The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  I didn’t dare move, because my broken arm was burning with pain, and in the end I fell asleep from exhaustion and despair. When I awoke, I no longer knew if it was day or night, since in the darkness of the cellar I couldn’t see even my own finger, and I had no idea how long I’d been asleep.

  My arm was still hurting, but I understood that it would do me no good to lie motionless like that, and so cautiously got to my knees, supporting the damaged arm delicately with the other. It was an awful pain, but I took no notice of it, and began slowly moving forward on my knees, until I bumped into the wall. Then I turned around and went to the other side, and came across a mass that was lying on the floor.

  At first I thought it was Uncle, and I got a fright, because I was now reconciled to the fact that my uncle was dead. Stumbling over a human corpse in a dark space is not the most pleasant experience. It was strange that Uncle, whom I loved so much, had now changed into something frightening; I saw in front of me his face swollen from suffocation, his bulging eyes and wide open mouth, his grinning teeth, and the darkness multiplied the intensity of my memory. Cold shivers ran up my back when I thought that that corpse with its gaping jaws was lying right here and maybe staring through the darkness right at me now with its glassy eyes. I swiftly jumped aside when the mass touched my knees, and whimpered as a shooting pain ran through my arm.

  Then I recalled that somewhere on the cellar floor had lain a large dried haunch of venison. I pulled myself together and stretched out my good arm to find out what it was. I was terribly afraid, because I had to stretch it out in the darkness, and my fingers could very easily find themselves between my dead uncle’s teeth. But I was lucky: it was a piece of venison. I ate it; there was a great deal of meat, and I knew that at least for now I wasn’t threatened with starvation.

  For a while I didn’t dare to leave the venison, because although it was also dead, that hunk of meat was somehow safe—nourishing and friendly—whereas my dead uncle was metamorphosing in my mind into an ever more horrible and dangerous being, lurking for me in the darkness and deathly silence somewhere. At the same time there was still a place in my thoughts for that other uncle, the smiling, genial Uncle Vootele, and as much as I feared that bug-eyed corpse, I yearned for the living Uncle Vootele, and I started quietly sobbing when I realized anew that Uncle was dead and we would never meet again. That awareness came in waves and was just as painful as the gnawing ache of my broken arm, bringing me to despair and then receding, only to return a little while later. I squatted by the venison, wept, and ate, mourning Uncle Vootele and fearing his corpse.

  Finally I fell asleep again and when I awoke again I tried to call out a little, but my voice was as hoarse and weak as before. Then, since my arm was hurting a little less for the moment, I hit upon the idea of trying to break out of the cellar by my own effort. That meant, of course, that I had to move around again and risk stumbling over the corpse, but after a moment’s hesitation I crawled from my spot. I managed to reach the ladder without coming across Uncle Vootele’s body, and with a little effort managed to get onto the first rung. But when I reached the closed hatch and tried to push it up with my good arm, I soon realized that it wasn’t possible. The hatch was too heavy; it would have been hard for me to get it open even with two hands, but with only one arm, moreover in a position where every movement caused such pain that I whimpered out loud, it was an unworkable task. I went down the ladder, but in the darkness I slipped on one rung, rolled to the floor, did more damage to my injured arm, and in the horrible rush of agony lost consciousness.

  I don’t know whether the time was short or long, but in the end I recovered. I was stunned and so weak that I couldn’t even get to my knees. I crawled slowly to where I thought the venison was, but naturally I now bumped almost immediately into Uncle Vootele.

  I was really afflicted by the pain radiating from my arm, and if I had wanted to escape, I simply wouldn’t have had enough strength. So I restricted myself to simply turning my face away after coming across the corpse.

  Uncle Vootele did not smell good; he gave off an unpleasant stench, but otherwise he remained quiet and gentle as a corpse should. Suddenly I no longer feared him, I put my whole arm out boldly, and touched the body resting beside me. I had bumped against Uncle’s shoulder. There was his arm, on the other side his neck and from there I could go up to the face, but I didn’t want to touch that. I left Uncle to rest in peace and crawled away. I was hungry and needed venison, not a dead human.

