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

^JUNE Tears

Watching the aerial displays of the ducks and geese, I sit at my table on the beach like one of those judges at a figure-skating competition getting ready to hold up their signs.

Amorous geography: I prefer shingle beaches where people shiver in wool sweaters to those deep-fryer sandy strands littered with oily bodies. Baikal’s stony shores fall into the first category.

The plugs of slushy ice blocking the bay for several days have been dispersed by the storm; the wind punished the innocent cabin all night long.

Zen monks called lingering in bed in the morning ‘forgetfulness in sleep’. My forgetfulness lasts until noon.

I assemble my kayak of blue canvas, but slowly, due to my lack of technical expertise. The instructions say the assembly should take two hours. I put in five, and it’s a major victory when I glide out onto the water this evening. With a few strokes of the paddle, I regain what the breakup of the ice had cost me: the possibility of seeing the mountain whole. It has turned green. The larches have got dressed again. Up to their chests in water, Aika and Bek, in a panic, can’t figure out how to follow me and let out keening moans. Then Aika realizes that I’ll eventually come back to the beach, so they need only run beside the lake in the same direction as I’m paddling.

‘Never go more than 300 feet from shore.’ This was Volodya’s injunction up at Elohin the last time I was there. The lake water is so cold that if you capsize, you will die. No one can survive in 37°F water, and fishermen have drowned here within shouting distance of the shore, even though Jules Verne mentions the legend of this lake in Michael Strogoff: ‘No Russian has ever drowned in Baikal.’

There is water, and there are winds. Both are treacherous. Born in the mountains, the sarma can awaken in minutes and whip up waves nine feet high. Boats are swept out and overturned. The lake takes payment in men for what they take away in fish: death pays the debt. I learned recently that Volodya lost his son to the lake five years ago, and then I understood why he spent hours staring out through the clear glass. Sometimes one contemplates a landscape while thinking of the people who once loved it; the atmosphere is steeped in remembrance of the dead.

The dogs slaver their joy when I return to shore. Avian squadrons streak through the sky. Reflections offer the chance to admire Baikal’s glory twice over.

Addressing the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his letter of 17 February 1903: ‘If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches…’ And here is the American naturalist and essayist John Burroughs, in The Art of Seeing Things: ‘The tone in which we speak to the world is the one the world uses with us. Give your best and you will get the best in return.’ We alone are responsible for the gloominess of our lives. The world is grey because of our blandness. Life seems pallid? Change your life, head for the cabins. In the depths of the woods, if life remains dreary and your surroundings unbearable, the verdict is in: you can’t stand yourself! Make the necessary adjustments.

I spend an hour sawing up the trunk of a dead larch in the clearing. The wood is still viable and the growth rings clearly visible. The sun tints the tree’s flesh, making it look appetizing. There are some sights that the human eye has no right to see, as when man exposes to the light things that were not at all prepared to receive it, thus breaking a taboo, changing the writing. In The Golden Pavilion, Mishima describes the cross-section of a tree that is now open ‘to the rustling flow of the wind and the sun, for which it was never destined’. Cutting down trees, picking flowers: will we one day pay for these tiny liberties that we take with the order of things, these infinitesimal transformations of the initial set-up? When one of his disciples suggested to Confucius that irrigation ditches be dug in the kitchen garden, the sage replied, watering can in hand: ‘Who knows where that would lead us?’ The advantage, in a cabin, is that aside from the occasional felling of a tree, one doesn’t change much in the general layout.

I’m gliding over silk. The sound of paddles in the silence… The dogs didn’t whine when I set out and they’re trotting along to the south. Bek’s white coat stands out against the azaleas of the slope. Volodya was no fool: after a quarter-hour of caution, I’m boldly cutting between the capes and have wound up more than a mile from shore, sitting in a canvas craft supported by a wooden frame I put together while taking a few liberties with the instructions. I’ve reached the ice jam that floats way offshore; the frozen chunks clink in the sun. I float perfectly still on the cold oily surface. Two yards from my bow, a seal pokes its head up and stares at me. It has no arms, no legs, but the look in its eyes is something like an old man’s, a gaze as deep as its domain. I speak to the seal, which listens, peers at me nearsightedly, and dives.

Every morning, upon rising, I greet the ducks. More and more of them are arriving at the lake after days of flying up along the 105th meridian east. According to the dictionary of symbols, ducks represent love and fidelity for the Japanese. As for the cedars here, they stand for virginity and purity in European esotericism. My stay is placed under the auspices of virtue.

I owe my presence here to that July day seven or eight years ago when I discovered the shores of Baikal, a first impression that became the certainty that I would one day see them again. Like those followers of the Sufi doctrines espoused by the French intellectual René Guénon, esotericists who are obsessed with finding the Golden Age, we are a few nomadic souls who seek by any means to relive the most intense moments of our existence. For some of us, these moments were in our childhood; for others, they were our first kiss under the local railway trestle, or a feeling of ineffable bliss one summer evening alive with the trilling of cicadas, or a winter’s night filled with the rumination of high-minded and generous thoughts… For me, the apex was at the edge of that sandy talus sloping down to Lake Baikal.

