The Last of the Vostyachs (2 page)

Since that day, Ivan had not uttered a word. He had carried on washing stones in the pool of icy water, had split rocks with his pick-axe, had pushed the wheelbarrow along the steep, slippery path, had gone about all his work with lowered eyes, had endured all manner of humiliation, eating without looking to see what they poured into his mess tin, getting up at dawn and going to bed at sunset without a word. The new convicts who arrived in the camp thought that Ivan was dumb. Only the ones who'd been there longer knew why he never spoke. The soldiers too – even the ones who had killed his father – had forgotten. They didn't recognise him among the crowd of tattered death's-heads they prodded into the lorries every day. When Ivan became a man, no one in the mine any longer had any idea who that short, sinewy local was, with his flat face and jutting Tartar cheekbones. Everyone who knew his story was long dead. The others felt alarmed by that inexplicable silence which seemed akin to madness. The cover of his file, kept in a cupboard in the barracks, bore just one word: Ivan. All it contained were a few crumpled pages concerning his arrest for poaching.

Ivan broke off a branch and swung it round his head to drive off the mosquitoes and the bad memories. Now he had other things to worry about. He had to take care of the child. First of all he had to teach him how to bend a birch branch into a bow, how to braid and stretch the fibres of the bark to make ropes, how to cut an arrow so that it would imitate the falcon's cry. Soon he would have to get by on his own and spend the winter in the forest. He would sleep in huts covered with skins and bark. He would dig into the frozen water of the lakes for bait. A thick row of young birch trees growing by the banks of a pool caught Ivan's eye. He walked out over the sand and caught sight of the odd fish darting through the still water. He bent one of the saplings towards him, broke off a gleaming white branch and turned it around in his hands, exclaiming aloud: ‘This will make a splendid bow.' Then salmon rose to the surface, dozens of coot flew skywards from their hiding-places among the reeds, thousands of hamsters emerged from their burrows and dived blindly into the muddy marshes; in the distant tundra, whole droves of wild reindeer galloped off in alarm. The lake waters puckered beneath a breath of wind, which then ran like a shiver throughout the forest. The mist melted away and the sun glittered on the tree trunks. It was twenty years since Ivan had uttered a word, twenty years since the language spoken by the oldest tribe of the Proto-Uralic family, the Vostyachs – cousins of the Samoyeds, the wild bear-hunters who once lived in the Byrranga Mountains and whom scientists believed to be extinct – had been heard anywhere in Northern Siberia. Hearing those sounds, all nature quaked. Things that had not been named for years emerged sluggishly from their long sleep, realising they still existed. Each animal in turn answered Ivan's words with its own call. They were back – the men who could talk with wolves, who knew the names of the black fish hidden in the mud of the Arctic lakes, of the fleshy mosses which, for just a few summer's days, purpled the rocks beneath the Tajmyr Peninsula; the men who had found the way out of the dark forests into another world but never the way back.

For the first few days, Ivan wandered through the thick of the trees and over the rocks, prompted by clues from his eyes and ears. For the first time in years, his heart felt untroubled. But he missed his fellow-men. He was looking for his people, because now at last he wanted, he needed to speak. He remembered the faces around the fire, the snow-covered hunters, dressed in skins, crowding into the yurt. They would sit down around the embers, drink a bowl of curdled milk and then sink into a deep sleep. When they came down from the mountains in the spring, their gaze was as piercing as that of the animals they had hunted throughout the winter. Ivan called out names which had come back to him the moment he opened his mouth to utter them. Korak, Häinö, Taypok. No one answered, no one came forward to meet the returning convict. He followed ancient paths scoured out in the rock, sometimes he came upon the skeleton of a burned-out yurt, or strips of hardened leather hanging from some branch. But he did not meet a living soul. Only the distant wolves answered his call. The whole forest was one vast graveyard without graves. His people were buried beneath the black earth where moss and mushrooms grew. They had dissolved into the rotting mud that lay at the bottom of the pools, into the dark flesh of the berries, into the sickly sap of the birch trees, swayed by mysterious gusts of wind.

