The Man Who Spoke Snakish

by Andrus Kivirähk

  The child didn’t have a name yet. Magdaleena wanted to christen him Jesus of course, but Johannes claimed that the monks would not allow that, because there could be only one Jesus in the world. Finally the child was christened Toomas, as that was supposed to be a suitable Christian name for a knight’s son. I didn’t go with them to the church, but since christening was so important to Magdaleena and her father I didn’t say anything. It did the child no harm, and while everyone was out of the house, I was able to take a nice little nap.

  When Toomas was brought back home, I tried to whisper his name in Snakish and it sounded quite good. The boy smiled on hearing my voice, and when I stroked his face, he turned his head and started sucking my finger, mistaking it for a nipple.

  “He wants to eat,” I told Magdaleena.

  Magdaleena came and picked up Toomas.

  “Toomas the Knight must have everything he wants!” she whispered in the child’s ear, putting the boy to her breast. I was often surprised by the way Magdaleena treated the suckling. It wasn’t ordinary motherly tenderness, but something much more; in her tone of voice there was humility, even supreme subjection. I was sure that when the boy grew bigger, Magdaleena would never be able to deny him or beat him; for her little Toomas really was a higher being.

  The same attitude could be observed among all the villagers. When they came to us to look at the infant, they didn’t dare to step farther than the threshold, but squinted at the corner where the little boy was sleeping, and if he suddenly woke up and started nodding, they all drew into a huddle and listened respectfully to the child’s babbling. The villagers obviously imagined that the knight’s son was talking German to them. I noticed that even Magdaleena listened to her son’s utterances with intense interest, and if she thought she caught something German sounding among the babble, she smiled, enraptured.

  Most ridiculous, though, to my mind, was Johannes’s behavior. He had a habit of occasionally sitting by the child’s bed, and when little Toomas started chuckling to himself, he listened to the child’s incoherent shrieks with a deadly serious face, nodding and saying “ahhaa!” from time to time. I couldn’t understand whether he was simply trying to give us the impression that he, a man who had visited holy Rome and shared his place with a bishop, understood the babblings of the offspring of a knight, or whether the village elder was simply off his rocker. He never explained his actions: if the child fell silent, Johannes always shook his head, as if he’d received supremely important tidings, went to his corner, and sat there for hours, as if he were meditating on something.

  This respect and reverence that people expressed to the baby of knightly blood was so stupid that I, on the other hand, behaved as freely as possible with the child; I tickled him under the chin, jiggled him in my arms, and blew on his tummy so that he roared with laughter and flailed his arms and legs joyfully. When I frolicked with him like that, Magdaleena always stood beside me looking concerned, as if she hadn’t quite decided whether such behavior with the son of a knight wasn’t too wanton, but she never actually forbade me. I noticed that after our romps, she was especially tender and caring to little Toomas, as if trying to exonerate my naughty behavior with an individual of such noble lineage. They really were peculiar, these villagers.

  Soon there was not much time left for playing with little Toomas, for spring arrived and I had to start on the exhausting and, to my eyes, completely useless tasks in the fields. But I did what was asked of me without grumbling, because in my life I had lived through much harder things than mere sowing, and if the villagers wished, I could help them cultivate crops. I was tired out by my companions’ talk much more than by the sowing.

  Their newest favorite subject was horseshit. The men of the village had few horses of their own, only a few old and bony creatures with shaggy manes. They sowed with bullocks. The iron men would gallop around everywhere, even trotting over the fields if they wished. It often happened that in the middle of sowing one of the villagers would discover a horse turd, signaling his find with a shout—and a moment later all the sowers were gathered round the dropping.

  They all regarded themselves as great experts on horseshit.

  “Now that’s a turd from an Arab thoroughbred!” said Jaakop. “I always recognize an Arab’s turd; it’s sort of curved at the end and a bit crumbly.”

  “Mm …” murmured fat Nigul doubtfully, almost pressing his nose into the shit and sniffing fiercely. “From the smell this should be from a Spanish horse.”

  “A Spanish horse doesn’t make droppings like that!” argued Andreas. “Believe me I know a stable hand who sometimes brings me turds from his gentleman knight’s horse. You know I collect them. Come to my place. I’ll show you a Spanish horse’s shit. Of course there’s a slight similarity to the layman’s eye, but I could see right away that this horse is actually from England. Notice those varying brownish tones.”

  Conversations like that took place every week, because there were plenty of iron men and they rode around widely. At first the men’s passionate interest in horseshit had seemed a joke to me, but later on it just made me yawn. I was carrying on calmly sowing, when suddenly I saw a village girl scurrying toward me in terrible pain across the field.

  “Help, help!” she screamed. “Snakebite! A snake bit Katariina!”

  Katariina was the same flaxen-haired girl who had asked me about the snake-king’s crown up on the swing hill. I understood well what was expected of me; everyone knew that I had once healed Magdaleena’s leg. It wasn’t really difficult—I only had to call the snake that had bitten the girl—but I didn’t want to do that. I was afraid of meeting some adder who knew and remembered me. What kind of look would it give me, Leemet, who had repeatedly spent the winter with the adders, been one of them, but was now wearing village clothes and smelling of porridge? I watched the girl approaching ever closer and just wanted to run off in the other direction.

  But naturally I didn’t do that. The bite might be serious, and I couldn’t let silly flaxen-haired Katariina die.

  “Where is she?” I asked the girl, who had now reached me and was panting terribly. “Lead me to her, quick!”

  “Ah, ah!” gasped the girl. “I ran so fast I can’t even stand up anymore!”

  She fell spread-eagled on the field and fanned herself with her skirt.

  “Well!” I said. “You were in a frightful hurry, but now you want to lie down!”

  “Ah, ah, I’m right out of breath,” panted the girl, and finally was able to pull herself together enough to explain to me where Katariina got bitten.

  I left the foolish messenger gasping on the field and rushed off on my own. Katariina wasn’t far away; it was quite a wonder that running over such a short distance would tire the silly girl out. But she was of course fat, with short legs.

  Katariina was sitting on a rock, white in the face and looking like she was about to faint. Seeing me, she couldn’t even speak; she only pointed to her leg, where two large bloody tooth marks were visible, and whimpered like a little animal.

  I quickly hissed the appropriate words, and the next moment who should come crawling out but Ints.

  “You!” I muttered, taken aback. I had been prepared to meet some familiar adder, but seeing Ints was unexpected. The tooth marks on Katariina’s shin suggested a small snake. Ints was of serpentine royalty, and if a king snake stung anyone, it was only in the throat, and after that it wasn’t possible to save anyone.

  “That’s the snake, yes!” Katariina was quick to scream. “The same disgusting creature!”

  “Be quiet!” I snapped over my shoulder at the girl, looking awkwardly at Ints. I felt terrible shame because of my village clothes, but Ints didn’t seem to pay much heed to that: she curled into a ring as always and said, “Hello, Leemet! Nice to see you again. That’s just why I gave this girl a jab, to lure you here; otherwise you wouldn’t show yourself. You know I’ll start by sucking the venom out of the girl, and then you and I can have a calm chat, without
this girl whining.”

  “Please do,” I replied, and Ints crawled up to Katariina and quickly cleaned the wound.

  “Doesn’t hurt anymore?” I asked the girl.

  “No,” said Katariina, looking spellbound at Ints’s head, which wore a splendid crown. “So that’s the king of the snakes!”

  “Yes, but you can’t have the crown!” I said. “Now go home.”

  “What about you?” asked Katariina.

  “What about me? What I do is none of your business. Get going!”

  Katariina departed slowly. We waited for her to disappear behind the trees; then Ints wriggled up to my knees and put her head in my lap.

  “We haven’t met for a long time,” she said. “How have you been, old friend?”

  “Not bad,” I said, trying to be vague. Life in the village was not a thing I could or wanted to talk to Ints about. “How’s my mother doing?”

