Cover

The Blue Sky

Title Page

The Blue Sky

Galsan Tschinag

Translated from the German by

Katharina Rout

MILKWEED EDITIONS

Dedication

For my grandmother—
The wa ming sun at the beginning of my life

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In 2001, I fell in love with Galsan Tschinag’s work. My first e-mail reached him two days before the fall of the Twin Towers, his reply to me two days after. He called my hope to translate The Blue Sky one day a small sun, shining from the West, and sent me a large herd of good spirits. Coming from a practicing shaman, the wish for good spirits meant a great deal.

Two years later, I met Tschinag when he was in Germany on one of his many reading tours. Immediately he inquired about my family and began sharing the story of his. He spoke of life, death, family, love, and the heart. Before dinner, I learned about his horses, after dinner, about how as a shaman he heals people, even with a life-threatening injury inflicted by a horse. A bit of Mongolia had arrived in Germany. He takes some Altai soil with him wherever he goes.

In 2004, my husband and I went to visit Galsan in Mongolia. From the first moment, we were impressed by the hospitality. His children had been instructed to guide and take care of us. In Ulaanbaatar, they put us on the plane to Ölgiy, where we were met by another son who had spent two days coming down from the Altai to pick us up. From Ölgiy (elevation 1700 meters) we traveled by jeep toward the distant mountain range. We were near the Russian border, and skirmishes in response to political borders that arbitrarily cross ancient tribal lands were common.

After hours of driving through the steppe and foothills—there are hardly any roads in Mongolia—we reached a windy mountain pass with a large ovoo, a cairn of sacrifi ial stones that marked the beginning of the traditional land of the Tuvans and, as the Mongolians say about this part of their country, the roof of the world. The air smelled of sage, and before us lay an awe-inspiring ocean of greenish-blue velvety mountain backs, broad valleys left behind by glaciers, and snow-covered peaks in the distance. ‘Altai,’ Galsan Tschinag has written, comes from ‘ala,’ multi-colored, and ‘dag,’ mountain. As the winds drove clouds across the sky, the mountains seemed to move under the changing patterns of sun and shadow, and it was easy to understand the Tuvans’ veneration for the Altai.

For the next few hours we kept climbing. From time to time, a Kazakh or Tuvan yurt could be seen in the distance. In a few valleys, herders were making hay from small patches of green: struggling for every blade of grass. Toward evening we arrived in the Tsengelkhayrkhan mountain range. Towering over three yurts on a ridge at the end of a valley near the Black Lake was the 4000 meters-high sacred mountain. The Tuvans call it Haarakan, Great Mountain, because awe and respect forbid them to spell out the proper names of what is divine or dangerous. This was the furthest the jeep could go. To meet us, Galsan Tschinag had left the neighboring valley and ridden across a mountain through hours of a lashing rain storm. We saw him from afar astride his white horse waiting on the ridge. He welcomed us into a yurt especially made for us—a brandnew, shining white yurt we were invited to take back to North America. We were offered different kinds of cheese and fried dough, and invited to drink from the silver bowl that has come down to him from his ancestors—as has his snuff bottle, his silver flint and the silver sheath of the dagger he wears on his silk saffron belt over his blue velvet coat when he is in the Altai. His son came to play a concert for us on the horsehead fi dle. He had brought the mail with him from Ölgiy, which included an invitation by the President of the Republic of Tywa, who hoped Galsan Tschinag would join him for the celebrations of the republic’s tenth anniversary; he would be offered a place of honor next to Putin. Clearly, we had arrived at the court of a prince. And we were honored because translations build bridges—honored by a man who is a most extraordinary bridge builder himself: As a shaman, he mediates between his community and the spirit world; as a chieftain, he connects Tuvans with each other; as a writer, he forges links between the oral tradition and epics of his people and the literate world outside; as a politician, he negotiates a future for his minority Tuvans among a sometimes hostile majority of Kazakhs and Mongolians; as a translator and teacher, he crosses, and enables others to cross, the linguistic borders of Tuvan, Kazakh, Mongolian, Russian, and German; and as a host, he opens his small yurt in the Altai, and his large yurt—the Altai and the steppe itself—to guests from abroad.

The next day, we continued our journey on horseback. Across steep, rocky terrain and a ridge more than 3000 meters high we rode for hours to reach the juniper valley, the summer pastures for a number of Tuvan and Kazakh families. There we watched Galsan Tschinag work as chieftain and shaman, and as host of a group of Europeans who, like us, had come to the Altai to learn about the Tuvans.

Every day Galsan took us to visit Tuvan and Kazakh families in the valley. Each had prepared a spread, mostly of meat and dairy products, but also of fried dough and sweets, and each offered us salted, buttery milk-tea and—since it was the foaling season—both fermented and distilled mare’s milk. In one yurt, a whole wether had been slaughtered for the occasion. These were celebrations, but they clearly were also opportunities Galsan Tschinag created to braid together the Tuvan and Kazakh families who have to share the sparse resources of the land. He was always given the seat of honor at the North end of the yurt, and while the guests were offered delicacies such as the fatty tail of a sheep, he inquired—in Tuvan, Kazakh, or Mongolian—about the well-being of each family and their animals. As a result of four catastrophic winters and unusually dry summers, the nomads in the Altai had lost two-thirds of their herds in the previous decade. Galsan Tschinag’s visits and the European visitors he has brought into the Altai for the last fifteen summers have created employment and income opportunities. We never left a yurt without him handing over a substantial stack of tugrik bills, but we also watched him engaging with every adult in the family; introducing the children to us; stroking, massaging, and caressing the sick and aged; praising (and translating into German) outstanding events and achievements; and making everybody feel encouraged and important.

In the process, we heard people’s stories. We learned how mothers on horseback carry their baby’s wooden cradle when the family moves: on a leather strap around the neck. More importantly, we learned how a family’s history can be read from the second, thinner yak leather strap stretched across the cradle. It allows visitors to avoid asking painful questions and instead find gentle and empathetic words. For every birth of a boy, a sheep’s right ankle bone is tied to the strap, for every girl, a left one. For every child that has died, the bone is removed, but the knot remains.

Bones connect life and death, the material and the spiritual. They were read by our host, by the shaman who provided guidance and support, and who taught us to read in the book of nature. A rock face, so forbidding from a distance, shows fracture lines from close up: nothing is forever, everything changes. Birds that breed their young at a lake near the foot of Haarakan’s glacier grieve when one of the couple dies. The shaman translated: love is the key to life, and the cause of suffering. Do as the birds.

The morning we started our two-day trip back to Ölgiy, people gathered to say farewell. Each was blessed by Galsan Tschinag, the shaman, with the traditional sprinkling of milk. And because my husband and I were the first North Americans to come to the Tuvan land in the High Altai, we were given special gifts to take home. The Cold War is ending, people had repeatedly said to us in the days before. When we laid our customary three stones on the ovoo, we had reason to be grateful indeed.

Like the birds Galsan Tschinag had referred to, I had embarked on my own journey to the top of the world. I returned with the shaman’s blessings to complete the translation of his important first novel into English. I want to thank Galsan Tschinag and his people for generously receiving us into their lives, and Galsan himself for discussing his text and my translation with me. I am also very grateful to Hiro Boga and Ron Smith from Oolichan Books, and to Daniel Slager from Milkweed Editions, for their careful and insightful editorial suggestions; to Malaspina University-College for supporting my work; and to my husband Jonathan for having shared my journey half way round the world to bring the project to completion.

Before I left, Galsan made one final observation: “I am convinced that our corner could quickly turn into a Karabakh or Kosovo, if in a country such as ours, with a colorful mix of peoples and a leadership that glorifi s violence and war, the Tuvan people were to glorify their own and denigrate their neighbors’ cultures.” Bridges have to be built from both sides of a river, though. While Galsan Tschinag promotes foreign-language learning among the Tuvans, he also gives one manuscript a year for publication, royalty-free, to a Mongolian publisher, hoping to sow the seeds of respect for Tuvan culture among his fellow Mongolians. His stories, he says about all his books, are not his stories alone: they are the stories of his people.

And they are stories for the world.

—KATHARINA ROUT
ERRINGTON, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2006

The Blue Sky

The ream

THE DREAM

This story may have begun in a dream. Was it a preparation for things to come, a warning perhaps? For it was a bad dream—a nightmare.

Don’t ever tell anybody about your bad dreams, people said. Tell your dreams to a hole in the ground and spit three times. They said similar things about good dreams. Don’t share them with anybody. Keep them to yourself. So, I wondered, were the only dreams you ever heard the dreams that were neither good nor bad?

