by Yana Vagner
CONTENTS
1. Mum
2. Planning the Escape
3. First Blood
4. New Realities
5. Face to Face
6. The Journey Begins
7. Singing on a Dark Road
8. Encounters on the Road
9. A Stabbing and a Shooting
10. ‘Stuffed Duck’
11. Temporary Accommodation
12. Sickening
13. Enter Dog
14. Cleansed Villages
15. Hatches
16. In a Hole
17. City Girls
18. Pavel and Nikolai
19. The Doctor’s Story
20. Mob Rule
21. Breakdown
22. Unlevel Crossing
23. Medvezhiegorsk
24. Two Hundred Kilometres to Go
25. Caterpillar Tracks
26. Into the Woods
27. Ends and Beginnings
1
Mum
My mother died on Tuesday, 17 November. It was her neighbour who rang me. Ironically, she was the last neighbour Mum or I ever wanted contact with; she was a grumpy woman, always whingeing. She had an unfriendly face which looked like it was carved from stone, and during the fifteen years my mum and I lived on the same floor as her, there were several years when I didn’t say hello to her at all. I would deliberately press the button inside the lift before she made it there, breathing heavily and struggling to move her legs. The doors would close just as she reached them, and she had this funny expression on her face, a look of permanent umbrage. She had the same expression during that period (I was fourteen or fifteen) when she would ring our doorbell – Mum never invited her in – and convey her displeasure on various matters: water splashes from my boots in the corridor, a confused guest who had rung her doorbell instead of ours after ten at night. ‘What does she want again, Mum?’ I used to call loudly from inside the flat when my mum’s voice started sounding helpless. Mum never learned how to bite back, and even the slightest disagreement in a shop queue gave her a bad headache, especially when other shoppers, their eyes glinting, became animated at the sight of people arguing. It gave her palpitations and led to tears too. When I turned eighteen, our neighbour’s weekly attacks on our flat ended; perhaps she stopped her glowering assaults because she realised I was old enough to answer the door myself. After that I started saying hello to her again, every time feeling some kind of triumph inside, and then shortly afterwards I left home (if the feud between them rekindled after I was gone, Mum never mentioned it) and the image of a bitter, hostile woman – whose name, Liubov, incongruously meant Love – faded and turned into an insignificant childhood memory.
I probably hadn’t spoken to her in the last ten years, but I recognised her voice as soon as she said ‘Anya’. She said my name and fell silent, and I realised that my mum was dead. She kept panting into the phone, noisily and intermittently, waiting while I slid down the wall on to the floor, while I tried to catch my breath, sobbing. She didn’t say another word. I cried, pressing the receiver, with her heavy breathing in it, harder into my ear, and I wanted to carry on crying for ever, so that I wouldn’t hear another word. And the angry woman, Love, who had long ago become a blurry picture from my childhood – the lift doors closing, her perennial complaining – allowed me to cry for ten seconds or maybe even longer, and only then spoke again. While I sat on the floor, she said that Mum hadn’t been suffering at all: ‘We saw such terrible things on the TV but she didn’t have none of that, it wasn’t all that scary, she didn’t have convulsions or suffocate, we kept the doors open, Anya, just in case, you know – what if somebody’s worse and won’t have time to get to the door – I brought her some soup, poked my head round, and she was just lying there in bed and her face was peaceful, as if she’d just stopped breathing in her sleep.’
Mum hadn’t told me that she was ill, but I somehow knew that it would happen. It was unbearable to live here and know that she was only eighty kilometres away from our quiet, comfortable house, some forty minutes in the car, and I couldn’t go and bring her here.
I’d last visited her about six weeks ago. Mishka’s school had already been quarantined by then. Universities were closed too, and I think there was talk of closing the circus and cinemas, but the situation still didn’t look like a disaster, merely like unplanned school holidays: there weren’t many people around wearing masks, and those who did felt awkward because everyone stared at them. Sergey was still going to the office, and they hadn’t cordoned off the city yet – there weren’t even any rumours. It hadn’t occurred to anyone at that point that a huge megalopolis, a gigantic warren of a thousand square kilometres, could be sealed off, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the outside world; that airports and railway stations could stop functioning in one day and that passengers would be ordered off commuter trains to stand on the platform in cold, startled crowds, gazing after empty trains leaving for the city, with conflicting feelings of alarm and relief, like schoolchildren whose lessons had suddenly been cancelled. But none of this had happened yet.
I had stopped by for a minute to pick up Mishka, who’d had tea with her, and my mum said: ‘Anya, please have some soup, it’s still hot,’ but I wanted to get home before Sergey, and I seem to remember I only had a quick cup of coffee and started getting ready without even talking to her, hurriedly pecking her on the cheek as I reached the front door, saying, ‘Mishka, hurry up, the rush-hour traffic will start soon.’
I didn’t even hug her.
Mum, Mummy, darling….
It had happened quickly. There were rumours on the internet, which I was reading out of boredom and then telling Sergey every time I read something new. But he’d only laughed, saying: ‘Anya, how do you think it’s possible to close down an entire city – thirteen million people, government, all that stuff, and also millions of commuters who work there? Don’t overreact. They’re trying to scare you to death if you have the sniffles, so that you’ll become paranoid and buy the whole stock of their medicines, and then everything will calm down again.’
They closed the city without warning, at night. Sergey never woke me up early, but I knew that he liked it when I got up with him, made coffee for him, followed him around the house barefoot, sat next to him, sleepy, while he was ironing his shirt, walked him to the front door and walked back to the bedroom to hide under the duvet and get some more sleep.
That morning he woke me with a phone call: ‘Check online, baby, there’s a horrendous traffic jam into the city. I haven’t budged for half an hour, it’s impossible to move an inch.’ He had the irritated tone of somebody who doesn’t like being late, but he didn’t sound alarmed. I remember well that he didn’t sound alarmed then. I sat up and put one leg out of bed and sat still for some time, trying to wake up. Then I shuffled to the study, turned on my laptop – I think I passed by the kitchen on the way and poured myself a cup of coffee. While I sipped my drink I waited for Yandex to load on the computer in order to check the traffic, and above the search line, among other news (‘No bodies found after plane crash in Malaysia’) there was this sentence: ‘Entrance into Moscow is temporarily prohibited’. This phrase wasn’t at all frightening; it was ordinary, even boring. ‘Temporarily’ sounded routine and safe. I read the whole text to the end – four lines – and while I was dialling Sergey’s number, the headlines started popping up with incredible speed, one after the other, replacing the first, boring one. I’d just read MOSCOW IS QUARANTINED when Sergey phoned me and said, ‘I know, they just said it on the radio but didn’t give much detail. I’ll call the office and then ring you back. Keep reading, OK? It’s bullshit,’ and rang off.
I didn’t read any more. I called my mum; nobody picked up. I hu
ng up and rang her mobile. When she finally picked up the phone she sounded out of breath:
‘Anya? What happened, what’s wrong with your voice?’
‘Where are you, Mum?’
‘I went to the shops to buy some bread. What’s wrong, Anya? Why are you panicking? I always go out at this time.’
‘You’ve been shut down, Mum, the city’s been shut down. I don’t know anything yet, I heard it on the news. Did you listen to the news this morning?’
She fell silent for a moment and then said, ‘I’m so glad you’re not in Moscow. Is Sergey at home?’
Sergey called several times on his way home. I read the news off the internet to him. All the messages were short, details coming through in snippets, many lines starting with ‘according to unconfirmed data’ or ‘a source in the city administration told us’. Then it said that the chief health official would give an update on the midday news. I kept reloading the page until my eyes became blurry reading the headlines and updates, my coffee went cold. More than anything else, I wanted Sergey to come home. After my third phone call he said that drivers had shut off their engines and been wandering up and down the road, poking their heads into other people’s cars, listening to the news on their radios, but now the traffic had finally started moving. ‘Baby, it’s insane, the news is only once every half hour, they play music and adverts all the time, damn it.’ After they had all returned to their cars, the long stream of vehicles started creeping towards the city; about forty minutes later, it turned out that they had to turn around at the next slip road and drive away from the city. Sergey called again and said:
‘It seems they’re not lying; the city’s closed.’ As if there was still doubt, as if, while crawling those last five kilometres, he’d been counting on all this being a prank, a bad joke.
