Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

While he was driving along the road to the airport, still dazed with fever, gripping the steering wheel as though it were the handle of a dagger, Professor Aurtova had a brief moment of lucidity. For an instant, his hectic mind was lit up by a flash of scientific spirit. He remembered the tapes he had in his pocket, and felt an urgent desire to listen to them, to hear the language once spoken by the now vanished Vostyachs. He turned on the radio and slipped the first tape into the lit-up mouth of the cassette player. Then, in the silence barely broken by the humming of the engine, the voice of Ivan Vostyach emerged from the surrounding cold as it had for the first time in the distant forests of the Byrranga Mountains. In all probability, thought the professor to himself with chilling nonchalance, that was the voice of a man already dead. Still, he felt a shiver run down his spine when he heard the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay ring out loud and clear in the chill air. So, the mysterious semi-consonant of the American Indians had indeed been heard in Asia, too. It issued from the deepest entrails of mankind, perhaps indeed from those times immemorial when men had only just started to stand upright. Aurtova listened in astonishment as that ancient sound vibrated in his ears, as it was borne away on the icy wind which was its native home. It set forgotten follicles stirring in the soft pulp of his brain, disturbing liquids that had lain motionless for centuries, arousing sensations not made for men of the modern world. Stunned by what he had heard, befuddled by fever, Aurtova felt the car going into a sudden skid; the spiked tyres grazed the kerb and the headlights revealed a wall of birch trees. He slowed down and came off the motorway just before Vantaa, taking a track which went deep into the woods. He stopped in a clearing, turned off the lights and waited for the silence to close in again around him. Then he got out of the car, kneeled down in the snow and used his lighter to set fire to the two cassettes. The plastic sizzled and crackled, then shrivelled away, spraying the air with a fine rain of fiery ashes. All that remained of the voice of Ivan Vostyach was a sticky, evil-smelling little lump which soon hardened in the snow.

From the top of his icy dune, Ivan stared at the black line which ran across the sea, branching out like a warm vein. Dragged by the strong current, the water was sending up a hail of spray; it was only near the shore that a slight, pearly white skin would form, to be shattered under the impact of the stronger waves. It was impossible to venture further out. Ivan had walked for miles, keeping clear of the last islands. He had advanced ever further into the desert of ice, following the eastern stars, those he could see shining beyond the woods from his mountains, towards the great river delta. He had clambered over huge clefts, sending the reindeer ahead of him, then pushing the sledge over the frozen surface to act as a footbridge. Around the islands most exposed to the wind, the sea had closed in, forming deep seams whose sharp peaks disfigured the frozen surface of the waves like scars. Ivan had had to split them with his axe to enable the runners of the sledge to clear them. But now he would have to turn back, because his way was barred, and skirting the flow of the current might be dangerous. Ivan turned towards the north. That was the only way of avoiding the city. He turned his reindeer’s heads towards the constellation of Urgel and set off again. He was hoping to reach the thick woods he had seen from the train window on his arrival in Helsinki. The horizon was sucking the light out of the stars; they were falling to earth in countless numbers, crossing infinitesimal spaces but taking centuries to do so. Ivan hadn’t taken his eyes off them since he had left Korkeasaari. He felt an unknown force closing in around him, and he was beginning to fear that it might be Ticholbon, the star which placed itself in front of the winter constellations and blocked their way. The old men of the Byrranga Mountains would drive it off with their axes, and their song. They would stay up the whole night staring at it, and in the morning people would find them in the forest, covered in ice but nonetheless triumphant. But you had to know just how to look at it: if you fixed it with an irreverent gaze, you might go mad. Ivan had heard tell of certain black shamans from the great river who had gone up into the mountains to drive Ticholbon away and who had found themselves destined to sing, hysterically, for the rest of their days. They were shunned by the villagers, who threw stones at them and made amulets of reindeer bone to ward off their spirits; even the wild beasts gave them a wide berth. That was why Ivan was fearful of lifting his eyes to the cold star, up there to the north-east, between Khaanto and Suolta.

When the icebreaker Sisu moved off from the quay at Pohjoisstama with a blast of its foghorn, the guanacos and wild goats galloped away in alarm. The crust of ice shattered before it with a sound of mangled stone, but it sailed serenely onwards, leaving a heaving strip of black water in its wake, wide as a road. It was going towards the open sea, to reopen the sea routes which crossed the Baltic. Soon its lights disappeared into the darkness, leaving a gleaming black chasm beside the quay where it had been moored, in which the buildings on the shore were now reflected like so many snaggleteeth. Now it was in the distance, buried beneath piles of cloud, and Ivan could no longer see it. But he felt the crust of ice swaying like a raft, and heard a roar, stronger even than thunder, explode in the open sea beyond the furthest islands. To the west of Lonna, the icebreaker had opened up a foaming trench giving free passage to the ferries to Tallinn. Now Ivan’s route to the forests was blocked by an impassable abyss. Alarmed by the hubbub, he took the whip to his reindeer, heading them towards the city. The sledge hissed and bounced over the snow, which split like a pane of glass beneath its runners. Ivan tried to peer beyond his reindeer’s straining necks to keep an eye out for the frozen clefts and mounds, and avoid the wind-hardened dunes. Fortunately, however, he had chanced on an expanse of unruffled sea, which had frozen over evenly, as though it had been stilled by the cold which rose up from the depths, and then been covered by a steady fall of snow. When he felt that he was out of danger, he got down from the sledge and bent down to listen. Now he could hear nothing, indeed see nothing, except, there in the distance, the faint glow of the city. There was nothing for it. He had to go that way in order to head eastwards. He drove his reindeer towards a heap of ice, put his drum on the ground and began to beat it with his scrap of bone. It ticked away in the silence like a mason’s chisel, chipping away at successive rims of sky. Ivan looked towards the north. There it was, as tiny and sharp as a spark, below the dim halo of Khanto. It was barely throbbing, stuck like a thorn in the flesh of the night. But, at every breath it drew, all the other stars grew paler, because Ticholbon was soaking up their light. Only the distant southern stars were shining, untrammelled in the less crowded sky. Now Ivan was beating more loudly on the drum-skin, which pulsed like a sheet of steel in the silent air. His breath, the course of the blood in his veins, the tautness of his muscles, everything within him was governed by that rhythm. He drummed until he could feel the very ice beneath his feet sending back the same beat, until the reindeer were still and even the wind died down, slithering almost noiselessly over the snow which was now giving out an eerie, opalescent light. Then, one after the other, the Vostyach sang out the five magic words of the black shamans. He picked up the axe and hacked fiercely at the crust of ice. Ticholbon sparkled. Ivan struck again, unleashing a rain of shards into the air, and then again, until, spark after spark, Ticholbon was thoroughly ablaze in the high heavens. It burned up in an instant, sputtering with a ruddy gleam and leaving a black patch in its place. Then all the other stars regained their light, took on new strength, breathed with new vigour, and slowly the starry vault began to turn once more. Now Urgel was free to go on his way, to lead the world out of winter’s grip.