by Chi Zijian
Each year Irina made sure to come back and visit me, and she always brought her artist’s tools. Painting aside, she just liked to be with the reindeer. There were colours in her paintings. She rubbed oil paints of every hue on her canvases, but I don’t care for oils. They’re very pungent.
She wasn’t as happy as before. I used to find her sitting alone on the bank, washing her paintbrushes and colouring the river. Her paintings were often published in art magazines. Each time she returned she brought those magazines to show me. Amidst all sorts of paintings, I could always recognise hers right away. They never lacked reindeer, bonfires, rivers and snow-capped mountains.
Irina usually became irritable after living with us for a month or two. She found the mountains too isolated and inconvenient for keeping in touch with the outside. Accompanied by Shiban, she’d go to Jiliu Township occasionally just to make a phone call to a friend.
Irina liked Shiban. She rarely drew people but she did several portraits of him. If Shiban wasn’t gnawing on tree bark in those paintings, then he was squatting in the camp starting a smoky fire to chase the insects away from the reindeer, or carving characters on a woodblock.
Shiban had two great loves: creating Evenki pictographs, and making birch-bark handicrafts. He preferred to speak Evenki, and when he learned that the language didn’t have a written form, he decided to invent one.
‘Such a lovely language without a script. What a pity!’ he said to us.
‘Would it be so easy to create one?’ we wondered.
‘If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I can create a way to write Evenki words.’
Maksym was good at woodcutting, so Shiban had him make stacks and stacks of woodblocks. Shiban liked to sit next to the fireplace and invent pictographs. Once he imagined a new word, he wrote it on his palm with a ballpoint pen. Shiban asked us to look at each pictograph, and if everyone agreed it was appropriate, then he’d have Maksym solemnly carve it into a woodblock.
The pictographs he invented were concise. Take ‘river’, for instance. It was just one perfectly straight horizontal line; lightning, a curving horizontal line; rain, a broken vertical line; the wind, two wave-shaped vertical lines; clouds, a pair of linked semicircles; and a rainbow was a semicircle.
Since he was always sketching on his palm, he washed his hands especially carefully, fearful that he would unwittingly wash away a newly created word.
Pictographs aside, Shiban also liked to create all sorts of mata, or birch-bark handcrafted items. He mastered various drawing and engraving skills, and carved images of flying birds, reindeer, flowers and trees on birch-bark cigarette cases, pen-holders, tea-leaf containers and jewellery boxes. His preferred motifs were waves and clouds with thunderbolts.
Shiban’s birch-bark items were very popular, and tourists from afar snapped them from the shelves of shops in Jiliu Township. Shiban used the money he earned to buy us all sorts of things, and this made Vladimir incomparably proud. Shiban’s greatest dream was to render our Evenki language in a concrete written form and ensure that it could be passed on to future generations.
But whenever Sakhar returned and found Shiban racking his brain to create pictographs, he ridiculed him and called him an idiot.
‘Who wants to speak Evenki among young people nowadays, anyhow?’ said Sakhar. ‘Those written words you invent, aren’t they destined to be buried in a grave?’
Shiban never took offence. He had a mild temperament and many people said he resembled An’tsaur. Tatiana once confided to me that Maikan had probably been pregnant with An’tsaur’s child.
‘How could that be? Maikan was missing for several days before she came back, and An’tsaur didn’t leave the camp then.’
‘Maybe Maikan tricked An’tsaur into making love with her first, and then she pretended to run away in order to confuse everyone,’ said Tatiana.
I thought Tatiana’s words were totally unfounded. That is, until one day two years ago when I was helping An’tsaur put things in order. I discovered a pastel handkerchief, and only then did I realise Tatiana’s guess might just be right.
I gestured at the handkerchief. ‘Did Irina leave this behind?’
‘Maikan gave it to me as a gift,’ An’tsaur said. ‘She has one and I have one. She said when the wind blows and makes me cry, I can use it to wipe my tears.’
Right away I recalled the handkerchief on Maikan’s head upon her return. How did Maikan get her hands on this pair of pastel-coloured handkerchiefs? I couldn’t imagine. In reality, our lives conceal countless secrets, and there is nothing bad about the days we live with those unknowns. So I didn’t feel like exploring Shiban’s parentage.
