THE
WHITE SHIP
BY CHINGIZ AITMATOV
TRANSLATED BY MIRRA GINSBURG
Introduction
Chingiz Aitmatov, born in 1928, a native of Kirghizia, writes both in Russian and in Kirghiz. One of the few truly talented writers to have emerged from the government's drive to transform the non-Russian nationalities in Russia into parts of the total Communist state, he is also one of the tiny handful that has managed to retain a good deal of originality and artistic integrity.
While most of the writers of the newly "modernized" nationalities produce crude versions of the dreary "Socialist Realist" fiction required by the Soviet rulers—fiction that is little more than propaganda of the current Communist line Aitmatov writes stories and novels about living people as he sees and feels them. He does not compose eulogies to the glorious "new Soviet man" created by the Party and the Communist society, nor does he confine his vision to what he is officially, expected to see.
Aitmatov is profoundly rooted in his people's past, as well as their present. And he writes of what he knows with a simplicity and tenderness that bring his prose close to the poetry of the ancient tales and epics of his people. He has won for himself a place both in modern literature and in the splendid tradition of Kirghiz folklore, which he knows and so obviously loves.
The Kirghiz people, somewhat over two million, occupy an area in Soviet Central Asia that borders on China in the southeast and Kazakhstan in the north. For the past two thousand years they have been overrun by a variety of conquerors and engaged in many wars and migrations of their own. In the distant past they had a flourishing culture, traded actively with China and the Arab countries, and had their own writing, which is still found on burial stones. Their ancient culture has long been obliterated, their writing lost, their wealth plundered. Yet there remains a vast oral literature that testifies to the people's pride and strength, humor and wisdom. A Mongol-Turkic people, Moslem since the ninth century A.D., they have traditionally led a nomadic existence, raising cows, sheep, horses, and goats, and only marginally engaging in agriculture.
Kirghizia was annexed by Russia a little less than a hundred years ago. At that time, most of its people were illiterate and poor, living in subjection to the beys—the rich land and cattle owners—and to various khans and princelings. It was only in 1936, almost twenty years after the Russian revolution, that the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic was established. It was also after the revolution that a system of schools was gradually set up, eliminating most of the illiteracy and providing the language with a written alphabet—first Arabic, then Latin, and later Cyrillic. And it was then that the modern Kirghiz literature began to develop.
As everywhere else in Russia, the government applied a great deal of energy to extirpating religion and its established institutions as supporters of the old way of life. Along with schooling, literacy, and—in certain areas—improvement in material conditions came many conflicts. The educated younger generation turned its back in contempt not only upon religion, but also upon the ancient traditions connected with it, and frequently preceding it. Many ancient monuments were destroyed, oral literature was neglected, and despite the declared official policy of encouraging national minorities, the sense of national identity was frowned on (and often persecuted) as divisive and counterrevolutionary.
Some of these problems are reflected in The White Ship, which produced a violent controversy when it first appeared in January 1970 in the then still liberal Soviet monthly Novy Mir, edited by the poet Alexander Tvardovsky.
What enraged the critics most was Chingiz Aitmatov's courage in revealing—in microcosm—some of the brutality, corruption, indifference, frustration, and suffering that still exist in Soviet Russia, as, indeed they do throughout the human world. In Communist Russia, the cry went up, such things cannot exist.
And yet, The White Ship—written chiefly from the view-point of a lonely, imaginative child—reveals precisely these evils. It also reveals nobility of spirit, love, kindness, and selfless dedication.
The White Ship, a moving and absorbing novel, is rich on many levels beyond the story itself. Aitmatov raises in it fundamental questions of good and evil, of ethics—in the relations between man and man, man and nature, man and his past (tradition, religion, legend—all that gives a national group its own unique character). He also examines the problem of power and its effect both on those who have it and those who don't.
