The Man Who Spoke Snakish (12 page)

She sat wiping her eyes and looked at us in a sort of terror.

“You’re still so young and sweet, but now you’re already trying bread! Don’t do it, please. I beg you!”

“Mother, you’ve eaten bread too,” argued Salme.

“I have,” sighed Mother. “But very little, not even a taste. And you mustn’t go trying out all these nasty things that your mother did when she was young. You are smarter!”

“Mother, I won’t ever eat bread again,” I promised, quite sincerely. “It was very bad. Your roast is much, much better, honestly!”

“Mother, don’t be angry,” Salme begged as well. “Look how much goat I ate today. You can cook it so very well.”

“I’m glad you like it,” smiled Mother through her tears. “Take no notice of me. I’m just afraid that you’ll start liking bread. You start eating it, you end up moving to the village. You see your friend Linda moved there yesterday with her family. I went past their hut today. The door was wide open and two wolves were lying on the threshold, their snouts between their paws. Poor abandoned animals.”

“I never would have believed that Linda would move away,” said Salme. “She promised she wouldn’t.”

“That’s what they all say, but in the end they leave. So many of them have gone! Even we left once, but I came back. I didn’t like that village life. Children, just remember this: I’m never leaving the forest. I’m going to die here.”

“No, Mother, you won’t have to go anywhere!” cried Salme. “We’re staying here with you.”

“If you suddenly get a taste for bread …” began Mother, but Salme cried to her not to start that again.

At that moment I felt inside me a tingle of excitement, a signal that it was time to run behind the hut and relieve myself. It was a wonderful feeling; I wanted to hug and kiss my own stomach. Finally, after all, my digestion was getting rid of that foul bread!
I leapt up, ran behind the house, and—word of honor!—I have never felt such pleasure in shitting. In one moment I was free of the bread!

Somebody coughed and groaned in my vicinity. I leapt up, covering my bottom, and saw Meeme, lying facedown, looking at me from the bushes. He was even shaggier than before, one ear covered in cobwebs, and had in his hand his inseparable wineskin.

“Want some wine, boy?” he croaked.

“No thanks!” I replied, and I couldn’t resist showing off. “I ate some bread today. I don’t want any more of that village food.”

“Bread is hogwash,” said Meeme. “But wine is different. It makes you nicely sleepy, so you don’t know anymore whether you’re alive or dead. You simply lie like a corpse.”

I didn’t see anything nice in that sort of existence, but the sight of Meeme reminded me of Manivald’s ring.

“Meeme, do you remember that ring you gave me once? What am I supposed to do with it?”

“You’re supposed to put it on your finger and prance around the forest. What is any ring good for? Well, if you really press it, it might fit on the end of your toe too. If you think it’s prettier that way.”

“Can’t you do anything else with it?”

“Well, what else would you want to do with a ring? Eat it? It’s even nastier than bread, and as hard as stone.”

“Why did you give me that ring anyway?”

Meeme gurgled with laughter.

“I didn’t want anything else to do with it,” he grinned. “What would I have a ring for? It would rot away with me and that would be a shame. Pretty little thing, anyway!”

He took another drink, but a bit unsteadily, and the red wine ran all down Meeme’s face, as if blood were coming out of his mouth.

I turned my back on Meeme and went indoors, where Salme had started eating again, to please Mother.

“I want some meat too,” I announced, flopping down at the table. “My tummy’s completely empty!”

I felt healthy and strong. The bread was gone from my stomach like an ugly pimple from my face, and I planned to eat as much goat as would fit into my belly.

saw Hiie and Pärtel the next day. Hiie was still somehow blotchy faced, and complained that she’d been vomiting all night.

“You ate only a fingertip-sized bit. What was there to vomit?” I asked.

“Nothing, but I had such a horrible feeling in the tummy,” complained Hiie. “And I was horribly afraid too. I was afraid there might still be a little crumb of bread inside me, and when I thought about it, I’d run off to the bushes again. My throat is still sore from all that puking.”

On the other hand Pärtel assured me grandly that the bread had done nothing to him.

“I didn’t even understand that it would be any different,” he told me. “I could eat even more of that bread. I could scoff three loaves of it and it wouldn’t do a thing. You want to go back to the village, grab some bread, and eat some more?”

“Ah, no,” I said, not enthused at all by Pärtel’s idea. “Why eat so much of it? It doesn’t taste good at all.”

I was ashamed to tell others what trouble that piece of bread had caused in my stomach. I made out that eating bread was nothing special for me, though I knew that I wouldn’t put that weird muck in my mouth again for any price.

I looked enviously at Pärtel, whose thick frame had digested the dangerous bread without any problems. In the past year Pärtel had grown a head taller than me, and considerably broader as well, so that beside him I looked like a snake with joints. I was lanky and skinny, with a pale face, while Pärtel’s hair was red brown and his complexion was ruddy.

I was quite angry with Pärtel at that moment, for he was tactlessly bragging about his bread-gobbling skills, as if it were a matter of honor. He laughed at Hiie, who was still hiccupping now and then from yesterday’s piece of bread, and asked me several times with a sly expression: “Listen, you must have been feeling bad afterward too? I didn’t at all!”

I put up with this for a while, then lost my temper and said that a fly eats shit again and again, but I don’t. Should I make a big deal out of a fly and give it great respect? Now Pärtel got angry, saying that he was going home if I was going to be so disgusting, comparing him to a fly. Bread is not shit. Very many people eat it, and all foreigners do. He stormed off, and I stared after him. Pärtel and I had had our tempers flaring up before, and played happily the next day together despite it all, so I didn’t make a big issue out of his anger.

Hiie and I stayed together at first, but after a little while Ints crawled up, and we decided to go and take a look at Pirre and Rääk. They still had the big louse, and every day there were titanic struggles with the birds. Despite its gigantic size, they
recognized it as an ordinary insect, and tried to grab it in their beaks and drag it to their nests, but naturally nothing came of this. The louse was so big that even an eagle could scarcely lift it, but eagles do not hunt lice or beetles. Little blackbirds, swallows, and flycatchers pried away with no success at all at the flanks of the huge louse, and twittered in annoyance while the great insect flailed its legs, knocking out some of the birds with its movements.

In the interval the louse had become a lot cleverer. Pirre and Rääk had trained it carefully, so that it no longer tried to scuttle off into crevices, but slouched along calmly on the end of a leash and, when a signal was given, stopped and got down on its belly. It had also learned to appreciate the presence of humans, but not as an ordinary louse does, trying to crawl into your hair and lay its eggs there. The big louse did not go for your head, but simply pressed itself against your leg and snuffled.

For some reason it particularly liked Hiie. The girl only needed to appear, and the louse would immediately scurry up to her. Hiie was small and the louse reached her shoulders. It rubbed itself against her so violently that she fell over, and Pirre and Rääk gave the insect a fierce tongue-lashing. Then it drooped down and sprawled unhappily on the ground, until Hiie started stroking it and telling it that it was a fine and nice animal.

According to the Primates, the louse shouldn’t have understood any of Hiie’s words, for in talking to the louse Hiie didn’t use Snakish words, let alone the ones with the ancient Primate pronunciation. But the louse became ever more cheerful when Hiie praised it, and scurried happily around the girl in a circle. It even let Hiie ride on its back, stepping slowly and solemnly, cautiously stretching out its legs, as if afraid to jolt its cargo too
much. It was a weird sight—a thin little girl riding bareback astride a big strange insect—but the Primates told us that in the old days, when there were only very large animals and insects living in the world, such things happened often. In any case, pale little Hiie on the louse’s back, with the two Primates sitting beyond her in front of their cave, and around them bushes and trees of species that had long since died out in other parts of the forest, looked like a secret visitor from some distant age. That was just how I had imagined those mysterious sprites of which Ülgas talked so much. If they existed at all, they would have to be like Hiie, riding on louseback.

Hiie herself looked after the louse, and always stroked and scratched it with care. I thought the louse was horrible, and I didn’t like to touch it; a couple of friendly pats was the most I could force myself to. Hiie, on the other hand, said it was very sweet.

“He’s such a friendly animal,” she told me. “And I’m terribly sorry for him, because I don’t understand at all where his eyes are, or his ears or his nose. He does have them, right? Just think, if you had to live without eyes, ears, or nose. Whenever I look at him, I get such a tender feeling coming over me. I want to fondle and stroke the poor creature … Ah, the poor little thing!”

“I think he has eyes and ears and everything else, but we can’t find them,” I said. “Insects have that stuff in other places than we and the animals have, but that louse must know very well where anything is.”

Hiie shook her head doubtfully and stroked the louse still in the same way, for in her eyes this giant insect was a wondrously dear little creature, and a poor beggar besides.

This time too the louse trotted gladly toward us, rubbed itself against me out of habit, leapt out of the way of Ints, who it feared,
and ended up with Hiie, who it knocked over at first, out of sheer enthusiasm. Then it got down to a crouching position, so that the girl could climb on its back. Hiie caressed and fondled the louse, and rode proudly up to Pirre and Rääk’s cave. The Primates were sitting in their yard and grinding some plant down on a big stone.

“What are you doing?” I asked, sitting down beside them.

“Take a look,” said Pirre, mixing the juice that flowed out of the crushed plants with some liquid slime, which colored it red.

“We want to draw the louse on the wall,” explained Rääk. “As a memorial. One day, when he’s no longer around, we can look at the picture and remember him.”

We went into the cave, and walked quite deep into it, where generations of the Primates’ ancestors had painted pictures from their lives. From floor to ceiling the walls of the cave were covered in thousands of tiny drawings, showing Primates and all kinds of long-extinct animals.

“This is our history,” said Pirre and Rääk proudly, and in one vacant spot Pirre set about drawing the louse. “Everything that has ever happened is nicely shown here. You see right up there is a picture of the arrival of the first humans. At first they were quite like us; they didn’t wear clothes or anything. But here”—and Pirre pointed to another picture—”they’ve hung skins on their backs.”

“Is the Frog of the North here too?” I asked.

“Oh yes, in quite a few places,” Pirre assured me, and showed me pictures of a big lizard-like creature, flying around the heads of tiny humans, with other humans’ legs dangling out between its jaws.

“These pictures are really, really old,” said Hiie respectfully. “The Frog of the North hasn’t been seen for ages.”

“Oh, dear child!” laughed Pirre and Rääk. “The time since the last time the Frog of the North flew can’t even be measured yet. It was so recently! These pictures tell us about times long before that. And actually these pictures aren’t all that old. The really old pictures are behind this wall.” The Primates pointed to a rock far at the back of the cave. “In olden times this cave was much bigger, but a few hundred thousand years ago the earth quaked here and the end of the cave was buried under rocks. All the old drawings remained there; there was a huge number of them, dating from the very earliest times. No one can see them anymore, and so you can’t know exactly what happened in those olden times. If there are no pictures, you can’t remember anything. But at least this big louse is now nicely drawn, and all future generations can admire him. He will endure.”

Pirre looked proudly at his handiwork, a great red insect painted on the wall, which might be a louse, or just as well a spider or a fly. The Primates were not the best of artists, and lice are quite difficult to draw.

“Look, this is you!” said Hiie tenderly to her pet. The louse shivered with pleasure, as Hiie stroked it. It was not interested in the picture and maybe didn’t even see it, since we weren’t sure if it had eyes.

We spent the whole evening with Pirre and Rääk, sitting by the fire and listening to the Primates singing their strange songs, which were not at all like the tunes that humans sing. Primates’ songs consisted more of vocalizations than of words, together with squeals, growls, and murmurs, but as a whole it sounded very beautiful. We tried to sing along, but couldn’t manage at all well. Nowadays, when I have nothing better to do, I sometimes call to mind those ancient tunes, which no one else remembers
apart from me, and I hum to myself. I like those old songs much better than these fashionable “regi” songs that the village women crow nowadays, which always give me a headache. They last so interminably long; you think the women will never shut up. The Primates’ songs were never long. They either ended with a deafening shriek or subsided into a low hum, and they had a strange power. Even today they make my heart glad and they conjure up before my eyes those happy evenings when Pirre and Rääk still lived in their cave and used to sing to us.

That cave has now collapsed shut. No one will ever see Pirre’s drawing of the louse. No one will ever know that such a creature lived here in the forest.

Oh, there are so many things that no one will ever get to know about.

We said good-bye to the Primates and went home. Ints crawled into his nest. Hiie set off for her hut. She had never gone home so late, and she would surely have got a beating from her mother and father, but luckily they weren’t there. Lately they had been going more and more to the sacred grove to listen to Ülgas’s incantations, and that evening too they were out at some special nocturnal gathering where they sacrificed foxes by moonlight, trying to find out what was on the sprites’ minds.

I was plodding toward my shack when suddenly someone called me. It was Pärtel. I was quite astonished that he was still roaming around so late, but I thought he might be doing something exciting, and I was ready for adventure right away. I didn’t give a thought to that morning’s quarrel.

As soon as I saw Pärtel closer up, I understood that he wasn’t out in the forest to play any pranks. He looked very troubled, even frightened, grabbed me by the shoulder, and demanded, “Where were you? I was looking for you!”

“What is it?” I asked. “Something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Pärtel. “It’s just that … I wanted to tell you … Father said today … We’re moving to the village.”

Nothing could have shocked me more. I sat right down among the ferns, completely stunned by my friend’s news, and Pärtel sat down beside me, looking at me pleadingly, as if he had fallen into a bog pool and was now waiting for me to heave him out from it and help him back onto dry land. But there was no way I could help him out from the pool into which he had now fallen.

“Why?” was the only thing I could say.

“Father said there’s no point in staying here; everyone’s leaving,” replied Pärtel. “He doesn’t want to go, but there’s nothing that can be done. There’s no sense in swimming against the tide. If the rest of the people have decided to move to the village, you have to get used to it and follow the crowd.”