The Chukchi Bible

by Yuri Rytkheu

  Ruptyn left for the clouds using the traditional, tested Chukchi method – he hung himself from a deer-sinew thong normally drawn through the top of a pair of nerpa-skin trousers. Mletkin performed the ritual of Asking, and ascertained that the dead man did not hold a grudge against anyone. As if to confirm this, the weather turned bright and sunny and stayed that for an unusually long time, right up to the melting of the snows.

  The last days of the open sled road from Mariinsky Post brought news that the Sun Sovereign Tirkerym had vacated the Golden Throne. It turned out that he had a name, just like any ordinary Russian: Nikolai. Only, unlike the other bearers of this common name, his also had a number: the Second.

  These tidings had no measurable effect on the lives of the Luoravetlan, but all the Tangitans – especially the merchant traders – were abuzz with discussions of events in the distant capital of the Russian Empire and speculation as to what might happen next. Swenson had brought a stack of American newspapers along with his yearly shipment of trade goods. Carpenter spent several days studying the printed news from Russia, waving them in front of Mletkin and wringing his hands:

  “I can’t make it out! What is this Interim Government? Are they going to elect a Russian president, as we do in America, or will they have a new tsar?”

  Mletkin was sorry about one thing only: once again, the arrival of the schoolteacher would be delayed, and the schoolhouse, empty for several years, would remain so.

  His sons were growing up. Already they were a help to their father – taking care of the sled dog harnesses, carrying fresh water from the stream in summer and ice in winter, even occasionally accompanying Mletkin on a day’s hunting. In the summers, they fished. But most of all they liked to play. They played at being adults. One of the brothers – usually Kmol’ – would play the part of a deer-person, while Giveu was an Ankalin, a sea hunter. The deer-person Kmol’ would fashion “reindeer” from bunches of dry tundra grass, while Giveu caught little crabs and tiny fish, which represented, respectively, nerpa and walrus.

  From time to time Atyk joined them in play. He played the role of “Carpenter” and “traded” with Kmol’ and Giveu.

  Mletkin’s heart filled with joy to see his sons. He never thought of Kmol’ as anything other than his own child now. No, he had not forgotten killing the boy’s father. But he had killed the man in a fair fight, according to ancient custom. Everyone in Uelen knew this, though no one spoke of it. Mletkin never spoke of it either, never asked his wife about the time she had been Yanko’s wife, never chided her for having married another instead of continuing to wait for his, Mletkin’s, return. He treated his sons equally. Of course one was the elder and the other the younger, but this was to the good. The older brother looked after the younger one, taught him, kept him out of harm’s way. And Giveu followed in Kmol’s footsteps almost despite himself, trying to be like his brother in everything.

  The winter of 1918 saw the return of Mahomet Dobriev from a long sojourn along the southern shore of the Chukotka Peninsula back home to Nuvuken. He had an excellent team of sled dogs, possibly the best in the region, and he knew how to care for his dogs, feeding them well and not exhausting them unnecessarily. He transported trade goods for Carpenter, and was now returning from Keniskun with a heavily laden sled of goods he’d earned from the American. Only after feeding and tying up the dogs outside did he walk into the chottagin and dust the snow off his clothes, paying special attention to his torbasses. For his hostess, he had a brick of tea, a lump of sugar and a can of molasses; he also brought a sugar lollipop for each of the children, and two steel traps for Mletkin.

  Once inside the polog, their guest divested himself of all his clothing, including his fur-lined, fawn-skin trousers. Givivneu handed him a scrap of deer hide to cover his nether parts; both she and the children found it difficult not to gawk openly at Mahomet Dobriev’s strange body. He was a perfect embodiment of his Chukchi moniker Kupylkyn. Yet it was not his thinness that made them stare, but the lavish growth of hair all over his person. His chest was especially hairy, while his legs might as well have been covered by kamusses still! What a battle against fleas he must have had to wage!

  Having done full honors to the kopal’khen and the dish of crushed, frozen walrus livers, Mahomet picked up his coffee mug. Carpenter and Dobriev were the only two men to whom Mletkin would offer a treat so rare in Uelen.

  “Great coffee!” praised Mahomet. “A wonderful beverage. How can the Russians and the Chukchi prefer tea?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said Mletkin, patiently waiting for his guest to get to the heart of their conversation, to the news he had brought with him.

  “There’s been a revolution in Russia, you know,” Mahomet informed him.

  “Yes, I did hear that the tsar has left his golden seat,” said Mletkin.

  “That’s old news,” scoffed his guest. “There’s a new tribe in Russia, they’re called Bolsheviks.”

  “What, giants?” said Mletkin.

  “That’s what I thought too, at first . . . But no, it’s just a name. Actually they’re normal height. But very poor! And their chieftain is called Lenin.”

  “Is he poor, too?”

  “He doesn’t seem to be, but he is very clever. Here’s what he thought up. He noticed that there were very many poor people in Russia . . .”

  Mletkin thought of the Russians who came to Chukotka. You could not call them poor. They always had plenty of goods to trade.

  “These poor people,” Mahomet went on, “were always envious of those who had more. And so, this Lenin decided: why not help the unfortunate ones? Take from the rich and give to the poor! They say there’s a great big fight among the Russians over this now. They’re all shooting at each other.”

  There were several poor families in Uelen. Lonlyh, who had lost his deer herd during the worst of the icy frost, had set his yaranga at the farthest end of the lagoon’s shingled spit. He had four daughters. He did not want to hunt on the open sea, or perhaps didn’t know how. His sharp-eyed daughters kept a lookout for hunters coming home with their kill. Then they would go and visit him, a leather satchel in hand. If several hunters came back successful, all of the daughters would go visiting. No one ever thought of refusing them. This was the custom – everyone was to be helped. If anyone starved in Uelen, everyone starved. Lonlyh was considered one of Uelen’s poorest men, despite the fact that his uveran was always full, and his barrels crammed with seal and walrus blubber. The family of Vuskineh was poor: her husband had been washed away to sea on an ice floe, leaving her alone with three children. Every villager knew it was his duty to help the widow and her children. When the roof of her yaranga wore out, a new walus hide would be provided for her – and so, from the outside, Vuskineh’s yaranga was ndistinguishable from all the others. There was also Yev’yak. But he was simply a layabout and a great lover of fire-water. He’d get drunk and wander from one yaranga to another spouting nonsense. Yet he somehow managed to memorize a handful of Russian and English words and got a reputation as someone who knew Tangitan speech.

  “We couldn’t have that here,” Mletkin said firmly.

  “And what if the new Russians come and say: here is the new law!” Mahomet cocked his right eye.

  “Well, that wouldn’t be our law, but theirs,” Mletkin objected.

  “There’s no understanding those Tangitans!” Mahomet peevishly summed up.

  Mletkin smiled to himself: so the Caucasus man saw himself as an Eskimo now, separate from the Tangitans.

  That night, Mletkin dreamed a terrible dream: Yev’yak had come into his yaranga. He cast a proprietorial look over the chottagin, then shouldered the Winchester and all the hunting gear, and took the barometer down from the wall. Then the daughters of Lonlyh showed up. They carried enormous leathers sacks slung over their shoulders, which they filled with the contents of Mletkin’s store barrels – meat, blubber, pieces ofitgil’gyn, and bundles of dried reindeer flesh. As he gave the robbers chase, he saw
Lonlyh untying Mletkin’s sled team outside the yaranga. The dogs strained to break out of their harness, unwilling to go to a new master. The lead dog ran to Mletkin with a whine and licked and licked his face.

  Mletkin discovered, as he came to, that he had half rolled clear out of the polog. And the lead dog was indeed licking his face. An earsplitting wind raged outside; this was the cruel spring blizzard, the last snowstorm of the deparing winter.

  Mahomet Dobriev was forced to stay with Mletkin for several days. Their long evening talks revolved around the new Bolshevik custom.

  “There are very rich people in Russia,” Mahomet mused dreamily. “They own lands, palaces, vast herds of cattle, huge workshops where they make different goods and machinery. They live in enormous houses, which could fit all the people of Uelen and still have room for Nuvuken. If you took a bit from them, they wouldn’t be badly off. But you probably shouldn’t take everything.”

  “If they start to take things away,” Mletkin conjectured, “they’ll take the whole lot.”

  Mahomet was silent, lost in thought.

  “Will these Tangitans really stick their noses down here, with their new laws?” Abruptly, he broke out of his reverie. “They should just leave us alone!”

  But it seemed that the wave of the revolution would roll inexorably to the farthest reaches of the Russian empire. There were violent clashes between the Bolsheviks and the bureaucrats of the Interim Government as near as Mariinsky Post, the official capital of Chukotka District. There were stories of human blood spilled in the snow, blood which the hungry dogs of the settlement licked from the frozen snowdrifts.

  Carpenter was worried too. He came to see Mletkin, and went on and on interminably about being an honest American trader and loyal to all governments.

  “We’re outside politics. Our business is supplying people with goods at fair prices.”

  “And what if the Bolsheviks come and really do take away all the goods and give them out to the poor?”

  “I’m happy to share with the poor,” Carpenter averred. “But you, Mletkin, would you yourself accept something that had been stolen from another?”

  Among the Luoravetlan, theft was considered so shameful a crime that anyone convicted of it would have chosen to commit suicide, or at least to move somewhere far away.

  Mletkin reassured the trader that Bolshevism would be impossible among the Chukchi. Carpenter calmed down and went back home to Keniskun, to his wife, Elizabeth, and their many children. Mahomet Dobriev, in contrast, grew more and more keen on the idea of confiscating the wealth of the rich and redistributing it among the poor. Whenever he came to visit he’d plot his course between the yarangas as if already mentally calculating what to take: a whaleboat from one family, a surplus skin boat from another.

  “But you wouldn’t want to give a good whaleboat to the likes of Lonlyh,” he reasoned, as he sucked zestily on duck bones. “He’d only spoil it. Or it would dry up on the beach, since Lonlyh wouldn’t actually go and hunt. And who would go after walrus and whale with him anyway, out to sea with a former deer herder who’s afraid of the water? No, we have to think this through.”

  No matter how hard Mahomet Dobriev thought about it, taking whaleboats and other vessels from their owners only to give them to the poor seemed pointless. The only sensible way of going about it would have been to rob Carpenter and distribute his wares among the people of Uelen and Nuvuken, in equal shares.

  “So you’d rob Carpenter, divvy up his goods. He’ll leave Chukotka and spread the news that it’s dangerous to trade here. And that’ll be the end of sugar, tea, tobacco, bullets . . . Where are we to get those? Only the rich Tangitans have them,” said Mletkin.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Mahomet agreed, disappointment palpable in his voice. But then he added brusquely: “But as for Tynesken’s schooner, we’ll take that away for sure!”

  Mletkin listened to all this talk and worried: what if the poor Tangitans really were at war with the rich ones, and taking everything away?

  Surely the rich would not give up their things just like that.

  Spring of 1919 saw many in Uelen anxious to book passage to Alaska. For the most part, these were the tsar’s former administrators of Anadyr, soon to be renamed Novo-Mariinsk, and a smattering of military men who, as rumor had it, had been defeated in the war with the new army of the Bolsheviks, called the Red Army. Tynesken had never had so many passengers to ferry across the Strait. All these people were fleeing the new regime.

  Olaf Swenson had been the first of the Americans to arrive. As usual, his schooner first docked at Keniskun, where he saw his agent Carpenter, then sailed to Uelen, picking up Mahomet Dobriev in Nuvuken along the way.

  When Mletkin asked him whether he intended to wrap up his business concerns on Chukotka, the American merchant replied:

  “We contacted the new government’s representatives at Vladivostok and Novo-Mariinsk and explained that, considering the difficulties in getting supplies to the local population, it would be practical to allow our company to continue its activities. They furnished us with the necessary permit and papers. So Olaf Swenson and all his agents shall continue to operate to across Chukotka, legally!”

  Never had Swenson or his agents been as generous as that summer. All the prices were substantially reduced. The schooner’s cook was kept busy doling out sweet coffee, generous with the sugar and milk; boatfuls of visitors kept on arriving in a steady stream, the native clients bringing their wives, children, and old folks along. There was a row of large tin boxes of hardtack on deck for guests to eat as many as they liked, or even to take home.

