by Diego Marani
At sunrise Ivan would tie his drum around his waist and follow the stony track up to the topmost point. Then he would kneel down on the highest rock and start to play, to tell the world that he was still alive. He rapped on the taut skin with both his hands, with the bones of animals, and, as he did so, his arms and fingers remembered movements they had made earlier in another life.
The first snowfall came towards the end of autumn. Ivan chose a sheltered spot in the wood and built himself a yurt of animal skins. Now, at night, he could hear the wolves coming closer and closer; in the darkness, he saw their yellow eyes. Then he would fashion arrows, which he would heat in the fire, and talk to the wolves aloud, to scare them off. But they stayed motionless behind the trees, fixing their gaze on man and fire alike, pricking their ears when Ivan doused the flames. Then they would curl up until dawn, when he would see them move off into the misty forest. One night Ivan had a disturbing dream. Awaking with a start, he heard the wolves howling; they were all around his yurt. Dozens of wolves were staring at him, lifting their muzzles skywards and baying piteously. Then Ivan understood. They were his people. Fleeing the soldiers, the men of his tribe had hidden in deep underground lairs in the mountain caves. They had become wolves themselves, and now they lived in the forests. That was why they were seeking him out now. He must call them back, sing and play to them to bring them back into the world of men. So each night Ivan would play his drum for them. He would light the fire and wait until the stars that made up Orion were above him in the sky – the glinting iron belt, the drawn bow and glowing arrow, pointing at the darkness. Then he would tap his fingers gently on the drum and look towards the wood. The wolves would narrow their eyes and whimper uneasily, scenting fire. Then they would circle in and sit on their hind quarters until the stars faded from the sky. But none of them ever took on human form. They had been too long out of the world of men, they had ventured too far among the beasts, and the way back was lost. Ivan would have to go right deep into their lairs and bring them back one by one.
At first, Ivan had felt wary of the fair-haired woman he’d come upon in the village inn, who seemed so eager to hear him talk. Her eyes were not unkind, she wasn’t wearing a military uniform, her voice was pleasant and she spoke the language of the turnip-growers. But Ivan sensed a hint of Russian in her accent, and he was also wary of the strange contraption she always had with her, and into which she would ask him to speak. He was afraid it was a trap to lure him away from his mountains and have him locked up in the mine again.
At the beginning of winter Ivan had discovered the village where the turnip-growers lived; it stood at the edge of the forest, in the direction of the great river, but he had never ventured into it. Its houses, with their tarred roofs, reminded him too much of the barracks in the mine. He stayed hidden in the trees, observing it from afar: its smoking chimneys and its inn, where the lorries from the sawmill would draw up, laden with timber. He would observe the bluish strip of road as it wound its way into the distance, afraid that columns of shrieking soldiers might come into view from one moment to the next. But nothing at all emerged from the tundra. The colour of the sky changed, the wood gave out new scents, and it began to snow hard on the Byrranga Mountains. A blizzard raged over the forests and newly frozen lakes for days on end. The wind piled the heavy snow into scaly dunes which shifted daily, so that the landscape of the tundra was always subtly changing. It was dry snow, too powdery to walk on, even with snow-shoes. Ivan couldn’t get to his traps, nor indeed go hunting. Low, thorny bushes were all that grew on the upland plain; it had now become a shifting desert, and Ivan had completely lost his bearings. The two points which looked like a hare’s ears and a deer’s head were cloaked in persistent cloud. Such powdery snow did not bode well; it meant that the winter had started off on a bad footing. Ivan remembered that the old people in the village would talk of a far-off time when the scourge of this powdery snow first struck. The tundra was treacherous, the marshes impassable. At the least cold times of day, gaps would form in the ice on the lakes and the reindeer would plunge into the freezing water. Within a few minutes they would have died a silent death; they would thrash around, baring their teeth, until they were numbed by the cold. At night the ice would close up again, transforming their carcasses into so many gruesome statues. The Vostyachs couldn’t go hunting for weeks on end. The snow was like sand, some six feet deep, and walking on it might end in suffocation. Nothing was possible without snow-shoes, but hunters were slowed down with such contraptions on their feet, and by the time they had drawn their bows their prey had fled. Children whimpered with hunger, and mothers often woke up in the morning to find them dead in their arms. The old people would slink out of the village unobserved. They would go off to die, burying themselves in the snow so as not to be a burden on their families. Men ate the drum-skins, the bark of trees, such roots as had managed to push their way through the frozen ground. As they became weaker, many lacked even the strength to dig or to collect firewood, and their fires went out. By now there was no coming and going around the yurts, and smoke meant that death had paid a call. Then, one night, the wind changed and the stars reappeared in the sky. The dry, powdery snow crusted over and the wood creaked ominously, as though each trunk were being wrenched apart. When the sun rose, the whole forest was strewn with reindeer, elk and deer, trapped up to the chest in the ice. Exhausted by their recent hardships, the men of the village dragged themselves out to where the creatures lay. They cut their throats and lay down in the snow to drink the warm blood as it spurted out.
