As the prow approaches, the ducks barely manage to lift off. I can paddle up to them without frightening them at all. I beach the kayak on a sandy shore where a torrent falls frothing into the lake. A storm chases me under a cedar, where the dogs rejoin me. The lake is like coal-black flannel pricked by a deluge of needles. In five minutes, the sky clears. Beneath the rainbow, wearing waders, I fish in the current. Ducks brush past me. Shafts of sunshine dab the forest with blond highlights. There is a perfect equilibrium in this distribution of roles played by the mountain, the creatures, the water and the shore.
As if they’d had an appointment, the fish suddenly start biting. In twenty minutes, I catch six char. While the light exhausts itself making holes in the clouds, I lie down on the beach in front of a wood fire, the dogs at my side, the kayak drawn halfway up on shore and, listening to the music of the waves, I watch my fish grill on skewers of green wood, and I think that life ought always to be like this: a homage rendered by humanity to the dreams of childhood. I struggle against the temptation to take a picture.
The sun, as usual, decides to fling its last light over Buryatia.
6 JUNE
Last night, suffering from insomnia, I went out onto the beach with my flare guns. The moon is waning. She’ll be back. Of that we can be sure. You’re better off betting on satellites than on messiahs. In the morning, the air is as joyous and flighty as a Dufy painting. The sound of the waves has invaded my life. The swell on the lake is a song of freedom.
From the top of the talus, the trunks of the pines and cedars frame slabs of flat turquoise down on the lake. A long promenade by the azure shore.
The kayak: the shuttle of a loom, plying back and forth on the warp of Baikalian silks.
After paddling around to correct the defective rudder, I pitch my hammock in the clearing. Looking out, I see the watery plain the heavens use as a mirror to try out different tints of light. ‘I felt a peculiar emotion, observing with what detailed precision earthly things gave refuge to the colours of the sky’ (Mishima, The Golden Pavilion). I read a few of Cicero’s letters. The hermit, without access to the news of the day, owes it to himself to be up-to-date on the doings of ancient Rome. In The Thousand and One Nights, amid the palms and the opulence, this sentence strikes an unpleasant note: ‘This generosity you’re putting on for me here must surely have a purpose.’ I prefer this homage to gratuity in Gilles, Drieu La Rochelle’s novel about the education of a French fascist between the two world wars: ‘The less direction his life had, the more sense it made.’
7 JUNE
I’m writing at the wooden table; the dogs are sleeping on the warm sand. Everything is quiet, intense and luminous.
At the edge of the beach, anemones in bloom. Bees and wasps are drinking themselves silly there. Why didn’t God, in His infinite wisdom, decree that man would simply and credulously believe in Him, without any fuss or questions? To have invented that perfectly inexplicable thing, the fertilization of flowers by Hymenoptera, and to have forgotten to leave tangible signs of His existence? Gross negligence!
8 JUNE
Barking! I’m up in a flash. In the distance, the sound of an approaching motor. It’s five a.m. and a boat is coming from the south. Through the binoculars I recognize one of Sergei’s small aluminium craft. Fifteen minutes later, he lands in the company of sad-eyed Yura. The tea kettle is on and I’ve set yesterday’s blini out on the table. When they come in, I’m seated and everything is in order. Sergei can’t get over it and talks about ‘the discipline of people who read’. Now there’s something that polishes France’s reputation on the cheap! The cabin sparkles like a Prussian guard post. Sergei hasn’t caught on that, without the dogs, I’d still be snoring.
I must have been an innkeeper in a previous life; I serve my guests with an eagerness tinged with irritation: an impromptu visit is a disturbance as well as a delight. The two men left Pokoyniki yesterday evening, zigzagged among the islands of rubble ice, and are heading for Elohin. This year they are the first to navigate the lake after the débâcle in May. Sergei treats me to a chronicle of the treachery and rancour displayed by the inspectors of the guard posts. The critical theory of the desiccation of the human soul by modernity – formulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jacques Ellul and later taken up by Julien Coupat and others nostalgic for the bonds of community – does not hold up. It isn’t crowding in the urban park that breeds nastiness, nor is it the stress provoked by market pressures that transforms men into snarling rats, nor is it the mirror-image rivalry of living cheek-by-jowl that ‘commands brothers to hate one another’ (Coupat in Tiqqun). At Baikal, separated by dozens of miles of shoreline, living among the wonders of the woods, men tear one another apart like next-door apartment-house neighbours in a vulgar megalopolis. Change the venue, and the nature of the ‘brothers’ will stay the same. The peacefulness of the setting won’t mean a thing. Man can’t remake himself in a different image.
Sergei pays me the best compliment of my life: ‘Your presence here puts off the poachers. You’ll have saved four or five bears.’ We lubricate these courtesies with a bottle of vodka. Yura, feeling unsociable, says nothing, doesn’t drink, and hangs back, now and then dispatching an onion or a smoked fish. The two men take off for Elohin where they have things to do and we arrange to meet that evening at Zavorotni, where they’ll be spending the night.
We’ve emptied the bottle, but fifteen miles in a kayak will put paid to any migraine. I paddle slowly, dawdling in the bays. I move at an otter’s pace and the prow slices through hours of silence. Bek and Aika are a little black dot and a little white dot at the mouths of the torrents. A marsh-hawk studies me from the top of an ash tree. The mergansers cackle. I cut across the capes a little over a mile from their shores. Six hours later, Zavorotni. Sergei, Yura and a few fishermen are sitting by a fire in front of the large izba belonging to their friend V.M.
The lake is falling asleep, the animals calm. Until three in the morning, we feed the fire, swallow smoked fish, and empty bottles. I would have liked to collapse in the warmth of a cabin. Russia has taught me never to count on the slightest respite after any effort, and always to be prepared to trash myself with vodka after having worn myself out mile after mile.
One of the fishermen, Igor, can’t hold his liquor. He gives off in sobs what he absorbs in ethanol and collapses in my arms blubbering over the child that isn’t on the way. I’ll remember all my life his big tears in a night still echoing with the cries of seagulls. He and his wife have consulted a shaman specializing in fertility and now want to go and stay in Tibetan temples where the power of bodhisattvas could make them fruitful. I don’t dare console him by pointing out that the human anthill is about to explode. And that the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described our billions of humans as meal worms in an overcrowded habitat in which we’re killing ourselves with our own toxins. And that the old master, worried about the demographic pressures now afflicting the Earth, had forbidden himself to make ‘any prediction about the future’ – he who’d been born in a world six times less densely populated. And that in his play The Dead Queen, the novelist and playwright Montherlant put these words in the mouth of the king when he discovers that his daughter-in-law is pregnant: ‘My God, will it never end?’ And that tossing an infant into the lions’ cage is not, perhaps, the wisest thing to do. And that the desire to be a father is easily thwarted by maintaining a small fund of pessimism.
9 JUNE
I’d brought along Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé, about the founder of the Trappists, and I’d planned on spending a pleasant day at Zavorotni with this master of the hermit’s way of life, but feeling guilty about leaving the sun to go on its way
alone, I wound up parading my hangover in the noonday sun on the schist slag of the abandoned mine here. Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘free men’ gutted the mountain in search of microcrystalline quartzite, leaving behind what is known in Russia as a ‘serpentine’, an eighteenth-century French word for a road with hairpin turns. This one is littered with the carcasses of engines and caterpillar excavators. My clothes are in rags, my hair is every which way, I’ve got booze breath and jaundiced eyes, and even the dogs look pitiful, done in by yesterday’s marathon. We all three collapse at regular intervals along the road to recharge ourselves in the sunshine. At an elevation of 3,280 feet, we reach the break in the slope created by the umbilical edge of a glacier long ago. The amphitheatre chewed from the mountain by machines has the dreary look common to all derelict mines. I climb to 6,560 feet, spitting out the scoria of my long night. Up there, the view of the hidden part of the lake is an invitation to adventure. Life is about moving forward, and there’s defeat in retracing one’s steps. We stagger back down through the couloirs of soft snow. Our bodies didn’t need to climb up almost 5,000 feet of crappy roadway today. I ought to have read Chateaubriand while drinking black tea and admiring the ballet of eiders whipping up the good black cream of the lake.
