The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  In the summer of 1910, Givivneu gave birth to a son. Mletkin was away, at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, where he was charged with accompanying an unusual cargo – a school – back to Uelen. The building had been delivered to Kamchatka by steamship the previous year, but ice conditions prevented the ship from reaching Uelen; the school was disassembled into carefully numbered logs and joints, packed up, and offloaded in Avacha Bay until the next navigable season.

  News of his son’s birth found Mletkin in Guvrel Bay, where the steamship was taking on fresh water. The local Eskimos had brought the tidings among a parcel of recent news from all across the Chukotka Peninsula. The district governor, a man named Khrenov, accompanied Mletkin to Uelen. Sporting both a luxuriant mustache and a broad, thick beard, he was a prime specimen of the “hairmouth.” His attire, too, was noteworthy: a uniform of vivid blue, with two rows of shiny buttons, and a cap with a golden cockade, ornamented with a bird of prey, a double-headed, sharp-taloned eagle. A long, ornate-handled knife hung from Khrenov’s waist, and to top it all off, there was a little gun in a leather sheath.

  Khrenov revealed to Mletkin that Tirkerym had decided to cast a keen eye upon the farthest reaches of his empire – Chukotka. Each year he would send a military ship to patrol her shores and chase away the American merchant schooners with their contraband fire-water. Only one trade patent had been granted, to Swenson’s firm and its agents. A school would be built in Uelen for the enlightenment of the aborigines.

  “Your countrymen will learn to read and write,” Khrenov proudly told Mletkin.

  However, there was no schoolteacher on the Stavropol’s passenger list; he was to be sent along in the coming year.

  Givivneu greeted her husband with a short, joyful cry.

  Mletkin hurried to the fur-lined polog where the newborn was sleeping and pulled back the fawn-skin blanket.

  “Have you named him?”

  “He couldn’t stay long without a name of his own,” Givivneu answered guiltily. “I called him Giveu.”

  The name’s meaning was “famed one” and it held an unspoken hope for the future.

  “A good name,” said Mletkin cheerlessly. He was displeased that his son’s name did not contain the ancient family root Mlen/Mlan. But it was true, there was no good in a newborn going long without a name, as he could fall prey to the evil spirits that lay in wait for nameless infants. In the end, Mletkin’s joy in having a child of his own with Givivneu trumped all. They would have more children, and among them would surely be a boy whose name would reflect the meaning that passed through his family in generation after generation.

  The place chosen for the schoolhouse was an elevated patch of unused land above the lagoon separating the main village and the homes of the Enmyralin, who lived beneath the Crag and were close relations of the Nuvuken Eskimos.

  The carpenters who had come on the ship quickly erected the wooden building, working day and night thanks to the sun’s very short spells in the waters beyond the horizon. Soon, an odd silhouette among Uelen’s black yarangas lent a strange new aspect to the seal hunters’ ancient place of habitation.

  When the walls had been raised and roofed with sheets of corrugated metal and the enormous windows glazed, the people of Uelen crowded inside to get a look at the wooden yaranga’s inner decor and to gaze at the lagoon through the glass of the windows. The brick oven blazed with black stones, giving off a great deal of heat. For the time being, the schoolhouse served as lodgings for Khrenov and his aide.

  In conversation with the Russian official and with Carpenter, who continued to make visits to the village, Mletkin began to understand the world’s political climate. As it turned out, the Tangitans had divided the world between them. The great and strong nations had annexed huge swathes of land into their empires. Mletkin remembered now the map he had seen at the Museum of Natural History in New York. On this map, Russia had spread from east to west, incorporating dozens of nations, large and small. According to Khrenov, all these nations acknowledged Tirkerym’s sovereignty and paid a tribute. Here Khrenov noted with some displeasure that of the multitude of peoples belonging to the Russian Empire only the Luoravetlan refused to send tribute – in fact, it was the tsar’s government that annually sent gifts to the Chukchi. Along the way, an inconceivably vast distance, these gifts would be pilfered and many Chukotka natives had no inkling of their existence. Another thing Mletkin learned from Khrenov was the tsar’s strict instructions to his messengers not just to protect the Chukchi and prevent others from taking advantage, but to respect their private lives, their customs and beliefs.

