I go to bed thinking there’s no point in keeping a journal when others can sum up their lives in thirty-one words!
29 MARCH
This morning, 27º F. First spring-like day. The titmice are flocking beneath the southern window. Suddenly, gusts shake the cedars and snow falls. The landscape is striped with grey gossamer.
I read Chinese verses while sipping vodka. If the world collapsed, would I hear any echo? A cabin is a wooden bunker. The logs are such a handsome protective barrier! The pine beams, alcohol and poetry form a triple carapace. ‘My cabin is far away and me, I know nothing’ – a Russian proverb born in the taiga.
Poles apart are the diktats of Paris: ‘You will answer the telephone! You will be reachable at all times! You will have an opinion on everything! You will be indignant!’
The Cabin Credo: Do not react … never let your buttons be pushed … never give up … float slightly tipsy in the snowy silence … admit indifference to the fate of the world … and read Chinese writers.
The wind strengthens. The world bangs on the window pane to be let in. Defend me, my books! Protect me, my bottle! Shield me, my cabin, from this north-east wind determined to distract me. If someone brought me a newspaper hot off the press right now, I’d take it for an earthquake.
I was almost certain they’d turn up: I happen across these verses by Du Mu, a ninth-century poet:10
The small pavilion can barely fit a bed in lengthwise
pouring myself drinks all day I watch the mountains
admirable when in the night the wind flies in with rain
amid drunkenness the noise knocks on the window pane in vain.
30 MARCH
I hot-footed it up to the ice waterfall today via a new route. I take the first valley to the south of my cabin and at 3,280 feet I begin working my way all around the shoulder. I pass the ridge and a few sentinels of rotten granite looming up through the snow. I continue along the flank of the slope on the hard snow, occasionally tripped up by a stretch of dwarf pines. It takes me five whole hours of hard labour to reach the left bank of the notch cradling the ice waterfall. My secret hope, in staying so long above the treeline, is to catch sight of a deer, but aside from some wolverine tracks disappearing into the woods and which fill me with joy, there is nothing.
Back at the lake, I catch my first fish at five o’clock. A second one three minutes later, and a third an hour and a half after that. Three quicksilver char, electric with fury, gleam on the ice. Their skin is shot through with quivers of energy. I kill them and look out at the plain, murmuring the words of thanks Siberians once addressed to the animal they had destroyed or the world they had just made a little poorer. In modern society, the carbon tax has replaced this ‘Thank you, I’m sorry.’
The happiness of having on your plate the fish you’ve caught, with a glass of water you’ve fetched, and the wood you’ve chopped in the stove: the hermit goes to the source. The flesh, water and wood are still fresh.
I remember my days in the city. I’d go down to shop for supper and wander along the aisles of a supermarket, glumly tossing items into my trolley. We’ve become the hunter-gatherers of a denatured, unnatural world.
The urban liberal, leftist, revolutionary and upper-middle-class citizen all pay money for bread, gas and taxes. The hermit asks nothing from the state and gives nothing to the state. He disappears into the woods and thrives there. His retreat constitutes a loss of income for the government. Becoming a loss of income should be the objective of true revolutionaries. A repast of grilled fish and blueberries gathered in the forest is more anti-statist than a protest demonstration bristling with black flags. Those who dynamite the citadel need the citadel. They are against the state in the sense that they lean against it. Walt Whitman: ‘I have nothing to do with this system, not even enough to oppose it.’ On that October day five years ago when I discovered old Walt’s Leaves of Grass, I had no idea that reading it would lead me to a cabin. It’s dangerous to open a book.
A retreat is a revolt. Entering one’s cabin means vanishing from surveillance screens. The hermit erases himself. He sends no more numeric traces, no telephonic signals, no banking data. He divests himself of all identity. He effects a kind of reverse hacking, and leaves the Great Game. No need, moreover, to head for the woods. Revolutionary asceticism can adapt to an urban milieu. The consumer society offers the choice to conform to it, and with a little discipline … Surrounded by abundance, some are free to live like pushovers but others may play the monk and stay lean amid the murmur of books, retreating to inner forests without leaving their apartments. In a society of penury, there is no other alternative. One is condemned to a state of want, and conditioned by it. Willpower is neither here nor there. A famous Soviet joke says a guy goes into a butcher shop and asks: ‘You have any bread?’ Answer: ‘Ah, no, this is the place where we have no meat, so for the place where they have no bread, go next door to the bakery.’ The Hungarian lady who raised me taught me such things and I often think of her. The consumer society is a somewhat vile expression, born of the phantasm of childish grown-ups disappointed at having been too spoiled. They haven’t the strength to reform on their own and dream of being constrained to live in sober moderation.
At seven this evening, I attempt to make myself blini with my stash of flour kept in watertight bags. An hour later I place on my wooden plank a single charred pancake. I spend a half-hour outside until the smoke is gone from the cabin, then open a packet of Chinese noodles.
31 MARCH
For a few days now, I’ve been conducting a Pavlovian experiment that is beginning to bear fruit. At nine in the morning, I play a tune on my flute at the window before tossing some crumbs to the titmice. This morning they arrived at the first notes, well before I’d set out their ration. I breathe deeply of the dawn air, surrounded by birds. The only thing missing is Snow White.
A day up in the heights. I head back up the ‘white valley’, a large combe filled with Japanese larches to the north of my cabin. After five hours of struggle in the deep snow I reach 5,250 feet. Sometimes I feel like a moose stuck up to the chest in glue. I think I’m about 980 feet from the summit, but it’s very cold and getting late. I head down to North Cedar Cape. Some lynx tracks cross my own. The animal must have passed by one or two hours earlier and still be somewhere in the vicinity. I bend down to sniff the paw prints but can’t smell a thing. I feel less alone. There were two of us traipsing around the neighbourhood today.
This evening, I split some wood in the clearing. First you must put the cleaving axe deep into the wood with a powerful blow. Once the metal is deeply set, you raise the axe and the log it’s stuck in – and whack the whole thing with all your strength down on the chopping block. If the blow is well struck, the log splits in two. Then all you have to do is lop off smaller pieces with a hatchet. My aim is true; I’m no longer missing my target. A month ago, it took me three times as long to prepare the necessary firewood. In a few weeks, I’ll be a chopping machine. When the metal strikes exactly where it should and the logs split with a ripping sound, I convince myself that cutting wood is a martial art.
APRIL
The Lake
1 APRIL
It’s nine in the morning. I’m reading Michel Déon’s novel about a man who withdraws to the Irish countryside, where the people are passing strange, when I come upon these words: ‘But you know, in spite of all my willpower, solitude is the most difficult thing to protect’ – and my door flies violently open. Displaying typically Russian energy, four fishermen burst into the cabin without warning, as if they intended to beat me senseless.
They bellow exuberant greetings. They’re driving to S
everobaikalsk, a large town on the northern end of Lake Baikal, to sell the fish they’ve caught in the southern sector of the reserve. I hadn’t heard their truck engine and in my fright have spilled my tea all over Un taxi mauve. There’s Sasha, who’s missing some fingers; my old acquaintance Igor (also missing some digits), whom I met five years ago out on the ice; Volodya T., whose former cabin I now inhabit; and Andrei, a Buryat I’ve never seen before. I perform the ritual: slice up the sausage they’ve placed on the table, open a bottle, bring out the glasses. Two of my visitors abstain, but the rest of us set about getting drunk.
I ask each of them to tell me how he spent his military service. Volodya was in a tank in Mongolia (a toast to tank crews); Sasha was a radio operator on the shores of the Arctic Ocean (a toast to those Arctic shores); Igor, a sailor in the Crimea (a toast to the fleet); and Andrei, a gunner in Cherkasy, in central Ukraine (a toast to the Russian politics of pacification in the Caucasus). The postings of Russian conscripts form a trans-Siberian journey to rival the one in Blaise Cendrars’s modernist poem about his Russian travels in 1905. My camera is in position on the shelf; I press the button. The conversation grows livelier, fuelled by the bite of Kedrovaya vodka in a 104º F cabin.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THE CONVERSATION OF 1 APRIL
SASHA: I say to myself: Fucking hell!
ME: What will be, will be.
SASHA: Brother drunks, alkies! (To Igor:) And you, not drinking? Bravo!
ANDREI: May everything go well! Everything, that means everything: love, family, everything.
ME: You’re returning from where?
SASHA: From Cape Shartlai. There’s this poor guy, he’s out there dying. All winter long, he’s been spending his time dying.
IGOR: No bird, no anyone! Alone.
SASHA: It’s his boss’s fault. He abandoned him out there for the winter without provisions!
ME: Who’s his boss?
SASHA: It’s that arsehole … shithead … queer … the hunter.
IGOR: The other day, I asked him: ‘You’ve got no cartridges for the gun?’ So he says: ‘No. The wolves come up a few yards away, I throw stones to drive them off.’
SASHA: When we went by Shartlai, we saw wolf tracks on the road.
ANDREI: Huge ones, big as this, and really fresh, fucking shit.
SASHA: And him, the bloke, he goes out at four in the morning, he sees their eyes shining thirty feet away. ‘So?’ I ask him. ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’ And he tells me: ‘Haven’t got any cartridges.’ We went back to see him in January. His dog had croaked. It had had nothing to eat at all. The dog was chained up, it died of hunger. The puppies …
ANDREI: Looked like skeletons.
ME: And him, what’s he eat?
SASHA: I don’t know.
IGOR: I don’t understand why no supplies are sent to him. I mean, what is this? A man going hungry in the forest!
SASHA: Shit. And all winter long trucks are going by but no one stops and no one sends him any provisions.
IGOR: It’s the first time I’ve seen that. A man living completely alone like that. And no one gives a fuck. Even a dick wouldn’t stay in his cunt of a hole.
SASHA: And yet he even seems happy!
ME: He’s a slave.
SASHA: That’s true, that’s true! I didn’t dare use that word: a slave.
VOLODYA: A serf, we also say in Russian.
ANDREI: Even a slave, you don’t torture him like that.
IGOR: No.
SASHA: He’s got a really bad boss. A shit boss. That’s no boss.
ME: But he had no other choice. He couldn’t have stayed in his village, with no work, no money …
IGOR: But he’s not getting any pay where he is, either.
SASHA: Maybe he’s better off here. If he’d stayed back in his village …
IGOR: He’d have already died of alcoholism.
SASHA: Yes! He’d have already died of alcoholism.
IGOR: Well of course! Of course!
SASHA: Whereas now, at least he’s still alive …
IGOR: There you have it: alive.
VOLODYA: By the way, Sylvain, there’s a crisis, seems that Europe’s in a real bad way. Especially Greece; that place is on its knees. Done for. Fucked.
ME: Fucked?
IGOR: Fucked.
VOLODYA: You won’t be able to go home any more.
SASHA: It’s Greece did that to you. Greece is in deep shit.
VOLODYA: Yup, in shit.
IGOR: Yes, it’s a huge catastrophe!
VOLODYA: Fucking fucked up, and there’s some demonstrations going on over there.
SASHA: Yes, revolts, people running around shouting!
IGOR: A democratic total mess.
SASHA: He’s still happy that in 1812 our Cossacks taught the French how to wash themselves and scrub their necks. They never bathed before that. Can you imagine? In 1812, the Cossacks built them banyas. Historical fact. That’s why the French invented perfumes, to cover up the nasty body odours and the bad smells of the cities. It stank all over, France! Our Cossacks who went there in 1812, they taught them to wash themselves in baths. I can assure you, it’s true.
IGOR: Catastrophe! Nightmare! Guys: catastrophe, cataclysm – they’re French words, Sylvain told me so.
SASHA: I’m not surprised.
VOLODYA: Fuck.
That’s where the recording ends. The Russians make a few more toasts to weird stuff and then suddenly they’re shouting that they’ve got to ‘get the fucking hell going’ and they put on their jackets, curse their gloves and their caps and their scarves and one of them kicks the door, calling it a fucker and, leaving me that good sausage barely half gone, off they go and there I am on the shore, a little the worse for wear, looking at a day wrecked by vodka.
Every time Russian fishermen visit my cabin I feel as if a cavalry division has come to bivouac in my kitchen garden. Fatalism, spontaneity, despotism: Mongol character traits have been injected into the Slavic venous system. The nomad shows through the woodsman. The dreadful Marquis de Custine, who wrote a celebrated account of his visit to Russia during the reign of Nicholas I, was right: Russia is ‘charged with conveying Asia to Europe’. In consideration of which, I spend an hour setting my trashed cabin to rights.
2 APRIL
It was −4º F last night and I finally got around to nailing strips of felt on the underside of the door. This morning I drank my tea while checking messages left on the window panes by the frost. Who could decipher them? Is there writing hidden in these things?
This evening, I at last make a success of my blini. Blini are like children: you can never take your eye off them. I invent the blini stuffed with spotted char. First, catch a char. Cut wood. Make a fire. Cook the fish in the embers with some dill or fennel. Make the blini (with a few drops of beer if you have no yeast). Pull the flesh of the char to pieces over a blini. Put another blini on top of that one. Wash the whole thing down with half a pint of vodka at room temperature.
I dine, gazing out of the window. Some people can dine exclusively by feasting their eyes on a landscape. That is one definition of Eden. To live ensconced in a space one may encompass with a look, circumambulate in a day and envision in the mind.
My dinners at Baikal comprise a faint glimmer of grey energy, which is embodied energy. Grey energy skyrockets when the caloric value of the food is less than the energy necessarily expended in its production and transportation. The orange once offered at Christmas was a treasure. Everyone kne
w it was swollen with grey energy, and they appreciated the cost of its voyage. A catfish pulled from a bend in the Mekong by a Laotian fisherman and grilled on the river bank has zero grey energy. Like my chars, cooked a few yards from the fishing hole. Steak from Argentina, however, from cattle who feed on soya beans on the estancias of the pampas before being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe, is tarred with the brush of infamy. Grey energy is the shadow of karma, the balance due for our sins. One day we will be called upon to pay it.
PARTIAL LIST OF A FEW HISTORIC MEALS WITH LOW GREY ENERGY
The manna from heaven that fell at the feet of the Jewish people.
The youths and maidens offered to the Minotaur by the Athenians.
The bread and wine at the Last Supper.
The loaves and fishes by the Sea of Galilee.
Pelops, the son of Tantalus.
The blood Tartar warriors sucked from their horses’ necks on the open steppes.
The dried lizards Saint Pachomius dined on in the desert.
The Christian missionaries who sailed to the Malayo-Polynesian islands and wound up in cannibal cooking pots.
In spite of appearances, the bears killed by famished Ukrainians after the fall of the Soviet Union were full of grey energy: the beasts had been brought from Siberia and raised in captivity. Forty years ago, the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes ate the flesh of their dead companions. They consumed a high-grey-energy meal: the meat had been flown in to the site.
The nutrients of the lake and the forest enrich the blood of the fishermen of Baikal. The air, water and humus of Siberia pulse through their arteries. In light of these biological findings, the rights of the soil should be taken into consideration. Since blood draws upon the substance of the soil, your identity would take root in the geographic space that nourishes you. If you partake of imported jams, you are a citizen of the world.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 9