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

^JULY Peace

A day of fishing. A piscivore, drawing nourishment from a lake, undergoes a psycho-physiological transformation. His cells feed on phosphorus, and his character absorbs the essence of the fish. What he loses in red-blooded strength he gains in placidity, taciturnity, dexterity, competence, and restraint.

I catch eight char. The frightened eyes of fish, as if they’d seen forbidden things.

Aika and Bek steal three of my catch. I can’t even bring myself to scold them. If I were raising kids, they’d wind up juvenile delinquents.

The air is loaded with bugs. A rumbling hum begins with the first glimmers of light and never falters until nighttime. Beetles crawl along the beams in the cabin, and the capricorn beetles show a particular fondness for my shelves. Gadflies with nightmarish eyes torment the dogs. If these insects weighed ten or twenty pounds, as they did in the Carboniferous period, we’d be a lot less full of ourselves.

Spring, the opening of the floodgates.

The waterfall is flowing free again.

Atop the 160-foot rock wall, water escapes via even the slightest gulley, covering the schist with rushing white streamers. Thanks to some acrobatics along a winding mountain track that cuts its way up to the summit, I reach the head of the falls, and the vertiginous vision of this clear mountain cascade plunging into the void.

In the evening, the dogs fight. Their jaws snap like the clashing of sabres. This grey beach: could there ever be a more beautiful place in which to witness a samurai battle, or wander in search of a word, or recite a poem? I live at the edge of a wood, before a vast plain of water, on the rim of a submerged cliff line rooted 5,000 feet underwater and rising 6,500 feet into the sky. All these spaces meet at the cabin.

Luxury? Twenty-four hours at my complete disposal each and every day, for the fulfilment of my slightest desire. The hours are tall girls of shining white standing in the sunlight to serve me. If I want to spend two days on my cot reading a novel, who’s to stop me? If I feel like taking off at twilight into the forest, who will dissuade me? The solitary woodsman has two loves, time and space. The first he uses as he pleases; the second he knows through and through.

I stay in my hammock in the broiling sun (72° Fahrenheit!). When I write on the beach, the dogs amble over to flop down at my feet: the Baikalian version of an Irish-country-house spaniel, dozing while his mistress reads.

Long wisps of mist are drifting seductively across the lake.

The insects react with the sensitivity of a seismograph to the faintest rise in temperature. As soon as the air reaches 37°F they hatch by the millions and churn the air in frenzied flight. The copulation of the capricorn beetles: the antennae touch lightly and the insects make love in statuesque immobility. I wouldn’t mind the visit of a young female Slovenian entomologist interested in studying this phenomenon. The ducks, well, they evoke the stability of the bourgeois ménage, gliding in their Sunday best, two by two, nodding discreetly to the other couples…

The world that I inhabit every day, from the clearing to the water’s edge, conceals treasures. In the grass, under the sand, armies are on the move. Their soldiers are jewels. They wear varnished armour, golden carapaces, malachite tunics or striped livery. Walking at North Cedar Cape, I never suspect that I’m treading on gems, cameos, diamonds. Some of them spring from the imagination of a Jugendstil jeweller, inspired by nature’s wonders and collaborating with a Faustian alchemist to bring brooches and enamels to life as they emerge from the oven.

Respecting insects brings joy. Taking a passionate interest in the infinitely small helps guard against an infinitely mediocre life. For the insect lover, a puddle can be Lake Tanganyika, a pile of sand takes on the aspect of the Taklamakan Desert, and a patch of brush becomes the Mato Grosso Plateau. Entering the geography of the insect gives grass the dimensions of a world.

When the lake is as slick as oil, the reflection is so pure that you could misread which half of the mirror image is which. My paddles send their echo cleanly to the forest. The reflection is the echo of the image; the echo is the image of the sound.

I catch a six-and-a-half-pound char. I read Bachelard’s philosophical reverie, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, by my own fire. A mist straight out of a Japanese print invades the shore, ‘beautiful like the ineffable, changeable like a dream, fleeting like love’ (Bachelard).

Insomnia. Regrets and discouragement are dancing a witches’ Sabbath in my skull. Sunrise shoos away the bats at 4.30 and I fall asleep at last.

Is it fatigue? When I get up at noon, I’m floating in a gentle daze. The prospect of happiness: a day that will bring me nothing new. No one on the horizon, no task to accomplish, no need to satisfy, no greeting to return. Eventually a few evening reverences to the seal and a squadron of eiders.

The cabin is a sidestep, where one can step aside. The haven of emptiness where no one is forced to react to everything. How to measure the comfort of these days free of all obligation to answer questions? I can now perceive the aggressive character of a conversation. Claiming to be interested in you, an interlocutor shatters the halo of silence, invades the shore of time, and calls upon you to answer his questions. All dialogue is a battle.

Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: ‘One must avoid chance, outside excitation, as much as possible; walling oneself up, so to speak, is an act of instinctive elementary wisdom, a part of intellectual gestation. Shall I permit an alien thought to secretly scale that wall?’ Further on, Nietzsche speaks in praise of impassive lethargy: ‘I see my future – a vast future – as a smooth sea: not a single wish disturbs the surface. Not for anything in the world would I want things to be different from what they are; as for me, I do not want to be different from what I am.’

Through some mystery, I stripped myself of all desire at the very moment when I was winning the maximum of freedom. I feel lacustrine landscapes developing in my heart. I have awakened the old Chinese hermit within me.

In the evening, I build a fire on the shore and grill my fish there.

The evening is the dying of a dream. All the elements of a Romantic era reverie take their places before my front-row seat at around eight o’clock: still waters, swirls of mist, pastel-tinted eddies, birds skimming in low to their nests. Nature flirts with kitsch without ever falling into it.

Today, struck by Nietzsche’s warning in Ecce Homo, I’m leaving the books alone: ‘I’ve seen this with my own eyes: gifted and rich natures “inclined toward freedom” who have “read themselves to death” by the time they are thirty, mere matches now, which must be struck to give off sparks – their “thoughts.”’ Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes with tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings. Volume after volume, the reader settles for recognizing the expression of thoughts he was ‘working on’ intuitively. Reading is reduced to either discovering the formulation of ideas that had been floating around in one’s mind, or to the simple knitting together of connections among the works of hundreds of authors.

Nietzsche describes poor exhausted souls who can no longer manage to think unless they ‘look it up’. Only the squeeze of lemon can awaken the oyster.

Hence the appeal of those people who see the world with eyes free of all reference, for whom memories of reading never come between them and the substance of things.

There was once a girl in my life who knew how to forget what she had read and who felt devotion for all forms of life. In southern France, we crossed the Camargue, the largest river delta in Western Europe. We rowed through the salt marshes, along canals, across lagoons. Flights of flamingoes sailed through the sunset. We camped out at night with hordes of mosquitoes that I would squash, bombarding them with chemicals. She said she loved them: ‘They bite, but to each his own, and besides, they keep men away from infested places so that the other animals can live there in peace.’ Twenty-two days ago, she left me.

My friends Thomas Goisque and Bernard Hermann arrive at twilight in Sergei’s boat, and in the tradition of North Cedar Cape, we all get drunk on the beach, toasting lost loves and renewed friendships. Goisque is here on assignment for a magazine. Hermann has come to do what for decades has been the focus of his life as a Zen sage: the contemplation of shifting light on the skin of the world. He looks like a colonel in the Indian Army: white cotton jacket, tortoiseshell glasses. His blond moustache and the ‘Pugachev’s Rebellion’ look in his eye lead Russians to take him for a Don Cossack ataman, but he informs them in a pidgin inherited from his journeys through the Russia of Khrushchev and Brezhnev that although he has Creole, Jewish, Celtic, Baltic, Hispanic and Teutonic genes, he can’t think of a single Cossack ancestor.

Sergei left us a supply of seal fat yesterday. I paddle off southwards with Goisque to leave the stinking substance on some rocks in the hope of attracting a bear. From the table on my beach, I can keep watch via binoculars. I spend my hours with the promise of the bear.

My guests and I live together nicely. We fish, explore the riparian forests, and discuss the subtle distinctions between Russian nihilism, Buddhist acceptance, and peaceful Stoic ataraxia. Sometimes Goisque and Hermann tackle their memories of army life, at which point the conversation veers between the moment when Shi poetry became Tang… and the operations of the SDECE (France’s external intelligence agency from 1944 to 1982) when it was ‘militarized’ into the 11th Shock Parachutist Regiment.

The sky is more generous with its creatures than the forest. No bear comes to the rendezvous with the smelly fat, which is instead mobbed by barnacle geese, mergansers, tufted ducks and eiders. Two German kayakers arrive from the north at nightfall. They set up camp on the cape beach, about a third of a mile from the cabin, and come up to recharge their equipment on my solar batteries. We have to look at their photos, their films, exchange e-mail addresses. When you meet someone nowadays, right after the handshake and a quick glance you write down the website and blog information. Conversation has given way to a session in front of the screen. Afterwards, you won’t remember faces or tones of voice, but you’ll have cards with scribbled numbers. Human society’s dream has come true: we rub our antennae together like ants. One day we’ll just take a sniff.

The German kayakers set out again in their perfectly organized craft. At the same moment, four other oarsmen show up in my bay. These men are not nearly as well equipped. Crappy gear: Russians. They’re using refuse bags as watertight skirts for the hatch coamings. They’re dressed like sailors and they accept the three shots of rotgut the Teutons declined (on the grounds that it was too early in the day). Germans and Russians: the former would like to put the world in order, while the latter must endure chaos to demonstrate their genius.

The last visit of the day is worthy of the Balkan cinema of the 90s. From the north, heralded by cannonfire, a raft of planks floating on Ural truck wheel inner tubes comes drifting towards my shore. In the centre of this floating island, enthroned on beams and braced by cables, sits a jalopy. Three Russians in full fatigue dress leap out onto the shingle: ‘Our raft is called The Intrepid!’ They’ve got the mugs of killers, striped submariner middy blouses, and daggers in their belts. The car’s universal joint has been pulled off its axis, tipped 20º, and equipped with a propeller. On this Kon Tiki from hell they are heading down to Irkutsk, taking turns piloting from the driver’s seat. At the stern, a wood fire in an oil drum serves as a kitchen. When they leave, they fire off a small portable cannon, and I contemplate this raft, so much like life in Russia: an unwieldy, dangerous thing on the verge of shipwreck, a slave to the currents – but aboard which you can always make tea.

That evening, at the waterfall, while Hermann guards the home front, Goisque and I succeed in crossing the torrent above the falls. We reach the granite ridge where I’d found a good camping ledge during the winter. It takes us an hour to cover the last fifty yards of uneven terrain, defended by dwarf pines that catch our feet in their branches.

On the platform, I build a fire. The traverse is a lodge for a vigil of arms, one of those places where you make peace with yourself before a dawn execution. The kind of spot where – depending on your mood – you are flooded with either darkest despair or radiant joy. We smoke our Romeo No. 1 cigars; the night is calm, the moon already almost full. Why this desire to remake the world just when it’s going out? Cumulus clouds obscuring the Buryat horizon ripen in the setting sun. The four elements play their parts. The water welcomes the shavings of lunar silver, the air is laden with fog, and the stones shimmer with banked heat. Why believe that God is anywhere else but in a sunset? The dogs are flopped out under the pines. The fire burns higher; night falls. They meet.

Suddenly Aika darts down the slope with fangs bared, while Bek huddles under the pines like an apartment dog lost out on the taiga. The little black watchdog barks in the darkness and we imagine a bear circling our camp.

Goisque, Hermann and I are walking in silence on the beach at Middle Cedar Cape. In his Life of Rancé, Chateaubriand, crushed by modesty, remembers having walked along ‘under the weight of my mind’.

At the tip of the cape, a moment of reflection at the cabin where that soul shipwrecked by the Red Century rotted away. Hermann: ‘A life without ever hearing a game-show host.’ In a clump of dwarf pines, on the shingle ridge that divides Baikal from the inland ponds, the dogs flush out a sitting duck, and we must restrain them from putting paid to the eggs. Aika still manages to gobble up a little live sparrow, to the dismay of Hermann, who has been a strict vegetarian for forty years.

The six o’clock sun has transformed the marsh into forest pools in an Arthurian wood. The mists of legends float across the water, parting at times to release a thousand darting diffractions in a scene tailor-made for a Victorian Gothic writer. In a fantasy novel of the late nineteenth century, dragonflies would become the winged steeds of fairies, the light flashing on the water would be the kisses of undines, the mist, the breath of sylphs, and spiders would stand guard over the gates of the wind, while the still waters would shelter the cave of a tutelary god, and the rays of the setting sun, shooting grandly up over the mountain crests, would symbolize the golden road to the realms of Heaven. But we’re mere men in a world of atoms and must get home before dark.

