The Last Speakers (16 page)
Authors: K. David Harrison
With the permission of the Chulym tribal council and the support of elderly speakers, we decided to begin a bold social experiment with Ãs. We created new social networks that we hoped would act as a powerful force in resurrecting this dormant language. Casting aside the idea that anthropologists should not actively intervene or affect the culture they are studying, we formed a partnership with the elders to help unlock their memories.
The Chulym council itself (with only one member out of seven admitting knowledge of Ãs) affirmed that the language was at a critical stage. There were probably only two dozen speakers, if that, and it had fallen nearly completely silent because the elders who knew it still felt their old childhood shame and lacked opportunities to speak it. Even the presence of a single Russian speaker was enough to suppress their desire to speak it. And since Russian speakers dominated these Siberian villages, the pressures silencing Ãs were always in force. This was the last best opportunity, the council believed, for scientists to document the language and to gain recognition for the community by bringing some of the most powerful stories to a wider audience.
We took extreme measuresâdriving from one village to the next, crossing rivers by ferry and reaching some locations by wooden canoeâto collect the elders. We brought them together for the sole purpose of having a conversation in their native tongue. Many of the elders we brought along had not visited the other villages, or even met the other speakers. They were unaware of the other elders who shared their fate of being silenced.
A commonplace that we take for grantedâa conversationâwas an utter novelty to these elders. We set up closed meetings in the villages and even posted bouncers at the doors of the houses to shoo away anybody who was a Russian speaker, whose very presence would have been enough to force the conversation to switch to Russian. The elders showed their joy at the opportunity by launching into long, laughter-filled dialogues in Ãs.
The elders included Ivan, a diminutive elderly man about five feet tall, with a toothy smile and a hand-rolled stub of a cigarette between his lips. His face was deeply lined from a lifetime of hunting and fishing in the cold climate. And Anna, who looked older than her 65 years, a pensioner with a bright flowered headscarf and a boisterous laugh accompanied by waving hand gestures. They reminisced freely, regaling each other with tales of bear and moose hunting. They were so engrossed, they seemed to forget our presence, though they had granted us permission to film the session. We kept the cameras rolling, eager to catch every word.
Then the talk turned to cultural themes, as Vasya brought up the ancient lunar calendar system:
VASYA
: How did we used to name our months? There was Fox monthâ¦. Ivan, you should know month names in our language!
ANNA
: Ah yes, months!
IVAN
: Well, there was Fox month, Chipmunk month, Green month, Riverbank monthâ¦.
ANNA
: Green month, that's May, I said that! May is Green month!
VASYA
: What else?
ANNA
: I knew some of the monthsâ¦my father he knew them all. Oh, I've forgotten already. We've forgotten a lotâ¦of course.
Anna waved her hand across her eyes, a gesture of forgetting. Of 13 lunar months, the elders could name only four. So much had faded from memory! They found it hard even to name plants that grew in the yardâbilberry, whortleberry, dandelion, nettleâbut did not hesitate in naming animals such as mink, wolf, and moose.
Shifting the topic to hunting, Vasya entertained the elders with a favorite story:
I got up in the morning before the sun rose, took my gun, and set off to the lake. My boat was at the lake. I sat in my boat and set off. Then I look: a moose is coming out of the water! I landed the boat on the bank, took my gun, aimed well, and made it go
boom!
The moose fell over. I smoked one pipe of tobacco, then I took out my knife, skinned the moose, put its meat in my boat, and returned home. My wife and children were waiting for me at home.
Afterward, the elders were moved to laughter and tears simultaneously while watching the video playback on my laptop computer. For the first time ever, they saw themselves on video and heard their own powerful, funny, archaic voices. While there is not much that scientists can do to save a language, on that day, sitting with the elders watching the playback, Greg and I felt empowered. Our presence had awakened a slumbering culture, had created a brand-new discourse, and had, however temporarily, breathed life into a dying vernacular. “You've made us immortal,” one of the elders observed. Now people far removed in space and time from these villages can hear the voices and listen to the stories.
Anna and Aleksei Baydashev, the last remaining husband and wife pair who speak Chulym at home.
After returning from the village on what we knew would probably be our last visit to the Chulym, we were somewhat downcast. We thought about the dramatic life stories that Maria Tolbanova had told us. She had probably been waiting decades to retell that story to an audience that could appreciate it in its original tongue. We were awed and humbled to have been a part of that audience. We knew that the story would likely never be told again, and so we had a special responsibility to care for the recording, archive it, translate it, and make it known to the world, as Maria had instructed us. As we pored over our notes and replayed bits of the sound recording to be sure we'd gotten it right, I had a sense of finality. I was convinced no more stories like this one would ever be told in this language.
But one more surprise awaited us. Back at the archives in Tomsk, the city where we had originally begun our expedition, we decided to examine once again a collection of dusty notebooks from 1971. Buried among the pages, we had uncovered all kinds of curiositiesâa list of words for types of flowers and fish, instructions on how to bake bread on hot coals and how to fish with a net from a wooden dugout canoe. We had faithfully made copies of these texts. But we had overlooked one. To our amazement, on page 573 of the notebooks, we stumbled upon a truly epic story. As we flipped through the book, we realized that the story and its translation went on for a full 56 pages! Nothing of this magnitude in Ãs had ever been published or even reported to exist. Not one of all the speakers we had talked to could tell a story of more than a few dozen lines. This was a truly astonishing find, and all the more so because it had lain hidden in the Tomsk University archives for nearly 40 years.
The story itself, “Three Brothers,” is a bizarre mash-up of dozens of different folktale motifs. It has echoes of Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, the
Arabian Nights,
and numerous other folktale traditions. It may be as old as or even older than any of these, representing an unbroken tradition of tale-telling from an ancient time. Handed down over centuries and passed through countless minds, it has been smoothed like a polished pebble by the process of hearing, memorizing, and retelling.
Because it had never been written down until 1971, it shows all the important qualities of oral tradition. Only what can easily remain in memory has been retained, and certain aspects have been dramatized, repeated, or embellished to make it easier to memorize. Some of the many memory hooks evident here are the repetitions, the heavy use of numbers (three, seven), archetypal animals (swan, deer, pike), and the scenes of violence (vampiric devils that stab with needles and drink blood). Like any good tale, it includes deception, doubt, betrayal, and revenge. No doubt this tale contains the threads of many ancient stories that have been woven together into a single cord. It is the culmination and the end of an ancient tradition. No person alive can retell this story in the original tongue from memory, and only a few still living would comprehend it as told. It is ancient, and yet completely new to the world, a nearly forgotten monument to human creativity that expresses our most primal fears and some of our fondest longings. These can be seen here in portions of the translated story of the “Three Brothers.”
6
Once upon a time there were three brothers. They were out hunting.
Suddenly three swans came flying, honking to them.
The swans spent the night on the roof of their house.
The next morning, when the three brothers were out hunting, the three swans suddenly rose up and became three girls.
The three girls came into their house.
The eldest girl says, “I'll marry the big brother.”
The middle girl says, “I'll marry the middle brother.”
The youngest girl says, “I'll marry the small one.”
Then eldest one washed the floor, the middle one washed shirts, and the youngest one cooked.
When the brothers returned from hunting, they said, “Who did all this for us so well?”
And so the three brothers married the three swan sisters, but things quickly went awry, as the story continues:
While the wives were living in their house, they grew thin and sickly.
The younger brother says, “Brothers, why have the wives gotten ill?”
The youngest brother told the oldest brother, “Lie in wait and watch!”
So the brother remained, lying in wait.
He saw ash rise up through the chimney pipe, and the chimney began wobbling wildly.
A devil flew out from the chimney.