Mishima in The Golden Pavilion: ‘…What gives meaning to our life’s actions is fidelity to a certain moment, and our effort to make that moment last for ever…’ Everything we undertake to do would flow from an ephemeral and intangible inspiration; a fraction of a second would establish existence. The Buddhists call them satori, these moments when our consciousness glimpses something that disappears forthwith. Blindly, we attempt to recover it, longing to revive that vanished sensation. Days stream by in this fumbling quest; we wander through and throughout our lives. We advance, butterfly net in hand, hoping to catch what has fled. This attempt to relive the satori, thwarted and revived a thousand times, will drive our efforts until death delivers us from the obsessive desire to resuscitate what has fainted away.

Alas, one cannot bathe in the same lake twice. The satori cannot ever be repeated. A hierophany – a physical manifestation of the sacred serving as spiritual inspiration – visits us only once. Madeleines cannot be reheated. And the shores of Baikal are now too familiar to me to draw the slightest tear from my eye.

I paddle to the north, as this afternoon draws to a close, with two fishing rods hooked on the gunwales. The bays spread out beaches of pink shingle. The water’s clarity allows glimpses of rocks on which the sun slaps splashes of lagoon brightness. An ice raft slips by with eight seagulls sunning themselves. From out on the lake, I discover the new face of the mountain. The tender green strip of larches supports the greenish-bronze band of cedars coiffed by the bluish-green frieze of the dwarf pines. Surviving patches of granular snow punctuate these lines like commas. The mountains are playing at standing on their heads, and their reflections are even lovelier than the reality. The water’s depth and mystery impart vibrancy to the images, and the trembling of the surface conjures visions at the edge of a dream.

As the prow approaches, the ducks barely manage to lift off. I can paddle up to them without frightening them at all. I beach the kayak on a sandy shore where a torrent falls frothing into the lake. A storm chases me under a cedar, where the dogs rejoin me. The lake is like coal-black flannel pricked by a deluge of needles. In five minutes, the sky clears. Beneath the rainbow, wearing waders, I fish in the current. Ducks brush past me. Shafts of sunshine dab the forest with blond highlights. There is a perfect equilibrium in this distribution of roles played by the mountain, the creatures, the water and the shore.

As if they’d had an appointment, the fish suddenly start biting. In twenty minutes, I catch six char. While the light exhausts itself making holes in the clouds, I lie down on the beach in front of a wood fire, the dogs at my side, the kayak drawn halfway up on shore and, listening to the music of the waves, I watch my fish grill on skewers of green wood, and I think that life ought always to be like this: a homage rendered by humanity to the dreams of childhood. I struggle against the temptation to take a picture.

The sun, as usual, decides to fling its last light over Buryatia.

Last night, suffering from insomnia, I went out onto the beach with my flare guns. The moon is waning. She’ll be back. Of that we can be sure. You’re better off betting on satellites than on messiahs. In the morning, the air is as joyous and flighty as a Dufy painting. The sound of the waves has invaded my life. The swell on the lake is a song of freedom.

From the top of the talus, the trunks of the pines and cedars frame slabs of flat turquoise down on the lake. A long promenade by the azure shore.

The kayak: the shuttle of a loom, plying back and forth on the warp of Baikalian silks.

After paddling around to correct the defective rudder, I pitch my hammock in the clearing. Looking out, I see the watery plain the heavens use as a mirror to try out different tints of light. ‘I felt a peculiar emotion, observing with what detailed precision earthly things gave refuge to the colours of the sky’ (Mishima, The Golden Pavilion). I read a few of Cicero’s letters. The hermit, without access to the news of the day, owes it to himself to be up-to-date on the doings of ancient Rome. In The Thousand and One Nights, amid the palms and the opulence, this sentence strikes an unpleasant note: ‘This generosity you’re putting on for me here must surely have a purpose.’ I prefer this homage to gratuity in Gilles, Drieu La Rochelle’s novel about the education of a French fascist between the two world wars: ‘The less direction his life had, the more sense it made.’

I’m writing at the wooden table; the dogs are sleeping on the warm sand. Everything is quiet, intense and luminous.

At the edge of the beach, anemones in bloom. Bees and wasps are drinking themselves silly there. Why didn’t God, in His infinite wisdom, decree that man would simply and credulously believe in Him, without any fuss or questions? To have invented that perfectly inexplicable thing, the fertilization of flowers by Hymenoptera, and to have forgotten to leave tangible signs of His existence? Gross negligence!

Barking! I’m up in a flash. In the distance, the sound of an approaching motor. It’s five a.m. and a boat is coming from the south. Through the binoculars I recognize one of Sergei’s small aluminium craft. Fifteen minutes later, he lands in the company of sad-eyed Yura. The tea kettle is on and I’ve set yesterday’s blini out on the table. When they come in, I’m seated and everything is in order. Sergei can’t get over it and talks about ‘the discipline of people who read’. Now there’s something that polishes France’s reputation on the cheap! The cabin sparkles like a Prussian guard post. Sergei hasn’t caught on that, without the dogs, I’d still be snoring.

I must have been an innkeeper in a previous life; I serve my guests with an eagerness tinged with irritation: an impromptu visit is a disturbance as well as a delight. The two men left Pokoyniki yesterday evening, zigzagged among the islands of rubble ice, and are heading for Elohin. This year they are the first to navigate the lake after the débâcle in May. Sergei treats me to a chronicle of the treachery and rancour displayed by the inspectors of the guard posts. The critical theory of the desiccation of the human soul by modernity – formulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jacques Ellul and later taken up by Julien Coupat and others nostalgic for the bonds of community – does not hold up. It isn’t crowding in the urban park that breeds nastiness, nor is it the stress provoked by market pressures that transforms men into snarling rats, nor is it the mirror-image rivalry of living cheek-by-jowl that ‘commands brothers to hate one another’ (Coupat in Tiqqun). At Baikal, separated by dozens of miles of shoreline, living among the wonders of the woods, men tear one another apart like next-door apartment-house neighbours in a vulgar megalopolis. Change the venue, and the nature of the ‘brothers’ will stay the same. The peacefulness of the setting won’t mean a thing. Man can’t remake himself in a different image.

