Alaska (41 page)

On Sunday after service in his rustic church at the end of the world, Father Vasili informed his tiny congregation that Cidaq had elected to march under the banner of Christ, and that she would, in conformance to the law of the empire, take an honest Russian name: 'Henceforth she will no longer be called by her ugly pagan name, Cidaq, but by her beautiful Christian name, Sofia Kuchovskaya.

Sofia means the wise, good one and Kuchovskaya is the name of a fine Christian woman in Irkutsk.' Kissing his convert on each cheek, he proclaimed: 'You are no longer Cidaq. You are Sofia Kuchovskaya, and now your life begins.'

WITH THE PERPLEXING SIMPLICITY THAT CHARACTERIZES

many devout believers, Father Vasili became fixed upon a course of theological action which seemed to him completely rational, indeed, inescapable: Sofia has become a Christian, and with her love and faith she can redeem the prodigal son Rudenko. Together they can find a new life that will bring honor to Russia and dignity to Kodiak.

Eager to believe that Rudenko was no more than a repetition of the Biblical prodigal son who had perhaps drunk too much or wasted his patronage in what was euphemistically termed

riotous living,

and incapable of believing that any man could be inherently evil, the young priest saw that his next task was to convert him as he had Sofia, and since he had never met the criminal, he asked Ensign Belov to take him to the darkened room where Rudenko still lingered.

'Be careful of this one,' the young officer warned. 'He killed three men in Siberia.'

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'It's just such men that Jesus seeks,' Vasili said, and when he sat with Rudenko, still in manacles and assigned to the next ship returning to the Pribilofs, he found the murderer still convinced that the girl he had purchased on Lapak was going to prove the agency for his rescue from the Seal Islands. Assessing Father Vasili correctly as one of those benign priests who could be convinced of anything, he saw that it was important for him to win the man's good graces, and he presented himself as submerged in contrition: 'Yes, the girl you now call Sofia is my wife. I did buy her, but I developed a sincere affection for her. She's a good girl.'

'What about that sinful behavior in the hold of the ship?'

'You know how sailors are, Father. I couldn't stop them.'

'And the same kind of behavior here at Three Saints Bay?'

'I suppose you know that one of them was killed by the Aleuts? He's the one that did it all. Me? My father and mother were followers of Jesus. Me too. I love Sofia and am not surprised she's joined our church, and I hope that you'll make us man and wife.' He made this final plea with tears filling his eyes.

Vasili was so affected by the prisoner's apparent transformation that the only matter which remained to be clarified concerned the murders in Siberia, and Rudenko was eager to explain: 'I was wronged. Two other fellows did it. The judge was prejudiced.

I've always been an honest man, never stole a kopeck. I wasn't supposed to be sent to the Aleutians, it was a mistake.' Now, speaking of his deep love for his wife, he became even more unctuous: 'My whole aim is to start a new life in Kodiak with the girl you call Sofia. Tell her I still love her.'

He delivered these sentiments with such a display of religious conviction that Vasili had to suppress a smile, and even though the priest knew that Rudenko had committed the murders, he was disposed to accept the man's longing to begin a better life.

Everything Vasili had been taught about the wishes of God and His Son Jesus made him want to believe that repentance was possible, and next day when he returned to talk with the onetime criminal, he asked that the manacles be struck from his wrists so they could talk as man to man, and at the end of the dialogue he was convinced that illumination had entered Rudenko's life.

Yearning to save what the prophet Amos called 'a firebrand plucked out of the burning,'

Vasili reported to Sofia: 'God's wishes will be served if you marry him and initiate a true Christian home.' In saying this, he was viewing her not as an isolated human individual with her own aspirations but as a kind of mechanical agent for good, and he would have

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been astonished had someone pointed this out. It was no tortured chain of theological reasoning which produced this impersonal conclusion, but rather the teachings his parents had hammered into him: 'Even the lowliest sinner can be reclaimed.' 'God is forever eager to forgive.' 'It's a woman's job to bring her man to salvation.'

'Woman must be man's beacon in the dark night.'

