Charlinder's Walk (22 page)

"You don't speak Russian, do you?" asked one of the tradesmen as Charlinder walked away.

"No, why?"

"Good luck, young man!"

Part 3: Eurasia

Chapter Eighteen

Russia

The weather had turned cold enough that Charlinder wore his sweater all day and night except sometimes in mid-afternoon on a sunny day. He saw it as a race against the change of seasons; he was going south as the weather grew colder, and he didn't want to let the season change gain on him. As he soon discovered, he would not outpace the encroachment of a Russian September no matter how quickly he marched with his woolly companion in tow. A week after he said goodbye to the Alaskans, he woke up with his whole right side painfully stiff and cold from contact with the ground. He hadn't dealt with that since late March. He announced to Lacey, therefore, that it was time for them to find a village.

He came across one the following day. As he approached, the several visible people in the area stopped whatever they were doing and stared at him. As he had seen this happen several times in North America, it did not slow him up. He addressed himself to the nearest young man.

"Hi, my name's Charlinder. Does your village have room for a lone traveler?"

The young man responded by looking oddly at him and then saying something he didn't understand.

"I'm sorry, what did you just say?"

He spoke again; it sounded similar, but Charlinder still couldn't make sense of him. "I really don't know what you're saying."

The villager made a gesture that could have been telling him to wait there, and ran off to a nearby house while his neighbors continued to stare.

He had never met anyone before who didn't speak English, in fact had never even heard anyone speak a different language until the Yu’pik village in Alaska, and no one else he knew had ever heard a foreign language, either. The idea that he would be unable to understand or be understood by anyone was as unthinkable as a journey to the center of the Earth.

When Charlinder's first contact emerged from the house, he had a stooped, toothless, smiling old woman marching ahead of him. She grabbed Charlinder by the forearms and went on gabbling excitedly at him in the same incomprehensible set of sounds as the guy who appeared to be her grandson. The only difference was that between the pace of her speech and her missing teeth, she was perhaps even more unintelligible.

The only thought Charlinder could muster was that he was a colossal fool for trying to approach a new country like this. What exactly did he need to say to this iron-handed old lady who was clearly happy to see him but had no idea who he was? "Look, let me show you," he muttered. She let go of his hands, and he reached into his pack's top compartment for a well-worn sheet of paper.

He opened his world map for the villagers, who peered at it with great interest. "I come from
here
," he pointed at the Paleola River, "and I've been through there, here, and all through here," he showed them the trail of markings from the villages he'd visited.

At this, the grandson said something to the old woman, which sounded more comprehending than before, while gesturing at Charlinder. She responded enthusiastically to him, and they rounded on Charlinder again. More gesticulating at the map, the land and himself ensued, punctuated by fits of disjointed phrases, during which a considerable number of neighbors came in for a closer look and kept Charlinder and Lacey boxed into their crowd. After much repetition of several attempts at sign language, the grandmother let go of Charlinder's arms again and announced something to the crowd, who looked pleased and gave him space to walk away. He wasn't sure what he'd just communicated, but soon he had the grandmother pulling him into the house while her grandson led Lacey to a spot of straggly grass. That would have to suffice for the time being.

The next two days were among the most bizarre experiences of his life up to that point. The family appeared to be the elderly grandmother, a pair of middle-aged parents, an uncle, three grown children around Charlinder's age, a daughter-in-law, and a girl toddler. The house consisted of a common area including kitchen and a room at either side filled with beds. Charlinder brought in a pot filled with Lacey's milk that evening, and it was their beverage with the night's dinner, so the Russians were presumably not allergic. He spent most of his time sitting in the common area with the grandmother, who cooed and petted him. While she was a very likable old lady, she still left him to wonder what on Earth she found so interesting about him. The surreal part of his stay with them was not the inexplicable affection but the communication problems. One would have thought that after the first three attempts, the family would have accepted that he could not work with them in verbal communication, but the family members kept talking to him and then expecting him to talk back in a way that would make sense. He lost count of how many times he had to tell people, "I really don't know what you're saying." He did a lot of knitting during his stay, which set the men to looking at him like a strange animal, but he was not concerned with their reaction; he needed new socks and mittens. Thus he spent several restful hours knitting with Grandmother, who was fascinated with how he held the needles, part of it also with the daughter-in-law while her baby scampered around the room. This was his favorite part of his stay with them. It was the only time he could exhale. When the entire family was in the house, he kept waiting for someone to ask something of him, to attempt communication with him in which he would fail to respond appropriately and they would become frustrated with him. On the afternoon of the second day, Charlinder took Lacey and kissed Grandmother goodbye. Then he had to wait while she summoned all the family over to show them that he was taking his leave. He hoped that he looked grateful enough in his departure, but was relieved when they let him go.

"I like having you around, Lacey," he said to his ewe that night as he prepared to turn in. "You're very simple company."

As was customary, Lacey gave no reaction except to flop down next to him. He took a moment to savor the quiet night, with stars glowing steadily above and no sound except the sheep's breathing. "This is going to be a
very
long journey," he mused out loud.

The next family to take him in was not quite as affectionate as the first, but he had the presence of mind to have them mark his map. It turned out he was already well on his way down a peninsula he'd planned to avoid. He headed west until he reached the land's edge, turned north and kept to the coastline until he found another village and another family to mark his map, which placed him back on the proper mainland. He often had bizarrely disturbing dreams in which he tried to speak, but no sound came out, while people all around him sounded like saws going through wood. Some families he found perhaps too hospitable. He wanted to stay no more than a day and a night, while they wanted to keep him longer, and of course he couldn't very well explain his reasoning with no language in common. Often being too exhausted to argue further, he found it easier to let them keep him longer than to leave a trail of offended hosts in his wake.

