by Yuri Rytkheu
Together with fear, outrage was kindling in Pyl’mau’s heart.
“Now I’ll have to think, before I reach out my hand to help you,” Armol’ went on. “Sson should have come back a long time ago but he hasn’t, and I don’t think he ever will. I know white people very well, and I see through them. They never see us as their equals. They despise us and laugh at our customs. Having touched us, they wash their hands, and after speaking to us they rinse their mouths with water and rub their tongues with brushes on sticks. You might say – but what about Sson? Yes, he’s different. But if he’d been a real white man – with hands – he’d quickly change his tune and wouldn’t live among us. So when he was left without his hands, he lost some of his pride because he couldn’t live with his own people as an equal, but here he still felt himself to be a little above us . . . And now he’s learned to shoot, get food for himself and even make speeches on paper with little marks . . . Now he’s become like his folk again, and so . . .”
“Armol’!” Pyl’mau shrieked, so frightening Yako that the boy burst into tears. “Get out and never show yourself in our yaranga again! Never come back, bringer of black thoughts! Poison drips from your tongue, and it’s a wonder it hasn’t eaten your mouth away!”
“Pyl’mau! Come back to your senses! Think what you’re saying!” Armol’ lurched from the whale vertebra and backed toward the door. “If you crawl by the entrance to my yaranga, I won’t open the door to you . . . Think, you’ll be left all alone!”
“It’s not true! It’s not true!” Pyl’mau was screaming, as she pushed Armol’ back.
Retreating, Armol’ tripped over the yaranga’s doorstep and fell flat on his back and out of the yaranga. Pyl’mau stopped to catch her breath, and it was then that she heard an unfamiliar sound: mosquito singing or else the twang of a thin metallic string. She stepped over Armol’, lying prone, and shouted to Yako:
“Run along with me, son!”
The unfamiliar sound was coming from the shore. With an effort, Pyl’mau made out two black dots on the horizon. Could it be John returning? She ran down the gravelly slope and stopped right at the waterline, mindless of the waves that lapped at her torbasses.
Pyl’mau was straining to see but the sudden flow of tears impeded her vision.
“One whaleboat and one hide boat!” someone called out.
“Look how quickly they’re going!”
“They’ve got a motor! A motor!”
“And they’re tugging the hide boat!”
Pyl’mau saw nothing. She took a step and someone grabbed her from behind:
“Crazy woman! You could drown this way!”
Pyl’mau turned back sheepishly, wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her kamleika and only now could make out the approaching boats.
The whaleboat flew over the water like a bird. Its speed was such that the tugged hide boat flopped from side to side. The roar of the motor grew louder and louder, and the people of Enmyn listened to the unusual sound with curiosity and surprise.
“Like singing,” said old Cheivuneh, stopping next to Pyl’mau.
“I can see Orvo!” someone shouted. “He’s sitting at the helm.”
“And there’s Sson!”
“Sitting by the motor!”
The whaleboat was very close now. The motor’s noise lessened, and then stopped altogether. The boat glided toward the shore. Tiarat jumped off the bow and onto the shingles.
“Yettyk! Pykirtyk!”34 came voices from every side, and the men on the whaleboat answered:
“Myt’yenmyk!”
Pyl’mau couldn’t take her eyes off John and, turning the little girl’s face his way, pointed to him, saying:
“There’s your father! Your father’s come back! He’s coming ashore to meet us.”
John took the motor out of its well and put it in the whaleboat.
They dragged the whaleboat and the hide boat from the water. The men who’d just returned loaded their family members with gifts and went off to their own yarangas.
John set down a large cloth sack and two crates – one bigger than the other – in the middle of the chottagin.
“How big and lovely you’ve grown!” he said, on looking his wife and children over.
“We really missed you,” Pyl’mau smiled. “Every day we looked to the sea.”
“We did,” Yako confirmed.
Pyl’mau looked at John, and it seemed to her that he had come back different from the man who had left, and her heart was a bit uneasy at this.
“Why do you look at me so strangely?” asked John.
