Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

by Sylvain Tesson

  Sylvain Tesson

  CONSOLATIONS OF THE FOREST

  Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

  Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

  Contents

  A Sidestep

  FEBRUARY: The Forest

  MARCH: Time

  APRIL: The Lake

  MAY: The Animals

  JUNE: Tears

  JULY: Peace

  Translator’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  To Arnaud Humann

  For I belong to the forests and solitude.

  KNUT HAMSUN

  Pan

  Freedom is always available. One need only pay the price for it.

  HENRY DE MONTHERLANT

  Cahiers, 1957

  A Sidestep

  I’d promised myself that before I turned forty I would live as a hermit deep in the woods.

  I went to spend six months in a Siberian cabin on the shores of Lake Baikal, on the tip of North Cedar Cape. Seventy-five miles from the nearest village, no neighbours, no access roads and every now and then, a visit. Wintertime temperatures in the minus twenties Fahrenheit; the summer brought bears out into the open. In short: paradise.

  I took along books, cigars and vodka. The rest – space silence and solitude – was already there.

  In that desert, I created a beautiful and temperate life for myself, experiencing an existence centred on simple gestures. Between the lake and the forest, I watched the days go by. I cut wood, fished for my dinner, read a lot, hiked in the mountains, and drank vodka, at my window. The cabin was an ideal observation post from which to witness nature’s every move.

  I knew winter and spring, happiness, despair, and in the end, peace.

  In the depths of the taiga, I changed myself completely. Staying put brought me what I could no longer find on any journey. The genius loci helped me to tame time. My hermitage became the laboratory of these transformations.

  Every day I recorded my thoughts in a notebook.

  This is the journal of a hermit’s life.

  S. T.

  FEBRUARY

  The Forest

  The Heinz company sells around fifteen kinds of tomato sauce. The supermarket in Irkutsk stocks them all and I don’t know which to choose. I’ve already filled six carts with dried pasta and Tabasco. The blue truck is waiting for me; it’s −26º F outside and Misha, the driver, keeps the engine running. Tomorrow we leave Irkutsk and in three days will reach the cabin, on the western shore of the lake. I must finish my shopping today. I decide on Heinz Super Hot Tapas. I buy eighteen bottles: three per month.

  Fifteen kinds of ketchup. That’s the sort of thing that made me want to withdraw from this world.

  9 FEBRUARY

  I’m stretched out on my bed in Nina’s house on Proletariat Street. I like Russian street names. In the villages you’ll find a Labour Street, an October Revolution Street, a Partisans Street, and sometimes an Enthusiasm Street, along which trudge grey-haired Slav grannies.

  Nina is the best landlady in Irkutsk. A former pianist, she used to play in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. Now she runs a guest house. Yesterday she told me: ‘Who’d ever have thought I’d wind up cranking out pancakes?’ Nina’s cat is purring on my stomach. If I were a cat, I know whose tummy I’d snuggle on.

  I’m poised on the threshold of a seven-year-old dream. In 2003 I stayed for the first time at Lake Baikal. Walking along the shore, I discovered cabins at regular intervals, inhabited by strangely happy recluses. The idea of going to ground alone in the forest, surrounded by silence, began to intrigue me. Seven years later, here I am.

  I must find the strength to push the cat off. Getting up from a bed requires amazing energy. Especially when it’s to change a life. This longing to retreat just at the point of achieving your heart’s desire … Certain men do an about-face at the crucial moment. I’m afraid I might be one of them.

  Misha’s truck is packed to the point of bursting. It’s a five-hour drive to the lake across frozen steppes, navigating over petrified wave crests and troughs. Villages smoke at the foot of hills, wreathed in mists trapped in the shallows. Faced with visions like these, the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich wrote: ‘Whoever has crossed Siberia can never again aspire to happiness.’ At the top of a ridge, there it is: the lake. We stop to have a drink. After four brimming glasses of vodka, we wonder: how in the world does the shoreline manage to follow the water so perfectly?

  Let’s get the statistics out of the way. Baikal: 435 miles long, 50 miles wide, almost a mile deep. Twenty-five million years old. The winter ice is over three and a half feet thick. Beaming its love down upon the white surface, the sun doesn’t give a damn about such things. Filtered by clouds, patches of sunshine slide in a gleaming herd across the snow, brightening its cadaverous cheeks.

  The truck ventures out onto the ice. Beneath the wheels, it’s two-thirds of a mile down. If the truck plunges through a fissure, it will topple into a black abyss. The bodies will sink in silence. Slow snowfall of the drowned. The lake is a godsend for anyone who dreads decay. James Dean wanted to die and leave ‘a beautiful corpse’. The tiny copepods called Epischura baikalensis1 will clean the bodies within twenty-four hours, leaving only ivory bones on the lake bed.

  10 FEBRUARY

  We spent the night in the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island, pronounced ‘Olkrhone’, Nordic style, and we’re heading north. Misha isn’t a talker. I admire people who keep quiet; I imagine their thoughts.

  I’m on my way to the place of my dreams. Outside, the atmosphere is bleak. The cold has let its hair down in the wind; wisps of snow skitter away from our wheels. The storm wedges itself into the cleft between sky and ice. I study the shore, trying not to think about living for six months in the requiem mass of those forests. All the ingredients of the imagery of Siberian deportation are there: the vastness, the livid cast of the light. The ice rather resembles a shroud. Innocent people were dumped for twenty-five years into this nightmare, whereas I will be living here by choice. Why should I complain?

  Misha: ‘It’s dreary.’

  And nothing more until the next day.

  Constructed in the 1980s as a geologist’s hut, my cabin is off in a clearing of the cedar forest in the northern sector of the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve. My new neighbourhood is named after these trees: North Cedar Cape. It sounds like an old people’s home. And after all, I am going on a retreat.

  Driving on a lake is a transgression. Only gods and spiders walk on water. Three times in my life I’ve felt I was breaking a taboo. The first was when I contemplated the dry bed of the once mighty Aral Sea, emptied by man. The second was when I read a woman’s private diary. The third was driving over the waters of Baikal. Each time, the feeling of tearing aside a veil. The eye spying through the keyhole.

  I explain this to Misha. And get no reply.

  Tonight we stay at the weather station of Pokoyniki, in the heart of the reserve.

  Sergei and Natasha run the station. They’re as beautiful as Greek gods, but wearing more clothes. They’ve been living here for twenty years, tracking down poachers. My cabin is thirty-one miles to the north of their home, and I’m glad to have them as neighbours. I’ll find
pleasure in thinking about them. Their love: an island in the Siberian winter.

  We spend the evening with two of their friends, Sasha and Yura, Siberian fishermen who embody two Dostoyevskian character types. Sasha is hypertensive, with a florid face, full of vitality. He has the eyes of a Mongol, and a deep, steely gaze. Yura is sombre, Rasputinian, an eater of bottom-feeding fish. He’s as pale as the denizens of Tolkien’s Mordor. Sasha is made for great feats, impulsive action, while Yura is a born conspirator. He hasn’t set foot in a city in fifteen years.

  11 FEBRUARY

  In the morning we take to the ice again. The forest streams past. When I was twelve my family went to see the Mémorial de Verdun, a museum dedicated to the Great War. I remember the Chemin des Dames hall, commemorating a trench where soldiers and their rifles had been engulfed by a flood of mud. The forest this morning is a buried army, of which nothing shows but its bayonets.

  The ice cracks. Sheets compressed by movement in the mantle explode; fault lines streak across the quicksilver plain, spewing crystalline chaos. Blue blood flows from wounded glass.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ says Misha.

  And nothing else until that evening.

  At seven p.m. my cape appears. North Cedar Cape. My cabin. The GPS coordinates are: N54º26´45.12˝/E 108º 32´40.32˝.

  The small dark forms of some people with dogs are advancing along the shore to welcome us. That’s how Breughel painted country folk. Winter transforms everything into a Dutch tableau, glossy and precise.

  Snow falls, and then night, and all this white turns a dreadful black.

  12 FEBRUARY

  Volodya T., a fifty-year-old forest ranger, has lived with his wife, Ludmila, in the cabin on North Cedar Cape for fifteen years. He has a gentle face and wears dark glasses. Some Russians look like brutes; Volodya would care tenderly for a bear cub. He and Ludmila want to move back to Irkutsk. Ludmila has phlebitis and needs medical attention. Like all Russian women steeped in tea, Ludmila has skin that is frog-belly white, and her veins look like vermicelli beneath its pearly lustre. Now that I have arrived, the ranger and his wife will leave.

  The cabin smokes in its grove of cedars. Snow has meringued the roof, and the beams are the colour of gingerbread. I’m hungry.

  With its back to the mountains, the cabin nestles at the bottom of slopes 6,500 feet high. Coniferous taiga rises towards the summits, giving up at about 3,300 feet. Beyond lies the realm of ice, stone and sky. From my windows I can see the shores of the lake, which lies at an elevation of almost 1,500 feet.

  Spaced about nineteen miles apart, the reserve’s stations are manned by rangers under Sergei’s command. To the north, on Cape Elohin, my neighbour’s name is Volodya. To the south, in the hamlet of Zavorotni, another one, Volodya E. Later on, melancholy, and in want of a drinking companion, I’ll need simply to trudge north for five hours or south for one day.

  Sergei, the head ranger, came with us from Pokoyniki. We clambered out of the truck and surveyed the splendour before us in silence. Then, touching his temple, Sergei announced: ‘This is a stupendous place to commit suicide.’ A friend of mine, Arnaud, has also come along in the truck from Irkutsk, where he has been living for the past fifteen years. He married the most beautiful woman in the city, who’d been dreaming of Cannes and the avenue Montaigne. When she realized that Arnaud thought only of running around the taiga, she left him.

