In those days of our childhood which feel so distant now, before the wars and the exterminations, it was common to hear the children speculate with gleeful anticipation if the rumours are true that the Haji is near, and would spend the winter over close to their place.
The Haji!
means stories after stories to wile away the dark Arctic nights with, which, for them, is a welcome respite to the boredom of being confined to the room for months. It was an excuse for which to congregate at the house of a neighbour, to hear the stories of old emerge from the old man in rhythmic and rhyming chants. And the children, hanging on to his every word, began to imitate him, and tried to commit all of his words to memory.
Someone who spots the Haji in the wild, who has not seen him before, would have made him out to be a vagrant, for such was the appearance of a wanderer who relied on the charity of others, with tattered rag and weathered mien, a crooked walking stick and rattling bells to scare off wild animals. The Haji is a very old man: as to how old, it was impossible to tell. The Haji has never given a straight answer as to his age; we have thus only the option to assume that he is older than the hills of the Mesogriadinas. Some would say that the Haji lives forever. Many believe that the same storyteller has made visitations to their grandparents, while they had been children, but such wild claims are impossible to verify.
The Haji is easy to please. The Haji would tell tales for scraps, but he is such a precious guest in these parts, so every host treats him like a king, trying their best to outdo the others, so that he might not be discouraged to come again. Each story session at the same time was also a feast which lasts all of the winter months.
The Haji is such an enigmatic character that people, especially those who were newly acquainted to his presence, could not refrain from asking him very personal questions, especially the children who could not for the lives of them hold their tongues in decorum: Who are you? Are you Christian or Muslim? Why are you a Haji? To these, as with his age, the Haji only launched into huge circumlocutions on the history of the world, the old gods and the old cities which left the listeners dazzled and feeling somehow enriched from the encounter, although none the wiser.
We understood that Haji was a title, not a name. The Haji in archaic history meant anyone who has made a visit to the archaic town, Yerushalayim, the place where Yesua and Mehmut Nabi spent their last days on Earth. In other words, this is a term relegated to the mythos, and belonging in the same domain in our consciousness as the afterlife; in this respect the Haji is unique in speaking about Yerushalayim, Yesua, and Mehmut Nabi with such vividness and detail that one might start imagining them as real people, rather than gods, or wraiths, or goblins as some have said linger in the wastes of Taimiria near Norilsk, and strike insanity in any wanderer who strays too close to the forbidden zone.
In any case, the only Haji that the world has known was him, and such was the singularness of this appellation that he has lost use of the name given for his person, and the man who remembers the history of the world before history started does not remember his own name.
His hosts were not always free of suspicion. You say you are the Haji, they asked, one day, then tell us: what was it like in Yerushalayim, when you were there?
To which the Haji responds, in a meandering, roundabout manner, about seeing the Philistines rain fireballs over the towns of Ashkelon and Ashdod, and seeing the Israelites send hawks flying beyond the city walls to catch them before they could land on the city neighbourhoods; of a holy city divided into four quadrants, for four different faiths and four different ways of worship; of the Temple of Solomon which fell to the Romans, but was never rebuilt; and there he was, a witness to all of these things. And since no one else in living memory had seen Yerushalayim, no one could have proven him wrong— and if anyone was convinced, they did so through the compelling power of his poetry.
In other winters, the stories would be of the land which they now sat on, the country of Taimiria, and how it had been settled; this tended to attract much more attentive listening, especially to those who would have been turned off by older histories and places which no one could have known were real or made up. In these accounts, known collectively as the Settlement of the North, the Haji would commence with a huge sweeping overture, rattling off as no one has requested, the settlement far-flung and obscure lands—
As the Papar to Iceland, the Skrælingar to the Kalaallit, so the Partholon, the Fomor, the Tuatha De Danaan, the Fir Bolg, and then the Milesians came to the Island of Eire—
And in the same way Taimiria came to be peopled first by the Samoyed, then the Dolgans, then the Orosz, and when the Wide Earth sank beneath the dunes of the desert, there came to be two migrations to Taimiria, since the highlands of Putorana left only two passages into the peninsula, east and west.
Between the two passageways, the Türkiler and the Ayeran came in from the west, and became the Muslims; the Lennat and Kushi came in from the east, and formed what would later become Christendom within Taimiria.
The Wide Earth
struck a feeling, at once wondrous and terrifying, into the minds of the Haji's attentive listeners. Only the best-travelled merchants of the world have seen places as far and remote as Alta, or Tunu, or the Islands of the Laurentides; and we have to tell them to know when to stop, lest they fall off the edge of the earth— for the lot of us will hardly leave the place or fiefdom of our births, much less venture a step outside of Taimiria—
—and because we are so attached to our land, then those who roam the earth as if they had no land have become strange to us, maybe even suspect, as some invariably view the Haji today—
but then again
it just excites the imagination so, that even beyond this big and terrifying world, filled with unfamiliar peoples, beasts, birds, and other things, there exists, or once existed, an even larger, even more awesome world, so gobsmacking as to be indescribable, in a time further back than any of us would bother to think and speculate about, an Earth more filled with people than we could imagine, who used much stronger and more powerful tools than the likes we have ever wielded, who held more wisdom in their hands than our sageliest sages—
—it may well be that some people would be made to feel small by such tales, and have their pride hurt by them... but if they keep the children occupied, then I am not complaining at all; besides, I quite like listening to them myself.
In time there was speculation on which of these old races that the Haji belonged to. People who could have sworn to tell apart Muslim and Christian by facial features faltered at the Haji's appearance, which proved difficult to characterize. Could it have been that the old man was so wizened that no one could tell his ethnicity? But the same people who say that had no problem pigeonholing other faces of advanced age. This has led some to believe that the Haji, who was old as old can be, must belong to the tribe of the Samoyeds, the oldest of all the races, the likes of whom are hardly seen anymore north of Putorana.
Now, right before the times of the exterminations, the princes of the South and East, the Christendom within Taimiria, came to produce their own stories on the origin of Man, in direct refutation of the Haji's accounts, and it worked rather well on the majority, who had not been completely convinced of the veracity of the Haji's tall tales in the first place, and only listened in for need of a distraction— these people welcomed the new stories, which seemed to them more accommodating and reassuring. The bards of Prince-Satrap Toyogarov and his court have come, and they can tell a story as good as any Haji, if not better. These stories told of the Taimirians as a noble race, who sprouted in caves on the sides of the mighty snow-capped Griadinas, and in the Dawn of Time crawled out into daylight to populate the Earth.
No more need of the Wide Earth; no more need of a Yerushalayim, or all of the fantastical characters of so called archaic history! In this new cosmos where sets the stage of the Battle between darkness and light, between Christendom and the Sultan from Ustanashehir, the only land is Taimiria, and the only sea is the Arctic. The elevation of the civil war to the level of a cosmic conflagration ignited a certain mood of nationalistic fervour among the people.
And so it became inevitable that, in addition to discrediting our storyteller's stories, the Prince-Satrap of Toyogarov sent his general, the honourable Tansukchin, to find the Haji and to kill him on the spot for his contrarian stories, which he judged were bound to undermine the stories of his own bards, and cause huge hindrance to his war efforts. Now what everyone knoes for sure is that the General never managed to fulfil this task of his, for when the war had intensified, his priorities shifted to the more demanding tasks of open combat, rather than to deal with a vagrant whom hardly anyone took seriously anyway.
However, a story has spread among us that Tansukchin did find the Haji— although the Haji, upon confronting the prospect of his demise, fell to his knees before the soldiers and wept and begged and groveled— not to have him spare his life, but to take it, for he has lived for way too long, and life had become tiresome with the weight of the atrocities he had seen laden on him, especially in the past months— and on seeing such a pathetic sight, the poor General left him, thinking it beneath his dignity to carry out such an execution... When I first heard this story, I only laughed, because that sounded exactly like what the old man would have said. And this is why now, even as we are deep in the back woods in hiding from our enemies, I still retain some hope that the Haji is still roaming the earth, and that he would, at some point of his long leisurely stroll, find us at our humble hiding spot, and stay for a while to keep the children happy with more descriptions of the Old, Wide Earth, and the Histories from the time before time itself began.
References
1. The 2021 Gaza-Israel conflict is referenced here, with the description of the Iron Dome, the missile interception system of the Israeli Defence Forces. "Philistine" is used here to refer to the State of Palestine, not as a pejorative, but to reflect the (current) rendering of the name in Arabic (فلسطين Filasṭīn).
2. The "Papar" were Irish hermits who inhabited Iceland before the first Viking settlers from Norway, described in the Icelandic Book of Settlements (Landnámabók). The "Skrælingar" were the name given to Thule-culture Inuit in Greenland by the Norse and have been used in works such as Íslendingabók, Grœnlendinga saga, and Eiríks saga rauða. The settlement of Ireland is a summary of the opening chapters of the Annals of the Four Masters (Annála Ríoghachta Éireann), compiled in co. Donegal, Ireland between 1632 and 1636.
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| A possible depiction of the settlement of Iceland by the Papar: an image from the tale of Saint Brendan, published by the Franciscan Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration (La Crosse, Wis.), c. early 1900s, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons |
3. Noril'sk is, even in present times, known as the most polluted locality in the Russian Arctic. The place is understood to have been abandoned for a long time during the events of this story. There is a deep stigma attached to the place, and also against anyone who has been near to there.
4. The name Griadinas/Mesogriadinas refers to the mountainous region near Lake Taymyr today known as the Byrranga Mountains (the term comes from the word "gryada", which appears on some old US or Soviet military maps of the region)
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| US military map of the Lake Taymyr Region |
