A few years later she was arrested again and sentenced to five years in prison for being the mother of a counter-revolutionary. Her son was a Tuvan state official. During the great purges of the Stalin era he was taken to be a Japanese spy, an enemy of the people, and was shot.
She served the entire sentence, and then in 1947 she was arrested a third time. In defiance of the ban, she had gone on treating children in her native village. This was regarded as an assault on Soviet medicine, and she was given twenty-five years in a labour camp. She was sixty-two years old.
MONGUSH
You can find him daily at the Tuva National Museum, which on sunny days is open from ten o’clock until six, and on cloudy ones from eleven to seven.
His study door is blocked by a large stake, and there is a sign on it saying: ‘The Honourable Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan, doctor of historical studies, chief expert ethnographer, living treasure-house of shamanism, Tuva Republic Man of the Century, national writer, founder and honorary president of the Tuvan Dungur Shamans’ Cooperative.’
Underneath there is another, even bigger sign: ‘Fee for entry to see the president . . . [all the titles are repeated in reverse order] ten roubles.’
That’s a zloty (20p). And the stake is at least a metre long, thick as an arm, gnarled, crooked, and painted in pale colours. It is leaning against the door, though I was told the Honourable Mongush Borakhovich was in . . . Weeell, maybe I’ll take a peek, I think to myself and stretch out a hand.
‘Stop!’ cries an old man with long white hair. ‘That is a sacred stake!’
Later on I discovered that it comes from the shamans’ cult tree, and that Mongush Borakhovich has been using it for fifty-five years instead of a key to his study. It is a sentry that no Tuvan thief would dare to touch.
For starters I had to say when I was born. It turned out I was born in the year of the rooster. Mr Mongush took out his fortune-telling pebbles, arranged them in small piles, nodded his head and said: ‘You have to know when a man, horse, calf, or camel was born to know what he’s worth. I was born on 10 April 1925. It was the year of the cow.’
He is the nephew of the Great Shamaness Ulu-Kham, the only descendant of a powerful shaman family, because the communists murdered every single one of Ulu-Kham’s children.
He refused to let me ask a single question. Every time I tried, he shouted at me, saying my questions were like those of a first-former, that I hadn’t read his books, that I had tried to take his business card with my left hand and that I don’t understand the East, and to make matters worse I talk too loud, while he is a man who ‘works with his senses’, and on top of that a man who is on his way out.
But he handed me a small comb, told me to tidy my hair and take my own photo, then I had to enter my name in his visitor’s book. He said I was to praise him and thank him nicely for everything. When I had finished writing, he was asleep with his head on the desk.
CLINIC
The Dungur Shamans’ Cooperative has its headquarters in a tiny wooden cottage at 255 Rabocha Street in Kyzyl. They run the shamanic clinic with a price list, invoices, twenty-four-hour shifts and home visits. The association has a secretary and an accountant, and pays taxes, pension contributions and health insurance for the shamans.
The head of the clinic is Nadyezhda Sam, a fifty-four-year-old retired geography teacher. She employs ten of the 300 Tuvan shamans who operate officially (meaning those who have a certificate from one of three associations). Sometimes they come to work in the capital from very remote mountain villages, because only here can they earn a decent wage.
Nadyezhda splits her sides laughing when I tell her how the Honourable Mongush Borakhovich received me. In all Tuva no-one ever mentions him without the epithet.
‘You should have had a present for him’, she says. ‘Best of all a huge box of chocolates.’
‘Why do the doctors let you into the hospitals?’
‘Because we have miracles happen, and they don’t. No-one is as able to stop a haemorrhage as I am. And when someone is bleeding because of haemophilia, the doctors call me themselves.’
‘How do you do it?’
‘I talk it round. I pray it away.’
Nadyezhda blows into her clenched fist, whispers something to it, mutters, swings her arm and claps it against a spot on my thigh where there’s a make-believe wound.
