To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘It’s time I did something useful. We need to go soon, and we haven’t finished packing yet. Lenny has gone, and we’re just sitting here wasting time. How about you watch the road, and I’ll check what we’re still missing?’ and before he could say anything, I turned and left the lounge.

  As soon as I stopped watching the wretched road, I felt a bit better. I went to the bathroom, opened the bedding cabinet and started taking out bath towels. First, three large chocolate ones – Something’s happened, he’s not coming back – then another three big ones, only blue; I took out new guest toothbrushes from under the sink, several tubes of toothpaste, soap, a pack of tampons, all the time thinking, I’ll have to ask Sergey – He won’t come back – if they remembered to buy some more for me, I never keep more than one pack at home, or I can ask Marina, people living in the country are normally good at stocking up. We’ll need washing powder or soap flakes, I think they were on the list, only where can I find soap flakes? Although they’ve probably bought some.

  I opened the medicine chest and took out iodine, Nurofen and nasal drops; Mishka can’t sleep if he has a blocked nose. What a pathetic medicine chest we have, I thought, it’s only good for holidays, for a week by the sea, and definitely not for half a year in the woods. We don’t even have any bandages, just a few strips of plaster for a rubbed toe after wearing a new pair of shoes. We’ll need antibiotics – what if somebody has pneumonia or something worse? I need to check what they bought yesterday at the pharmacy. I’ll get on with the packing, and if I don’t go to the window he’ll come back. Woollen socks, warm hats, ski gloves, underwear, yes, underwear, there are no windows in the dressing room, maybe I should go downstairs to the storage room.

  We need pulses and cans, they’ve most likely bought all these, but it’d be silly to leave it here. Sugar, this is laughable – two bags, a kilo each, we need a big sack of sugar, a sack of rice, a sack of everything, there’s seven of us, how many potatoes do seven people need for the winter? How many tins of meat? The cabin’s surrounded by woods, a cold, empty, wooden house, no mushrooms or berries – everything under the snow, what are we going to eat? How are we going to sleep, seven of us, in two rooms? We need to take sleeping bags, we only have two, we need seven, no, nine, because he’s bringing two more. I’ll smile at her, I’ll become her best fucking friend, only please let him come home, let him be safe. I think I heard a door shut upstairs, I’m not listening, it’s just Mishka waking up, or Lenny coming back, I’m not trying to listen if it’s Sergey’s voice, if I try not to listen, if I pretend I’m not waiting for him, he’ll come back, it’s a shame there’s no radio in the storage room, I could turn the music on and it would drown any outside noise. I’m not listening, not listening…

  It suddenly became brighter in the storage room. I turned around; the door was open and Mishka stood there. He was saying something and looked surprised. I took my hands away from my ears and heard:

  ‘Mum, we’ve been calling you for ages, didn’t you hear? Why did you cover your ears? They’ve come back, everything’s OK.’

  And then I could breathe out – it was as if I’d only been breathing with half my lungs. Of course he’d come. I pushed Mishka aside and ran into the corridor. Sergey was taking off his jacket, and next to him stood a tall woman in a dark quilted coat with the hood up. She was holding a boy by the hand; he had a dark blue snowsuit on, zipped up all the way to his chin. They were standing still, not making the slightest effort to take off their coats. Sergey looked at me and smiled, but I could see he was terribly tired. He spoke:

  ‘We got held up, couldn’t come back by the same road, had to make a detour via the ring road, hope you haven’t been worried, baby.’

  I wanted to run up to him, to touch him, but I would have to push aside the tall woman and the little boy standing near her, so I stopped a few steps away and said, ‘You forgot your watch.’

  At the sound of my voice, the woman turned, pulled down her hood and shook her head to release long blonde hair, trapped by her collar.

  ‘This is Ira, baby,’ Sergey said. ‘And this is Anton.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, baby,’ said the woman slowly, and looked me coolly in the eye. Our eyes met, and although she didn’t say anything else, this gaze was enough for me to understand that I had little chance of keeping my promise to become her best friend.

