Khon Yush. Way From the Ob

«Look, the girl survived and got to the ground.»

«Everything mixed up in this world! Why are we punished? Why is this girl tormented?»

«I had only one cow and I'm here for it now. They say I'm a kulak…» a woman said, exhausted to the extreme. She became even thinner over the journey, and it seemed that her skeleton was covered with thin skin, which was about to tear. Her eyes shone with kind and quiet light.

«And I always had a good household,» her friend straightened in misfortune, remembering the past prosperity. «It's painful for people to look at someone else's good, and here we are destitute.»

The second woman did not get thinner during the long journey. She squinted her eyes and looked evilly at the escorts and strangers. Everything annoyed her. She seemed angry at the whole world.

The arrivals moved to the shore in a row.

«Faster!» Shouted the guards. «Hurry up!»

People silently looked around. They carried ashore the bodies of those who got frozen at the barge that night. The guards hastily distributed shovels among the settlers – to dig holes for the graves. They buried the dead, leveled the land, and drove people higher up the hill.

Autumn has already taken over. The morning was hazy, gray and inhospitable. Fog crawled low over the river, covering the dark waters of the Ob with a light haze. It went in colorless paths along dried Pitlyar litter, along small streams, stretched out like a mosquito haze along the taiga light forest, painted with cheerful colors of autumn, affectionately hiding the warm earth with gentle swan fluff.

At that moment, as if mourning the restless souls of all those who had died on the barge from hunger and cold, women cried higher on the hill. The guards were taking three men in old suede malica to the river.

Earlier that morning, when the horizon was slightly twisted with the silver threads of khutli – dawn, a kayak boat docked on the shore of Pitlourkurt. There were two reindeer herders and a man wearing the NKVD uniform. He jumped out first, followed by Iakov Matveevich Tyrlin. He helped the old man with sparse braided hair, faded like the feathers of an old haley – a Siberian gull. It was Taras Nikonovich Rusmilenko. Both were tired and tried to stretch their arms and legs.

People were brought from afar, from the villages of Vulykurt and Khashkurt that lay upstream of the river. Three days ago, shamans could not be found in their native villages where they arrested many «enemies of the people», but nevertheless they caught them in hunting huts. Now they had to catch up with the ship that was going towards Salekhard.

Seeing Iakov Matveevich, a fair-faced, fair-haired man over forty, the villagers respectfully bowed their heads, but hid their eyes. For many kilometers along the Ob, people revered this man, the Great Shaman, nicknamed «Lylan Luhpi Shepan iki» – the «Living Spirit», which had a special gift of healing serious illnesses. They could not help him in anything and therefore only bowed their heads in deference to the man who had helped them in difficult times, to his heavenly gift.

His married daughter, Vurty Matra Khashkurne, who was married in this village three years ago, ran to the boat. She had already been informed that the authorities had brought Lylan Luhpi. She rushed to the shore like a breeze, but even then she did not forget to cover her face with a beautiful burgundy shawl with long white tassels and a rim blue as a river. It was an ancient custom. She was not the one to establish it, and not the one to neglect it.

On the day of the matchmaking, each girl covered her face with the edge of her headscarf forever, hiding her from the eyes of her husband's older relatives. From that day, not a single self-respecting man: neither an old man whose hair was foamed with gray Ob waves, nor a father-in-law, nor any other of her husband's relatives – dared to look at her daughter-in-law. This has been done according to the traditions that were once established in ancient times.

Hashkurne wanted to rush into the arms of her father, but was blocked by the escort:

«Where are you rushing, you mad girl! You can't come here. Don't you see? These are enemies of the people!»

She hesitated and stopped halfway, puzzled, as if delving into something, carefully examining the escort. Knowing the calm nature of his daughter, her father prudently shouted:

«No need to cry, daughter, I'll be back soon!»

The quiet, obedient Khashkurne did not answer. She carefully covered her face with a handkerchief, as if hiding from everyone, and quietly fell silent, hidden in a crowd of curious women.

Residents of the Pitlourkurt village cried for people on whom their lives were based. One woman grabbed her husband's clothes and, unable to hold him, fell to the ground. She did not let go of the hem of his malica, and her body dragged lifelessly after him.

Vasily Ivanovich Khartaganov, local, was a young, forty-four-year-old shaman. He tried to pull the edge of his clothes from his wife's fingers, but apparently they had convulsions, so she couldn't unclench them. The guards withdrew her hands from malica with force, but nothing helped. The shouldered short man, trying to stay calm, continued to walk towards the shore after his fellow tribesmen.

Nearby villages that day were left without support, without shamans, without doctors. Since ancient times, they supported their people, served as a bright guiding star, a clear moon and a warm sunbeam in the life of this snowy land, which was not always easy.

«Damn shamans! Let him go, you fool!» Shouted the guard.

The guards were already used to the grief of others. Women cried in every village, some of them even rushed at people in uniform. Particularly active were beaten with whips. This was their task: to cleanse the society from dangerous people, the brave, wise freethinkers. To protect people from themselves, shuffle, reorganize, put them in place. It was like removing a leader from a deer herd, decapitating a motley stock and driving everyone into a snowstorm. If a wolf pack attacks, only the fastest, the strongest and, of course, the most cunning will survive.

Father of the nations Stalin was to foresee any discord in a large multinational family. Riots were eradicated without delay, using any methods. Otherwise, there could be trouble.

The leader's iron hand reached «to the very outskirts» of the Soviet Union. There was no way to hide in the taiga wilderness or in the endless tundra of nomadic reindeer herders, nor in the marshy swamps of the Ob North.

The decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the АН-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the orders of the NKVD in 1937 brought fear, hopelessness, denunciation and spying, including to the North. They were looking for spies everywhere. The planned tasks, figures and norms for the arrest of «enemies of the people», approved in the center, served as a guide for the local NKVD bodies. They had a kind of social competition for the greatest exposure of «enemies of the people.» The arrests of shamans and «kulaks» destroyed the indigenous peoples of the North. Instead, the leadership assigned obeying people able to bow their heads before the authorities. But here, in the dense swampy lands, among the small peoples of the Ob region, accustomed to roam freely along their hunting and deer paths, through the vast expanses of their native land for centuries, there were still few of them.

Therefore, today the main representatives of these people, confident in themselves, silently moved to the unknown. Like an unbending trunk of a cedar, they did not bow, and did not lower their heads. And it did not matter that there were few of them among the so-called shamans. The storytellers, stewards of sacred rites, the mind and power of the people, went away forever and nowhere. In today's mess, no one could disobey the Father of Nations. The police, the NKVD, even if they wanted to help someone, did not have the right to do so. They were firmly accustomed to the forgotten Khanty mountains, bringing them into a new order.

An elderly woman in front of the crowd pushed her old man:

«Help me unhook her fingers. She's got three kids without a father at home! They can take her!»

Together, they went to Khartaganov's crying wife, dragging lifelessly after her sweet, most dear man in this world. The young shaman, realizing what could happen to the mother of his children, tried to tear off the hem of his clothes. He finally managed to grope and tear a weak spot along the seam of his malica, sewed in the evenings by his Khutline – the morning dawn of the young shaman. As he walked, he continued tearing off the wide hem of his clothes. Skilful stitches sewn with reindeer veins gave in with difficulty. Finally, he stepped over the torn part of the malica, leaving it in the hands of the one that was half of his soul, half of his heart. His beloved remained sobbing angrily at the earth.

«Heia!» The crowd was agitated. «Your husband won't come back. Don't you howl like that!»

«He tore his clothes alive. Bad sign.»

Long winters and frosts in the North established their conditions for the funeral rites that had appeared in distant times, when people got used to live among the eternal snows. It was believed that in the «lower world» the dead live an ordinary life, so they need all the necessary utensils, including clothes. Women were buried in a new yagooshka, and men were buried in their malica. During the funeral, all things were spoiled – torn or cut with a knife. With a hatchet they cut sleds into two halves.

Today, the shaman tore his clothes going on a long journey. He knew the customs, but the family was more important than the ancient customs.

Keeping his dignity, the man, not knowing what would await him ahead, without bowing his head, went to the barge. Without looking back, he walked to its middle.

Khashkurne, not seeing the grief of others, with a heart breaking in her chest looked only after her father and whispered:

«Come back home! You promised!»

The escort, having seated three shamans, ordered to move ahead – and the steamboat rattled again, firing a black column of smoke. Under the female cries, the cry of children, the barking of dogs, the vicious screams of the Ob big gulls «Chale, chale, chalev, chalev!», the steamboat headed to Salekhard, which was Obdorsk a couple of years ago. There were more shamans there that needed to be taken to jail.

«They will be taken to the south, to Tobolsk, or Omsk,» said an obsolete woman, «they say they put shamans in prisons.»

«And they brought us to the North. They are unaccustomed to heat, so are we to cold. This is the punishment, but for what?» her friend asked, not addressing anyone.

«No, we were torn from our native land, from our roots. Not only the plant dies without roots, but also people.»

«But man is not a tree. We still have a head and hands. Hopefully, we will not die of longing and hunger!»

«The main thing is that we were not sent to prison. We will live free.»

«Why are you standing here, kulaks? Settle down, prepare a place for dugouts. You will dig tomorrow. Otherwise, in the open air you will die before winter!» Shouted the fair-haired man in uniform.

«So we'll spend the winter here?» The woman said.

The crying Khanty slowly moved to their village.

«Lucky ones, they are free, free!» – the woman said enviously. «They go whatever they want.»

«Who knows if we have free people today?» The second woman answered, looking at the grass that had died before winter frosts.