Running around naked looking for the trick of it is perhaps as good a symbol of the relationship I had with Marcel Vierchau as anything else. In memory, now, he is always laughing and I am trying to find the joke, on the verge of feeling hurt. Yet it is difficult to stay angry with a man having so good a time, and he was never vindictive, or mean, or cruel. He just thought I was funny; and was I not? A large, somewhat overbred American girl, mad for sex and ethnography, desperate for approval, would have been funny to a man like Marcel, and especially amusing were my pathetic efforts to spy out his secrets. While we were together, I would actually hide myself and try to watch him, looking for the incredibly clever, spidery apparatus that enabled him to pull off his stunts. When he was out of the apartment, or the tent or the van, I made it a habit to poke through his things. Yes, embarrassing; and worse, I never found anything.
Marcel knew, and it amazed him, because his whole life was dedicated to teaching that real magic was a technology of the mind, not of smoke and mirrors. It’s your Catholic prejudice against witchcraft, he’d tell me, you can’t allow yourself to believe that someone you love is really a witch and so you look for wires.
We were together for seven years, continuously, almost. Based in Paris, we traveled to every continent?city, jungle, desert, steppe. The problem with a relationship like that is that the girl gets spoiled. His friends are so much more interesting than your friends. When famous people listen to you respectfully at dinner parties, do you really want to go clubbing with twenty-somethings? You don’t. They say the young woman delights in her sexual power over the older man, and that this is good for her confidence and self-esteem. Maybe so, but in exchange her real life is stolen from her, and she grows up twisted, like a pear tree espaliered against the wall of the Great Man. And what does she do when the wall crumbles? As it must.
I don’t know whether thinking about Marcel and what happened in the garden last night are connected. No, I do know?it’s all connected. For a long time I was spared the pangs of memory; post-traumatic shock, I suppose, or perverted will, but now things are loosening up, like the ice breaking in springtime on the Yei.
It’s going to be another (another!) hot day today and here I am thinking about the Yei. I used to think about the Yei in Danolo, too, memories of coolness being especially precious there. I’m a northern girl. I love fog and mist, and crisp, cheek-pinching nights, and crunching through snow, and so I ask you why am I here and why have I spent much of my life in the fucking tropics? I don’t suffer from the heat, as some do, though. I’m adaptable to the various extreme climates where live the sort of people anthropologists dote on: steaming jungles, baking deserts, frozen steppes.
Perhaps I could show up at Medical Records in shorts and T-shirt, the same sort of outfit that Luz is now pulling on. She wishes to select her own clothes and dress herself. Muffa is merely to watch, and check the clock and worry about being late.
The Yei is a river in Siberia, one of those long, sluggish Arctic rivers that only ascend to literate consciousness as crossword clues. Six down: Siberian river, three letters: the mighty Mil. The winding Sem. The rushing Yei. The Chenka pass the winter on its banks, and one winter I did, too, with Marcel, so that I could harvest a doctoral dissertation out of the soil he had so brilliantly cultivated. I was twenty-seven and it had lately occurred to me that being Vierchau’s beautiful assistant was not a lifetime career. I was to study woman’s magic, which among the Chenka is quite different from the men’s magic that Marcel knew about.
The Chenka are pastoralists related to the Yakut, and speak a similar language, but their connection with the various Yakut tribes is obscure. The other Yakut avoid them, sometimes even deny that there are any Chenka people at all. Except when they wish to learn. The Chenka operate a kind of informal, floating sorcerer’s university and at any particular time you will find among them Yakuts, Buryats, Altais, Evenks, and peoples from even further off, Yukakirs, Nenets, Khants, and, once, an American, me.
Marcel discovered the Chenka in 1969 in the journal of a Soviet functionary named T. I. Berozhinski. This included an eyewitness report of how a group of Siberian nomads had walked through a cordon of OGPU troops who had come to arrest them. This occurred in daylight, and none of the secret policemen saw a thing. Berozhinski saw them, but when he told the commissar in charge, he got sent straight to the gulag, where he died. Other than this, the Chenka were unknown to history or anthropology.
Marcel was thunderstruck by the account. If Berozhinski was not bemused himself or a liar, the Chenka had witched their way through scores of the most brutal, unimaginative, and disciplined men on earth. This was no pathetic ethnic remnant like the jungle tribes he and his colleagues normally studied. He was instantly on fire to see them for himself.
