by Diego Marani
All this happened many years ago. Now Professor Aurtova no longer sees Pecheneg and Tartar horsemen riding over the ceiling of his white-painted cell. He has been given permission to have a small bookshelf beside his bed, and a desk beneath the window. He has had the university doorman send him his precious edition of Paavo Kurjensaari’s Encyclopedia of Finno-Ugric Languages, the big Finnish dictionary edited by Jukka Svinhufvud and Heino Virkunen and some outdated handbooks of Uralic Philology. He spends his days declining irregular nouns and reconstructing the etymology of old words no longer mentioned in the dictionaries. He has pinned up the postcards which the doorman sends him from his holidays on the wall above his desk. He keeps a careful daily diary, and the speech he intends to give at the XXIVth Congress of Finno-Ugric languages, the one to be held in Budapest, is already stowed away in the drawer of his bedside table. Hurmo now rests under a birch tree in a wood outside Helsinki, although the wooden board nailed into the bark, its pink paint already peeling off, refers to him as Kukka. Margareeta has sold her Helsinki apartment and has gone to live with her sister in Kemi, where the sea always freezes over in winter in the course of a single night, so that the melancholy lilt of the last autumn waves remains before your eyes until the following spring.
On a cruise ship plying the Baltic from Helsinki to Stockholm, the last of the Vostyachs earns his living by performing with the Estonian folk group ‘Neli Sardelli’. He plays a drum made of reindeer skin, singing the ancient songs of a mysterious language which makes your hair stand up on end; which makes you want to pray.
