15 JUNE
These rock flies flow down cliffs and tree trunks in silky streams. They are sacred manna. The month of June when the animals need all their vigour for love presents a problem in the cycle of life. How to bridge the gap between the awakening in May and the abundance of July? Nature has come up with – the flies. These poor insects serve as fodder destined to provide energy during a period of penury. In two weeks, their job done, they will vanish after a brief existence, sacrificed in the common biological interest. They don’t forget to live, though: at the slightest touch of sunlight, they go into Brownian motion, quivering with the lightest of vibrations, and mate. Their trembling reminds me of the shiver of a secret joy, and I like them so much that I almost sprain my ankles trying not to crush them on the rocky beaches.
16 JUNE
Everything has collapsed. On the satellite phone I save for emergencies and have not yet used to make any calls, five lines appear, more painful than a searing burn. The woman I love has dismissed me. She has lost interest in a man who’s like a straw in the wind. I’ve sinned through my flights, my evasions and this cabin.
After being gone for years, she came back to me when I was just leaving on that first assignment for Lake Baikal. Now she is leaving me, and I’m looking at those same shores. For three hours, I wander along the beach. I’ve let happiness fly away. Life should be nothing but this: giving constant thanks to fate for the slightest blessing. Being happy is knowing that you are.
It’s five in the afternoon. The pain comes in waves; at times I find some relief. I manage to feed the dogs, even to fish. But the ache always returns, with a life of its own: molten lead coursing through my being.
I dream about a little house in the suburbs with a dog, wife and children, protected by a row of fir trees. For all their narrowness, the bourgeoisie has nevertheless understood this essential thing: we must give ourselves the possibility of a minimum of happiness.
I’m condemned to stay in this dead end full of stupid ducks, face to face with my pain.
I have to marshal my strength to make it to the next hour. I bury myself in a book. As soon as I stop reading, I hear those five lines in the sat-phone message shrieking through my skull.
I close the book and cry into my dogs’ fur. I had no idea that fur soaks up tears so well. On human skin, tears slide away. Usually the dogs are capering all over at this hour; tonight, their heads hanging a little, they keep quiet under my miserable flood of weeping. I have only a flare gun with which to blow my brains out. And no guarantee of success. A seal appears above the waterline, just in front of the beach … I tell myself that it’s her, come to smile at me. I must manage to speak to her one last time. You’re always late to your own life; time doesn’t hand out second chances. Life can ride on one roll of the dice. And me, I hared off to the forest, leaving her behind.
I read until I’m worn out, because if my eyes look away from the page, the pain chokes me and forces me to get up. Tonight I keep hearing boats, but it’s the throbbing of my eyes.
17 JUNE
I’m padlocked into this Eden I made for myself. The sky is blue yet black. Strange how time withdraws its friendship from you. Just yesterday, it slipped by like satin. Now every second needles me.
To be thirty-eight years old and here, by a lake, crawling and asking a dog why women go away.
Without Aika and Bek, I’d be dead. This afternoon I chop wood from four-thirty to six-thirty until I can’t hold the axe any more. ‘Only the purest of heart can become murderous because of others,’ writes Jim Harrison in Dalva. The wave comes back. Tears are kept in check by reading. In films, wolves retreat before the flames of torches.
I scuttled the ship of my life and realized it when the water was up to the gunwales. Question: it’s seven o’clock; how do I make it to eight? It’s a lovely evening, with pompadour clouds that are a little silly, like those velvet tassels on old-lady curtains. The fish surface and kiss the wavelets, leaving circles that grow larger, fade away.
I scribble all day, writing anything at all so as not to feel pain. In my little black notebooks the people are full of memories, anecdotes, thoughts. I read The Stoics: there are things in their practices you can use to steel yourself, a first step towards consolation. I’d like to snuff out my pain in this forest that knows nothing of sorrow. Life everywhere: ducks, seals and a bear, in my binoculars, at the base of the hill where I like to rest. It’s the evening hour when everyone goes home and says a last thank-you to this latest day of life.
