by Yana Vagner
An hour later, we all decided to go to bed. Nobody was hungry, so with no cooking to do Marina and I felt rather useless. I tried to assert my authority by raising my voice to Mishka to send him to bed, and after a short protest he went gloomily upstairs. The others followed, still talking away. Lenny bent down to pick up the little girl from Marina’s lap, but she suddenly pulled the girl to her chest and said, surprisingly brusque:
‘Anya, can we stay here for the night? I don’t want to go back there.’
We all had the same thought at the same time and looked out of the window at the black sky, the snow glittering in the street lights, an empty road disappearing into the woods. I imagined the ransacked house opposite, the beautiful dead dog lying in the red snow – the bloodstains had probably turned black in the dark, and the dead dog’s white fur would now be covered with frost.
In the sudden silence Sergey said:
‘That’s a good idea, Marina. You should stay here. Dad will sleep in the lounge, and you can take the study. I also think that we should take turns and watch the road. If they dared come here during the day, it would be daft to assume they’ll spare us at night.’
Sergey volunteered to be the first to keep guard and went upstairs to collect his guns from the metal cabinet inside the dressing room. Boris started moving his sleeping bag from the study into the lounge and Marina went to bathe the little girl. I didn’t go with her, because they wouldn’t need me, but said, ‘You can find towels in the cabinet in the bathroom,’ and then stood in the middle of the lounge, watching them go. The child, like a pet monkey on a chain, was peeping out from behind her back, turning her head to me, blurry-eyed, a shapeless, plump cheek resting on Marina’s shoulder. I thought to myself again how strangely inactive this tiny, plain little girl was. If it had been Mishka when he was little, he would have explored the whole room and climbed onto everyone’s lap. As I was trying to remember if I had ever heard this little girl speak, Lenny, who stood behind me, said: ‘She doesn’t say a word, not even “Mummy”. We’ve seen many doctors and they all tell us we need to wait, so we’re waiting. But she doesn’t say a word, just looks, little dumbo.’
I turned to him. He was standing near the window and peering to one side as if trying to see his own house in the dark, even though it wasn’t visible from our lounge window. Then he turned to me and said: ‘I’d go and bury the dog, but Marina would panic. Anya, please find us some bedding.’ And he set off towards the study, and I followed him, almost glad that at last somebody needed my help.
5
Face to Face
I woke in the middle of the night. It was dark, and a dog was barking somewhere far away. It was a comforting noise, the noise of a peaceful life. Somehow I knew there was nobody in bed with me – I didn’t even need to turn over to check – however, I turned and even stretched my arm over to the other side. The pillow was untouched, and it was clear Sergey hadn’t been to bed. I didn’t feel sleepy at all; I lay on my back in the quiet, dark bedroom and felt angry, cold tears streaming down my cheeks, trickling into my ears. I was fed up with waking up in an empty bed, not knowing anything, having to wait until things were decided for me, feeling inert and useless.
At this, I jumped to my feet, wiped my eyes and came downstairs. I’ll send Sergey to bed to get some sleep, I thought. I’ll take the gun and keep watch, I’m a good shot, Sergey always praises me for my accuracy, I know how to hold the gun and keep my aim steady.
Without turning on the landing light I went down to the ground floor. It was completely dark downstairs, and the balcony door was slightly ajar. I could feel cold air on my feet and regretted not getting dressed. I tiptoed across the empty lounge, peered outside and called:
‘Sergey!’
I wanted him to turn around at my voice, step inside, tell me off for walking outside undressed – Why did you pop out like this, you’ll get cold, silly – and then take off his jacket, which I would refuse to put on. I realised how much I missed him, how long we hadn’t been alone together. We would lay the jacket down, near the window, smoke a cigarette together and then, perhaps, make love right here, on the floor. We hadn’t made love for ages. I opened the door wider and stepped forward.
The person standing on the balcony flicked away his cigarette end, which scattered red sparkles in the air. He turned around and said:
‘Anya, damn it, why aren’t you asleep? Go back indoors, you’ll get cold.’ It wasn’t Sergey’s voice.
‘Where’s Sergey?’ A glance at the sofa in the lounge showed that it was empty.
‘Let’s go back in,’ Boris said and held his arms out towards me. I pushed him off, ran to the edge of the balcony and peered round the corner at the parking spaces in front of the house.
Sergey’s car wasn’t there.
‘Sit down, Anya, don’t make any fuss, you’ll wake the whole house,’ said Boris in the lounge, after he had turned on the light and pushed me indoors. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow at the latest. He must at least try and pick them up, if they’re… if they’re fine. I’m sure you’ll understand.’
I did understand. I sat on the sofa and automatically pulled the blanket towards me, which was hung over the armrest. Last night, it was Mishka who had slept under it, when Sergey and I had sat on the floor watching the sparks in the fireplace as they landed and faded on the back wall. The prickly wool scratched me through the thin fabric of my nightdress, but I put the blanket over my shoulders and thought how silly of me it was not to get dressed before coming downstairs. Even at this moment I was aware that Boris was looking at my lacy nightdress and bare knees, and I felt awkward; I shouldn’t be walking around in a nightie with so many men in the house. I was remembering how Sergey and I had gone to the barrier to try and collect my mum. He knew that we wouldn’t get through, because as soon as they’d announced the quarantine he had tried to break through the checkpoints and get into the city – alone, without me. I remember him going out and coming back, angrily throwing the keys onto the coffee table and saying, ‘Damn it, it’s all closed off,’ but not once, not even once, did he tell me why he’d tried to get into the city. And that day when we were arguing, and I begged and cried, he came with me just to prove that it was impossible, because he knew I had to try and do it myself, and even then, in the car, when the empty, dark road was winding under the wheels, he didn’t tell me. And on the way back, although he had surely offered them money many times before to let him through, had surely said, ‘Guys, I’ve got a son there, he’s little,’ and held his hand about a metre above the ground, had told them, ‘It’s only about five hundred metres from the inner ring road, it’s a stone’s throw away, we won’t spend any time packing, I’ll just pick him up, put him in the car and come back, give me fifteen minutes,’ and had turned the car around and driven to another barrier, and tried again, and again, and failed, and come back home.
I never asked Sergey how his son was. It hadn’t even occurred to me, although his photo is on the desk in the study – fair hair, wide-set eyes. Once a week without fail, sometimes more often, Sergey would go to see him, telling me, ‘You’ve got a day off today, Anya.’ We somehow made a rule not to talk about it, and when he came back I always dutifully asked, ‘How’s the little one?’ and he always answered ‘He’s OK,’ or ‘Growing fast,’ and never gave any more details. I never knew his first word or when he said it, which fairy tales he liked or if he was afraid of the dark. Once Sergey asked, ‘Have you ever had chickenpox?’ and I understood that the boy was poorly, but I didn’t ask if he had a high temperature, if he was itchy, if he was sleeping OK, and just replied, ‘Yes, both Mishka and I have had it, don’t worry, we can’t catch it.’
Perhaps we were tense talking about him because of the huge, stifling sense of guilt that had completely overcome me when Sergey left the mother of his two-year-old boy for me. He had left gradually, not in one go, but it was still too fast both for her and for me, not giving us enough time to get used to the new situation. Men tend
to do this when they make decisions with consequences whose sharp edges hurt everyone until women find ways to smooth them over and hide them through daily efforts which are usually tiny and, for the most part, go unnoticed. After this, life becomes normal again, and everything that happens can not only be explained but justified too. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe neither the woman he had left nor I had made a single effort to bring our worlds, which revolved around Sergey, closer to each other. At least not through our relationship with this little boy, who was so easy to love because he hadn’t had enough time to do anything to stop us.
I was prepared to love him, back then, in the beginning, and not only because I was ready to love everything that Sergey held dear but also because Mishka was growing up and had started brushing my arms away when I’d try to hug him. Not in a nasty way, but assertively, like horses do when they wave off flies. He didn’t want to sit on my lap any more or for me to lie down with him before he went to sleep. Or maybe it was because a few years after Mishka was born one of my regular visits to the gynaecologist finished with his phrase ‘It’s lucky you already have a child’; or maybe because the smooth, comfortable, flawless world which I had created around Sergey, his habits and preferences – created so fast I didn’t have time to realise it myself – didn’t allow for any other intrusions, even from people who were close to him. And so the little boy, with his need for love, care and entertainment, turning up occasionally during school holidays or weekends, did not encroach on this world to a degree that another child might have done, the one Sergey and I didn’t have. I’m not sure I explained it to myself like this, but I was prepared to love Sergey’s son, and I would tell Sergey, ‘Please don’t go, let’s bring him here for the weekend, let’s go to the circus, to the park, I know how to make porridge and to tell stories, I’m a light sleeper and don’t mind getting up at night.’ When we moved into our new house, I set aside a room for him. I called it a guest bedroom, but I put a bed in there which was too small for an adult and brought in Mishka’s old ‘treasures’, which he’d grown out of: plastic dinosaurs, whose complex names I still remembered, as well as a set of Native Americans on horses – you could take them off the horses, but their legs were still bent.
None of this was much use, because the woman Sergey had left for me categorically rejected both my guilt and my generosity, two emotions which I couldn’t help experiencing and which she must have been aware of. The invisible barrier she built between our lives started long before the quarantine: first she said that she couldn’t let the boy come to our house until he learned to talk and was able to tell her if everything was all right; later, when he started talking, there were other reasons – either he had a cold or he was going through a ‘difficult phase’ and was afraid of people he didn’t know. Then he started going to nursery and it wasn’t appropriate for him to come because there would be extra stress. Once, weeks after I’d bought it, I found a present for him in the boot of Sergey’s car, as if Sergey was an accomplice in this plot, and then I started noticing that my desire to make the little boy part of our life was fading and turning into a feeling of relief, and soon I was grateful to his mother for trying so hard not to remind me about that long period in Sergey’s life before me, with its highs as well as its lows.
It was her decision, and although I wasn’t aware of the reason she’d made it, I accepted it, I let go – perhaps too easily. I stopped asking questions, and the man who lived in the same house as me and who slept in the same bed as me stopped talking about it, and this allowed me to forget about the situation, so much so that when this whole nightmare started, I didn’t even think of that woman and her child. That was why he left last night without saying goodbye, without saying a word.
‘Anya?’ Boris said somewhere behind my back, and the cigarette burned my fingers. I’d been miles away and hadn’t noticed myself lighting it. I crushed it in the ashtray, tightened the rug around me and said to him:
‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll get dressed and wait for him… them, and you go and get some sleep, OK?’
‘Mishka is next on the list to keep guard,’ Boris said and looked up, over my shoulder. I turned round and saw Mishka coming downstairs. His face was sleepy and creased but decisive – it was clear that he’d woken up to the alarm clock, which was unusual as I always had to wake him for school. Mishka looked at me and frowned.
‘Mum,’ he said, ‘why are you here? Go to bed, it’s my turn. Lenny will take over in two hours, we made a deal last night: the girls sleep and the boys keep watch.’
‘Don’t be silly, what’s that got to do with girls and boys?’ I retorted. ‘I’m awake anyway, and you need to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.’ Mishka looked annoyed, and Boris stretched his arm towards me, as if he was going to usher me to the stairs, and said almost crossly:
‘Go, Anya, we’ve got everything under control, you absolutely don’t have to sit here.’ I looked at him and said:
‘Wait, you’re sending me away because you think I’m going to shoot her, aren’t you? You really think that about me?’
‘Who’s her?’ Mishka said.
I looked at Boris, who held out his hand and started walking upstairs. He stopped, and turned to face me.
‘You’re talking rubbish, Anya, just listen to yourself. As soon as they come back, Mishka will wake you up. Now go, come on, stop being a baby.’
