Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  Like a gigantic excavation, a valley lies before me in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. White snowcaps sparkle dazzling and frosty bright in the sun, reflected in a round, perfectly smooth Lake as still as a mirror. Dwarf pines line its shores. To my right a foaming river roars as it bursts out of the forest and seems, like me, to have come running to this place, scrambling and struggling at great length before leaping out and hurtling down with a thunderous roar of exultation.

  “I’ve found it,” I whisper. “I’ve found it.” I take a deep breath of air as pure and icy as the waters of the Lake and yell at the top of my voice, “Hey, everyone! I’ve found it!!!”

  The roar of the river becomes deafening.

  Chachkan

  That evening, when it became clear they were going to leave in the morning, we gathered up the food and shared it out fairly, given that they were going back down to the world while we would be staying here. Their share was a little barley and maize grain. Carefree and happy, they poured it all together into a tin and all evening Sasha walked around playing it like the maracas.

  It hurt me to see their unrestrained delight at the prospect of getting away from this place. It was as if they had already left and forgotten all about us who were staying. As prickly and cantankerous as an old hedgehog, I disappeared into the tent without saying goodbye to them. In the morning half asleep I heard them talking to each other, packing their belongings, but even then I didn’t emerge. It was plain that from now on we were following different paths: they, Sasha and Nastya, would go down, while I would stay here alone with Grand, strange, inexplicable, scary Grand crashing through the bushes in search of invisible spirits.

  If you have ever in the mountains parted with a friend whom you once loved, you will understand how I felt. If nothing of that kind has yet befallen you, may God grant it never does.

  They packed up and left and we stayed behind. Waiting until their voices had faded, I came out of the tent. Grand was sitting by the fire, leaning over a pot, grimacing as he tried the contents, blowing on the spoon. Nastya and Sasha had been cooking porridge from some of the grain we gave them yesterday. They hadn’t finished the job and left with no breakfast, evidently in a hurry. Now Grand was fiddling about over what they had left behind. I went down to the water’s edge, to a place we already, after just these few days, took for granted. Our tent was pitched ten short steps from the water but I took them slowly, looking all around as if for the first time at this paradise which for once was bathed in sunshine.

  The water in the lake is limpid and azure. At dawn it is so calm it reflects the sky, the mountains, and the cold, majestic glaciers. The opposite shore is pure scree with never a tree or a bush, as if someone has dumped the stones there. Our shore is forested, with cedars growing all the way down to the water. If we sit very still in the grass, chipmunks making clicking sounds come down from the branches and start inspecting our campsite.

  There is stillness all around and stillness within. No thoughts. They seem to have been overwhelmed, forced out by this air, this tranquillity, this silence of the mountains.

  Those mountains know more than we can imagine. They know more than we can take in.

  Human beings are fluid and inconstant. They are like water with their thoughts, emotions, sensations. You blink and all that is no more and the flow rushes purposefully on inside you. But these mountains, these rocks, the bed of this chill, crystal Lake… Down in the valley eras and empires come and go, but they remain, unshakeable, calm, eternal. What can a person think as they look at them? Nothing. You can only sit and contemplate and dissolve in the timelessness.

  The morning turns out surprisingly warm. All the days we have been here, in the vicinity of the glaciers, with the untiring voice of the river plunging as a waterfall down the precipice and into the Lake, the weather has been the same. The sky has cleared only occasionally and more often we have had rain or hail or snow, or some other form of precipitation for which we didn’t know the name. We would have left sooner if I hadn’t found my right ankle swollen and turning blue.

  It happened the evening we reached the Lake, coming down from the ridge and setting up camp. I discovered it only by chance because my foot hadn’t hurt at all during the day. “It’s sprained,” Sasha said, tut-tutting. “Bruised,” speculated Grand. Nastya said nothing, just pulled a wry face. They examined my foot in the firelight, their faces anxious. I looked up at them and felt guilty.

  “The road is saying you should stop here for a while,” Grand said. “For some reason that is something you need right now.” He was joking but the others looked grave. An oppressive feeling, as if we were doomed, descended on us. How could I know why this had happened to me, friend? Who can?

  I suddenly started, staring into the forest. “There’s someone there.” They all turned. On the hillside behind the tent Grand and I shared, we saw the silhouette of a short woman. She didn’t move. “Hey!” Sasha called. Still the woman did not move or answer. “Hiya!” he called again, with the same lack of result. Grand jumped up and in two great bounds was beside her. “It’s a rock!” he shouted back, and we joined him.

  There really was a stone pillar standing in the bushes which looked like a rather stocky girl of fifteen or so. Through the tracery of lines, cracks and chips you could make out her facial features, hair and clothing. It was spooky standing next to her in the growing darkness. She just looked too human.

  “It’s a local shrine,” Sasha said in a low voice. “She looks like a shaman,” Nastya said. “This is a good omen,” Grand announced. “This is an interesting place. There may be many spirits. A good place to hunt them,” he added with a grin, pleased. I winced with pain. “Help me get down,” I said, and leaned on Sasha’s arm. From a thundercloud invisible in the darkness, cold, white grain started pelting down on us. Such was the welcome we received from our longed-for Lake.

