The Last of the Vostyachs
Page 14
Margareeta walked on, drunk and happy, raising her face to the cold wind now coming from the east. She felt she was being pursued by her wretched memories, by all those days she had wasted with that egotistical Jarmo, but that they would relinquish her somewhere out in the open sea, becoming transformed into so many monstrous icy hulks, never able to catch up with her again. She turned to look at Hurmo as he trudged behind her, and suddenly felt that he himself was the past from which she had to free herself. The fifteen years of her rotten marriage were all there, beneath his dirty coat and in his yellow eyes. She felt, even more strongly, that the new day must not dawn before she had rid herself of that loathsome creature. She walked on faster, clenching her fists in her pockets, seized with a sudden desire to sing. Then, equally suddenly, there in the open sea she found herself before a strange catafalque: taller than herself, it was made of birch branches and decorated with foliage and scraps of skin. When she saw what was on it she took a hasty step backwards, trembling with fear; then she ran off, unable even to utter a cry.
The chief of police himself had come to view the bodies of the two women found on the catafalque just off the island of Tahvonlahti. Seated in the back of the police van, Hyttynen was yawning as he sipped at the cup of coffee handed him by a colleague. His eyelids were swollen with tiredness and his windcheater was stained with blood. Recapturing all the animals which had escaped from the zoo had taken several hours. By the time the last Siberian tiger had been brought down by means of a dart containing a sleeping draught, the first trams were already running. People stared out of the windows in amazement at the sight of policemen going about the streets like hunters in the savanna, carrying mangled antelopes strung from a pole. Now dozens of police cars were flashing along the quays at Tahvonlahti, then setting off again for the city, sirens blaring. Margareeta, together with a nurse from the first-aid station, was waiting near the catafalque. She was still crying, and clearly very shaken, and the policeman who was questioning her was repeating his questions patiently, taking notes as he did so. Seated at her feet, whimpering anxiously from time to time, Hurmo appeared to be frowning, as though he too were trying to remember exactly what had happened. Dawn was now coming up, and the eastern sky was throbbing with pink light. The stars were drowning in the pale glow of morning, and long delicate lines of shadow were appearing on the snow. It was going to be a clear day. In the distance, Helsinki was coming back to life. Thick clouds of white smoke were rising from the buildings, one by one the blue streets were emerging from the dazzle of the lamplight; but banks of shadow still lingered above the sea, coming together towards the horizon to form one single leaden mass. In the harsh light of the floodlights, the faces of the corpses looked hacked clean of flesh, as gaunt as skulls; the women had feathers in their hair, and coloured stones had been laid on their chests. A policeman removed a bit of ice from one of Olga’s eyes, covered up Katia’s naked thighs and nodded towards the waiting ambulance. Two nurses came forward with stretchers. They spread red and yellow ribbons around the catafalque, then set up pickets with numbered pennants on the ice. One policeman was busy taking measurements, while others swept away the snow. Comment was offered in hushed tones. Flashbulbs went off, a radio croaked from a distant car. Engines were started, and the chief of police went back to the dark car from which he had emerged, chilled to the bone. Nobody paid any attention to Hurmo, who had approached the bodies and was now sniffing at them cautiously. Then he let out a sudden bark and started scratching away at Olga’s body, seeming to rummage through her clothing. The chief of police was called back, and the floodlights were again trained on to the bodies. Hurmo was jumping around, barking playfully: now he was straddling the body, now throwing himself against it, tail wagging furiously, shaking his head from side to side as he tugged doggedly at a scrap of fabric protruding from her jacket. A policeman came forward and freed a pair of blue silk men’s pyjamas from the ice. Through her tears, Margareeta recognised the monogram J. A. embroidered on the pocket. This was the last birthday gift she’d given him: a special offer from the great firm of Marimekko.
