So one morning Uncle Sargaj showed up with four camels he had borrowed from the Kazakhs in exchange for a ewe lamb, and the yurt was loaded up. Aunt Buja and Munsuk, the youngest of the children, sat on the white horse that always stood saddled from morning to night. Everybody else followed the packed camels on foot.
The family left their livestock to Uncle Sama. “That’s madness. They will drink milkless tea as early as the hot autumn. Ask them if they don’t want to take the black horse so at least they can ride?” Mother asked Father.
But Father laughed scornfully: “He who thirsts for poverty shall enjoy it to the fullest.”
Until this episode, it had been customary for families who were about to move, to invite everybody who would stay behind for tea on the day before their move. And then they in turn would be invited back for early tea on the day of their departure.
But now none of this happened with Uncle Sargaj. “What strange times these are,” Grandma commented.
A little later, we heard that Uncle Sama and Aunt Galdarak, too, would move to the sum and settle down. But they would not move until the onset of winter, and so their yurts still stood where they used to be. Having heard of the plan, Father called over to Uncle Sama, who was lying in front of his yurt tanning himself: “And what will come of your animals?”
“I’ll pay the Kazakhs to look after them,” was the answer that came back. Father grabbed the dog’s bowl at his feet and hurled it away. The aspen-wood bowl flew across the dshele, across the pile of ashes, and broke in two as it landed. Brother Galkaan brought it back, and we saw that it had cracked through the middle. Father didn’t have time to glue it back together. He leapt into the saddle on the black horse and trotted away with a suddenness that shocked us. Had we done the same, we surely would have been rebuked.
Father truly did not have much time to spare in those days, as we had to prepare for winter. He had only just mucked out the hürde, taken the dung to the winter camp, and carefully stacked the cowpats as fuel for the winter. Now he made hay on Sara Ortuluk, an island at the meeting of the two big rivers. In the morning he rode off before sunrise, and in the evening he came home after sunset. One day he took Brother and Sister along to help him gather up the hay. My job was to stay home and look after the lambs and calves. I did as I’d been told and ended up without a moment’s peace all day.
Grandma and Mother had their hands full as well. They had been sewing school clothes for Brother and Sister, a quilted coat and a long winter robe for each. Each also got a bag—yes, yes indeed, a shoulder bag like the darga’s, although theirs were made from cloth and had a red five-pointed star at the center of the top facing out. Sister Torlaa’s things were all green, while Brother Galkaan’s were blue. That is what the school uniform of the day was like. Finally, they both got their boots resoled, and even their felt insoles replaced.
The hay gatherers did not return until darkness had fallen. Brother and Sister were euphoric and talked of many beautiful things. I had nothing new to report. My day without them had been long. The next day Father, too, stayed home and beat a couple of sheep skins. He beat them until the compressed wool flew apart and sprung up again like the wool of an animal just slaughtered. Then he rolled up the skins and packed them into the travel bag, to which the two felt tons, the two school bags, and the spare underwear were later added.
That day was Brother and Sister’s last day in the ail. Things happened that I had never seen before: Father sawed a comb out of a billy-goat’s horn. Sister Torlaa was to use it to comb the shock of hair that covered her parting and hung down over her forehead. Then he carved two little sticks from willow wood, hollowed them out with a piece of red-hot wire, and poured molten lead into the holes. This is how pencils were made.
The next morning was strange. A feeling crept upon me that with each new piece of clothing they slipped into, Brother and Sister increasingly stopped being who they had been for me until then. Finally both of them stood, cowed dumb, in their new clothes in front of the grown-ups. The relatives had gathered in front of our yurt to sniff and kiss the children before they left.
They sat together on one horse, Sister Torlaa in the saddle and Brother Galkaan behind her on the bag with the sheep skins and tons. They sat speechless and acquiescent; their horse would follow an outrider.
The crowd of children rode alongside the departing riders as they headed toward the ford. Brother Galkaan, who had remained silent all this time, staring at his sister’s back in embarrassment, suddenly called out: “Dshurukuwaa, go home!”
We had not yet reached the ford, but I obeyed and stopped. The other children galloped on, not wanting to turn back until they got to the river. When they finally came back, I had long been making my way home. They caught up with me, and I let them pass.
That morning, rain came down from the mountains in the north. It lashed the yurts, the meadows, and the river, and then left as hastily as it had arrived. Immediately afterward the sun came out, and the day turned out warm and long. That autumn was mild and lasted a long time. Much happened. But to me, the warm, long, eventful autumn seemed to be all in vain and to waste itself to no avail.
FAREWELL
Finally winter arrived. I was glad that it did and that our yurt could be moved back into its comfortable solitude. Maybe I was also glad because lately everybody had been telling me that I was a big boy and that the time had come to show whether I could guard my flock by myself.
Sure, I thought when they told me, sure I can guard my flock and look after Grandma. But I would need a yurt of my own, a big white yurt with many pretty furnishings—a palace yurt!
The hendshe fell to me. It consisted of lambs born late in the year or out of season, and of grown animals that, for one reason or another, could not follow the big flock to the distant pasture.
In the mornings, when the big flock had left the hürde and disappeared from sight, I drove my own flock to its pasture. The big flock always went uphill to the mountain ridge, whereas the hendshe went downhill to the mountain folds that were sheltered from the wind. But first, half the flock had to be untied from the höne, and the lambs and kids led out of the yurt one by one so they would not run around inside and perhaps cause damage. For the flock’s other half all I had to do was open the door of the small wooden shed and the young animals inside, which were not tethered, came out on their own.
The days of winter, which seemed so short to the adults, seemed long, infinitely long to me. I was not to play but rather to take the flock to its pasture, and I was told to watch the wind, the sun, and the grass, to watch how the animals reacted to them, and to watch how each of the animals behaved. It was also important to be on my guard against wolves and eagles. Should any appear, I was told not to be afraid and to grab quickly my shepherd’s crook, which I carried over my shoulder like a gun; I was to aim it at them, produce a bang, and scream loudly.
But the days of winter were not only long. More than anything, they were cold. My face and hands got particularly cold. It was strange, but people in the mountains did not wear gloves: gloves did not exist. Instead, our sleeves were long, and anything sharp-edged, cold, or hot, anything we could not touch with our bare hands, we grabbed through these long sleeves. Only toys—stones covered with hoarfrost—were to be fingered by your bare hand and touched by your skin so they could come alive and change into people and animals, into yurt utensils and other such things.
As a result my hands got cold. But what did it matter? Rather, I assured myself once again of how much I had at my fingertips and of how pleasant my life was. And besides, I had my glow stone, which I carried in my breast pocket like a little stove, a tiny sun, and which my freezing hand could touch and warm itself on any time. My right hand often reached into my breast pocket, warmed itself on the glow stone, and passed on the warmth to my left hand and my face.
The stone was the size and shape of a horse dropping, was smooth and purplish-black, and every morning was heated in the embers. It retained t
he heat for a long time, and when I arrived back home in the evening and took the stone from my pocket to put it aside, it still felt lukewarm.
Every morning my dog Arsylang welcomed me when I stepped out into the world. Compared to me, the world was incomparably awesome as it lay in front of me in all its mystery. And every evening it was Arsylang, again, who brought me back safely from the world of mysteries and dangers to the shelter of my parents’ yurt. In the mornings, we had to hurry ahead of the flock, and in the evenings, follow behind. That was the number one rule for anybody who was willing to take upon himself the dangers lying in wait for his flock. But Arsylang always watched out for me: In the mornings, he ran out ahead of me and in the evenings, he trailed along behind me.