Sergei pays me the best compliment of my life: ‘Your presence here puts off the poachers. You’ll have saved four or five bears.’ We lubricate these courtesies with a bottle of vodka. Yura, feeling unsociable, says nothing, doesn’t drink, and hangs back, now and then dispatching an onion or a smoked fish. The two men take off for Elohin where they have things to do and we arrange to meet that evening at Zavorotni, where they’ll be spending the night.

We’ve emptied the bottle, but fifteen miles in a kayak will put paid to any migraine. I paddle slowly, dawdling in the bays. I move at an otter’s pace and the prow slices through hours of silence. Bek and Aika are a little black dot and a little white dot at the mouths of the torrents. A marsh-hawk studies me from the top of an ash tree. The mergansers cackle. I cut across the capes a little over a mile from their shores. Six hours later, Zavorotni. Sergei, Yura and a few fishermen are sitting by a fire in front of the large izba belonging to their friend V.M.

The lake is falling asleep, the animals calm. Until three in the morning, we feed the fire, swallow smoked fish, and empty bottles. I would have liked to collapse in the warmth of a cabin. Russia has taught me never to count on the slightest respite after any effort, and always to be prepared to trash myself with vodka after having worn myself out mile after mile.

One of the fishermen, Igor, can’t hold his liquor. He gives off in sobs what he absorbs in ethanol and collapses in my arms blubbering over the child that isn’t on the way. I’ll remember all my life his big tears in a night still echoing with the cries of seagulls. He and his wife have consulted a shaman specializing in fertility and now want to go and stay in Tibetan temples where the power of bodhisattvas could make them fruitful. I don’t dare console him by pointing out that the human anthill is about to explode. And that the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described our billions of humans as meal worms in an overcrowded habitat in which we’re killing ourselves with our own toxins. And that the old master, worried about the demographic pressures now afflicting the Earth, had forbidden himself to make ‘any prediction about the future’ – he who’d been born in a world six times less densely populated. And that in his play The Dead Queen, the novelist and playwright Montherlant put these words in the mouth of the king when he discovers that his daughter-in-law is pregnant: ‘My God, will it never end?’ And that tossing an infant into the lions’ cage is not, perhaps, the wisest thing to do. And that the desire to be a father is easily thwarted by maintaining a small fund of pessimism.

I’d brought along Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé, about the founder of the Trappists, and I’d planned on spending a pleasant day at Zavorotni with this master of the hermit’s way of life, but feeling guilty about leaving the sun to go on its way alone, I wound up parading my hangover in the noonday sun on the schist slag of the abandoned mine here. Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘free men’ gutted the mountain in search of microcrystalline quartzite, leaving behind what is known in Russia as a ‘serpentine’, an eighteenth-century French word for a road with hairpin turns. This one is littered with the carcasses of engines and caterpillar excavators. My clothes are in rags, my hair is every which way, I’ve got booze breath and jaundiced eyes, and even the dogs look pitiful, done in by yesterday’s marathon. We all three collapse at regular intervals along the road to recharge ourselves in the sunshine. At an elevation of 3,280 feet, we reach the break in the slope created by the umbilical edge of a glacier long ago. The amphitheatre chewed from the mountain by machines has the dreary look common to all derelict mines. I climb to 6,560 feet, spitting out the scoria of my long night. Up there, the view of the hidden part of the lake is an invitation to adventure. Life is about moving forward, and there’s defeat in retracing one’s steps. We stagger back down through the couloirs of soft snow. Our bodies didn’t need to climb up almost 5,000 feet of crappy roadway today. I ought to have read Chateaubriand while drinking black tea and admiring the ballet of eiders whipping up the good black cream of the lake.

At ten this evening, surrounded by his dogs, V.E. serves me supper in his home, which is more like a kennel than an izba. The floor is sticky with grease, and the stove features huge simmering vats of seal offal and trimmings from elk quarters: dog food. It looks like an athanor, the furnace of an alchemist in eighth-century Lotharingia.

‘So, the mine?’ asks V.E.

‘Very pretty, up there,’ I reply.

‘The dogs?’

‘They followed me, the scamps.’

‘Before, this village was alive, we had a little restaurant. Today, a ruin.’

‘Tovarich, you’re pining for the Soviet Union.’

‘No: nostalgia is pining only for your youth.’

V.E. serves me braised seal for breakfast. This meat is a nuclear explosion in the mouth that sends its strength all through the body.

‘Comrade,’ I announce, ‘give me some seal, hand me a tank, and leave Poland to me!’

‘That’s not a Russian proverb.’

‘It could be.’

‘Yeah.’

For the moment my friend is feeding his ten dogs with the ingenuity of a wrestler. He has to invade the barking heap with his pail and hurl the rations into the pans while beating back the onslaught of the dogs. Mine are pretty much holding their own in the mêlée. Whoever doesn’t fight doesn’t eat.

On the trip home, I bless the seal meat for giving me its strength. A contrary wind and a heavy chop cost me seven hours of effort to cover about fifteen miles. The dogs wait up for me with short siestas on the smooth boulders. My muscles are in shreds. Dehydration probably has something to do with it. Russia makes its drunks live like athletes. The shore creeps along. Seals keep popping up.

I take a break: a nap ashore with the dogs on the warm rocks, near a fire hot enough to drive spiders from their lairs.

At five I land on my beach just when a trawler arrives to nudge its steel prow among the rocks. The captain asks me if a couple of Dutch passengers may come ashore for a moment.

Erwin works on Sakhalin Island for an oil company. His wife speaks perfect French. The two children are sunburned and better behaved than my dogs. The cabin must seem like a dream to them: Snow White’s cottage, and in it, one of the seven dwarfs. We drink tea in a very civilized way, standing on the beach. They stay fifteen minutes and take a photo, which you would do if you weren’t staying six months.

At the top of the gangplank, Erwin calls out: ‘I’ve got a Herald Tribune, want it?’

‘Sure!’

‘It’s last week’s.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He tosses me the paper and it occurs to me that it’s well worth having lived thirty-eight years to have a Batavian guy on a Russian fishing boat deliver the Herald Tribune to me out in the taiga.

The news: little Afghan girls abused by their relatives, then repudiated by their mothers. Women whipped by mullahs (photo). Iraqi Shiites blowing up Sunnis along with a few of their own in the process because homemade IEDs are tricky (photo). The Turks recall their diplomats from Israel (commentary). Iranian atomic scientists crowing over making great strides with their programmes. By page four, I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind staying a few months more out here. The newsprint of the Herald works quite nicely to wrap Siberian fish.

Rancé is the St Anthony of the temperate latitudes. One of God’s fools minus the sand dunes and scorpions. It’s the seventeenth century: a man of wealth and distinction decides to die to the world. At the age of thirty-seven, he sets a new course for the wilderness ‘without memory and without resentment’. Chateaubriand paints a frightening portrait of Rancé. Giving no warning, he leaves his gilded halls, renouncing his aristocratic life for one of penitence. Taking the Gospels literally, he pays his debt to the poor and then, in the hills of Perche in northern France, founds l’ordre de La Trappe, a congregation of deadly serious discipline, a ‘Christian Sparta’. In his retreat, he prays, writes, meditates and mortifies his sick body. He will live thirty-seven more years in solitude, crippled by suffering, cloistered in the ‘desolation’ of stones. Thirty-seven years of pleasure against thirty-seven years of silence: a loan redeemed. With the maniacal exactitude of an accountant, Rancé will repay the debt he owed the devil, drawing ‘his last strength from his first weakness’. In a letter to the Bishop of Tournai, he sums everything up: ‘We live to die.’

Rancé’s flight fascinates and repels me in equal measure. His extremism dazzles me, his motive shocks and disgusts me. In the abbé’s anxieties, there is something of the feverish child who exclaims to the heavens: ‘I want the absolute and I want it now!’

The impulsive impatience is superb, but the fire is morbid, devouring everything that lies outside an expectation of the afterlife. Out on the taiga, I would rather gather up moments of felicity than intoxicate myself with the absolute. The scent of azaleas delights me more than that of incense. I beam at fresh blossoms instead of at a silent sky. As for the rest – simplicity, austerity, oblivion, renunciation and indifference to comfort – I admire and willingly imitate that.

This morning, fog. The world wiped out. It’s weather for water sprites. When the cottony mist dissipates, I set out to fish the river at North Cedar Cape. Fishing: you gain a fish but lose some time. Worth it?

I let the flies drift along the current and keep them suspended in the water, about four or five feet below the surface, where the fish gather to glean the nutritious outfall from the rivers. The thrill when the cork takes a dive: dinner will be served! When I kill a char, shivers run over its skin as life leaves in electrical discharges. The skin then loses its lustre. Life is what gives us colour.

In Life of Rancé, this quotation from the Elegies of Tibullus: ‘How sweet it is while lying in bed to hear fierce winds.’ The wind rampages all day long and I read my Tibullus.

The lashing surf has washed the rocks. I advance carefully, trying not to slip. The dogs are afraid of the waves, which have teeth so they can bite the earth. The points of the capes are hidden by flying foam. The wind is still carrying on in the dark forest; the taiga crackles. The occasional gull shoots by. Millions of flies have hatched out on the shingle, covering entire sections of beach. The dogs lick them up. The flies live only a week and the animals love them: free protein and easy pickings. The sand is starred with plantigrade tracks: flat-footed bears have come down to the feast.

The dogs can’t manage to cross the River Lednaya. Aika has jumped onto a rock in the middle of the current and waits for me to come wading through the churning water to get her. Bek wails pitifully, convinced that we’re plotting to desert him. I cross again to ferry him over on my shoulders. To get past the abrupt shoreline north of the river, I go up onto slopes littered from landslides. These cliffs and their way of murmuring: ‘Hey sweetie, come on over here…’ The wind’s nasty humour gives me wings.

I reach my goal: a cascading torrent of a river almost two miles north of the Lednaya. A good spot for fish but three hours away. The dogs nose around for a moment, then go to sleep under the awnings of the rhododendrons. I admire the ease with which they collapse at the slightest respite. My new motto: in all things, do as a dog does! Bionics takes its inspiration from biology and applies it to technology. We need a school of ethobionics that would use animal behaviour to guide our actions. At the moment of decision, instead of seeking counsel from our heroes – what would Marcus Aurelius, Lancelot or Geronimo have done? – we would ask ourselves: ‘And now, what would my dog decide? Or a horse? Or a tiger? Or even an oyster (a model of placidity)?’ Bestiaries would provide our rules of conduct. Ethology – the scientific study of animal behaviour – would become a moral science. I interrupt my reverie when a char pulls my cork down after him. This evening I bring four fish back to the cabin. And I wolf them down, because that’s what animals do.

These rock flies flow down cliffs and tree trunks in silky streams. They are sacred manna. The month of June when the animals need all their vigour for love presents a problem in the cycle of life. How to bridge the gap between the awakening in May and the abundance of July? Nature has come up with – the flies. These poor insects serve as fodder destined to provide energy during a period of penury. In two weeks, their job done, they will vanish after a brief existence, sacrificed in the common biological interest. They don’t forget to live, though: at the slightest touch of sunlight, they go into Brownian motion, quivering with the lightest of vibrations, and mate. Their trembling reminds me of the shiver of a secret joy, and I like them so much that I almost sprain my ankles trying not to crush them on the rocky beaches.

Everything has collapsed. On the satellite phone I save for emergencies and have not yet used to make any calls, five lines appear, more painful than a searing burn. The woman I love has dismissed me. She has lost interest in a man who’s like a straw in the wind. I’ve sinned through my flights, my evasions and this cabin.

After being gone for years, she came back to me when I was just leaving on that first assignment for Lake Baikal. Now she is leaving me, and I’m looking at those same shores. For three hours, I wander along the beach. I’ve let happiness fly away. Life should be nothing but this: giving constant thanks to fate for the slightest blessing. Being happy is knowing that you are.

It’s five in the afternoon. The pain comes in waves; at times I find some relief. I manage to feed the dogs, even to fish. But the ache always returns, with a life of its own: molten lead coursing through my being.

I dream about a little house in the suburbs with a dog, wife and children, protected by a row of fir trees. For all their narrowness, the bourgeoisie has nevertheless understood this essential thing: we must give ourselves the possibility of a minimum of happiness.

I’m condemned to stay in this dead end full of stupid ducks, face to face with my pain.

I have to marshal my strength to make it to the next hour. I bury myself in a book. As soon as I stop reading, I hear those five lines in the sat-phone message shrieking through my skull.

I close the book and cry into my dogs’ fur. I had no idea that fur soaks up tears so well. On human skin, tears slide away. Usually the dogs are capering all over at this hour; tonight, their heads hanging a little, they keep quiet under my miserable flood of weeping. I have only a flare gun with which to blow my brains out. And no guarantee of success. A seal appears above the waterline, just in front of the beach… I tell myself that it’s her, come to smile at me. I must manage to speak to her one last time. You’re always late to your own life; time doesn’t hand out second chances. Life can ride on one roll of the dice. And me, I hared off to the forest, leaving her behind.

I read until I’m worn out, because if my eyes look away from the page, the pain chokes me and forces me to get up. Tonight I keep hearing boats, but it’s the throbbing of my eyes.

I’m padlocked into this Eden I made for myself. The sky is blue yet black. Strange how time withdraws its friendship from you. Just yesterday, it slipped by like satin. Now every second needles me.

To be thirty-eight years old and here, by a lake, crawling and asking a dog why women go away.

Without Aika and Bek, I’d be dead. This afternoon I chop wood from four-thirty to six-thirty until I can’t hold the axe any more. ‘Only the purest of heart can become murderous because of others,’ writes Jim Harrison in Dalva. The wave comes back. Tears are kept in check by reading. In films, wolves retreat before the flames of torches.

I scuttled the ship of my life and realized it when the water was up to the gunwales. Question: it’s seven o’clock; how do I make it to eight? It’s a lovely evening, with pompadour clouds that are a little silly, like those velvet tassels on old-lady curtains. The fish surface and kiss the wavelets, leaving circles that grow larger, fade away.

I scribble all day, writing anything at all so as not to feel pain. In my little black notebooks the people are full of memories, anecdotes, thoughts. I read The Stoics: there are things in their practices you can use to steel yourself, a first step towards consolation. I’d like to snuff out my pain in this forest that knows nothing of sorrow. Life everywhere: ducks, seals and a bear, in my binoculars, at the base of the hill where I like to rest. It’s the evening hour when everyone goes home and says a last thank-you to this latest day of life.

My body is compressed with suffering. Can the great pressures of grief provoke congestive heart failure?

The only hope on the horizon is the expected arrival tomorrow of Bertrand de Miollis and Olivier Desvaux, two painter friends who are travelling in Russia and have promised to visit me. Sergei is supposed to bring them here by boat. As it turns out, they’re arriving right when I’m as flat as a tar blotch on a beach.

I’ll say nothing to them, hide my tears, and use their presence to stay alive.

Hang on. And to hang on, take strength from the infinite solidity of the little dogs. Nature is overjoyed at getting its hands on a new summer. At six in the evening, the sound of an engine rouses me from my stupor. A black dot to the south: my deliverance. I welcome Miollis and Desvaux like a benediction; they will distract me from my danse macabre. Sergei heads back without even tossing back a single glass, because the wind is rising. I sit the two painters down at the wooden table beside the lake and unpack all the provisions they’ve brought from Irkutsk: wine, beer, vodka, hard cheese. We get falling-down drunk. The alcohol takes its toll on our bodies, but at least it chases away all sorrow.

The happiness lasts one second. There’s a pleasant moment upon awakening at dawn, just before consciousness remembers and the heartache begins again.

Since the apocalypse of 16 June, I’ve read two Shakespearean comedies, The Handbook of Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, José Giovanni’s The Adventurers and Eve, a psychological thriller by James Hadley Chase, the hero of which is a lousy creep whose character sucks the life out of everything and creates a desert around him. That guy is me. Guided by a mysterious impulse, my hand selected the books I needed to read. Marcus Aurelius helped me. Giovanni showed me the man I should have been; Chase showed me as I am. Books are more useful than psychoanalysis; they say everything, better than life does. In a cabin, mixed with solitude, they make a perfect lytic cocktail, gradually relieving the symptoms of acute disease.

The vodka hangover hangs us out to dry. Miollis and Desvaux emerge at noon, having slept on the cabin floor. To sweat out the poison, we set off on foot for the Lednaya and have lunch on one of the grassy shelves on the cliffs of the right bank. The dogs run around chasing ducks. All that joy!

Two easels planted on a beach before white-smocked painters, who compose their pictures with careful little brushstrokes. A couple of dogs lie at their feet in the pale mauve twilight of Siberia. It’s a classically peaceful scene, and I can’t take my eyes off my friends, who have been travelling through Siberia painting from nature in the purest tradition of the itinerant painters of Holy Russia. With the help of light and a dollop of time, they create space in two dimensions. I’m writing these lines while they put the finishing touches on their canvases. The cabin is beginning to look like an artist’s studio: a Villa Medici for muzhiks.

At dawn, I pose, sitting at my work table. The two painters have set up their easels in the cabin. Miollis looks like a German troubadour and Desvaux, a Swiss shepherd. Desvaux is technically conservative, painstaking and generous, and he always pulls something off. Miollis is more hit-and-miss, sometimes blowing his picture but occasionally coming up with a stunner. This morning they are painting a man with a crumpled heart. It’s easy to hide feelings. Constructed in haste by Russian government ministers out in the countryside (or so the story goes), ‘Potemkin villages’ were just façades restored and repainted on the fly to hide hovels and impress the ruler of Russia on a tour of inspection, who then went happily home to the palace.

Cheerful Miollis and gentle Desvaux distract me from my misery. Without them, grief would eat me up like a crab.

In one day my guests paint the cabin, the dogs, the beach. It takes as much nerve to try rendering the beauty of this place on canvas as it does to capture it in a few perfectly chosen words.

This morning, a big ship passes well out on the lake. Ten minutes later the wake reaches the beach, carrying with it something of the world’s unpleasant intrusion onto my pristine little property.

The painters spend the day limning the flight of wild geese through the radiant heavens. They stand before their easels as if before a window that is waiting for them to invent its view.

I climb to the top of the crumbling butte to have lunch. Having reached the summit, my dogs gaze pensively at the lake, panting and drooling. Five days ago, these little creatures held out their paws and saved me from drowning.

At twilight, fishing. Desvaux catches dinner for three people and two dogs. His silhouette stands out against the great ash tree that leans over the water at the point of the cape. Unwilling to come down from the heights, the light clings to the spurs of the cliffs. A flash of silver at the end of the line: the lake is giving up its treasures. Writing, painting, fishing: three ways of paying one’s respects to time.

Pollen has fallen on the lake and hems the beaches with bright yellow ribbons. Dead butterflies drift on the waters. Seals keep surfacing to stare at the shore, checking to see that the world is still in its place and that they’ve done well to dwell in the depths.

Not a sound, not one noise, just the odd butterfly.

‘Silence, the ornament of sacred solitudes’ (Life of Rancé).

Miollis and Desvaux go from painting to painting, offerings in harmony with the genius loci. The infinite superiority of a painting over a photograph. A snapshot immobilizes a precise moment in time and stakes it out in two dimensions. (Primitive peoples were not entirely wrong to see photos as thefts.) A painting offers a historical interpretation of a moment that will live a long time in the eye of those who contemplate it, and, as a work that does not interrupt the flow of time, its very confection is fluid, inscribed in a long period of composition.

Shortly before dawn, we head out for a six-hour trek along the shore.

Miollis and Desvaux are returning to Irkutsk and must take a boat setting out this morning from Zavorotni, a fifteen-mile hike from the cabin. We look like three Jewish painters fleeing along the Vistula with all our art impedimenta crammed into beggars’ bags. We’re bent double under enormous backpacks stuffed with fifty-odd pounds of gouache paints and mediums in tubes, an encyclopaedia of Russian painting, and the easels on top. At Middle Cedar Cape, we salute the hermit’s ghost. Near the pond by the derelict cabin we find the carcass of a bear. Leaning against an immense ash tree at South Cedar Cape, an anthill teems with life: millions of skeletons busily build themselves a body. Barnacle geese speed north fast enough to dislocate their necks. I waste some time trying to find the old geologists’ path V.E. told me about that runs along some 500 feet above the lake, but the trail has been invaded by saplings that make walking even more difficult than on the stones of the lakeshore.

At Zavorotni, Miollis and Desvaux leap onto the boat, whose diesel engines we had heard warming up a good hour before arriving at the dock. We’ve barely time to shake hands. I like this kind of farewell, it’s like taking a tumble.

