The Gray Earth Read online

  A huge pile of light-colored wood sits in the school yard, as if it’s there for good. It takes a long time before the eye gets used to it and the heart no longer pounds. Anxious pride begins to sneak into our hearts, but it does not make us any happier. The aftershocks continue, and my chest feels hollow and covered by wounds.

  Besides, nothing happens to confirm that Sister was right to be worried. There is no punishment. Neither the sky nor the earth sends one. Arganak lives on and doesn’t look sickly at all. Orgush says her mother is still safe at home. No one has come for her, nor has a letter arrived.

  One evening Sister Torlaa’s patience runs out: “I don’t believe anymore what Father, Mother, or the shamans keep telling us. Now I think that the teachers, the dargas, and people like him have got it right. If someone were to tell me to puke into a spring, crap on an ovoo, burn a shaman’s coat, or smash his or her drum, I would no longer hesitate.”

  I am inclined to think she’s right. Brother Dshokonaj sends her an encouraging glance and says cheerfully, “Your teacher is right. You’re a smart student, and you’ll go a long way. Science has put down deep roots in you.”

  Brother Galkaan says that for now he will go on believing Father and Mother as well as the teachers. After all, Father and Mother have experience, but the teachers have education.

  Big Brother smiles. “Well, well. I can see you want to spare yourself your sister’s fate and not get on anyone’s bad side.”

  I keep silent and pretend I am not listening. But I am aware of something that feels like a lump inside me, sitting there like the woodpile in the school yard. It must be the shock given me by the screaming, staggering, crashing, groaning, and whimpering tree. It would be sad if Sister were right and there were no spirits. But I think I can feel them inside me and around me, just as I can feel the wind, the heat, and the cold, even though I cannot see them.

  Everyone speaks of the soul that leaves the body. What about the spirits? Can they leave their place? Ever since the day we felled the trees I have been unable to shamanize. I have not once felt the desire to reach inside for a chant that would praise the sky or the earth or one of the spirits. Perhaps the spirits have left with the tree’s soul, fleeing from me and everyone else. Perhaps they fled the whole Altai when the great shock stormed through me and through everyone. Is my body—or anyone’s body, for that matter—just a bag of skin in which a pile of flesh hangs off a bunch of bones, a hollow bag stuffed with organs, a handful of guts, and a noseful of smelly gases? Is the same true of the sky and the earth? Are they nothing but air, water, sand, and rock? And are the plants and animals also just bundles of flesh, bone, water, air, and earth?

  I feel empty inside and dull outside—a soulless bundle in a disenchanted world.

  ALL-GOOD AND HALF-GOOD DAYS

  No punishment ever comes, Arganak remains alive, and everything stays the same. Or so it seems. For there are rumors about things said by the shamans Bajbur, Shalabaj, and Ürenek. Our own shaman is never mentioned. Sister says that has always been the way. In our clan we have always known to keep her predictions to ourselves, while the other clans spread rumors like wildfires in the hope of reversing the course of events. These rumors have also been fueled by some people’s dreams.

  I have not had a dream worth mentioning for the longest time. I may have stopped dreaming altogether. If so, I really would have lost my soul. But I do well at school and am now clearly the top student in my class. I get quite confused when trying to make sense of these two developments. Sister gets me even more confused. Having loudly announced that she would never again believe our parents or the shamans, now she insists that we not burn anything impure in the stove, nor leave the yurt at night with greasy lips, that we not step on the yurt’s doorstep nor break any of the many other rules our superstitious parents have taught us over the years.

  Arganak doesn’t look as if he is about to fall seriously ill. But his face has grown gaunter, and his eyes pointier. When he looks at us, the piercing light in his gaze drills into us like the tip of an awl. He stands in front of us at Pioneers’ Hour. “Not one of my forebears ever soiled himself with wealth,” he says. “I, too, have stayed poor. I enjoy being poor, and I am proud of it.” More often than not, his words make our freezing hands clap. One day the old man is made an Honorary Pioneer, and a red scarf is tied around the ragged collar of his greasy sheepskin ton. It makes him so happy he cries and twitches with excitement.