Meanwhile, the weather grew colder and his latest pair of shoes sewn from sampled cow hide were thin and sprouting holes. He'd also stopped shaving after he left Alaska, but he still did not grow a decent beard. The patchy growth didn't keep his face any warmer. He woke up one morning and ranted to Lacey, "the beard, it does nothing!" His existence was quickly becoming untenable, and he needed to stop somewhere and get his bearings.

He came to another settlement the next day, and it reminded him somehow of the North American town where he'd met Randall and Cleo. It was smaller than the Hyatts' settlement, and the obvious use of metal in their construction was ubiquitous in the Siberian territory, but this was clearly a more organized community than most and also a more obedient set of people.

Charlinder was still working on the execution, but he had more or less developed an efficient formula to find a place to stay. He found an understanding-looking person and showed himself as a foreigner, in case the unusually dark coloring, conspicuous hair texture and narrow facial structure didn't tip them off. Then the explanation followed with a lot of sign language involving his world map until his audience caught on. If his mark wasn't keen on receiving a guest, they would find somebody else to take him. Thus began a day or two of him sleeping in their house, eating their food, and not understanding a word they said.

This time, there was an extra layer to the process. Charlinder introduced himself to a woman slightly older than Vilma by looks, and she was sympathetic. She took him inside and showed him to her family to get their approval; her husband, an elderly father, her children, a sibling and spouse, their children; and no one raised any objection. Before he could put down his baggage, then, the woman and her husband pulled him and Lacey off to another part of the village and showed him to someone else.

There was a large building where his new hosts led Charlinder and Lacey to a room that bore the same air as the Paleola village’s council room, only more polished. The woman waited with Charlinder while her husband excused himself. He shortly returned with a scowling, ornately dressed middle-aged man who took a seat at the head of the table. His hosts then bowed to this man--Charlinder decided to think of him as the Grand Poobah--and proceeded to talk to him about Charlinder. He listened to them, sometimes nodding but never smiling, and only looked at Charlinder when they'd finished. He nodded, said a few more words, and took his leave.

The hosting couple, looking relieved, took Charlinder outside again but did not go straight home. They parked Lacey in a barn full of cattle before returning to the house. During the walk, Charlinder noticed that, though he'd only been introduced to a few people in the community in general, there were some who were not happy to see him. News of outsiders spread rapidly, it appeared, and there were two communities to be seen in this village. One was composed of the friends of his new hosting family--healthy-looking, warmly clad and mildly timid but friendly people who came to ask about this odd-looking newcomer. The other showed signs of a very different quality of life. Gauntly thin, shabby and conspicuously not socializing with their better-off neighbors, they did not approach. Whether engaged in grueling labor involving frozen animal dung, or merely loitering around and letting the other community ignore them, they all had eyes for Charlinder, and those eyes were not smiling. The women beheld him bitterly, maybe even fearfully, just long enough to let him see them look pointedly away. The men fixed him with a stare that was positively menacing, and the children simply looked blank, thoughtless. Charlinder waited for his hosts to indicate to him that the unhappy ones were to be avoided, or perhaps disregarded. In fact he waited for them to do anything to acknowledge their attention, but the first community's policy toward the second was to give them a wide berth and otherwise pretend they weren't there. He was shown back to the house, where he enjoyed the luxuries of a wood stove, a filling meal, and children to climb on him.

As his stay wore on, Charlinder had to think seriously about when he might leave the village. Unlike his usual visits, in which he endured the stress of everyone speaking Russian to him in exchange for solid food and sleeping indoors, he was now caught between the tedium of staying and the uncertainty of leaving. The house was comfortably warm and dry and remarkably tidy for a residence housing so many people. It was so cozy, in fact, that Charlinder, with his perpetual struggle against the cold, regularly fantasized that he really didn't need to remove himself from the family's hospitality until the end of winter, not concerned that such a span would likely take most of the year. Creature comforts aside, he would periodically flee from the awkwardness of the family's double-brick-walled conversations with him and escape to visit Lacey at the dairy barn. This meant much walking through a good-sized portion of the settlement, during which he could not escape the continued attention from the miserable lower stratum. Their interest in him did not flag, and their emotions did not soften at his continued, though wholly innocuous presence. At every route he took between the barn and the house, he would encounter several of these unfortunate people who clearly despised Charlinder for whatever crime he'd committed in entering their village. Still none of them extended so much as a hand in his direction, but he soon began to doubt the wisdom of leaving the village, as some of them might follow him to a place where no one could hear him scream.

While they apparently wanted nothing for Charlinder except death, he wanted nothing except to know more about them. Having no one to talk with and nothing to do except spin and knit, he had abundant time to think. Why did they look upon him so angrily?, he kept asking himself. Were they so hateful towards every outsider they saw? Did they think he was taking something from them? Did he disturb them because he looked different? Did they think he was evil because he couldn't speak their language? Then there was the reality of their condition. They obviously endured a miserable existence, having no work except the most degrading of tasks, from which followed little to eat, ragged clothes to wear, and little acknowledgement with no compassion from their neighbors. Though Charlinder had grown up in a very different area, he could imagine that being inadequately fed and clothed was especially dangerous in a part of the world that was already so cold in September. He didn't like to think about what they had for shelter. That the upper stratum did their best to ignore them must have made their existence only more frightening. This left him to wonder how they became the village's bottom rung. Had they committed serious crimes, and this was their punishment? Did the village naturally produce a certain number of people in every generation who were mentally abnormal and fit for nothing but drudgery on the margins of society? Was it the village's religious system to create a class of untouchables, who were invisible at best? Or did their economic structure simply not offer room for everyone, and those who fell through the cracks ended up like this? These were the questions that kept running through his head, with no one to give him the answers.