Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

The last man … Mother also said that, one evening when I came home and sat in my usual place to taste Mother’s roasted deer withers. Seven years had now passed since Uncle Vootele’s death; I had grown tall, but remained as lean as before, and my beard was red, though my hair was brown. Mother put before me a decent slice of carefully and thoroughly roasted meat, sat on the other side of the table, and sighed sadly.

“What’s the matter now?” I asked, knowing that Mother was sighing to force that question out of me. She sighed once more.

“You’re the last man in our family,” she began. That beginning was familiar to me; she often spoke like that. Actually I knew what Mother wanted to say, because we had had many talks like this. Nothing much new happened in the forest; everything was peacefully curled around its own tail, and our days looked like the wolves’ flea searches: first they nibble at their thighs, then the stomach, then the withers, then the tail, and so on over and over again, always in the same order, without involving any part of the body that might present a surprise.

“You’re the last man in our family,” said Mother. “You’ll have to talk to Mõmmi. Salme’s very upset because of him.”

Mõmmi was my brother-in-law, a big fat bear, with whom Salme had been living for more than five years. I remembered well how she left home — for Mother it was a matter of terrible shame and unhappiness, because since her own youthful experience she could not stand to look at bears. The fact that a bear was hanging around Salme was long known to us, and though Mother did all she could to keep Salme away from the bruin, there was not much she could do. Salme moved freely around the forest and the bear was likewise shuffling around at will, so it was no surprise that their paths kept crossing somewhere under a bush. It’s hard for a young girl to resist a bear, something so big, soft, and cuddly, whose lips taste of honey. Mother combated it as best she could, but when she got home in the evenings Salme’s clothes were always full of bear hairs.

“You’ve been meeting the bear again!” wept Mother. “I told you it’s not right! A bear will not bring you happiness! They’re evil animals!”

“Mõmmi’s not evil at all!” contested Salme. “Quite the opposite, he’s terribly kindhearted. I don’t know, Mother. Maybe your bear was evil, but you can’t tar all bears with the same brush!”

Mother didn’t like reminders about “her bear”; her face always turned red and she changed the subject. But in this case it wasn’t possible; she wanted to make it clear to Salme that going out with a bear was disastrous. So she grew a little embarrassed and said that all bears are deceitful, and their evil sometimes only appears years later.

“Years later!” sputtered Salme. “You might as well say there’s no point in me getting married at all. Mother, I love Mõmmi!”

“Dear child, don’t do this to me!” pleaded Mother. “Don’t talk like that! It’s terrible to hear. All your life I’ve been keeping you away from bears and protecting you, and now you go and undo all my good work!”

“But mother, who am I going to marry if not the bear?” asked Salme. “There are no young men in the forest apart from Leemet. Or should I go to old Ülgas? Would that filthy old man please you more than a lovely fat hairy bear?”

Mother had nothing to say to that; she just wept uncontrollably, and Salme’s meetings with the bear continued. And one day she announced that she was moving in with Mõmmi and would become his lawful wife.

“Mõmmi doesn’t like me having to always go home for the night,” said Salme. “He says it breaks his heart and he can’t sleep at night; he just sighs at the moon and moans.”

“If you move in with him, you’ll break my heart!” wailed Mother. “That bear is stealing my precious daughter!”

“Why?” complained Salme. “We’ll live here in the same forest. I’ll come and visit you. And besides, Mother, you can visit me too. Mõmmi’s offended that you’ve been avoiding him like this. Many times he’s been wanting to meet you.”

“I’ll never come to a bear’s den!” shouted Mother, shocked, brandishing her hand as if a horrid bear were flying over her head in the form of a fly. “Never!”

“Well, that’s a great shame!” declared Salme defiantly, and left home.

Mother resisted for precisely one day; then she roasted two large haunches of venison as a housewarming present, hauled them, groaning, onto her shoulder, and we trudged to Mõmmi’s lair. The bear came to meet us, his head cocked in his simpleminded way, and humbly licked Mother’s feet.

“And you’re Salme’s mother,” he said in a deep voice. “I’ve seen you sometimes in the forest, but I’ve never dared to come up to you, as you’re such a charming and lovely lady.”

Mother’s old love of bears, which she had dammed up like a beaver, now burst into full flood; she burst into tears, hugged Mõmmi, and kissed him behind the ears. She presented the bear with both of the haunches and watched tenderly as he hungrily gnawed on them, polished the last bone but one clean with his tongue, and when he got on his hind legs and bowed to the ground before Mother as a mark of gratitude, my dear mother was completely won over. All the way back she was telling me that she’d never seen such a polite bear, and that she was pleased for Salme.

“That bear knows how to respect her and care for her,” Mother declared. “Actually bears are very pleasant animals. The bear that I knew …”

At this point Mother stopped, because she realized that it isn’t quite polite to praise in my hearing the bear who ate my father’s head off. But Mother was wrong. I didn’t hold any grudge against that unknown bear. I didn’t remember my father, and if I tried to imagine him, the face of Johannes the village elder appeared before me, and I remembered how he tried to club Ints to death.

Mother started visiting Salme and Mõmmi every day, taking them meat and decorating their cave, while Mõmmi picked wildflowers and brought honeycombs down from the trees in return. Salme was happy in her dear bear’s embrace, and often rode around the forest on Mõmmi’s back, clinging to his furry throat like a little frog, her cheek against Mõmmi’s nape.

Of course this did not please Tambet; the marriage of Salme and Mõmmi gave him yet another reason to despise our family. In his opinion a bear was a creature far below a human. Bears never visited the sacred grove, they lived a wild and loose life, and they were gluttonous and lecherous. It was a matter of shame for a human to live openly with a bear. In secret it had of course occurred before — in fact very often; according to my departed Uncle Vootele, in ancient times it often happened that while all the men were rushing off to battle under the protective cover of the Frog of the North, the women left at home had bears waiting for them in the yard who were happy to console them while the men at the front were cutting down foreigners. Tambet would of course never have agreed to admit that anything so crude could have happened in those noble ancient times. For him the olden times were a single uninterrupted ray of sunshine; all the ugly stains that darkened its luster were due to the present day, and our immoral family in particular.

Still, there is no point in denying that Tambet was right in his opinion of bears as lecherous. That was the reason why Mother often sighed in the evenings and called me the last man in the family. Mõmmi, who had been living happily with Salme for years, had started looking for new girls. Only Hiie was available in the forest, and Mõmmi tried to court her, put a wreath on his head and hung around the girl shaking his head sadly, but Hiie did not take the bait. She could hardly fail to have heard stories at home about the lustfulness of bears. One might think that I was in very bad odor at Tambet’s and Mall’s home, but this didn’t stop my good relations with Hiie.