Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

He took a sip of cognac, and felt a welcome shudder at the instant burst of warmth which ran through his veins. Then came a sudden knock at the door, and his secretary entered the room.

‘You didn’t collect your post, professor,’ she said, putting an envelope down on the table.

‘I completely forgot!’ he said, lifting a hand to his forehead.

‘If there’s nothing else, I’d quite like to be off…’

She lingered on the threshold, peering owlishly at Aurtova from behind her thick glasses.

‘Of course, Leena, go by all means. And have a quiet day tomorrow, because from Sunday it’ll be all work and no play.’ He moved back to the table without closing the window.

‘Yes indeed…Goodnight, professor,’ she said, retreating from the cold.

The envelope contained just one letter. It had a Russian stamp, and the address was written by hand. He recognised the writing.

Dear Jarmo,

I’m passing through Moscow and I’m sending you this letter so that I can be the first to give you a sensational bit of news. I’ve just spent a few months with the Nenets and Nganasan, making recordings of local speakers. As you know, my passion has always been the northern Samoyedic languages, so I paid another visit to those parts on the track of some minor dialect to record before it died out. Over the last few years I really think I’ve catalogued them all! At the end of November I found myself in a remote village in the Tajmyr Peninsula. I was waiting for the weather to improve so that I could get to Norilsk, where I was to take the plane to Saint Petersburg, but I was left stranded by a blizzard, so I had to resign myself to a long wait. I spent my days copying out my notes in a dismal room in the only inn, when one afternoon my guide came into my room in a state of high excitement. He knows I speak Nganasan, so he never addresses me in Russian. But I have difficulty in understanding him when he talks in that Polustrov dialect of his, so I went off with him somewhat unwillingly, not really knowing what he wanted. He took me to the floor below, the bar-room I suppose you could call it, which was strangely lively for the time of day. And there, surrounded by a muttering crowd, was a truly weird individual. Physically, he looked like an Inuit, but more athletic, and darker-complexioned. He was entirely dressed in skins, had a bow slung over his shoulder and was holding a string of squirrels’ tails. At his feet was a sack of skins. When they saw me come in, everyone stopped muttering. The guide pointed at the man and whispered in my ear, in Russian: ‘We can’t understand a word of anything he says!’ I went up to him and tried addressing him in Vogul, thinking he might belong to some Eastern Ugric tribe. He listened to me carefully, but then frowned in puzzlement. Yet I noticed that those sounds were familiar to him, even if he didn’t understand them. He looked at me questioningly, waving the string of squirrels’ tails. He put them on the table and began unstringing them, so that I could see them better. He must have already repeated himself several times without making himself understood. At first I could understand nothing: just a blurred flow of Uralic sounds. I thought it was some Dolgan dialect which had eluded me, and I was almost irritated at the thought of having to deal with yet another one. I didn’t even feel like going back up to my room and fetching my tape recorder. But the more he talked, the more I realised that this was another language entirely. It might be some localised variant of Jurak, but I was unconvinced by the coup de glotte. At first it was the schwa which unsettled me: I’d never heard it so unvoiced before. Nganasan has one that is very similar; but when I noticed how the man pronounced his velar affricatives and above all his retroflex palatals, I was no longer in any doubt: the man I was listening to was a Vostyach!

Dear Jarmo, you can imagine how I felt. I immediately rushed upstairs to get my tape recorder and encouraged the man to talk into it. And I could hardly believe my ears. They’re all there, the consonants which mark the transition between the Finnic languages and the Eskimo-Aleut ones. Even the fricative lateral with the labiovelar appendix! I haven’t finished mapping the phonetic analogies, but will have done so in time for the conference, even if I have to work on my new paper round the clock. So, goodbye Samoyedic dialects, hallo Vostyach! If you wanted the Helsinki conference to be a turning point in the study of the Finno-Ugric languages, your wish is granted. Now at last we can be certain that, in antiquity, languages belonging to the same family were spoken from the Baltic to the great plains of North America. Who knows, Jarmo, perhaps your ancestors included some Sioux chief who fought at Little Big Horn! In a word, you can see that the Eskimo-Aleutian theory was indeed correct, and that it is not just because they speak an agglutinative language that the Inuit have a vowel harmony similar to that of you and your Finns. The Vostyach says his name is Ivan. But when he talks of himself he describes himself as ‘vostyach’, which means ‘man’. So for the people of the village he has become Ivan Vostyach. He’s probably a survivor from some gulag. At the inn they told me that there was a large mining settlement on the far side of the lakes, an open-cast mine where they sent convicts to break stones and wash them by the ton, all to extract a few specks of gold. Hell on earth, apparently. When wages stopped arriving from Moscow, the overseers did a bunk and the few remaining prisoners escaped.

My Vostyach understands Nganasan: perhaps someone spoke it at the mine. He also understands a little Russian, but he can’t speak a word. It’s a language which frightens him: as soon as he hears it, he tenses up and looks away. It probably has the most terrible associations for him. So at first we communicated by gesture, or in rudimentary Nganasan. But then I started learning Vostyach, and it wasn’t long before I could compose the odd sentence. Mostly, I myself reconstructed the words, basing myself on those I heard him pronounce. But it worked, and Ivan understood me. At first he was disconcerted on hearing me speak his language. But then something within him seemed to melt, and we immediately became friends. To begin with I couldn’t persuade him to stay in the village for more than a few hours. He seemed nervous when he came into the inn, and even when he accepted a bowl of soup he was continually looking out of the window, peering anxiously along the grey road which wound up into the steppe, on the lookout for soldiers. But I felt that he sought me out, that he liked being with me. Every time he heard his language issuing from my mouth, he seemed enchanted. Uttering those primitive sounds, I too felt that I was back in the distant past. It’s true that you can have the illusion that you know all about a people by reading about their civilisation in libraries — about their kings, their battles, their religion. But until you take possession of their language, you really know nothing of them. Ivan wanted to speak, he was hungry for words and company. Loneliness and fear had marked him physically as well as mentally. He moved furtively, like an animal lying in wait; he pricked up his ears at noises I myself could not hear, and when he was worried he would show his unease by clenching and unclenching his fists. I’ve never seen such misshapen hands. His fingers were just stubby protuberances, without nails, the skin on them was tough and hairless. Ivan would always return to the forest before dark. He’d stay away for a couple of days and then reappear in the village bringing me some squirrels’ tails. He said he couldn’t stay for very long, he had to get back to his people. I had imagined a whole tribe of Vostyachs up there in the woods. But then I saw that he must be referring to something else — his animals, perhaps, or the spirits of his ancestors. He always had that strange sack of skins on his shoulder. He never opened it in my presence and he never put it down. One afternoon when he had fallen asleep on the inn floor, I looked inside it, to find it contained a few stones, some animal bones, feathers, bears’ teeth and little braids of hair. When he woke up, it was the first thing he reached for. It was already beginning to get dark, but he set off anyway towards the woods at quite a pace, as though there really were someone waiting for him up there. It was hard to know where he lived, because it was impossible to follow him: as soon as he entered the wood he was immediately lost from view. The snow seemed to close in after him. But, over time, I managed to gain his confidence. He realised that not all Russians were bad, even if on the few occasions when he did stay on in the village he would sleep in some shed, or in the outhouses of the sawmill, rather than be near other human beings. There was a distant land, I told him, where there were many people who would like to get to know him: not Russians, but people of his own race, who spoke a language similar to his own. I explained to him that he was not alone, but that he belonged to a large and ancient tribe who were his brothers, and who would be eager to meet him. He was very struck by my talk of this great tribe, and questioned me closely about it. So finally I persuaded him to come with me to Helsinki. But I had to reassure him that there are no Russians there.