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

by Sylvain Tesson

  I traverse chaotic jumbles of ice. Snow has spread white cream over the blue slices; I’m walking on a cake for a boreal god. At times the sun illuminates the tips of icicles, lighting up stars in broad daylight. On the dark, glassy sections, the fault lines run through the obsidian masses in a recurrent pattern, a kind of arboreal schema in right angles, branching out in the manner of genealogical trees, or the roots of certain plants. Might that correspond to a mathematical structure, a writing determined by the laws of the universe? Water has a memory; perhaps ice possesses a form of intelligence (a cold one, of course)?

  After six hours of walking, I round a cape and see the hamlet of Zavorotni, a few wooden houses nestled in a bay. Only one is occupied year-round, by a ranger named Volodya E. This place is an enclave about six miles by twelve within the reserve, a free zone where Russians can indulge in their favourite activity: doing whatever they want. The village served as a rear base for the teams of men who worked a microquartz mine in the local mountain at an elevation of 3,300 feet. Microquartz was used in the manufacture of diamond styluses for stereos and the needles in some oscillators. I owe my knowledge of these fascinating things to V.E., who welcomes me into his izba.

  His kitchen is basically a pigsty. Grease coats the walls. The floor is dangerous: a person might slip on some fish guts and tip over one of the pots full of simmering seal grease intended for the dogs who run riot here. V.E. was for a long time the head of the weather station at Solnechnaya, twenty-five miles to the south. He’s a former alcoholic who stopped drinking after a heart attack; he is doing better these days, but his teeth are gone.

  He shows me a chunk of lava, a present from some geologists.

  ‘These are the oldest minerals in the world,’ he tells me.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Four billion years. I put it under my pillow to inspire my dreams.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’ He adds: ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want some fish?’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  The sight of V.E. busy whacking a frozen fish with a hammer while standing at a kitchen table that hasn’t been cleaned since the end of the Soviet Union delights me. Russians never put on airs and the fish is delicious.

  ‘Anything happen in the world over the last three weeks?’ I wonder.

  ‘No, it’s quiet, the Muslims are hibernating.’

  7 MARCH

  A day on the lake, fascinated by the designs in the icy mantle. Into that frozen body the cracks and fissures weave electric layers whose current spreads with hectic abandon: the lines retract, join up, veer away. The ice has absorbed the energy of the shocks by distributing it along sheaves of ‘wiring’. Staggering blows rend the silence and are borne along as the echo of an explosion dozens of miles away. The noise vents itself through these networks of veining. As the sun’s rays are refracted in the cross-connections, the skein begins to glow. Light irradiates the veins of turquoise, infusing them with trails of gold. The ice convulses. It is alive and I love it. The pearly coils trace knots resembling neuronal tissues or photos of stardust clouds. The map of this meshing would be psychedelic. Without drugs or wine, my brain perceives hallucinatory sequences as the world offers glimpses of an unknown writing. The patterns stream by as if born in an opium dream, for nature refuses us even the consolation of projecting our own brand-new images on this psychedelic screen.

  This oeuvre will vanish in May, engulfed by the thaw. The ice of Baikal is a mandala that will lose its patient design to warmth and the wind.

  Twelve and a half miles south of Zavorotni, I spend the night in the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi. It’s a dilapidated shelter used when needed by the foresters of the reserve. Three years ago I spent two days here with Maxim, an ex-convict to whom the authorities had given a second chance. They’d made him an inspector. He had the face of a brute and a gentle, sweet smile. He was moping terribly in his cabin, and his life was no picnic. A bear had been prowling the clearing for days, trapping him inside the cabin. ‘I’ve been reduced to peeing in my teapot,’ he’d complained. His superiors hadn’t wanted to risk issuing a rifle to a former drug addict fresh from the jails of Irkutsk. In the evening, the bear had come and stared at us from the door. ‘Fucking hell, I was safer in prison,’ Maxim had fumed.

  Since then, the bear has been murdered, Maxim has relapsed, is serving out a new sentence, and the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi is empty once more.

  I play chess with myself. The last streak of daylight shoots through the window, ricocheting off a knife blade. In spite of a mad, heroic charge, White loses. On the wooden beams, photos: nude girls with smooth white skin and hefty breasts pose in positions a bit too overdone to inspire any conversation. Already it’s impossible to see a thing; nightfall has won out.

  8 MARCH

  On the ice. I reach the weather station at Solnechnaya during the afternoon. Back in the time of the defunct USSR, a trim little village stood on a deforested shoulder of the mountain. Today the remains of the hamlet harbour two people: Anatoli, an inspector, and Lena, his ex-wife. They recently separated and live in two neighbouring izbas, like a set of porcelain dogs at the end of the world. A chaotic mess of jagged ice makes it hard to reach the station, and, when I knock on Anatoli’s door, there is no answer. I push the door open. Sunlight floods into the room. There are empty tin cans on the floor, empty bottles beneath the table and a body on the couch. I had forgotten it was 8 March, Women’s Day in Russia. Anatoli has been celebrating. Lena will later tell me that he banged on her door all night shouting: ‘You’re gonna open up!’ A gentleman should always observe Women’s Day.

