Sakhalin Island
, which he had just
finished reading the week before. He had marked the more interesting spots with
paper tags and figured this would make it easy to choose suitable passages to read.
Tengo prefaced his reading with a brief explanation of the book—that Chekhov
was only thirty years old when he traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1890; that no one
really knew why the urbane Chekhov, who had been praised as one of the most
promising young writers of the generation after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and who
was living a cosmopolitan life in Moscow, would have made up his mind to go off to
live on Sakhalin Island, which was like the end of the earth. Sakhalin had been
developed primarily as a penal colony, and to most people it symbolized only bad
luck and misery. Furthermore, the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built,
which meant that Chekhov had to make more than 2,500 miles of his trip in a horse-
drawn cart across frozen earth, an act of self-denial that subjected the young man in
poor health to merciless suffering. And finally, when he ended his eight-month-long
journey to the Far East and published
Sakhalin
as the fruit of his labor, the work did
little more than bewilder most readers, who found that it more closely resembled a dry
investigative report or gazetteer than a work of literature. People whispered amongst
themselves, “Why did Chekhov do such a wasteful, pointless thing at such an
important stage in his literary career?” One critic answered scathingly, “It was just a
publicity stunt.” Another view was that Chekhov had gone there looking for a new
subject because he had run out of things to write about. Tengo showed Fuka-Eri the
location of Sakhalin on the map included in the book.
“Why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“You mean, why do
I
think he went?”
“Uh-huh. Did you read the book.”
“I sure did.”
“What did you think.”
“Chekhov himself might not have understood exactly why he went,” Tengo said.
“Or maybe he didn’t really have a reason. He just suddenly felt like going—say, he
was looking at the shape of Sakhalin Island on a map and the desire to go just bubbled
up out of nowhere. I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and
I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter
what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to.
I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what
people are doing there. It’s like measles—you can’t show other people exactly where
the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration.
Of course, traveling from Moscow to Sakhalin in those days involved almost
unimaginable hardships, so I suspect that wasn’t Chekhov’s only reason for going.”
“Name another one.”
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“Well, Chekhov was both a novelist and a doctor. It could be that, as a scientist, he
wanted to examine something like a diseased part of the vast Russian nation with his
own eyes. Chekhov felt uncomfortable living as a literary star in the city. He was fed
up with the atmosphere of the literary world and was put off by the affectations of
other writers, who were mainly interested in tripping each other up. He was disgusted
by the malicious critics of the day. His journey to Sakhalin may have been an act of
pilgrimage designed to cleanse him of such literary impurities. Sakhalin Island
overwhelmed him in many ways. I think it was precisely for this reason that Chekhov
never wrote a single literary work based on his trip to Sakhalin. It was not the kind of
half-baked experience that could be easily made into material for a novel. The
diseased part of the country became, so to speak, a physical part of him, which may
have been the very thing he was looking for.”
“Is the book interesting,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“I found it very interesting. It’s full of dry figures and statistics and, as I said
earlier, not much in the way of literary color. The scientist side of Chekhov is on full
display. But that is the very quality of the book that makes me feel I can sense the
purity of the decision reached by Anton Chekhov the individual. Mixed in with the
dry records are some very impressive examples of observation of character and scenic
description. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the dry passages that
relate only facts. Some of them are quite marvelous. For example, the sections on the
Gilyaks.”
“The Gilyaks,” Fuka-Eri said.
“The Gilyaks were the indigenous people of Sakhalin long before the Russians
arrived to colonize it. They originally lived at the southern end of the island, but they
moved up to the center when they were displaced by the Ainu, who moved north from
Hokkaido. Of course, the Ainu themselves had also been pushed northward—by the
Japanese. Chekhov struggled to observe at close hand and to record as accurately as
possible the rapidly disappearing Gilyak culture.”
Tengo opened to a passage on the Gilyaks. At some points he would introduce
suitable omissions and changes to the text in order to make it easily understandable to
his listener.
The Gilyak is of strong, thick-set build, and average, even small, in height. Tall
stature would hamper him in the taiga. [“That’s a Russian forest,” Tengo added.] His
bones are thick and are distinctive for the powerful development of all the appendages
and protuberances to which the muscles are attached, and this leads one to assume
firm, powerful muscles and a constant strenuous battle with nature. His body is lean
and wiry, without a layer of fat; you do not come across obese, plump Gilyaks.
Obviously all the fat is expended in warmth, of which the body of a Sakhalin
inhabitant needs to produce such a great deal in order to compensate for the loss
engendered by the low temperature and the excessive dampness of the air. It’s clear
why the Gilyak consumes such a lot of fat in his food. He eats rich seal, salmon,
sturgeon and whale fat, meat and blood, all in large quantities, in a raw, dry, often
frozen state, and because he eats coarse, unrefined food, the places to which his
masticatory muscles are attached are singularly well developed and his teeth are
heavily worn. His diet is made up exclusively of animal products, and rarely, only
when he happens to have his dinner at home or if he eats out at a celebration, will he
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add Manchurian garlic or berries. According to Nevelskoy’s testimony, the Gilyaks
consider working the soil a great sin; anybody who begins to dig the earth or who
plants anything will infallibly die. But bread, which they were acquainted with by the
Russians, they eat with pleasure, as a delicacy, and it is not a rarity these days in
Alexandrovsk or Rykovo to meet a Gilyak carrying a round loaf under his arm.
Tengo stopped reading at that point for a short breather. Fuka-Eri was listening
intently, but he could not read any reaction from her expression.
“What do you think? Do you want me to keep reading? Or do you want to switch
to another book?” he asked.
“I want to know more about the Gilyaks.”
“Okay, I’ll keep going.”
“Is it okay if I get in bed?” Fuka-Eri asked.
“Sure,” Tengo said.
They moved into the bedroom. Fuka-Eri crawled into bed, and Tengo brought a
chair next to the bed and sat in it. He continued with his reading.
The Gilyaks never wash, so that even ethnographers find it difficult to put a name to
the real colour of their faces; they do not wash their linen, and their fur clothing looks
as if it has just been stripped off a dead dog. The Gilyaks themselves give off a heavy,
acid smell, and you know you are near their dwellings from the repulsive, sometimes
hardly bearable odour of dried fish and rotting fish offal. By each yurt usually lies a
drying ground filled to the brim with split fish, which from a distance, especially
when the sun is shining on them, look like filaments of coral. Around these drying
grounds Kruzenshtern saw a vast number of maggots covering the ground to the depth
of an inch.
“Kruzenshtern.”
“I think he was an early explorer. Chekhov was a very studious person. He had
read every book ever written about Sakhalin.”
“Let’s keep going.”
In winter the yurts are full of acrid smoke which comes from the open fireplace, and
on top of all this the Gilyaks, their wives and even the children smoke tobacco.
Nothing is known about the morbidity and mortality of the Gilyaks, but one must
form the conclusion that these unhealthy hygienic arrangements must inevitably have
a bad effect on their health. Possibly it is to this they owe their small stature, the
puffiness of their faces, and a certain sluggishness and laziness of movement.
“The poor Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.
Writers give varying accounts of the Gilyaks’ character, but all agree on one
thing—that they are not a warlike race, they do not like quarrels or fights, and they
get along peacefully with their neighbours. They have always treated the arrival of
new people with suspicion, with apprehension about their future, but have met them
every time amiably, without the slightest protest, and the worst thing they would do
would be to tell lies at people’s arrival, painting Sakhalin in gloomy colours and
thinking by so doing to frighten foreigners away from the island. They embraced
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Kruzenshtern’s travelling companions, and when Shrenk fell ill this news quickly
spread among the Gilyaks and aroused genuine sorrow. They tell lies only when
trading or talking to a suspicious and, in their opinion, dangerous person, but, before
telling a lie, they exchange glances with each other in an utterly childlike manner.
Every sort of lie and bragging in the sphere of everyday life and not in the line of
business is repugnant to them.
“The wonderful Gilyaks!” Fuka-Eri said.
The Gilyaks conscientiously fulfil commissions they have undertaken, and there
has not yet been a single case of a Gilyak abandoning mail halfway or embezzling
other people’s belongings. They are perky, intelligent, cheerful, and feel no stand-
offishness or uneasiness whatever in the company of the rich and powerful. They do
not recognize that anybody has power over them, and, it seems, they do not possess
even the concept of “senior” and “junior.” People say and write that the Gilyaks do
not respect family seniority either. A father does not think he is superior to his son,
and a son does not look up to his father but lives just as he wishes; an elderly mother
has no greater power in a yurt than an adolescent girl. Boshnyak writes that he
chanced more than once to see a son striking his own mother and driving her out, and
nobody daring to say a word to him. The male members of the family are equal
among themselves; if you entertain them with vodka, then you also have to treat the
very smallest of them to it as well. But the female members are all equal in their lack
of rights; be it grandmother, mother or baby girl still being nursed, they are ill treated
in the same way as domestic animals, like an object which can be thrown out, sold or
shoved with one’s foot like a dog. However, the Gilyaks at least fondle their dogs, but
their womenfolk—never. Marriage is considered a mere trifle, of less importance, for
instance, than a drinking spree, and it is not surrounded by any kind of religious or
superstitious ceremony. A Gilyak exchanges a spear, a boat or a dog for a girl, takes
her back to his own yurt and lies with her on a bearskin—and that is all there is to it.
