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

I explain this to Misha. And get no reply.

Tonight we stay at the weather station of Pokoyniki, in the heart of the reserve.

Sergei and Natasha run the station. They’re as beautiful as Greek gods, but wearing more clothes. They’ve been living here for twenty years, tracking down poachers. My cabin is thirty-one miles to the north of their home, and I’m glad to have them as neighbours. I’ll find pleasure in thinking about them. Their love: an island in the Siberian winter.

We spend the evening with two of their friends, Sasha and Yura, Siberian fishermen who embody two Dostoyevskian character types. Sasha is hypertensive, with a florid face, full of vitality. He has the eyes of a Mongol, and a deep, steely gaze. Yura is sombre, Rasputinian, an eater of bottom-feeding fish. He’s as pale as the denizens of Tolkien’s Mordor. Sasha is made for great feats, impulsive action, while Yura is a born conspirator. He hasn’t set foot in a city in fifteen years.

In the morning we take to the ice again. The forest streams past. When I was twelve my family went to see the Mémorial de Verdun, a museum dedicated to the Great War. I remember the Chemin des Dames hall, commemorating a trench where soldiers and their rifles had been engulfed by a flood of mud. The forest this morning is a buried army, of which nothing shows but its bayonets.

The ice cracks. Sheets compressed by movement in the mantle explode; fault lines streak across the quicksilver plain, spewing crystalline chaos. Blue blood flows from wounded glass.

‘It’s lovely,’ says Misha.

And nothing else until that evening.

At seven p.m. my cape appears. North Cedar Cape. My cabin. The GPS coordinates are: N54º26´45.12˝/E 108º 32´40.32˝.

The small dark forms of some people with dogs are advancing along the shore to welcome us. That’s how Breughel painted country folk. Winter transforms everything into a Dutch tableau, glossy and precise.

Snow falls, and then night, and all this white turns a dreadful black.

Volodya T., a fifty-year-old forest ranger, has lived with his wife, Ludmila, in the cabin on North Cedar Cape for fifteen years. He has a gentle face and wears dark glasses. Some Russians look like brutes; Volodya would care tenderly for a bear cub. He and Ludmila want to move back to Irkutsk. Ludmila has phlebitis and needs medical attention. Like all Russian women steeped in tea, Ludmila has skin that is frog-belly white, and her veins look like vermicelli beneath its pearly lustre. Now that I have arrived, the ranger and his wife will leave.

The cabin smokes in its grove of cedars. Snow has meringued the roof, and the beams are the colour of gingerbread. I’m hungry.

With its back to the mountains, the cabin nestles at the bottom of slopes 6,500 feet high. Coniferous taiga rises towards the summits, giving up at about 3,300 feet. Beyond lies the realm of ice, stone and sky. From my windows I can see the shores of the lake, which lies at an elevation of almost 1,500 feet.

Spaced about nineteen miles apart, the reserve’s stations are manned by rangers under Sergei’s command. To the north, on Cape Elohin, my neighbour’s name is Volodya. To the south, in the hamlet of Zavorotni, another one, Volodya E. Later on, melancholy, and in want of a drinking companion, I’ll need simply to trudge north for five hours or south for one day.

Sergei, the head ranger, came with us from Pokoyniki. We clambered out of the truck and surveyed the splendour before us in silence. Then, touching his temple, Sergei announced: ‘This is a stupendous place to commit suicide.’ A friend of mine, Arnaud, has also come along in the truck from Irkutsk, where he has been living for the past fifteen years. He married the most beautiful woman in the city, who’d been dreaming of Cannes and the avenue Montaigne. When she realized that Arnaud thought only of running around the taiga, she left him.

For the next few days, we’ll all get me set up in my cabin. Then my friends will go home, leaving me alone. Task at hand: unloading the truck.

Axe and cleaver

Tarp

Burlap bag

Pickaxe

Dip net

Ice skates

Snowshoes

Kayak and paddle

Fishing poles, line, weights

Fly-fishing flies and spoons

Kitchen utensils

Teapot

Ice drill

Rope

Dagger and Swiss knife

Whetstone

Kerosene lamp

Kerosene

Candles

GPS, compass, map

Solar panels, cables and rechargeable batteries

Matches and lighters

Mountain backpacks

Duffel bags

Felt carpet

Sleeping bags

Mountaineering equipment

Mosquito net face mask

Gloves

Felt boots

Ice axe

Crampons

Pharmaceuticals (10 boxes of acetaminophen for vodka hangovers)

Saw

Hammer, nails, screws, file

French flag for Bastille Day

Hand-launched anti-bear flares

Flare gun

Rain cape

Outdoor grill

Folding saw

Tent

Ground cloth

Headlamp

−40°F sleeping bag

Royal Canadian Mounted Police jacket

Plastic luge

Boots with gaiters

Liquor glasses and vodka

90% alcohol to make up for any shortage of the above article

Personal library

Cigars, cigarillos, incense paper and a Tupperware container ‘humidor’

Icons (Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Saint Nicholas, the imperial family of the last Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas II, black Virgin)

Wooden trunks

Binoculars

Electronic appliances

Pens and notebooks

Provisions (six-month supply of pasta, rice, Tabasco, hardtack, canned fruit, red and black pepper, salt, coffee, honey and tea)

It’s funny: you decide to live in a cabin, and envision yourself smoking a cigar under the open sky, lost in meditation… and you wind up checking off items on supply lists like an army quartermaster. Life comes down to grocery shopping.

I push open the door of the cabin. In Russia, Formica reigns supreme. Seventy years of historical materialism have obliterated the Russian sense of aesthetics. Where does bad taste come from? Why use linoleum at all? How did kitsch take over the world? The principal phenomenon of globalization has been a worldwide embrace of the ugly. If you need convincing, just walk around a Chinese village, check out the latest decor in French post offices, or consider what tourists wear. Bad taste is the common denominator of humanity.

For two days, with Arnaud’s help, I tear off the linoleum, oilcloth, polyester tarp and adhesive plastic papers that cover the walls. We crowbar our way through cardboard panels. Stripped clean, the interior reveals logs pearled with resin and a pale yellow wood floor, like that of Van Gogh’s room in Arles. Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance.

We have brought two yellow pine double-paned windows from Irkutsk to replace the cabin windows, which shed a dreary light. Sergei enlarges the embrasures by cutting the logs with a chainsaw, working hectically, non-stop, without calculating the angles, correcting the mistakes he makes in his haste as he goes along. Russians always build things with a sense of urgency, as if fascist soldiers were about to pour over the hill at any minute.

In the villages sprinkled around this territory, Russians feel the fragility of their position. That little nursery-tale pig in his house of straw was about as vulnerable. Living within four wooden walls amid frozen marshes calls for modest ambitions, and these hamlets are not made to last. They’re a clutch of shacks creaking in the north wind. The Romans built for the ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter.