by Chi Zijian
That laugh reminded me of the strange emotion that swept across Dashi’s face when he spread out the wolf-skin and urged his hawk to pounce on it. Her laughter made your hair stand on its end, and it drove Luni and me out of our shirangju. We looked dumbly at the sky, longing for a gust of wind that would whisk away her cackling.
I had become a young lady, and Luni had also grown up and begun to grow a beard. We watched Tamara wither day by day, her back bent over.
One time little Dashi came to our shirangju. He looked at Mother and suddenly said, ‘Your head is covered with snow. Aren’t you cold?’
Tamara knew little Dashi was referring to her increasingly numerous grey hairs. ‘I’m cold indeed,’ she said bleakly. ‘But what’s to be done? Perhaps a thunderbolt will take pity on me, carry me away and put an end to my suffering.’
From then on, each time there was a thunderstorm Mother would run off into the forest. I knew what she sought. But the thunderbolts would not serve as a noose around her neck. They just wanted to strike her with the raindrops they had brought to life.
Soaked and shivering, her hair dishevelled, she would return safely to the camp, and then Nidu the Shaman would begin to chant. As soon as he began, little Dashi would rush into Maria’s embrace and wail. That song was too sorrowful.
Then the Japanese made their appearance. The year of their arrival, two major events occurred in our urireng: Nadezhda fled with Jilande and Nora back to the Left Bank of the Argun, an act that pushed lonely Ivan into an abyss. And I married a man, with hunger playing my matchmaker.
PART TWO
MID-DAY
ONCE THE FLAMES in the fireplace grow faint, the coal’s face is no longer red but grey.
I spot two embers that stand tall. A bellyful of tales seems to be smouldering within them, waiting for me to divine what they might be.
Traditionally, if you see an upright ember in the morning that means someone will arrive today – you should hurry to bow and offer a greeting, otherwise you’re neglecting your guest. If you see an upright ember in the evening, you should knock it over because it foreshadows a ghost’s arrival. But it is neither dawn nor dusk. So what’s coming: a human or a ghost?
It’s noon and the raindrops are still falling. An’tsaur walks in.
An’tsaur isn’t a ghost, but he doesn’t resemble a human either. I’ve always felt that the one to remain with me to the very end would be a Spirit.
When An’tsaur came into the shirangju just now, the embers collapsed. Perhaps they really do live and die for him.
An’tsaur puts a birch-bark basket in front of me. It contains several items he has picked up while tidying the campground: a roe-deerskin sock, a small iron hip flask, a colourful handkerchief, a deer-bone necklace and several white reindeer bells, all unintentionally left behind when Tatiana and the others moved this morning.
In the old days, when we relocated we always used soil to fill the holes we had dug for the fireplace and to fix the shirangju poles in place. Then we put all the rubbish together and buried it deep to avoid the stench, and so as not to scar the place that hosted us.
Even though they began taking stock of their possessions several days before departure, when the moment came to set out early this morning, they still showed signs of confusion. From what they left behind, it seems not only were our people confused, so were our reindeer. As they jostled and butted one another, their bells fell to the ground.
But that makes sense. As Beriku said to me, the reindeer will be cooped up in pens with barbed-wire fences. They know they won’t be free to roam in the mountains, so what use would bells be? They might just as well be dangling mute bells from their necks.
One look at the deerskin sock and you know it’s Maksym’s. It’s so big.
The hip flask is Vladimir’s. In the wee hours of the morning I saw him drinking, his mouth open, guzzling the baijiu while cooing ‘ululu’ as if he were very gay, or maybe very sad. It reminded me of old Dashi’s throaty birdcall.
Vladimir forgot his flask. He’ll be agitated when he gets to Busu, won’t he? When Vladimir gets upset, it’s Shiban who suffers because Vladimir takes it out on him. Vladimir either curses him for no reason or throws rocks at him and threatens to stone him to death. Busu is a town and perhaps stones aren’t so easy to come by, so Vladimir won’t be able to hit Shiban, he’ll just swear at him. But cursing doesn’t hurt the flesh, so Shiban won’t have it so bad.
