The Last of the Vostyachs Read Online Free PDF Page B

made two dots. One was Saint Petersburg, the other the Tajmyr Peninsula, as I explained to him. Ivan came up to me to look more closely, then rubbed his hand angrily over the pane. He ran to the next window, and the next, wiping away the condensation. Then he went to the back of the room and stared out at me from the semidarkness; although I could not see him, I knew that he was crying. Then he put on his jacket, picked up his sack and drum and left the room. I was afraid that he would do his usual disappearing trick, and that I’d never see him again. On this occasion, though, he allowed me to follow him out to the wood. He stopped on a small rise and arranged his drum carefully on his chest. I knew that he did not like to be observed when he was playing, so I went to stand behind a tree. I saw him crouch down in the snow, put his hand in his sack and draw out a mask made of birch bark, which he then put on. Until that point, I’d never noticed it among his possessions. He stayed crouched there without moving for some time, then began to beat slowly, intensely and increasingly loudly on the drum-skin. It was as though he were embarking on a fight, as though with that incessant, insistent beat he might rid the world of disharmony and give it the steady rhythm of his own music. I felt as though all living matter were now moving to the rhythm of his drumbeat, breathing in time to it; falling seamlessly into step with him, walking beside him – only to plummet once more into its normal, fatal disarray. He was singing words I’d never heard him use. His voice was different now – deep and somehow majestic. He articulated each sound cautiously, as though he were almost afraid of it, as though it might unleash something uncontrollable, superhuman. He turned his head from side to side as he proceeded with his awesome dance, twisting his neck so far in each direction that I felt that I might see his head wrenched from his body and fall with a thud on to the snowy ground. There was pain in his voice, a sense of irreparable solitude, like a maze of ice settling into new and ever more intricate, tunnel-like formations as his song proceeded. Jarmo, I felt as furtive as a thief, hidden among those trees. For a moment I thought that it would be better to leave Ivan Vostyach there where he was, in his own land; that introducing him to people so different from himself would cause him suffering, make him feel even more alone. What did he know about Finno-Ugric or Proto-Uralian? What did it matter to him that he was the last of the Vostyachs? I suddenly felt that I was being purely selfish, going around with my tape recorder on the trail of dialects as though they were so many fur-bearing animals, pillaging memories in order to stuff them and put them on show in dismal museums. I thought of all those dazed little old men I’d gone to torment with my microphone, forcing them to remember things they might well have preferred to forget. I expected them to unroll the grief of a lifetime for my sole benefit. But even they were less vulnerable than Ivan Vostyach: they had houses, families, or at least the village where they had been born. Whereas Ivan Vostyach had nothing. He was the last survivor of a vanished world. Then I asked myself if we are indeed really salvaging something when we preserve these now vanished languages in formalin like so many freakish animals. Are we not in fact rather pandering to some personal obsession of our own, of no more use to anyone else than a collection of beer mats or cigarette packets? Maybe I’m getting old, but sometimes I feel that all this vainglorious science is beginning to bore me and that one day I shall throw my phonology handbooks out of the window and hurl my tapes of Samoyedic dialects into the stove. But, fight against it as I may, I remain a product of the Soviet era and I cannot rid myself of the illusion that one day the world will be made comprehensible to us by the