  For the next few days, we’ll all get me set up in my cabin. Then my friends will go home, leaving me alone. Task at hand: unloading the truck.

  REQUISITE SUPPLIES FOR SIX MONTHS IN THE BOREAL FOREST

  Axe and cleaver

  Tarp

  Burlap bag

  Pickaxe

  Dip net

  Ice skates

  Snowshoes

  Kayak and paddle

  Fishing poles, line, weights

  Fly-fishing flies and spoons

  Kitchen utensils

  Teapot

  Ice drill

  Rope

  Dagger and Swiss knife

  Whetstone

  Kerosene lamp

  Kerosene

  Candles

  GPS, compass, map

  Solar panels, cables and rechargeable batteries

  Matches and lighters

  Mountain backpacks

  Duffel bags

  Felt carpet

  Sleeping bags

  Mountaineering equipment

  Mosquito net face mask

  Gloves

  Felt boots

  Ice axe

  Crampons

  Pharmaceuticals (10 boxes of acetaminophen for vodka hangovers)

  Saw

  Hammer, nails, screws, file

  French flag for Bastille Day

  Hand-launched anti-bear flares

  Flare gun

  Rain cape

  Outdoor grill

  Folding saw

  Tent

  Ground cloth

  Headlamp

  −40º F sleeping bag

  Royal Canadian Mounted Police jacket

  Plastic luge

  Boots with gaiters

  Liquor glasses and vodka

  90% alcohol to make up for any shortage of the above article

  Personal library

  Cigars, cigarillos, incense paper and a Tupperware container ‘humidor’

  Icons (Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Saint Nicholas, the imperial family of the last Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II, black Virgin)

  Wooden trunks

  Binoculars

  Electronic appliances

  Pens and notebooks

  Provisions (six-month supply of pasta, rice, Tabasco, hardtack, canned fruit, red and black pepper, salt, coffee, honey and tea)

  It’s funny: you decide to live in a cabin, and envision yourself smoking a cigar under the open sky, lost in meditation … and you wind up checking off items on supply lists like an army quartermaster. Life comes down to grocery shopping.

  I push open the door of the cabin. In Russia, Formica reigns supreme. Seventy years of historical materialism have obliterated the Russian sense of aesthetics. Where does bad taste come from? Why use linoleum at all? How did kitsch take over the world? The principal phenomenon of globalization has been a worldwide embrace of the ugly. If you need convincing, just walk around a Chinese village, check out the latest decor in French post offices, or consider what tourists wear. Bad taste is the common denominator of humanity.

  For two days, with Arnaud’s help, I tear off the linoleum, oilcloth, polyester tarp and adhesive plastic papers that cover the walls. We crowbar our way through cardboard panels. Stripped clean, the interior reveals logs pearled with resin and a pale yellow wood floor, like that of Van Gogh’s room in Arles. Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance.

  We have brought two yellow pine double-paned windows from Irkutsk to replace the cabin windows, which shed a dreary light. Sergei enlarges the embrasures by cutting the logs with a chainsaw, working hectically, non-stop, without calculating the angles, correcting the mistakes he makes in his haste as he goes along. Russians always build things with a sense of urgency, as if fascist soldiers were about to pour over the hill at any minute.

  In the villages sprinkled around this territory, Russians feel the fragility of their position. That little nursery-tale pig in his house of straw was about as vulnerable. Living within four
wooden walls amid frozen marshes calls for modest ambitions, and these hamlets are not made to last. They’re a clutch of shacks creaking in the north wind. The Romans built for the ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter.

  Given the violence of the storms, the cabin is a matchbox. A creature of the forest, destined to rot; the trunks of the clearing’s trees furnished the logs for its walls. The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.

  13 FEBRUARY

  Ten more hours spent ridding the clearing of rubbish, sprucing the place up to lure back the genius loci. Russians make a clean sweep of the past, but not of their refuse. Throw something away? I’d rather die, they say. Why toss out a tractor engine when the piston might make a good lamp base? The territory of the former Soviet Union is littered with the crud of Five-Year Plans: factories in ruins, machine tools, the carcasses of planes. Many Russians live in places that resemble building sites and car scrapyards. They do not see rubbish, ignoring the spectacle before them. When you live on a dump, you need to know how to edit things out.

  14 FEBRUARY

  The last crate contains books. If asked why I’ve come to shut myself up here, I’ll say I was behind in my reading. I nail a pine plank up over my bedstead to hold my books. I’ve got at least seventy. Back in Paris I took pains to put together an ideal list. When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner life, it’s important to bring along good books to fill that void in a pinch. The mistake would be to choose only difficult reading on the assumption that life in the woods would keep your spiritual temperature at fever pitch, but time drags when all you’ve got for snowy afternoons is Hegel.