Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  The bushes suddenly parted and three men in red overalls emerged into our clearing. I don’t know who was more startled, us after not having seen anyone for so many days, or them, never expecting to find anyone here. After a moment’s hesitation we got over our surprise and talked.

  They were mountaineers heading for a glacier beyond the mountain pass and had already been waiting several days for snow. They told us that was the only way you could get through the pass and now the snow had come. We looked complete idiots for having reached the Lake by the least obvious, highly circuitous route which, if it was used by anyone, was the province of local hunters, and shepherds driving their flocks to the summer pastures.

  “You really like doing things your own way, Grand,” Nastya said when the climbers had gone off to mount their assault on the glacier. “That is how the road would have it, and no doubt there was a reason,” Grand replied. “We have benefited both from this place and from the way we came here.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded giving it a miss,” Nastya said. “At least now we know there are people nearby and we can stop pretending to be a lost expedition. I take it we’re leaving now?” “You know why we’re here.” “Well, we’ve been in these forests quite long enough. I was expected back long ago. People will be worried. You do as you please, but I’m going back.” Grand shrugged and said, “You are free to do as you wish. It will mean only that our paths diverge forever.”

  Nastya made no reply and went to the tent. Uneasy guilt feelings stirred in my heart for a moment, but only for a moment. I knew that sooner or later this was going to happen. It was just that now they were being open with each other.

  The day continued normally except that Sasha was behaving oddly. He kept hanging around me, looking at my face but recoiling from direct eye contact. He finally brought me a branch of honeysuckle berries and made his speech while I was gratefully devouring them.

  “You know, Titch, I need to be heading home too. My holiday will be over soon and I should get back to work. And also I have to hitch my way back.” “Right,” I nodded with my mouth full, getting a sense for myself of the path he was embarking on.

  “Well, and then… you know… Nastya hasn’t got a tent, so how could she go back alone? At present we’re, you know… sleeping in mine because she hasn’t… well, you know…” “Got a tent,” I prompted, swallowing the last berry. “Right.” He nodded. “So?” “Well, you won’t mind if I er… If I go with…?” “Your tent?” “Well, yes. Well, no. With Nastya!”

  “Go ahead. No problem.” “Well, you know… You won’t mind?” “What’s it to do with me? I’m in no hurry to go anywhere. And I don’t have a tent either.” He went off as if he’d just done a heavy day’s work. I stayed behind on the shore throwing stones into the Lake.

  So I didn’t say goodbye to them that evening, and didn’t come out of the tent the next morning. What could I have said to you, friend? Safe journey!

  Dusk is falling again. How many times have I experienced that now beside this Lake? Once again the bird which accompanies the setting sun flies out over the water with its shrill cry. This evening, however, is warm and I sit out until it is dark. The sky turns grey, then thickens, freezes, and the stars bore their way through. I’ll go to the tent now and wait for Grand. He isn’t back yet, but that is quite normal. He always comes back after the moon is up.

  There is a huge pile of wood by the fire, enough for several days. Why does he need so much? I make out the pot with what remains of the porridge, covered with my bowl, hobble over to the tent, lean down and see it is open. The flap is thrown back and Grand’s rucksack is missing.

  It would be untruthful to say tears poured from my eyes. No, my cedarwood sense of tranquillity is not that easily broken. I stood thinking about the situation, trying to awaken my emotions through thought. What should I do now? Somewhere in another part of my brain I was thinking, “So that’s why he gathered so much firewood. He must have been concerned for me.” I heard a rustle in the tent and climbed in, found a lighter and clicked it.

  Little tailless mice scatter in all directions trying in their panic to run up the walls. “Shit! For heaven’s sake, shoo! Shoo! All of you, just get out!” The mice in their terror can’t find the tent flap. I grab my things, shake my sleeping bag. More and more mice cascade out and scuttle around. I start trying to catch them and get them out but it’s not easy. Then one mouse finds the flap, runs out and squeaks to the others to follow. Now there is just one left, but it is huddled in the far corner and in its terror doesn’t know what to do. We go round in circles, trying to avoid each other, we thrash about until I hear another squeak. The first mouse has come back and the straggler rushes towards her. Together they scamper away. With a single tug I close the flap, retreat to the corner and suddenly, in the silence that descends, clear-eyed and desperate, consider my isolation.

