Alaska (38 page)

237

to convert to Christianity before the church wedding can take place.'

Showing mock horror, she asked: 'Otherwise they'd send him back?'

'Might even shoot him.'

'You mean, he came back without permission?'

'Yes. He was burning to be with you again.'

'Christian? Marriage? Is that all that's needed?'

'Yes, and Father Pe'tr says he's ready to supervise your conversion and marriage.'

Her round face radiant with feigned gratitude, Cidaq smiled at Ensign Belov, thanked him for his heartwarming news, and asked like a young woman deeply in love: 'And when can I see Master Yermak?'

'Right now.'

Three Saints Bay had no jail, which was not surprising, since it had little else that an organized society required, but there was in Company offices a room with no windows and a double door, both parts of which could be kept locked, and when the bolts were shot, the young officer led Cidaq into the dark room where her supposed husband sat in shackles. 'Yermak!' she cried with a joy which pleased but did not surprise the prisoner, for although he realized that he was taking a gamble in relying upon her to achieve his freedom, he was arrogant enough to believe that she would be blinded by this dazzling opportunity to become the lawful wife of a Russian and would forgive him all he had done to her in the past.

'Yermak!' she cried again, like a dutiful wife. Breaking away from Ensign Belov and running to her persecutor, she took his manacled hands, kissed them, and then, pushing her smiling face into his beard, she kissed him again. Belov, witnessing this emotional reunion of a Russian fur trader and the island girl who adored him, sniffled and went off to inform the authorities that the marriage should proceed.

As SOON AS CIDAQ WAS FREE OF RUDENKO AND BELOV, she hurried to the shaman's hut: 'Lunasaq! I must speak with your mummy!' and when the sealskin pouch was opened, Cidaq revealed with laughter the surprising opportunity that had chanced her way: 'If I marry him, he stays here, and if I don't, back he goes to his seals.'

'Remarkable!' the mummy said. 'Have you seen him?' 'Yes. Manacled. Guarded by a soldier with a gun.' 'And what did you feel when you saw him?' 'I saw him with my hands about his neck, strangled.' 'And what shall you do about this?'

238

In the time since she first saw Rudenko's hateful face she had perfected her devious strategy: 'I'll make everyone believe I'm happy. I'll let them think I'm going to marry him. I'll talk with him about our life here in Three Saints . . .'

'And you'll relish every minute?' the ancient one asked.

'Yes, and at the last moment I'll say ”No”and watch as he's dragged back to his forever prison among the seals.'

The mummy, who had been a practical woman in life, which explained her long persistence thereafter, asked, 'But what reason will you give . . . for changing your mind?'

In response, Cidaq uttered words which would create the most intricate complications: 'I'll say I'm unable to surrender my old religion and become a Christian.'

At this frivolous statement Lunasaq gasped, for now religion, the essence of his life, was involved, and he foresaw the danger in playing such a game. The withered mummy was left to one side in her sealskin pouch, and Lunasaq, the endangered shaman, took sole control: 'Did you say you were thinking of turning Christian?'

'No, they said it. I'd have to join their church before I could marry Rudenko.'

'Surely, you'd not think of that?'

Continuing to play games, she said half humorously: 'Well, if he were a decent Russian . . . like young Belov, for instance . . .'

Gravely the shaman placed Cidaq on a stool and took a position facing her; then, as if he were summarizing his entire life, he began speaking: 'Young woman, have you not seen the Russian Christianity? Has it done anything for our people? Has it brought us the happiness they promised? Or the warm house? Or the food? Do they love us as their Book says they should? Do they respect us? Or allow us entrance to their places? Have they given us any new freedoms, or preserved the ones we built for ourselves?

Is there anything . . . any one thing you can think of... any good thing their god has given us? And is there any good thing which we already had which they have not taken away?'

From her sack the mummy groaned at this accurate summation of Christian rule under the Russians, and fortified by this encouragement the shaman continued, his unkempt locks shaking whenever he made a persuasive point: 'Did we not in the old days on our islands know happiness with our spirits? Did they not keep food swimming past our islands, protect us in our kayaks, bring our babies safely to birth, bring back the sun each spring, ensure a harmony in our life, and enable us to maintain good villages where children played in the sun and old men died in peace?'

239

He became so agitated by this vision of the lost Aleutian paradise that his voice rose to a plaintive wail: 'Cidaq! Cidaq! You've survived great tribulation. The spirits have saved you for some noble mission. Do not at this time of crisis even think of embracing their ignoble ways. Cidaq, stay with your people. Help them to regain their dignity. Help them to pick their way honestly through these testing times. Help me to help our people.'

He was trembling when he finished, for his spirits, those forces which animated the winds and activated the sun, had vouchsafed him a glimpse of the future, and he saw the rapid and painful demise of his people if they abandoned the old ways. He saw the drunkenness increasing until men lay senseless; he saw strange illnesses slaying his dark Aleuts but never the white Russians; he saw vibrant young women like Cidaq debauched and discarded; but most of all, he saw the remorseless decline and eventual disappearance of all that had made life on Attu and Kiska and Lapak and Unalaska resplendent, saw it all dragged in the dust until even the spirits who had supervised that life would be gone.

A universe, an entire universe which had known its episodes of grandeur, as when two men alone on the vast sea, protected only by a sealskin kayak with sides that even a determined fish could puncture, went up against leviathan they two hundred and fifty pounds in all, he forty tons to fight him to the death. This universe and all it comprised was in danger of being extinguished, and he felt that he alone was responsible for its salvation. 'Cidaq,' he whispered, pleading and anguish almost stifling his voice, 'do not scorn the tested old ways which have protected you in favor of bad new ones which promise a good life and deliver only death.'

His words had a powerful effect on Cidaq, and she sat in a kind of trance as he produced from his bundles those revered symbols which had guided her life so far: the bones, the pieces of wood, the polished pebbles, the ivory harvested so painfully from the sea. Distributing them about her in the designs to which she was accustomed, he began chanting, using words and phrases which she did not understand but which were so potent that into the room came the spirits that governed life, and they spoke to her as in the days of her childhood: 'Cidaq, do not desert us! Cidaq, the others promise a good life but never produce it, not for our people. Cidaq, cling to the ways that enabled your great-grandmother to live so long and so bravely. Cidaq, do not transfer your allegiance to strange new gods that have only boasting and no power.

Cidaq! Cidaq!' Her name reverberated from all corners of the hut until she feared she might faint, but then from the 240

mummy sack came comforting words: 'First things first, Cidaq. Smile at Rudenko. Give him reason to hope. Then send him back to exile with the seals. After that we must grapple with the things that perplex our shaman, for they perplex me, too.'

The round-faced girl with the sunburst smile shook her head vigorously from side to side as if to clear it for the tasks ahead, then promised her shaman: 'I'll not allow them to make me a Christian, not a real Christian, that is,' and she left the hut, smiling once more and trying to imagine how Rudenko was going to look at the last moment when she refused to marry him and he realized that she had tricked him into going back to the seals.

THE MUMMY HAD PREDICTED THAT THREE MEN WOULD

arrive at Kodiak with disturbing or hopeful messages, and Rudenko had been the first, with news that was all bad; but now a second was approaching, with creative ideas, and he came not a moment too soon.

By 1790, Russian colonization of her American territories had stumbled to the lowest level achieved by any European nation in bringing its civilization to newly discovered lands. Spain, Portugal, France and England all performed better, and it would not be until Belgium behaved so atrociously along the Congo that any nation would come close to the malperformance of Russians in the Aleutians. They destroyed the reasonable systems by which the islanders had governed themselves. They depleted food supplies, so that people starved. They nearly exterminated the sea otter, so that a wealth which might have expanded forever almost vanished. And worst of all, they crushed old beliefs without substituting viable replacements. Drunken old priests like Father Petr at Three Saints converted less than ten Aleuts to Christianity in nineteen years, and even to these willing souls they brought no spiritual reassurance or worldly improvements. Conditions were so bad that an impartial observer would have been justified in concluding: 'Everything the Russians have touched, they've debased.' But now reform was coming, from Irkutsk.

During that winter of 1726 when Vitus Bering and his aide Trofim Zhdanko were snowbound on their way to Kam chatka, they made a voluntary detour to the regional capital at Irkutsk, not far from the Mongolian border, and there they consulted with the voivode, Grigory Voronov, whose able and forceful daughter Marina impressed them so favorably. This Marina married the Siberian fur trader Ivan Poznikov 241

and later, after he was slain by brigands on the way to Yakutsk, the cossack Zhdanko.

She had said, during her introduction to Zhdanko: 'All good things in Siberia come from Irkutsk,' and this was still true.

During the intervening years the town had blossomed, becoming not only the administrative and commercial focus of eastern Russia but also the center from which radiated those imaginative ideas which enrich society, and no agency was more energetic than the Orthodox Church, whose local bishop was determined to inject religious vigor into Kodiak, the most eastern and backward of his administrative areas.

When Bering and Zhdanko met Marina Voronova they were not aware that she had a younger brother named Ignaci, who had remained behind in Moscow when his father moved east to assume his governorship. This Ignaci had a son Luka, who in 1766 had a son Vasili, who, from his earliest days, showed an inclination toward holy orders. As quickly as possible after finishing his preliminary studies, this Vasili sought entrance to the seminary in Irkutsk and in 1790, at the age of twenty-four, he qualified himself for ordination. But now a vigorous debate occupied the Voronov family and Great-Aunt Marina Zhdanko from Petropavlovsk, eighty-one years old, had come all the way to Irkutsk to make her strong opinions known, which she did to the irritation of many.

The problem confronting the family was a curious one. In the Russian Orthodox Church, priests at the time of ordination were required to make a difficult choice, one which determined the future course and limits of their lives. A young man, his heart aflame with zeal, could elect to become either a black priest or a white, and this designation included priestly costumes proclaiming the decision. A white priest was one who elected to serve the public as head of some local church or as a missionary or as a lowly assistant in God's work. Significantly, he was not only allowed to marry but encouraged to do so, and when he did establish his family in the community he became inextricably affiliated with it. A white priest was a man of the people, and much of the good work of the church stemmed from his and his family's efforts. Luka Voronov, Vasili's father, had been a white priest serving the Irkutsk countryside, which meant that his son, growing up in this tradition, had been indoctrinated as to its merits.

But other young priests, fired with either ecclesiastic ambition or an honest desire to see their church well administered, chose to become black priests, knowing that this would prevent them from ever marrying but knowing also that to their 242

care would be handed the governance of their church. Any boy aspiring to become a metropolitan in Russia or even in a major province like Irkutsk, must choose the black, take a vow of chastity, and adhere to these decisions through life, or he would find himself rigorously excluded from any significant position in the hierarchy.

It was an ironclad rule, one admitting no exceptions: 'Church leaders come only from the black.'

Young Vasili was strongly inclined to follow in his father's footsteps, for no priest in the Irkutsk area was more highly regarded than Luka Voronov, not even the bishop himself, who was, of course, a black. And with considerable encouragement from his father, Vasili would have followed his father's example had not Great-Aunt Marina voiced firm opinions to the contrary: 'Child! It would be horrible to cut yourself off from eventual leadership of our church. Don't even think of electing the white.

You were destined from birth to be a leader, maybe even the supreme leader.'

Her nephew Luka, the young priest's father, reacted rather vigorously to this advice, which he felt visionary: 'My dear Aunt Marina, you know and Vasili knows that leadership in our church does not seek out priests from Siberia.'

'Now wait! Just wait! Because you forsook the high moral road, Luka, and turned your back on preferment, which I never understood, there's no reason why your gifted son should do the same. Look at him! Has he not been ordained by God Himself to be a man of leadership?'

When the family turned to stare at Vasili, dignified in his seminary robes, blond, tall, straight, handsome in appearance and reverent in manner, they saw in him a young man eligible for distinguished service in their church. He was, as his great-aunt properly observed, a man destined for greatness. But his father saw something else nobler than the possibility of preferment: he saw a young man born to serve, perhaps in the humblest position the church provided, perhaps as a metropolitan, but serving always the noble responsibilities of his religion, as he, Luka, had striven to serve.