‘Shamanism is a belief in the power of nature and the spirits of the ancestors’, she says. ‘It’s not me that does the healing, but an unknown force that I ask for help. And if the haemorrhage doesn’t stop, I do a ritual to bless water, but the live kind, in the river, beside which I light a fire. I throw various things to eat and drink onto it, and like that, through smoke, I feed the spirit of the river. And the whole time I pray, using words and the drum. Then I scoop up some water and carry it to the hospital. It is no longer ordinary water, but prayer-filled. The patient drinks it and washes with it. Like this a harmonious, steady, united rhythm of water, fire and man is created. The perfect rhythm.’
‘Why are you so similar to the North American Indian shamans?’ I ask Nadyezhda. ‘The same feather headdresses, drums, rhythms, tunes and ways of singing. And similar rituals.’
‘It is they who are like us. After all, they come from here. Twelve thousand years ago they set off from central Siberia, crossed the Bering Strait and populated both Americas.’
TRIP
Shamaness Anisya Otsur, the one I met at the children’s hospital, doesn’t want to tell my fortune. She has a very poor command of Russian. She says that for divination you need lots of ‘unsimple’ words, and in this language there aren’t any.
I’m really sorry, because Anisya can tell fortunes from a sheep’s shoulder blade, which she thrusts into the fire, and then watches how it burns. She is a very humble village woman of over seventy, who smells of smoke and animals, and whose face is suntanned even in winter. Anisya rattles like a skeleton, because her ritual costume is festooned in lily-white goat and sheep bones. She comes from the village of Iskra, known in Tuvan as Tsubon-Sazhenalak, where to this day the Iskra herder’s state farm is still in operation. For more than half a century, ever since she discovered her own shamanic power, successive communist state-farm managers facing animal pestilence, natural calamities, and even financial collapse or lack of fuel for the machines, have ordered her to perform the relevant rituals in secret.
The woman lights a sprig of autysh, purifies and warms her hands in the fire, then blows on the flame, so the plant starts to smoulder profusely, like a smoke bomb. She fumigates me very thoroughly, including my feet, crotch and armpits. She fumigates a stool, part of the ceiling and the floor, on which she places the seat. She tells me to sit down.
She performs lots of bizarre acts. She pours milk and vodka into various small containers, strokes a dry snake that is hanging on some deer antlers, rattles her black magic jewellery and keeps bashing me with a strange wooden sceptre with a big tangle of shamanic debris attached to it: bones, fangs, claws, feathers, ribbons, rags, bits of metal and wood. This is the aberyok, Anisya’s extremely powerful personal bodyguard, something like a shaman’s vitamin complex, a mixture of talismans, each of which protects against something different.
‘Does your heart ache?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘But it will start to. You should not drink. Remember. You have immense willpower. And imagination. And a long road ahead of you. But it is open.Watch out for a large metal object. It is very dangerous for you.’
‘I came here by car. And I have to go beyond Baikal. To Vladivostok.’
‘You must go to the tyre centre and check. Wheels. I can see wheels. I call on the spirit of the place where I was born to make sure your head doesn’t spin.’
She tells me to drink the milk and vodka out of several containers. I have to close my eyes, so I switch on the Dictaphone to record what she is doing by sound at least. The air becomes thick with smoke, and she starts banging a drum, harder
, faster and more steadily with every beat, as if wanting to drive someone away or defeat them with this music. Or kill them. And she wails wistfully, more and more wildly, narcotically, throatily. Only some Tuvans are capable of making their vocal cords shudder in this unearthly way, producing several sounds of various pitch simultaneously, and triggering vibrations that change the rhythm of your heart.
After three or four minutes she falls silent and spits the milk at me.
When I listened to the tape a week ago, it turned out it wasn’t three or four minutes. The tape was wound onto the end, so at least an hour had gone by, while she never stopped drumming and singing. And where had I tripped off to? Had I fallen asleep as I sat there? Had I died a little?
LONG AGO
I bought the biggest box of chocolates I could find in Kyzyl, and went to see the Honourable Mongush Borakhovich again.
