Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

Since that day, Ivan had not uttered a word. He had carried on washing stones in the pool of icy water, had split rocks with his pick-axe, had pushed the wheelbarrow along the steep, slippery path, had gone about all his work with lowered eyes, had endured all manner of humiliation, eating without looking to see what they poured into his mess tin, getting up at dawn and going to bed at sunset without a word. The new convicts who arrived in the camp thought that Ivan was dumb. Only the ones who’d been there longer knew why he never spoke. The soldiers too — even the ones who had killed his father — had forgotten. They didn’t recognise him among the crowd of tattered death’s-heads they prodded into the lorries every day. When Ivan became a man, no one in the mine any longer had any idea who that short, sinewy local was, with his flat face and jutting Tartar cheekbones. Everyone who knew his story was long dead. The others felt alarmed by that inexplicable silence which seemed akin to madness. The cover of his file, kept in a cupboard in the barracks, bore just one word: Ivan. All it contained were a few crumpled pages concerning his arrest for poaching.

Ivan broke off a branch and swung it round his head to drive off the mosquitoes and the bad memories. Now he had other things to worry about. He had to take care of the child. First of all he had to teach him how to bend a birch branch into a bow, how to braid and stretch the fibres of the bark to make ropes, how to cut an arrow so that it would imitate the falcon’s cry. Soon he would have to get by on his own and spend the winter in the forest. He would sleep in huts covered with skins and bark. He would dig into the frozen water of the lakes for bait. A thick row of young birch trees growing by the banks of a pool caught Ivan’s eye. He walked out over the sand and caught sight of the odd fish darting through the still water. He bent one of the saplings towards him, broke off a gleaming white branch and turned it around in his hands, exclaiming aloud: ‘This will make a splendid bow.’ Then salmon rose to the surface, dozens of coot flew skywards from their hiding-places among the reeds, thousands of hamsters emerged from their burrows and dived blindly into the muddy marshes; in the distant tundra, whole droves of wild reindeer galloped off in alarm. The lake waters puckered beneath a breath of wind, which then ran like a shiver throughout the forest. The mist melted away and the sun glittered on the tree trunks. It was twenty years since Ivan had uttered a word, twenty years since the language spoken by the oldest tribe of the Proto-Uralic family, the Vostyachs — cousins of the Samoyeds, the wild bear-hunters who once lived in the Byrranga Mountains and whom scientists believed to be extinct — had been heard anywhere in Northern Siberia. Hearing those sounds, all nature quaked. Things that had not been named for years emerged sluggishly from their long sleep, realising they still existed. Each animal in turn answered Ivan’s words with its own call. They were back — the men who could talk with wolves, who knew the names of the black fish hidden in the mud of the Arctic lakes, of the fleshy mosses which, for just a few summer’s days, purpled the rocks beneath the Tajmyr Peninsula; the men who had found the way out of the dark forests into another world but never the way back.

For the first few days, Ivan wandered through the thick of the trees and over the rocks, prompted by clues from his eyes and ears. For the first time in years, his heart felt untroubled. But he missed his fellow-men. He was looking for his people, because now at last he wanted, he needed to speak. He remembered the faces around the fire, the snow-covered hunters, dressed in skins, crowding into the yurt. They would sit down around the embers, drink a bowl of curdled milk and then sink into a deep sleep. When they came down from the mountains in the spring, their gaze was as piercing as that of the animals they had hunted throughout the winter. Ivan called out names which had come back to him the moment he opened his mouth to utter them. Korak, Häinö, Taypok. No one answered, no one came forward to meet the returning convict. He followed ancient paths scoured out in the rock, sometimes he came upon the skeleton of a burned-out yurt, or strips of hardened leather hanging from some branch. But he did not meet a living soul. Only the distant wolves answered his call. The whole forest was one vast graveyard without graves. His people were buried beneath the black earth where moss and mushrooms grew. They had dissolved into the rotting mud that lay at the bottom of the pools, into the dark flesh of the berries, into the sickly sap of the birch trees, swayed by mysterious gusts of wind.

Ivan had realised that the child who sometimes followed him, then disappeared again between the ferns, was not alive. He was a vision, a spirit without a home; a dead thing rejected by the world to come. A silent shade. Yet, in his desire to break out of his solitude, Ivan had begun to talk to him. He told him stories he did not know he knew, but which came into his head with every step he took in those familiar places. To his surprise, he also found himself singing, remembering the sound of instruments which did not seem to be part of any known memory, but which beat in his temples the moment he began to sing. One after the other, he rediscovered the hidden paths he had taken with his father, he recognised the copse of black birches where the young deer, their antlers still soft and pulpy as young bark, would go to hide. He found the waterfall in the mountain stream he’d gone to with his father to catch salmon, from which you could see the distant outline of the far-off peaks, those furthest to the north, the first to catch the snow. He came to the bare, dry upland plain, where all that grew was the odd dwarf birch tree, clinging to the rock, the odd reddish dwarf pine, laid low by frost. He followed the stony track up as far as he could and, though he could not see it, he knew that somewhere, far below him, lay the sea. With his white bow he hunted and killed animals whose flesh he had no intention of eating: what he craved was their strong, sour smell. Greedily, he breathed in the smell of lives which were being cut short in order to quicken his own, which was still in suspended animation. What most alarmed him, in the new world he was discovering, was its silence. It was too similar to that of the nights in the hut, when he’d been in the mine. So Ivan made himself a drum out of reindeer skin. He remembered his father’s skilful hands as he bound strips of leather around the carefully shaped piece of spruce. He would play it in front of the fire on moonless nights, when it was dangerous to fall asleep and you might be plummeted into the world of the dead. This was what had happened to old Kunnas one October night in his hut when he was getting ready to go out hunting. The wind had crept down quietly from the Byrranga Mountains, slipped into the forest almost at ground level, without setting the branches stirring. It had stolen into the huts, whistling among the skins, among the sheets of bark, and had frozen the blood of all the sleepers in their veins. Kunnas had been found seated on his rush mat, his bow clutched in his hand and his quiver slung over his shoulder. His eyes were open; he seemed surprised to have been taken by death so mindlessly.

At sunrise Ivan would tie his drum around his waist and follow the stony track up to the topmost point. Then he would kneel down on the highest rock and start to play, to tell the world that he was still alive. He rapped on the taut skin with both his hands, with the bones of animals, and, as he did so, his arms and fingers remembered movements they had made earlier in another life.

The first snowfall came towards the end of autumn. Ivan chose a sheltered spot in the wood and built himself a yurt of animal skins. Now, at night, he could hear the wolves coming closer and closer; in the darkness, he saw their yellow eyes. Then he would fashion arrows, which he would heat in the fire, and talk to the wolves aloud, to scare them off. But they stayed motionless behind the trees, fixing their gaze on man and fire alike, pricking their ears when Ivan doused the flames. Then they would curl up until dawn, when he would see them move off into the misty forest. One night Ivan had a disturbing dream. Awaking with a start, he heard the wolves howling; they were all around his yurt. Dozens of wolves were staring at him, lifting their muzzles skywards and baying piteously. Then Ivan understood. They were his people. Fleeing the soldiers, the men of his tribe had hidden in deep underground lairs in the mountain caves. They had become wolves themselves, and now they lived in the forests. That was why they were seeking him out now. He must call them back, sing and play to them to bring them back into the world of men. So each night Ivan would play his drum for them. He would light the fire and wait until the stars that made up Orion were above him in the sky — the glinting iron belt, the drawn bow and glowing arrow, pointing at the darkness. Then he would tap his fingers gently on the drum and look towards the wood. The wolves would narrow their eyes and whimper uneasily, scenting fire. Then they would circle in and sit on their hind quarters until the stars faded from the sky. But none of them ever took on human form. They had been too long out of the world of men, they had ventured too far among the beasts, and the way back was lost. Ivan would have to go right deep into their lairs and bring them back one by one.