My body is compressed with suffering. Can the great pressures of grief provoke congestive heart failure?
The only hope on the horizon is the expected arrival tomorrow of Bertrand de Miollis and Olivier Desvaux, two painter friends who are travelling in Russia and have promised to visit me. Sergei is supposed to bring them here by boat. As it turns out, they’re arriving right when I’m as flat as a tar blotch on a beach.
I’ll say nothing to them, hide my tears, and use their presence to stay alive.
18 JUNE
Hang on. And to hang on, take strength from the infinite solidity of the little dogs. Nature is overjoyed at getting its hands on a new summer. At six in the evening, the sound of an engine rouses me from my stupor. A black dot to the south: my deliverance. I welcome Miollis and Desvaux like a benediction; they will distract me from my danse macabre. Sergei heads back without even tossing back a single glass, because the wind is rising. I sit the two painters down at the wooden table beside the lake and unpack all the provisions they’ve brought from Irkutsk: wine, beer, vodka, hard cheese. We get falling-down drunk. The alcohol takes its toll on our bodies, but at least it chases away all sorrow.
19 JUNE
The happiness lasts one second. There’s a pleasant moment upon awakening at dawn, just before consciousness remembers and the heartache begins again.
Since the apocalypse of 16 June, I’ve read two Shakespearean comedies, The Handbook of Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, José Giovanni’s The Adventurers and Eve, a psychological thriller by James Hadley Chase, the hero of which is a lousy creep whose character sucks the life out of everything and creates a desert around him. That guy is me. Guided by a mysterious impulse, my hand selected the books I needed to read. Marcus Aurelius helped me. Giovanni showed me the man I should have been; Chase showed me as I am. Books are more useful than psychoanalysis; they say everything, better than life does. In a cabin, mixed with solitude, they make a perfect lytic cocktail, gradually relieving the symptoms of acute disease.
The vodka hangover hangs us out to dry. Miollis and Desvaux emerge at noon, having slept on the cabin floor. To sweat out the poison, we set off on foot for the Lednaya and have lunch on one of the grassy shelves on the cliffs of the right bank. The dogs run around chasing ducks. All that joy!
Two easels planted on a beach before white-smocked painters, who compose their pictures with careful little brushstrokes. A couple of dogs lie at their feet in the pale mauve twilight of Siberia. It’s a classically peaceful scene, and I can’t take my eyes off my friends, who have been travelling through Siberia painting from nature in the purest tradition of the itinerant painters of Holy Russia. With the help of light and a dollop of time, they create space in two dimensions. I’m writing these lines while they put the finishing touches on their canvases. The cabin is beginning to look like an artist’s studio: a Villa Medici for muzhiks.
20 JUNE
At dawn, I pose, sitting at my work table. The two painters have set up their easels in the cabin. Miollis looks like a German troubadour and Desvaux, a Swiss shepherd. Desvaux is technically conservative, painstaking and generous, and he always pulls something off. Mi
ollis is more hit-and-miss, sometimes blowing his picture but occasionally coming up with a stunner. This morning they are painting a man with a crumpled heart. It’s easy to hide feelings. Constructed in haste by Russian government ministers out in the countryside (or so the story goes), ‘Potemkin villages’ were just façades restored and repainted on the fly to hide hovels and impress the ruler of Russia on a tour of inspection, who then went happily home to the palace.
Cheerful Miollis and gentle Desvaux distract me from my misery. Without them, grief would eat me up like a crab.
In one day my guests paint the cabin, the dogs, the beach. It takes as much nerve to try rendering the beauty of this place on canvas as it does to capture it in a few perfectly chosen words.
21 JUNE
This morning, a big ship passes well out on the lake. Ten minutes later the wake reaches the beach, carrying with it something of the world’s unpleasant intrusion onto my pristine little property.
The painters spend the day limning the flight of wild geese through the radiant heavens. They stand before their easels as if before a window that is waiting for them to invent its view.
I climb to the top of the crumbling butte to have lunch. Having reached the summit, my dogs gaze pensively at the lake, panting and drooling. Five days ago, these little creatures held out their paws and saved me from drowning.