The coloured handkerchief is Beriku’s. He loves to toy with girls’ knick-knacks, and once I saw him wrap that handkerchief around his head, jerk his head up and down and shout ‘Hey! Hey!’ as he danced, like a woodpecker hammering ‘tuk tuk’ against a tree.
Beriku loved to dance as a youngster, and he used to dance quite handsomely too. His waist and neck did not shake as violently then. But after he bummed around in the city for a year and returned to the mountains, his dancing wasn’t fit to watch. His waist rocked erratically and his neck gyrated madly. It made me feel like his neck was attached by a single tendon.
I hate the way he makes his voice hoarse and yells ‘Hey! Hey!’ when he dances. He was blessed with a crisp, clear voice, but he insists on making it raspy.
This deer-bone necklace is Lyusya’s and she has worn it for several decades. It was polished by Viktor, my eldest son, and he strung it just for her. When Viktor was alive she wore it daily, but since he died, she only wears it to weep under the full moon.
When she left early this morning, I saw her clutching the necklace. She must have thought leaving it elsewhere was risky. Most probably a few reindeer weren’t willing to get on the truck, and as everyone scrambled higgledy-piggledy to grab them, Lyusya helped out and lost the necklace in the midst of it all. It seems the thing you least want to lose slips out of your hands most easily.
An’tsaur adds a few pieces of firewood from wind-felled trees to the hearth. We never chop live trees for firewood. There are many things in the forest that can feed a fire, like naturally shed dry branches, trees struck by lightning, and those blown down by strong winds. We aren’t like the Han who station themselves in the mountain forests. They chop down trees that are perfectly healthy, hack them into little pieces of firewood and stack them all around their houses.
It hurts just to look at those piles. I still remember many years ago when Valodya passed by a Han hamlet for the first time and saw mounds of firewood in front of every household. He came back and said anxiously to me that they didn’t just cut the trees down and transport them to the outside world. They burned live trees every day! Sooner or later all the trees would be chopped down and burned, and then how would we and our reindeer survive?
Valodya was my second husband, the last Clan Chieftain of our people, and he was far-sighted about such things. The day that Tatiana summoned all the members of our urireng to vote on whether to leave the mountains, I recalled Valodya’s words. When I cast my piece of birch-bark into the hearth – and not towards the Spirit Drum left behind by Nihau – I saw Valodya’s smile there in the firelight.
An’tsaur adds water to my tea mug. ‘We’ll have meat at noon, Até,’ he says. I nod.
Ever since Beriku told An’tsaur to address me as ‘Nainai’ – ‘grandmother’ in the Han fashion – and not ‘Até’ in our language, An’tsaur stopped calling me anything. He probably thinks that now those who addressed me as ‘Eni’ and ‘Bergeng’ for ‘sister-in-law’ in Evenki and ‘Gugu’ for ‘aunt’ in the Han tongue have all left, and no one requires that he use ‘Nainai’ any more, so he can call me ‘Até’ again.
If I am an old tree that has lived through the wind and the rain without falling to the earth, then the children and grandchildren at my knees are branches on that tree. No matter how old I am, those branches continue to flourish. And of all those branches, An’tsaur is the one I most adore.
An’tsaur’s speech is often rather curt. After he said we’d have meat for lunch, he went to fetch half a pheasant left over from yesterday.
/> Knowing they were departing for good, the mountain-leavers wanted to treat us to a feast. As the time for departure approached, Maksym, Suchanglin and Shiban went hunting daily, but invariably returned empty-handed.
In recent years, like trees, wild animals have become increasingly scarce in the mountains.
Fortunately, Shiban killed two pheasants yesterday, and Suchanglin used a lenz – a contraption with sharp wooden stakes that allows fish in but not out – to corner a few fish in a cove, so last night there was a pleasant aroma wafting around the bonfire.
Maksym told me that one day when they were searching for prey they spotted two grey cranes flying over a low-lying marsh in the forest. But just when Maksym was about to open fire, Shiban stopped him. Shiban said they’d be leaving the mountains soon, so they should save those birds for An’tsaur and me. If not, we couldn’t gaze upon the loveliest fowl, and our eyes would suffer. Only my Shiban could say something so adorable.
