9 MAY
Morand, chapter 2: ‘There are three ways to begin one’s life. With pleasure at first, and serious things later, or by working hard at the beginning so as to ease up towards the end, or by managing to pursue both pleasure and labour at once.’ The cabin follows that last prescription.
At eight in the morning, a bear of well over 600 pounds comes prowling around the sandy embankment to the south of the small clearing at Elohin. Volodya has filled some cans with seal fat to attract the animals, and now he murmurs: ‘Ah, too bad it isn’t about a third of a mile to the north, outside the reserve, we could shoot it.’ I feel suddenly numb with despair. We ought to have a little bit of our neocortex removed at birth to neutralize our desire to destroy the world. Man is a capricious child who believes the Earth is his bedroom, the animals his toys, the trees his baby rattles.
Yesterday’s lesson has borne fruit. Aika and Bek stay close to me and away from the other dogs. When we return to the enclosure around the izba, my two little darlings are set upon by Volodya’s howling pack. I plunge into the mêlée, kicking furry flanks right and left to protect my puppies while Volodya yells at me over the barking to ‘let them follow their fucking rules!’ That’s when the black cat that palled around with Aika the night before comes flying to the rescue and with a few swipes of his claws, routs the ringleaders. I immediately bestow upon him ‘the Imperial Order of the Northern Cedars for service rendered to my personal guard’, and I head home after kissing Irina on her rosy cheeks and getting my chest crushed in Volodya’s parting hug.
On the way back, a seal. He’s sunning himself near a handy emergency escape fissure. I crawl over the ice, concealed by a ridge of ice chunks. Did he hear me? Was it Aika’s black stain on the ivory tablecloth? I’m some 200 yards away when he vanishes.
The weather has warmed up, and the chimney plume from my stove traces persistent spirals in the air, as reassuring as the evening cloud of cigarette smoke.
10 MAY
This morning, dawn has kept its promise again: the sun appeared, punctually, and the sky became a ceiling for an operetta theatre. I go out onto the lake to get a good look at the mountain cleared of its snow. Only the summits and the depths of canyons are still white. On the lake, I leap over a fault – and its far edge snaps off: I’ve jumped too short and fall into the water, where the main thing is not to slip under the ice. I have a chilly walk back. The faults in the lake, like the crevasses of glaciers, greet overconfidence with the kiss of death.
In the afternoon I go up to the waterfall. The snow in the understorey still sticks to the snowshoes, and the dwarf pines hamper me more than ever. To make any headway, I have to use the scree slopes. As for the dogs, they’re mastering the art of frisking among the rocks. At the edge of the cut leading to the waterfall, spring is preparing its rite. Fragile forces are erupting; velvety mountain anemones quiver in the sunshine; grasses are growing among the patches of crystalline snow. An expanse of white still shows my footprints, which a bear has followed before turning back to the river below. Ants flow up and down their towering cities of ice needles; it’s as if they were observing some solar cult around a (slightly eroded) pre-Columbian temple. The torrent has broken free and dives beneath the ice down at the mouth of the valley. The mountain is melting. Its flanks are striped with living streams hurrying with girlish haste to plunge into the lake. Alder buds have popped out of their sheaths. Clumps of azaleas are sprinkled with violet flowers. Glossy leaves smell like bee’s-wax polish. Nature’s timidity is a prelude to its triumph.
Two opposing impulses foster this rebirth: the emergence of what was buried beneath the soil, and the overflowing of what was stored up in the heights.
What overflows: the water tumbling from the peaks, the freshets washing the faces of the slopes, the ants boiling out of their cauldrons, the sap pearling on the pine bark, the stalactites stretching for the earth, the bears and deer quitting the plateaus to scrounge for a pittance on the shores.
What emerges: the larvae in the ground that break out by the billions, the shoots, the flowers blooming on their stems, the schools of fish returning to the surface after their benthic winter. And I, tonight, will be tranquilly smoking in my cabin, right at the junction between this uprush and downpour.
Way up there, the waterfall is still frozen, but its liberation draws nigh. A matter of days.
I catch three char in one hour this evening. It’s puzzling, but the lake never delivers more than that to me, as if it were adjusting my catch to my needs. There’s a mystery there that acts as a caution against fishing fever. One day, a caveman must have fished for more than he could eat, announcing the advent of human hubris and our current pillaging of the planet. The other explanation for my meagre results – and the more likely one – is that I’m a lousy fisherman.
Today I saw a seagull. And a female black grouse at the tip of North Cedar Cape. My eye fell on her by chance, otherwise I’d have passed blithely by, only inches away.
The evening arranges pastel reflections of blue and rose on the Buryat peaks. The mountains? Good enough to eat.
The ice won’t last much longer. Near my watering spot, I open a breach a yard wide in half an hour, as if I were hacking through loaf sugar. In my new swimming hole, in the glow of hurricane lanterns, I immerse myself in the water. The Russians do this for the salvation of their souls in January, at Epiphany. At 36 or 37º F, water bites into your legs and winds up gripping your whole body. My cigar brings an illusion of warmth. The heart seems surprised at being subjected to such treatment. The human brain is a kind of aristocratic headquarters that enjoys commanding the body to do the labour of convicts. The grey matter bathes pleasantly in spinal fluid while the carcass breaks its back working.
I scramble out of the hole after I suddenly have a vision of enormous catfish teeming in the waters, along with some of Baikal’s indigenous Epischura copepods seeking something to munch on. The lake is clean thanks to its scavengers.
11 MAY
I don’t miss a thing from my former life. I’m struck by this certainty while spreading honey on some blini. Not one thing. Nothing, nobody. It’s a worrying thought. Can a man so easily shed the clothing fitted to his thirty-eight years of life?11 When you organize your life around the idea of possessing nothing – then you have everything you need.
With my binoculars I spot a seal a good mile away. Drawing closer in an elaborate detour, I’m careful to keep the light behind me. Ice slabs from a breach in the ice about five yards across make a kind of floating bridge, and I keep my balance leaping from one to another. I’ve approached to within about a hundred yards of the seal when it vanishes, swallowed down by its hole in a brisk gulp.
This evening the little dogs spend two hours running after a wagtail that shows remarkable patience. After which, they squabble over a roe deer’s hoof.
12 MAY
A day at North Cedar Cape.
Look at the sky at six in the morning. Light the fire (murmuring a few nice words to it) and go out to draw water. Note that the thermometer says 28º F. Pour boiling tea on a blini and eat it. Look outside again – but through the smoke of the first cigarillo. Finish Promise at Dawn while eating some blueberries from Irina. Visit the four anthills that surround my cabin, all spaced about 300 yards apart, and check out the consolidation work underway. Use binoculars to search for the black dots of seals basking in the sun. Draw the oil lamp, trying to depict the transparency of the glass. Repair the knife sheath damaged during yesterday’s outing. Chop wood. Feed the dogs some catfish mush. Cook the evening’s kasha. Spend forty minutes at the nearest fishing hole catching the two fish that will accompany the kasha. Think about what this day m
ight have been if my dear one, the only person on this earth whom I miss even when she’s with me, had deigned to be here. Do not think about the reasons that led her not to come along. Get quietly drunk because of the impossibility of not thinking about the above. Rejoice at the coming of night that will hide the shit on my shitfaced face.
13 MAY
It’s raining and it’s cold and the cedar branches gleam and drip. Beauty will never save the world; it merely provides lovely settings in which men kill one another.
A grey silence has settled on the lake. What is this soft day brooding over? A last gasp from winter? No, spring is too far advanced. What’s lovely about the seasons is that each one politely hands over its charge. Not one of them lingers too long. Finally, at around five o’clock, something happens: the clouds part. Blue sky dissolves the cotton wool. The grey mass is breaking up and scarves of mist drape themselves around the taiga’s throat. Quick, a glass! May the vodka help me to better see the subtlety of these transformations! Oh, if I had some wine … Well, the Kedrovaya will do, after all. At the fifth shot, I understand what’s going on inside the clouds.
14 MAY
Time time time time time time time time time.
Hmm?
It passed!
15 MAY
The best way to kill the intensity of a moment is to feel obliged to catch it in a photo. I sit for an hour at the window while dawn churns out moments by the ton.
The cabin is the railway carriage in which I signed my armistice with time: I have made my peace with it. Letting it pass is simply common courtesy. From one window to the other, one glass to another, within the pages of a book, beneath closed eyelids, the main thing is to move aside to let it go on its way.
The grey wagtails are making their nest at the north-eastern corner of the roof. The dogs have given up trying to get them. Sitting at my table, I watch the ice die. The blanket of snow is in tatters. Water has seeped in everywhere, mottling the surface with black blotches. The lake is suffering, unaware that men sit at its bedside. I am one of many keeping vigil.
The day is marked by notes that measure out a solfeggio. The titmouse arrives at 8.00, the sunbeam hits the oilcloth at 9.30, the seals appear in the middle of the afternoon, the little dogs gambol about at twilight, the moon’s reflection blooms in the pail nightly: a perfect mechanism. These insignificant rendezvous are the immense events of life in the woods. I wait for them, hopefully. When they arrive, I recognize them, salute them. They prove to me that the poem respects its metre. The ancient Greeks watched for similar changes in the atmosphere: suddenly, something was going on, the god was appearing. This feeling of startlement before a ray of light: wisdom or senility? Happiness becomes this simple thing: waiting for something you know will happen. Time turns into the marvellous organizer of these appearances. In cities the opposite principle is at work: there we require a permanent efflorescence of fresh surprises. The fireworks of novelty constantly interrupt the flow of hours and illuminate the night with their fleeting bouquets. In a cabin, one lives to the rhythm of the metronome rather than the glitter of pyrotechnics.
The dogs content themselves with endless repetitions. As soon as the event begins to take shape, they drool with impatience. If the unexpected occurs, if a visitor arrives, they growl, bark, attack. The enemy? Novelty.
Sometimes revelations rise from the depths of our own being. Instead of quivering before the signals of the world, we sense an inner impulse, the birth of an idea, an overwhelming desire. Then we feel like a world in ourselves, where gods and demons are locked in battle.
It rains again this afternoon. The clouds blow in from the west and stagnate over the basin of the lake. Off on the Russian plain, the reserves of humidity are apparently inexhaustible. Cawing crows skim the surface of the water, raindrops hammer the shingles, and the taiga seems like an army biding its time. Nature is going through a depressive phase.
In my case, stuck here alive in my wooden coffin, the dreaded hours arrive with the evening. Ghosts and regrets take advantage of the twilight to slip into my heart, launching their operations just when the light fails, at seven o’clock. I need vodka to repel them. Inventory of supplies: I have twenty-two litres of Kedrovaya, three litres of pepper vodka, twelve Partagás, and five cartons of cigarillos (twenty to a box). Enough to fight the demons for a few months.
The courageous course would be to face things: my life, my times and other people. Nostalgia, melancholy, reverie – these give romantic souls the illusion of a virtuous escape route. They pass for aesthetic ways to stave off ugliness but are merely the cache-sexe of cowardice. What am I? Contemptible, frightened by the world, a recluse in a cabin off in the woods. A coward who silently soaks himself in alcohol to avoid witnessing the spectacle of his times or encountering his own conscience pacing up and down along the lakeshore.
16 MAY
Finally, the sky clears. I act like a Russian: for three or four days I’ve been waiting lethargically at the window, and with a bound, I rush outside, the dogs at my heels and three days’ worth of provisions in my backpack. That’s how the Russians cope: long days of inertia interspersed with periods of bustling activity. The ice is still holding up. I cut towards Middle Cedar Cape, intending to head up the valley that debouches there. I leap over the fissures, leaving ever greater margins of safety because the edges are getting thinner. I take refuge from a sudden downpour in the primeval forest that for millions of years has covered the alluvial plain of the river on which I’ve set my sights. My steps sink into the mosses. Ribbons of lichen loop like felt beneath the trees. The forest resembles the marshes of Walter Scott and the exotic undergrowth of The Lost World. The sun comes out to shoot its rays through the swirling fog. Birches line up in ivory aisles. The hardy Rhododendron dauricum gives off the smell of a very clean old lady, which stands out against the earthy odours of stumps clawed open by bears. The forest is full of its own breath. Confused by the profusion of scents, the dogs are beside themselves: Pandora’s box has been opened a crack, and these treasures have seeped out. The Siberian taiga is a cold jungle. The queen of the elves could appear with all her court, parting the curtains of lichen with her hand, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Behind a string of willows in a strangely straight line, I discover a ditch colonized by shrubs. Twenty years ago, a trail linked the camp of some geologists to the lake, and the base mentioned on the map is still here, at 2,300 feet: four derelict izbas and two rusted sheet-metal trailers sit among the saplings. To the north opens a double valley where the thalwegs – the line defining the lowest points along the length of a valley or river bed – are separated by a ridge of stone. I struggle on a scree slope cluttered with dwarf pines, whose branches, lying like a net across the stones, present a supple, impassive wall. I retreat down into the combe, put on my snowshoes, and climb to the base of the rocky ridge. At around 3,300 feet, a shelf seems suitable for a bivouac. A storm breaks out, dumping all the water in the sky on our terrace of schist and granite. I hide the ice axe and crampons a hundred yards below us. The lightning terrifies Aika and Bek, who huddle under a birch tree. I admire them, these little creatures who set off for the mountain happy to be alive, without provisions or plans to return.
I cut strips of dwarf pine to serve as flooring for the terrace, then spend three solid hours trying to light a fire with waterlogged wood. A few pages of Rameau’s Nephew finally catch. (Not the first time that Diderot has set something on fire.) An anaemic flame rises from a tiny pile of shredded bark, dried against my skin. Fire, a poor animal wounded by the storm; I make it grow twig by twig. The flame wavers … and I feel as if I were dealing with a cardiac arrest. The flame grows: victory. I blow
on it until I’m dizzy and obtain live coals. The dogs come to warm themselves in the flickering glow. Just when I’m setting up the tent, a fresh cloudburst. I retreat beneath my poorly stretched canvas as hail sparkles into thousands of diamonds during the nano-seconds of lightning. The tent bends, doesn’t collapse, gets drenched. While the tempest bedevils the mountain and my panel of nylon, I learn that Diderot liked to relax every evening in the mellow light of the Palais-Royal. The wind dies down, the storm passes, the stars come back out and, oh joy, the embers are still alive. I stoke the fire and lie down with an anti-bear flare wedged close to my head in case we have visitors. Aika and Bek are curled around each other in the Siberian night like the symbol of yin and yang.
17 MAY
The sun is already high in the sky. The little dogs welcome my awakening. They must be expecting some snack, but I’ve nothing except a bit of bread. It would be best if they returned to the cabin, but they won’t do that, and remain close to me. Dogs take us for their god and their mother, i.e. their master. I break camp and climb along the ridge for five hours. The dogs whine when they’re stopped by a ledge; Aika then finds a way around and guides her clumsier brother. The ridge line straightens out and at 5,250 feet I reach the layer of hardpack. Perched on a boulder, Aika and Bek contemplate the lake.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 13