Tropic of Night Read online

  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 invisibl
e. 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.

  After a long time by the clock of the sun shaft’s travel across the rugs of the yurt floor, Marcel came and sat by me and put his arm around me and asked me how I was, and I said I felt fine, which was perfectly true. I remember the bright, glistening marks, like a string of tiny garnets, where I had clawed his cheek, and I found that interesting, too, they told a story. He helped me gather up my gear. We left Puniekka’s yurt and went over to the tent that Marcel was renting for the festival from some other woman. He settled me in there as if nothing had happened.

  He was gentle as he reminded me that the Chenka do not have a psychology, as we think we do. No neuroses, psychoses, introjects, repressions, obsessions, phobias, or megrims. It is all a matter of spirits, independent transcendent entities who inhabit us in various ways. One of them is the little person in the control booth who operates our bodies and observes the world through our sensoria, and whom we are pleased to call our “self.” Among the Chenka, the little person is something of a shift worker, knocking off for long periods while others take control, sometimes several at once. The inner life of the Chenka thus has to do with harmonizing the relationships among the various spirits as they pass through the control room. These beings also have an existence in the unseen worlds, of which the Chenka record several dozen, and a busy commuting takes place among beings human and subhuman and superhuman. There is a whole aesthetics involved in this dance, which I do not have the terms to describe, but it is the essence of Chenka existence, perilous and ecstatic by turns. I knew this, of course, but I had thought that it was all imaginary. Or symbolic. Or merely spiritual, which is much the same thing to 99.9 percent of people in our culture. It did not occur to me that it was about as imaginary, symbolic, and spiritual as quantum electrodynamics.

  As to why I had gone nuts, why I couldn’t learn Chenka magic: Marcel explained that the various ogga lounging about
my particular control room made it impossible for me to enter into shamanic apprenticeship. They were in a sense wild ogga, who had invaded me during my childhood and adolescence, when I was angry, or sad, or envious, or wrapped in one of the other psychic states that ogga like to snack on. These beings could be removed or transformed. The procedure was as well known to the Chenka as an appendectomy is to an American surgeon. They would do it for me, but it had some cost. One’s ego is, let us say, rectified. One dies, let us say, and is reborn, with the various resident spirits working more or less in concord. Marcel said that I was free to decide whether I wanted this done. He, naturally, had been through it during his long stay with the Chenka. In the state I was in at the moment, he allowed, I could not make a decision of such magnitude. True: it was difficult enough to decide whether I wanted to move my legs. Marcel was extremely sweet to me, especially considering how I had mauled him. He held me, and stroked my filthy hair. Time passed. Gradually I fell into something more like regular sleep.

  In the morning the various ogga were back in charge, as yours are in charge of you?that is, I felt once again “myself.” I now was terrified of Marcel, terrified of the Chenka, and worked hard at concealing this from myself and others. I recalled the nasty scene of the previous day, was deeply embarrassed, and took refuge in a chilly formality. Marcel did not ask me again if I wanted to have my brains scrambled in the Chenka fashion and I did not volunteer. I abandoned my efforts at penetrating Chenka shamanism. There was plenty of anthro work besides that, however, although it was a bit like doing an ethnography of a Polish village without mentioning Catholicism or the local priests. I worked all winter and by the time the ice broke on the Yei I had enough fieldwork to hack into a dissertation no more phony than most of the stuff anthro departments give Ph.D.’s for. A competent job. Even Marcel said so, not looking me in the eye.