Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

Olga peered eagerly at the plate and turned her shining eyes upon her host.

‘ Embarras de richesses! ’

‘There’s also a bottle of vodka outside the door. For reasons of neutrality, it is neither Russian nor Finnish, but Polish,’ Aurtova added jokingly.

‘An excellent compromise.’

‘And, after dinner, a good soaking in the sauna.’ He pointed towards the porthole at the end of the corridor.

‘Oh, goodness! Naked, Finnish style? Will we be whipping each other’s back with fir branches?’ asked Olga, blushing with excitement.

Aurtova nodded with a grunt. For him, that would be the hardest part of the evening. He was dreading it. But he hoped that the drink would work its magic: that the sauna would be the coup de grâce and that she would pass out, delivering him from the supposed climax. He poured them some champagne and raised his glass.

‘To the Finno-Ugric languages!’ he exclaimed.

‘To the Finno-Ugric languages,’ repeated Olga. They drank in silence.

‘By the way, Jarmo, you haven’t yet told me what you think of my Vostyach.’

Aurtova sat himself down in front of her as they sipped their champagne.

‘Well, you were right, I must admit: I was deeply moved by the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay. It’s a sound that comes from the very depths of our history!’ he said with feigned emotion. ‘I imagine…I imagine you’ve brought the tapes with you? They will be invaluable material for the congress minutes,’ he added meaningfully.

‘Of course. I take them with me wherever I go, just to be on the safe side,’ said Olga, patting the black leather bag hanging from her arm. ‘In fact, I’d like to make a copy to take back with me to Saint Petersburg, for the faculty library. Can you see to that?’

‘No problem, I’ll have it done tomorrow,’ Aurtova promised obligingly, staring at the bag as though it were a mirage, likely to recede before him at any moment. A sweet smell of resin was wafting through the room, and the heat was causing the furniture to creak as the grain breathed and expanded in the warmth. The fire was crackling cheerfully, lighting their faces up with its spurts of red. But their eyes remained hidden, sunk in the black cavities of their sockets. Each was seeking out the other’s gaze in an attempt to read their thoughts. From behind his glass, Aurtova was observing Olga, who was nervously fiddling with her rings.

‘As you probably know, some scholars in America claim that the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay is also found in Palaic, or ancient Hittite,’ Olga said suddenly, a hint of mystery in her voice. Aurtova took a sip of champagne, and made a clucking noise.

‘Nothing could be more plausible!’ he remarked, self-confidently. ‘Just one more confirmation that the Indo-European languages were strongly influenced by Proto-Uralic. In ancient times we were the civilised ones and they were the barbarians. We were the masters, they were the slaves. Not for nothing is the word aryan so similar to the Finnic orja , which means slave.’

‘Actually, we don’t even know what Palaic sounded like — it’s died out completely. I shudder when I think how many languages have met that fate,’ said Olga, dreamily.

‘Well, statistics tell us that one of the six thousand languages still spoken on this earth dies out every two weeks, my dear,’ retorted Aurtova, almost gleefully.

‘And with each one that dies, a little truth dies with it,’ Olga retorted in her turn, stiffening a little and rubbing her sweating hands.

‘Whereas I would say the contrary is true: the fewer there are left, the more we’re moving towards the truth, towards the pure language which contains them all,’ said Aurtova, taking another sip.

‘I once thought that way, too. Don’t you remember when you hoped against hope to track down some speaker of Karagass among the Tungus?’

‘The vanity of youth,’ said Aurtova, shrugging his shoulders. Olga shook her head. A burst of warmth caused her cheeks and ears to redden.

‘The true meaning of things is hidden from us; it lies beyond the bounds of any one language, and everybody tries to arrive at it with their own imperfect words. But no language can do this on its own. Every single language is necessary to keep the universe alive,’ said Olga ardently, giving Aurtova an impassioned look.

‘A dying language is like a dying man. However unfortunate the death of any language, it’s just a fact of life. While some will be born of it, yet others will die of it. Like men, words too have to adapt in order to survive. Those which burn themselves out, or move away from their original meaning, are doomed to disappear,’ Aurtova noted coldly.

‘But think what vast tracts of time each language has travelled though, how much it’s said. Sometimes its survival or its extinction hangs by a thread! Do you know why the Vostyachs survived into the last century, while the Koibalics, the Motorici and the Karagass were already extinct by 1600?’

Aurtova had gone back into the kitchen to prepare the salmon hors d’oeuvre. He spread two plates with savoury biscuits, butter and gherkins.

‘That I couldn’t tell you,’ he said from the other room. Olga went to join him, glass in hand.

‘Because of an arrow, Jarmo. The Vostyachs invented a kind of arrow with side pieces. If it missed its mark, it would get stuck in the reeds, rather than lost in the swamps of the tundra. It was indeed one more arrow to their quiver: one more coot per day, enabling them to survive’.

‘How intriguing! So it’s an arrow I’ll have to thank if I manage to prove that Helsinki was a Sioux Encampment and that I am a distant descendant of Jarmo Sitting Bull! Russian woman, never will you have my scalp!’ said Aurtova jokingly. But the ironic note he’d tried to adopt stuck in his throat. Olga laughed, redder than ever, while her host refilled her glass.

‘You’re going too far, as usual, Jarmo!’ she chided him in tones of affectionate reproach. Then she went on:

‘It’s true that Vostyach consonants open up new paths, but they have yet to be explored. All we can conclude from the discovery of Vostyach is that it is related to Eskimo-Inuit. At the time when the Indo-Europeans reached Europe, the Finno-Ugrians were migrating eastwards, and their linguistic unity was breaking up into various languages, increasingly remote from one another. But, without Vostyach, it was impossible to reconstruct this fragmentation. This is now within our grasp. As to your Finno-Ugrians, only one part of the Uralic branch went eastwards. Speakers of Veps, Ingrian, Estonian, Karelian, Sami and finally Finnish arrived in successive waves. That would also explain why you settled so far to the north: simply because the rest of the continent was already occupied. It’s true that this will oblige you to reconsider your theories, Jarmo. But do you realise what fascinating new perspectives it will open up? Who knows, perhaps before too long we’ll find ourselves together again attending a congress on the Algonquin languages of North America!’

Aurtova had been listening in silence, biting his lip in irritation. He uncorked the second bottle of champagne with an angry gesture.

‘No, Olga, that’s where you’re wrong. The Finno-Ugrians were a single people, fragmented only marginally by the invasions of Altaic peoples who drove them westwards. A good idea of the various stages of our migration is given by the distribution of our languages across the map, between the Urals and the Gulf of Bothnia, and by their phonological development. To the east we have the Dolichocephalics , with indistinct or barely voiced consonants and some remnants of the coup de glotte . To the west, among the Brachiocephalics , the coup de glotte disappears and the consonants are clearer. Despite this dispersion, even today our languages are very similar, and still have all the sophistication of an ancient civilisation. But during the Upper Proto-Uralic Period we were too far from the Mediterranean for anyone to notice us. There have been other ancient and sharp-witted peoples who, like ourselves, have thousands of years of history behind them. But they were at the centre of the known world: the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Hebrews. Like ours, the words of their languages are hard as slivers of diamond, they have been pared down to the bone by the pitiless scalpel of time. Then come the European peoples, currently at the height of their maturity. Their languages have a hard crust, but below it they are still soft. Then come the linguistic losers: stranded beyond the reach of history’s flow, they are like linguistic ox-bow lakes. Some have already dried up, others will soon meet the same fate. They are peoples with wizened faces; they look like old sages who have seen it all, but inside they are still children, feral children whom no one has ever disciplined, who have grown up running wild, with no need to develop a sophisticated language. The sounds of their speech are too akin to the cries of animals. Your Vostyach is one of these. He does not utter words, but howls. Living alone among the beasts, his phonation apparatus has regressed. His velar and guttural consonants, for example, speak volumes: they are all posterior sounds made with the back of the mouth. According to Baudouin de Courtenay, producing sounds with the posterior phonatory apparatus is typical of animals. The dog, for example, barks with his larynx. Whereas man’s phonatory development has led him to produce sounds with the front of his mouth, with his lips, with the tip of his tongue against his teeth and palate. It is the labials, the palatals and the sibilants which distinguish us from beasts. The language of your noble savage should be consigned to oblivion, not preserved. That’s the truth of the matter! By freeing itself of Vostyach, mankind will be taking yet another step away from the animal kingdom.’