  But now they had packed their things and left. Travelling light, in the sunshine, down they gaily tripped. In just a couple of hours they would be past the Lake and come upon a well trodden path. They would follow it along the river which plunged downwards and soon spot a couple of tents some way off the track but they would see nobody around. They would stop, take off their rucksacks and rest, but no one would appear and they would hike on.

  From the first people they met Sasha would scrounge a cigarette. He would stand, his eyes half-closed with pleasure, exhaling smoke through his ginger bristles while Nastya asked the way. She wouldn’t really need to because it would be obvious and straightforward. A little further on they would come to a backwater with a campsite which had a bathhouse and even a shop selling tinned food, beer, cigarettes and bread. There they would buy some tinned stew. They would talk the bathhouse attendants into letting them both in for the price of one, and be treated to free beer by the people camping next to them that night.

  In the morning they would go on. The people they had attached themselves to last night would give them sugar and tea, and before they left give them pasta which they would eat with the meat they had bought the day before. They would again be travelling light in the sunshine, and the lower they went the higher their spirits would be. At noon they would have trouble getting across a river, rest on their rucksacks, then stray from the path but soon after meet rafters who would give them directions and also biscuits and a tin of condensed milk. Very pleased with themselves, they would continue on their way.

  I sit looking at shadows, the shadows of clouds which succeed each other on the glassy surface of the Lake, rushing on their way and disappearing. Why should I bother to keep track of our friends when they’ve already forgotten all about us? Why should I care what’s happening to them and what will happen next? The shadows of the clouds cover the Lake again and the part of the shore I am sitting on, but then they scud off, following the river down into the valley.

  I’m becoming part of this landscape. Incapacity has separated me from my companions, and now it seems to me that my inner speed,
the speed at which feelings flow inside me, will soon be comparable with that of a cedar or the bush I am sitting under. Other people move immeasurably faster than I do. My friends were evidently frustrated and impatient and that made it impossible for them to stay here for more than three days. I didn’t notice them wearying of this place and now I have no choice but to be here and wait.

  This break in my onward movement is teaching me to see the world differently. From up here, in a ravine in the mountains, with the frosty breath of the glaciers, looking out from the roots of cedar trees, I have a larger and broader view of the world than you get down there in the towns and the valley. There the view breaks down into a hustle and bustle which obscures it, while here it is limpid and clear, and fussing is seen for what it is, mere dust on the surface of eternal things. I see people, their cares, what prompts them to act and what blocks them on their path. I see the interweaving of roads I have yet to travel or which I am destined never to travel. I find it easy to track the movements of those who have left us and, by looking further, to see others below who have lost and are looking for us. I see my own road too, and believe I can see deep and wide with clarity, since the very source and on, and it is only fear and superstition which prevent me from looking far ahead, into dark mists, to the very end.

  Here thinking about death comes easily and not at all like it does in the town, not about the death of a particular person or myself, and not even really about death at all. It is easy here to think about the grass which will some day grow on all our graves. It is not frightening, even though in the town we want what comes after to be different, yet as near as possible to how it was. Here, though, it is ineluctably clear that there is nothing different, only all the things which surround me now and what will come after them.

  I will be no more, others will be no more, all cities and states will disappear, but the grass and the trees and mountains will remain and grow, and it won’t matter to them that we are no longer. They are life and they are eternal and I am not afraid of becoming them. Is it not through our awareness of the eternal life of everything, that we cross over, that we overcome the death that is in us?

  At night it was colder than it had been the whole way here. We shivered and huddled in our sleeping bags, trying to keep warm, putting on all the clothes we had in our rucksacks, but that was at best a partial remedy.

  Every night our tent was stormed by mice. They jumped on to it and slid down, then jumped again, and again slid down, so interminably that we fell asleep before they finished. They jumped so high it seemed someone was deliberately throwing them at the tent. That idea was enough to make things a bit scary.

  “It’s her way of playing with us,” I joked. “That girl we’ve got standing out there. She is the ruler of the animals here, the Siberian Diana.” We lay there, peeping out of our sleeping bags, looking at the shadows on the tent walls and listening to the games the mice played. We barely moved, and spoke in whispers.

  “Chachkan,” Grand said one time. “That what she’s called. Chachkan means mouse for the peoples who have lived since time immemorial in these mountains.”

  “Ah, right. Mouse.”

  Their path will lead them to a boggy meadow and they will lose their way again. Grass waist-high and water underfoot, trails fanning out in all directions but leading nowhere and disappearing. They will wander about before coming to a stream, and follow it in a straight line, sometimes walking in it, until they again come to a forest and a rapid descent with a well trodden path they will have to clamber down like steep steps. They will speed up and not even their wet feet will spoil their mood.

  When there are no clouds here you can get a tan, but when it’s heavily overcast and windy you feel cold even if you pull on a sweater. As a result I am constantly shivery, but I’ve got used to it. I sit and watch the water lapping against the shore, steadily, at intervals, as if the Lake is breathing.

