The Shamans at the End of Time, page 8
It took them a long time to notice I’d vanished. I don’t matter too much. No wonder, with my poor dancing skills.
“Dance,” they say, standing in front of me, moving their hips in time to the music, their voices calm and smooth, as if they were not dancing like the devil only a few moments ago.
“Later.”
“Now!” they shout, laughing and, grabbing my hands, trying to pull me up.
“Later,” I repeat; nothing will persuade me to dance again, at least for a while.
The girls look disappointed but, in the end, they shrug and return to the mass of people still dancing in a frenzy that looks like madness to me. After another half an hour, both dancers and musicians finally take a break and break for some refreshments, yet it is clear, even to me, that the great feast featuring the bear meat will start later. The girls bring me something that looks like a burnt tuber. They show me how to peel it, and under that almost black crust appears something that looks edible, though I don’t know what plant it is. I take a cautious first bite, but it tastes good, a little sweet, with a flavor that eludes me. They are eating the same thing, perhaps just to convince me that I will not be poisoned. I may be poisoned by mistake, I can’t stop thinking. Because my stomach may lack the right enzymes. Usually, I am an optimistic guy, but this place and the way I arrived here always make me think the worst.
Selma points at the sun, on its path down behind the mountain. “Sun, one finger, mountain. Dance.” She puts her finger in front of her eyes to make me understand how she measures time against the mountain.
Oh, no, I groan silently, calculating that I have less than half an hour before my next session of torture will start. And I used to like dancing.
“Dance,” Malva says, her shoulder pushing against me. Her voice and gesture are both childish and amused, and she can’t understand why I react like a tortured man.
If I don’t dance, it’s bad... If I dance, I may collapse and I will be the laughing stock of the whole clan. Maybe I can join the musicians. I remember that they liked it when I sang Moon River to them, in the morning, though my voice is not so good, but they don’t know how Andy Williams sang the same song. I stand up, followed by their probing eyes. I enter and leave my room in silence, the thing I want to keep hidden resting in my left hand, behind me. “Close eyes.” My right hand touches first Malva’s then Selma’s eyes. With broad smiles on their faces, they conform to my wish. To be sure that they can’t see me, I stand in the doorway, while they sit on the floor, leaning against the wall. How should I start? I know so many songs, and now my mind seems empty. Nervously, I moisten my lips. Finally, I decide on Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa, and I purse my lips over the nai. Half of the first notes are wrong. They can’t know that, I tell myself, but I take care to play quietly.
The girls jump to their feet and turn toward me. Their eyes are wide, and they are breathing fast, staring at me. I finally get into the song’s rhythm, and the music flows through the village. Some heads appear from the hut nearby, and I stop playing. Malva takes the nai from my hand and press her lips to it. She knows how to play flute, but having twenty flutes in her hands is a different thing; still she manages to play some notes. Selma plays too but, instead of trying randomly, she takes one pipe after another, playing the whole range. She stops, with a pensive look, then tries again in reverse order, starting from the lowest note this time.
“Notebook stores words. This stores sounds,” she says, still keeping the nai in her hand. Selma wants to say or to ask more, but she doesn’t know how to cope with my limited vocabulary. Her fingers caress the wood of the nai gently.
“Name is nai,” I say in my rudimentary language.
Malva sees Moira and Edna some distance away and hustles toward them. She speaks and gesticulates as if she is being attacked by a swarm of savage African bees. It is more than enough to convince the two shamanes that something special has happened. I am done with the dancing, I encourage myself.
Selma plays the scale again, starting from the lowest note, and the nai passes from her to Moira and to Edna. After a while, it returns to me.
“Play,” both girls say in one voice, like they are twins.
I start The Sound of Silence again. There are no false notes this time, and finishing it properly makes me feel proud.
“Dance,” Moira says, and I freeze, thinking that she wants me to dance again, but she points at the nai. “Nai ... dance.”
Does she want me to play something faster? Reluctantly, I play a new song.
“Faster.” Moira’s hand gestures left and right, as if trying to give me the proper rhythm.
I offer several choices, but she discards all the pop or rock music samples. It takes her no more than ten to fifteen seconds to decide, and her hand makes a swift gesture that I interpret as being ‘next’. Reconsidering their dances, I feel the need to slap myself. They resemble some folk dances I know, but I am not a real fan of that music and I know only a few tunes, almost all of them Romanian. Despite my worries, this time she selects two hora and sarba dances from the county where my grandparents live. One of them, the Old Man’s Sarba, is quite popular in their modern, but isolated, village in the middle of the mountains. I remember an Irish dance, and Moira chooses that too. The name of the dance eludes me. “Ireland,” I say when she insists on knowing the name. My folk repertoire ends and, lost for choices, I try Hora Staccato. Moira says yes in less than five seconds. My next choice, Brahms, the Hungarian Dance no. 5. is accepted fast too, and this time she seems to think that there are enough dances for that evening. Her last two choices of classical music are puzzling me, but I don’t complain, and actually classical composers were always trying to get the essence of music in their compositions. Moira might belong to the Stone Age, but I start to realize even more that, as a shamane, she must be an intelligent woman with a high capacity for abstraction. There must also be some degree of sophistication in their culture that I may be able to learn about later.
“RiverDance...,” Moira says, but I don’t understand the words that follow.
Selma whistles El Condor Pasa, and I start to play it, though I don’t understand the association Moira has made with the word ‘river’. I see both Moira and Edna frowning, like they are not convinced by my music. Pretentious audience... Mechanically, I switch to an ancient folk version I heard, some time ago, in the Aconcagua Valley, at a winery which provided both food and local music, part of their Musica des los Andes concert. For some strange reason, both the song and the taste of the Carmenere Wine are fresh in my mind, and I sigh, thinking that I will never taste wine again. The climate seems to be too cold to allow vines to grow, if such plants grow on this world which may or may not be Earth. I try to remember the name of the winery, but I fail. It’s like my previous life is slipping away from me, and I play some false notes again. It doesn’t matter, the new version of the song has convinced them and, anyway, they don’t know that I made a mistake.
“River Dance...,” Moira says, followed by the same unintelligible words as before. “Song name?” she asks, using a limited vocabulary this time.
“Condor.” It makes no sense to use the whole name.
“What means condor?”
“Big bird.” I make a sign on the ground, then I walk twenty feet and make another sign. I spread my arms like wings, then I point at the distance marked on the floor. Their eyes widen, but none of them comment.
“Good name, condor,” Edna says, still wondering about the size of the bird they have never seen and never will. It seems that her inquisitive mind has found an association between the song and a bird she doesn’t know. I want to know what she thinks, how she made that association, but how can I ask?
After making me play almost twenty melodies, Moira settles for Gabriel’s Oboe song from The Mission movie, a piece written by Enyo Morricone, Zamfir’s The Lonely Shepherd and a part of Enesco’s Romanian Rhapsody. All of them work well on a nai.
“Condor, Gabriel, Shepherd, Rhapsody.” Moira repeats, at the end, the names I gave to her. “Dance.” She gestures at me, then at the place where the clan’s singers have gathered again, properly refreshed. We walk together, and Moira speaks to the five musicians. I understand nothing. “One song,” she gestures at the band of five. “One song,” she gestures at me.
Yes, ma’am, I agree inside with a smile.
When the dance session finally ends, one of the singers plays a long pattern on his drum. It comes in short and loud bursts of sounds, very similar to the medieval habit of using the drum before an important announcement is made, and the people gather around him.
Rune stands tall on a stone, so he can be seen by everybody. For a while, he remains silent, all eyes on him. He looks bored, and tension roses into the crowd. “Bear!” he finally shouts, pointing at me, and a cacophony of cheerful cries burst out. Rune gives a small speech, that is lost in the noise, and anyway I could not understand, but this I know at least: the steak is finally ready.
While the last sunshine is vanishing behind the mountain, the sky is fading to a radiant rose, but the mists that covers the waters of the Great River resemble a patch of quicksilver. Walking slowly, women and men gather again in a place that looks like a reversed amphitheater. Edna comes and signals me to follow her. The girls come with us too, and we walk toward the top of the amphitheater. There is a bench, ten feet long, three feet wide, carved in the stone of the mountain, and Edna sits on it, inviting me to do the same. The girls join us.
“Vlahins know you sing,” Edna forces herself to use a limited vocabulary. “They trust ... you play.” There is a word I don’t understand, but everything is now clear: playing for the dancers was a step to gaining acceptance into the clan. I suppose that it’s only a first step, but I keep the comment to myself.
Trust for what? I wonder. Even if I wanted to ask what for, I am sure that they would not understand my question or I would not understand their explanation or both.
“Now River Dance ...,” Edna speaks again. I recognize the strange words following ‘river’ only because Moira said them twice before, but who knows what they mean? It must be something difficult to explain, as Edna doesn’t even try. “River ... important ... Vlahins.” She touches her forehead, but I have no idea what that means. Mechanically, I imitate her, but she ignores my gesture; it’s clear that she doesn’t expect me to understand, and the thought, that for them I am a savage, comes to me. I struggle to stifle the smile spreading on my lips; Edna seems to be really serious. “Order is important .... River Dance...” She stares at me, as if trying to imprint her words in my mind, the ones I understand, at least. “Gabriel,” she looks again at me. “Shepherd, Rhapsody, Condor. Condor ... very important.”
“Gabriel, Shepherd, Rhapsody, Condor,” I repeat after her, just because of that seriousness in her voice, in her stare.
Moira and Rune join us too, while below, in the lower part of the amphitheater, people start to gather, forming four semicircular rows. The first row is only sixty paces from us. It’s difficult to count, but there seem to be more than two hundred people down there, children included, and the children seem to be at least nine or ten years old. I don’t see any toddlers, though I know that there are many in the village. Moira looks briefly at me, and under her studied calm, I feel a degree of anxiety. Then she glances at Edna, who nods slightly, as if she has more confidence in me.
What is so important? I wonder, then I remember from Eliade’s History of Religions – a book my uncle forced me to read several times, as he thought that I had too much free time, though I never understood why he believed such a thing–that gatherings like this were used to make people feel closer to their gods. A spiritual communion. We could be wrong, of course; while some prehistoric cult objects have survived the vicissitudes of time, they came to us without a user manual. Deciphering what our ancestors thought or did in rituals is half science, half an exercise of wild imagination, and notoriously tricky. Once, some history students and I even tried to use mushroom powder to reenact a shamanic ritual we found in an old esoteric book. It was a Siberian ritual, and all we got was a bad headache, which felt far from spiritual. The pain was not enough to connect us with the magical world, and we did not try again. My uncle tried to make me study history at university, but I was a practical man, and all my childhood I had dreamed of flying. When I was still in secondary school, I enjoyed his summer camps in isolated and exotic places, and with my music skills, I received a fair share of the female students’ attention, though I was two or three years younger. It was pleasant, but not enough to change my dreams. Flying filled people’s mind long before we invented history and historians, even if I count Homer as being the first one.
Twenty paces in front of our bench, there are two, poles, nine feet tall, stuck into the ground inside a circle eight feet wide, which is marked with two circular rows of white and red stones, the size of a child’s head. Two women come and set four fires around the circle, then put torches in sconces carved into the poles. Many details I observe only because someone involuntarily attracts my attention to them. From the geography of the place, the fires mark the four cardinal points, and the people are sitting south of us. The arrangement must have some esoteric importance to them, something like the axis mundi, but I have no way to be sure if they have such a notion. ‘One of the worst mistake an anthropologist can make is to impose his own cultural habits when trying to understand another culture’, my uncle used to say. Even if it is wrong, the association stirs my mind and, for the first time, I think that I should have chosen history as my field of study. While it’s more interesting, knowing how to build rockets is not particularly useful now. Shamanism and mystery, not science, are flowing around me. I should make some notes for my uncle. Deep in my mind, a small part of me still has some trace of hope for a return to the civilized world. I may even write a book and become famous. If I survive the war. If I do return, the main issue is not to make notes, but to make my eventual readers believe me. For this kind of knowledge, according to my uncle, people do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit their interpretation of something that might or might not have happened many millennia ago. They ignore or even attack everything which doesn’t fit into their beloved theories, or they become believers. The latter is less likely to happen. ‘Science advances through funerals,’ was one of my uncle’s favorite quotes. The quote belongs to a famous physicist, I think, but it applies to any field of study, or so my uncle believed.