  We often see him go in and out of the teachers’ room. While he sits, the teachers stand. At times the principal himself has to stand in front of him. Arganak keeps telling everyone to forge ahead, and “offensive” has become his favorite word. It begins to spread among the teachers and eventually among the students. We yell “Offensive!” each time we enter or leave the school building or classroom, trying to swim to the front of the stream. During recess a group of boys fighting to be first in line to use the outhouse yells the familiar slogan repeatedly.

  The logging project was an offensive, we learn, and a very successful one at that. Six more offensives will follow; Comrade Arganak has dreamed them up while mourning the late marshal—each day he came up with a new one. From now on we will fight one offensive per month. And each of them will enter virgin territory.

  By now it is really the middle month of spring. But we must not call it that. The teachers instruct us to no longer call this the Year of the Black Dragon, but rather 1952. When I first hear that number, I wonder how the earth could possibly be that old. When I ask the teacher, he says the earth has in fact existed for even more years than that.

  But when I ask how many more years precisely, he has no answer. Nor does he know who started counting and why. “This is the calendar people use in Russia” is all he has to say. I make do with this answer, secure in the knowledge that Russia is called the Soviet Union and that the Soviet Union is clearly more progressive and better.

  The current month is not the middle month of spring then, but simply the third month. The night of jolka was the start of the year and thus of the first month. The first month, the teacher says, had thirty-one days, but the next one was shorter by a whole two days and nights. Got it, I think, so the third month is going to be three days and nights shorter than the first month. But I am soon to discover that the third month is exactly as long as the first. I wonder if this means that the fourth one is like the second, with exactly twenty-nine days and nights. Wrong again.

  I give up trying to figure it out. The Russians are obviously smarter than us. We can only hope they will always let us know how many days there are in which month in any given year, so that when we use their calendar out of sheer love for them, we will get it right.

  A month breaks into weeks. Fortunately weeks always have the same number of days, and unfortunately, it is the unlucky number seven. The teachers, who drill us on the new calendar every morning, know that the notion of lucky and unlucky numbers is just superstition. But how can they be so sure? They also number the days of the week, calling the sixth day half-good and the seventh all-good, for on the half-good day we have a half-day of school and on the all-good day, there is no school at all.

  On good days people must rest, explains the teacher. Civilized people do. Very soon our parents will also rest for half a day on the sixth day and all day on the seventh. But the teacher does not say when exactly they will start. Civilized people live by the clock, he continues. They get up and go to bed at the same time each day. They sleep wrapped in white sheets that are changed, washed, and ironed once a week, and they eat three meals a day. It is weird to imagine Father and Mother civilized. In the summer they would lie in bed long after first light, waiting to get up at seven o’clock. And in the winter they would sit waiting through the dark evenings, the smoke of an oil lamp wafting around them, until the clock said eleven o’clock and they could finally go to bed. And then every few days they would stay in bed or sit in the yurt, resting. What would become of the sheep, goats, yak cows, and mares?
Who would milk them and drive them to pasture? Would Father drive his flocks back to the yurt each day at noon, so he could have his second meal? Or would Mother take a pot and a jug out to the pastures and look for him?

  Oddly, the smart Russians appear to have forgotten the names and colors of the years, months, days, and hours. They no longer know the gender of each year, either; their hermaphrodite year consists of flocks of hermaphrodite months, days, and hours.

  Rather than calling this moment the beginning of the first quarter of the Snake hour on the Yellow Snake’s twenty-ninth day in the Blue Rabbit’s middle month of the Year of the Water Dragon called Joy then, Ha! I am simply to say ten o’clock on March 25, 1952.

  Admittedly, this new way will be easier. And easier may well be more progressive and better. How did Ombar put it? “Since I no longer have to stare at the moon and the stars in the night sky each evening, I’m so rested I’ve got a ball of fat in each socket.” Billy Goat got it just right.

  The teacher also says it is not enough to be civilized. We have to be patriotic as well. Civilized patriots rest doing a different kind of work on the half-good and all-good days. It is called community service. Since the day we went logging, we have done community service each weekend. Arganak decides what we do and for how long. For now we are clearing the steppe of rocks. We pick them up and stack them in hollows. The piles must always be square, as superstitious people might mistake round ones for ovoos. The point of clearing the rocks is to create space for growing vegetables. We don’t really know what vegetables are, but Brother Dshokonaj has eaten some. They look like wild onions, they grow in soil, and they are supposed to have vitamins. Vitamins are substances one needs to live; they make people’s faces handsome, and their bodies and minds strong. We are ugly and weak because we live on meat and milk, neither of which contains vitamins.

  In the Soviet Union, says the teacher, people have dug canals that are infinitely long and wide. Whole rivers have been redirected when their waters were diverted through those canals. We partly understand his stories, since we are familiar with the stories of Sardakpan, the Creator, and see the results of his labor all around us. Sardakpan pulled our great river all the way down from Huraan Höl, our Lamb Lake, and past where we are today. Behind Dshedi Geshig he felt like resting a little, so he dug a basin and let it gather the floods following him. It did not take long for the basin to fill, so he took his enormous shovel, plunged it deep into the steppe nearby, and turned it over to let the rising flood rush in. But now that it had been abducted and then allowed to flow, the water would no longer be tamed. It broke through the dam at the foot of the eastern mountains and rushed on from there. Because we can see the sandy bright mountain amid the rocky black mountains, as well as the waterfall where the wide basin tumbles into the steep gorge, and the lake next to the hill thrown up in the steppe, we have unshakable faith in the truth of this myth. But the teacher wouldn’t accept this. He says fairy tales, epics, and myths are primitive and dangerous, and distract us from life’s truth. “True power comes from within,” he likes to say. “Everyone is the master of his own fate.” We like to hear him say that, for we all would like to have great power, and to be master of a great fate.

  One day we, too, will dig a ditch and divert the Haraaty. Before we can start though, the glaciers have to melt and their waters flow past us. Until then, we have to work the soil in the steppe. And because no one knows what working the soil means, we must be patient and wait for someone to come and show us. It has taken us no more than two days to pick up the rocks in a field worked out by the principal with a giant set of wooden dividers. Perfectly straight rows of rocks now mark the borders of our field.

  The path is clear for our next offensive: building a root cellar. It is to be dug into the steep slope of Eer Hawak, within sight of the field. At the end of the last week of the third month, work on the cellar starts with a school assembly on site, which features a ceremonial turning of the first sod. We also learn a new slogan: “Earth! We know you are not sacred. We shall tear open your belly and dig into your fat kidneys. We are not afraid!”

  The words are meant to chase away our fears. In times gone by, Eer Hawak marked the eastern boundary of a monastery whose lamas used to perform their sacred rituals on the even mountaintop. Its smooth ground reminded people of a saddlecloth and was deeply revered.

  Soon it becomes obvious there are simply too many of us. No more than four people can work at one time, and so there is nothing at all for the first grade students to do. The pickaxes and crowbars are too heavy for the senior boys to make any progress in the hard ground. So we set out to find fuel for a fire. We swarm out, collecting anything that will burn: dung, caragana branches and roots, bones, and garbage such as rags, the discarded soles or legs of boots, and bits of dried fur and muddied felt. The pile grows fast, but shrinks even more quickly as it all gets thrown on the fire, which rages impressively. In the end all that is left is a mere pile of embers that we cover with rocks and gravel. It will keep warm through the night and thaw the frozen ground.

  The next morning the gravelly ground is covered in soot. But it has indeed thawed, and soon we have dug a hollow that grows to a hole, and then slowly becomes a cave.