I slice a piece of pheasant and throw it on the fire in veneration of the Fire Spirit, and only then do I sprinkle it with salt, spear it with a willow branch, and put it over the fire to roast. As An’tsaur and I eat the pheasant, he suddenly says: ‘Look, Até, it’s raining. Will there be water again in Rolinsky Ravine?’
Rolinsky Ravine was once a mountain stream with a plentiful source, and the children all loved to drink from it. But it ran dry six or seven years ago.
I shake my head, for I know one rainfall can’t revive a mountain stream. Disappointed, An’tsaur puts down his food, stands up and walks away.
I put my food down too and sip my tea. Seeing the flames burning vigorously again, I’d like to continue recounting our tale. If rain and fire, this pair of foes, have tired of hearing me rattle on this morning, I’ll have An’tsaur bring in the items that are inside the birch-bark basket, and they can lend an ear.
They must have been left behind for some very important purpose. So let the roe-deerskin sock, coloured handkerchief, hip flask, deer-bone necklace and reindeer bells come now and listen to my tale!
***
If you had arrived in the forests on the Right Bank of the Argun seventy years ago, you’d have frequently encountered two things hanging between the trees: wind-burial coffins and kolbo for storing goods.
Actually, it was beneath a kolbo that I first encountered Lajide. Prior to that, a kolbo had just been a cache hanging high above the forest floor, but once Lajide and I became engaged under one, in my mind a kolbo became a square-shaped moon, because it lit up and warmed my formerly gloomy and solitary heart.
In the autumn of the twenty-first year of the Republic of China, what is now called 1932, Turkov the anda brought news to our urireng of the arrival of the Japanese. He came on horseback, bringing only a small amount of ammunition, flour, salt and liquor. He said the world belonged to the Japanese now, and that they had established the state of ‘Manchukuo’ in the historical homeland of the Manchu. Rumour had it that they intended to launch an attack on the Soviet Union very soon. Many Russian anda in Jurgang feared persecution by the Japanese, so they returned to the Left bank. Trading became difficult and goods were in short supply.
Hase was furious that these measly items were all Turkov could offer us in exchange for more than one hundred squirrel pelts and our high-quality velvet antlers. ‘Don’t try to use the Japanese as an excuse to cheat us!’ he said. ‘Rolinsky was never so black-hearted!’
Turkov became hostile. ‘I risked my neck to bring these things to you! Look around you now. How many blue-eyed anda still dare to do business under the eyes of the Japanese? If you think you’re getting a raw deal, I’ll take my things and be off. You can find somebody else to trade with!’
Back then with only a few remaining, our bullets were like the stars in the sky at dawn, the bags we used to store flour were shrivelled stomachs; and the salt our reindeer loved to lick was like snow on the ground in the spring wind, sparser by the day. The items that Turkov brought were life-saving straws to be grasped no matter how high the price. In our hearts we cursed him: sly dahé! But we still traded with him.
Turkov appeared quite pleased as he readied his departure. ‘Word has it that the Japanese are going to come in the mountains and eradicate people with blue eyes.’ He looked to Jilande. ‘Start running now – don’t wait here to die!’
Jilande had always been chicken-hearted, and Turkov’s words turned his face white and set his teeth chattering.
‘I’ve lived here in the forest all my life,’ he said tearfully. ‘Why do the Japanese want to “eradicate” me?’
‘The colour of your eyes! If they were black like the soil here, that’d be fine. You could take root. But they’re sky-blue, and that’s a dangerous colour indeed. You wait and see!’
Then Turkov turned to Nora. ‘And if you don’t flee, you’ll be even more unlucky. The Japanese like to bed pretty blue-eyed maidens!’
Nadezhda’s hair was already mostly grey, but she still looked quite sturdy. ‘What’s to be done?’ she said to Ivan, crossing herself. ‘Let’s ask for Nidu the Shaman to help us turn our eyes and hair black!’
At crucial times like this, Nadezhda turned to our Spirits for aid. Perhaps because Nidu the Shaman was very close, while the Virgin Mary was far, far away.
‘What’s wrong with blue eyes?’ said Ivan. ‘My wife and children just happen to be blue-eyed! If any Japanese dares “eradicate” them, I’ll “eradicate” what’s sandwiched between his legs first!’