“It’s just that I’m very glad,” Pyl’mau sighed. “Don’t you be angry with me, but at times I did think: What if you he doesn’t come back . . . His home isn’t far from there . . .”
“Darling Mau!” John embraced her and kissed her. “Wherever I am, wherever the winds may blow me, the home nearest and dearest to me is this yaranga, and the nearest and dearest people are you Mau, Yako, and little Mary.”
“Tynevirineu-Mary,” corrected Pyl’mau.
While his wife was preparing the food and lighting a fire inside the chottagin, John was unpacking the presents from his bag. He dressed Yako in a brightly colored jacket, erected a cloth bonnet upon Mary’s head, laid out bricks of tea, sugar, tobacco, and then picked up a smallish box of redwood. Yako was following his father’s every move.
“What is it that you’re making, Ateh?” he asked.
“Wait a minute, you’ll find out,” John replied.
And when he attached an enormous ear-shaped pipe and started to wind the handle, Yako hazarded a guess:
“I know – it’s a motor!”
“You’re almost right,” John carefully lowered a shiny head with a bird’s neck on top of a spinning disc that looked like a charred tree-trunk ring.
The chottagin was filled with unusual sounds, and Pyl’mau, startled, almost dropped the hot kettle.
Then a woman’s voice began to sing. The dogs that were lounging inside the chottagin pricked up their ears and stared at the pipe’s wide maw in bewilderment. The woman sang of something very dear, very heartfelt, and listening to her, Pyl’mau felt an aching yearning in her own breast.
“What is it?” she whispered, as though afraid of frightening the voice away.
“A gramophone,” John answered.
When the song was over, Yako tiptoed up to the pipe and peered inside. Finding nothing, he turned to his father:
“So where is she?”
“Who?”
“The singer.”
“She stayed behind, far away from here, and it’s only her voice that is here,” John attempted to explain.
“She stayed behind, and her voice traveled here?” Pyl’mau’s voice contained both fear and astonishment.
“Well, yes,” John replied.
“Poor thing!” Pyl’mau wrung her hands. “Why did you do that? How can a person live without a voice? How is she going to talk now?”
John took a long time explaining the mechanics of sound recording, but neither Pyl’mau nor Yako could understand a thing.
When he wound up another record, Pyl’mau asked, as she listened to the man’s voice:
“So that one’s mute too, now?”
Then John did his best to explain that the people singing out of the wide wooden pipe haven’t lost their voices at all. It was more like they’d shared their voice with the record, the thing that looked like a sliver from a charred tree stump.
“And those people’s voices didn’t even get weaker?” asked Pyl’mau.
“No,” was John’s firm answer.
Pyl’mau calmed down and listened to the music with obvious pleasure, no longer pitying and commiserating with the singers who’d lost their voices. Still, it was Orvo who explained the principle of sound recording best of all, when almost all of Enmyn gathered in John’s yaranga to hear the gramophone.
“It’s a kind of frozen echo,” said Orvo. “This black record is like a steep c
rag – it reflects voice and sound. Only the crag gives the sound back right away, but the record holds it and can repeat it many times.”
Only Yako was not completely convinced by the grown-ups’ explanation. To him, it seemed that the most convincing explanation was that there were little people with musical instruments inside the box.
So when he and Tynevirineu-Mary were the only people left inside the yaranga, Yako – left behind as a babysitter – dragged the music box into the center of the chottagin, under the light coming from the smoke-hole. The pipe was easily taken off: Yako had seen his father attach it. Carefully inspecting the box he discovered nail studs. These little nails were just the same as on the Winchester, and to pry them out of the wood, you needed a screwdriver. But when you haven’t got a screwdriver, the end of a hunting knife will do just as well.
Holding his breath, Yako lifted the lid . . . but instead of the expected little people he found only metal parts. Yako unscrewed them one by one, but the little people were nowhere to be seen. Bitterly disappointed, Yako shoved the unhinged mechanism wrathfully back into the gramophone, put back the lid and carried the music box to its place.
“There’s nothing there,” he mournfully announced to his baby sister, who was staring at him with her round little eyes. “No little folk.”
