The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Twenty-Three

was pretty tired when we finally got to Saaremaa, and it immediately occurred to me that Grandfather hadn’t given us any clues about where to find Möigas the Sage. As always, here too I had the help of Snakish. I only needed to hiss a couple of times for a nice fat adder, head raised, to come crawling from among the junipers.

“I have to say I’m pretty surprised,” he said after the usual greetings and polite expressions. “I did see you landing, but it didn’t even occur to me that you might understand Snakish. Nowadays that is sadly very rare. All sorts of people come to the island, but there’s no talking to any of them; they might as well all be dumb and just babble incomprehensibly. So, in all honesty, I was quite amazed when I heard you calling. Things may be bad here with us, and yet there are still educated people in other places.”

“Things are no better in other places,” I replied. “I was actually looking for Möigas the Sage of the Wind. Do you know where he lives?”

“I do indeed,” said the adder. “Follow me. I’ll lead you to him.”

Möigas didn’t live far away. His shack was on the seashore and was surrounded by juniper bushes. The adder wished us a good day and wriggled off.

I knocked on the door. It opened, and looking back at me was — a monk! I certainly hadn’t expected that. I took a few steps back, as if I’d encountered a wasp’s nest.

“Are you Möigas, the Sage of the Wind?” asked Hiie, who was also amazed to see a monk and took me by the hand.

“No, dear girl, I’m only his unworthy son,” replied the monk in a thin voice, as if milk were being sucked from his mouth. He was still a young man, but hairless and, stranger still, also without eyebrows, so that his face resembled a bird’s egg. Behind the monk’s back some grumbling was heard, and out of the shack climbed a stunted old man with a long red beard, braided into hundreds of little plaits. This had to be Möigas.

“Here stands my esteemed father,” said the monk, putting his hand on the red-bearded old man’s shoulder. “Daddy, these people have come to see you.”

“Yes, I can see that myself,” muttered Möigas. “What can I do for you?”

“Are you Christians?” asked the monk, before we had time to reply. “Do you like Jesus Christ?”

“Be quiet, Röks!” snapped Möigas. “Don’t embarrass me!”

“Daddy, I’ve told you my name isn’t Röks anymore,” chirped the monk, making a kindly face, as if the utterance of every word were an extreme pleasure. “It’s not a proper name; no one in the Christian world has it. My name is Taaniel. I’ve told you that a hundred times, dear father. Brother Taaniel, that’s what the other reverend brothers in the monastery call me.”

I was reminded of Pärtel and I became very sorry for the old Sage of the Wind, because to lose a friend is unpleasant, but to lose a son is far worse. Möigas seemed to have read my thoughts; he looked at me sadly and said, “My son has gone to waste. Forgive me. It must be because he lost his mother early. I wasn’t able to bring him up properly. But what am I going to do. He’s my own child; I can’t abandon him just because he has become — ugh, it’s horrible to even say it — a monk.”

“Daddy, you’ve brought me up very well,” said the monk. “I’ll be grateful to you till my dying day that you sired me and tenderly looked after me.”

“What do you know about siring, you wretch?” sighed old Möigas. “You haven’t even got balls!”

“Nobody has in our monastery; it’s the fashion nowadays,” replied Taaniel the monk. “Thanks to that, we can sing the praises of God in a high voice. Daddy, I’ve invited you to come and listen. Why haven’t you? You’d certainly be proud to listen to your son singing with the reverend brothers.”

“I don’t want to hear it or see it. I’d be ashamed of my own eyes!”

“Oh Daddy, what are you saying! What is there to be ashamed of; they do this all over the world. And our choir has many admirers, women cry when they listen to us, and even men wipe away tears, so light and beautiful are our voices.”

“Don’t make me sick!” said Möigas, turning toward us. “Forgive me, guests, that you have to see and hear such ugly things. What brings you here? Tell me! And you, Röks, be quiet and don’t interrupt!”

I quickly explained what we were seeking and who sent us. Tears came into old Möigas’s eyes.

“Ah, old Tolp is still alive!” sighed Möigas. “Well, not to be wondered at, he was always a tough guy. Oh, so now he’s taken it into his head to start flying! Why not, why not!”

“A human being can’t fly,” said the monk. “Only angels fly. And Jesus walked on water.”

“I told you, Röks, don’t interrupt!” barked Möigas. “And don’t talk rubbish! Why do you embarrass me in front of these nice young people? You’d be better off following their example. Look how good they are! They respect their grandfather and don’t go around with any iron men or monastic brothers. You see this young man, Leemet? He still has his balls. Haven’t you, Leemet?”

“I have,” I quickly replied.

“Hear that, Röks! Why do you have to be such a will-o’-the-wisp, flying wherever the wind blows?”

“Dear Daddy, to start with, I’m not Röks,” the monk began to slowly chirrup, his eyes half-closed, but old Möigas snapped at him to be silent.

“Why do you tell me all the time you’re not Röks! As far as I’m concerned you’re still Röks. I’m never going to start calling you Taaniel. Now sit down and shut your mouth: I have to go out and look for that windbag. And you, dear guests, wait a while. Take no notice of what my son says. He’s a bit half-witted, a disgrace to the whole family!”

With these words Möigas disappeared into his shed. Taaniel the monk settled down in a sunny spot, nodded amiably to us, and said, “Daddy’s very old now; his head can’t take in young people’s concerns anymore. What can you do; time has passed him by. What do young people think of Jesus in your neighborhood? I’m terribly fond of him. I have his picture over my bed.”

“I don’t know who Jesus is,” I said.

The monk made a noise of amazement that sounded like the shriek of a seagull.

“You don’t know who Jesus is?” he repeated and kneaded his hands, gazing at me kindly and sympathetically. “Baptized, are you?”

“No,” I replied.

“Really?” intoned the monk. “I thought that all young people these days are baptized. Baptism is cool; they pour water over your head. Without baptism they won’t take you into the monastery.”

“I don’t want to go into a monastery!” I declared, by now quite irritated. The monk reminded me of Magdaleena and of how we’d been to listen to the monks singing, and also that I was up to my ears in love with her. Now, sitting next to Hiie, it was somehow unpleasant to be reminded of it. I felt that the monk might suddenly say, “Ho, I saw you with a pretty girl behind our monastery wall!” What would Hiie do and say? I knew that such a thing wasn’t actually possible, that it was an entirely different monastery and other monks singing there, but the bad feeling remained. I was upset by these modern people who boasted all the time about their new customs and strange pets like this Jesus, whom I didn’t know anything about and didn’t want to either. I wasn’t interested in whose picture a monk kept by his bedside, and I said so, though not quite so abruptly.

The monk remained as gentle as before. “It’s silly to close your eyes to education,” was all he said, raising an instructive finger. “You simply won’t get on in today’s world if you don’t know about Jesus. You’ll have nothing to talk about to other people. All right, if music doesn’t interest you, then you don’t have to enter a monastery, and castration isn’t absolutely necessary. But you can’t get to be a knight’s henchman either, if you aren’t baptized and you don’t know about Jesus!”

“Why should I have to be anyone’s henchman?” I asked. This was another horrible trait that united all these modern people — the desire to be someone’s servant.

“Well, but what do you want from life, anyway?” asked the monk. “You want to be a peasant, sowing and reaping? That is of course noble; Adam also sowed and reaped and cultivated the land by the sweat of his brow. Yes, those who have not been given any higher gifts of the spirit must be content to work the fields.”

“Who is this Adam?” Hiie now asked.

“Our forefather, the first human, whom God created out of the dust,” explained the monk. “Before that the land was empty and bare, but then God made everything in six days, and so it has been untouched until today.”

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “I’ve seen the Primates’ history, which over thousands and thousands of years they have drawn on the walls of their cave. There was no God and no Adam. And what does ‘untouched’ mean? So many things have disappeared forever. For instance the Frog of the North. For instance the great fish Ahteneumion, who rose to the surface of the water this morning for the last time and then dived to the bottom of the sea forever. Or Snakish words. Do you know those, Röks?”

“Snakish words are from Satan,” declared the monk, excited for the first time. “A human cannot know them. Satan created the snakes and gave them the power of speech, so as to tempt Eve, the first woman. They are all servants of Satan.”

“Now I can really see how stupid you are,” I said. “You yourself serve God and the iron men and some sort of Pope in Rome. But snakes are nobody’s servants. Nobody created them; they existed in the most ancient times, back when neither humans nor even Primates lived in the forest. I do know what I’m talking about, because I know them well. I do know Snakish! I think that snakes would laugh out loud if they could hear your nonsense. You’ve simply been taught in the monastery a modern legend, but there are many legends in the world. Some are forgotten; new ones are invented to take their place.”

“Dear boy,” said the monk, having regained his former composure. “I don’t want to argue with you, because you haven’t been to school and you don’t know anything. Humankind has become wiser than you realize. I’m simply sorry that you don’t want to live like other young people. Even if you do speak Snakish words and they aren’t from Satan, well, what will you do with them in the wider world? Who will you speak them to? Nowadays young people are interested in Jesus. They talk about him a lot; he’s very successful.”

“He doesn’t interest me,” I said.

“A great pity,” replied the monk with a smile.

We were silent for a while. Hiie and I looked at the monk, but he seemed to be dozing in the sunshine. Suddenly he started singing in a high voice, so that Hiie and I were both startled.

Immediately Möigas the Sage rushed out of the shed and cried, “Be quiet! At once! Don’t shame me in front of the whole world!”

“Daddy, it’s just an innocent hymn, where I extol Jesus’s mercy and grace,” said the monk lazily. “How can this beautiful music shame you in any way? This hymn is making big waves in the world at the moment; it’s being sung at all the feasts.”

“But not under my roof! Not here! In the world they might go in for that sort of thing, but in my house we do things the right way!”

He gave Hiie and me a signal to follow him.

“I don’t have a single windbag ready at home,” he explained. “But never mind, we’ll soon pack the right winds together. Then it will be good for your grandfather to fly. Let him fly to visit me too.”

“Yes, let him come,” said the monk. “I’ll be glad to welcome your friend, Daddy, and I’ll pray for him.”

“No, better he doesn’t come,” said Möigas. “Tolp is a fierce man; he’ll knock you dead in his great rage.”

“Good, then I’ll die a martyr,” declared the monk. “And I’ll go straight to Heaven, where I can sit on the right hand of Jesus. To be a martyr is a great honor; books are written about you and your picture is put up in churches. Daddy, just think, your son a martyr!”

“That might very easily happen. If you don’t keep your mouth shut for once, I might do you some damage myself. Children, let’s go inside quickly! My son is driving me mad!”

We went with the sage into his shed. On its walls hung a huge number of fine, coarse, and even coarser ropes, all tied into large knots. Möigas started rummaging among them and chose about ten bundles of ropes.

“These are wind knots,” he explained. “On the side of each rope is one wind. I go in a boat to sea to catch them, like any other man fishing. But a wind is much harder to catch. It’s fast and slippery; you have to be enormously skillful to get it to run into your noose. Then quickly you tie it on and you can hang the wind on your wall until you need it. A wind is not a fish; it won’t go bad. It can hang on the wall for up to a hundred years, but if you let it open, it howls and pants, as if it had been caught only yesterday and is completely fresh. I have here quite old winds, captured by my father, storms and tempests that you won’t find anywhere today. Here we have, still surviving, the first wind that I caught when I was still a little boy. It’s quite a weak summer breeze, the kind that brings a little nice coolness on a hot day. Look, the same here. A wind like this is quite easy to catch, but at that time I had a lot of bother with it. A little boy’s thing, with ten fingernails I had to keep hold of the other one, stopping the rope from getting tangled, but when I finally hung it up on the wall, it was a great feeling! Just as if I’d captured a whirlwind. In fact I’ve got a few of those, but I’m not sending them to your grandfather; they’re not good for flying. They were used in war: let one of these loose and it’d capsize the enemy’s ships or raze their villages to the ground. Worse than fire! Oh, I’ve got every kind of wind here: winter ones, which bring snow with them, and autumn ones, which blow the rain clouds in. These ones are spring winds: let one of these loose and soon you’ll be breathing light and fresh. There are following winds, which help sailors, and headwinds, to help you defend yourself against enemies. All kinds. I won’t be catching many more. I’m old already, and I probably can’t catch a really big storm, haven’t got the strength, and what will I do with these winds anyway? I wanted to make my son a wind-sage, but that good-for-nothing is not interested in my wind collection at all. So I’m happy to send a few winds to your grandfather; at least one person cares about them and knows how to use them. I chose ten winds; that should be enough.”

“Do we take them with us like that, on the end of a rope?” I asked.

“No, not like that,” replied Möigas. “A wind is smart and cunning, like a living creature. As long as he’s in my hand, he keeps still, because he recognizes that I’m a wind-sage and I’m not going to play tricks with him. But if he understands that some ordinary person is holding the end of the rope, he’ll start to struggle and push, and try to tear himself from the rope end. No, I’ll put them in a bag, so they won’t get out and you can get back nicely to Grandfather’s place.”

From under a table the sage took out a pouch, sewn together from several skins, the mouth of which was pulled shut with a rope. He took hold of the first wind and carefully undid the knots that held it in a bunch. Suddenly the air in the room started to move, and Hiie’s hair started fluttering, as if a sudden gust had tangled it. Then Möigas pushed the wind into the bag. He did the same with all the other bundles of ropes, and by the end the pouch was quite fat. If you pressed your ear to it, you could hear a muffled whooshing and roaring, as if a storm were raging inside.

“Now it’s ready,” said Möigas. “Now there’s nothing more to do than to carefully open the mouth of the bag and let out just enough wind as you need. Your grandfather will know what to do. Yes, he’s one fine man, and he raised his children to be sensible. See, I couldn’t do that with my son; he went bad, so it’s terrible to look at him. Oh, spare me! He’s singing again! I told him that if he isn’t quiet, I’ll box his ears.” A wail could indeed be heard from the yard. Mixed with the monk’s high-pitched singing someone swearing could be heard. We rushed outdoors and saw the monk arguing with a short but horribly fat old man, who was brandishing a stick furiously and yelling, “Will this whining stop for once? I can’t get peace; you’re always opening your jaws and howling like a wolf! What’s wrong with you, Röks? Are you in pain or something?”

“Dear old neighbor,” replied the monk, piously rubbing his hands slowly together, as if washing them with sunshine. “You could be a bit more agreeable. This kind of music is what the young people appreciate these days. You’re old; you have your own favorite tunes. But you should understand that times move on, and what you don’t like might provide happiness for a new generation, who take their example from Christ.”

“It was Christ that taught you to sing like that, was it?” shrieked the stocky neighbor.

“Of course,” replied the monk. “He is my idol, and the idol of all young people. These songs are sung by the angels in paradise; they’re sung by the cardinals in the holy city of Rome. Why shouldn’t we sing them too, as the whole Christian world does?”

“My backyard isn’t the Christian world!” interjected Möigas now. “I’m sorry, Hörbu, that you were disturbed. You must have been having your noontide nap.”

“Well, of course I was having my noontide nap!” complained Hörbu the neighbor. “And just when the sleep was sweetest, your useless son started whining. Why do you let him come here at all? Let him sit in his monastery if that’s what he’s chosen.”

“He’s my own flesh and blood,” sighed Möigas.

“So what if he’s your son! I told my daughter: ‘If you ever become a nun, you slut, don’t ever show your face in my house again!’ The whore!”

“You didn’t have to bless your daughter with such ugly words, dear neighbor,” countered the monk. “Johanna is a very exemplary nun. I meet her often. Why should she have stayed in this wild place? There’s no better way for a modern girl of today to get into the wide world than by becoming a bride of Christ!”

“She should’ve got married!” shouted Hörbu. “There are fifty of those brides of Christ there in the nunnery. It’s a disgusting obscenity, and it’s putting everything upside down!”

“You’ve misunderstood everything,” sighed the monk sympathetically. “Pious nuns live out their days in deep virtue and have nothing to do with men.”

“You go there yourself! You said yourself that you meet her often!”

“I’m a monk. Oh, neighbor, you don’t understand anything about young people today.”

“I don’t understand, and I don’t want to,” declared Möigas. “And don’t speak in the name of all young people! Leemet is young too, and he isn’t involved in that kind of filth.”

“He’s from the forest, completely uneducated,” replied the monk, with scorn in his voice. “It’s a shame, Daddy, that for you there is more value in spiritual darkness and clinging to past times than in ambition and the desire to learn.”

“If you’re so keen on learning, why didn’t you want to learn to catch the winds?” asked Möigas sadly. “This ancient art will now go to the grave with me. You would’ve had an honorable profession, one which would always keep you fed.”

“On the contrary, Daddy, there’s no future in that profession. You don’t need to catch the winds; it’s enough to humbly turn to God in prayer and he will roll the winds toward you where you need it; he quietens the storm and calms the tempest.”

“Sadly it’s not so simple,” sighed Möigas. “But you believe only in what you’re told in the monastery, not what your own old father says.”

“Forgive me, Daddy, but there in the monastery they read books printed in Latin. When the wise men in foreign lands wrote them, our ancestors were still running around the forest with the foxes,” said the monk with a smile, as if feeling pleasure that he had raised up such great wisdom from such harsh circumstances. He shook his head in a saintly way, looked at us all in turn, and rose with a sigh.

“I shall pray for you, poor heathens, and especially for you, dear father,” he stated. Then he looked once more at Hiie and me and added, “If you start to take an interest in Jesus Christ, then you know where to find me. Sharp young men are always welcomed with open arms to our monastery.”

I didn’t reply. The monk nodded again, made the sign of the cross in the air, and left.

Hörbu spat on the ground.

“Forgive me, Möigas, but that son of yours is as mad as a polecat.”

“Yes,” sighed Möigas bitterly. “In his younger days he was such a sweet little boy. These new winds, they’re changing people.”

“My daughter was such a strong little grasshopper,” said Hörbu. “But then she started hanging around that monastery. I forbade her. I even gave her a hiding, but she kept on going where she wasn’t allowed. What was driving her there? Why did she become a nun? Perhaps we really are old and we don’t understand a thing about the new world?”

In my nose I smelt again the carrion stench that assaulted me from time to time. I would have liked to open the windbag and let out all Möigas’s storms and tempests, to scare away the rotting odor, let myself be cleaned by the airs. But these winds were intended for Grandfather. So we said farewell to Möigas and Hörbu and sat down in the boat.

On the way to Grandfather’s island we saw one of the iron men’s ships passing on the horizon.

“Ahteneumion rose to the surface a bit too early,” said Hiie. “Now he would have seen the iron men, and the iron men would have seen him. But now they’re sailing there and they don’t even know what’s lying on the sea bottom under his own beard. Only we know. Isn’t that exciting?”

At that moment it seemed to me that we knew perhaps too much that others didn’t know, and on the other hand too little that was known to everyone else, but I said nothing to Hiie.