  “And so, according to the tsar’s edict, I must respect you as a shaman,” Khrenov said. “Never mind that as an Orthodox Christian I don’t share your beliefs, I am not to convert you to Christianity. First I must enlighten you. Maybe it’s too late for you, but your children and grandchildren are another story. That’s why we’ve built the school here, to wean you and your countrymen off of savage customs and shamanic beliefs through literacy and knowledge.”

  “But I can already speak and read Russian, and I know American writing and language too,” Mletkin demurred. “Yet I have no intention of renouncing my customs or beliefs.”

  “That’s too bad,” was Khrenov’s brusque reply.

  There was a plan to build a chapel to follow the school, and send down a priest. Yet several navigable seasons came and went and the schoolhouse remained empty. Khrenov and his assistant spent their days drinking and enticing women into their wooden rooms. Soon enough there was a gaggle of blond “Khrenov kids” dashing about the village.

  It was Carpenter who brought news of the hideous outbreak of fighting among the Tangitans to Uelen. Germany had declared war on Russia. Other European nations joined the fray. For now, America stood aside. Because of the war, the military patrols along the Chukotka shores were suspended. There had already been a war, relatively nearby, between Japan and Russia a decade before.

  As the memory of intertribal bloodshed on Chukotka receded into the ancient past, the Tangitans’ own conflicts seemed to get ever more cruel with each new year. Mletkin had learned in America what hideously lethal machines the hairmouths had invented for the purpose of exterminating one another. Their warships carried equipment capable of destroying entire settlements with all their people, houses, and cattle. They had invented devices expressly for killing many people at once – the machine gun and the bomb. The whole point of war – the big fight beween the Tangitans – was, in the final reckoning, to kill off as many people, to destroy as many homes, to sink as many ships, to burn as many fields and slaughter as many cattle as possible, to do everything possible to make sure the opponent did not survive! Mletkin could only thank the Outer Forces for placing his homeland far from the Tangitans’ battlefields.

  Khrenov and his aide departed in the summer of 1915 and the school remained empty, with not a single inhabitant of Uelen any more able to read or write. Mletkin grieved more than anyone for the school, having secretly hoped to improve his Russian.

  The Americans, however, perked up. They now sold not just items of domestic use, but wooden whaleboats and even prefabricated wooden houses. Tynesken hunted the seas from his wooden schooner and traded his kills for foreign goods, eventually opening his own village store to rival Carpenter’s. The American responded by lowering his prices, hosting tea parties, lavishing small gifts on his customers, and treating the village worthies to complimentary tots of fire-water. He knew each of his clients by name and made a point of keeping abreast of their domestic affairs; he was generous with the small treats he gave to the women and children. Most important, he was always happy to open a line of credit. Soon all of Uelen and all the inhabitants of the neigboring villages from Nuvuken to Kytryn had an account with him, and furs, walrus tusks, and whalebone streamed into Keniskun. Tynesken was forced to close up shop and distribute his goods among his relations.

  Tynesken’s nephew, the young bone carver Gemauge, built a little wooden
house for himself and erected beside it a tall pole with several perpendicular struts and a kind of bird’s nest perched atop, not unlike the whale- and-weather-viewing platforms of commercial whalers. Each morning Gemauge would climb his aerie and scan the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

  The people of Uelen reveled in the good life. The new weapons and fast whaleboats, equipped with cloth sails or even gasoline motors, allowed for hunting far out at sea. They killed plenty of whales and walrus, and stored a great deal of kopal’khen and blubber for the winter. They had grown used to sweet tea, fried pancakes, sweet molasses, and good quality Prince Albert tobacco. The women wore kamleikas of bright printed calico, and the clacking of foot-powered Singers rose up from within the pologs. No one went hungry. True, some had so fallen for the fire-water that they could no longer do without it. On the whole, however, it seemed that everyone in Uelen was happy. Everyone, that is, except one man – the blind Ruptyn.

  He often came to Mletkin’s yaranga to demand that the shaman scrape the white film from his eyes with his surgical knives. He would begin with cajoling and flattery, calling Mletkin the greatest of all shamans, one whose combined experience encompassed both the ancient magical rites and the new Tangitan discoveries. When Mletkin refused, saying that he could only do Ruptyn damage, the other would lose patience, swear and rage, accusing the shaman of having become “one of them,” just like a Tangitan. The expression “just like a Tangitan” was derisory in the extreme, meaning as it did the lowest to which a Luoravetlan could fall, the moral degradation of turning into a despised hairmouth, capable of the basest actions. Any Luoravetlan, on hearing such an address, would have to think long and hard about his behavior, for fear of being ostracized.

  But Mletkin could not resolve to touch Ruptyn’s veiled eyes. Not even in his American life had he ever seen a doctor perform such an operation. The disease was probably considered incurable. Mletkin tried hard to convince the unfortunate man to resign himself to his blindness, and to enjoy what pleasures life had left in store for him. Ruptyn was a song maker, worthy competition for the famed Rentyrgin, even for the young up-and-coming Atyk.

  To top it all off, Ruptyn had gotten himself addicted to the fire-water. Dead drunk, he’d stagger through the line of yarangas and collapse onto the ground. In summer, the dogs often nibbled on his torbasses as he lay in a stupor outside.

  Folks came to see Mletkin from all across the shore villages and the tundra camps of the entire peninsula.

  One day he was brought a small, fragile Tangitan with blackened toes.

  He was swarthy-skinned and hairy, not just on his face but on his body too. If it hadn’t been for his refined features and a pair of huge, liquid black eyes, he would have closely resembled the ape Mletkin had encountered in a New York zoo. Aleš Hrdlička had insisted quite seriously that it was from exactly that creature that human beings were descended. Mletkin categorically denied any kinship with the grotesque creature, conceding at the end of a long argument that, indeed, the Tangitans might well be descended from apes, but not the Luoravetlan, who knew their ancestors to be First Father Reu and Forever-Woman Nau.

  The patient’s name was Mahomet Dobriev. After the surgery he exclaimed:

  “Who would have thought that I, proud descendant of the warlike tribe of Vainakhs,20 would be tended to by a shaman!”

  A decade earlier, having heard of the golden shallows of Alaska – where one could dredge gold sand by the bucketful – Mahomet Dobriev had left his native Caucasus for America. He spent three years on sailing ships, plus another year to reach Nome, doggedly striving toward his goal. He had an unshakeable belief that some gold yet remained on the Nome spithead. But the shore of the cold, dark sea offered only the remnants of ships and rusty machine parts, the wind ruffled the tatters of tarpaulin camp tents half buried in the wet sand – and not a grain of gold! There were, however, many and varied tales of inexhaustible gold veins on the other side of the Bering Strait, on Chukotka. Mahomet Dobriev boarded the first native hide boat to cross the foggy, churning waters, and alighted in Nuvuken, where he immediately fell in love with Chulkhena, the most celebrated beauty of the Eskimo village. Strapping, hale, and large-breasted, she was of a jolly disposition. Her plump round face was lined with blue tattoos, which only made her more attractive.

  Having married Dobriev, Chulkhena set her mind to making him into a real Eskimo hunter. Yet each spring, he would leave his pregnant wife and head to the tundra to prospect for gold. With each return he found an increase to his family and the dream of riches would burn brighter with each new year.

  He told Mletkin:

  “One of these days, I’ll find a vein of gold, stake my claim, and be a real rich man!”

  “And what will you do with your riches?”

  “Go home to the Caucasus, so that everyone can see what kind of person that poor Mahomet from Akhal-Yurta has become! I’ll arrive sporting a hat and gloves!”

  “What about Chulkhena and the children?”

  “They’ll come along, of course. In handsome coats and sturdy leather boots, and in gloves! And Chulkhena herself in a silk dress, a huge straw hat, holding a big white fringed parasol in her hands!”

  “Our folk don’t take well to hot weather,” Mletkin said, and told him of the Greenland Eskimos who had died in New York because of the unfamiliar climate and their longing for home. “But more pertinently, what will your countrymen think of Chulkhena’s tattooed face? What we consider beautiful here isn’t always seen so by the Tangitan.”

  Even the loss of several toes from his left foot did not dampen Mahomet Dobriev’s ardor for prospecting.

  “A man ought to be rich!” he instructed Mletkin. “Rich means independent. He can do as he pleases. If he wishes, he can go to the Caucasus, and no one would look askance at Chulkhena’s face. Because she is rich. Maybe it’s the custom of rich Eskimos to hide their faces, just as Muslim women do? If I wished, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere at all, I could open a shop like Carpenter, smoke cigars and drink whiskey of an evening, surrounded by my many children.”

  Mletkin liked him immensely, this rail-thin person, whom the villagers immediately nicknamed Kupylkyn, Skinny. He answered to this name as readily as to his own. He followed the local customs, and didn’t criticize but accepted them as they had been laid down since ancient times.

  “Customs ought to be respected!” Kupylkyn would utter as he ceremoniously pointed a crooked finger, with its thick, yellowing broken nail, to the sky.

  He went hunting in the winter, and was lucky at it. Despite its size, his family was never in need; this was due in large part to its extended family, who had taken this strange Tangitan into their hearts.

  In the spring of 1917, when the first flocks of duck took flight over Uelen’s shingled beach, Ruptyn voluntarily departed from life. He had come to see Mletkin on the previous evening, quiet and withdrawn. He listened to his host play some banjo music and sing a few songs, then asked Mletkin to wind up the Victrola. As the sounds of an operatic aria died away, he suddenly began to speak:

  “You know, I can remember what it was like to see. The fog that veiled my vision came on slowly, gradually. And I didn’t even grieve much. Our life never changed, after all. Everything was the same from year to year, familiar. Only the people changed – first they were children, then they grew older, then old . . . But all my companions, I can only remember them as youths. A person’s voice is the slowest to change, but it does change, in the end. Maybe he doesn’t even realize it. But most of all, I miss not being able to see the new things. New weapons, new whaleboats, new ships, new implements. I’ve run my hands up and down this music box, yet I still don’t know what it looks like as a whole. On the one hand, it’s like a bird with a long, sleek neck, and then the neck widens, as though turning into a wide maw. Then there’s the little bird’s head with its needle beak, which scratches at the disc that goes round and round atop the box. But how the voice and the music are made, I can’t even imagin
e, and it’s the impossibility of seeing – of even imagining – these new things, that gives me no peace . . . Look at what I’ve done to my hand.”

  Mletkin saw a row of black dots on the skin of the blind man’s right hand, between the thumb and the pointing finger.

  “I was trying to figure out how a sewing machine works, and I stitched right through my hand. I circled Gemauge’s wooden house, and that pole of his that he climbs up to look at the sea, but I still have no idea what any of it really looks like . . . Yesterday I was walking through Uelen and knocked into walls twice, first at Gemauge’s house and then the corner of the school . . . It’s as though I’ve become a stranger to Uelen. I never had a woman, because they were frightened of me, of my hands when I tried to see them. I could only know the world through touch and through sound.

  “But I know I can see!” Ruptyn was shouting now, in his despair. “I could see as a child, I remember what the world looks like, I can feel light and I can see it. But it’s as though a thick curtain of fog covers my eyes. And you refuse to rid my eyes of this curtain.”

  For the umpteenth time, Mletkin began to explain to Ruptyn that he could easily ruin his eyes altogether, that an operation might cause Ruptyn to bleed uncontrollably, fatally.

  “But the Tangitans perform this kind of operation!” Ruptyn continued to shout at him. “They told me so!”

  “In that case you need to go to America,” said Mletkin.

  It was strange to see tears seep from those white-veiled eyes, which so resembled melting spring snow. Mletkin’s heart was breaking from pity and helplessness. The Bible spoke of Jesus curing the blind. But where was Jesus? Why was it necessary for the unfortunate man to convert specifically to the faith of Jesus Christ, the chief of Tangitan gods, before he could be healed? If Jesus was all-knowing and all-powerful, why could he not show a mercy which cost him nothing? No, the Tangitans were a different race altogether. And their gods were different, too.