  Grand gathers firewood, disappearing for a long time and bringing back whole armfuls of dead branches and thick logs. We already have enough for a campfire. If I ask him whether he’s planning to melt the glaciers he will half smile without replying. He likes this place. He’s always doing something, although he doesn’t say what. He’ll go off in one direction and come lumbering into the clearing from another, and his eyes are like those of a cat after a successful night’s hunting. I once asked him, “Grand, what are you up to?” “Tracking the power” was his answer.

  Some time earlier, barely able to contain his laughter, he told me he was trying to catch spirits in the gorges, but every time he called them, Sasha would emerge from the bushes with some twig or other in his hands.

  Grand didn’t need anyone to hunt with him, so he didn’t find our stay here at all tedious. Sasha had also been busy studying the local flora, and said that almost every plant we encountered on the way was also to be found here. Only Nastya was grim-faced and made it plain she was bored by the lack of anything to do. She tried to avoid me, wandered around aimlessly between the tents or on a fifty-metre stretch of the shore. I looked at her and wondered whether the road had given us this break precisely so that she and I should get to know and understand each other, but we exchanged barely a word in the course of the days they were here.

  I didn’t see it happening, but suddenly they were close. Sasha is like a piece of soft clay: he readily assumes any shape and doesn’t stick to your hands. For the whole of his life he has played just one role, smoothing the sharp corners in any group of people he finds himself with. So now, encountering Nastya, he instinctively set about plastering over the cracks between her and us.

  They talked in the evenings by the fire. Sasha would return from his daily quest before Grand, light a fire, and busy himself making herbal tea and vitamin-rich soup. Nastya had little alternative but to come and warm herself there. Dusk fell rapidly. No sooner did the sun disappear behind the mountain on the opposite shore than the air thickened, turned greyish, and everything became more contrasted: light objects became bright and prominent, while anything dark became part of the background. Such sounds as there were became muffled except for the shrill cry of an evening bird which punctured the stillness as it flew over the lake. I carried on sitting by the water, and from the direction of the fire came the sound of Sasha making quiet, calm, sensible conversation.

  As he had to me in times gone by on Yakimanka, he was talking about his life and his friends, all of whom to the last man and woman were singers and poets; and as I had been on Yakimanka, Nastya was bewitched by his manner of narrating, his voice and the interminableness of all his stories which flowed smoothly on one from another. Turning, I could see Sasha’s back and Nastya’s profile. She was bent over, hugging her knees, in the red light of the fire and at that moment I couldn’t say what her face was expressing, but possibly it wasn’t expressing anything and that was what made it beautiful. Looking further round I could see the stone girl shaman standing on her mound beyond the tent intently watching our clearing. She seemed like a reflection of me, two silent observers, me and Chachkan.

  Even when I limped past them into the tent when I got cold, or sat down beside them to warm up, they paid no attention and Sasha didn’t interrupt his story. They were so absorbed in the warmth of their evenings that everything else might as well not have existed. I could see they were being drawn together, but could never have imagined what was going to happen. Although, even if I had guessed, would I have been able, or wanted, or have dared to do anything about it? No. So I just watched and marvelled at how unfathomable the road is, and how strangely it sometimes shuffles people’s fates.

  Now they’ve gone, after trying to cook that inedible porridge. The two different kinds of grain couldn’t be cooked together, and what use were rations like that going to be to them? “You like reading signs, Grand,” I said pointing to what they had left behind in the pot. “What does this signify?” “You can interpret that yourself, Titch. It tells us that those two are beyond reproach.”

 
I nodded and did not seek clarification of his new concept: I knew what he meant. “How will they get there?” “The road will help them. It’s like hitchhiking. The main thing is to be open and to spread happiness.”

  After the descent they will find themselves back at the river and will walk along the bank. They will meet a group of schoolchildren, advancing towards the summit in an orderly single file, all of them with thumb sticks and with mugs on the side of their rucksacks as if on parade. The children will tell them it is less than a day’s hike to the village. They have come from it today but they were given a lift in UAZ jeeps as far as the first steep ascent. There won’t be anything they can scrounge from them, and they will continue on their way.

  They will cross the river over a three-log bridge, then stop and eat blueberries from the bushes. These will be growing right beside the trail so they will help themselves. This will take up two hours and they will come to their senses only when they see that night is drawing in. They will grab their rucksacks and start running downhill, but after half an hour will see a good camp site with a table under cover, a bonfire like a hearth, and a couple of tents already pitched there. They will approach, say hello, and stay there for the night. The tents’ owners will be a group of tourists from Tomsk who will give them a meal and vodka and tea to drink in return for Sasha’s inspirational tale of our tribulations: the trail we followed which missed the pass through the mountains, and the Lake by the glaciers.

  When they leave in the morning, deciding that by evening they will be on the outskirts of the town, they will leave their container of uncookable cereal, preferring to travel light.

  The four of us woke up one morning to find snow on the ground. The glade and forest were suddenly hushed, no birds, no wind. The Lake placidly reflected the dawn sky but the snow was in no hurry to melt. I screwed up my eyes in the blinding brightness, scooped up a fistful of the snow and tried it with my tongue. It tasted good, sweetish, like the water in the Lake. In the distance, on the mountain, a crow cawed.