When the Whales Leave Read online

  When the Whales Leave

  When the Whales Leave

  Yuri Rytkheu

  Translated from the Russian by

  Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

  MILKWEED EDITIONS

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © 1975 by Juri Rytchëu

  © 2019, English translation by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

  First published in Russian as Kodga Kity Ukhodiat by Sovetsky Pisatel’. Also published in German as Wenn die Wale fortziehen by Unionsverlag.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520-6455

  milkweed.org

  Published 2019 by Milkweed Editions

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design and illustration by Mary Austin Speaker

  19 20 21 22 23 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel; the Jerome Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rytkhėu, 1930-2008, author. | Chavasse, Ilona Yazhbin, translator.

  Title: When the whales leave / Yuri Rytkheu ; translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse.

  Other titles: Kogda kity . English | Seedbank (Minneapolis, Minn.)

  Description: Minneapolis : Milkweed Editions,2019. | Series: Seedbank; 3 | Summary: “a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi, a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego”-- Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022510 (print) | LCCN 2019022511 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571311313 (paperback) | ISBN 9781571317254 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chukchi--Fiction. | Chukchi Peninsula (Russia)--Fiction. | Whales--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3476.R965 K613 2019 (print) | LCC PG3476.R965 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/44--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022510

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. When the Whales Leave was printed on acid-free 30% postconsumer-waste paper by Sheridan Books, Inc.

  Contents

  Introduction by Gretel Erlich

  When the Whales Leave

  Translator’s Note

  INTRODUCTION

  Yuri Rytkheu was born in 1930 in Uelen, a small town on a long, narrow barrier spit perched between a lagoon and the Bering Sea. The northeastern coast of Chukotka is raw, cold, and remote, though it’s only sixty-one miles across the ocean to Wales, Alaska. On both the Russian and American sides, life has been dedicated to bowhead whale hunting for thousands of years.

  In those places the whale is at the center of existence, nutritionally and spiritually. The animals are hunted from traditional walrus hide boats in dangerous spring ice and after, celebrations, clearing out of meat storehouses, and sacred dances are performed in the qasiq (dance hall) as an expression of gratitude when a whale has given itself to a hunting crew.

  Yuri was the son of a hunter and the grandson of a local shaman. He earned money for university out on the ice and on the sea as a stevedore. He witnessed the decline of traditional lifeways and the ways that both communism and an open market economy dismembered the cultural threads that held a subsistence hunting society together. He remembered “whale temples”—colonnades of whale jaws and ribs lining the shores of the peninsula. He remembered the fickle currents and winds that quickly moved pack ice and brought migrating whales nearby. He remembered stories of the epidemics brought by European whalers that eviscerated whole villages, and the over-harvesting of whales and walruses by outsiders for profit in the midst of subsistence hunting territory. He understood that as soon as you have to leave the village to work for a wage, traditional culture falls apart. He understood the necessity of holding the whole culture in your mind and heart, that if you don’t, the center won’t hold.

  When the Whales Leave is a spare, three-part, generation-spanning novel that begins in what Arctic people call “ancestor times”: when animal-human transformations were common; when time and lifespans were elastic; when the world was densely populated not with humans, but with stars, mountains, ice floes, animals, birds, fish, plants, rocks; when personhood was observable everywhere.

  Nau is a young woman who falls in love with a whale who, smitten with love, becomes a man so he can live with her. She is a perpetrator of and participant in the creation of earth, and she helps people it. Passing whales beckon her, she feels an irresistible tug, one that is urgent and sexual, and after falling in love with Reu, the whale-man, she gives birth to whale-children, nurses them at the shore, and later is the mother of human children. Reu provides for them—not whale meat but caribou. As the children grow, Nau becomes First Mother, dispensing wisdom and admonitions, then an elderly pest who bums around the village staying with whoever will let her in.

  When the son who questions his mother’s creation story is lost with his whaling crew in bad ice and faces certain death, he is astonished when whales rescue them and bring them ashore. Another son becomes curious and takes others with him on a long journey to see the world, a trip that takes nearly a lifetime. The next generation stays at home but questions the usefulness of traditional lifeways and the veracity of the legends Nau tells him. And on it goes, a tracery of the vertiginous fall from tradition, from moral rectitude and its consequences.

  Yuri lived the fall: this novel is a tribute to the relevance of the old ways that have been trampled and disposed of. The scale is intimate and concise—almost translucent—befitting the language of those who recount legends. He follows the downward spiral from respect for the power of the natural world, modesty in front of the weather, and group effort, to the generational shift that produced, finally, a vain bully and gloating brute whose final murderous acts kill the long-lasting First Mother, Nau.

  It is an old story and a modern story, and above all, a cautionary tale. Though originally published in 1975, it is evermore relevant today. Yuri’s Chukchi name “Rytgev,” means “forgotten.” It’s hard to know the sense behind it, but in my mind, his name has come to stand for the hard-won and thoughtful way Arctic people behave and the dismissive way in which they are regarded in the modern world. I know because I’ve traveled with subsistence Inuit hunters in Greenland by dogsled for twenty-five years.

  Arctic people evolved with ice. For them, weather is consciousness. Self-discipline, perseverance, modesty, and generosity are the necessary survival tools in a harsh world that is light for six months and dark for the other six, where death comes easily and often, where chance and transience and a robust humor are vital to how they live i
n the world.

  So much of that 30,000-year-old Arctic culture has been desecrated culturally as well as biologically, even as our anthro-pocentric trajectory toward extinction escalates. It must have been heartbreaking for Yuri, who died in 2008. To stem those losses, urgently felt in his St. Petersburg home, the novel stands as a renewal of faith in his Chukotka homeland. It is a song that celebrates, illuminates, warns, and finally exposes what were once the moral principles of village life that were traded down for the furious power-mongering and “me-ism” of today.

  Every element of When the Whales Leave is based on legends that have been carried from the northeastern coast of Siberia across the Bering land bridge all the way to Greenland—from Vankarem to Siorapaluk—and are still told today. The migration trail of indigenous people across the polar north took them to the top of Alaska, through the MacKenzie Delta, the archipelago of Nunavut, then across the Smith Sound to Etah, Greenland—a well-used route taken by dogsled that is now callously referred to as the “Northwest Passage.”

  Yuri Rytkheu applied to the prestigious Institute of the Peoples of the North and when he failed to get in, he studied literature at Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University). St Petersburg is famous for ethnography and Yuri was fascinated by the ethnographic efforts of Vladimir “Tan” Bogoraz, who died when Yuri was six, plus the traditional ecological knowledge imparted to him by his own family.

  In Arctic literature there are hundreds of creation stories, and charmingly, Yuri composed his own. The woman, Nau, existed; the power of love caused a whale to become human, and the desire to communicate resulted in the birth of language. “It was through me that land and the sea joined, through my body that human beings were born,” Nau says. Ageless, Nau becomes a Greek chorus of one: witnessing, celebrating, dispensing wisdom and warnings, whether or not anyone listens. Ordinary and wise, she is central and peripheral at the same time, and, roaming from house to house, she sees all.

  “Whales have ears and are like people,” one old woman said. In the old days differences between humans and animals were porous and permeable. Across the polar north it was known that whales and bears could understand what humans said, that any animal could marry any human and vice versa: a chief’s son married a bear, a girl eaten by wolves becomes a caribou, a hunter is lured by a woman who turns out to be a night owl, a seal’s soul is revealed inside a dancer’s mask, the soul of an animal killed its killer because it was not cut up tenderly.

  Tales of world journeys were common. People were said to take off and stay gone for lifetimes. They left young and came back unrecognizably old. Shamans who were tied up facing the wall of a house were able to fly through sod, ice, and mountains; heal the sick; and find lost things.

  Time had no chronological scaffold: no one was keeping time, nor did they seem to notice gravity. Everything was alive, and there was an uncanny liveliness in people’s sense of themselves.

  A few weeks ago, I spent time on a remote barrier island twenty-five miles off the coast of Utqiagvik and I couldn’t help thinking of Uelen. How quickly its borders are eroding, intruded upon by raging Arctic seas that, without the calming lid of ice, have become dark and violent heat sinks. Villagers, seabirds, polar bears, seals, and walruses are compelled to find new places to live as sea ice disappears, and the very bits of land—barrier islands and long spits of stone, gravel, and sand—will soon be washed away by rising waters. Those who have failed to consider the whole, the health of language and lifeways as well as biological diversity, and who have strived solely for profit are now reaping the consequences as land and sea ice are pulled out from under us all. How lucky we are to have Yuri Rytkheu’s transcendent work of literature. May it save our lives.

  -GRETEL EHRLICH

  MELVILLE, MONTANA, 2019

  When the Whales Leave

  Part I

  1

  Nau loved the sight of the bright, shimmering gusts as they sprang up suddenly over the sea; sparkling jets of water leaping high in the air, with the sun riffling through them, weaving in glittering rainbows.

  Nau ran barefoot over the cool, damp grass. When beach shingle tickled her feet, the girl’s soft laughter mingled with the clinking of the sea-smoothed pebbles as they rolled about in the surf.

  Nau was fast breeze, green grass, wet shingle, high cloud, and endless blue sky, herself and all these things at once.

  And when startled birds, and arctic squirrels, and stoats, gray in their summer coats, scattered from her path, Nau called out to them full throated with joy, and the creatures understood her. They watched her as she passed, the tall maiden with long, streaming hair, black as wings.