Marcel arranged for a scientific study visa, went to Siberia, met the Chenka, was amazed. He went again and stayed for his seven years. The rest is now familiar from the pages of his book. The Chenka had real magic, whatever that means.
Another peg snagging the folds of the net of my life. Berozhinski begat Vierchau, and Vierchau begat Doe. Since the start of our connection, not more than days after that first marathon in bed, I had been bugging Marcel to take me to the Chenka. It was somehow never arranged. Always other commitments intervened or there was some hitch with the authorities, or they invaded Afghanistan, or something. But now at last I, too, was encamped upon the Yei, learning how to make mare’s milk yogurt, kvass, and women’s magic. So called. The Chenka practice a sexual egalitarianism quite remarkable among pastoral societies, which tend to be ferociously patriarchal, women being merely a sort of cattle. Among the Chenka it is otherwise, and I think it is because the women exercise substantial powers in the magical realm. The women, for example, decide who is to marry whom, and whether they will have children, and of what sex. So the Chenka and Marcel believed, and during my year with them I saw nothing to contradict it. Puniekka expressed amazement when I told her that in the lands of the Alues, the non-Chenka, there were such things as unwanted children, and people who wanted children and couldn’t have them. She was further astounded that we did not routinely determine the sex of our babies in advance.
Puniekka was the shaman in whose yurt I lodged. This was another of the disappointments of my Siberian experience. I had imagined that Marcel and I would live together, as a team. I thought he was being hyberbolic when he said that when we got to Chenka we would hardly see each other. But it was so. Sexual segregation among the Chenka during the seasonal migration is nearly total. The men are out all day moving the herds, and the women are cooking, brewing, and making things as the carts rumble across the steppe. The men all eat together, too, in their herding camp. The women bring them their morning and evening meal, packed in clay pots. Child rearing is matrilocal: women own the yurts, carts, and all the physical apparatus of the culture, except for personal clothing, harness, and magical apparatus. The men own all the animals. Paternal care is diffuse and paternal lineage obscure. The Chenka understand the association of pregnancy with sex, but they often attribute the qualities of a child to spiritual rather than earthly parenthood.
And on top of this, Chenka shamans are celibate, or to put it more accurately, they do not engage in sex with other human beings, but only with the denizens of the spirit world. Marcel had explained this to me and it’s in the book, too, but I thought … Jesus, you know, I can’t remember what I thought.
As it turned out, I hardly saw Marcel for nine months that year, and I didn’t get laid, although I did get a lot of offers from various Chenka women, several of which I accepted out of anthropological curiosity. I did not get taken on as an apprentice shaman. Marcel had warned me about that, too, but again, I failed to take it seriously. It is so hard, even for anthropologists, to take other cultures seriously.
One day, I couldn’t stand it any longer and jumped on a pony and rode out to where the men were and I confronted him and demanded he spend more time with me, let me stay with the men and herd, and he took me aside and listened to me rant, his eyes getting wider, and I have to say, that was the only time he really got mad at me, although looking back I realize I must have been a colossal pain in the butt. He said, You silly woman, don’t you understand who these people are? What they can do? He said, Don’t you understand my status with these people? And I didn’t really, because, to be fair, he hadn’t exactly dwelled on it in the book, but now he told me. I’m a pet, he said, a kind of superior dog. They’re teaching me a couple of tricks and it amuses them. I walk on my hind legs, I play dead, I roll over.
I didn’t get it. We?we in what we are pleased to call advanced societies?don’t have this experience. We’ve always been ahead, whatever that means. We could read and write, and they couldn’t. We have the Maxim gun and they have not. Berozhinski’s tale about the invisibility trick I took to be some kind of hallucination, probably drug-induced. The Chenka eat a lot of dope, mostly strains of fungi, hundreds of different kinds, which they grow in tubs, but also various plant and animal preparations, and I assumed that old T.I. was whacked out of his mind most of the time.
I told Marcel this. He looked at me like you look at a crazy person, pityingly. I’m sure I looked at him the same way. He walked away, and I rode back to the women’s camp.
