Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

I felt healthy and strong. The bread was gone from my stomach like an ugly pimple from my face, and I planned to eat as much goat as would fit into my belly.

saw Hiie and Pärtel the next day. Hiie was still somehow blotchy faced, and complained that she’d been vomiting all night.

“You ate only a fingertip-sized bit. What was there to vomit?” I asked.

“Nothing, but I had such a horrible feeling in the tummy,” complained Hiie. “And I was horribly afraid too. I was afraid there might still be a little crumb of bread inside me, and when I thought about it, I’d run off to the bushes again. My throat is still sore from all that puking.”

On the other hand Pärtel assured me grandly that the bread had done nothing to him.

“I didn’t even understand that it would be any different,” he told me. “I could eat even more of that bread. I could scoff three loaves of it and it wouldn’t do a thing. You want to go back to the village, grab some bread, and eat some more?”

“Ah, no,” I said, not enthused at all by Pärtel’s idea. “Why eat so much of it? It doesn’t taste good at all.”

I was ashamed to tell others what trouble that piece of bread had caused in my stomach. I made out that eating bread was nothing special for me, though I knew that I wouldn’t put that weird muck in my mouth again for any price.

I looked enviously at Pärtel, whose thick frame had digested the dangerous bread without any problems. In the past year Pärtel had grown a head taller than me, and considerably broader as well, so that beside him I looked like a snake with joints. I was lanky and skinny, with a pale face, while Pärtel’s hair was red brown and his complexion was ruddy.

I was quite angry with Pärtel at that moment, for he was tactlessly bragging about his bread-gobbling skills, as if it were a matter of honor. He laughed at Hiie, who was still hiccupping now and then from yesterday’s piece of bread, and asked me several times with a sly expression: “Listen, you must have been feeling bad afterward too? I didn’t at all!”

I put up with this for a while, then lost my temper and said that a fly eats shit again and again, but I don’t. Should I make a big deal out of a fly and give it great respect? Now Pärtel got angry, saying that he was going home if I was going to be so disgusting, comparing him to a fly. Bread is not shit. Very many people eat it, and all foreigners do. He stormed off, and I stared after him. Pärtel and I had had our tempers flaring up before, and played happily the next day together despite it all, so I didn’t make a big issue out of his anger.

Hiie and I stayed together at first, but after a little while Ints crawled up, and we decided to go and take a look at Pirre and Rääk. They still had the big louse, and every day there were titanic struggles with the birds. Despite its gigantic size, they recognized it as an ordinary insect, and tried to grab it in their beaks and drag it to their nests, but naturally nothing came of this. The louse was so big that even an eagle could scarcely lift it, but eagles do not hunt lice or beetles. Little blackbirds, swallows, and flycatchers pried away with no success at all at the flanks of the huge louse, and twittered in annoyance while the great insect flailed its legs, knocking out some of the birds with its movements.

In the interval the louse had become a lot cleverer. Pirre and Rääk had trained it carefully, so that it no longer tried to scuttle off into crevices, but slouched along calmly on the end of a leash and, when a signal was given, stopped and got down on its belly. It had also learned to appreciate the presence of humans, but not as an ordinary louse does, trying to crawl into your hair and lay its eggs there. The big louse did not go for your head, but simply pressed itself against your leg and snuffled.

For some reason it particularly liked Hiie. The girl only needed to appear, and the louse would immediately scurry up to her. Hiie was small and the louse reached her shoulders. It rubbed itself against her so violently that she fell over, and Pirre and Rääk gave the insect a fierce tongue-lashing. Then it drooped down and sprawled unhappily on the ground, until Hiie started stroking it and telling it that it was a fine and nice animal.

According to the Primates, the louse shouldn’t have understood any of Hiie’s words, for in talking to the louse Hiie didn’t use Snakish words, let alone the ones with the ancient Primate pronunciation. But the louse became ever more cheerful when Hiie praised it, and scurried happily around the girl in a circle. It even let Hiie ride on its back, stepping slowly and solemnly, cautiously stretching out its legs, as if afraid to jolt its cargo too much. It was a weird sight — a thin little girl riding bareback astride a big strange insect — but the Primates told us that in the old days, when there were only very large animals and insects living in the world, such things happened often. In any case, pale little Hiie on the louse’s back, with the two Primates sitting beyond her in front of their cave, and around them bushes and trees of species that had long since died out in other parts of the forest, looked like a secret visitor from some distant age. That was just how I had imagined those mysterious sprites of which Ülgas talked so much. If they existed at all, they would have to be like Hiie, riding on louseback.

Hiie herself looked after the louse, and always stroked and scratched it with care. I thought the louse was horrible, and I didn’t like to touch it; a couple of friendly pats was the most I could force myself to. Hiie, on the other hand, said it was very sweet.

“He’s such a friendly animal,” she told me. “And I’m terribly sorry for him, because I don’t understand at all where his eyes are, or his ears or his nose. He does have them, right? Just think, if you had to live without eyes, ears, or nose. Whenever I look at him, I get such a tender feeling coming over me. I want to fondle and stroke the poor creature … Ah, the poor little thing!”

“I think he has eyes and ears and everything else, but we can’t find them,” I said. “Insects have that stuff in other places than we and the animals have, but that louse must know very well where anything is.”

Hiie shook her head doubtfully and stroked the louse still in the same way, for in her eyes this giant insect was a wondrously dear little creature, and a poor beggar besides.

This time too the louse trotted gladly toward us, rubbed itself against me out of habit, leapt out of the way of Ints, who it feared, and ended up with Hiie, who it knocked over at first, out of sheer enthusiasm. Then it got down to a crouching position, so that the girl could climb on its back. Hiie caressed and fondled the louse, and rode proudly up to Pirre and Rääk’s cave. The Primates were sitting in their yard and grinding some plant down on a big stone.

“What are you doing?” I asked, sitting down beside them.

“Take a look,” said Pirre, mixing the juice that flowed out of the crushed plants with some liquid slime, which colored it red.

“We want to draw the louse on the wall,” explained Rääk. “As a memorial. One day, when he’s no longer around, we can look at the picture and remember him.”

We went into the cave, and walked quite deep into it, where generations of the Primates’ ancestors had painted pictures from their lives. From floor to ceiling the walls of the cave were covered in thousands of tiny drawings, showing Primates and all kinds of long-extinct animals.

“This is our history,” said Pirre and Rääk proudly, and in one vacant spot Pirre set about drawing the louse. “Everything that has ever happened is nicely shown here. You see right up there is a picture of the arrival of the first humans. At first they were quite like us; they didn’t wear clothes or anything. But here”—and Pirre pointed to another picture—”they’ve hung skins on their backs.”