  Mletkin cautiously sounded out Olaf Swenson’s views on the Bolshevik intention to take away the wealth of the rich and give it to the poor.

  The American burst out laughing.

  “First of all you’d have to ascertain who was rich and who was poor. You, for example,” he said, turning to Mahomet Dobriev, “where would you place yourself, among the rich or the poor?”

  “It depends,” said Mahomet. “Next to you I’d probably be considered poor, but if compared to, say, Yev’yak, I’d be a man of wealth.”

  Indeed, in the course of the last few years Mahomet had become one of the most well-off men in Nuvuken. But as Mletkin had long known, a wealthy man always wanted more. So if the Bolshevik idea were to be followed to the letter, those poorer than Mahomet would take from him, and he in turn from those wealthier than himself. Thus his victims could only be Swenson and Carpenter.

  “Lenin asserts that people should have everything equally,” Swenson attempted to explain. “To achieve this, all property has to be owned communally. So your whaleboat, Mletkin, would be considered to belong to all of Uelen, and by the same token you would become a co-owner of Tynesken’s schooner.”

  “Tynesken would never agree,” Mletkin told him. “He’d sooner sink it than share it with anyone else.”

  Uelen settled into an anxious sort of waiting.

  Amazing rumors out of Russia abounded. For example, that not just whaleboats, weapons, and yarangas were to become communal, but wives, too.

  “Could this be true?” Givivneu inquired of her husband.

  Mletkin imagined salacious old Ermytagin walking into his yaranga one fine evening and saying: “Tonight I’ll sleep with your wife, since, according to the new Bolshevik custom, she is my wife in equal measure. You can go bed down with my old woman!”

  “I still believe in people having common sense,” Mletkin reassured her. Then he added, “I’d never give you to anyone, and that’s for sure!”

  The New Russians

  They came late one spring evening. The travelers, arriving in two sleds, had made a colossal journey from the Mariinsky Post all the way to Uelen, along the coast, through the tundra, across tall watersheds and deep, snow-covered valleys.

  They looked to be of the same age, though the swarthy, dark-haired man was actually the elder. His name was Bychkov, and the other’s Rudykh. They cam
ped inside the empty schoolhouse, where they stoked up the stove with the coal supply luckily left over from Khrenov’s stay there.

  “We’re Bolsheviks,” they announced to the villagers, whom they had gathered together in the most spacious room of the schoolhouse.

  “We represent the government of the poor and the workers, a government headed by Lenin . . .”

  Mletkin translated the speech, all the while marveling at the youth of these representatives of the new powers-that-be.

  “Are there any among you who are oppressed by the rich?” Rudykh asked the crowd.

  Silence was his only answer. No man in Uelen considered himself to be poor.

  “So who are the rich round about here, then?”

  More silence.

  “But you’re still being robbed!” Rudykh expostulated. “The biggest robbers are the American traders, who have leeched onto Chukotka’s working masses and are sucking your blood!”

  At the fleeting mental image of Carpenter’s hairy mouth on his skin, Mletkin shuddered with revulsion.

  “You’re also being gulled by the shamans,” added Bychkov.

  “What, me?” Mletkin turned to the guests in astonishment. “You’ve only met me for the first time today, but already you accuse me of deceit. How can that be?”

  Arrested in midflow, Rudykh looked at his companion for support.

  “Are you a shaman?” asked Bychkov.

  “Mletkin is the shaman of Uelen and a man respected by all.” This from Gal’mo.

  The new Russians had conceived of the shaman as a half-wild creature, painted with soot, with lank, dirty hair hanging in clumps, dressed in a clanging, jingling robe, clutching a tambourine . . . And here was a middle-aged Chukcha man, neatly dressed, his mustache crisply trimmed, wearing a nondescript gray kamleika over his fur-lined kukhlianka, and a pair of nerpa-skin boots.

  “But still,” Bychkov drawled after a slight pause, “Lenin teaches us that religion is the opium of the masses. It’s a con perpetrated on the poor and the laborers. The shamans drag you down into ignorance and murk.”