by Diego Marani
Professor Aurtova turned off the lamp, stuffed his typescript into a drawer and struck a match to light the table-candlestick. He liked the smell of wax, the flickering of the candles in the darkness. He slipped a hand behind the big Finnish dictionary and pulled out a bottle of cognac and a crystal glass. He poured himself a drink and walked over to the large French window. Below, the cathedral square was covered with snow, the street lamps were all lit and the windows of the houses were festooned with strips of little lights. The trams slid by noiselessly, sending out showers of blue sparks. It was the harshest winter for decades. The temperature had gone down to minus 30, and the whole bay of Helsinki was frozen up, all the way out as far as the lighthouse at Harmaja. This year perhaps we might be able to go on foot all the way to Tallinn, he thought to himself. He enjoyed the feel of the biting air as it whipped his face, the grandiose vista of his city, the white vastness that lit up the northern night. Snow always has a sense of wildness about it, and the footsteps of the passers-by on the flight of steps outside the cathedral gave the professor a pleasing feeling of mystery, as though they were unknown spoors met with in some wild wood.
He took a sip of cognac, and felt a welcome shudder at the instant burst of warmth which ran through his veins. Then came a sudden knock at the door, and his secretary entered the room.
‘You didn’t collect your post, professor,’ she said, putting an envelope down on the table.
‘I completely forgot!’ he said, lifting a hand to his forehead.
‘If there’s nothing else, I’d quite like to be off...’
She lingered on the threshold, peering owlishly at Aurtova from behind her thick glasses.
‘Of course, Leena, go by all means. And have a quiet day tomorrow, because from Sunday it’ll be all work and no play.’ He moved back to the table without closing the window.
‘Yes indeed…Goodnight, professor,’ she said, retreating from the cold.
The envelope contained just one letter. It had a Russian stamp, and the address was written by hand. He recognised the writing.
Dear Jarmo,
I’m passing through Moscow and I’m sending you this letter so that I can be the first to give you a sensational bit of news. I’ve just spent a few months with the Nenets and Nganasan, making recordings of local speakers. As you know, my passion has always been the northern Samoyedic languages, so I paid another visit to those parts on the track of some minor dialect to record before it died out. Over the last few years I really think I’ve catalogued them all! At the end of November I found myself in a remote village in the Tajmyr Peninsula. I was waiting for the weather to improve so that I could get to Norilsk, where I was to take the plane to Saint Petersburg, but I was left stranded by a blizzard, so I had to resign myself to a long wait. I spent my days copying out my notes in a dismal room in the only inn, when one afternoon my guide came into my room in a state of high excitement. He knows I speak Nganasan, so he never addresses me in Russian. But I have difficulty in understanding him when he talks in that Polustrov dialect of his, so I went off with him somewhat unwillingly, not really knowing what he wanted. He took me to the floor below, the bar-room I suppose you could call it, which was strangely lively for the time of day. And there, surrounded by a muttering crowd, was a truly weird individual. Physically, he looked like an Inuit, but more athletic, and darker-complexioned. He was entirely dressed in skins, had a bow slung over his shoulder and was holding a string of squirrels’ tails. At his feet was a sack of skins. When they saw me come in, everyone stopped muttering. The guide pointed at the man and whispered in my ear, in Russian: ‘We can’t understand a word of anything he says!’ I went up to him and tried addressing him in Vogul, thinking he might belong to some Eastern Ugric tribe. He listened to me carefully, but then frowned in puzzlement. Yet I noticed that those sounds were familiar to him, even if he didn’t understand them. He looked at me questioningly, waving the string of squirrels’ tails. He put them on the table and began unstringing them, so that I could see them better. He must have already repeated himself several times without making himself understood. At first I could understand nothing: just a blurred flow of Uralic sounds. I thought it was some Dolgan dialect which had eluded me, and I was almost irritated at the thought of having to deal with yet another one. I didn’t even feel like going back up to my room and fetching my tape recorder. But the more he talked, the more I realised that this was another language entirely. It might be some localised variant of Jurak, but I was unconvinced by the coup de glotte. At first it was the schwa which unsettled me: I’d never heard it so unvoiced before. Nganasan has one that is very similar; but when I noticed how the man pronounced his velar affricatives and above all his retroflex palatals, I was no longer in any doubt: the man I was listening to was a Vostyach!
