The Last of the Vostyachs Read Online Free PDF Page A

is Ivan. But when he talks of himself he describes himself as ‘vostyach’, which means ‘man’. So for the people of the village he has become Ivan Vostyach. He’s probably a survivor from some gulag. At the inn they told me that there was a large mining settlement on the far side of the lakes, an open-cast mine where they sent convicts to break stones and wash them by the ton, all to extract a few specks of gold. Hell on earth, apparently. When wages stopped arriving from Moscow, the overseers did a bunk and the few remaining prisoners escaped.
    My Vostyach understands Nganasan: perhaps someone spoke it at the mine. He also understands a little Russian, but he can’t speak a word. It’s a language which frightens him: as soon as he hears it, he tenses up and looks away. It probably has the most terrible associations for him. So at first we communicated by gesture, or in rudimentary Nganasan. But then I started learning Vostyach, and it wasn’t long before I could compose the odd sentence. Mostly, I myself reconstructed the words, basing myself on those I heard him pronounce. But it worked, and Ivan understood me. At first he was disconcerted on hearing me speak his language. But then something within him seemed to melt, and we immediately became friends. To begin with I couldn’t persuade him to stay in the village for more than a few hours. He seemed nervous when he came into the inn, and even when he accepted a bowl of soup he was continually looking out of the window, peering anxiously along the grey road which wound up into the steppe, on the lookout for soldiers. But I felt that he sought me out, that he liked being with me. Every time he heard his language issuing from my mouth, he seemed enchanted. Uttering those primitive sounds, I too felt that I was back in the distant past. It’s true that you can have the illusion that you know all about a people by reading about their civilisation in libraries – about their kings, their battles, their religion. But until you take possession of their language, you really know nothing of them. Ivan wanted to speak, he was hungry for words and company. Loneliness and fear had marked him physically as well as mentally. He moved furtively, like an animal lying in wait; he pricked up his ears at noises I myself could not hear, and when he was worried he would show his unease by clenching and unclenching his fists. I’ve never seen such misshapen hands. His fingers were just stubby protuberances, without nails, the skin on them was tough and hairless. Ivan would always return to the forest before dark. He’d stay away for a couple of days and then reappear in the village bringing me some squirrels’ tails. He said he couldn’t stay for very long, he had to get back to his people. I had imagined a whole tribe of Vostyachs up there in the woods. But then I saw that he must be referring to something else – his animals, perhaps, or the spirits of his ancestors. He always had that strange sack of skins on his shoulder. He never opened it in my presence and he never put it down. One afternoon when he had fallen asleep on the inn floor, I looked inside it, to find it contained a few stones, some animal bones, feathers, bears’ teeth and little braids of hair. When he woke up, it was the first thing he reached for. It was already beginning to get dark, but he set off anyway towards the woods at quite a pace, as though there really were someone waiting for him up there. It was hard to know where he lived, because it was impossible to follow him: as soon as he entered the wood he was immediately lost from view. The snow seemed to close in after him. But, over time, I managed to gain his confidence. He realised that not all Russians were bad, even if on the few occasions when he did stay on in the village he would sleep in some shed, or in the outhouses of the sawmill, rather than be near other human beings. There was a distant