Silent and solemn, Moira steps inside the circle, and raises her arms. Her gesture is fluid, and there is a strange elegance in it that fully captures my attention. Like it’s been cut by a knife, all the noise stops in the amphitheater. It’s not yet fully dark, but this is the part of the day when the world falls asleep, and an almost unnatural silence settles around us. The air between the poles shimmers for a few seconds, like in a high voltage lamp, causing me to shiver involuntarily and raising the hairs on my arms. It must be just a figment of my imagination, but it brings to mind a scene from the movie Metropolis, and I shake my head. I am no longer there. I am here. Selma slides her palm over mine, making even more hairs rise on my arm, for a different reason though, and I smile at her. It’s an automatic gesture, perhaps more a grin than a genuine smile. She smiles back, and she is genuine. Of course, I complain inside. Nothing is new to her. Nothing is as exciting to her as it is to me. Or strange. The last thought tilts me in the right direction, and those unruly hairs calm down.
Edna knees behind me, and it’s strange how well I feel that without seeing her moving. “Fear not,” she says gently. Her hand sneaks under my shirt, along my spine, and a brief shiver passes through me. “Fear not,” she repeats, and her warm palm settles at the base of my neck, bringing even more shivers.
What an irony, I think, warmth makes me shiver.
An undercurrent passes between her and my skin and, even stranger, I have the same sensation as when the doctor places a cupping glass on your skin to massage your back. Inside the circle, Moira still stands, arms aloft. She looks like an antique statue, and an invisible power seems to surge from her stance. “Sing now,” Edna urges me, a slight tension surfacing in her voice.
The first notes of Gabriel’s Oboe start to flow, going down the hill, and I almost have the physical sensation of feeling the sound waves moving through the air. Below, the people start to absorb the music and move slowly, left to right, like synchronized dancers. One row of people is leaning to the right, the next row to the left. They resemble the blades of a giant scissors. It looks so mystical, and I wonder; if this sensation passes through my mind, what kind of feelings are born in their minds, which are accustomed to living in a world of supernatural things? As if by its own will, the music flows further, silencing my thoughts, spreading over the valley. It engulfs me, and I am now alone with my nai. A peculiar sensation, that the night doesn’t follow twilight as quickly as the previous day, floats around me, but I don’t have the right mindset to search for an explanation; it’s a perfect time to enjoy and wonder, not to think.
“Close your eyes,” Edna whispers in my ear, and I obey, instantly. “Feel the First River of Thought coming to you.”
I understand her words, though the true understanding will come to me only the next day. Something emanates from her palm and spreads into my skin, going up my spine, into the cerebellum, the oldest part of the human brain. The feeling is acute, both pleasant and demanding, without being overwhelming. It spreads into my skull, and I have the impression of it flowing into my mouth and on into my nai, being released with each note into the valley. That strange flow becomes visible to my closed eyes, spreading like tendrils of white mist, surrounding Moira. Her body captures them, in a whirlpool of mist and, now, the mist is a light blue so pale it is almost white. It forms a shroud that clings to her, and she is dancing, hypnotic, feline. Like an afterthought, the mist follows her undulations. She is trying to capture and amplify the blue-white mist, I suddenly realize, and I start to doubt that my mind is functioning properly. It hasn’t functioned properly since I got here. The tendrils grow stronger and stronger, flowing down from Moira, slow and serpentine, toward the people’s torsos, moving left and right, in the same rhythm as the Shamane. The flow resembles a white river.
