The Last of the Vostyachs

PRAISE FOR DIEGO MARANI
AND THE LAST OF THE VOSTYACHS

‘Diego Marani's second novel to appear in English, in a dazzling translation from the Italian by Judith Landry, is a riot of comic unpredictability…
The Last of the Vostyachs
cleverly explores notions of freedom, possession and imprisonment—erudition keeping pace with a rollicking plot. Marani's sentences are controlled explosions of impressionism, his narrative structure a thematic echo chamber.'
Times Literary Supplement

‘So, we have: 1. An intellectual puzzle. 2. A wild man of nature adrift in a big city. 3. A policier set near the Arctic Circle. (If that alone doesn't make you put down your copies of Fifty Shades of Whatever then I despair. It has that Killingesque atmosphere.) 4. Magic, and a sense of the immensity of the primeval universe. 5. An unmistakable dash of humour, even when your nerves are being shredded. 6. Wolves, and a Siberian tiger, let loose from a zoo. 7. A happy ending against all odds. And 8. All hanging together. When I reviewed
New Finnish Grammar
, I edged towards using the word “genius” to describe Marani. I'm doing so again now.'
The Guardian

‘For Italian fiction in translation, there is nobody more important being published today. This is a beautiful, intelligently funny novel.'
Italia Magazine

‘Landry is an adept translator, of the kind who likes to make it seem that the book has all along been written in English.'
The London Review of Books

‘A roller-coaster ride whisking the reader alternatively through zones of darkness, hilarity, cruelty, tenderness, the near-lubricious…There's something for almost everyone.' PEN

PRAISE FOR NEW FINNISH GRAMMAR

‘This is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje's
The English Patient
and with a similar mystery at its heart.'
The Spectator

‘Beautifully written and translated, and beautifully original.'
The Times

‘Who is Sampo? This identity thriller delivers plot, bodies and clues—as well as poetic musings on national and individual identity. Marani is obsessed by language and how it defines us.'
Independent

‘Marani's miraculous novel is profound, moving, elusive and tragic.'
Irish Times

‘This is a desperately sad book. It takes its place beside Romantic stories of Kaspar Hauser and Wolf Boy of Aveyron, which have haunted the European imagination for two centuries…Judith Landry is to be congratulated on her seamless translation from the Italian.'
The New Statesman

‘We soon forget we are reading an English translation of an Italian novel. Sheer narrative vim is one reason for this…What gives
New Finnish Grammar
its true interest, however, is its evocation of a place and language foreign to the author yet, to all appearances, intimately familiar.'
Times Literary Supplement

‘I lost count of the number of times that I chuckled quietly or gasped involuntarily at a simple yet beautiful word play… A stunning book. I know I will be thrusting it into people's hands for years to come.' Blackwell's Bookshop, Oxford

‘A thoroughly European sensibility: intellectual, melancholy, mysterious, imbued with a sense of tragedy and history.'
Independent on Sunday

DIEGO MARANI was born in Ferrara in 1959. He has worked as a translator and policy officer for the European Commission and has written several other novels, collections of essays and short stories. Marani has been awarded the Campiello Prize and the Stresa Prize for
The Last of the Vostyachs
, as well as winning the Bruno Cavallini Prize.
New Finnish Grammar
has received the Grinzane-Cavour Prize, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, and the Best Translated Book Award, and longlisted for the European Book Prize. Marani invented the mock language Europanto, in which he has written columns for European newspapers. He lives in Brussels with his wife and two children.

JUDITH LANDRY is a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture. Her translations include
The House by the Medlar Tree
by Giovanni Verga,
The Devil in Love
by Jacques Cazotte,
A Bag of Marbles
, by Joseph Joffo, and
Smarra & Trilby
by Charles Nodier. In 2012, she was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Marani's
New Finnish Grammar
.

TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

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L' Ultimo dei vostiachi
© copyright Diego Marani 2002
English translation copyright © Judith Landry 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in Italian as
L' Ultimo dei vostiachi
Bompiani, 2002
First published in the UK by Dedalus, 2012
Published by arrangement with Marco Vigevani Agenzia Letteraria and Dedalus Publishers.
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Imogen Stubbs
Typeset by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: Marani, Diego.
Title: The Last of the Vostyachs / by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry.
ISBN: 9781922079688 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9781921961885 (ebook)
Other Authors/Contributors: Landry, Judith.
Dewey Number: 853.914

To Simona, Alessandro and Elisabetta

‘Jede Sprache ist ein Versuch'

(Every language is an experiment)