So when Vasili spread his plan before Sofia, he told her: 'You are Rudenko's beacon in the dark night,' and she asked: 'Now what does that mean?' and he explained: 'God, who now has you in His care, loves every man and woman on this earth. We are His children and He longs to see each of us saved. I grant your husband has had a troubled past, but he's reformed and wants to start a new life obedient to Christ. To do so, he must have your help.'

'I never want to help that one. Let him go back to his seals.'

'Sofia! He's a voice crying in the night for help.'

'I was crying in the night, real tears, and he gave me no help.'

'God wants you to fulfill your promise . . . marry him . . . save him . . . bring him into eternal light.'

'He left me in eternal darkness. No.'

The proposal was so repugnant, so contrary to common sense that she allowed Vasili no time to develop it. Leaving him abruptly, she marched openly to Lunasaq's hut, unaware that in joining the Christian church she had obligated herself to forswear all others, and especially shamanism. When she came to what had been the source of her spiritual instruction, she cried: 'Bring out the mummy! I want to talk with a woman who knows about these things.'

And when the mummy appeared, Cidaq blurted out: 'They've made me change my name to Sofia Kuchovskaya so I can be a good Russian.'

The mummy laughed: 'You could never be a Sofia. You are forever Cidaq.'

'And they say I must go ahead and marry Rudenko . . . to save him . . . because their God wills it.'

The mummy sucked in her breath so sharply that she whistled: 'Suppose you do ruin your life to save his, what will that accomplish?' and Cidaq explained: 'It's called salvation, his, not mine.'

The shaman was bold and unrelenting in his rejection of all the priest stood for: 'Always the interests of the Russians come first. Sacrifice the Aleut girl to make the Russian man happy. What kind of god gives such advice?' And as he ranted on, he revealed his motives to Cidaq, who thought to herself: He's afraid of the priest, knows that the new religion

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is powerful, but even so, a shaman may know what's best for Aleuts, so she listened respectfully as Lunasaq concluded his diatribe: 'They crush us step by step, these Russians. The Company makes slaves of us, they bring in their priests to assure that everything is the way their spirits intended. And each day, Cidaq, we fall lower.'

Now came an example of how the shaman's utilization of the mummy had endowed the ancient relic with a character and mind of its own, for when Lunasaq pretended to be the old woman, he became one, drawing upon his long familiarity with how women thought and expressed themselves: 'On the islands women served their men, making their clothes, collecting the fish and the berries, chanting when the men went out to fight whales. But I never felt that we were lesser, only different and with different capacities. What man on what island could bear a child? But this new faith, it's quite horrible, to sacrifice a girl like you to a brute like Rudenko in order to make him feel better.' She surprised Cidaq by laughing: 'Once we had a man like your Rudenko. Bullied everyone. Beat his wife and children. Once when he didn't do his share he caused the death of a good fisherman.'

'What did you do about it?' the shaman asked, and the old woman, replied: 'There was a woman in our village who caught the most fish and sewed the best sealskin pants.

One morning she told us: ”When the kayaks return tonight, you three join me when I go out to unload his fish, and while he is still in the canoe, watch me.”'

'What happened?' Cidaq asked, and she said: 'He came in. We waded out to get his fish. And at this woman's signal, she and I pulled him from his kayak and the two others joined us as we held him under the waves.' She reported this without gloating: 'Sometimes that's the only way.' And Cidaq asked: 'The other fishermen must have seen you. What did they do?'

'They looked the other way. They knew we were doing their work for them.'

'And what should I do?' Cidaq asked, and the old woman replied in heavy words: 'These are troubled times, child.' Then, realizing that this was an inadequate answer, she added: 'Some evening when the kayaks come home through the mists, you'll discover whatever it is that must be done.'

'Should I let them marry me to that one?' and in posing this question she saw nothing wrong in seeking moral advice from the shaman and his mummy, because she still felt herself a member of their world. She would look to her new priest for guidance in ethereal matters, to her old shaman for instruction in practical affairs.

The shaman, seeing an opportunity to reinforce his control 258

over her, leaped at her question: 'No! Cidaq, they're using you for their purposes.

This is corruption, the destruction of the Aleuts.' Fighting to preserve the Aleut universe of sea and storm and walruses and salmon leaping up the stream, he cried: 'It is not Rudenko who should be drowned at dusk, but the priest who gives such advice.

