To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘What happened?’ asked Mishka quietly.

  ‘Let’s put it this way: I doubt that the house burnt down because somebody was messing about with fireworks, although anything’s possible,’ Boris said, and he poked his head out of the window and shouted to Lenny: ‘Did you get a good look? Now let’s go, Lenny, let’s go!’

  Following the unplanned stop by the burnt gingerbread house, we paid no more attention to the road signs, no longer wanting to meander along looking at the surroundings. Sergey was the first to increase speed, then the Land Cruiser followed, sounding like a tractor – its exhaust started smoking and I wound the window up. The wretched radio was stopping me from steering properly. At every turn I caught it with my elbow, and the metal rectangle dangled, scratching the leather armrest. But the road was familiar; after two years of living here I knew every twist and turn, and we soon caught up with Lenny.

  Ten minutes later we came out on to the motorway and drove towards the great orbital in single file. For some reason, after the ruined fairy-tale village was behind us, I expected to see people fleeing the dangerous outskirts of the dying city in cars or on foot, but we were the only ones on the road – there was no one following us or going in the opposite direction. Boris also seemed surprised to see the empty road. He even leaned down and checked the frequency of the radio, but there was only silence and occasional interference. On the left, there was a dense wall of trees, and on the right we were expecting to see the slip roads to the little villages spread alongside the motorway. We had about forty kilometres to go to the outer ring road. I knew these places well too; when Sergey and I were looking for a house, fed up with the rented flat full of somebody else’s furniture and the soulless view from the window that I’d never got used to in the nine months I lived there, we drove around this area – ‘It’s an anthill, baby,’ said Sergey. ‘You don’t want to live in an anthill, do you? Let’s look somewhere else. It’s OK if it’s further away from the city, it’ll be fine, it’ll be quiet, just you and me and nobody else around.’ Our friends in the city thought we were mad to want to leave, but we didn’t listen to anyone, and couldn’t imagine that the distance, which seemed far enough at the time to separate us from the rest of the world, would now seem short to us.

  I didn’t expect to arrive at the turning onto the outer ring road so abruptly. I’d only just seen its lights twinkling far ahead, but now noticed the large white signs with the names of towns and distances in kilometres on them. And then I heard Sergey’s crackling voice over the radio:

  ‘Anya, turn right here.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, irritated, and realised as I was saying it that he couldn’t hear me because the microphone was still in the cup holder, where I usually kept my cigarettes, although nobody in the car pointed that out to me. The next minute the radio crackled again, but this time it was a new, unfamiliar voice. ‘Hey, mate,’ it said, sounding tense, ‘did you come across any open petrol stations on your way? I only need to get to Odintsovo, they’ve shut them all, motherf—’

  Before Sergey could reply, I took the microphone, pressed the button and said: ‘Don’t go to Odintsovo. I’d turn around if I were you.’

  The man on the other end sounded worried. ‘What’s happening in Odintsovo then? Do you know something?’ And then, without waiting for an answer, he added: ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Don’t tell him, Anya,’ Boris said before I could reply. Then he reached over and took the microphone out of my hand and clasped it in his fist as if trying to block any sound, in case I was going to answer this unknown voice that was still shouting into the air: ‘Hello? Where are you at the moment? What’s happening in Odintsovo? Hello?’

  ‘It could still be safe in Odintsovo, you know,’ I said to Boris without turning my head, as we were leaving the motorway.

  ‘Odintsovo’s ten kilometres from Moscow, Anya, how do you think it could be safe? And also, we’re on the same channel as everyone else, so no personal information – who we are, where we are and what car we’ve got, do you understand? If this man isn’t lying about petrol, even our small amount of fuel makes us a target for any decent citizen running away from the city who’ll shoot us in the head to fill his tank. Let alone the usual crazies who infested this road even before all this started.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, still irritated, and we stayed silent after that. Sergey was silent too; in complete silence our three cars left the motorway and drove under the sign to Novopetrovskoye, beyond which we passed residential areas on both sides of the road. I noticed a petrol station and next to it, by the slip road, two long curtain-sided trucks with their lights off. The petrol station was illuminated but obviously shut: there was nobody near the pumps or the cashier’s window. We drove straight past, without even slowing down. I thought I saw a broken window and bits of glass glinting on the clear, dry pavement, but before I had a chance to take a proper look, there was a bend, and I lost sight of the forecourt.

