Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Johannes greeted me with his own overweening friendliness.

“Poor boy,” he said. “You look so thin and worn out. But your days of misery are now at an end. Come inside. I’ll give you some bread. You can eat as much as you want, because, thank God, we still have a crumb of bread.”

I forced a smile onto my face, but inside I was thinking, So it begins. You’ve hardly got your foot over the threshold when they’re already rushing to smother you with bread. But I had made my choice. I hadn’t come to the village to enjoy life or to gourmandise, apart from on Magdaleena, and I had all the more reason to forgo all other pleasures. The mosslike bread was a suitable foodstuff; it was enough to keep you alive, and I needed no more.

“I’d be glad of a piece of bread,” I said to Johannes.

I was handed a fresh slice of bread, I bit into it, and I gobbled up the unchewed bits into my intestines, as if wanting as fast as possible to fill myself with an alien substance and thus change into a new being. Johannes attributed my greed to desperate hunger; he looked at me sympathetically and sighed, “What a terrible life you must have had in the forest. Poor boy! Why didn’t you come and stay with us earlier? This time you won’t be leaving, and besides, winter is coming. You’d die of cold and hunger in the forest.”

Before my eyes appeared the gigantic white stone in the snakes’ lair, which was so sweet to lick and brought that pleasant lassitude, a long soft sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be going to spend the winter with the adders ever again — the last miserable human among the energetic and fruitfully propagating snakes. I didn’t want to be a poor relation. I didn’t want to play the part of a unique specimen, miraculously preserved down to our own day. It was all over; our kind had died out.

“Yes, I won’t be leaving anymore,” I told Johannes. “Now I’ll stay here.”

“The right decision. We’d better find you a place to stay to get you started, until you set up your own land.”

“Father, Leemet is staying with us,” said Magdaleena. “He’s going to be my husband.”

Elder Johannes was slack-jawed.

“My dear child, this is news to me … Why him? You’ve caught the eye of others too, boys in our village that you’ve known from childhood. You’ve always been so haughty … But this one here is straight out of the forest.”

“That’s just it, Father!” cried Magdaleena. “Why should I get married to a peasant, who doesn’t know how to do anything but what he’s picked up from the knights and the monks? I don’t want a pupil in my bed. I want a master, and that’s what I’ve got. You know, Father, whose child I’m carrying in my belly and what he will grow up to be!”

“I do know,” said Johannes, looking at Magdaleena’s midriff with such a reverent gaze that I was reminded of the story of how the elder had shared his bed with some bishop as a young boy. Evidently the poor man was hoping to get pregnant himself, I thought. What a disappointment it would be to him if not even his beloved God could get foreign men to have children. I didn’t say anything, because obviously I had to start living under the same roof as Johannes, and it wasn’t sensible to get into an argument with him on the first day.

“I understand that very well indeed,” said Johannes. “You’re like me, daughter: you aim high. It’s a great thing that you got to know a real knight; no other girl in our village has that experience and I’m proud of you. But Leemet? Look at him! He’s a savage!”

I was surprised that he was not ashamed to talk like that in my hearing, but apparently the old man thought I was so hungry that my attention would be only on the bread.

“Father, I have my own reasons why I chose Leemet,” declared Magdaleena. “You might call him a savage, but he’s special to me.”

“He’s special, of course, but being special like that is not worth anything,” countered Johannes, eyeing me with evident embarrassment. “I’m not saying he won’t become a decent peasant, that he won’t learn how to sow and reap — but right now he’s a nobody. He’s been living like an animal. He isn’t even baptized.”

“Father, I know what I’m doing,” said Magdaleena, rising to her full height. “Don’t forget that I’m the mother of a future knight! Father, in your time you’ve traveled a lot and seen a lot, but now you’re old and I understand the new world better. Leemet is the one I need, no one else. He will be the father of my child. He’s the one best suited for it.”

She looked at me loftily, but then smiled almost apologetically.

“Besides, I love him,” she said, and sat down next to me on the bench, taking me by the neck. “Father, don’t even try to argue. The matter is settled.”

“All right,” sighed Johannes. “Let him stay. Well now, I was supposed to go to the monastery anyway today and ask advice of the holy brothers on the question of werewolves. I might as well arrange a time for baptism too. Leemet must become a Christian and be given a Christian name. He must get to know the Word of God and the Lord’s commandments.”

“No God,” I said. Really, I was prepared to swallow bread, cut straws in the fields, turn a quern, and do all the other idiocies that the villagers had learned from the foreigners, but I wanted to keep away from God. I was sick to the back teeth of all these sprites and jesuses and other invented beings. They had aggrieved me in the forest and now even in the village they wouldn’t go away. They had changed their names, but they were still just as invisible and senseless. I didn’t want to hear about any such stupidity; it reminded me of Ülgas and the fact that I’d only been able to chop half of his head off. I had destroyed the sacred grove so that no one would set foot there ever again, and I didn’t intend to now go to church.

“What do you mean — no God?” snapped Johannes. “I cannot allow an unbaptized pagan living on my land. That’s impossible! We have a Christian village and we belong to the Christian world. We are a worthy part of it, even though poor and a little backward, but even we are kept in place by our Holy Father. You must have yourself baptized and receive the proper faith; you must go to church and learn God’s commandments!”

“I don’t intend to do that,” I replied. “Now listen! I agree to do all the work, till the fields, and prepare the same bread, which doesn’t taste good but fills your stomach — everything that is tangible and edible, and thus real and actual. But I don’t need new sprites!”

“I’m not talking about sprites!” shouted Johannes. “Sprites naturally only bring misfortune on people, because they’re in the service of the devil. They are really to be feared. I’m talking about God, who protects us!”

“Elder, I have lived in the forest all my life and I tell you there are no sprites! There is no need to fear them; what you should fear is people who believe in sprites. The same goes for your God. It’s just a new name for the sprites, given by the monks, like me changing my name if I were christened. I’ll still be myself; it doesn’t matter what I’m called. I can’t be bothered to play this game.”

“This is not a game!” shouted Johannes, rising up. “You have to choose: will you become a Christian, like all the people in this village, or will you go back to the forest? I’m not going to allow a pagan to live among us, no way!”

“Father, be quiet!” Magdaleena cried. “Leemet doesn’t have to go to church if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have to be christened. I want him just as he is.”

“But he’s a pagan! All pagans serve the devil!”

“Father, why do you think we don’t sometimes have a use for the devil? Do you think God is all-powerful? You saw today that the sacred belt didn’t save our village’s sheep. Maybe turning to the devil might have been more useful?”