That was what the old men said, and Ivan was afraid of the powdery snow which could spell death.
So he decided to go down to the village where the turnip-growers lived, to exchange the odd fur for a bit of bread and dried meat. But when he pushed open the door of the inn, he was greeted by hostile stares. Ivan ran his eyes over the group to assure himself that they were not soldiers. He took off his fur hat and greeted them with a nod. Then he laid his skins on the table and asked those present to name their price. But no one said a word; they merely inspected him in stony silence. They had stopped drinking and playing cards; the only sound was the crackling of the stove and the innkeeper’s wife rinsing out a pan in the kitchen behind the counter. It was then that the fair-haired young woman had come in. She had been kind, she’d had someone bring him some soup and had bought all the squirrels’ tails. The woodsmen had gone back to their drinking and card games, and the hum of their conversation once more mingled with the cigarette smoke and the smell of cabbage and wood smoke. But when the woman turned on the strange contraption which registered your voice, Ivan had taken fright. He had picked up his skins, gone out of the inn and taken refuge in the woods. That night he hadn’t slept in his hut, but in a hole he’d hollowed out of the snow. In the days that followed, armed with his bow, he had again gone to the edge of the forest to observe the inn. He was afraid that the fair-haired woman might have gone to get the soldiers. But nothing in the village seemed to have changed. The chimneys carried on smoking above the tarred roofs and the battered lorries from the sawmill juddered along the icy road, scattering long trails of sawdust as they went. One morning, climbing on to the ridge of snow which was his lookout post, Ivan heard the woman calling him. Then he caught sight of her in the snowy meadow behind the inn. She had her hands around her mouth and was calling towards him, in Vostyach:
‘Vostyach! Rony noxeita pedeya!’
Ivan still had a good stock of squirrels’ tails. The woman had been kind to him. She had given him bread and had not called the soldiers. So he left his hiding-place and went towards her.
