Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude and send greetings to the people who helped me throughout my stay in the cabin at North Cedar Cape.

FEBRUARY

The Forest

The Heinz company sells around fifteen kinds of tomato sauce. The supermarket in Irkutsk stocks them all and I don’t know which to choose. I’ve already filled six carts with dried pasta and Tabasco. The blue truck is waiting for me; it’s −26º F outside and Misha, the driver, keeps the engine running. Tomorrow we leave Irkutsk and in three days will reach the cabin, on the western shore of the lake. I must finish my shopping today. I decide on Heinz Super Hot Tapas. I buy eighteen bottles: three per month.

Fifteen kinds of ketchup. That’s the sort of thing that made me want to withdraw from this world.

9 FEBRUARY

I’m stretched out on my bed in Nina’s house on Proletariat Street. I like Russian street names. In the villages you’ll find a Labour Street, an October Revolution Street, a Partisans Street, and sometimes an Enthusiasm Street, along which trudge grey-haired Slav grannies.

Nina is the best landlady in Irkutsk. A former pianist, she used to play in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. Now she runs a guest house. Yesterday she told me: ‘Who’d ever have thought I’d wind up cranking out pancakes?’ Nina’s cat is purring on my stomach. If I were a cat, I know whose tummy I’d snuggle on.

I’m poised on the threshold of a seven-year-old dream. In 2003 I stayed for the first time at Lake Baikal. Walking along the shore, I discovered cabins at regular intervals, inhabited by strangely happy recluses. The idea of going to ground alone in the forest, surrounded by silence, began to intrigue me. Seven years later, here I am.

I must find the strength to push the cat off. Getting up from a bed requires amazing energy. Especially when it’s to change a life. This longing to retreat just at the point of achieving your heart’s desire … Certain men do an about-face at the crucial moment. I’m afraid I might be one of them.

Misha’s truck is packed to the point of bursting. It’s a five-hour drive to the lake across frozen steppes, navigating over petrified wave crests and troughs. Villages smoke at the foot of hills, wreathed in mists trapped in the shallows. Faced with visions like these, the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich wrote: ‘Whoever has crossed Siberia can never again aspire to happiness.’ At the top of a ridge, there it is: the lake. We stop to have a drink. After four brimming glasses of vodka, we wonder: how in the world does the shoreline manage to follow the water so perfectly?

Let’s get the statistics out of the way. Baikal: 435 miles long, 50 miles wide, almost a mile deep. Twenty-five million years old. The winter ice is over three and a half feet thick. Beaming its love down upon the white surface, the sun doesn’t give a damn about such things. Filtered by clouds, patches of sunshine slide in a gleaming herd across the snow, brightening its cadaverous cheeks.

The truck ventures out onto the ice. Beneath the wheels, it’s two-thirds of a mile down. If the truck plunges through a fissure, it will topple into a black abyss. The bodies will sink in silence. Slow snowfall of the drowned. The lake is a godsend for anyone who dreads decay. James Dean wanted to die and leave ‘a beautiful corpse’. The tiny copepods called Epischura baikalensis¹ will clean the bodies within twenty-four hours, leaving only ivory bones on the lake bed.

10 FEBRUARY

We spent the night in the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island, pronounced ‘Olkrhone’, Nordic style, and we’re heading north. Misha isn’t a talker. I admire people who keep quiet; I imagine their thoughts.

I’m on my way to the place of my dreams. Outside, the atmosphere is bleak. The cold has let its hair down in the wind; wisps of snow skitter away from our wheels. The storm wedges itself into the cleft between sky and ice. I study the shore, trying not to think about living for six months in the requiem mass of those forests. All the ingredients of the imagery of Siberian deportation are there: the vastness, the livid cast of the light. The ice rather resembles a shroud. Innocent people were dumped for twenty-five years into this nightmare, whereas I will be living here by choice. Why should I complain?

Misha: ‘It’s dreary.’

And nothing more until the next day.

Constructed in the 1980s as a geologist’s hut, my cabin is off in a clearing of the cedar forest in the northern sector of the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve. My new neighbourhood is named after these trees: North Cedar Cape. It sounds like an old people’s home. And after all, I am going on a retreat.

Driving on a lake is a transgression. Only gods and spiders walk on water. Three times in my life I’ve felt I was breaking a taboo. The first was when I contemplated the dry bed of the once mighty Aral Sea, emptied by man. The second was when I read a woman’s private diary. The third was driving over the waters of Baikal. Each time, the feeling of tearing aside a veil. The eye spying through the keyhole.

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.

11 FEBRUARY

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.

12 FEBRUARY

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.

REQUISITE SUPPLIES FOR SIX MONTHS IN THE BOREAL FOREST

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.

Given the violence of the storms, the cabin is a matchbox. A creature of the forest, destined to rot; the trunks of the clearing’s trees furnished the logs for its walls. The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.

13 FEBRUARY

Ten more hours spent ridding the clearing of rubbish, sprucing the place up to lure back the genius loci. Russians make a clean sweep of the past, but not of their refuse. Throw something away? I’d rather die, they say. Why toss out a tractor engine when the piston might make a good lamp base? The territory of the former Soviet Union is littered with the crud of Five-Year Plans: factories in ruins, machine tools, the carcasses of planes. Many Russians live in places that resemble building sites and car scrapyards. They do not see rubbish, ignoring the spectacle before them. When you live on a dump, you need to know how to edit things out.

14 FEBRUARY

The last crate contains books. If asked why I’ve come to shut myself up here, I’ll say I was behind in my reading. I nail a pine plank up over my bedstead to hold my books. I’ve got at least seventy. Back in Paris I took pains to put together an ideal list. When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner life, it’s important to bring along good books to fill that void in a pinch. The mistake would be to choose only difficult reading on the assumption that life in the woods would keep your spiritual temperature at fever pitch, but time drags when all you’ve got for snowy afternoons is Hegel.

Before I left, a friend advised me to take along the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, a classic of seventeenth-century French literature, and Paul Morand’s biography of Nicolas Fouquet, the ill-starred superintendent of finances under Louis XIV. I already knew that one must never travel with books related to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal, Byron.

I empty the crate. I have the novelists Michel Tournier for daydreaming, Michel Déon for melancholy, D. H. Lawrence for sensuality and Yukio Mishima for steely coldness. I have a small collection of books on life in the woods: Grey Owl for his radical stance, Daniel Defoe for myth, Aldo Leopold for ethics and Thoreau for philosophy, although I find his sermonizing a touch wearing. Whitman – he’s enchanting: his Leaves of Grass is a work of grace. Ernst Jünger invented the expression ‘recourse to the forest’; I have four or five of his books. A little poetry and some philosophers as well: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, the Stoics. Sade and Casanova to stir up my blood. Some crime fiction, because sometimes you need a breather. A few nature guides for birds, plants and insects published by Delachaux and Niestlé. When you invite yourself into the woods, the least you can do is know the names of your hosts; indifference would be an affront. If some people were to install themselves in my apartment by force, I should at least like them to call me by my first name. The section of my Pléiade volumes in their glossy covers gleams in the candlelight. My books are icons. For the first time in my life, I’m going to read a novel straight through.

LIST OF IDEAL READING MATERIAL CAREFULLY COMPOSED IN PARIS FOR A SIX-MONTH STAY IN THE SIBERIAN FOREST

Six days after I left Irkutsk, my friends vanish over the horizon in the blue truck. No sight is more poignant to a castaway than the disappearance of a ship’s sail. Volodya and Ludmila are off to Irkutsk and their new life. I wait for the moment when they’ll turn around for a last look at the cabin.

They don’t turn around.

The truck dwindles to a dot. I am alone. The mountains seem harsher now. Intense, the landscape reveals itself. The land is in my face. It’s incredible how much mankind hogs its own attention. The presence of others makes the world fade out. Solitude is this reconquest of the enjoyment of things.

It’s −27º F. The truck has dissolved into the fog. Silence falls from the sky in little white shavings. To be alone is to hear silence. A blast of wind; sleet muddles the view. I let out a scream. I open my arms, raise my face to the icy emptiness, and go back inside where it’s warm.

I’m poised on the gangway.

I will finally find out if I have an inner life.

15 FEBRUARY

My first evening on my own. In the beginning, I don’t dare move around much, anaesthetized by the perspective of the days ahead. At ten o’clock, explosions shatter the stillness. The air has warmed up to 10º F, and the sky looks like snow. The cabin couldn’t shake any harder if Russian artillery were pounding the lake. I step outside into the mild flakes to listen to the staggering blows. Currents are heaving at the lake ice.

Imprisoned, the water pleads for release. Setting a screen between life and the stars, the ice separates creatures from the sky: fish, seaweed, micro-organisms, marine mammals, arthropods.

The cabin measures ten feet by ten feet. Heat is supplied by a cast-iron stove, which will become my friend. I put up with the snoring of this particular companion. The stove is the axis of the world, around which everything is organized. It’s a little god with its own life, and when I offer it wood, I honour Homo erectus, who mastered fire. In his The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard imagines that the idea of rubbing two sticks to kindle a spark was inspired by the frictions of love. While fucking, man intuited the creation of fire. Nice to know. To dampen the libido, remember to stare at dying embers.

I have two windows. One looks southward, the other to the east. Through the latter I see, some sixty miles away, the snowy crests of Buryatia, an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation, while through the other window I can trace, behind the branches of a fallen pine, the line of the bay as it curves away to the south.

My table, set right up against the eastern window, occupies its entire width, in the Russian fashion. Slavs can sit for hours watching raindrops on window panes. Once in a while they get up, invade a country, have a revolution and then go back to dreaming at their windows in overheated rooms. In the winter they sip tea interminably, in no hurry to go outside.

16 FEBRUARY

At noon, outdoors.

The sky has powdered the taiga, shaking velvety down over the vert-de-bronze of the cedars. Winter forest: a silvery fur tossed onto the shoulders of the terrain. Waves of vegetation cover the slopes. This desire of the trees to invade everything. The forest, an ocean swell in slow motion. At every fold in the relief, black streaks darken the egg-white crowns of the trees.

How can people adore abstract fancies more than the beauty of snow crystals?

17 FEBRUARY

This morning the sun hoisted itself over the peaks of Buryatia at 8.17. A sunbeam came through the window, striking the logs of the cabin. I was in my sleeping bag. I thought the wood was bleeding.

The last flickers in the stove die at around four a.m. and by dawn, the room is freezing. I have to rise and light the fire: two actions that celebrate the passage from hominid to man. I begin my day by blowing on embers, after which I go back to bed until the cabin has reached the temperature of a new-laid egg.

This morning I grease the weapon Sergei left with me, a signal flare pistol like the one used by sailors in distress. The barrel launches a blinding charge of phosphorus to squelch the ardours of a bear or an intruder.

I have no gun and will not be hunting. To begin with, hunting is not allowed in the nature reserve. Secondly, I would consider it a dirty trick to shoot down the living creatures of these woods in which I am a guest. Do you like it when strangers attack you? It doesn’t bother me that creatures more noble, better made and far more muscular than I roam freely in the open forest.

This place isn’t the Forêt de Chantilly. When poachers run into the gamekeepers, guns are drawn. Sergei never patrols without his rifle. Along the shores of the lake lie tombs bearing the names of rangers: a simple cement stele decorated with plastic flowers and every so often, the guy’s photo engraved on a metal medallion. As for the poachers, they have no graves.

I think about what happens to minks. Being born in the forest, surviving the winters, falling into a trap – and winding up as coats for old hags who wouldn’t last three minutes out in the taiga. If at least they were as graceful as the mustelids that are skinned for them … Sergei told me a story. The governor of the Irkutsk region was hunting bears from his helicopter in the mountains overlooking Baikal. Destabilized by the wind, the Mi-8 crashed. Tableau de chasse: eight dead. Sergei: ‘The bears must have danced a polka around the bonfire.’

My other weapon is a dagger made in Chechnya, a handsome knife with a wooden handle, which never leaves my side all day. In the evening, I stick it into the beam over my bed. Deeply enough so that it doesn’t fall down while I’m dreaming and slice open my belly.

18 FEBRUARY

I wanted to settle an old score with time. I had discovered that walking provided a way to slow it down. The alchemy of travel thickens seconds: those spent on the road passed less quickly than the others. Frantic with restlessness, I required fresh horizons and conceived a passionate interest in airports, where everything is an invitation to departure. I dreamed of ending up in a terminal. My trips began as escapes and finished in track races against the hours.

Two years ago, I chanced to spend three days in a tiny izba, a traditional Russian log cabin. A ranger, Anton, had welcomed me into his home on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. Anton was so farsighted that, behind his glasses, his goggle-eyes gave him the look of a gleeful toad. At night we played chess, and during the day I helped him haul in the nets. We spoke hardly at all but we read a lot: for me, the ‘decadent’ nineteenth-century novelist Huysmans, and for him, Hemingway (which he pronounced ‘Rhaymingvayee’). He sloshed down gallons of tea; I went walking in the woods. Sunlight flooded the room. Geese were fleeing the autumn, and I thought about my dear ones. We listened to the radio. Whenever the female announcer reported the temperatures in Sochi, Anton would say: ‘It must be nice, down at the Black Sea.’ From time to time he’d toss a log into the stove, and at day’s end, he’d get out the chessboard. We’d sip at some Siberian vodka from Krasnoyarsk and push the pawns around: I was always white and often lost. The endless days passed quickly, and when I left my friend I thought, This is the life for me. All I had to do was ask of immobility what travel no longer brought me: peace.

That was when I promised myself I would live alone in a cabin for a few months. Cold, silence and solitude are conditions that tomorrow will become more valuable than gold. On an overpopulated, overheated and noisy planet, a forest cabin is an Eldorado. Over 900 miles to the south, China is humming with a billion and a half human beings running out of water, wood and space. Living in the forest next to the world’s largest reserve of fresh water is a luxury. One day, the Saudi oilmen, the Indian nouveaux riches and the Russian businessmen who drag their ennui around the marble halls of palaces will understand this. Then it will be time to go a step up in latitude to the tundra. Happiness will lie beyond the 60th parallel north.

Better to live joyfully in a wilderness clearing than languish in a city. In the sixth volume of The Earth and Its Inhabitants, the geographer Élisée Reclus – a master anarchist and antiquated stylist – proposes a superb idea. The future of humanity would lie in ‘the complete union of the civilized with the savage’. There would be no need to choose between our hunger for technological progress and our thirst for unspoilt places. Life in the forest offers an ideal terrain for this reconciliation between the archaic and the futuristic. An eternal existence unfolds beneath the treetops, literally at one with the Earth. There we can reconnect with the truth of moonlit nights, submitting to the doctrine of the forests without renouncing the benefits of modernity. My cabin shelters the happy union of progress and the past. Before I came here, I selected from the department store of civilization a few products indispensable to happiness: books, cigars, vodka, and I will enjoy them in the rugged surroundings of the woods. I followed the intuitions of Reclus so faithfully that I’ve equipped my home with solar panels, which run a small computer. The silicon of my integrated circuits feeds on photons. I listen to Schubert while watching the snow, I read Marcus Aurelius after my wood-chopping chores, I smoke a Havana to celebrate the evening’s fishing. Reclus would be pleased.

In What Am I Doing Here? Bruce Chatwin quotes Jünger quoting Stendhal: ‘The art of civilization consists in combining the most delicate pleasures with the constant presence of danger.’ An observation that echoes Élysée’s injunction. The essential thing is to live one’s life with a brave hand on the tiller, swinging boldly between contrasting worlds. Balancing between danger and pleasure, the frigid Russian winter and the warmth of a stove. Never settling, always oscillating from one to the other extremity on the spectrum of sensations.

Life in the woods allows us to pay our debts. We breathe, eat fruit, pick flowers, we bathe in a river’s waters and then one day, we die without paying the bill to the planet. Life is sneaking a meal in a restaurant. The ideal would be to go through life like the Scandinavian troll who roams the moorland without leaving any tracks in the heather. Robert Baden-Powell’s advice should be made a universal principle: ‘When through with a campsite, take care to leave two things behind. Firstly: nothing. Secondly: your thanks.’ What is essential? Not to weigh too heavily on the surface of the globe. Shut inside his cube of logs, the hermit does not soil the Earth. From the threshold of his izba, he watches the seasons perform the dance of the eternal return. Possessing no machines, he keeps his body fit. Cut off from all communication, he deciphers the language of the trees. Released from the grip of television, he discovers that a window is more transparent than a TV screen. His cabin provides comfort and brightens up the lakeshore. One day, we tire of talking about ‘de-growth’ and the love of nature: we want to get our actions in sync with our ideas. It’s time to leave the city and close the curtains of the forest over speechifying.

The cabin, realm of simplification. Beneath the pines, life is reduced to vital gestures, and time spared from daily chores is spent in rest, contemplation, small pleasures. The array of tasks to be done has shrunk. Reading, drawing water, cutting wood, writing, pouring tea: such things become liturgies. In the city, each action takes place to the detriment of a thousand others. The forest draws together what the city disperses.

19 FEBRUARY

It’s evening, it’s nine o’clock, I’m at the window. A timid moon is out looking for a kindred spirit but the sky is empty. I who used to pounce on every second to make it surrender and give up its all – I am learning the art of contemplation. The best way to observe a monastic calm is to find oneself obliged to do so. To sit at the window drinking tea, allowing the land to ripple through its nuances, letting oneself steep in the passing hours, no longer thinking of anything, but suddenly seizing a passing idea and jotting it down in a notebook. The use of a window: to invite beauty in and let inspiration out.

I spend two hours in the position of Dr Gachet as painted by Van Gogh: gazing into space, cradling his cheek in his hand.

A rumbling arises abruptly in the silence and searchlights punch holes in the night. Through my binoculars I can see a small pack of four-wheel-drive vehicles heading north on the ice – and they’re coming my way. Twenty minutes later, eight 4×4s with ad posters on their flanks are lined up on my beach. Some notables have arrived from Irkutsk, members of Putin’s party, Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia), who are spending a week touring the lake. They’ll pass the night here in a tent. A few months later I’ll learn that among them are an FSB² man, a few guys close to the governor, and the director of a nature reserve. Their tyres have broken up the snow embankment that led to the shore. The men don’t seem to have any respect for the powder snow. Walking on snow, that’s attacking the virginity of the world. You start with smashing in the white slopes and before you know it you’re disembowelling Poles.

The engines are running. The transistor radios blare out some Nadiya, a Lolita for pre-teen global villagers over whom the provincial nouveaux riches in Russia fawn like groupies. I’m devastated.

Shut tight inside my cabin, I try to soothe my nerves with half a pint of Kedrovaya vodka. I can hear those men whooping out on the ice, where they’ve cut a hole, set up a spotlight, and are taking turns plunging screaming into the frigid water. Which barely ranks as a first-class hazing in a barracks in Chechnya.

What I came here to escape has descended on my island: noise, ugliness, testosterone-fuelled herd behaviour. And I, poor fool, with my speeches about retrenchment and my copy of Rousseau’s Reveries on the table! I think about those Benedictine monks obliged to shepherd tourists around: religious recluses who thought to safeguard their faith in cloisters and who find themselves explaining the rules of their order to indifferent crowds.

In the fourth century, the Desert Fathers³ became crazed with solitude. Unable to bear even the slightest intrusion, they went deep into the sandy wastes, burying themselves in grottoes. The world they loved was cleansed of their fellow men. These days, sometimes a man just starts shooting at a bunch of kids hanging out in the estates. He gets a short paragraph in the newspapers and lands in a prison cell.

To cool my blood down, I go out on the lake while the Russians are skijoring, being pulled along on skis by their cars. I walk about a mile in the direction of Buryatia and stretch out on the ice. I’m lying on a liquid fossil 25 million years old. The stars overhead are a hundred times that. Me, I am thirty-seven and I’m calling it a day because it’s −30º F.

20 FEBRUARY

The men leave, the animals return.

What makes me happier this morning? The departure of that sad bunch of revellers at eight a.m. or the visit of a Siberian tit at my window a few minutes later?

I get out of bed so hung-over I’m almost upside-down. Yesterday I drank to forget. I feed the tit, light the stove. The cabin warms up quickly. I install the solar panels on the sawhorses I built yesterday. These panels will have it easy, lying there all day surrounded by beauty, gorging on photons.

Many reflections are born of the steam from my tea.

Sitting with my cup, I wonder about my little sister. Has she had her child yet? I can’t receive the slightest news: the computer imploded yesterday, done in by the extreme temperatures, and as for my satellite phone, it doesn’t pick up anything. Before I left Paris, I wasted precious hours gathering my technological equipment. I should have heeded the philosophy of Dersu Uzala, the Siberian hunter in Kurosawa’s eponymous film: the only things you can trust in the forest are an axe, a stove and a dagger. Without my computer, I have only thought. Well, memory is an electric impulse like any other.

21 FEBRUARY