among the Chenka during the seasonal migration is nearly total. The men are out all day moving the herds, and the women are cooking, brewing, and making things as the carts rumble across the steppe. The men all eat together, too, in their herding camp. The women bring them their morning and evening meal, packed in clay pots. Child rearing is matrilocal: women own the yurts, carts, and all the physical apparatus of the culture, except for personal clothing, harness, and magical apparatus. The men own all the animals. Paternal care is diffuse and paternal lineage obscure. The Chenka understand the association of pregnancy with sex, but they often attribute the qualities of a child to spiritual rather than earthly parenthood.
And on top of this, Chenka shamans are celibate, or to put it more accurately, they do not engage in sex with other human beings, but only with the denizens of the spirit world. Marcel had explained this to me and it’s in the book, too, but I thought … Jesus, you know, I can’t remember what I thought.
As it turned out, I hardly saw Marcel for nine months that year, and I didn’t get laid, although I did get a lot of offers from various Chenka women, several of which I accepted out of anthropological curiosity. I did not get taken on as an apprentice shaman. Marcel had warned me about that, too, but again, I failed to take it seriously. It is so hard, even for anthropologists, to take other cultures seriously.
One day, I couldn’t stand it any longer and jumped on a pony and rode out to where the men were and I confronted him and demanded he spend more time with me, let me stay with the men and herd, and he took me aside and listened to me rant, his eyes getting wider, and I have to say, that was the only time he really got mad at me, although looking back I realize I must have been a colossal pain in the butt. He said, You silly woman, don’t you understand who these people are? What they can do? He said, Don’t you understand my status with these people? And I didn’t really, because, to be fair, he hadn’t exactly dwelled on it in the book, but now he told me. I’m a pet, he said, a kind of superior dog. They’re teaching me a couple of tricks and it amuses them. I walk on my hind legs, I play dead, I roll over.
I didn’t get it. We?we in what we are pleased to call advanced societies?don’t have this experience. We’ve always been ahead, whatever that means. We could read and write, and they couldn’t. We have the Maxim gun and they have not. Berozhinski’s tale about the invisibility trick I took to be some kind of hallucination, probably drug- induced. The Chenka eat a lot of dope, mostly strains of fungi, hundreds of different kinds, which they grow in tubs, but also various plant and animal preparations, and I assumed that old T.I. was whacked out of his mind most of the time.
I told Marcel this. He looked at me like you look at a crazy person, pityingly. I’m sure I looked at him the same way. He walked away, and I rode back to the women’s camp.
My work there was not going well, and this was perhaps a greater cause for distress than loneliness. The Chenka ladies would talk to me politely about anything except sorcery. You won’t understand, they would say when I pressed them. Puniekka would be grinding up some foul-smelling paste. What’s that for, Puniekka? You wouldn’t understand. Tell me anyway. A sigh. Then, patiently, as to a child: It’s a griunat. What is a griunat? Answer: when the raaiunt teno’s d’okka kiarrnkch, we spread a griunat on the doorposts. I would paw desperately through my Chenka glossary, but the critical words were never there. I asked them, What did these words mean? They would explain each, using a host of other terms that I also could not connect to the world of sensation and material. Describing color to a blind man. I don’t understand, I would cry, sometimes with actual tears. Yes, they would say, we told you that you wouldn’t understand.
There is a green parrot, a flock of green parrots in the flame trees near Providence when I drop Luz off and they are shrieking like maniacs, like demons, like oh, shit, where has this one been hiding?
This memory. Night, in the yurt. Another little mystery: nobody in the surrounding ten thousand square miles lives in yurts, but the Chenka do. They say that Chesei-Anka gave them yurts, sheep, goats, and horses when the Chenka emerged from the sea. No Chenka to anyone’s knowledge has ever seen the sea, but they know where it lies, far to the south. It was Puniekka’s yurt. I slept in the place for guests on the east side. A yurt is always pitched facing south, so that the sun streaming through the smokehole makes a clocklike passage across the floor during the day. Two of Puniekka’s other students were sleeping there, too, on the west wall, and the mistress herself was at the north. Spirits arrive from the north. I remember coming out of sleep, awakened by a sharp cry. The other students were wrapped in their blankets, long lumps, like logs reflecting the red glow from the dying fire in the center. Rhythmic gasps, the sound of a body moving against cloth. Another cry. I listened, fascinated. Ai! Oh! Ai! And heavy mouth-breathing, male and stertorous, like a horse. Puniekka was having a terrific fuck by the sound of it, and I was dying to know who the guy was. It had never happened before and I had been assured of the strict celibacy of all the shamans, male and female. I rolled on my side so I could make ethnographic observations. I recall feeling terrific, a warming intellectual smugness. This was something even Marcel didn’t know?guys sneaked into lady shamans’ tents at night. So I stared, and I could see pretty well, too: besides the glow from the fireplace, moonlight flooded down through the smokehole. She was on her back, with her knees up high. She still had her heavy woolen stockings on, but I could see her knees gleaming and moving back and forth with his thrusts. Powerful thrusts, because each one smacked the crown of her head against a large leather pillow, which creaked at the blows.
The space above her where her lover should have been was perfectly empty.
And what happens to you when you see something like that, if you’re a Western materialist, is that your mind sort of splits in two. One part is thinking, Oh, how fascinating, an example of hysterical conversion in the trance state among the primitives, she’s imagining a demon lover and sure enough her body is going through the motions just as if she were being violently had and she’s having spectacular orgasms, too, from the sound of it and the rigid arching of her back and the shuddering, and clearly she’s not manually masturbating because her hands are wrapped around the thing that isn’t there. And, How interesting, it really does look like she has sunk deeper into the sheepskin pallet, just as if she were being pressed down by a heavy man.
As for the other part, that one’s four years old and blubbering under the covers, and cold sweat is bursting forth embarrassingly all over its body. We wish to control that part, and we do, out of long practice. Such things cannot be. That’s what we’ve learned to say. And having reestablished scientific objectivity, we grope among our things for a notebook and pencil and record the event, except for the personal details that are not the business of the scientific community to know, such as that the sexual field in the yurt is so intense that little ripples are running across the observer’s belly and down the observer’s thighs and her breath is coming in short gasps and the observer’s cunt is gushing wet. There is no such thing as a “sexual field,” for we cannot detect its elementary particles.
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
