The Blue Sky

by Galsan Tschinag

  The Blue Sky

  The Blue Sky

  Galsan Tschinag

  Translated from the German by

  Katharina Rout

  MILKWEED EDITIONS

  © 1994, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

  © 2006, English translation by Katharina Rout

  First published in German as Der blaue Himmel by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:

  Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

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  milkweed.org

  Published 2020 by Milkweed Editions

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design and illustration by Mary Austin Speaker

  20 21 22 23 24 5 4 3 2 1

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Galsan, Chinagiĭn, 1943- author. | Rout, Katharina, translator.

  Title: The blue sky : a novel / Galsan Tschinag ; translated from the German by Katharina Rout.

  Other titles: Blaue Himmel. English

  Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, [2020] | Series: Seedbank; 4 | Published 2006 by Milkweed Editions. Originally published as Der blaue Himmel by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994. | Translated from the German. | Summary: “In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people’s ancient way of life collides with the pervasive influence of modernity as seen through the eyes of Dshurukawaa, a young shepherd boy”-- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047019 (print) | LCCN 2019047020 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571311399 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781571317391 (ebook) Classification: LCC PT2682.S297 B5413 2020 (print) | LCC PT2682.S297 (ebook) | DDC 833/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047019

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047020

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The Blue Sky was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Sheridan Books, Inc..

  For my grandmother—

  The wa ming sun at the beginning of my life

  Contents

  Introduction by Katharina Rout

  The ream

  Grandma

  The Ail

  Farewell

  Arsylang

  Glossary

  Words to Accompany My Blue Sky Child

  INTRODUCTION

  In 2001, I fell in love with Galsan Tschinag’s work. My first e-mail reached him two days before the fall of the Twin Towers, his reply to me two days after. He called my hope to translate The Blue Sky one day a small sun, shining from the West, and sent me a large herd of good spirits. Coming from a practicing shaman, the wish for good spirits meant a great deal.

  Two years later, I met Tschinag when he was in Germany on one of his many reading tours. Immediately he inquired about my family and began sharing the story of his. He spoke of life, death, family, love, and the heart. Before dinner, I learned about his horses, after dinner, about how as a shaman he heals people, even with a life-threatening injury inflicted by a horse. A bit of Mongolia had arrived in Germany. He takes some Altai soil with him wherever he goes.

  In 2004, my husband and I went to visit Galsan in Mongolia. From the first moment, we were impressed by the hospitality. His children had been instructed to guide and take care of us. In Ulaanbaatar, they put us on the plane to Ölgiy, where we were met by another son who had spent two days coming down from the Altai to pick us up. From Ölgiy (elevation 1700 meters) we traveled by jeep toward the distant mountain range. We were near the Russian border, and skirmishes in response to political borders that arbitrarily cross ancient tribal lands were common.

  After hours of driving through the steppe and foothills—there are hardly any roads in Mongolia—we reached a windy mountain pass with a large ovoo, a cairn of sacrifi ial stones that marked the beginning of the traditional land of the Tuvans and, as the Mongolians say about this part of their country, the roof of the world. The air smelled of sage, and before us lay an awe-inspiring ocean of greenish-blue velvety mountain backs, broad valleys left behind by glaciers, and snow-covered peaks in the distance. ‘Altai,’ Galsan Tschinag has written, comes from ‘ala,’ multi-colored, and ‘dag,’ mountain. As the winds drove clouds across the sky, the mountains seemed to move under the changing patterns of sun and shadow, and it was easy to understand the Tuvans’ veneration for the Altai.

  For the next few hours we kept climbing. From time to time, a Kazakh or Tuvan yurt could be seen in the distance. In a few valleys, herders were making hay from small patches of green: struggling for every blade of grass. Toward evening we arrived in the Tsengelkhayrkhan mountain range. Towering over three yurts on a ridge at the end of a valley near the Black Lake was the 4000 meters-high sacred mountain. The Tuvans call it Haarakan, Great Mountain, because awe and respect forbid them to spell out the proper names of what is divine or dangerous. This was the furthest the jeep could go. To meet us, Galsan Tschinag had left the neighboring valley and ridden across a mountain through hours of a lashing rain storm. We saw him from afar astride his white horse waiting on the ridge. He welcomed us into a yurt especially made for us—a brandnew, shining white yurt we were invited to take back to North America. We were offered different kinds of cheese and fried dough, and invited to drink from the silver bowl that has come down to him from his ancestors—as has his snuff bottle, his silver flint and the silver sheath of the dagger he wears on his silk saffron belt over his blue velvet coat when he is in the Altai. His son came to play a concert for us on the horsehead fi dle. He had brought the mail with him from Ölgiy, which included an invitation by the President of the Republic of Tywa, who hoped Galsan Tschinag would join him for the celebrations of the republic’s tenth anniversary; he would be offered a place of honor next to Putin. Clearly, we had arrived at the court of a prince. And we were honored because translations build bridges—honored by a man who is a most extraordinary bridge builder himself: As a shaman, he mediates between his community and the spirit world; as a chieftain, he connects Tuvans with each other; as a writer, he forges links between the oral tradition and epics of his people and the literate world outside; as a politician, he negotiates a future for his minority Tuvans among a sometimes hostile majority of Kazakhs and Mongolians; as a translator and teacher, he crosses, and enables others to cross, the linguistic borders of Tuvan, Kazakh, Mongolian, Russian, and German; and as a host, he opens his small yurt in the Altai, and his large yurt—the Altai and the steppe itself—to guests from abroad.