And for some reason I listened to him, stopped resisting and went upstairs, pausing briefly when I reached the landing to turn back and look at them again. It looked as if they had both forgotten about me already. Boris was explaining something to Mishka, showing him the best viewpoint in the lounge for watching the road. I could see that Mishka was impatient; he couldn’t wait to be left alone, watching the road with the gun by the window.
I went upstairs, throwing Sergey’s jumper over my shoulders – it had been on the floor among other warm clothes we’d prepared the night before – and moved the wicker armchair closer to the window. The chair was too low, and I had to kneel on it to see the street. A few minutes later the square of light on the snow from the illuminated window in the lounge disappeared, which meant that Boris had gone to sleep on the sofa and Mishka had started his two-hour shift. Everything went quiet, the dogs stopped barking, and I could even hear the ticking of Sergey’s watch on the bedside table – my present to him for our anniversary. I sat looking into the darkness in front of me, uneasy because of the hard armchair, the cold from the window, and thought: He didn’t even take his watch with him.
When the study door slammed shut downstairs, showing that Lenny had got up to replace Mishka, I put on my jeans and went down. It was still a while before dawn, and the ground floor was dark. The balcony door was open and the three of them – Mishka, Lenny and Boris – stood outside, talking quietly. I poked my head out and said: ‘Mishka, go to bed, your shift is over. I’ll wake you up in about three hours.’
The conversation stopped and they turned to me, looking embarrassed. Mishka caught my gaze and, without saying a word, pushed his way past me into the house. The men on the balcony watched me in silence.
‘Can’t sleep?’ I asked Boris.
‘As far as I can see you haven’t been to bed either,’ he said. His eyes were red; I realised that he’d only had a few hours’ sleep in the last two days and felt bad for him.
‘Let me make some coffee,’ I said, closing the balcony door, and walked through the dark lounge into the kitchen, switching on the table lamp. Boris followed me from the balcony and stopped in the doorway, as if hesitating whether to come in or not.
‘How about tea instead, Anya? My old innards can’t take too much coffee any more.’
Without answering, I filled the kettle with water and pressed the button. The light came on and the kettle started whooshing, but I turned away to get the cups and the box of tea, keeping busy as I didn’t want to look at him. And then he said: ‘Anya, I couldn’t stop him.’ I didn’t reply.
I was looking for sugar, and couldn’t remember where the wretched sugar bowl was. None of us took sugar in our tea, so we only got it out for guests. ‘He’ll be back, Anya, sixty kilometres one way, plus some time for packing, some kids’ stuff – where would you buy it now? It’s been only four hours, let’s wait, don’t worry, it’ll be fine.’
I finally found the sugar bowl, grabbed it and stood holding it for a moment, then turned to Boris and said:
‘Of course it will. We’ll have tea together and then let Lenny go and do his packing – he could take your list and bring what he can while the girls are asleep. And you and I will watch the road, OK?’
‘Sure,’ he agreed, and, relieved, he set off to tell Lenny about my plan – and I watched him go and wondered if he slept in his felt boots.
Lenny declined my offer of tea, and, excited by our decision, ran across the road to his house. I didn’t want to go outside with him, so I gave him a spare set of keys to our gate and watched him wrestle with the lock. As soon as he left, Boris and I took our positions near the window in the lounge, the loaded rifle nearby, against the wall, and spent the next hour in silence, watching the dark, empty road.
The sky started brightening up. We didn’t feel like talking. Sometimes one of us would change our position to stretch a numb limb or back and would startle the other, who would immediately look into the distance, where the road showed between the trees framing it on both sides like black, dense fencing. God, I thought, I used to love the view from our lounge window, but from now on I’ll never be able to look at it without remembering the thoughts that pop into my head now; my feet are cold and my back’s asleep, I need the loo, and I mustn’t move my eyes from the window in case, if I stop looking, I prevent the return of the black car I’m looking out for.
After the first hour of our watch (it was five hours since he’d left; something must have gone wrong), I got up and said to Boris, who had jumped and looked up at me:
