If only this guy lived in Velikaya Guba, which is, after all, the last administrative center on the north coast of Europe’s second biggest lake. No, the oddball has settled down on the farthest outskirts of town, at the end of a maze of little woodland roads. The people on the bus had tried to explain the road to us: “Go on foot until you come to a little wooden church dedicated to Saint Simon, the patron of vagabonds. Ask in town, everybody knows where it is. The Polish guy lives right near there, with his wife, Natasha. You can’t miss it!” But I haven’t got the least bit of confidence. If we got lost on the bus, we’ll surely get lost on foot.
It is at this point that out from the absolute silence of the forest, under a rainy sky, comes the car of Judge Maximov. Walking along with my gimpy gait, I’ve already been swearing for a mile and a half, and it seems too good to be true that this late-traveling automobile, the only car in circulation in the entire district of Onega, is passing right by us as we’re walking on the gravel, dragging our backpacks behind us. Oleg Maximov looks to be around forty, speaks decent English, and immediately bends over backward for us. He clears the backseat of piles of court documents and files and invites us to get in. He can’t believe that a foreigner of my respectable age is hitchhiking in Russia. He says it’s dangerous; there’s no telling what might happen. I reply that in Italy it’s worse. Nobody would ever have picked me up in the woods after dark in such a deserted place.
Oleg: “You’re a wise man. I could see that as soon as you came into view, from the way you were walking.” They say things like that in Russia. They put their heart in your hands right off the bat. One time in Italy, on a train, I met an elder caregiver from Smolensk who, after five minutes of conversation, asked me if I was happy. It wasn’t just formal curiosity; she really wanted to know. Obviously, it had been years since anyone in Italy had asked me a question like that.
Velikaya Guba is a forgotten piece of old Russia on the shore of Lake Onega. Having grown up around the dock for the ferry to Petrozavodsk, today it is a small conglomeration of colored izbas, together with the remains of an old sovkhoz (expropriated Soviet farm), a country library with the samovar always on the stove, an alarming monument to the Soviet heroes from the secret services, and a small psychiatric hospital, which may have had some connection to the KGB.
Next to a small food store, the magistrate picks up a young boy who knows how to get to where we’re going and takes us on a dirt-road roller-coaster ride all the way to our destination, a solitary heath on the lake, surveilled by skeins of chaikas, the seagulls with a supernatural squeal, immortalized by Chekhov and unbeatable in vertical diving. Nothing at all to do with our marauding omnivorous seagulls. The chaika is a genteel beast that flies light, like the Holy Spirit, and certainly symbolizes it much better than the dove, unworthily promoted by theologians to the rank of God’s bird.
By now it’s eleven o’clock, and it’s frigid, but Mariusz and Natasha’s house, next to the chapel of Saint Simon, is burning in the evening sunlight. The Northern sky is like that: when it catches fire, it repays you for all the gray it has afflicted you with for days, weeks, or months. The chimney is smoking, so there must be somebody home. We bid farewell to the judge, but before he goes, Oleg makes us a present of a bottle of the elixir of Onega as a down payment on an invitation to his house for dinner in the next few days.
Now we’re on our own in the wind. The “burning” house creaks, wind gusts whistle through the cracks, and as it opens, the front door sounds a long lament like a boat in a raging sea. I make my way forward, tottering on the loose boards of the most dilapidated entryway I’ve ever seen, and knock on the door, to my left, of what I imagine is the kitchen. It feels like a ghost house, but no, the odd couple is there, just finishing their candlelight dinner. Blond Natasha Vladimirovna, sitting next to the pechka, the wood-fired stove with a crackling fire, invites us in with a big smile. To get to know a man of the North, you have to understand his house, but since the heart of the house is always the pechka, the fire is always where you start. Next to the fire is where you are born and where you die. Around the fire is where encounters are sealed.
Mariusz struggles to come out of his wolf-man silence, and then he loosens up and talks. The stove is big, six feet by nine, as tall as a man, and is always in the “women’s corner.” The pagan idol stood there, in the feminine heart of the house. That’s where offerings were made. But when Christianity arrived—a late discovery for the Russians—it became the “impure” corner and, in contraposition, the corner opposite the fire came to be known as the “holy” space. The religious icons were placed there. The izba is a concentrate of symbols.
The ceiling is a blend of soot and larch-wood resin where once the stars were painted, while the tree trunk at the apex of the roof is the Milky Way. The izba, therefore, is a representation of the cosmos in a world where until yesterday a shepherd was before all else a medium, someone able to interrogate the great silences of nature.
It’s midnight, and the horizontal sunlight, doubled by the reflection off the lake, fills the house, enters even into the mouth of the pechka, as though to light the fire. It’s something inconceivable in the Mediterranean world, a sacred mystery that Sergei Yesenin described better than anyone and that Mario Rigoni Stern, author of The Sergeant in the Snow, discovered to his amazement in 1943, on the front of the river Don. But it is only the beginning of the journey into a blazing constellation of symbols, which only now, after millennia, are losing their meaning and are calling for a poet to ensure they will be remembered. As Wilk tells it, “At the moment of birth, the door of the pechka was opened to propitiate the passage of the newborn baby, and if some burning coals fell out, they were gathered up to prepare an infusion for the mother.” When the baby was born, he or she was placed immediately on a mattress on the roof of the stove-mother, cozy nook and perfect reproduction of human warmth. It’s made of clay, the same biblical paste from which humankind was fashioned.
The idea that all of this is being lost deeply concerns Mariusz and Natasha, and they feel they have been called to a mission to save it. She has opened a school of weaving and traditional cooking in Velikaya Guba. He focuses on this age-old heritage in his writing to save it from oblivion. The Pole has now definitively come out of his diffidence and is talking in torrents. “By now almost no one lives here on a permanent basis. The lake has become a vacation spot, and the people have all bought Canadian woodstoves. The Russians are losing their memory of what it meant to spend a winter on a Russian stove. You know, when it’s forty below, you can sleep naked on top of the stove. Every now and again you go out, make a hole in the ice, pull out a bucket of water and take it home. That’s the extent of your relationship with the outside world. You’re hungry? Make a hole in the ice and fish. Have a fever? You treat it with a wet blanket and juniper branches covered with berries. There’s talk of a certain Ivan who never left his bed on the pechka all winter long, not even if he was summoned by the czar.”