Dear Jarmo, you can imagine how I felt. I immediately rushed upstairs to get my tape recorder and encouraged the man to talk into it. And I could hardly believe my ears. They’re all there, the consonants which mark the transition between the Finnic languages and the Eskimo-Aleut ones. Even the fricative lateral with the labiovelar appendix! I haven’t finished mapping the phonetic analogies, but will have done so in time for the conference, even if I have to work on my new paper round the clock. So, goodbye Samoyedic dialects, hallo Vostyach! If you wanted the Helsinki conference to be a turning point in the study of the Finno-Ugric languages, your wish is granted. Now at last we can be certain that, in antiquity, languages belonging to the same family were spoken from the Baltic to the great plains of North America. Who knows, Jarmo, perhaps your ancestors included some Sioux chief who fought at Little Big Horn! In a word, you can see that the Eskimo-Aleutian theory was indeed correct, and that it is not just because they speak an agglutinative language that the Inuit have a vowel harmony similar to that of you and your Finns. The Vostyach says his name is Ivan. But when he talks of himself he describes himself as ‘vostyach’, which means ‘man’. So for the people of the village he has become Ivan Vostyach. He’s probably a survivor from some gulag. At the inn they told me that there was a large mining settlement on the far side of the lakes, an open-cast mine where they sent convicts to break stones and wash them by the ton, all to extract a few specks of gold. Hell on earth, apparently. When wages stopped arriving from Moscow, the overseers did a bunk and the few remaining prisoners escaped.
My Vostyach understands Nganasan: perhaps someone spoke it at the mine. He also understands a little Russian, but he can’t speak a word. It’s a language which frightens him: as soon as he hears it, he tenses up and looks away. It probably has the most terrible associations for him. So at first we communicated by gesture, or in rudimentary Nganasan. But then I started learning Vostyach, and it wasn’t long before I could compose the odd sentence. Mostly, I myself reconstructed the words, basing myself on those I heard him pronounce. But it worked, and Ivan understood me. At first he was disconcerted on hearing me speak his language. But then something within him seemed to melt, and we immediately became friends. To begin with I couldn’t persuade him to stay in the village for more than a few hours. He seemed nervous when he came into the inn, and even when he accepted a bowl of soup he was continually looking out of the window, peering anxiously along the grey road which wound up into the steppe, on the lookout for soldiers. But I felt that he sought me out, that he liked being with me. Every time he heard his language issuing from my mouth, he seemed enchanted. Uttering those primitive sounds, I too felt that I was back in the distant past. It’s true that you can have the illusion that you know all about a people by reading about their civilisation in libraries – about their kings, their battles, their religion. But until you take possession of their language, you really know nothing of them. Ivan wanted to speak, he was hungry for words and company. Loneliness and fear had marked him physically as well as mentally. He moved furtively, like an animal lying in wait; he pricked up his ears at noises I myself could not hear, and when he was worried he would show his unease by clenching and un
clenching his fists. I’ve never seen such misshapen hands. His fingers were just stubby protuberances, without nails, the skin on them was tough and hairless. Ivan would always return to the forest before dark. He’d stay away for a couple of days and then reappear in the village bringing me some squirrels’ tails. He said he couldn’t stay for very long, he had to get back to his people. I had imagined a whole tribe of Vostyachs up there in the woods. But then I saw that he must be referring to something else – his animals, perhaps, or the spirits of his ancestors. He always had that strange sack of skins on his shoulder. He never opened it in my presence and he never put it down. One afternoon when he had fallen asleep on the inn floor, I looked inside it, to find it contained a few stones, some animal bones, feathers, bears’ teeth and little braids of hair. When he woke up, it was the first thing he reached for. It was already beginning to get dark, but he set off anyway towards the woods at quite a pace, as though there really were someone waiting for him up there. It was hard to know where he lived, because it was impossible to follow him: as soon as he entered the wood he was immediately lost from view. The snow seemed to close in after him. But, over time, I managed to gain his confidence. He realised that not all Russians were bad, even if on the few occasions when he did stay on in the village he would sleep in some shed, or in the outhouses of the sawmill, rather than be near other human beings. There was a distant land, I told him, where there were many people who would like to get to know him: not Russians, but people of his own race, who spoke a language similar to his own. I explained to him that he was not alone, but that he belonged to a large and ancient tribe who were his brothers, and who would be eager to meet him. He was very struck by my talk of this great tribe, and questioned me closely about it. So finally I persuaded him to come with me to Helsinki. But I had to reassure him that there are no Russians there.
