Letters to Another Room. Ravil Bukhraev

so carefully ministers today to the regular visitors and chance passers-by to this ancient English wood, who, sadly however, have no idea that in the world there exist entirely different kinds of wood …

      …where also in the beginning there was silence, undisturbed by a single memorable sound, and only later did the sun pierce the deep blue and gold gaps in the clouds to break the chill – drip-drop, splash, little by little – and suddenly a stiff breeze stirs the uncaring leaves, and sunlight flushes glittering gold from birch and aspen in clearings still spread with white, and sparkles the pearly frosted webs that in autumn glimmer through the tall grass – in autumn, filled with taiga briar, gangly pink honeysuckle, dizzy elder, as well as copper-rusty angelica, yellow-eyed tansy and marvellous magenta fireweed …

      …in autumn, when helpful fatigue forces you to find moments of midday repose – the blissfully stretched out body with no sense of its final shape, lying supine on the grass and merging into one with the season happening around, and just barely, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse moments of your life flowing by – a gun and backpack; fresh animal trail winding through birch glade and past pine windbreak; flash of sunlight on dragonfly wings; sun-baked mushroom umbrella – but even those visit only vaguely before again comes, drip-drop, honest, sensitive, wonderful silence, and you soon can’t tell what was, what is and what will be, and events swap over and over in the undelineated reality of memory, happening before and after, after and before, flowing in and out, joining, transposing, stretching and shrinking …

      …just as this onflowing sentence which, like a dream, can only be broken by waking …

      …and will slip again, slithering through brown shadows under pines over the mesh of crimson cranberry and emerald taiga mosses to the capercaillie lek, where amid hog-hued shadows, a trio of capercaillie cocks flurry from boughs to view the brace of hens that squat on silvery needles strewn on the close-compacted sandy forest floor – and the old grey cock perches on palings, sprinkled beak to tail with beads of icy, autumn dew.

      It’s so good to doze in the last heat of the autumn, so good to feel the whole day open before you, open to impressions, amongst which will be the forest river Ilet, with its confined channel, sandbanks and deep pools, running smoothly past trees that plunge in their roots and trunks, and bifurcating into three limpid streams that quietly murmur in sympathy with the whispering wind and the soft rustle of glowing-in-the-sun leaves.

      If you gaze from the bank or, mayhap, the knotty bole of a pine where it drops to rapids: shoals of dark-backed, double-edged ide, riding the current on scarlet fins, head upriver: the flicker and glitter of silvery roach; a deep hole where the novice might be seduced into angling for red-scaled perch, unaware that the first catch will scare off the rest, leaving you to fish in vain all day. Taiga rivers demand movement, not just when hunting with a gun, but even fishing will knock your legs out, walking from catch to catch up the stream in search of the perfect bowl of ukha.¹⁶

      Will you come back to this extraordinary, fleeting experience at least once again? Or of all that truly was, will the lasting memory be waking in the dusk – awakening from sleep before night falls, before the coming of mortal loneliness, with the sudden, distressing realization that reality endures more memorably than any dream.

      These twilight moments are so familiar – these moments when all around becomes imperceptibly more vague and melancholy; when each joyful tree, its boisterous rustling briefly stilled and suspended from the innocent festival of life, and the purling river, too, slipping into quiet abstraction, accentuate the coming silence with their remoteness. These moments of detachment when barely lingering day yields to the clarity of night, and you seem to sense directly each tree and flower and bird – birds especially seem to sense this time of withdrawal, becoming quieter.