  The next day, we continued our journey on horseback. Across steep, rocky
terrain and a ridge more than 3000 meters high we rode for hours to reach the juniper valley, the summer pastures for a number of Tuvan and Kazakh families. There we watched Galsan Tschinag work as chieftain and shaman, and as host of a group of Europeans who, like us, had come to the Altai to learn about the Tuvans.

  Every day Galsan took us to visit Tuvan and Kazakh families in the valley. Each had prepared a spread, mostly of meat and dairy products, but also of fried dough and sweets, and each offered us salted, buttery milk-tea and—since it was the foaling season—both fermented and distilled mare’s milk. In one yurt, a whole wether had been slaughtered for the occasion. These were celebrations, but they clearly were also opportunities Galsan Tschinag created to braid together the Tuvan and Kazakh families who have to share the sparse resources of the land. He was always given the seat of honor at the North end of the yurt, and while the guests were offered delicacies such as the fatty tail of a sheep, he inquired—in Tuvan, Kazakh, or Mongolian—about the well-being of each family and their animals. As a result of four catastrophic winters and unusually dry summers, the nomads in the Altai had lost two-thirds of their herds in the previous decade. Galsan Tschinag’s visits and the European visitors he has brought into the Altai for the last fifteen summers have created employment and income opportunities. We never left a yurt without him handing over a substantial stack of tugrik bills, but we also watched him engaging with every adult in the family; introducing the children to us; stroking, massaging, and caressing the sick and aged; praising (and translating into German) outstanding events and achievements; and making everybody feel encouraged and important.

  In the process, we heard people’s stories. We learned how mothers on horseback carry their baby’s wooden cradle when the family moves: on a leather strap around the neck. More importantly, we learned how a family’s history can be read from the second, thinner yak leather strap stretched across the cradle. It allows visitors to avoid asking painful questions and instead find gentle and empathetic words. For every birth of a boy, a sheep’s right ankle bone is tied to the strap, for every girl, a left one. For every child that has died, the bone is removed, but the knot remains.

  Bones connect life and death, the material and the spiritual. They were read by our host, by the shaman who provided guidance and support, and who taught us to read in the book of nature. A rock face, so forbidding from a distance, shows fracture lines from close up: nothing is forever, everything changes. Birds that breed their young at a lake near the foot of Haarakan’s glacier grieve when one of the couple dies. The shaman translated: love is the key to life, and the cause of suffering. Do as the birds.

  The morning we started our two-day trip back to Ölgiy, people gathered to say farewell. Each was blessed by Galsan Tschinag, the shaman, with the traditional sprinkling of milk. And because my husband and I were the first North Americans to come to the Tuvan land in the High Altai, we were given special gifts to take home. The Cold War is ending, people had repeatedly said to us in the days before. When we laid our customary three stones on the ovoo, we had reason to be grateful indeed.

  Like the birds Galsan Tschinag had referred to, I had embarked on my own journey to the top of the world. I returned with the shaman’s blessings to complete the translation of his important first novel into English. I want to thank Galsan Tschinag and his people for generously receiving us into their lives, and Galsan himself for discussing his text and my translation with me. I am also very grateful to Hiro Boga and Ron Smith from Oolichan Books, and to Daniel Slager from Milkweed Editions, for their careful and insightful editorial suggestions; to Malaspina University-College for supporting my work; and to my husband Jonathan for having shared my journey half way round the world to bring the project to completion.

  Before I left, Galsan made one final observation: “I am convinced that our corner could quickly turn into a Karabakh or Kosovo, if in a country such as ours, with a colorful mix of peoples and a leadership that glorifi s violence and war, the Tuvan people were to glorify their own and denigrate their neighbors’ cultures.” Bridges have to be built from both sides of a river, though. While Galsan Tschinag promotes foreign-language learning among the Tuvans, he also gives one manuscript a year for publication, royalty-free, to a Mongolian publisher, hoping to sow the seeds of respect for Tuvan culture among his fellow Mongolians. His stories, he says about all his books, are not his stories alone: they are the stories of his people.

  And they are stories for the world.

  —KATHARINA ROUT

  ERRINGTON, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2006

  The Blue Sky

  THE DREAM

  This story may have begun in a dream. Was it a preparation for things to come, a warning perhaps? For it was a bad dream—a nightmare.

  Don’t ever tell anybody about your bad dreams, people said. Tell your dreams to a hole in the ground and spit three times. They said similar things about good dreams. Don’t share them with anybody. Keep them to yourself. So, I wondered, were the only dreams you ever heard the dreams that were neither good nor bad?

  We usually started the day in our yurt by telling each other what we had dreamed the night before. Oddly enough, it made everybody both happy and worried at the same time, which you could tell from watching the listeners.

  But when I had my dream, I didn’t know that rule. So while the dream was hot, as hot as tears, I passed it on to my mother. I had cried and had to be woken up. It was Mother who had woken me. She had come into the yurt from the morning milking to empty the full pail, and the hand that stroked me was wet and cool and smelled of raw milk.

  Still sobbing, I told her what I had just dreamed. But after she listened to my story, she announced it was a good dream. I wondered if she was really listening because while I was talking, she was busy straining the milk through a tuft of yak tail hairs into the big aluminum jug. “No, it was not!” I said fie cely and started sobbing again. Mother held her ground. What’s more, she said my interpretation of the dream was wrong, and talked instead of gold, silver, and silk, of celebrations and sweets. None of it made sense to me.

  But I learned: Don’t tell your dream to anybody, tell it to a hole in the ground, and spit three times.

  That’s what she explained when she turned back at the door. “Mind you, that’s only for a truly bad dream!” she warned.

  Of course it was a bad dream. So I had to do what had to be done. But I had already shared it with somebody, with Mother. What now?

  I thought about it as I crawled out from under the old, quilted coat that had once belonged to Father and was now my blanket. And I was still thinking it over as I set off into the new day.

  A bright summer morning welcomed me with the smell of dew, sun, and animal pee. Just then the flock of sheep was noisily leaving the pen, while the lambs stayed tethered to the höne and formed a square, white patch. The women and girls were milking the yaks at the dshele. All around me squirts of milk were drumming into pails of resonating aspen wood; each sounded different, from a bright hiss to the dark gurgle of water bubbling up from an earth eye.

  Our dog Arsylang was asleep next to the dung heap. He was breathing peacefully. Sunlight streamed onto his dark, downy fur and exploded into rays that glittered and danced on the ends of his hair. His ribs rose and fell almost imperceptibly. His limbs lay slightly curved and gathered in as if they had neither joints nor weight. I could see his body was calm, and everything was as it had been: good. But what about the dream?

  I went over to Mother, who, squatting beside a cow, milked it so nimbly and vigorously that her shoulders rocked as if they were trembling. She had buried half her face in the cow’s thick, bushy belly fur and had closed her one, still-visible eye.

  I moved my mouth close to her ear and whispered: “Mother!” The eye opened. “What if you have already told somebody?”

  Mother didn’t immediately catch what I meant. She had to think. Then she said firmly: “Don’t ever tell anybody about your dream. Not anybody!”

&
nbsp; I got scared and left. I thought more about it and decided it was not yet too late to run out into the steppe and get rid of the dream. Somehow it seemed better than leaving the matter all wrong.

  I walked a fair way from the ail. Then I turned to face the mouth of the river valley and spoke, enunciating each word as clearly as I could: IN MY DREAM, MY ARSYLANG HAS BEEN POISONED. HE CANNOT WALK OR STAND. HE STAGGERS, FALLS OVER, AND FOAMS AT THE MOUTH. HIS LIMBS ARE STIFF, HIS FUR STANDS ON END, HE IS DYING. OH-OH-OH!

  Just then the dogs raced off, barking noisily, to chase a horseman who was speeding at some distance past the ail. When he noticed the dogs coming closer, the horseman slowed from a gallop to a trot and then slowed even further until he rode at a calm walk. The dogs reached him, raced around him in circles, and barked at him. But they soon calmed down, and eventually they lost interest in the placid horseman and turned back.

  Under the morning sun, which was still low in the sky, I dallied and played with my long, thin shadow, trying to catch up with it, but never getting lucky. No matter how quickly I skipped, the shadow leapt along and always got away. Then the dogs returned. With their tails curled high above their backs, they walked lazily, yawned, and licked their mouths with their long, dangling pink tongues.

  But not so Arsylang. He never curled his tail, nor did he lift it much, but carried it slanting downward, with its tip only slightly curved outward. And his ears rose straight up; pointy like a foal’s and close to each other, they looked like a pair of scissors. He was ambling as usual, his neck reaching forward, with the collected poise of a predator.

  Arsylang was a foundling dog. When he was still a pup, Father had brought him from far away. At the time the pup came to us, I already had my first teeth. But the young dog grew fast and had long been considered grown up, while I was still a child.