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

by Sylvain Tesson

  3 APRIL

  I’ve begun Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, have finished Tournier’s Friday and An Island to Oneself, Tom Neale’s account of the six years he spent on the tiny deserted island of Anchorage in the atoll of Subwarrow.

  One can establish certain traits characteristic of castaways, common similarities that outline the archetypical figure of the solitary survivor washed up on a shore.

  A sense of injustice at the time of the shipwreck, followed by curses directed at the gods, men and sailing ships in general.

  The appearance of a slightly megalomaniacal syndrome: the castaway convinces himself that he is a privileged being.

  The feeling of being the lord of a realm and of ruling over all animal, vegetable and mineral subjects: ‘If I pleased, I might call myself king, or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals,’ says Defoe’s Robinson.

  The need to constantly confirm the merits of the solitary life by insisting to oneself at every occasion on the beauty of such an existence.

  The contradictory wavering between the hope of prompt rescue and revulsion at any contact with one’s fellow man.

  Panic over the slightest intrusion of human beings on the island.

  Empathy with the natural world (this may take several years to appear).

  An insistence on strictly regulating varying periods of action, meditation and leisure.

  The temptation to transform each moment of existence into a staged game.

  The slightly euphoric feeling of playing the role of an observer or watchman on the margins of a humanity gone astray.

  The risk of contracting the ‘ivory tower syndrome’, which in its extreme form leads the castaway to see himself both as the repository of universal wisdom and the redeemer of the sins of mankind.

  4 APRIL

  Today I read a lot, skated for three hours in a Viennese light while listening to the Pastorale, caught a char and harvested a pint of bait, looked out of the window at the lake through the steam of my black tea, chopped up a tree trunk nine feet long and split two days of wood, cooked and ate some good kasha, and reflected that paradise was right there for the taking in the course of my day.

  5 APRIL

  Gusty weather last night. Northern winds thrashed the edge of the woods until noon. The thermometer says −9º F. What a delightful spring! When the afternoon turns mild, I begin building a table. Thick cedar branches for the legs, with a braced frame, and for the top, four planks that had been slumbering sheltered by the porch roof. Three hours of work, and by nightfall, I have my table. I take it down to the beach and set it out in the snow, where the clearing opens in front of the cedar shaped like a shell. Then I sit down on a log and lean back against the tree trunk. Those people who forbid you to put your feet on a table … do not understand the pride of a woodworker.

  In the evening, I smoke a Partagás out in the cold, with my elbows on my new ‘observation deck’. The table and I, we already love each other very much. On this Earth, it’s good to lean on something.

  This life brings peace. Not that all longings fade away. The cabin is no tree of Buddhist Enlightenment. A hermitage draws ambitions back to proportions of possibility. By restricting the panoply of actions, one goes deeper into each experience. Reading, writing, fishing, scaling heights, skating, strolling in the woods … Existence becomes reduced to a dozen or so activities. The castaway enjoys absolute freedom – but within the limits of his island. At the beginning of all Robinsonian narratives, the hero tries to escape by building a boat. He is convinced that anything is possible, that happiness lies just over the horizon. Cast up once again on the shore, he understands that he will not escape and, at peace, discovers that limitation brings joy. He is then said to resign himself. Resigned, the hermit? No more than the city dweller who, haggard, suddenly realizes beneath the twinkling lights of the boulevard that his whole life will still not be enough for him to sample all the attractions at the party.

  6 APRIL

  In the fourth century, in Upper Egypt, the shifting sand dunes of the Sahara in Wadi Natrun were swarming with monks in rags. The anchorites ran to the desert to follow in the footsteps of Saints Anthony and Pachomius. Their eyes gazed with an unhealthy light out of leathery faces. Reality horrified them: they found life degrading. Spectres nourished on lizards, they rejected the world, fearing its savours. Their sensations were their enemies. If they dreamed of a pitcher of water, they believed Satan was tempting them. They wished to die to attain the other realm, the one guaranteed by Holy Scripture to be eternal.

  The hermit of the taiga is a world away from such renunciation. The mystics tried to disappear from this earth. The woodsman wants to be reconciled with it. The ascetics waited for the advent of something not of this life, while the forester seeks the serendipitous appearance of brief pleasures, here and now. They wanted eternity; he craves the granting of prayers. They hoped to die; he desires felicity. They hated their bodies; he hones his senses. In short, if you want to have a good time around a bottle of vodka, you’re better off running into a hermit in the woods rather than a holy fool perched on his pillar.

  Out in those deserts, encountering one’s fellow man was an event. The anchorites forgot what a human face looked like, and when a visitor appeared, many of them fell to their knees, convinced this apparition was a demon.

  Which is what happens to me when Volodya T. pops in on me this morning, arriving in a jeep to collect some belongings. Why doesn’t this damn door ever open to reveal a svelte Danish ski champion come to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on the shores of Baikal?

  ‘A vodka?’ I ask Volodya.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘You’re not drinking?’

  ‘I stopped.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Twenty years ago, before I came here. One day I woke up and my wife and children were gone. Family is better than booze. They came back later but I haven’t gone back to drinking.’

  ‘So, how’s your new life in Irkutsk?’

  ‘Not great.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Money. I keep having to shoot bears. I can get 6,000 roubles for a skin, a month’s salary! I’ve promised one to two or three people who’ve already paid me.’

  ‘In France we have a saying about people who sell a bearskin before …’

  ‘I know, don’t tell me. So do we.’

  ‘Really, not even one small vodka?’

  ‘No, I told you, fucking hell.’

  7 APRIL

  A whole hour cleaning the cabin. My reed broom works wonders. I sponge off the oilcloth and polish the windows with vodka. Since it’s housekeeping day, I prepare my banya. In the evening, shiny as a rouble, I’m at the table with my glass of vodka, the kasha is cooking, the kettle’s on, the candles are dripping and the lake is creaking: everything’s in its place doing its duty. The barometer is dropping like a stone; I can hear the tops of the cedars whistling …

  8 APRIL

  Storm.

  All that’s left of my life are the notes. I’m keeping a diary, as a supplement to memory, to stave off forgetting. Without a record of one’s exploits, what’s the point of living? The hours stream by, and each day vanishes into a triumph of nothingness. The private diary: a commando operation against the absurd.

  I archive the passing hours. Keeping a journal makes life fruitful. The daily appointment with the blank page forces one to pay better attention to the doings of the day – to listen harder, to think more clearly, to see more intently. It would be grim to have nothing to inscribe in one’s notebook in the evening. The daily composition is like having dinner with a fian
cée: in order to know what to tell her later on, it’s best to think about it during the day.

  Outdoors, chaos. The wind is carving the snowdrifts with its teeth. Gusts are giving the edge of the forest a whipping. The cedars are in the front line, taking their punishment. Torn branches sail over the crowns of the trees, which the tempest seems bent on uprooting. A sad force, the wind, labouring in vain. Watching this fury with a good smoke, warm by the stove, is one definition of civilization.

  In the evening, I slowly get drunk. The cabin: a cell of inebriation.

  9 APRIL

  Still storming. Inexhaustible, the wind, leading the assault against the skirt of the forest. Why this thirst for revenge? Its rage against what endures … The lake, perfectly polished, gleams, stripped of all snow. I go for a little walk on the ice, pushed along by the wind. A blast tears off my shapka, which whirls out of sight in ten seconds, carried off at sixty miles an hour. I’m almost two miles out on the lake. I rig up a turban from my scarf and pull my hood down tight. I hadn’t anticipated having so much trouble getting back to the shore without crampons, going against the wind. I have to get down on my knees to offer less resistance. I progress by wedging my feet into the edges of cracks. Crawling across a frozen lake, bowed down before a storm, is a lesson in humility.

  With a few more miles-per-hour, the wind would sweep me off to the middle of the lake like a hockey puck, forcing me to go ask for help on the other shore, fifty miles away in a village in Buryatia: ‘Hello, pardon me, the wind just blew me in.’

  Tonight the cabin creaked in every joint, adding the moans of the wood to the explosions of the ice. If I were superstitious, I’d be aghast at the noise.

  Trapped, I’m angry. And calm down when I read this in Defoe’s Crusoe: ‘The 24th [December]. Rain all day all night, no stirring about for me.’

  10 APRIL

  Dawn revealed a cold, blue day. The lake, washed. The world is new, burnished by forty-eight hours of fury. I drink my tea outside, at my table, in the refreshed atmosphere. Not a breath of wind. I detect a muffled humming, the tinnitus of solitude.

  A visit to my wooden crates. My supplies are dwindling. I have enough pasta left for a month and Tabasco to drench it in. I have flour, tea and oil. I’m low on coffee. As for vodka, I should make it to the end of April.

  In the afternoon, I try out a new fishing spot an hour’s tramp to the north, at the mouth of a little river, below a slope covered with sturdy conifers. The hole doesn’t produce much: an hour to catch one char. I stay there until dusk, sitting on the stool, waiting for a twitch on the line. Fishing: the last clause in the pact signed with time. If you go home empty-handed, it means that time made the only catch of the day. I’m willing to spend hours sitting still. All that patience might bring me a fish. If not, too bad; I won’t be angry at those hours for my disappointment. There aren’t that many activities that risk being reduced to a vague hopefulness. Personally, I don’t believe in messiahs any more, and will await the coming only of fish.

  In the evening, after dealing with the sole char of the day, I finish Crusoe and begin Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue. These two books should be read together. Not in order to imagine Justine arriving on a castaway’s island, but because Robinson tries to re-create civilization and reinvent morality, whereas the Marquis de Sade tries to dynamite the former and soil the latter. Two servants of culture at opposite ends of the spectrum.

  11 APRIL

  After an overnight lull, the wind has doubled in strength. At two in the afternoon, it dies down again. The clouds open, soaking Baikal in sunshine. When a cloud counterattacks, the ice grows dull, and areas still bathed in light become striped with shadows. The grey knife blade gains ground, sliding over the ivory; the sun regroups, breaks through, and darkness ebbs away. The light is playing at games of wind and chance.

  Amid all this mottling, four points stand out. My binoculars reveal some people on bicycles. For a moment I consider putting out the stove to keep the chimney from revealing my presence, but then feel ashamed of that thought.

  They have passed Middle Cedar Cape and have altered course. They’re coming towards me. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.

  Sergei, Ivan, Svieta and Igor work in the hydroelectric plant in Bratsk. During their winter holiday, they get on their bikes and ride along the frozen trails. I serve them tea; they unpack quantities of cold cuts and a huge jar of mayonnaise, which they carefully spread on every slice of sausage.

  ‘Would you like more tea?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ replies Igor, dipping a sausage in the mayonnaise. ‘We’re going to have lunch in Elohin in about an hour.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of titmice around here,’ remarks Svieta.

  ‘Yes. They’re my friends and they’re teaching me Russian.’

  They give me strange looks, and eventually pack up to leave.

  12 APRIL

  I’m going to Elohin. I felt like having one of those banyas Volodya knows how to prepare, with the temperature at 200º F and beer to drink outside, our bodies steaming under the wooden awning as we look out at the mountains. En route, two hours north of my cape, I leave my sledge at the mouth of a frozen river that slices through the forest with its icy blade. The crampons are gripping well and I climb up from 2,600 feet through walls of schist bristling with denuded fir trees. The surface is only a bridge: I can hear water running beneath the vault. Red saplings grow along the edges, and their frozen debris streaks like blood through the crystal body of the ice. Winter is a vice.

  From the lower river, it’s still a little over seven miles to Elohin. Some wide faults force me to make many detours, seeking a way through the labyrinth of gaps and sometimes leaping over the fissures. Gusts of wind chivy along snaking lines of fine snow. I like walking on ice; in moonlight, it’s one of the few places where you can be sure you won’t be crushing little critters. The perfect terrain for those Jain priests who strive not to harm the tiniest gnat …

  The veins in the ice. Like following the thread of a thought. If nature thinks, landscapes express the ideas. We ought to draw up a psychophysiology of ecosystems by attributing an emotion to each one. There would be the melancholy of forests, the joy of mountain torrents, the hesitation of bogs, the strict severity of peaks, the aristocratic frivolity of lapping waves … A new discipline: the anthropocentrism of landscapes.

  Volodya teases me when I show up at his door.

  ‘You didn’t bring any flowers for Irina?’

  ‘Offering women flowers is a heresy. Flowers are obscene sex organs, they symbolize ephemerality and infidelity, they spread themselves wide open at the roadside, on offer to every passing breeze, the mouth parts of insects, clouds of seeds and the teeth of animals. They’re trampled, picked and sniffed by noses. One should bring the woman one loves stones, fossils, some gneiss; I mean something that lasts for ever and won’t wither and fade.’

  That’s what I would have liked to reply to Volodya, but my Russian is too weak so I say: ‘Yes, I did have some, but they shrivelled on the way. The banya, Volodya: it’s ready?’

  ‘It’s waiting for you, pal.’

  That evening, I sit on the bench with Volodya’s cat on my lap and watch Buryatia’s lights go out. It’s 10º F; the horizon is a sheet of satin. A snapping noise makes the cat’s ears prick up; a dog barks.

  Eleven o’clock. Volodya hasn’t turned off the radio. I’m lying on the floor in the toasty cabin; we’re listening to the main station. They announce the disaster. The Polish government’s Tupolev jet has crashed near Smolensk. The Polish president and dozens of officials are dead. It seems there were no survivors. The plane was bringing a Polish deleg
ation to a ceremony in honour of the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre, for which Moscow has finally agreed to admit responsibility.

  ‘Volodya?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This isn’t the first time a Russian plane has wiped out some Poles.’

  ‘That’s not funny, fuck that, not funny at all.’

  13 APRIL

  Throughout the night the radio spat out its news. In my half-sleep, I heard the growing toll: ninety-five dead … ninety-six dead … ninety-seven dead … At around two o’clock I stopped up my ears with chewed paper. I tore out a page of Lord Jim, masticated it slowly (evil-tasting ink), and used Conrad’s literature as earplugs, thinking I would hear the sea.

  This morning, Volodya takes me along to inspect his trap line. The job of a forest ranger is to keep poachers from massacring the animals. Volodya carries out his mission strictly, and strictly within the boundaries of the reserve. His cabin sits on the southern bank of the River Elohin, the northern boundary of the nature reserve. On the other side, the taiga is no longer protected, and that’s where Volodya sets his traps.

  He’s wearing his skis: horsehide strips tacked onto a pair of wooden runners. I’m wearing snowshoes. It takes three hours to check the traps. We sink deeply into the powder, working our way along the joint between the mountain slope and the wooded shelf at its base. The jays signal our approach. Volodya’s young dog keeps raising false alarms, having not yet learned that one doesn’t disturb the master over a squirrel. Volodya is training him with gobs of yelling: ‘These dogs don’t know a thing, fucking hell!’ Out of fifteen traps, two minks. Volodya swears that the forest is empty and that life was better in the old days. What the Americans did with the prairie bison, the Russians did with their mustelids: they’ve exterminated the weasel family to put people in furs. One day, man enters the woods, and the gods withdraw.