The Gray Earth. Galsan Tschinag

turns an angry red and begins to fester.

      All that happened in the summer. Now it is autumn, and still the wound has not healed. It is the reason we had to take our yurt on a detour along the dangerously wild Homdu River instead of traveling across Borgasyn and battling straight through our mild, milky-white mother river, Ak-Hem. The day before yesterday we arrived in this place on the far side of the district center and the large water, and yesterday the doctor came to look at my wound. He brushed on a pungent liquid and told me to take off my old puss-encrusted pants and go to bed. At first I enjoy lying in bed. I even fall asleep in the middle of the day! But then I decide to get up. Many lines of poetry come to mind. Bite after bite, they slide over my tongue. I can neither make them stay nor make them go silently—they demand to be chanted aloud and released into the wide world.

      I have no choice but to get up and steal away from the yurt.

      Worn thin are my soles

      Like the shoes of a camel yearling.

      That is how much I have looked for you, o-oh-ooj.

      Threadbare is my throat

      Like the opening of a bag.

      That is how much I have called you, u-uh-uuj.

      I am calling for the spirits even though the words, jumping dumb like fish from the flood, run effortlessly together as lines, and the voice that nets them has already found its own strength. So far I am no more than a neighbor to the clouds and a brother to the fish, but I sense I am being transformed and on my way to water and air, ready to rise above myself and become the fish’s throat and the clouds’ heart. If I succeed, I will also succeed in becoming a counterforce and a counterweight for the sky and the earth.

      For anything that needs to be poured,

       Here is my brainpan.

       Round and rooted with soot-black hair

       Take it, a-ah-aaj.

       For anything that needs to be bound,

       Here is the thread of my life.

       Red and braided of eight springtimes

       Take it, e-eh-eej.

      I take my time as I call out to the spirits whose presence I sense as clearly as the sun and the wind. Incessantly I plead and relentlessly I lure, for today I want to see them in the flesh.

      And then I catch sight of something: a blurry figure in a pale, fluttering cape stands before me in the ladle. I am startled, and as the ladle slips from my hand, I believe I see the figure shrink into something round, like a stuffed first stomach of a sheep, its rumen, before bursting and dissolving. I quickly turn and jump: someone is standing right behind me.

      He is an elegant, foreign-looking man. His body is angular and chiseled and his face light-skinned and smooth. Luscious glittering hair flows out with a flourish from under his ash-colored peaked cap. His long coat is as green as bile and unbuttoned, and his narrow boots have high legs and heavy heels, and are made from leather polished to a mirror.

      A muffled groan escapes me as I stare at the man who seems more likely to have fallen from the clouds than squeezed through the dense willow bushes—he seems so celestial. Nevertheless, his pale chiseled face with the narrow flat eyes and the bony crooked nose looks familiar. Suddenly I recognize Brother Dshokonaj. Yet I cannot believe it is him, or why it is him.

      I cannot help thinking about the figure I saw in the water. Still, I have my doubts. That figure was stripped bare both above and below the waist, was it not?

      Until now the man has stared at me in silence, but now a greeting escapes him: “Come here, little man, let your big brother sniff you.”

      I finally stand and, relieved because it really is his voice, walk toward him.

      Close up, I am hit by a wave of the sharp smells I recognize from the goods sold in the store. I take them in with relish and am reminded of sweets and especially the red-and-yellow striped candies I was once given as a present. I feast on the man’s smell as if it were exuding from crackling white candy wrappers.

      But then I stop and think again: the two hands touching my cheeks are cool and wet. Again I remember the figure in the water. He must have been wet and naked. The figure had trembled before it shrank into a rumen and then fell apart and dissolved.

      A cold shiver runs up my calves and spreads across my belly and my back, and I feel my hair rise and turn into awls piercing my skull through the skin.

      BROTHER

      “What were you doing?” he asks me.

      I think it better not to tell him. But when his gaze drills through the already tight skin at the top of my ringing head, I can’t hold back: “I was chanting.”

      He doesn’t reply. But once we are back in the yurt, he says what I dreaded hearing all the way home, limping behind him, ladle in hand. After putting the water pail down in front of the kitchen shelf abruptly, he lets fly: “Do you know why the rascal wouldn’t come home? He was shamanizing! Fooling around with the spirits!”

      Father and Mother wince as these words pelt them like rocks hurled at animals.

      “All the while you are sitting here, innocently thinking he’s too young for school,” he rages on. “He’s played the baby long enough—it has to stop. Anyone who makes rhymes on death and the devil and fills the sky and the earth with his shouting can learn a few measly letters and numbers.”

      Father and Mother cower in silence. I sit motionless, not saying a thing. Occasionally our eyes meet. See, their eyes say to me, that’s what happens when you don’t listen to us. At least be good now, please.

      I hold on a little longer, but my eyes ask, Where has he come from? And why?

      They do not know. I ask why they sent him after me. They did not, I read in their eyes. He went of his own accord. I should not have stayed out so long.

      It looks as if he wants take me with him right then and there. My eyes plead and cry, but neither Father nor Mother is able to resist. Instead, they want to know what they should prepare for me.

      They don’t need to prepare a thing, he announces. Everything will be provided by the school. Mother mentions the doctor, who will return the next day. No longer necessary, the brother growls. I will be taken for treatment today.

      Suddenly I realize I am not wearing any pants. To my annoyance I learn there is not a pair of clean pants around. Of course the doctor will not want to see me in the old dirty ones he had pulled off me with his own hands.

      I make a face and try to suppress the tears. It makes me deeply miserable that I am no longer allowed to do anything, not even shout and cry to my heart’s content. How I would love to jump and run around and yell until I wear myself out. But I feel so heavy and mortally cowed I can no longer find legs to run away. I have to accept that everything around me happens exactly as he, and he alone, decides. And so I have to put up with not having any pants to wear.

      What had to happen happens: he takes me away. As tiny as lice and as dumbfounded as I am, Father and Mother stand there stunned. All they can do is release me to go my separate way by sniffing my right cheek and leaving the left one for later, for our reunion. And talk about how I am to gain knowledge and how I must not cry when I am leaving for school with my big brother.

      I cry anyway. The milk I am allowed to sip for the farewell cannot wash away the salt that fills my throat.

      Father and Mother stay behind, along with our yurt and our flocks, the meadows and the bushes. I can see them blurred through the tears. Behind the saddle, glued to the horse’s back, which presses against my naked bottom as narrow and as hard as the back of a knife, I begin to grasp my situation. My threadbare lawashak barely covers my private parts as I stick to the horse like a tick and withdraw into myself, away from a suddenly incomprehensible world.

      I feel ambushed. No one ever said a word about my starting school this fall,