The Europeans have proceeded with the construction of third-generation pressurized water reactors, relaunched the Transgreen Project aiming to import solar energy produced in the Sahara, and there’s a massive black tide offshore of Florida. I read these chronicles of human demiurgy in the newspapers Goisque brought with him.

Life in the cabin is a profession of faith in a form of energy that has nothing to do with man’s age-old ambition to master the universe. The woodcutter’s axe and the solar panel provide light and heat. Being frugal with energy is not a burden. Neither is the satisfaction of knowing one is self-sufficient, nor the spiritual comfort of enjoying the prodigality of the sun. Photovoltaic panels capture the photons showering down from the sky, and wood – which is fossilized solar light – releases its energy in fire.

Every calorie drawn from fishing or gathering, each photon assimilated by the body, is spent to fish, gather, draw water and chop wood. The woodsman is an energy-recycling machine. Relying on the forest is a form of self-reliance. Without a car, the hermit walks. Without a supermarket, he fishes. Without a boiler, he chops wood. The principle of non-delegation concerns the mind as well: without a TV, he opens a book.

What do oil and uranium look like? What does the containment building of a pressurized water reactor contain? What is the composition of the crude oil flowing from the BP well-head two and a half miles down? Who transforms these forces and brings them to us in the form of watts? Cabin communism means eliminating intermediaries. The hermit knows where his wood and water come from, along with the meat he eats and the wild rose perfuming his table. The principle of proximity guides his life. He refuses to live in the abstraction of progress and draw upon an energy source about which he knows nothing. To be ‘modern’ means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.

The other news in the paper concerns the corruption of the personnel of the French state, who sometimes betray a confounding clumsiness in hiding their malfeasance. Even the valets of the Marquis de Sade remembered to lock the doors of their master’s boudoir. The ugliness of the men in suits and their impoverished command of the language are worse than their crimes.

The sun hoists the colours at 4 a.m., and I raise mine a little later. I’ve only three – sky, snow, blood – and the little flag snaps on the beach, flying from a fishing pole. For the fatherland on Bastille Day, Goisque, Hermann and I down three times three vodka eye-openers. We salute the memory of Borodino, the bloodiest day of the French invasion of Russia – indeed, of all Napoleon’s wars. I organize some ‘dancing in the streets’ and teach Bek how to waltz. Aika, the bitch, refuses to dance. Is it legal to plant the French flag on the soil of Russia? Is it a provocation? I must remember to ask the next constitutional scholar who paddles by in a kayak.

Goisque and Hermann left this morning. Their friendly presence and the constant stream of rowers these past few days have screwed up my internal clock, and it will take me a few days to recover a rhythm based exclusively on the observation of the sun’s progress around my clearing.

Cabin life is like sandpaper. It scours the soul, lays bare one’s being, ensavages the mind, and reclaims the body for the wild, but deep in the heart it unfolds the most sensitive nerve endings. The hermit gains in gentleness what he loses in civility. ‘The less sensitive he was to suffering, perhaps, the more receptive our ancestor was to pleasure, and the more conscious of his happiness,’ writes Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

If he wishes to safeguard his mental health, an anchorite cast up on the shore must live in the moment. Let him begin to elaborate plans, and he will descend into madness. The present: a protective straitjacket against the sirens of the future.

The evening clouds put cotton nightcaps on the drowsy mountains.

Wild roses cluster at the feet of trees along the edge of the forest, turning their corollas towards their god, the Sun. I think of the description of the garden on the rue Plumet in Les Misérables. Jean Valjean has let it lie fallow, and Hugo makes a profession of pantheistic faith: ‘Everything toils at everything… No thinker would dare maintain that the scent of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations… Between beings and things, there are marvellous relations…’

Taking Hugo’s question even further: who would claim that the fawn never dreams of tumbling surf, that the wind feels nothing when it strikes the wall, that dawn is unmoved by the trilling of titmice?

Figure it takes one day to split a supply of wood, catch four char, feed the dogs, repair the boards of a shed somewhat battered by a storm, and read Typhoon. Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr is an anti-Ahab: he stands on the threshold of destiny, accepts the typhoon, does not seek to escape what is unavoidable. Why should we be moved by what is not of our own making? No white whale is worth getting worked up about. Carried to an extreme, indifference makes men seem obstinate, and Conrad’s MacWhirr begins to seem a brute. The captain would make a good Russian hero. In Russia, to indicate that one doesn’t give a damn, one says ‘mnyeh po figou’. And ‘pofigism’ is a resigned indifference to all things. Russians boast of facing the convulsions of history, the challenges of the climate, and the villainy of their leaders with their own inner pofigism, which is not dependent on Stoic resignation or Buddhist detachment. Pofigism has no ambition to guide mankind to the virtue of Seneca or to hand out karmic merit badges. Russians ask simply that they be allowed to empty a bottle today because tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. Pofigism is a state of inner passivity corrected by a vital force. The deep contempt in which he holds all hope does not prevent the pofigist – whose event horizon is the end of the day – from snatching as much enjoyment as possible from the passing hours. MacWhirr, sweating on the bridge of his ship as he awaits the typhoon, might be one of the faithful in this Church of No Hope.

The fog surprises me as I’m cutting from cape to cape in the kayak. The sun manages to deploy its glories, lining breaks in the mist with spiky crowns like blindingly bright sea urchins. It’s weather for being attacked by the Monster of Baikal. I go ashore in front of the abandoned cabin and plunge into the forest towards the marshes, seeking wild onions, rhubarb and bear’s garlic. The mosquitoes mob me. I’d like to drag the people who write ads for mosquito repellant through here stark naked, so they’ll tone down the bull on their labels. The ponds sparkle. The cedars darken the shores, and the wild roses brighten them. I return to the cabin laden with aromatic herbs. The lake is turning pink as clouds mottle the sky, now covered with lavender bruises and streaked with cyan blue. You’d need to be a forensic pathologist to fully appreciate a Baikalian sunset.

A shower on the beach. I’m washing with buckets of lukewarm water when Volodya arrives from Elohin in his little boat, bearing gifts of smoked fish. He has come to discuss a problem that enthrals Russians. ‘There are riots in your French cities! The Arabs are in revolt! Everything’s going up in flames.’ My Russian vocabulary is too small to tell him that things are less serious but more complicated than that. And anyway, are they really? I’d have to explain that these movements are expressions of social anger and that the ethnic origins of the demonstrators may well impress the Russians, but are not stressed by French commentators. I’d have to show him that this is not a revolution. These public disturbances don’t aim to overthrow bourgeois society but to break into it. Are these young people demanding liberty, power and glory? Why are they burning cars in those pockets of poverty? To protest against the savaging of society by technology and the market? Or in despair at not owning the biggest and most beautiful cars themselves?

I remember my forays into such ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods – an adjective applied to places marked by a certain odour of brutality. The little kids were quite lively and did me the honour of listening to what I had to say, but they made fun of my equipment, how I was dressed and the way I talked. What I took away from such encounters was that they invest enormous tribal significance in clothing and conformist behaviour, cultivate a sense of neighbourhood loyalty, love expensive things, demonstrate an unhealthy obsession with appearance, believe that might makes right, show little curiosity about the other, and have their own linguistic codes: the distinctive signs of bourgeois society.

Ye gods of the woods – to live out here and insult these mountains by paying any attention to such things! As soon as Volodya takes off, I chase away such concerns and get back to my chores and my books.

Today I scale rugged terrain to 5,250 feet and clamber back down again: so much for the statistics. I’d decided to tackle the peak directly behind the cabin. First comes the long and difficult climb through the taiga. I get into the underbrush after 2,800 feet. The far edge of the forest marks the threshold of the upper world, where boulders torn from the summits have rolled all the way down to the ramparts of the trees. The silence is vast and still. The dogs pant in the heat. We drink straight from the cascading torrent. The canyon is growing tighter, giving Aika and Bek trouble with its rock steps and ledges. I sit down by clumps of mountain anemones to study the slow collapse of woods and scree slopes down to the lakeshore below.

It seems that some men check out women’s hips to assess whether they will bear children easily. Others consider their eyes for signs that they will prove captivating lovers, or think the length of their fingers will reveal something about their sensuality. And some men study geography in the same ways.

These mountains offer nothing but a host of immediate sensations. Man will never improve on these ranges. Calculating souls will get nothing for their pains in this unpromising landscape wracked with grandeur, for it is unconquerable. Here nature relaxes for the sole appreciation of minds free from all ambition. The taiga is not a good playground for dreams of cultivation. Developers, buzz off back to Tuscany! Under temperate skies, there the land waits for man to mould it into countryside. Here, in this amphitheatre, the elements reign for eternity. There were epic battles in volcanic periods, but now all is calm. The landscape: geology in repose.

At an elevation of 5,600 feet, I cut across scree slopes towards the peak. Up there, along the ridge dividing the basins of Lake Baikal and the River Lena, I have lunch with the dogs: three smoked fish and some wild onion. Another hour’s march across dried lichens to the top at 6,890 feet, where the dogs and I nestle together for a nap. Until we’re driven off by mosquitoes, the guardians of the summit, who defend it against all comers. Nature, in its genius, has deployed not armies of monstrous creatures, vulnerable to rifle fire, but tiny flying syringes whose buzzing drives one insane.

We beat a retreat down the north-eastern versant and scramble down a scree slope, dislodging mini-avalanches with every step. I pass through a firn field – old snow not quite hardened yet into glacier ice – canted at a 40º angle, using two fine slabs of schist to cut out steps. The dogs howl before resigning themselves to going around the obstacle, and when the slope moderates, we start sinking into the snow. At 3,000 feet, confronted with a suspicious transverse fault, I instinctively leave the firn for its rocky edges, where a stream appears; the river beneath the snow briefly shows itself again before vanishing into a gulf a hundred feet below.

Not one bird is singing. Not one ripple on the lake. Fog has swallowed up the world.

Their silent approach takes me by surprise: I become aware of their presence only when I hear the kayaks scraping over the shingle. Two colossi with shaved heads. They have bloodthirsty smiles but the gentlest of eyes. They’re paddling to Olkhon Island at the rate of about thirty miles a day. They ask me for some tea, and while the kettle is coming to a boil, they announce that they are Shivaists and are travelling along the lakeshore to find sacred sites, since they consider Baikal to be the original birthplace of their god. The funny thing is that they look like Special Forces killers.

My ten years of education with the Brothers have left me enough residual patience to get through the spiritual mishmash, liberally sprinkled with Sanskrit, that Sasha expounds to me for an hour, the gist of which is that Baikal’s mountains are linked to sacred Mount Meru, that the Ural Mountains are a world hot-spot for celto-cosmic revelations, and that Zarathustra built the kurgans – those prehistoric burial mounds found in southern Russia and Ukraine – on the Indo-Sarmatian plains. I admire these believers who speak of such things with the same aplomb as if they’d just split a beer with God in the cabin next door. Since the collapse of the USSR, New Age theories have been all the rage with Russians. After all, something had to fill the mystic vacuum left by the debunking of socialist dogma. Russians love esoteric explanations of the world and will never shrink from swallowing whole any of those theories that professional occultists would never dare even to mention in Western Europe. Russians aren’t the sons of Rasputin for nothing.

It’s a lovely idea, sailing around while trying to recognize in the shape of a landscape the physical transcription of a legend. This spiritual and symbolic distortion of geography takes one’s breath away. Paddling along, my two friends detect signs, track correspondences. In a prominent hill they see a lingam; in the crenellation of a ridge, the trident of Shiva; and in a cabin, the ‘centre of effort’ where all forces are thought to concentrate.

After supper, Sasha and his disciple sit in the lotus position on the beach and recite a Hindu mantra. Sasha blows into his Tibetan conch shell. The bleating awakens Bek, who starts howling.

‘My dog doesn’t like the sound of the conch,’ I say.

Sasha gives me a strange look.

‘Maybe he isn’t a dog…’

They tell me again that the North Cedar cabin is on an ‘energy knot’ of great intensity. They head out southwards. The blasts on the conch echo in the distance.

I’m paddling towards the River Lednaya. The lake smells like a dead body. The fog is back. The forest appears, withdraws, returns. At the river, I fish from the rocks, then dine on the product of my patience. Tonight my bivouac is the quintessence of campsites: lapping water, a meadow at the base of a cliff overlooking a calm lake, with a few birches to break up the breeze. The fish are roasting on the fire while the dogs wait for their share, and a moon the colour of a delicate iced biscuit is lounging among the clouds. I smoke a Partagás. Cigars are consecrated by the places where they are smoked: my memory is geographic. Cigars retain the atmosphere and genius of places even better than faces and conversations can.

The only thing missing this evening is the woman of my dreams.

Dawn, and the sound of an engine. It’s Volodya, who has come to spread a net at the mouth of the Lednaya. I hail him from the top of the cliff. We talk for an hour, sharing tomatoes on the bow deck of the canoe. In his discussions of the immediate, the French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch speaks of that faculty the Russians have of spending long hours sitting at a table, clinging to the reefs of an island covered with abundance. Around the table awaits a hard, hostile world into which everyone must plunge, sooner or later, until a new table appears, a little further on.

I head back, steering through the fog. The shoreline is my guide, like Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth. The storm has the last word, striking two hours after I get home.

I’m going to be saying goodbye to the dogs. I watch them sleeping, with their heads on the cabin doorstep. Why does everything finally happen? There’s only one way to avoid the unavoidable.

‘I’m leaving, and have barely passed the first of the elms that line the road…’ André Chénier, guillotined on 25 July 1794.

Sergei will come to get me the day after tomorrow. We’ll drop the dogs off at Elohin, where they’ll stay until they find a master in a different cabin in the reserve.

I came here without knowing whether I’d find the strength to stay; I leave knowing that I will return. I’ve discovered that living within silence is rejuvenating. I’ve learned two or three things that many people know without having to hole up somewhere. The virginity of time is a treasure. The parade of hours is busier than the ploughing-through of miles. The eye never tires of splendour. The more one knows things, the more beautiful they become. I met two dogs, I fed them and, one day, they saved me. I spoke to the cedars, begged forgiveness from the char, and thought about my dear ones. I was free because without the other, freedom knows no bounds. I contemplated the poem of the mountains and drank tea while the lake turned pink. I killed the longing for the future. I breathed the breath of the forest and followed the arc of the moon. I struggled through the snow and forgot the struggle on the mountaintops. I admired the great age of trees, tamed titmice, and perceived the vanity of all that is not reverence for beauty. I took a look at the other shore. I knew weeks of silent snow. I loved to be warm in my hut while the tempest raged. I greeted the return of the sun and the wild ducks. I tore into the flesh of smoked fish and felt the fat of char eggs refresh my throat. A woman bade me farewell but butterflies alighted on me. I lived the most beautiful hours of my life until I received a message and the saddest hours afterwards. I watered the earth with tears. I wondered if one could become a Russian not through blood but through tears. I blew my nose on mosses. I drank litres of poison at 104°F, and I enjoyed pissing with a wide-screen view of Buryatia. I learned to sit at a window. I melted into my realm, smelled the scent of lichen, ate wild garlic and shared trails with bears. I grew a beard, and time unfurled it. I left the cave of cities and lived for six months in the church of the taigas. Six months: a life.

It’s good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible, something fairly close to the sheer happiness of being alive.

A nap on the stones of the beach with the dogs draped on top of me. Aika and Bek, my masters in fatalism, my comforters, my friends, who expect nothing more than what the immediate reserves for you in the dog dish of life, I’m truly fond of you.

Harsh sun, azure lake, wind in the cedars, ebb and flow of the waves: in my hammock, I think I’m on the coast of the Mediterranean. In the forest, I drink a last toast to life à la Crusoe. Spotting an anthill, I plug the top with my palm. The insects defend themselves, bombarding my hand with formic acid. My skin glistens with the fluid and I sniff it up into my sinuses when I down a shot of vodka. The effect of the ammoniated fumes is instant and stunning: the forest garbs itself in unheard-of colours.

I take apart the kayak, pack my bags. My life has unfolded here for months. I fold it back up. I’ve always lived in suitcases. My crates of provisions are empty. I eat some fish. It’s over. Tomorrow, the return.

One last visit to the top of the hill to bid farewell to the lake. Here, I ask the genius loci to help me make peace with time. On our way downhill, Aika flushes a female eider, which beats the water with its right wing, pretending to be wounded. Bek is fooled and chases her into the water until he loses his footing.

Aika seeks the nest, finds it, and savages the six ducklings before I can intervene. I finish off the downy little things with a stone.

For a long time, the mother duck’s mourning cries on the shore…

She grieves for the thousands of miles travelled for nothing; she grieves for her lost offspring. Life means holding on through the death of dear ones.

All it took was the instinctive snapping teeth of a little carnivore for an immense bright loneliness to descend on North Cedar Cape.

I’m sitting on the wooden bench waiting for Sergei’s boat. The sun is beating down. The bags and trunks are piled up. The dogs are sleeping on the sand. And that mother duck weeping in the sunshine.

The morning has the taste of death, the taste of departure.

The dogs look up. A faint rumbling, confirmed: the boat. A dot grows larger and larger on the horizon. One last time.