Mikhail plays the host: a salad of wild greens dressed with mayonnaise, along with pepper vodka and lard soup. From my pack I pull a three-litre bottle of beer that we drink dry before it even has a chance to go pffft.
28 JUNE
We walk up a valley clotted with vegetation. And we’re staggering like two drunks who’ve decided to climb a mountain pass after hitting a bar. Every step is a triumph over a cascade of stones, a tangle of roots or a mini-quagmire. The river flows on indifferently, having a long way to go before reaching the Arctic Ocean via the Lena. At 4,000 feet, the forest leaves the task of masking the rocks to the dwarf pines. Faithful to the Russian principle whereby there can be no excuse – not war, not exodus – for skipping teatime, we spend an hour coaxing fire from a few soaking-wet twigs.
Stretched out in a puddle, sipping tepid water in the rain, we have a pleasant conversation.
‘Your books are translated?’
‘A few of them.’
‘Into what?’
‘Finnish, Italian, German.’
‘Russian?’
‘No.’
‘That figures; we’re still a primitive people.’
We have to force our way through clumps of flowering rhododendrons. The pass turns out to feature a small swamp. The rain falls harder. Hippolitov suggests that we turn around, but I don’t see myself scramming back through the algal forest to spend the rest of the day in a soggy sleeping bag. We climb slopes that lead to a plateau of ‘endemic tundra’. The lichen here is springier than a nouveau riche Muscovite’s wall-to-wall carpet. Four wild reindeer graze near some old snow and we try to skulk Comanche-like around them. A hundred yards from the animals, hidden by a rhododendron, we realize that we are not the only skulkers: a brown bear is making an approach and, spotting us, freezes. The impression of competing with a bear at feeding time is not enjoyable. I get my flare gun ready and Hippolitov loads his rifle. The sharp sound of the breech startles the reindeer, which scatter, and the bear must be cursing us but never moves a muscle. Until he stands up on his hind legs. We have to wait a few seconds to find out whether he’ll about-face or charge us. That day, no need to shoot: we stare a long time at the gentle undulation, showing over the bushes, of fur in flight.
It takes us two hours to relocate the tributary along which we descended yesterday. Hippolitov has a plan. A year ago, he brought a cast-iron stove that far and would like me to get it the rest of the way to his cabin. Which costs me another two hours of fun carrying sixty-five pounds of stove, two lower corners of which dig into my back while two upper ones catch on branches, provoking with each step a truly bracing flood of chilly water. I must look like those Himalayan porters who cart the most incongruous objects through the Nepalese jungles: leather trunks, mahogany gramophones, tubs for the officers’ baths …
29 JUNE
If I’m ever launched in a space capsule, I’ll already know what it’s like to spend an entire day lying on a cot next to a galactic travelling companion. I’d brought along Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, which I would not recommend to anyone confined to a cabin by rain. Hippolitov’s little radio sputters a constant stream of pop songs and information about the 1941–45 war. Rain falls from a sky utterly lacking in imagination.
‘Mikhail.’
‘What?’
‘We’re not having any luck with the rain.’
‘But it means fewer mosquitoes.’
‘There’s that.’
Hippolitov has forgotten his book back in Elohin and stares haggardly at the ceiling as though it were about to start showing a marvellous movie. At four in the afternoon, in a burst of feverish activity, we replace the old stove with the new one, and in the fine warmth it gives off, we dispatch three little glasses of vodka in the traditional salute to ‘the first smoke’. At six, the rain slows to drizzle and we set out to climb the pyramidal peak on the eastern edge of the valley. The rain returns as we get under way. The lichen curtains are liquid veils. The mosses swallow our boots. The mosquitoes can’t find space to fly in. It takes us an hour to ascend the 1,000 feet of uneven terrain crowned with 300-year-old cedars. The trees look like ruins. Around the edges of what was once a bear’s den, the little wine-coloured bells of wild orchids bring a touch of joy to that world.
I’m awakened in the night by a mouse that’s got into my sleeping bag, which isn’t as scary as a spider – nor as nice as a Kirov ballerina.
30 JUNE
On the streets of Irkutsk, Hippolitov would pass for a proper family man with greying hair and a staid, orderly life. Every year he spends a few months in the forest, alone, visiting his six cabins strung along a line seventy miles long, and reconnecting with that conviction certain Russians have that city life must be only an interlude to life in the woods.
We head back. It’s still raining. The spellbound bushes seem to be dreaming of Thailand. With my hood pulled tight, I recall my climbs in the fragrant limestone hills of Provence. Walking in the rain, a factory for memories.
In tropical jungles, heat and humidity foster a profusion of life, but growth in the taiga doesn’t benefit from such a biological incubator. Whereas the hot jungle is in constant production, the taiga preserves. Here plant growth is slow, but decomposition doesn’t clear out the understorey as quickly as it does in the lower latitudes. A Siberian cedar can take years to rot. In both cases, vegetable chaos encumbers the ground, the result of tropical exuberance elsewhere, and of biostasis here. The cold jungle is a plant museum; the hot jungle, a chlorophyllian laboratory.
In Elohin, my little dogs are waiting, and I have lunch with Volodya, Irina and Hippolitov: blini with char caviar. There’s never enough caviar. But much too much vodka.
Then, scooping into the coffee-coloured lake, I row home.
JULY
Peace
1 JULY
A day of fishing. A piscivore, drawing nourishment from a lake, undergoes a psycho-physiological transformation. His cells feed on phosphorus, and his character absorbs the essence of the fish. What he loses in red-blooded strength he gains in placidity, taciturnity, dexterity, competence, and restraint.
I catch eight char. The frightened eyes of fish, as if they’d seen forbidden things.
Aika and Bek steal three of my catch. I can’t even bring myself to scold them. If I were raising kids, they’d wind up juvenile delinquents.
2 JULY
The air is loaded with bugs. A rumbling hum begins with the first glimmers of light and never falters until nighttime. Beetles crawl along the beams in the cabin, and the capricorn beetles show a particular fondness for my shelves. Gadflies with nightmarish eyes torment the dogs. If these insects weighed ten or twenty pounds, as they did in the Carboniferous period, we’d be a lot less full of ourselves.
3 JULY
Spring, the opening of the floodgates.
The waterfall is flowing free again.
Atop the 160-foot rock wall, water escapes via even the slightest gulley, covering the schist with rushing white streamers. Thanks to some acrobatics along a winding mountain track that cuts its way up to the summit, I reach the head of the falls, and the vertiginous vision of this clear mountain cascade plunging into the void.
In the evening, the dogs fight. Their jaws snap like the clashing of sabres. This grey beach: could there ever be a more beautiful place in which to witness a samurai battle, or wander in search of a word, or recite a poem? I live at the edge of a wood, before a vast plain of water, on the rim of a submerged cliff line rooted 5,000 feet underwater and rising 6,500 feet into the sky. All these spaces meet at the cabin.
4 JULY
Luxury? Twenty-four hours at my complete di
sposal each and every day, for the fulfilment of my slightest desire. The hours are tall girls of shining white standing in the sunlight to serve me. If I want to spend two days on my cot reading a novel, who’s to stop me? If I feel like taking off at twilight into the forest, who will dissuade me? The solitary woodsman has two loves, time and space. The first he uses as he pleases; the second he knows through and through.
I stay in my hammock in the broiling sun (72º Fahrenheit!). When I write on the beach, the dogs amble over to flop down at my feet: the Baikalian version of an Irish-country-house spaniel, dozing while his mistress reads.
Long wisps of mist are drifting seductively across the lake.
5 JULY
The insects react with the sensitivity of a seismograph to the faintest rise in temperature. As soon as the air reaches 37º F they hatch by the millions and churn the air in frenzied flight. The copulation of the capricorn beetles: the antennae touch lightly and the insects make love in statuesque immobility. I wouldn’t mind the visit of a young female Slovenian entomologist interested in studying this phenomenon. The ducks, well, they evoke the stability of the bourgeois ménage, gliding in their Sunday best, two by two, nodding discreetly to the other couples …
The world that I inhabit every day, from the clearing to the water’s edge, conceals treasures. In the grass, under the sand, armies are on the move. Their soldiers are jewels. They wear varnished armour, golden carapaces, malachite tunics or striped livery. Walking at North Cedar Cape, I never suspect that I’m treading on gems, cameos, diamonds. Some of them spring from the imagination of a Jugendstil jeweller, inspired by nature’s wonders and collaborating with a Faustian alchemist to bring brooches and enamels to life as they emerge from the oven.
Respecting insects brings joy. Taking a passionate interest in the infinitely small helps guard against an infinitely mediocre life. For the insect lover, a puddle can be Lake Tanganyika, a pile of sand takes on the aspect of the Taklamakan Desert, and a patch of brush becomes the Mato Grosso Plateau. Entering the geography of the insect gives grass the dimensions of a world.
6 JULY
When the lake is as slick as oil, the reflection is so pure that you could misread which half of the mirror image is which. My paddles send their echo cleanly to the forest. The reflection is the echo of the image; the echo is the image of the sound.
I catch a six-and-a-half-pound char. I read Bachelard’s philosophical reverie, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, by my own fire. A mist straight out of a Japanese print invades the shore, ‘beautiful like the ineffable, changeable like a dream, fleeting like love’ (Bachelard).
7 JULY
Insomnia. Regrets and discouragement are dancing a witches’ Sabbath in my skull. Sunrise shoos away the bats at 4.30 and I fall asleep at last.
Is it fatigue? When I get up at noon, I’m floating in a gentle daze. The prospect of happiness: a day that will bring me nothing new. No one on the horizon, no task to accomplish, no need to satisfy, no greeting to return. Eventually a few evening reverences to the seal and a squadron of eiders.
