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

SASHA: I say to myself: Fucking hell!

ME: What will be, will be.

SASHA: Brother drunks, alkies! ( To Igor :) And you, not drinking? Bravo!

ANDREI: May everything go well! Everything, that means everything: love, family, everything.

ME: You’re returning from where?

SASHA: From Cape Shartlai. There’s this poor guy, he’s out there dying. All winter long, he’s been spending his time dying.

IGOR: No bird, no anyone! Alone.

SASHA: It’s his boss’s fault. He abandoned him out there for the winter without provisions!

ME: Who’s his boss?

SASHA: It’s that arsehole… shithead… queer… the hunter.

IGOR: The other day, I asked him: ‘You’ve got no cartridges for the gun?’ So he says: ‘No. The wolves come up a few yards away, I throw stones to drive them off.’

SASHA: When we went by Shartlai, we saw wolf tracks on the road.

ANDREI: Huge ones, big as this, and really fresh, fucking shit.

SASHA: And him, the bloke, he goes out at four in the morning, he sees their eyes shining thirty feet away. ‘So?’ I ask him. ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’ And he tells me: ‘Haven’t got any cartridges.’ We went back to see him in January. His dog had croaked. It had had nothing to eat at all. The dog was chained up, it died of hunger. The puppies…

ANDREI: Looked like skeletons.

ME: And him, what’s he eat?

SASHA: I don’t know.

IGOR: I don’t understand why no supplies are sent to him. I mean, what is this? A man going hungry in the forest!

SASHA: Shit. And all winter long trucks are going by but no one stops and no one sends him any provisions.

IGOR: It’s the first time I’ve seen that. A man living completely alone like that. And no one gives a fuck. Even a dick wouldn’t stay in his cunt of a hole.

SASHA: And yet he even seems happy!

ME: He’s a slave.

SASHA: That’s true, that’s true! I didn’t dare use that word: a slave.

VOLODYA: A serf, we also say in Russian.

ANDREI: Even a slave, you don’t torture him like that.

IGOR: No.

SASHA: He’s got a really bad boss. A shit boss. That’s no boss.

ME: But he had no other choice. He couldn’t have stayed in his village, with no work, no money…

IGOR: But he’s not getting any pay where he is, either.

SASHA: Maybe he’s better off here. If he’d stayed back in his village…

IGOR: He’d have already died of alcoholism.

SASHA: Yes! He’d have already died of alcoholism.

IGOR: Well of course! Of course!

SASHA: Whereas now, at least he’s still alive…

IGOR: There you have it: alive.

VOLODYA: By the way, Sylvain, there’s a crisis, seems that Europe’s in a real bad way. Especially Greece; that place is on its knees. Done for. Fucked.

ME: Fucked?

IGOR: Fucked.

VOLODYA: You won’t be able to go home any more.

SASHA: It’s Greece did that to you. Greece is in deep shit.

VOLODYA: Yup, in shit.

IGOR: Yes, it’s a huge catastrophe!

VOLODYA: Fucking fucked up, and there’s some demonstrations going on over there.

SASHA: Yes, revolts, people running around shouting!

IGOR: A democratic total mess.

SASHA: He’s still happy that in 1812 our Cossacks taught the French how to wash themselves and scrub their necks. They never bathed before that. Can you imagine? In 1812, the Cossacks built them banyas. Historical fact. That’s why the French invented perfumes, to cover up the nasty body odours and the bad smells of the cities. It stank all over, France! Our Cossacks who went there in 1812, they taught them to wash themselves in baths. I can assure you, it’s true.

IGOR: Catastrophe! Nightmare! Guys: catastrophe, cataclysm – they’re French words, Sylvain told me so.

SASHA: I’m not surprised.

VOLODYA: Fuck.

That’s where the recording ends. The Russians make a few more toasts to weird stuff and then suddenly they’re shouting that they’ve got to ‘get the fucking hell going’ and they put on their jackets, curse their gloves and their caps and their scarves and one of them kicks the door, calling it a fucker and, leaving me that good sausage barely half gone, off they go and there I am on the shore, a little the worse for wear, looking at a day wrecked by vodka.

Every time Russian fishermen visit my cabin I feel as if a cavalry division has come to bivouac in my kitchen garden. Fatalism, spontaneity, despotism: Mongol character traits have been injected into the Slavic venous system. The nomad shows through the woodsman. The dreadful Marquis de Custine, who wrote a celebrated account of his visit to Russia during the reign of Nicholas I, was right: Russia is ‘charged with conveying Asia to Europe’. In consideration of which, I spend an hour setting my trashed cabin to rights.

It was −4°F last night and I finally got around to nailing strips of felt on the underside of the door. This morning I drank my tea while checking messages left on the window panes by the frost. Who could decipher them? Is there writing hidden in these things?

This evening, I at last make a success of my blini. Blini are like children: you can never take your eye off them. I invent the blini stuffed with spotted char. First, catch a char. Cut wood. Make a fire. Cook the fish in the embers with some dill or fennel. Make the blini (with a few drops of beer if you have no yeast). Pull the flesh of the char to pieces over a blini. Put another blini on top of that one. Wash the whole thing down with half a pint of vodka at room temperature.

I dine, gazing out of the window. Some people can dine exclusively by feasting their eyes on a landscape. That is one definition of Eden. To live ensconced in a space one may encompass with a look, circumambulate in a day and envision in the mind.

My dinners at Baikal comprise a faint glimmer of grey energy , which is embodied energy. Grey energy skyrockets when the caloric value of the food is less than the energy necessarily expended in its production and transportation. The orange once offered at Christmas was a treasure. Everyone knew it was swollen with grey energy, and they appreciated the cost of its voyage. A catfish pulled from a bend in the Mekong by a Laotian fisherman and grilled on the river bank has zero grey energy. Like my chars, cooked a few yards from the fishing hole. Steak from Argentina, however, from cattle who feed on soya beans on the estancias of the pampas before being shipped across the Atlantic to Europe, is tarred with the brush of infamy. Grey energy is the shadow of karma, the balance due for our sins. One day we will be called upon to pay it.

The manna from heaven that fell at the feet of the Jewish people.

The youths and maidens offered to the Minotaur by the Athenians.

The bread and wine at the Last Supper.

The loaves and fishes by the Sea of Galilee.

Pelops, the son of Tantalus.

The blood Tartar warriors sucked from their horses’ necks on the open steppes.

The dried lizards Saint Pachomius dined on in the desert.

The Christian missionaries who sailed to the Malayo-Polynesian islands and wound up in cannibal cooking pots.

In spite of appearances, the bears killed by famished Ukrainians after the fall of the Soviet Union were full of grey energy: the beasts had been brought from Siberia and raised in captivity. Forty years ago, the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes ate the flesh of their dead companions. They consumed a high-grey-energy meal: the meat had been flown in to the site.

The nutrients of the lake and the forest enrich the blood of the fishermen of Baikal. The air, water and humus of Siberia pulse through their arteries. In light of these biological findings, the rights of the soil should be taken into consideration. Since blood draws upon the substance of the soil, your identity would take root in the geographic space that nourishes you. If you partake of imported jams, you are a citizen of the world.