by Yuri Rytkheu
“What do you think you’re doing?” came a bellow from Hrdlička, as he went past. The anthropologist was already under the influence, judging from his crimson face. “Reading the papers, when you should be eating your meat!”
Mletkin recollected himself with a start. It did look absurd – a so-called savage, an aboriginal, sunning himself over a morning paper!
Mletkin stashed the newspapers, got comfortable atop a whale vertebra, and slid the wooden dish of meat toward himself.
The first visitors duly appeared. Most came with children, shouting, chewing, spitting, and examining the exhibits with unabashed peering and pointing.
A couple with two children in tow halted in front of Mletkin’s yaranga. The paterfamilias stooped to read the explanatory note and, pulling a piece of brightly wrapped candy from a paper twist, tossed it on the ground in front of Mletkin.
“Take it! Take it!”
The two children, a boy and a girl of about eight, smartly dressed, joined in:
“Take it! Take it!”
Mletkin concentrated on chewing his meat, though it tasted stale and bitter now. Had he not been holding himself in check, he would have thrown his knife, the one he used to cut boiled meat, at the portly, pink-cheeked couple.
“He only eats meat!” exclaimed the wife, pleased with her guess. “Show him, children, that candy is good to eat!”
The boy and then the girl unwrapped their candies slowly, with exaggerated gestures. Grimacing pleasure and delight, they proceeded to chew the sweets, while their parents droned, “Take it! Take it!” without a pause.
Mletkin, eyes down, chewed his meat and was unable to swallow it down.
“Oh, blast him,” said the man suddenly, his voice dripping with irritation and disappointment. “Let’s go see the Papuan.”
“Let’s go see the Papuan!” trilled the children, and clapped their hands.
Most of the visitors came up, read the explanatory notes attentively, watched the vacant-looking, chewing exhibit for a little while and went on their way. Mletkin dreaded those who stayed and tried to chat.
Children threw sweets, which Mletkin gathered and tidied into a sack inside the polog, while the adults tossed small change, and occasionally bills. Mletkin collected the money at the end of each day, having noticed that when there was a mound of money in front of him other visitors were more likely to add their own contribution.
Photographers and journalists came often. The former would set up tripods topped with an apparatus that had a dark glass eye and a metallic cup of flammable powder, then aim for a long while before they finally clicked the device, upon which a plume of instant fire would rise up like a little cloud. The journalists prompted him endlessly about life in Uelen and Chukchi customs. Most of them were tediously obsessed with the ancient custom of wife sharing and quizzed him greedily about this practice of welcoming a particularly favored traveler with a loan of one’s wife for the night. “So if I come and visit you, say,” one of the hacks feverishly consulted, “I’ll also be offered the chance to lie with the host’s wife?”
Hrdlicka and Bogoraz came by each day to say how pleased they were.
“You’re a great success!” the anthropologist told him. “You’re a real star of the fair! We’re proud of you.”
“What do I do with these?” Mletkin pointed to a heap of crumpled dollars and coins.
“Why, that’s your money!” said the anthropologist immediately. “Your honestly earned pay.”
“They toss it to me as though to an animal,” Mletkin sighed.
“You’ll just have to be patient.” Bogoraz shrugged. “I’ll tell you frankly, the public is rather uncouth and uneducated around here. So don’t you mind them.”
For his first shamanic séance, Mletkin had risen early and prepared his garments, shaking out and moistening the dry chamois, and wetting the tambourine.
He’d had trouble falling asleep that night, tossing and turning for a long while as he lay listening to the noises drifting out of the various dwellings in the multihued global village. He heard snatches of conversation, a woman’s weeping, children’s cries, and dogs barking; but over all of this, he heard the thrum of a big city that spread over the shore of a lake as big as the sea. His thoughts flew to Uelen, to his native shore and the ceaseless murmur of the summer ocean’s surf. The only real silence came in the depths of winter, during those brief lulls that come at the thick of a blizzard, and falls of the northern lights overhang the yarangas, flaring down from the sky. Here at the fairground, there was never a moment of true silence to be had.
In the morning the breakfast trolley came – a bacon omelette, milky coffee, bread with butter and jam. And separately, a heap of meat for the wooden platter, both boiled and raw. This was the first relatively cool morning after a succession of hot, sunny days. There was a light breeze, moist from skimming the surface of the lake. But toward midday, when the séance was to begin, the air thickened and tensed.
Some fair officials appeared, among them a rumpled, hungover Hrdlicka and the ever-spruce Bogoraz, sporting his little beard and metal-rimmed spectacles.
He examined the shaman, who was already garbed in the ceremonial garments, nodded with satisfaction and curtly asked:
“Ready?”
Mletkin nodded yes. Already he was retreating into himself, into those regions of the soul that slowly attune themselves to communion with the Great Forces. He had not expected that inspiration would come, and had almost decided to trick the crowd a little, show them a kind of practice trance. And then it came to him, that state when every nerve and every fiber of one’s being is stripped bare and open to the Great Forces.
He picked up the tambourine, grazed the tightly stretched surface with his hand, and began to sing softly:I am setting off into the endless void
On a journey of measureless distance.
Somewhere on the stellar paths of the Sky
I will meet with the Higher Powers.
Having touched the rim of the moon
I will carry a handful of stardust
When I drift back down to earth
To the green grass of the earth
And let the Powers of the Heavenly Spheres
Come to my aid and succor.
Mletkin did not see the crowd thicken and coagulate around the yaranga. Nor did he hear them; all were silent, watching the shaman slowly moving around the fire. The fire that licked and devoured the dry firewood was invisible in the bright glare of the sun, and only a thin plume of smoke streamed upward, snaking around the dancing shaman.
Bogoraz was watching Mletkin carefully from his place beside Hrdlička. He had witnessed the mysteries of the shamanic trance several times during his years of traversing the Chukchi lands, but he figured that, for the most part, they had fobbed him off with mere tricks. It was very seldom that he had been privileged to see what he believed was now taking place before his eyes, and before the throng of visitors to the fair.
Mletkin had mesmerized the large crowd; it watched with bated breath as the shaman spun faster and faster in his whirling dance, as though drawing a mantle of streaming smoke about himself, turning into a pillar of smoke. The tambourine pealed ever louder; the sound seemed to fill the entire space, muffling the noise of the many-tribed village and the enormous city of Chicago that lay outside the fairground. The sky darkened and, suddenly, a silence fell over the watchers. The shaman was gone.
A wispy column of smoke still rose to the ceiling, but there was nothing to be seen in or beyond it. Bogoraz and Hrdlička eyed one another, both men ready to spring in search of the disappeared shaman, but then a tambourine thrummed from the far corner of the fur-lined polog and Mletkin appeared from the darkness. He took a few steps toward the fire, still banging the tambourine, and a distant thunderclap, soon followed by another, was heard in the spaces between each beat, portents of a quickly approaching storm. It was growing darker by the second. The fire rose higher and brighter. Wind lashed the air abo
ve the spectators’ heads.
Mletkin raised the tambourine high over his head and, with a final few beats upon the instrument, collapsed beside the fire. Rain crashed down like a wall of water and thunder. The crowd was instantly soaked to the bone, but no one moved. The receding thunderclaps were all but drowned in deafening applause, shouts of encouragement and shrill, appreciative whistling.
Bogoraz knelt beside Mletkin, still prone by the fireside, and asked him gingerly: “You still alive?”
“I think so,” Mletkin replied wearily, “but I’m very tired.”
“Rest, rest up now,” Bogoraz counseled sympathetically, as he helped the shaman into the polog and off with his clothes. He lowered the fur-lined curtain as Mletkin succumbed to a deep sleep.
The crowd was dissipating. Thunder still rent the sky, and the drought-hardened earth soaked up the longed-for, beneficent, generous, warm rain that poured from the heavens.
