The Last of the Vostyachs (18 page)

When Ivan stopped playing, panting and sweating, to mad applause, the musicians rushed to cluster around him and bear him off with them on to the stage, putting microphones, kettledrums, hunting horns and a whole range of other drums before him. But Ivan batted them all away with a sweep of his hand, clutching his drum of reindeer skin more closely to his chest. He sighed deeply, narrowed his eyes and, with the tips of his fingers, drummed out the beat that told of the bear's dash through the trees; then, with his knuckles, he played out its roar; with the flat of his hand he played its flight, and, with a grazing motion, he imitated the sound of the hunters' arrows as they whistled through the air, piercing the bear's coat with a moist thwack. When at last he laid them, open, down on the hard leather, his hands were burning, throbbing like wounds. He got down on his knees, lowered his chin and stayed there for several minutes, motionless. The audience stared at him with bated breath. Now came the magic song for warding off the devil, who was preparing to pounce once the bear's spirit left his body. Ivan inhaled as deeply as he could; he needed all the breath he could muster for this song.

Uutta murha ristirimme

Pehkavalla pokevemme

Ulitalla tohkevasti

Pikku ranta vikevasti

Naike viike tukavanne

Ei se loutta polevanne

Namma tilla vanta rokka

Simme karatali ehka

Toise timmo rantaseli

Eika poro muisteseli

Murha tavon eli koska

Riitta sahko pulliselkska

Uutta murha ristirimme

Pehkavalla pokevemme

Ulitalla tohkevasti

Pikku ranta vikevasti

Ivan was beating time with his feet, smothering the words of his song within his throat so that they would raise no echo; that was what the hunters of Tajmyr had done. His song rose through the room like smoke, cloaked in hoarse warmth. Listening to those wild shouts no one had ever heard before, the audience was ecstatic, and began to sway along with the rhythm. As though wearing a succession of ever-changing masks, the Vostyach twisted his face into a thousand different grimaces as he forced the breath up from his belly and turned it into song. It was not just his voice that sang, but his eyes, his nose, his hands, his legs, his arching back, his whole body. Slowly, the people around him started repeating the odd word, then a verse, then the whole song. In the freezing night, the whole Baltic echoed with the song of the men of the tundra which had come down from the distant peaks of the Byrranga Mountains to the land of the thousand lakes.

Uutta murha ristirimme

Pehkavalla pokevemme

Ulitalla tohkevasti

Pikku ranta vikevasti

bellowed the drunken Finnish tourists at the tops of their voices, not understanding a word of what they were saying, raising their tankards with one hand and using the other to touch up their partners, themselves scarlet in the face from alcohol and the excitement of that unprecedented spectacle. None of them realised that what they were singing was in fact Vostyach, the unknown ancient language which linked them to the American Indians. None of them knew that the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay was once more returning to its natural home, their very own mouths, and that thousands of miles away, across the ocean, deep within the Canadian forests, seated in a circle around their coloured totems on their reservations, the Algonquin Indians pronounced it in exactly the same way in their songs invoking the spirits of their ancestors. Yet, strangely, on the Aland Islands which were now streaming past them on the other side of the glass, the elk now raised their heads, the owls opened their eyes, the hares pricked up their eyes in their dens. Salmon, herring and whitefish, their bellies streaked with mauve, rose to the surface from the frozen depths and slithered silently behind the
Amorella
as she picked her way between the shattered ice floes heading for Stockholm, all lights ablaze.

The professor paused: he had already been speaking for twenty minutes. He poured himself a glass of water before carrying on, and the sound rang out like a cataract in the total silence of the lecture hall. He had now almost reached the end of his speech, but no one had laughed or clapped at the points where his secretary had put the asterisks. Cowed by Aurtova's steady glare, by his wooden movements and dogmatic tone, the audience had listened to him in subdued silence, barely risking a cough, obscurely convinced that something momentous was about to happen. His expression invisible behind his thick glasses, rather than taking notes in preparation for some poisonous riposte, even Juknov was peering around as though seeking help. In the brief pause files rustled, chairs creaked, noses were blown; in their booths, the interpreters made use of the short interruption to consult each other about some problem word. But when Aurtova put down his glass and turned over the last sheet of his speech, silence reigned once more.

‘
I would like to conclude with a reflection which may perhaps seem harsh, but which is today more relevant than ever: I would like to launch an appeal which may affront the more tender-hearted among you, but which I nonetheless hope will prick the consciences of those who have our language and our culture truly at heart.

‘In this age of stagnation and decline, certain sated and jaded nations have squeezed themselves into history, only to find they can't get out. They clog up the course of events, wallowing in their decadence. Like some monstrous misshapen tumour, they are sprouting from the very thing which throttles them. In the normal course of events it would take centuries before they were digested, before their flesh dissolved, hardened as it is by its thousand-year acquaintanceship with evil. But their incurable corruption produces recurrent flare-ups of infection in which thousands of human beings are annihilated. How many more gulags, how much more ethnic cleansing will it take before humanity is purged of that toxic pustule, the Slavs? For how long will man's progress towards all that is good continue to be hampered by these corrupt and backward nations, scions of a primitive world that is no more? All forms of life, each man, each plant, each animal, each stone, strain inexorably to move on from the purely material, to march towards the perfection which will link them once more to God. But the dinosaurs of our time refuse to die, and their interminable death throes oblige the rest of humanity to linger on in a world of evil. Their very language has turned against them: it no longer stills incomprehension but foments it, and, when words have become irretrievably snarled up, a language will subdivide and move ever further away from its original meaning, indeed from any meaning. Then debate and even invective become vain, and we are left with just yes and no, and black and white. This spiral of destruction spawns monstrous languages, designed to conceal, to deceive, to erect a barrier between words which were once held in common, to give them double meanings, so that even the most humdrum of phrases – “Hello, who's speaking?” for example – may trigger off a war. In the new world we're all waiting for, a drastic new morality will be needed, one which will ensure the suicide of any distinctive group when it becomes useless or threatening to the rest of humankind. People who can no longer be understood should have the humility to change languages, seeking continued existence in the freshness of another tongue, cleansing themselves through some salutary cultural transfusion which puts new sap in their veins, and infuses new grace into their customs.

‘It was the Greeks who fostered the slippery notion of democracy, the tortuous concept of the state, the unnatural condition of living penned up within city walls. This was the model adopted by continental Europe, which further elaborated the concept of creeping, all-pervasive governance and cherished the teeming cesspit of the city and the myth of the public institution. But what is an institution? It is an empty building where no one lives, it is faceless and anonymous, even its telephones remain unanswered. All these ideas are alien to Finnish culture. For us, the village is the centre of all things, the institution is a living being, which sits itself down and drinks beside us, whose every secret we are privy to, which bares its all to us openly in the sauna. So it is to the village that we must return and, by founding one after another, repopulate the land we have abandoned, bringing back the music of our language into forests that have too long been silent, intimidated by the Slavic bark. This is how we will escape the steam-roller of the great western democracies and their blackmailing call for enforced assimilation. But we must do more besides, combining renewed cultural expansionism with firm yet passive resistance. Now I shall explain how this might be done.

‘Over these last years we have at last been able to take stock of the state of the various Finno-Ugric languages, and have found them to be in rude health and consistent growth, much more so than their past history might suggest. Driven by enemy peoples out of their first homelands into the Siberian tundra at the edge of the occupied world, forced to live in climatic conditions which put their very existence in jeopardy, the Finnish peoples survived centuries of persecution, and indeed of genocide during the dark Soviet era. Besieged by the hostile tide of Slavs, our peoples resisted cultural assimilation, keeping the memory of their mother tongue alive to the point that it may now at last be reborn. Suddenly a mood of brotherhood is stirring once again, one which we thought had been put out, but which is now making itself felt from the Urals to the Atlantic, from Mordvia to Karelia, from Ingria to Hungary, over an area the size of Western Europe. All in all, what saved our peoples from Russianisation and linguistic annihilation was not just their intrinsic physical robustness, their dogged hold on life, their fighting spirit, but sheer ignorance. It was our ignorance of the Russian language, our refusal to learn it and to surrender to the dominant culture, which enabled our peoples to survive linguistically. If today Nenets, Ngnasan, Mordvin, Vogul and Votic are still spoken, it is because they have been protected by their speakers' ignorance. Instead of learning Russian and improving their social condition by moving into the great industrial centres or emigrating to more prosperous areas, the Finnish peoples preferred to barricade themselves behind their own language, thus remaining impervious to Russianisation.

And this should serve us as an example. In the world of mass culture, where the weaker languages are threatened by a new linguistic colonialism which stifles minority cultures, only ignorance can protect us from extinction. My call to the new generations, here as in the former Soviet republics of Finnish stock, is therefore this: cherish ignorance, do not study the language of the foreigner, but force him to learn your own! Since he cannot take on the world's linguistic colossi on equal terms, all that the speaker of a Finnic language can do is to adopt an attitude of resolute, dumb ignorance, the very one which has enabled him to survive intact over so many centuries. Ignorance will be our strength, our breastplate, and it will sabotage linguistic imperialism until it is no more. We must never forget that expansion always saps the strength, and that the day will inevitably come when the dominant languages crumble away. Too far from their meanings, like an advance guard too far from their supply lines, such foreign words as are still trickling into the Finnic languages will be swallowed up by the very tongues which they themselves were destined to stifle; their sounds and phonemes will be cast out, their double consonants will fall away, their vowels will broaden out and the language of true men will be reborn. Who today recognises the Indo-European roots of our familiar
ranta
or
pullo
or
kaupunki
? Yet these were originally Germanic words, which were brought into Finland with domination in mind. But the Finnic languages gobbled them up, turned “strand”, “bottle” and “kaufpunkt” into something of their own, stripping away the undesirable sounds which our mouths found hard to pronounce, giving new strength to tainted vowels and merging three untidy palatals into a single velar, thereby creating new and solid words, destined to last forever.

‘So, on this solemn occasion, I am taking advantage of this celebration of our languages to express the hope that, in fifty years time, no one between the Gulf of Bothnia and the White Sea will know one single word of English or of Russian, and that the vocalic harmony of the Finno-Ugric languages will ring out loud and clear, dense and compact as our own forests. Long live Finland! Long live ignorance!'

Such desultory applause as Aurtova's speech elicited was short-lived; the packed lecture hall seemed in the grip of some nameless dread. The eyes of most of the audience were no longer on the speaker's platform, bedecked with flowers and flags, but on the group of policemen advancing warily from the back of the hall, leaving damp footprints on the linoleum. Their leader stood stiffly at the foot of the dais, waiting for the professor to descend to his own level, then asked him demurely for his personal details, reading out every word from the identity card the great man coolly handed him. Then, in a voice touched with regret, he uttered the indictment:

‘Professor Jarmo Aurtova, I declare you under arrest for the murder of Olga Pavlovna and Katia Rekhsadze.'

Staring into the middle distance, Aurtova held out his wrists to receive the handcuffs and followed the police without a word. He walked through the hall with a martial step, holding his head high in the midst of the crowd which drew aside to let him pass. The photographers who were awaiting him in the entrance hall seemed cowed by his haughty demeanour, scarcely able to perform their function: the face they saw before them, which would stare forth from the crime pages of the
Helsingin Sanomat
, was not that of a murderer, but of a hero, fit for some monument to the fallen, some commemorative medal, a thousand-mark banknote. Aurtova did not see the rows of blank faces in front of him; his impassive gaze was not on the hall around him, nor on the buildings of the city that could be glimpsed beyond the great glass door, nor even on the hazy horizon beyond. He was gazing into distances yet more remote, beyond the sky, beyond time itself. He was staring, mesmerised, into the spinning maelstrom of the future as it swallowed centuries, peoples, seas and mountains. The Vostyachs' yurts were ripped to tatters as they were sucked into the eye of that mighty cyclone, along with Pecheneg horsemen, Viking hordes, Cossack horses, Swedish galleons. Outside, on the quay in front of the conference centre where the crowd had gathered to observe the scene, the professor did not deign to cast even the briefest of glances at his ex-wife, or at poor Hurmo, who was whimpering and straining on the leash to run to greet his master. He turned his back on the two figures who were waiting for him in the snow; for one brief moment he looked out to sea, breathed in a deep lungful of sea air and got into the police van, doing up the top button of his coat as he did so.