Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

Such desultory applause as Aurtova’s speech elicited was short-lived; the packed lecture hall seemed in the grip of some nameless dread. The eyes of most of the audience were no longer on the speaker’s platform, bedecked with flowers and flags, but on the group of policemen advancing warily from the back of the hall, leaving damp footprints on the linoleum. Their leader stood stiffly at the foot of the dais, waiting for the professor to descend to his own level, then asked him demurely for his personal details, reading out every word from the identity card the great man coolly handed him. Then, in a voice touched with regret, he uttered the indictment:

‘Professor Jarmo Aurtova, I declare you under arrest for the murder of Olga Pavlovna and Katia Rekhsadze.’

Staring into the middle distance, Aurtova held out his wrists to receive the handcuffs and followed the police without a word. He walked through the hall with a martial step, holding his head high in the midst of the crowd which drew aside to let him pass. The photographers who were awaiting him in the entrance hall seemed cowed by his haughty demeanour, scarcely able to perform their function: the face they saw before them, which would stare forth from the crime pages of the Helsingin Sanomat , was not that of a murderer, but of a hero, fit for some monument to the fallen, some commemorative medal, a thousand-mark banknote. Aurtova did not see the rows of blank faces in front of him; his impassive gaze was not on the hall around him, nor on the buildings of the city that could be glimpsed beyond the great glass door, nor even on the hazy horizon beyond. He was gazing into distances yet more remote, beyond the sky, beyond time itself. He was staring, mesmerised, into the spinning maelstrom of the future as it swallowed centuries, peoples, seas and mountains. The Vostyachs’ yurts were ripped to tatters as they were sucked into the eye of that mighty cyclone, along with Pecheneg horsemen, Viking hordes, Cossack horses, Swedish galleons. Outside, on the quay in front of the conference centre where the crowd had gathered to observe the scene, the professor did not deign to cast even the briefest of glances at his ex-wife, or at poor Hurmo, who was whimpering and straining on the leash to run to greet his master. He turned his back on the two figures who were waiting for him in the snow; for one brief moment he looked out to sea, breathed in a deep lungful of sea air and got into the police van, doing up the top button of his coat as he did so.

While he was being driven across the city on his way to the prison at Valilla, Professor Aurtova still had no idea who or what it was that had given him away. Nor did he care. The Director of the Institute of Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Helsinki had no regrets, indeed he was proud of what he had done. He lifted his head and thrust out his chest as he drove past the white faculty colonnade.

Even when he learned that it was his pyjamas that had betrayed him, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He didn’t realise that Olga had put them on before losing consciousness and that he, fumbling around in the dark, had mistaken them for her silk blouse. As to the mysterious catafalque the papers talked of in the days that followed, Aurtova was certain that it was the work of Pecheneg horsemen, and he was surprised that no one seemed interested in tracking them down. Why was no one pursuing them to the Estonian coast; burning down their villages, running their swords through their children’s heads and stringing them up from the trees, as those bloodthirsty barbarians themselves had done with the Finns? Pecheneg children should be tracked down and impaled in full view of their fathers, so that no Pecheneg would dare ever again to raise a sword against the Finnish peoples. It did not even enter the professor’s head that it had been Ivan who had built that gruesome monument, that he had not in fact embarked for Sweden but was playing his drum on board a cruise ship. The Vostyach must disappear from the face of the earth, along with all his kind. In the nightmare visions into which he was ever more often plunged, Aurtova imagined Ivan roaming the streets of Stockholm, chased off like a tramp, pursued like a thief, disease-ridden in some poorhouse. He dreamed that he had become a drug addict, an alcoholic, rotting away in a Swedish prison, or dead in some harbour brawl, his body thrown into the sea. Festering in the dark waters of the port of Stockholm, his body would soon have turned to mud, food for the fish, a fossil shell, empty and silent, sent rolling to and fro by the cold currents on the ocean floor.

Seated on a bench in his prison cell, hands in his lap and knees together, as though he were in church, Aurtova would look through the bars on the narrow windows, seeing the streets and squares of his city, imagining the great rooms of his exclusive apartment. He knew he wouldn’t be seeing any of them again for quite some time. But, with a bit of luck, he might be out in time for the XXIVth Congress of Finno-Ugric languages, which was to be held in Budapest. And what are fifteen years in the life of a language?

Hurmo flicked the foam from his muzzle and dug in his claws, thoroughly unwilling to be immersed in that soapy water. But Margareeta took him lovingly in her arms, all fat and shapeless as he was, and laid him delicately down amidst the bubbles. At first he stiffened, lowered his ears and let out a powerful howl. Then, under the caresses of his mistress, he relaxed, folded his paws and curled up in the warm water. He even allowed his stomach to be brushed, put up with the jet of water trained on his chest, staring resignedly at his soaking fur. He shook himself with relief into the towel in which Margareeta had wrapped him, proffering each paw in turn to have it dried. Lastly, he opened an obedient mouth and swallowed the worming pill. That was how it was every Sunday, and by now Hurmo was used to it. He had become used to everything; except for his new name.

‘You’ll never see your master again,’ Margareeta had told him one summer evening as she came into the house and threw herself wearily on to the bed. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and had spent a few moments staring at the ceiling while Hurmo panted suspiciously on his little armchair.

‘Well, if fate has decreed that you and I should be together, we might as well resign ourselves, don’t you agree?’ she had added, getting up to give him a stroke, the first he’d had since the divorce. He wagged his tail timidly, but kept his distance.

‘Meanwhile, the first thing we have to do is to change your name, because Hurmo is a dog’s name, and you’re a bitch. From now on you’ll be called Kukka, do you understand? And my word, Kukka, what a beauty you’re going to be!’

So Hurmo had become Kukka, and he no longer slept on the little armchair in the bedroom, which was filthy by now, but under the kitchen window in a brand-new basket lined with flowered material. He had his food in a pink bowl under the sink, and a new real leather collar with a little bell, which in fact made him feel a bit like a cat, but on the other hand it also gave him a touch of pedigree. But when Margareeta took him for walks in the Observatory Gardens, he never responded to his new name. That was the only, minor disappointment he continued to cause his mistress.

From his position in the wooden dock in the law-court, Professor Aurtova had answered all the Public Prosecutor’s questions with a smile, describing everything that had happened on that far-off night of the ninth of January for the umpteenth time to a courtroom criss-crossed by gilded rays of dusty sunlight. He had confirmed that it was he and only he who had dragged the bodies of both women into the frozen sea where they would meet their deaths, after having made them drunk and drugged them with sleeping pills. He explained that he had lured them to the cottage with promises of generous financial rewards if they lent themselves to his secret sexual fantasies. At that point the members of the jury had coughed nervously in their seats, and a shocked murmur had gone up from the public, losing itself in the austere vaults above. The judge had politely called for silence and blushingly begun to leaf through his sheaf of papers, before inquiring somewhat bashfully about the precise nature of such fantasies. Then the professor had again assumed the distant, vacant look which the prison doctors had noted with concern some days previously, when Aurtova had been brought into the infirmary, bound to a stretcher completely naked. Then the Public Prosecutor returned to his charge, wanting to know how the professor had managed to construct the strange catafalque on which he had laid the bodies, with all those peculiar scraps of leather and feathers and plaited hair. He had approached the accused with a faintly threatening air, ordering him to explain the hidden meaning of that diabolical construction. Aurtova had explained to him, precisely and patiently, how he had found the timber in the woods on the nearby islands, and cut the trees down with his axe. He had used his rope to bind the trunks to the tow coupling on his car and pulled them into the sea, where he had built the catafalque. As to its meaning, here the professor had shaken his head, and his eyes had suddenly gone blank: now they were fixed on the throngs of Pechenegs pressed up against the lowering wind-scoured sky, riding across the steppe, brandishing the translucent skins of their flayed enemies from the tips of their lances like so many paper banners, like kites in human form. The lawyers had looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders. In the public gallery, the women had pressed their knees together in disapproval, and the men sighed heavily, crossing their arms. The judge had risen to his feet and the members of the jury had trooped out of the courtroom in an orderly fashion.