The Man Who Spoke Snakish (14 page)

“Ha!” scoffed Ints, who up to now had been lying peacefully coiled. “Only insects live without Snakish words. What kind of life is that?”

Pärtel was startled at the sight of Ints and stared at him for a moment somewhat fearfully.

“Do you want to strike him down with a stick?” I asked. “Have those jolly boys and girls already taught you that all adders must be bludgeoned to death?”

“No,” said Pärtel. “But just by the way—in the village they really don’t like snakes. They are the enemies of God.”

“So who is this God then?” I asked.

“That is the most powerful of the sprites,” said Pärtel. “He has made us. He has made all the things in the world and can still make them. He can do everything. He helps those who worship him and fulfills their wishes. But those who are his enemies will perish.”

“Who told you that?” I asked. “That’s just the same sort or drivel that Ülgas drones on about in the forest.”

“Johannes, the village elder,” said Pärtel. “By the way, my name isn’t Pärtel anymore. I was christened and I’m now Peetrus. God doesn’t care for people called Pärtel. But he loves a Peetrus and when I ask him for something he gives it.”

“That’s just stupid!” I protested. “How can you believe a thing like that? There aren’t any spirits!”

“There might not be any spirits, but there is a God,” contested Pärtel. “Johannes the village elder spent a long time telling me about it. It was very interesting. He was put on a cross and then rose from the dead.”

“You can’t rise from the dead,” said Ints. “That has never happened.”

“But Johannes the village elder says it has!” Pärtel-Peetrus eyed Ints with completely evident disgust. “The whole world believes that he rose from the dead, and all the people can’t be stupid.”

“All the adders in the world know you can’t rise from the dead!” I said. “And I believe them!”

“Adders can’t read!” Pärtel gave me a stubborn look. “You think that only you and your snakes are smart. But Johannes has told me things that … You’ve only lived in the forest, but he has been beyond the seas, in far foreign lands. There are huge numbers of people living there and they all believe in God and know that he rose from the dead. And they all harvest grain and eat bread and none of them lives in the forest or talks to snakes. Maybe you’re the one who’s half-witted. Johannes said that in other places in the world they think that people who live in the forest and talk to animals are complete fools.”

“You lived in the forest yourself!”

“I don’t anymore! Everyone’s left the forest. Everyone!”

“Go to hell!” I shouted. I didn’t know how to argue with Pärtel; I didn’t want to argue with him. I wanted everything to be just as it was before and Pärtel to be Pärtel again, not Peetrus. But he stood there wearing his village clothes and carrying a scythe, talking to me with a serious face about God and grain harvesting, and behind his back the whole world and the myriads of people who didn’t live in the forest and hungrily munched on bread all glared at me. I only had the Snakish words. I turned my back on Peetrus and ran back among the trees.

I kept on walking, striding through the forest, pushing branches away and stumbling through thickets. I passed Pirre and Rääk’s cave and saw the louse getting hopefully to its feet; it must have been pining for Hiie, but the girl had to stay at home and couldn’t come visiting her friend. Pirre and Rääk were looking out of their cave, but I didn’t go up to them. These last Primates were just living in their own strange past, bare bottomed, not having even learned to wear animal skins. I was a primate in comparison
to Pärtel in his village clothes. I rushed onward, enraged with the whole world.

I kept on walking all day, through the whole forest, getting to places where I’d never been before. I saw many animals: deer, goats, and elk, who stopped still when they saw me and looked at me thoughtfully with big eyes; bears, who tried clumsily to greet me; a few wandering wolves. I met no humans. Finally, toward evening, when I was dead tired, the forest started to thin out. I kept going until I got to the forest’s edge. Yonder was an unknown village. I saw humans there too; they were gathered in a great cleared square, making fire and swaying. They were screaming and laughing. There were many of them.

The forest was surrounded on every side by people and their villages.

“So, what now?” someone was asking, and only now did I notice that Ints had been crawling along with me the whole way. He didn’t seem tired at all, coiling himself up and looking up at me benignly. “Let them live in clumps, on each other’s backs. That’s how ants live, because they are just tiny specks of dirt with legs, not even worth noticing. They have to stick together to survive. They have no other option; they don’t know Snakish. Don’t worry about them!”

I was too tired to reply. I threw myself down on the moss and closed my eyes.

“I can’t get back home today,” I said. “I’ll sleep right here.”

“You’ll catch cold here,” said Ints. “It’s autumn already. But there’s an adders’ burrow just near here. Actually they’re everywhere; our kind has burrowed everywhere throughout the forest. Let’s go inside; it’s warm there. It’ll be good for you to sleep there.”

“Thanks, Ints,” I said. Ints crawled ahead and I tried to stumble after him on my painful legs. That must have been why Ints stayed so lively; he didn’t have legs to get tired. He led me below a fallen tree, under which was a narrow passage leading to a snakes’ lair.

I climbed inside. Down in the burrow there were other adders, who watched me curiously. Since I was so far from home, there wasn’t a single snake I knew among them. I greeted them with a hiss and laid myself out in a corner. The adders made a cozy space for me.

I fell asleep, feeling more snake than human, and that sensation comforted me a little.

didn’t meet with Pärtel after that. I no longer stood waiting at the edge of the forest; if Pärtel had come toward me in the forest, I probably would have jumped into the bushes, as I did when I saw the Sage of the Grove or Tambet. I didn’t want to meet Pärtel, because he wasn’t Pärtel anymore but Peetrus, and there is nothing worse than seeing an old friend change into someone alien and incomprehensible.

I had often seen Ints eating, gobbling up a whole frog or mouse in one gulp. A little animal would gradually disappear into his throat and in the end the curves of its body would still be visible under Ints’s skin, even when completely covered by the snake. It had been swallowed by the adder, just as my old friend Pärtel had been swallowed up by some village boy called Peetrus. Pärtel’s nose and ears were still visible inside that Peetrus, but digestion had already begun, and soon enough the last traces of him would disappear. I would have been much happier if Pärtel had died—then I could have mourned him in peace. But now I knew that he was still moving around in some distorted,
defiled form; he existed, but not for me. I had the feeling you have when someone takes your good old trousers and shits in them; the trousers still exist, but they can’t be worn anymore; they are full of a disgusting alien smell.

Naturally Pärtel didn’t come to me in the forest, so I had no need to flee into the bushes. No doubt he felt much the same as I did. He had entered a new world and was now greedily learning its rules, just as I had once tirelessly contorted my own tongue to enunciate all the Snakish words and get the whole forest to communicate with me. Pärtel no doubt wanted to be absorbed into his new life as quickly as possible, and I was part of his old one. The sight of me embarrassed him. He might have felt a bit like a traitor, but above all he was ashamed of me. Pärtel had nothing to talk to me about, while in the village there were plenty of boys and girls who lived his kind of life, ate the same foods, and did the same kinds of tasks. It was quite natural for Pärtel to exchange me for them; it was simpler that way.

Would I have acted differently if my mother and father had moved to the village and Pärtel had stayed in the forest in my place? I can’t say. I’d like to say that I wouldn’t have betrayed the forest, would have stayed a true friend to the adders and gone to visit Pärtel every day, that I wouldn’t have forgotten Snakish, as Pärtel had done, because the next time I met him—it was many years later—he couldn’t force out a single hiss. All the Snakish words were, so to speak, purged from his memory, and if he had remembered them, he wouldn’t have been able to hiss them, because he’d lost half his teeth from gnawing on bread and his tongue was swollen from drinking bitter beer, which the village people guzzled instead of simple water. It would be easy for me to say that I wouldn’t have changed into such an oaf, but
I’m afraid I’d be lying. Even I would have been sucked into the village, swallowed up as if by a gigantic snake, by the alien and hostile Frog of the North, and gradually digested. And I would have had no power to resist, because my own Frog of the North had vanished, and no one knew where it was sleeping.

So I gave up thinking about Pärtel and became reconciled to the fact that somewhere in the village there now lived a boy named Peetrus, who cut rye with a scythe, played on the swing with the other village children, and had nothing at all to do with me. So I played with Ints and sometimes also visited Hiie. Uncle Vootele often took me with him on his trails, and we went to visit those solitary old men who had stayed on in the forest, but as if by some agreement they all died off during that autumn, and the forest was even emptier of people. Ülgas the Sage burned their corpses on a pyre, but Uncle Vootele and I didn’t take part in the funerals, because after the business of the sacred lake our family had nothing to do with Ülgas. So he cast spells and invocations alone by the fire, the only mourner being the deeply silent Tambet, who naturally didn’t question any rite that had any of the flavor of the ancient way of life.