When Irina became restless in the mountains, she would put her paintings on her back and return to the city. But she’d be back again before long. On each return she was excited, saying that everywhere the city was full of people in motion, buildings, vehicles and dust, and it was really a bore.
‘It’s wonderful to come back to the mountains where I can be with the reindeer, sleep at night with stars in my eyes, hear the wind, and fill my eyes with mountains, brooks, flowers and birds. It’s so refreshing.’
But in less than a month’s time, once again she’d be frustrated that there was no bar here, and no phone, no cinema and no bookshop. She’d get drunk, and afterwards direct her fury at the paintings she hadn’t finished, say they were rubbish, and toss them in the fire.
Tatiana was often terribly anxious. Even though Irina had brought her worldly honour and everyone admired that her family had produced a painter, her daughter’s internal contradictions and pain still made her uneasy.
As for Soma, she hated school like Sakhar. When she studied in Jiliu Township, she skipped class two days out of three.
Soma liked to make friends with boys, and at fourteen, she announced to Tatiana that she wasn’t a virgin any more. Tatiana was so enraged that she brought Soma back into the mountains, forbade her to leave and made her herd reindeer every day.
But Soma despised reindeer. ‘It would be great if they all caught the plague. Then we’d all have to leave the mountains.’ Her curse aroused much aversion.
One day Irina finally quit her job and returned to us with luggage in tow.
‘Why did you leave?’ I asked her.
‘I’m tired of work, the city and men. I’ve finally grasped the fact that the only things one never tires of are reindeer, trees, rivers, the moon and the cool wind.’
After that, she stopped painting with oils and began using animal fur to create collages. According to their different hues, she cut the furred hides of reindeer and elk into different shapes, and then stitched them together to form a ‘fur mosaic’.
This sort of collage featured light brown and pale grey as the main colours. There were sky and clouds at the top, mountains rising and falling or rivers meandering at the bottom, and in the middle there were always reindeer in myriad poses.
To be frank, from the day that Irina began to make those fur mosaics, my heart was not at peace. I felt the pelts had souls, and while they might be willing to help people cover themselves against the rain and keep themselves warm, once you shredded them to amuse the eye and made them into a decoration to be hung, those furred hides might become cross.
At first Irina stated she wouldn’t take her paintings out of the mountains, but after she created two mosaics, she couldn’t resist rolling them up and taking them into the city. She looked like someone in search of a kind owner for her two dogs.
Two months later she came back with a TV reporter. She looked so excited. ‘Those two tableaux created a sensation in the art world. A gallery accepted one for its collection, and somebody bought up the other one for big money.’
The TV crew came solely on her account. They filmed the shirangju, the reindeer, the bonfire, Shiban creating pictographs, and old Nihau and her Spirit Robe and Spirit Drum.
They wanted to shoot me too. ‘We hear that you’re the wife of this people’s last Clan Chieftain. Can you ch
at with us about what you’ve experienced?’
I turned and walked away. Why should I tell them my story?
In early spring 1998 a big fire occurred in the mountains. The fire crept slowly over from the northern branch of the Greater Khingan Range. Those years the spring had been dry, the winds strong and the grasses parched, and there were frequent fire disasters. Some resulted from lightning strikes, while others were started by a smoker carelessly discarding his cigarette butt.
In order to prevent the possibility of an unextinguished cigarette destroying the forest, we invented a substitute: a unique kind of ‘mouth tobacco’. It combined three ingredients: ground tobacco, tea leaves and charcoal dust. You don’t need to light it. You just take a pinch and stick it up against your gums, and while your mouth enjoys the flavour of tobacco, it also refreshes the mind. Each spring and summer, we used mouth tobacco as a substitute for cigarettes.
Two forestry workers who carelessly discarded their cigarette butts started that fire. We had just relocated by the banks of the Argun when the fire dragon swept down upon us. Smoke billowed above the forest, and one flock of birds after another cried in panic as they escaped from the north. Their plumage was already tinted grey-black, so you can imagine the fire’s ferocity.