He's here to destroy us.' But the mummy had other counsel: 'Wait. See what happens.

In my long years I've found that many problems are solved by waiting. Will the baby be a boy or a girl? Wait nine moons and you'll see.' And Cidaq, as she left the hut, knew that the shaman spoke only of this year, this body of contradictions, whereas the mummy spoke of all the summers and winters there were to be, and their joint counsel made more sense to her than Father Vasili's.

SOFIA'S BRAZEN RETURN TO THE SHAMAN'S HUT, AND TO

a religion she was supposed to have forsworn, alerted Father Vasili to the fact that the struggle for the soul of this young woman was far from decided. She had been baptized and was technically a Christian, but her faith was so wavering that he must take dramatic steps to complete her conversion. Inviting her to the driftwood building he called his church, he sat her on a chair he had made, and began: 'Sofia, I know the pull of the old ways. When Jesus Christ took His new faith to the Jews and the Romans ...' She understood not a word he was saying. 'It is not I who has brought the true religion to Kodiak, it is God Himself, who has said: ”It's time those good Aleuts were saved.”I didn't come here. God sent me. And He did not send me to the island. He sent me to you. God longs to take you, Sofia Kuchovskaya, to His bosom.

And even if you don't want to listen to what I say, you cannot escape listening to what He says.'

'How can He tell me to marry a man like Rudenko?' 'Because you are both His children.

He loves you equally. And He wants you to serve as His daughter to save His son Yermak.'

For more than an hour he pleaded with her to embrace Christianity completely, to forswear shamanism, to throw herself onto the mercy of God and the benevolence of His Son Jesus, and he was shocked when she finally halted the persuasion by throwing at him the arguments she had heard in the hut: 'Your god cares nothing for the woman, me, only for the man, Rudenko.'

He jumped back as if he had been struck, for in the harsh rejection of this island girl he was hearing one of the permanent complaints against the Russian Orthodox faith and other versions of Christianity: that it was a man's religion 259

established to safeguard and prolong the interests only of men, and he realized that he had instructed this capable young woman in no more than half the basics of his faith. Humbled, he took her two hands and confessed: 'I've left out the beauty of my religion. I'm ashamed.' Fumbling for a clear way to express the aspect of his faith that he had overlooked, he mumbled: 'God especially loves women, for it is they who keep life moving forward.'

This new concept, beautifully developed by the ardent young priest, had a powerful effect upon Sofia, who remained fixed to her chair in a kind of trance as Vasili collected from his altar area those revered symbols which summarized his religion: a depiction of the crucifixion, a lovely Madonna and Child carved by a peasant in Irkutsk, a red-and-gold icon showing a female saint, and an ivory cross. Distributing them before her in almost the exact pattern that Lunasaq had used when displaying his icons, he began pleading with her, using words and phrases best calculated to summarize the exquisite significance of Christianity: 'Sofia, God offered us salvation through the Virgin Mary. She protects you and all other women. The most glorious saints are women who saw visions and helped others. Through such women God speaks, and they beg you not to reject the salvation they represent. Abandon the evil old ways and embrace the new ways of God and Jesus Christ. Sofia, their voices call you!'

and from all corners of the rude chapel her name seemed to reverberate until she feared she might faint, but then came the compelling words: 'As God has sent me to Kodiak to save your soul, so you have been brought here to save Rudenko's. Your duty is clear. You are the chosen instrument of God's grace. Just as He could not save the world without the help of Mary, so He cannot save Rudenko without your help.'

When Sofia heard these radiant words she realized that her new Christianity had been made whole. Hitherto it had concerned only men and their well-being, but these new definitions proved that there was a place for her too, and in these transcendent moments of revelation came a wholly new vision of what a human life could be. Jesus became real, the Son of Mary through the benevolence of God, and through Mary's intercession women could attain what had for so long been denied them. The women saints were real; the cross was tangible driftwood that had come to whatever island it was that these women saints occupied; but above all the other mysteries and the precious symbols of the new religion rose the wondrous message of redemption and forgiveness and love.