At twilight, fishing. Desvaux catches dinner for three people and two dogs. His silhouette stands out against the great ash tree that leans over the water at the point of the cape. Unwilling to come down from the heights, the light clings to the spurs of the cliffs. A flash of silver at the end of the line: the lake is giving up its treasures. Writing, painting, fishing: three ways of paying one’s respects to time.
22 JUNE
Pollen has fallen on the lake and hems the beaches with bright yellow ribbons. Dead butterflies drift on the waters. Seals keep surfacing to stare at the shore, checking to see that the world is still in its place and that they’ve done well to dwell in the depths.
Not a sound, not one noise, just the odd butterfly.
‘Silence, the ornament of sacred solitudes’ (Life of Rancé).
Miollis and Desvaux go from painting to painting, offerings in harmony with the genius loci. The infinite superiority of a painting over a photograph. A snapshot immobilizes a precise moment in time and stakes it out in two dimensions. (Primitive peoples were not entirely wrong to see photos as thefts.) A painting offers a historical interpretation of a moment that will live a long time in the eye of those who contemplate it, and, as a work that does not interrupt the flow of time, its very confection is fluid, inscribed in a long period of composition.
23 JUNE
Shortly before dawn, we head out for a six-hour trek along the shore.
Miollis and Desvaux are returning to Irkutsk and must take a boat setting out this morning from Zavorotni, a fifteen-mile hike from the cabin. We look like three Jewish painters fleeing along the Vistula with all our art impedimenta crammed into beggars’ bags. We’re bent double under enormous backpacks stuffed with fifty-odd pounds of gouache paints and mediums in tubes, an encyclopaedia of Russian painting, and the easels on top. At Middle Cedar Cape, we salute the hermit’s ghost. Near the pond by the derelict cabin we find the carcass of a bear. Leaning against an immense ash tree at South Cedar Cape, an anthill teems with life: millions of skeletons busily build themselves a body. Barnacle geese speed north fast enough to dislocate their necks. I waste some time trying to find the old geologists’ path V.E. told me about that runs along some 500 feet above the lake, but the trail has been invaded by saplings that make walking even more difficult than on the stones of the lakeshore.
At Zavorotni, Miollis and Desvaux leap onto the boat, whose diesel engines we had heard warming up a good hour before arriving at the dock. We’ve barely time to shake hands. I like this kind of farewell, it’s like taking a tumble.
That evening, Sergei, sad-eyed Yura and Sasha of the missing fingers arrive in Zavorotni by boat. We prepare a feast of smoked fish, nalim12 liver, caviar with wild onion and grilled venison. Sasha pours us his homemade rotgut. These Russians have a way of tossing back their drinks and grabbing hunks of meat that displays their pride in bypassing all commercial resources. They live exclusively off the forest, and taking what you need from the woods guarantees contentment. Such men operate autonomously in the order of things, but remain bound to the traditions of their fathers, and they are worlds away from the free-thinkers who have thrown off all ties to God and princes but depend on cities and their services for food, warmth and transport. Who is right? The autarkic muzhik who commends his soul to heaven but never sets foot in a store? Or the modern atheist, liberated from all spiritual corsetry, but forced to live on the tit of the system and obey all injunctions imposed by life in society? Must one kill God but submit to legislators, or live free in the forest while still fearing the spirits? Practical and material autonomy doesn’t seem a less noble achievement than spiritual and intellectual autonomy. In On Democracy in America, in the chapter ‘What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear’, Tocqueville writes: ‘One forgets that it is above all in the details that it proves dangerous to enslave men. For my part I would be inclined to believe liberty less necessary in great things than in the lesser ones.’ This evening, emptying bottles with the woodsmen of the taiga, I take sides. For the gods, princes and beasts, and against the penal code.
‘We’re taking you home!’ exclaims Sergei suddenly. And we throw ourselves into an activity at which Russians excel: raising a toast, breaking camp in a hurry, tossing baggage into a boat and taking off full speed for no matter where. No matter where – as long as the wind blows, the world is pitching and rolling, and inebriation carries the day with the promise of finding something new at the end of the journey.
There’s nowhere more propitious for meditation than an aluminium boat en route across a fog-shrouded lake. Sometimes the edge of a cliff manages to tear the curtain of mist; sections of shore appear and melt away again. I hate manifestations. Except when they are revelations of beauty. Our journey resembles thought: the mind proceeds through cotton wadding until a sudden breakthrough permits a glimpse of something. Floating in formlessness, we see the light and can put a name to the shadows.
Sergei cuts the engine and we down a glass in the humid silence. We’ve been drinking for hours and are soused. Sprawled over the gas cans and fishing nets, sucking on my cigarette, heading through fog in a boat with a drunken captain, I feel reassured. Having lost my lover, I have nothing more to lose. Misfortune casts off ties. Happiness is an obstacle to serenity. When I was happy, I was afraid of unhappiness.
24 JUNE
Throughout Midsummer Day, the sky puts on a superb show. The foehn, that warm, dry wind arising in the lee of a mountain range, caps the summits with clouds and covers the forest with mist as gently as if veiling the amours of shameless animals.
In the hammock, I study the shapes of the clouds. Contemplation is what clever people call laziness to justify it in the eyes of the supercilious, who watch to ensure that we all ‘find our place in an active society’.
25 JUNE
Another day of looking at the sky. Swarms of insects in the gold-dust sunlight. Later, a salmon-coloured moon swims up the current of the night to go lay its single monstrous egg in a nest of clouds. Simply put: there’s a full and blood-red moon.
26 JUNE
The wrenching sight of drowned butterflies, hundreds of them floating on the lake, some of them still strong enough to struggle. I transform my kayak into a rescue patrol boat and delicately collect the insects one by one. Poor sky flowers fallen on the field of honour … So
on thirty butterflies decorate my blue boat with limp stars. I’m the captain of an ark for Hymenoptera.
27 JUNE
I reach Elohin, with the wind at my back. Stormy weather is on the way, dashing all hopes of sun. Elohin takes on its dismal outpost look. I have an appointment with Mikhail Hippolitov, a reserve inspector who has promised to take me along on his visit to a cabin a day’s march beyond the peaks. At noon, in a high wind, bowlegged under the weight of fifty-some pounds of vodka and canned goods, I toil along behind Hippolitov as he trots over the taiga. We ascend the forested slopes above the promontory of Elohin. Hippolitov takes off like a cannonball, slows, announces brief halts, leaps to his feet, and winds up 650 feet above me. Below the pass, at 4,265 feet, pummelled by gusts of rain, my friend requires tea. The situation becomes very Russian: lying beneath low-hanging pine branches, we wait for our tiny fire to heat a pint of water amid the slabs of schist.
Two saddles covered with graphite pebbles open in the ridge, allowing access to a high, marshy plateau. The wind rises, and we wait out a violent squall, huddling behind a rocky projection. It’s a voluptuous feeling, walking for miles over springy lichen. You’d almost dream of becoming a herbivore. Partridges squawk at our passing. Centuries of wind have shaped the dwarf pines into labyrinths as tangled as viscera. Strands of moss drip from trees. In the boggy areas, gravity has weighed more heavily on the vegetation than any tropism towards the sky. Crossing into a valley we find a 1,000-year-old cedar that goes back before the time of the Mongols. We pass forests of firs, crystalline streams, mountain ‘shelves’ infested with insects, and sloughs where our boots sink deeply into the mud. 54º 36.106´N / 108º 34.491´E brings us to Hippolitov’s cabin, built two years earlier right on the border of the nature reserve. It’s ten feet by ten feet, a haven constructed on the flank of a valley through which winds a river. A conical mountain bristling with evergreens forms the horizon. Wild onion, rhubarb and bear’s garlic grow plentifully nearby, well guarded by swarms of mosquitoes. It’s the kind of place I like: an area apart, where the evening light falls more softly than elsewhere, as if from pity.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 17