This ritual lasted an entire summer and, while the ancestors were busy with it, the little boy was not allowed to eat or drink anything and so grew very pale. Now he was grown up, the Shaman looked at Walser’s pale skin and thought that the counting of his bones must have taken much longer than a summer. Had there been some problem? Too many bones? Too few? And what might too many, or too few bones, mean in the great scheme of things? Just the sort of puzzle the Shaman enjoyed!
After the ancestors counted the bones, they put them back together again and restored the boy with a strengthening drink of reindeer blood. As he lay in his hut, his tongue began to sing of its own accord. His mother and father, both of whom were shamans, came to listen. The singing tongue told them what kind of drum their son should carry when he went to summon up the spirits. They went out to kill a reindeer and set to work at once to flay and cure the skin.
The Shaman gave Walser another tumblerful of piss and Walser started to sing. The Shaman listened very carefully. Walser sang:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon shine still as bright.
Such tender concern as the Shaman felt, to see the tears splash down his young charge’s cheeks! But the sound of his singing seemed passing strange to the Shaman, unaccustomed as he was to European music. However, he was sure he interpreted the sounds correctly, so he killed a reindeer and stretched the skin out between two poles to dry. Due to the inclemency of the weather, he was forced to do this inside the hut, which soon smelled ripe. He stoked up the fire with dried branches of thyme and juniper, not so that the fragrant smoke would disguise the stink of rotting reindeer-hide – himself, he rather savoured that, though Walser gagged a bit – but because the incense of the burning herbs procured visions. Walser’s eyes rolled round and round in their sockets, again; splendid!
Normally, Walser shared the Shaman’s suppers, but, today, as an experiment, the Shaman decided to feed Walser the same diet he offered to the idols in the austere and windowless village god-hut, the quasi-anthropomorphs in front of whom he practised the mysteries of his religion. They thrived on a porridge made of crushed barley mixed with pine nuts and broth from boiled capercailzie. Walser supped up suspiciously, then pushed the porridge round and round the wooden bowl with his horn spoon. The dried herbs crackled above the stove. Walser’s eyes fused.
‘Hamburgers,’ he ruminated aloud. The Shaman pricked up his ears. Walser rambled off down a gastronomic memory lane; who can tell what litany the Shaman thought he was reciting?
‘Fish soup.’ Walser’s face was the mirror of his memory; he grimaced. He tried again. ‘Christmas dinner . . .’
His face convulsed and he whimpered. The words, ‘Christmas dinner’, reminded him of something most fearful, of some hideous danger; they reminded him of the main course, they reminded him of . . . ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’
He cried aloud, assailed by dreadful if incomprehensible memories, then fell into a haunted silence until another happier thought came to him:
‘Eel pie and mash.’
At that, he beamed and rubbed his stomach with his hand. Raptly attentive, the Shaman, the reader of signs, poured him more broth, and waited for further revelations.
‘Eel pie and mash, me old cock,’ said Walser appreciatively.
The Shaman decided Walser must mean the time had come to make him his shamanising drum. Next morning, he blindfolded Walser with a strip of reindeer hide, wrapped him up warmly, took him outdoors, spun him round three times on the spot to disorient him, and gave him a hearty push. Walser lurched off, the Shaman following after with an axe on his shoulder, listening intently to the soft voices of larch and birch and fir murmuring sweet nothings to him.
Walser wandered uncertainly forward, teased by increasingly unpleasant voyages his imagination took eyeless behind the blindfold until he could have sworn he heard, in the swish of the wind in the undergrowth, the hiss of a single word: ‘Homicide!’
At that, Walser snatched off his blindfold and punched the Shaman on the nose. But the Shaman was confidently anticipating irrational behaviour and punched Walser right back, although he had to jump up in the air to do so since Walser was much taller than he. However, after that, he let Walser tramp on without the blindfold.
After a while, the Shaman heard a soft, persistent knocking. Walser, who could hear nothing – and, indeed, there was really nothing to be heard – watched the Shaman suspiciously from the corner of his eye as he went up to a tree whose name Walser did not know and put his ear to the trunk. After a moment, the Shaman shook his head irritably and motioned Walser to walk on.
That is what the drumming tree said to the Shaman: ‘Yah! Fooled you!’
Soon another tree began to drum but it turned out this one, too, was enjoying a joke at the Shaman’s expense. He began to mutter under his breath. But the third drumming tree announced disconsolately: ‘I am the one.’ The Shaman immediately cut it down and made Walser carry the trunk home. He cut the hoop of the drum out of the wood from this tree as he sat in front of the stove in his odorous house.
The Shaman’s quarters were a neat, snug, square, one-storey house built of pine logs. Over the samovar hung a leather bag decorated with eagle feathers, tails of squirrels and rabbits, tin discs and little plaits of leather; this bag contained his amulet, which he let nobody see, not even Walser, even though he soon came to love Walser dearly. In his amulet resided the whole source of his extraordinary powers. His father, from whom he had inherited it, assured him he must never, ever reveal the contents. He was so secretive about the contents of his amulet bag it might well have contained nothing at all.
The Shaman and Walser did not live alone. There was a bear, a black one, not yet a year old, still almost a cub. This bear was part pet, part familiar; he was both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same time, a transcendental kind of meta-bear, a minor deity and also a partial ancestor because the forest-dwellers extended considerable procreational generosity towards the other species of the woods and there were bears in plenty on the male side of the tribal line.
The Shaman believed the bear, as a baby, had been let down from the sky in a silver cradle. He saw the cradle drop down into a thicket from a silver cord but cradle and cord had both vanished by the time he reached the baby bear. He brought it home in his fetish satchel and gave it a rag dipped in reindeer milk to suck. When the cub progressed to solids, he ate what the Shaman ate – fresh-water fish; porridge; game. He would be offered bear-steaks only after he was dead.
The Shaman pierced the cub’s ear and gave it copper earbobs, to make it pretty, and also gave it a copper collar, and put a copper bracelet on the left paw. On its first birthday, it would be taken to the god-hut and its throat would be slit in front of an ursine idol sitting above a heaping mound of skulls of bears who had met their fate in a similar fashion.
The Shaman himself did not do the deed. The bear’s executioner was elected from amongst the villagers by the spirits, who manifested their choice in dreams or by other extra-terrestrial means, and the Shaman was glad of that because he always established such close relationships with the bears that it would have broken his heart to dispatch them, even though he knew it was all for the best. The entire village crowded into the god-hut to watch the ceremony, lamenting vigorously and apologising profusely: ‘Poor bruin! We’re so sorry, bruin! How we love you, poor little bruin! How bad we feel because we must do away with you!’ Then the bear’s head would be cut off and the rest of it roasted over an open fire. The severed head, still with the copper bobs in its ears, was set in the middle of a common table and the choicest titbits, the liver, the sweetbreads, the tender meat of loin and buttock, were laid in front of the bleeding relic whilst everyone else feasted on the remainder of the bear’s anatomy. The celebrants of this Siberian sacrament pretended not to notice the provider of the banquet never touched a morsel himself.
> Bruin, now free of his fleshy envelope, would carry messages to the dead; those who ate him would partake of the strength and valour of the bear; and, besides, since death was not precisely mortal in this theology, bruin would soon be up and about again, to be born again, captured again, reared again, killed again in a perpetually recurring cycle of return.
And, golly! didn’t he taste good!
After the flesh was boiled away, his skull would be tossed on the heap in the god-hut that, were it to have been counted out, would have announced the extreme antiquity of these customs. But nobody ever counted the heap because none of them knew in what way the past differed from the present. They weren’t too sure of what was different about the future, either. Meanwhile, the bear lived on in happy ignorance.
Walser shared with the Shaman and the bear a large brass bedstead which the Shaman, waste not, want not, had retrieved from the garbage heap at the railhead of R. Soon Walser shared the bear’s vermin, too.
The Shaman believed that bears could talk to all other animals in the forest and so, sooner or later, his bear would strike up a meaningful conversation with Walser but time passed and, though the young man and the bear got on well enough together, they showed no signs of conversing. However, for want of anything better to do, time lying heavy on his hands during the long evenings, Walser taught the bear to dance. Following a deep, almost instinctual prompting, Walser led, although the bear was male too.
The first time the bear got the hang of it, another piece of the jigsaw of Walser’s past fell into the incoherence of his present, although the jigsaw was not only incomplete but not yet recognised as a jigsaw. He and the bear circled the hut. His feet knew better than his brain what he was up to and obeyed the dictates of a certain otherwise forgotten rhythm: one, two, three, one, two three . . . He and the grunting bear circled the floor in front of the stove on which the dried juniper cracked and smoked, as once he had danced on a floor of sawdust with another clawed predator. As once he had danced a –
‘Waltz!’ he cried. And then, with glad recognition: ‘Walser! Me, Walser!’
And let go the bear in order to beat himself on the chest.
‘Walser is me!’
The Shaman understood perfectly and, for once, correctly. He was very pleased when his apprentice, in his ecstasy, executed a barbarous dance and, in an ecstasy, gave himself his professional name. Walser would be able to make his debut as a sorcerer very, very soon. The Shaman stretched the reindeer hide he had prepared over the hoop of the drum and left it to cure. The Shaman carved a drumstick from alder wood, trapped a variable hare, skinned it and covered the drumstick with the pelt that, at this season, was as white as the snow that lay all around. Now all that remained was the patient wait until such time as Walser exhibited the signs, the frothings at the mouth, the fallings, the shrieks, that would show he was ready to begin drumming.
Walser, by this time, was willy-nilly picking up a few words of the Shaman’s language, hard and lumpy as it was, spiked with k’s and t’s, clogged with glottal stops, all the clicking, gulping noises of axe on wood and boots in snow. In the haphazardly functional manner of a child learning to speak, he first acquired nouns: ‘Hunger’; ‘Thirst’; ‘Sleep’. Then he acquired a rapidly increasing number of the seventy-four words in their language expressing different varieties of cold. Before long, he began to adventure with their rococo grammar.
His gradual acquisition of the Shaman’s language set up a conflict within him, for his memories, or his dreamings, or whatever they were, were dramatised in quite another language. When he spoke out loud in that language, the Shaman paid him far more attention than he did when he asked for another glass of tea in proto-Finno-Ugric, because the Shaman assumed Walser’s remembered English was the astral discourse that must be interpreted according to his own grand hypothesis, a set of conundrums that became perfectly scrutable with the aid of meditation and that distillate with which he continued to dose Walser.
The Shaman listened the most attentively to what Walser said after a dream because it dissolved the slender margin the Shaman apprehended between real and unreal, although the Shaman himself would not have put it that way since he noticed only the margin, shallow as a step, between one level of reality and another. He made no categorical distinction between seeing and believing. It could be said that, for all the peoples of this region, there existed no difference between fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magic realism. Strange fate for a journalist, to find himself in a place where no facts, as such, existed! Not that Walser would have known what a journalist was, any more. He was increasingly visited by memories; had he but known it, his head was clearing more and more day by day – he no longer crowed like a cock – but his memories were incomprehensible to him until the Shaman interpreted them.
The Shaman effortlessly reconciled the facility with which Walser spoke in tongues with the tenets of his own complex metaphysics. But, if Walser came to accept the notion he was unusually gifted with the power of dreaming, for this was the only theory of his difference available to him, sometimes, as with the rediscovery of his name, he brought himself up short:
‘Is there, as I sometimes imagine, a world beyond this place?’
Then he would sink into troubled introspection. So Walser acquired an ‘inner life’, a realm of speculation and surmise within himself that was entirely his own. If, before he set out with the circus in pursuit of the bird-woman, he had been like a house to let, furnished, now he was tenanted at last, even if that interior tenant was insubstantial as a phantom and sometimes disappeared for days at a time.
But, in the circumstances, it was useless to ask if there was a world beyond – because the Shaman knew quite well there was! Didn’t he visit it constantly? During the trances for which he possessed a hereditary disposition, he often travelled there. The Shaman was not alone in his familiarity with the world beyond; whenever he took a trip, he found the air above Transbaikalia thick with flying shamans! That world was as familiar to him as the one in which he had temporarily dropped anchor in order to discuss the proposition of another world with Walser, and that world and this world must surely be the same as the world Walser visited in his trances, because all worlds were unique and indivisible.
And that was that. End of discussion. The Shaman fell to caressing his bear.
But Walser, one day, wandered down by the railway track and found there a little tribal boy squatting on a stump in the snow, his eyes fixed on the middle distance upon whose whiteness a smudge of smoke from a departing train gradually erased itself. And on the face of this child Walser saw an expression of yearning that moved him, and, more than that, stirred his memory, for he recognised that expression, not with his eyes but with his heart; for just one moment he became again the tow-haired urchin who, a quarter-century ago, had gazed at the swelling sails, the belching smokestacks, of the ships that set out from San Francisco Bay towards the four corners of the world.
And so he remembered the sea. When he remembered the landless wastes, the infinite freedom of the eternally shifting waters, the fugal music of the deep, he knew the Shaman could never believe all that; the Shaman lived so far inland he would have taken an oar, had he ever seen one, to be a winnowing fan. And he could not interpret this vision; he could not decide what the sea meant – although, as his grasp of the Shaman’s language grew, he was able to make a few stabs at interpreting the dream material as he went along.
‘I see a man carrying a’ – he fumbled for the word – ‘a pig. You don’t know what a pig is? A little animal, good to eat. The upper part of this man’s apparel mimics the starry heavens. The lower part, by a system of parallel bars, represents, perhaps . . . felled trees . . . He brings light, and he brings food, but he also seems to bring . . . destruction . . .’
Wajser had learned to speak in images in order to recount his visions so that the Shaman would understand them but the Shaman understood them in his own way. He identified the ‘little, delicious animal??
? as the bear, of which Walser was almost as fond as he, and therefore interpreted this dream as the one in which the spirits named Walser as the bear’s executioner, for the bear’s time was drawing nigh. The spirits must also be using the dream to place an order for Walser’s shamanising costume.
The Shaman therefore carved a dress out of elk-hide and cut some stars out of the remains of an old bully-beef tin he’d picked up in R. He went to a female first cousin of his who worked in a minor pastoral capacity as village midwife and wise woman and asked her to sew up the eik-hide dress and appliqué the tin stars to the bosom. She consented to do this in the spare time left over from the complex rituals surrounding the birth of her eldest daughter’s first child. These rituals were especially complex because births were relatively rare in the community, these days, and it was necessary to deceive the spirits – to convince them no birth had, in fact, taken place, lest they come and steal away the little newcomer in order to increase the population of the other world, rather than this one.
Walser sat in front of the stove and thought of the stars and the stripes, and sang:
Oh, say can you see
By the dawn’s early light . . .
He tried to translate the song for the Shaman but words failed him and he carried on in American. The Shaman enjoyed hearing Walser sing, although to his ears, the noise was raucous and discordant in the extreme, further proof of the extraordinary things the spirits kept up their sleeves for such as he. He liked to sing along with Walser, especially after a tot of piss, modifying the alien melodies with a quarter-tone or two of his own.
But the rockets’ red glare,