  In the following days I hardly left the pile of meat. Uncle had begun to stink and the stench made me feel ill. I no longer feared Uncle’s corpse; it had become repulsive to me. Somewhere in the dark he lay slowly rotting, contaminating the air which I, his nephew, had to breathe. At one time he had taught me Snakish; now he was gradually poisoning me.

  I cowered in the dark, having lost all sense of time passing, drowsy and almost stupefied with pain, despair, and the stench of death, and strange ideas and visions revolved in my head. In my exhausted brain the fresh leafless forest that I had seen when I climbed out of the snakes’ den and my rotting uncle blended together, and I saw apparitions of those same snow-thawed trees, the leafless branches like putrefied forked joints, and from that forest emerged a suffocating corpse stench.

  Then in my thoughts Uncle was transformed into the Frog of the North, a gigantic winged snake, but he too was oozing and decaying. I could almost see him; he was lying beside me, and in my ramblings I lifted my arm and patted the darkness around me, consoling the imaginary Frog: “Never mind. You’ll get well!” But my arm passed through the giant snake’s scales, for it was decayed and brittle, and fetid air escaped from it with a hiss. In that hiss I recognized Snakish words and answered them; I was hissing on my own in the darkness of Uncle Vootele’s cellar, and the air grew thicker and heavier. When I chewed the venison, it too stank of death and I was not sure whether I was eating deer or my own deceased uncle. But even that gruesome doubt couldn’t shock me anymore, so weak was I.

  Yet it was the hissing that saved me, those same Snakish words that this beloved uncle, now decomposing on the ground, had taught me, choked on the venison that he so loved to eat. I drove the image of the dead Frog of the North from my mind and rambled on, pressing from my parched lips the most diverse hisses. And those quiet, barely audible Snakish words penetrated through the ground surface, to where not even the loudest screams produced by the human mouth could penetrate.

  The adders, now awoken from their hibernation, heard me, and the king of the snakes, Ints’s father, bit through the trapdoor. They brought me out and carried me home to Mother, who had to spend a long time nursing and feeding me before I could walk and talk again.

  My left arm remained crooked forever, broken in two places. Likewise the smell of the corpse never left my nostrils. Sometimes it seems to have gone. For many days I can’t smell it, but in a moment it again strikes my nose, ranker than ever, and turns my stomach. It was the last gift I received from my beloved uncle, who taught me Snakish and who moldered away beside me.

  Fifteen

  he forest has changed. Even the trees are not as they were, or I don’t recognize them; they have become alien to me. I don’t mean that their trunks have become thicker, their crowns broader, and their tops stretch ever higher; that is all natural. There is something apart from the usual growth; the forest has become careless. It grows in any old way; it sheds leaves where previously the paths were clear. It has become tangled and shaggy. It is no longer a home but lives its own life and breathes to its own set rhythm. You might almost think that the forest is itself to blame for the people leaving its midst, because it behaves like a conqueror, spreading out in the footsteps of its former master. It was the people that vacated the place, and just as they let loose their own wolves, so they released the forest from its bonds and it dispersed itself like a pile of mold. Going to the spring, I’m constantly finding it off the footpath, and I stamp back the footpath into the ground, and the
forest falls with an insulted rustle back into a coma, only to gain consciousness and spring back the next moment, stretching out its branches and leaves and covering the ancient human paths with needles. One day I will no longer go to the spring, and then the power will finally be in its hands.

  Of course there are still the villagers, and they come here sometimes to pick berries, mushrooms, or brushwood, but they are no match for the forest. They are afraid of the forest, much more than needs be, and to increase their terror they have invented all sorts of monsters—werewolves, leprechauns, and ghosts. These poor idiots even believe in sprites; Ülgas the Sage can really rest assured that he has good disciples and plenty of them. Strange that Snakish has been forgotten while belief in fairies remains. Stupidity is stronger than wisdom. Ignorance is as tough as a tree root that bores into the ground where people once walked. The forest is proliferating; the village people are on the increase—but I am the last man who knows Snakish.

  The last man … Mother also said that, one evening when I came home and sat in my usual place to taste Mother’s roasted deer withers. Seven years had now passed since Uncle Vootele’s death; I had grown tall, but remained as lean as before, and my beard was red, though my hair was brown. Mother put before me a decent slice of carefully and thoroughly roasted meat, sat on the other side of the table, and sighed sadly.

  “What’s the matter now?” I asked, knowing that Mother was sighing to force that question out of me. She sighed once more.

  “You’re the last man in our family,” she began. That beginning was familiar to me; she often spoke like that. Actually I knew what Mother wanted to say, because we had had many talks like this. Nothing much new happened in the forest; everything was peacefully curled around its own tail, and our days looked like the wolves’ flea searches: first they nibble at their thighs, then the stomach, then the withers, then the tail, and so on over and over again, always in the same order, without involving any part of the body that might present a surprise.

  “You’re the last man in our family,” said Mother. “You’ll have to talk to Mõmmi. Salme’s very upset because of him.”

  Mõmmi was my brother-in-law, a big fat bear, with whom Salme had been living for more than five years. I remembered well how she left home—for Mother it was a matter of terrible shame and unhappiness, because since her own youthful experience she could not stand to look at bears. The fact that a bear was hanging around Salme was long known to us, and though Mother did all she could to keep Salme away from the bruin, there was not much she could do. Salme moved freely around the forest and the bear was likewise shuffling around at will, so it was no surprise that their paths kept crossing somewhere under a bush. It’s hard for a young girl to resist a bear, something so big, soft, and cuddly, whose lips taste of honey. Mother combated it as best she could, but when she got home in the evenings Salme’s clothes were always full of bear hairs.

  “You’ve been meeting the bear again!” wept Mother. “I told you it’s not right! A bear will not bring you happiness! They’re evil animals!”

  “Mõmmi’s not evil at all!” contested Salme. “Quite the opposite, he’s terribly kindhearted. I don’t know, Mother. Maybe your bear was evil, but you can’t tar all bears with the same brush!”

  Mother didn’t like reminders about “her bear”; her face always turned red and she changed the subject. But in this case it wasn’t possible; she wanted to make it clear to Salme that going out with a bear was disastrous. So she grew a little embarrassed and said that all bears are deceitful, and their evil sometimes only appears years later.

  “Years later!” sputtered Salme. “You might as well say there’s no point in me getting married at all. Mother, I love Mõmmi!”

  “Dear child, don’t do this to me!” pleaded Mother. “Don’t talk like that! It’s terrible to hear. All your life I’ve been keeping you away from bears and protecting you, and now you go and undo all my good work!”

  “But mother, who am I going to marry if not the bear?” asked Salme. “There are no young men in the forest apart from Leemet. Or should I go to old Ülgas? Would that filthy old man please you more than a lovely fat hairy bear?”

  Mother had nothing to say to that; she just wept uncontrollably, and Salme’s meetings with the bear continued. And one day she announced that she was moving in with Mõmmi and would become his lawful wife.

  “Mõmmi doesn’t like me having to always go home for the night,” said Salme. “He says it breaks his heart and he can’t sleep at night; he just sighs at the moon and moans.”

  “If you move in with him, you’ll break my heart!” wailed Mother. “That bear is stealing my precious daughter!”

  “Why?” complained Salme. “We’ll live here in the same forest. I’ll come and visit you. And besides, Mother, you can visit me too. Mõmmi’s offended that you’ve been avoiding him like this. Many times he’s been wanting to meet you.”

  “I’ll never come to a bear’s den!” shouted Mother, shocked, brandishing her hand as if a horrid bear were flying over her head in the form of a fly. “Never!”

  “Well, that’s a great shame!” declared Salme defiantly, and left home.

  Mother resisted for precisely one day; then she roasted two large haunches of venison as a housewarming present, hauled them, groaning, onto her shoulder, and we trudged to Mõmmi’s lair. The bear came to meet us, his head cocked in his simpleminded way, and humbly licked Mother’s feet.

  “And you’re Salme’s mother,” he said in a deep voice. “I’ve seen you sometimes in the forest, but I’ve never dared to come up to you, as you’re such a charming and lovely lady.”