My work there was not going well, and this was perhaps a greater cause for distress than loneliness. The Chenka ladies would talk to me politely about anything except sorcery. You won’t understand, they would say when I pressed them. Puniekka would be grinding up some foul-smelling paste. What’s that for, Puniekka? You wouldn’t understand. Tell me anyway. A sigh. Then, patiently, as to a child: It’s a griunat. What is a griunat? Answer: when the raaiunt teno’s d’okka kiarrnkch, we spread a griunat on the doorposts. I would paw desperately through my Chenka glossary, but the critical words were never there. I asked them, What did these words mean? They would explain each, using a host of other terms that I also could not connect to the world of sensation and material. Describing color to a blind man. I don’t understand, I would cry, sometimes with actual tears. Yes, they would say, we told you that you wouldn’t understand.
There is a green parrot, a flock of green parrots in the flame trees near Providence when I drop Luz off and they are shrieking like maniacs, like demons, like oh, shit, where has this one been hiding?
This memory. Night, in the yurt. Another little mystery: nobody in the surrounding ten thousand square miles lives in yurts, but the Chenka do. They say that Chesei-Anka gave them yurts, sheep, goats, and horses when the Chenka emerged from the sea. No Chenka to anyone’s knowledge has ever seen the sea, but they know where it lies, far to the south. It was Puniekka’s yurt. I slept in the place for guests on the east side. A yurt is always pitched facing south, so that the sun streaming through the smokehole makes a clocklike passage across the floor during the day. Two of Puniekka’s other students were sleeping there, too, on the west wall, and the mistress herself was at the north. Spirits arrive from the north. I remember coming out of sleep, awakened by a sharp cry. The other students were wrapped in their blankets, long lumps, like logs reflecting the red glow from the dying fire in the center. Rhythmic gasps, the sound of a body moving against cloth. Another cry. I listened, fascinated. Ai! Oh! Ai! And heavy mouth-breathing, male and stertorous, like a horse. Puniekka was having a terrific fuck by the sound of it, and I was dying to know who the guy was. It had never happened before and I had been assured of the strict celibacy of all the shamans, male and female. I rolled on my side so I could make ethnographic observations. I recall feeling terrific, a warming intellectual smugness. This was something even Marcel didn’t know?guys sneaked into lady shamans’ tents at night. So I stared, and I could see pretty well, too: besides the glow from the fireplace, moonlight flooded down through the smokehole. She was on her back, with her knees up high. She still had her heavy woolen stockings on, but I could see her knees gleaming and moving back and forth with his thrusts. Powerful thrusts, because each one smacked the crown of her head against a large leather pillow, which creaked at the blows.
The space above her where her lover should have been was perfectly empty.
And what happens to you when you see something like that, if you’re a Western materialist, is that your mind sort of splits in two. One part is thinking, Oh, how fascinating, an example of hysterical conversion in the trance state among the primitives, she’s imagining a demon lover and sure enough her body is going through the motions just as if she were being violently had and she’s having spectacular orgasms, too, from the sound of it and the rigid arching of her back and the shuddering, and clearly she’s not manually masturbating because her hands are wrapped around the thing that isn’t there. And, How interesting, it really does look like she has sunk deeper into the sheepskin pallet, just as if she were being pressed down by a heavy man.
As for the other part, that one’s four years old and blubbering under the covers, and cold sweat is bursting forth embarrassingly all over its body. We wish to control that part, and we do, out of long practice. Such things cannot be. That’s what we’ve learned to say. And having reestablished scientific objectivity, we grope among our things for a notebook and pencil and record the event, except for the personal details that are not the business of the scientific community to know, such as that the sexual field in the yurt is so intense that little ripples are running across the observer’s belly and down the observer’s thighs and her breath is coming in short gasps and the observer’s cunt is gushing wet. There is no such thing as a “sexual field,” for we cannot detect its elementary particles.
Finally, a series of unearthly cries, very like those of the parrots above me as I walk back to my car, a greater arching of back and flailing of limbs, something like a breathy gasp from no visible source, and relative silence. It was apparently over. I was shaking, and I became aware that Puniekka was staring at me; I could see the whites of her eyes glowing in the moonlight, sending it seemed their own light from within. She said, “Go to sleep, Chane Aluesfan.” Then I was waking up and thinking, What a weird dream! I went on thinking that until, while looking through my notes a couple of days later, I found what I had written during the … whatever-it-was.
A hallucination, that useful word. Of course. I hallucinate, we hallucinate, Berozhinski hallucinates; yes, but when all of us hallucinate, each one of us hallucinating the same thing, then that is the hallucination we are pleased to call reality. It got worse. I once saw Puniekka turn into an owl. I once saw Ullionk, one of Puniekka’s students, appear in two places at once. An old woman seen in a yurt, looking up from her pot, had a dog’s head. I attributed this sort of thing to inhaling or eating the psychotropic fungal dust that was everywhere about the camp. A reasonable explanation.
I tried, like a good ethnologist of the Vierchau school, to step into their reality. Here I failed utterly, which was the last straw. My notes were a confused mess, my glossary a nonsense. My only half-useful informant was that same Ullionk, a pie-faced girl of seventeen or so, who was often to be found staring into space with her mouth drooping, or speaking animatedly to beings invisible. A schizophrenic, clearly, but well in with Puniekka and her clique. And friendly, when she wasn’t being nuts.
A week or so after the night of the demon lover, I approached Ullionk and asked her, in my paltry Yakut, why it was that no one was paying attention to me, why nobody would teach me anything about teniesgu, which is what the Chenka call the sort of magic practiced by women. She was amazed that I wanted to learn. I asked her what she thought I was doing in Puniekka’s yurt, why she thought I was asking all those questions. Because you are Vaarka’s ketzi, she answered, with the tone of saying something all the world knows. Vaarka was Marcel. A ketzi is an animal, usually a dog, but sometimes a sheep, in which a shaman has imprisoned a troublesome spirit. For a moment my gape of mouth mimicked Ullionk’s in high fit. When I recovered I asked whether Vaarka had told them this, and she said, No, he said you were to be taught teniesgu, but it was clear to everyone that this was a joke, that you were ketzi. Why was this? Because, she explained, night after night spirits have come to enjoy you. Surely you know that no one can be a fentienskin, a shamaness, without being enjoyed by one of the rishen or rishot. We must have dala from them, and as we are women, sometimes there is a child.
No, actually, that had slipped my mind, although it’s fairly clear in Marcel’s book. I thought, though, that it was figurative, that it was just a kind of dream. (Just a dream,by the way, is an expression not much used among shamans.) Yes, they came, she continued, and the ogga within you turned them away. Puniekka told her rish — husband to bring all his friends. Puniekka said she would not lie with him until they had enjoyed you and given you dala. But they could not come to you. And she named here all the seducers who had tried and failed. So at last, Puniekka gave up on you and allowed her rishen to give her dala. She is not angry at you, but wishes Vaarka would put his ketzi in a young dog, or send it back to the other world, as it is very inconvenient having one in an Aluesfan, and though it was a good joke, it had stopped being funny.
I was fuming after I heard this. Marcel had said he was a kind of dog, which was fine if he wanted to believe that, but now this wacko was telling me I was less than a dog, a kind of spiritual trash can. And, rotten with pride as I was, I was mad to see Marcel and have him get me out of this insane position. I said this to Ullionk and she looked at me as if I were crazy, not very comfortable to get such a look from an actual crazy person, and reminded me that it was currently Vshenda, a long ceremonial period around the autumn equinox, in which sexual segregation was strongly enforced. I would have to wait for the end of the period, twenty days hence, when there would occur one of the regular feasts, whereat ordinary Chenkas indulged deeply in drinking, singing, dancing, and sex with other humans.
But I did not want to wait. Therefore, the next morning before dawn I took my compass, food, water, and a Russian map, and set out on a pony for the men’s camp, which was about fifteen miles to the south. It was not a difficult navigational task. The steppe is flat or gently undulating, the weather was fine, dry and chilly. The sun was rising on my left hand as I set out riding, my compass clearly showing where south was. It should have been an easy three-hour jaunt toward the blue hump of the Konginskiye Gory in the distance. The direction was unmistakable, and so I was not surprised to see, some two hours later, the smoke of habitation ahead.
