In Siberia (14 page)

A native woman wanders by, singing one of those plaintive songs you hear all over the Turkic world, like tuneless ruminations. This, and the river flowing, and the mauve hills under that immense sky, touch me with faint vertigo. I have the fleeting notion that they have pre-existed in my head like an inherited memory, as if this were the first river in the world, flowing to a still uncreated sea.

The woman stares at the foreigner craning into the distance, into nothing. It is absurd, of course. The centre of Asia is a geographic conceit, pin-pointed here by a nineteenth-century English eccentric named Proctor. He identified the heart of two more continents, it seems, confirming the Arab's opinion of the English. Other calculations locate the heart elsewhere.

 

The death of shamanism, Siberia's ancient and intrinsic faith, was announced decades ago. Collectivisation and the breakup of traditional clans undermined the shamans' influence all over Siberia. They were persecuted, re-educated, exiled, shot. They went underground. In Kyzyl's museum, among the mandatory stuffed elks and showcases of modern achievement, a map shows that in 1931 Tuva had 725 shamans, 314 of them women. From contemporary photographs they stare out remote and half-savage. Documents record their repression and execution all through the 1930s.

Nearby hang their reassembled costumes: the feathered or ant
lered head-dresses, tambourines and flails, the unreflecting gold plates which were their mirrors. Their long, black coats drip with a layered mass of clinking discs and rods, so that the shaman's every movement was accompanied by a commotion of other movements, half-independent of him. Everything is festooned with tassels and ribbons. At worst he must have looked squalid, like a rubbish-heap moving about. More often his regalia enhanced an eerie power, its sexless shape and decoration echoing his own ambivalence. The shaman was often homosexual; but no conventional taboos applied to him.

He was the keeper of his people's memory, of their stories and traditions, and of his own inherited secrets. He had knowledge of death. He knew the ancestral spirits, and may even in trance have recruited or repulsed them. Sometimes he gave them peace. Yet he was separated from his community, often feared. He was called upon not for simple healing, but to cure deeper sickness, when patients were being eaten by the malignant dead, or to reverse tribal ill-fortune. If he were a ‘white shaman', he enlisted the good spirits; if he were ‘black', he deflected or coerced the evil.

Often the shamans' calling was bitter and unwilled. In youth they became solitary and perhaps mad, suffered delusions, dreamt strangely, fell inexplicably sick. Then people knew that the ancestors had chosen them, and were whispering songs into their ear or brain. Often they came of shamanic ancestry, and were taught by an elder, and their practice seemed to release them from some psychic burden, even to cure them. Sometimes they learnt a secret language, or the speech of animals. In their initiation they might undergo dreams of their own death, a traumatic dismemberment and decay.

Even sceptical Russians were moved by their trances at the sick-bed: the reverberation of their drums as they danced in the firelit tent, the fantastical jangle of their ornaments, the weird ecstasy of their chanting. When they invoked their animal spirit-helpers, they trilled or screamed with unearthly similitude. Then they entered a shadowland. They flew through the 26-odd levels of the Tuvan nether-life, summoning the help of friendly demons, fighting off the hostile, and plunging–if they dared–into zones
strewn with the corpses of shamans who had failed, until they reached the sunless basement of Erlik, god of the dead. Sometimes they returned carrying the patient's soul in their hands, and reinserted it through the mouth.

The artefacts of the Tuva museum, the photographs and death-notices, implied that all this was long ago. Rumours of shamans surviving in remote areas had surfaced even in the eighties, but went uncorroborated. Yet hanging in the museum was a photograph of the recent opening of Doongyr, the Association of the Tambour. It was a society of shamans. And someone had given me a letter to a Tuvan shaman, if I could find him, enclosing money for the sale of a yak.

I wondered cynically what an association of shamans was. The shaman had always been a loner, protecting his clan against the outside. They fought one another with psychic powers, poached each other's spirits, attempted one another's lives. But a hundred yards off Lenin Square I found a cottage blazoned with a tambour, and peered in on a nest of near-empty rooms. Three Tuvan women in tight skirts and high heels were standing in the passage, and a frightened-looking Russian youth waited on a bench.

The shamans emerged like casual wizards. A young man in a quilted coat sauntered up to inspect us, his head bound by a soiled cloth with a feather sticking up behind. He had small, heartless eyes. They swept over us, then he vanished into an office. I asked one of the women: ‘Where do these shamans come from?' She answered nervously: ‘From the country.'

They were as strange to her as to me, I sensed. For her they had kept the redemptive power of the forest, the interior. She wore a chiffon scarf, and had lost the speech of animals. These people were her beginnings. They kept the rude potency of Rasputin in St Petersburg.

A door opened on a shamaness. Her coat was hung with rainbow ribbons over trousers and rubber shoes, and bells tinkled on her back. She looked commonplace. I asked her if she knew the whereabouts of my shaman, Kunga-Boo, who had sold a yak. She stared at me without expression, then muttered a street-name
and beckoned the Russian youth into her room. I heard the thump of a drum.

I was overcome by a creeping gloom. I didn't know what I had expected, only that this was different. The old shamanic ceremony, its rapt and collusive audience, seemed to have withered to a ten-minute seance. Through open doors I glimpsed linoleum-topped tables with nothing on them but a tambour or a decorated horsewhip. The Russian youth re-emerged, looking bewildered. We smiled wanly at one another. I told myself I was a heartless purist; yet this guild of shamans, I was sure, had mutated out of recognition. The thread with the past had snapped, and they had lost touch with the ancestors. In becoming institutionalised, they only died a little more. The spirits could not bear much common light.

 

The street was in a poor suburb, and his home was a shack. I reached it through a cemetery and across a causeway of duckboards over autumn swamp. I had been told only that he was an old shaman, who was wary of talking, and I realised then how my ideas had been stained by Soviet propaganda: the image of a savage charlatan benighting the proletariat. Two women sat on the steps of his semi-detached hut, but they did not know him. Outside his iron door lay a pair of plastic slippers. Their ordinariness surprised me. His feet looked the same size as Lenin's.

‘Kunga-Boo?' I tapped on the iron. I heard shuffling inside, some stifled words. Maybe he was senile, I thought, or spoke in riddles.

The door opened on a small man with a face of weathered sweetness. He wore old trousers and a threadbare shirt. His jaw was dimpled by scars, which complicated his smile. He accepted the letter and his yak-money without counting it, and put it away indoors, while I hovered at his threshold. Then he returned with thanks, bowing and touching his hands together in a gesture which I read as dismissal. For a second I stared beyond him into the starkness of his room. This was a shaman's home, I told myself: I must remember it. On the bare floor lies a cloth piled with grasses. An immured stove is dropping tiles. He has an
aluminium churn for water (I suppose), and a low table is scattered with powdered herbs. Everything looks small, his own size. But his rooms are separated by a crimson curtain, and I cannot see beyond.

Then he bowed and touched his fingers again, and I realised that this was a greeting, and that he was welcoming me in. We sat on low stools, crouched close together. I felt I was in Lilliput. He gave me tea in a blue-patterned bowl. How far I had come! He knew of London only from Soviet schooling: the London of Dickens and Conan Doyle. ‘How do you see in all that fog?'

He had scarcely travelled, he said, he did not know the world. ‘When I was very small, we lived in western Mongolia. My father used to say our ancestors arrived with Genghis Khan. Then we came north into Tuva–people did that in those days–and settled in a village here. My father was eighty-five when he died, still strong and a great hunter.'

I could not guess his age. He spoke softly, easily, so that I imagined him a craftsman or a teacher. I found myself asking him very simply: ‘Your father was a shaman?'

‘No, he lived by hunting. He knew about shaman's work a little, and about medicine. But only I am a shaman.' His voice rose with pride. ‘When I told my father I wanted to be a shaman, he just said: Good! Do it! The world needs a shaman!'

So the ancestors, it seemed, had not called him. He had called himself. And no one teacher had guided him. ‘There are no teachers now. There are only lamas. But I learnt Buddhism alone, reading the scriptures. So I call myself not a white or black shaman, but a yellow, a Buddhist shaman.'