At ten this evening, surrounded by his dogs, V.E. serves me supper in his home, which is more like a kennel than an izba. The floor is sticky with grease, and the stove features huge simmering vats of seal offal and trimmings from elk quarters: dog food. It looks like an athanor, the furnace of an alchemist in eighth-century Lotharingia.
‘So, the mine?’ asks V.E.
‘Very pretty, up there,’ I reply.
‘The dogs?’
‘They followed me, the scamps.’
‘Before, this village was alive, we had a little restaurant. Today, a ruin.’
‘Tovarich, you’re pining for the Soviet Union.’
‘No: nostalgia is pining only for your youth.’
10 JUNE
V.E. serves me braised seal for breakfast. This meat is a nuclear explosion in the mouth that sends its strength all through the body.
‘Comrade,’ I announce, ‘give me some seal, hand me a tank, and leave Poland to me!’
‘That’s not a Russian proverb.’
‘It could be.’
‘Yeah.’
For the moment my friend is feeding his ten dogs with the ingenuity of a wrestler. He has to invade the barking heap with his pail and hurl the rations into the pans while beating back the onslaught of the dogs. Mine are pretty much holding their own in the mêlée. Whoever doesn’t fight doesn’t eat.
On the trip home, I bless the seal meat for giving me its strength. A contrary wind and a heavy chop cost me seven hours of effort to cover about fifteen miles. The dogs wait up for me with short siestas on the smooth boulders. My muscles are in shreds. Dehydration probably has something to do with it. Russia makes its drunks live like athletes. The shore creeps along. Seals keep popping up.
I take a break: a nap ashore with the dogs on the warm rocks, near a fire hot enough to drive spiders from their lairs.
At five I land on my beach just when a trawler arrives to nudge its steel prow among the rocks. The captain asks me if a couple of Dutch passengers may come ashore for a moment.
Erwin works on Sakhalin Island for an oil company. His wife speaks perfect French. The two children are sunburned and better behaved than my dogs. The cabin must seem like a dream to them: Snow White’s cottage, and in it, one of the seven dwarfs. We drink tea in a very civilized way, standing on the beach. They stay fifteen minutes and take a photo, which you would do if you weren’t staying six months.
At the top of the gangplank, Erwin calls out: ‘I’ve got a Herald Tribune, want it?’
‘Sure!’
‘It’s last week’s.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
He tosses me the paper and it occurs to me that it’s well worth having lived thirty-eight years to have a Batavian guy on a Russian fishing boat deliver the Herald Tribune to me out in the taiga.
The news: little Afghan girls abused by their relatives, then repudiated by their mothers. Women whipped by mullahs (photo). Iraqi Shiites blowing up Sunnis along with a few of their own in the process because homemade IEDs are tricky (photo). The Turks recall their diplomats from Israel (commentary). Iranian atomic scientists crowing over making great strides with their programmes. By page four, I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind staying a few months more out here. The newsprint of the Herald works quite nicely to wrap Siberian fish.