  “She’s doing fine; she’s living with us now. She came in the winter and stayed. She said she wasn’t used to living alone. You could come and see her; she misses you badly.”

  I nodded, but Ints didn’t let me say anything, and carried on. She told me about Salme and Mõmmi, and for his birthday how my sister had sewn him trousers that are put on with so many buckles and hooks that Mõmmi couldn’t take them off, and now Salme could be sure that the bear won’t be unfaithful when left on his own. Ints told me that during the winter Pirre and Rääk had grown very old and their fur was now gray all over, so that when they crouched in their tree they looked like two big cobwebs, and that her own sons were now big and living their own lives and they had new, very beautiful skin. As she told me all this, I realized suddenly how terribly I longed for the forest and how much I missed my mother. The sight of Ints cleared my head. That whole world that I had regarded as forever lost to me was wriggling and undulating around me in the slender person of Ints, and at once I felt like a fish that had fallen back into water.

  Suddenly I was no longer able to understand the reasons that had forced me to leave the forest and move to the village. In whose name had I been sitting here through a whole winter, many long months, among stupid villagers, while in the forest my own mother in the flesh, my sister, my friend Ints were waiting for me? All right, Magdaleena’s son, little Toomas, was to be my pupil, but that didn’t mean I had to spend the rest of my life in the village, that I couldn’t visit my mother and friends. I no longer feared sympathy; for me it would not be terrible even for Ints or Mother to start talking about Hiie. On the contrary, right now I almost even wanted that. For a while now I had been living with swollen eyes, but now suddenly the swelling had abated and I saw everything again just as before.

  “Ints, I’m coming today to visit Mother,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you’ve been looking for me. Otherwise I might have stayed here moldering who knows how long.”

  “Yes, I thought too I ought to simply pull you out of here,” replied Ints. “Now you can come back to the forest and forget this village.”

  “No, not quite,” I said, and I told Ints about Magdaleena’s son, whom I had to teach Snakish, so that there would be at least one person in the world who would understand it after my death. Ints listened and sighed.

  “You’re always hoping,” she said. “Leemet, old boy, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think humans are finished. It’s sad and it’s nasty, but what can you do? You and your family are exceptions, and if you teach that boy, he too will be an exception, but the rest of humanity are like little blue tits that have pecked their own wings off and are now hopping about on the ground like feathery mice.”

  “All the more reason,” I said. “At least one of those tits has to learn to fly too, so that it will be known in the future: a tit is a bird, not a mouse. At least one!”

  “Well, but a child of the village …” Ints began scornfully, but I interrupted her.

  “Ints, I do understand that that child should have been my son with Hiie,” I said. “But that child wasn’t born, and never will be.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Ints quietly. “I thought you wouldn’t want to talk about Hiie.”

  “It’s not important anymore. As you said, you’ve already pulled me out of that old life. Let’s go to the forest now. I’m longing to see my mother.”

  Mother had grown older, but otherwise was much the same. She fell on my neck when I squirmed into the snakes’ cave, squeezed me as much as she could and then let me go, took a look at me amazed, cried “oy!” and ran away.

  “Mother, what’s wrong?” I called after her. “Where are you going?”

  I tried to follow her, but Mother had vanished. She had rushed out of the cave and it wasn’t possible to find her among the trees.

  I went back into the cave to talk to the adders, to look over Ints’s children and praise them for how much they’d grown, and after a while Mother came back.

  “Mother, where did you go?” I asked—and then I noticed that Mother’s cheek was bloody and her clothes torn in places. “What happened?” I cried in astonishment.

  “Nothing, nothing!” Mother protested. “Everything’s all right.”

  “All right, when your cheek’s gashed? Did someone attack you?”

  “Oh, it’s just a little graze,” said Mother, trying to wipe the blood off with her sleeve. “Nobody attacked me. Who would do that? This is my home forest! I simply fell over.”

  “Where did you fall?” I wondered.

  “Out of a tree. My foot slipped on a branch you see. I must be getting old,” said Mother, almost apologetically. “I used to climb like a squirrel; no tree was too tall for me.”

  “But Mother, why did you have to climb a tree? I don’t understand. I haven’t seen you for a long time, and when I come, you climb a tree.”

  “I wanted to fetch you some owls’ eggs,” replied Mother, taking two beautiful big eggs from her pocket. “They were your favorite when you were a child, and all the time you were away I was constantly thinking that when my dear boy comes home I’ll offer him owls’ eggs, as I used to when you were still small. Now you’ve come, and I didn’t have a single owl’s egg! I was embarrassed, so I ran to fetch them. There’s an owls’ nest just near here, but you see I was so excited that I stumbled and tumbled out of the tree. Lucky I didn’t have the eggs in my pocket yet, otherwise they would have broken. So I climbed again and got the eggs anyway. There you are, son. These are for you.”

  I took the owls’ eggs from Mother’s hand and simply held them for a while, unable even to thank her. Mother was still rubbing her cheek; the wound was deep and the blood kept on oozing.

  “Now look, my son comes visiting after a long time, and like a fool I’m bleeding,” she muttered, almost angrily. “Oh, I’m useless! I’m sorry, Leemet. I know how horrible it is with my torn cheek …”

  “Mother, what are you saying!” I cried. “I should be asking your forgiveness that I haven’t shown my face for so long. You understand …”

  “I understand!” interrupted Mother. “Leemet, I understand it all. My poor child …”

  She sat down beside me, took me by the waist, sobbing, and asked, “But why don’t you eat your owls’ eggs? Don’t you like owls’ eggs anymore? Are the village foods better?”

  “Mother, what do you mean!” I said. “How can you even ask that? Nothing compares to owls’ eggs!”

  “So suck them empty then!” Mother pleaded. “They’re at their best right now.”

  I knocked a hole in an egg and sucked the yolk out. Mother looked at me with mournful satisfaction.

  “At least I can still offer you owls’ eggs, dear child,” she said. “When everything else is gone, you can always eat your fill at your mother’s house.”

  She drew her sleeve once more over her bloody cheek and got up decisively.

  “Suck the other egg out and come and eat,” she said. “Roast venison is waiting for you, darling.”

  Thirty-Two

  t really is ridiculous how persistent
ly everything in my life has gone awry. It reminds me of a bird that builds itself a nest high in a tree, but at the same time as it sits down to hatch, the tree falls down. The bird flies to another tree, tries again, lays new eggs, broods on them, but the same day that the chicks hatch, a storm comes up and that tree, too, is cloven in two.

  If I looked back at my life now and didn’t know that all these events actually took place, I would say it wasn’t possible. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be. But that’s just it: I haven’t lived an ordinary life. Or rather, I tried to, but the world around me changed. To put it metaphorically: where there was once dry land, the sea now splashed, and I had not had time to grow gills. I was still gulping air with my old lungs, which would not serve me in this watery new world, and therefore was always short of air. I tried to get away from the encroaching water and burrow a hole for myself in the shoreline sand, but every successive wave obliterated my efforts. What could I do about it? Nor is the bird to blame for always failing to hatch when its tree collapses. It acts as all birds have acted for thousands of years, and it chooses to nest in the same oak trees in whose crowns its ancestors have always hatched their young. How is it supposed to know that time has run out for those trees, that they are rotten from within and that even the smallest gust of wind can split these once-mighty giants?

  That day in the snakes’ cave really showed me that once again I had found a little patch of dry land that was not reached by the flood. Mother was beaming with joy; she kept bringing me delicious venison, a food I had not tasted for so long. Moreover this was not just ordinary roast venison, but Mother’s roast venison—and I couldn’t wish for anything tastier. Ints and the other adders were with me. We chatted as friends, and for the first time in over half a year I heard myself laughing.

  “Mother, will you be staying here to live with Ints?” I asked.