The irony is not lost on Yuri Norstein—how could it be, a great Russian artist failing to finish a masterwork adapted from a great Russian artist who died with his masterwork unfinished. Sometimes it seems the process is working in reverse: He set out to adapt Gogol, and instead, Gogol adapted him. But he has no interest in God and no desire to starve himself. “His children tease him,” Tania says. “They say, ‘Papa, Papa, why do you live this way, why do you make things so difficult? Come on vacation to Greece with us!’ But Yuri Borisovich says, ‘No, no, I need to be in Moscow. I need to touch the flowers. I need my cross-country skis. I need to feel the wind in my face!’” He likes to swim in his pond and he likes to sit with Kuzya in the studio, and on weekends he likes to visit Francheska at the dacha, where she now spends most of her time. He likes being applauded at his talks. He likes drinking cognac. He likes to storm and yell and fire his assistants, too, but he always hires them back before they get through the door. He looks through books of nature drawings and fantasizes about visiting the Arctic. He thinks that for all the damage people do to it, the world is too fascinating a place to turn away from.
There are long stretches when he does no work, while he summons his creative energies. But when the time is right, Tania says, he works quickly: “Yuri Borisovich takes his little tweezers and goes tchk, tchk, tchk, and just like that, a scene is finished.”
He likes to tell a story about a time when Francheska surprised him. He has always been in awe of her intuitive connection to nature. One year, they brought home a bundle of nettles that turned out to be full of caterpillars. The caterpillars crawled all over the room; soon chrysalises hung from every available space. One morning Francheska told him, “A butterfly is about to come out of that chrysalis.” And as he watched, “my heart pounding with excitement,” the shell cracked and a pair of wet wings came through. The wings began, slowly, to beat. Francheska explained that the butterfly was drying itself, preparing to fly for the first time. “She knew in advance each action of the butterfly,” he says, and it happened just as she told him. When the time was right, the butterfly stepped out of the chrysalis, and then it began to fly.
Many years ago, when he was fifteen, he was chosen to attend a special art class for talented students. The class met two days a week in a stately old mansion in Moscow, near the planetarium. The spacious quiet of the studio was something utterly new to him. After the dark, crowded kommunalka, it opened his eyes to a different world. He discovered Greece through the alabaster statues in the art room: Laocoön, silently screaming; Socrates, bald and with a nose like a potato. He remembers the sound of the easels rattling, the clinking of the watercolor brushes in their saucers. It is good, he thinks, to have memories like these. He keeps them among his sources of enchantment—along with bright light, and sugared bread, and a talking cat whose shadow he can almost see.
Man-Eaters
1
Of the twelve tigers I saw in India, one might have been a ghost; two were in water, eight were on land, and one was sleeping in a tree. One stepped out of high grass, crossed the road in front of me, and disappeared into grass on the other side. One walked along a low ridge on the edge of a different road, oblivious or indifferent to the tourists taking her photograph. One looked out from a cover of branches and red leaves, so perfectly concealed that from thirty feet away he kept stereoscoping in and out of sight. Three were cubs, just four or five months old. Three were juveniles, aged around one year. The rest were fully grown. All were tired, because the days were hot, and because the days were dry they moved and breathed and slept in a film of clay-colored dust.
Every morning we left before dawn, to have the best chance of seeing a tiger. At that hour the lodges didn’t serve breakfast, but at four forty-five or five o’clock or five fifteen they put out tea and ginger cookies, and sometimes porridge or fruits. Shadowed safarigoers in camouflage pants and intricately pocketed wrinkled vests gathered in hushed groups around the piles of their camera gear, sipping Darjeeling from china cups. Later, after we had driven for three or four hours, we would stop and the guides would spread a white tablecloth on the jeep’s hood and on this they would lay out a full breakfast: hard-boiled eggs in metal tins and green apples and basmati rice and triangular sections of cheese sandwich and salt in fluted glass shakers. Tea was steeped in boiling water, from kettles that drew power from the jeep’s battery. If we had stopped at a forest rest area there would be stalls where you could buy hot chai for twenty rupees and Coca-Cola for fifty rupees and also T-shirts, and books of wildlife photography still wrapped in cellophane. Tourists browsed among the tables or threw bits of egg to the stray dogs lying in the dust between the jeeps. I bought a Coke from a boy selling them from a dirty Styrofoam cooler, then looked out at the field of black bushes behind the rest area and wondered how close the tigers came.
