“My friends who saw you put me on the train asked afterwards, ‘Who was that, then? Is he a friend? Your boyfriend? A relative? Your guru? What’s the relationship?’” she said, inserting the key in the lock. It rasped. “I told them, ‘He’s all those things.’” As she pulled the door open, she turned round, looked me straight in the eye and said, at that moment just for me (and never had anything to say to me again), “After all, that’s how it is.” Her eyes finished the phrase. “Isn’t it.”
Yes, it is, as we both know. And since that is how it is, since that is how it is for both of us, why can we not just be friends? Why is there no understanding between us and why do we behave as if there is something we don’t want to share, something we are afraid of losing? No, neither of us has anything. Grand is footloose and fancy-free, and if he did suddenly put down roots I would be the first to disown him.
Sasha Sorokin had come to the rescue, materialising on Grand’s mobile as unexpectedly as people do when hitchhiking. We went immediately to collect him. They went, but I rushed full tilt and fell on his neck, rubbing my face against his hedgehoggy ginger cheeks. “Hey, Titch! Steady on. You’ll knock me over.”
He was swaying under the weight of his rucksack. Unslept, dust-laden, he smelled of Yakimanka and the road, or rather, of beer and fags which of course is the same thing.
Grand and Nastya joined us rather primly. Sasha, always sensitive to other people’s moods, became formal too and shook hands with them. We returned unhurriedly to the apartment, but I was capering around him like a little dog, babbling away, “At last, at last you’ve arrived. I’ve missed you so much, and all the stuff that is going on here, but you’ll see that for yourself, you’ll understand.”
Unshaven, intoxicated by food after famine, Sasha had sat round-shouldered in the kitchen, talking excitedly about the trials of his journey. Even the old woman’s auricles were silent: Sasha rattled on so loudly and enthusiastically she could hear him clearly even from her room.
A month later, when we were lost and a search party was sent out for us, the old woman told the cops we quite certainly belonged to a sect and the unshaven one with the ginger stubble must have been our leader, because we had been waiting for him for several days and been silent the whole time.
“Grand, tell me where we are going?” “I told you already, Titch. We are going to where there is power.”
If only they would talk to each other, but they say nothing. More precisely, they talk endlessly but it’s all just nonsense. They have said nothing of any substance which might, for example, clarify the mystery of why Sasha and I are separating them. I sleep in Grand’s tent and Sasha sleeps in Nastya’s.
They look as if the person they knew before was someone else, as if they had been waiting for that someone else but a different person has been substituted for each of them. They look as if they don’t know what has happened. It would seem that only Sasha and I know that, but because they are silent we are silent.
What they were like before, Nastya and him, what they meant to each other I can only surmise, try to read in their eyes, in their moods and silences. I think sometimes I might be able to do something if I knew the situation for sure, but I don’t, so all Sasha and I can do for now is be, and hike on to our Enchanted Lake. It is a role we perform faultlessly.
I never had any idea before what getting lost in the forest must feel like. I still can’t really see how it came about that we got so lost. We were following tracks the whole time. So what if sometimes the track disappeared and Sasha and Grand started arguing about whether anybody had ever gone along it or whether it was only an animal track. So what if we hadn’t met a single other person in all that time. Nothing too terrible was happening to us, and if anything distinguished our progress from an ordinary hike in the forest it was only a disagreeable, oppressive feeling that we were lost and didn’t know where we were going.
That was enough to make the forest seem more grim, claustrophobic, and indifferent towards our fate. It was all around us, growing in on all sides, and seemed to be deliberately opening up before us in order to lure us on, further and further, and when you turned to look back you could see no sign of your own steps. The trail behind had already been overgrown by the forest.
We started seeing things. I could have sworn I saw an old man with a beard. It showed in the rocky profile of the mountains, in a bend in the river, in the patterning of tree bark, in mud which had dried fantastically on our trail. His hat was trimmed with fur, his big lips had sunk into his moustache, his brows overarched his eyes, and he had a fleshy nose and large birchbark earrings.
I first saw him when, deep in thought, I was gazing at the intertwining of the veins in a rock, a large, white, patterned stone which had remained cool and slightly damp in the heat of the sun. His face appeared and became clearer. Even after looking away, I immediately found him again, so naturally did the lines come together to form his image. Now I see him anywhere I look.
We were sitting silently round the campfire, drying our things over it, while above us every now and then it started to rain. For us, though, even marginally warm clothes were welcome. The glaciers exhaled their cold breath but were still far away. As, indeed, was the Lake. Grand had seemed particularly alert today as we trekked on, often looking around, staring at something. I knew he was looking for signs as to why we couldn’t find the right path, what was hindering us.
“These mountains are full of spirits,” he said suddenly, looking into the fire. “Good or evil?” Nastya asked. “Spirits aren’t good or evil,” he replied. “This land is theirs and we are their guests. We need to remember that and behave accordingly.” “I know,” Sasha interjected. “There are wood sprites here. They point the berries and mushrooms out to me.” “Do you treat them with respect?” Grand asked. “Yes, I always thank them.” This was perfectly true. I’d seen Sasha myself, bowing in acknowledgement of every mushroom. “Good,” Grand said nodding and fell silent. We were all conscious that he had brought us here, and only he could lead us out again.
That night I dreamed. A tree was stooping over the tent, muttering. It was a huge, spreading spruce. In its outline I begin to recognise the familiar features, the old man, his head in a hat, his hairy face, his earlobes distended by the oversized earrings.
I heard a voice: “The mountains are misleading you, misleading you. The branches are poorly linked, they fall apart. You have no single goal or vision. You have nothing to give but you want to get. The mountains are misleading you.”
“The mountains are misleading you … They are misleading you …” I mumbled as I woke up because Grand was shaking me by the shoulder and shining a torch in my face. I was still uncoordinated, unable to think clearly, and he was shaking me. “Tell me who you are?” “Whaddya mean? It’s me!” I parried. “Who were you? Who were you talking to?” “I was dreaming, it was a dream!”
His face was hard, almost brutal, as if he had just let someone slip whom he had been pursuing for a long time. I felt distraught. I told him the dream, what there was of it. “Yes, I see.” He was pensive. “Yes, yes, I see.” He looked upwards and said to someone not in the tent, “Thank you.” He turned off the torch and snuggled back down in his sleeping bag.
We are standing beneath a huge larch tree. It is growing on the edge of a cliff, alone. There is a clearing beneath its branches, the perfect site for a couple of tents. We light a fire before it starts raining. We haven’t heard the sound of the river for some days now, the one which was leading us to the Enchanted Lake.