Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Johannes patted us on the shoulder once more and led us into the yard.

“Now go home and talk to your parents. And come back soon. All Estonians have to come out of the dark forest, into the sun and the open wind, because those winds carry the wisdom of distant lands to us. I’m an elder of this village. I’ll be expecting you. And Magdaleena will be expecting you too; it would be nice to play with you and go to church on Sunday to pray to God. Till we meet again, farewell, boys! May God protect you!”

Obviously something was troubling Pärtel; he opened his mouth a few times, but didn’t dare utter a sound. Finally, when we really did turn to leave, he couldn’t contain his question any longer: “What is that long stick in your hand? And all those spikes in it!”

“It’s a rake!” replied Johannes with a smile. “When you come to live in the village, you can have one of these!”

Pärtel’s face broke into a smile of joy. We ran into the forest.

For a little while we ran together, then we each scurried off to our own homes. I rushed into the shack, as if someone were chasing me, in the certain knowledge that now I would make it clear to my mother: life in the village was much more interesting than in the forest.

Mother wasn’t at home. Nor was Salme. Only Uncle Vootele was sitting in a corner, nibbling on some dried meat.

“What happened to you?” he asked. “Your face is on fire.”

“I went to the village,” I replied and told him rapidly, gabbling, and sometimes losing my voice with excitement, about everything I had seen in Johannes’s house.

Uncle Vootele did not change his expression on hearing all these marvels, even though I drew a rake for him on the wall with a piece of charcoal.

“I’ve seen a rake, yes,” he said. “It’s no use to us here.”

This seemed to me unbelievably stupid and old-fashioned. How? If something as crazily exciting as a rake has been invented, then it’s definitely of use! Magdaleena’s father Johannes is using it, after all!

“He might really need it, because you can scrape hay together with a rake,” explained Uncle Vootele. But they need to cultivate hay so that their animals won’t die of hunger in winter. We don’t have that problem. Our deer and goats can fend for themselves in winter; they look for their own food in the forest. But the villagers’ animals don’t go out in winter. They’re afraid of the cold and anyway they’re so stupid that they might get lost in the forest and the villagers would never find them again. They don’t know Snakish, so they can’t summon living beings to them. That’s why they keep their animals all winter penned in and feed them with the hay they’ve gone to great trouble to collect in the summer. You see that’s why the villagers need that ridiculous rake, but we get by very well without it.”

“But what about the spinning wheel!” The wheel had left a more powerful impression on me than the rake. All those skeins and wheels and other whirring fiddly bits were to my mind so magnificent that it wasn’t possible to describe it in words.

Uncle smiled.

“Children like toys like that,” he said. “But we don’t need a spinning wheel either, because an animal skin is a hundred times warmer and more comfortable than woven cloth. The villagers simply can’t get hold of animal skins, because they don’t remember Snakish anymore, and all the lynxes and wolves run off into the bushes away from them, or, otherwise, attack them and eat them up.”

“Then they had a cross, and on it was a human figure, and Johannes the village elder said it was a god whose name is Jesus Christ,” I said. Uncle had to understand for once just what inspiring things there were in the village!

Uncle Vootele just shrugged.

“One person believes in sprites and visits the sacred grove, and another believes in Jesus and goes to the church. It’s just a matter of fashion. There’s no use in getting involved with just one god; they’re more like brooches or pearls, just for decoration. For hanging around your neck, or for playing with.”

I was offended at my uncle, for flinging mud at all my marvels like that, so I didn’t start talking about the bread shovel. Uncle would certainly have said something foul about it — something about us not eating bread anyway. I kept quiet, glowering at him.

Uncle smirked.

“Don’t get angry. I do understand that when you see for the first time how the villagers live all that flapdoodle turns a kid’s head. Not only a kid — a grown-up too. Look how many of them have moved from the forest to the village. Including your own father — he used to talk about how fine and nice it was to live in the village, his eyes glowing like a wildcat’s. The village drives you crazy, because they have so many peculiar gadgets there. But you’ve got to understand that all these things have been dreamed up for only one reason: they’ve forgotten the Snakish words.”

“I don’t understand Snakish either,” I faltered.

“No, you don’t, but you’re going to start learning it. You’re a big enough boy now. And it’s not easy, and that’s why many people today can’t be bothered with it, and they’d rather invent all sorts of scythes and rakes. That’s a lot easier. When your head isn’t working, your muscles do. But you’re going to start on it. That’s what I think. I’ll teach you myself.”

n the old days, they say, it was quite natural for a child to learn the Snakish words. In those days there must have been more skilled masters, and even some who didn’t get all the hidden subtleties of the language — but even they got by in everyday life. All people knew Snakish, which was taught in days of yore to our ancestors by ancient Snakish kings.

By the time I was born, everything had changed. Older people were still using some Snakish, but there were few really wise ones among them — and then the younger generation no longer took the trouble to learn the difficult language at all. Snakish words are not simple; the human ear can hardly catch all those hairline differences that distinguish one hiss from another, giving an entirely different meaning to what you say. Likewise, human language is impossibly clumsy and inflexible, and all the hisses sound quite alike at first. You have to start learning the Snakish words with the kind of practice you take with a language. You have to train the muscles from day to day, to make your tongue as nimble and clever as a snake’s. At first it’s pretty annoying, and so it’s no wonder that many forest people found the effort too much, and preferred to move to the village, where it was much more interesting and you didn’t need Snakish.

Moreover, there weren’t any real teachers left. The retreat from Snakish had started several generations ago, and even our parents were only able to use the commonest and simplest of all the Snakish words, such as the word that calls a deer or an elk to you so you can slit his throat, or the word to calm a raging wolf, as well as the usual chitchat, about the weather and things like that, that you might have with a passing adder. Stronger words hadn’t come in for much use for a long time, because to hiss the strongest words — to get any result out of them — would need several thousand men at once, and there hadn’t been that many in the forest for ages. And so many Snakish words had fallen into desuetude, and recently no one had bothered to learn even the simplest ones, because as I say they didn’t stick in your mind easily — and why go to the trouble, when you could get behind a plow and work your muscles?