  Mother’s old love of bears, which she had dammed up like a beaver, now burst into full flood; she burst into tears, hugged Mõmmi, and kissed him behind the ears. She presented the bear with both of the haunches and watched tenderly as he hungrily gnawed on them, polished the last bone but one clean with his tongue, and when he got on his hind legs and bowed to the ground before Mother as a mark of gratitude, my dear mother was completely won over. All the way back she was telling me that she’d never seen such a polite bear, and that she was pleased for Salme.

  “That bear knows how to respect her and care for her,” Mother declared. “Actually bears are very pleasant animals. The bear that I knew …”

  At this point Mother stopped, because she realized that it isn’t quite polite to praise in my hearing the bear who ate my father’s head off. But Mother was wrong. I didn’t hold any grudge against that unknown bear. I didn’t remember my father, and if I tried to imagine him, the face of Johannes the village elder appeared before me, and I remembered how he tried to club Ints to death.

  Mother started visiting Salme and Mõmmi every day, taking them meat and decorating their cave, while Mõmmi picked wildflowers and brought honeycombs down from the trees in return. Salme was happy in her dear bear’s embrace, and often rode around the forest on Mõmmi’s back, clinging to his furry throat like a little frog, her cheek against Mõmmi’s nape.

  Of course this did not please Tambet; the marriage of Salme and Mõmmi gave him yet another reason to despise our family. In his opinion a bear was a creature far below a human. Bears never visited the sacred grove, they lived a wild and loose life, and they were gluttonous and lecherous. It was a matter of shame for a human to live openly with a bear. In secret it had of course occurred before—in fact very often; according to my departed Uncle Vootele, in ancient times it often happened that while all the men were rushing off to battle under the protective cover of the Frog of the North, the women left at home had bears waiting for them in the yard who were happy to console them while the men at the front were cutting down foreigners. Tambet would of course never have agreed to admit that anything so crude could have happened in those noble ancient times. For him the olden times were a single uninterrupted ray of sunshine; all the ugly stains that darkened its luster were due to the present day, and our immoral family in particular.

  Still, t
here is no point in denying that Tambet was right in his opinion of bears as lecherous. That was the reason why Mother often sighed in the evenings and called me the last man in the family. Mõmmi, who had been living happily with Salme for years, had started looking for new girls. Only Hiie was available in the forest, and Mõmmi tried to court her, put a wreath on his head and hung around the girl shaking his head sadly, but Hiie did not take the bait. She could hardly fail to have heard stories at home about the lustfulness of bears. One might think that I was in very bad odor at Tambet’s and Mall’s home, but this didn’t stop my good relations with Hiie.

  She was now seventeen years old, still pale and thin, not beautiful, with downcast eyes and bony shoulders. But Mõmmi was trying to snare her all the same, for bears are not attracted to women’s appearance particularly; what excites them is their scent, but Hiie would run away every time she saw Mõmmi approaching. The bear got tired of it, and since there were no more young women in the forest, he moved to a new hunting ground—the village.

  He didn’t have any luck there either. The village girls were desperately afraid of Mõmmi, and every time he appeared at the edge of the forest, they all threw down their rakes and sickles and rushed with piercing screams to their houses, slammed the doors shut, and peered out of the tiny windows to see whether the ghastly wild animal was still lurking in the bushes. Mõmmi was very upset by the girls’ behavior, because he had no bad intentions. Quite the contrary, he would gladly have loved all the young maidens. There were so many of them. They smelled so sweet. And that drove the bear to distraction. Day after day he went to the edge of the forest to prowl, but it did no good. The girls only feared him all the more, while the bear went more and more in heat.

  Actually Mõmmi’s adventures need not have concerned Salme at all, because it was clear that not a single village girl would let a bear into her arms; she would rather die. But Salme was still stricken with jealousy. She didn’t like Mõmmi sitting on the edge of the forest, his tongue hanging out hungrily, watching the screaming village maidens. And so I as the “only man” had to be the one to call Mõmmi to order, to go to this wicked bear at the forest edge and take him home.