4.23 The Evenk Eskimo Eve

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23. Mamka

   Boris stops the car outside a fence of broken branches. He gets out with Olga, who watches 1.2 meter high woman being picked up and hugged by 1.8 meter man then put down and introduced. Close up, Olga observes Mamka's puffed eyelids of brown wrinkled skin, the folds confirming Mongoloid race, and eyes of high intelligence. Apart from burlap dress and wood clog footwear, Mamka wears black bandanna wrapped around head covered by ear-length cut hair which frames oriental face.
  American Indian ancestor, my eye! thinks Olga rejecting received opinion about origins. More like Eskimo Eve!

   Mamka says “Come in Boris Alexeivitch! And to Olga, "What name?”

   “Olga. Call me Olenka. May I say for you ‘Mamka’?”

   “Yeah, sure. In my language my name is Ggnutt.  But I no nut.” She points finger at her nose, laughs at her joke, and Olga instantly likes her, thinking, She reminds me of me. Olga notes Mamka's spoken syntax is simple with few grammatical articles and verbs mostly present tense sometimes with wrong ending or dropped ‘is.’ Yet she expresses self well.

   Here is what Boris said of Mamka. He knew her from settlers who call her Lake Lady. She is an Evenk, a reindeer culture Siber distantly related to Eskimos. Forty years ago as 16-year-old girl she lived with parents in Kamchatka the peninsula from the mainland north of Sakhalin Island. Because she learned Russian she got job as interpreter for an anthropology study group from University of Petrograd. One of the scientists, 40-year-old Andreyev was taken with her and obsessed by an idea of educating this bright backwoods young woman. Also he desired her for his woman. After agreeing with her father on a price they married.

   Andreyev was of mysterious origin. He was Russian, and a cultural anthropologist studying the comparative human behavior of ethnically related peoples in Russian Far East. A utopian and futurist who admired Tolstoy, Andreyev saw his marriage to the 16-year-old a chance to prove that culture could leap hundreds of generations by live-in teaching. He desired to create a mate whose company he would delight in because she would be intellectually his equal and complement him in useful knowledge – complement him by possessing what he lacked – her unique mentality that could reach conclusions teacher never taught, that could put one and one together and get a three superior to the usual two.

   Andreyev was no cockeyed optimist; rather a dour fellow who considered his contemporaries fools and the civilization they represented dead wrong. Reclusive, he devoted his remaining 25 years to educating Mamka far from the madding civilization yet not divorced from science. He bought the lake and its land and built the house.

   On Andreyev's death, Mamka inherited the house and land and his fortune.

   To Continue, click 4. (24-25) Opium Sanity