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

by Sylvain Tesson

  In the sky, clouds were passing in front of the livid moon around which, at that moment, an American crew was orbiting. When I place a candle on a tomb, it has no effect, but its message is a rich one. It burns for the entire universe, confirming its meaning. If the astronauts circle the moon, the effect will be considerable, but the meaning of less account.

  Next, to reward myself for having sent a sign to the universe, I down two and a half litres of beer. This relaxes my legs no end.

  13 MARCH

  I had a clutter of weird dreams last night. Never happens in Paris. The standard explanation would hinge on the quality of my sleep, conducive to hallucinatory fantasizing. I tend towards the idea that the genius loci visits me secretly at night and, shining softly into the arcana of my psyche, shapes the substance of my dreams.

  At dawn, a car from Irkutsk brings good old Yura, the pale-eyed fisherman who visited me not so long ago. He lives in a small log cabin at the station of Pokoyniki. He lives by fishing and helps Sergei with the more demanding chores. He has just spent two days in Irkutsk renewing his papers, stolen during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  ‘For three presidents, I hadn’t left the woods: Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev!’

  ‘What struck you the most, in Irkutsk?’

  ‘The stores! They’ve got everything. And it’s so clean!’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The people: they’re speaking nicely to one another.’

  At noon, farewells to Yura, Sergei and Natasha. I’ll be home in three days. To the north of Pokoyniki Bay lies a frozen swamp; in winter one can take a certain revenge on terrain that in summer demands herculean efforts.

  I retrace my steps. An evening halt at the cabin of Bolshoi Solontsovi. The stove takes a long time to start drawing. The cabin heats up slowly and I stay by the fire. Cats have figured everything out. Must remember to check, when I get back to France, if a ‘psychoanalysis of the cabin’ has been published or not, because this evening, I feel as comfy as a foetus.

  In the beginning there was the organic womb where life put itself together. In the marshes, coal beds and peat bogs, bacteria macerated, and from the primordial soup would spring more complex life forms. Then the Earth delegated the task of maintaining warmth: uteruses, marsupial pouches, eggs provided their hot-house environment, while primitive habitats in turn acted as incubators. Men lived in caves, in the very womb of the Earth. Later, round igloos and yurts, wooden cabins and woollen tents were our homes. In the Siberian forest, the hermit expends a huge amount of energy on heating his shelter, the guarantee of bodily security and well-being. Only then is the solitary woodsman free to roam the forests and climb mountains despite the cold and other privations. He knows that his haven awaits him. The cabin fulfils the maternal function. The danger comes from constantly craving the comfort of this lair and vegetating there in a kind of semi-hibernation. This temptation threatens many Siberians, who can no longer manage to leave their cabins, where they regress to an embryonic state and replace the amniotic fluid with vodka.

  14 MARCH

  It’s nice out today: zero degrees. I knock off twelve and a half miles. Lava and ice are magical elements. Both have undergone the metamorphic influence of another element: cold air freezes water, fiery temperatures produce molten rock – and both will be transformed again when warm air melts the ice and cold water petrifies the lava. Walking on a frozen surface is not a trifling thing. Our footsteps land on something in the making. Ice is one of the alchemical wonders of our world.

  I’m a little more than six miles from Zavorotni, dragging my sledge northwards, when a snowmobile catches up with me and the driver cuts the engine. He and his passenger seem numb with cold. Mika and Natalia own one of the izbas at Zavorotni; they saw me from way off and headed for my silhouette advancing along the coast. Within seconds, Natalia spreads out a blanket on the black linoleum of the lake and sets out cognac, a fish pie and a thermos of coffee. We stretch out around this bounty. Russians have a genius for instantly producing the setting for a feast. How many times have I run into them, these muzhiks who hail me from the roadside? Gesturing, they invite me to sit down. In these situations, the new companions inevitably lean back onto their elbows, with legs crossed and furry shapkas pushed up on their foreheads. Sometimes a fire pops up, items leap out of bags, someone opens a bottle of vodka, there are bursts of laughter, glasses are filled. We share a loaf of bread, slice the rest of some elk liver. The conversation grows lively, addressing essentially three subjects: the current weather, the state of the track and terrain, the relative value of various modes of transport. Occasionally someone touches on the theme of the city and everyone agrees: you have to be nuts to live cheek by jowl like that. But out here, where there had been nothing, an oasis has sprung up within the borders of the blanket, and the secret of such transmutations is known only to peoples of nomadic blood. Perov7 has painted such a scene in his celebrated The Hunters at Rest. We see three shabby men lounging on the ground; in front of them lie the ducks and hare they have just bagged. One of the hunters is smoking, and they’re all laughing as they chat about life. The light is soft, the grass velvety. This painting fascinates me: it says nothing about hope. It’s a snapshot of immediate happiness. The sky could fall and the three friends wouldn’t give a damn: they’re sitting there, on the grass, lords of all they survey. Like the three of us on the ice.

  Natalia and Mika roar off again. We’ve taken the time to empty the small bottle of cognac in seven toasts. The sun is already setting as I struggle on towards Zavorotni. With my habits, I would have been better off living on the eastern shore of Baikal, where the sun rises later and the afternoons last longer.

  15 MARCH

  I have thirteen and a half miles to go across the lake to reach home. As I’m preparing to leave Zavorotni, a squad of 4×4s appears on the horizon, their emergency roof lights flashing. Taking advantage of the statute exempting Zavorotni from the reserve regulations, V.M., a businessman from Irkutsk, is constructing an izba in the enclave. He’ll use the place for country parties, and invite his friends or clients out next year to fish, drink and shoot at animals. This morning he has come with his entourage to inspect the work site. Sergei and Yura are with him. The General, as he is called here, distributes his largesse to the guardians of the reserve. In front of the slope where the foundations of the large izba are rising, there’s a mob scene out on the ice. Everyone is drunk. Crates are being unloaded. One of V.M.’s lieutenants shows me his Saiga MK 7.62, which he always keeps handy to be ready if the fascists or the Yellow Peril show up on the ice. This is why Russian newspapers are full of stories about outings like these that go wrong. In Afghanistan, the Americans provide a finale for village festivities by shelling guests who celebrate by shooting into the air; Russians just shoot themselves up on their own.

  A troop of drunken men, military weaponry, vodka, big vehicles and technology: a recipe for death. Yura watches the goings-on with weary resignation. A malignant energy is gathering in the bay; all Russia is here in miniature: the dangerous overlords, the faithful Tolstoyan servant, Sergei the woodsman. And the humble attendants, knowing what profit they will reap from hanging around the powerful, swallow their disgust. This country in which the bonds of vassalage still survive was the laboratory of communism. I long for one thing only: to get back to my desert.

  V.M. offers to drive me home in his Mercedes. I climb into the enormous car with Sergei and two other Russians, one of whom falls instantly asleep, while the other shouts into a walkie-talkie for three minutes before realizing that the thing is dead. The radio spits out a rap song. Sergei doesn’t say a word. Some patronage comes at a heavy cost.
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  We are now having a drink at my place. Pointing to the window, V.M. says: ‘I lived in the USA for a year; I don’t like the Americans’ mentality. This is what I want: liberty, anarchy, the lake.’ We have more drinks. In the end, these guys are touching. They’ve got the mugs of fellows who’d tear Chechens limb from limb, and they delicately share their crackers with the tit. They and I are staying by this lake for the same reason, but in different ways. When they leave, I can breathe again. They have turned on the emergency light on the roof of the Mercedes, in case they hit a traffic jam.

  Silence comes back to me, the immense silence that is not the absence of sound but the disappearance of any interlocutor. I feel love welling inside me for these woods harbouring deer, this lake gorged with fish, this sky crisscrossed by birds, and the intensity of my great beatnik love is proportional to the increasing distance between V.M.’s gang and my cabin. As they disappear, so does everything I fear: noise, the herd mentality, the urge to hunt – in short, the fever of the human mob.

  I’m drunk and I need water. In the ten days I’ve been gone, my water holes have frozen over. I attack the lake with the ice axe, spending an hour and a half chopping out a handsome basin a yard wide and four feet deep. Water gushes up suddenly, and I dip into it with pleasure. This feeling of having earned one’s water. My arm muscles ache. Once upon a time, in the fields and forests, living kept us in shape.

  16 MARCH

  In the world I left, the presence of others has some control over our actions, and maintains discipline. In the city, when shielded from the eyes of our neighbours, we behave less elegantly. Who has never eaten alone, standing in the kitchen, happy not to have to set the table, eagerly devouring a tin of cold ravioli? In a cabin, standards are always at risk of slipping. How many solitary Siberians, delivered from all social imperatives, knowing that there is no one to judge them, wind up flopped on a bed of cigarette butts, scratching their rashes? Crusoe was aware of this danger and decided, so as not to debase himself, to have supper every evening at a table and properly dressed, as if he had invited a guest.

  Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

  Boredom doesn’t frighten me in the least. There are worse pangs: the sorrow of not sharing with a loved one the beauty of lived moments. Solitude: what others miss out on by not being with the person who experiences it.

  In Paris, I was warned before I left. Boredom would be my deadly enemy! I’d die of it! I listened politely. People who said such things assumed that they themselves were a superb form of entertainment. ‘Reduced to myself alone, I feed, it is true, on my own substance, but it does not run out …’ writes Rousseau in the Reveries.

  Rousseau becomes aware of the challenge and ordeal of loneliness in the Fifth Walk. The solitary man must strictly devote himself to virtue, he says, and must never indulge in cruelty. If he behaves badly, the experience of his hermit’s way of life will impose a double penance on him: on the one hand, he will have to endure an atmosphere corrupted by his own baseness, and on the other, he’ll be forced to admit his own failure as a human being. In opposition to the natural man stands the civil man: ‘The civil man desires the approval of others; the solitary man must of necessity be content with himself, or his life is unbearable. And so the latter is forced to be virtuous.’ Rousseau’s solitude generates goodness, and through a feedback effect, it will dissolve the memory of human wickedness. Solitude is the balm applied to the wound caused by the distrust of one’s fellow men: ‘I would rather flee them than hate them,’ he writes in the Sixth Walk.

  It is in the interest of the solitary man to treat his surroundings well, to rally to his cause all animals, plants and gods. Why should he increase the austerity of his state with the hostility of the world? The hermit refuses to brutalize his environment. It’s the ‘Saint Francis of Assisi syndrome’. The saint speaks to his brothers the birds, Buddha soothes the mad elephant with a gentle pat, Saint Seraphim feeds the bears, and Rousseau seeks consolation by botanizing.

  At noon, I study the snow falling on the cedars. I try to let the sight sink into me so that I can follow the paths of as many snowflakes as possible. An exhausting exercise. And some people call this laziness!

  This evening, the snow is still falling. Watching it, the Buddhist says, ‘Let’s not expect any change’; the Christian, ‘Tomorrow will be better’; the pagan, ‘What does all this mean?’; the Stoic, ‘We’ll see what happens’; the nihilist, ‘Let it bury everything’; and I say, ‘I’ll have to cut some wood before the woodpile gets snowed under.’ Then I put another log in the stove and go to bed.

  17 MARCH

  Questions to clarify over the coming months:

  Will I be able to stand myself?

  Will I, at the age of thirty-seven, be able to change?

  Why don’t I miss anything I left behind?

  The sky is still churning out snow. A morning at the window. In a cabin, life revolves around three activities:

  The surveillance and profound understanding of one’s field of vision (determined by the window frame). Nothing must go unnoticed.

  Good housekeeping.

  The welcoming of rare visitors, entertainment, the giving of directions, and sometimes, on the contrary, the barring of the door to pests.

  If I wanted to flatter myself, I’d say that these tasks make me something of a sentinel and my cabin a lookout post for the empire of trees. Actually, I’m a concierge and the cabin is my loge. Next time I head off to the woods, perhaps I’ll hang out a sign that says Back soon.

  Towards evening, the slanting sunlight gives the snow a steely glint. The flat white tints now gleam like mercury. I try to take a photo of this phenomenon but the image catches nothing of its brilliance. The vanity of photos. The frame reduces the real to its Euclidian value, killing the substance of things, compressing their flesh. Reality gets squashed against the screen. A world obsessed with images can’t taste the mysterious emanations of life. No photographic lens will capture the memories unfolded by a landscape in our hearts. And what a face sends us in the way of negative ions or impalpable invitations – what camera could show them to us?

  18 MARCH

  My provisions are getting low. I have to figure out a way to fish. At Baikal the Siberians use a simple method: they dump a handful of what they call bormash, living water fleas collected in the marshes, through a hole in the ice. Attracted by this manna, fish gather at the hole, and the fisherman need only toss in his line. Having neither marshes nor bormash at hand, I borrow an old technique from the foresters: cutting quite a large hole in the ice fairly close to shore, where the lake is nine feet deep, I pile in cut cedar boughs and leave them to soak. In a few days, thousands of tiny organisms will have collected around the needles, ready to be harvested and used for bait.

  The wind, still southerly, still smells like snow. The whiteness absorbs all sound. A rare silence reigns, and the air is pleasant. The thermometer shows 5º F.

  19 MARCH

  Last night, the cracking and booming woke me up. A colossal blow stronger than the rest shook the rafters of the cabin. Rebelling against its incarceration, the mass of water is banging on the lid.

  Still snowing. More stillness. Before, I was travelling around like an arrow from a bow; now I’m a stake driven into the ground. And I’m vegetalizing. My being is taking root. I’m slowing down, drinking lots of tea, becoming
hypersensitive to variations in the light. I’m not eating meat any more. My cabin: a hot-house.

  INTERIOR WORLD EXTERIOR WORLD

  Maternal cabin Paternal lake

  Heat Cold, dryness

  Softness of wood Hardness of ice

  Safety Constant danger

  Purring of the stove Cracking, booming

  Tears of resin on the beams Sparkling of the ice

  Intellectual labour Physical labour

  The body fattens The body dries out

  The skin grows pale The skin weathers and chaps

  Spent a long time on firewood duty. Another tree cut down and up and stacked away. Then I cut paths with a shovel through the snow to the lakeshore, the banya and the woodpile. Tolstoy recommended working four hours a day to earn the right to shelter and sustenance.

  Tonight, insomnia. I imagine the animals prowling or sleeping near the cabin at this moment. Minks no one wants to turn into coats, deer no one dreams of baking into pâtés, bears no one wants to kill to prove his virility.

  20 MARCH

  These days, titmice tap at the window every morning. Their beaks sound my wake-up alarm. Mild weather; I set out a stool a mile or so from the shore and smoke a Romeo y Julieta No. 2 (a bit dry) while admiring the view. The mountains, until now, have been something I’ve learned to climb, descend, navigate and survey. I have not yet ever looked at them.

  In the evening, Casanova. Locked up in Venice ‘under the Leads’, a small prison in the Doge’s palace for detainees of high status and named for the lead plates on the roof, Casanova writes: ‘Believe that in order to be free, you need only believe that you are.’ His liking for sugar-coated sweets filled with a powder made from the beloved’s hair. (I should have brought some of those with me.) His critique, made to Voltaire, of human utopias: ‘Your premier passion is the love of humanity … but you can only love it as it is. It does not deserve the blessings you would bestow upon it … I have never laughed so heartily as at Don Quixote having a hard time defending himself from the galley slaves he has just generously set free.’