Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

We walked quickly down the hillside. No point denying it: my heart was beating quite fast, and Pärtel’s probably was too. We had been here once before, but that was years ago, and I felt like a person preparing to jump into a lake from a high treetop. He knows that there is nothing bad lurking in the water, but it’s still a little creepy to stare down into the depths from the top, and there is a hollow feeling in his stomach as he falls.

Everything happened exactly as on our first visit. Out of the door stepped Magdaleena, who in the meantime had grown considerably, and Pärtel and I were astonished to see her. She was so beautiful. Magdaleena was also taken aback — that was clear to see — and obviously not at our beauty. Rather the opposite; she must have been shocked to see two boys dressed in animal skins, leading between them a slight girl also wearing skins. The previous time she had greeted us with childish candor; since then, however, she had obviously heard many an unpleasant thing about the forest dwellers, so she screamed, “Father!”

“What’s going on?” a voice from indoors asked, and out stepped Johannes the village elder. He was not too startled to see us, and asked, smiling, “Is it you, boys? The same ones who came here once before? Well, you’ve grown a lot! What took you so long to come? I told you to move with your parents to the village. Poor children, you look so wild. Are you hungry? Want some bread?”

Before we had time to reply, he disappeared inside and came back a moment later with half a loaf of bread.

“There you are,” he said kindly. “Fresh rye bread.”

He handed the bread to me. For the first time I was holding in my hand an object so despised in the forest: the bread had a knobbly crust, but was soft. Hiie looked at me, her eyes full of terror; she wanted to say something but didn’t dare. Evidently she was afraid that even just holding one single piece of bread could somehow do me harm; this must have had something to do with one of her father’s many stories. I wasn’t afraid of the bread, for I knew that Mother had eaten it at one time and nothing bad had happened to her. Bread wasn’t dangerous; it was just supposed to have a disgusting taste. Nevertheless I resolved to try the bread later, even though now would be a chance to show off my courage to Hiie. But for the moment I wanted to show Hiie some other miraculous things.

“Do you still have the spinning wheel?” I asked knowingly. “And that bread shovel? I’d like to look at them.”

Johannes laughed.

“We still have the spinning wheel, and the bread shovel too,” he said. “Step inside and admire them!”

We were already stepping indoors and Hiie was shaking like a leaf. I felt sorry for her; I nudged her and whispered in her ear: “It’s nothing. We’ll take a little look and go back home.”

But then suddenly something happened. Magdaleena screamed.

“A snake!” she shrieked, her eyes full of blind fear, as she pointed at Ints. “Daddy, a snake!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll strike him dead!” shouted Johannes. “Out of the way, I’ll hit him!”

I was so taken aback that I did step aside, and I saw Johannes grabbing a stick and trying to kill Ints. The adder deftly wriggled aside and hissed viciously. I knew he would bite the first chance he had and I leapt to intervene.

“Why are you beating him?” I stammered. “He hasn’t done anything!”

“The snake is the worst enemy of mankind!” cried Johannes. “The snake is the right hand of Satan, and it is the duty of the people of the cross to beat down these abominable creatures! Now where did he get to?”

“He’s my friend!” I shouted, terrified, as if I were the one being threatened with death by thrashing. I was even starting to cry. “You mustn’t beat him!”

“A snake can’t be a human’s friend!” declared Johannes. “You’ve gone astray, poor child, and you’re saying terrible things. You mustn’t go back to the forest. You must stay here, or otherwise your soul will be lost. You should all stay here. You should be quickly christened and saved! Come in here now, but that snake, that damned snake, I’m going to—”

He squeezed the pole in his palm and looked around with a mad stare, seeking Ints.

I felt horrible. I had once seen a deer between whose ribs the village people had driven a strange wooden stake. The villagers didn’t know Snakish, and therefore couldn’t summon the deer to them, so they hunted it across the country and fired little sticks into the air. This stick caused the deer outrageous pain, but didn’t kill it, and so the poor animal rushed with bloodshot eyes through the forest, shrieking and thumping everything in its path, until Uncle Vootele calmed it with Snakish words and cut the animal’s throat, to release it from its suffering. Johannes was now reminding me of that maddened deer; he too was screaming confused words, and wanted to strike the completely innocent Ints dead. Perhaps he too had been struck by some stake? He looked completely crazed, and in my terror I just stood there helplessly, and I would even have let Johannes haul me into the room if Hiie hadn’t tugged at my elbow.

“Let’s run out of here!” she whispered. “Quick! Let’s just run away!”

I heeded her words straight away, grabbed Hiie by the hand, and we ran off toward the forest without looking back. I saw Pärtel, white in the face, running beside me, with Ints crawling a little way ahead, and although I could hear Johannes’s shouting behind me, I realized that we’d all escaped alive.

n reaching the forest, we sank down in the moss, panting for a while, not saying a word. Ints was the only one who didn’t seem shocked; he sought a sunny place and coiled up.

“What came over him?” asked Pärtel at length.

“Whatever did come over him, that’s how people are in the village. Father tells me that whenever they see a snake, they go on the attack. Like hedgehogs.”

“Do they eat you?” asked Pärtel.

“Just let them try,” hissed Ints. “I would have stuck my fangs into that creature if Leemet hadn’t jumped in front of me.”

“Before you had time to bite him he would have broken your back,” I said. For the first time I understood how dangerous a human can be to an adder.

Living in the forest, this had never occurred to me; humans and snakes lived like brothers, and never had a human raised a hand against an adder. To talk of whether a human could do harm to a snake seemed just as senseless as discussing whether an oak could attack a birch. There was eternal peace between adders and humans. But now I saw that nothing is eternal, and a human can kill an adder with one whack of a stick. I couldn’t help looking at Ints now with quite different eyes. How fragile he really was! You only needed to keep away from his poison fangs, for he couldn’t defend himself in any way against a creature who doesn’t understand Snakish and uses a long stick. I felt sick; in my mind’s eye I could already see Ints’s back broken in two. I looked away.

Only then did I notice that I was still clutching the hunk of bread. My first thought was to bury this gift from Johannes in the swamp, and I let the bread fall with a sense of revulsion.

“What’s this?” asked Pärtel. “You took the bread with you?”

“It simply stayed in my hand,” I explained.

Pärtel shifted closer, and with his finger cautiously stroked the knobbly brown crust of the piece of bread.

“Shall we have a taste?” he suggested.

“No!” shrieked Hiie. “Let’s not taste it! You mustn’t eat bread! Daddy won’t allow it! Mummy said it’s poisonous!”