Mishka woke up, came downstairs, and I heard the fridge door shut; I came out of the study and said:
‘The city’s closed.’
‘Meaning?’ He turned around and for some reason his sleepy eyes, ruffled hair and mark on his cheek from the pillow made me feel calm again.
‘Moscow is quarantined. Sergey’s coming back home. I rang Grandma, she’s fine. We won’t be able to get into the city for some time.’
‘Cool,’ said my skinny carefree boy, whose worst problem ever had been a broken games console. He wasn’t thrown in the slightest by this news – maybe he thought that the school holidays would carry on longer, or maybe he thought nothing at all. He smiled at me sleepily and, picking up a carton of orange juice and a biscuit, shuffled back to his bedroom.
All this was not so scary. It was impossible to imagine that the quarantine period would not end within a few weeks. They were saying things on TV like ‘it’s a temporary measure’, ‘the situation is under control’, ‘the city has enough medicine, and food arrangements are in place’. The news wasn’t coming as an endless stream with running text at the bottom of the screen, with live reports from strangely empty streets, with the few remaining pedestrians in masks. Instead, the channels still had all the usual entertainment programmes and adverts, and nobody was actually afraid yet – neither those in the city nor those outside it. My morning started with the news, and calls to Mum and my friends. Sergey was working from home, which was nice, a break in our usual routine. Our connection with the city wasn’t broken yet, it was just restricted. It didn’t seem urgent to find a way to get into the city and bring my mum here. When we first talked about it, we weren’t serious. It was at dinner, I think, during the first day of quarantine, and in those early days Sergey (as well as some of our neighbours, it turned out) drove out several times during the day. Rumour had it that only the main roads were closed and lots of minor ones were still open, but he didn’t manage to get into the city on any of those attempts and came back feeling defeated every time.
We got properly scared when they announced that the underground was closed. Then everything happened at once, as if a curtain had been raised, and information poured over us like churning waters. We were horrified at how complacent we had been: four hundred thousand people were infected. Mum called and said there were empty shelves in the shops (‘But don’t worry, I managed to stock up on things,’ she told me. ‘I don’t need much, and Liubov says that the city authorities are going to issue food stamps and will be distributing groceries any time now.’ And she added: ‘You know, darling, I’m starting to feel a bit uneasy now everyone’s wearing a mask outside.’) Then Sergey couldn’t get in contact with work because the network was as busy as New Year’s Eve, and towards the end of the day the headlines came in a torrent – curfew restrictions, a ban on moving through the city, patrols, medicine and food stamps, closure of all offices, emergency medical care stations at schools and nurseries. My friend Lena got through to us at night and cried into the phone: ‘Anya, they’re talking about medical care, but where is it? These places are like infirmaries, mattresses on the floor with sick people on them, like it’s a war.’
From then on Sergey and I spent our evenings planning how we could breach the quarantine, break through the cordons guarded by glum-looking armed men in masks. At first the roadblocks were made up of red and white plastic cubes, the sort you find at any police checkpoint and easy to scatter if you drive at full speed. The concrete beams with metal trimmings which rusted in the wet November weather appeared later. I argued with Sergey about our plans: ‘Look, they’re not going to shoot at us. We have a big heavy car – we could go through the fields. Let’s bribe them,’ and, ‘We must collect Mum and Lena, we must at least try!’
During one of those evenings, after the argument reached its peak, I forced us out of the house. Sergey stuffed his pockets with money, silently laced up his boots without looking at me, went outside, then came back to pick up the car keys. I was so worried he’d change his mind that I grabbed the first coat from the hook and shouted to Mishka, ‘We’re going to collect Grandma. Don’t open the door to anyone, OK?’ and without waiting for his answer ran out after Sergey.
On the way to the cordons we were silent. The road was empty and dark, and we had to drive for another twenty or so kilometres before reaching the streetlit stretch of the road. We saw a few cars going the opposite way. As we approached a bend we saw a cloud of white light which then flashed at us and turned into a pale yellow low beam, and these flashes, like a greeting, made me feel less worried. I looked at Sergey; his lips were tightly closed, and I didn’t dare reach over and touch his hand in case I destroyed that impulse which after a few days of arguments, tears and doubts had made him listen to me. I was looking at him and thinking, I’ll never ask you for anything else, just help me bring my mum here, please help me.
