The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  Magdaleena took me by the neck and pressed herself close to me. It was pleasant, and yet I couldn’t suppress the thought that somewhere right here, snuggled against my stomach, was a little jesus, and this made me slightly uncomfortable. But then Magdaleena slipped her hand under my jacket and I did the same and forgot about all the jesuses in the world. To me they might as well have been mere midges. As long as I could stroke Magdaleena’s bare back, I didn’t care about them one bit.

  “I know that God is strong,” whispered Magdaleena in my ear. “But I also know that sometimes he gives way to the devil. Often it happens that holy pictures and crosses can’t stop it, and today the belt didn’t help either. It didn’t stop you; you killed the sheep anyway.”

  I couldn’t be bothered arguing; right now I didn’t care what Magdaleena said, as long as I got to caress her bare hot skin.

  “Things like this come up quite often in the village,” continued Magdaleena. “Father is very wise. He has studied many useful spells in far-off lands, but they’re all supported by God’s power. He’s forgotten the devil; the monks and the other foreigners don’t know the devil either. They’re only afraid of him, because they know that God won’t always avail them against him. But you’re not afraid of the devil. You know him; you can talk with him. You’ve seen the sprites and you understand the language of snakes, but a snake is almost the same as the devil. My son will be a jesus, and he will have the whole of God’s world open to him, but I want you to open up the devil’s world to him too. I want you to bring him up and teach him like a father in the flesh, to teach him Snakish, and the art of changing into a werewolf, everything you know how to do. Leemet, will you fulfill my wish? If you can’t leave your forest, you won’t have to live with us, but you should visit every day, because my son must become a man who understands the language of both God and the devil. When you get cold in the forest, there’ll always be room for you in my bed.”

  “I’m cold already,” I said.

  “Already?” murmured Magdaleena. “I don’t have a bed here in the forest to invite you into the warm. This is your world, werewolf, and your bed. This is where I have to ask you if there’s room in your bed.”

  “Always,” I replied, and indeed we had plenty of room.

  Twenty-Nine

  re you coming with me?” asked Magdaleena afterward, as we were getting dressed.

  “Yes, I’m coming,” I replied. For why shouldn’t I go? I didn’t want to stay in the forest. Especially now—after having got out of bed for the first time since Hiie’s death, and gone straight off and slept with a beautiful village girl—it seemed completely impossible for me to go back home. I imagined Mother and Salme waiting for me there, their eyes full of pity and sadness, competing with each other to chat about everything that had happened since that fateful wedding. They would tell me about Hiie’s cremation; they might even want to show me the remains of the pyre. But I would be coming from another woman, carrying her scent on me, and feeling like a villain. That would be horrible; I couldn’t stand the idea of it. If I even just thought of Mother’s weeping eyes, her mournful expression that would follow me day in, day out from then on, the drowning sympathy that drove me out of the house, a choking lump came into my throat. I didn’t want to be pitied, and there was no danger of that in the village. Nobody sympathized with me there. Not a single person suspected that I was an unhappy man, deprived of his wife on his wedding day. This was an opportunity to escape from my own mourning.

  Besides, I wanted Magdaleena as much as before. I appreciated that this was crude and repulsive; I should have remained true to Hiie’s memory, but if I had behaved like a bear in heat anyway, I would no longer have anything to lose. So I would move to the village. I would sink myself among those stupid village folk, start gobbling that nauseating bread, and working in the fields like the worst of fools. It was best for me. That was my punishment. I would no longer be Leemet, but somebody else completely, a nameless villager. Leemet died with Hiie; a new slouching little man would be the one to start living in the village, as idiotic as his neighbors.

  If I refused now, I would die in the forest full of regret—both that I had betrayed Hiie and that I had given up Magdaleena’s alluring beauty, which she herself was offering me so generously. I couldn’t live as before anyway; that was impossible.

