The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

Our ursine acquaintance came out of the bushes.

  “Salme, you’re so pretty!” he sighed. “I was sitting here and I didn’t get a look from you. There are many beautiful women up there in the trees, but you’re the nicest.”

  “Mõmmi, it’s not decent to watch in secret like that!” said Salme, shielding her naked body with her hands. She wasn’t angry in the slightest. I imagined how differently she would have spoken to me and Pärtel. It was actually insulting: she would have berated her own brother mercilessly for peeping at her and her peers, but with this bear she spoke in a tender and kind voice, as if he were her dearest friend. The bear came right up to Salme and licked her bare feet.

  “Don’t do that; Mother is up there,” whispered Salme. “I have to climb back up too. See you some other time.”

  “I’ll stay here under the tree until morning,” murmured the bear. “Let me admire your beauty!”

  “You silly thing!” said Salme sweetly and stroked the bear’s head. Then she slipped back to her own tree and climbed up.

  “Who was there?” asked Mother.

  “Nobody,” my sister answered. She took the switch and set about swishing again, but in quite a different way than before. She was no longer bathing in the moon rays; she was performing for Mõmmi, watching down in the thicket, showing off all her charms.

  “Let’s go home,” I said, angry with both my sister and the bear.

  Ten

  was really disappointed in Salme, and I had a good mind to tell Mother that my sister was flirting with a bear. I couldn’t do it, however, because straight away she would have wanted to know where I’d seen Salme consorting with a bear, and then I would have had to tell her that I’d been spying on the women whisking in the moonlight. So now I knew my sister’s secret, but had to keep it to myself. Even I couldn’t lash out at Salme, lest she guess that I had been in the forest that night and had seen everything. It was unpleasant.

  What made the whole thing especially embarrassing was that Pärtel had also seen my sister with the bear, and kept asking me: “Are they a couple?” He didn’t do it to tease me, but it still irritated me. The fact that Salme was carrying on with a bear was shameful enough—but did the whole world have to know about it? The relations between the bear and Salme were a private family matter! I ordered Pärtel not to tell anyone what we had seen in the moonlit forest, but wasn’t at all sure that he would keep his promise.

  I knew for myself how difficult that was. The secret turned in my stomach and pressed itself on my tongue—for what is the point of nosing out a secret if you can’t boast about what you know! It wasn’t just a question of Salme and the bear; we had seen a lot of other things that night that weren’t intended for our eyes. Later, when I met a friend of Salme’s, my head was spinning with the joy of victory; there she sat and regarded me as just an annoying boy, when I had seen her bosoms and bottom! If only she knew! But I kept quiet about my secret reconnaissance and only smiled strangely when Salme’s friends turned to me.

  “What are you laughing at?” they would ask, but I wouldn’t answer. Instead I quickly twisted my mouth straight and ran away, so as not to betray my secret knowledge of bosoms and bottoms.

  The only one to whom I dared honestly talk about it was Ints. But my news aroused neither interest nor amazement in him. For an adder, a bear and a human were quite similar creatures, and he saw no reason why they would not be attracted to each other. Nor did Ints have any opinion on the hidden beauty of Salme’s friends. Of course it’s quite natural that a snake, a creature that resembles a long smooth rope, would never see the purpose of breasts and buttocks. So Ints listened to my story quite indifferently and said that yes, he had seen all that and there was nothing special about it whatsoever.

  I had promised myself that I’d visit Hiie more often, and I did. The girl was chopping up hares again when we crept out of the shrubbery, encouraged by Ints saying that neither Tambet nor his wife were at home at the moment. Hiie looked terribly tired, but when she saw us she suddenly grew downright joyful. Though she was ashamed of her spattered apron and bare toes, which were red with hares’ blood. She hid her toes behind the large ax, and would have liked to chat with us, but the wolves in the barn kept on baying hungrily, demanding food.

  “I suppose I’d better carry on working,” whispered Hiie unhappily. “Otherwise they’ll start making so much noise that Mummy and Daddy will hear.”