  ‘Did you see that, Dad?’ Sergey asked. He was obviously avoiding talking to me, and I regretted being short with him earlier, and then, after I remembered that he hadn’t heard my reply anyway, I was sorry that instead of talking to him I had talked to a stranger on the radio, who, as if on purpose, had stopped hogging the frequency with his endless questions and finally fallen silent.

  Boris brought the microphone to his mouth and said softly, ‘Don’t talk on the way, Sergey, we’ll talk later.’

  After the fire at the gingerbread village the rural calm that surrounded us was no longer free from danger, even though everything seemed normal at first glance: the lighted windows, the parked cars in front of the houses. What seemed bizarre to me was the absence of people on the streets. It wasn’t late yet, but nowhere could I see anyone walking, or children playing, or dogs running, or the usual old grandmothers selling their garish towels, potatoes and suspicious mushroom concoctions in glass jars of every size. There was an alarming, deadly stillness in the air, as if something bad was waiting for us behind every corner and every bend of the road, and I was glad that we weren’t walking past these lifeless houses but zooming past them at one hundred kilometres per hour, too fast for anything to stop us.

  We passed a small building the size of a bus stop, with a green roof and grilles on the windows; underneath its roof we could just see the sign MINI-MARKET. Despite the name, it looked more like a roadside kiosk. Maybe because the ill-fated ‘Mini-Market’ was closer to the road than the petrol station we had left behind, the iron door had been ripped off its hinges and the windows broken; but there was nobody here either. Perhaps the unfortunate incident had happened in the morning, or maybe even the day before.

  The deafening silence which was ringing in my ears must have affected everyone else as well, because Mishka said, ‘Mum, put some music on, please, it’s so quiet…’

  I reached out, pressed the tuner button and instead of the radio station I was used to, the empty, dead hissing noise reminded me that the city we had left behind was no longer there; I imagined a deserted studio, scattered papers, telephone receiver off the hook – why on earth is my imagination so fertile? – and quickly switched to the CD player. Nina Simone’s deep, husky voice started singing ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, and the silence, beating in my ears, ebbed and allowed her voice to fill the space, so much so that for a second I forgot what we were doing there, three cars on a long, empty road, as if we were friends out for a day in the country rather than fleeing as fast as we could, unable to take our eyes off the road.

  ‘Anya,’ said Boris, annoyed, ‘is this a funeral march or something? Can you find something more cheerful?’

  ‘It depends how you listen to it, Boris,’ I said, turning off the song. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything more cheerful, but in any case all the other CDs are buried under your lovely radio, so it’s either Nina Simone or we’ll have to sing ourselves.’

  ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round,’ Mishka chanted suddenly from his back seat, out of tune
; I caught his eye in the mirror and he smiled at me, which made me feel better straight away.

  I saw Lenny’s brake lights come on. We fell silent, trying to work out why he was stopping. Boris, swearing in a low voice, struggled to find the button to wind the window down, and started poking his head out before it was properly open. I couldn’t see anything from my side, but, in order not to bump into the back of Lenny’s car, I also braked. Even though there was no one at the side of the road, it made me anxious and afraid to drive slowly.

  ‘It’s only a level crossing,’ Boris said with relief, and I saw the signalman’s cabin, with dark windows and a raised red and white barrier, and next to it a road sign and railway lights. The black circles of the lights, like the eyes of a toy robot, were intermittently flashing red, and we could just about hear the quiet melodic ringing through the open window. The Land Cruiser came to a halt; I wound the window down and saw Sergey’s car stop right in front of the rails.

  ‘But the barrier’s up,’ I said, and Boris grabbed the radio and shouted into it:

  ‘Sergey, why are you waiting?’

  ‘Wait, Dad,’ Sergey replied. ‘The light’s red, can’t see a damn thing, wouldn’t want to run into a train—’

  He didn’t have time to finish his sentence, because the door of the signalman’s cabin, which had looked deserted, was flung open and two people came out and started walking quickly towards us.

  ‘Step on it! Anya, go!’ shouted Boris, but we had all already seen them, even Lenny, who wasn’t taking part in the conversation, and with foot on accelerator we all drove off at the same time, so fast that I nearly collided with the shiny back of the Land Cruiser.

  We zoomed past several villages at full throttle, and my panic started easing only after the level crossing was left far behind. The black, impenetrable walls of the forest which flanked the road now seemed a lot more appealing than any of the villages lurking in the distance – illuminated windows, empty streets, vandalised food stalls. I found a cigarette and lit it, glad that my hands weren’t shaking.

  ‘That was a good place for an ambush,’ Boris said into the microphone. ‘We’ll know next time.’

  ‘Yes, that was smart of them,’ Sergey replied. ‘Good job they couldn’t put down the barrier and raise the metal roadblocks. I’m sure I could drive through the barrier, but none of us would be able to leap over the blocks, even Lenny in his show-off four-by-four.’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t an ambush,’ I suggested, remembering that the people who came out of the cabin didn’t have anything in their hands. ‘We don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ Boris agreed readily. ‘Maybe they just wanted to nick a couple of ciggies. Only I wouldn’t want to check, Anya, honest to God, I wouldn’t.’

  The comfortable feeling of safety we had while driving through the dark, uninhabited forest didn’t last long. Within about ten kilometres, there were lights ahead again. People, I thought, looking at the road nostalgically, there are so many of you everywhere, you live so close to each other and there’s no way to get away from you, however far we go. I wonder if there’s a place anywhere for hundreds of miles that is free of people, completely free, so that you could dump the car on the side of the road and go into the woods and stay there, without being afraid that somebody would find your footprints or the smoke from your fire and follow them. Who invented this way of living, where you live a mere couple of steps from the door or the window of a neighbour? Who decided that it would be safe when people like you, your neighbours and friends, can soon become your enemies if they know you have something they really want?

  We had only been on the road a few hours, and I was already feeling sick just thinking about driving through another village, another level crossing, torn between my aversion to taking my eyes off the road and my inability to prevent it.

  Perhaps I sighed, or pressed my foot a bit harder on the accelerator, because Boris, who was also looking at the fast-approaching lights, said:

  ‘Oh, come on, Anya, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just a small village. I think this is Nudol. We don’t even have to drive through it, it’s a bit off the road. We can have a nice, peaceful drive all the way to Klin now.’

  ‘Are we going to drive through Klin?’ I asked, my blood running cold. The thought of driving through a city, any city, was terrifying me. ‘Weren’t we going to avoid cities?’

  ‘Well, you can’t really call it a city,’ Boris said. ‘It’s hardly bigger than a Moscow suburb. I think it should still be OK there – we should be able to drive through without much trouble. You see, it’s like a big wave. It’s following us, and the faster we move, the more likely it is that it won’t overwhelm us. We’ve got neither the time nor the fuel to roam around country lanes, plus there’s no guarantee that they’re safer. The most important thing for us now is speed, and the sooner we escape the Moscow area the better. And we have Tver to look forward to. You can’t go round that, with the Volga running through it.’

  What he was saying reminded me of a scene in a film I’d once seen: cars squeezed between houses full of terrified people, with an approaching gigantic steel-coloured wall of water higher than the surrounding skyscrapers and heavy, like a concrete slab, with a white foamy crown on top, drawing closer and closer… Like a wave, he says. If we don’t hurry, it’ll swallow us in spite of our fast cars, guns, provisions, in spite of the fact that we know where we’re going, unlike those who stayed put, waiting for a lucky escape they won’t see and who will die under this wave, and unlike many others, who will take off as soon as they see the wave on the horizon, without any preparation, without packing, who are also doomed to failure. I can’t believe I used to enjoy films like that.