When the Enmyn people came that evening to hear the music, John discovered that the music box was silent. The winding handle turned easily in its nest, and inside the wooden box itself, the mechanism parts rattled around from side to side.
Yako sat in the corner, half-dead with fright. He realized that he’d ruined the music box, despite having tried to make sure all the innards fit back inside.
“What could have happened to it?” John was puzzled as he turned the handle and gave the box a shake.
Pyl’mau’s eyes met her son’s. His mother walked over to him and Yako said, guiltily:
“I was looking for the little people.”
“You’ve been told already, haven’t you – there are no little people in there!” Pyl’mau shouted and grabbed the boy by the ear.
Yako’s pained and frightened wail filled the entire chottagin.
“What are you doing?” John took the boy away from his furious mother. “Calm down, Yako. It’s a good thing that you took a look. Good boy. There’s nothing wrong with trying to find out new things. Only next time, ask me to help you. All right, Yako?”
The little boy stopped crying and nodded his assent.
They fixed the gramophone and during the wet autumn evenings, a wind orchestra sounded over the quietened village. Negro singers’ voices rent the damp cool air.
The motor whaleboat brought excitement and a new way of life to Enmyn. Now the distances were made shorter, and it was no great challenge to take a trip to Uelen or Keniskun. The only thing they did have to worry about was the fuel.
“If only the motor could eat nerpa or walrus fat!” Orvo daydreamed. “Then we’d go far out on the sea, where nobody’s hunted yet, where the animals aren’t wary.”
The hunters had been to the Inchovin breeding ground, but there was not much walrus this year, and their main hopes remained in hunting along their own shores. But it so happened that the ice came early this winter.
20
A churning icy porridge had moved up to Enmyn’s shoreline that morning. High waves launched themselves at the frosty shingled beach, spitting enormous chunks of ice onto the shore. A number of them reached so far they punched a hole in the roof of Tiarat’s yaranga.
There were some days of sleet. Enmyn’s paths froze over, and it was a struggle to get from one yaranga to another. The dogs didn’t stir from the chottagins, and the people themselves were loath to leave their warm dwellings.
Each time John ventured out to pick up some supplies of meat, the sky seemed to him to be gathering lower and lower, and the waves creeping ever nearer the shore, as though nature, alien and hostile, were trying to swallow up the small and lonely human outpost.
One night, a strong frost descended, a veil of dry snow covered the ground and leveled the ice-churned surface of the sea.
Buckling “crow’s feet” onto their shoes, the hunters walked out onto the new ice. A path to the sea stretched from each of the yarangas, and by nightfall, these paths were ruddy with fresh nerpa blood.
John sat inside the polog, attending to some broken straps on his snowshoes. A stamping of feet soon filled the chottagin.
“Yetti!” John shouted through the fur-lined curtain. “Menin?”35
“Ghym,”36 Orvo’s head poked inside the polog, and then another head popped up beside his.
“Remember him?” Orvo nodded toward his companion. “This is Il’motch, the one you lived with when Kelena healed your hands.”
“Of course!” John exclaimed. “I remember him very well!”
Having put away two large mugs of tea, Il’motch looked to Orvo with anticipation.
“John,” Orvo turned to their host, “Il’motch has heard a lot about your music box, and he’d like to hear it play.”
“Sure thing,” said John. “Yako, go on and wind us up some music!” A naked Yako reached into the corner and asked his father:
“Do you want me to put on the woman’s voice or the man’s?”
“Which would you like?” John consulted with Il’motch.
“We can listen to the man’s voice for now,” Il’motch said, shooting Orvo an oblique glance.
The nomad listened attentively. Indeed, the expression on his face suggested that he understood every word of the jaunty cowboy song by Dean Morgan.
When the record was finished, Il’motch gave a word of praise:
“Good singing. Loud.”
After the man, they listened to a woman’s singing and then to a Negro church choir. The visitor was well pleased with the concert.
“I came to give you a present, Sson,” he declared.
“That’s right,” Orvo corroborated. “Il’motch is going to be your tundra friend. For now, he’s brought you two deer carcasses, a few hides, kamusses, fawn skins, and deer tendons to use as thread. All this he gives to you as his friend.”