  I wake him up. He smells of formaldehyde, ether and cabbage. He stands up and falls down.

  ‘It’s my rheumatism,’ he says, to save face. ‘Very painful.’

  ‘Yes, the damp weather,’ I agree.

  Anatoli spends the afternoon drifting along the steep flank of the mountain. These weather stations are launching pads to psychiatric wards. Ever since Stalin’s time, they stud the territory from Belarus to Kamchatka. Spreading such posts around was a way to both occupy the emptiness and maintain a supply of citizens who would warn Moscow if a fascist turned up … or if anyone else felt an itch to protest against something. In izbas all kitted out with the same recording equipment, meteorologists live in couples or groups of four or five. Every three hours, they go outside to record the data they will radio to their base. Their time is not their own, and the inflexible routine fosters mental confusion. This no-exit situation becomes a circus of disorders: the sufferers drink, tear into one another, develop mental pathologies. Once in a while, a disappearance interrupts their routine. On an island station in the Laptev Sea north of Siberia, a meteorologist’s felt boots were found. Conclusion: wool gives polar bears indigestion. A few decades ago, here in Solnechnaya, a station master hated by his men vanished into thin air one winter’s night out in the forest. The administration hushed the matter up.

  I leave Anatoli when Lena invites me to tea at her place. She has the handsome face of a Flemish fishwife, with blue, almond-shaped eyes and a pert nose. We have three hours before I must set out again. The tea steams and Lena holds forth. She arrived at the station when she was sixteen and wouldn’t leave here for anything.

  ‘I don’t like asphalt. In the city the tar makes my feet hurt and money evaporates.’

  ‘And the job?’

  ‘I like it. Except for the wild animals. The recording equipment is fifty yards from the house and at night, that’s a really long way, so I run. But I’m not complaining.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because there are stati
ons where the equipment is more than half a mile away!’

  ‘No animal attacks?’

  ‘Yes, wolves.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The second time I saw the wolf, here, was 6 June. I go out to the field at eight o’clock and see the cows running home past me. I thought the ox had frightened them. While I’m coming back, off in the distance I think I see our dog Zarek. I turn around – Zarek is right there. So it’s a real wolf, up ahead of me! The cows had already gone around behind me again, so I run at the wolf with a big stone. The wolf comes closer, I see its grin. I’m throwing stones at it. So the cows, maybe they felt ashamed, they do another U-turn and come back to me!’

  ‘The cows came back!’

  ‘And the ox as well. So then the wolf begins to retreat, still grinning, as if it were urging me to follow it. And I do, throwing more stones: I pluck up my courage, and I have a whole herd behind me!’

  ‘Good for the cows.’

  ‘Yes, but another year, we had losses.’

  ‘More wolves?’

  ‘No, the bears.’

  ‘Bears?’

  ‘I hear the dogs howling. Like you wouldn’t believe. I run outside to see. Afterwards, some women said I was crazy to have gone out alone. If the bear had still been there it would have killed me. So I go out, I see the ox lying on the ground, dying. His legs were broken, gashes on the muzzle, and a big chunk of flesh torn from around the spine. The bear had broken his legs so he couldn’t run away.’

  ‘The poor ox!’

  ‘I turned straight around and ran home. I called Palitch, a friend who’d happened by. We had to do something. Palitch finished off the ox with a knife. Me, I didn’t eat any of that meat. The next day, we found the cow …’

  ‘The cow?’

  ‘The bear had already stashed her before I arrived. A few hundred yards from where it attacked the ox. It had made a tomb for her … Her belly was slashed open. She’d been pregnant. You could see the calf spilling out, and the cow’s muzzle was torn off. Cows, well, I get attached, as if they were children. I had a nervous breakdown that year.’

  Lena stands up to send a message on the radio, saying: ‘If I miss three check-in times in a row, it means I’m dead.’

  I leave her, fortified in my love for Russia, a nation that sends rockets into space and where people fight off wolves with stones.

  After walking a good mile over sheets of lunar ice that resemble huge jellyfish veined with turquoise, I reach the station at Pokoyniki, where Sergei and Natasha live. Sergei has prepared a banya. We suffocate there for an hour. Then we empty a bottle of honey-flavoured vodka, not forgetting to toast the ladies, because 8 March, that’s the day men buy themselves a good conscience on the cheap.

  9 MARCH

  At noon, Sergei opens a three-litre bottle of beer. On the label, it says Siberian Size.

  For five years I dreamed about this life. Today, it feels like an ordinary accomplishment. Our dreams come true but only as soap bubbles fated to burst.

  10 MARCH

  I set off for Ujkani. The island lies nineteen miles east of Pokoyniki, out in the middle of the lake. From a distance, it looks like a felt hat sitting on the horizon. The wind is from the north-west. I push on like a maniac, eating up the miles on this lake of frosted glass. A fish swims beneath the ice. We are a world apart. To me, the fish seems imprisoned, cut off from the sky by an impenetrable lid; it’s heartbreaking. Sometimes I lie down on a snow bank to look at the hygienically blue sky through the oval frame of my furry hood. My little sledge holds me back, but when boosted by a gust of wind it shoots past me and I have to lean back to stop it. I reach the island in six hours.

