Diego Marani: The Last of the Vostyachs

Over the days which followed, Professor Aurtova underwent further psychiatric tests and was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, a danger to himself and others. The windows of the mental hospital in which he was confined looked out on to a wood, not far from the sea: in the autumn the leaves briefly took on a variety of lovely hues, and when the leaves fell there was a distant view of the seashore, the sea forever grey and dark between the white trunks of the birch trees.

The manager was a short, fat man who looked very like the doctor in the mine. Ivan was not sure what was wanted of him, but he had at least understood that this strange smartly turned-out figure was pleased to see him play the drum and dance with the other musicians on the stage in the big saloon with the flashing floor. Scarcely a week had gone by since Ivan had embarked on his improvised number, but already everyone on board the Amorella was singing his songs: the waiters while they were serving at the bar, the ship boys as they mopped the kitchen floors, the officers when they were playing cards on the bridge; even the seven Somalis who worked cooped up in the oily heat of the engine-room would burst cheerily into Uutta murha ristirimme as though it were a shepherd’s song from Ogaden. The ship’s turbines throbbed to the rhythm of Ivan’s drum, the foghorn played along in time to it and the propellers danced to the beat of the wild music as they turned in the water. Thus the Samoyedic language of the Vostyachs, which scholars believed extinct, could truly be said to be alive and flourishing from the hold to the smart upper deck, from stem to stern, of one large ship in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The weary, happy tourists who poured off the Amorella at the end of the cruise, laden with souvenirs and liquor bottles, all went home singing that irresistible refrain, those perfect, rounded sounds which left the mouth sated and the heart at rest. So, throughout Finland, in showers, on skis, in sawmills, in workshops, queuing along the ring road around Espoo or in the grey factories of Pasil, Vostyach was coming back to life among the people to whom it had one day belonged. In the forests the wood grouse raised their crests, the bears roared as they reared up on their hind legs and the lemmings crowded together around the banks of the lakes to hear the sound of their ancient name which no one had uttered for years.

When Ivan went back into the changing room after his performance, the short fat man came after him to accompany him, smiling, to the restaurant on the upper deck, and had him served at a table with a white cloth, right by the window, with a view of the sea. Ivan had never seen it so brightly lit up by the moon. He liked it on that ship, together with his new friends from the ‘Neli Sardelli’ folk group, even if he had difficulty in communicating with them, and sometimes felt that they were teasing him, laughing and pulling wry faces; but then they would slap him on the back, and he knew that there was no malice in what they did. He could see in their eyes that they were fond of him, and when the ship docked at Stockholm or Marieham they would never leave him on his own. They took him around with them to the beer houses, to the cinema, or window-shopping. The only place he refused to go to was the striptease joints: he was afraid of women baring swollen breasts and hard buttocks in the glare of psychedelic lighting. They reminded him of the black shape with its smell of internal organs which had driven him beside himself that distant winter morning. So he would stay outside, seated in some bar where his friends would buy him crisps and beer, signalling to the barman to keep an eye on him. They too had begun to refer to him as ‘Vostyach’, because Ivan had said the word a thousand times to explain who he was and where he came from. But the Estonian musicians knew nothing of the Vostyachs, they had never been hunting in the tundra, and Ivan was unable to explain to them where the Byrranga Mountains were. On summer nights, when they stayed up on deck, looking at the white sky, Ivan would indicate the distant point in the middle of the sea where Urgel set; but no one knew what he meant. They would give him another bottle of beer and sit him down on a deckchair, hoping he’d forget and quieten down.

Sometimes his people had appeared to him in dreams: Korak, Häinö, old Taypok. He’d seen his father coming towards him over the ice, smiling, with a big fish dangling from his line. Then he had awoken with a start, remembering the wolves which howled in the forest in Tajmyr, unable to become men again. But all that was now too far away, and Ivan wanted to forget about it. He no longer wanted to think about the mine or to meet the child who had never died, and if, on lonely nights, he sometimes felt like weeping, it was only for the fair-haired woman who had been fond of him. The gate of memory was open for her alone. In the evening, before falling asleep, he found himself repeating the words he had spoken for her to capture in the little black box which talked on its own. He remembered them all, and each one of them brought back images of those happy days. He remembered the inn, the tarred roofs of the houses in the village of the turnip-growers, his favourite trees, the fair-haired woman who smiled as she listened to him, and the rounded hills of the Byrranga Mountains in the distance, the deer’s head and the two protruding points like hares’ ears. He remembered the time in the Byrranga Mountains when each name adhered magically to the thing to which it belonged, and the tundra rang with the mighty Vostyach language; he remembered the men who could talk with wolves, who knew the name of the black fish which lived in the mud of the arctic lakes, of the fleshy moss which bloomed in high summer just for one day, purpling the rocks above the Tajmyr Peninsula. He remembered the men who had found the way out of the dark forest to another world, but never the way back.

All this happened many years ago. Now Professor Aurtova no longer sees Pecheneg and Tartar horsemen riding over the ceiling of his white-painted cell. He has been given permission to have a small bookshelf beside his bed, and a desk beneath the window. He has had the university doorman send him his precious edition of Paavo Kurjensaari’s Encyclopedia of Finno-Ugric Languages , the big Finnish dictionary edited by Jukka Svinhufvud and Heino Virkunen and some outdated handbooks of Uralic Philology. He spends his days declining irregular nouns and reconstructing the etymology of old words no longer mentioned in the dictionaries. He has pinned up the postcards which the doorman sends him from his holidays on the wall above his desk. He keeps a careful daily diary, and the speech he intends to give at the XXIVth Congress of Finno-Ugric languages, the one to be held in Budapest, is already stowed away in the drawer of his bedside table. Hurmo now rests under a birch tree in a wood outside Helsinki, although the wooden board nailed into the bark, its pink paint already peeling off, refers to him as Kukka. Margareeta has sold her Helsinki apartment and has gone to live with her sister in Kemi, where the sea always freezes over in winter in the course of a single night, so that the melancholy lilt of the last autumn waves remains before your eyes until the following spring.

On a cruise ship plying the Baltic from Helsinki to Stockholm, the last of the Vostyachs earns his living by performing with the Estonian folk group ‘Neli Sardelli’. He plays a drum made of reindeer skin, singing the ancient songs of a mysterious language which makes your hair stand up on end; which makes you want to pray.