The sky is insane, in a fluster of fresh air, dazed with light. Images of intense beauty spring up – and vanish. Is that the apparition of a god? I’m incapable of taking the slightest photo, which would be a double offence: a sin of inattention and an insult to the moment.
When we reach the cape where I wanted to test the fishing, a little over six miles from the cabin, I don’t even have time to get out my ice drill. The enraged wind orders a retreat. I go home at a run, the dogs on my heels. We’re waylaid by some fierce blasts, which suck up particles of abrasive crystal. The dogs protect their noses with their forepaws. For two hours, we fight our way towards the cabin against an invisible hand.
Tomorrow is May Day. Will the traditional lilies-of-the-valley bloom on the taiga?
MAY
The Animals
1 MAY
Last February, a good mile to the north of the cabin and within the orbit of a bay, Volodya T. set up a net to catch catfish. It lies out on the ice, attached to wooden stakes. I break open the old hole and thrust in the net, at the bottom of which I’ve hooked two char heads. The dogs stand guard in case any catfish come out of the hole to pounce on me.
I am the emperor of a mountainside, lord of my puppies, king of North Cedar Cape, protector of titmice, ally of lynxes and brother of bears. I am above all a little tipsy because after two hours of cutting wood, I’ve just polished off the dregs of a bottle of vodka.
Living in a nature reserve is symbolic: man is just passing through. What trace of him is left? Footprints in the snow. Across the lake, on the Buryat shore, there is a biosphere polygon off-limits to all visitors. I find it poetic, this idea of turning stretches of the Earth into sanctuaries where life would go on without mankind. Animals and gods would flourish there, all unseen. We would know that life in its wild state was carrying on in that haven, and this thought would be an elixir. The point would not be to deny men the usufruct of the forests, barrens and seas, but to protect a few selected acres from our appetites. The pretentious pedants of this world, however, are ever watchful, polishing up their speeches on the necessity of an ecology in the service of mankind. They would never allow 7 billion human beings to be barred from the tiniest hankie-size sliver of the planet …
2 MAY
Hail is blurring the bronze of the taiga. The heavens have decided to send something besides snowflakes. A day for reading Mircea Eliade (a book for awaiting spring: The Myth of the Eternal Return), and for cleansing the clearing of the last of Volodya T.’s debris. Later in the day, I try out a new hole at the mouth of the North Cedar River. Now I have four fishing holes: in front of the cabin, at the tip of the cape, an hour’s tramp to the north, and at the heart of the bay where I reactivated the catfish trap yesterday. Sitting on my stool, I smoke, keeping an eye on my fly line.
The dogs twine constantly around my legs; in me they have found someone who responds to their affection. They neither rely on nor delight in their memories. Between longing and regret, there is a spot called the present. Like jugglers who ply their trade while standing on the neck of a bottle, we should train ourselves to balance in that sweet spot. The dogs manage it.
When he entrusted the puppies to me, V.E. from Zavorotni told me: ‘Don’t let them get too close to you.’ I’m the most pathetic dog trainer east of the Urals, incapable of forbidding Aika and Bek from bubbling over with affection. People teach a dog how to lie down – and announce that they’re training him. I accept the high jinks of the two little creatures and all it costs me is their paw prints on the legs of my trousers.
We return home with dinner: three spotted char. Tonight the dogs will get the heads and entrails mixed into their mush of flour and lard. In the distance, the sun is cutting its way through the clouds here and there. This would have been a good spot for Paradise: infallible splendour, no serpents, impossible to live naked, and too many things to do to have any time left over for inventing a god.
3 MAY
This morning, dawn is tangled up in frilly tulle. I climb up towards the head of the ‘white valley’. The dogs are dementedly struggling to follow me, collapsing through the flat tracks of my snowshoes. At the heart of the combe, at the place where I turn up the flank to reach the granitic ridge, a bear has crossed through, heading for the other side of the valley. Hibernation is over. The awakening of the bears, the arrival of the wagtails and the cracking of the ice are ambassadors of spring. I’ve got my flare gun at my waist, the dogs as scouts: I’m not at risk. The bears, on the other hand, know that man is a wolf to them, and they avoid encounters.
I’m at 3,280 feet, on the edge of the ridge. Sitting on a branch of dwarf pine, leaning back against a boulder, dangling my legs over the drop with a stand of golden larches far below, I watch the morning mist reach the lakeshore. Its billowy wave flows up against the lower edge of the forest. I love mist, that incense of the earth. I trim a Partagás. A lover of Havanas enjoys surrounding himself with smoke. Offerings in an inoffensive sacrifice, the puffs bind men to the gods. Every smoker dreams of disappearing into his own cloud.
4 MAY
The snows of yesteryear returned to the land today. A sidecar motorcycle appears on the northern horizon and stops at my shore. The dogs don’t bark: not a good omen regarding their ability to warn me about approaching bears! It’s Oleg, a fisherman I’ve met once or twice. He’s travelling from Elohin to Zavorotni on an ageless Ij Planeta 750, a machine from the 80s that’s better than the Ural 650 but lacks the chic of a military sidecar bike, as Oleg readily admits.
The vodka’s good, snow is falling and Oleg has brought cucumbers. We slice them thinly, and crunch one up with each glass. Oleg hasn’t talked to anyone for a while.
‘When I think that I was afraid of capitalists, but you, you’re really nice. You have to come to Elohin more often. We’re going to drive on the lake for another two weeks before it starts opening up everywhere and we can’t take a step any more without risking a pratfall. The ducks and geese will arrive, you’ll see: one morning, there they’ll be, back from China or Thailand or some other fucking paradise. Once some geese landed at my place, near the lake, and made a nest in my canoe. A few hunters showed up and wanted to blow their heads off. I told them, just try and I’ll punch your faces flat. I don’t like having birds asleep in my boat shot at. Last year, I found a baby seal beached on the pebble shore and I fed it all summer long.’
I imagine Oleg with his huge mitts feeding the little animal from a bottle. Earlier, when the bike was heading here, I thought: Please let this bastard destroying my silence go on his way. And here we are, two brothers polishing off a bottle.
‘By the way,’ he says, ‘Irina sends you this little packet of yeast.’
We’ve put paid to a litre of poison. Oleg takes off, I collapse on my bed.
5 MAY
Buryatia hands over the sun at 6.30 a.m.
Yeast changes everything with blini.
The dogs have declared war on the wagtails.
A thin layer of snow makes the lake look like the world’s largest salt flat.
It takes me three minutes to chop into firewood one of the pine log sections Sergei chainsawed three months ago.
It’s 14º F at night and barely above freezing during the day.
Birch bark makes better tinder than dry moss.
The black dog stands out starkly on the ice. In the summer, she’ll still be the one easiest to spot on the light grey lakeshore.
To sharpen the axe, a smooth stone patiently rubbed along the edge is enough.
The fish position themselves naturally at the very bottom of the fishing holes.
Vodka diluted with water makes a decent window cleaner.
There is pleasure in keeping one’s home in order.
Cooking char en papillote without either scaling or gutting them intensifies the flavour of the fish.
At seven o’clock, the dawn light touches my table; at two in the afternoon, the foot of my bed; at six, the sun drops behind my peaks.
Not one insect has awakened yet.
It’s at the fifth glass of vodka that resisting the next one becomes difficult.
Having little to do prompts one to pay attention to everything.
Those are the findings of today’s inquiry.
6 MAY
Ice is the timekeeper. Spring will soon deliver the coup de grâce. Water has invaded the surface, carving it into countless vertical ruts, as if the ice were being eaten by worms. I must watch for the day when it breaks up into myriads of crystal bread sticks. The pitted surface no longer presents that lovely obsidian mirror, as sleek as metal. The mother-of-pearl crunches underfoot.
I take endless walks, flanked by Aika and Bek. I come and go, from one cape to another, and the crows cackle at each round trip.
7 MAY
There are six catfish caught in the trap, making this overcrowded net in the frigid water a nightmare. I understand why so many cultures consider this fish a demonic being. Catfish have maws like Chinese monsters and slimy yellow and greenish-bronze bodies … They’re somewhat like Tolkien’s Gollum. I release four and keep the two biggest, which I kill with a blow just behind the skull. Even the dogs don’t dare approach their flaccid bodies. Ah, the intense pleasure of giving a creature back its freedom! I mentally salute Commander Charcot, a polar scientist who opened the cage door for his gull before sinking off the coast of Iceland in 1936. On the wooden table at the beach, I gut the fish, then stuff the stove with wood to cook them. The flesh of catfish is elastic, with a strong taste some find pleasant, others slightly nauseating. There are many ways of dealing with it, but the best is to dredge it in flour and crumbs so that the greasy fried coating masks the muddy flavour. (The English fry everything they get their hands on in breadcrumbs, and I still recall the oily newspaper pages we had for napkins at a fish and chips place in Brighton.) I prepare a stew for the little dogs, saving a delicacy for myself: pan-fried catfish liver in a splash of vodka.
Months of devouring fish have produced a metamorphosis in me. My character has become lacustrine, more taciturn, slower, and my skin is whiter. I smell like scales, my pupils are dilated, my heart beats at a gentler pace.
A long walk on the lake to Middle Cedar Cape. The wind carries an odour of damp wood far and wide; temperatures slightly above freezing have released the perfume of the taiga. Spring is still only a frisson, but in the usual cold sky, the sun marks a hot spot. The water in the ice faults has melted. Whenever one of them is too wide, the dogs won’t cross it. I take one in my arms, leap over the divide, then return for the other pup, who begs in faint whimpers not to be abandoned.
At Middle Cedar Cape, a ruined cabin. A man hid out there until the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Every time the KGB came around, he fled into the mountains for a few days until the danger passed. I couldn’t find out whether he was a dissident or a deserter. Today there’s only a hut with a caved-in roof. When I step inside it, I think about that guy. After Yeltsin came to power, the fellow returned to Irkutsk and promptly died there. I would have liked to have met him; he would always have been welcome in my cabin. In the wreckage of the beams, I find a cup and the base of an oil lamp.
In Russia, the forest holds out its branches to the shipwrecked. Yokels, nonentities, bandits, the pure of heart, rebels, those who can bear to observe only unwritten laws – they all head for the taiga. A forest has never refused anyone asylum. As for the princes, they used to send their woodcutters to chop down the trees. To govern a country, the rule is to clear the land. In an orderly realm, the forest is the last bastion of freedom to fall.
The State sees everything; in the woods, life is hidden. The State hears everything; the woods are a vault of silence. The State controls everything; here, only the immemorial codes apply. The State wants submissive subjects, pinched hearts in presentable bodies; the taiga loosens up souls and returns men to the wild. Russians know that the taiga is there if things go wrong, it’s an idea anchored in their collective unconscious. Cities are temporary experiments, provisional experiences that the forests will one day reclaim. To the north, in the vastness of Yakutia (a territory larger than Argentina), this digestion has already begun. Out there, the taiga is retaking coal-mining cities abandoned at perestroika. In a hundred years, there will be nothing left of these open-air prisons but ruins buried under foliage. A nation prospers through the substitution of populations: men replace trees. One day, history turns around, and the trees grow back.
Refuseniks of every country, take to the woods! Consolation awaits you there. The forest judges no one, and imposes its rule. It stages its annual party at the end of May: life returns and the copses swell with an electric fever. In winter, you’ll never feel alone: the cries of the crow family, the visits of titmice, and the tracks of lynx dispel all anguish. As for melancholy, simply consider this beautiful principle of regeneration: trees die, fall and rot. And on the humus, which is the memory of the forest, other trees are born and begin their one or two centuries of reaching for the sky.
Bek, the little white dog, is bleeding. The ice has scraped his right front paw pads. I massage them with a mixture of catfish fat and oil. Has evolution foreseen the eventual use of silurid liver for the healing of small Siberian dogs?
8 MAY
Across the grey and white plain fractured by its live-water wounds, I’m off to Elohin for a courtesy visit to Volodya. Bek’s paw pads are better. The dogs trot along side by side, and we cover the distance in five hours. We had to find a way through the labyrinth of fissures in the middle of Elohin Bay; a big eagle was soaring overhead, keeping tabs, perhaps, on a dead seal.
I’m sitting at Volodya’s table looking through the window at eternal Russia passing in a series of images. Russians use the word glubina – depth – to refer to these far-flung zones, the deep country of the nation. Irina, her kerchief on her head, is feeding her goose in the vegetable garden. A billy-goat goes by, followed by a cat. This window, which could be entitled A Day in Siberia, is like a painting by Ilya Repin, a Ukrainian whose realistic depictions of life at all levels of the social order became archetypes of the ‘Russian national style’.
Now the dogs are fighting. When they arrived in Elohin, Bek and Aika, all of four months old, rushed at Volodya’s five mastiffs to have their hides. They took a drubbing, but I congratulated them on their fighting spirit. Volodya is holding a cup of tea in his huge mitt and eating a lemon as if it were an apple. On the radio, Yves Montand is singing ‘Autumn Leaves’, which crackles a bit. An announcer launches into a tribute to the glory of the Red Army. Tomorrow is 9 May, Victory Day. It’s 2010 and the Russians are still amazed at having beaten fascism. Sixty-five years are as nothing: they speak of the victory as if it were yesterday.
‘Volodya, what’s the news, aside from the fact that you won sixty-five years ago?’
‘Nothing. Wait, yes, in Florida there’s a black tide: all the American coasts are gummed up.’
A tour of the stag traps. A simple procedure: a piece of sheet metal with five cuts sawn into it to form a central star is placed over a hole and covered with grass. A block of salt attracts the animal. When it steps onto the trap, it’s snagged. Stag trophies go for a pretty price in the city. Man has felt himself duty-bound to emp
ty the forest.
That evening: ‘Chess, Volodya?’
‘Yes. The second most intelligent game after tug-of-war.’
We play, I lose, and finish Morand’s biography of Fouquet, the fabulously wealthy superintendent of finances whom an envious Sun King finally sent to prison for life. I like to immerse myself in reading that transports me to the precise antipodes of my actual life. Exoticism: while the wind rustles gently through the Siberian cedars, I navigate through the political intrigues and dirty tricks of the court at Versailles, the animosities of Louis’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and the battles within the Roman Catholic hierarchy in France over the theological movement of Jansenism. Question: who would have lasted longer, Volodya at the court of Versailles, or the king’s great general, le Grand Condé, out on the taiga? ‘Before Fouquet, nature itself trembles,’ writes Morand, evoking the monumental construction of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, the first example of le style Louis XIV. ‘It is as if nature were razing herself to the ground, seeking to be forgotten, so often have the tragedians and preachers informed her that she has no rightful claims over mankind.’ It was to forget the warbling of tragedians and preachers that I installed myself in a cabin.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 12