11 JUNE
Rancé is the St Anthony of the temperate latitudes. One of God’s fools minus the sand dunes and scorpions. It’s the seventeenth century: a man of wealth and distinction decides to die to the world. At the age of thirty-seven, he sets a new course for the wilderness ‘without memory and without resentment’. Chateaubriand paints a frightening portrait of Rancé. Giving no warning, he leaves his gilded halls, renouncing his aristocratic life for one of penitence. Taking the Gospels literally, he pays his debt to the poor and then, in the hills of Perche in northern France, founds l’ordre de La Trappe, a congregation of deadly serious discipline, a ‘Christian Sparta’. In his retreat, he prays, writes, meditates and mortifies his sick body. He will live thirty-seven more years in solitude, crippled by suffering, cloistered in the ‘desolation’ of stones. Thirty-seven years of pleasure against thirty-seven years of silence: a loan redeemed. With the maniacal exactitude of an accountant, Rancé will repay the debt he owed the devil, drawing ‘his last strength from his first weakness’. In a letter to the Bishop of Tournai, he sums everything up: ‘We live to die.’
Rancé’s flight fascinates and repels me in equal measure. His extremism dazzles me, his motive shocks and disgusts me. In the abbé’s anxieties, there is something of the feverish child who exclaims to the heavens: ‘I want the absolute and I want it now!’
The impulsive impatience is superb, but the fire is morbid, devouring everything that lies outside an expectation of the afterlife. Out on the taiga, I would rather gather up moments of felicity than intoxicate myself with the absolute. The scent of azaleas delights me more than that of incense. I beam at fresh blossoms instead of at a silent sky. As for the rest – simplicity, austerity, oblivion, renunciation and indifference to comfort – I admire and willingly imitate that.
12 JUNE
This morning, fog. The world wiped out. It’s weather for water sprites. When the cottony mist dissipates, I set out to fish the river at North Cedar Cape. Fishing: you gain a fish but lose some time. Worth it?
I let the flies drift along the current and keep them suspended in the water, about four or five feet below the surface, where the fish gather to glean the nutritious outfall from the rivers. The thrill when the cork takes a dive: dinner will be served! When I kill a char, shivers run over its skin as life leaves in electrical discharges. The skin then loses its lustre. Life is what gives us colour.
13 JUNE
In Life of Rancé, this quotation from the Elegies of Tibullus: ‘How sweet it is while lying in bed to hear fierce winds.’ The wind rampages all day long and I read my Tibullus.
14 JUNE
The lashing surf has washed the rocks. I advance carefully, trying not to slip. The dogs are afraid of the waves, which have teeth so they can bite the earth. The points of the capes are hidden by flying foam. The wind is still carrying on in the dark forest; the taiga crackles. The occasional gull shoots by. Millions of flies have hatched out on the shingle, covering entire sections of beach. The dogs lick them up. The flies live only a week and the animals love them: free protein and easy pickings. The sand
is starred with plantigrade tracks: flat-footed bears have come down to the feast.
The dogs can’t manage to cross the River Lednaya. Aika has jumped onto a rock in the middle of the current and waits for me to come wading through the churning water to get her. Bek wails pitifully, convinced that we’re plotting to desert him. I cross again to ferry him over on my shoulders. To get past the abrupt shoreline north of the river, I go up onto slopes littered from landslides. These cliffs and their way of murmuring: ‘Hey sweetie, come on over here …’ The wind’s nasty humour gives me wings.
I reach my goal: a cascading torrent of a river almost two miles north of the Lednaya. A good spot for fish but three hours away. The dogs nose around for a moment, then go to sleep under the awnings of the rhododendrons. I admire the ease with which they collapse at the slightest respite. My new motto: in all things, do as a dog does! Bionics takes its inspiration from biology and applies it to technology. We need a school of ethobionics that would use animal behaviour to guide our actions. At the moment of decision, instead of seeking counsel from our heroes – what would Marcus Aurelius, Lancelot or Geronimo have done? – we would ask ourselves: ‘And now, what would my dog decide? Or a horse? Or a tiger? Or even an oyster (a model of placidity)?’ Bestiaries would provide our rules of conduct. Ethology – the scientific study of animal behaviour – would become a moral science. I interrupt my reverie when a char pulls my cork down after him. This evening I bring four fish back to the cabin. And I wolf them down, because that’s what animals do.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 16