Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

by Sylvain Tesson

  I can’t help thinking of the dead. The thousands of Russians swallowed up by the lake.5 Do the souls of the drowned struggle to the surface? Can they get past the ice? Do they find the hole that opens up to the sky? Now there’s a touchy subject to raise with Christian fundamentalists …

  It took me five hours to reach Elohin. Volodya welcomed me with a hug and a ‘Hello, neighbour’. Now there are seven or eight of us around the wooden table dunking biscuits in our tea: some fishermen passing through, myself and our hosts. We talk about our lives and I’m exhausted already. Intoxicated by the pot-luck company, the fishermen argue, constantly correcting one another with grand gestures of disgust and jumping down one another’s throats. Cabins are prisons. Friendship doesn’t survive anything, not even togetherness.

  Outside the window, the wind keeps up its nonsense. Clouds of snow rush by with the regularity of phantom trains. I think about the tit. I miss it already. It’s crazy how quickly one becomes attached to creatures. I’m seized with pity for these struggling things. The tits stay in the forest in the icy cold; they’re not snobs like swallows, which spend the winter in Egypt.

  After twenty minutes we fall silent, and Volodya looks outside. He spends hours sitting in front of the window pane, his face half in shadow, half bathed in the light off the lake. The light gives him the craggy features of some heroic foot-soldier. Time wields over skin the power water has over the earth. It digs deep as it passes.

  Evening, supper. A heated conversation with one of the fishermen in which I learn that Jews run the world (but in France it’s the Arabs); Stalin, now there was a real leader; the Russians are invincible (that pipsqueak Hitler bit off more than he could chew); communism is a top-notch system; the Haitian earthquake was triggered by the shockwave from an American bomb; September 11 was a Yankee plot; gulag historians are unpatriotic; and the French are homosexuals.

  I think I’m going to space out my visits.

  26 FEBRUARY

  Volodya and Irina live like tightrope walkers. They have no contact with the inhabitants on the other side of Baikal. No one crosses the lake. The opposite shore is another world, the one where the sun rises. Fishermen and inspectors living north or south of this station sometimes visit my hosts, who rarely venture into the mountains of their domain. They stay along the shoreline, at their outpost in the littoral zone, in equilibrium between the forest and the lake.

  This morning Irina proudly shows me her library. In old editions from the Soviet era, she has works by Stendhal, Walter Scott, Balzac, Pushkin. The most recent book is The Da Vinci Code. A slight downswing in civilization.

  And I go home by walking on the water.

  27 FEBRUARY

  The luxury of living alone in this world where being side by side will become the major problem. In Irkutsk, I learned that a French author had published a long novel entitled Ensemble, c’est tout. ‘Togetherness, It’s Everything.’ It’s a lot. It’s even the essential challenge, which I don’t believe we are meeting very well. The animal and vegetable biological organisms exist together in equilibrium. They destroy one another and reproduce within a greater, well-regulated harmony. Thanks to our frontal cortex, humans cannot manage to coexist in peace. Our music is out of tune.

  It’s snowing. I’m reading Men Possessed by God, Jacques Lacarrière’s essay on eremitism in the Egyptian deserts in the fourth century. Dazzled by the sun, hirsute prophets abandoned their families for the desert, where they dragged out their lives in the Thebaid, the territory around ancient Thebes in Egypt. God never visited them there because, like any normal person, He preferred the magnificence of Byzantine domes. The anchorites wished to escape the temptations of their century, but some of them sinned through pride by confusing wariness towards their time with contempt for their fellow men. Not one of the anchorites returned to the world after tasting the poisonous fruit of the solitary life.

  Societies do not like hermits and do not forgive them for their flight. They disapprove of the solitary figure throwing his ‘Go on without me’ in everyone else’s face. To withdraw is to take leave of one’s fellows. The hermit denies the vocation of civilization and becomes a living reproach to it. He is a blot on the social contract. How can one accept this person who crosses the line and latches onto the first passing breeze?

  At four in the afternoon, an impromptu visit from Yura. He’s the meteorologist at the Uzuri weather station on Olkhon, the largest island in Lake Baikal.

  The ice has opened up where it meets the beach: four feet of water are preventing vehicles from crossing to land. New snow has made my shore pristine again. Yura parks his van at the edge of the fracture. He’s taking an Australian woman, a tourist, around the lake.

  I set the vodka glasses on the table, and we become gently drunk in the foetal warmth. The Australian woman doesn’t quite get the picture. We have a brief exchange in English.

  ‘Do you have a car?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I reply.

  ‘A TV?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if you have a problem?’

  ‘I walk.’

  ‘Do you go to the village for food?’

  ‘There is no village.’

  ‘Do you wait for a car on the road?’

  ‘There is no road.’

  ‘Are those your books?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you write all of them?’

  I prefer people whose character resembles a frozen lake to those who are more like marshes. The former are cold and hard on the surface, yet deep, roiling and alive underneath, whereas the latter seem soft, spongy, but inert and impermeable at the core.

  The Australian appears leery of sitting on the upended logs I use as stools. She gives me strange looks. My untidiness must reinforce her opinions of the backwardness of the French people. When my guests leave, I’m as tight as a tick and it’s time to do some ice skating.

