The third yurt looked almost black, and its felted sides and roof were riddled with holes. It belonged to Uncle Sama. He was Father’s only brother and was, as we later learned, ten years younger. People said Uncle Sama would always stay a child. But he was big and terribly strong. Like many children, he did not like to wash his face. (Neither, at times, did I, particularly when Father was away.) People said the same sort of thing about his wife, Aunt Pürwü. But they did not dare to say so too often, and particularly not too loudly, because she was a shaman. With shamans you had better live in friendship. That’s what Mother said. And Father not only agreed but added: “Same with dogs!” But not everybody seemed to know that. Least of all Uncle Sargaj. He used to cheer on the ail children, and so we made fun not only of Uncle Sama but also of Aunt Pürwü. And oddly enough, the two of them often made fun of each other. We spent hours in their yurt, listening to and laughing loudly at their sparring.

Everybody in the ail except Grandma, Father, and Mother were people of the new era. That’s what Uncle Sargaj said. He could tell because like everybody else in the new era, they all smoked. Aunt Pürwü, though, smoked only when she shamanized. Then she sat with her back to the stove in the yurt’s upper right half, smoked one pipe after the other, and sang. Her songs were pleas addressed to the spirits, whom she implored to appear at long last. It sometimes took them quite a while. And when eventually the moment arrived, she rose, and the actual shamanizing that everybody had impatiently been waiting for could finally begin. Until then, she crouched with her face turned away from both the stove and the people, shook her head, and smoked and snarled. And each time a pinch of tobacco turned to ash and Aunt Pürwü exhaled, she reached back with her right hand, which held the empty pipe that was made from a wether’s shoulder blade. Then the pipe lighter would take the pipe from her, refill it with tobacco, light it, and put it back into the hand that was still waiting behind her back with spread fingers. Not even Uncle Sama, whom Father called a rotten puffer, smoked as much as she did on these occasions.

Uncle Sargaj was an elegant man. He smoked a pipe while everybody else rolled little tobacco sausages with bits of newspaper. You couldn’t compare his brass pipe to the shaman’s, though. Mother would have also liked to be a person of the new era and smoked sometimes herself, but she had to do so secretly because Grandma and Father were not supposed to know.