I started to understand. I had read in accounts of nineteenth-century travellers to Tuva how shamanism and Buddhism had interfused. A Russian visiting the Chief Lama even saw in his home, side by side with Tantric banners, the costume of ‘his consort, the Great Shamaness'. Lamas and shamans had adopted each other's rituals, sacred instruments, even each other's godlings. And from this blend of faiths there had emerged the
burkhanboo
, ‘godly shamans', who knew the Buddhist scriptures yet who
communed with the dead. Born in Mongolia, Kunga-Boo might be the last of this arcane race.

‘It's a very hard calling, very hard. I've studied and practised for thirty-seven years, mostly in secret. It had to be secret.'

‘And what is it like, this…this…' but my delicacy collapsed: ‘this travelling among spirits?'

‘I can cure the sick sometimes. I can exorcise them.'

‘By going into trance?' I longed to hear this. I wondered how simply he slid into this dream-journey. Was it induced by the beat of the tambour in the brain? ‘How do you enter trance?'

But he only said again: ‘I can cleanse the sick. You see, I make my own medicines.' He got up and squatted in front of a table sprinkled with powders on little squares of paper. He touched the grains to his nostrils. ‘Here's black locust grass, and this is old flea-grass. And here's pig-plant'–he handed me a root resembling ginseng–‘it's a styptic and skin-healer.' He placed a pinch on his tongue. ‘This one is good for chest pains…and here's black
saranka
, a wonderful grass, cures haemorrhoids'–he pointed up his bottom. ‘Now I'm making a ten-day course of Mongolian
khash
…No, it doesn't have a Russian name…'

He had wide, coarse hands, but his fingertips edged the grey-green sprinklings into tiny envelopes, while he declaimed an antiphony of illnesses and cures. Stomach ulcers, headaches, kidney defects: all could be healed or palliated. ‘But you must only take a little, very little. Take too much, and they turn and kill you.'

‘How did you learn about them?'

‘From ancestors. They did it like this.' He was concentrating now, as if they had imposed a duty. ‘There's only one ingredient I haven't got.' He spoke out of long frustration. ‘Perhaps you can find me some in London. It's
morzh
.'

‘What's that?'

‘
Morzh! Morzh!
' He was filling with hope. ‘England's in the north, isn't it? So you must have it there! They swim in the sea.
Morzh!
' He conjured a dripping moustache, then dangled his forefingers from his mouth's corners.

‘Walrus!' I joined his excitement.

‘Wall-russ?' His fingers rose again in two questioning tusks.

‘Yes, yes!' I jabbed mine down from my lower lip. We stared idiotically at one another.

‘You have them in England, wall-russes?'

The image of a club bore went by. ‘Maybe in Scotland.'

‘I need one.'

I repeated stupidly: ‘One.'

‘Yes.' He returned to sorting
khash
. Walrus tusk, essence of walrus, walrus fat. Any of them would do, he said.

Was he perhaps only a medicine-man after all, I wondered? Siberia used to teem with native folk-healers and herbalists. Even the Russians copied them. But a shaman was different, defined above all by the tambour, whose thudding, like mystic hoof-beats, carried him on his flight. There was no sign of any regalia in the room where we sat. Kunga-Boo lived in poverty. But I returned, nagging, to my obsession. ‘Can herbs help you go into trance?'

I was still hoping, with waning expectation, for a spirit-traveller's tale: for the gliding over seas and chasms, above the bones of his crash-landed rivals, to the gloomy halls of Erlik.

But he only said: ‘Herbs are not for that.' He pushed some grains of
saranka
towards me. They were bitter. Then he was silent. There were things he would not speak about. The light was fading from the windows, and he got up and switched on a naked bulb, then slipped away behind the crimson curtain dividing his home.

My eyes wandered the room, searching for tell-tale signs, but noticed little new: a plastic box filled with tomatoes, a miniature incense-burner, a coil of yellow silk. I wondered what he was doing.

Then
Boom!
My hair prickled.
Boom! Boom!
A ginger cat shot out from under the curtain.
Boom-boom-boom!
It was a deep, haunting reverberation.

I parted the curtain. Kunga-Boo had lifted his tambour like a trophy, and was banging it with a padded stick, and over his bed lay all his shaman's regalia.
Boom-boom-boom!
He was beaming like a child. It was as if he had known my interest all along, and had been testing me.