Ivan had realised that the child who sometimes followed him, then disappeared again between the ferns, was not alive. He was a vision, a spirit without a home; a dead thing rejected by the world to come. A silent shade. Yet, in his desire to break out of his solitude, Ivan had begun to talk to him. He told him stories he did not know he knew, but which came into his head with every step he took in those familiar places. To his surprise, he also found himself singing, remembering the sound of instruments which did not seem to be part of any known memory, but which beat in his temples the moment he began to sing. One after the other, he rediscovered the hidden paths he had taken with his father, he recognised the copse of black birches where the young deer, their antlers still soft and pulpy as young bark, would go to hide. He found the waterfall in the mountain stream he'd gone to with his father to catch salmon, from which you could see the distant outline of the far-off peaks, those furthest to the north, the first to catch the snow. He came to the bare, dry upland plain, where all that grew was the odd dwarf birch tree, clinging to the rock, the odd reddish dwarf pine, laid low by frost. He followed the stony track up as far as he could and, though he could not see it, he knew that somewhere, far below him, lay the sea. With his white bow he hunted and killed animals whose flesh he had no intention of eating: what he craved was their strong, sour smell. Greedily, he breathed in the smell of lives which were being cut short in order to quicken his own, which was still in suspended animation. What most alarmed him, in the new world he was discovering, was its silence. It was too similar to that of the nights in the hut, when he'd been in the mine. So Ivan made himself a drum out of reindeer skin. He remembered his father's skilful hands as he bound strips of leather around the carefully shaped piece of spruce. He would play it in front of the fire on moonless nights, when it was dangerous to fall asleep and you might be plummeted into the world of the dead. This was what had happened to old Kunnas one October night in his hut when he was getting ready to go out hunting. The wind had crept down quietly from the Byrranga Mountains, slipped into the forest almost at ground level, without setting the branches stirring. It had stolen into the huts, whistling among the skins, among the sheets of bark, and had frozen the blood of all the sleepers in their veins. Kunnas had been found seated on his rush mat, his bow clutched in his hand and his quiver slung over his shoulder. His eyes were open; he seemed surprised to have been taken by death so mindlessly.

At sunrise Ivan would tie his drum around his waist and follow the stony track up to the topmost point. Then he would kneel down on the highest rock and start to play, to tell the world that he was still alive. He rapped on the taut skin with both his hands, with the bones of animals, and, as he did so, his arms and fingers remembered movements they had made earlier in another life.

The first snowfall came towards the end of autumn. Ivan chose a sheltered spot in the wood and built himself a yurt of animal skins. Now, at night, he could hear the wolves coming closer and closer; in the darkness, he saw their yellow eyes. Then he would fashion arrows, which he would heat in the fire, and talk to the wolves aloud, to scare them off. But they stayed motionless behind the trees, fixing their gaze on man and fire alike, pricking their ears when Ivan doused the flames. Then they would curl up until dawn, when he would see them move off into the misty forest. One night Ivan had a disturbing dream. Awaking with a start, he heard the wolves howling; they were all around his yurt. Dozens of wolves were staring at him, lifting their muzzles skywards and baying piteously. Then Ivan understood. They were his people. Fleeing the soldiers, the men of his tribe had hidden in deep underground lairs in the mountain caves. They had become wolves themselves, and now they lived in the forests. That was why they were seeking him out now. He must call them back, sing and play to them to bring them back into the world of men. So each night Ivan would play his drum for them. He would light the fire and wait until the stars that made up Orion were above him in the sky – the glinting iron belt, the drawn bow and glowing arrow, pointing at the darkness. Then he would tap his fingers gently on the drum and look towards the wood. The wolves would narrow their eyes and whimper uneasily, scenting fire. Then they would circle in and sit on their hind quarters until the stars faded from the sky. But none of them ever took on human form. They had been too long out of the world of men, they had ventured too far among the beasts, and the way back was lost. Ivan would have to go right deep into their lairs and bring them back one by one.

At first, Ivan had felt wary of the fair-haired woman he'd come upon in the village inn, who seemed so eager to hear him talk. Her eyes were not unkind, she wasn't wearing a military uniform, her voice was pleasant and she spoke the language of the turnip-growers. But Ivan sensed a hint of Russian in her accent, and he was also wary of the strange contraption she always had with her, and into which she would ask him to speak. He was afraid it was a trap to lure him away from his mountains and have him locked up in the mine again.

