“A baby—and you’ll still find your way back?”
“Everybody finds his way back, so why not me as well?”
This made sense. Everybody finds his way back meant that other people, too, had to go home, hence the notion that everybody has to. It followed that I, too, would have to go one day. How terrible, but also how interesting! But I kept this thought to myself. Instead I asked Grandma how I would recognize her once she had turned into a baby.
“You just will.”
She said it cheerfully and firmly.
The nearer Grandma got to her end, the more stories she told and the more instructive her stories became. The very last story I heard from her was this one: Grandma did not think much of superfluous habits. By that she meant smoking, taking snuff, and drinking. Yet once she had drunk a whole bowl of liquor made from fermented mare’s milk, and since then she knew that sometimes the bad can be better than the good.
One day, during the foaling season, a horseman arrived at a late hour. He was a much dreaded ruffian who was now drunk to boot. Understandably, people hoped to get rid of him peacefully, and so Grandma quickly filled a huge bowl with the steaming hot liquor that had just been distilled, and offered it to the guest in response to his greeting. He took the gift from her, had a sip, paused, tasted it again, and began to roar: “Why don’t you knock back this dog piss yourself, woman? Go right ahead! Or else I’ll knock your brains out and tear your yurt’s roof ring down onto the stove!”
That’s when Grandma remembered that there had been salt in the bowl. She grabbed the brine from the roaring and raging man’s hand and did as she was told. Fear was simply bigger than disgust. As a result, she became very sick, but in the end some good came of it, too: she had been suffering for some time from a stubborn case of diarrhea, which now finally seemed cured. She thought about it and decided to test the cure on an animal should she ever get the chance. Soon she got her chance, and the cure proved eff ctive. And ever since then Grandma had known how to cure diarrhea, whether it was she herself who suffered from it or a sheep.
One day I noticed that Grandma was eating less than she used to. Her bowl was tiny as it was. But now she asked that it be filled only halfway. Was she already on her way to becoming a baby? Could she perhaps become one without having to go home first?
I lived in fear as well as in hope.
THE AIL
We walked back home unhurriedly. Grandma pointed to the birds clamoring and romping in the air, and the flowers piercing the ground and rising from the steppe around us in a multitude of colors like glittering splashes that had drizzled down from the sun, the sky, the glaciers, and from mountain ridges that seemed to smoke and blaze with all this light.
In front of us lay the ail like a well-ordered board game. The hürde wasn’t yet black with dung or checkered white with loose wool, but stood out brownish against the green of the grass because the ail had moved there only two days before. The four yurts looked as if somebody had thrown gashyk; one stood a little to the side and seemed round and upright like a well-built and tightly hobbled horse, while the others were herded together and resembled goats. Each seemed to lack something.
One of the yurts was very small and had four sides, but was covered with snow-white canvas that sparkled in the sunlight. It belonged to Aunt Galdarak. She was the younger of Father’s two sisters. Aunt Galdarak had a daughter who still lay in her cradle and had a famous name that nobody among us had ever gone by. Her name was Dolgor. For five years Aunt Galdarak had been up to mischief far off in the south. That’s what Father said. Others said so, too, although they all told different stories. Aunt Galdarak had her own stories. She had seen the capital and eaten bread. She had been a soldier and played war with a wooden gun. Nobody knew what war was, but everybody agreed it was terrible. We had never played war. The grown-ups would not have allowed it anyway. There were many things they did not allow. For example, they forbade us to play wolf, or even to call its name. We said Eshej, “Grandpa,” and knew whom we meant. “Bad games lead to bad things,” Grandma said. Aunt Galdarak had played war and had bad luck as a result. The man she was married to had walked out on her in that faraway place and disappeared. Aunt Galdarak had only recently returned—with her daughter and her tiny, snow-white yurt, a yurt such as nobody in these parts had ever seen, let alone owned. It was a fancy yurt whose dör was decorated with a suitcase and a mirror.
The yurt next to it, which was larger but not as bright, belonged to Father’s other sister. This aunt was called Buja, and her husband was called Sargaj. They had five children, each spoiled worse than the other. That’s what Father and Mother said. But I envied them because, for example, they were all allowed to smoke. It often happened that Uncle Sargaj and Aunt Buja sat around the stove with their five children, all seven of them smoking. The inside of their yurt was blue with smoke and gave off the same wonderful smell as the people in the sum center. Each winter Aunt Buja and Uncle Sargaj’s family settled in the center, and Munsuk, the youngest of their three sons, told us that while they were there, they were free of their animals from morning to night, and for months at a time.
The third yurt looked almost black, and its felted sides and roof were riddled with holes. It belonged to Uncle Sama. He was Father’s only brother and was, as we later learned, ten years younger. People said Uncle Sama would always stay a child. But he was big and terribly strong. Like many children, he did not like to wash his face. (Neither, at times, did I, particularly when Father was away.) People said the same sort of thing about his wife, Aunt Pürwü. But they did not dare to say so too often, and particularly not too loudly, because she was a shaman. With shamans you had better live in friendship. That’s what Mother said. And Father not only agreed but added: “Same with dogs!” But not everybody seemed to know that. Least of all Uncle Sargaj. He used to cheer on the ail children, and so we made fun not only of Uncle Sama but also of Aunt Pürwü. And oddly enough, the two of them often made fun of each other. We spent hours in their yurt, listening to and laughing loudly at their sparring.
Everybody in the ail except Grandma, Father, and Mother were people of the new era. That’s what Uncle Sargaj said. He could tell because like everybody else in the new era, they all smoked. Aunt Pürwü, though, smoked only when she shamanized. Then she sat with her back to the stove in the yurt’s upper right half, smoked one pipe after the other, and sang. Her songs were pleas addressed to the spirits, whom she implored to appear at long last. It sometimes took them quite a while. And when eventually the moment arrived, she rose, and the actual shamanizing that everybody had impatiently been waiting for could finally begin. Until then, she crouched with her face turned away from both the stove and the people, shook her head, and smoked and snarled. And each time a pinch of tobacco turned to ash and Aunt Pürwü exhaled, she reached back with her right hand, which held the empty pipe that was made from a wether’s shoulder blade. Then the pipe lighter would take the pipe from her, refill it with tobacco, light it, and put it back into the hand that was still waiting behind her back with spread fingers. Not even Uncle Sama, whom Father called a rotten puffer, smoked as much as she did on these occasions.
Uncle Sargaj was an elegant man. He smoked a pipe while everybody else rolled little tobacco sausages with bits of newspaper. You couldn’t compare his brass pipe to the shaman’s, though. Mother would have also liked to be a person of the new era and smoked sometimes herself, but she had to do so secretly because Grandma and Father were not supposed to know.
The felted door of our yurt had already been rolled up onto the roof while they were still hanging down at the other yurts. None of the children from the other yurts were visible, and I knew they were still asleep. And so were Uncle Sargaj and Uncle Sama. Father grumbled: “Th se going downhill have a big sleep!”
Things were indeed going downhill with them: Each of the other families was down to just one höne of lambs and kids, and none of these was even full, so that Aunt Galdarak’s four lambs and t
hree kids had been added. On the other hand, we had six höne, all with lambs. And yet at some point our grandfather had given all these siblings the same number of animals. Ours had multiplied, while theirs had dwindled.
During Aunt Galdarak’s absence Uncle Sargaj and Aunt Buja had looked after her animals. Now only a tiny number remained. But neither Aunt Galdarak nor her sister or brother-in-law made a fuss about it. Times had changed, they said. The new era had begun, and you no longer needed animals. Uncle Sama and Aunt Pürwü said so, too.
“Maybe they’re right after all?” Mother said one day. “Everybody is saying the same thing, and they can’t all be wrong!”
“Nonsense,” Father flared up. “I am somebody, too, and so are all the others, all the people who cling to the herds that have already fed our parents and our ancestors, and that will feed our children and children’s children for all eternity!”
Grandma agreed with Father. “Trust your husband, Balsyng, particularly these days, when people are getting their heads turned,” she said firmly.
I immediately ran over to Uncle Sama and Aunt Pürwü’s yurt. The ail people had gathered around the kettle simmering with porridge tea. I looked carefully at people’s heads, but I could not detect anything suspicious. They seemed to be right where they had always been.
Usually we finished tethering or untethering the lambs of our six höne before our cousins finished their single, half-full höne, and so we would help them fill their höne in the evening and empty it in the morning. “The poor pamper their children, the rich their mounts and pack animals,” Grandma said. Uncle Sama and Uncle Sargaj were poor, and their children were allowed to sleep in and dodge work.
But were we rich? Were our mounts and pack animals pampered? I wasn’t sure. I knew Brother and Sister were not pampered. They rose early every morning and went to bed late. They worked all day long. It was a different story with me: I was the youngest, and I was still little.
Grandma and I walked to the river, down to the shallow spot she had picked for me to wash my face and hands each morning. I stepped into the water and suddenly remembered I had forgotten to pee.
“Grandma, can I pee in the water?”
“No, darling. Haven’t I told you that you must never soil a stretch of water?”
“Just this once, please?”
“No, you’d better not. If you do it once, you open the door to doing it more often. Our mother-river, Ak-Hem, will get angry.”
I climbed out of the water and skipped off. I wanted to show Grandma and the mother-river that I was a good child, and so I skipped farther and farther into the steppe until Grandma called after me: “That’s good enough, stay there.”
Sister Torlaa and Brother Galkaan were returning from gathering dung. They walked bent over and stumbled beneath the heavy full baskets.
“Run to your brother and sister, it will give them strength,” Grandma said.
As I ran toward them, I wondered how my joining them might give them strength.
“You’re a strong boy!” Sister praised me when I reached them.
“Watch for any dung falling off, will you?” Brother called out.
I squeezed myself between them and watched their baskets as we walked. That not a single piece fell off annoyed me somewhat, but I was captivated by their panting.
One of Father’s quirks was that he always wanted to have a big dung heap next to our yurt. No sooner had we taken the yurt parts off the pack animals’ backs after a move, and he would empty the baskets and send the children out for dung.
“We won’t get to finish the heap anyway, so why drive the children so hard?” Mother scolded him when again he rearmed us for yet another dung excursion. Father replied: “So what if some is left over? Others who move by will be pleased and grateful to whoever gathered it in the steppe, carried it by the sweat of his brow, and piled it up so lovingly. Why do you think we have the saying: A worthy man’s yurt leaves a pile of dung behind, but an unworthy man’s yurt, a pile of shit?”
Again Grandma agreed with Father, and Mother had to keep quiet. Right then, Uncle Sargaj, with his pipe already between his lips and Aunt Buja’s coat around his shoulders, stepped out of his yurt. He had taken hardly ten steps when he stopped, spread his legs, and peed. While he was peeing, he kept his body straight and calm but kept turning his head. I knew he was looking at the distant mountains and the sky above. And so he did not seem to notice us as we walked past him only a lasso’s length away. Brother admonished me quietly: “Don’t look. One mustn’t look when grown-ups relieve themselves.” I tried to defend myself: “I only looked at his pipe!” But I obeyed at once and afterward only listened to the high-pitched hiss of his pee, which went on for quite some time. It always took Father a long time, too, even longer, really. But Father walked farther away, and instead of standing, he knelt. So mostly you didn’t hear anything.
Grandma stood next to the dung heap and waited for us. She remarked that the baskets were full and that the pieces of dung glistened gray and were hard and dry. This was praise for Brother and Sister. I tried to draw her attention to my own contribution: “And I watched that nothing fell off, Grandma!”
“That’s what I just said!” she reassured me. I could see the soft little smile in the middle of her upper lip.
And that is how our day began.