The last time he saw his aunt, the Great Shamaness Ulu-Kham, was in 1947 before leaving for college in Leningrad. She told his fortune and said under no circumstances should he return to his homeland until six years had gone by. Soon after, she was arrested for the third time.
At the headquarters of the Kyzyl NKVD on Komsomolskaya Street they cut off her hair and took a photograph of her. In it, Ulu-Kham is still in her coat, reaching below the knees, which the Tuvans call a del, but she would soon exchange it for a prisoner’s donkey jacket. She was given a twenty-five-year sentence and transported from Tuva to the Far North, to the Charnogorka women’s camp in Krasnoyarsk Krai.
Six years were up in 1953, after the death of Stalin, so Mongush Borakhovich went home. At the railway station in Abakan a man came up to him and asked for money, saying he had none to pay for his journey home. Mongush gave it to him, and then the man said he knew who Mongush was, because he had just come out of a labour camp, where he had met the shamaness Ulu-Kham. He told Mongush that in the camp she had had a prophetic dream.
‘The sun was surrounded by a black ring’, the Honourable Mongush recalls the stranger’s tale. ‘Silver rain fell from the sky and a hurricane came. A crack appeared in the earth, out of which flowed a red river. Ulu-Kham related her dream to all the prisoners and explained that something unusual was going to happen in the country. The next day, Stalin died. My aunt also told that man he would soon leave the camp.’
The shamaness told the stranger that the young man whom he would ask for help on the way, and who would give it to him, would be the last male descendant of her clan. He was to bid him farewell from her, as they would never see each other again.
The prison camps emptied. At Charnogorka, where Ulu-Kham was the last Tuvan woman left, the governor was a Russian NKVD general. His daughter was seriously ill. She had even been treated in Moscow, but there was no hope for her. She was dying, so in extreme despair the governor turned to the old shamaness for help.
Ulu-Kham cured the girl. In his gratitude, the general arranged her release and put her in his own car. Then they set off on the journey back to the shamaness’s homeland.
Their last stopover was in Tuva, where they spent the night by a ford with some nomadic herders. The Great Shamaness spent a long time standing by the water, singing softly, then took off her shoes, threw them into the river and said she was not destined to return home and see her loved ones again. She calmly went to bed in the herders’ yurt, and died that very night.
‘On 20 June in the year of the serpent’, says the Honourable Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan gloomily.
NOT LONG AGO
‘I was four years old when they found out I was going to be a shamaness’, says Aychuryek.
That means it must have been 1962.
‘I was a normal child, but I only ever played with whirlwinds. They’re very good, very jolly. I spent the whole time with them, they shaped me. In my village the men drove out to work in the taiga, and the whirlwinds always knew where they were going, they ran around them like dogs and then told me everything. One day some people were going to drive into the forest on a tractor, but there were already some evil winds sitting on it, and I had a vision, so I ran, crying and shouting, I threw myself in front of the vehicle to stop them from going, because they’d never come back. Don’t go with those evil winds! My mother came and took me away. She yelled at me that I shouldn’t talk like that. So they drove into the taiga, the tractor fell over a precipice and five men were killed. I used to fly with the whirlwinds, but other people couldn’t see them. They told me everything in my vision.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘They took me to a mental hospital.The doctors said I had epilepsy and schizophrenia.’
‘You call it the shamanic illness.’
‘Yes. For almost thirty years I lived alternately in hospitals or alone in the mountains, near my shamanic tree. The doctors wouldn’t let me have children, because they’d be like me, with epilepsy and the shamanic illness, but I had to. I fell pregnant, but I did the right rituals, made sacrifices and prayed a lot. Now my son is at the best school in Kyzyl. Eleventh-year maths and physics. And he doesn’t have our illness. And mine went away too, when I gave birth.’
‘What is a shaman afraid of?’ I ask.
‘Spirits, and his own shamanic illness. Only after it will he become a strong shaman. After the illness, but the fear never goes away.’
‘Fear of what?’
‘Visions. Because I can see what’s in store for people, and also any evil they have experienced or have in their soul. It’s like watching terrifying films non-stop. It can drive you mad. And what if you’re four or five years old? The soul runs away from it and they shut you up in the loony bin.’
HEAVENS
Aychuryek is the most powerful shamaness in Tuva, head of the Tos-Deer – meaning Nine Heavens – Religious Cooperative. She treats people with herbs, roots and shamanic, so-called wild massage. No-one taught it to her. She knows it all from birth. But she doesn’t do internal medicine, ordinary illnesses or infections. Exceptionally difficult cases are brought to her from all over Russia – wildly aggressive madmen, paralysed people, people in comas and the mentally ill.
She takes them to powerful places, to her shamanic tree, to Urgalak cave, the Arzhan spring, and to the shores of a sacred saltwater lake.
‘They need strength, because the city is a very difficult space. I tell them about the spirits and the whirlwinds, and we look for strength. Just the place itself gives it, and heals.’
‘I know you fight cancers in the same way.’
‘The patient has to stop taking chemicals, because that causes a loss of strength. I give him a lot of smoke, and I boil nettles and fir bark for him to drink – to make his hair grow back and to let him regain strength.’
‘And I couldn’t meet with you for a week because you were sick with the silly old flu.’
For my journey Aychuryek gives me an amulet with three stones in a small bundle of rags. She says the stones come from three very strong places and they are to protect me from ‘big metal’, curses and spells, even ones cast by evil shamans and Gypsies.
‘And it won’t cause interference if you have a badge of your god round your neck’, she says, meaning my medallion of the Virgin Mary. ‘A shamanic talisman doesn’t interfere with anything.’
I was also given a small eren, a lovely little wooden doll with a pebble inside, which Aychuryek made herself. You have to rattle it when things are very bad.
At home we call it the ‘little shamaness’. It turned out to be the only cure when my daughter Oleśka had a splitting headache. Seriously.
LATELY
‘Why do you let shamans into the hospital?’ I ask Dr Olaga Danovich, an anaesthesiologist from the Tuvan Children’s Hospital.
‘Because they treat the soul. And we only treat the body. They can pray, burn incense, play the drum and sing, but we keep watch to make sure they don’t give any medicines. I know 100 per cent that if the patient’s condition is serious, and a surgeon is needed for instance, no folk medicine is goin
g to help. They can be effective for chronic, long-term illnesses, sometimes even cancers, but they’re most useful in situations where a psychotherapist is needed. At our hospital I often see a huge queue of patients, and I know half of them should be sent to a psychiatrist, but we haven’t got one in Tuva. Nor any psychotherapists, so they’d be better off going to a shaman, a Buddhist lama or an old woman who does herbal cures.’
‘In this city you also have a qualified cosmo-energetic therapist and a Kirgiz who heals using the Koran.’
‘They would do just as well. Lots of physically healthy people have psychological problems and imaginary illnesses’, says Dr Danovich. ‘Then the body starts to pack up. A shaman can cure that sort of illness.’
‘But the mother who brought the shamaness to your ward to see the boy with stomach cancer believed she would do what you could not.’
‘Of course we both know the child will not get better. But perhaps it will make the parents feel better? A sort of Tuvan psychotherapy. And possibly if the parents feel better, the child will improve too.’
‘So faith cures them, not the shaman.’
‘It comes to the same thing.’
TRANCE
At the Tengeri – meaning Paradise – City Religious Organization there is a ceremony going on in connection with the New Year. About a dozen shamans and shamanesses are sitting in a group, not exactly singing, and not exactly reciting, but rather shouting in a monotonous chorus, in hoarse voices that grate on the ear. There are also several dozen believers packed into this small space in an indescribable crush. They are placing gifts on little tables in front of the shamans – cigarettes, vodka, cartons of milk, plates of biscuits, butter by the weight in little plastic bags, honey, lard and tins of condensed milk.
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