Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  Sasha Sorokin will come to the rescue.

  Mountains, larch trees, swamps. I never realised you get swamps in the mountains. We trek on, looking where we are treading, seeing only the rucksack of the person in front. Above are branches and a lowering sky, but if you look into the distance you see beyond the forest, rocky ranges as sheer as walls. At their summits there are glaciers. You can’t see them behind the clouds, but I know they are there. That’s why it’s so cold at night.

  It has been raining for three days and any time now we will turn into mushrooms, get covered in moss and mildew, and settle down here to live forever. You really don’t want to move. You just want to stay immobile in the tent and sleep, burrowing deep into a warm sleeping bag.

  Grand does not allow us that pleasure. He gets us up and forces us to go on, into the rain and the mud. He says that as long as we are on the move we are in some measure heading towards our goal, whereas if we stop we just eat, and our rations are running low.

  We trudge through the swamps following a narrow track, not seeing each other, not knowing each other. We are just backs carrying a rucksack, stooped, our feet squelching in the mire. When we stop we say little, and lie down quietly in the tents to sleep. In the morning we get up to go on, and not to see, not to know, never to get to know each other.

  Sometimes I stare at the way she walks, at her figure under that rucksack, and when we stop I stare into her eyes. I stare at her, trying to make her out, but her face remains as inscrutable as the bronze faces of Buddhas. Her body is tense and hard and she puts her feet down almost without flexing them. What she wants, what she hopes for is hidden away, sealed. She’s not going to tell anyone, probably not even herself. Sometimes, especially in the light of the campfire, I seem to see her face crumple, to sag into wrinkles, and she begins to look like the old lady with the parchment skin in whose apartment we were living. Nastya had met us by the station and taken us there. She talked incessantly, recalling her time with Grand, once, long ago. As we got to the door she had got to the moment when they parted.

  “My friends who saw you put me on the train asked afterwards, ‘Who was that, then? Is he a friend? Your boyfriend? A relative? Your guru? What’s the relationship?’” she said, inserting the key in the lock. It rasped. “I told them, ‘He’s all those things.’” As she pulled the door open, she turned round, looked me straight in the eye and said, at that moment just for me (and never had anything to say to me again), “After all, that’s how it is.” Her eyes finished the phrase. “Isn’t it.”

  Yes, it is, as we both know. And since that is how it is, since that is how it is for both of us, why can we not just be friends? Why is there no understanding between us and why do we behave as if there is something we don’t want to share, something we are afraid of losing? No, neither of us has anything. Grand is footloose and fancy-free, and if he did suddenly put down roots I would be the first to disown him.

  Sasha Sorokin had come to the rescue, materialising on Grand’s mobile as unexpectedly as people do when hitchhiking. We went immediately to collect him. They went, but I rushed full tilt and fell on his neck, rubbing my face against his hedgehoggy ginger cheeks. “Hey, Titch! Steady on. You’ll knock me over.”

  He was swaying under the weight of his rucksack. Unslept, dust-laden, he smelled of Yakimanka and the road, or rather, of beer and fags which of course is the same thing.

  Grand and Nastya joined us rather primly. Sasha, always sensitive to other people’s moods, became formal too and shook hands with them. We returned unhurriedly to the apartment, but I was capering around him like a little dog, babbling away, “At last, at last you’ve arrived. I’ve missed you so much, and all the stuff that is going on here, but you’ll see that for yourself, you’ll understand.”

  Unshaven, intoxicated by food after famine, Sasha had sat round-shouldered in the kitchen, talking excitedly about the trials of his journey. Even the old woman’s auricles were silent: Sasha rattled on so loudly and enthusiastically she could hear him clearly even from her room.

  A month later, when we were lost and a search party was sent out for us, the old woman told the cops we quite certainly belonged to a sect and the unshaven one with the ginger stubble must have been our leader, because we had been waiting for him for several days and been silent the whole time.

  “Grand, tell me where we are going?” “I told you already, Titch. We are going to where there is power.”

  If only they would talk to each other, but they say nothing. More precisely, they talk endlessly but it’s all just nonsense. They have said nothing of any substance which might, for example, clarify the mystery of why Sasha and I are separating them. I sleep in Grand’s tent and Sasha sleeps in Nastya’s.

  They look as if the person they knew before was someone else, as if they had been waiting for that someone else but a different person has been substituted for each of them. They look as if they don’t know what has happened. It would seem that only Sasha and I know that, but because they are silent we are silent.

  What they were like before, Nastya and him, what they meant to each other I can only surmise, try to read in their eyes, in their moods and silences. I think sometimes I might be able to do something if I knew the situation for sure, but I don’t, so all Sasha and I can do for now is be, and hike on to our Enchanted Lake. It is a role we perform faultlessly.

  I never had any idea before what getting lost in the forest must feel like. I still can’t really see how it came about that we got so lost. We were following tracks the whole time. So what if sometimes the track disappeared and Sasha and Grand started arguing about whether anybody had ever gone along it or whether it was only an animal track. So what if we hadn’t met a single other person in all that time. Nothing too terrible was happening to us, and if anything distinguished our progress from an ordinary hike in the forest it was only a disagreeable, oppressive feeling that we were lost and didn’t know where we were going.

  That was enough to make the forest seem more grim, claustrophobic, and indifferent towards our fate. It was all around us, growing in on all sides, and seemed to be deliberately opening up before us in order to lure us on, further and further, and when you turned to look back you could see no sign of your own steps. The trail behind had already been overgrown by the forest.

  We started seeing things. I could have sworn I saw an old man with a beard. It showed in the rocky profile of the mountains, in a bend in the river, in the patterning of tree bark, in mud which had dried fantastically on our trail. His hat was trimmed with fur, his big lips had sunk into his moustache, his brows overarched his eyes, and he had a fleshy nose and large birchbark earrings.

  I first saw him when, deep in thought, I was gazing at the intertwining of the veins in a rock, a large, white, patterned stone which had remained cool and slightly damp in the heat of the sun. His face appeared and became clearer. Even after looking away, I immediately found him again, so naturally did the lines come together to form his image. Now I see him anywhere I look.

  We were sitting silently round the campfire, drying our things over it, while above us every now and then it started to rain. For us, though, even marginally warm clothes were welcome. The glaciers exhaled their cold breath but were still far away. As, indeed, was the Lake. Grand had seemed particularly alert today as we trekked on, often looking around, staring at something. I knew he was looking for signs as to why we couldn’t find the right path, what was hindering us.

  “These mountains are full of spirits,” he said suddenly, looking into the fire. “Good or evil?” Nastya asked. “Spirits aren’t good or evil,” he replied. “This land is theirs and we are their guests. We need to remember that and behave accordingly.” “I know,” Sasha interjected. “There are wood sprites here. They point the berries and mushrooms out to me.” “Do you treat them with respect?” Grand asked. “Yes, I always thank them.” This was perfectly true. I’d seen Sasha myself, bowing in acknowledgement of every mushroom. “Good,” Grand
said nodding and fell silent. We were all conscious that he had brought us here, and only he could lead us out again.

  That night I dreamed. A tree was stooping over the tent, muttering. It was a huge, spreading spruce. In its outline I begin to recognise the familiar features, the old man, his head in a hat, his hairy face, his earlobes distended by the oversized earrings.

  I heard a voice: “The mountains are misleading you, misleading you. The branches are poorly linked, they fall apart. You have no single goal or vision. You have nothing to give but you want to get. The mountains are misleading you.”

  “The mountains are misleading you … They are misleading you …” I mumbled as I woke up because Grand was shaking me by the shoulder and shining a torch in my face. I was still uncoordinated, unable to think clearly, and he was shaking me. “Tell me who you are?” “Whaddya mean? It’s me!” I parried. “Who were you? Who were you talking to?” “I was dreaming, it was a dream!”

