The Man Who Spoke Snakish (2 page)

This time too, Meeme was on his side beside the stump and again I hadn’t seen when and how he had come. I promised myself that one day I would yet find out what that man looked like standing on two legs and how he moved around at all—upright like a human or on all fours like an animal, or sliding along like a snake. I went closer to Meeme and saw to my surprise that
this time he wasn’t eating fly agaric, but sipping some sort of drink from a skin.

“Ahh!” He was just wiping his mouth when I crouched down beside him and sniffed the strange odor wafting from the skin. “It’s wine. Much better than fly agaric, thanks be to those foreigners and their bit of common sense. The mushroom used to make you drink lots of water, but this here quenches your thirst and makes you drunk at the same time. Great stuff! I’ll think I’ll stick with it. Want some?”

“No,” I said. True, my mother hadn’t forbidden me to drink wine, but I could guess that since Meeme offered it, it couldn’t be any better than the fly agaric. “Where do you get skins like that?” I’d never seen anything like it in the forest.

“From the monks and the other foreigners,” replied Meeme. “You just have to smash their heads in—and the skin is yours.” He went on drinking. “Tasty little drink, there’s no denying it. That silly Tambet can yell and squeal all he likes, but the foreigners’ tipple is better than ours.”

“So what was Tambet yelling and squealing about?” I asked.

“Ah, he won’t allow us to have anything to do with the foreigners or even try their things,” said Meeme dismissively. “I did say that it wasn’t I that touched that monk, it was my ax, but he’s still twitching. Well, what if I don’t want to carry on eating fly agaric? I mean this stuff’s much better and goes to your head quicker too … A man has to be flexible, not stiff like this stump here. But that’s what we’re like these days. What use has being stiff been to us? Like the last flies before the winter, we drone our way slowly through the forest, until we slouch into the moss and die.”

I didn’t understand any more of his talk and I got up to go back to my uncle. “Wait, boy!” Meeme stopped me. “I wanted to give you something.”

I started shaking my head vigorously, for I knew that now he would produce some fly agaric or wine or some other disgusting thing.

“Wait, I said!”

“Mother won’t let me!”

“Hold your tongue! Your mother doesn’t even know what I want to give you. Here, take it! I don’t have anything to do with it. Hang it around your neck.”

Meeme thrust into my palm a little leather bag, which seemed to have something small yet heavy inside it.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

“In there? Well, there’s a ring in there.”

I untied the mouth of the bag. Indeed there was a ring in it. A silver ring, with a big red stone. I tried it on, but the ring was too big for my tiny fingers.

“Carry it in the bag. And hang the bag around your neck.”

I put the ring back in the bag. It was made of a strange kind of leather! As thin as a leaf, and if you let it out of your hand, the wind would carry it straight away. But then, a precious ring should have a fine little nest.

“Thank you!” I said, terribly happy. “It’s a really pretty ring!” Meeme laughed.

“You’re welcome, boy,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it’s useful. Keep it nicely in the bag like I told you.”

I ran back to the bonfire. Manivald had been burned up by now, only his ashes still smoldered. I showed the ring to Uncle Vootele, and he examined it long and thoroughly.

“It’s a precious thing,” he said at length. “Made in a foreign land and probably reached our shores at one time along with the men of iron. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first owner of this ring was a victim of the Frog of the North. I don’t understand why Meeme chose you to give it to. He could well have sent it to your sister, Salme. What will you do, boy, with an expensive piece of jewelry like that in the forest?”

“I certainly won’t give it to Salme!” I cried, offended.

“No, don’t. Meeme never does anything for no reason. If he gave you the ring, there must be a need for it. Right now I don’t understand his plan, but that doesn’t matter. It’ll all be clear one day. Let’s go home now.”

“Yes, let’s,” I agreed, and realized how sleepy I was. Uncle Vootele lifted me onto a wolf’s back and we went home through the nocturnal forest. Behind us lay the embers of the fire and the sea, no longer watched over by anyone.

n fact I was born in the village, not in the forest. It was my father who decided to move to the village. Everybody was moving, well, almost everybody, and my parents were among the last. That was probably on my mother’s account, because she didn’t like village life; she wasn’t interested in farming and she never ate bread.

“It was slops,” she used to say to me. “You know, Leemet, I don’t believe anybody actually likes it. This bread eating is really just showing off. They want to appear terribly fine and to live like foreigners. But a nice fresh haunch of deer is quite another thing. Now come on and eat, dear child! Who did I roast these joints for?”

My father was obviously of a different opinion. He wanted to be a modern person, and a modern person should live in a village, under the open sky and the sun, not in a murky forest. He should grow rye, work all summer like some filthy ant, so that in autumn he could look important and gobble bread like the foreigners. A modern person was supposed to have a scythe at home, so that in autumn he could stoop down and cut the
grain on the ground; he had to have a quern on which to grind the grains, huffing and puffing. Uncle Vootele told me how my father—when he was still living in the forest—would just about explode with irritation and envy when he thought about the interesting life the villagers were leading and the impressive tools they had.

“We must hurry up and move to the village!” he had shouted. “Life is passing us by! These days all normal people live under the open sky, not in the bushes! I want to sow and reap too, as they do everywhere in the developed world! Why should I be any worse? Just look at the iron men and the monks; you can see straight away that they’re a hundred years ahead of us! We must make every effort to catch up with them!”

And so he took my mother to live in the village; they built themselves a little cottage and my father learned to sow and reap and got himself a scythe and a quern. He started going to church and learning German, so he could understand the speech of the iron men and learn even better and more fashionable tricks from them. He ate bread and, smacking his lips, praised its goodness, and as he learned to make proper barley gruel, there was no end to his enthusiasm and pride.

“It tasted like vomit,” my mother confessed to me, but my father ate barley gruel three times a day, screwing up his face a bit, while claiming that it was a particularly dainty dish, for you had to develop a taste. “Not like our hunks of meat, which any fool can gobble, but a proper European food for people with finer tastes!” he would say. “Not too rich, not too fatty, but sort of lean and light. But nourishing! A food for kings!”

When I was born, my father advised that I should be fed only on barley gruel, because his child “has to have the best.” And
he got me a sickle, so that as soon as my legs could carry me I would go stooping in the fields with him. “Of course a scythe is a precious thing, and you might think there’s no sense in putting it into a tiny tot’s hands, but I don’t agree with that attitude. Our child ought to get used to modern tools from the start,” he said proudly. “In the future we won’t get by without a scythe, so let him learn the great art of reaping rye straight away!”

All this was related to me by Uncle Vootele. I don’t remember my father. And my mother didn’t like talking about him; every time he came up she would become uneasy and change the subject. She must have blamed herself for my father’s death, and I suppose she was guilty. My mother was bored in the village; she didn’t care for work in the fields, and while my father was striding out to go sowing, my mother was wandering around the old familiar forests, and she got acquainted with a bear. What happened next seems to be quite clear; it’s such a familiar story. Few women can resist a bear; they’re so big, soft, helpless, and furry. And besides that, bears are born seducers, and terribly attracted to human females, so they wouldn’t let slip an opportunity to make their way up to a woman and growl in her ear. In the old days, when most of our people still lived in the forest, there were endless cases of bears becoming women’s lovers, trysts that would ultimately end in the man discovering the couple and sending the brown beast packing.

The bear started visiting us, always when my father was toiling in the field. He was a very friendly animal; my sister, Salme, who is five years older than me, remembers him and has told me that the bear always brought her honey. Like all bears at that time, this bear knew how to talk a little, since bears are the cleverest of animals, of course excepting snakes, the brothers of humans.
True, bears couldn’t say much, and their conversation wasn’t very smart—but how smart do you have to be to talk to your lover? At least they could chat nicely about everyday matters.

Of course, everything’s changed now. A couple of times, when carrying water from the spring, I’ve seen bears and shouted a few words of greeting to them. They’ve stared at me with stupid faces and taken off with a crackle into the bushes. That whole stratum of culture they possessed down the long centuries in their dealings with men and snakes has been dissipated in such a short time, and bears have become ordinary animals. Like ourselves. Apart from me, who now knows the snake-words? The world has gone downhill, and even the water from the spring tastes bitter.

But never mind that. In those days, in my childhood, bears were still able to exchange ideas with humans. We were never friends; we considered bears too far below us for that. Ultimately we were the ones they pawed with their honey-paws and pulled at, out of primitive stupidity. In their way they were the pupils of humans, for we were their superiors. And of course we knew the lustfulness of bears, and that incomprehensible attraction that our women felt for them. That was why every man looked on them with a slight suspicion: “That fat furry bundle of love won’t get my woman …” Too often they would find bear fur in their beds.

But things were even worse for my father. He didn’t find only bear fur in the bed; he also found a whole bear. In itself that mightn’t have been so bad; he should have just given the bear a good hiss and the creature, caught in the act, would have slunk off in shame to the forest. But my father had started to forget Snakish, because he didn’t need to speak it in the village, and besides, he didn’t think much of the snake-words, believing that
a scythe and a quern would serve him a whole lot better. So when he saw the bear in his own bed, he mumbled some words of German, whereupon the bear—confused by the incomprehensible words, and annoyed at being caught
in flagrante
—bit his head off.