  Yesterday’s wind has polished the rink. I glide over the glaze with the grace of a seal. Internal faults sheet through the ice in turquoise veils. I pass refrozen fissures the colour of ivory. I maintain my balance, skating on the reflections of mountains that resemble shy dancers, cinched into their white dresses and hesitating to join the waltz.

  Just before I catch a blade in a crack and crash onto the dance floor, I think about those athletic figure skaters in their tight spangled boleros who zip around whirling pink young Czech partners over their heads for a jury of old ladies who resemble escapees from a Riviera casino, busy brandishing little cards with numbers whose total will win the athlete either a kiss from the girl or chilly tears.

  I hobble miserably home with bruised ankles.

  In the evening, the sky clears and the temperature plummets. I spend a heavenly hour, swaddled in my bedding, on my wooden bench: a pine plank nailed to two stumps. I’m sitting at the edge of the forest, beneath the tree outside my southern window. Harassed by the western wind, the branches bend down towards the lake, forming a band shell. And in my alcove of icy needles providing an illusion of warmth, I gaze at the black well of the lake. I see the mass of ice as a nightmarish crucible. I sense the force at work beneath this lid. Down in this vault, a universe teems with creatures that slice, crush and devour. Sponges slowly wave their arms in the depths. Shells coil their spires, beating time to Time and creating nacreous jewels shaped like constellations. At the muddy bottom prowl silurids, monstrous catfish, while carnivorous fish migrate towards the surface in a nightly feast and holocaust of crustaceans. Shoals of Arctic char perform their benthic choreography. Bacteria churn and digest debris, purifying the lake. This bleak working of the waters takes place in silence, beneath a mirror where the sta
rs haven’t even the strength to send down their reflections.

  28 FEBRUARY

  Force 8 this morning. The blasts carry off the snow, slamming it in angry clouds against the greenish-bronze wall where the cedar forest begins. Two hours of housekeeping. Cabin life fosters the same finickiness as does life on a small boat. Mustn’t end up like those sailors for whom being shipshape becomes an end in itself and who rot at permanent anchor in port, spending their days tidying an extinguished life.

  Setting up residence in a one-room Siberian hut is a victory in the battle against being buried alive by objects. Life in the woods melts the fat away. Unburdened, the airship of life sails higher. Two thousand years ago, the Indo-Sarmatian steppe nomads knew enough to transport their possessions in a small wooden coffer. One’s attachment to belongings is in direct proportion to their rarity, and to a Siberian woodsman, a knife and a gun are as precious as any flesh-and-blood companion. An object that has been with us through the ups and downs of life takes on substance and a special aura; the years give it a protective patina. To learn to love each one of our poor patrimony of objects, we have to spend a long time with them. Soon the loving looks directed at the knife, the teapot and the lamp come to embrace their materials and elements: the wood of the spoon, the candle’s wax, the flame itself. As the nature of objects reveals itself, I seem to pierce the mysteries of their essence. I love you, bottle; I love you, little jackknife, and you, wooden pencil, and you, my cup, and you, teapot steaming away like a ship in distress. Outside roars such fury of wind and cold that if I don’t fill this cabin with love it might be blown apart.

  I learn via my satellite phone, miraculously reactivated, that my sister’s child has been born. This evening I’ll drink to the baby’s health and pour a mug of vodka on this Earth that welcomes one more little creature foisted upon it without permission.

  POEM: ON SNOW

  For a domain, a bay;

  For a castle, a cabin;

  For a Fool, a tit;

  For subjects, my memories.

  Spent the morning cutting firewood. It’s stacked in a small but growing wall under the porch roof. I’ve got ten days’ worth of heating in those split logs.

  A hermit expends intense physical energy. In life, we have the choice of putting machines to work or setting ourselves to the task. In the first instance, we entrust the satisfaction of our needs to technology. Relieved of all impetus towards effort, we devitalize ourselves. In the second case, we activate the machinery of our bodies to provide for all necessities. And the less we rely on machines, the more muscle we put on. Our bodies toughen up, our skin grows calloused and our faces weather. Energy redistributes itself, transferring from the belly of machines to the human body. Backwoodsmen are power stations glowing with dynamic force. When they enter a room, their vitality fills the space.

  After a few days, I noticed the first changes in my body. My limbs are more muscular, but I’ve got the flabby abdomen and white skin of an alcoholic or a creature dwelling in a mud bank. Less tension, slower heartbeat: confined in a cramped space, I’m learning to move slowly. Even the mind grows lax. Without conversation, deprived of the contradiction and sarcasm of sparring partners, the hermit is less witty, less lively and incisive, less worldly, slower off the mark than a city dweller. The hermit gains in poetry what is lost in agility.

  Sometimes, this desire to do nothing. I’ve been sitting at my table for an hour, surveying the progress of sunbeams across the tablecloth. Light ennobles all it touches even glancingly: wood, the row of books, the knife handles, the curve of a face and of time going by, even the dust motes in the air. That’s not nothing, to be specks of dust in this world.

  So now I’m rhapsodizing about dust. March is going to be a long month.

  MARCH

  Time

  1 MARCH

  My father’s birthday. I imagine the dinner back home near Guise, in Picardy. Every year the family gathers in a restaurant remodelled from eighteenth-century stables: the Belgian cousins, beer, wine, meat and the light beaming down from the brick vaults. They must have arrived in the rain and are now dining cosily. The tables are set up beneath the racks where the animals once tucked into their feed. Hundreds of horses that would be warm in these stalls now spend the night outside in northern France. I’m no fonder of stables turned into banquet halls than I am of churches turned into munitions dumps. I pour myself a generous shot of vodka, raise a toast towards the west, and toss it down.

  Would my father be happy here? He wouldn’t like all this nature. He loves the theatre, public debate, lively conversation. He is at home in the world of the snappy rejoinder. It’s hard to hold a conversation in the woods of Siberia. There’s nothing to stop a man from expressing himself, of course. He can always roar like the fellow in The Howling Miller, a tale by the Finnish novelist Arto Paasilinna. It’s just that yelling is futile. From a naturalist perspective, the rebellious figure of l’homme révolté is useless. The sole virtue, in these latitudes, is acceptance. Vide the Stoics, animals or (even better!) simple stones. The taiga can offer only two things: its resources, which we blithely plunder, and its indifference. Let’s take the moon, for example. Yesterday it was shining. In my notebook I wrote: The rhinoceros moon that with its horn wounds a night the colour of Africa. Just how much of a damn does the moon give about such sophomoric pseudo-aphorisms?

  Tonight I finished a murder mystery. I closed the book feeling as if I’d just eaten at McDonald’s: nauseated and slightly ashamed. The action is hectic – and forgotten the next moment. Four hundred pages to find out whether MacDouglas cut up MacFarlane with a butter knife or an ice axe. The characters are ruled by all-powerful facts. The myriad details paper over a void. Is it because novels like these resemble bureaucratic bumf that they’re called police procedurals?

  Midnight; I stroll out on the lake. How can I recover the impression I had when I first arrived on these gleaming coal-grey shores seven years ago? My soul was laid wide open with happiness. Where is the enjoyment of this place that kept me awake those first few nights on the beach? The comfort of my cabin is dulling my perceptions. Too much ease coats the soul with soot. I’ve been here just a few weeks and already I feel like a local. Soon I’ll know every evergreen as well as I know the bistros of my Parisian stomping grounds. Being at home somewhere is the beginning of the end.

  A hundred paces from my cabin, the toilet: a hole in the ground in an open shed cobbled together from planks. Going out there tonight, I remember ‘The Apple Tree’, a short story by Daphne du Maurier: a man meets his downfall one freezing night, tripping over the roots of his long-suffering wife’s favourite tree, vengefully cut down by the widower after her death. I imagine myself falling somewhere along the way in −30º. I would die there, about fifty yards from the cabin, with its string of smoke rising from the roof, and the explosions of the lake ice for a eulogy. Ceasing to struggle, I would slowly rejoin the beautiful silence while thinking: No, really, this is too dumb. Oh, those people who’ve got lost and died a few yards from shelter …

  Help is there, a mere ten steps away, but the threshold of safety remains out of reach. Kurosawa made a movie about that: a group of mountaineers, freezing in a blizzard some seventy yards from camp. And Scott of the Antarctic! Have we forgotten his agony, not even twelve miles from a supply depot? Out in the Taklamakan Desert of north-west China, where ancient mummies of Caucasoid peoples have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, the explorer Sven Hedin had the opposite adventure: believing himself lost, he prepared to die – and stumbled onto an oasis.

  2 MARCH

  Almost half a mile to the south of the cabin, a granite rise cleaves the forest. Looming 300
feet into the air, the rise dominates the lake; six larches crown the summit, giving it the shape of a pine cone. Lynx tracks mottle the slope leading to the foot of the dome. I toil my way up there; powdery snow covers the scree. I sink in up to my thighs and sometimes lose a foot down a gap between two rocks. From the summit, Baikal: a plain striped with ivory veins. The silence of the forest envelops the world and the echo of this silence is millions of years old. I’ll be coming back here. The ‘pine cone’ will be my crow’s nest for the days when I need a lofty view.

  Sasha and Yura, the fishermen I met at Sergei’s two weeks ago, drop in for a visit. I pour the ritual glasses. In this life, sharing a glass with a companion, feeling safe in the warmth of a shelter – this is already something. The stove is drawing well and the atmosphere makes us drowsy. A soft weight falls upon our brows, a sign of biological well-being. The vodka goes down. The spirit is buoyed, the body contented. The air fills with tobacco smoke as conversation dies away. I always find peace in the company of Russian woodsmen: I feel theirs is the human environment in which I would have liked to be born. It’s good not to have to keep a conversation going. Why is life with others so hard? Because you must always find something to say. I think of those days of walking around Paris nervously tossing off ‘Just-fine-thank-yous’ and ‘Let’s-get-together-soons’ to strange people I don’t know who babble the same things to me, as if in a panic.

  ‘Cold?’ asks Sasha after a moment.

  ‘S’okay,’ I say.