A Dream in Polar Fog

by Yuri Rytkheu

  “Well now, well now,” Carpenter muttered with real surprise, as he put away the little bag of gold.

  Uelen was lively and animated in these clear frosty days, and there was a multitude of passers-by crowded in every street. The local dogs were at a loss for whom to bark at first. The visitors had assembled a dog depot at the seaside by the large icebergs that had not managed to float down to the Pacific Ocean that summer, tying up their sled-dog packs to some wooden pikes, frozen into the ice.

  There was a fire blazing in each of the yarangas, food being prepared and an astonishing amount of tea being drunk. Carpenter could not allow such an opportunity to pass by and opened a small shop in the dog section of Gemal’kot’s yaranga. He did a brisk trade in brick tea, sugar, treacle. The hunters were buying cartridges, gunpowder, buckshot. Twice, the dogsleds had to be sent back to Keniskun to pick up more goods.

  The trader made no more mention of the gold sand to John; he grew pointedly considerate and attentive.

  On the appointed day, the hosts and the guests gathered together inside a large newly made wooden building. The Russians had intended to open a school, or possibly some government office, but because of the war, the building lay empty, and today, with the volost’ 43 chief’s permission, it was being used for the entertainment.

  Inside the building it smelled of fresh paint. Winter sunlight beat at the windowpanes, the wooden tread boards creaked underfoot – all around him were the sounds that John MacLennan had grown long unused to. And it was not even so much a matter of familiarity, but that the noise was unusual in these circumstances and did not sit easily with the crowd of Chukchi and Eskimos in their fur-lined kukhliankas, their brightly colored cloth kamleikas, and festive beaded torbasses.

  They were coming into the wooden yaranga, peering from side to side, touching their fingers to the painted walls and looking down at the wooden floor with wonder, as though it were the deck of a ship.

  The Chukchi and Eskimos found their places right on the floor, as it was clean and shone with new paint, while the singers and dancers arranged themselves on a small dais made by the slightly raised floor of the next room and fenced in by removable screen walls.

  The Uelen masters were the first to sing and present women’s group dances. The large ochre drums obscured the faces of the singers, who were singing directly at the tightly stretched walrus stomach. The sound reverberated and, as it grew stronger, created the illusion of a mountain echo.

  The women danced with abandon, eyes half-closed. John watched them, and emotion stirred in his breast. He was thinking that, even a few years ago, had he seen these dances, heard these songs, at best he would have condescended to allow that they had a certain interest for specialists. But now he was genuinely moved, moved to the depths of his soul, by this dancing and these songs that were almost without words – only a melody that conveyed the wind’s howl, the rustling of tundra grass under a caressing summer breeze, the waterfall’s thunder, the shadows of wind-blown clouds on the surface of the sea, the ringing peal of blueing ice, and much more, all the things that are called life, in its great variety and, at the same time, its great simplicity. The women’s movements were expressions of unspoken tenderness; they never appeared undressed before a stranger’s eyes. And they were glad that now with their supple bodies they could speak of a loving heart, of a concealed desire. They were a little shy, and so the maidens’ eyes were half-hidden under their long eyelashes.

  John watched the dancing women and his thoughts went to Pyl’mau, to her tender, loving look. He remembered her penetrating, gentle voice, her devotion to him, and once again it seemed that no one could take him from this land now, or tear him away from these people who had become his family.

  Now came forward a slender youth, almost a boy still, the famous Aivanalin dancer, maker of songs and melodies, Nutetein. He was performing a song-dance about a seagull caught in a storm on the sea. But the story was not about the bird, but about those whose turbulent lives are filled with storms, about the ones who never lose their hope of reaching the dreamed-of shore. There were only a few words in the song, but they were all that was needed, and therein lay the song’s true poetry. Poetry, thought John, chooses the most vital, the most genuine words.

  Nutetein was succeeded by the Uelen vocalist, dancer, poet, and musician – a young man named Atyk. John peered into his face and marveled at its beauty. This was true masculine beauty – the beauty of an intelligent, strong-willed and inspired face, illuminated by the flame of poetry and the joy of living.

  Applause was not the customary thing among the natives, but Carpenter, never bound by conventions, clapped loudly, expressing his delight and approbation.

  “Honest to God, there’s something in it!” he commented loudly to John, seated beside him. “Know what I mean? There’s something there! You sit there listening to these plain simplistic songs, like a wolf’s howling, and suddenly you realize that they stir up some emotion, touch some chord in your heart.”

  “Because this is genuine artistry! A genuine art!” MacLennan repeated.

  “Now really, there’s no need to go that far!” Carpenter drawled. “Although I do agree with you, there is an embryonic art in some of the dances. Of course, in the right hands, if this were polished up, transposed to real musical interests, some of it could be good entertainment even in the States . . .”

  “They’ve got no business going anywhere near the States!” John cut him off abruptly. “Let everything of theirs stay here, because only they understand it and feel it as it should be understood and felt.”

  “Well,” Carpenter conceded, “maybe you are right.”

  Carpenter was clearly trying to win John’s goodwill. The old trader was annoyed at himself for feeling guilty around the handless cripple, as though he’d done something wrong in his eyes.

  By evening, the celebrations moved to the snowy expanse of Uelen’s lagoon. Runners armed with staffs set off on their long journey right from the beach. They had to run roughly fifteen miles. The reindeer herders got a few fawn skins ready for the victor, and Carpenter, the main source of prizes, stuck a flat bottle of whiskey into the snow, to await the best runner.

  In a marked-out circle, wrestlers were also competing. Divesting themselves of their kukhliankas, bare to the waist, they gave off steam in the frosty air, trying to grab a hold of one another’s slippery bodies.

  “Do you have these sort of gatherings often here?” John asked Gemal’kot, who was standing beside him.

  “Every year that we manage to have a mild winter,” Gemal’kot answered readily. “But you must come in the summer. That’s when the most interesting stuff happens. They come all the way from Nome for the celebrations, not to mention the islands of the Bering Strait. Then we get a second Uelen growing right here, on the seashore . . . Come and see,” Gemal’kot repeated his invitation. “When the spring hunt is over and the walruses start to bunch at the breeding grounds, that’s when we get together.”

  “I’ll come for sure,” John promised.

  The festivities continued by the light of the moon. The runners were murky shadows. They slid noiselessly across the moonlit snow and seemed to be merely drawn onto the landscape.

  The winner, and this turned out to be a deer herder from the Katryn tundra, deftly plucked the bottle from the snowdrift by its neck, and with the same light step walked off toward the yaranga where he was staying. The yaranga’s owners followed suit, accompanied by the envious glances of the spectators.

  They walked back to Gemal’kot’s yaranga together. Their host walked slightly ahead, while John and Carpenter were walking together behind him.

  “These people have a healthy temperament, and the right life path,” John spoke heatedly, still under the influence of all he’d seen and heard. “They don’t need any other intoxicants.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Carpenter was cautiously assenting. “But so often they don’t know the difference between what’s valuable and what�
��s not worth a cent. One way or another, they need people like you. Just to keep up rational interaction between the world of the white men, as they call us, and them. I’ll tell you frankly, that it was only when I opened my shop that the raiding of these shores by merchant ships has come to a stop. Now the trading company of the Russian merchant Karaev is about to set up shop here. I’ve thought long and hard about how to deal with him, and came to the conclusion that we have to cooperate with the Russian government. There’s nothing else to do. Especially as the Russians have no intention of interfering with our company’s commercial operations.”

  “I’m not quite sure why you’re telling me all this,” John shrugged.

  “Forgive me, but I see a cultured and educated person,” Carpenter said courteously. “You say that you intend to devote your life to the flourishing of the Chukchi people, and I can make you an offer to join forces.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be of any use to you. I live just the same way as all the Chukchi or the Eskimo. I have no other means of survival than my two hands. The sea and the tundra feed and clothe me. As far as I’m aware, you don’t go hunting, don’t set nets or traps – you only trade. And so the only thing that distinguishes me from the native people is the color of my skin.”

  Carpenter fell silent. And in his silence there was anger and helplessness.

  “Well then,” he gritted through his teeth, “it is true, you and I are speaking different languages.”

  On the next day, Enmyn’s dogsled caravan set out for Keniskun. Making the necessary purchases and having taken a final dip in the mineral baths, the travelers made their way back, cutting a significant length off their journey by setting course from Keniskun through the tundra and toward the Koliushinskaya promontory.

  Two weeks later, the heavily laden dogsleds entered Enmyn from the east, and next to each of the yarangas, people stood waiting to greet them.

  28

  And now it is the year 1917, wrote John MacLennan in his diary. The year was ushered in during this bright and vivid night, amid the blaze of the Northern Lights, in the flickering of the stars, unusually large for the north. They don’t celebrate a new year around these parts. Here, there is a wholly different cycle of life, a different rhythm. A new being is chirping in my yaranga – my daughter, Sophie-Ankanau MacLennan. She was born in the autumn blizzards, and that is how Pyl’mau explains the unusual whiteness of her skin ...

  From the chottagin came the sound of footsteps, and John called out to the newcomer from the polog.

  “It’s me!” Tiarat informed him, and stuck his round, neatly barbered head through the fur curtain.

  Tiarat watched John write with curiosity:

  “You’re very nimble with those loops!”

  “Did you know that the new year arrived today?” John inquired with a certain exultation.

  “Really!” Tiarat was surprised to hear it, and looked around the polog carefully, as if the new year could have simply walked in and concealed himself in some corner.

  But there was nothing noteworthy inside the polog. In one corner, Pyl’mau was breast-feeding the baby girl and simultaneously stoking the flame beneath a low-hanging kettle. In the other corner, Yako and Bill-Toko played with small seal teeth, making intricate designs on the walrus-hide floor. The protector of the hearth with his countenance shiny from sacrificial fat, and the sparkling copper washstand hung from the corner posts.

  “The year nineteen hundred and seventeen has come,” John continued, mentally reckoning up how many twenties there were in nineteen hundred.

  “That many?” Tiarat marveled. “I’ve heard white men counting years, but I can’t figure out how it is that they can see the arrival of the new year in the polar night. It must be a hard thing to do?”

  John had wanted to explain about chronicles and calendars, but after some thought, decided to change the topic to something else, since the explanation was likely to take some hours, and he doubted that Tiarat would appreciate the necessity of such precise timekeeping, especially on these glacial winter evenings that made it seem as though the flow of life itself had stopped.

  “Can I have a look?” Tiarat reached for John’s notepad.

  He was poring over the filled pages, and again John had the same feeling he’d had when Orvo had examined his words, that Tiarat comprehended something of the written text – such was the concentration on his face.

  “How I’d like to learn to do that!” Tiarat said longingly, as he returned the notepad to John with a sigh of regret. “It must be wonderful to understand what you’ve marked and take back the spoken words, like turning back to look at your own thoughts.”

  “But I’m writing in my own language, not in Chukchi,” John said. “Now if your language had its own signs, then it would be no big task for you to draw and understand them as easily as you do prints in the snow.”

  “Can it be such an impossible thing, to come up with some squiggles for our language, too?”

  “Perhaps it can be done,” John assented. “But some learned people would have to study your language carefully, first.”

  “Why should the learned people study our language?” Tiarat said in surprise. “It’s enough that we know it well ourselves.”

  “I have no doubt that you know it well, meaning that you can speak it. But in order for a language to have the squiggly signs, we need to know what it’s comprised of. For example, every person who lives along the coast has seen a deer, but what a deer is like on the inside – not everyone knows that.”

  “But to find out what the deer is made of, you’d have to kill him first,” Tiarat objected. “And what about the language? How can you kill that? You’d probably have to kill everybody who speaks it.”

  “There’s no need to kill a language, in order to study it,” John replied. “Here I am speaking the Chukchi tongue, thinking in Chukchi, and I can even write your name using English letters.”

  “Try it.” Tiarat gave John a pleading look.

  On a clean page, John set down Tiarat’s name in large letters. The Chukcha picked up the sheet and took a long time scanning it, as though trying to discern the features of his own face within the letters’ curves.

  Pyl’mau, unable to contain her curiosity, looked over Tiarat’s shoulder and suddenly said:

  “Doesn’t look like him at all.”

  “Why not?” Tiarat asked, insulted.

  “In the middle, something is bulging there. But you’re a well made, handsome man.”

  “True, true,” Tiarat agreed. “Not exactly like me, you can see it right away.” With a sigh, he commented: “You can just feel how it’s made with foreign letters . . . Now if they were our own. Here,” Tiarat carefully poked a finger at the notepad, “it looks like I’ve decked myself out in a white man’s clothes.”

  One day, Tiarat was chopping up a large kymgyt for the dogs. Before plunging his sharpened blade into the frozen walrus hide, he took some time to peruse his family’s mark, a diagram of two crossed oars.

  John had come up to him, pulling his own kymgyt by a short-handled boat hook. Tiarat stopped and moved his eyes to John’s sigil – the letter J.

  When he was done chopping up kopal’khen for both his and John’s packs, Tiarat asked:

  “Do you think you could teach me the white people’s talk? Your own language?”

  While making the plea, he was looking at his own feet, like a misbehaving schoolboy.

  “Could be done,” John answered readily, and felt a flush of pleasure: Now there would be something to pass these long winter evenings. “It’s even possible to learn making the marks and recognizing them as you learn to talk.”

  “That would be something. But I wouldn’t so much as dream of it.”

  “We’ll start tonight, there’s no sense in postponing it,” John said firmly.

  Tiarat ran home to change his clothes and then presented himself at John’s yaranga. When he removed his kukhlianka, Pyl’mau couldn’t suppress an admiring ex
clamation: Tiarat’s mighty physique was clad in a silk top of clearly Eastern origin. Fighting valiantly to smother his own smile, John joined in his wife’s expressions of delight.

  The paper and pencil had been readied. Naturally, John had never before played the teacher’s role. After momentary reflection, he decided that it would be best to begin with mastering the immediate surroundings.

  Pointing to Tiarat, he uttered:

  “Man!”

  Tiarat shuddered, but collected himself and nodded to indicate his agreement.

  “Woo-man!” John shouted, moving the finger to Pyl’mau, who’d returned to her lamp.

  “Woo-man!” Tiarat assented with a whisper and, out of sheer nerves, bore down on his pencil so heavily that the graphite tip immediately cracked.

  Dully, he followed the black bit with his eyes, as it rolled down to the end of the page, then gave himself a cuff on the head.

  “What have I done! I broke it! Broke the fragile little thing with my big paws!”

  “Don’t worry Tiarat, we’ll sharpen the pencil again,” John reassured him. John was trying to speak deliberately at the top of his lungs, on the assumption that the louder he spoke the easier it would be for Tiarat to learn. Having yelled the names of some items inside the yaranga into Tiarat’s ear, the man dripping with the sweat of mental work and anxiety, John decided to test him. Tiarat’s memory turned out to be first-rate, and he named the items in English with barely a mistake.

  “Let’s keep going!”

  “Wait, Sson,” Tiarat pleaded. “Can I have a drink of water?”

  He emptied a big ladle with greedy gulps and asked for another. The silk shirt was splotched with dark sweat stains.

  At this point, John elected to make a start on introducing his pupil to a few letters of the alphabet.

  Tiarat copied them onto his own sheet of paper with relative ease, even repeating the defects of his teacher’s own handwriting.