It’s a lovely idea, sailing around while trying to recognize in the shape of a landscape the physical transcription of a legend. This spiritual and symbolic distortion of geography takes one’s breath away. Paddling along, my two friends detect signs, track correspondences. In a prominent hill they see a lingam; in the crenellation of a ridge, the trident of Shiva; and in a cabin, the ‘centre of effort’ where all forces are thought to concentrate.
After supper, Sasha and his disciple sit in the lotus position on the beach and recite a Hindu mantra. Sasha blows into his Tibetan conch shell. The bleating awakens Bek, who starts howling.
‘My dog doesn’t like the sound of the conch,’ I say.
Sasha gives me a strange look.
‘Maybe he isn’t a dog …’
They tell me again that the North Cedar cabin is on an ‘energy knot’ of great intensity. They head out southwards. The blasts on the conch echo in the distance.
23 JULY
I’m paddling towards the River Lednaya. The lake smells like a dead body. The fog is back. The forest appears, withdraws, returns. At the river, I fish from the rocks, then dine on the product of my patience. Tonight my bivouac is the quintessence of campsites: lapping water, a meadow at the base of a cliff overlooking a calm lake, with a few birches to break up the breeze. The fish are roasting on the fire while the dogs wait for their share, and a moon the colour of a delicate iced biscuit is lounging among the clouds. I smoke a Partagás. Cigars are consecrated by the places where they are smoked: my memory is geographic. Cigars retain the atmosphere and genius of places even better than faces and conversations can.
The only thing missing this evening is the woman of my dreams.
24 JULY
Dawn, and the sound of an engine. It’s Volodya, who has come to spread a net at the mouth of the Lednaya. I hail him from the top of the cliff. We talk for an hour, sharing tomatoes on the bow deck of the canoe. In his discussions of the immediate, the French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch speaks of that faculty the Russians have of spending long hours sitting at a table, clinging to the reefs of an island covered with abundance. Around the table awaits a hard, hostile world into which everyone must plunge, sooner or later, until a new table appears, a little further on.
I head back, steering through the fog. The shoreline is my guide, like Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth. The storm has the last word, striking two hours after I get home.
25 JULY
I’m going to be saying goodbye to the dogs. I watch them sleeping, with their heads on the cabin doorstep. Why does everything finally happen? There’s only one way to avoid the unavoidable.
26 JULY
‘I’m leaving, and have barely passed the first of the elms that line the road …’ André Chénier, guillotined on 25 July 1794.
Sergei will come to get me the day after tomorrow. We’ll drop the dogs off at Elohin, where they’ll stay until they find a master in a different cabin in the reserve.
I came here without knowing whether I’d find the strength to stay; I leave knowing that I will return. I’ve discovered that living within silence is rejuvenating. I’ve learned two or three things that many people know without having to hole up somewhere. The virginity of time is a treasure. The parade of hours is busier than the ploughing-through of miles. The eye never tires of splendour. The more one knows things, the more beautiful they become. I met two dogs, I fed them and, one day, they saved me. I spoke to the cedars, begged forgiveness from the char, and thought about my dear ones. I was free because without the other, freedom knows no bounds. I contemplated the poem of the mountains and drank tea while the lake turned pink. I killed the longing for the future. I breathed the breath of the forest and followed the arc of the moon. I struggled through the snow and forgot the struggle on the mountaintops. I admired the great age of trees, tamed titmice, and perceived the vanity of all that is not reverence for beauty. I took a look at the other shore. I knew weeks of silent snow. I loved to be warm in my hut while the tempest raged. I greeted the return of the sun and the wild ducks. I tore into the flesh of smoked fish and felt the fat of char eggs refresh my throat. A woman bade me farewell but butterflies alighted on me. I lived the most beautiful hours of my life until I received a message and the saddest hours afterwards. I watered the earth with tears. I wondered if one could become a Russian not through blood but through tears. I blew my nose on mosses. I drank litres of poison at 104º F, and I enjoyed pissing with a wide-screen view of Buryatia. I learned to sit at a window. I melted into my realm, smelled the scent of lichen, ate wild garlic and shared trails with bears. I grew a beard, and time unfurled it. I left the cave of cities and lived for six months in the church of the taigas. Six months: a life.
It’s good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible, something fairly close to the sheer happiness of being alive.
27 JULY
A nap on the stones of the beach with the dogs draped on top of me. Aika and Bek, my masters in fatalism, my comforters, my friends, who expect nothing more than what the immediate reserves for you in the dog dish of life, I’m truly fond of you.
Harsh sun, azure lake, wind in the cedars, ebb and flow of the waves: in my hammock, I think I’m on the coast of the Mediterranean. In the forest, I drink a last toast to life à la Crusoe. Spotting an anthill, I plug the top with my palm. The insects defend themselves, bombarding my hand with formic acid. My skin glistens with the fluid and I sniff it up into my sinuses when I down a shot of vodka. The effect of the ammoniated fumes is instant and stunning: the forest garbs itself in unheard-of colours.