During the day, he crouched next to me and watched me play. I wanted him to join in, but smart as he was, he did not grasp that the sheep and goats had to be kept apart from the yaks and horses, or that the yurt had to be round and the stove at its center. From time to time I chided him, sometimes even shoved his neck, but then consoled him when I thought I detected in his greenish-brown eyes something like traces of guilt and of helpless sadness. Then I would stop playing the solitary game and play other games with him, games that he, too, was able to play: We skipped and ran, wrestled and rolled around in the snow. I was always the first to get tired and when I did, we would give up on that game as well and instead busy ourselves with the flock. Arsylang was quick, was sharpness itself, and skilled in guiding the flock. Sometimes he would punish a kid that had climbed on rocks or got up to some other silliness instead of eating its fill. His punishments varied. At best, the offender was given a little fright. At worst, he would chase an animal until it collapsed. But he inflicted the harsh punishment only when I wanted him to, and I swear that Arsylang’s teeth never broke the skin of any animal in the flock.
On windless Sundays we hiked up to the top of Doora Hara. From there everything was visible as if in the palm of my hand: The big rivers that were now covered with ice and snow and were glinting in places; the ails along the bank on this side of the Ak-Hem; Tewe-Mojun, the Camel’s Neck, and Saryg-Höl, the Yellow Lake, both brought into being by Sardakpan, the giant hero and creator of the Altai Mountains; the six Kazakh yurts that lay in regular intervals along the Homdu’s left bank and almost always gave off clouds of thick smoke; beyond Ak-Hem and on the Homdu’s right bank the center of the Ak-Hem sum, which was Kazakh; the bushes starting at Dshedi-Geshig and stretching along the Homdu until they disappeared in the ravine between the mountain ridges of Ortaa-Syn and Borgasun; the center of Tsengel sum, which was Tuvan; and finally the mountains in the distance, above all Harlyg Haarakan, the vast blue-white, snow-covered peak.
I had been to fewer than half of these places, but I knew all of them by name, and I knew pretty much where things were and who lived where. I knew because Grandma had a good memory and, unlike Mother, the patience to answer all my questions.
The sum, which always meant the center of the Tuvan sum, was closest to my heart. I stared at it more often and longer than at anything else, until I was able to distinguish one house from the next and thought I could even count the yurts scattered around the houses like a shooed herd. They stood out against the brown steppe, shimmering from afar. Sometimes I saw a car drive past. It dragged along a white thread of dust, which would often grow into a cloud. At other times the thread would break off and balloon into a veil of fog that grew bigger and paler until I could no longer see it.
Uncomprehending, but curious, I watched and drew Arsylang’s attention to what went on beyond the two rivers and the steppe. He would stare across, prick up his ears, and growl at moving cars. And naturally, as we kept watching, I thought of Brother and Sister and discussed them with my four-legged companion. Whenever he heard their names, Arsylang became restless and whimpered. But if his whimper began to turn into a howl, I jumped in to interrupt and tell him that howling and crying might harm Brother and Sister and thus were not allowed. Then Arsylang obeyed, fell silent, and looked at me with his submissive, pleading eyes. Once, though, I did not interrupt his whimpering—I was unable because I had burst into tears myself. Arsylang immediately joined in with his muffled howling, which in turn only made me cry harder with streams of tears and noisy sobbing. And as happened so often in those days, I could not help but think about why Brother and Sister had to leave home, and for the first time ever I felt hurt by Father, who had wanted it all to be this way.
Father idolized his own father, who had been a baj and in some people’s eyes even a kulak. However, Father called him something different when he wanted to call him anything besides “Father”: a man with a heart for his animals. That name applied to Father himself as well.
What may have moved Father, a man with a heart for his animals, to separate his children from his animals, from the proven roots and sustenance of their lives, just when they had turned old enough to take on some of his tasks and to ease his burden? Was it the salary? People talked about the salary as if it were a little fairy-tale pot that cooked porridge whenever you asked. Or was it rather obedience to the powers-that-be, which supposedly represented the people and certainly were strict? Or perhaps a kind of trust in those powers? Or was it the perceptiveness of the arate, that natural ally of the victorious working class, a class which couldn’t possibly have existed from the start?