  ‘Ira,’ Boris said. ‘Thank goodness you’re both fine.’

  Smiling, he came up closer but didn’t hug her or the boy. I stepped out of the way, letting him through, and thought that it looked as if this family hadn’t been used to giving each other hugs at all before I joined it. She lifted the corners of her lips slightly, outlining a faint smile in reply, and said:

  ‘Anton and I have spent two weeks in the flat. I’m not entirely sure, but I think, apart from us, there’s no one left on our floor.’

  Mishka came up, then Marina popped her head out of the study, and Ira finally took off her coat and gave it to Sergey, and then, bending down to the boy and undoing his snowsuit, started talking. Without raising her head, in a plain, ordinary voice, she described to us how the city was dying; how the panic began straight after they announced the quarantine, and how people started fighting in grocery shops and pharmacies; how the troops came in and masked soldiers gave out food and medicines from military trucks; how a neighbour who used to babysit Anton had the fingers on both her hands broken when somebody tried to snatch her bag, and how after that they only went out in groups of eight or ten. How buses and trams had stopped running and only ambulances circled the streets, soon replaced by military trucks with red crosses – the red strips clumsily stuck to their canvas tops gave way to painted crosses later on, which looked more permanent. They stopped picking up infected people from their homes, and their families had to walk them to the trucks, which would come twice a day to start with, and then several times a day. How those ‘field ambulances’ then stopped coming altogether and notices were put up on front doors, saying The nearest emergency medical aid station is located at ———— and people had to take their infected family members by themselves. Sometimes they had to take their dead bodies. She said that when her sister’s son got ill (‘Do you remember Lisa, Sergey?’) Lisa took him to the field ambulance and afterwards had to call various hospitals and couldn’t find him – phones still worked back then. And then Lisa came to her late at night, on foot, and rang the doorbell, and Ira could see through the peephole that she was unwell: her face was covered in beads of sweat and she had a hacking cough (‘I didn’t open the door, we would have caught it straight away, and then Lisa sat by our door and didn’t go away for a long time, and I think she was sick on the stairs, and when I went to the door again, she had gone’). After that, she realised they needed to stay in the flat. The TV continued saying that the situation was under control, that the number of deaths was down as the peak of the epidemic was about to be passed, and she still had some food at home. She hoped they could sit it out. But after a week it became obvious that what they had was not enough, and she started eating very little but the food ran out anyway, and in the last two days she and Anton were eating old jam from a jar they found on the balcony – four spoons in the morning, four in the afternoon and four in the evening – and were drinking cool boiled water.

  She said that she had spent all her time by the window, and towards the end there was hardly anyone left in the streets, day or night, and she was afraid that she would miss an announcement about evacuation or a vaccine and kept the TV on, even slept next to it, and then was afraid that they would turn off the electricity and water, but everything was working. The windows in the building opposite did a strange thing – some of them were permanently dark, and others had the light on all the time, even during the day, and she would pick a window and watch it, trying to determine if there were any survivors there. She said that when Sergey came and rang the doorbell, she looked at him through the peephole for a long time and made him come closer and take h
is jacket off so that she could see that he was not sick, and when they were running to the car together, they saw a woman’s body in the snow, lying face down, and she even thought for a second that it was Lisa, although it couldn’t have been Lisa, because Lisa had been there a week earlier.

  Her voice was unemotional, her eyes dry. She was still holding the child’s snowsuit and his hat in her hands, and after she finished talking, she stuffed them into the sleeve of the snowsuit and, finally, looking up at us, asked:

  ‘Where can I hang these?’

  Sergey took the clothes and I said:

  ‘Ira, come with me, I can offer you something to eat.’

  ‘There’s no need to stand on ceremony,’ she said. ‘Feed Anton, if that’s OK. I know it sounds strange, but I’m not hungry at all.’

  ‘Come with me then,’ I said to the boy, and offered him my hand. He looked at me but didn’t move, and then Ira lightly nudged him forward and said, ‘Come on then, she’ll give you something to eat,’ and then he made a move and stepped towards me. He didn’t take my hand but just followed me into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and looked inside.

  ‘Would you like an omelette? Or shall I make some porridge? I’ve also got milk and some biscuits.’ The boy didn’t answer. ‘How about I make you a big sandwich, and while you’re eating it, I’ll make you some porridge as well?’

  I cut off a large piece of bread, put a slice of salami on it and turned around. He was still standing on the threshold and I went over to him, crouched down and gave him the sandwich. The boy looked at me without a smile, his eyes wide-set like his mum’s, and asked:

  ‘Is this my dad’s house?’ I nodded, and he nodded too – not to me, but to himself – and then said quietly, ‘That means it’s my house as well. And who are you?’

  ‘My name is Anya,’ I said and smiled at him. ‘And you must be Anton?’

  ‘My mum doesn’t let me talk to strangers,’ the boy said, then took the sandwich from my hand and, taking care to go round me, walked out of the kitchen. I stayed squatting for some time, feeling silly, as grown-ups often do when they think it’s easy to talk to kids, then got up, brushed the crumbs off my hands and followed him.

  All the adults were standing near the window in the lounge; the boy went up to his mum, took her by the hand and only then bit into the sandwich. He didn’t look at me. None of them did; they were all looking intensely at something outside the window. ‘What are you looking at?’ I asked, but nobody answered, and then I came closer and also saw it. Behind the thin strip of trees, which looked dark against the sky, there was a big black smoke cloud.

  ‘It’s that luxury development,’ I said to nobody in particular. Nobody had asked me, after all. ‘It’s completely new, not very big, about ten or twelve houses. They’ve only recently finished it; I don’t even know if anybody lives there.’

  ‘That’s a lot of smoke,’ Sergey said without looking at me. ‘Looks as if a house is on fire.’

  ‘Shall we go and see?’ Mishka said. ‘It’s only about a kilometre and a half.’ Before I had time to object, Sergey said:

  ‘There’s nothing to see there, Mishka. We saw several of these fires on the way here and will see more of them, no doubt.’ He looked at Boris. ‘Everything’s happening too fast, Dad, looks like we’re being left behind.’

  ‘We’ve got almost everything,’ I said. ‘We’ve no reason to wait. Let’s load our stuff in the car and go.’

  ‘I’ve got an empty tank, Anya,’ said Sergey. ‘We didn’t have time to top up, nor did we last night. You get the stuff ready and I’ll go and find petrol. Maybe some stations are still open.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Boris said. ‘It’s best not to go alone. Lenny should stay with the girls. I’ll go and tell him.’

  And everyone disappeared. Boris was looking through coats in the corridor trying to find his hunting jacket under the others hanging on the wall. The boy suddenly cried out: ‘Mum, I need a pee!’ and Mishka took them away. Sergey and I were left alone in the lounge, and I could finally go up to him, put my arms around his neck and press my cheek against his woollen jumper.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ I said to the jumper, without looking up.

  ‘Baby—’ Sergey said, but I interrupted him.

  ‘I know. I just don’t want you to go.’

  We stood like this, without saying a word. Water was running somewhere, doors were slamming, I could hear people’s voices, and I stood there with my arms around him and thought that Boris would come back and bring Lenny to guard us, and before that, in a second or two, Ira and the boy would turn up and I’d have to unclasp my arms and let Sergey go.

  The front door slammed shut: it was Boris and Lenny. Sergey moved, as if trying to break free, and for a second I tightened my grip on him and then felt awkward. I let go and we walked to the hallway. Boris was standing on the threshold alone, without Lenny, and he looked at me and said:

  ‘Anya, chin up, we’re not taking him away from you. Lenny is a right hoarder – he’s got a power generator in the basement, and we’ve checked – there’s about a hundred litres of diesel. Come on, Sergey, let’s open the gate. Let him go, Anya, he won’t go further than the fence. It’s time to load the car, we must leave before dusk.’

  Sergey grabbed the keys, and he and Boris left. I draped a jacket over my shoulders, came out onto the veranda and watched them, as if I wanted to make sure they were telling the truth and that Sergey wasn’t going anywhere.

  The gate opened and Lenny’s enormous Land Cruiser drove in. To fit it into the driveway they had to move Boris’s old Niva, which looked rather miserable next to this black shiny monster. I watched the Niva’s front wheels crushing the tiny cedar trees I had planted last year. When he got out of the car, Boris glanced up at me. Lenny shouted something from the gate, but Boris waved him off and walked towards me. With one hand on the veranda railing, he looked up at me and said quietly:

  ‘Anya, pull yourself together.’ He sounded strict. ‘I know a lot has happened, but now isn’t the time, do you understand? We’ll pack, load up the cars and leave, and everything will be fine, but in the next village – can you see the smoke? – there’s chaos, and we can’t waste time comforting you because of something as minor as your crushed trees. We’ve still got to extract the petrol from my Niva, and I don’t want to do it on the road, attracting attention. Do you hear me, Anya? Look at me.’ I looked down at him. ‘I hope you’re not going to cry. We’ve got a difficult couple of days ahead. The road is long, and anything can happen, and we need you calm and collected. Go and make sure we’ve packed everything we need, and when we reach our destination, we can sit down and have a good cry together about everything, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said and was surprised how high my voice sounded, like a child’s. He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a pack of his terrible Java, and passed it to me.

  ‘Have a fag, calm down and go back to the house. There are two women with kids who need organising. Tell them to feed the kids, dress them warmly, and take a look around – men aren’t good at packing, we’ve almost certainly left something behind.’ He turned and started walking towards the gates, shouting to Lenny: ‘Open the boot, Lenny, let’s see what you’ve got there.’ I winced, swallowed the sharp, strong smell of the cigarette and watched the smooth gliding of the Land Cruiser’s hatch as it opened and the three men, on whom all our lives depended, peering inside, examining its contents. When I finished the cigarette I threw the butt into the snow and went back into the house.

  There was nobody in the lounge. I walked into the kitchen and saw Ira standing by the cooker and Marina at the table with the little girl on her lap, and next to them, on the chair, the boy, sitting quietly; there were plates in front of them and a jar of jam. As I’d been approaching the kitchen I could hear them talking, but as soon as I came in they fell silent. Marina looked up at me, and Ira, without turning round, said:

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, I’m ma
king porridge for them. They need to eat before the journey.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘There’s also cheese and salami. Do you want to make some sandwiches? We can also fry some eggs. We all need to eat. The frying pan’s on the cooker.’

  Ira didn’t reply and didn’t move, just kept on stirring the porridge, and then I went to the fridge, opened it and started taking out eggs, sausage and cheese.

  ‘I’ll tell them to come and eat in half an hour. I still need to pack some stuff,’ I said.

  Without looking at me Ira stepped out of my way, and I turned to Marina and said: ‘Lenny’s here, are you sure he brought everything we need? Do you think it’s worth checking?’

  Marina stood up, put down her little girl on the chair she’d been sitting on, and said to Ira, ‘Can you watch her?’ and left the kitchen.

  The girl stayed sitting still. I could only see the top of her face above the table. She hadn’t noticed her mother go and didn’t look bothered that she’d gone; reaching over, she carefully touched the empty plate with her short, plump fingers, and a moment later froze again. I looked at Ira, who was still stirring the porridge, and said to the back she was stubbornly showing me, ‘In half an hour,’ before leaving the kitchen.

  I went upstairs to the bedroom, found Sergey’s hunting rucksack and two holdalls and packed all the warm clothes that Boris and I had prepared the day before. I should have asked Ira if she needed any clothes, but I didn’t feel like going back downstairs and talking to her again. Instead, having checked through the wardrobe, I packed a few more jumpers into the bag and, after a bit of thought, a couple of T-shirts and some underwear too. I don’t know her size, I thought, and it’s not my problem anyway. If she needs anything, I’ll give it to Sergey. Why on earth is she standing there, in my kitchen, with her back to me? We’ve got a lot of clothes, so we’ll sort something out.