The engines are running. The transistor radios blare out some Nadiya, a Lolita for pre-teen global villagers over whom the provincial nouveaux riches in Russia fawn like groupies. I’m devastated.
Shut tight inside my cabin, I try to soothe my nerves with half a pint of Kedrovaya vodka. I can hear those men whooping out on the ice, where they’ve cut a hole, set up a spotlight, and are taking turns plunging screaming into the frigid water. Which barely ranks as a first-class hazing in a barracks in Chechnya.
What I came here to escape has descended on my island: noise, ugliness, testosterone-fuelled herd behaviour. And I, poor fool, with my speeches about retrenchment and my copy of Rousseau’s Reveries on the table! I think about those Benedictine monks obliged to shepherd tourists around: religious recluses who thought to safeguard their faith in cloisters and who find themselves explaining the rules of their order to indifferent crowds.
In the fourth century, the Desert Fathers3 became crazed with solitude. Unable to bear even the slightest intrusion, they went deep into the sandy wastes, burying themselves in grottoes. The world they loved was cleansed of their fellow men. These days, sometimes a man just starts shooting at a bunch of kids hanging out in the estates. He gets a short paragraph in the newspapers and lands in a prison cell.
To cool my blood down, I go out on the lake while the Russians are skijoring, being pulled along on skis by their cars. I walk about a mile in the direction of Buryatia and stretch out on the ice. I’m lying on a liquid fossil 25 million years old. The stars overhead are a hundred times that. Me, I am thirty-seven and I’m calling it a day because it’s −30º F.
20 FEBRUARY
The men leave, the animals return.
What makes me happier this morning? The departure of that sad bunch of revellers at eight a.m. or the visit of a Siberian tit at my window a few minutes later?
I get out of bed so hung-over I’m almost upside-down. Yesterday I drank to forget. I feed the tit, light the stove. The cabin warms up quickly. I install the solar panels on the sawhorses I built yesterday. These panels will have it easy, lying there all day surrounded by beauty, gorging on photons.
Many reflections are born of the steam from my tea.
Sitting with my cup, I wonder about my little sister. Has she had her child yet? I can’t receive the slightest news: the computer imploded yesterday, done in by the extreme temperatures, and as for my satellite phone, it doesn’t pick up anything. Before I left Paris, I wasted precious hours gathering my technological equipment. I should have heeded the philosophy of Dersu Uzala, the Siberian hunter in Kurosawa’s eponymous film: the only things you can trust in the forest are an axe, a stove and a dagger. Without my computer, I have only thought. Well, memory is an electric impulse like any other.
21 FEBRUARY
It’s −26º F. Crystalline sky. In cold winters in Norway, water freezes into huge castles around waterfalls, and like the ceiling of the ice palace in the novel by Tarjei Vesaas, the Siberian winter is sterile and pure.
Yesterday’s idiots have trashed everything. They’ve trampled the drifts and left their mark all over. I won’t have peace until a snowstorm reupholsters the lakeshore.
About fifty yards south of my cabin is a banya, the Slavic version of a sauna. This one is sixteen by sixteen feet and heated by a stove. Volodya built it last year. It takes four hours to reach 175º F. The banya illustrates the Russian’s contempt for temperance. The body swings without transition from fire to ice. After cooking for twenty minutes, I go outside where it’s now −22º and all that heat evaporates, so with my skull in a vice of ice, I have to go back inside. The banya, allegory of our lives spent in the perpetual pursuit of improvement. We push through the door, thinking to reach happiness, but quickly head back where we came from, which soon oppresses us afresh.
In Russia people take refuge in the banya once or twice a week to rid themselves of toxins. The heat squeezes the body like a lemon. All rancour dissolves. Bad fat, dirt and alcohol seep out.
A storm blows in at six in the evening. Naked in my felt boots, I trudge back to the cabin, kerosene lantern in hand. I still remember the story of those zeks in the gulag who went out to piss one night in a blizzard. They got lost, couldn’t find their way back to the shelter, and were found dead in the morning fifty yards from the barracks. I drink down a quart of piping hot tea. The banya: absolute luxury. I’m a new man. Give me a shovel and a red silk scarf and I’d build socialism.
In the evening, a bowl of rice au Tabasco, half a sausage, a pint of vodka, and for dessert the moon up over the mountains, trundling its tristesse. I go outside to salute the big maternal ball that watches over the sleep of hermits, then go to bed full of pity for animals that have no cabin or banya. Or burrow.
22 FEBRUARY
Life in the forest: escapism? That’s how people mired in routine disparage the vital, creative force of life. A game? Absolutely! What else would you call willingly staying alone on a lakeshore by a forest with a crate of books and some snowshoes? A quest? Too big a word. An experiment? In the scientific sense, yes. The cabin is a laboratory, where you precipitate your longings for freedom, silence and solitude. An experimental field where you invent a slowed-down life for yourself.
The theorists of ecology extol de-growth. Since we cannot continue to aim for endless growth in a world of increasingly scarce resources, we ought to decelerate our rhythms, simplify our existence, reconsider our requirements on the downswing. We can accept these changes of our own accord. Tomorrow, economic crises will force them upon us.