When I entered the enclosure, however, I found myself in the women’s camp. The sun was still on my left, above the flat horizon. Jerk that I was, I whipped the pony around and, circling the camp, headed south again, a sick sweat breaking out all over me. As I rode, I kept checking the compass needle, which continued to say south, south, all the way up to the northern edge of the women’s camp. Again. By that time, the sun was high in the day, and the camp was in the midst of its usual bustle. I dismounted, walked on rubber legs to Puniekka’s yurt, and took to my pallet. No one spoke to me.
There I stayed, more or less, hardly eating, silent, curled up in a ball, leaking tears. I suppose I had been driven mad. I suppose I was clinically speaking a paranoid psychotic during those weeks, although I don’t know whether this term is of any value in the cultural context of the Chenka. It’s hard for me to reconstruct my thoughts during that time, but I know there were a lot of them, more thoughts than usually run through a human brain in a similar stretch of time, racing thoughts. Like: all the fault of Marcel Vierchau, French shit, filthy Jew, seducer, manipulator, never loved me, just wanted me as a guinea pig and a free fuck. Stupid me. Never loved me never. Fucking all the other girls, too. I wasn’t the first, no. I saw his notes. I can read French. I’m not the first, no, he brought lots of girls out to Puniekka to eat up like the witch in the fairy tales, evil magician, egg in my cunt, how did he do that, how did she do that, it was pointing south, south, south all the time, they will give me a dog’s head, and the ogga will make me into an old lady.
Marcel arrived with the other men for the feast. He came to see me and I immediately attacked him, physically and with words, horrible stuff, and a remarkable amount of it anti-Semitic, although I thought myself quite free of that mental vice. Marcel had as a baby been hidden in a Catholic orphanage during the Nazi time, and his parents had died in the camps, so whatever was speaking through me had a fine taste in cruelty. And the usual lies about what an old impotent sack of shit he was in bed, how his prick was way too small, how I’d fucked all his graduate students, and on and on and he just sat there looking at me, maddeningly calm until I leaped on him, fists and nails. He cried out something. Puniekka moved, striking like a snake, and placed both her hands flat upon my temples. They were icy; shortly I felt the coolness sink into my brain and I fell back upon my pallet and into a dream.
Or something like one. I was curiously at ease, detached but interested, like an actor in the wings, watching the other performers, waiting for her own cue. I remember that my vision seemed particularly acute, the colors of the yurt’s furnishing and of the dress of Puniekka and Marcel seemed hyperreal. I want to say jewel-like, but that’s not quite it. Like food in a food ad. The rage had quite gone, or rather I still felt it, but abstractly, as if it didn’t engage my real self.
After a long time by the clock of the sun shaft’s travel across the rugs of the yurt floor, Marcel came and sat by me and put his arm around me and asked me how I was, and I said I felt fine, which was perfectly true. I remember the bright, glistening marks, like a string of tiny garnets, where I had clawed his cheek, and I found that interesting, too, they told a story. He helped me gather up my gear. We left Puniekka’s yurt and went over to the tent that Marcel was renting for the festival from some other woman. He settled me in there as if nothing had happened.
He was gentle as he reminded me that the Chenka do not have a psychology, as we think we do. No neuroses, psychoses, introjects, repressions, obsessions, phobias, or megrims. It is all a matter of spirits, independent transcendent entities who inhabit us in various ways. One of them is the little person in the control booth who operates our bodies and observes the world through our sensoria, and whom we are pleased to call our “self.” Among the Chenka, the little person is something of a shift worker, knocking off for long periods while others take control, sometimes several at once. The inner life of the Chenka thus has to do with harmonizing the relationships among the various spirits as they pass through the control room. These beings also have an existence in the unseen worlds, of which the Chenka record several dozen, and a busy commuting takes place among beings human and subhuman and superhuman. There is a whole aesthetics involved in this dance, which I do not have the terms to describe, but it is the essence of Chenka existence, perilous and ecstatic by turns. I knew this, of course, but I had thought that it was all imaginary. Or symbolic. Or merely spiritual, which is much the same thing to 99.9 percent of people in our culture. It did not occur to me that it was about as imaginary, symbolic, and spiritual as quantum electrodynamics.
As to why I had gone nuts, why I couldn’t learn Chenka magic: Marcel explained that the various ogga lounging about my particular control room made it impossible for me to enter into shamanic apprenticeship. They were in a sense wild ogga, who had invaded me during my childhood and adolescence, when I was angry, or sad, or envious, or wrapped in one of the other psychic states that ogga like to snack on. These beings could be removed or transformed. The procedure was as well known to the Chenka as an appendectomy is to an American surgeon. They would do it for me, but it had some cost. One’s ego is, let us say, rectified. One dies, let us say, and is reborn, with the various resident spirits working more or less in concord. Marcel said that I was free to decide whether I wanted this done. He, naturally, had been through it during his long stay with the Chenka. In the state I was in at the moment, he allowed, I could not make a decision of such magnitude. True: it was difficult enough to decide whether I wanted to move my legs. Marcel was extremely sweet to me, especially considering how I had mauled him. He held me, and stroked my filthy hair. Time passed. Gradually I fell into something more like regular sleep.
In the morning the various ogga were back in charge, as yours are in charge of you?that is, I felt once again “myself.” I now was terrified of Marcel, terrified of the Chenka, and worked hard at concealing this from myself and others. I recalled the nasty scene of the previous day, was deeply embarrassed, and took refuge in a chilly formality. Marcel did not ask me again if I wanted to have my brains scrambled in the Chenka fashion and I did not volunteer. I abandoned my efforts at penetrating Chenka shamanism. There was plenty of anthro work besides that, however, although it was a bit like doing an ethnography of a Polish village without mentioning Catholicism or the local priests. I worked all winter and by the time the ice broke on the Yei I had enough fieldwork to hack into a dissertation no more phony than most of the stuff anthro departments give Ph.D.’s for. A competent job. Even Marcel said so, not looking me in the eye.
I left the Chenka that spring as the ice on the Yei dissolved with many a groan, along with (as it turned out) the Soviet Union. By that time, I had put much of the unpleasantness behind me, and had erected the usual structure of self-justification. Marcel something of a fraud, sad to say, not the sort of man I had thought him at all, curiously cold in that French intellectual way, but helpful, of course, encouraging and helpful, and it had been quite a lark, our affair, something to dine out on for years to come. I recall saying just this in a light tone, with many an amusing anecdote, to Louis Nearing, a fellow anthropologist I dated for a couple of months in Chicago. I was in Chicago on a teaching contract, the year after Columbia gave me my doctorate. Anthro 101 and two veg. The bloom had gone off anthropology to an extent, but one must do something. Lou was a big, solid, open guy, a football player from Notre Dame, a Catholic, a year younger than me, sweet-natured and transparent as his collection of beer bottles; yes, just about as far as one could get from Marcel Vierchau. He was incredibly impressed, as were the other faculty, that I had been with Marcel for all those years, and knew all the great stars of the field, and had seen the remarkable Chenka in Siberia. In response I had developed this pathetic ironic set piece, especially to the what’s-he-really-like opening. I had been well trained in this sort of dissembling at home. Getting along by not seeing or mentioning things was the prime value chez Doe.
Lou was not significant enough to be a rebound from Marcel, and I think he knew it. I suppose I went out with him to demonstrate that I was still a regular person, that I could still have a regular life. If I had been more skillful at the lessons Mom tried to teach me, I would have married him and I’d now be living in a four-bedroom in Bloomingdale or Wheaton, teaching at the U., with a couple of kids, a retriever, and a Volvo. But I met my husband instead.
Poor Lou! I hadn’t thought about Lou Nearing in years. He’s gained a little weight, but that is certainly, undeniably, him walking toward me down a corridor at Jackson, me having just picked up a cart full of records at the ER. He’s deep in conversation with a small brown middle-aged man dressed entirely in white, an obvious santero. I recall now what Lou was interested in. Medical anthropology. In another age he might have been a missionary priest, but he became a medical anthropologist.
He glances up and looks into my face as I glide by. I look back at him for an eyeblink, willing the recognition from my eyes, keeping my progress steady, not breaking into a mad run, as I wish to do. The problem is that I have forgotten my slump. Aside from the face, there is nothing so recognizable as the walking posture. I see his eyes change. The small brown man looks at me, too. His glance is bland, merely social for an instant, and then his eyes change.
Now I am past them, slumping for all I am worth. “Jane?” Lou actually introduced me to my husband! But the next moment I am through the swinging door and then I start to run.