  We need no fire today, so we stand around, watch the two or three boys working, and indulge ourselves with harmless little jokes behind the backs of the teachers. “The labor front is tight, and not all who burn to work can join. Have a little patience, Comrade Students,” Arganak consoles us. “We will open up more labor fronts for you.”

  And in fact, that does happen soon. We are told to clear a large area around the cellar of any rocks, and to arrange them as boundary markers in the now familiar rows. With so many hands the job is done in no time. Soon we stand idle again, watching the workers and entertaining ourselves with games.

  Not long after, we are told to create a path, four steps wide, to bridge the distance between the cellar and the field. This means gathering some of the rocks we had previously removed from the area around the cellar and lining them up in two straight rows to create a long narrow tongue through the steppe.

  The distance is considerable, and the floodplains along the river are still covered with snow. In spite of the many hands available, the task keeps us busy for quite some time. The sun is low when we are finally done. We all stand there admiring the bare, lighter-colored strip, which runs as straight as an arrow from the side of the hill all the way down to the eastern embankment of the Haraaty.

  Work on the excavation, however, has been slow and laborious. Our leaders decide that work will need to continue daily and full time from now on. Every morning Arganak takes four boys from the senior classes out to continue digging. The rest of us don’t get to see the results until the afternoon of the half-good day. But each time we go, the pit has grown deeper.

  During the week we all try to guess what job we will get to do next. Arganak has concerned himself with the same question, of course, and decided that we will collect white rocks. Unfortunately, finding white rocks in the steppe between Eer Hawak and Hara Ushuk is as hard as catching fish in meltwater. It would take a very long walk along the dark-brown back of the steppe before you came across anything light, let alone white. There may be a few white rocks closer by, on the mountain, although the crags all stand out dark. But the northern side of the mountain is still covered with snow, and in order to reach its southern side, where the sun has melted the snow, we would have to hike around the broad western slope. And even if we find white rocks there, I have no idea how we would lug them back. In any case, we have no choice but to set out on the long exhausting hike. To make it a little easier for us, the teachers let us play games along the way. We play caravan, walk in single file, and pretend to be camels. To walk like a camel and feel the rays of the sun in every pore of your skin is beautiful. This must be the rest-throughwork that people always talk about.

  When we finally reach the other side of the mountain, we find no white rocks. Di
sappointed as well as relieved that we won’t have a load to carry back, we soon set out for home. This time we are not allowed to play. The teachers insist we walk faster. They seem to be afraid of Arganak. And, as it turns out, we do get a harsh reception. By now Arganak believes himself responsible for each and every thing that happens, and he explodes with rage when we dare to return empty-handed after having been gone for so long. “So much for ‘Our Rich Altai’!” he bursts out. “It doesn’t even have white rocks. And as for you scholars with your white paws,” he hisses and glares at the teachers, “what on earth were you thinking, wasting half the day with these greedy pigs without finding a single rock?”

  No one dares to answer. Our teachers look sheepish, like children who have been up to no good. Arganak can’t seem to calm down. “Hey, Danish!” he yells in such an irritating loud voice that the teacher jumps. “You’re still a member of the Party, right? As a fellow Party member, I’m going to give you an express order. Go fetch a bucket of strong lime. And tell your principal he can work for the Party Cell all he wants at night. But during the day he has to be on-site and join the School Collective’s offensive in person.” Teacher Danish swallows the speech without arguing. His narrow face shows no sign of resistance. “Yes, Comrade Leader of the Labor Front!” he says before leaving. “As soon as possible.”

  Next, Arganak commands Makaj to step forward and follow him. He goes to the western slope of the hill, where he orders the teacher to carve the slogan he is fixed on into the ground. Teacher Deldeng is told to fill the carved-out lines with rocks, and our teacher organizes the transport of the rocks to the spot. Finally we all have something to do and, with the teachers spurring us on, we move nimbly and fast. This is an easy job, and we race around like little storms. The Altai steppe is full of black and brown rocks, and in no time we have amassed a big dark pile.