  She had never yet thought of herself as separate from those who dwelled in ground warrens, or nested on cliffs, or crawled in the grass, nor thought of herself as different from them. Even the sullen black rocks were alive and dear to her.

  She looked upon all these things with the same serene goodwill: the living things that each had voice and cry, the silent things that nevertheless moved, and the things that were at rest eternally.

  And so it went with her until the first time she noticed the whale spout approaching the shore, so high and so strident—until she gazed at last on the long, taut, shining body of the sea giant Reu.

  The whale drew ever closer, until she could hear the shingle creak under his weight. The cold wave that preceded his bulk stung Nau’s bare feet like a burn.

  At first the girl was careful not to come too near. Something powerful and forbidding moved in her when she came down to the shoreline, the place where dried-out seashells would crumble from the slightest touch, and where pieces of bark and even whole dead tree trunks lay strewn about, preserved in salt water.

  Nau observed the whale from afar and, seeing how his gigantic black body mirrored the sun’s bright rays, imagined the whale glowing from within.

  Water rushed into his great mouth with a burbling murmur, sieving tiny seashells and jellies; the watery spray above his head made rainbows.

  She longed to come closer—against the silent prohibition, across the unspoken threshold marked by a line of washed-up colored shingle. She wanted to touch the gleaming mist, to feel on her skin even just one of those droplets, each shining with a tiny sun.

  One day she crept so near the whale that the fountain he made drenched her from head to foot.

  It was both unexpected and somehow familiar, just as she had imagined it would be. The water was warm and full of light, the sun’s rays stroked her skin, and Nau felt a new and unfamiliar sense of tenderness, a kind of catch in her breast. She was panting and slightly dizzy, like when she sat too long atop a high cliff watching cloud shadows skitter across the sea.

  But the whale went on caressing her body with gentle, sundrenched pulsing and her ears with the quiet ripple of coursing water.

  Nau felt her heart expanding, filling her chest and making it hard to breathe. Her blood warmed with the heat of the whale’s pulsing jets, and she stood as in a trance, unsure of what to do. Before, she did not hesitate…. she had been as the wind, the waves, the clouds, the growing grass and hidden flowers, the squirrels and birds on the wing, the beasts and fishes that swam in the sea. She had been a part of the huge world that was both alive and dead, gleaming and lost in shadows, lulled to sleep by the domed silent sky and the coverlet of soft clouds, or else raging, as when a sudden hurricane rocked the waves and flung them onto the shore, coursing toward Nau’s feet, which were always cold, try as she might to warm them in the grass.

  Something different coursed through her now. It was as though she had just opened her eyes from sleep, but the moment of awakening went on and on—as though she was seeing the sky and blue sea and green grassy hills for the first time, and hearing anew the squeaking of the gopher, the ringing birdsong over the cliffs, the murmuring of the stream … as though she was discovering for the first time that seawater tastes differently than water from the brook, or that the morning’s chill v
anishes as the sun rises over the sea.

  Later, when she passed through the tundra with her quick, springing step, she took time to peer at the tiny blue flowers that dotted the grass like slivers of sky. The little blue eyes trembled on their thin green stalks, and Nau could hear their piercing, evanescent chiming.

  The world of sound gave up its mysteries to her as had the world of sight, and now she knew whence came the thundering waves that beat against the crags, the whistling of the wind as it smoothed the tundra grasses with a vast open hand, the splashing of the small waves in the lagoon, the babbling of the brook as it ran down a rocky slope.

  The talk of the birds and the beasts, too—she knew now the language of each.

  The black raven croaked black sounds, and these sounds were dark and cold, like the shadows on the shore where sun never reached and where ancient snow never melted but lay grimy and porous with age.

  The yapping arctic foxes, in their shaggy summer pelts, sounded like they were coughing up cloudberry pits; the gophers whistled sharply, as though calling Nau to take notice of the shadowed mouths of their burrows, hollowed out underneath protective stones.

  The seabirds shrilled from their nesting grounds atop the shoreline crags, and if they took wing all at once, disturbed by a prowling wolverine, all other sound was lost in their noisy cacophony, and the world suddenly seemed dreary, gray, and flat.

  Nau was discovering that some sounds were pleasant, and there were others that made her want to run and hide. She loved to hear the birds’ morning chatter above the brook; it reminded her of the whale rainbows, and the birdsong told her that something mysterious and magical was sure to come.

  With each passing day the tundra was bursting into bright vivid color. Nau’s feet went black from berry juice. The loyal old tundra she-wolf licked them and gazed at Nau with sadness. The she-wolf could feel the approach of winter, and of her own death. She wasn’t good for much anymore; a hard life had worn down her fangs …