I sit looking at shadows, the shadows of clouds which succeed each other on the glassy surface of the Lake, rushing on their way and disappearing. Why should I bother to keep track of our friends when they’ve already forgotten all about us? Why should I care what’s happening to them and what will happen next? The shadows of the clouds cover the Lake again and the part of the shore I am sitting on, but then they scud off, following the river down into the valley.
I’m becoming part of this landscape. Incapacity has separated me from my companions, and now it seems to me that my inner speed, the speed at which feelings flow inside me, will soon be comparable with that of a cedar or the bush I am sitting under. Other people move immeasurably faster than I do. My friends were evidently frustrated and impatient and that made it impossible for them to stay here for more than three days. I didn’t notice them wearying of this place and now I have no choice but to be here and wait.
This break in my onward movement is teaching me to see the world differently. From up here, in a ravine in the mountains, with the frosty breath of the glaciers, looking out from the roots of cedar trees, I have a larger and broader view of the world than you get down there in the towns and the valley. There the view breaks down into a hustle and bustle which obscures it, while here it is limpid and clear, and fussing is seen for what it is, mere dust on the surface of eternal things. I see people, their cares, what prompts them to act and what blocks them on their path. I see the interweaving of roads I have yet to travel or which I am destined never to travel. I find it easy to track the movements of those who have left us and, by looking further, to see others below who have lost and are looking for us. I see my own road too, and believe I can see deep and wide with clarity, since the very source and on, and it is only fear and superstition which prevent me from looking far ahead, into dark mists, to the very end.
Here thinking about death comes easily and not at all like it does in the town, not about the death of a particular person or myself, and not even really about death at all. It is easy here to think about the grass which will some day grow on all our graves. It is not frightening, even though in the town we want what comes after to be different, yet as near as possible to how it was. Here, though, it is ineluctably clear that there is nothing different, only all the things which surround me now and what will come after them.
I will be no more, others will be no more, all cities and states will disappear, but the grass and the trees and mountains will remain and grow, and it won’t matter to them that we are no longer. They are life and they are eternal and I am not afraid of becoming them. Is it not through our awareness of the eternal life of everything, that we cross over, that we overcome the death that is in us?
At night it was colder than it had been the whole way here. We shivered and huddled in our sleeping bags, trying to keep warm, putting on all the clothes we had in our rucksacks, but that was at best a partial remedy.
Every night our tent was stormed by mice. They jumped on to it and slid down, then jumped again, and again slid down, so interminably that we fell asleep before they finished. They jumped so high it seemed someone was deliberately throwing them at the tent. That idea was enough to make things a bit scary.
“It’s her way of playing with us,” I joked. “That girl we’ve got standing out there. She is the ruler of the animals here, the Siberian Diana.” We lay there, peeping out of our sleeping bags, looking at the shadows on the tent walls and listening to the games the mice played. We barely moved, and spoke in whispers.
“Chachkan,” Grand said one time. “That what she’s called. Chachkan means mouse for the peoples who have lived since time immemorial in these mountains.”
“Ah, right. Mouse.”
Their path will lead them to a boggy meadow and they will lose their way again. Grass waist-high and water underfoot, trails fanning out in all directions but leading nowhere and disappearing. They will wander about before coming to a stream, and follow it in a straight line, sometimes walking in it, until they again come to a forest and a rapid descent with a well trodden path they will have to clamber down like steep steps. They will speed up and not even their wet feet will spoil their mood.
When there are no clouds here you can get a tan, but when it’s heavily overcast and windy you feel cold even if you pull on a sweater. As a result I am constantly shivery, but I’ve got used to it. I sit and watch the water lapping against the shore, steadily, at intervals, as if the Lake is breathing.
Grand gathers firewood, disappearing for a long time and bringing back whole armfuls of dead branches and thick logs. We already have enough for a campfire. If I ask him whether he’s planning to melt the glaciers he will half smile without replying. He likes this place. He’s always doing something, although he doesn’t say what. He’ll go off in one direction and come lumbering into the clearing from another, and his eyes are like those of a cat after a successful night’s hunting. I once asked him, “Grand, what are you up to?” “Tracking the power” was his answer.
Some time earlier, barely able to contain his laughter, he told me he was trying to catch spirits in the gorges, but every time he called them, Sasha would emerge from the bushes with some twig or other in his hands.
Grand didn’t need anyone to hunt with him, so he didn’t find our stay here at all tedious. Sasha had also been busy studying the local flora, and said that almost every plant we encountered on the way was also to be found here. Only Nastya was grim-faced and made it plain she was bored by the lack of anything to do. She tried to avoid me, wandered around aimlessly between the tents or on a fifty-metre stretch of the shore. I looked at her and wondered whether the road had given us this break precisely so that she and I should get to know and understand each other, but we exchanged barely a word in the course of the days they were here.
I didn’t see it happening, but suddenly they were close. Sasha is like a piece of soft clay: he readily assumes any shape and doesn’t stick to your hands. For the whole of his life he has played just one role, smoothing the sharp corners in any group of people he finds himself with. So now, encountering Nastya, he instinctively set about plastering over the cracks between her and us.
They talked in the evenings by the fire. Sasha would return from his daily quest before Grand, light a fire, and busy himself making herbal tea and vitamin-rich soup. Nastya had little alternative but to come and warm herself there. Dusk fell rapidly. No sooner did the sun disappear behind the mountain on the opposite shore than the air thickened, turned greyish, and everything became more contrasted: light objects became bright and prominent, while anything dark became part of the background. Such sounds as there were became muffled except for the shrill cry of an evening bird which punctured the stillness as it flew over the lake. I carried on sitting by the water, and from the direction of the fire came the sound of Sasha making quiet, calm, sensible conversation.
As he had to me in times gone by on Yakimanka, he was talking about his life and his friends, all of whom to the last man and woman were singers and poets; and as I had been on Yakimanka, Nastya was bewitched by his manner of narrating, his voice and the interminableness of all his stories which flowed smoothly on one from another. Turning, I could see Sasha’s back and Nastya’s profile. She was bent over, hugging her knees, in the red light of the fire and at that moment I couldn’t say what her face was expressing, but possibly it wasn’t expressing anything and that was what made it beautiful. Looking further round I could see the stone girl shaman standing on her mound beyond the tent intently watching our clearing. She seemed like a reflection of me, two silent observers, me and Chachkan.