  “And then they’ll be angry?” I asked.

  “No, no!” replied Hiie, but it was evident from her face that they would.

  “Let’s go and look at those wolves,” suggested Ints, and we stepped into the barn. I had never before seen so many wolves gathered together. It was simply horrible—there were hundreds of them, each in its own little stall. As we looked inside the shed, they all turned their muzzles in our direction and smacked their tongues, obviously hoping that we were bringing the hare meat they hungered for. When the wolves saw that we came empty-handed, they started again with their piercing wail, and some of them threw themselves down on the ground and rolled, to show that they were frantic with hunger.

  “They haven’t eaten since this morning,” explained Hiie.

  “And a wolf shouldn’t eat so much anyway,” added Ints. “They have some fat on them; some are even quite plump. Just look at that beast by the door! It’s as big and fat as a bear. Don’t feed them so much!”

  “But they howl if they don’t get food,” complained Hiie.

  “Let’s make them stay quiet,” I said, and hissed loudly. Naturally my voice couldn’t compete with the ululations coming from the wolves’ throats, but a properly uttered Snakish word always reaches its mark; it burns itself through the loudest noise, and it’s impossible not to hear it. This Snakish word was intended to lull animals to sleep. The wolves ceased their clamor, yawned—showing their fangs—then snapped their jaws together and spread themselves out languidly. For a little while they eyed us sleepily, then put their heads on their paws and fell into slumber.

  “Haven’t you been taught Snakish?” I asked.

  “I have, but not those words,” replied Hiie, watching the sleeping wolves with fascination. “How long will they sleep?”

  “Till the evening, or until we wake them. I’ll teach you the Snakish words I just used, so you can feed them in the morning and then put them to sleep, so they won’t make a noise. Would you like that?”

  Hiie nodded excitedly. I repeated the relevant words of Snakish until they stayed in her mind and she could pronounce them. Then we did a test: I woke up the wolves. They got drowsily to their feet and at first were quite peaceful, but then their habit of continuous devouring came back to their minds. Noticing that they had no food, they let their throats resonate. Then Hiie faultlessly hissed the Snakish words she had learned by heart, and the wolves obediently lay down, covering their snouts with their tails, and in a moment were asleep again.

  “Well, you see how simple it is!” I said. “Strange that your father and mother haven’t taught you that trick before.”

  “They probably want Hiie to fatten the wolves all the time,” said Ints. “My mother always says that Tambet loves wolves more than people.”

  Hiie blushed on hearing this, because we were talking about her father. She knew that we didn’t like her parents, and she felt guilty for being friendly to us. She must have also been afraid that our dislike for Tambet might grow so great that we wouldn’t like his daughter anymore either. She could hardly have loved her father much anyway. In fact Tambet was so terribly cruel to her that she could have replied to Ints: “Yes, it’s true. He really is a spiteful person.” But Hiie was too ashamed and meek to utter such words. I never heard her say anything bad about her parents, even though she was the one who suffered most because of them. She simply felt a constant embarrassment about them, as if she were ashamed of some ugly scar that could not be hidden from the gaze of others.

  Naturally we didn’t think Hiie was to blame for having a stupid father.
On the contrary, we liked visiting her all the more for it. It gave us a chance to turn the screws on Tambet. He wanted his precious wolves to be feeding all the time, but we put them to sleep and in that way were snatching Hiie from the cage her parents had built for her—the big ax and constantly replenishing piles of hares for her to chop up. We visited her every day, and Tambet and Mall couldn’t work out why the wolves had become so sleepy and no longer ate in the daytime. They even stayed at home to keep watch, but hissing Snakish words doesn’t take much time, and Hiie always found an opportunity to utter them, thus proving to her parents that the wolves went to sleep even when the couple were at home.

  Finally Tambet invited Ülgas to come—who else! The sage came and examined the wolves, who were alert in the mornings and bayed as if frenzied, but while Ülgas and Tambet went into the bushes behind the shack to find out whether the Forest-Mother or the tree-sprites had anything to do with the wolves’ sleepiness, Hiie hissed the Snakish words, and when the men came back into the barn, all the wolves were sleeping the sleep of the just.

  “It’s the work of the sprites,” said Ülgas. “No doubt about it. I can guess what the trouble is. Tambet, old friend, the baying of your wolves is apparently disturbing the tree-sprites’ sleep. You know that the sprites sleep in the daytime, and they are disturbed by the noise from those benighted animals. So they put the wolves to sleep. You’ll have to get used to it; the sprites mustn’t be annoyed!”

  Tambet was satisfied, for when it came to the sprites he was meek as a kid. It would not even occur to him to go against ancient customs or the word of the sage. What did amaze me, though, was that neither Ülgas nor Tambet had thought that Snakish might be behind the wolves’ behavior. To tell the truth, I had been sure that they would soon work out our trick, wake up the wolves, and forbid Hiie from putting them to sleep again. Ülgas and Tambet knew Snakish, and although the hiss needed for putting animals to sleep was not one of the easiest, it was not such a rare and unfamiliar hiss, unlike those taught to me by Ints’s father, the king of the snakes. Ülgas and Tambet should certainly have known that hiss. But for some reason the possibility that the wolves had been put to sleep with the aid of Snakish words didn’t enter their heads. That was odd.

  Only later did I understand that although Ülgas and Tambet hated all those who had settled in the village, they themselves no longer really lived in the forest. They were disappointed and angry to see the good old sylvan life gradually dying out, and to overcome that they clung to the especially ancient and secret ways. They cherished spells, sought a way out in the invented world of the sprites, and no longer cared for ordinary Snakish words. To them they seemed too weak; they had not been able to keep people in the forest, so must be of no use. Ülgas and Tambet thought that only sorcery was worthy of attention, but since the snakes knew that there is no such thing as sorcery, Ülgas and Tambet wanted nothing more to do with them. Not even the Frog of the North would have satisfied them. They believed they had found something altogether stronger, and they kept on about their sprites and Forest-Mothers, imagining that they preserved ancient values. They had gone just as far astray as the people in the village. But they never appreciated that.

  In any case, more peaceful days came for Hiie, since Tambet and Mall reconciled themselves to the wolves having to sleep in the daytime. It was what the sprites wished. In the mornings they got restless if the wolves were awake too long making a noise, since they feared that the sprites would be annoyed and that they would have to bring sacrifices to restore peace. A few times, at our request, Hiie delayed putting the wolves to sleep, and we hid in the bushes, stifling laughter while we watched Tambet and Mall running anxiously around the barn and trying to somehow calm down the terrible baying so that the revered sprites of the forest could sleep peacefully.

  Finally Hiie would hiss the necessary word to the wolves. “Thank goodness!” said Tambet and Mall happily, not noticing what their daughter had done, and went about their own business. They did not try to find another job for Hiie instead of feeding the wolves—or more correctly, they forgot to. Nor did they pay much attention to their daughter. This didn’t bother Hiie much. She could go and play with us, and often spent the whole day in our company—something that would have been completely impossible before. We wandered everywhere with her, home to my place and to the snakes’ home, and visited Pirre and Rääk to look at the lice. I believe that Hiie had never had such fun before as that summer.

  Since the time when Pärtel and I went to the village and were almost stunned by the miraculous things we’d seen in the home of Johannes the village elder, we had not visited any village people. More than five years had passed since then. Although at first I had been burning with enthusiasm for the bread shovel and the spinning wheel, this passion had cooled with the years. I had experienced other interesting things, had learned Snakish with the help of Uncle Vootele, and had grown to like life in the forest more and more. For a long time I had been able to think of the spinning wheel and the shovel without any desire. I had grown up and become more sensible, and understood that there was no need for such tools in the forest. The village no longer interested me much at all, it was something alien and distant, a place that I could conceivably visit again, but was in no hurry to.