I take apart the kayak, pack my bags. My life has unfolded here for months. I fold it back up. I’ve always lived in suitcases. My crates of provisions are empty. I eat some fish. It’s over. Tomorrow, the return.
28 JULY
One last visit to the top of the hill to bid farewell to the lake. Here, I ask the genius loci to help me make peace with time. On our way downhill, Aika flushes a female eider, which beats the water with its right wing, pretending to be wounded. Bek is fooled and chases her into the water until he loses his footing.
Aika seeks the nest, finds it, and savages the six ducklings before I can intervene. I finish off the downy little things with a stone.
For a long time, the mother duck’s mourning cries on the shore …
She grieves for the thousands of miles travelled for nothing; she grieves for her lost offspring. Life means holding on through the death of dear ones.
All it took was the instinctive snapping teeth of a little carnivore for an immense bright loneliness to descend on North Cedar Cape.
I’m sitting on the wooden bench waiting for Sergei’s boat. The sun is beating down. The bags and trunks are piled up. The dogs are sleeping on the sand. And that mother duck weeping in the sunshine.
The morning has the taste of death, the taste of departure.
The dogs look up. A faint rumbling, confirmed: the boat. A dot grows larger and larger on the horizon. One last time.
Translator’s Notes
1. Baikal is the deepest lake on earth and one of the most ancient in geological history. Much of Baikal’s rich biodiversity is endemic to the lake, and at 85 per cent of the total biomass of this ‘cauldron of evolution’, Epischura baikalensis is the major zooplankton species there. In his book Sacred Sea, the environmentalist Peter Thomson describes not only how this janitorial service of scavenging copepods filters the world’s largest and largely pristine freshwater lake with amazing efficiency, but also how modern industries on its shores have made Baikal a vat of pollution poisonous to its inhabitants. Besides the
Epischura, in his Siberian journal Sylvain Tesson mentions in particular two more of the lake’s unique creatures: the omul, a whitefish species of the salmon family, and the Baikal seal, both of which have been listed as endangered. The Epischura ingest toxins, the fish eat the copepods, and the seals – among others – eat the fish. The ‘nasty irony’ of the lake’s famously clear waters, as Thomson says, is that if the Epischura die, so will Baikal.
2. The FSB has a long pedigree; here is a simplified genealogy. After the Russian Revolution swept away the secret police of Imperial Russia, Lenin created the Cheka, which in time became the GPU (part of the NKVD), and subsequently spun off to become the OGPU. The OGPU later moved back into the NKVD as the GUGB, moved out again into the NKGB, then back into the NKVD, finally separating out again into the NKGB only to wind up reassigned to the NKGB-MGB. Beria eventually combined the MGB and MVD into the MVD, but after Beria was purged, the MVD shed the secret police into the KGB. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the KGB was dissolved and its functions distributed among the FSO, the SVR and its main successor agency, the FSB, whose personnel are informally referred to in Russia as ‘Chekists’ – which brings us full circle.
3. Around the third century AD, hermits and ascetics began moving into the Nitrian Desert of Egypt, and these growing desert communities of monks and nuns became known collectively as the Desert Fathers. Saint Anthony the Hermit (ca. 251–356), depicted in many a ‘Temptation of St Anthony’, is the most famous exemplar of this movement, which greatly influenced the development of Christianity and provided the model for Christian monasticism.
4. The eighteenth-century adventurer Casanova’s multi-volume Story of My Life beggars description. The four allusions on this page refer to these stories:
Tiretta was Casanova’s ‘companion in vice’ and his guest, along with several women, at a gathering in a rented room overlooking the Place de la Grève in Paris to witness a man’s execution there on 28 March 1757. Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV, was hideously tortured for four hours before his limbs were hacked off and his reportedly still-living torso burned at the stake. Damiens screamed so piteously that Casanova had to look away at one point – and noticed Tiretta quietly enjoying ‘indecent pleasures’ from behind with one of the women guests, who never took her eyes off the entertainment in the square below.
On the run, a typical scenario, Casanova went to Parma, where he met a Frenchwoman he called Henriette, with whom he had a three-month affair and of whom he wrote with singular respect and admiration, perhaps because she declined, in the end, to ‘unite her destiny’ with his. Many Casanova scholars consider Henriette to be his greatest love, the one who got away.
A castrato was a boy castrated before puberty to preserve his high singing voice, and the Italian castrato Bellino greatly impressed Casanova, whose experienced eye perceived that this singer was actually a lovely woman en travesti. In his memoirs Casanova calls her Teresa Lanti, and, naturally, he had an affair with her. Bellino-Teresa subsequently had a son, Cesarino, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Casanova and whom she raised as her brother.
The story of Leonilda begins with Donna Lucrezia, a married woman with whom Casanova began an affair during a carriage ride to Rome. Casanova claims to have made love to both Lucrezia and her daughter, the seventeen-year-old virgin Angelica, in the same bed at the same assignation and only weeks before the daughter’s wedding. Donna Lucrezia had a child by Casanova, Leonilda, who was raised as legitimate by her family – who were understandably aghast when Leonilda became engaged sixteen years later to … Casanova! The engagement was broken off, but Casanova claims to have repeated his mother-daughter coup by getting Donna Lucrezia and Leonilda into bed together, although he denied having sex with his daughter at that time. Years later, according to his memoirs, he encountered Leonilda again, now married to an impotent man, and this time he got her pregnant with his own grandson.
5. Perhaps the most famous example of ‘death by Baikal’ occurred during the Great Siberian Ice March of the Russian Civil War. Pursued by the Red Army, Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian troops retreated east in January and February of 1920 until their only way forward lay across the lake. Heading out in sub-zero temperatures made excruciating by the Arctic winds scouring the ice, around 30,000 soldiers, their families, pack animals, carts and possessions crossed to Transbaikal, but a great many people and animals froze to death along the way. For months the long trail of their corpses offered a macabre spectacle, until the spring thaw sent them and all the army’s abandoned baggage to the bottom of Baikal.
6. Named after John Clipperton, an English pirate and privateer, Clipperton Island is an uninhabited and largely barren coral atoll of only 3.5 square miles in the eastern Pacific Ocean. In 1906 the British Pacific Island Company built a guano mining settlement there, installing one Lieutenant Arnaud as Governor of Clipperton and its colony of soldiers, their families, and sixty Italian workers. The First World War and the Mexican Revolution made the resupplying of the island by ship impossible, but when a US navy warship arrived to evacuate the island, Arnaud and some thirty colonists refused to leave. By 1917 scurvy and an ill-fated attempt to leave the island in a small boat had left only one man alive there, the lighthouse keeper, Victoriano Álvarez, who proclaimed himself King of Clipperton and began terrorizing the remaining women and children through rape and murder. When the USS Yorktown checked the atoll on 18 July 1917, they found the surviving women and children and the corpse of Álvarez, whom Arnaud’s widow had killed in self-defence the day before with a hammer.
7. Vasily Grigorevich Perov (2 January 1834–10 June 1882) was one of the founding members of a group of Russian realist painters. His Wikipedia entry shows The Hunters at Rest (1871).
8. Named for the River Sarma, which empties into the Small Sea Strait lying between Olkhon Island and the Western shore of Baikal, this wind comes roaring out of its valley as if from a cannon and can reach hurricane force. Among the coldest and strongest of Baikal’s winds, the Sarma is only one of many specific air currents created by the mountain ranges of Baikal, and they vary according to geographical location, time of year, time of day, temperature, air pressure, etc. For added insight into the tremendous ecosystem of Lake Baikal, see the entertaining essay on these quirky and often quite dangerous winds – the Verkhovik, Kultuk, Kharakhaiku, Gornaya and others – at www.magicbaikal.com/winds.php in the Baikal Winds section. Here, for example, is its description of the Sarma’s power: ‘Sarma can blow continuously for days and at times the wind is so strong that it can uproot trees, overturn boats, tear the roofs off houses and sweep cattle from the shores into the lake. The roofs of houses in the village of Sarma, situated in the valley of the river with the same name, are tied to the ground by the villagers.’
9. Considered the greatest poet of the Six Dynasties Period (ca. 220–589), Tao Yuanming (365–427), was the most famous of the Chinese ‘poets of reclusion’, artists who retired to the countryside or wilderness to write, often in praise of the quiet life they found there. A noted recluse, Tao Yuanming was admired for the elegant way in which he extolled both the joys of leisure and the contentment of fulfilling one’s duties, and beloved for the artless simplicity of the motifs that became emblematic of his style. A pastoralist who delighted in fields and gardens, he found solace from the hardships of a farmer’s life in the cultivation of chrysanthemums, a flower that became his personal ‘seal’ in later Chinese painting and literature, and his influence is still felt in modern English poetry.
10. Du Mu (803–52) was a prominent poet of the late Tang Dynasty, a golden age of Chinese poetry, but unlike Tao Yuanming, he cared deeply about statec
raft and remained actively engaged in the Chinese bureaucracy all his adult life. Although he is appreciated for the bold, unconstrained energy of his long narrative poems, he is best known for his sensually descriptive quatrains.
11. While off in Irkutsk sorting out his visa problem, Tesson became thirty-eight on 26 April.
12. The nalim is a kind of burbot (a codlike fish) that is usually 18–20 inches long and weighs between 11 and 15 pounds. This description from a Russian English-language website about native freshwater fish says it all: ‘Large, widespread fish. A body extended, covered with very small scales with the big layer of slime. On either side of nostrils on a small short moustache, one more short moustache – on a chin. Colouring of a body from grey-black and dark-brown to brown with a reddish shade and the big stains or divorces. A belly light.’
Acknowledgements
I express my gratitude and send greetings to the people who helped me throughout my stay in the cabin at North Cedar Cape.
Alexis Golovinov
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 20