Six: The Arrival

Our village can seem insignificant and of little importance, lying secluded as it does in an out-of-the-way corner of the parish, squeezed in between the river and the stony hills, poor and gray and run-down, and hidden besides in a spiritual sense from the eyes of the world on account of its Orthodox faith and its old-fashioned customs; but its people are more cheerful than in most other places, and nowhere in the world is the stranger as well received as here. He needs merely to put his foot on the village path---bumpy and half grown over, meandering gracefully alongside sparse pastures and around little hills---in order to feel that it is a beginning of the road to serenity and truth. The fresh, damp air from the river and from the gum alders down in the hollow immediately meets the wanderer; and if he chances upon someone from the village, some wily old man, or a flock of inquisitive children or a brown-eyed woman with her skirts tucked up and a child on her arm, he will experience---perhaps for the first time in his life---the fascination of pleasing his fellow men, of giving them delight by his mere existence. It is this very circumstance which makes a stranger feel so extremely happy in our village, and which has vouchsafed so many souls---generous ones, to be sure, but grown thorny from   [p. 72]   life's wounds---a sanctuary and a refuge from the harassments of fate.

Here, hospitality is not just a virtue but an inherent necessity which even the poorest and most wretched person allows himself to satisfy. It's wonderful to have strangers around, they feel, and they value nothing more highly than a quiet exchange of thoughts. An animal-lover would perhaps have some criticisms to make of the people here, for the horses are treated so badly that it's a shame, and God alone knows how the cats and dogs with which the village teems get their share of food. But our village is a paradise for someone who loves human beings. No matter whether he is bad or good, poor or rich, a person is treated not only with equanimity but with genuine affection. Even a beggar can feel like a man who has something of value stored away inside him, even though he doesn't have very much in his bag. The rather sly curiosity and inclination to gossip one can notice here is basically of a benevolent nature; it conceals a spiritual tolerance and a joy at human nature---human nature taken just the way it is---that beams with an invigorating force on every stranger who, for whatever reason, happens to find his way here.

The incomparable Assendorff, for example, who was engaged in a feud with God and the whole world, and who could no longer find a single person willing to receive him and his tattered dragoon's cape beneath his roof; where could so pugnacious a soul have found a sanctuary, if the peasants here had not taken an interest in him, letting him fish in their waters, letting him fool along with one thing and another in their forests? They merely laughed at the pickles he got himself into and if the situation seemed to be taking a really serious turn, they made the sign of the cross and said: "God be merciful to his soul." Poor unhappy Schwancken was a similar case: he had run away from his   [p. 73]   elegant father and his crazy mother, and lived like an animal in the woods, sleeping in crevices in the rocks and eating roots and berries. No doubt he would have hanged himself from a tree long ago if the young owner of Vornikka farm, himself a little of a hermit, had not caught him in his pea-patch and made a human being out of him again. What did the farmer actually do on that occasion? He just sat looking at Schwancken from his hiding place, and after he had watched for a while, he discovered that it was an unfortunate man on whom he gazed. He crept up quietly and grabbed the thief by the neck. Schwancken defended himself furiously, but could not pull loose. When he realized that he was caught, he curled up between the pea vines and lay there quite still. Then the young farmer sat down beside him, as if nothing at all had happened and as if the place was the most natural one in the world for a conversation, and began to talk calmly and reasonably, as was his custom. He talked about what concerned him most and what he had read about in all the books he owned, about a way of life in harmony with nature, about horticulture, and about the destiny of mankind. The despairing Schwancken lay there listening to him, just as the ground lies listening to the gentle rain in springtime. They left the pea-patch as friends for life, and now there is nothing in seven parishes like the garden at Vornikka, thanks in great part to Schwancken.

And who could forget how Uncle Ungert looked when he arrived here one raw, cold October evening with his beggar's sack in his hand and his eyes like burning coals, famished and frozen in the hard wind of adversity? With his hooked nose and his hanging mustaches he looked like a Turkish bandit, and as soon as they caught sight of him, the children clung like bunches of grapes to his arms and his legs and cried out in chorus: "Tell us a story, tell us a story!" They had realized immediately that a man from the world   [p. 74]   of fairy tales and adventures stood before them in a beggar's form. And then Uncle Ungert began to tell his stories. He went into the nearest house, and the children sat down in a ring around him, and he told them about his life. It is not easy to know how much the young ones understood of all he had to say, but they listened with breathless attention, and the more strange words they heard, the more captivated they became. Their eyes grew deep and dark like the mysterious pools in the bog, and right before their bare and dirty feet a mighty and astounding world revealed itself in the twilight of the cottage. Carefully and with great gravity, as if he were handling treasures beyond price, Uncle Ungert took his memories out of the box of the past which he had carried with him for such a long time without ever opening it to look inside. He saw himself as a young cadet, storming up the stairs at the Alexejev military college, three steps at a time, as reckless and impatient as every youth is who cannot plunge into the great adventure soon enough. When the heavy oak door of the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok closed behind him, his steps were heavier and the unknown lay like a dark and alluring shadow upon his eyes. It drew him onward with an irresistible force, farther and still farther away, and wherever war burst into flame in its passage across the earth, he was to be found. Somewhere beyond Mongolia's endless steppes, in the timeless stillness beside the river Ljao---He, he arrived at the realization that his life was a pursuit of the wind. He devoted himself to highly respectable research, received the order of the Double Dragon, and the title of mandarin was bestowed upon him. That which followed, the World War, the revolution, his flight, his misery, were simply repetitions of what had gone before, but with the roles reversed: now he was not the hunter but the hunted.

