Diego Marani - The Last of the Vostyachs

I stayed on in the Tajmyr Peninsula for a few more weeks and made a complete catalogue of all the words he knew. Unfortunately, his vocabulary is very limited. But, thanks to certain roots, I managed to construct a number of etymological hypotheses, though of course they are yet to be proved correct. Hunting for words became our game. We’d go around the forest and Ivan would put a name in Vostyach to everything he saw. Whenever he remembered this or that word, the name of some tree or object, he was triumphant. He knew he was making me happy and would come running towards me, wreathed in smiles. He offered me his words like gifts. He must have suffered a great deal, and I sensed that the aftermath of such suffering still weighed upon him. Sometimes his mood would darken for no apparent reason, as though he were dogged by frightening images which he could not shake off. Then he would run off into the woods alone. At times I felt as though I were dealing with a child, he is so vulnerable, so naïve, so incapable of applying any form of reason to certain aspects of everyday life. Yet he knows how to make bows and arrows, dress hides and set traps. In the deepest woods he can find his bearings like a human compass. He can smell distant scents on the air and follow them. But his intelligence seems somehow one-dimensional. He moves in just one direction, among the things he knows. He makes no distinction between reality and fantasy. When he does not understand something, he instantly takes fright.

On the morning of our departure, after so much snow, a chilly sun appeared and the forest was tinged with pink. Waiting for the local bus which was to take us to Norilsk, looking out through the inn window, I gazed in awe at the forms of the snow-laden trees. The innkeeper’s wife had just lit the stove, and the scent of resin wafted through the room. The big pot of water for the soup had just begun to boil, and the steam was causing the panes gradually to mist over. Everything felt strangely blank, slow-moving, suffused with sadness. Seated on the ground, Ivan was gazing raptly out at the dazzling light. Together with his sack of skins, he had brought with him a drum made of reindeer hide, which he kept clutched to his chest, his fingers spread out over it. I went up to him and sat beside him. I told him that the inn was not my home, but that I lived in a distant city, and that after our trip to Helsinki I would not be coming back with him to the forests of the Tajmyr Peninsula. He gave me a bewildered look. He stared angrily at my suitcase, inspected my city outfit — so different from my normal shabby village wear — with disapproval. He shook his head, retreating as though he didn’t want to hear me. I tried to reassure him, telling him I’d be back to see him from time to time. He promised me that if I was leaving him because he couldn’t provide me with any new words, he would get the wolves to tell him some. They knew many more than he, but he would have to persuade them to speak to him again, he said, looking sadly out towards the forest. He sighed. He clearly wanted to ask me something, but did not have the words. He made a vague gesture, then gave up, crestfallen. He was trying to understand how far I would be from his mountains, mentally measuring distances which for him were unimaginable. I went up to the misty windows and drew a rough map of Russia, in the form of a circle, on which I made two dots. One was Saint Petersburg, the other the Tajmyr Peninsula, as I explained to him. Ivan came up to me to look more closely, then rubbed his hand angrily over the pane. He ran to the next window, and the next, wiping away the condensation. Then he went to the back of the room and stared out at me from the semidarkness; although I could not see him, I knew that he was crying. Then he put on his jacket, picked up his sack and drum and left the room. I was afraid that he would do his usual disappearing trick, and that I’d never see him again. On this occasion, though, he allowed me to follow him out to the wood. He stopped on a small rise and arranged his drum carefully on his chest. I knew that he did not like to be observed when he was playing, so I went to stand behind a tree. I saw him crouch down in the snow, put his hand in his sack and draw out a mask made of birch bark, which he then put on. Until that point, I’d never noticed it among his possessions. He stayed crouched there without moving for some time, then began to beat slowly, intensely and increasingly loudly on the drum-skin. It was as though he were embarking on a fight, as though with that incessant, insistent beat he might rid the world of disharmony and give it the steady rhythm of his own music. I felt as though all living matter were now moving to the rhythm of his drumbeat, breathing in time to it; falling seamlessly into step with him, walking beside him — only to plummet once more into its normal, fatal disarray. He was singing words I’d never heard him use. His voice was different now — deep and somehow majestic. He articulated each sound cautiously, as though he were almost afraid of it, as though it might unleash something uncontrollable, superhuman. He turned his head from side to side as he proceeded with his awesome dance, twisting his neck so far in each direction that I felt that I might see his head wrenched from his body and fall with a thud on to the snowy ground. There was pain in his voice, a sense of irreparable solitude, like a maze of ice settling into new and ever more intricate, tunnel-like formations as his song proceeded. Jarmo, I felt as furtive as a thief, hidden among those trees. For a moment I thought that it would be better to leave Ivan Vostyach there where he was, in his own land; that introducing him to people so different from himself would cause him suffering, make him feel even more alone. What did he know about Finno-Ugric or Proto-Uralian? What did it matter to him that he was the last of the Vostyachs? I suddenly felt that I was being purely selfish, going around with my tape recorder on the trail of dialects as though they were so many fur-bearing animals, pillaging memories in order to stuff them and put them on show in dismal museums. I thought of all those dazed little old men I’d gone to torment with my microphone, forcing them to remember things they might well have preferred to forget. I expected them to unroll the grief of a lifetime for my sole benefit. But even they were less vulnerable than Ivan Vostyach: they had houses, families, or at least the village where they had been born. Whereas Ivan Vostyach had nothing. He was the last survivor of a vanished world. Then I asked myself if we are indeed really salvaging something when we preserve these now vanished languages in formalin like so many freakish animals. Are we not in fact rather pandering to some personal obsession of our own, of no more use to anyone else than a collection of beer mats or cigarette packets? Maybe I’m getting old, but sometimes I feel that all this vainglorious science is beginning to bore me and that one day I shall throw my phonology handbooks out of the window and hurl my tapes of Samoyedic dialects into the stove. But, fight against it as I may, I remain a product of the Soviet era and I cannot rid myself of the illusion that one day the world will be made comprehensible to us by the power of human reason. You knew me when I was a student, you will remember how passionately we at the institute believed that all things — perhaps even emotions — were susceptible to comparison. Science could explain everything, knowledge was the great panacea. At the time, for us, those strange languages that we collected out in the sticks were diseases, the product of ignorance and barbarism which had to be tracked down and eradicated, so that the pure language of communism could flourish. But the cynical mentality of the scientist is clearly still with me, so I shall bring my Vostyach along to the XXIst Conference on Finno-Ugric languages. Partly in acknowledgement of our longstanding friendship, you are the only person I have told of his existence.