I stayed on in the Tajmyr Peninsula for a few more weeks and made a complete catalogue of all the words he knew. Unfortunately, his vocabulary is very limited. But, thanks to certain roots, I managed to construct a number of etymological hypotheses, though of course they are yet to be proved correct. Hunting for words became our game. We’d go around the forest and Ivan would put a name in Vostyach to everything he saw. Whenever he remembered this or that word, the name of some tree or object, he was triumphant. He knew he was making me happy and would come running towards me, wreathed in smiles. He offered me his words like gifts. He must have suffered a great deal, and I sensed that the aftermath of such suffering still weighed upon him. Sometimes his mood would darken for no apparent reason, as though he were dogged by frightening images which he could not shake off. Then he would run off into the woods alone. At times I felt as though I were dealing with a child, he is so vulnerable, so naïve, so incapable of applying any form of reason to certain aspects of everyday life. Yet he knows how to make bows and arrows, dress hides and set traps. In the deepest woods he can find his bearings like a human compass. He can smell distant scents on the air and follow them. But his intelligence seems somehow one-dimensional. He moves in just one direction, among the things he knows. He makes no distinction between reality and fantasy. When he does not understand something, he instantly takes fright.
On the morning of our departure, after so much snow, a chilly sun appeared and the forest was tinged with pink. Waiting for the local bus which was to take us to Norilsk, looking out through the inn window, I gazed in awe at the forms of the snow-laden trees. The innkeeper’s wife had just lit the stove, and the scent of resin wafted through the room. The big pot of water for the soup had just begun to boil, and the steam was causing the panes gradually to mist over. Everything felt strangely blank, slow-moving, suffused with sadness. Seated on the ground, Ivan was gazing raptly out at the dazzling light. Together with his sack of skins, he had brought with him a drum made of reindeer hide, which he kept clutched to his chest, his fingers spread out over it. I went up to him and sat beside him. I told him that the inn was not my home, but that I lived in a distant city, and that after our trip to Helsinki I would not be coming back with him to the forests of the Tajmyr Peninsula. He gave me a bewildered look. He stared angrily at my suitcase, inspected my city outfit – so different from my normal shabby village wear – with disapproval. He shook his head, retreating as though he didn’t want to hear me. I tried to reassure him, telling him I’d be back to see him from time to time. He promised me that if I was leaving him because he couldn’t provide me with any new words, he would get the wolves to tell him some. They knew many more than he, but he would have to persuade them to speak to him again, he said, looking sadly out towards the forest. He sighed. He clearly wanted to ask me something, but did not have the words. He made a vague gesture, then gave up, crestfallen. He was trying to understand how far I would be from his mountains, mentally measuring distances which for him were unimaginable. I went up to the misty windows and drew a rough map of Russia, in the form of a circle, on which I made two dots. One was Saint Petersburg, the other the Tajmyr Peninsula, as I explained to him. Ivan came up to me to look more closely, then rubbed his hand angrily over the pane. He ran to the next window, and the next, wiping away the condensation. Then he went to the back of the room and stared out at me from the semidarkness; although I could not see him, I knew that he was crying. Then he put on his jacket, picked up his sack and drum and left the room. I was afraid that he would do his usual disappearing trick, and that I’d never see him again. On this occasion, though, he allowed me to follow him out to the wood. He stopped on a small rise and arranged his drum carefully on his chest. I knew that he did not like to be observed when he was playing, so I went to stand behind a tree. I saw him crouch down in the snow, put his hand in his sack and draw out a mask made of birch bark, which he then put on. Until that point, I’d never noticed it among his possessions. He stayed crouched there without moving for some time, then began to beat slowly, intensely and increasingly loudly on the drum-skin. It was as though he were embarking on a fight, as though with that incessant, insistent beat he might rid the world of disharmony and give it the steady rhythm of his own music. I felt as though all living matter were now moving to the rhythm of his drumbeat, breathing in time to it; falling seamlessly into step with him, walking beside him – only to plummet once more into its normal, fatal disarray. He