As it happened, I never saw a tiger near a rest area. As it happened, the only wild animals I saw near rest areas were langurs, big coal-faced monkeys that congregated in troops along the sides of forest roads, infants clinging to their mothers’ necks and staring out with calmly startled eyes. Families of gray langurs would sometimes go leaping through the bushes, and I liked watching them because I liked the front-sprung, bucking gait with which they ran, tipping from hind limbs to fore. I liked the langurs, too, because their unbothered presence near a rest area seemed to suggest that there was nothing, after all, so strange about the scene, that the act of shopping for baseball caps and art books in the middle of a jungle preserve contained no insurmountable irony, that the Coca-Cola and the banyan trees and the cheese sandwiches and the monkeys were merely pieces in a puzzle whose edges were by necessity somewhat blurred. Eventually, my experience in the jungles of Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh made me mistrust the convenience of this reasoning; it was comforting while it lasted.
I had no trouble imagining a tiger creeping up behind the T-shirt stand, in any case, because in the presence of a tiger what most astonishes is not its size or its power or even its beauty but its capacity to disappear. I’m sure you’ve heard about the stealth of tigers on nature shows. It’s no preparation for the reality. You will not see a tiger that does not choose to be seen. Maybe a professional guide can spot one, or one of the forest villagers who live around the reserves; for a regular human with untrained, human senses, there’s no chance. The way a tiger arrives is, there is nothing there. Then a tiger is there. Outside one of the exits from Bandhavgarh, the densely forested jungle reserve in central India, there is a sun-faded sign. It shows a picture of a tiger, and next to the tiger the sign reads: PERHAPS YOU MAY NOT HAVE SEEN ME, BUT PLEASE DON’T BE DISAPPOINTED. I HAVE SEEN YOU.
The arrival of a tiger, it’s true, is often preceded by moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Birdcalls darken. Small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emerging group consciousness of an escape route. A kind of shiver seems to run through everything, a low hum that sounds—literally, in the murmured Hindi conversation of the guides—like tiger, tiger, tiger. This zone of apprehension follows the tiger as it moves. Often, the best way to find a tiger is to switch off your engine and listen. You might then hear, from a distance, the subtle changes in pitch and cadence that indicate a boundary of the zone. But even then, it is impossible to predict where, or if, the tiger will appear.
The first tiger I saw came out into a rocky canyon in Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalayas. We were parked on the rim, looking down. For several minutes before the tiger showed herself, unease warped through the canyon. An unidentifiable impulse made the human occupants of the jeeps on the canyon rim stand on their seats, gripping their binoculars with both hands. Two peacocks that had been dancing on the canyon floor folded their tails and slunk away in silence. And it was very strange: Because the tiger had been, so long as she was invisible, a hazard of pure atmosphere, a permeating energy that
filled the whole jungle with dread, when she walked out into the open, she seemed curiously small and specific, no longer a magic aura but a creature bound by a body, with a body’s limitations. Above all she seemed indifferent. She had not come to justify the myth we were writing for her. She was not interested in the mood she created or in the sounds her audience made. She was hot, and here was a muddy pool, so she waded into it; that was as far as her participation went. Somehow her aloofness made her even less conspicuous. When she first appeared, I had to have her pointed out to me. I was scanning the canyon floor only for her, yet she had taken several steps out of the cover of the tree line before my eyes would register her existence.
2
At Bandhavgarh, I shared a jeep with Jerry and Verbena, an English couple on holiday from Wiltshire. They were in late middle age and very tall, and they lived near Stonehenge, in a house they described as full of dogs and guns and old furniture. Verbena had been to India before, in her youth, which from her brief anecdotes I imagined as a time of freedom and acoustic guitars and truth seeking, flowers in her dark hair, wild horses, trains to Goa. Her voice was clear and deep, her pronunciation received, her posture immaculate. Would you mind, Brian, she said, if on the way back we stop at that lovely little shop that sells crafts made by the local women? I would quite like to have a look around. In Agra we went, didn’t we, Jerry, to a studio where we saw the most beautiful marble tabletop. The marble was inlaid with stones in what really were the loveliest patterns. I was so tempted to buy it, but of course it wouldn’t fit our lifestyle, with the dogs. And then, too, in Agra, the prices are always exorbitant.
Jerry was making his first trip to India. His accent was West Country (“China” rhymed with “joiner”) and though his manner was mild, even gentle, there was something about him, a stooped ruggedness, that suggested a military past. His blue eyes, watery now, seemed acquainted with long-ago deserts. He kept bees. He knew about the rifles hunters used in the nineteenth century. Had made trips to see famous examples. It had more to do with artistry then, he’d say, gunsmithing. He and Verbena had met late in life, there were grown children from previous relationships, but in Wiltshire they went tramping together through wet woods and hills and built big fires in the hearth and looked up birds in bird books, and at Bandhavgarh they wore matching white neckerchiefs and loose camouflage shirts and tactical sunglasses, and they passed water back and forth and reminded each other to put on sunscreen.
Every morning and every afternoon we drove from our lodge to a checkpoint outside Bandhavgarh, where we joined the line of jeeps waiting to enter the forest. Guards in khaki uniforms moved down the line checking passports. They made ticks on their clipboards. Our guide filled out entrance forms.
They do love a bit of paperwork, Jerry said affectionately, don’t they, the Indians.
Until recently, our guide told us, it had been easier to gain access to the reserve. Then, in 2014, it was found that the amount of jeep traffic was harmful for the tigers. Tigers were mobbed by jeeps. Jeeps bristling with tourists and photographers surrounded tigers at road crossings and watering holes. The government announced new rules. Fewer jeeps would be allowed in. Guides would no longer be allowed to share a tiger’s location by radio. Core areas were declared off-limits.
The new rules had the intended effect of thinning out the crowds and reducing stress for the tigers. They also produced unforeseen consequences. Fewer jeeps in the parks meant fewer visitors, which hurt tourism. The eco-lodges, which were licensed to operate jeep tours in the reserves, often hired local people, and those jobs were coveted, because they paid well and offered the chance of advancement. Now lodges were closing; people were being put out of work. Fewer tourists in the park also made it easier for poachers to operate, so more tigers were shot, and this problem was exacerbated by the fact that villagers were less motived to help the cause of tiger conservation when their share in the tourist economy was reduced. Deprived of jobs at the lodges, they might turn a blind eye to poaching, or assist in poaching, or even become poachers themselves.
The guard waved us through. We drove into the jungle. Already, just after sunrise, it was 90 degrees; afternoon would hit 115. Sunscreen stung the corners of my eyes where sweat blurred into them.
Jerry and Verbena had seen a documentary about tiger poaching and they knew how much it cost to have a tiger killed. It cost three hundred American dollars. Our guide confirmed this: For $300, you can hire a local soldier to shoot a tiger. Then, if you have the right contacts, you can smuggle the dead tiger into China. It will follow an overland route, across Tibet, through the mountains. At each checkpoint and border crossing, the tiger will be passed to someone else and a fee will be paid, a fee that doubles with each handoff as the dead tiger draws closer to its destination. It will be necessary to preserve the tiger, and perhaps also to butcher it, along the way. A tiger’s pattern of stripes is unique to it—if you shave a tiger, you find the same pattern on its skin—and some wildlife reserves keep records of their tigers’ markings, so skinning the tiger will help to hide your tracks. In Lhasa, Tibet, you can sell the skin for $10,000. When the rest of the tiger reaches Beijing, it will be sold to a black-market shop for $100,000 or more. Chinese traditional medicine creates the world’s largest market for poachers of endangered species, and this is particularly true where tigers are concerned: Tiger bone wine, a rice wine in which the bones of tigers have been steeped, is credited with far-reaching health benefits, and when the bones come from wild tigers, which are valued over tigers raised in captivity, wealthy Chinese will pay astonishing prices. Other parts of the tiger are equally lucrative. Tiger penises, for instance, are prized for their power to enhance male potency. The word “Viagra” is taken from vyaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.
It turned out that I was bad at spotting tigers. This wasn’t for lack of trying. Jerry and Verbena were enchanted by the little birds that swung in clothesline arcs beneath the canopy or perched on fallen branches by the road. They tracked each bird with their binoculars. They craned forward to read the passages the guide showed them in his books. They agreed that the little gentleman really did have the most extraordinary plumage, he must be on his way to a party dressed like that, in his special ruby cravat. I ignored the birds and spent this time scanning our surroundings for tiger shapes. Nevertheless, when a tiger did detach from the ambient background plane of branches and shadows and dead leaves, I was almost always slow to see it, slower even than my companions in the jeep who were focused on something else.
We were stopped twenty yards from a watering hole. Two little tiger cubs, around four months old, were alternately dozing and playing by the side of the pool. The air was full of the feeling of a tiger’s presence. A jungle fowl was crowing. I was scanning the trees with binoculars, and Verbena said, Do you know, we had a cock that sounded just like that when I was growing up, his name was Mr. Mustard, and Jerry said, Why Mr. Mustard, love, and Verbena said, Because he was really quite vicious, he had a tyrannical personality, and then the naturalist in the front seat turned with his binoculars and said There, and Verbena and Jerry turned and said Oh my yes oh hello gorgeous, and I saw nothing at all. Only by following the line of their binoculars did I finally spot the gigantic male who had come out of the trees and lain down in the shade near the water. His big flank inflated and collapsed. His muscular tail switched at the air like a cow’s.
No doubting what kind he is, Jerry said with a chuckle.
My God, Verbena said, look at his great balls.
We drove under a canopy where soft black tumors that were beehives hung upside down from branches where sun streamed through. Black bees mulled below the hives. I believe I shall have a swim when we get back to the lodge, Verbena said. And then perhaps I will use that coupon that they gave us for the spa. A cool dip and a bit of a massage really would be the loveliest thing right now. Ah! I wish we never had to leave this place.
They were leaving for Delhi the next afternoon, she said. They wer
e taking the train, because it was cheaper than hiring a driver or buying a plane ticket from Jabalpur. Verbena felt that they had perhaps miscalculated in purchasing a second-class fare, because they had ridden second-class from Agra, and on that trip they had been forced to share their carriage with a rather large Indian army officer. This had been all right during the day, but it became a serious problem at night, because the officer snored loudly, indeed snored so violently that you could feel the vibration of it throughout the carriage, like the cup of water in Jurassic Park, Jerry said. Verbena had asked the desk manager at the lodge to see about upgrading them to a private first-class compartment for the trip to Delhi, but there was no guarantee that one would be available, and Verbena was anxious about this, as well as sad about saying farewell to the tigers, which she had grown to love.
The jeep stopped at a village and our guide got out. Jerry took off his neckerchief and poured a bit of water into it from one of the reusable aluminum water bottles the eco-lodge had given us. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. The village was clustered around a grassy clearing with a wide tree. There were piles of bricks around the tree and a giant tire, which looked as though it belonged to a piece of construction machinery. A small boy wearing a shirt and no pants was squatting in the tree’s shade. Two young women in brilliant saris walked down the side of the road, carrying baskets. The jeep began to drive and Verbena leaned forward. Are we leaving without the guide, she asked the driver, and when he said we were, she turned to Jerry and said, I haven’t tipped him, I thought he was coming back.
Impossible Owls Page 15