The Township Party Secretary and Deputy Township Head drove a jeep into the mountains. At each of the Evenki campgrounds, they showed us how to construct fire buffer zones and protect our reindeer. Helicopters flew back and forth in the sky to artificially induce rain. But the cloud cover wasn’t thick enough, so we heard the rumble of thunder but felt no raindrops.
It was then that Nihau donned her Spirit Robe, Spirit Headdress and Spirit Skirt, and drumstick in hand, and prepared to perform a Rain Dance for the last time. Her back was bent, and her cheeks and eye sockets sunken. She used two wooden woodpeckers as ritual items to pray for rain, one grey with a red tail, one black with a red forehead. She placed them in shallow water near the bank, ensured their bodies were submerged and their beaks opened towards the sky, and then began her dance.
As Nihau danced thick clouds roiled in the sky and the reindeer herd stood, heads down, on the bank of the Argun. The drum beat feverishly, but Nihau’s feet were not as nimble as before. She danced and danced, and then she coughed. She was stooped at the start, but when she coughed she bent over even further. Her Spirit Skirt dragged on the forest floor and collected dirt.
We couldn’t bear to watch her arduous movements as she prayed for rain, so one by one we moved away and mingled with the reindeer. Except for Irina and Luni, no one had the heart to observe the ritual to its end.
But after Nihau had danced for an hour, dark clouds appeared; one hour later, thick clouds shrouded the sky; after yet another hour of dancing, bolts of lightning appeared. Nihau stopped. Swaying from side to side, she walked to the bank of the Argun, picked up the pair of soaked woodpeckers, and hung them from a sturdy pine. Just then thunder rumbled and a bolt of lightning lit up the sky, and rain poured down.
In the middle of the downpour, Nihau intoned her final Spirit Song, but collapsed before she could finish:
O, Argun River
Flow towards the Milky Way.
Our parched mortal world . . .
The mountain fires extinguished, Nihau departed. She hosted many a funeral in her lifetime, but she was unable to see herself off.
Long-lost Berna returned for Nihau’s funeral. With her was the very same youth who once stole our reindeer, but now they were both middle-aged. Where he found Berna, and how they learned of Nihau’s death, we didn’t bother to ask. Nihau’s last wish was realised anyhow, for Berna returned to take part in her funeral. Nihau needn’t perform any more Spirit Dances, and the terror in Berna’s heart was banished for ever.
About six months after Nihau’s departure, Luni left too. Maksym said Luni looked just fine that day. He was sipping leisurely at his tea. ‘Give me a piece of candy,’ he said to Maksym out of the blue.
Suddenly his head tilted sharply, and his breathing ceased.
I believe that the world where Luni and Nihau went is a jovial one, because Grigori, Juktakan and Tibgur are all there.
To Irina, the scene of Nihau praying for rain was unforgettable. ‘At that instant I saw a century of the storms that have engulfed our people. It was inspiring. I must capture this on canvas.’
At first she used a fur collage to express it, but half-way through she said that animal fur was too frivolous a material; oils would be more solemn.
She fixed the canvas against a piece of wood again, dipped her brush in the oils and continued painting. She painted very slowly with great emotion, often painting until she broke down in tears.
That painting took two years to complete. It expressed a bold vision. At the top are thick, swirling clouds and black-green mountains shrouded in smoke. Nihau is dancing and reindeer surround her in the middle of the tableau. The Shaman’s face is fuzzy, but the Spirit Robe and Spirit Skirt are so vivid that if the wind were to blow ever so lightly, those twinkling metallic totems would kling and klang. At the bottom are the desolate Argun and our people standing on the bank with heads drooped, praying for rain.
We thought that painting had long ago been finished, but Irina kept saying no, it wasn’t. She painted so delicately and in such detail that it seemed she was reluctant to finish.
It wasn’t until we celebrated the first spring of the new millennium that Irina announced she had completed the tableau. At the time we were delivering fawns on the banks of the Bistaré. To celebrate the painting’s completion, we organised a bonfire gathering.
Irina drank a lot. She didn’t dance, but because she walked as if on air, she gave everyone the impression of dancing.
That was the night that Irina departed.
After she had drunk her fill, she returned to her shirangju, grabbed a handful of paintbrushes and walked towards the Bistaré, swaying from side to side. ‘I’m going to wash my brushes,’ she said as she passed. It was just a five-minute walk, and we watched her proceed towards the river.
‘When Irina’s finished cleaning her brushes, she’ll go and paint something new for sure,’ said Tatiana. ‘But she’d better not spend another two years on a single painting. How could she bear it?’
‘Irina is stupid,’ said Soma. ‘Two years just for one painting. That’s long enough to have two kids!’
Soma’s words made us laugh.
We chatted about Irina and her Rain Dance painting, and we didn’t notice that it had grown late and Irina hadn’t returned.
‘Go and see why your elder sister hasn’t returned,’ said Tatiana to Soma.
‘Tell Shiban to go!’
Shiban was squatting next to the open fire, head down, inventing pictographs while Maksym carved them on woodblocks. Shiban heard Soma. ‘No, you go. I’m busy inventing our script.’
‘Whoever it is that Irina draws in her paintings, that person should go look for her!’
‘Uh,’ said Shiban. He stood up. ‘That’s me. I’ll look for her.’
About twenty minutes later Shiban returned with a handful of brushes. They were all dripping wet, rinsed perfectly clean by the Bistaré.
‘What about Irina?’ asked Tatiana.
‘There are just brushes, no Irina.’
At noon the next day we found Irina downstream. If it weren’t for several bushy willows that stopped her at a bend in the river, who knows where she would have floated. But I hate those meddling willow trees, because Irina was a fish and she should have kept floating on the Bistaré towards a far-off place that we cannot see.
When Irina returned to the camp prostrate in a birch-bark canoe, the setting sun had dyed the surface of the water golden, as if the Heavens knew that she liked paintings, so they splashed an oil painting on the river and embedded her in it.
Just then Vladimir was helping deliver a snow-white fawn. It was certainly from the sky above because it resembled a cloud. Vladimir named the fawn after his unforgettable
mouth harp: Mukulén.
On the bank where Irina washed up, I selected a stretch of white rock and painted a lamp for her. I hoped that it would light her way as she drifted on dark, moonless nights. I knew that would be the last rock painting of my life. When I finished, I put my head against it and cried. My tears seeped into the lamp and filled it with oil to burn.
When we left the Bistaré, Shiban fastened a pair of golden bells around Mukulén’s neck. As they echoed crisply and melodiously in the wind, they awoke memories of years past. They were the sun and the moon in the sky, illuminating the paths we left on the Right Bank of the Argun – ‘Evenki trails’, as they are called – those paths trod into existence by our feet and the plum-blossom hooves of our reindeer.
PART FOUR
THE LAST QUARTER OF THE MOON
THE DAY IS just about over. The sky is dark and I’ve almost finished my tale.
Tatiana and the others must have arrived in Busu by now.
Jiliu Township is a ghost town and none of our people are there. But that tiny township was a big, big city in my eyes. I’ll never forget the two rolls of cloth that I saw in the store, one milky yellow, one deep blue-green. They stood there, one dark and one bright, like the night and the dawn.
Irina’s death made Tatiana despise life in the mountain forests, and Suchanglin descended into the depths of pain too. He began to get drunk regularly. One day he finished off his baijiu and told Vladimir to go down the mountain and buy him some more. When Vladimir refused, Suchanglin took an axe to Vladimir’s head. If Shiban hadn’t pulled them apart, Vladimir might not have escaped alive.
Vladimir shouted in pain all night.
Because of all the logging, trees have grown sparser in recent years and there’s less and less game too, while the wind blows stronger by the day. Meanwhile, the annual decline in edible moss means that we are forced to relocate more frequently with our reindeer.
The third year after Nihau left us, Maksym began exhibiting bizarre behaviour. He slit his wrist with a hunting knife, and tossed red-hot embers in his mouth. On rainy days, he took to running outside and shouting at the top of his lungs, and in arid weather he covered his head and wailed at the sight of zigzagging crevices in the soil.