  For a long time, Pärtel and I had not talked about the village or recalled our old adventures, because plenty of other things had happened in our lives. Ints knew nothing about the village, apart that the villagers didn’t know Snakish. Adders regarded such creatures with supreme contempt—unless they were hedgehogs, which they also disdained, but feared as well. They had no reason to fear the villagers, because those people could not withstand snake poison, so that adders always felt themselves their superiors.

  Now, when we had Hiie with us, Pärtel and I got the idea of going back to the village. We had taken Hiie around the forest with us and shown her everything we knew and Hiie had never seen. We enjoyed the girl’s enthusiasm hugely and wanted to keep surprising her, but we had almost exhausted all the exciting things in the forest. So we began to think about the village, Johannes the village elder, and his daughter, Magdaleena.

  “Let’s go and see them,” I suggested, and Pärtel agreed immediately, all the more so because Hiie resisted and looked really frightened. Tambet must have told her dreadful things about the village at home. Hiie knew, of course, that her father spoke badly about many things, including me and my family, but she did really fear the village. Of course that increased our keenness to take her there—for what could offer a boy more enjoyment than to drag a trembling and reluctant girl in the direction of apparent mortal danger! One can show off one’s courage, but when it finally turns out that the danger is not real danger, you can laugh happily and say, “I said there’s nothing terrible here; you’ll even like it here. Haven’t we shown you interesting things?” And so we weren’t worried about Hiie’s timid objections. We took her with us, and Ints came as well, because he had not visited the village, and thought that one adder should get to know everything there is to be found in and around the forest.

  We got to the hillock where you could see the whole village, including Johannes the village elder’s cabin, which was closest to the forest. Hiie said nothing; she just panted, and when I took her hand I felt that the girl’s palm was covered in sweat. Evidently she was really afraid. She had never gone out of the forest before. The sun was behind the clouds, but still she was astounded by the light and space, a kind she had never encountered in the forest. She looked imploringly at me. Obviously she would have liked to scuttle back among the trees, but I was merciless. So Hiie submitted to me, just as she had always submitted to her mother and father.

  We walked quickly down the hillside. No point denying it: my heart was beating quite fast, and Pärtel’s probably was too. We had been here once before, but that was years ago, and I felt like a person preparing to jump into a lake from a high treetop. He knows that there is nothing bad lurking in the water, but it’s stil
l a little creepy to stare down into the depths from the top, and there is a hollow feeling in his stomach as he falls.

  Everything happened exactly as on our first visit. Out of the door stepped Magdaleena, who in the meantime had grown considerably, and Pärtel and I were astonished to see her. She was so beautiful. Magdaleena was also taken aback—that was clear to see—and obviously not at our beauty. Rather the opposite; she must have been shocked to see two boys dressed in animal skins, leading between them a slight girl also wearing skins. The previous time she had greeted us with childish candor; since then, however, she had obviously heard many an unpleasant thing about the forest dwellers, so she screamed, “Father!”

  “What’s going on?” a voice from indoors asked, and out stepped Johannes the village elder. He was not too startled to see us, and asked, smiling, “Is it you, boys? The same ones who came here once before? Well, you’ve grown a lot! What took you so long to come? I told you to move with your parents to the village. Poor children, you look so wild. Are you hungry? Want some bread?”

  Before we had time to reply, he disappeared inside and came back a moment later with half a loaf of bread.

  “There you are,” he said kindly. “Fresh rye bread.”

  He handed the bread to me. For the first time I was holding in my hand an object so despised in the forest: the bread had a knobbly crust, but was soft. Hiie looked at me, her eyes full of terror; she wanted to say something but didn’t dare. Evidently she was afraid that even just holding one single piece of bread could somehow do me harm; this must have had something to do with one of her father’s many stories. I wasn’t afraid of the bread, for I knew that Mother had eaten it at one time and nothing bad had happened to her. Bread wasn’t dangerous; it was just supposed to have a disgusting taste. Nevertheless I resolved to try the bread later, even though now would be a chance to show off my courage to Hiie. But for the moment I wanted to show Hiie some other miraculous things.