by Yuri Rytkheu
One day, instead of Pyl’mau it was Grandma Cheivuneh who came out to greet him. Handing him the ladle, she announced:
“An important guest has come to your yaranga.”
“Carpenter?” John asked in surprise.
“This guest isn’t a man, it’s a woman. And she’s more important and prettier than a dozen Poppies!”
John wanted to get inside the yaranga, but the old lady barred the entrance.
“First you must be purified. Wait . . .”
Cheivuneh whispered a few words of an incantation and only then allowed him to enter the chottagin. John was already beginning to guess what had happened.
“So it’s a woman who’s come visiting?” he confirmed with Cheivuneh.
“Yes. A beauty with hair like the dawn,” Cheivuneh answered.
“Red-haired, like grandfather Martin,” John decided, and carefully raised the polog’s fur-lined curtain.
“What are you doing?!” the midwife screamed. “Watch it! This guest is afraid of the cold.” Paying no attention to the old woman’s wailing, John crawled inside the polog. And when his eyes grew used to the murk, after a day of bright sunlight, he made out his wife by the back wall. She lay on her side, her large swollen breasts bare. Next to her, on a pile of fawn skins, wriggled something small and pink.
“Sson!” Pyl’mau’s voice was a little hoarse. “Look how pretty she is!”
At first John was hard-pressed to find anything beautiful in this tiny lump of life. The child’s sparse hair really was reddish. But as he looked into the tiny crumpled face, the greedily suckling little being, there was an unfamiliar and enormous tenderness alighting in his breast. Tears came to his eyes, and John whispered to the newborn:
“Hello, Mary!”
“Do you like her?”asked Pyl’mau.
“She’s beautiful!” John answered. “I named her Mary. That’s my mother’s name.”
“And I’ve given her a Chukchi name – Tynevirineu,” Pyl’mau said.
“So let the girl have two names, then: Mary and Tynevirineu.”
“Yes, yes!” Pyl’mau said happily. “Like a white person. You’ve got two names, haven’t you? John MacLennan.”
“In that case, Mary will have a total of three names: Mary-Tynevirineu MacLennan,” smiled John.
“And three is even better!” Pyl’mau agreed.
Cheivuneh crawled into the polog and started shooing John away:
“Enough, enough already! You’ve had a look, now off you go. A husband is not supposed to see his wife for ten days after she’s given birth, but we did let you in, as you’re a white man. But now, go and get the gifts ready: Your guest hasn’t arrived empty-handed, has she?”
“Go, Sson,” said Pyl’mau. “The gifts are all in the wooden crate, in a nerpa-skin bag.”
The chottagin was already crowded with people. Orvo stepped forward to greet John and showed him his little finger. John looked at the crooked, blue-nailed pinkie with bewilderment. Beside it, a second pinkie appeared – Tiarat’s, then Armol’s. John soon found himself surrounded by an assortment of pinkies, whose owners congratulated him on the arrival of a long-awaited and wanted guest.
“I don’t understand anything,” John muttered.
“It means,” Orvo explained, pinkie still held high, “that now you have to present us all with gifts in the name of your guest – the newborn.”
John took out the sack that Pyl’mau had been talking about. Yes, his wife had taken care of everything. Small packets held pinches of tobacco, lumps of sugar, tea, lengths of colored cloth, needles, thread and even a pair of soles for torbasses.
John wanted to go back inside the polog and spend some time with Pyl’mau, but the guests kept on arriving, little fingers in the air, while those who had already received their gifts seemed in no hurry to leave . . . settling down for a cup of tea around the short-legged table.
“It’s not a bad thing, of course, that the girl was named right away,” Orvo mused aloud, “but the gods ought to have been consulted, really.”
“If it’s so important,” John said, “it’s not too late to do that.”
“Yes, let’s ask them anyway,” Orvo advised, and sent a boy for his divining stick. While they were waiting, Orvo ordered all the men who had done what they came to do to clear out of the yaranga. Only John and Orvo, plus little Yako, were left.
“Now you have to really look after yourself,” Orvo sternly enjoined his friend. “Couldn’t you have had enough patience to postpone looking at the newborn girl? And this too: You shouldn’t have touched your wife for ten days, and what did you do? You crawled right inside the polog, not even taking off your hunting kamleika. You’ve angered the gods, and only one thing might save you: They will forgive you, as someone only starting a new life. Remember, the gods are not the only ones who dislike your making these blunders . . .”
The boy brought over the divining stick, and Orvo sat down directly underneath the smoke-hole. Setting one end of the stick against the sunspot, he began lifting and lowering the other end of the stick slightly, all the while whispering sacred words. He did this for a few minutes, then laid the divining stick aside and cheerfully informed John:
“Everything’s fine! I’ve convinced them!”
It was late in the night by the time the last guest departed. Two women who were to take care of the new mother stayed behind in the yaranga. John was about to reenter the polog, but Cheivuneh firmly forbade it and only allowed him to chat through the fur curtain.
Little Yako had been led off somewhere, and John had to lie down for the night in his little room.
For a long while he couldn’t fall asleep, listening to the noises coming from inside the polog. At first, he could hear the women’s muffled conversation, and then the infant’s cry pierced the silence of the night. This was so unexpected that John vaulted off his bed and rushed to the door. But the cry was immediately hushed. John listened for a moment then stretched out on the bed again. That was my child crying, he thought, lying there with his eyes wide open. My first child. The person who will continue my life and carry the features of my face, my blood flowing through her veins even after I’ve gone beyond the clouds. What will she be like? What future lies ahead of her? Can it be that she will spend her entire life – her youth, her adulthood and her old age – here, on these deserted shores? And the old, but lately forgotten, ache for his old life gripped John’s heart, and his breath caught. Suddenly he became aware that he was weeping. And he wanted so badly to have one more look at his daughter, at Pyl’mau, that he got up and, paying no heed to Cheivuneh’s scolding, crept inside the polog.
The old women held something over the fire, something that resembled a piece of worn-out shoesole. The sole smelled of burnt wood. Cheivuneh was carefully scraping off the ash that formed on it, and collecting it on a piece of clean chamois.
Pyl’mau lay on the bed, and little Mary – eyes shut – slept, snoring sweetly through her tiny nose and making sucking motions with her lips. John noticed a leather pouch, similar to a tobacco pouch, at the head of the bed.
“How do you feel?” John asked, whispering so as not to wake the baby.
“Fine,” Pyl’mau answered him, with a guilty look at Cheivuneh.
“I can’t sleep,” John said, and turned to Cheivuneh:
“Can’t you burn that thing in the chottagin? All this smoke makes it hard for Pyl’mau and the newborn to breathe.”
“How can you say that, Sson!” Pyl’mau said reproachfully. “Grandmother is doing everything as it should be done. We’ll sprinkle these ashes on Tynevirineu-Mary’s belly button, so that it heals faster.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” John was mortified.
“And this is where we keep our girl’s most precious treasures,” Pyl’mau gestured to the leather pouch.
“What is it?” asked John.
“The umbilical cord and the stone blade that was used to cut it. All this has to be kept very careful
ly.”
“All right, we’ll keep it safe,” and, heedless of Grandma Cheivuneh’s stern glances, John touched his lips to Pyl’mau’s ruddy cheek.
For ten days, John suffered under a kind of house arrest. He was not to do anything: Whether going out to hunt or doing work at home, it could all have brought trouble from the unseen but omniscient gods.
It was without him that the hide boats sailed to the spring hunt.
And when his “quarantine,” as John termed his sacred idleness, was over, John discovered that he was the only man left in Enmyn. People came to him with various requests for help, settling a dispute or simply asking his advice.
Pyl’mau was back to doing all the housework, and John sat happily in the sun, watching the sleeping Tynevirineu-Mary, who more and more at once resembled the older Mary and Pyl’mau and the red-headed Martin. This unexpected combination was the source of much amusement for John, and helped pass the days of enforced leisure.
Any day now, they expected the hunters’ return. The long-awaited tidings came to the yaranga via Yako, who saw himself as a grown-up now that he had a little sister.
“Two hide boats coming in, and one whaleboat!” he shouted and ran off.
Together with the women and old people, John descended to the shore.
Yes, these were Enmyn hide boats, and a white whaleboat with a black stripe on its side: So Armol’ really did become the owner of a wooden boat.
The absence of wind forced the hunters to row themselves in, and the vessels were slow on the approach to the settlement. The new whaleboat was tugging a heavily laden hide boat.
Finally the hide boats and the whaleboat landed on the beach.
“Yettyk!” John shouted, rushing to meet the hunters that clambered out onto the shore.
“Ee-ee! Myt’yenmyk!” the hunters answered him. Only Orvo, breaking with tradition, walked up to John and shook his hand according to the white people’s custom.
“How is your daughter?”
“Very well! She’s expecting you to visit today.”
“I’ll come, I’ll come,” Orvo replied.
They unloaded the fresh walrus meat onto the beach, and Orvo began the reckoning up of shares. Despite the fact that John had not participated in the hunt, he was doled out the same share of meat and blubber as if he had gone hunting alongside everyone else.
“That’s how it should be,” Orvo explained. “If I fell ill, or another man did, my companions would do just the same for him.”
Everyone was grateful for the fresh walrus. They pulled it up onto the beach, with bone rollers under the keel to keep the bottom from harm.
Armol’ was walking about the boat with a great show of importance, gave orders, and helped insert the struts underneath it, so it would not fall on its side.
John circled the vessel from every angle, took a look at the inside and even ran his stumps over the metal-sheeted keel.
“It’s a good whaleboat,” he said to Armol’, who’d been jealously watching his every move.
“It is a good one,” Armol’ agreed, barely keeping rein on his self-importance. “Now all it needs is a motor. But Carpenter didn’t have one. He promised it for next year. So if you were my motor driver on the whaleboat, we’d be the most well favored hunters.”
“I intend to buy a whaleboat myself,” John answered.
In the evening, Orvo came for a visit. The old man picked up the newborn girl and told her:
“Grow big and beautiful!”
“Orvo,” John addressed the old man, “now we should go and get our whaleboat. Straight to Nome. Besides the whalebone, I’ve got pelts, too.”
“We’ll rest up a bit, and then we’ll go,” Orvo concurred.
19
It was almost a month since Orvo, John, Tiarat, and a few more Enmyn hunters had gone to Nome. There had been no word of them, and Pyl’mau tried to quell her fears by throwing herself into housework and tending to little Tynevirineu-Mary.
Tying the baby to her back, accompanied by Yako, she would go into the tundra to gather edible leaves and roots. They would take some provisions along and, in good weather, spend the entire day in the tundra. Sometimes they came as far as the reindeer herders’ camps that had moved closer to the sea in order to protect the deer from midges and mosquitos.
Il’motch, the head of the camp, would invite them into his yaranga and treat them to delicacies: boiled tongue, deer’s-leg bone marrow, singed lips, and even plain boiled reindeer meat.
“You tell your husband,” he instructed Pyl’mau, “that I wish to be his friend.”
To be a deer herder’s friend meant having a sure means of replenishing your store of deerskins for bedding, clothing, and the polog; and in the case of a dearth of animals on the sea, a deer herder’s friend could always come to your aid.
Whenever she returned home, Pyl’mau tried to take the mountain path, so that she could see Enmyn’s shore from a distance. But each day, Armol’s whaleboat and hide boat were all that her eyes could see.