Ivan woke up in a sweat. He sat up in his bunk not knowing where he was, and gazed around him in bewilderment at the dimly-lit cabin. He was hungry and thirsty. He felt around on the shelves, in the drawers of the bedside locker, among the covers. He pulled on a handle and found himself faced by a row of bottles; there were also bars of chocolate and packets of crisps and nuts. He ate everything in sight, sampled each of the bottles and polished off the one with the blue label with the figure of a stag. He liked the sweet, fresh flavour: it reminded him of berries. His head was spinning, and his limbs, tense for so long with weariness and fear, were now at last relaxing. He undid his leather jacket and took it off. Now he was stripped to the waist, but the little low room was horribly stuffy, and he needed air. He picked up his sack, slung his drum round his neck and went out into the corridor. He came to a gangway with a glassed-in parapet, overlooking a thronged saloon. Dazzlingly elaborate chandeliers cast light on men with polished shoes, sinking their moustaches into tankards of beer and clutching half-naked women clasping glasses of brightly coloured liquid. A sweet scent hovered over everything, not unlike the one that pervaded the refectory in the mine on feast days, when lorry-loads of soldiers would come over from the barracks, singing and waving red flags. Beyond the glass door there was a wider corridor, walled with glass and mirrors. This led into another saloon, where the light came from panels set into the floor, causing Ivan to proceed with caution. The sight of a group of guards, in red jackets and white gloves, caused him to panic, but they simply smiled at him and moved off in the wake of the noisy throng. A staircase with small lamps on the handrail led up to a round dance-floor, roofed by a black dome studded with little lights, like a night sky but with a tangle of wires and steel pipes hanging down from it. Beyond the dance-floor was a raised platform on which Ivan could make out two drums similar to his own, as well as a much larger one, standing on a tripod, its skin kept taut by four iron pegs. People were swarming into the saloon and sitting down on the soft carpet which covered the staircase steps. Ivan did the same, partly because his head was swimming and his vision was becoming blurred. The lights went out, and a spotlight picked out four figures seated on the stage, dressed in multicoloured fabrics and strange pointed hats. Enthralled, Ivan gazed at the cymbals flashing in the darkness, listened to the electric guitars spitting out volleys of metallic sound worthy of submachine-guns. He listened enchanted as the saxophone let out its solitary wail, sending out flashes which lit up the faces of the audience. But when the awesome wave of sound of the big drum set the air throbbing, and the sound of deep singing rose up from the stage, Ivan leapt to his feet. That was his music! That was the rhythm the hunters of Tajmyr beat out on their drums to lure the bears out of their dens! Without thinking, without realising he was doing so, the Vostyach began to dance, stamping his right foot twice, his left three times, then both feet together, arms raised. He let go of his sack and raised his drum to his chest; then he too started playing the song of the maddened bear. The spotlight swerved away from the stage and settled on to him. The musicians abandoned their scores and matched their rhythm to his own demonic beat, while the audience clapped enthusiastically, thinking that the dishevelled individual in the tattered skins was a member of the Estonian folk group ‘Neli Sardelli’ performing for them there that evening.
When Ivan stopped playing, panting and sweating, to mad applause, the musicians rushed to cluster around him and bear him off with them on to the stage, putting microphones, kettledrums, hunting horns and a whole range of other drums before him. But Ivan batted them all away with a sweep of his hand, clutching his drum of reindeer skin more closely to his chest. He sighed deeply, narrowed his eyes and, with the tips of his fingers, drummed out the beat that told of the bear’s dash through the trees; then, with his knuckles, he played out its roar; with the flat of his hand he played its flight, and, with a grazing motion, he imitated th
e sound of the hunters’ arrows as they whistled through the air, piercing the bear’s coat with a moist thwack. When at last he laid them, open, down on the hard leather, his hands were burning, throbbing like wounds. He got down on his knees, lowered his chin and stayed there for several minutes, motionless. The audience stared at him with bated breath. Now came the magic song for warding off the devil, who was preparing to pounce once the bear’s spirit left his body. Ivan inhaled as deeply as he could; he needed all the breath he could muster for this song.
Uutta murha ristirimme
Pehkavalla pokevemme
Ulitalla tohkevasti
Pikku ranta vikevasti
Naike viike tukavanne
Ei se loutta polevanne
Namma tilla vanta rokka
Simme karatali ehka
Toise timmo rantaseli
Eika poro muisteseli
Murha tavon eli koska
Riitta sahko pulliselkska
Uutta murha ristirimme
Pehkavalla pokevemme
Ulitalla tohkevasti
Pikku ranta vikevasti
Ivan was beating time with his feet, smothering the words of his song within his throat so that they would raise no echo; that was what the hunters of Tajmyr had done. His song rose through the room like smoke, cloaked in hoarse warmth. Listening to those wild shouts no one had ever heard before, the audience was ecstatic, and began to sway along with the rhythm. As though wearing a succession of ever-changing masks, the Vostyach twisted his face into a thousand different grimaces as he forced the breath up from his belly and turned it into song. It was not just his voice that sang, but his eyes, his nose, his hands, his legs, his arching back, his whole body. Slowly, the people around him started repeating the odd word, then a verse, then the whole song. In the freezing night, the whole Baltic echoed with the song of the men of the tundra which had come down from the distant peaks of the Byrranga Mountains to the land of the thousand lakes.
Uutta murha ristirimme
Pehkavalla pokevemme
Ulitalla tohkevasti
Pikku ranta vikevasti
bellowed the drunken Finnish tourists at the tops of their voices, not understanding a word of what they were saying, raising their tankards with one hand and using the other to touch up their partners, themselves scarlet in the face from alcohol and the excitement of that unprecedented spectacle. None of them realised that what they were singing was in fact Vostyach, the unknown ancient language which linked them to the American Indians. None of them knew that the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay was once more returning to its natural home, their very own mouths, and that thousands of miles away, across the ocean, deep within the Canadian forests, seated in a circle around their coloured totems on their reservations, the Algonquin Indians pronounced it in exactly the same way in their songs invoking the spirits of their ancestors. Yet, strangely, on the Aland Islands which were now streaming past them on the other side of the glass, the elk now raised their heads, the owls opened their eyes, the hares pricked up their eyes in their dens. Salmon, herring and whitefish, their bellies streaked with mauve, rose to the surface from the frozen depths and slithered silently behind the Amorella as she picked her way between the shattered ice floes heading for Stockholm, all lights ablaze.
The professor paused: he had already been speaking for twenty minutes. He poured himself a glass of water before carrying on, and the sound rang out like a cataract in the total silence of the lecture hall. He had now almost reached the end of his speech, but no one had laughed or clapped at the points where his secretary had put the asterisks. Cowed by Aurtova’s steady glare, by his wooden movements and dogmatic tone, the audience had listened to him in subdued silence, barely risking a cough, obscurely convinced that something momentous was about to happen. His expression invisible behind his thick glasses, rather than taking notes in preparation for some poisonous riposte, even Juknov was peering around as though seeking help. In the brief pause files rustled, chairs creaked, noses were blown; in their booths, the interpreters made use of the short interruption to consult each other about some problem word. But when Aurtova put down his glass and turned over the last sheet of his speech, silence reigned once more.
‘I would like to conclude with a reflection which may perhaps seem harsh, but which is today more relevant than ever: I would like to launch an appeal which may affront the more tender-hearted among you, but which I nonetheless hope will prick the consciences of those who have our language and our culture truly at heart.
‘In this age of stagnation and decline, certain sated and jaded nations have squeezed themselves into history, only to find they can’t get out. They clog up the course of events, wallowing in their decadence. Like some monstrous misshapen tumour, they are sprouting from the very thing which throttles them. In the normal course of events it would take centuries before they were digested, before their flesh dissolved, hardened as it is by its thousand-year acquaintanceship with evil. But their incurable corruption produces recurrent flare-ups of infection in which thousands of human beings are annihilated. How many more gulags, how much more ethnic cleansing will it take before humanity is purged of that toxic pustule, the Slavs? For how long will man’s progress towards all that is good continue to be hampered by these corrupt and backward nations, scions of a primitive world that is no more? All forms of life, each man, each plant, each animal, each stone, strain inexorably to move on from the purely material, to march towards the perfection which will link them once more to God. But the dinosaurs of our time refuse to die, and their interminable death throes oblige the rest of humanity to linger on in a world of evil. Their very language has turned against them: it no longer stills incomprehension but foments it, and, when words have become irretrievably snarled up, a language will subdivide and move ever further away from its original meaning, indeed from any meaning. Then debate and even invective become vain, and we are left with just yes and no, and black and white. This spiral of destruction spawns monstrous languages, designed to conceal, to deceive, to erect a barrier between words which were once held in common, to give them double meanings, so that even the most humdrum of phrases – “Hello, who’s speaking?” for example – may trigger off a war. In the new world we’re all waiting for, a drastic new morality will be needed, one which will ensure the suicide of any distinctive group when it becomes useless or threatening to the rest of humankind. People who can no longer be understood should have the humility to change languages, seeking continued existence in the freshness of another tongue, cleansing themselves through some salutary cultural transfusion which puts new sap in their veins, and infuses new grace into their customs.
‘It was the Greeks who fostered the slippery notion of democracy, the tortuous concept of the state, the unnatural condition of living penned up within city walls. This was the model adopted by continental Europe, which further elaborated the concept of creeping, all-pervasive governance and cherished the teeming cesspit of the city and the myth of the public institution. But what is an institution? It is an empty building where no one lives, it is faceless and anonymous, even its telephones remain unanswered. All these ideas are alien to Finnish culture. For us, the village is the centre of all things, the institution is a living being, which sits itself down and drinks beside us, whose every secret we are privy to, which bares its all to us openly in the sauna. So it is to the village that we must return and, by founding one after another, repopulate the land we have abandoned, bringing back the music of our language into forests that have too long been silent, intimidated by the Slavic bark. This is how we will escape the steam-roller of the great western democracies and their blackmailing call for enforced assimilation. But we must do more besides, combining renewed cultural expansionism with firm yet passive resistance. Now I shall explain how this might be done.