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

^MAY The Animals

Last February, a good mile to the north of the cabin and within the orbit of a bay, Volodya T. set up a net to catch catfish. It lies out on the ice, attached to wooden stakes. I break open the old hole and thrust in the net, at the bottom of which I’ve hooked two char heads. The dogs stand guard in case any catfish come out of the hole to pounce on me.

I am the emperor of a mountainside, lord of my puppies, king of North Cedar Cape, protector of titmice, ally of lynxes and brother of bears. I am above all a little tipsy because after two hours of cutting wood, I’ve just polished off the dregs of a bottle of vodka.

Living in a nature reserve is symbolic: man is just passing through. What trace of him is left? Footprints in the snow. Across the lake, on the Buryat shore, there is a biosphere polygon off-limits to all visitors. I find it poetic, this idea of turning stretches of the Earth into sanctuaries where life would go on without mankind. Animals and gods would flourish there, all unseen. We would know that life in its wild state was carrying on in that haven, and this thought would be an elixir. The point would not be to deny men the usufruct of the forests, barrens and seas, but to protect a few selected acres from our appetites. The pretentious pedants of this world, however, are ever watchful, polishing up their speeches on the necessity of an ecology in the service of mankind. They would never allow 7 billion human beings to be barred from the tiniest hankie-size sliver of the planet…

Hail is blurring the bronze of the taiga. The heavens have decided to send something besides snowflakes. A day for reading Mircea Eliade (a book for awaiting spring: The Myth of the Eternal Return), and for cleansing the clearing of the last of Volodya T.’s debris. Later in the day, I try out a new hole at the mouth of the North Cedar River. Now I have four fishing holes: in front of the cabin, at the tip of the cape, an hour’s tramp to the north, and at the heart of the bay where I reactivated the catfish trap yesterday. Sitting on my stool, I smoke, keeping an eye on my fly line.

The dogs twine constantly around my legs; in me they have found someone who responds to their affection. They neither rely on nor delight in their memories. Between longing and regret, there is a spot called the present. Like jugglers who ply their trade while standing on the neck of a bottle, we should train ourselves to balance in that sweet spot. The dogs manage it.

When he entrusted the puppies to me, V.E. from Zavorotni told me: ‘Don’t let them get too close to you.’ I’m the most pathetic dog trainer east of the Urals, incapable of forbidding Aika and Bek from bubbling over with affection. People teach a dog how to lie down – and announce that they’re training him. I accept the high jinks of the two little creatures and all it costs me is their paw prints on the legs of my trousers.

We return home with dinner: three spotted char. Tonight the dogs will get the heads and entrails mixed into their mush of flour and lard. In the distance, the sun is cutting its way through the clouds here and there. This would have been a good spot for Paradise: infallible splendour, no serpents, impossible to live naked, and too many things to do to have any time left over for inventing a god.

This morning, dawn is tangled up in frilly tulle. I climb up towards the head of the ‘white valley’. The dogs are dementedly struggling to follow me, collapsing through the flat tracks of my snowshoes. At the heart of the combe, at the place where I turn up the flank to reach the granitic ridge, a bear has crossed through, heading for the other side of the valley. Hibernation is over. The awakening of the bears, the arrival of the wagtails and the cracking of the ice are ambassadors of spring. I’ve got my flare gun at my waist, the dogs as scouts: I’m not at risk. The bears, on the other hand, know that man is a wolf to them, and they avoid encounters.

I’m at 3,280 feet, on the edge of the ridge. Sitting on a branch of dwarf pine, leaning back against a boulder, dangling my legs over the drop with a stand of golden larches far below, I watch the morning mist reach the lakeshore. Its billowy wave flows up against the lower edge of the forest. I love mist, that incense of the earth. I trim a Partagás. A lover of Havanas enjoys surrounding himself with smoke. Offerings in an inoffensive sacrifice, the puffs bind men to the gods. Every smoker dreams of disappearing into his own cloud.

The snows of yesteryear returned to the land today. A sidecar motorcycle appears on the northern horizon and stops at my shore. The dogs don’t bark: not a good omen regarding their ability to warn me about approaching bears! It’s Oleg, a fisherman I’ve met once or twice. He’s travelling from Elohin to Zavorotni on an ageless Ij Planeta 750, a machine from the 80s that’s better than the Ural 650 but lacks the chic of a military sidecar bike, as Oleg readily admits.

The vodka’s good, snow is falling and Oleg has brought cucumbers. We slice them thinly, and crunch one up with each glass. Oleg hasn’t talked to anyone for a while.

‘When I think that I was afraid of capitalists, but you, you’re really nice. You have to come to Elohin more often. We’re going to drive on the lake for another two weeks before it starts opening up everywhere and we can’t take a step any more without risking a pratfall. The ducks and geese will arrive, you’ll see: one morning, there they’ll be, back from China or Thailand or some other fucking paradise. Once some geese landed at my place, near the lake, and made a nest in my canoe. A few hunters showed up and wanted to blow their heads off. I told them, just try and I’ll punch your faces flat. I don’t like having birds asleep in my boat shot at. Last year, I found a baby seal beached on the pebble shore and I fed it all summer long.’

I imagine Oleg with his huge mitts feeding the little animal from a bottle. Earlier, when the bike was heading here, I thought: Please let this bastard destroying my silence go on his way. And here we are, two brothers polishing off a bottle.

‘By the way,’ he says, ‘Irina sends you this little packet of yeast.’

We’ve put paid to a litre of poison. Oleg takes off, I collapse on my bed.

Buryatia hands over the sun at 6.30 a.m.

Yeast changes everything with blini.

The dogs have declared war on the wagtails.

A thin layer of snow makes the lake look like the world’s largest salt flat.

It takes me three minutes to chop into firewood one of the pine log sections Sergei chainsawed three months ago.

It’s 14°F at night and barely above freezing during the day.

Birch bark makes better tinder than dry moss.

The black dog stands out starkly on the ice. In the summer, she’ll still be the one easiest to spot on the light grey lakeshore.

To sharpen the axe, a smooth stone patiently rubbed along the edge is enough.

The fish position themselves naturally at the very bottom of the fishing holes.

Vodka diluted with water makes a decent window cleaner.

It’s stupid to hang the hurricane lantern from the cabin ceiling the way I did yesterday: the beams could have caught fire.

There is pleasure in keeping one’s home in order.

Cooking char en papillote without either scaling or gutting them intensifies the flavour of the fish.

At seven o’clock, the dawn light touches my table; at two in the afternoon, the foot of my bed; at six, the sun drops behind my peaks.

Not one insect has awakened yet.

It’s at the fifth glass of vodka that resisting the next one becomes difficult.

Having little to do prompts one to pay attention to everything.

Those are the findings of today’s inquiry.

Ice is the timekeeper. Spring will soon deliver the coup de grâce. Water has invaded the surface, carving it into countless vertical ruts, as if the ice were being eaten by worms. I must watch for the day when it breaks up into myriads of crystal bread sticks. The pitted surface no longer presents that lovely obsidian mirror, as sleek as metal. The mother-of-pearl crunches underfoot.

I take endless walks, flanked by Aika and Bek. I come and go, from one cape to another, and the crows cackle at each round trip.

There are six catfish caught in the trap, making this overcrowded net in the frigid water a nightmare. I understand why so many cultures consider this fish a demonic being. Catfish have maws like Chinese monsters and slimy yellow and greenish-bronze bodies… They’re somewhat like Tolkien’s Gollum. I release four and keep the two biggest, which I kill with a blow just behind the skull. Even the dogs don’t dare approach their flaccid bodies. Ah, the intense pleasure of giving a creature back its freedom! I mentally salute Commander Charcot, a polar scientist who opened the cage door for his gull before sinking off the coast of Iceland in 1936. On the wooden table at the beach, I gut the fish, then stuff the stove with wood to cook them. The flesh of catfish is elastic, with a strong taste some find pleasant, others slightly nauseating. There are many ways of dealing with it, but the best is to dredge it in flour and crumbs so that the greasy fried coating masks the muddy flavour. (The English fry everything they get their hands on in breadcrumbs, and I still recall the oily newspaper pages we had for napkins at a fish and chips place in Brighton.) I prepare a stew for the little dogs, saving a delicacy for myself: pan-fried catfish liver in a splash of vodka.

Months of devouring fish have produced a metamorphosis in me. My character has become lacustrine, more taciturn, slower, and my skin is whiter. I smell like scales, my pupils are dilated, my heart beats at a gentler pace.

A long walk on the lake to Middle Cedar Cape. The wind carries an odour of damp wood far and wide; temperatures slightly above freezing have released the perfume of the taiga. Spring is still only a frisson, but in the usual cold sky, the sun marks a hot spot. The water in the ice faults has melted. Whenever one of them is too wide, the dogs won’t cross it. I take one in my arms, leap over the divide, then return for the other pup, who begs in faint whimpers not to be abandoned.

At Middle Cedar Cape, a ruined cabin. A man hid out there until the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Every time the KGB came around, he fled into the mountains for a few days until the danger passed. I couldn’t find out whether he was a dissident or a deserter. Today there’s only a hut with a caved-in roof. When I step inside it, I think about that guy. After Yeltsin came to power, the fellow returned to Irkutsk and promptly died there. I would have liked to have met him; he would always have been welcome in my cabin. In the wreckage of the beams, I find a cup and the base of an oil lamp.

In Russia, the forest holds out its branches to the shipwrecked. Yokels, nonentities, bandits, the pure of heart, rebels, those who can bear to observe only unwritten laws – they all head for the taiga. A forest has never refused anyone asylum. As for the princes, they used to send their woodcutters to chop down the trees. To govern a country, the rule is to clear the land. In an orderly realm, the forest is the last bastion of freedom to fall.

The State sees everything; in the woods, life is hidden. The State hears everything; the woods are a vault of silence. The State controls everything; here, only the immemorial codes apply. The State wants submissive subjects, pinched hearts in presentable bodies; the taiga loosens up souls and returns men to the wild. Russians know that the taiga is there if things go wrong, it’s an idea anchored in their collective unconscious. Cities are temporary experiments, provisional experiences that the forests will one day reclaim. To the north, in the vastness of Yakutia (a territory larger than Argentina), this digestion has already begun. Out there, the taiga is retaking coal-mining cities abandoned at perestroika. In a hundred years, there will be nothing left of these open-air prisons but ruins buried under foliage. A nation prospers through the substitution of populations: men replace trees. One day, history turns around, and the trees grow back.

Refuseniks of every country, take to the woods! Consolation awaits you there. The forest judges no one, and imposes its rule. It stages its annual party at the end of May: life returns and the copses swell with an electric fever. In winter, you’ll never feel alone: the cries of the crow family, the visits of titmice, and the tracks of lynx dispel all anguish. As for melancholy, simply consider this beautiful principle of regeneration: trees die, fall and rot. And on the humus, which is the memory of the forest, other trees are born and begin their one or two centuries of reaching for the sky.

Bek, the little white dog, is bleeding. The ice has scraped his right front paw pads. I massage them with a mixture of catfish fat and oil. Has evolution foreseen the eventual use of silurid liver for the healing of small Siberian dogs?

Across the grey and white plain fractured by its live-water wounds, I’m off to Elohin for a courtesy visit to Volodya. Bek’s paw pads are better. The dogs trot along side by side, and we cover the distance in five hours. We had to find a way through the labyrinth of fissures in the middle of Elohin Bay; a big eagle was soaring overhead, keeping tabs, perhaps, on a dead seal.

I’m sitting at Volodya’s table looking through the window at eternal Russia passing in a series of images. Russians use the word glubina – depth – to refer to these far-flung zones, the deep country of the nation. Irina, her kerchief on her head, is feeding her goose in the vegetable garden. A billy-goat goes by, followed by a cat. This window, which could be entitled A Day in Siberia, is like a painting by Ilya Repin, a Ukrainian whose realistic depictions of life at all levels of the social order became archetypes of the ‘Russian national style’.

Now the dogs are fighting. When they arrived in Elohin, Bek and Aika, all of four months old, rushed at Volodya’s five mastiffs to have their hides. They took a drubbing, but I congratulated them on their fighting spirit. Volodya is holding a cup of tea in his huge mitt and eating a lemon as if it were an apple. On the radio, Yves Montand is singing ‘Autumn Leaves’, which crackles a bit. An announcer launches into a tribute to the glory of the Red Army. Tomorrow is 9 May, Victory Day. It’s 2010 and the Russians are still amazed at having beaten fascism. Sixty-five years are as nothing: they speak of the victory as if it were yesterday.

‘Volodya, what’s the news, aside from the fact that you won sixty-five years ago?’

‘Nothing. Wait, yes, in Florida there’s a black tide: all the American coasts are gummed up.’

A tour of the stag traps. A simple procedure: a piece of sheet metal with five cuts sawn into it to form a central star is placed over a hole and covered with grass. A block of salt attracts the animal. When it steps onto the trap, it’s snagged. Stag trophies go for a pretty price in the city. Man has felt himself duty-bound to empty the forest.

That evening: ‘Chess, Volodya?’

‘Yes. The second most intelligent game after tug-of-war.’

We play, I lose, and finish Morand’s biography of Fouquet, the fabulously wealthy superintendent of finances whom an envious Sun King finally sent to prison for life. I like to immerse myself in reading that transports me to the precise antipodes of my actual life. Exoticism: while the wind rustles gently through the Siberian cedars, I navigate through the political intrigues and dirty tricks of the court at Versailles, the animosities of Louis’s chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and the battles within the Roman Catholic hierarchy in France over the theological movement of Jansenism. Question: who would have lasted longer, Volodya at the court of Versailles, or the king’s great general, le Grand Condé, out on the taiga? ‘Before Fouquet, nature itself trembles,’ writes Morand, evoking the monumental construction of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, the first example of le style Louis XIV. ‘It is as if nature were razing herself to the ground, seeking to be forgotten, so often have the tragedians and preachers informed her that she has no rightful claims over mankind.’ It was to forget the warbling of tragedians and preachers that I installed myself in a cabin.

Morand, chapter 2: ‘There are three ways to begin one’s life. With pleasure at first, and serious things later, or by working hard at the beginning so as to ease up towards the end, or by managing to pursue both pleasure and labour at once.’ The cabin follows that last prescription.

At eight in the morning, a bear of well over 600 pounds comes prowling around the sandy embankment to the south of the small clearing at Elohin. Volodya has filled some cans with seal fat to attract the animals, and now he murmurs: ‘Ah, too bad it isn’t about a third of a mile to the north, outside the reserve, we could shoot it.’ I feel suddenly numb with despair. We ought to have a little bit of our neocortex removed at birth to neutralize our desire to destroy the world. Man is a capricious child who believes the Earth is his bedroom, the animals his toys, the trees his baby rattles.

Yesterday’s lesson has borne fruit. Aika and Bek stay close to me and away from the other dogs. When we return to the enclosure around the izba, my two little darlings are set upon by Volodya’s howling pack. I plunge into the mêlée, kicking furry flanks right and left to protect my puppies while Volodya yells at me over the barking to ‘let them follow their fucking rules!’ That’s when the black cat that palled around with Aika the night before comes flying to the rescue and with a few swipes of his claws, routs the ringleaders. I immediately bestow upon him ‘the Imperial Order of the Northern Cedars for service rendered to my personal guard’, and I head home after kissing Irina on her rosy cheeks and getting my chest crushed in Volodya’s parting hug.

On the way back, a seal. He’s sunning himself near a handy emergency escape fissure. I crawl over the ice, concealed by a ridge of ice chunks. Did he hear me? Was it Aika’s black stain on the ivory tablecloth? I’m some 200 yards away when he vanishes.

The weather has warmed up, and the chimney plume from my stove traces persistent spirals in the air, as reassuring as the evening cloud of cigarette smoke.

This morning, dawn has kept its promise again: the sun appeared, punctually, and the sky became a ceiling for an operetta theatre. I go out onto the lake to get a good look at the mountain cleared of its snow. Only the summits and the depths of canyons are still white. On the lake, I leap over a fault – and its far edge snaps off: I’ve jumped too short and fall into the water, where the main thing is not to slip under the ice. I have a chilly walk back. The faults in the lake, like the crevasses of glaciers, greet overconfidence with the kiss of death.

In the afternoon I go up to the waterfall. The snow in the understorey still sticks to the snowshoes, and the dwarf pines hamper me more than ever. To make any headway, I have to use the scree slopes. As for the dogs, they’re mastering the art of frisking among the rocks. At the edge of the cut leading to the waterfall, spring is preparing its rite. Fragile forces are erupting; velvety mountain anemones quiver in the sunshine; grasses are growing among the patches of crystalline snow. An expanse of white still shows my footprints, which a bear has followed before turning back to the river below. Ants flow up and down their towering cities of ice needles; it’s as if they were observing some solar cult around a (slightly eroded) pre-Columbian temple. The torrent has broken free and dives beneath the ice down at the mouth of the valley. The mountain is melting. Its flanks are striped with living streams hurrying with girlish haste to plunge into the lake. Alder buds have popped out of their sheaths. Clumps of azaleas are sprinkled with violet flowers. Glossy leaves smell like bee’s-wax polish. Nature’s timidity is a prelude to its triumph.

Two opposing impulses foster this rebirth: the emergence of what was buried beneath the soil, and the overflowing of what was stored up in the heights.

What overflows: the water tumbling from the peaks, the freshets washing the faces of the slopes, the ants boiling out of their cauldrons, the sap pearling on the pine bark, the stalactites stretching for the earth, the bears and deer quitting the plateaus to scrounge for a pittance on the shores.

What emerges: the larvae in the ground that break out by the billions, the shoots, the flowers blooming on their stems, the schools of fish returning to the surface after their benthic winter. And I, tonight, will be tranquilly smoking in my cabin, right at the junction between this uprush and downpour.

Way up there, the waterfall is still frozen, but its liberation draws nigh. A matter of days.

I catch three char in one hour this evening. It’s puzzling, but the lake never delivers more than that to me, as if it were adjusting my catch to my needs. There’s a mystery there that acts as a caution against fishing fever. One day, a caveman must have fished for more than he could eat, announcing the advent of human hubris and our current pillaging of the planet. The other explanation for my meagre results – and the more likely one – is that I’m a lousy fisherman.

Today I saw a seagull. And a female black grouse at the tip of North Cedar Cape. My eye fell on her by chance, otherwise I’d have passed blithely by, only inches away.

The evening arranges pastel reflections of blue and rose on the Buryat peaks. The mountains? Good enough to eat.

The ice won’t last much longer. Near my watering spot, I open a breach a yard wide in half an hour, as if I were hacking through loaf sugar. In my new swimming hole, in the glow of hurricane lanterns, I immerse myself in the water. The Russians do this for the salvation of their souls in January, at Epiphany. At 36 or 37°F, water bites into your legs and winds up gripping your whole body. My cigar brings an illusion of warmth. The heart seems surprised at being subjected to such treatment. The human brain is a kind of aristocratic headquarters that enjoys commanding the body to do the labour of convicts. The grey matter bathes pleasantly in spinal fluid while the carcass breaks its back working.

I scramble out of the hole after I suddenly have a vision of enormous catfish teeming in the waters, along with some of Baikal’s indigenous Epischura copepods seeking something to munch on. The lake is clean thanks to its scavengers.

I don’t miss a thing from my former life. I’m struck by this certainty while spreading honey on some blini. Not one thing. Nothing, nobody. It’s a worrying thought. Can a man so easily shed the clothing fitted to his thirty-eight years of life?[11] When you organize your life around the idea of possessing nothing – then you have everything you need.

With my binoculars I spot a seal a good mile away. Drawing closer in an elaborate detour, I’m careful to keep the light behind me. Ice slabs from a breach in the ice about five yards across make a kind of floating bridge, and I keep my balance leaping from one to another. I’ve approached to within about a hundred yards of the seal when it vanishes, swallowed down by its hole in a brisk gulp.

This evening the little dogs spend two hours running after a wagtail that shows remarkable patience. After which, they squabble over a roe deer’s hoof.

A day at North Cedar Cape.

Look at the sky at six in the morning. Light the fire (murmuring a few nice words to it) and go out to draw water. Note that the thermometer says 28°F. Pour boiling tea on a blini and eat it. Look outside again – but through the smoke of the first cigarillo. Finish Promise at Dawn while eating some blueberries from Irina. Visit the four anthills that surround my cabin, all spaced about 300 yards apart, and check out the consolidation work underway. Use binoculars to search for the black dots of seals basking in the sun. Draw the oil lamp, trying to depict the transparency of the glass. Repair the knife sheath damaged during yesterday’s outing. Chop wood. Feed the dogs some catfish mush. Cook the evening’s kasha. Spend forty minutes at the nearest fishing hole catching the two fish that will accompany the kasha. Think about what this day might have been if my dear one, the only person on this earth whom I miss even when she’s with me, had deigned to be here. Do not think about the reasons that led her not to come along. Get quietly drunk because of the impossibility of not thinking about the above. Rejoice at the coming of night that will hide the shit on my shitfaced face.

It’s raining and it’s cold and the cedar branches gleam and drip. Beauty will never save the world; it merely provides lovely settings in which men kill one another.

A grey silence has settled on the lake. What is this soft day brooding over? A last gasp from winter? No, spring is too far advanced. What’s lovely about the seasons is that each one politely hands over its charge. Not one of them lingers too long. Finally, at around five o’clock, something happens: the clouds part. Blue sky dissolves the cotton wool. The grey mass is breaking up and scarves of mist drape themselves around the taiga’s throat. Quick, a glass! May the vodka help me to better see the subtlety of these transformations! Oh, if I had some wine… Well, the Kedrovaya will do, after all. At the fifth shot, I understand what’s going on inside the clouds.

Time time time time time time time time time.

Hmm?

It passed!

The best way to kill the intensity of a moment is to feel obliged to catch it in a photo. I sit for an hour at the window while dawn churns out moments by the ton.

The cabin is the railway carriage in which I signed my armistice with time: I have made my peace with it. Letting it pass is simply common courtesy. From one window to the other, one glass to another, within the pages of a book, beneath closed eyelids, the main thing is to move aside to let it go on its way.

The grey wagtails are making their nest at the north-eastern corner of the roof. The dogs have given up trying to get them. Sitting at my table, I watch the ice die. The blanket of snow is in tatters. Water has seeped in everywhere, mottling the surface with black blotches. The lake is suffering, unaware that men sit at its bedside. I am one of many keeping vigil.

The day is marked by notes that measure out a solfeggio. The titmouse arrives at 8.00, the sunbeam hits the oilcloth at 9.30, the seals appear in the middle of the afternoon, the little dogs gambol about at twilight, the moon’s reflection blooms in the pail nightly: a perfect mechanism. These insignificant rendezvous are the immense events of life in the woods. I wait for them, hopefully. When they arrive, I recognize them, salute them. They prove to me that the poem respects its metre. The ancient Greeks watched for similar changes in the atmosphere: suddenly, something was going on, the god was appearing. This feeling of startlement before a ray of light: wisdom or senility? Happiness becomes this simple thing: waiting for something you know will happen. Time turns into the marvellous organizer of these appearances. In cities the opposite principle is at work: there we require a permanent efflorescence of fresh surprises. The fireworks of novelty constantly interrupt the flow of hours and illuminate the night with their fleeting bouquets. In a cabin, one lives to the rhythm of the metronome rather than the glitter of pyrotechnics.

The dogs content themselves with endless repetitions. As soon as the event begins to take shape, they drool with impatience. If the unexpected occurs, if a visitor arrives, they growl, bark, attack. The enemy? Novelty.

Sometimes revelations rise from the depths of our own being. Instead of quivering before the signals of the world, we sense an inner impulse, the birth of an idea, an overwhelming desire. Then we feel like a world in ourselves, where gods and demons are locked in battle.

It rains again this afternoon. The clouds blow in from the west and stagnate over the basin of the lake. Off on the Russian plain, the reserves of humidity are apparently inexhaustible. Cawing crows skim the surface of the water, raindrops hammer the shingles, and the taiga seems like an army biding its time. Nature is going through a depressive phase.

In my case, stuck here alive in my wooden coffin, the dreaded hours arrive with the evening. Ghosts and regrets take advantage of the twilight to slip into my heart, launching their operations just when the light fails, at seven o’clock. I need vodka to repel them. Inventory of supplies: I have twenty-two litres of Kedrovaya, three litres of pepper vodka, twelve Partagás, and five cartons of cigarillos (twenty to a box). Enough to fight the demons for a few months.

The courageous course would be to face things: my life, my times and other people. Nostalgia, melancholy, reverie – these give romantic souls the illusion of a virtuous escape route. They pass for aesthetic ways to stave off ugliness but are merely the cache-sexe of cowardice. What am I? Contemptible, frightened by the world, a recluse in a cabin off in the woods. A coward who silently soaks himself in alcohol to avoid witnessing the spectacle of his times or encountering his own conscience pacing up and down along the lakeshore.

Finally, the sky clears. I act like a Russian: for three or four days I’ve been waiting lethargically at the window, and with a bound, I rush outside, the dogs at my heels and three days’ worth of provisions in my backpack. That’s how the Russians cope: long days of inertia interspersed with periods of bustling activity. The ice is still holding up. I cut towards Middle Cedar Cape, intending to head up the valley that debouches there. I leap over the fissures, leaving ever greater margins of safety because the edges are getting thinner. I take refuge from a sudden downpour in the primeval forest that for millions of years has covered the alluvial plain of the river on which I’ve set my sights. My steps sink into the mosses. Ribbons of lichen loop like felt beneath the trees. The forest resembles the marshes of Walter Scott and the exotic undergrowth of The Lost World. The sun comes out to shoot its rays through the swirling fog. Birches line up in ivory aisles. The hardy Rhododendron dauricum gives off the smell of a very clean old lady, which stands out against the earthy odours of stumps clawed open by bears. The forest is full of its own breath. Confused by the profusion of scents, the dogs are beside themselves: Pandora’s box has been opened a crack, and these treasures have seeped out. The Siberian taiga is a cold jungle. The queen of the elves could appear with all her court, parting the curtains of lichen with her hand, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Behind a string of willows in a strangely straight line, I discover a ditch colonized by shrubs. Twenty years ago, a trail linked the camp of some geologists to the lake, and the base mentioned on the map is still here, at 2,300 feet: four derelict izbas and two rusted sheet-metal trailers sit among the saplings. To the north opens a double valley where the thalwegs – the line defining the lowest points along the length of a valley or river bed – are separated by a ridge of stone. I struggle on a scree slope cluttered with dwarf pines, whose branches, lying like a net across the stones, present a supple, impassive wall. I retreat down into the combe, put on my snowshoes, and climb to the base of the rocky ridge. At around 3,300 feet, a shelf seems suitable for a bivouac. A storm breaks out, dumping all the water in the sky on our terrace of schist and granite. I hide the ice axe and crampons a hundred yards below us. The lightning terrifies Aika and Bek, who huddle under a birch tree. I admire them, these little creatures who set off for the mountain happy to be alive, without provisions or plans to return.

I cut strips of dwarf pine to serve as flooring for the terrace, then spend three solid hours trying to light a fire with waterlogged wood. A few pages of Rameau’s Nephew finally catch. (Not the first time that Diderot has set something on fire.) An anaemic flame rises from a tiny pile of shredded bark, dried against my skin. Fire, a poor animal wounded by the storm; I make it grow twig by twig. The flame wavers… and I feel as if I were dealing with a cardiac arrest. The flame grows: victory. I blow on it until I’m dizzy and obtain live coals. The dogs come to warm themselves in the flickering glow. Just when I’m setting up the tent, a fresh cloudburst. I retreat beneath my poorly stretched canvas as hail sparkles into thousands of diamonds during the nano-seconds of lightning. The tent bends, doesn’t collapse, gets drenched. While the tempest bedevils the mountain and my panel of nylon, I learn that Diderot liked to relax every evening in the mellow light of the Palais-Royal. The wind dies down, the storm passes, the stars come back out and, oh joy, the embers are still alive. I stoke the fire and lie down with an anti-bear flare wedged close to my head in case we have visitors. Aika and Bek are curled around each other in the Siberian night like the symbol of yin and yang.

The sun is already high in the sky. The little dogs welcome my awakening. They must be expecting some snack, but I’ve nothing except a bit of bread. It would be best if they returned to the cabin, but they won’t do that, and remain close to me. Dogs take us for their god and their mother, i.e. their master. I break camp and climb along the ridge for five hours. The dogs whine when they’re stopped by a ledge; Aika then finds a way around and guides her clumsier brother. The ridge line straightens out and at 5,250 feet I reach the layer of hardpack. Perched on a boulder, Aika and Bek contemplate the lake.

At the summit, elevation 6,890 feet, it’s gulag cold. To the east, the heart of the nature reserve is revealed. The mountain chain running along Baikal collapses as soon as it crosses to the other side of the ridge. The view to the north grows narrow, running parallel to the shore. Baikal: a cameo set into a shrine. To the east, foothills roll out forests of grey pine, spotted with lakes and streaked with tributaries. The climate out on the taigas is harsher than that of Baikal. Asian timber companies drool over these virgin territories; the Chinese would love to get their hands on such reserves of wood and water, which would be like a second Manchuria for them, since they’ve exhausted the first one. Never in our history has a mass of humanity left a nearby depopulated area rich in resources unexploited for long. History is governed by the laws of hydraulics, and if we set China and Siberia up as hypothetical communicating vessels, Mongolia would be the connecting valve. If there were ever a struggle for control of the taigas here, my summit would make a good surveillance post. The Chinese will have the advantage of numbers and hunger; the Russians will have backwoods inaccessibility and their hatred of any threat to mat rodina, the motherland. The little dogs, noses tucked into their fur, are fast asleep.

We go back down through the northernmost canyon. At the halfway point, the walls draw together and a sudden forty-five degree dip in the slope forces me to cut steps in the snow. The dogs whimper, unable to advance. Then Aika launches herself onto the slide, counting on me to stop her, which I do, and Bek as well. The technique Aika has devised works well, and we reach the foot of the wall. Towards the bottom of the valley, I rejoin my tracks from yesterday, which have been crossed – and recently – by a bear: the prints are deep and the animal seems not to have shown the slightest interest in my trail. At the edge of the wood, the tongue of snow over the torrent has broken open, spitting out its flood of clear water. I make a fire to dry my clothes and nap in the wonderful sunshine.

Return to the lake via the geologists’ trail. The sun and clouds are playing chess: they place their pieces on the marble board, where the white and black spots move around with the speed of cavalry charges.

At noon, I leave the cabin to ascend the ‘white valley’, that curving combe of larches that cuts through the mountain a good half a mile to the north. Atop the rocky crest from which flow curtains of scree, the ravages of spring are clear: the lake is a mess.

To reach the summit that looms above the cabin, one need simply follow the serrated ridge. Beneath a Mediterranean sun, I pass turrets and rock pinnacles of Hercynian granite, rotten to the core. Small boulders not anchored to the slope by dwarf pines now roll beneath my feet and I’m afraid of crushing the dogs. By nightfall, after a third of a mile of tapering ridgeline larded with snow-filled couloirs, those steep, narrow gullies and fissures, I reach the summit, at 6,560 feet. Before me lie the arches of the Baikal Range, crowned sixty miles to the north by Mount Chersky. Sharp rocky crests spread out like starfish in all directions. Areas where the snow has melted are covered with the lichens so prized by the deer. A few days ago, a bear passed through the small, narrow saddle not far below. Hegel’s So ist – It is so – is the wisest thing to say before the incommensurable. I like the idea of having climbed up to find out what’s on the other side of my domain. Baikal is a closed basin, containing its own species, governed by its own climate. The inhabitants live on its edges as if around a village square. Most of them have never come here to take a look behind the ramparts of the fortress. One can be content with never going outside. Or, one can decide to go and have a look.

In 1643 a band of Cossacks led by Kurbat Ivanov, the first Russian explorer to reach Baikal, arrived from the west and climbed these peaks one day bearing guns and daggers. They perched on the ridge and discovered in one fell swoop, four or five hours’ march away, the Baikal Sea of which the various peoples of the taiga must have been telling them ever since the Yenisei, the mightiest river of Siberia…

Crossing slippery slopes and unstable couloirs, I find a good shelf planted with dwarf pines at 5,250 feet, where I spend a divine night with the dogs, the lake, the peaks and the starry fire-sparks that would like to join their sisters up in the heavens.

A rapid return: we slide through the couloirs to the first trees of the ‘white valley’. A powerful wind blows from the north, exciting the dogs. A storm is brewing. I’m in the hammock with a cigar and Giono’s The Song of the World when it hits. In a few seconds the tempest sweeps down from the mountains and the wind begins chewing up the icy plain. Within ten minutes, the débâcle ruins winter’s attempt to keep order in the world. The spectacle of this season must have dismayed the Prussian generals; it’s a Russian who celebrated the rite of spring.

The ice is breaking up: the water regains its freedom, cutting channels among the floes or submerging sections of the plain. The rain can’t find its way to the earth. Whorls of water return to the sky in little whirlwinds. In the confusion, the cedars send signals of alarm. Aika and Bek have taken refuge beneath the stoop of the shed. The anthracite breaches of open water show up starkly against the routed pack-ice. Wind flurries roil the waters. A rainbow, born at the tip of the cape, touches down in the middle of the lake, framing beneath its curve ebony clouds massed in the north. Lightning bolts strike just as the sky closes down, leaving only one shaft of light to turn the Buryat peaks blood-red as their range bears up under a ceiling of ink. I have just watched, in the space of ten minutes, the death of winter.

The storm carries its devastation off to the south. The lake settles down. In the cool air, beneath a satin sky, the unleashed wind shoves the drifting ice around, and shards of the former stained-glass window break off at the slightest touch with a rustle like rough silk. The débâcle has released the ebb and flow of the lake. I set my stool on a sheet of ice and spend the evening gently drifting. The water is back! The water is back! Nothing will be the same.

On this first morning of the lake’s liberation, the wagtails indulge in feats of illusionism: they hop about on the invisible scales of ice a millimetre thick that cover the stretches of open water. Towards noon, a hard rain falls with a voluptuous rattling on the humus. The Earth is drinking its fill. The rivers run almost all the way to the lake; only a hem of ice masks their arrival at the shore. In years and centuries to come, these waters that quench my thirst will be churned by the swells of the polar sea. When you consider the voyage of a snowflake, from the peaks to the lake and the lake to the sea via the rivers, you feel like a poor excuse for a traveller.

I remove two blood-sucking ticks from Aika. Life is a business of exacting tribute, and it’s the plants that pay for everyone else in the end!

The rafts of ice will shift about for a month at the mercy of the winds and currents, coming and going, and it’s possible that one day my bay will be closed again by pack ice. This morning the lake is a liquid plain. Not one ice cube on the oily black surface. I leave with the dogs for the River Lednaya, halfway between my cabin and Elohin’s, to try fishing there.

Along the shore, recent events have fostered an explosion of life. The day is full of flies. I have a nap on some sun-warmed rocks. On the embankments, clumps of anemones dot the sand. Ducks have landed in the open areas, eager for love and fresh water. They were living it up down south. They lift off clumsily when the dogs dash over to them. First men imitated birds to build planes, and now the first planes they built are imitated by ducks. The shoreline is in a permanent aerial ferment: eagles soar, geese patrol in gangs, gulls do nosedives, and butterflies, amazed at being alive, stagger through the air. Forty-eight hours have been enough for spring to bring off its putsch.

In the forest, the path traced by deer and bear tracks has opened up along the shore, a few yards behind the edge of the wood. Suddenly the doggies are barking: higher up on a rocky talus, a bear pokes its head through the rhododendrons. I hold Aika back by the scruff, while her brother cowers between my legs. Courage was doled out unevenly in that litter. Russians are emphatic on this point: when a bear shows up, do not run, do not look at the animal, don’t make any sudden moves, just tiptoe off murmuring reassuring things. The problem lies in inspiration: what does one say to a bear? I’m unprepared and, retreating delicately, find nothing better than: ‘Beat it, you big bunny!’ It works: the animal forages its way off through the undergrowth.

I catch two char at the mouth of the river. We go home via the shore. I walk along with the distress flares glued to my hands. The beaches and bands of littoral ice are covered with bear tracks. I’m not afraid, I know they will not attack me. In case of anxiety, think only of the last pages of Robinson Crusoe where Defoe describes the taciturn indifference of these beasts: ‘The bear was walking softly on, and offered to meddle with nobody…’

I reach the cabin, repair my fishing fly, feed the dogs, prepare my two fish, flick my knife into the wall, and go to bed with The Song of the World. Giono displays the usual reversal of values favoured by all who convert to natural laws: he personifies things and naturalizes people. In his works, rivers have legs and the coureurs des bois have ‘bodies like rocks’.

The wind is busy cuffing a stretch of open water a third of a mile long that runs beside the shore. Beyond it, a chum of floating ice is driven by the west wind, and frozen sheets are snapping apart like loaf sugar soaked with champagne. The lake gives off a scent of sex.

Diggers, borers, crunchers, kneaders and burrowers, scratchers, those with claws, and drills, and beaks or proboscises, the crawlers, walkers, fliers, and those who perch on the back of a stronger creature, and the imitators, the disguisers, those of the night, the day and the twilight, those who see, those who smell: all are emerging from their torpor and coming to see the liberation of the waters the way friends welcome a prisoner the day he’s released from jail. Despite their long sleep, these creatures have not forgotten their roles and reflexes. The insect hordes are poised to invade the woods, and I feel less alone.

In a cabin, life takes on a counter-revolutionary tone. Never destroy, the hermit tells himself, in reactionary mode, but conserve and carry on. The recluse seeks peace, unity, renewal, and believes in the eternal return. Why break with anything, since everything will pass – and come around again? Does the cabin have a political meaning? Living here adds nothing to the community of men; the hermitage experience adds nothing to the collective study of how to get people to live together. Ideologies, like dogs, remain just outside the hermit’s door. Off in the woods – neither Marx nor Jesus, neither order nor anarchy, neither equality nor injustice. How could the hermit, preoccupied solely with the immediate, possibly care about foreseeing the future?

The cabin is not a base camp for reconquest but a hideout, a port of call.

A haven of renunciation, not a headquarters for fomenting revolution.

An exit door, not a point of departure.

A wardroom where the captain goes to drink a last glass of rum before the shipwreck.

The hole where the animal licks its wounds, not the burrow where it sharpens its claws.

Last night, at three o’clock, barking sent me rushing from the cabin, flare gun in hand. A bear was wandering on the beach. At dawn, its tracks on the grey sand.

The open water continues to bring off victories. This morning it extends for over six miles between the drift ice and my shore, and the wind is pushing the ice raft further out. The sun sparkles on the slush, while the beach remains in shadow. There’s no sight more joyful: the first sunbeams enter the cabin to dance around the floor. The sun fusses over me like the dogs. During the day, the eye gleans all these images that dreams will cook up later on.

According to Kierkegaard in his The Sickness unto Death, man knows three ages: those of aesthetic and don juanesque pleasure, Faustian doubt, and despair. To them must be added the age of withdrawal to the woods, as a sound conclusion drawn from the three earlier periods.

Around my neck I wear a small Orthodox cross, which shines in the sun when I chop wood with my shirt off. In my childhood I dreamed of a ‘Robinson Hood’ with a blond beard, who always wore on his breast the cross of Christ. I love that man who forgave adulterous women, strode along with his mouth full of pessimistic parables, denounced the bourgeois and went off to kill himself on a hill where he knew death was waiting for him. I feel I am a part of Christendom, those places where men – deciding to worship a god who preached love – allowed freedom, justice and reason to invade their cities. What holds me back, however, is Christianity, the name given to that tinkering with the Gospel by the clergy, that alchemy by sorcerers in tiaras ringing little bells that has transformed a burning message into a penal code. Christ should have been a Greek god.

Last night I dreamed of a bear attack. They were jumping on the cabin roof, as agile as cats and as svelte as Afghan hounds. Pretty damn horrible. I suspect the newly pervasive smell of algae in the atmosphere of influencing my dreams and nudging them into Gothic territories.

A squadron of tufted ducks alights on a sheet of open water edged by three enormous festoons of ice, then takes off in perfect formation in the direction of Mongolia. A pair of mergansers likes it here in my bay. I spend hours peering through my binoculars studying their punkish crests. Some diving Harlequin ducks come in for a full-tilt landing on a narrow canal. These ducks are dressed to kill, and when they fly off you just know they know where they’re going.

At eight every evening, the sunlight manages to slip into a notch in the peaks to the south and shoot a long stream of russet gold onto the velvety foliage of the thorn bushes. I’m not interested in knowing whether God or chance is responsible for such beauty. Must you know the cause to enjoy the effect?

In the evening, I dine outdoors, before a bonfire out on the beach. Then I stay to watch the flames with the dogs, my hands warm in their fur, until the moon over the mountain gives the signal to go to bed.

I spend hours smoking in my hammock at the top of the hill, with the dogs in faithful attendance. In Paris, my loved ones think I’m wrestling with the Siberian cold, panting at my chopping block to cut wood in a blizzard.

The lake: a blue-leaded window with alabaster panes. Scales of ice glide towards the south. Lying out in the mild air, I watch these watery flocks on the move. Between the scales, the colour of the water changes from hour to hour. Two sheldrakes zip over this leprous display so fast that I wonder if something is hot on their heels, or if they have some important meeting to attend… Why would anyone rather look at birds through a gun sight instead of binoculars?

People who find time’s swift passage painful cannot bear the sedentary life. In activity, they find peace. As the scenery streams past, they feel that time is slowing down. Their lives become a journey that never ends.

The alternative is the hermitage.

I never tire of studying my landscape. My eyes know each nook and cranny there and still explore them eagerly every morning as if discovering them for the first time. I look for three things: fresh nuances in this well-explored tableau; deeper understanding of my remembered idea of the place; confirmation that my move here was a wise decision. Immobility compels me to perform this exercise of virginal observation. If I neglect it, I open the door to the longing to go elsewhere.

One never tires of grandeur: an ancient sedentary principle. And anyway, why complain? Things are not as static as they seem: light fine-tunes beauty, transfigures it. Beauty may be cultivated, and renews itself day after day.

Travellers in a hurry need change. The sight of a patch of sunshine on a sandy hillside is not enough for them. Their place is on a train, before a television, but not in a cabin. In the end, along with vodka, bears and storms, the ‘Stendhal syndrome’ – or hyperkulturemia, psychosomatic suffocation at the sight of overwhelming beauty – is the only danger threatening the hermit.

It takes me seven hours to toil up a crumbling ridge covered with dwarf pines, spongy lichens and flakes of schist to gain the summit that crowns my ‘white valley’ at 6,560 feet. On the other side, the verso of my recto world. The other side is, always, a promise. One takes a look at it as if tossing out a net: to cement the certitude of going there one day to look around. Back down from the mountain, we carry that pledge alive in us: a part of our gaze is still up on the mountaintop…

Lying close to each other on the stones at the summit, the dogs stare at the landscape. They are contemplating it, I’d put my hand in a fire on that. Little dogs are ‘poor in world’, Herr Heidegger? No, only stripped down to the most accurate part of their knowledge, completely confident in the moment and careless of all abstraction. The courage of dogs: to look straight at what appears before them, without wondering if things could have been otherwise. I think about men’s efforts to deny all consciousness to animals. Thousands of years of Aristotelian, Christian and Cartesian philosophy lock us into the conviction that an insurmountable divide separates us from beasts. They lack morality: their actions – even their altruistic behaviours – are considered devoid of intentionality. They live without any suspicion of their own mortality. Adapted to their environment, they are incapable of opening themselves to the whole of reality, and will never have any notion of the world. The animal is merely an impoverished will, without any representation of its surroundings. Chained to the immediate, unable to transmit anything, the animal supposedly deprives itself of history and culture. And the philosophers keep bashing us over the head with the claim that no one has ever seen a monkey interpret a natural scene symbolically or express any aesthetic judgement.

And yet, deep in the woods, what we see of animals is troubling. How can we be certain that a dancing cloud of midges in the setting sunlight has no meaning? What do we know about the thoughts of a bear? What if crustaceans bless the coolness of water without having any way to let us know this, while we have no hope of ever figuring this out? How can we measure the emotions of sparrows when they greet the dawn from the highest branches? And why shouldn’t butterflies in the noonday sun find some aesthetic feeling in their choreography? ‘The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds a nest, or the young spider any idea of the prey for which it spins a web…’ (Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation). But what do you know about that, Arthur? Where did you obtain your information on this subject, from what conversation with which bird do you draw such certainty? My two dogs choose to face the lake, blinking, enjoying the peace of the day, and their drool is a thanksgiving. They are conscious of the happiness of resting there, on the summit, after the long climb. Heidegger tumbles into the water and Schopenhauer as well. Glug-glug, goes thought. I regret that some philosopher schooled in the old humanism (a spiritual masturbation) cannot witness the silent prayer pronounced by two five-month-old pups before a geological fault 25 million years old.

Back to the lake. It creaks in the peace of the evening. The ice is saying farewell: no wonder it’s moaning.

I spend the day with Delachaux and Niestlé’s bird guide: ‘848 species and 4,000 drawings’. This book is a breviary devoted to the ingenuity of life, to the infinite subtleties of evolution, a celebration of style. Even the most sophisticated of urban dwellers for whom birds are stupid robots with crazed eyes, blown hither and yon by the wind, will bow before the audacious livery of the pheasant, the rock ptarmigan or the ruddy shelduck. I try to identify each of the visitors from the sky. Putting names to plants and animals using field guides is like recognizing superstars in the street thanks to celebrity magazines. Instead of: ‘Ohmigod, it’s Madonna!’, you exclaim: ‘Wow, there’s a Siberian crane!’

I always go out with a flare gun in my hand in case a bear is roaming the forest. The wilderness begins right outside the door. My home offers no transition; no garden, for example. There is a threshold, of course: a plank, an ‘air lock’ between the civilized world and the perils of the forest. Stags, lynxes and bears stroll by the cabin; the dogs sleep right outside the door, flies buzz up under the eaves. The two realms are contiguous. The cabin is a tiny island of human survival in this Eden and not an implantation of pioneers determined to improve the earth. During the conquest of Siberia, the tsar’s Cossacks built entrenched camps, enclosing a church, an arms depot and a few buildings behind a palisade of pines trimmed into points at the top. They called such a small fortress an ostrog, and these posts protected them from an outside world that had all the time in the world to wait them out. If the Cossacks were there, it was because they dreamed of transforming the taiga, whereas a hermit is content to be dwelling in the forest. The windows serve to welcome nature per se, not to fend it off. The hermit contemplates nature, uses what he needs of it, but cherishes no ambitions to subdue it. The cabin allows him to take a position, but does not enforce a statute. He may play the hermit, but not claim to be a pioneer.

The hermit agrees to be henceforth weightless in the workings of the world, no longer counting as anything in the chain of causality. His thoughts will not influence anyone, or affect the course of events. His actions will signify nothing. (Perhaps he may still figure in a few memories.) How light that thought is! And how clearly it foretells the final release: we are never so alive as when we are dead to the world!

A russet moon rose tonight, its reflection in the shattered lake ice like a blood-red Host on a wounded altar.

Today I wrote little things on the trunks of some birches. Birch, I entrust this message to you: go tell the sky I say hello. Birch bark feels as pleasant to write on with a pen as parchment is. Certain zeks recorded their memories on the skin of these trees.

After that, I skipped some stones, and now I’m trying to improve my knife-throwing with an old board for a target.

It really is nice to have some free time.

A mountain slope of 5,000 feet extends that much again on its journey down to the bottom of Baikal, and my cabin sits precisely at this halfway point, on a tiny break in a descent just under two miles long. I live balanced between a gulf and a rock face. The river has finally broken the sheath of ice along the shore, opening the sluices. The torrents tumble and frolic all the way to the lake, making the sound of life on its way to a party. The rivers are slashing their way through the forest.

A pair of eiders takes the waters just off the cape. Whenever two sheets of drifting ice threaten to close in on them, they fly off to another open spot. An allegory of exile.

Sometimes my gaze lingers on a stretch of open water on which two ducks then suddenly alight, as if to fulfil a presentiment. As when the eye discovers in a book a phrase for which the mind has long been waiting without ever managing to compose it.

The first Capricorn beetles have arrived. They fly heavily through the clearing and plunk down upon the chopping-blocks. I feel affection for these insects. Their long, black, backswept antennae frame their jet carapaces. They scramble clumsily over the trunks of the pines. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Wouldn’t real love be the love of what is irremediably different from us? Not a mammal or a bird, for they are still too close to our humanity, but an insect, a paramecium. Humanism gives off whiffs of a corporatism based on the imperative to love what resembles us. We are supposed to love one another the way the dentist loves other dentists. In the clearing, I reverse the proposition and try to love creatures with an intensity proportional to their degree of biological distance from me. To love is not to celebrate one’s own reflection in the face of one’s double, but to recognize the value of what one can never know. Loving a Papuan, a child or one’s neighbour is hardly a challenge. But a sea sponge! A lichen! One of those tiny plants roughed up by the wind! Here’s what’s tough: feeling infinite tenderness for the ant busy rebuilding its hill.

A short afternoon at Middle Cedar Cape to observe the geese sailing around the inland pond. On the way back, I find fresh bear tracks mixed with mine. They weren’t there before. The dogs don’t react at all. I pass again by the ruins of the refusenik’s cabin. Must a man head for the woods at all costs if he rejects his times? There is silence to be found in these secluded vaults.

One can also close one’s eyes: the eyelid is the most effective screen between the self and the world.

V.E. down at Zavorotni has often spoken to me about the dissident who lived here, describing him to me as a nice fellow. The idea of this noble soul’s existence in harmony with the brutal beauty of these surroundings makes me see this cabin in a friendly light. I imagine the poor man picking wild onions to flavour his char, talking to the birds, leaving the remains of his fish on the shore for the foxes. It’s only in Paris, where I live, that intellectuals cultivate a fascination for bastards and make heroes of criminals. Which is the error denounced by Varlam Shalamov, who survived seventeen years in the gulag, in his Essays on the Criminal World: ‘…every writer seems to have chipped in on this sudden demand for a romanticism of crime, this frenzied poeticizing of thugs…’ Criminals are not heroic wolves. And the cabins that have sheltered them do not give off an aura of serenity.

The high pressures building up at the foot of the mountains plunge me into lethargy for the rest of the day. Dreary hours of ennui, rocking in the hammock.

I haven’t even the strength to read. I’m dozing beneath a cedar when a rainstorm chases me into the cabin. And then the sight of a steaming cup of tea fills me with an immense feeling of security as the heavens rampage outside. To the west, liquid chaos. Rain was invented so that we can be glad to be under a roof. The dogs are beneath the front door awning. Ideal companions for these moments of withdrawal: vodka and a cigar. They’re all that poor people and loners have left. And the health police would like to outlaw these blessings! So that we can die in good shape?

The rain has passed, the air is drying the forest. Through my binoculars I spot a bear standing two or three hundred yards away on the south shore. The bear stays perfectly still. Then I realize that the boulders are quivering in the evening air: I’m having palpitations over a mirage.

I make some bread. I knead the dough for a long time. Nothing is softer or sweeter to the touch when one is alone. It’s easy to understand the wealth of expressions exploring this relationship between flesh and dough. A woman baking things is an aphrodisiac figure, plump and rosy, evoking a healthy eroticism. I eat my bread and force myself not to think any more about women baking because I still have two months to go out in this hole.