The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  The girl looked back at us. She didn’t seem to feel any fear.

  “Did you come from the forest?” she asked.

  We nodded.

  “Have you come to live in the village?”

  “No,” replied Pärtel, and I saw my chance to do a bit of bragging, informing her that I had already lived in the village, but moved away.

  “Why did you go back to the forest?” The girl was amazed. “Nobody goes back to the forest; they all come from the forest to the village. They’re fools that live in the forest.”

  “You’re a fool yourself,” I said.

  “No I’m not; you are. Everyone says only fools live in the forest. Look what you’re wearing! Skins! Awful! Like an animal.”

  We compared our own clothing with the village girl’s, and we had to admit that the girl was right; our wolf and goat skins really were a lot uglier than hers, and hung off us like bags. The girl, on the other hand, was wearing a long, slim shirt, which was nothing like an animal skin; it was thin, light, and moved in the wind.

  “What kind of skin is that?” asked Pärtel.

  “It isn’t skin; it’s cloth,” replied the girl. “It’s woven.”

  That word meant nothing to us. The girl burst out laughing.

  “You don’t know what weaving is?” she shrieked. “Have you even seen a loom? A spinning wheel? Come inside. I’ll show you.”

  This invitation was both frightening and alluring. Pärtel and I looked at each other, and we decided that we ought to take the risk. These things with strange names ought to be seen. And whatever that girl might do to us, there were two of us after all. That is, unless she had allies inside …

  “Who else is in there?” I asked.

  “No one else. I’m alone at home; the others are all making hay.”

  That too was an incomprehensible thing, but we didn’t want to appear too stupid, so we nodded as if we understood what “making hay” meant. Our hearts were in our throats as we went inside.

  It was an amazing experience. All the strange contraptions that filled the room were a feast for the eyes. We stood as if thunderstruck, and didn’t dare sit down or move. The girl, on the other hand, felt right at home and was delighted to show off in front of us.

  “Well, there’s a spinning wheel for you!” she said, patting one of the queerest objects I’ve ever seen in my life. “You spin yarn on it. I can already do it. Want me to show you?”

  We mumbled something. The girl sat down at the spinning wheel and immediately a strange gadget started turning and whirring. Pärtel sighed with excitement.

  “Mighty!” he muttered.

  “You like it?” the girl inquired proudly. “Okay, I can’t do any more spinning just now.” She got up. “What else can I show you? Look, this is a bread shovel.”

  The bread shovel, too, made a deep impression on us.

  “But what’s that?” I asked, pointing to a cross shape hanging on the wall, to which was attached a human figure.

  “That is Jesus Christ, our God,” someone answered. It wasn’t the girl; it was a man’s voice. Pärtel and I were as startled as mice and wanted to rush out the door, but our way was barred.

  “Don’t run away!” said the voice. “No need to tremble like that. You’re from the forest, aren’t you? Calm down, now, boys. Nobody means you any harm.”

  “This is my father,” said the girl. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you afraid?”

  Timidly we eyed the man who had stepped into the room. He was tall, and looked very grand with his golden hair and beard. To our eyes he was also enviably well dressed, wearing the same sort of light-colored shirt as his daughter, the same furry breeches, and around his neck the same figure on a cross that I had seen on the wall.

  “Tell me, are there still many people living in the forest?” he asked. “Please do tell your parents to give up their benighted ways! All the sensible people are moving now from the forest to the village. In this day and age it’s silly to go on living in some dark thicket, doing without all the benefits of modern science. It’s pathetic to think of those poor people who still carry on a miserable existence in caves, while others are living in castles and palaces! Why do our folk have to be the last? We want to enjoy the same pleasures that other folk do! Tell that to your fathers and mothers. If they won’t think of themselves, then they ought to show some pity for their children. What will become of you if you don’t learn to talk German and serve Jesus?”

  We couldn’t utter a word in response, but strange words like “castles” and “palaces” made our hearts tremble. They must surely be finer things than spinning wheels and bread shovels. We would have liked to see them! We should really talk our parents into letting us spend at least some time in the village, just to look at all these marvels.

  “What are your names?” asked the man.

  We mumbled our names. The man patted us on the shoulders.

  “Pärtel and Leemet—those are heathen names. When you come to live in the village, you’ll be christened, and you’ll get names from the Bible. For instance, my name used to be Vambola, but for many years now I’ve had the name Johannes. And my daughter’s name is Magdaleena. Isn’t that beautiful? Names from the Bible are all beautiful. The whole world uses them, the fine boys and pretty girls from all the great peoples. Us too—the Estonians. The wise man does as other wise men do, and doesn’t just run around berserk like some piglet let out of a pen.”

  Johannes patted us on the shoulder once more and led us into the yard.

  “Now go home and talk to your parents. And come back soon. All Estonians have to come out of the dark forest, into the sun and the open wind, because those winds carry the wisdom of distant lands to us. I’m an elder of this village. I’ll be expecting you. And Magdaleena will be expecting you too; it would be nice to play with you and go to church on Sunday to pray to God. Till we meet again, farewell, boys! May God protect you!”

  Obviously something was troubling Pärtel; he opened his mouth a few times, but didn’t dare utter a sound. Finally, when we really did turn to leave, he couldn’t contain his question any longer: “What is that long stick in your hand? And all those spikes in it!”

  “It’s a rake!” replied Johannes with a smile. “When you come to live in the village, you can have one of these!”

  Pärtel’s face broke into a smile of joy. We ran into the forest.

  For a little while we ran together, then we each scurried off to our own homes. I rushed into the shack, as if someone were chasing me, in the certain knowledge that now I would make it clear to my mother: life in the village was much more interesting than in the forest.

  Mother wasn’t at home. Nor was Salme. Only Uncle Vootele was sitting in a corner, nibbling on some dried meat.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. “Your face is on fire.”

  “I went to the village,” I replied and told him rapidly, gabbling, and sometimes losing my voice with excitement, about everything I had seen in Johannes’s house.

  Uncle Vootele did not change his expression on hearing all these marvels, even though I drew a rake for him on the wall with a piece of charcoal.

  “I’ve seen a rake, yes,” he said. “It’s no use to us here.”

  This seemed to me unbelievably stupid and old-fashioned. How? If something as crazily exciting as a rake has been invented, then it’s definitely of use! Magdaleena’s father Johannes is using it, after all!

  “He might really need it, because you can scrape hay together with a rake,” explained Uncle Vootele. But they need to cultivate hay so that their animals won’t die of hunger in winter. We don’t have that problem. Our deer and goats can fend for themselves in winter; they look for their own food in the forest. But the villagers’ animals don’t go out in winter. They’re afraid of the cold and anyway they’re so stupid that they might get lost in the forest and the villagers would never find them again. They don’t know Snakish, so they can’t summon living beings to them. That’s why t
hey keep their animals all winter penned in and feed them with the hay they’ve gone to great trouble to collect in the summer. You see that’s why the villagers need that ridiculous rake, but we get by very well without it.”

  “But what about the spinning wheel!” The wheel had left a more powerful impression on me than the rake. All those skeins and wheels and other whirring fiddly bits were to my mind so magnificent that it wasn’t possible to describe it in words.

  Uncle smiled.

  “Children like toys like that,” he said. “But we don’t need a spinning wheel either, because an animal skin is a hundred times warmer and more comfortable than woven cloth. The villagers simply can’t get hold of animal skins, because they don’t remember Snakish anymore, and all the lynxes and wolves run off into the bushes away from them, or, otherwise, attack them and eat them up.”

  “Then they had a cross, and on it was a human figure, and Johannes the village elder said it was a god whose name is Jesus Christ,” I said. Uncle had to understand for once just what inspiring things there were in the village!

  Uncle Vootele just shrugged.

  “One person believes in sprites and visits the sacred grove, and another believes in Jesus and goes to the church. It’s just a matter of fashion. There’s no use in getting involved with just one god; they’re more like brooches or pearls, just for decoration. For hanging around your neck, or for playing with.”

  I was offended at my uncle, for flinging mud at all my marvels like that, so I didn’t start talking about the bread shovel. Uncle would certainly have said something foul about it—something about us not eating bread anyway. I kept quiet, glowering at him.

  Uncle smirked.

  “Don’t get angry. I do understand that when you see for the first time how the villagers live all that flapdoodle turns a kid’s head. Not only a kid—a grown-up too. Look how many of them have moved from the forest to the village. Including your own father—he used to talk about how fine and nice it was to live in the village, his eyes glowing like a wildcat’s. The village drives you crazy, because they have so many peculiar gadgets there. But you’ve got to understand that all these things have been dreamed up for only one reason: they’ve forgotten the Snakish words.”

  “I don’t understand Snakish either,” I faltered.

  “No, you don’t, but you’re going to start learning it. You’re a big enough boy now. And it’s not easy, and that’s why many people today can’t be bothered with it, and they’d rather invent all sorts of scythes and rakes. That’s a lot easier. When your head isn’t working, your muscles do. But you’re going to start on it. That’s what I think. I’ll teach you myself.”

  Four

  n the old days, they say, it was quite natural for a child to learn the Snakish words. In those days there must have been more skilled masters, and even some who didn’t get all the hidden subtleties of the language—but even they got by in everyday life. All people knew Snakish, which was taught in days of yore to our ancestors by ancient Snakish kings.

  By the time I was born, everything had changed. Older people were still using some Snakish, but there were few really wise ones among them—and then the younger generation no longer took the trouble to learn the difficult language at all. Snakish words are not simple; the human ear can hardly catch all those hairline differences that distinguish one hiss from another, giving an entirely different meaning to what you say. Likewise, human language is impossibly clumsy and inflexible, and all the hisses sound quite alike at first. You have to start learning the Snakish words with the kind of practice you take with a language. You have to train the muscles from day to day, to make your tongue as nimble and clever as a snake’s. At first it’s pretty annoying, and so it’s no wonder that many forest people found the effort too much, and preferred to move to the village, where it was much more interesting and you didn’t need Snakish.

  Moreover, there weren’t any real teachers left. The retreat from Snakish had started several generations ago, and even our parents were only able to use the commonest and simplest of all the Snakish words, such as the word that calls a deer or an elk to you so you can slit his throat, or the word to calm a raging wolf, as well as the usual chitchat, about the weather and things like that, that you might have with a passing adder. Stronger words hadn’t come in for much use for a long time, because to hiss the strongest words—to get any result out of them—would need several thousand men at once, and there hadn’t been that many in the forest for ages. And so many Snakish words had fallen into desuetude, and recently no one had bothered to learn even the simplest ones, because as I say they didn’t stick in your mind easily—and why go to the trouble, when you could get behind a plow and work your muscles?

  So I was in quite an extraordinary situation, as Uncle Vootele knew all the Snakish words—no doubt the only person in the forest who did. Only from him could I learn all the subtleties of this language. And Uncle Vootele was a merciless teacher. My otherwise so kindly uncle suddenly became very gruff when it came to a lesson in Snakish. “You simply have to learn them!” he declared curtly, and forced me over and over again to repeat the most complex hisses, so that by the evening my tongue ached as if someone had been twisting it all day. When Mother came with a haunch of venison, my head shook in fear. Just the thought that my poor tongue had to chew and swallow, in addition to all the twistings of the day, filled my mouth with a horrible pain. Mother was in despair, and asked Uncle Vootele not to exhaust me so much and to start by teaching me just the simplest hisses, but Uncle Vootele wouldn’t agree.

  “No, Linda,” he told my mother. “I’ll teach Leemet the Snakish words so well that he won’t know anymore whether he’s a human or a snake. Only I speak this language as well as our people have from the dawn of time, and one day, when I die, Leemet will be the one who won’t let the Snakish words fade into oblivion. Maybe he’ll manage to train up his own successor, like his own son, and so this language won’t die out.”

  “Oh, you’re as stubborn and cruel as our father!” sighed Mother, and made a chamomile compress for my injured tongue.

  “Was Granddad cruel, then?” I mumbled, with the compress between my teeth.

  “Terribly cruel,” replied Mother. “Of course, not to us—he loved us. At least I think so—but many years have passed since he died, and I was only a little girl then.”

  “So why did he die?” I persisted. I had never heard anything about my grandfather before, and only now I came to the surprising conclusion that quite naturally my father and mother couldn’t have just fallen out of the sky; they must have had parents. But why had they never talked about them?

  “The iron men killed him,” said Mother. And Uncle Vootele added, “They drowned him. They chopped his legs off and threw him in the sea.”

  “What about my other grandfather?” I demanded. “I must have had two grandfathers!”

  “The iron men killed him too,” said Uncle Vootele. It was in a big battle, which happened long before you were born. Our men went out bravely to fight with the iron men, but they were smashed to smithereens. Their swords were too short and their spears too weak. But of course that shouldn’t have mattered, because our people’s weapons have never been swords and spears, but the Frog of the North. If we’d managed to wake the Frog of the North, he would have swallowed up the iron men at a stroke. But there were too few of us; many of our people had gone to live in the village and didn’t come to our aid when they were asked. And even if they had come, they wouldn’t have been of help, because they no longer remembered the Snakish words, and the Frog of the North only rises up when thousands call on him. So there was nothing left for our men but to try to fight against the iron men with their own weapons, but that has always been a hopeless task. Foreign things never bring anyone good fortune. The men were cut down and the women, including your grandmothers, brought up their children and died of melancholy.”

  “Our father, of course, wasn’t killed in battle,” Mother corrected him. “
No one would dare go near him, because he had poison teeth.”

  “What do you mean, poison teeth?”

  “Like an adder’s,” explained Uncle Vootele. “Our ancient forefathers all had fangs, but as time passed and they forgot Snakish, their poisonous fangs disappeared. In the last hundred years very few of them have had them, and now I don’t know anybody who has them, but our father did, and he bit his enemies without mercy. The iron men were terribly afraid of him and fled for their lives when Father flashed his fangs at them.”

  “So how was he captured?”

  “They brought a stone-throwing machine,” sighed Mother. “And started firing rocks at him. Finally they got him and stunned him. Then the iron men tied him up, with whoops of joy, cut off his legs, and threw him into the sea.”

  “The iron men hated and feared your grandfather terribly,” said Uncle. “He had a really wild nature, and our ancestors’ fiery blood flowed in him. If we had all stayed like that, the iron men wouldn’t have stood a chance of building a nest in our land; they would have had their throats cut and been gnawed to the bone. But unfortunately people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language, until finally they’re bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a scythe.”

  Uncle Vootele spat and glowered at the floor with such a horrible expression that I thought, My heroic grandfather’s cruel blood hasn’t completely gone from his son.

  “Even amid the waves, Father bellowed in such a frightful voice that the iron men fled to their castle and closed all the window holes,” Mother said, concluding her woeful tale. “That was more than thirty years ago.”

  “So isn’t that reason enough to learn Snakish?” said Uncle. “In memory of your brave grandfather. I can’t plant fangs in your mouth, but I can put a nimble tongue in there. Spit out that pap, and let’s get started again.”