Although Aitmatov avoids generalizations, his book can also be read as a parable. Orozkul, the forest overseer and head of the tiny forest post where the story unfolds, is, in a sense, the carrier of evil. The good and innocent are helpless against him. The brutal will of the powerful prevails and destroys both the good and the innocent.
But the prime tenet that rules Soviet literature—Socialist Realism—demands that all fiction be "optimistic" and "life- affirming"; that it teach a lesson and lead to action; that it help in the building of the Communist state.
From this naive and vicious position, which has stifled all valid art in Russia for many decades, attacks upon The White Ship were launched in a number of magazines and newspapers. True, there were also many defenders of the novel. Among the participants in the controversy were writers, critics, and readers who wrote in to register their views. The level of the controversy was almost wholly superficial and utilitarian. The only assertion of the artist's need and right to create according to his vision came from Aitmatov himself, in a long letter of reply to his critics that appeared in the Literary Gazette. The rest of the articles and letters argued chiefly the question of whether the novel was truly pessimistic and hopeless, or whether, by exposing evil, it called upon the readers to fight it.
Another "sin" of the book is that it reveals how deeply the traditional strain still permeates the lives and minds of men—especially, perhaps, of those who live on the land, and in areas away from the "civilizing"—and dehumanizing—influence of the big cities and of the strenuous "rationalist" propaganda of Communist officialdom.
It is extremely interesting that, in the matter of tradition, the novel shows a skip of a whole generation, or perhaps even of two generations. Orozkul, the personification of the Stalinist official longing for the "good old times" when the powerful were "properly respected," dismisses all imagination, all love for the traditional, as nonsense. Many of the younger men, "educated" by the party and the army, also dismiss tradition as old wives' tales. Yet, there are also young men like the ex-soldier who drives a tractor at the Soviet farm, who comments poignantly on the dissolution of the old clan ties: "We Bugans don't even know one another anymore."
Aitmatov skillfully weaves into his book the old and the new. Beneath the story of The White Ship runs, as a major theme, the lovely ancient tale of the Horned Mother Deer— the totem figure of the Bugu clan, protectress of her people and bringer of fertility. This tale is handed on from grandfather to grandson. The very young and the very old become continuous links in the interrupted chain of tradition.
Significantly, the tragic ending of the book comes when the old man is compelled by those in power to kill the sacred Mother Deer, the central image of the tale. The boy is robbed of the only two bright, solid figures in his life. Racked by fever, crushed, despairing, sickened by the sight of the brutish humans devouring the magic, ancient Mother, he walks into the river, seeking fulfillment of his own secret legend. He will become a fish and swim far, far away, to seek out the proud, glorious white ship he has seen sailing upon the distant lake and the father who had long ago abandoned and forgotten him.
Many of the critics were outraged by this "suicide" of a child. Failing to see the book as a many-faceted parable, some of the letter writers argued indignantly that the parent
less boy should have been placed in an orphanage, that his grandfather should have been sent to an old age home, and that the uncle, Orozkul, tyrannical, corrupt, and brutal, should have been sent to prison.
The criticism of Aitmatov's literary colleagues was not on a much higher level. The boy's action, some said, was due to a morbid mind and a warped sense of reality, resulting from his isolation in a tiny village. Aitmatov was accused of saying that reality and beauty were incompatible. He was attacked for permitting evil to triumph over goodness and beauty. His novel was criticized for "leading to hopelessness and despair," for not pointing to bright, "realistic" alternatives, for showing the evil as strong and the good as weak. And so on, in the same vein.
To these criticisms Aitmatov answers patiently: the death of a hero need not be a defeat—it may be a victory. And what remains need not be utter darkness and the executioner. For when the book ends, there remains—the reader and what happens within him. But the crux of his reply is a clear statement of a writer's duty to himself and to his art: "Some readers ask, 'Was it not in the author's power to arrange his hero's fate differently?' No, it was not in the author's power. The logic of a work of art follows its own rules, and these rules are not subject to the author's will."
Elsewhere, Aitmatov wrote: "In art, facts cannot replace the truth of character. . . . The living core of every work of art is man."
Unfortunately, as in so many other cases in Soviet Russia, there was a sad postscript to the controversy provoked by The White Ship. When the novel appeared later in 1970, as part of a collection of Aitmatov's works, it contained some changes in its final pages, attempting to bring it closer to some of his critics' ideas. Clearly, the author was compelled to violate the spirit of his own work as the price for its publication in book form. The Orozkuls are obviously still the masters of Soviet life. And this is the tragedy of the author, as well as of his hero.
This translation of The White Ship follows its original version, as published in Novy Mir. The novel, as the author intended it to be, carries its own truth, and the reader, I hope, will recognize and welcome it, and come to love this powerful and tender book.
MIRRA GINSBURG
1
He had two tales. One was his own, unknown to anybody else. The other he had heard from grandfather. Then one day both were gone. That's what this story is about.
He was seven years old, going on eight.
First came the schoolbag. A black imitation-leather schoolbag, with a shiny metal snaplock that slipped into a catch. With an outside pocket for small things. A most extraordinary ordinary schoolbag. That was, perhaps, the beginning of it all.
Grandfather bought it from the visiting store truck, which made the rounds of the cattle breeders in the mountains and occasionally looked in on the forest post in the San-Tash Valley.
Beyond the post, the forest preserve rose densely up the slopes and ravines to the mountaintops. There were only three households here, but once in a long while the store truck would visit the foresters.
The only boy in the post, he was always the first to see the truck.
"It's coming!" he would shout into the doors and windows. "The store truck is coming!"
The road that wound its way here from the banks of the Issyk-Kul Lake ran through deep gorges, along the riverbank, over rocks and gulleys, all the way. It was a very difficult road. When it came to Outlook Mountain, it went up slantwise from the bottom of the canyon, then made a long descent down the steep, bare slope toward the forest post. Outlook Mountain was near the post. In the summer, the boy climbed up there almost daily to watch the lake through his binoculars. And the road could be seen from the mountain as plain as the palm of his hand—the curves and turns, the rare pedestrians, the riders, and, of course, the cars.
This time—it was a hot summer day—the boy was swimming in his pond when he caught sight of the truck raising dust as it came down the slope. The pond was at the edge of the river, where the water ran shallow over the gravel bottom. Grandpa had dammed it up with rocks. If it were not for the dam, who knows, the boy may have been drowned a long time ago. And, as grandma kept saying, the river would have washed his bones white and carried them away to Issyk-Kul, where fish and other water creatures would be staring at them. And nobody would search for him or mourn him, because there was no reason why a boy should be forever fooling mound in the water. So far, he hadn't drowned. If he did— who knows—maybe grandma really would not run to save him. If he was kin, at least, she said, but he was only a stranger. And a stranger, no matter how you feed him or look after him, remains a stranger. A stranger . . . But what if he didn't want to be a stranger? And why was he the stranger? Maybe it wasn't he, but she, who was the stranger?
But all this will come later in the story—this, and grandfather's dam. . . .
Well, then, he caught sight of the store truck as it came downhill, trailing a cloud of dust behind it. And he leaped with excitement, as if he knew he would get that schoolbag. He ran out of the water and quickly pulled his pants over his skinny thighs. Still wet and blue—the water in the river was cold—he hurried down the path to be the first to announce the coming of the truck.
The boy ran fast, jumping over low shrubs and going around boulders that were too big to jump across. He did not stop anywhere—not by the tall grasses, nor by the rocks, even though he knew that they were not plain grasses and rocks. They could take offense or even trip him up. "The store truck's coming, I'll be back," he cried as he ran past the "resting camel"—the reddish, humped granite boulder sunk chest-deep in the earth. At ordinary times the boy never passed by without patting the camel on the hump. He patted it with a light, familiar gesture, as grandpa patted his short- tailed gelding, as if to say, "Wait here, I must be off on business." Another of his boulders was a "saddle"—half-black, half-white, with a dip in the middle—and he could ride it like a horse. There was also a "wolf," brown-gray, hoary, with powerful shoulders and a heavy brow. The boy would stalk it on all fours and take aim at it. But his favorite was the "tank" —a huge, massive boulder right at the river's edge, the sand and gravel washed away around it. At any moment, the "tank" would plunge into the water, and the river would boil and churn and rise in fierce white-crested waves. That was what tanks did in the movies—down from the bank into the water, and on and on. The boy saw movies very seldom and therefore remembered everything. His grandfather sometimes took him to see a movie at the livestock-breeding farm in the neighboring village beyond the mountain. This was how a "tank" appeared by the water, ready to rush across the river. There were also other rocks, some "bad," some "kind," some even "sly," or "silly."
Among the plants there were also "favorites," "brave ones," "fearful," "evil ones," and a variety of others. The thornbush, for example, was the chief enemy. The boy fought it dozens of times every day, but there seemed no end to their war—the bush continued to grow and multiply. The wild convolvulus, though also a mere weed, was the cleverest and merriest plant. Its flowers welcomed the sun in the morning better than any others. Other grasses did not know anything: morning, evening—it didn't matter to them. But the convolvulus—the moment it felt the warm rays of the sun it opened its eyes and laughed. First one eye, then another, then all the furled flowers opened up. White, pale blue, lilac, every color. . . . And if you sat quietly, quietly near them, it seemed that they were silently whispering among themselves about something. Even the ants knew this. In the morning they ran along the sterns and flowers, squinting in the sunshine and listening to what the flowers were saying. Perhaps they told each other about their dreams?
In the daytime, at noon, the boy liked to climb into the thickets of long-stemmed, reedlike shiraldzhins. The shiraldzhins were tall; they had no flowers, but they smelled good; and they grew in patches, gathering in dense groups, allowing other plants to come near them. The shiraldzhins were true friends, they offered the best hiding place, especially when you were hurt and wanted to cry where nobody could see. They smelled like
the edge of a pinewood. It was hot and quiet among them, yet they did not shut out the sky. You could stretch out on your back and stare into the sky. At first, you could see nothing through the tears. But then the clouds would come up above and do whatever you wanted them to do. The clouds knew you were not happy, they knew you wanted to run away somewhere, to fly away where nobody would ever find you. And then everybody would sigh and moan: The boy is lost, where shall we find him now? And to prevent it, to keep you from disappearing, to make you lie still and watch them, the clouds would turn into anything you wished. The same clouds could turn into many things. All you needed was to see what they were showing.
And it was quiet among the shiraldzhins, and they did not shut out the sky. That's what they were like, the shiraldzhins, which smelled of hot pine.
There were many other things he knew about the grasses. Toward the silvery feather grass down in the meadow, he had a tolerantly condescending attitude. It was silly, that leather grass! Scatterbrained. Its soft, silky tassels could not live without wind. All they did was wait to see which way it blew, and then they bowed in the same direction. Not one or two, but all together, the whole meadow, as at a command. And if it rained or stormed, the feather grass went frantic, it did not know what to do, where to hide. It tossed and flattened, pressed itself against the earth. If it had feet, it surely would run away, just anywhere at all. But actually it was only pretending. The moment the storm was over, the giddy tassels were back at their game with the wind, bowing wherever it blew.
Alone, without playmates, the boy lived with the simple things around him, and only the store truck could make him forget everything and rush to meet it. After all, a store truck wasn't like stones and grasses. There wasn't a thing you could not find in it!
By the time the boy reached home, the store truck was already entering the yard behind the houses. The houses in the post faced the river. The front yard passed directly into the slope that ran down to the bank, and on the other side, across the river, the forest rose steeply from the washed-out ravine up the mountainside. The only way to drive up to the houses was from the back. If the boy had not made it in time, nobody would have known that the store truck was already there.
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