  The lord and master around here is Yura. He lives with his wife in a weather station on a steep flank of the island: four large izbas, facing west. He has the despotic character of island hermits, the ‘King of Clipperton syndrome’,6 which becomes tinged with madness when vodka lights its fire in his eyes. He reigns unchallenged in his satrapy. In the outposts of Baikal the authority of Moscow holds hardly any sway. A tacit contract does link the government to its reclusive citizens: the former sends not a single rouble in subsidy payment, while the latter cheat, lie and scrounge all they can.

  11 MARCH

  I spend a whole day on Ujkani Island half asleep. The Siberian sun warms the façade of the izba and light pours into my room. Lying on my bed, I read a French translation of Jünger’s Journal Vol. 1, 1965–1970. The old magus would not have liked the brightness here; too raw, it kills the mystery of things. The faded eyes of seers are more at home in half-tones. I gather images from every page, flashes, visions. Jünger expresses through symbols the metaphysics of the physical world:

  p. 27: Common progress consists of the quantification of things and human beings, translated into numbers.

  p. 66: Human beings must be viewed as semaphores, bearers of signs.

  p. 119: Here dwell gods whose names I need not know, and who lose themselves, like trees in the forest, in the Divine-in-itself.

  p. 164: A single day in Ceylon … Perhaps it would be better, instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged from temple to temple, to pay our respects to a few ancient trees.

  p. 199: Demythologizing aims to render people and their conduct submissive to the laws of the world of machines.

  p. 266: The less we cling to differences, the more intuition comes to our aid; we no longer hear the rustling of the tree but the whole forest’s answer to the wind.

  p. 353: Entrance fee. Even better, quite often, is the exit fee, the price we pay to have nothing whatsoever to do any more with society.

  p. 366: Increasing haste is a symptom of the transmutation of the world into numbers.

  p. 519: And one day, bees discovered flowers and moulded them to their caresses. Ever since, beauty has filled more space in the world.

  Where does it come from, my love for aphorisms, witticisms and a nicely turned phrase? And my preference for the particular over the collective, individuals over groups? From my name? Tesson: ‘shard’, a fragment of something that once was. Its shape conserves the memory of the bottle. A ‘Tesson’ would be a creature nostalgic for a lost unity, seeking to rejoin the All. Which is what I’m doing here, getting drunk in the woods.

  Yura is tending to his chores. He will never return to the city. On the island, he enjoys the two ingredients necessary for an unencumbered life: space and solitude. In the city, the human crowd can survive only if its excesses are curbed and its needs regulated by law. When men crowd together, administration is born. An equation as old as the first Neolithic hamlet and illustrated in every human collectivity. For the hermit, administrative rule begins with another person. Then it’s called marriage.

  Men of the forest are very sceptical about projects for ‘citizen cities’, self-governed, no prisons or police, where triumphant liberty shall suddenly reign among crowds now perfectly well behaved. These loners detect a grotesque paradox in such utopias: the city is an inscription in space of culture, order – and their natural child, coercion.

  Only withdrawal to a boundless and barely populated wilderness validates a pacifist anarchy founded on this simple principle: in contrast to urban life, danger in the woods arises from nature, not man. The idea of majority rule that governs human relations may therefore fail to reach such distant regions. Let’s daydream a little. We might imagine for our Western societies small groups of people, like those in Pokoyniki or Zavorotni, who are eager to peel off from the parade of progress. Tired of overpopulated cities where governance implies the promulgation of ever more abundant rules, hating the administrative hydra, outraged by the intrusion o
f new technologies into every aspect of daily life, anticipating the spread of social and ethnic chaos fostered by the growth of mega-regions, these groups decide to abandon urban zones and return to the woods. They would re-create villages in forest glades among towering trees. They would invent a new life. This impetus would be related to the hippie movement, but draw strength from different motives. The hippies fled an order that oppressed them. The neo-foresters will flee a disorder that demoralizes them. As for the woods, they are ready to welcome pilgrims, being used to the eternal return.

  To attain a sense of inner freedom, one must have solitude and space galore. Add to these the mastery of time, complete silence, a harsh life and surroundings of geographic grandeur. Then do the maths, and find a hut.

  12 MARCH

  I leave the island behind. I sleepwalk the nineteen miles back to Pokoyniki in seven hours. I spend the afternoon on a bench near Sergei’s cabin, motionless and muffled up like a little old man. A little old man who just tossed off nineteen miles in twenty-four-below-zero weather.

  Sergei joins me and we talk about the people – English, Swiss, German – who visit the lake in the summer.

  ‘I love the Germans,’ says Sergei.

  ‘Ah, yes: the philosophy, and their music …’

  ‘No, the cars.’

  In the evening, by my bed, I light a candle for the icon of Seraphim of Sarov that I carry with me everywhere. And I write on a piece of paper, which I place before the image, this passage written by Jünger and dated December 1968: