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

Back in the cabin, I decide it’s time to set up my altar. With my handsaw I cut a board a foot long and four inches wide, which I nail up next to my work table and christen with three images of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, purchased in Irkutsk. Fifteen years alone in a forest in Western Russia taught Seraphim how to feed bears and speak the language of stags. Next to him I place three icons: Saint Nicholas, a black Virgin and Tsar Nicholas II, canonized by the Patriarch Alexis and portrayed in his imperial finery. I light a candle and a Partagás No. 4. Through the smoke from my Havana, I watch the candlelight gleam like honey on the picture frames. The cigar: profane incense.

I have finished the chores of settling into my cabin. I’ve stashed away everything from my last crate. I smoke lying on my back and musing on the fact that I forgot to bring just one thing: a handsome history of painting to help me contemplate, from time to time, a human face.

To remind me of which, I have only my mirror.

This morning, a clean-slate day. The lake – ‘the sacred sea’, as the Russians call it – is drowning in sky. The thermometer reads −8°F. I light the woodstove and open Casanova’s Story of My Life . Rome, Naples, Florence parade by, along with Tiretta in his alcove and Henriette in her attic. Then come mad dashes in mail coaches, escape from the ducal prisons of Venice, letters in ink blotched by tears, promises broken as soon as they’re made, eternal love sworn twice in the same evening to two different people, and grace, frivolity, style. I learn by heart the phrase in which Giacomo describes a sensual pleasure that ‘ceased only when it could not possibly increase’. I close the book, pull on my felt boots, and go out to draw two buckets of water from my hole in the ice while thinking about Bellino-Teresa of Rome and Leonilda of Salerno. [4] The eighteenth-century adventurer Casanova’s multi-volume Story of My Life beggars description. The four allusions on this page refer to these stories: Tiretta was Casanova’s ‘companion in vice’ and his guest, along with several women, at a gathering in a rented room overlooking the Place de la Grève in Paris to witness a man’s execution there on 28 March 1757. Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV, was hideously tortured for four hours before his limbs were hacked off and his reportedly still-living torso burned at the stake. Damiens screamed so piteously that Casanova had to look away at one point – and noticed Tiretta quietly enjoying ‘indecent pleasures’ from behind with one of the women guests, who never took her eyes off the entertainment in the square below. On the run, a typical scenario, Casanova went to Parma, where he met a Frenchwoman he called Henriette, with whom he had a three-month affair and of whom he wrote with singular respect and admiration, perhaps because she declined, in the end, to ‘unite her destiny’ with his. Many Casanova scholars consider Henriette to be his greatest love, the one who got away. A castrato was a boy castrated before puberty to preserve his high singing voice, and the Italian castrato Bellino greatly impressed Casanova, whose experienced eye perceived that this singer was actually a lovely woman en travesti . In his memoirs Casanova calls her Teresa Lanti, and, naturally, he had an affair with her. Bellino-Teresa subsequently had a son, Cesarino, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Casanova and whom she raised as her brother. The story of Leonilda begins with Donna Lucrezia, a married woman with whom Casanova began an affair during a carriage ride to Rome. Casanova claims to have made love to both Lucrezia and her daughter, the seventeen-year-old virgin Angelica, in the same bed at the same assignation and only weeks before the daughter’s wedding. Donna Lucrezia had a child by Casanova, Leonilda, who was raised as legitimate by her family – who were understandably aghast when Leonilda became engaged sixteen years later to… Casanova! The engagement was broken off, but Casanova claims to have repeated his mother-daughter coup by getting Donna Lucrezia and Leonilda into bed together, although he denied having sex with his daughter at that time. Years later, according to his memoirs, he encountered Leonilda again, now married to an impotent man, and this time he got her pregnant with his own grandson .

The books of a dandy and the life of a muzhik .

The day stretches out before me. In Paris I never dwelled much on my state of mind. Life wasn’t conducive to tracking the seismographic data of the soul. Here, in the whited-out silence, I have time to perceive the nuances of my own tectonics. The hermit faces this question: can one stand living with oneself?

The captivating spectacle of what’s happening outside the window. How can anyone still have a TV at home?

The tit is back. I look it up in my bird book. According to the Swedish ornithologist Lars Svensson, born in 1941, whose oeuvre includes many works like the famous guide to the passerines of Europe, the Willow Tit may be recognized by its cry of ‘zee-zee teh teh teh’. Mine’s not letting out a peep. One of its relatives, I read on the next page, goes by the name of the Sombre Tit.

The little creature’s visit enchants me. Lights up my afternoon. Within only a few days, I have managed to be content with such a spectacle. Amazing how quickly one can shuck off the Barnum & Bailey business of city life. When I think how I had to fling myself into action with meetings, must-reads and visits just to get through a Parisian day! And here I am silly-faced over a bird! Maybe life in a log cabin is a regression. But what if I’m making progress through this regression?

I set out at noon into the wind. I’m going to visit my neighbour Volodya, a gamekeeper stationed out on Cape Elohin, just over nine miles north of my cabin. He lives in an izba with his wife, Irina. Their domain marks the northern frontier of the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve. I met him five years ago while touring the icy landscapes of the lake on a Ural sidecar motorcycle. I’d loved that flat skull of his, bristling with hair. I’ll enjoy seeing him again. I remember his grip: the mitts of a metallurgist, two paddles that crush your hand.

Beyond the cape that protects my cabin, the blustering wind veers northward. The cedars thrash their treetops in the blast, signalling like castaways. Who comes to the rescue of trees?

I hadn’t anticipated that the wind would rise. I cut across the lake, towards Elohin, keeping between a half-mile and a mile from the shore. I’m muffled in my Canadian Goose parka (designed for −40°F), a Neoprene face mask, a mountaineering mask and mittens for an Arctic expedition. It took me twenty minutes to get suited up. It’s vital not to leave even the slightest bit of skin exposed.

Today Baikal has come down with sclerosis. The snow is peeling off, bitten away by the wind, leaving the obsidian ice spotted here and there with patches as white as the skin of an orca, while the lake blackens as it’s stripped bare.

My crampons dig into the lacquer. Without them, the gusts would blow me ‘out to sea’. Their powerful sweep courses down mountains, dusting off the taiga. Volodya will tell me later that they can reach seventy-five miles an hour. The wind forces me to walk hunched over. Sometimes a gust simply stops me dead.

I stare out at the section of ice framed in the opening of my hood ruff of coyote fur. Gossamer strands of snow meander across the mirror with the grace of gorgons. Along refrozen faults, the seams are turquoise, the colour of lagoons. Then the tropical interlude gives way to a long pool of smoked glass. The sun diffuses streaks of albumin through the fissures. Air bubbles are trapped in the stratum, and one hesitates to step on these pearly jellyfish. Aquatic visions ripple through my face mask, lingering on my retinas when I close my eyes.