De-growth will never be a political option. Only an enlightened despot could impose such a remedy, and what leader would be brave enough to try? How would he convince his people of the virtue of asceticism? And persuade billions of Chinese, Indians and Europeans that it’s better to read Seneca than to gobble cheeseburgers? The waning utopia: a poetic recourse for those seeking better living through dietetics.
The cabin is a perfect terrain in which to build a life founded on luxurious sobriety. The sobriety of the hermit is not to encumber yourself with either objects or your fellow man. And to break the habits of your former needs.
The luxury of the hermit is beauty. Wherever you look, there is absolute glory. The parade of hours is uninterrupted (aside from yesterday’s contretemps). Technology does not imprison you within its circle of fire through the needs it creates.
Retreating to the forest cannot be everyone’s course. Eremitism is elitism. Aldo Leopold says as much in his A Sand County Almanac, which I began rereading this morning right after lighting the stove: ‘All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.’ When crowds enter the forests, it’s to chop them down. Life in the woods is no solution to ecological problems. The phenomenon contains its own counter-principle: the masses, taking to the woods, would bring along the evils they’d hoped to flee by leaving the city. No exit.
A blank day. A fisherman’s truck in the distance. Long conversation with my window. In late morning I toss a half-dozen bottles of Kedrovaya into a snowbank. I’ll find them again in three months, at the spring thaw. Their necks will peek out of the snow, announcing better weather more surely than snowdrops. Winter’s present to the eternal return of spring.
An afternoon of repairs and tidying up. I finish sorting through the crate of provisions and waterproof the cabin’s porch roof by nailing up some planks. But afterwards? When there are no more planks to nail up or things to put away?
The sun disappears at five behind the mountaintops. Shadows take over the clearing and the cabin grows dark. I find an imm
ediately effective remedy for anguish: a short stroll on the ice. A simple glance at the horizon convinces me of the strength of my choice: this cabin, this life. I don’t know if beauty will save the world. It saves my evening.
23 FEBRUARY
Journey into the Whirlwind is the English title of Eugenia Ginzburg’s story of her years in the gulag, but in French it’s called Le Vertige, vertigo. I read a few pages in the warmth of my sleeping bag. When I awaken, my days line up, eager virgins, offered in blank pages. And I have dozens of them in reserve. Each second of them belongs to me. I’m free to dispose of them as I will, to make them into chapters of light, of slumber or of melancholy. No one can change the course of such an existence. These days are creatures of clay to be modelled. I am the master of an abstract menagerie.
I was familiar with the vertical vertigo of the climber clinging to the cliff in terror at the sight of the abyss. I remembered the horizontal vertigo of the traveller on the steppe, staggered by vanishing perspectives. I’d experienced the vertigo of the drunkard who thinks he’s come up with a brilliant idea that his brain just won’t process even though he can sense it growing within him. And I discover the vertigo of the hermit, the fear of the temporal void. The same pang of distress as on the cliff – only not for what lies below, but for what lies ahead.
I am free to do anything in a world where there is nothing to do. I look at the icon of Seraphim. He had God.
God, never sated with the prayers of men, is a helluva pastime. Me? I have writing.
A walk on the lake, after my morning tea. The constant severe cold has the thermometer in its grip, so the ice has stopped cracking. I head out onto the lake. In the snow, with a stick, I trace the first poem in a series of ‘snow haiku’:
Footsteps dot the snow
Walking sets short black stitches
Into the white cloth
The advantage of poetry inscribed in the snow is that it will not last: verses carried off by the wind.
A mile and a half from the lake’s edge, a fault has split the ice. Translucent blocks straddle the fracture, a stripe that darts off parallel to the shoreline. Gurgling wells up from the opening: Baikal is suffering. I walk along the wound, at a distance, for the slightest misstep would slip me underwater.
Suddenly I can picture those dear to me: through the mysterious mechanics of memory, faces spring to mind. Solitude is a country inhabited by the remembrance of others; thinking of them is a comfort in their absence. My dear ones are there, enfolded in memories. I see them. Orthodox Christians believe that Being becomes present in the image. God’s essence flows down into the substance of icons, incarnate in glowing oil paint. The picture is transmuted.
Back in the cabin, I decide it’s time to set up my altar. With my handsaw I cut a board a foot long and four inches wide, which I nail up next to my work table and christen with three images of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, purchased in Irkutsk. Fifteen years alone in a forest in Western Russia taught Seraphim how to feed bears and speak the language of stags. Next to him I place three icons: Saint Nicholas, a black Virgin and Tsar Nicholas II, canonized by the Patriarch Alexis and portrayed in his imperial finery. I light a candle and a Partagás No. 4. Through the smoke from my Havana, I watch the candlelight gleam like honey on the picture frames. The cigar: profane incense.
I have finished the chores of settling into my cabin. I’ve stashed away everything from my last crate. I smoke lying on my back and musing on the fact that I forgot to bring just one thing: a handsome history of painting to help me contemplate, from time to time, a human face.