The cabin is a sidestep, where one can step aside. The haven of emptiness where no one is forced to react to everything. How to measure the comfort of these days free of all obligation to answer questions? I can now perceive the aggressive character of a conversation. Claiming to be interested in you, an interlocutor shatters the halo of silence, invades the shore of time, and calls upon you to answer his questions. All dialogue is a battle.
Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: ‘One must avoid chance, outside excitation, as much as possible; walling oneself up, so to speak, is an act of instinctive elementary wisdom, a part of intellectual gestation. Shall I permit an alien thought to secretly scale that wall?’ Further on, Nietzsche speaks in praise of impassive lethargy: ‘I see my future – a vast future – as a smooth sea: not a single wish disturbs the surface. Not for anything in the world would I want things to be different from what they are; as for me, I do not want to be different from what I am.’
Through some mystery, I stripped myself of all desire at the very moment when I was winning the maximum of freedom. I feel lacustrine landscapes developing in my heart. I have awakened the old Chinese hermit within me.
8 JULY
In the evening, I build a fire on the shore and grill my fish there.
The evening is the dying of a dream. All the elements of a Romantic era reverie take their places before my front-row seat at around eight o’clock: still waters, swirls of mist, pastel-tinted eddies, birds skimming in low to their nests. Nature flirts with kitsch without ever falling into it.
Today, struck by Nietzsche’s warning in Ecce Homo, I’m leaving the books alone: ‘I’ve seen this with my own eyes: gifted and rich natures “inclined toward freedom” who have “read themselves to death” by the time they are thirty, mere matches now, which must be struck to give off sparks – their “thoughts.”’ Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes with tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings. Volume after volume, the reader settles for recognizing the expression of thoughts he was ‘working on’ intuitively. Reading is reduced to either discovering the formulation of ideas that had been floating around in one’s mind, or to the simple knitting together of connections among the works of hundreds of authors.
Nietzsche describes poor exhausted souls who can no longer manage to think unless they ‘look it up’. Only the squeeze of lemon can awaken the oyster.
Hence the appeal of those people who see the world with eyes free of all reference, for whom memories of reading never come between them and the substance of things.
There was once a girl in my life who knew how to forget what she had read and who felt devotion for all forms of life. In southern France, we crossed the Camargue, the largest river delta in Western Europe. We rowed through the salt marshes, along canals, across lagoons. Flights of flamingoes sailed through the sunset. We camped out at night with hordes of mosquitoes that I would squash, bombarding them with chemicals. She said she loved them: ‘They bite, but to each his own, and besides, they keep men away from infested places so that the other animals can live there in peace.’ Twenty-two days ago, she left me.
My friends Thomas Goisque and Bernard Hermann arrive at twilight in Sergei’s boat, and in the tradition of North Cedar Cape, we all get drunk on the beach, toasting lost loves and renewed friendships. Goisque is here on assignment for a magazine. Hermann has come to do what for decades has been the focus of his life as a Zen sage: the contemplation of shifting light on the skin of the world. He looks like a colonel in the Indian Army: white cotton jacket, tortoiseshell glasses. His blond moustache and the ‘Pugachev’s Rebellion’ look in his eye lead Russians to take him for a Don Cossack ataman, but he informs them in a pidgin inherited from his journeys through the Russia of Khrushchev and Brezhnev that although he has Creole, Jewish, Celtic, Baltic, Hispanic and Teutonic genes, he can’t think of a single Cossack ancestor.
9 JULY
Sergei left us a supply of seal fat yesterday. I paddle off southwards with Goisque to leave the stinking substance on some rocks in the hope of attracting a bear. From the table on my beach, I can keep watch via binoculars. I spend my hours with the promise of the bear.
My guests and I live together nicely. We fish, explore the riparian forests, and discuss the subtle distinctions between Russian nihilism, Buddhist acceptance, and peaceful Stoic ataraxia. Sometimes Goisque and Hermann tackle their memories of army life, at which point the conversation veers between the moment when Shi poetry became Tang … and the operations of the SDECE (France’s external intelligence agency from 1944 to 1982) when it was ‘militarized’ into the 11th Shock Parach
utist Regiment.
10 JULY
The sky is more generous with its creatures than the forest. No bear comes to the rendezvous with the smelly fat, which is instead mobbed by barnacle geese, mergansers, tufted ducks and eiders. Two German kayakers arrive from the north at nightfall. They set up camp on the cape beach, about a third of a mile from the cabin, and come up to recharge their equipment on my solar batteries. We have to look at their photos, their films, exchange e-mail addresses. When you meet someone nowadays, right after the handshake and a quick glance you write down the website and blog information. Conversation has given way to a session in front of the screen. Afterwards, you won’t remember faces or tones of voice, but you’ll have cards with scribbled numbers. Human society’s dream has come true: we rub our antennae together like ants. One day we’ll just take a sniff.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 18