The Gray Earth Page 6

  “Yesterday,” she continues, “urged by myself and Brother Gagaa, Brother Dshokonaj crossed the wild river, risking his life twice. As the Council of Siblings we had decided to fetch you and bring you here to live with us. Now we four can stand surrounded by the winds that blow from the four directions, warming and supporting each other. You’re the lucky one who could have brought the number of students to exactly one hundred. You would have complemented both us and the whole school. And, as Number One Hundred, you would have been honored with a reward: you would have got a complete school uniform for free, a style no one here has ever seen, let alone worn. What a relief that would have been for Father and Mother! They suffer under the burdens of livestock taxes and quotas. How they would rejoice over any lamb they could save!”

  So far, in spite of her superior, unshakable manner and her fighting spirit—her grandmotherly tone, as Father always called it—she has been relatively restrained. But now comes the about-face. Just as I have anticipated and feared, she loses it: “You must have been possessed by the devil, you miserable snot! Your brother Dshokonaj put good fortune on the tip of your tongue like a drop of sweet cream, and you spat it out. Why didn’t you swallow? You made us all look like fools.”

  She bursts into tears, shakes and twitches, and screeches as if in great pain.

  Brother Gagaa agrees: “Yes, Galdan. You’ve broken something and you’ll never be able to put it back together again.”

  His words make Sister cry even harder. She sobs as if struck by terrible misfortune. Brother Dshokonaj lies motionless and stares into space. In the flickering light from the stubby candle his wide-open eyes have a terrifying shine.

  Oh heaven, oh earth! I think. What have I done to cause my sister and both brothers such misery? I try to look inside myself and find only a dark void. I listen for sounds outside and hear a distant dull roar. The cursed voice that so readily spurred me on to all sorts of impertinent remarks has fallen silent. Has it abandoned me? Why?

  Sister has finished crying. “Worst of all,” she says calmly but firmly, “your foolishness is putting others at risk. Envious people have been given ammunition. What if someone hears about what happened today and uses it to go to battle against Father or Brother? Father is the son of a kulak and not poor enough, and Brother is new at his job and not yet in the Party. Neither sits firm in his saddle.”

  I am not sure I follow everything she says, but I do understand “going to battle” and “not sitting firm in the saddle.” I get what that means.

  I recall Arganak’s fox face and manner. And I see Brother Dshokonaj lying in front of me, with his pale expressionless face and his shining eyes, looking lost.

  “What do you think I should do?” My voice sounds alien.

  Sister flares up: “Stop acting crazy!” But this time she calms down quickly and starts sewing me a pair of pants.

  “And listen to us, your brother and sister,” Brother Gagaa speaks up. “Above all, listen to your eldest brother. The State has entrusted him with leading a whole school. If he knows how to lead a hundred, he knows how to keep the three of us on the straight and narrow.”

  Suddenly I become the most attentive listener. Our big brother—head of our tiny State yurt with its four scissorgrid walls—lies flat on his back and grieves, but things around him are happening. Sister is sewing, younger Brother is cooking noodles, and I am the nimble errand boy flitting about, doing what I am told. I poke the fire, peel the onions, wash the pots, and am once more the baby whose small, nameless services are available to all. But in truth I am weighed down with worries. Fear as cold as ice clings to my inside like a tick: what if ...?

  When my much maligned, hapless bottom is finally clad in a pair of pants, I feel a quiet joy warming me down there and inside. But Gagaa and Dsandan, whom I secretly keep calling Galkaan and Torlaa, have to leave for the night, and that prospect casts a dark cloud over my joy. It is hard to spend another night with the man who is more Comrade Principal than a big brother to me. And the prospect of many more such nights is very discouraging. The dormitory, on the other hand, which I have not seen but have heard quite a bit about, seems more bearable. At this point, though, I don’t even know if I will be readmitted to school at all.

  Brother Dshokonaj, brought back to his feet by the noodle soup, figures that the rule forbidding students to spend the night away from the dormitory applies especially to any relatives of the teaching staff. I am left behind with him and have no idea how this or future nights will unfold.

  Later he says, “If you want to get ahead in life, you must first promise to learn.”

  Then he asks if I understand.

  I nod.

  “How can I know if you really understand?” he says.

  I think about it for a while. Then I say, “I promise that starting tomorrow I’ll do everything I’m asked to do.”

  THE ONSET OF WINTER

  Already at the beginning of the last month of autumn we get snow that stays. It starts snowing while the sun is still up and continues late into the night. The next morning the Altai lies transformed, a brilliant flaming white. Only the caves and crags and the river stand out black against the sea of white. The air is still and the sun shines mild and timid. Around noon the surface of the snow begins to melt, and soon the Altai is barely visible beneath a layer of fog.

  But the sun is not warm enough to break through the snow cover; the day is too short, and soon the sun abandons the earth to the night. Everything cools off and freezes. The snow forms a crust of ice over the mountain and steppe. Any wind would be too late now. It would only further seal the cover of snow.

  Rumors, mostly bad, abound. The snow is said to have had a bluish tinge first and a greenish one later. I saw neither a bluish nor a greenish gleam, but later I remember that there were grains of sand in the snow I scraped off the roof of our yurt.

  The shaman Shalabaj is rumored to have announced that a great upheaval is coming, both for Mongolia and for our small home country in the Altai. The shaman Ürenek is said to have confirmed this, and even to have predicted early spring as the precise time for the upheaval. I have met neither of these two shamans, but I have heard that they are enemies, and that Ürenek is not even a real shaman, but only reads oracles. “And even then I wouldn’t exchange Ürenek for three Shalabajs,” Mother once said in an argument where she took Ürenek’s side against Father. Referring to the women’s latest quarrel, Father had praised Shalabaj’s art a bit too loudly. Worse, he called her beautiful.

  My wounds have healed. I am no longer Limpy. Instead, I am now called the Runaway. The whole class uses this nickname, and half the school knows it means me. Yes, I have become a student, and a good one at that. Learning comes easily to me, say people who would know. It took Brother and Sister no more than a few afternoons to teach me the letters and numbers. Letters and numbers have long stopped being lines and circles, pliers and hammers. I have learned their meanings and can drive them toward each other like sheep and goats. Animals get milked and letters get read; the latter make words instead of milk. Each word contains a meaning, as each chest contains a heart and each belly a stomach.

  The teacher praises me, even when he scolds others, such as Billy Goat. The tip of Billy Goat’s tongue always sticks out, and most of the time his face looks unwashed, particularly around his eyebrows. When you look at his face, you really are reminded of a billy goat during mating season, all spent and sticky. On the class list Billy Goat’s name is Ombar. Even though he is in our grade for a second year, he has trouble with numbers. He cannot tell you what seven ankle bones plus five adds up to. Other people have other problems. Some students cannot keep the different letters apart.

  Sürgündü, who is nicknamed Old Woman, has been through first grade twice before. She disappeared both years soon after she was warned that she would have to repeat the grade. Her tongue is so lazy it would be covered with rust and notches if it were a knife.

  “If you aren’t too embarrassed, Old Woman
, ask the little guy. He grasped in three days what you haven’t learned in three years.” The teacher has started to play us against each other. At first this flattered me, I have to admit. It was then that I changed from calling him the Stout One to the Teacher. But the greater gain of that day was something else. I decided to behave differently toward the girl. Seeing the poor thing humiliated by the teacher—hence by the school and by the State it represents and the teacher embodies—and seeing him get away with treating her so mercilessly made me forget the pain she had caused me. I had kept it alive like embers under the ashes, but now I feel increasingly sorry for her as she stands there groaning, her quiet green eyes filling with tears. As I watch how she fails to remember some small thing—something insignificant, really—I no longer understand the world. I wonder whether to whisper the answer, which is on the tip of my tongue. But I can’t make myself do it, mostly because I don’t want to cause her any more pain.

  But the teacher doesn’t only praise me. I have made my bed and now I often have to lie in it. When I do anything wrong, he reminds me I have been a bad egg right from the start.

  Most of the criticism I receive comes from my sister. Arganak, she whispers into my ear, has submitted a formal complaint about Brother Dshokonaj to the District Administration. She pulls a face as if she has eaten a mouthful of salt. Shortly afterward I find out this really is a bitter lump: since Arganak is a Party member and the principal is not, things easily could go wrong for us.

  Brother seems downcast. He spends most evenings flat on his back with his mouth shut. His eyes shine, not angrily but helplessly. I still live with him. Once or twice I cautiously ask about the dormitory. He says they don’t have an extra bed unless someone moves out to live with relatives or friends. Then he declares it better for me to stay with him anyway. But he doesn’t say why. If that’s the case, I ask, why don’t Sister Dsandan and Brother Gagaa live with us as well? They are fully registered and settled at the dormitory, he says, and already were before he even arrived at the school.

  Some time later he says, “One day someone may drop by for a visit. It’ll be better if Sister weren’t here, what with her loose tongue and strong opinions.” When is one day? I ask myself. Who might come? And why? But I keep these questions to myself.

  Another time he says to me, “After all, you’re my brother.” It sounds as if he were saying I was family and the others were not, and I feel badly for them.

  Before this conversation takes place, a bad storm comes up in the afternoon, followed by a cold evening, and our yurt gets warped out of shape and turns freezing cold inside. I come home that day and immediately sit down to my homework, secretly waiting for Sister Torlaa and Brother Galkaan to come and take care of the stove and the dinner. But no one comes. Instead, the wind, which has been strong all day, develops into a storm. The yurt flaps and squeaks, swaying and creaking ever more dangerously. Some of the roof poles come crashing down. I race over to the neighbors to ask for help, but they are busy securing their own yurts. So I run back and start to weigh down our yurt. I put gravel into everything that has a round belly—every bag and sack, bucket and bowl, even the round tin stove. Then I tie all these things to the end of a rope whose other end I tie to the roof ring. Finally, I take whatever else can serve as a weight, tie ropes around it all, and drag the pile into the middle. Our yurt, which normally looks so tidy and orderly, is a terrible mess. But I successfully defend it against the storm.

  That evening Brother comes home late. The storm has eased a bit since sunset, but the sea of dust outside still rages and whirls, which is why I have not lit the candle. I am sitting on the mountain of stuff with my arms and legs curled around the rope. The pile must have had a considerable weight already, but after a while I had decided, prompted partly by boredom and partly by thoughtfulness, to add my own little weight as well. Then I fell asleep.

  I wake up when Brother lights a match and calls for me: “Dshuruunaj, where are you?”

  “Up here,” I say sleepily. I yawn and climb down. I expect to get into trouble for falling asleep or for making such a mess, or most likely for both. But instead I am praised for my efforts: “I see you’ve worked really hard, little man. You turned the yurt into a fortress and barricaded yourself in. You’ve put up a real fight!”

  He tells me quite a few yurts have been blown away or flattened by the storm. “But you saved ours. That’s amazing! The yurt is our small country. I can tell you’re going to be a great fighter.” He adds that he, too, would have expected Brother and Sister to come and take care of me and the yurt.

  It is freezing cold in our rescued yurt. But because the storm is not over, we don’t dare light a fire. So we get ready to go to bed. Then Brother says, “Come over. We’ll sleep in one bed—it’ll be easier and warmer, won’t it?”

  His suggestion leaves me trembling with fear—and joy. I have never shared a bed with him. In the past, when he would visit and ask Mother if he could take me, his little brother, to his bed, I always whined that I wanted to sleep with Father and Mother.

  I don’t respond. But I take off my clothes, climb on the bed with its shiny iron frame and billowing feathers, and crawl under the downy quilt, between the snow-white sheets. They feel smooth and cool. This is my first time on a high bed under a soft white quilt. Earlier that day, before starting my homework, I had climbed on this bed with its velvety covers and silky curtains and fluffed the feathers a little to make them billow and sing. When will the day come, I wondered, when I could sleep in such a bed? And now I’m about to do just that!

  Brother’s body is colder than mine. While I have goose bumps all over, his skin is smooth, as cold as ice and as slippery as a fish. We have snuggled into each other and are shivering and talking. I tell him about the grades I got in class and about my battle to save the yurt. He mentions a meeting, but doesn’t say what it was about. I do learn, though, that the meeting took so long that in the end everyone had a headache. One man—the doctor, of all people—even passed out. Brother, who had learned first aid at the teachers’ college, helped to revive him. “I felt that I had a special duty to save the man,” he says. “After all, he fainted at a meeting that was called because of me.” He doesn’t elaborate. The next morning the whole school will know.

  Suddenly he says something that shocks me: he has never shared a bed with a brother or sister. When I hear this, I feel really bad inside. I am ashamed for all of us children, and I am ashamed for Mother for never giving me a slap on the bottom and telling me to share the bed with my big brother. Most of all, I am ashamed for Father. After he married Mother and our big brother was sent off to be raised by his grandmother, Father never found a way to bond with him, nor helped the rest of us to do so.

  Outside the storm is calming down, and yet the yurt still trembles like some creature that reaches in vain for a handhold, but grasps only air and cannot rest. Our bodies warm, and as I snuggle with Brother, I feel incomparably happy about the night that stretches out ahead of us, about the soft bed that quivers under its fluffy quilt even when I scarcely move, and about the joy a mother’s two children are finally giving each other. Anticipating good dreams, I drift, doze, and sink into sleep ...

  The next morning it is clear that winter has arrived. This winter is as bright as ice and shimmers from all sides of the Altai. The mere sight of all the ice in the distance makes one shiver. A current of cold air flows briskly, and the river that only yesterday was as smooth as a mirror and stood out as black as night against the white snow is now full of ice floes, clustered like so many lichen-backed folktale characters.

  Brother struggles to get a fire going. But once it takes off, it warms the yurt in no time. We cook slices of meat in our milkless tea and realize only when we start eating that we were both starving. Everything tastes the better for it, and we are that much happier. While we solemnly eat our breakfast, Brother says, “I don’t know what they are going to say to us brothers this morning or in the future. But I do know that we wil
l be fine in the end. We must never forget to do whatever we are asked to do. Otherwise we’ll perish. That’s life.”

  He casts a quick glance at me. His eyes look empty and melancholy. I believe I understand what he is saying and assure him: “I’ll do everything you say, Brother.”

  On the way to school we are dreadfully cold. When we arrive, we are not allowed in. The light-skinned teacher blocks the door by pushing his back against it and shouts something of which I understand only the words party cell and school assembly. He doesn’t even let the principal pass, and I notice Brother is the one who offers the first greeting. Has Brother lost his position?

  We walk over to the assembly. People arrive and quickly line up in rows. Brother Dshokonaj seems not to be needed at all, so he stands aside and waits silently. He seems thinner and smaller than before. Meanwhile, the other teachers bustle about and bark commands into the freezing-cold morning.

  It is a long time before anything happens. The student body—class after class, row after row—stamps the icy, rock-hard ground in an attempt to keep their feet from getting frostbitten. Finally the man everyone has been waiting for appears: Jadmaj, Secretary of the District Party Cell. I have seen him and his chrome-tanned leather bag with the flashing metal clasp before, and I know what people call him: Hos Haaj, Hollow Nose.

  He comes waddling along, wearing a Kazakh black coat as tall as the man and as wide as the steppe. His chromeleather bag dangles at his side from a shoulder strap made with polished metal rings. Arganak and Oksum trail about three paces behind him.