“…a clearing on a road leads into a forest. The road had once been well traveled, but now the weeds, grass and flowers grow in the center of the road. It looks as if it is late summer. To the left is a tall, spindly pine tree. I don’t know where the road leads except into the forest. I yearn to go there. I feel the longing to leave the sun-filled clearing to walk on the road into the dark, Russian, sun-spattered forest…”

…and now in Listvyanka, I would be drawn into the Siberian forest as I had been drawn into the picture. As a child, I was a creature of the sun… brown as a berry in summer… my hair wild… my feet dirty from running barefoot… my knees always skinned from climbing here and there in places I never told my mother about… endless winter play in the snow that never heeded the advice to come indoors.  My walk that morning had a deep sense of the familiar… the forays of my childhood… the bright sun on my face, a blue sky, frozen, dazzling whiteness, dizzyingly clean air, the changing lake in the distance. I took the winding road shaded by the trees, then sun… a stand of bare Aspen dappled in sunlight… a shaman tree bright with ribbons… I listened for the spirits… but heard only the child in me… as if the child I had been was singing a song. I had yearned for this walk in the forest alone. Now, I was content with what I had found.

Later that night, I became a creature of the twilight… the moon, the stars, the planets. I left Galya’s house and walked to the lake. Each day the lake had changed… Baikal, a jewel in the treasure chest of the world. The lake was not frozen when I first arrived, but by this last night, there was ice almost as far as the eye could see. I stood in the penetrating cold, touched the icy skin of my forehead with the back of my hand… became alive with the Baikal night. My spirit hungered to fly into the forest, to live there commemorated by a bright ribbon on a pine tree…

 

 

I could only remember the first line of a poem by Lermontov instead:

Выхожу один я на дорогу.
I go out on the road alone.

….and all the while, the low booming of the colliding of cracking ice… its sound, the breath of the spirit that lives deep in the lake. I listened to the sigh of its memories. The moon and the stars listened with me.