To remind me of which, I have only my mirror.
24 FEBRUARY
This morning, a clean-slate day. The lake – ‘the sacred sea’, as the Russians call it – is drowning in sky. The thermometer reads −8º F. I light the woodstove and open Casanova’s Story of My Life. Rome, Naples, Florence parade by, along with Tiretta in his alcove and Henriette in her attic. Then come mad dashes in mail coaches, escape from the ducal prisons of Venice, letters in ink blotched by tears, promises broken as soon as they’re made, eternal love sworn twice in the same evening to two different people, and grace, frivolity, style. I learn by heart the phrase in which Giacomo describes a sensual pleasure that ‘ceased only when it could not possibly increase’. I close the book, pull on my felt boots, and go out to draw two buckets of water from my hole in the ice while thinking about Bellino-Teresa of Rome and Leonilda of Salerno.4
The books of a dandy and the life of a muzhik.
The day stretches out before me. In Paris I never dwelled much on my state of mind. Life wasn’t conducive to tracking the seismographic data of the soul. Here, in the whited-out silence, I have time to perceive the nuances of my own tectonics. The hermit faces this question: can one stand living with oneself?
The captivating spectacle of what’s happening outside the window. How can anyone still have a TV at home?
The tit is back. I look it up in my bird book. According to the Swedish ornithologist Lars Svensson, born in 1941, whose oeuvre includes many works like the famous guide to the passerines of Europe, the Willow Tit may be recognized by its cry of ‘zee-zee teh teh teh’. Mine’s not letting out a peep. One of its relatives, I read on the next page, goes by the name of the Sombre Tit.
The little creature’s visit enchants me. Lights up my afternoon. Within only a few days, I have managed to be content with such a spectacle. Amazing how quickly one can shuck off the Barnum & Bailey business of city life. When I think how I had to fling myself into action with meetings, must-reads and visits just to get through a Parisian day! And here I am silly-faced over a bird! Maybe life in a log cabin is a regression. But what if I’m making progress through this regression?
25 FEBRUARY
I set out at noon into the wind. I’m going to visit my neighbour Volodya, a gamekeeper stationed out on Cape Elohin, just over nine miles north of my cabin. He lives in an izba with his wife, Irina. Their domain marks the northern frontier of the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve. I met him five years ago while touring the icy landscapes of the lake on a Ural sidecar motorcycle. I’d loved that flat skull of his, bristling with hair. I’ll enjoy seeing him again. I remember his grip: the mitts of a metallurgist, two paddles that crush your hand.
Beyond the cape that protects my cabin, the blustering wind veers northward. The cedars thrash their treetops in the blast, signalling like castaways. Who comes to the rescue of trees?
I hadn’t anticipated that the wind would rise. I cut across the lake, towards Elohin, keeping between a half-mile and a mile from the shore. I’m muffled in my Canadian Goose parka (designed for −40º F), a Neoprene face mask, a mountaineering mask and mittens for an Arctic expedition. It took me twenty minutes to get suited up. It’s vital not to leave even the slightest bit of skin exposed.
Today Baikal has come down with sclerosis. The snow is peeling off, bitten away by the wind, leaving the obsidian ice spotted here and there with patches as white as the skin of an orca, while the lake blackens as it’s stripped bare.
My crampons dig into the lacquer. Without them, the gusts would blow me ‘out to sea’. Their powerful sweep courses down mountains, dusting off the taiga. Volodya will tell me later that they can reach seventy-five miles an hour. The wind forces me to walk hunched over. Sometimes a gust simply stops me dead.
I stare out at the section of ice framed in the opening of my hood ruff of coyote fur. Gossamer strands of snow meander across the mirror with the grace of gorgons. Along refrozen faults, the seams are turquoise, the colour of lagoons. Then the tropical interlude gives way to a long pool of smoked glass. The sun diffuses streaks of albumin through the fissures. A
ir bubbles are trapped in the stratum, and one hesitates to step on these pearly jellyfish. Aquatic visions ripple through my face mask, lingering on my retinas when I close my eyes.
At the third hour, I risk looking into the wind, towards the mountains to the west. Trees stand guard until the mountain shrugs them off at about 3,000 feet; canyons wind their way through the drapery of slopes. In four months, they’ll channel meltwater down into the bowl. Whenever I come abreast of them the wind redoubles in strength, from the funnel effect. To think that writers dare depict the beauty of such places …
I’ve read practically all of Jack London, Grey Owl, Aldo Leopold, Fenimore Cooper, a host of works by American nature writers, and I’ve never in reading a single one of those pages felt one-tenth of the emotion that fills me before these shores. And yet, I’ll keep on reading, and writing.
Two or three times an hour, a sharp crack breaks up my thoughts. The lake is shattering along a fault line. Like surf, birdsong or the roar of waterfalls, the crumpling of an ice mass won’t keep us awake. A motor running, or someone snoring or water dripping off a roof, on the other hand, is unbearable.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 3