He stabbed the wives with a needle. The wives cried out.
As their blood flowed out, the devil began drinking it.
He drank up, and then went back up into the chimney.
When the brother confronted the chimney-dwelling vampire, a cataclysm ensued, and the underground portion of the epic began:
As the youngest brother lay in wait, once again the devil came out.
His wife began to cry and scream.
The youngest brother started shooting with a gun.
Suddenly, the devil together with the house and the wife fell into a crevice in the earth.
He himself jumped out from the crack in the ground, then slaughtered some of his cows and tore and bound up their skins for ropes and lowered himself down into the earth.
He says to his brothers, “I will go underground to search for my wife.”
Here the story shifts gears from a horror/vampire story to a what looks like a very typical quest tale. As the brother searches for his wife in the underworld, he encounters strange and fantastic creatures.
He comes to a large bird tied to an iron chain.
The bird says, “Free me now, and I will help you sometime!”
So he set him free and then went on.
Next he saw a large pike lying stuck in shallow water, who lacked the strength to go on.
“Free me now, [called the pike] and I will help you sometime!”
So he freed the pike.
At long last, the brother located his wife, but she had been imprisoned by an evil “Iron Khan.” A wise old woman advised them that they must kill the Khan.
“How should I kill him?” the husband says.
“Make him drink a lot of vodka, and when he gets drunk on the vodka, he will tell you where his soul is,” the old woman told him.
So then his wife went to the Khan and made him drink a lot.
She asks him, “Where is your soul?”
The drunk Khan told her about his soul, “You must go to a bog, to the steppe, and to a cave where you will find seven deer.
“You must kill all of those seven deer.
“Having killed the deer, split open their stomachs, and you'll find a small chest there.”
So the husband did as the Khan said. When he opened the chest, there were seven eggs inside.
The husband took the Khan's eggs and dropped and broke five of them.
When he came back to the Khan with the two eggs, the Khan shouted, “Leave my soul alone!”
Her husband held on to the eggs with all his might, but one egg fell into the lake. Then the pike swam up.
“Young boy, what do you need?” he said.
The man says, “I dropped my egg into the lake.”
So the pike went and got it and brought it back for him.
So the man held one of the eggs in his fist [threatening to crush it], and he asked the Khan, “Where is your gold?”
So the Khan told him about all of his gold.
Then the man crushed the remaining egg and was able to kill the Iron Khan.
Having killed the Khan and rescued his wife, the brother begins his ascent from the underworld. He sends his wife first, but as soon as she is safe above, his treacherous brothers cut the rope, stranding him down below.
The brother comes once again to the large bird, and he says, “Large bird, I helped you before.”
The bird came to the boy: “What [do you] need, young man?”
The young man says, “I don't have the strength to get up over the edge.”
“You go and shoot birds for me, forty birds,” said the great bird.
So he shot some birds and brought them.
The big bird approached the young man.
“Get up on my back and give me a bird [to eat] each time I call.”
So the young man gave one at each call of the bird.
Flying up, they approached the edge.
But at the next call of the big bird, the young man had no more birds to feed him.
So, he cut off a piece of his leg for him
Again, and again (the big bird) called out for food, and he cut the meat off his leg to feed the bird.
When they reached the edge, he didn't have any legs left.
The big bird asked the young man, “What happened to you? You don't have any legs.”
“I cut the meat off and gave it to you.”
So the big bird spat up the meat and glued it back onto to the young man's legs.
The young man became better, and so he returned to his brothers.
But his brother had taken his wife and they had married.
His wife saw him and started to cry.
The young man asked his brothers, “Who cut my rope?”
His brothers didn't say anything.
So he said, “Let's all go outside. You two shoot arrows from your bows. Whoever is the person who cut the rope, the arrow will hit the mark in his body.”
So they started shooting.
One arrow passed straight through the eldest brother, and he died immediately.
So the two younger brothers lived on, after they buried that other one.