Ivan’s words made everyone break out in laughter, everyone but Nadezhda, that is. She looked wistfully at Jilande and Nora, like a starving person who has picked two lovely mushrooms but – suspecting they’re poisonous – just stares at them.
Jilande was listless, like grass suddenly covered in frost. As for Nora, she regarded her hands vacantly. Since she had dyed her fingernails in various hues, they weren’t pink. They were purple and blue, yellow and green. Perhaps she was wondering if she could dye her fingernails, couldn’t she dye her eyes black?
Jilande wasn’t as rugged as his father Ivan. The frail boy had no interest in hunting and preferred women’s chores like tanning hides, making birch-bark containers, sewing leather gloves, or gathering wild vegetables.
All the women in the urireng were fond of Jilande, but Ivan lamented that his son didn’t act like a boy. ‘How can a man who can’t hunt win a wife?’ he’d say.
The thing Nora most loved was dyeing fabric. She extracted liquid from fruits or blossoms, using blueberries to dye white cloth blue, and red love-peas for a bright pink tint.
She even coloured one piece with lily extract. Nora first picked a summer’s worth of pink lily blossoms. She mashed them into a paste, squeezed an extract from it, which she salted and diluted with water, then let it stew in a pot all afternoon. In the evening, she rinsed the dyed cloth in the river, and spread it out on a blue-green poplar.
The first to see the cloth was Maria who thought it was the sun setting on our camp, and she shouted for everyone to come out. It really did resemble the sky at sunset, the rosy clouds after the rain, so lively and fresh. We all thought it was the Spirits revealing themselves!
If not for the distant sound of Nadezhda scolding Nora, no one would have realised what it was. ‘You didn’t clean the pot you used to dye your cloth. How am I to cook dinner?’
Only then did everyone gazing from afar realise that it was just a piece of dyed fabric, and they all left with a sigh.
But I didn’t leave, I treated it as a genuine swathe of sunset, for that’s what it seemed. Those watery pink hues weren’t consistent, as if there were tiny beads of rain and wisps of cloud mixed up inside. This very cloth later served as the decorative border for my wedding gown.
Nora liked to bring her batik to our shirangju to show Luni. Like Ivan, however, Luni was fond of his rifle. ‘If there’s no game to hunt, people will starve,’ he said. ‘But if you’ve got one set of thick clothes and another single-layered one made from animal hides
, that’s enough for a lifetime. Cloth is something you can do without.’
When Nora heard Luni say that, she fumed. ‘How could you raise a son as idiotic as Luni!’ she said to Tamara who was lost in thought.
But despite this reproach, Tamara didn’t get angry. She gave Nora a glance, looked at the cloth in her hands, and sighed. ‘Even if you keep on dyeing, it still won’t be as lovely as my feather skirt! Who dyed those feathers? The Spirits! Can your colours compare with Theirs?’
Nora stomped off, vowing never again to show us her batiks. But the very next time she dyed a cloth, she still brought it over triumphantly.
After Turkov left, Nadezhda didn’t focus so intently on her chores. More than once she cut her finger slicing meat. I frequently saw her talking about something with her daughter until Nora’s eyes brimmed with tears.
One day when Yveline and I were fastening bells to the fawns, Nora suddenly came running over. ‘Where do the Japanese come from? The Left Bank or the Right?’ she asked Yveline.
‘What have the Japanese got to do with the Argun?’ Yveline said indignantly. ‘Neither bank is their land! You have to cross the sea to get to where they live. People crossed to Japan on rafts once upon a time, but the ones who arrived there never returned!’
‘If they have nothing to do with the Argun,’ said Nora, ‘why would they come here?’
‘Wolves will flock to any place that has game but lacks good hunters,’ said Yveline.
The germ of Nadezhda’s idea to flee may have been planted by Turkov, but it was a strange encounter on Hase’s part that finally prompted her to take action.
One day when Hase was searching for two stray reindeer, he came across an old Han man with a birch-bark basket on his back. He was gathering astragalus root. Hase asked him if he was collecting it for deer foetus extract, because when we decoct it in a metal pot, we often add medicinal herbs like palm-shaped ginseng and astragalus root.