  I was terribly afraid that at the last moment Ints, or my mother, or Mõmmi, or a Primate would appear out of the bushes and say something. I didn’t want any human or animal from the forest to ever see me again. I wanted to vanish without trace, and at a stroke draw a veil over my whole past, like a lizard that discards its own tail and staggers off who knows where.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Magdaleena. “I love you. I’ll always stay with you. I won’t ever go back to the forest.”

  “You’re so sweet,” replied Magdaleena with a radiant smile. “I knew you’d agree. You’ll start teaching my child, won’t you, and look after him as if he was your own.”

  “I will,” I assured her. I really did intend to do that. Magdaleena’s stories of gods, devils, and jesuses were of course completely harebrained, and I understood nothing of all this strange twaddle, but I really did want to be the father of her child. I recalled Uncle Vootele’s talk about Snakish and how the time would come when I would have to pass it on to my successor. In this case, the Snakish words would live on, and at least I wouldn’t be the last man in this world who understood the language of the serpents. I needed a child with whom to share all my wisdom, and where else would I find such a child but in the village? There were no children in the forest, and by now it was abundantly clear that no more would be born there. Hiie was dead; the whole forest was dying. But the Snakish words would live on, as long as I was alive, and I wished them to live on a little longer than myself.

  I was not troubled in the least that the father of Magdaleena’s child was an iron man; I didn’t feel any jealousy toward that rattling creature that had impregnated Magdaleena one night. If my training met its mark, then one fine day Magdaleena’s child might, with a single Snakish word, break the stride of his father’s horse and the neck of the old iron man. If Magdaleena’s hopes came true, and her child really did wander out into the wide world from his home village, then with the help of Snakish he could achieve a great deal. I knew from my own experience how helpless people are when they don’t understand Snakish and are attacked in the right way. I wanted to make this child my heir; I wanted to give him that great secret weapon that only he in the whole world could use. That was the only thought I had, the only goal that my life could still have.

  I strode along at Magdaleena’s heels toward the village and didn’t look back once. I no longer wished to ever see my mother or sister again. In the normal course of events, I should have died of the fever; my recovery was absurd and incomprehensible. Everything had changed too much, and it was no longer possible to find one’s way in the world. The only possibility was to leap straight into the bushes. That was what I was doing. I saw Johannes’s house before me, and I took a deep breath, as if before diving.

  Johannes greeted me with his own overweening friendliness.

  “Poor boy,” he said. “You look so thin and worn out. But your days of misery are now at an end. Come inside. I’ll give you some bread. You can eat as much as you want, because, thank God, we still have a crumb of bread.”

  I forced a smile onto my face, but inside I was thinking, So it begins. You’ve hardly got your foot over the threshold when they’re already rushing to smother you with bread. But I had made my choice. I hadn’t come to the village to enjoy life or to gourmandise, apart from on Magdaleena, and I had all the more reason to forgo all other pleasures. The mosslike bread was a suitable foodstuff; it was enough to keep you alive, and I needed no more.

  “I’d be glad of a piece of bread,” I said to Johannes.

  I was handed a fresh slice of bread, I bit into it, and I gobbled up the unchewed bits into my intestines, as if wanting as
fast as possible to fill myself with an alien substance and thus change into a new being. Johannes attributed my greed to desperate hunger; he looked at me sympathetically and sighed, “What a terrible life you must have had in the forest. Poor boy! Why didn’t you come and stay with us earlier? This time you won’t be leaving, and besides, winter is coming. You’d die of cold and hunger in the forest.”

  Before my eyes appeared the gigantic white stone in the snakes’ lair, which was so sweet to lick and brought that pleasant lassitude, a long soft sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be going to spend the winter with the adders ever again—the last miserable human among the energetic and fruitfully propagating snakes. I didn’t want to be a poor relation. I didn’t want to play the part of a unique specimen, miraculously preserved down to our own day. It was all over; our kind had died out.

  “Yes, I won’t be leaving anymore,” I told Johannes. “Now I’ll stay here.”

  “The right decision. We’d better find you a place to stay to get you started, until you set up your own land.”

  “Father, Leemet is staying with us,” said Magdaleena. “He’s going to be my husband.”

  Elder Johannes was slack-jawed.

  “My dear child, this is news to me … Why him? You’ve caught the eye of others too, boys in our village that you’ve known from childhood. You’ve always been so haughty … But this one here is straight out of the forest.”

  “That’s just it, Father!” cried Magdaleena. “Why should I get married to a peasant, who doesn’t know how to do anything but what he’s picked up from the knights and the monks? I don’t want a pupil in my bed. I want a master, and that’s what I’ve got. You know, Father, whose child I’m carrying in my belly and what he will grow up to be!”

  “I do know,” said Johannes, looking at Magdaleena’s midriff with such a reverent gaze that I was reminded of the story of how the elder had shared his bed with some bishop as a young boy. Evidently the poor man was hoping to get pregnant himself, I thought. What a disappointment it would be to him if not even his beloved God could get foreign men to have children. I didn’t say anything, because obviously I had to start living under the same roof as Johannes, and it wasn’t sensible to get into an argument with him on the first day.

  “I understand that very well indeed,” said Johannes. “You’re like me, daughter: you aim high. It’s a great thing that you got to know a real knight; no other girl in our village has that experience and I’m proud of you. But Leemet? Look at him! He’s a savage!”

  I was surprised that he was not ashamed to talk like that in my hearing, but apparently the old man thought I was so hungry that my attention would be only on the bread.

  “Father, I have my own reasons why I chose Leemet,” declared Magdaleena. “You might call him a savage, but he’s special to me.”

  “He’s special, of course, but being special like that is not worth anything,” countered Johannes, eyeing me with evident embarrassment. “I’m not saying he won’t become a decent peasant, that he won’t learn how to sow and reap—but right now he’s a nobody. He’s been living like an animal. He isn’t even baptized.”

  “Father, I know what I’m doing,” said Magdaleena, rising to her full height. “Don’t forget that I’m the mother of a future knight! Father, in your time you’ve traveled a lot and seen a lot, but now you’re old and I understand the new world better. Leemet is the one I need, no one else. He will be the father of my child. He’s the one best suited for it.”

  She looked at me loftily, but then smiled almost apologetically.

  “Besides, I love him,” she said, and sat down next to me on the bench, taking me by the neck. “Father, don’t even try to argue. The matter is settled.”

  “All right,” sighed Johannes. “Let him stay. Well now, I was supposed to go to the monastery anyway today and ask advice of the holy brothers on the question of werewolves. I might as well arrange a time for baptism too. Leemet must become a Christian and be given a Christian name. He must get to know the Word of God and the Lord’s commandments.”

  “No God,” I said. Really, I was prepared to swallow bread, cut straws in the fields, turn a quern, and do all the other idiocies that the villagers had learned from the foreigners, but I wanted to keep away from God. I was sick to the back teeth of all these sprites and jesuses and other invented beings. They had aggrieved me in the forest and now even in the village they wouldn’t go away. They had changed their names, but they were still just as invisible and senseless. I didn’t want to hear about any such stupidity; it reminded me of Ülgas and the fact that I’d only been able to chop half of his head off. I had destroyed the sacred grove so that no one would set foot there ever again, and I didn’t intend to now go to church.

  “What do you mean—no God?” snapped Johannes. “I cannot allow an unbaptized pagan living on my land. That’s impossible! We have a Christian village and we belong to the Christian world. We are a worthy part of it, even though poor and a little backward, but even we are kept in place by our Holy Father. You must have yourself baptized and receive the proper faith; you must go to church and learn God’s commandments!”

  “I don’t intend to do that,” I replied. “Now listen! I agree to do all the work, till the fields, and prepare the same bread, which doesn’t taste good but fills your stomach—everything that is tangible and edible, and thus real and actual. But I don’t need new sprites!”

  “I’m not talking about sprites!” shouted Johannes. “Sprites naturally only bring misfortune on people, because they’re in the service of the devil. They are really to be feared. I’m talking about God, who protects us!”

  “Elder, I have lived in the forest all my life and I tell you there are no sprites! There is no need to fear them; what you should fear is people who believe in sprites. The same goes for your God. It’s just a new name for the sprites, given by the monks, like me changing my name if I were christened. I’ll still be myself; it doesn’t matter what I’m called. I can’t be bothered to play this game.”

  “This is not a game!” shouted Johannes, rising up. “You have to choose: will you become a Christian, like all the people in this village, or will you go back to the forest? I’m not going to allow a pagan to live among us, no way!”

  “Father, be quiet!” Magdaleena cried. “Leemet doesn’t have to go to church if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have to be christened. I want him just as he is.”

  “But he’s a pagan! All pagans serve the devil!”

  “Father, why do you think we don’t sometimes have a use for the devil? Do you think God is all-powerful? You saw today that the sacred belt didn’t save our village’s sheep. Maybe turning to the devil might have been more useful?”

  “Child, what you’re saying is a terrible sin!” said Johannes, his face turning white. “The devil is unable to protect anyone; he only knows how to bite and attack. You will see; today I’m going to the holy brothers and they will give me a potion to destroy this damned werewolf that brought death to our sheep.”

  Magdaleena looked fearfully in my direction, evidently worried that the monks’ potion might really put an end to me, the werewolf. I grinned back at her and she seemed calmed. How stupid they were! Magdaleena was at least beautiful, but there was nothing to excuse Elder Johannes. Suddenly I was terribly tired of all this. How different this argument was to my conversations with Hiie! I felt on the verge of crying. But there was no way back. Here I sat now, in the middle of modern stupidity, and I had to stay here till the end of my life. I yearned for Magdaleena to give birth right then, wishing that the child might be born and grow at supernatural speed to the age when I could teach him Snakish. But I knew that in that hope I was as stupid as the village people were with their gods. Supernatural things don’t exist; everything proceeds according to the natural order, and births and deaths take place at their appointed time.

  “Well?” I asked, annoyed. “How far have you got with your chattering? Can I stay here or must I go back to the f
orest? What do you say, Johannes?”

  I looked at the village elder’s rage-reddened face, and suddenly a good idea passed through my head—to kill him and end all this ridiculous arguing, make a drinking goblet of his skull and live in peace with Magdaleena without having to put up with the idiotic old man. But I hadn’t come to the village to fight; I had come to bury myself. I was awaiting an answer and listened to Johannes panting with exasperation—but it was Magdaleena who started speaking.

  “Of course you’ll stay here,” she said calmly. “You’re my husband and the father of my child, and you don’t have to become a Christian. There are many Christians here in the village; if I’d wanted to find a husband among them, I could have had one long ago. But I wanted you. Did you hear, Father? I want Leemet and my child—who is the child of a knight and in whose veins runs the blood of jesuses, don’t forget that!—wants Leemet too.”

  “So be it,” said Johannes, though I thought I heard his teeth grinding. “Let him stay then. But I tell you, Magdaleena, God won’t forgive us for giving shelter to a pagan. He’ll punish us for it. One cannot serve two masters!”

  “I won’t serve anyone,” I said. “I don’t need a master, and even less do I need to invent one.”

  “So be it, but you know you are the only and the last pagan in our village!” declared Johannes.

  I didn’t reply. What was there for me to say? I was used to the knowledge that I was the last. Everywhere and always.

  Thirty

  n the evening Magdaleena invited me to the swing.

  I no longer wore my old animal-skin jacket. Magdaleena had peeled that off me and instead given me some old rags of her father’s. They weren’t bad, but no better than my previous clothes—and it was quite clear that a lot of trouble had to be taken to make such clothes, whereas for us in the forest a proper animal skin was no more than the work of a lunchtime.