  His face was hard, almost brutal, as if he had just let someone slip whom he had been pursuing for a long time. I felt distraught. I told him the dream, what there was of it. “Yes, I see.” He was pensive. “Yes, yes, I see.” He looked upwards and said to someone not in the tent, “Thank you.” He turned off the torch and snuggled back down in his sleeping bag.

  We are standing beneath a huge larch tree. It is growing on the edge of a cliff, alone. There is a clearing beneath its branches, the perfect site for a couple of tents. We light a fire before it starts raining. We haven’t heard the sound of the river for some days now, the one which was leading us to the Enchanted Lake.

  “Well then, Grand, when do we get there?” Nastya asked rudely. “When we change.” “What do you mean, change?” “Stop behaving in the old ways and become different.” “So how are we behaving?” “Badly. We keep trying to guess what is coming next, we’re waiting for something and hoping.” “Well, what should we be doing?” “We should be living here and now. Rejoicing in what is around us, in what is happening to us.” “Oh, Grand! My feet haven’t been dry for days, we’ve been frozen for nights at a time, we fall asleep at dawn then drag ourselves off to who knows where, eat those disgusting swamp mushrooms. What is there to rejoice about?” “Rejoice nevertheless! See everything as a trial, a lesson, and be glad that you have an opportunity to change.”

  “Grand, it’s just talk for you but I really am frozen, and I really am sick and tired of all this! You keep teaching us but nothing changes in the slightest, and it’s completely unclear where we’re supposed to be going!”

  Quite what happened next neither I nor Sasha really saw. While they were talking we were trying not to look in that direction, to make as little noise as possible and get on with cooking our porridge. All we saw was that Grand seemed suddenly to pounce on Nastya and she sprang back, as if he had sent her flying, to the larch tree. She looked scared but Grand was already quietly coming back to the fire. “You’re right,” he said flatly. “Words don’t change people much. The Zen masters had good reason to carry a stick.” I thought Nastya would be in a big snit, but she came over and behaved just like us, and we were pretending nothing had happened.

  Then he hit Sasha because he was in raptures at finding orange milk mushrooms and rattled on, as he usually did, telling us tales of things that had happened to him in the past when he had been out looking for them. Nastya got it in the neck one more time for refusing to take her glasses off, even though she knew she didn’t need them and her eyes needed a rest. After that Sasha was deprived of his glasses too, and I got a not very serious kick for talking a lot of stuff about reading Tarot cards and coffee grounds. In the end I found I agreed with Grand that I’d been talking a lot of nonsense.

  We became less boisterous and more disciplined, and kept a closer eye on what we said and did. Perhaps this, at least, would bring us closer to the Lake.

  “Grand, would you like me to tell you all about her?” “Go ahead, Titch.” “You met on the road. More precisely, it was the road brought you together, somewhere around here, in these parts, and you both went West. Am I seeing that correctly?” “Yes, so far you’re getting it right.” “The hitchhiking was easy and swift. You taught her to understand the lessons the road offers and to see the signs around her. In the towns you showed her the right way to walk backwards and look at the shadows on the asphalt. Right?” He smiled.

  “Then you came to the town where you live and let her into your home. She lived there long enough to get accustomed and attached to you, to learn your weaknesses and remember what you like. But then it was autumn and you didn’t feel like going on the road, right?” “The autumn was warm, Titch. We could have gone anywhere, but things didn’t turn out that way. We just strolled around a bit in the woods near the town.”

  “Okay. Then the rain came. It was time for her to go back, but it would have been grim for her to try hitching a long way on her own. You very civilly put her on a train and you parted. You corresponded. From her letters you saw how attached she was to you. You hadn’t expected that. She wrote to say she wanted to see you again. You doubted that was a good idea but then decided you could, as long as you were not on your own. That way her attention would not be focused solely on you. At which point Sasha and I came on the scene. Am I right?”