  The radio under my right elbow crackled and said:

  ‘Petrol station, Anya, look – on the left, there’s an open petrol station!’

  ‘Slow down, Sergey,’ Boris said immediately, but Sergey was already slowing down and Lenny did the same. I drove a bit further ahead to draw level with the Land Cruiser, and lowered the passenger side window.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Lenny shouted to us. ‘Why are we waiting?’

  ‘Let’s take a good look at it first,’ Boris said. ‘And you, Lenny, don’t jump out of the car as if you’re going to a birthday party, understand? We need to be careful.’

  There was no queue, which was understandable considering the empty motorway, the absence of radio chatter and the sinister level crossing. Apart from us, there were no strangers on the motorway, and the locals probably didn’t want to venture out for fuel in the dark. It was an ordinary roadside petrol station, with a peacefully glowing blue and white sign casting light on a couple of trucks staying overnight at the side, three cars with lit headlights near the pumps, the illuminated cashier’s window, some silhouetted people inside. Everything seemed more or less normal, other than the bright banner saying BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING THE CRISIS, a dark blue minibus parked nearby with SECURITY written on its side in yellow, and four people in identical black uniforms with machine guns. The uniforms had writing on their fronts and backs that was impossible to read from a distance, and peaked caps which, for some reason, underlined the difference between them and the kind of people who had kicked at our gate yesterday morning. One of them stood next to the road, holding a cigarette in a hollowed palm, military-style.

  ‘I think this looks fine, Dad,’ Sergey said. ‘These guys with machine guns look like they’re the company’s security men. We could really do with topping up. I think we should go in. They might tell us what’s going on, too.’

  ‘Crisis!’ Boris spat out sarcastically, and hawked onto the road through the open window. ‘They think it’s just a crisis? Listen to them. They have no idea, bastards. It’s the bloody apocalypse.’ He used several long-winded, fruity swear words, then looked back and apologised: ‘Sorry, guys, forgot you were here for a second.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Mishka said, impressed.

  Th
e radio started crackling again and Ira spoke. For some reason, she was speaking to me.

  ‘Anya, there are masks in the sandwich bag on your back seat. You should put them on. Tell Lenny, too.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Ira,’ Boris answered. ‘There’s hardly anyone there, they look fine, we’ll only scare them with our masks.’

  I could hear Sergey saying irritably, ‘Ira, why do we need the masks now,’ and she immediately shouted:

  ‘Because we must always wear them, do you hear me, we must, you don’t understand, you haven’t seen a thing!’

  And then I grabbed the microphone from Boris and said: ‘Got it, Ira, we’ll put them on. I’ll tell Lenny.’ I turned to Mishka and said: ‘Give me the bag with the sandwiches.’

  When we’d managed to put on our masks – Boris, swearing under his breath, was the last to pull on the pale green rectangle – we slowly drove onto the forecourt. A guard, who was smoking on the side of the road and had been watching us for some time, flicked his cigarette end away and started walking towards us, resting his arms on the machine gun hanging around his neck. Having caught up with him, Sergey stopped and wound the window down, and I could hear his voice clearly in the quiet, crisp frosty air.

  ‘Good evening, we’d like to get some petrol.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the guard, ‘that’s fine.’ Sergey’s mask didn’t faze the guard, but he kept his distance from the car, even stepped back a bit. ‘Just the driver out of the car, please – it’s one person at a time at the till,’ he said. ‘There’s still plenty of fuel, everything’s OK so far.’

  ‘Is there a limit on how much we can buy?’ asked Sergey, without moving.

  ‘No queue – no limit,’ said the guard in an official tone, and then smiled and added, in a normal voice: ‘Are you from Moscow? Do you need some spare cans, guys? I’d buy some if I were you, the fuel tankers haven’t been for a couple of days. We’re selling off the petrol that’s left, and then wrapping up by the looks of it.’