That evening, Sergei, sad-eyed Yura and Sasha of the missing fingers arrive in Zavorotni by boat. We prepare a feast of smoked fish, nalim[12] liver, caviar with wild onion and grilled venison. Sasha pours us his homemade rotgut. These Russians have a way of tossing back their drinks and grabbing hunks of meat that displays their pride in bypassing all commercial resources. They live exclusively off the forest, and taking what you need from the woods guarantees contentment. Such men operate autonomously in the order of things, but remain bound to the traditions of their fathers, and they are worlds away from the free-thinkers who have thrown off all ties to God and princes but depend on cities and their services for food, warmth and transport. Who is right? The autarkic muzhik who commends his soul to heaven but never sets foot in a store? Or the modern atheist, liberated from all spiritual corsetry, but forced to live on the tit of the system and obey all injunctions imposed by life in society? Must one kill God but submit to legislators, or live free in the forest while still fearing the spirits? Practical and material autonomy doesn’t seem a less noble achievement than spiritual and intellectual autonomy. In On Democracy in America, in the chapter ‘What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear’, Tocqueville writes: ‘One forgets that it is above all in the details that it proves dangerous to enslave men. For my part I would be inclined to believe liberty less necessary in great things than in the lesser ones.’ This evening, emptying bottles with the woodsmen of the taiga, I take sides. For the gods, princes and beasts, and against the penal code.

‘We’re taking you home!’ exclaims Sergei suddenly. And we throw ourselves into an activity at which Russians excel: raising a toast, breaking camp in a hurry, tossing baggage into a boat and taking off full speed for no matter where. No matter where – as long as the wind blows, the world is pitching and rolling, and inebriation carries the day with the promise of finding something new at the end of the journey.

There’s nowhere more propitious for meditation than an aluminium boat en route across a fog-shrouded lake. Sometimes the edge of a cliff manages to tear the curtain of mist; sections of shore appear and melt away again. I hate manifestations. Except when they are revelations of beauty. Our journey resembles thought: the mind proceeds through cotton wadding until a sudden breakthrough permits a glimpse of something. Floating in formlessness, we see the light and can put a name to the shadows.

Sergei cuts the engine and we down a glass in the humid silence. We’ve been drinking for hours and are soused. Sprawled over the gas cans and fishing nets, sucking on my cigarette, heading through fog in a boat with a drunken captain, I feel reassured. Having lost my lover, I have nothing more to lose. Misfortune casts off ties. Happiness is an obstacle to serenity. When I was happy, I was afraid of unhappiness.

Throughout Midsummer Day, the sky puts on a superb show. The foehn, that warm, dry wind arising in the lee of a mountain range, caps the summits with clouds and covers the forest with mist as gently as if veiling the amours of shameless animals.

In the hammock, I study the shapes of the clouds. Contemplation is what clever people call laziness to justify it in the eyes of the supercilious, who watch to ensure that we all ‘find our place in an active society’.

Another day of looking at the sky. Swarms of insects in the gold-dust sunlight. Later, a salmon-coloured moon swims up the current of the night to go lay its single monstrous egg in a nest of clouds. Simply put: there’s a full and blood-red moon.

The wrenching sight of drowned butterflies, hundreds of them floating on the lake, some of them still strong enough to struggle. I transform my kayak into a rescue patrol boat and delicately collect the insects one by one. Poor sky flowers fallen on the field of honour… Soon thirty butterflies decorate my blue boat with limp stars. I’m the captain of an ark for Hymenoptera.

I reach Elohin, with the wind at my back. Stormy weather is on the way, dashing all hopes of sun. Elohin takes on its dismal outpost look. I have an appointment with Mikhail Hippolitov, a reserve inspector who has promised to take me along on his visit to a cabin a day’s march beyond the peaks. At noon, in a high wind, bowlegged under the weight of fifty-some pounds of vodka and canned goods, I toil along behind Hippolitov as he trots over the taiga. We ascend the forested slopes above the promontory of Elohin. Hippolitov takes off like a cannonball, slows, announces brief halts, leaps to his feet, and winds up 650 feet above me. Below the pass, at 4,265 feet, pummelled by gusts of rain, my friend requires tea. The situation becomes very Russian: lying beneath low-hanging pine branches, we wait for our tiny fire to heat a pint of water amid the slabs of schist.

Two saddles covered with graphite pebbles open in the ridge, allowing access to a high, marshy plateau. The wind rises, and we wait out a violent squall, huddling behind a rocky projection. It’s a voluptuous feeling, walking for miles over springy lichen. You’d almost dream of becoming a herbivore. Partridges squawk at our passing. Centuries of wind have shaped the dwarf pines into labyrinths as tangled as viscera. Strands of moss drip from trees. In the boggy areas, gravity has weighed more heavily on the vegetation than any tropism towards the sky. Crossing into a valley we find a 1,000-year-old cedar that goes back before the time of the Mongols. We pass forests of firs, crystalline streams, mountain ‘shelves’ infested with insects, and sloughs where our boots sink deeply into the mud. 54º 36.106´N / 108º 34.491´E brings us to Hippolitov’s cabin, built two years earlier right on the border of the nature reserve. It’s ten feet by ten feet, a haven constructed on the flank of a valley through which winds a river. A conical mountain bristling with evergreens forms the horizon. Wild onion, rhubarb and bear’s garlic grow plentifully nearby, well guarded by swarms of mosquitoes. It’s the kind of place I like: an area apart, where the evening light falls more softly than elsewhere, as if from pity.

Mikhail plays the host: a salad of wild greens dressed with mayonnaise, along with pepper vodka and lard soup. From my pack I pull a three-litre bottle of beer that we drink dry before it even has a chance to go pffft.

We walk up a valley clotted with vegetation. And we’re staggering like two drunks who’ve decided to climb a mountain pass after hitting a bar. Every step is a triumph over a cascade of stones, a tangle of roots or a mini-quagmire. The river flows on indifferently, having a long way to go before reaching the Arctic Ocean via the Lena. At 4,000 feet, the forest leaves the task of masking the rocks to the dwarf pines. Faithful to the Russian principle whereby there can be no excuse – not war, not exodus – for skipping teatime, we spend an hour coaxing fire from a few soaking-wet twigs.

Stretched out in a puddle, sipping tepid water in the rain, we have a pleasant conversation.

‘Your books are translated?’

‘A few of them.’

‘Into what?’

‘Finnish, Italian, German.’

‘Russian?’

‘No.’

‘That figures; we’re still a primitive people.’

We have to force our way through clumps of flowering rhododendrons. The pass turns out to feature a small swamp. The rain falls harder. Hippolitov suggests that we turn around, but I don’t see myself scramming back through the algal forest to spend the rest of the day in a soggy sleeping bag. We climb slopes that lead to a plateau of ‘endemic tundra’. The lichen here is springier than a nouveau riche Muscovite’s wall-to-wall carpet. Four wild reindeer graze near some old snow and we try to skulk Comanche-like around them. A hundred yards from the animals, hidden by a rhododendron, we realize that we are not the only skulkers: a brown bear is making an approach and, spotting us, freezes. The impression of competing with a bear at feeding time is not enjoyable. I get my flare gun ready and Hippolitov loads his rifle. The sharp sound of the breech startles the reindeer, which scatter, and the bear must be cursing us but never moves a muscle. Until he stands up on his hind legs. We have to wait a few seconds to find out whether he’ll about-face or charge us. That day, no need to shoot: we stare a long time at the gentle undulation, showing over the bushes, of fur in flight.

It takes us two hours to relocate the tributary along which we descended yesterday. Hippolitov has a plan. A year ago, he brought a cast-iron stove that far and would like me to get it the rest of the way to his cabin. Which costs me another two hours of fun carrying sixty-five pounds of stove, two lower corners of which dig into my back while two upper ones catch on branches, provoking with each step a truly bracing flood of chilly water. I must look like those Himalayan porters who cart the most incongruous objects through the Nepalese jungles: leather trunks, mahogany gramophones, tubs for the officers’ baths…

If I’m ever launched in a space capsule, I’ll already know what it’s like to spend an entire day lying on a cot next to a galactic travelling companion. I’d brought along Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, which I would not recommend to anyone confined to a cabin by rain. Hippolitov’s little radio sputters a constant stream of pop songs and information about the 1941–45 war. Rain falls from a sky utterly lacking in imagination.

‘Mikhail.’

‘What?’

‘We’re not having any luck with the rain.’

‘But it means fewer mosquitoes.’

‘There’s that.’

Hippolitov has forgotten his book back in Elohin and stares haggardly at the ceiling as though it were about to start showing a marvellous movie. At four in the afternoon, in a burst of feverish activity, we replace the old stove with the new one, and in the fine warmth it gives off, we dispatch three little glasses of vodka in the traditional salute to ‘the first smoke’. At six, the rain slows to drizzle and we set out to climb the pyramidal peak on the eastern edge of the valley. The rain returns as we get under way. The lichen curtains are liquid veils. The mosses swallow our boots. The mosquitoes can’t find space to fly in. It takes us an hour to ascend the 1,000 feet of uneven terrain crowned with 300-year-old cedars. The trees look like ruins. Around the edges of what was once a bear’s den, the little wine-coloured bells of wild orchids bring a touch of joy to that world.

I’m awakened in the night by a mouse that’s got into my sleeping bag, which isn’t as scary as a spider – nor as nice as a Kirov ballerina.

On the streets of Irkutsk, Hippolitov would pass for a proper family man with greying hair and a staid, orderly life. Every year he spends a few months in the forest, alone, visiting his six cabins strung along a line seventy miles long, and reconnecting with that conviction certain Russians have that city life must be only an interlude to life in the woods.

We head back. It’s still raining. The spellbound bushes seem to be dreaming of Thailand. With my hood pulled tight, I recall my climbs in the fragrant limestone hills of Provence. Walking in the rain, a factory for memories.

In tropical jungles, heat and humidity foster a profusion of life, but growth in the taiga doesn’t benefit from such a biological incubator. Whereas the hot jungle is in constant production, the taiga preserves. Here plant growth is slow, but decomposition doesn’t clear out the understorey as quickly as it does in the lower latitudes. A Siberian cedar can take years to rot. In both cases, vegetable chaos encumbers the ground, the result of tropical exuberance elsewhere, and of biostasis here. The cold jungle is a plant museum; the hot jungle, a chlorophyllian laboratory.

In Elohin, my little dogs are waiting, and I have lunch with Volodya, Irina and Hippolitov: blini with char caviar. There’s never enough caviar. But much too much vodka.

Then, scooping into the coffee-coloured lake, I row home.