It was a bleak autumn, perhaps the bleakest in my life, because although I had lived through even sadder times and experienced much more horrible events, back then I hadn’t yet grown that thick carapace over my heart that makes all misfortunes more bearable. To put it in Snakish terms, I hadn’t yet moulted my skin, as I did several times later in life, changing into a harder covering, until my skin could withstand all but a few sensations. By now, probably nothing can penetrate it. I’m wearing a coat of stone.

With the forest seeming almost extinct I spent a lot of time at home. Nothing had changed there. Mother would spend
whole days in front of the fire, roasting monstrous amounts of deer and goat. She was in a good mood because she liked her children to sit at home all day eating meat instead of wandering in the forest and turning up at the table only in the evening. I ate more than ever before, and I got fat, which pleased Mother very much. She was even more overjoyed at how Salme became nicely buxom, not least because it proved that her cooking skill hadn’t declined and the roasted haunches of venison were going down well.

Salme was also often at home that autumn. She had been used to going out in the evenings and coming back late at night; she claimed that she’d been watching the sunset. That was an obvious lie, because at that time of the year the sun set early, and you might rather say you were watching the moon rise. But one day she no longer went out, and sat sadly at the table instead, and I guessed immediately what was wrong: the bears had gone into hibernation.

In fact we were also used to snoozing through the winter. Usually in early autumn a giant amount of meat was collected, and with the forest covered in snow we stayed at home, slumbering, stirring ourselves to eat only once a day. That is what all the wiser creatures of the forest do—snakes, humans, and bears, as well as some smaller animals. In winter there was no sense in roaming around and wading through the snow; it was much smarter to conserve your strength and use the dark days for proper rest. The wolves were released into the forest to forage for their own food, and they enjoyed their winter freedom to the full, killing goats and deer, as well as village people who in their alien way didn’t sleep in the winter. Since they didn’t understand Snakish, they were easy prey for our wolves.

That year, too, we were prepared to hibernate in the usual way, when one evening Ints crawled into our place and said, “Father said to ask you whether you’d like to hibernate with us this winter. He’d be very pleased if you came.”

This was an unexpected offer, because the snakes had always hibernated on their own, in large underground caves, and I had never heard of a human spending the winter with them. But apparently there were so few humans left in the forest that the adders thought it was possible to take them in. All the more so because apart from us no one else was going there. Ülgas and Tambet would never have moved in with snakes, because snakes showed no respect for the sprites who were so vital to them. And the adders would not tolerate conjuring or spell casting or any other noise, which Ülgas would insist on.

Uncle Vootele was at our place that evening and he took it on himself to accept.

“We’d be glad to come,” he said. “It’s a great honor for us.”

We moved in with the adders a couple of days later. The first snowflakes were falling from the sky, and it was high time to set up winter quarters. Mother wanted to bring with us a large supply of venison, but the adders sent to escort us said that wasn’t necessary.

“We have plenty to eat there,” they explained. “Keep that meat for the spring; there’s no sense in hauling those hunks of flesh with you.”

I was excited. Although I had often visited the adders, I had never seen the caves where they slept in the winter. And it was wonderful to spend a whole winter with Ints, to doze beside him, and occasionally chat to each other in whispers about our dreams, until we got exhausted again and fell back to sleep. It
was only Hiie that I felt sorry for, having to stay aboveground and be satisfied with spending the winter only in her mother’s and father’s company. There was nothing I could do about that; it wasn’t possible for me to bring Hiie along to join the adders.

We trudged through the forest behind two rather vulgar snakes—Mother, Salme, Uncle Vootele, and I—and then descended for a while down a gently sloping passage, until we reached a large warm hall, which was completely dark. But it was a pleasant darkness, soft and caressing. Our eyes got accustomed surprisingly quickly and soon I could see a large number of snakes, who were prettily coiled up—and in the middle of the hall stood a gigantic white stone.

Apparently it was because of that stone that I was able to see so well in the dark. The stone didn’t actually radiate light directly, but it was so pale that the dimness became transparent around it.

“What is that stone?” I asked Ints, who crawled up to me and swished his tail in greeting.

“That is our food stone,” replied Ints. “We lick it in the winter and fill our stomachs. The stone is ancient and never gets smaller. Try it once with your tongue; it’s very good!”

I stepped up to the stone and licked it. The stone was as sweet as honey and I carried on licking until I felt my stomach was terribly full. I felt I had eaten a whole deer.

“Now you won’t want to eat for several days,” said Ints. “That’s how we live in the winter here. We lick the stone, then doze for a couple of days, then we lick again. It’s quiet and warm here and sleep comes quickly.”

We settled down inside and I must admit that I only had to lie down to be overcome with delicious exhaustion. I stretched out like a fox and fell straight to sleep.

I have only the most blissful memories of that winter. Dreams floated around me, and didn’t fly away even when I half-consciously stumbled over to the white stone to get some sustenance, my eyes closed and my body weak from the pleasure of sleep. In the cozy darkness hundreds of adders were snuffling quietly in their sleep; somewhere in their midst were my mother, sister, and uncle. Everything was peaceful, everything good. Pärtel and the emigrants to the village seemed to be just shadows, forgotten as fast as the mind happened to stray to them, and I thought only of how good it is to sleep.

I swam in sleep; its waves rolled over me. I could even feel sleep; it was as soft as moss and crumbled between your fingers like sand. Sleep was all around me; it filled every groove and hole. It was at once both warm and refreshing, enfolding me like a caressing and cooling gust of wind. I had never slept so well as that winter in the adders’ cave, and never since then have I felt such pleasure in sleep, even though I often came to hibernate with the snakes. Those times were just a repetition of the enjoyment; that winter, though, being completely buried in sleep was new and especially thrilling.

I lost my sense of time and didn’t know whether I’d slept a long or a short time, but at one moment I woke up. At first I thought I simply had an empty stomach, and I crawled on all fours over to the stone, licked it, and wanted to fall back to sleep. But unexpectedly I was no longer sleepy. The sweet pleasure had vanished; I no longer sank into dreams headfirst like a stone thrown into a lake. My leg started to itch, then my ear, and finally I felt I could not lie down a moment longer, and I quickly stood up.

The adders around me were curled around each other, slumbering, and a little way away I saw Mother and Salme, also
asleep. But Uncle Vootele was awake. He was sitting, scratching the beard that had grown half as long again in the winter and fixed his eyes on me.

“Good morning!” he said. “Time to get up.”

“Is it spring already?” I asked incredulously. It seemed to me that we had arrived here in the cave only yesterday.

“Who would know that in this darkness?” answered Uncle. “But let’s go and look. I believe it’s beautiful weather outside.”

“But the others are still asleep,” I said.

“Let them sleep,” replied Uncle. “We can be the first to see the new spring.”

We climbed out of the cave and, for the first moment, were dazzled by the bright light. The sun, which we had not seen for so long, shimmered through the treetops at us. We kept our eyes shut for a while, and only later did we dare to peep out through our eyelashes.

It really was spring. Here and there was still some snow, but you could see the first flowers by the forest and the air smelled of freshly fallen rain. We gulped down the fresh air and rubbed our faces with the last of the snow; it was so good after a long sleep underground. The last of the sleepiness vanished from our bodies and I felt that I didn’t want to sleep again for several years; the fresh spring air in my lungs for a long time made me feel so alive.

“Let’s go and walk around a bit,” said Uncle. “Our legs have withered away after lying around so long.”

It was very exciting to see the forest again after the winter months I’d spent in the snakes’ cave. Here and there was a tree half-broken under the weight of snow, and in the bushes you could find traces of wolves’ meals—the strong bones of deer, the more delicate skeletons of goats. The forest was familiar, but at
the same time a little different, and the change was fascinating and arousing, like a girl’s new hairstyle. The forest was like an adder that had moulted. The tempering carpet of snow had given it a youthful flush; the first spring rain had washed it clean.