was singing words I’d never heard him use. His voice was different now – deep and somehow majestic. He articulated each sound cautiously, as though he were almost afraid of it, as though it might unleash something uncontrollable, superhuman. He turned his head from side to side as he proceeded with his awesome dance, twisting his neck so far in each direction that I felt that I might see his head wrenched from his body and fall with a thud on to the snowy ground. There was pain in his voice, a sense of irreparable solitude, like a maze of ice settling into new and ever more intricate, tunnel-like formations as his song proceeded. Jarmo, I felt as furtive as a thief, hidden among those trees. For a moment I thought that it would be better to leave Ivan Vostyach there where he was, in his own land; that introducing him to people so different from himself would cause him suffering, make him feel even more alone. What did he know about Finno-Ugric or Proto-Uralian? What did it matter to him that he was the last of the Vostyachs? I suddenly felt that I was being purely selfish, going around with my tape recorder on the trail of dialects as though they were so many fur-bearing animals, pillaging memories in order to stuff them and put them on show in dismal museums. I thought of all those dazed little old men I’d gone to torment with my microphone, forcing them to remember things they might well have preferred to forget. I expected them to unroll the grief of a lifetime for my sole benefit. But even they were less vulnerable than Ivan Vostyach: they had houses, families, or at least the village where they had been born. Whereas Ivan Vostyach had nothing. He was the last survivor of a vanished world. Then I asked myself if we are indeed really salvaging something when we preserve these now vanished languages in formalin like so many freakish animals. Are we not in
fact rather pandering to some personal obsession of our own, of no more use to anyone else than a collection of beer mats or cigarette packets? Maybe I’m getting old, but sometimes I feel that all this vainglorious science is beginning to bore me and that one day I shall throw my phonology handbooks out of the window and hurl my tapes of Samoyedic dialects into the stove. But, fight against it as I may, I remain a product of the Soviet era and I cannot rid myself of the illusion that one day the world will be made comprehensible to us by the power of human reason. You knew me when I was a student, you will remember how passionately we at the institute believed that all things – perhaps even emotions – were susceptible to comparison. Science could explain everything, knowledge was the great panacea. At the time, for us, those strange languages that we collected out in the sticks were diseases, the product of ignorance and barbarism which had to be tracked down and eradicated, so that the pure language of communism could flourish. But the cynical mentality of the scientist is clearly still with me, so I shall bring my Vostyach along to the XXIst Conference on Finno-Ugric languages. Partly in acknowledgement of our longstanding friendship, you are the only person I have told of his existence.
I haven’t said anything about my discovery to my colleagues in Saint Petersburg, not even to Juknov, although he’s my superior. Dear Jarmo, the times when we shared a scientific passion are long gone – the times when I would write you letters even longer than this to update you on the progress of my research. Perhaps you will be surprised by the sincerity of these pages. You may feel it is misplaced, because we are no longer in such close touch. I know that my discovery will arouse envy and jealousy in the academic world, I know that many of my colleagues will try to put a spanner in the works and dispute its authenticity. I know that you too will find the existence of my Vostyach inconvenient. Nonetheless, I decided to tell my secret to you, and you alone: perhaps because there was a time when everything seemed to me more innocent, when we too spoke a language which has now disappeared: the artless, straightforward language of two students who were full of hope. So, in the name of the enthusiasm we once shared, I am asking you to help me, to do all you can to ensure that Ivan receives a warm welcome in Helsinki and is treated with all possible consideration. We must keep an eye on him, make his time there as pleasant as possible. He must feel that those around him are on his side. I don’t want him to feel that he’s being treated like an animal at the zoo, or a fairground attraction. After the conference, I’ve decided to go back to his forests with him and help him to settle back into the village where I found him. All in all, it probably doesn’t matter if he carries on living among the Nganasan and forgets his Vostyach. One peaceful human life is surely more important than the survival of the lateral affricative with labiovelar overlay.