by Egon Lass

Created on: March 09, 2009

SHAMEN

When I first knew him, he was already like an ancient gnarled oak. In my first decade of life he was the closest thing to a scientist that I knew, and his kind of science was as mysterious as the world from which he had come. He had lived much of his life in the Ukraine, but as a young man he had gone to America, had worked in Chicago, the hog-butcher of the world, and had tried his luck in the Yukon Gold Rush. None of his first six children survived beyond the age of six, and the succeeding ones who did survive were banished, along with the entire village, to Siberia. There my grandmother died, and he adopted my mother, orphaned at the age of eight. Expelled from Russia, he wound up close to the German village in which I was born, there to practice whatever it was that he had learned in his wandering.

Our peasant life was medieval. We lived in thatch-roof cottages, each of which had its own moss-covered well. Hygiene was unknown to us, and we drank of every water that we found, including puddles in the street. As a result we had worms; tapeworms. There was a great deal of blood-poisoning, and enormous chancres grew on our bodies which we called "the Rose." My sister had hers on her stomach, while I experienced mine on my back; enormous angry yellow-red-blue chancres full of puss and poison for which there was no medical cure, as there was none for blood-poisoning. But there was my uncle, the shaman, against whose hands even the vilest affliction could not endure. He knew every proportion of leaf, dung and herb that was needed for balm, but against the Rose he used only the language that came to him from a supernatural realm. He spoke' to it. (Thirty years later a friend told me that the Rose was still known in Ireland, and that there were still a few ancient men left who retained the ability to speak to it the divine words; and the chancre inevitably burst and subsided).

One day my mother knicked her hand while chopping wood, and the next day a red stripe began to make its way up her arm, the unmistakable symptom of blood-poisoning. The village doctor could do nothing. In the middle of the night she made her way to my uncle's cottage. He placed his hand on her wound and spoke to it, and the next day it had subsided more than half, to vanish entirely a day after.

But my uncle, like my father, gave me only the barest glimpse of his world before he made his final exit and went back to the voyage of non-incarnate space travel.

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