We usually started the day in our yurt by telling each other what we had dreamed the night before. Oddly enough, it made everybody both happy and worried at the same time, which you could tell from watching the listeners.

But when I had my dream, I didn’t know that rule. So while the dream was hot, as hot as tears, I passed it on to my mother. I had cried and had to be woken up. It was Mother who had woken me. She had come into the yurt from the morning milking to empty the full pail, and the hand that stroked me was wet and cool and smelled of raw milk.

Still sobbing, I told her what I had just dreamed. But after she listened to my story, she announced it was a good dream. I wondered if she was really listening because while I was talking, she was busy straining the milk through a tuft of yak tail hairs into the big aluminum jug. “No, it was not!” I said fie cely and started sobbing again. Mother held her ground. What’s more, she said my interpretation of the dream was wrong, and talked instead of gold, silver, and silk, of celebrations and sweets. None of it made sense to me.

But I learned: Don’t tell your dream to anybody, tell it to a hole in the ground, and spit three times.

That’s what she explained when she turned back at the door. “Mind you, that’s only for a truly bad dream!” she warned.

Of course it was a bad dream. So I had to do what had to be done. But I had already shared it with somebody, with Mother. What now?

I thought about it as I crawled out from under the old, quilted coat that had once belonged to Father and was now my blanket. And I was still thinking it over as I set off into the new day.

A bright summer morning welcomed me with the smell of dew, sun, and animal pee. Just then the flock of sheep was noisily leaving the pen, while the lambs stayed tethered to the höne and formed a square, white patch. The women and girls were milking the yaks at the dshele. All around me squirts of milk were drumming into pails of resonating aspen wood; each sounded different, from a bright hiss to the dark gurgle of water bubbling up from an earth eye.

Our dog Arsylang was asleep next to the dung heap. He was breathing peacefully. Sunlight streamed onto his dark, downy fur and exploded into rays that glittered and danced on the ends of his hair. His ribs rose and fell almost imperceptibly. His limbs lay slightly curved and gathered in as if they had neither joints nor weight. I could see his body was calm, and everything was as it had been: good. But what about the dream?

I went over to Mother, who, squatting beside a cow, milked it so nimbly and vigorously that her shoulders rocked as if they were trembling. She had buried half her face in the cow’s thick, bushy belly fur and had closed her one, still-visible eye.

I moved my mouth close to her ear and whispered: “Mother!” The eye opened. “What if you have already told somebody?”

Mother didn’t immediately catch what I meant. She had to think. Then she said firmly: “Don’t ever tell anybody about your dream. Not anybody!”

I got scared and left. I thought more about it and decided it was not yet too late to run out into the steppe and get rid of the dream. Somehow it seemed better than leaving the matter all wrong.

I walked a fair way from the ail. Then I turned to face the mouth of the river valley and spoke, enunciating each word as clearly as I could: IN MY DREAM, MY ARSYLANG HAS BEEN POISONED. HE CANNOT WALK OR STAND. HE STAGGERS, FALLS OVER, AND FOAMS AT THE MOUTH. HIS LIMBS ARE STIFF, HIS FUR STANDS ON END, HE IS DYING. OH-OH-OH!

Just then the dogs raced off, barking noisily, to chase a horseman who was speeding at some distance past the ail. When he noticed the dogs coming closer, the horseman slowed from a gallop to a trot and then slowed even further until he rode at a calm walk. The dogs reached him, raced around him in circles, and barked at him. But they soon calmed down, and eventually they lost interest in the placid horseman and turned back.

Under the morning sun, which was still low in the sky, I dallied and played with my long, thin shadow, trying to catch up with it, but never getting lucky. No matter how quickly I skipped, the shadow leapt along and always got away. Then the dogs returned. With their tails curled high above their backs, they walked lazily, yawned, and licked their mouths with their long, dangling pink tongues.

But not so Arsylang. He never curled his tail, nor did he lift it much, but carried it slanting downward, with its tip only slightly curved outward. And his ears rose straight up; pointy like a foal’s and close to each other, they looked like a pair of scissors. He was ambling as usual, his neck reaching forward, with the collected poise of a predator.

Arsylang was a foundling dog. When he was still a pup, Father had brought him from far away. At the time the pup came to us, I already had my first teeth. But the young dog grew fast and had long been considered grown up, while I was still a child.

Nobody who came to visit us ignored Arsylang. Everybody acknowledged him with at least a general comment: “Oi, that’s a dangerous dog.” To which the reply was always the same, regardless of who was helping the guest off his saddle or lifting him back up again: “He only looks that way.”

Arsylang was not dangerous and had never bitten anybody. But people never stopped fearing him. Usually, their remarks would lead to a longer conversation about the dog.

Some people commented on his name, which meant “lion.” Then Father would reply that the lion’s job was not to see but to hear. Others said we should not have called the dog Arsylang, but Börü, which meant “wolf.” To which Father would answer: “That would mean calling the wolf by its name ten or twenty times a day and drawing it near—who would do that?”

Suddenly I felt like seeing Arsylang run. So I ran backward and called out in one breath, “Arsylang, Arsylang, Arsylang!” and then, “Tuh-tuh-tuuh!” Here and there barking rang out, and all of a sudden the dogs came charging. I watched how Arsylang ran: he stretched and pressed low to the ground, his tail flat and straight. He tore past the dogs that had taken off ahead of him, and he was now in the lead. I ran a bit further and crouched beside a burrow that a marmot or maybe even a fox could have easily slid into. When Arsylang arrived, he landed with his muzzle right in the burrow and, whimpering and scratching with all four paws, tried to squeeze the rest of himself into it as well. Grass and soil, still damp from the night’s dew, flew up in lumps. Then came a dry layer of soil which crumbled into dust and grew into a little cloud. I called Arsylang by his name, and he stopped straining. But the excitement wouldn’t let go of him for a long time: He continued to whimper, and his fur stood on end.

I got a fright.

Then Grandma arrived. She walked toward me with little toddling steps. Because I didn’t want her to drag herself so far from the ail for my sake, I called, “tshuh!”, gave myself a slap on the bottom, and galloped toward her.

The dogs followed me. Arsylang soon caught up and trotted along beside me. The other dogs stayed behind, none passed us.

Grandma stopped. She had grabbed the top end of her short birchwood stick with both hands and was leaning on it when we reached her.

“What was that? Was it a wolf?” she asked softly, with that little smile on her lips that rarely faded. “No, not a wolf,” I said, unsure of myself. “Maybe a fox or just a marmot.” I felt a little hurt that Grandma would ask me a question I had to answer with a lie.

“Where have you been, Grandma?” I asked sullenly, partly to fend off the shame that was bound to come, and partly to counter that shame by keeping alive the feeling of hurt so I would find it easier, for the first time ever, to keep a secret from her.

“I had to relieve myself,” Grandma said humbly.

“So long and so far away?”

“I went behind the hill. My legs are getting on.”

Grandma sighed, but immediately cheered up again. She pointed at her legs: “I told the two of them, Don’t be so lazy or I’ll take you to herd the sheep!”

I didn’t want to reply because I thought her joke was inappropriate. Instead, I wanted to get to the bottom of something else: “Grandma, why did you have to go behind the hill? The others squat right here in the steppe.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear. I’m not used to squatting while people look—I could never do that!”

Suddenly a fie ce feeling for her overcame me. It was part compassion and part awe. Then it changed into love. It felt like pain, it really hurt. The rims of my eyes turned hot. “Grandma!” I said and took her hand. She looked at me so kindly and with such understanding that I could barely speak: “Let’s go, Grandma. Let’s go home.”

Grandma

GRANDMA

Grandma was human silk. That’s what Father said, and what he said was always right. Always. And she had been sent to me by the sky. That’s what Mother had revealed to me. Some of the things she said weren’t true of course, but when the sky was involved, we were not allowed to lie. Mother had said so herself and even Grandma had listened.

At first she was a stranger among us, people said. She used to have a husband, a son, a yurt, and a sizeable flock. Later her husband was shot dead by fleeing Russians, and her son struck dead by pillaging Kazakhs. The two events happened one right after the other.

Left all alone, she sought the company of her younger sister, Hööshek. The sister was widowed as well, and for all I know, she was the only woman in our corner of the world who had managed to acquire the title baj. She had a son who, though long grown up, had remained weak and shy; and probably as a result of this worry Hööshek felt both more important as head of her family and more determined to assert herself in life.

Grandma did not talk much about her sister, and what little she said was good. She never said anything bad about anybody, not even about strangers. That’s the way she was.

In spite of that, people talked a great deal about Hööshek and about what she had done with Grandmother’s yurt and flock. The stories added up. They were common knowledge.

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