  “Hey, Titch! Aren’t you scared?” “The forest is still and dense. I am of no interest to the Lake. All the mice are gone and will not return. I am not afraid.” “Hey, but Titch, you’ve been left all alone.” “I have the forest, I have the mountains, and soon the moon will rise and be reflected in the water, lighting up the icy peaks. Beneath a black sky there is the Earth, on it, like a tumulus, there is my tent, and inside it there is me, the only thing for miles around that can call this forest a forest. In the town there are millions like me, but that does not make me happier there.”

  “Titch, you are lame and have little to eat. You’re not good at lighting fires and don’t know the way back. What will you do tomorrow when the sun comes up? Hush, listen. A raven is cawing on the rocky mountain.” “Yes. That is my kind Cara not forgetting me even here.”

  I must have dozed off or been dreaming. The frenzied girl shaman is dancing round the fire with a tambourine, now raising it to the skies, now lowering it to the ground. I hear drumming and singing, and muttering, sometimes soft, then louder, and seem even to hear the ceaseless rhythms of a mouth harp. She leaps and spins, and scraps of cloth and the ribbons of her complicated costume fly about her in the wind. I watch enchanted. I watch in a daze, trying to make out her facial features contorted in ecstasy. It is She, our Chachkan, come to life out of the stone. She jumps over to me in a single leap, leans over my injured foot and tugs something out of it or from nearby. I clearly see a small black serpent writhing in her hand, but only for a moment before she jumps over to the fire and casts this black thing into it. I lower my eyes to my ankle and cannot help laughing. A dozen tailless mice are dancing on their hind legs next to me in time to the music of this frenzied ritual.

  I laugh and wake up. Through the walls of the tent I can see the campfire burning in our clearing. I look out and see Grand sitting there and he actually is quietly playing a mouth harp. A pot is suspended over the fire. I had forgotten food could smell like that. A pot of boiled potatoes and stew. I go to him but somehow instead of words of joy there comes from me an outburst of hysteria. “How could you leave me? How could you just abandon me? You’re all traitors! All of you! The lot of you!”

  “Titch, what are you on about?” He stands up and impulsively wants to put his arm round my shoulders. I don’t want that and, ashamed of my tears, tear myself away, turn aside and wail.

  “I told those mountaineers we were staying and why, and they invited me to go with them to their base for food. It was a couple of hours to the base and they’ve got a bathhouse. I told you, the road will help us. When you’re better we’ll go down there and have a good wash.” “A wash…” I murmur dreamily, as if hearing the word for the first time.

  I sit looking into the pot, and from just the sight and smell of his stomach-filling stew and the heat of the fire I stop feeling hungry. The fire crackles. Stars shine through the great paws of the cedars. The breeze is still and it is very quiet.

  “Why have you gathered so much firewood? Are you planning to spend the winter here?” “I was going to commune with the spirits but as I was walking back from the ba
se everything felt so good and peaceful. I didn’t want to go hunting them. The world around us is enormous, Titch, and we are so small, puny and alone. We’re all trying to go somewhere in this world, but if you look to the heart of things, you see that none of this is real.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t real?”

  “It just isn’t. There is a boundless dark sea all around, and that gives you a sense of awe. Imagine, Titch: it’s summer, it’s hot, it’s evening. There’s a pool of yellow light on the veranda and a smell, the smell of the heated earth which is cooling as night closes in.

  “Standing in the lamplight on the veranda, with the soft rustle of the wings of moths, you peer out into the garden and it seems as if it doesn’t exist. What is around you is a dark sea, and the garden isn’t there. Nothing else exists, only you, snatched from the darkness by a circle of dim lamplight. ‘What sparks are those I see flickering?’ you will ask. ‘Fireflies or stars?’ Stars,’ I reply. ‘Fireflies.’”

  “Yes. I understand,” I say, nodding my head, and for the first time I really do understand him.

  Everything was like a dream, only it wasn’t a dream. The nearby Lake was still and the glaciers were reflected in its bottomless depths. The sky was cold and black but we felt no chill and forgot the food. We sat and soaked up all the emptiness, and the good spirits of that place, my good brothers, surrounded us and were almost tangible.

  We went to the tent and for the first time slept holding each other tight, and we were warm.