  “Yes, on the whole, yes. From her letters I saw that one year had been long enough for her to forget everything I’d taught her. She’d lost the goal. But I also recognised that I was the only man in her life she had fallen in love with.”

  “Splendid. See how well I have learned my lessons! I won’t forget a thing. Only, you know what? As I’ve been such a good pupil, just promise me, Grand, that I won’t find out on the return journey where you live.”

  The rain has stopped during the night and the morning is sunny. We crawl out of the tents and warm ourselves. We begin enjoying life, laughing and joking, something we haven’t done for a long time. Twenty metres from the tents we find a low rock shelter among the boulders suitable for making a fire to enable us afterwards to dry our things on the heated rocks. Next to it is a large flat boulder which I immediately proclaim to be our table and lay our mugs and plates out on it. Sasha and I start making breakfast.

  We play at home comforts, forget the rain and the damp, and almost forget we are lost. The forest begins to seem hospitable. It fills with birds and we can hear the distant roar of a river we couldn’t hear yesterday.

  Sasha takes his clothes off and repairs to the shelter and its fire. He sits there in his underpants and hiking boots, grunting with pleasure as if he’s in a bathhouse. I imagine clouds of steam coming off him. Nastya arrives, looks round and sits down, frowning in the sunlight. She gives me a smile. Everything is so fine today that we’re prepared to like each other. A little distance away in the glistening bushes I find a few small dark raspberries which I proudly bring back and place on our table.

  Suddenly Grand jumps out of the bushes. He is oddly rigid, his eyes fiery. He looks demented, like a lion (if you can have a demented lion). He leaps on to the rock and stares round at us as if about to reveal something. I am pleased to see him and say jokingly, throwing up my hands in mock horror, “This is our table, Grand. Why are you standing on it?”

  Before I have finished, the lion leaps down on me from above, pushes me in the chest and knocks me over. I fall backwards and just have time to see his furious, fixed stare, his pitiless frozen eyes and I quail in terror. I flee to the niche under a rock where Sasha is and don’t move. Grand stalks off. It is quiet, as if nothing has happened.

  I jump up and run. I slither on the sodden ground, terrified at first that he may be coming after me, but he isn’t. He has done all he wanted to, only why? What had I done wrong? I run, bawling. Not with pain but from incomprehension and the sense of hurt. What had I done to him? Who is he? I’ve come the devil knows how far and he starts fighting the moment anything is not just so! That’s it! Sod him, I’ll turn back and leave him to it. Alone? So what?! Hitchhiking? No proble
m! Only I know I won’t be on my own: it only needs one person to rebel and they’ll all leave him. He can go alone on his travels as far as he likes but I’m out, I’ve had it up to here, he’s nothing to me and nothing will change for me except that now I’ll never see the Lake! Except that I’ll never…

  I stop, dumbstruck. After all, what is it I’m travelling for? For the Lake. It’s nothing to do with Grand and his games. No, my goal is the Lake. A wonderful, pure mountain lake reflecting glaciers like a mirror. That’s what it’s all for. What have I got? What do I stand to lose? Nothing, except my goal.

  My emotions subside, and in the stillness I suddenly hear the bubbling roar of water from somewhere seemingly close. Very close. Behind those bushes. I only need to climb up this slope and there will surely be… Well, I might have to climb a bit further up there and then I’ll see it. Or a bit further… and a bit more… I’ll get to it quickly, before they even notice I’ve gone. It’s somewhere here. It’s so loud it must be nearby. It’s thundering, boiling, it must be a huge waterfall. If it still isn’t here, how it’s raging in the place where it is! It really must be huge. I’ll see it any minute now. Now. Just on a little further. Here, here…

  I scramble and climb, there are no trees, there are no longer any bushes, all that remains is the stones, the scree, grey, tetchy, they slip away under your feet and you slide down with them, and the roar is deafening, but now I emerge at the top, at the top of a sleep slope and… there’s nowhere further to climb, I stop dead in my tracks, looking down.

  “Jesus,” I whisper. “Get a load of that…”