Naturally he regretted it straight away, because bears are generally not bloodthirsty animals, unlike for example wolves, who will serve humans, carrying them on their backs and allowing themselves to be milked—though only under the influence of the Snakish words. A wolf really is a fairly dangerous domestic animal, but since there is no tastier milk to be had from anyone in the forest, one reconciles oneself to its sullenness, especially as the Snakish words render it as meek as a titmouse. But a bear is a creature with sense. The bear had killed my father in desperation, and since the murder was committed in the heat of passion, he punished himself on the spot and bit his own tool off.

Then my mother and the castrated bear burned my father’s body, and the bear fled deep into the forest, vowing to my mother that they would never meet again. Apparently this was a suitable solution for my mother because, as I said, she felt terribly guilty and her love for the bear ended abruptly. For the rest of her life she couldn’t stand bears, would hiss as soon as she saw them, and in this way she retreated from her former life. This hatred of hers later brought much confusion to our family, and strife too, but I will speak of that later, at the right time.

After my father’s death, my mother saw no reason to stay in the village; she strapped me on her back, took my sister by the hand, and moved back to the forest. Her brother, my uncle Vootele, was still living there, and he took us into his care, helped us to build a hut, and gave us two young wolves, so we would
always have fresh milk. Although she was still shocked by my father’s death, she breathed more easily, because she had never wanted to leave the forest. This was where she felt at ease, and she didn’t care a bit that she wasn’t living like the iron men or that there wasn’t a single scythe in the house. In our mother’s home we no longer ate bread, but there were always piles of deer and goat meat.

I wasn’t even one year old when we moved back to the forest. So I knew nothing of the village or the life there; I grew up in the forest and it was my only home. We had a nice hut deep in the woods, where I lived with my mother and sister, and Uncle Vootele’s cave was nearby. In those days the forest was not yet bereft of people. Moving around, you would be bound to meet others—old women milking their wolves in front of their huts, or long-bearded old men, chatting away crudely with the vipers.

There were fewer younger people and their numbers kept decreasing, so that more and more often you would come across an abandoned dwelling. Those huts were vanishing into the undergrowth, ownerless wolves were running around, and the older people said that once you’ve let it go, it’s not really a life for anyone anymore. They were especially distressed that children were not being born anymore, which was quite natural. Who was around to bear them when all the young people were moving to the village? I too went to look at the village, peering from the edge of the forest, not daring to go any closer. Everything there was so different, and a lot smarter too I thought. There was plenty of sunlight and open space, the houses under the open sky seemed a lot nicer to me than our hovel, half-buried
in the spruce trees, and in every home I could see big numbers of children scurrying around.

This made me very jealous, for I had few playmates. My sister, Salme, didn’t care much for me. She was five years older, and a girl besides; she had her own things to do. Luckily there was Pärtel, and I ran around with him. And then there was Hiie, Tambet’s daughter, but again she was too small, tottering around her home on stiff legs and falling over every now and then on her bum. She was no company for me at first, and anyway I didn’t like going over to Tambet’s place. I may have been young and stupid but I did understand that Tambet couldn’t stand me. He would always snort and hiss when he saw me, and once, when Pärtel and I were coming from berry picking and, out of the goodness of my heart, I offered a strawberry to Hiie, who was squatting on the grass, Tambet yelled from inside the house: “Hiie, come away from there! We don’t take anything from the village people!”

He could never forgive my family for once leaving the forest, and he stubbornly persisted in regarding me and Salme as villagers. At the sacred grove he always scowled at us with obvious disdain, as if he were offended that stinking village mongrels like us would push our way into such an important place. And I only went to the grove under duress, because I didn’t like the way Ülgas the Sage anointed the trees with hare’s blood. Hares were such dear creatures; I couldn’t understand how anyone could kill them just to sprinkle on the tree roots. I was afraid of Ülgas, although in appearance he wasn’t so horrible; he had a kindly, grandfatherly face, and was good to children. Sometimes he would visit us and talk about all sorts of fairies and about how children in particular should show great respect to them, and bring a sacrifice to the water-sprite before washing at the spring,
and then another after emptying the water bucket. And when you want to bathe in a river, you should bring a few sacrifices, if you don’t want the water-sprite to drown you.

“What sacrifices should they be?” I asked, and Ülgas the Sage explained, laughing affably, that the best thing to take is a frog, cutting it alive from the head lengthwise and throwing it into the spring or river. Then the sprite is satisfied.

“Why are those sprites so cruel?” I asked, frightened, because torturing a frog like that seemed horrible to me. “Why do they want blood all the time?”

“What rubbish you talk! Sprites aren’t cruel,” said Ülgas, admonishing me. “Fairies are simply the rulers of the waters and the trees, and we should obey their orders and do their bidding; that has always been our custom.”