Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

“You lived in the forest yourself!”

“I don’t anymore! Everyone’s left the forest. Everyone!”

“Go to hell!” I shouted. I didn’t know how to argue with Pärtel; I didn’t want to argue with him. I wanted everything to be just as it was before and Pärtel to be Pärtel again, not Peetrus. But he stood there wearing his village clothes and carrying a scythe, talking to me with a serious face about God and grain harvesting, and behind his back the whole world and the myriads of people who didn’t live in the forest and hungrily munched on bread all glared at me. I only had the Snakish words. I turned my back on Peetrus and ran back among the trees.

I kept on walking, striding through the forest, pushing branches away and stumbling through thickets. I passed Pirre and Rääk’s cave and saw the louse getting hopefully to its feet; it must have been pining for Hiie, but the girl had to stay at home and couldn’t come visiting her friend. Pirre and Rääk were looking out of their cave, but I didn’t go up to them. These last Primates were just living in their own strange past, bare bottomed, not having even learned to wear animal skins. I was a primate in comparison to Pärtel in his village clothes. I rushed onward, enraged with the whole world.

I kept on walking all day, through the whole forest, getting to places where I’d never been before. I saw many animals: deer, goats, and elk, who stopped still when they saw me and looked at me thoughtfully with big eyes; bears, who tried clumsily to greet me; a few wandering wolves. I met no humans. Finally, toward evening, when I was dead tired, the forest started to thin out. I kept going until I got to the forest’s edge. Yonder was an unknown village. I saw humans there too; they were gathered in a great cleared square, making fire and swaying. They were screaming and laughing. There were many of them.

The forest was surrounded on every side by people and their villages.

“So, what now?” someone was asking, and only now did I notice that Ints had been crawling along with me the whole way. He didn’t seem tired at all, coiling himself up and looking up at me benignly. “Let them live in clumps, on each other’s backs. That’s how ants live, because they are just tiny specks of dirt with legs, not even worth noticing. They have to stick together to survive. They have no other option; they don’t know Snakish. Don’t worry about them!”

I was too tired to reply. I threw myself down on the moss and closed my eyes.

“I can’t get back home today,” I said. “I’ll sleep right here.”

“You’ll catch cold here,” said Ints. “It’s autumn already. But there’s an adders’ burrow just near here. Actually they’re everywhere; our kind has burrowed everywhere throughout the forest. Let’s go inside; it’s warm there. It’ll be good for you to sleep there.”

“Thanks, Ints,” I said. Ints crawled ahead and I tried to stumble after him on my painful legs. That must have been why Ints stayed so lively; he didn’t have legs to get tired. He led me below a fallen tree, under which was a narrow passage leading to a snakes’ lair.

I climbed inside. Down in the burrow there were other adders, who watched me curiously. Since I was so far from home, there wasn’t a single snake I knew among them. I greeted them with a hiss and laid myself out in a corner. The adders made a cozy space for me.

I fell asleep, feeling more snake than human, and that sensation comforted me a little.

didn’t meet with Pärtel after that. I no longer stood waiting at the edge of the forest; if Pärtel had come toward me in the forest, I probably would have jumped into the bushes, as I did when I saw the Sage of the Grove or Tambet. I didn’t want to meet Pärtel, because he wasn’t Pärtel anymore but Peetrus, and there is nothing worse than seeing an old friend change into someone alien and incomprehensible.

I had often seen Ints eating, gobbling up a whole frog or mouse in one gulp. A little animal would gradually disappear into his throat and in the end the curves of its body would still be visible under Ints’s skin, even when completely covered by the snake. It had been swallowed by the adder, just as my old friend Pärtel had been swallowed up by some village boy called Peetrus. Pärtel’s nose and ears were still visible inside that Peetrus, but digestion had already begun, and soon enough the last traces of him would disappear. I would have been much happier if Pärtel had died — then I could have mourned him in peace. But now I knew that he was still moving around in some distorted, defiled form; he existed, but not for me. I had the feeling you have when someone takes your good old trousers and shits in them; the trousers still exist, but they can’t be worn anymore; they are full of a disgusting alien smell.

Naturally Pärtel didn’t come to me in the forest, so I had no need to flee into the bushes. No doubt he felt much the same as I did. He had entered a new world and was now greedily learning its rules, just as I had once tirelessly contorted my own tongue to enunciate all the Snakish words and get the whole forest to communicate with me. Pärtel no doubt wanted to be absorbed into his new life as quickly as possible, and I was part of his old one. The sight of me embarrassed him. He might have felt a bit like a traitor, but above all he was ashamed of me. Pärtel had nothing to talk to me about, while in the village there were plenty of boys and girls who lived his kind of life, ate the same foods, and did the same kinds of tasks. It was quite natural for Pärtel to exchange me for them; it was simpler that way.

Would I have acted differently if my mother and father had moved to the village and Pärtel had stayed in the forest in my place? I can’t say. I’d like to say that I wouldn’t have betrayed the forest, would have stayed a true friend to the adders and gone to visit Pärtel every day, that I wouldn’t have forgotten Snakish, as Pärtel had done, because the next time I met him — it was many years later — he couldn’t force out a single hiss. All the Snakish words were, so to speak, purged from his memory, and if he had remembered them, he wouldn’t have been able to hiss them, because he’d lost half his teeth from gnawing on bread and his tongue was swollen from drinking bitter beer, which the village people guzzled instead of simple water. It would be easy for me to say that I wouldn’t have changed into such an oaf, but I’m afraid I’d be lying. Even I would have been sucked into the village, swallowed up as if by a gigantic snake, by the alien and hostile Frog of the North, and gradually digested. And I would have had no power to resist, because my own Frog of the North had vanished, and no one knew where it was sleeping.

So I gave up thinking about Pärtel and became reconciled to the fact that somewhere in the village there now lived a boy named Peetrus, who cut rye with a scythe, played on the swing with the other village children, and had nothing at all to do with me. So I played with Ints and sometimes also visited Hiie. Uncle Vootele often took me with him on his trails, and we went to visit those solitary old men who had stayed on in the forest, but as if by some agreement they all died off during that autumn, and the forest was even emptier of people. Ülgas the Sage burned their corpses on a pyre, but Uncle Vootele and I didn’t take part in the funerals, because after the business of the sacred lake our family had nothing to do with Ülgas. So he cast spells and invocations alone by the fire, the only mourner being the deeply silent Tambet, who naturally didn’t question any rite that had any of the flavor of the ancient way of life.