The Last of the Vostyachs (14 page)

Once he had reached the changing room, Aurtova noticed that the lamps in the living room were flickering and becoming dim. They flickered a little longer, then went out. Now the room was lit only by the almost burnt-out candles on the table. Their faint light was casting shadows on the walls, those of the empty bottles, the smeared glasses, the congealed remains of supper glistening on the plates. The professor strained his ears for some sound of the generator, but it had gone out. He went into the hall, grabbed his jumbled clothes from the coatrack and put them on, feeling his forehead constantly as he did so. Fumbling in the darkness in the kitchen, he came upon the torch, then remembered that it had no batteries. He picked up a still guttering candle and found some aspirin in the medicine chest, swallowed down four tablets, without water, and began to grope his way around the house in search of Olga.

From the corridor, he glimpsed her in the bedroom, on the double bed. She looked like some beached whale, washed up on a river bank. He went into the room, saw that shocking black chasm looming out of the semi-darkness. He sniffed disgustedly at the animal sweat, mingled with the smell of alcoholic breath. Yet some perverse attraction drew him on to scrutinise the abomination from a nearer vantage point. A sudden shudder ran through Olga's blubbery frame. Aurtova drew back in alarm, seeking refuge in the gloom, but almost at once all movement ceased, and her body became as ominously motionless as before. Aurtova lifted the candle to peer at her face in its feeble light. She opened her eyes and smiled, as though waking up from some pleasant dream.

‘You're so handsome, Jarmo! The older you get, the more handsome you become!' she murmured voluptuously before sinking back into unconsciousness. The professor gave a sigh of relief; he suddenly felt distinctly less unwell. He waited for a few moments, then shook her several times in a gingerly fashion, taking her by the shoulder with the tip of his fingers, as though afraid of sullying himself. But Olga did not stir. She was breathing more and more quietly, looking more and more unappealing. Shaking with fever, Aurtova crumpled on to the bed beside her and pulled the covers up. That had been a near thing. The sleeping pill had done its work at last. He stayed put, waiting there in the warm until some semblance of strength returned, keeping an ear out for sounds of Olga's increasingly faint breath. At last he felt strong enough to get up, fumbled around in the gloom, picked up her clothes from the chair and dressed her in them, in the light of the last candle-end, this time forcing himself to touch the spongy flesh more closely, because she had to be correctly dressed, not a hair out of place. He slipped her suit jacket over her silk blouse, zipped up her skirt, did up her belt – with difficulty – at the right hole and laced up her boots, making sure he got them on the correct foot. He didn't attempt to put on her jewellery, there was too little light to get her ear-rings in and do up her necklace properly. He put it into his pocket, wrapped up in her silk scarf. He found her fur coat in the hall and put that on her too, doing up all the fastenings. He found her black leather bag hanging from the bed-head and rummaged through it warily, until he came upon two tapes, which he put into the inside pocket of his jacket. He picked up all the bits and pieces lying on and underneath the bed, together with the bath robes which had been left in the changing room. He put the lot into the sheets, tied them up and put them in a jute sack. At that point the candle-end drowned in a pool of melted wax, so that now the only light came from the dying embers in the hearth. But Aurtova lay down on the floor and searched every inch of it, then every piece of furniture, every drawer, every nook and cranny to ensure that the cottage would bear no trace of what had happened there that night. He put the remnants of the supper, the glasses, plates, bottles and the little jar of green pills into another sack, together with the cooking pot and candlesticks. He doused the embers with a few handfuls of snow, and raked the ashes with the fire shovel. He checked the outside lumber room. Feeling for the generator in the dark, he saw that there was a split in the tank. That was why it had failed: the petrol had leaked away, making a puddle outside on the ice, which he concealed by covering it with fresh snow. Then he dragged Olga outside and laid her on the back seat of the car, together with the sacks, started the engine and drove, without the headlights, down to the shore, where the ice was hard and he would leave no trace. Then he went back and looked around the cottage, securing all the locks. He fixed the rubber watering hose to the tap in the lumber room and directed the jet upwards, using the hand pump. The water fell back on the ground like gravel, covering the tyre marks, and Olga's footsteps in the patches of snow along the shore. It proved time-consuming work. Finally he sprayed the doors and windows, which were instantly covered with glistening droplets. He put the hose back in the lumber room and walked in a wide circle on the ice, over the frozen sea, to go back to his car. He checked his watch: it was exactly midnight. He started up the engine and drove slowly to the quay at Koirasaari, still without turning on the headlights. He stopped near the ballast in the tourist port, where the tyre tracks of the snowploughs left their marks as they drove up from the beach. There he opened the car door and let Olga's body tumble out. He continued along the shore, beyond the lighthouse and back again on to dry land. At the first lights of Varisluodonkari he drew up at the verge and took off the chains.

While he was driving along the road to the airport, still dazed with fever, gripping the steering wheel as though it were the handle of a dagger, Professor Aurtova had a brief moment of lucidity. For an instant, his hectic mind was lit up by a flash of scientific spirit. He remembered the tapes he had in his pocket, and felt an urgent desire to listen to them, to hear the language once spoken by the now vanished Vostyachs. He turned on the radio and slipped the first tape into the lit-up mouth of the cassette player. Then, in the silence barely broken by the humming of the engine, the voice of Ivan Vostyach emerged from the surrounding cold as it had for the first time in the distant forests of the Byrranga Mountains. In all probability, thought the professor to himself with chilling nonchalance, that was the voice of a man already dead. Still, he felt a shiver run down his spine when he heard the lateral fricative with labiovelar overlay ring out loud and clear in the chill air. So, the mysterious semi-consonant of the American Indians had indeed been heard in Asia, too. It issued from the deepest entrails of mankind, perhaps indeed from those times immemorial when men had only just started to stand upright. Aurtova listened in astonishment as that ancient sound vibrated in his ears, as it was borne away on the icy wind which was its native home. It set forgotten follicles stirring in the soft pulp of his brain, disturbing liquids that had lain motionless for centuries, arousing sensations not made for men of the modern world. Stunned by what he had heard, befuddled by fever, Aurtova felt the car going into a sudden skid; the spiked tyres grazed the kerb and the headlights revealed a wall of birch trees. He slowed down and came off the motorway just before Vantaa, taking a track which went deep into the woods. He stopped in a clearing, turned off the lights and waited for the silence to close in again around him. Then he got out of the car, kneeled down in the snow and used his lighter to set fire to the two cassettes. The plastic sizzled and crackled, then shrivelled away, spraying the air with a fine rain of fiery ashes. All that remained of the voice of Ivan Vostyach was a sticky, evil-smelling little lump which soon hardened in the snow.

III

From the top of his icy dune, Ivan stared at the black line which ran across the sea, branching out like a warm vein. Dragged by the strong current, the water was sending up a hail of spray; it was only near the shore that a slight, pearly white skin would form, to be shattered under the impact of the stronger waves. It was impossible to venture further out. Ivan had walked for miles, keeping clear of the last islands. He had advanced ever further into the desert of ice, following the eastern stars, those he could see shining beyond the woods from his mountains, towards the great river delta. He had clambered over huge clefts, sending the reindeer ahead of him, then pushing the sledge over the frozen surface to act as a footbridge. Around the islands most exposed to the wind, the sea had closed in, forming deep seams whose sharp peaks disfigured the frozen surface of the waves like scars. Ivan had had to split them with his axe to enable the runners of the sledge to clear them. But now he would have to turn back, because his way was barred, and skirting the flow of the current might be dangerous. Ivan turned towards the north. That was the only way of avoiding the city. He turned his reindeer's heads towards the constellation of Urgel and set off again. He was hoping to reach the thick woods he had seen from the train window on his arrival in Helsinki. The horizon was sucking the light out of the stars; they were falling to earth in countless numbers, crossing infinitesimal spaces but taking centuries to do so. Ivan hadn't taken his eyes off them since he had left Korkeasaari. He felt an unknown force closing in around him, and he was beginning to fear that it might be Ticholbon, the star which placed itself in front of the winter constellations and blocked their way. The old men of the Byrranga Mountains would drive it off with their axes, and their song. They would stay up the whole night staring at it, and in the morning people would find them in the forest, covered in ice but nonetheless triumphant. But you had to know just how to look at it: if you fixed it with an irreverent gaze, you might go mad. Ivan had heard tell of certain black shamans from the great river who had gone up into the mountains to drive Ticholbon away and who had found themselves destined to sing, hysterically, for the rest of their days. They were shunned by the villagers, who threw stones at them and made amulets of reindeer bone to ward off their spirits; even the wild beasts gave them a wide berth. That was why Ivan was fearful of lifting his eyes to the cold star, up there to the north-east, between Khaanto and Suolta.

When the icebreaker Sisu moved off from the quay at Pohjoisstama with a blast of its foghorn, the guanacos and wild goats galloped away in alarm. The crust of ice shattered before it with a sound of mangled stone, but it sailed serenely onwards, leaving a heaving strip of black water in its wake, wide as a road. It was going towards the open sea, to reopen the sea routes which crossed the Baltic. Soon its lights disappeared into the darkness, leaving a gleaming black chasm beside the quay where it had been moored, in which the buildings on the shore were now reflected like so many snaggleteeth. Now it was in the distance, buried beneath piles of cloud, and Ivan could no longer see it. But he felt the crust of ice swaying like a raft, and heard a roar, stronger even than thunder, explode in the open sea beyond the furthest islands. To the west of Lonna, the icebreaker had opened up a foaming trench giving free passage to the ferries to Tallinn. Now Ivan's route to the forests was blocked by an impassable abyss. Alarmed by the hubbub, he took the whip to his reindeer, heading them towards the city. The sledge hissed and bounced over the snow, which split like a pane of glass beneath its runners. Ivan tried to peer beyond his reindeer's straining necks to keep an eye out for the frozen clefts and mounds, and avoid the wind-hardened dunes. Fortunately, however, he had chanced on an expanse of unruffled sea, which had frozen over evenly, as though it had been stilled by the cold which rose up from the depths, and then been covered by a steady fall of snow. When he felt that he was out of danger, he got down from the sledge and bent down to listen. Now he could hear nothing, indeed see nothing, except, there in the distance, the faint glow of the city. There was nothing for it. He had to go that way in order to head eastwards. He drove his reindeer towards a heap of ice, put his drum on the ground and began to beat it with his scrap of bone. It ticked away in the silence like a mason's chisel, chipping away at successive rims of sky. Ivan looked towards the north. There it was, as tiny and sharp as a spark, below the dim halo of Khanto. It was barely throbbing, stuck like a thorn in the flesh of the night. But, at every breath it drew, all the other stars grew paler, because Ticholbon was soaking up their light. Only the distant southern stars were shining, untrammelled in the less crowded sky. Now Ivan was beating more loudly on the drum-skin, which pulsed like a sheet of steel in the silent air. His breath, the course of the blood in his veins, the tautness of his muscles, everything within him was governed by that rhythm. He drummed until he could feel the very ice beneath his feet sending back the same beat, until the reindeer were still and even the wind died down, slithering almost noiselessly over the snow which was now giving out an eerie, opalescent light. Then, one after the other, the Vostyach sang out the five magic words of the black shamans. He picked up the axe and hacked fiercely at the crust of ice. Ticholbon sparkled. Ivan struck again, unleashing a rain of shards into the air, and then again, until, spark after spark, Ticholbon was thoroughly ablaze in the high heavens. It burned up in an instant, sputtering with a ruddy gleam and leaving a black patch in its place. Then all the other stars regained their light, took on new strength, breathed with new vigour, and slowly the starry vault began to turn once more. Now Urgel was free to go on his way, to lead the world out of winter's grip.

Listening to the hockey match on the radio was not the same thing as watching it on television, of that he was assured. Hyttynen tried vainly to picture the scrum at the second face off, and the powerful shot from the neutral zone which had again given the advantage to the Lokerit team. The commentator's excited voice reported every detail of the action, rattled off the names of the players as the ball passed from one to the other. But without being able to see the puck, and the sticks embroiled in hand-to-hand encounters, for Rauno Hyttynen, a fan of the Helsingfors Idrottsföreningen Kamraterna, the winter's most eagerly anticipated hockey match lost all appeal, as did the hundred marks he'd bet on the outcome with Lieutenant Lampinen. Disavowing the ethical stance to be adopted by any fan worthy of the name, Hyttynen even began to hope that there might be a draw, leading to extra time. With a bit of luck, he would at least manage to see that. But Vasikkasaari was still a long way off, and the minutes were ticking by on the dashboard clock. They had only just been through Suomenlinna, and the icy track was hardly conducive to fast driving. This woman must be really worried, thought Hyttynen, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. He'd seen a lot of such rapidly ageing female intellectuals who were now at last waking up to the fact that it wasn't their brains that made them interesting. Their husbands soon got tired of them, dumping them as people did with dogs before going on holiday: slightly ashamed of themselves, but resolute. Talking of dogs, that shapeless creature which the woman dragged along with her smelt quite abominable. It had settled itself comfortably on the back seat and was panting, its tongue hanging out. It must be one of those indoor dogs, which have never seen a wood and eaten nothing but tinned food all their lives. Hyttynen was still not sure what it was that linked the animal to her ex-husband, but he was certainly not going to ask for further explanations of the woman seated beside him, who was fiddling with her rings and looking impatiently towards the sea. Of all the police stations in Helsinki, what dastardly stroke of ill luck had led her unerringly to his own? Rauno Hyttynen had been studying the work rota for weeks in order to ensure that he would be on duty in the station on the evening of the match. Leave was out of the question, Palolampi had broken his foot and would be off all month. So Hyttynen had exchanged his February shift with Vennamo, so as not to be on evening patrol in January, and had come to an agreement with Donner that all evening calls would be diverted directly to the patrol car radio. That way he would be able to watch the match all on his own, in suitable peace and quiet. And all that manoeuvring had been for nothing. The most important match in the whole championship was now on, and he would miss every single minute of it.