“Oh! Thank you!” John was overwhelmed by such generosity.
So Pyl’mau had guessed correctly when she told him about Il’motch’s intention to become John’s tundra friend. Well then, it would be both flattering and useful to have such a friend. Only what could he offer him in return? And should this be done immediately?
“John and I will come to visit you soon, before you move camp too far from us,” Orvo told the nomadic reindeer herder.
As soon as the guests finished their tea and departed, John asked his wife:
“Maybe I should have given return gifts to Il’motch right away?”
“No, it isn’t done, to give gifts back right away,” Pyl’mau answered. “Otherwise it would look more like a trade than an exchange of gifts. When you go visit him in his camp, that’s when you’ll take him your gifts.”
A few days later, Orvo and John loaded their sleds with presents for the reindeer herders and set off into the tundra. John’s sled held a variety of small items purchased in Nome – lengths of printed cloth, coarse white calico for kamleikas, thread, needles, bits of lakhtak skin for shoe soles, leather strips, and two nerpa-skin containers of clarified seal fat.
They spent the first night in the tundra. Orvo dug some twigs out from under the snow and made a blazing fire, heating up some tea over it. They dined on cold kopal’khen and boiled nerpa meat; then, surrounded by their dogs, they bedded down in a snow-lined hollow.
The weather was calm. Flares of the Northern Lights promenaded across the starry night, and the moon’s narrow crescent was etched sharply into the sky. Lying there for a while, eyes wide open, John called to Orvo:
“Are you asleep?”
“I’m not,” the old man replied. “I’m lying here and thinking: Could I ever have imagined that two winters and two summers later we’d be going to
visit Il’motch again, you and I. And not as a white man and a luoravetlan, but simply as two people who live the same life . . . And it wasn’t so long ago, now was it? So does that mean that our ways are not so strange to you now?”
“The first time I made this journey, I too never imagined that it would be my path to you. You wouldn’t believe how frightened I was. To be honest, I didn’t even think of you as people.”
“This is not new to me,” Orvo replied. “When I found myself on a white people’s ship for the first time, it was like diving headlong into another world. I didn’t know the language or any of the customs. They laughed at me, teased me, beat me when the mood took them. For some reason, they loved offering me soap to eat. How much soap I had to gobble, before they showed me a little respect!”
Orvo sighed heavily, and the sleeping dog-pack leader sighed in his sleep, too, as if in concord.
“The thing that divides us from one another is stereotypes about others and wrong ideas about ourselves,” John said. “I think that the biggest mistake might be this: Each nation thinks that it’s the only one that lives in the right way, and all the others have turned their backs on this right way, for one reason or another. In itself, the idea is harmless. It even helps keep order in a society. But when a nation tries to change another’s way of life forcibly, that’s when things go wrong. Dear Orvo, if only you knew the whole bloody history of the civilized world!”
“No one has tried to change our life here,” Orvo answered.
“Didn’t they try to change your gods?” asked John. “I know all about the Ananalin and the North American Indians. Our main shamans, the servants of the white gods, dream about converting the savages – as they call them – to their own faith.”
“They wanted to change our gods here, too,” Orvo replied. “The bearded white shamans drove around from camp to camp, passing out metal crosses and white shirts. You had to be dipped in water and accept the whites’ god, to get one . . . Many people accepted him.”
“What do you mean?” John was surprised. “So you’re Christians?”
“What harm did it do us to believe in another god, too?” In the darkness, Orvo went on, “In those times, such a thing as a metal cross that you could make a fishhook out of was hard enough to come by. On top of that, adults were given a whole packet of tobacco leaf. And why should we have refused the white god? My countrymen took him up and said, Why shouldn’t there be such a god as this one? They would set him next to their other gods and pray to him just the same way. This is how they reckoned: If the god that the whites brought really is all-powerful and all-knowing, he won’t evict the host gods that took him in under their roof. So for a while, these new gods lived together with our old ones, and were eventually forgotten. Truth be told, they were not much use, since they didn’t know what our lives are like, didn’t know about the sea and the reindeer. And then, they didn’t take to our food . . .”