The following day’s papers all ran gushing reports about the miracle wrought by the Chukchi shaman from the Eastern Cape – Mletkin, who was also called Frank.
“The Uelen shaman disappeared before the very eyes of the astonished fair visitors – and then he brought down rain!” “A heavenly miracle, wrought by man!” “Could this shaman from the Eastern Cape be a visitor from another world?” and “Skeptics, raise your hats to this extraordinary savage,” were just some of their conclusions.
Mletkin acceded to Bogoraz and Hrdlička’s pleas, then outright insistence, and performed three more séances. But the inspiration that had visited him on that first occasion did not return. He would disappear from sight, then return, and the public roared their appreciation – though each time there were more and more shouts for new, fresh miracles. One time, to the shock and delight of the crowd, Mletkin sliced his arm from wrist to shoulder. Rivulets of blood ran down to the green grass and dropped, sizzling, into the fire. Then Mletkin showed them the same arm, intact, unblemished. It was a simple trick his grandfather Kalyantagrau had taught him. The crowd roared and frothed, and would have broken through the protective rope cordon, if not for the police guards who had been set to keep order by Mletkin’s yaranga after the first performance.
With each passing day Mletkin found it more and more difficult to spend hours in the public eye. There were moments when he had to marshal all his will, to refrain from throwing something into the peering, babbling wall of red-and-white faces. The children were worst of all. They could be counted on to throw something that would stain his face or clothing. Sweets and ice creams were the preferred missiles, as well as pebbles. If tossing a coin, they’d try to hit him in the eye, or in the face at least. Teenagers with slingshots were the most dangerous. They did not confine themselves to firing wads of chewed paper or bread pellets, but loaded their weapons with pebbles and even ball bearings.
Finally, closing day arrived, bringing another crowd of very important persons. This time the main attraction was another president – the president of the National Geographic Society. There was another round of fireworks and more music from a woodwind orchestra, but none of it held any interest for Mletkin, who couldn’t conceal his joy at the freedom that awaited him.
He purchased some decent clothing and a small leather-bound suitcase, and spent his last night before departing for San Francisco in a hotel.
Vladimir Bogoraz saw him off early on the morning of August 23, 1898. He noted down Sally’s address in San Francisco and said, in parting:
“You’ll hear from me. Maybe we can make our way back to Chukotka together.”
In America
Mletkin stood in front of the familiar door for a long while. When the door opened to his tentative knocking, Sally peered over his shoulder and gave a tentative smile:
“Where’s Nelson? Come out, Nelson! I know you’re hiding somewhere. Stop teasing your little sister.”
“Nelson isn’t here,” Mletkin croaked.
“You didn’t come here together?”
“He’ll never come here again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nelson is gone.”
Sally was beginning to grasp his meaning. When she finally understood, she sank down to the floor. Tears streamed down her face; her body was racked with silent convulsions. Mletkin didn’t know what to do. He had never encountered such a frank and extraordinary expression of grief, a silent weeping that was far more affecting than the noisiest cries. He knelt before the weeping woman and stroked her curly, surprisingly rough hair.
“There’s nothing to be done . . . Nelson is very far from us now . . . But he always thought of you, and his last words were for you. He was a wonderfully kind person, and a true friend.”
“Yes, that was him,” Sally agreed through her tears.
She rose slowly and motioned for Mletkin to come inside.
“You must be hungry... I’m sorry, I’ll whip up something for you to eat. Would you like something to drink? Some beer, or maybe whiskey?”
“I don’t drink alcohol,” said Mletkin. “I’ll have some coffee if that’s all right.”
During his sojourn in America Mletkin had developed a fondness for the beverage, which he liked far better than the tea commonly drunk on the Chukotka Peninsula.
The rich aroma of coffee soon filled the room.
“How did it happen?” asked Sally.
Mletkin told her of the starry night over Port Clarence that Christmas Eve, and the fire aboard the ship. To spare his sister’s feelings, he did not linger over Nelson’s horrific burns and the suffering they caused. He only emphasized how bravely and uncomplainingly Nelson had behaved.
“The whole ship honored him,” Mletkin told her.
And it was the truth: there was not one man aboard the Belevedere who did not respect Nelson, or honor him above the other men of the crew.
“And loved him,” Mletkin added.
Before he came, he had counted out his friend’s meager savings and added much of the money he’d earned as an exhibit to the pile. Toting up the bills neatly, Sally asked:
“And you? Have you got enough to live on?”
“Yes, of course,” Mletkin told her. “I’ve made some good money recently.” And he told her about the Chicago World’s Fair, adding, with a smile, that he’d even practiced his profession there, as he was a shaman, after all.
“Yes,” Sally recollected. “I seem to remember Nelson telling me something about that.”
Her eyes moistened at each mention of her brother’s name. After several mugs of coffee Mletkin decided he should go, and leave the woman alone with her grief. He picked up his suitcase.
“I’ll be going, then.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay? Nelson’s room is free. I think you’ll be more comfortable here than in a hotel.”
Mletkin did like Sally’s modest and cozy apartment. He marveled at himself, that he – who had been raised in a yaranga, where hygiene was a very relative term – should be so appreciative of Tangitan neatness and cleanliness.
After some initial wavering, Mletkin agreed to stay. The only awkwardness now lay in living in such close proximity to a young and attractive woman. To his amazement, Mletkin soon stopped noticing the blackness of her skin. When the two of them spoke, he saw only the dazzling whites of her large round eyes, and the limitless kindness that emanated from them. They were like gates to a bottomless treasury of tenderness and love. It often occurred to him that from a Luoravetlan point of view Sally was surely a Tangitan, despite her black skin. Yet precisely because of that blackness, she was somehow apart from the various multihued Tangitan tribes, and that gave her a kind of kinship with Mletkin, a kinship that brought them closer together.
After a few days of rest at Sally’s cozy home, Mletkin went down to the San Francisco harborside, to inquire about ships due to sail for the Northwest. To his dismay, it turned out that all the vessels had long sailed, the season for navigation in high latitudes was nearing its end and there would be no ships for the
Bering Sea for some time to come.
“I’ll have to winter in the States,” Mletkin sighed on his return to Sally’s.
“No big deal,” Sally smiled back. “Better to winter in a warm house than in the Arctic ice fields.”
That was true enough. Yet more and more often Mletkin was overcome by a yearning for his native shores. He thought of his yaranga, his parents and friends. The young woman who had vowed to wait for his return, who waited for him still in Rentyrgin’s deer camp. Mletkin’s occasional need for a woman was amplified and exacerbated by the nearness of the young, attractive Sally. She herself seemed to radiate the heat of pent-up desire as she showered her houseguest with tender attentions. A fleeting, casual touch from Sally would ignite a spark of answering heat in Mletkin, and he was at once helpless before a sweetly excruciating tide of unspent male longing. Nights were the worst. As Sally lay just beyond a thin screen, Mletkin’s feverish imagination painted her hot, naked body sprawled on a white sheet like that of a young walrus cow resting on a slab of ice.
A few times Sally had called him Nelson, forgetting. She sometimes hugged him too, pressing her warm body close and raising a raw throbbing inside Mletkin, like a carbuncle about to burst.
Mletkin was not one to sit idly, and despite the fact that his expenditures were modest, the remainder of his pay was melting like snow on Uelen’s hillocks. He couldn’t resist buying a sea chronometer, barometer, and compass from a specialist merchant near the port. The purchases made a sizable dent in his savings, and he still wanted to buy a set of surgical instruments to take back home.
Searching for some temporary employment, Mletkin stopped by the local hospital and, to his surprise, was hired on as a male nurse. This was a hospital for the poor, and it was badly equipped, but staffed by recent medical graduates – a bold and brave bunch overall. In large part, the patients went from the street outside straight into the operating room and Mletkin often found himself assisting in surgery. He was fascinated by surgery, and spent every free moment in the operating room.