Once, cleaning up John’s little room, she found a thick leather-bound notepad whose pages were covered in scrawly symbols, as though thousands of flies had gone over the white page and left their mark. Pyl’mau even sniffed the pages; they had a barely perceptible and strange scent. Pyl’mau knew that the pages were the record of a conversation, words, sounds that had meaning. She peered at each line, at the interwoven curlicues of each letter, and even listened to the pages with bated breath, as though it were possible to catch the set-down speech with your ear. What did John talk about on these thin, white as though snow-covered, sheets of paper, she wondered? What thoughts and musings had left their mark here? Maybe it was with this drooping letter at the end of a line that he expressed his sorrow for his past life, for the loved ones left behind in the far-off and unknown Port Hope? . . . Some long evenings, John would get to telling her about the land where he was born and where he’d lived his life. There would be yearning and emotion in his voice, and Pyl’mau would then hurry to change the topic to something else. And now John wasn’t far from his home at all. There were no ships sailing straight to Port Hope from Nome but, as John said, you could first go to Vancouver and from there it was no trouble to go over metal runners on a sled hitched to a fire-breathing cart . . . When John was leaving, Pyl’mau, as befitted the wife of a hunter, didn’t say a word to him. But how badly she had wanted to shout after him: Come back without fail, remember that I wait for you, and so does golden-haired Tynevirineu-Mary and your son, Yako! But she only gazed at her husband, never taking her eyes off him and saying the words in her mind. Almost as though John had heard them, he walked back to the three of them standing on the shore before getting into the hide boat. He looked carefully at Tynevirineu-Mary and Yako, and quietly told his wife:
“Don’t worry, take care of the children. We’ll be back soon . . .”
But a month has gone, and still they had not returned.
It seemed to Pyl’mau that her fellow-wives were starting to give her sideways glances. And one time, Cheivuneh had told her the story of how there had been a white man living in Uelen, who’d married a Chukchi girl, made four children with her and then disappeared forever, went back to America, or maybe Russia.
“Why are you telling me this?” Pyl’mau pleaded.
The old lady pursed her lips, embarrassed.
Taking advantage of Orvo’s absence, Armol’ had moved the device for making bad joy-making water over to his own yaranga, and fitted it with the barrel of his own Winchester.
In a drunken haze he’d descend to shore and sing songs, dancing around the snow-white whaleboat with its black stripe.
One day, in a very inebriated state, he came by Pyl’mau’s yaranga. She was feeding the little girl, while Yako was polishing off some cured walrus meat that he cut off the rib with an enormous hunting knife.
“Yetti, Armol,” Pyl’mau affably greeted him.
“Ee-ee,” Armol’ lowered himself heavily to a
whale vertebra and fixed his eyes on the little girl.
Tynevirineu-Mary left the breast, suddenly gave a wide smile and laughed noisily.
“Kakomei! She’s real.”
“Did you doubt that I could give birth to a real baby girl?” Pyl’mau said, offended.
“It wasn’t you I doubted, but Sson . . .”
“But why?”
“It’s hard to explain it to you, a woman . . . But this is what I think: Can a white willow-grouse and a black raven have a child together? And will this child be able to fly, even if it is born?”
“As you see, this baby is real enough, and I’m sure that Tynevirineu-Mary will fly.”
“Won’t such a long and heavy name drag her down to the ground?” Armol’ deliberately and slowly stretched out the syllables: “Ty-ne-vir-i-neu-ma-ree . . .”
“You might like to know that a third name can be added to those. That’s the custom with white people. And then the girl will be called Tynevirineu-Mary MacLennan,” challenged Pyl’mau.
“One who tries to live according to another people’s custom is like a duck that caws like a raven,” Armol’ told her in a pedantic tone.
“What’s to be done, then?” Pyl’mau shrugged. “Tynevirineu-Mary is the daughter of two nations. What’s wrong with her being able to caw like a raven and quack like a duck?”
“You can’t be argued with!” Armol’ said angrily. “You’re the same as you were before you were married . . . Just the same . . .”
Suddenly Armol’ went silent, as though he were seeing something in the distance. He stared into a fixed point in space for a long time, and all the while deep furrows gathered and relaxed on his brow.
“He was my best friend . . . And when they entrusted us with wearing the sharp hunting knives, we swore to always be side by side, to help not just one another, but also those near to us . . . Well you know that when a friend dies, it’s up to the surviving one to take care of his wife. I should have taken you into my yaranga and made you my second wife. But you chose another. The one who had killed your husband . . .”