I felt guilty after I had cried and I still felt guilty when I woke up the next morning. I had had a dream, and although I could not remember the details, I sensed it had been about Brother and Sister, and I felt something heavy inside me. And then Arsylang, too, seemed to go quiet and move with heaviness. Maybe my mood was indeed affecting him?
A few days went by before word arrived that flu had broken out in the sum. Father and Mother turned mute with fear. Their prayers, those conversations with oneself that were addressed to the mountains, the waters, and the clouds, became longer and more fervent by the day, and whereas at other times they might have taken place out of habit, as a kind of duty, they now arose from a heartfelt need. Re-awoken, my guilty conscience did not pass but gnawed at me and made my wound spread further with each passing day.
I begged the mountains, the steppe, and the sky to protect Brother and Sister from vicious and rabid dogs, from illness, and from black or white tongues. That such dangers existed I learned from the grownups as I listened to their prayers. But there were some additional pleas that I had not heard from anybody but that I came up with myself. For example, I asked of Eser-Haja, the mountain saddle, that Brother and Sister not only return happy and healthy, but also with candies. And I pleaded with the ravine below our camp and with the river that snaked through it and was now frozen stiff and seemed to be resting, to protect me from school and to let me live with Grandma and our shared flock. Because I saw that the sides of the ravine were steeper than any other I had ever seen, and because I knew that its river gathered the waters of all other rivers, I did not doubt their omnipotence.
My wishes were insatiable, my pleas unbridled. Arsylang crouched next to me and listened patiently—full of understanding, I thought—when, my arms stretched out and my head held high, I adopted the pose of an epic hero and with my high voice loudly recited my pleas.
I begged Harlyg Haarakan for a flock of a thousand. They would all be stumpy-eared Blackface, the whole one thousand of them.
“One thousand sheep—do you know how many that is?” I turned to Arsylang. “That’s all the fingers of one hundred people taken together!” Arsylang tilted his head and looked at me attentively. “One hundred is a big number, too,” I went on to tell my companion. “Where will we get so many people, hey?”
Arsylang realized he had been asked but could not grasp, let alone answer, the question. There was confusion in his eyes. “Never mind,” I consoled him and continued: “It’s winter now, so we won’t be able to gather so many people. But in the summer we will. In the morning and in the evening, there will be lots of people at the dairy plant to drop off
the milk. And if they don’t add up to a hundred, we’ll get a man to ride from ail to ail and ask that everybody quickly come to the dairy plant. People will want to know if there’s a meeting.”
Nobody liked to go to meetings. What people liked to go to were feasts. So why would anybody go to the dairy plant? The messenger, before riding on to the next ail, would announce: “Schynykbaj’s youngest, Dshurukuwaa, along with his dog Arsylang, wants to become the owner of a flock of one thousand sheep, but first he wants to see what ‘one thousand’ looks like by counting your fingers!”
I thought I detected a smile on Arsylang’s face. It was going to be fun with all the people and their fingers. Amyj, whom Father and Mother called Uncle and whom the children called Grandfather, would exclaim: “Good Heavens! Isn’t that something? So young, and already he can count to a thousand!” Aunt Tuudang, his wife, would answer: “How could it be otherwise? He is, after all, Schynykbaj’s son and Hylbang’s grandson.” They would probably say more, but what mattered was that they, too, were going to be there, and that everybody contributed his or her ten fingers. Yet it was not so simple with everybody else. I would have to watch out for Gokasch and Dupaj: If Gokasch were there, I would have a thousand and one, but if Dupaj were included, it would be nine hundred and ninety-nine. And if both of them were among the hundred people, I would have exactly one thousand fingers. This was because Gokasch had six fingers on his left hand, while Dupaj had only four on his right. Supposedly, the former had been born this way and the latter’s index finger had been torn off when he threw a lasso.
The Blue Sky Page 7
