Nights at the Circus (41 page)

Not, of course, that theirs was, in any sense, the country of the blind. As far as seeing went, they made good use of their eyes. Tracks of bird and beast upon the snow were legends they descried like writing. They read the sky to know from which direction wind, snow and the thaw would come. Stars were their compasses. The wilderness that seemed a bundle of blank paper to the ignorant, urban eye was the encyclopedia, packed with information, they consulted every day for every need, conning the landscape as if it were an instruction manual of universal knowledge of the ‘Enquire within’ type. They were illiterate only in the literal sense and, as far as the theory and the accumulation of knowledge were concerned, they were pedants.

The Shaman was the pedant of pedants. There was nothing vague about his system of belief. His type of mystification necessitated hard, if illusory, fact, and his mind was stocked with concrete specifics. With what passionate academicism he devoted himself to assigning phenomena their rightful places in his subtle and intricate theology! If he was always in demand for exorcisms and prophecies, and often asked to use his necromantic powers to hunt out minor domestic items which had been mislaid, these were frivolous distractions from the main, pressing, urgent, arduous task in hand, which was the interpretation of the visible world about him via the information he acquired through dreaming. When he slept, which he did much of the time, he would, could he have written it, have put a sign on his door: ‘Man at work’.

And even when his eyes were open, you might have said the Shaman ‘lived in a dream’. But so did they all. They shared a common dream, which was their world, and it should rather be called an ‘idea’ than a ‘dream’, since it constituted their entire sense of iived reality, which impinged on
real
reality only inadvertently.

This world, dream, dreamed idea or settled conviction extended upwards, to the heavens, and downwards, into the bowels of the earth and the depths of the lakes and rivers, with all whose tenants they lived on intimate terms. But it did not extend laterally. It did not, could not, take into account any other interpretation of the world, or dream, which was not their own one. Their dream was foolproof. An engine-turned fabrication. A closed system. Foolproof because it
was
a closed system. The Shaman’s cosmogony, for all its complexity of forms, impulses and states of being perpetually in flux, was finite just because it was a human invention and possessed none of the implausibility of authentic history. And ‘history’ was a concept with which they were perfectly unfamiliar, as, indeed, they were with any kind of geography except the mystically four-dimensional one they invented for themselves.

They knew the space they saw. They believed in a space they apprehended. Between knowledge and belief, there was no room for surmise or doubt. They were, at the same time, pragmatic as all hell and, intellectually speaking, permanently three sheets in the wind.

Until they met the Russian fur-trader who, half a century previously, had introduced into the tribe the strain of gonorrhoea which accounted for their historically low birthrate at this time, they had never encountered a foreigner – that is, one whose terms of reference were not their own terms. Since they did not have a word for ‘foreigner’, they used the word for ‘devil’ to designate the fur-trader and, later on, decided it had been such an apt choice they continued to use the word ‘devil’, as the generic term for those round-eyed ones who soon began to pop up everywhere.

Because, before you could blink, an entire alien township was clustering round that first wooden hut; and, now that the railway passed so close to them on its way to R. that their little children trotted alongside the great, lumbering, puffing engines, cheering them on, how much longer would this community of dreamers be able to maintain the primitive integrity of its collective unconsciousness against the brutal technological actuality of the Age of Steam?

For just so long, perhaps, as they conspired to ignore it. As long as none of those applauding children decided it wanted to be an engine driver when it grew up. Until such a time as one of them wondered where the trains really came from and where they were really going instead of looking at them with indifferent wonder. And it was indifference, a cultivated indifference, with which the tribespeople defended themselves against all the significance of the township of R. and its residents.

This indifference masked fear. They did not fear the strangers themselves; he who introduced sterility amongst them also introduced firearms, and aborigines and settlers quickly learned an armed neutrality was best. Nor did they fear the gonococci; it was another kind of infection that they feared – a spiritual infection of discontent, contracted from exposure to the unfamiliar, whose symptoms were questions. Therefore they visited the settlement of R. in order to trade and to scavenge. No more. For them, R. was just as much a town of dream as their own village, and they intended to keep it that way.