  We left two days later. My foot was better and walking was easy. At the base we met a new group of climbers gazing mournfully at the glacial precipices in the hope of seeing dark clouds bringing snow. “Without snow there’s no point in going up to the pass,” they grumbled. We were in a hurry and didn’t wash.

  We moved on and it seemed to me that the road was familiar. We spent the night in the forest, next to a flooded meadow. We crossed it swiftly, following the path closest to the trees which grew round its edge.

  We crossed streams and descended an almost sheer track. Our next overnight stop was by a river and, as we discovered in the morning, a bare hundred metres away from the site with the table under cover.

  The place was deserted when we reached it. The dark planks of the bench and table, with rusty bruises around the nail heads, looked forlorn, a dull echo of the civilisation we had left behind and to which we were now returning. Near the site of the fire we found the plastic container with the incompatible grains which our friends had abandoned. We sat for a time before going on, down into the valley.

  Mars, The Red Star

  The Russian steppe, night time, and we are being driven at speed in a red car with rounded contours. It is a right-hand drive Japanese Daewoo and if I peep round the back of the driver’s seat I can see the illuminated speedometer on the dashboard, only it’s better not to. I really won’t do that again. May God and all his messengers of light protect us. We are travelling so fast we seem to be flying. It would be good to have something to hold on to, but there is nothing.

  “Why aren’t you talking, Sergey?” the driver demands of Grand. “Let’s sing! ‘Moans my heart… moans my heart…!’” he bursts forth with a voice so powerful I am pressed down in the back seat from where, as if peering up from the bottom of the sea, I can observe only a scrap of black sky through the rear window and a large red star suspended in it.

  God forbid that you should find yourself hitchhiking in the night with a drunk at the wheel. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We accepted the lift so now we must stick it out to the end because, in any case, we have no choice.

  We didn’t immediately see the situation. We were even pleased because we really needed a lift. Night was falling and we had gone barely any distance away from Novosibirsk. We hadn’t made 50 kilometres and found ourselves in steppe so desolate there wasn’t a birch tree to be seen. Far away on the horizon huge green radar dishes, which looked like eviscerated tortoise shells were rotating. It was a creepy place to be and we had no wish to be stuck there overnight. We had just decided to walk on a bit and start thumbing when suddenly this little car as red as a Christmas tree bauble and with tinted windows shot out of the filling station and screeched to a halt for us. The driver lowered his window, looked at Grand and laughed. Grand looked at him and laughed too, as if they were two old friends, as I thought they were. I laughed too.

  “Fancy seeing you here!” the driver said, still laughing. “Well, come on. Get in and let’s go.” “Let’s go,” Grand agreed and opened the rear door. Before I could say anything I was bundled in along with our rucksacks and the car roared off. The driver turned to Grand and they continued laughing. He didn’t look at the road.

  “Hey, guys, it’s great to meet you! We’ll travel along together all the way to where I live, all the way to Omsk. You guys from Omsk? No? I am. I’m from Omsk. I’ve got a house there, kiddies, and the wife waiting for me. ‘I’ve a wee wife a-waiting and she’s waiting just for me…’ She’s been waiting three days for me and I didn’t come back. I went to see my brother-in-law in Novosibirsk and I’ve been away for three days now. I had a wild time, guys, a really wild time. A man’s gotta do… But now it’s time to go home, if we make it, touch wood, eh guys? Isn’t that right, eh? ‘I’ll be back home soon, back to my sources. Kiss the wife and tend the horses.’” He laughed again but by now I was silent. Grand gave a kind of nervous chuckle.

  “What’s your name, man?” our driver asked. “Sergey,” Grand said. “And I’m Sasha. Call me Sash! How about you, Seryozha, do you know what a yesaul is? You’ve probably forgotten the meaning of the word. Anyway, Seryozha, a yesaul is a guy like me. Yesaul Ulanov, Captain of the Cossacks.”

  I’d worked out by now that they didn’t know each other. May the powers of light protect us! Just as well the road here was running through steppe, flat, long, no side roads. Fly while you can! And we were flying.

  “Whaddya say, Seryozha, how about we sing?” Yesaul Ulanov barked. “‘Oh, boundless steppes of Russia…’”

  I pressed myself down in the rear seat between the rucksacks. I didn’t sleep. I kept an eye open.

  I’m back on Yakimanka and Tolya is in a bad mood as he surfs the Internet, clicking his mouse and grumbling, pre-empting any desire others might have to make a nuisance of themselves. “Managers, Managers. The only people this country seems to need are managers.” “Are you looking for a new job, Tolya?” I enquire from my gallery. “No, I’m studying the demand for new employees. I’m studying Russia.”

  Tolya works for a mobile phone company and is well paid by the standards of our commune, but he is an eternal oppositionist. I shrug my shoulders and get back to my book. “Managers, managers… nothing but bloody managers.” I hear him squeezing a plastic beer bottle.

  Yakimanka, Yakimanka. On Yakimanka old Artemiy sits night and day by the central heating radiator, rolling his own cigarettes from tobacco so rough you have to take a deep breath before you run into the kitchen and back out again. I had always supposed he was Roma’s grandfather, but nothing of the sort. Artemiy has different grandchildren who come every quarter to pay Roma his rent of forty bucks a month so the old man can smoke his tobacco and sit by the central heating radiator.

  “Isn’t that a bit stiff, Roma?” Tolya asked him. “The old geezer takes up no space at all. You’re turning bourgeois.” “They don’t bring him any food,” landlord Roma retorts. “Half the money they give me goes on feeding him.” “That poor old man only gets half?!” Tolya taunts him. “Oh, Roma, you sticky-fingered bourgeois!”

  Old Artemiy, our commune’s scarecrow, a symbol of times before any of us were around, sits in the kitchen, slobbering on pieces of newspaper and rolling his smokes with dirty, arthritic fingers. He inhales with a look of concentration on his face.

  “Heh-heh,” he laughs, squinting at me. “Khe-khe-khe,” his laughter changes into a smoker’s cough.

  What does our Old Artemiy know, what does he remember? Wh
at nook of forgotten history is preserved in that bald head of his, that skull with the skin stretched taut over it? I tried to find out one time, but the old man said nothing and only bared his toothless gums from behind his smokescreen. “Hehheh, girlie. I know why you keep asking all these questions,” he finally wheezed. “Khe-Khe, girlie, I know everything. You’re one of our blue bloods. If things had turned out different you’d have been living here on your own and we would be running errands for you. Khe-Khe-Khe.” “You can’t get anything out of him, just a load of nonsense,” I growled, retreating from the kitchen in confusion. He chucked a few bricks after me: “Our lady countess, for Christ’s sake! Khe-Khe-Khe!”

  “Well, Titch, you walked into that, eh? He’s got you sussed.” Tolya laughed an evil laugh. “I’ve long had my doubts about you. I guessed as much! You’re a member of the bourgeoisie, Titch, there’s a class enemy skulking inside you to this day. Now you and your blue blood have been exposed once and for all!” “Oh, give over.” I am Titch, a well-intentioned daughter of our latest Time of Troubles. What’s my lineage got to do with anything?

  We took off in a screech of rubber, like racers, with the wind whistling in our ears, a round red car eating up the expanses of the steppe at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. “‘From behind a distant is-land like a sho-oal of fearsome sha-arks…’ Why aren’t you joining in, Seryozha? Show me some respect!” bawls Yesaul Ulanov. I shudder and raise myself up a little. The same darkness surrounds us and the bleak expanse of Russia judders and rushes beneath us. “… there come sai-ailing with the cur-rent Stenka Ra-zin’s painted barques.” “I’d rather you told me about the Cossacks, and kept your eyes on the road in the meantime,” Grand suggests.

  “Ekh, the road, the dust, the mist!” the Yesaul intoned. “What are the Cossacks, Seryozha my brother? What were the Cossacks for Russia and what are they for our Russia today, I ask you? They are everything! The only link left holding Russia together as a nation. From olden times and up till now, to our own days. What is there of the past that is truly alive? From that great, great distance what is alive, I ask you? Nothing! Only the Cossacks remain. That’s who we are – the Cossacks! We‘ve been there from time immemorial, from aeons ago. It was we took Siberia with Yermak Timofeyevich, raised fortresses, kept the frontiers inviolable, drove off the Tatar scum, drove off the German scum, and held these lands against all comers. Without the Cossacks there would be no Siberia, without the Cossacks there would be no Russia either. That’s what I have to tell you, Seryozha. What have you to say to that? Can you deny it? If you deny it, speak out, man!” “Times change, Sasha.”