From that day onwards Ivan started to go down to the inn and speak into the little black box the woman placed before him. He would get the best squirrels’ tails down from the walls of his yurt and take them to her. On sunny days he would go into the wood with her and call out the names of all the plants and animals they came upon as they walked. The woman would write them carefully in a not
ebook the same colour as the one belonging to the doctor who came each summer to inspect the barracks in the mine and who would scatter white lime over the plank beds. Ivan felt pleased as the pages gradually filled up. By now he was proud of all the words he knew. He felt as though he were the owner of a personal treasure-trove. He carried on for as long as they continued to come into his mind, even adding some invented ones of his own, to please the fair-haired young woman who listened to him smilingly. He was saddened when he realised that his knowledge had been exhausted, that he couldn’t tell her the names of the things that were in the inn, nor the instruments used by the woodcutter in his hut with its corrugated iron roof. But then, gradually, the young woman herself started to talk his language. Ivan did not know all the words she used, but he understood many of them all the same; it was as if he had known them for ever. They prompted him to remember others, which he would shout out loudly, as though he had been groping for them for years, and it was only then that they had come back into his mind. With more words at his disposal, Ivan could tell the woman many more things. He told her about the mine, about his father being murdered by the soldiers, about fishing for whitefish in the lake, about the yurt encampment which he had been unable to find when he returned to the Byrranga Mountains. He told her how deer is hunted, how its flesh is dried, how to build traps for wolverines. The fair-haired woman was surprised to learn that Ivan did not skin beavers, but would roast them by tossing them, gutted, into the burning coals. That seemed to set her thinking, and she dashed off several pages in her notebook. Ivan was happy at last to be able to tell someone about the minutiae of his days. Only now that someone knew he was alive, and was able to talk to him, did he feel truly free, reborn to a new life where the mine had never existed. He was sure that sooner or later his people too would return to life, would emerge from the wolves’ lairs and begin to talk. Sooner or later, Korak, Häinö and Taypok would come back to hunt with him. This was the only subject he never succeeded in explaining to his new friend. The woman seemed to understand everything Ivan told her. She would nod and write, copy down the words she heard, dividing them up by subject. But when Ivan tried to explain to her about the other Vostyachs who had become wolves, she would shake her head and was clearly mystified:
‘Tyonya? Miwa tyonya?’ she would ask, frowning.
She would draw a wolf in the notebook, make a circle around it and hand the pencil to Ivan, who would make deep marks on the white paper, then go over them with his fingertips.
Ivan felt strangely peaceful in her presence. Sometimes her affectionate face would appear to him in dreams of when he’d been a child, living in the yurt. But then she had a different smile, and a more fragile look, which somehow frightened him. She looked like the cork masks hanging from the walls. On snowy afternoons, while she was going through her notes, seated at a table in the inn – which would be empty, except for the odd snoozing drunkard, propped up against the wall – Ivan would settle down on a skin next to the stove, and wait for her to finish. He listened to the crackle of the flames, the sounds of her writing and rubbing out, the whirring of the black box as it unleashed his words into the empty room, exactly as he had spoken them to her. Only in her presence would he feel his muscles relax, feel again that melting sense of utter security which he had had as a child, curled up in front of the fire, watching his father making arrows for hunting coot. The fair-haired woman was deeply engrossed in her writing, sometimes pausing to gaze into the empty air. But every so often she would also cast a glance in Ivan’s direction, a look so tender and protective that it almost hurt, from which he could not look away. That unknown woman was the only being in the world who wished him well, who, by calling him by name, also caused him to exist. As he did with his wolves. Ivan sensed this, and it amazed him. He explored the feeling in his heart, both fascinated and horrified at the knowledge that one day it would be taken from him.
Professor Jaarmo Aurtova crossed the floor of his study, making the parquet creak. He stopped in front of his desk, between the portrait of Marshal Mannerheim in full-dress uniform and an old map by the Arab geographer Ibn Al-Idrisi. He cleared his throat, lifted his chin and embarked, not for the first time, on the concluding speech he was to deliver at the XXIst Congress of Finno-Ugric, trying to keep his eyes from the typescript he was holding in his hand.
‘My warmest and most respectful greetings to you all – to the minister, the rector, the mayor, to my distinguished colleagues, my illustrious guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honour for me to present my report to this XXIst congress of Finno-Ugric languages which, after so many years, is finally being held here in Helsinki. Essentially, our city is the capital of the Finno-Ugric World, the symbol of the political and economic success of this culture of ours which has for too long remained unjustly little known. It is Finland which has brought homo finnicus into Europe, no longer as a slave but as a free citizen. Furthermore, the arrival in Finland of such an illustrious body of scientists is confirmation of the high standard of our university research and our country’s dominant position in a science which has always been particularly dear to us – perhaps more so than to any of our linguistic cousins. Now at least we are no longer alone in this corner of Europe, because Estonian is at last being spoken and taught again in Tallinn. And every Finno-Ugric language which is saved from extinction is tantamount to a promise of eternity for our whole culture.’
(Probable applause), his secretary had written in brackets in the margin, marking the spot with an asterisk.
‘It’s true that we are glad that the Gulf of Finland is there to separate us from our Estonian friends and shield us from all their “tuds” and “tabs”. But perhaps with time, as we get to know each other better, we shall at least be able to convince them that “stopp” can also be written with one “p”, without in any way dishonouring the rule of the doubled consonant!’
(Wait for probable end of laughter), also in brackets, also with an asterisk.
‘As we shall see over the course of the next three days, the study of Finno-Ugric languages has made great progress over recent years. The opening of frontiers that were once impassable, together with great advances in science, has enabled us to know more and more about our languages and the history of the peoples who speak them. Today, it is increasingly clear that the Ugro-Finns were by no means a pack of hunter-gatherers lacking in all civilization, as one school of thought continues to maintain, against all the evidence. As early as the Bronze Age, the Ugro-Finns had reached a level of development equivalent, if not superior, to that of the Mediterranean peoples. They practised advanced forms of agriculture and cattle-rearing. Furthermore, as we now know, thanks to the much milder climate of the time, our ancestors were also able to cultivate the vine. Who knows, had it not been for the glaciation of the Neolithic Period, today the finest “millesimes” might be maturing in the cellars of Uusimaa, and Laplanders might be quaffing champagne. So, long live the greenhouse effect! With good use of our saunas we could heat the entire planet! In a hundred years, what today is regarded as the chilly outer edge of Europe might be transformed into the garden of Eden, and our language might have become what it should rightfully always have been: the Latin of the Baltic!’
(Further laughter and applause), as suggested by an asterisk.
‘As to the question of our earliest ethnic origins, recent studies have been conclusive. Faced with new evidence, even our Russian colleagues will be obliged to think again in connection with a well-established falsehood to which they have clung desperately over the years, and which has been made use of by an ideology which died away much more speedily than our languages: for what was once mere supposition is now a certainty. Recent archaeological discoveries in Ingria and Scania, corroborated by carbon 14 dating, confirm that the Ugro-Finnic civilisation did indeed develop beyond the Urals, but they also prove that it migrated towards Europe very early on, reaching the lands where it is found today at the same period as the Indo-European peoples, and many
centuries before the Slavs. So that the alleged kinship between the Ugro-Finnic and the Ural-Altaic branches, from which the Mongols and Eskimos descend, is to be excluded once and for all. The so-called Eskimo-Aleutian hypothesis has been proved to be baseless. Recent discoveries in this field prove that the Uralic linguistic melting-pot was more extensive than had originally been thought, and indeed cast doubt upon the very concept of Indo-European languages. Indo-Europeans should more properly be referred to as Indo-Iranians, and it is they who are the true Asiatics of Europe, not us. Right from the dawn of history we have belonged geographically to the continent of Europe, indeed we might say that we are the first Europeans, we, the Finnic peoples, and that Finnish is Europe’s oldest language!’
Whenever he reached this part of the speech, Aurtova would always become flustered. He would imagine the inscrutable faces of the Russian linguists, that of Juknov in particular, always in the front row, dressed in black, the headphones with the simultaneous translation clapped firmly to his ears, his unforgiving gaze obscured behind his glasses. Then he would see Olga Pavlovna’s mocking smile, her know-it-all expression. He knew that she would enjoy discomfiting him by quoting his old articles, written with her when she was still an unknown researcher, burning with idealism. This made him jumpy, he would start to strike the wrong tone, mumbling his words, rather than pronouncing them clearly, one by one, in expectation of the effect they would have on the wizened faces of his adversaries.