In the afternoon a darga appeared at the edge of the steppe. Even before they could make out his clothes, people recognized him by the way he sat on his horse. He sat across the saddle on one of his thighs. Soon they were also able to identify his clothes: the peaked cap, the high boots, and the shoulder bag, all gleaming in the sun. The chrome-leather bag at his side swung forward and backward to the rhythm of his horse’s gallop, like a young black goat charging a stake and bucking.
In those days, people held dargas in a kind of sacred awe. All of a sudden, life in the ail quickened. Men hunted for their sleeves which they had taken off their coats now that it was warm again—after the cool days up in the summer camp—down in the fall camp. Women picked up pieces of clothing and whatever else was lying around—and that during the course of the day had turned into a mess—so they could put everything where it belonged or could be hidden. And the children were sent for water and dung, and reminded to blow their noses and behave themselves in front of the darga.
The ail’s people and dogs all kept their eyes on the approaching darga. By letting his feet as well as his left fist with the reins bounce non-stop, the darga drove his galloping horse forward. Meant to hold the whip, his right hand, too, was clenched in a fist and resting on his thigh, a gesture that almost hid his lack of a whip and instead added to his powerful appearance. Meanwhile, the people were rushing about the ail, trying to hold back their dogs, while the dogs, already risen, looked back and forth from the foreign horseman to their masters, and held back.
But all of a sudden one of the dogs lost its patience. No sooner did it jerk up its muzzle, start to bark and make a quick jump, then the others joined in its barking, and all of them tore off oisily.
As the dogs charged close, the horse slowed from a gallop to a trot, and the rider slid from his thigh onto his buttocks and into the saddle where he sat still and stiff. But since his right fist remained on his thigh, he maintained at least half the look of a darga.
At first the dogs barked as noisily as if an enemy was approaching. While their owners shouted at them, they made a big show of jumping at the horse from all sides as if they might pull the rider from his saddle. But since they didn’t follow through, their bluster became less and less convincing, and when the rider finally crossed the edge of the hürde, they gave up altogether and stopped in their tracks, only to walk off a little later in different directions, each eventually settling down next to its own yurt.
The darga steered his horse toward Uncle Sama’s near-black yurt, and according to the custom of those days, he sought out the poorest people first.
Uncle Sama, the youngest son of the richest man
in our corner of the world, had turned himself into one of the poorest among us, and thus endeared himself to the authorities of the day.
The darga never could have guessed that this supposed pillar of the people’s state would only too soon become an infamous trader, and his wife a dreaded shaman. At the time, the two of them were really only just starting their careers, they still led disorderly lives, and they were poor. They had more children than lambs. These were Uncle Sargaj’s words, but they were not entirely true. After all, the shortest höne consisted of twenty loops, while Uncle Sama and Aunt Pürwü managed no more than fifteen children in all. They had always been considered a family with lots of children, and I have a slight suspicion that the chaos reigning in their yurt made people entering it somehow more sharply aware of the large number of children inside, because it would have reminded them of a den teeming with slippery, gray pups.
Now everybody stood stunned and watched the darga arrive and dismount. I had already seen quite a few dargas and thought this one particularly elegant, young, and nice-looking. But then I got a fright, and I sensed that the fright came from outside myself, from the grown-ups. The darga had no lead! He was about to use the reins to tie his horse to the yurt’s tensioning band. You were never allowed to do that, it was strictly forbidden! Everybody got even more frightened when Father shouted: “Hang on, boy! Hang on to the horse till I’m back!”
He meant the darga. The women seemed frozen. They remained bent over whatever they had been working on while their eyes darted back and forth between Father, the head of the ail, and the darga, whom he had just called a boy. In the meantime, Uncle Sama, who, squatting on all fours, had stuck his head out the door to watch the darga come closer, crawled across the threshold and was now crouching outside with a tattered dshargak around his shoulders and an ambiguous smile on his face. His squinting, narrow eyes seemed to glance in all directions at once.
The Blue Sky Page 5
