A Drop

A story about fishing on the taiga river Oparikha, a tributary of the Yenisei. The story “Kaplya” (“A Drop”) is from the book “The Tsar-Fish.”

By my own choice and by my own desire, I rarely have to go back home. More often, they call me there for funerals and memorials—there’s plenty of relatives, plenty of friends and acquaintances. That’s good: you get and give a lot of love over the course of your life—good, as long as it’s not time for the people dear to you to fall, the way the overaged pines in an old forest fall, with a heavy crack and a long exhale…

However, I’ve also been on the Yenisei without being called by those short telegrams of grief—listening not only to laments. There were happy hours and nights by the campfire on the riverbank, where the river trembles with the lights of buoys, down to the bottom, pierced by golden drops of stars. Not only to listen to the splash of the waves, the roar of the wind, the hum of the taiga—but also to hear the unhurried stories of people around the fire in nature—people opened up in a special way. Confessions, recollections until dark dawn, and sometimes until morning, when a calm, bright light begins to rise beyond distant passes. Until, out of nothing, sticky fogs creep in—until words turn thick and heavy, until the tongue becomes clumsy, and the little flame sinks down, and everything in nature finds that long-awaited peacefulness, when you can hear only an infant-clean soul.

In such moments you almost find yourself alone with nature, and with a slightly fearful joy you feel: you can and should finally trust everything that surrounds you. And you grow soft without noticing—like a leaf or a blade of grass under the dew. You fall asleep easily and deeply, and, as you’re falling asleep, you smile at a long-forgotten feeling—how free you were, before you had loaded your memory with any recollections, and you could barely remember yourself, only feeling with your skin the world around you, getting your eyes accustomed to it, attaching yourself to the tree of life with that short stalk of the same leaf by which you felt yourself right now—at this rare moment of inner peace…