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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t miss a thing from my former life. I’m struck by this certainty while spreading honey on some blini. Not one thing. Nothing, nobody. It’s a worrying thought. Can a man so easily shed the clothing fitted to his thirty-eight years of life? [11] While off in Irkutsk sorting out his visa problem, Tesson became thirty-eight on 26 April. When you organize your life around the idea of possessing nothing – then you have everything you need.

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

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

A day at North Cedar Cape.

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

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

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

Time time time time time time time time time.

Hmm?

It passed!

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

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

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

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