R )   A P R I L , 1 9 4 4   -   T H E   S H A M A N ’ S   D I S E A S E

A year after his marriage, Peter (presumably weakened by his constant nightmares) suffered a sudden and bizarre illness: “There is a dreadful scream from my yurt. The villagers rush over to see what has happened and find Jötung [Peter’s wife] in a state of utter hysteria: ‘Erlick Khan has cooked my white-devil husband on a spit!’ Cautiously, I enter the yurt with the old Tungus Tusput; in the half light we see a figure on the bed, his entire body covered in suppurating red welts and crackled skin. This disintegrating body is me! The smell is so sickening, Tusput is forced to run back outside to avoid retching. Outside, I can hear the crowd of villagers become agitated: this cannot be a good omen for the tribe. Tasak, the old shaman, is summoned to the scene immediately - on seeing my condition, he sends a boy off to collect a large block of salagan [rancid horse butter] and some turga [reindeer skin, imported from the North]. With these materials, the old shaman rubs me down and wraps me up. I am put on a kulag and taken to the old shaman’s yurt just outside the settlement. I hear a distant voice. I really am dying, the nightmare is real. ‘My son, I cannot treat you if you continue to defy the spirits. They are not friends to us. They have claimed your soul - you must give it up. It is useless to struggle!’ Barely capable of thought, I whisper a promise.”

The old shaman treated Peter for several weeks, dressing and redressing his skin with salagen and quoomis. In the Buryat world view, it seems likely that Tasak would have diagnosed Peter’s illness as “the shaman’s disease.” (see text, plate 35: “how a person is selected to become a shaman”) The long, slow recovery gave Peter a chance to reflect on his life.

“Lying immobile, I realize just how much I has changed over the past three years; I bare no resemblance to the man I was before the war, how farcical to ever imagine I could one day simply resume my old life, read the paper, eat a strudel in the park. My thoughts, my experiences no longer function against a rational backdrop, I have gone native, everyone who ever knew me believes I am dead, I am dead.”
Peter had no subsequent recollection of the night when his injuries occurred; he tried to find out what happened from the old shaman, but Tasak would only tell him that another nightmare as severe will kill him. “‘Give it up, my son,’ he repeats over and over.”