Although Walser was twice their average size, white as stripped birchwood, and his round eyes were minus the Mongolian fold, they knew he was not a ‘devil’ in the sense of a ‘foreign devil’, more a ‘devil in the sense of ‘demonic visitant’, or ‘wood demon’, or ‘representative of the spirit world’, because of the extraordinary rapture with which he was seized during most of his waking hours. The Shaman introduced his foundling to the rest of the tribe: ‘Behold, this dreamer!’ They listened respectfully to Walser’s babblings and, when they did not understand him, took it as proof he was in a holy trance.

So, as Walser recovered from the amnesia that followed the blow on his head, he found himself condemned to a permanent state of sanctified delirium – or, would have found himself condemned, if he had been presented with any other identity but that of the crazed. As it was, his self remained in a state of limbo.

Walser lived with the Shaman. Even the father of the grandfather of the Shaman had been a shaman. When a sickly boy, he suffered from fainting fits, just as they had done before him. During one of these fainting fits, all his marvellous forefathers visited the boy. Some wore horns, others bore udders. They stood him up like a block of wood and fired arrows at him from their bows until he went off into another fainting fit within the fainting fit – put it another way: during his faint, he dreamed he fainted. Then his ancestors cut him up in pieces and ate him raw. They counted the bones that were left. There was one more than the regular number. That was how the ancestors knew the lad was made of the right stuff to follow the family profession.

This ritual lasted an entire summer and, while the ancestors were busy with it, the little boy was not allowed to eat or drink anything and so grew very pale. Now he was grown up, the Shaman looked at Walser’s pale skin and thought that the counting of
his
bones must have taken much longer than a summer. Had there been some problem? Too many bones? Too few? And what might too many, or too few bones, mean in the great scheme of things? Just the sort of puzzle the Shaman enjoyed!

After the ancestors counted the bones, they put them back together again and restored the boy with a strengthening drink of reindeer blood. As he lay in his hut, his tongue began to sing of its own accord. His mother and father, both of whom were shamans, came to listen. The singing tongue told them what kind of drum their son should carry when he went to summon up the spirits. They went out to kill a reindeer and set to work at once to flay and cure the skin.

The Shaman gave Walser another tumblerful of piss and Walser started to sing. The Shaman listened very carefully. Walser sang:

Such tender concern as the Shaman felt, to see the tears splash down his young charge’s cheeks! But the sound of his singing seemed passing strange to the Shaman, unaccustomed as he was to European music. However, he was sure he interpreted the sounds correctly, so he killed a reindeer and stretched the skin out between two poles to dry. Due to the inclemency of the weather, he was forced to do this inside the hut, which soon smelled ripe. He stoked up the fire with dried branches of thyme and juniper, not so that the fragrant smoke would disguise the stink of rotting reindeer-hide – himself, he rather savoured that, though Walser gagged a bit – but because the incense of the burning herbs procured visions. Walser’s eyes rolled round and round in their sockets, again; splendid!

Normally, Walser shared the Shaman’s suppers, but, today, as an experiment, the Shaman decided to feed Walser the same diet he offered to the idols in the austere and windowless village god-hut, the quasi-anthropomorphs in front of whom he practised the mysteries of his religion. They thrived on a porridge made of crushed barley mixed with pine nuts and broth from boiled capercailzie. Walser supped up suspiciously, then pushed the porridge round and round the wooden bowl with his horn spoon. The dried herbs crackled above the stove. Walser’s eyes fused.

‘Hamburgers,’ he ruminated aloud. The Shaman pricked up his ears. Walser rambled off down a gastronomic memory lane; who can tell what litany the Shaman thought he was reciting?

‘Fish soup.’ Walser’s face was the mirror of his memory; he grimaced. He tried again. ‘Christmas dinner . . .’

His face convulsed and he whimpered. The words, ‘Christmas dinner’, reminded him of something most fearful, of some hideous danger; they reminded him of the main course, they reminded him of . . . ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’

He cried aloud, assailed by dreadful if incomprehensible memories, then fell into a haunted silence until another happier thought came to him:

‘Eel pie and mash.’

At that, he beamed and rubbed his stomach with his hand. Raptly attentive, the Shaman, the reader of signs, poured him more broth, and waited for further revelations.

‘Eel pie and mash, me old cock,’ said Walser appreciatively.

The Shaman decided Walser must mean the time had come to make him his shamanising drum. Next morning, he blindfolded Walser with a strip of reindeer hide, wrapped him up warmly, took him outdoors, spun him round three times on the spot to disorient him, and gave him a hearty push. Walser lurched off, the Shaman following after with an axe on his shoulder, listening intently to the soft voices of larch and birch and fir murmuring sweet nothings to him.

Walser wandered uncertainly forward, teased by increasingly unpleasant voyages his imagination took eyeless behind the blindfold until he could have sworn he heard, in the swish of the wind in the undergrowth, the hiss of a single word: ‘Homicide!’

At that, Walser snatched off his blindfold and punched the Shaman on the nose. But the Shaman was confidently anticipating irrational behaviour and punched Walser right back, although he had to jump up in the air to do so since Walser was much taller than he. However, after that, he let Walser tramp on without the blindfold.

After a while, the Shaman heard a soft, persistent knocking. Walser, who could hear nothing – and, indeed, there was really nothing to be heard – watched the Shaman suspiciously from the corner of his eye as he went up to a tree whose name Walser did not know and put his ear to the trunk. After a moment, the Shaman shook his head irritably and motioned Walser to walk on.

That is what the drumming tree said to the Shaman: ‘Yah! Fooled you!’

Soon another tree began to drum but it turned out this one, too, was enjoying a joke at the Shaman’s expense. He began to mutter under his breath. But the third drumming tree announced disconsolately: ‘I am the one.’ The Shaman immediately cut it down and made Walser carry the trunk home. He cut the hoop of the drum out of the wood from this tree as he sat in front of the stove in his odorous house.

The Shaman’s quarters were a neat, snug, square, one-storey house built of pine logs. Over the samovar hung a leather bag decorated with eagle feathers, tails of squirrels and rabbits, tin discs and little plaits of leather; this bag contained his amulet, which he let nobody see, not even Walser, even though he soon came to love Walser dearly. In his amulet resided the whole source of his extraordinary powers. His father, from whom he had inherited it, assured him he must never, ever reveal the contents. He was so secretive about the contents of his amulet bag it might well have contained nothing at all.

The Shaman and Walser did not live alone. There was a bear, a black one, not yet a year old, still almost a cub. This bear was part pet, part familiar; he was both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same time, a transcendental kind of meta-bear, a minor deity and also a partial ancestor because the forest-dwellers extended considerable procreational generosity towards the other species of the woods and there were bears in plenty on the male side of the tribal line.

The Shaman believed the bear, as a baby, had been let down from the sky in a silver cradle. He saw the cradle drop down into a thicket from a silver cord but cradle and cord had both vanished by the time he reached the baby bear. He brought it home in his fetish satchel and gave it a rag dipped in reindeer milk to suck. When the cub progressed to solids, he ate what the Shaman ate – fresh-water fish; porridge; game. He would be offered bear-steaks only after he was dead.

The Shaman pierced the cub’s ear and gave it copper earbobs, to make it pretty, and also gave it a copper collar, and put a copper bracelet on the left paw. On its first birthday, it would be taken to the god-hut and its throat would be slit in front of an ursine idol sitting above a heaping mound of skulls of bears who had met their fate in a similar fashion.

The Shaman himself did not do the deed. The bear’s executioner was elected from amongst the villagers by the spirits, who manifested their choice in dreams or by other extra-terrestrial means, and the Shaman was glad of that because he always established such close relationships with the bears that it would have broken his heart to dispatch them, even though he knew it was all for the best. The entire village crowded into the god-hut to watch the ceremony, lamenting vigorously and apologising profusely: ‘Poor bruin! We’re so sorry, bruin! How we love you, poor little bruin! How bad we feel because we must do away with you!’ Then the bear’s head would be cut off and the rest of it roasted over an open fire. The severed head, still with the copper bobs in its ears, was set in the middle of a common table and the choicest titbits, the liver, the sweetbreads, the tender meat of loin and buttock, were laid in front of the bleeding relic whilst everyone else feasted on the remainder of the bear’s anatomy. The celebrants of this Siberian sacrament pretended not to notice the provider of the banquet never touched a morsel himself.