Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

At first, Ivan had felt wary of the fair-haired woman he’d come upon in the village inn, who seemed so eager to hear him talk. Her eyes were not unkind, she wasn’t wearing a military uniform, her voice was pleasant and she spoke the language of the turnip-growers. But Ivan sensed a hint of Russian in her accent, and he was also wary of the strange contraption she always had with her, and into which she would ask him to speak. He was afraid it was a trap to lure him away from his mountains and have him locked up in the mine again.

At the beginning of winter Ivan had discovered the village where the turnip-growers lived; it stood at the edge of the forest, in the direction of the great river, but he had never ventured into it. Its houses, with their tarred roofs, reminded him too much of the barracks in the mine. He stayed hidden in the trees, observing it from afar: its smoking chimneys and its inn, where the lorries from the sawmill would draw up, laden with timber. He would observe the bluish strip of road as it wound its way into the distance, afraid that columns of shrieking soldiers might come into view from one moment to the next. But nothing at all emerged from the tundra. The colour of the sky changed, the wood gave out new scents, and it began to snow hard on the Byrranga Mountains. A blizzard raged over the forests and newly frozen lakes for days on end. The wind piled the heavy snow into scaly dunes which shifted daily, so that the landscape of the tundra was always subtly changing. It was dry snow, too powdery to walk on, even with snow-shoes. Ivan couldn’t get to his traps, nor indeed go hunting. Low, thorny bushes were all that grew on the upland plain; it had now become a shifting desert, and Ivan had completely lost his bearings. The two points which looked like a hare’s ears and a deer’s head were cloaked in persistent cloud. Such powdery snow did not bode well; it meant that the winter had started off on a bad footing. Ivan remembered that the old people in the village would talk of a far-off time when the scourge of this powdery snow first struck. The tundra was treacherous, the marshes impassable. At the least cold times of day, gaps would form in the ice on the lakes and the reindeer would plunge into the freezing water. Within a few minutes they would have died a silent death; they would thrash around, baring their teeth, until they were numbed by the cold. At night the ice would close up again, transforming their carcasses into so many gruesome statues. The Vostyachs couldn’t go hunting for weeks on end. The snow was like sand, some six feet deep, and walking on it might end in suffocation. Nothing was possible without snow-shoes, but hunters were slowed down with such contraptions on their feet, and by the time they had drawn their bows their prey had fled. Children whimpered with hunger, and mothers often woke up in the morning to find them dead in their arms. The old people would slink out of the village unobserved. They would go off to die, burying themselves in the snow so as not to be a burden on their families. Men ate the drum-skins, the bark of trees, such roots as had managed to push their way through the frozen ground. As they became weaker, many lacked even the strength to dig or to collect firewood, and their fires went out. By now there was no coming and going around the yurts, and smoke meant that death had paid a call. Then, one night, the wind changed and the stars reappeared in the sky. The dry, powdery snow crusted over and the wood creaked ominously, as though each trunk were being wrenched apart. When the sun rose, the whole forest was strewn with reindeer, elk and deer, trapped up to the chest in the ice. Exhausted by their recent hardships, the men of the village dragged themselves out to where the creatures lay. They cut their throats and lay down in the snow to drink the warm blood as it spurted out.

That was what the old men said, and Ivan was afraid of the powdery snow which could spell death.

So he decided to go down to the village where the turnip-growers lived, to exchange the odd fur for a bit of bread and dried meat. But when he pushed open the door of the inn, he was greeted by hostile stares. Ivan ran his eyes over the group to assure himself that they were not soldiers. He took off his fur hat and greeted them with a nod. Then he laid his skins on the table and asked those present to name their price. But no one said a word; they merely inspected him in stony silence. They had stopped drinking and playing cards; the only sound was the crackling of the stove and the innkeeper’s wife rinsing out a pan in the kitchen behind the counter. It was then that the fair-haired young woman had come in. She had been kind, she’d had someone bring him some soup and had bought all the squirrels’ tails. The woodsmen had gone back to their drinking and card games, and the hum of their conversation once more mingled with the cigarette smoke and the smell of cabbage and wood smoke. But when the woman turned on the strange contraption which registered your voice, Ivan had taken fright. He had picked up his skins, gone out of the inn and taken refuge in the woods. That night he hadn’t slept in his hut, but in a hole he’d hollowed out of the snow. In the days that followed, armed with his bow, he had again gone to the edge of the forest to observe the inn. He was afraid that the fair-haired woman might have gone to get the soldiers. But nothing in the village seemed to have changed. The chimneys carried on smoking above the tarred roofs and the battered lorries from the sawmill juddered along the icy road, scattering long trails of sawdust as they went. One morning, climbing on to the ridge of snow which was his lookout post, Ivan heard the woman calling him. Then he caught sight of her in the snowy meadow behind the inn. She had her hands around her mouth and was calling towards him, in Vostyach:

‘ Vostyach! Rony noxeita pedeya! ’

Ivan still had a good stock of squirrels’ tails. The woman had been kind to him. She had given him bread and had not called the soldiers. So he left his hiding-place and went towards her.

From that day onwards Ivan started to go down to the inn and speak into the little black box the woman placed before him. He would get the best squirrels’ tails down from the walls of his yurt and take them to her. On sunny days he would go into the wood with her and call out the names of all the plants and animals they came upon as they walked. The woman would write them carefully in a notebook the same colour as the one belonging to the doctor who came each summer to inspect the barracks in the mine and who would scatter white lime over the plank beds. Ivan felt pleased as the pages gradually filled up. By now he was proud of all the words he knew. He felt as though he were the owner of a personal treasure-trove. He carried on for as long as they continued to come into his mind, even adding some invented ones of his own, to please the fair-haired young woman who listened to him smilingly. He was saddened when he realised that his knowledge had been exhausted, that he couldn’t tell her the names of the things that were in the inn, nor the instruments used by the woodcutter in his hut with its corrugated iron roof. But then, gradually, the young woman herself started to talk his language. Ivan did not know all the words she used, but he understood many of them all the same; it was as if he had known them for ever. They prompted him to remember others, which he would shout out loudly, as though he had been groping for them for years, and it was only then that they had come back into his mind. With more words at his disposal, Ivan could tell the woman many more things. He told her about the mine, about his father being murdered by the soldiers, about fishing for whitefish in the lake, about the yurt encampment which he had been unable to find when he returned to the Byrranga Mountains. He told her how deer is hunted, how its flesh is dried, how to build traps for wolverines. The fair-haired woman was surprised to learn that Ivan did not skin beavers, but would roast them by tossing them, gutted, into the burning coals. That seemed to set her thinking, and she dashed off several pages in her notebook. Ivan was happy at last to be able to tell someone about the minutiae of his days. Only now that someone knew he was alive, and was able to talk to him, did he feel truly free, reborn to a new life where the mine had never existed. He was sure that sooner or later his people too would return to life, would emerge from the wolves’ lairs and begin to talk. Sooner or later, Korak, Häinö and Taypok would come back to hunt with him. This was the only subject he never succeeded in explaining to his new friend. The woman seemed to understand everything Ivan told her. She would nod and write, copy down the words she heard, dividing them up by subject. But when Ivan tried to explain to her about the other Vostyachs who had become wolves, she would shake her head and was clearly mystified: