version of the creation of the universe, and the enormous sun around which the planets moved in a circle. The two of them pored over the globe, and Mletkin now understood why his homeland’s summers were so short and its winters so long and cruel. From a geographical standpoint, the unbearable heat Mletkin had encountered in San Francisco, the first large city he’d visited, was easily explained.
The makeup of the universe turned out to be elegant and rather simple. It was this simplicity that surprised Mletkin most of all. Often, he would grab a pair of binoculars and head for the deck, to observe the heavily star-laden skies. What the eye could see could not be compared with the countless lights that, as they receded from the earthbound viewer, turned into the glitteri
ng banks of the Sandy River. On closer observation, the Sandy River itself, which the Tangitans called the Milky Way, turned out to be a host of stars. John Forster had explained the trajectories of planets and the movement of the heavenly bodies by the spinning of the earth itself, and it was hard to argue against the earth’s being round in the face of his teacher’s reasonable explanations. Mletkin had nothing against this description of his home planet, but ventured that he found it inexplicable that the seas and oceans did not spill out, and that the people who lived on the downward curve did not fall off but clung to the globe like flies to a chunk of smoked walrus meat or the underside of a yaranga’s hide walls. The captain shooed him up to the deck and ordered a crewman to bring a bucket of water and a rope. As he swung the full bucket around by the rope, barely missing Nelson, who’d been passing by, the captain shouted:
“You see! The water doesn’t spill. And the speed of the planet is so great that it creates a force strong enough to keep everything from falling off its surface.”
The crew watched the captain’s antics with wonderment, and kept an ear out for his explanations. Belowdecks they quizzed Mletkin about his long conversations with the captain. He shared what he was learning with them, discovering to his surprise that on the whole these Tangitans knew a good deal less than he about the universe and the movement of the stars. And this left a kind of disappointment in him, who had once been convinced of the white man’s superior knowledge.
Unloading his goods in Seattle, the captain gave some of the sailors their final pay and, with a smaller crew, set out for Port Clarence, Alaska, where they would winter.