Finally, a series of unearthly cries, very like those of the parrots above me as I walk back to my car, a greater arching of back and flailing of limbs, something like a breathy gasp from no visible source, and relative silence. It was apparently over. I was shaking, and I became aware that Puniekka was staring at me; I could see the whites of her eyes glowing in the moonlight, sending it seemed their own light from within. She said, “Go to sleep, Chane Aluesfan.” Then I was waking up and thinking, What a weird dream! I went on thinking that until, while looking through my notes a couple of days later, I found what I had written during the … whatever-it-was.
A hallucination, that useful word. Of course. I hallucinate, we hallucinate, Berozhinski hallucinates; yes, but when all of us hallucinate, each one of us hallucinating the same thing, then that is the hallucination we are pleased to call reality. It got worse. I once saw Puniekka turn into an owl. I once saw Ullionk, one of Puniekka’s students, appear in two places at once. An old woman seen in a yurt, looking up from her pot, had a dog’s head. I attributed this sort of thing to inhaling or eating the psychotropic fungal dust that was everywhere about the camp. A reasonable explanation.
I tried, like a good ethnologist of the Vierchau school, to step into their reality. Here I failed utterly, which was the last straw. My notes were a confused mess, my glossary a nonsense. My only half-useful informant was that same Ullionk, a pie-faced girl of seventeen or so, who was often to be found staring into space with her mouth drooping, or speaking animatedly to beings invisible. A schizophrenic, clearly, but well in with Puniekka and her clique. And friendly, when she wasn’t being nuts.
A week or so after the night of the demon lover, I approached Ullionk and asked her, in my paltry Yakut, why it was that no one was paying attention to me, why nobody would teach me anything about teniesgu, which is what the Chenka call the sort of magic practiced by women. She was amazed that I wanted to learn. I asked her what she thought I was doing in Puniekka’s yurt, why she thought I was asking all those questions. Because you are Vaarka’s ketzi, she answered, with the tone of saying something all the world knows. Vaarka was Marcel. A ketzi is an animal, usually a dog, but sometimes a sheep, in which a shaman has imprisoned a troublesome spirit. For a moment my gape of mouth mimicked Ullionk’s in high fit. When I recovered I asked whether Vaarka had told them this, and she said, No, he said you were to be taught teniesgu, but it was clear to everyone that this was a joke, that you were ketzi. Why was this? Because, she explained, night after night spirits have come to enjoy you. Surely you know that no one can be a fentienskin, a shamaness, without being enjoyed by one of the rishen or rishot. We must have dala from them, and as we are women, sometimes there is a child.
No, actually, that had slipped my mind, although it’s fairly clear in Marcel’s book. I thought, though, that it was figurative, that it was just a kind of dream. (Just a dream,by the way, is an expression not much used among shamans.) Yes, they came, she continued, and the ogga within you turned them away. Puniekka told her rish — husband to bring all his friends. Puniekka said she would not lie with him until they had enjoyed you and given you dala. But they could not come to you. And she named here all the seducers who had tried and failed. So at last, Puniekka gave up on you and allowed her rishen to give her dala. She is not angry at you, but wishes Vaarka would put his ketzi in a young dog, or send it back to the other world, as it is very inconvenient having one in an Aluesfan, and though it was a good joke, it had stopped being funny.
I was fuming after I heard this. Marcel had said he was a kind of dog, which was fine if he wanted to believe that, but now this wacko was telling me I was less than a dog, a kind of spiritual trash can. And, rotten with pride as I was, I was mad to see Marcel and have him get me out of this insane position. I said this to Ullionk and she looked at me as if I were crazy, not very comfortable to get such a look from an actual crazy person, and reminded me that it was currently Vshenda, a long ceremonial period around the autumn equinox, in which sexual segregation was strongly enforced. I would have to wait for the end of the period, twenty days hence, when there would occur one of the regular feasts, whereat ordinary Chenkas indulged deeply in drinking, singing, dancing, and sex with other humans.
But I did not want to wait. Therefore, the next morning before dawn I took my compass, food, water, and a Russian map, and set out on a pony for the men’s camp, which was about fifteen miles to the south. It was not a difficult navigational task. The steppe is flat or gently undulating, the weather was fine, dry and chilly. The sun was rising on my left hand as I set out riding, my compass clearly showing where south was. It should have been an easy three-hour jaunt toward the blue hump of the Konginskiye Gory in the distance. The direction was unmistakable, and so I was not surprised to see, some two hours later, the smoke of habitation ahead.
When I entered the enclosure, however, I found myself in the women’s camp. The sun was still on my left, above the flat horizon. Jerk that I was, I whipped the pony around and, circling the camp, headed south again, a sick sweat breaking out all over me. As I rode, I kept checking the compass needle, which continued to say south, south, all the way up to the northern edge of the women’s camp. Again. By that time, the sun was high in the day, and the camp was in the midst of its usual bustle. I dismounted, walked on rubber legs to Puniekka’s yurt, and took to my pallet. No one spoke to me.
There I stayed, more or less, hardly eating, silent, curled up in a ball, leaking tears. I suppose I had been driven mad. I suppose I was clinically speaking a paranoid psychotic during those weeks, although I don’t know whether this term is of any value in the cultural context of the Chenka. It’s hard for me to reconstruct my thoughts during that time, but I know there were a lot of them, more thoughts than usually run through a human brain in a similar stretch of time, racing thoughts. Like: all the fault of Marcel Vierchau, French shit, filthy Jew, seducer, manipulator, never loved me, just wanted me as a guinea pig and a free fuck. Stupid me. Never loved me never. Fucking all the other girls, too. I wasn’t the first, no. I saw his notes. I can read French. I’m not the first, no, he brought lots of girls out to Puniekka to eat up like the witch in the fairy tales, evil magician, egg in my cunt, how did he do that, how did she do that, it was pointing south, south, south all the time, they will give me a dog’s head, and the ogga will make me into an old lady.
Marcel arrived with the other men for the feast. He came to see me and I immediately attacked him, physically and with words, horrible stuff, and a remarkable amount of it anti-Semitic, although I thought myself quite free of that mental vice. Marcel had as a baby been hidden in a Catholic orphanage during the Nazi time, and his parents had died in the camps, so whatever was speaking through me had a fine taste in cruelty. And the usual lies about what an old impotent sack of shit he was in bed, how his prick was way too small, how I’d fucked all his graduate students, and on and on and he just sat there looking at me, maddeningly calm until I leaped on him, fists and nails. He cried out something. Puniekka moved, striking like a snake, and placed both her hands flat upon my temples. They were icy; shortly I felt the coolness sink into my brain and I fell back upon my pallet and into a dream.
Or something like one. I was curiously at ease, detached but interested, like an actor in the wings, watching the other performers, waiting for her own cue. I remember that my vision seemed particularly acute, the colors of the yurt’s furnishing and of the dress of Puniekka and Marcel seemed hyperreal. I want to say jewel-like, but that’s not quite it. Like food in a food ad. The rage had quite gone, or rather I still felt it, but abstractly, as if it didn’t engage my real self.