At the beginning of winter Ivan had discovered the village where the turnip-growers lived; it stood at the edge of the forest, in the direction of the great river, but he had never ventured into it. Its houses, with their tarred roofs, reminded him too much of the barracks in the mine. He stayed hidden in the trees, observing it from afar: its smoking chimneys and its inn, where the lorries from the sawmill would draw up, laden with timber. He would observe the bluish strip of road as it wound its way into the distance, afraid that columns of shrieking soldiers might come into view from one moment to the next. But nothing at all emerged from the tundra. The colour of the sky changed, the wood gave out new scents, and it began to snow hard on the Byrranga Mountains. A blizzard raged over the forests and newly frozen lakes for days on end. The wind piled the heavy snow into scaly dunes which shifted daily, so that the landscape of the tundra was always subtly changing. It was dry snow, too powdery to walk on, even with snow-shoes. Ivan couldn't get to his traps, nor indeed go hunting. Low, thorny bushes were all that grew on the upland plain; it had now become a shifting desert, and Ivan had completely lost his bearings. The two points which looked like a hare's ears and a deer's head were cloaked in persistent cloud. Such powdery snow did not bode well; it meant that the winter had started off on a bad footing. Ivan remembered that the old people in the village would talk of a far-off time when the scourge of this powdery snow first struck. The tundra was treacherous, the marshes impassable. At the least cold times of day, gaps would form in the ice on the lakes and the reindeer would plunge into the freezing water. Within a few minutes they would have died a silent death; they would thrash around, baring their teeth, until they were numbed by the cold. At night the ice would close up again, transforming their carcasses into so many gruesome statues. The Vostyachs couldn't go hunting for weeks on end. The snow was like sand, some six feet deep, and walking on it might end in suffocation. Nothing was possible without snow-shoes, but hunters were slowed down with such contraptions on their feet, and by the time they had drawn their bows their prey had fled. Children whimpered with hunger, and mothers often woke up in the morning to find them dead in their arms. The old people would slink out of the village unobserved. They would go off to die, burying themselves in the snow so as not to be a burden on their families. Men ate the drum-skins, the bark of trees, such roots as had managed to push their way through the frozen ground. As they became weaker, many lacked even the strength to dig or to collect firewood, and their fires went out. By now there was no coming and going around the yurts, and smoke meant that death had paid a call. Then, one night, the wind changed and the stars reappeared in the sky. The dry, powdery snow crusted over and the wood creaked ominously, as though each trunk were being wrenched apart. When the sun rose, the whole forest was strewn with reindeer, elk and deer, trapped up to the chest in the ice. Exhausted by their recent hardships, the men of the village dragged themselves out to where the creatures lay. They cut their throats and lay down in the snow to drink the warm blood as it spurted out.

That was what the old men said, and Ivan was afraid of the powdery snow which could spell death.

So he decided to go down to the village where the turnip-growers lived, to exchange the odd fur for a bit of bread and dried meat. But when he pushed open the door of the inn, he was greeted by hostile stares. Ivan ran his eyes over the group to assure himself that they were not soldiers. He took off his fur hat and greeted them with a nod. Then he laid his skins on the table and asked those present to name their price. But no one said a word; they merely inspected him in stony silence. They had stopped drinking and playing cards; the only sound was the crackling of the stove and the innkeeper's wife rinsing out a pan in the kitchen behind the counter. It was then that the fair-haired young woman had come in. She had been kind, she'd had someone bring him some soup and had bought all the squirrels' tails. The woodsmen had gone back to their drinking and card games, and the hum of their conversation once more mingled with the cigarette smoke and the smell of cabbage and wood smoke. But when the woman turned on the strange contraption which registered your voice, Ivan had taken fright. He had picked up his skins, gone out of the inn and taken refuge in the woods. That night he hadn't slept in his hut, but in a hole he'd hollowed out of the snow. In the days that followed, armed with his bow, he had again gone to the edge of the forest to observe the inn. He was afraid that the fair-haired woman might have gone to get the soldiers. But nothing in the village seemed to have changed. The chimneys carried on smoking above the tarred roofs and the battered lorries from the sawmill juddered along the icy road, scattering long trails of sawdust as they went. One morning, climbing on to the ridge of snow which was his lookout post, Ivan heard the woman calling him. Then he caught sight of her in the snowy meadow behind the inn. She had her hands around her mouth and was calling towards him, in Vostyach: