by Yana Vagner
It felt like packing for a holiday, which I always did the night before departure; I couldn’t sleep, so I would put on a DVD and bring the clothes one by one, pausing for a cigarette on the balcony or coffee downstairs or stopping to watch a favourite scene before carrying on, sometimes remembering something I’d forgotten to pack. To be fair, I would just put the clothes on the bed and Sergey would pack them, but he was always busy with something else – I’d hear his voice through the open window. It had been kind of a game we played: I’d pretend I couldn’t pack the suitcase properly so would ask him for help, although before we met I had always done it for myself.
This time I didn’t wait for Sergey, and when I finished packing, there was still room in both bags. I straightened the coverlet, sat on the bed and looked around the bedroom. The room was tidy and calm, with the packed bags by the door. I imagined how in a few hours we would leave here for good and everything I hadn’t packed would stay here. It would shrink, get covered in dust and disappear forever. What else would I need, apart from sturdy boots, food, medicines, warm clothes, and spare underwear for a woman who was most likely not going to wear it?
As a child, I liked looking at all my prized possessions before going to sleep and in the morning I would ask everyone, ‘What would you take with you if there was a fire? You can only take one thing, only one.’ Everyone would turn it into a joke and my mum would say, ‘Of course I’d take you, silly,’ and I would get cross and say, ‘You need to choose a thing, you see, a thing!’ When Mishka was born, I understood why Mum had said that, but now I was sitting in the bedroom of a house we’d built two years ago and where I’d been happy, and this house was full of things which were meaningful to us, and there was still room in the bags. Not a lot of room, so I needed to choose carefully.
I heard voices downstairs. The men had come back into the house. I got up, went into the dressing room and picked up a cardboard box containing a jumble of photographs of various sizes and dates, black and white, colour. There was my parents’ wedding, my grandparents, little Mishka, me in my school uniform, but there wasn’t a single one of Sergey. I had never found the time to sort them out because we stopped printing photos at some point and stored them on our computer. I emptied the box, put the photos into a plastic bag and packed it into one of the holdalls, then closed the door and went downstairs.
I bumped into Lenny and Marina near the stairs. They were quietly arguing about something. When I came up, she looked at me and said, ‘I can’t go back into our house. Lenny forgot a lot of stuff – Dasha’s clothes, bedding and lots of other little things. I wanted to go and get them, but I can’t. I’m scared, and there’s this smoke as well.’ She turned to Lenny. ‘I’m not going, let’s not waste any time. Look, I’ve made a list, Dasha’s red snowsuit is in the wardrobe on the right, you’ll need to bring my ski suit as well, the white one, it’s very warm – I’m not going away in this awful jacket – and thermal underwear. Lenny, you know where it is, you were the one to put it there.’ Lenny rolled his eyes, took the list from her hands and went to the exit, and she shouted to him: ‘And don’t forget my jewellery box, it’s on the table near the mirror.’
‘Marina,’ Lenny said from the door, ‘we’re not going to Courchevel. Why the hell do you need your jewellery?’ and, without waiting for an answer, he left.
‘My grandma,’ Marina said quietly, calm and even smiling, ‘always said to me that the reason diamonds have such high value is because you can always swap them for a loaf of bread. They won’t take up much space in the luggage, and you’ll see, Anya, they’ll come in handy, so if I were you, I’d take everything you’ve got, too.’
We were carrying bags to the car for the next two hours, with a small break for lunch. Having fed the children (even Mishka ate the porridge without complaining), Ira fried the eggs after all, and everyone ate them on the go, without sitting down at the table. I didn’t even regret not sitting round our lovely big table for the last meal in the house. I felt the odd one out, a bit awkward and uncomfortable with this particular group. With the remaining bread and cheese Ira made sandwiches, which she wrapped and distributed between the cars. Each time we thought everything was ready, somebody would remember something important (‘I’ve forgotten tools!’ Sergey would say, and he and Boris would disappear into the basement, shouting to me on the way, ‘Anya, can you pack a medical dictionary, if you have one?’ and Marina would answer, ‘We’ve got one,’ and Lenny would dash across the road to his empty house with dark windows, and we’d have to make space for the new thing, moving the bags around, rearranging boxes and suitcases).
The three cars parked in front of the house, with their open back doors, looked like a bizarre group of sculptures. The stripped Niva was there too. Boris had disconnected its long antenna and removed the short-wave radio. Sergey had given it to him after he’d bought a new one for himself, and now he was trying to install it inside my car. I’d always hated that radio (‘You’ve got an antenna, as if you’re a taxi driver,’ I would tell him), but really I was angry at Sergey’s habit of eavesdropping on conversations between long-distance lorry drivers (‘Anyone selling fuel?’; ‘There’s a traffic patrol on the forty-fifth kilometre, keep your eyes peeled, guys’). It had become Sergey’s favourite toy, and sometimes when we were in the same car he would turn it on trying to decipher other people’s chats with each other while I blew smoke out of the window, annoyed.
It started snowing. When we ran out of space in the cars, the last few boxes had to be fixed with duct tape on top of Sergey’s car. Last to be packed were the rifles, one of which Sergey gave to Lenny. ‘Can you shoot at all?’ he asked, but Lenny only mumbled something grumpily and took the rifle to his car. Finally, the cars were all packed and Boris stood in the doorway and shouted into the house: ‘Come out, everyone, we could go on packing forever but it’s half past four, we can’t wait any longer.’ And then Marina and Ira brought the children out. When everyone was outside, Sergey said to me: ‘Let’s go, Anya, let’s go and lock up.’
We turned off the lights everywhere and stood in the corridor for a few moments, near the front door. Through the big windows, the dim, soft, moonlike light of the street lamp was flooding the inside of the house, creating long, pale shadows on the floor, which was mottled with wet footprints. In the corner of the corridor was a crumpled piece of paper. Under our feet, a group of abandoned slippers sat in the small puddle of melted snow, looking sad and soaked through. There were five of them, and I leaned down to pick them up and find the sixth one. I was determined to find it, it must be somewhere around here, I needed to put them together in pairs.
‘Anya,’ Sergey said behind me.
‘Hang on,’ I said, and sat down to look under the shoe rack. ‘I just need to find—’
‘Don’t,’ Sergey said. ‘Leave it. We need to go.’
‘Wait half a second,’ I started, without looking back, ‘I’ll just—’ and then he put his hand on my shoulder.
‘Get up, Anya, it’s time,’ he said, and when I stood up and looked into his face, he smiled and added, ‘You’re like the captain who’s the last to leave the sinking ship.’
‘How funny,’ I said, and then he hugged me and said into my ear, ‘I know, baby. Let’s not delay, we need to go.’ He walked out of the door and stopped there, waiting for me, with the house keys in his hand.
Lenny and Marina were strapping their little girl inside their car, and Boris, Mishka, Ira and the boy were standing a bit further away, watching us lock the door.
‘Ira, Anton and you will go in Anya’s Vitara,’ Sergey said. ‘Dad, take Anya’s keys. Mishka, get into the car.’
‘Let’s go, Anton.’ Ira took the boy’s hand and he obediently followed her, but in front of the car he pulled his hand away and said loudly, ‘I want to go with Daddy.’
‘We’ll go in Granddad’s car, Anton, and Daddy will follow us. We’ll talk to him on the radio.’ Ira bent down and put her arms around him, but the boy pu
shed her away.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘I’m going with Daddy!’
Mishka, who was already inside the car, popped his head out to see what was going on, while the boy stood looking up at our faces. All of us – four adults – were standing round him; it was awkward for him to look at us with the hood fastened under his chin, so he arched his back to be able to see us better. It was almost a threatening pose, with his fists clenched, but he didn’t cry. Eyes wide open and lips tight, he looked round at us one by one and shouted, again:
‘I’m going with my dad! And with my mum!’
‘He’s had a difficult couple of weeks,’ said Ira quietly. Sergey crouched down next to his son and started talking to him. He was visibly cross and clueless about what to do, and the boy didn’t want to listen and vigorously shook his hooded head. Then I said: ‘Boris, give me my keys. Mishka, come out, we’ll go in the Vitara and Ira and Anton will go with Sergey.’
The boy immediately turned, grabbed Ira by the hand and started dragging her towards the car. Sergey looked at me helplessly and said:
‘Just until Tver, Anya, then we’ll swap.’
I nodded without looking up, and reached out my hand for the keys. Boris came up to me.
‘Anya, shall I drive? It’s dark—’ he said, and I replied before he’d even finished his sentence.
‘It’s my car, I’ve been driving it for five years, and I’ll drive it now too. Let’s not argue about that at least, OK?’
‘She’s a good driver, Dad—’ Sergey started, but I cut him off.
‘Let’s not waste any time. Please open the gate and let’s go.’ I sat behind the wheel, and even though I tried to close the door quietly, it slammed loudly.
‘You rock, Mum,’ Mishka said from the back seat. I caught his eye in the mirror and tried to produce a smile. ‘Looks like it’s going to be some trip, Mishka,’ I said.
While Sergey was opening the gate, Boris walked up to the Land Cruiser and shouted to Lenny through the open window:
‘Lenny, we’ll drive in single file, but since you haven’t got a radio, make sure you keep us in view. We’ll get onto the New Riga road, and then take the motorway towards Tver. If we’re lucky, we’ll be there in one and a half to two hours. We’ll go through the villages without stopping, no pee breaks for the kids or anything – let yours pee in her pants, if she’s desperate. If you do get lost, we’ll meet you near the exit for Tver. Oh, and we’re going to check all petrol stations. Anya’s car won’t take your diesel, so if any of them are open, we’ll buy all the fuel we can get on the way.’ If Lenny said anything, I couldn’t hear it because of the noise from the running engines; Boris tapped on the roof of Lenny’s car, turned around, and climbed into the passenger seat next to me.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
And we went.
6
The Journey Begins
I wanted to stop myself from looking back at the lonely, dark house we were leaving behind, so I opened the glove box – its lid flipped open and fell on Boris’s knees – and felt inside it for a pack of cigarettes. I lit one, and when Boris also clicked his lighter and the car filled with acrid smoke, I angrily wound the passenger window all the way down. It wasn’t very polite, and I felt his eyes fix on me, but nevertheless, I left the window open, and he, without saying a word, started tuning the short-wave radio. We drove slowly to the end of the village, Lenny’s Land Cruiser at the front, followed by Sergey. I don’t know if anyone looked left or right, but I saw only the red lights of Sergey’s car until we left behind the sign with the crossed-out name of the village. Five hundred metres until the turning, the familiar bus stop (if I turned my head now I’d see our little village over to the right, a bright area in the middle of dark surroundings, framed by two tongues of woods, with mismatched houses, among which my eye would pick out one familiar roof). I wasn’t able to turn my head for another hundred metres, no, two hundred, and then suddenly the forest encroached on both sides and it became dark. Now there were only the motionless trees, the snow-sprinkled road and the two big cars ahead; it was OK to turn my head and look around, but I couldn’t see anything else. All the roads in the unlit forest look the same, and it doesn’t matter if they’re a kilometre from your house or a thousand kilometres, your world immediately becomes restricted to the thin shell of the car, which stores warmth and lights up a narrow strip of road in front of you.
The radio, which Boris had placed on the leather armrest between our seats, started flashing lights and crackling, and then we heard Sergey in mid-sentence:
‘…hardly moving on this shit. I don’t know what kind of diesel this is. I hope it isn’t a summer one, it’d be good to find a petrol station that’s open, what do you think, Dad?’
While he was speaking, I heard music from Sergey’s car through the crackling and interference. He always turns the music down when he uses the radio, but you can hear it anyway. I could also hear the boy’s thin voice, but his words were indistinct. I saw him looking through the rear window of the car – perhaps he’d been kneeling on the back seat and trying to reach the window to wipe off the condensation; and next to him, the blonde hair of his mother. I only saw the back of her head. She didn’t turn, but presumably said something to the boy, because I could hear Sergey.
‘Leave him, Ira, let him sit the way he wants. It’s a long journey, he’ll get bored.’
I nearly waved to the boy but realised he couldn’t see me; instead I reached for the radio before Boris could pick it up to talk to Sergey about the petrol stations.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I think Lenny should go between us – he hasn’t got a radio. Do you want to overtake him, or shall I?’
Sergey was silent for a few seconds, then said, ‘OK, I will,’ and started overtaking, without saying a word to contradict me. I never call him ‘darling’ for no reason. It’s our code word, which I only use as a last resort, a word I’ve chosen especially for those people who fall silent when we come into the room and then look from him to me and then back to him, and then come up to me on the balcony when I’m lighting a cigarette and ask, ‘Is everything OK with you two?’ Or for those who expect confessions and complaints about our failing relationship. Because there should be confessions and complaints, shouldn’t there?
Both of us needed that word, not just me, because the woman who was sitting in the back of his car was never short of words when she was unhappy – I know, he told me, and I’d give my right arm not to become like her. And that’s why every time I was suffocating among people who didn’t like me, I would simply say, ‘Shall we go home, darling?’ in a sweet voice, and smile, and then he would look at me carefully and we would leave. Bravo, darling, you know me so well.
The back of Lenny’s car was not as interesting. Nobody was peering through the back window; the little girl, strapped in the car seat, couldn’t look back, and the windows were tinted, so I could finally look around me. We left the first patch of woods separating our village from the others, which looked like yellow spots in the winter darkness. The houses were so close together that the black, dense air surrounding us became diluted with yellow glow from the street lights and windows. I thought that if I was to peer through the windows of the houses alongside the road, I would see a family around their dinner table under an orange kitchen lampshade, or the blue screen of a TV in the lounge; a car, parked outside, the glow of a cigarette near the front door: all these people, hundreds of people, staying put, unafraid, not driving around the surrounding towns in search of petrol, not packing up their belongings, deciding to stay and sit out this horror, trusting the solidity of their homes, their doors and fences. So many lit-up windows, I thought, so many smoking chimneys on the roofs. They can’t all be wrong, can they? Where are we going? Why are we going? Was this decision, made without me, right? Was I right to agree to it without saying a word, to leave without complaint the only place I could feel safe now, while all these people around me make dinner, watch the news, cut wood
and wait until the epidemic ends, confident that it’ll end soon? My reality – the hurried packing, gunshots, a dead dog, a story about the dying city – is separated from their reality by an impenetrable screen: I can see them through it but can’t reach them, can’t stay with them, I’m just passing through, with my son sitting behind me, and all I feel is unbearable loneliness.
We all saw it at the same time, before Lenny’s brake lights came on. I slammed my foot down on the pedal. I heard Lenny’s door shut; he jumped out heavily, walked round the car and headed for the side of the road. Boris poked his head out and shouted, ‘Lenny, wait, don’t go there!’ and Lenny stopped but didn’t return to the car.
The fire had gone out. Even a big house wouldn’t take a whole day to burn down, and this one wasn’t that big, judging by the other houses, all like peas in a pod. This was a small, neat private villa community, which they’d started building after we moved into our house, and every time I went past the fenced-off building site, I’d been surprised at how fast it was growing. First, neat boxes with empty, unglazed windows, then identical brown roofs, low light-coloured fences, and after a year, they took down the tall fence and revealed a beautiful fairy-tale village. It still looked like a fairy tale: the paths cleared of snow, the pale walls framed by chocolate-brown logs, the brick chimneys. Only that on the site of the house nearest to the road there was an oil-black ragged patch with the charred silhouette of the ruins. Through a dense cloud of white smoke, resembling what you often see above open-air swimming pools in winter, I could see that the front wall of the house had collapsed, exposing its charred insides, and that the greasy, ugly-looking blobs of what was left of the curtains and carpets, or maybe cables, were hanging from the ceilings. Where the roof used to be, there were just the remains of the framework, impregnated with the smell of bonfire.
‘Look, Mishka, you were wondering what it was this morning,’ Boris said, turning to us.