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

I

They came out silently, without exchanging a glance; unhurriedly, expecting to be shot at any moment, to crumple on the spot, on to that mud they'd traipsed over so often. But now the camp was empty. The guards had all gone off during the night. The storeroom doors lay open, the chimneys of the barracks had ceased smoking. They fanned out from along the track dug out by the great wheels of the lorries, into the still dark forest, each in their own direction, without a word, as though in all those years spent locked up in there together they had never known each other. Ivan could still hear the odd thud, the sound of a broken branch, then nothing. So then he too pushed open the doors of the hut and went outside. A sooty mist hung over the wood, clinging to everything. The black wood of the huts, beaded with drops of grimy moisture, seemed to be sweating. Ivan hesitated to approach the main gate. He had never gone beyond it. For twenty years, getting up from his bench in the morning he had climbed straight on to the lorry, which then drove downhill behind the barracks, along the side of the mountain to the mine. But he'd never gone through the gates. He'd never seen them from the outside. He paused now to stare at them, and felt afraid. With one step he plunged backwards through time. A child was coming up towards him. He had a bow slung over his shoulder and was holding three dead squirrels by the tail. ‘Another four and we'll be able to buy ourselves a bushel of flour down in the village,' thought Ivan as he looked at them. Then he set off down the track, slithering through mud up to his ankles. It was the end of summer, when the birds migrate, the bears go into hibernation and the first snow falls on the high meadows. But for Ivan it was a morning in spring. He spent the whole day walking, away from the mine, away from the Russians. He was still walking as a watery sun went down behind the trees. Sinking his feet into the moss, he stepped over the roots of service trees covered with pale berries, went through clouds of mosquitoes which settled on his face then dissolved in a column of light inside the dense wood. Soon the white arctic night wiped away the shadows, the sky faded to a milky blur but Ivan carried on. He didn't stop until he saw the stumpy ridges of the Byrranga Mountains and breathed in the bitter scent of heather and sedge. He drank water from a puddle in the hollow of a rock and then at last allowed himself to stretch out exhausted on the ground, never taking his eyes off the familiar outline silhouetted in the distance. He saw the crest in the shape of a deer's head, and the two points which looked like a hare's ears. Hunting with his father, he had found those mysterious forms faintly disquieting. Though he could no longer see it, he could sense that the child was still there, running to and fro. Twenty years had gone by, but he had remained a child. He had waited for him.

Now Ivan could start again from that distant winter morning when the soldiers had arrived. They had urinated, laughing, on to the fire, on to the roasting meat, and Ivan had never forgotten that smell of scorched urine. They had taken all the furs: those of the otters, the beavers, even the wolverine which Ivan had found in his trap. They had pushed Ivan and his father into the lorry with their rifle butts and taken them to the mine. Loading those stones into the wheelbarrow and washing them in the cold water, turning them over with a shovel, had been hard work. By the evening, Ivan could hardly move his hands. Trying not to think of food, he would sit huddled on the plank bed next to his father, listening to him singing his sad songs until he tumbled into sleep. He would dream about the mountains, the yurt in the middle of its clearing, his favourite animals. Strangely, he could see them from above, and suddenly he would realise that he was a falcon, flying above the trees, far from the darkness down below, the soldiers' boots, the mine. One night, without a word, his father suddenly pulled him down from the plank bed by the arm. Outside, the snow was chest-high and Ivan made his way through it with difficulty. There was no moon, no stars. The snow was dull, mud-flecked. All that could be heard in the freezing darkness was the rustling of their bodies as they sank into the snow. Someone gave a shout, nailed boots clumped down from the watchtowers, there was the sound of guns being loaded but the two shadows did not pause. Ivan's father carried on groping his way towards the wire fencing, thrusting his feet down into the snow with all his strength, holding his son firmly by the arm as he did so. Then two shots rang out in the darkness. He could see the soldiers' white breath in the torchlight. All around, dark shadows were looming up out of the snow, seeming to take an age to reach the runaways. Ivan felt hard hands grabbing him, hitting him on the face and in the stomach, then dragging him back into the hut. He climbed on to his plank bed and cowered there, gulping down mouthfuls of blood-streaked saliva. Shortly afterwards, several faceless men dragged his father's body into the hut by the feet. In the blue flash of their torches Ivan saw his head bouncing over the floor as though it had become detached from his body. By now it was a swollen lump of hair and mangled flesh. The soldiers were shrieking, thrusting their rifle butts at random through the ragged clothing into the bodies of the other prisoners as they lay on their plank beds. But no one moved, no one tried to fend them off. The blows sank into their shadowy forms, snapping bones, crushing flesh which seemed inert. At last the door clanged shut again, the padlocks could be heard grinding in the locks, the rasping voices of the soldiers faded into the distance, together with their heavy tread. Soon all was quiet again. Even the chinks of light between the boards faded from view. Then Ivan climbed down from his plank bed, aching all over, and felt his way towards his father on the floor. He clasped his ever colder hands, shook him, called out his name with such voice as he could muster, stroked his blood-spattered hair. Then he curled up, weeping, beside the lifeless body, sought out its mouth gently with his fingers and pressed his lips against it, hoping to replace its vanished life with his own warm breath. He spent the whole night pressed up against that cold, hard body which no longer spoke to him.