Anna Nerkagi

The Nenets are a people of just over 40,000 individuals, settled in the northeastern part of the Ural region: their economy is fundamentally based on reindeer herding. Like many young Nenets, Aniko left to study far from her homeland: first at a boarding school in the nearest town, then further away still, to study geology at the university. She assimilated Russian language and culture to the point of forgetting her origins. She must return to her aging father because news has reached her of the death of her mother and little sister, killed by a wolf dubbed Lame Devil. The return is marked first by revulsion ( > when her father was now close to her: she involuntarily took a step back: he gave off a stench of alcohol, smoke, and filth ), then she slowly reclaims the language and customs, and finally the remembrance of her lost childhood returns: «Evening had fallen; together with her mother, she had lit a fire near the» chum > . She played with her rag dolls that had bird beaks instead of faces. Mother was busy sewing a new jaguska for one of the dolls. For an instant Aniko thought she truly saw her mother's concentrated face again. But once that instant had passed, however hard she tried, she could no longer redraw her features in her memories. They had vanished, perhaps forever . She is confused; until then, «she had done nothing but try to live». Must she accept the reproach-laden invitation of Aleska, her childhood friend, to stay in order to improve the conditions of the Nenets? Or should she let herself be submerged by the spell of the tundra and of an ancestral, motionless, and seemingly harmonious society? It is this that attracts Pavel, a young non-Nenets geologist, prompting him to want to stay, to abandon «the usual ordinary thoughts» and «suddenly discover oneself to be more mature, sincere, and good!» We do not know what Aniko will do; she leaves the tundra, but will she return one day? What will become of her? Aniko is a slight character, and her story is too tenuous to convey the contradictory feelings of a young woman poised between affection for her father—alone now, yet sheltered by the village—and the desire to be part of a society rich in cultural and professional stimuli. Abstracted from the specific setting, and were we to substitute Russian with English, Aniko’s state of waiting and nostalgia is the condition of many young people today. Yet this was not the writer’s purpose: deeply bound to her land, the author leads us into a world of serene concord where men, dogs, reindeer, and even wolves live «in a stillness of inexhaustible joy», as Ungaretti put it when speaking of his birthplace, Alexandria, Egypt. Think of the reindeer Temujko, who was suckled by Aniko’s mother and continually returns to her mistress’s grave; of the dog Buro, the old father’s faithful friend; and of how the father accepts with sorrowful resignation his daughter's abandonment, perhaps definitive. And what of Lame Devil? The description of the wolf, of his loneliness and bitterness, opens the entire tale and leaves its mark on some of the novel's finest pages. Nenets society seems perfect in its centuries-old harmony, but it is not so. As Pavel says to Aniko, > the nenets are confused. Outwardly they appear calm. imperturbable as ever, but I know they are uneasy. They wonder what their future will be like, where their children will end up. (...) And if we don't help them now... And what if the entire story were a fable—and, like any fable, fit for all latitudes—as well as a metaphor for our wretched Italy, a summons to free ourselves from passivity? The writing is melodious and fluid, like the story itself: sweet and graceful, evocative and naturalistic at once when describing the tundra and its inhabitants; concise and effective in dialogue, in the timeless conversation among the Nenets, yet contracted whenever Aniko speaks, as if mirroring the agony of the life choices she must confront, despite herself. The plot is weak in its narrative pacing (it seems as though nothing happens), but the prose is splendid, with assonances resonating from other languages. Why read it? Sweet and graceful.

To comprehend this literary "gem," one must return to an earlier novel by the author: *Aniko*, a review of which can be read on this site. Aniko has abandoned her people, the Nenets, to live far away, leaving behind Aleska, her childhood companion, and her father, Petko. The tale begins with the decision of Aleska’s mother to find a wife for her son. > Her husband had died, (...) yet the hearth had not gone out after the master's departure. There remained another task to accomplish (...): to engender a living current that would not scatter or dry up like a puddle in spring, but would continue to flow like a river within its banks. At twenty-six, her son was not yet a true man. (...) He had to be married at all costs.  Aleska's heart, however, is weighed down by his love for Aniko. If as a child he felt > like a defenseless fledgling with wings not yet formed , now he is > a spiteful, wounded vulture. He felt like a bird of prey that, spreading the talons of self-regard, leans against the deaf wall of life without anyone being able to understand his sorrow. At night he dreams of Ilne (as Aniko is called in the book), of her seductive smile, and he possesses her. (...) When he realizes that it is merely a dream and not reality, he is consumed by longing. Longing is like a black, hairy spider. The touch of its legs poisons the soul. The novel recounts Aleska's liberation from awaiting Aniko's return, and it does so within a society—that of the Nenets—now in dissolution, yet still anchored to old values, to the stubborn determination to preserve its own culture. At the center of this world lies the hearth, the fire kept perpetually alight—the woman's duty and prestige; hers is the task of bearing and raising children, hers the burden of preserving and passing on Nenets culture. Hence arises the enormity, for the old mother and the entire community, of a man who refuses to marry, obstinately bound to a "distant" love. The two narrative planes, the individual and the collective, overlap, alternating oneiric moments with choral tales. In the dream, > Ilne stared at him and smiled. She was no longer the same Ilne who had invited him to follow her. A sly, knowing smile, which he had never seen on her face and which for some reason unsettled him, never left her lips. (...) He realized that he wanted to wipe that smile from her face; (...) hers was an invitation to a game of love that was nothing but an illusion. If Aniko turns into a painful remembrance before fading from Aleska's heart, with the surrender of her sledges old Petko declares before the community that Aniko will never return; there is no need to keep the dowry, > ten abandoned sledges (...), like orphans, guilty before men and life. (...) The chum was silent, as though immersed in sleep. Yet the young man knew that, motionless, the two women (the mother and the young bride) awaited him, kneeling before the fire. (...) Parting the tent behind his shoulders with a wide gesture, he entered. Thus enters a boy who has become a man. There is a hidden protagonist, and it is Aniko. She appears suddenly, unexpected, with a sort of declaration of love in which Nerkagi seems no longer able to restrain her own "I," in a novel where the narrator is "omniscient." > I love old trees, says Aniko, (...) I love them for all the summers gone by, for the mystery of life they conceal, for the murmur of the leaves that might be mistaken for a song or a lament, a confession or a tale. Ancient trees resemble the old. And it would be wonderful to be certain that they, indeed, are still the keepers of that Golden word of truth, forgotten by mankind heaven knows when. Moreover, in this deceptively simple narrative—much as Dante stands behind the figures of the *Commedia*—there are certain characters behind whom Nerkagi conceals herself. To be sure, one of these is Aleska's mother, the emblem of a stubborn attachment to tradition; yet there is another figure, so delicate as to seem superfluous to the plot. It is the young bride rejected by Aleska, reverent toward the mystery of her husband's soul. Through a splendid simile, Nerkagi thus sings the sorrowful and resigned plight of an unreceived bride: > the girl's world was like that of a tiny flower blossomed by the will of fate at the bottom of a ravine, where the rays of the sun penetrate only in the early morning and the hostile stones exude cold. Covered in a slimy moss, they emit a foul stench and envy the beauty and sweetness of the flower's petals, blind to the light that its corolla radiates into the darkness. I have remained silent for too many years, the author confesses, and now it is time for the moss to turn white. The style is a gentle flow of words, at times elegiac, at others lyrical, rich in similes drawn from the natural world, from trees and animals; a seemingly motionless nature that contrasts with the shifts in the Nenets world and the enigmas of the human soul. Such is the sweetness of the prose that a kind of metamorphosis takes place within the reader, allowing one to measure oneself against the mystery without deciphering it. Why read it? Outside of time and space, it is a hymn to our human condition.