"Can you go flying with the Double Dragon?" a boy asked all of a sudden, burning with suspense.

"Naturally, that's why you get to be a mandarin," Uncle Ungert answered with that unshakable earnestness which appeals to children more than any other human quality.

"Are you a real mandarin? Can you fly for us now?" the children cried, completely beside themselves from excitement.

"It can very well happen that I'll fly one day," answered Uncle Ungert in a sepulchral voice. "But I don't want to now. I'm so tired that I'll sleep for a hundred days."

The children took the explanation at face value, and this very hour they are still waiting for the hundred days to come to an end. It doesn't bother them at all to see Uncle Ungert tramp around with his bark-basket over his arm. After all, they know that the mandarin is asleep.

From that moment on Uncle Ungert was supernatural, a being of a higher sort, a half-god, the hero of whom the race of men seems to have an ineradicable need. He was never especially friendly toward the children---on the contrary, his manner was quite sullen and distant, and the very fact that he never laughed served to enhance his reputation among them. Like animals, children do not want people to laugh. His person had something of that inaccessibility and mysticism which attaches to the true magician, and this was enough to turn him into the master of unlimited possibilities, the man who can fulfill your most secret wishes with a wave of his hand, offering you a life of magnificent happenings and events which go against the order of nature. In brief: he became the mandarin of our little community. The children had never heard such a word before, but as soon as they had heard it, they grasped its incantatory and magic meaning. Thereafter, the mandarin was with them, wherever they   [p. 76]   might go, and their secret hiding places acquired a special fascination through the fact that the mandarin could conceal himself in them. He became the main character in their play-acting, and finally the children created their immortal Mandarin Game, a profoundly solemn and at the same time breakneck game which became more popular than any other in our village.

Thus it came to pass that Uncle Ungert, a man who had wandered through such a great part of our world, stopped at last in our insignificant village and became its ornament and pride. He postponed his departure from day to day, and before he knew it, years had passed by, and still he could not bring himself to leave the children. New generations of children gathered around him and listened to his tales, but he scarcely noticed the change. He saw the same expectant eyes directed toward him, and heard the same shrill voices crying "Mandarin, mandarin," and it sounded like the twitter of birds in the silent forests of his memories. And one thing is sure: as long as Uncle Ungert walks here in the flesh among these children, no one can persuade them to abandon their belief that, one fine day, he will wrap himself in the wings of the Double Dragon and fly away, big as life, with his mustaches and his hooked nose and the familiar bark-basket on his arm. Whoever refuses to believe it is no child of our village.

Actually, it was not so strange that Abel Myyriäinen, when he came trudging into our village one warm and rather sultry June evening in the company of his friend the tinker, thought to himself that he might as well stay here forever---the road leading into our village is a pretty one indeed. Of course, there was a great deal of commotion when the people in the outlying cottages caught sight of the pilgrims. The news about little Sanni's pilgrimage to the cloister had spread like wildfire, and both Natalia Ivanovna   [p. 77]   and, in particular, the Olsbom woman had expressed their views on the matter. A whole crowd of curious people, their eyes abulge, came streaming up, and Lampinen played his role as the chief figure of events with a genuine bravura. His position was truly enviable. He was not only the father of a child who had died before the eyes of the Most Holy Madonna, he was also the man who had brought along a stranger as his honored guest. The women looked at him with proper reverence, too, and no one attached much importance to the fact that Sanni had died; after all she was an odd sort of child who had not died at home in a corner by the stove. When the tinker pointed to Myyriäinen with a sweeping and chivalrous gesture of his hand and said: "This is my guest," the women made their most dignified curtsy, and the men took him stiffly by the hand, saying: "Welcome among us. It's very nice in our village this time of year."

Myyriäinen did not feel at all annoyed by the attention he received. As a matter of fact, he became quite exhilarated and chattered as freely with these people as if he had known them all his life. While Lampinen's boasting was at its height, he stood to one side and let the careless and curiously vital mood of the village street and the friendliness the people emanated penetrate to the core of his being. His first encounter with the spirit of the village told him that this was a place where a man could live, as the people say here, "lower than the grass and stiller than the water," and at this moment there was nothing he longed for more than such an intimate and hidden life. He wanted to enter some place where he would be as well concealed, as little noticed, as the seed within the earth, where people would not know what sort of person he was, and would not ask whether he remained the same or not; instead, they would let him lie quietly and be transformed.

He had been prepared for an idyl. But when, at a bend in the path, he suddenly caught sight of Lampinen's cottage on the slope, with the birches and the blooming lilac and the friendly gray hill as a shield toward the back and the potato patch and the hops which crept up the big stone beside the front stoop, he realized how insignificant and empty his own notion had been, and how much more meaningful the reality itself was. Here in this sparse forest, the house grew out of the earth in such a way as to suggest perfect and classical harmony. The ample, dark-eyed woman sat on the stoop and suckled her youngest child; the skin on her bared breast had the same dusky, sun-soaked shimmer as the patina on the house's gray gable, burned by the sun and dried by the wind. Small flaxen-haired heads and some darker ones stuck up here and there like mushrooms emerging from the earth. The earth was everything here: the cottage, the woman, the children, bread and death. Living, sun-soaked earth, the home of man.

He saw it all at once in a single glance, while he stood running his fingers over the gate which he was to open for Lampinen and little Sanni. And in the same moment he knew that the sole thing he wished for himself was to become earth of this earth, to sink into it and be united with it throughout every part of his being. "I shall bury my false tools here," he thought, "and beneath that hill over there I shall prepare a grave for the dream of my youth." As he opened the gate, he noticed that the gray woodwork within its frame had the shape of a lyre. The ornament caught his sympathy; it was an expression of Lampinen's poetic sense. In this moment, the primitive wooden lyre on the tinker's rickety gate seemed to him to be lovelier than the world's most beautiful work of art, because it had grown out of the forest's own essence in the same way as everything else here: the people, the houses, the paths, the hop garden and   [p. 79]   the potato patch. The wind and the sun played upon it, and the silent melody which arose was that dream-melody which belonged to these people alone, giving life and color to the self-absorbed and motionless hours of their existence.

When the guest had been bid welcome, and the first thoughts had been exchanged concerning the pilgrimage and little Sanni's death, and Palaga had gone inside in order to put her little boy in his cradle and to tend to her dead child, and when the children after a long period of intense staring had temporarily got their fill of the stranger, returning with a certain hesitation to whatever it was they had been doing, although still without having decided whether the new arrival was to be regarded as an asset or not---then it became surprisingly quiet out there on the hillside, quiet in a way that Abel Myyriäinen had never known before. The children's voices and their shrill little shrieks fluttered around him like butterflies, and the echoing evening heaven gently reproduced the various sounds from the pastures and the village---laughter and yodeling calls to summon the cattle, the clear tinkling of the cowbells, a fragment of a song a girl was singing---and the stillness took all these sounds unto itself, enclosing them within its mighty peace.

Myyriäinen thought of his mother for a moment. He saw her as he had so often seen her when he had entered unnoticed in the evenings, sitting beside the window in such a way that the light fell upon her withered face and her coarse gray hair, with her tired hands in her lap and her eyes filled with a melancholy which seemed to stretch its invisible hands backward to her own childhood, her own origin, her own mother. He had no sensation of pain or loss, only the deep peace of a perfect sense of belonging. Sinking down onto the ground where he stood, he spread out his arms, as if he would embrace his mother's lap; he remained   [p. 80]   lying there, his face pressed into the grass and his body utterly given up to the soft and shielding forces of the earth.

There Myyriäinen fell asleep as easily as though the grass and the trees and the heavy clouds had rocked him in a cradle made for the children of the giants. The tinker's offspring came up and looked at him and poked him with sticks and straws and stuck their fingers into his ears, but the only result was that he stirred slightly in his slumber. "He's asleep," the excited children cried out to one another, and it seemed to be a marvelous and incomprehensible discovery. Gradually they were called into the house, one after the other. The cottage door was closed, the people went to their rest. Out in the summer evening, Myyriäinen slept alone. The odor of the lilacs lay heavy and sweet in the sultry air, and in the dense thicket behind the sauna the little gray nightingale sat singing its elaborate and impassioned hymn to the brightness of the night. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, some heavy raindrops fell. Violent gusts of wind arose, the trees bent down with a whining sound that was followed by a muffled roar. It grew dark, the thunder crashed like metal. The sheets of lightning crossed through one another, sketching quick and awful signs of flame upon the heavens. The passionate little bird fell silent, the leaves trembled, the whole of nature concealed itself and waited. Myyriäinen slept like a child in the whistling, booming giant's cradle of the storm, while the thunderbolts flashed above his head and the rain streamed down upon him.