The Last of the Vostyachs

by Diego Marani

  ‘Over these last years we have at last been able to take stock of the state of the various Finno-Ugric languages, and have found them to be in rude health and consistent growth, much more so than their past history might suggest. Driven by enemy peoples out of their first homelands into the Siberian tundra at the edge of the occupied world, forced to live in climatic conditions which put their very existence in jeopardy, the Finnish peoples survived centuries of persecution, and indeed of genocide during the dark Soviet era. Besieged by the hostile tide of Slavs, our peoples resisted cultural assimilation, keeping the memory of their mother tongue alive to the point that it may now at last be reborn. Suddenly a mood of brotherhood is stirring once again, one which we thought had been put out, but which is now making itself felt from the Urals to the Atlantic, from Mordvia to Karelia, from Ingria to Hungary, over an area the size of Western Europe. All in all, what saved our peoples from Russianisation and linguistic annihilation was not just their intrinsic physical robustness, their dogged hold on life, their fighting spirit, but sheer ignorance. It was our ignorance of the Russian language, our refusal to learn it and to surrender to the dominant culture, which enabled our peoples to survive linguistically. If today Nenets, Ngnasan, Mordvin, Vogul and Votic are still spoken, it is because they have been protected by their speakers’ ignorance. Instead of learning Russian and improving their social condition by moving into the great industrial centres or emigrating to more prosperous areas, the Finnish peoples preferred to barricade themselves behind their own language, thus remaining impervious to Russianisation.

  And this should serve us as an example. In the world of mass culture, where the weaker languages are threatened by a new linguistic colonialism which stifles minority cultures, only ignorance can protect us from extinction. My call to the new generations, here as in the former Soviet republics of Finnish stock, is therefore this: cherish ignorance, do not study the language of the foreigner, but force him to learn your own! Since he cannot take on the world’s linguistic colossi on equal terms, all that the speaker of a Finnic language can do is to adopt an attitude of resolute, dumb ignorance, the very one which has enabled him to survive intact over so many centuries. Ignorance will be our strength, our breastplate, and it will sabotage linguistic imperialism until it is no more. We must never forget that expansion always saps the strength, and that the day will inevitably come when the dominant languages crumble away. Too far from their meanings, like an advance guard too far from their supply lines, such foreign words as are still trickling into the Finnic languages will be swallowed up by the very tongues which they themselves were destined to stifle; their sounds and phonemes will be cast out, their double consonants will fall away, their vowels will broaden out and the language of true men will be reborn. Who today recognises the Indo-European roots of our familiar ranta or pullo or kaupunki? Yet these were originally Germanic words, which were brought into Finland with domination in mind. But the Finnic languages gobbled them up, turned “strand”, “bottle” and “kaufpunkt” into something of their own, stripping away the undesirable sounds which our mouths found hard to pronounce, giving new strength to tainted vowels and merging three untidy palatals into a single velar, thereby creating new and solid words, destined to last forever.

  ‘So, on this solemn occasion, I am taking advantage of this celebration of our languages to express the hope that, in fifty years time, no one between the Gulf of Bothnia and the White Sea will know one single word of English or of Russian, and that the vocalic harmony of the Finno-Ugric languages will ring out loud and clear, dense and compact as our own forests. Long live Finland! Long live ignorance!’

  Such desultory applause as Aurtova’s speech elicited was short-lived; the packed lecture hall seemed in the grip of some nameless dread. The eyes of most of the audience were no longer on the speaker’s platform, bedecked with flowers and flags, but on the group of policemen advancing warily from the back of the hall, leaving damp footprints on the linoleum. Their leader stood stiffly at the foot of the dais, waiting for the professor to descend to his own level, then asked him demurely for his personal details, reading out every word from the identity card the great man coolly handed him. Then, in a voice touched with regret, he uttered the indictment:

  ‘Professor Jarmo Aurtova, I declare you under arrest for the murder of Olga Pavlovna and Katia Rekhsadze.’

  Staring into the middle distance, Aurtova held out his wrists to receive the handcuffs and followed the police without a word. He walked through the hall with a martial step, holding his head high in the midst of the crowd which drew aside to let him pass. The photographers who were awaiting him in the entrance hall seemed cowed by his haughty demeanour, scarcely able to perform their function: the face they saw before them, which would stare forth from the crime pages of the Helsingin Sanomat, was not that of a murderer, but of a hero, fit for some monument to the fallen, some commemorative medal, a thousand-mark banknote. Aurtova did not see the rows of blank faces in front of him; his impassive gaze was not on the hall around him, nor on the buildings of the city that could be glimpsed beyond the great glass door, nor even on the hazy horizon beyond. He was gazing into distances yet more remote, beyond the sky, beyond time itself. He was staring, mesmerised, into the spinning maelstrom of the future as it swallowed centuries, peoples, seas and mountains. The Vostyachs’ yurts were ripped to tatters as they were sucked into the eye of that mighty cyclone, along with Pecheneg horsemen, Viking hordes, Cossack horses, Swedish galleons. Outside, on the quay in front of the conference centre where the crowd had gathered to observe the scene, the professor did not deign to cast even the briefest of glances at his ex-wife, or at poor Hurmo, who was whimpering and straining on the leash to run to greet his master. He turned his back on the two figures who were waiting for him in the snow; for one brief moment he looked out to sea, breathed in a deep lungful of sea air and got into the police van, doing up the top button of his coat as he did so.

  While he was being driven across the city on his way to the prison at Valilla, Professor Aurtova still had no idea who or what it was that had given him away. Nor did he care. The Director of the Institute of Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Helsinki had no regrets, indeed he was proud of what he had done. He lifted his head and thrust out his chest as he drove past the white faculty colonnade.

  Even when he learned that it was his pyjamas that had betrayed him, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He didn’t realise that Olga had put them on before losing consciousness and that he, fumbling around in the dark, had mistaken them for her silk blouse. As to the mysterious catafalque the papers talked of in the days that followed, Aurtova was certain that it was the work of Pecheneg horsemen, and he was surprised that no one seemed interested in tracking them down. Why was no one pursuing them to the Estonian coast; burning down their villages, running their swords through their children’s heads and stringing them up from the trees, as those bloodthirsty barbarians themselves had done with the Finns? Pecheneg children should be tracked down and impaled in full view of their fathers, so that no Pecheneg would dare ever again to raise a sword against the Finnish peoples. It did not even enter the professor’s head that it had been Ivan who had built that gruesome monument, that he had not in fact embarked for Sweden but was playing his drum on board a cruise ship. The Vostyach must disappear from the face of the earth, along with all his kind. In the nightmare visions into which he was ever more often plunged, Aurtova imagined Ivan roaming the streets of Stockholm, chased off like a tramp, pursued like a thief, disease-ridden in some poorhouse. He dreamed that he had become a drug addict, an alcoholic, rotting away in a Swedish prison, or dead in some harbour brawl, his body thrown into the sea. Festering in the dark waters of the port of Stockholm, his body would soon have turned to mud, food for the fish, a fossil shell, empty and silent, sent rolling to and fro by the cold currents on the ocean floor.

  Seated on a bench in his prison cell, hands in his lap and knees together, as though he were in
church, Aurtova would look through the bars on the narrow windows, seeing the streets and squares of his city, imagining the great rooms of his exclusive apartment. He knew he wouldn’t be seeing any of them again for quite some time. But, with a bit of luck, he might be out in time for the XXIVth Congress of Finno-Ugric languages, which was to be held in Budapest. And what are fifteen years in the life of a language?

  Hurmo flicked the foam from his muzzle and dug in his claws, thoroughly unwilling to be immersed in that soapy water. But Margareeta took him lovingly in her arms, all fat and shapeless as he was, and laid him delicately down amidst the bubbles. At first he stiffened, lowered his ears and let out a powerful howl. Then, under the caresses of his mistress, he relaxed, folded his paws and curled up in the warm water. He even allowed his stomach to be brushed, put up with the jet of water trained on his chest, staring resignedly at his soaking fur. He shook himself with relief into the towel in which Margareeta had wrapped him, proffering each paw in turn to have it dried. Lastly, he opened an obedient mouth and swallowed the worming pill. That was how it was every Sunday, and by now Hurmo was used to it. He had become used to everything; except for his new name.

  ‘You’ll never see your master again,’ Margareeta had told him one summer evening as she came into the house and threw herself wearily on to the bed. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and had spent a few moments staring at the ceiling while Hurmo panted suspiciously on his little armchair.

  ‘Well, if fate has decreed that you and I should be together, we might as well resign ourselves, don’t you agree?’ she had added, getting up to give him a stroke, the first he’d had since the divorce. He wagged his tail timidly, but kept his distance.

  ‘Meanwhile, the first thing we have to do is to change your name, because Hurmo is a dog’s name, and you’re a bitch. From now on you’ll be called Kukka, do you understand? And my word, Kukka, what a beauty you’re going to be!’

  So Hurmo had become Kukka, and he no longer slept on the little armchair in the bedroom, which was filthy by now, but under the kitchen window in a brand-new basket lined with flowered material. He had his food in a pink bowl under the sink, and a new real leather collar with a little bell, which in fact made him feel a bit like a cat, but on the other hand it also gave him a touch of pedigree. But when Margareeta took him for walks in the Observatory Gardens, he never responded to his new name. That was the only, minor disappointment he continued to cause his mistress.

  From his position in the wooden dock in the law-court, Professor Aurtova had answered all the Public Prosecutor’s questions with a smile, describing everything that had happened on that far-off night of the ninth of January for the umpteenth time to a courtroom criss-crossed by gilded rays of dusty sunlight. He had confirmed that it was he and only he who had dragged the bodies of both women into the frozen sea where they would meet their deaths, after having made them drunk and drugged them with sleeping pills. He explained that he had lured them to the cottage with promises of generous financial rewards if they lent themselves to his secret sexual fantasies. At that point the members of the jury had coughed nervously in their seats, and a shocked murmur had gone up from the public, losing itself in the austere vaults above. The judge had politely called for silence and blushingly begun to leaf through his sheaf of papers, before inquiring somewhat bashfully about the precise nature of such fantasies. Then the professor had again assumed the distant, vacant look which the prison doctors had noted with concern some days previously, when Aurtova had been brought into the infirmary, bound to a stretcher completely naked. Then the Public Prosecutor returned to his charge, wanting to know how the professor had managed to construct the strange catafalque on which he had laid the bodies, with all those peculiar scraps of leather and feathers and plaited hair. He had approached the accused with a faintly threatening air, ordering him to explain the hidden meaning of that diabolical construction. Aurtova had explained to him, precisely and patiently, how he had found the timber in the woods on the nearby islands, and cut the trees down with his axe. He had used his rope to bind the trunks to the tow coupling on his car and pulled them into the sea, where he had built the catafalque. As to its meaning, here the professor had shaken his head, and his eyes had suddenly gone blank: now they were fixed on the throngs of Pechenegs pressed up against the lowering wind-scoured sky, riding across the steppe, brandishing the translucent skins of their flayed enemies from the tips of their lances like so many paper banners, like kites in human form. The lawyers had looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders. In the public gallery, the women had pressed their knees together in disapproval, and the men sighed heavily, crossing their arms. The judge had risen to his feet and the members of the jury had trooped out of the courtroom in an orderly fashion.

  Over the days which followed, Professor Aurtova underwent further psychiatric tests and was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, a danger to himself and others. The windows of the mental hospital in which he was confined looked out on to a wood, not far from the sea: in the autumn the leaves briefly took on a variety of lovely hues, and when the leaves fell there was a distant view of the seashore, the sea forever grey and dark between the white trunks of the birch trees.

  The manager was a short, fat man who looked very like the doctor in the mine. Ivan was not sure what was wanted of him, but he had at least understood that this strange smartly turned-out figure was pleased to see him play the drum and dance with the other musicians on the stage in the big saloon with the flashing floor. Scarcely a week had gone by since Ivan had embarked on his improvised number, but already everyone on board the Amorella was singing his songs: the waiters while they were serving at the bar, the ship boys as they mopped the kitchen floors, the officers when they were playing cards on the bridge; even the seven Somalis who worked cooped up in the oily heat of the engine-room would burst cheerily into Uutta murha ristirimme as though it were a shepherd’s song from Ogaden. The ship’s turbines throbbed to the rhythm of Ivan’s drum, the foghorn played along in time to it and the propellers danced to the beat of the wild music as they turned in the water. Thus the Samoyedic language of the Vostyachs, which scholars believed extinct, could truly be said to be alive and flourishing from the hold to the smart upper deck, from stem to stern, of one large ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The weary, happy tourists who poured off the Amorella at the end of the cruise, laden with souvenirs and liquor bottles, all went home singing that irresistible refrain, those perfect, rounded sounds which left the mouth sated and the heart at rest. So, throughout Finland, in showers, on skis, in sawmills, in workshops, queuing along the ring road around Espoo or in the grey factories of Pasil, Vostyach was coming back to life among the people to whom it had one day belonged. In the forests the wood grouse raised their crests, the bears roared as they reared up on their hind legs and the lemmings crowded together around the banks of the lakes to hear the sound of their ancient name which no one had uttered for years.

  When Ivan went back into the changing room after his performance, the short fat man came after him to accompany him, smiling, to the restaurant on the upper deck, and had him served at a table with a white cloth, right by the window, with a view of the sea. Ivan had never seen it so brightly lit up by the moon. He liked it on that ship, together with his new friends from the ‘Neli Sardelli’ folk group, even if he had difficulty in communicating with them, and sometimes felt that they were teasing him, laughing and pulling wry faces; but then they would slap him on the back, and he knew that there was no malice in what they did. He could see in their eyes that they were fond of him, and when the ship docked at Stockholm or Marieham they would never leave him on his own. They took him around with them to the beer houses, to the cinema, or window-shopping. The only place he refused to go to was the striptease joints: he was afraid of women baring swollen breasts and hard buttocks in the glare of psychedelic lighting. They reminded him of the black shape with its smell of internal organs which had driven him beside him
self that distant winter morning. So he would stay outside, seated in some bar where his friends would buy him crisps and beer, signalling to the barman to keep an eye on him. They too had begun to refer to him as ‘Vostyach’, because Ivan had said the word a thousand times to explain who he was and where he came from. But the Estonian musicians knew nothing of the Vostyachs, they had never been hunting in the tundra, and Ivan was unable to explain to them where the Byrranga Mountains were. On summer nights, when they stayed up on deck, looking at the white sky, Ivan would indicate the distant point in the middle of the sea where Urgel set; but no one knew what he meant. They would give him another bottle of beer and sit him down on a deckchair, hoping he’d forget and quieten down.

  Sometimes his people had appeared to him in dreams: Korak, Häinö, old Taypok. He’d seen his father coming towards him over the ice, smiling, with a big fish dangling from his line. Then he had awoken with a start, remembering the wolves which howled in the forest in Tajmyr, unable to become men again. But all that was now too far away, and Ivan wanted to forget about it. He no longer wanted to think about the mine or to meet the child who had never died, and if, on lonely nights, he sometimes felt like weeping, it was only for the fair-haired woman who had been fond of him. The gate of memory was open for her alone. In the evening, before falling asleep, he found himself repeating the words he had spoken for her to capture in the little black box which talked on its own. He remembered them all, and each one of them brought back images of those happy days. He remembered the inn, the tarred roofs of the houses in the village of the turnip-growers, his favourite trees, the fair-haired woman who smiled as she listened to him, and the rounded hills of the Byrranga Mountains in the distance, the deer’s head and the two protruding points like hares’ ears. He remembered the time in the Byrranga Mountains when each name adhered magically to the thing to which it belonged, and the tundra rang with the mighty Vostyach language; he remembered the men who could talk with wolves, who knew the name of the black fish which lived in the mud of the arctic lakes, of the fleshy moss which bloomed in high summer just for one day, purpling the rocks above the Tajmyr Peninsula. He remembered the men who had found the way out of the dark forest to another world, but never the way back.