Polygamy is allowed, but it has not become widespread, although to all appearances
there are more women than men. Contempt toward women, as if for a lower creature
or object, reaches such an extreme in the Gilyak that, in the field of the question of
women’s rights, he does not consider reprehensible even slavery in the literal and
crude sense of the word. Evidently with them a woman represents the same sort of
trading object as tobacco or nankeen. The Swedish writer Strindberg, a renowned
misogynist, who desired that women should be merely slaves and should serve men’s
whims, is in essence of one and the same mind as the Gilyaks; if he ever chanced to
come to northern Sakhalin, they would spend ages embracing each other.
Tengo took a break at that point, but Fuka-Eri remained silent, offering no opinion
on the reading. Tengo continued.
They have no courts, and they do not know the meaning of “justice.” How hard it is
for them to understand us may be seen merely from the fact that up till the present day
they still do not fully understand the purpose of roads. Even where a road has already
been laid, they will still journey through the taiga. One often sees them, their families
233
and their dogs, picking their way in Indian file across a quagmire right by the
roadway.
Fuka-Eri had her eyes closed and was breathing very softly. Tengo studied her face
for a while but could not tell whether she was sleeping or not. He decided to turn the
page and keep reading. If she was sleeping, he wanted to give her as sound a sleep as
possible, and he also felt like reading more Chekhov aloud.
Formerly the Naibuchi Post stood at the river mouth. It was founded in 1866. Mitzul
found eighteen buildings here, both dwellings and non-residential premises, plus a
chapel and a shop for provisions. One correspondent who visited Naibuchi in 1871
wrote that there were twenty soldiers there under the command of a cadet-officer; in
one of the cabins he was entertained with fresh eggs and black bread by a tall and
beautiful female soldier, who eulogized her life here and complained only that sugar
was very expensive.
Now there are not even traces left of those cabins, and, gazing round at the
wilderness, the tall, beautiful female soldier seems like some kind of myth. They are
building a new house here, for overseers’ offices or possibly a weather center, and
that is all. The roaring sea is cold and colourless in appearance, and the tall grey
waves pound upon the sand, as if wishing to say in despair: “Oh God, why did you
create us?” This is the Great, or, as it is otherwise known, the Pacific, Ocean. On this
shore of the Naibuchi river the convicts can be heard rapping away with axes on the
building work, while on the other, far distant, imagined shore, lies America … to the
left the capes of Sakhalin are visible in the mist, and to the right are more
capes … while all around there is not a single living soul, not a bird, not a fly, and it is
beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights
here, what they want, and, finally, who they would roar for when I was gone. There
on the shore one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections
and reveries. It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire
to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to
their threatening roar.
It appeared that Fuka-Eri was now sound asleep. He listened for her quiet
breathing. He closed the book and set it on the little table by the bed. Then he stood
up and turned the light off, taking one final look at Fuka-Eri. She was sleeping
peacefully on her back, her mouth a tight, straight line. Tengo closed the bedroom
door and went back to the kitchen.
It was impossible for him to continue with his own writing, though. His mind was
now fully occupied by Chekhov’s desolate Sakhalin coastal scenes. He could hear the
sound of the waves. When he closed his eyes, Tengo was standing alone on the shore
of the Sea of Okhotsk, a prisoner of his own meditations, sharing in Chekhov’s
inconsolable melancholy. What Chekhov must have felt there at the end of the earth
was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. To be a Russian writer at the end of the
nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they
tried to flee from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
After rinsing his wineglass and brushing his teeth, Tengo turned off the kitchen
light, stretched out on the sofa, pulled a blanket over himself, and tried to sleep. The
234
roar of the ocean still echoed in his ears, but eventually he began to lose
consciousness and was drawn into a deep sleep.
He awoke at eight thirty in the morning. There was no sign of Fuka-Eri in his bed.
The pajamas he had lent her were balled up and tossed into the bathroom washing
machine, the cuffs and legs still rolled up. He found a note on the kitchen table: “How
are the Gilyaks doing now? I’m going home.” Written in ballpoint pen on notepaper,
the characters were small, square, and indefinably strange, like an aerial view of
characters written on a beach in seashells. He folded the paper and put it in his desk
drawer. If his girlfriend found something like this when she arrived at eleven, she
would make a terrible fuss.
Tengo straightened the bed and returned the fruits of Chekhov’s labor to the
bookcase. Then he made himself coffee and toast. While eating breakfast, he noticed
that some kind of heavy object had settled itself in his chest. Some time had to go by
before he figured out what it was. Fuka-Eri’s tranquil sleeping face.
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