We drove past the idyllic luxury villages, with their windows peacefully glimmering in the dark, and came out on to the lit-up part of the road. I looked out at the street lights, which bent their yellow heads over both sides of the wide motorway like trees, at the huge shopping centres on both sides, which were dark at night, at the empty parking lots, lowered barriers and the billboards advertising expensive villas and plots for sale. When we saw the cordon, blocking the entrance into the city, I didn’t even grasp what it was at first. There were two patrol cars parked askew, one of which had its headlights on; a small green lorry at the side of the road; and a pile of several long concrete beams, which looked like marshmallow sticks from a distance, or a man’s lonely dark silhouette. All this looked so basic, like children’s toys arranged on the floor, that I started thinking that we’d be OK to get into the city. While Sergey was slowing down I dialled Mum’s number, and when she answered, I said: ‘Don’t say anything, we’re coming to pick you up,’ and rang off.
Before getting out of the car Sergey opened and closed the glove box but didn’t take anything out of it; he left the engine running and for a few seconds I watched him walk towards the cordon. He was moving slowly, as if trying to plan what he was going to say. I watched his back and then jumped out of the car; I heard that the door h
adn’t shut properly behind me but decided to leave it and instead ran after him. When I caught up with him he was facing a big, bearlike man dressed in camouflage; it was cold and the man had a mask under his chin, which he started hurriedly pulling over his face as soon as he saw us coming over. He struggled for some time, trying to grab its edge with his thick black glove. He had a half-smoked cigarette in his other hand. I could see a few silhouettes in one of the patrol cars, and a lit-up screen. These people are watching TV, they’re ordinary people just like us, we’ll manage to make a deal, I thought.
Sergey stopped about five steps away, and I told myself that this was a clever thing to do: the man’s rush to pull on his mask meant only one thing, that they didn’t want us to come close. I stopped too, and Sergey said in an exaggeratedly cheerful voice, the one we use to talk to traffic police, ‘Hey mate, how do we get into the city?’ And I could sense by his tone and by the tightness of his mouth how difficult it was for him to act in this carefree manner, how uncomfortable this artificial friendliness was, so unlike him, how unsure he was that it would work. The man adjusted his mask and rested his hand on the machine gun on his shoulder. It wasn’t a threat, it just looked natural, as if he had no other place to rest his arm. He was silent and Sergey carried on, in the same artificially easy-going voice: ‘I really need to get there, mate, how many of you, five? Can we make a deal?’ And he put his hand in his pocket. We saw the door of the patrol car open slightly, and then the man, who still had his hand resting on the machine gun, said in what sounded like a teenage voice that hadn’t broken yet, ‘Not allowed. Special orders. You’ll have to go back,’ and waved the hand holding the glowing cigarette towards the central reservation. We both automatically looked in that direction: there was now a gap cut into the metallic barrier, and we could see tyre tracks in the snow both sides of it.
‘Hang on, mate,’ Sergey protested, but I sensed there and then by looking into the machine-gunner’s eyes that there was no point in calling him ‘mate’ or offering him money, that he would call for help now and we would have to get back into our car, turn around and follow the same tracks as the others who had tried to sneak into the sealed city and rescue their loved ones. I gently pushed Sergey aside, walked four steps towards the man with the machine gun and stood right in front of him, and then finally saw how young he was, probably no older than twenty. He turned his face away from me and I spoke, trying to catch his attention. ‘Listen,’ I began, even though I would never normally address anyone like that. It’s always been important to me to be polite and keep my distance, but here I was, an educated, successful grown woman, standing in front of this boy whose acne scars were visible round the sides of his mask, and I knew this was the way I needed to talk right now. ‘Listen. My mum’s there, you see, I have my mum there, she’s completely alone, she’s healthy. Do you have a mum? Do you love her? Please let us in, nobody’ll notice. Do you want me to go on my own? He can wait here, I have a child at home, I’ll be back I promise, I’ll be back in an hour, please let me in.’
