To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

‘I’m fine,’ I replied quickly, and although what I really wanted to tell him was how awful it had been to see the burnt-down fairy-tale house, how difficult it had been to lie to the man at the petrol station who’d called us girls, how frightened I was every time a car came from the opposite direction or we had to go past a village, how badly I needed to be with him, to see his face reflecting the light of occasional traffic, and instead I’d been watching the rear lights of his car for the last four hours, and that was only when they weren’t obstructed by the Land Cruiser. Instead I said something completely different: ‘I’ve persuaded Boris to take a rest – I don’t like the way he looks. You need to get some sleep. Ask Ira, maybe she’ll swap with you for a couple of hours.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That isn’t a great idea – it should be either Boris or me driving the leading car. I’ll go as far as Novgorod, and then we’ll wake Dad up. Ira will drive, and you and I will be able to get some sleep.’ He put his hand on the back of my head, running his fingers through my hair, and I thought, he’s right, and realised that we wouldn’t change places now, or after Novgorod, because we couldn’t stay for long, we had to keep going forward, without losing time, because we needed every hour, every minute to increase the distance between us and the wave we were escaping.

  Sergey’s door opened and Ira carefully stepped down and said quietly: ‘Anton’s asleep.’

  She didn’t say it to anyone in particular, but I knew her words were addressed to me. We could easily do something to ensure that Sergey and I could be in the same car, perhaps move the sleeping boy into my Vitara – no, we could even leave him there and Sergey could drive the Vitara himself and Boris could drive his car. But Boris needed rest and I could still take the wheel for some time, so there was no point in making all these complicated arrangements because I was missing my husband after less than two hundred kilometres. I didn’t answer, although she wasn’t really waiting for me to answer; she was just standing near the car, facing the road, her hand on the roof.

  We heard the sound of snapping branches. It was Lenny, coming back; shortly afterwards Mishka skipped past, slammed the door, and disappeared into his corner on the back seat. Boris threw away his cigarette end and also headed back to the car, but I still couldn’t unclasp my arms and kept holding Sergey as if I was recharging myself from him, like a battery which needed every extra second to top up energy, and I whispered – quietly, so that only Sergey could hear:

  ‘I don’t give a damn if they’ve all come back; let’s stand like this for a bit longer, OK?’

  ‘I don’t either,’ he replied into my temple. ‘Let’s.’

  I wasn’t watching the road and that’s why I didn’t see the approaching car until it blinded us with its lights. Lenny and Boris were already in their cars, but Marina hadn’t come back yet. Sergey didn’t move; he just let go of me and turned slightly towards the car, which pulled over close to us, on the opposite side of the road. The driver’s door opened and somebody poked their head out and shouted:

  ‘Hey guys, do you know if the petrol stations are still working in Tver?’

  Dazzled by the lights, we didn’t say a word, trying to figure out who the person was and annoyed with his wretched DIY xenon headlights. The door opened wider and he stepped out. We could only see his silhouette in the brightness. He took a step towards us and repeated his question:

  ‘I say, are the petrol stations still working in Tver? Somebody said you can still buy petrol there but the queues are horrendous.’

  The details of the scene I was looking at were emerging slowly, as if on a photograph immersed in developer, as my eyes got used to the bright light. Squinting from behind Sergey’s shoulder, at first I saw a dirty car – the number plates weren’t Moscow ones – and then the person who was talking, a middle-aged man wearing glasses and a thick woollen jumper without a jacket, which he’d presumably left inside the car. He was smiling, hesitant, and was about to take one more step forward when he threw his arms up in the air as if protecting his head, and froze, and I heard a voice behind me which I didn’t recognise straight away, it sounded so harsh and abrupt:

  ‘Don’t come closer. I said, stop!’

  ‘Hey, are you mad?’ the man said quickly. ‘Wait, I only wanted to ask—’

  ‘Stop!’ Ira shouted again. I turned back; she was standing by the car, pressing Sergey’s gun to her right shoulder, holding it clumsily, and kept lifting the long, heavy barrel, waving it dangerously from side to side as it was too heavy for her to hold up. It was clear that the hammer wasn’t pulled back, but it was impossible to see that from where the man stood.

  ‘Jesus, Ira!’ Sergey shouted, but she only shook her head impatiently and addressed the man again.

  ‘Turn round and go back to your car.’ When he took a blinking, frightened step forward instead, she shouted: ‘Back to your car! Get out of here!’

  The man didn’t say another word. He carefully walked backwards, got into his car, slammed the door and, tyres screeching, peeled off and disappeared, along with the dazzling headlights. At the same time Sergey went over to Ira and took the gun from her. She let go of it without resisting and now stood with her arms hanging wearily down, although she was sticking out her chin defiantly.

  ‘Why on earth did you take the gun?’ he said crossly. ‘You can’t shoot anyway, what the hell were you thinking?’

  Lenny poked his head cautiously out of his car.

  ‘What a lovely family you are,’ he said with a smirk. ‘If in doubt, just grab a gun.’

  Ira looked round at each of us in turn and folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘The incubation period,’ she said, stressing every word, ‘is from several hours to several days. It varies from person to person, but on average it’s very short. It starts with shivers, like a common cold. You’ve got a headache, your body aches, but you can still walk, talk, drive, and you pass the virus on to the people you’re close to – not to all of them, but to many. When the fever hits, you can’t walk any more—’

  ‘That’s enough,’ I said. Sergey looked back at me.

  ‘You lie in bed, sweating. Some people become delirious, some have convulsions, but some are particularly unlucky: they stay conscious the whole time, for the several days it lasts,’ she continued, not paying any attention to me, ‘and right at the end this bloody foam comes out of your mouth, which means—’

  ‘Enough!’ I shouted again. I turned around and ran to the Vitara, shut the door so nobody could see my face, and burst into tears there. Mummy, darling, I thought, several days, while we were hiding in our comfortable, cosy world, the several whole days. Several – days.

  ‘Anya.’ Sergey opened the door and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sweetheart.’

  I raised my head, and he saw my tear-streaked face and winced. He didn’t say another word, just stood there and kept his hand on my shoulder until I stopped crying.

  ‘Are you OK? Can you drive?’ he asked finally, after I wiped away my tears, and I turned to him and said:

  ‘She should stay away from me, this… this Rambo of yours. Keep her at a distance.’ And I immediately felt disgusted with myself for the way I scowled as I was saying it. Sergey nodded, squeezed my shoulder and slowly walked back to his car. As soon as we pulled away it started snowing; the snowflakes were big, dense, and it felt like Christmas.

  It soon became clear that Marina and Lenny had swapped seats because we were moving more slowly; as soon as Sergey’s Pajero sped up and reached a hundred kilometres an hour, the Land Cruiser started lagging behind, and the distance between the two cars would increase so much that I could easily overtake it and push in between them. Unfortunately, the snowfall was becoming heavier as well. It was a proper blizzard. For some time, I was irritated at how slowly we were driving. I flashed my headlights at Marina to try to make her go faster, and even considered overtaking the Land Cruiser but it was obvious that the heavy car would tail off in Marina’s inexperienced hands
and disappear into the impenetrable white foam closing in on us from all sides. Soon the Vitara started slipping on the road and it became obvious that it was dangerous for me to drive fast too.

  An hour or so later, we were crawling slowly and I had stopped looking sideways and trying to make out the villages we were passing. I knew they were there only because the faint, dispersed light from the street lamps was coming through the snow cloud we were in. They were surprisingly scarce, at least judging by the streetlit parts of the road. I didn’t remember the map well, but I had thought that this area was much more densely populated; perhaps I was so tired I didn’t always notice the transition from dark to light and back, or maybe there were power cuts in some parts.

  Mishka fell asleep as soon as we pulled away. I could see his tousled hair in the mirror. He rested his head on the wobbly pile of boxes and bags towering on the back seat. So good we’re together, I thought, looking at his peaceful, sleeping face. I’ve managed to take you away from this horror – maybe at the last minute, but I’ve managed, and I’ll take you to a place where nobody can harm you, where there are no people, only the nine of us, and everything will be fine.

  Boris was asleep next to me, on the passenger seat. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell him to recline the seat, so his body was resting uncomfortably on the seat belt, cutting into his hunting jacket, his head lolling and almost touching the dashboard. For some reason it was only now, when everyone was asleep, and the windows were plastered with sticky wet snow, and the screeching wipers were struggling to clear it off the windscreen through which even the Land Cruiser’s tail lights were barely visible, that I finally felt calm and became confident that we’d reach the lake which promised us our long-awaited salvation. Our airy, light house with its transparent walls seemed more and more like a distant memory now, like a childhood dream, and for some reason I didn’t regret losing it. The most important thing to me was the fact that we were alive, healthy, that Mishka was sound asleep on the back seat, and that Sergey, who was staring into an empty, snow-covered road, was in a car only a few metres ahead of me.

  As soon as I thought this, the radio started crackling and Sergey, somewhere from underneath my right elbow, said:

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘I am,’ I said, into the air, and then picked up the radio, pressed it against my lips so as not to wake anyone sleeping, and said again, ‘I am,’ and laughed, because I was happy to hear his voice.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he whispered, and I realised that everyone else in his car was fast asleep too, somewhere far away, separated from him by headrests and bags, covered by darkness, as if they didn’t even exist, as if it was just Sergey and me on this snowbound, empty road.

  ‘I’m driving,’ I said. ‘And thinking about you.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Christmas soon…’ he said quietly.

  We drove in silence for a while, but this time the silence was completely different, and the snow outside was different too – it was soft, cosy, peaceful. Most importantly, I wasn’t alone any more: Sergey was with me, even if I couldn’t see his face or reach over and touch him.

  ‘It’ll be a brilliant Christmas, you’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said and smiled, and although he didn’t see my smile, I knew that he knew I was smiling.

  ‘Let’s sing a song,’ he suggested.

  ‘We’ll wake everyone up,’ I answered.

  ‘We’ll sing quietly,’ he said, and without waiting for my reply, started singing:

  ‘Pitch-black raven, do not hover, circling high above my head…’ It was his favourite song, and he always sang it. Despite the off-key notes, which I couldn’t help noticing thanks to my piano lessons as a child, this was the only kind of performance I loved for this song, because he was so expressive, so passionate, as if he was living it, every word of it, which was more important than music, it was more powerful than any rules of singing, and the only thing his singing made me want to do was to join him and carry on:

  ‘There’s no prey for you to discover. Pitch-black raven, I’m not dead…’

  We sang it to the end, and it became quiet again. The windscreen wipers were swishing rhythmically, the rear lights of the Land Cruiser glowing through their covering of snow. Nobody woke up, and then the radio crackled again and somebody’s voice spoke, so clearly in the hushed silence that it made me jump:

  ‘That was great. How about this one? ‘My dark thoughts, my secret thoughts…’ The man carried on chanting in a husky voice – singing was clearly not his forte – until the road took him out of our radio’s range. For a while we could still hear an odd word, but soon the radio went dead again.

  ‌8

  Encounters on the Road

  I wished we could drive like this all the way. I thought I could manage five hundred, even a thousand kilometres in this darkness, at crawling speed, holding tight to the steering wheel on this slippery road – if I only never had to stop again, to look for fuel, to be scared of meeting anyone on the way. I wanted to carry on like this until we reached our safe place and not speak to anyone again except Sergey, to not listen to Boris’s dark humour, which freaked me out, nor to Ira’s descriptions of this disease we’d known so little about before and which we were all now terrified of catching. On this dark, empty, snow-sprinkled road it was easy to imagine that we weren’t running away from anything, weren’t hurrying anywhere: we were moving from A to B, as if we were trying to solve a mathematical problem. It’s amazing how reluctant we were to let go of the belief that the situation wasn’t dire. If the oncoming traffic, the checkpoints and armed guards disappeared, our fears and anxieties would fade too, as if they had never existed, as if the whole journey had been no more than a little adventure, or maybe somebody’s experiment, an endurance test. In the end we’d reach the invisible finish line, where there would be television crews, the bright lights would come on, and the person who started this experiment would come out from behind the camera and tell us: ‘It was all staged, there was no epidemic, you did what you were expected to do. You can go home now.’

  It might have been possible to hold on to this illusion had my eyes not involuntarily glanced at the fuel level every now and then, at the thin red needle that kept dropping lower every time I looked at it: three hundred, two hundred and fifty, two hundred kilometres. And then we’d have to stop, open the boot, take out the jerrycans and top up, watching our backs all the time, listening carefully and checking to see if the road was clear. I was always bad at maths, both at school and afterwards, in my adult life; I always needed a piece of paper or a calculator to work it out, but I’d had enough time by then to estimate that the petrol we had, splashing about heavily somewhere in the depths of our car, wasn’t going to be enough, and that somewhere ahead, among the unfriendly, icy northern lakes, maybe even sooner, perhaps in the middle of a road, several kilometres away from some godforsaken village, the engine would choke and die, and this illusion of safety we had in the car – with its lockable doors, rubber mats, heated seats and our favourite CDs in the glove box – would die, too.

  But that hadn’t happened yet; there was still time. The needle was dropping slowly, the road was empty and I could tell myself: Anya, stop getting ahead of yourself, you’re not alone, your job is to stay awake, hold on to the wheel and watch the red rear lights of the Land Cruiser, and by early morning, when we reach Novgorod, you’ll swap places with Boris, close your eyes, and the rest of the journey will be somebody else’s responsibility. While you’re asleep the others will manage to top up the fuel safely and reach our destination, where nothing will threaten you.

  Within an hour or two the heavy snowfall died down, the dark air around us became clear, and the lit-up areas of the villages alongside the road became visible again. Their names were unfamiliar and they looked different from the tidy settlements we had gone past outside Moscow: small, dilapidated two-window houses, sloping fences. The windows facing the road were dark, like close
d eyes, and many were hidden behind closed shutters. The road here was so narrow that I might have thought we were lost if Sergey hadn’t been confidently continuing forward. Perhaps because it was easier to drive now, or maybe because the stillness accompanying the heavy snowfall had gone, we started moving faster, and even Marina managed to increase her speed to almost a hundred kilometres per hour.

  It happened straight after Vyshny Volochek, a sleepy, deserted, unprotected town with lonely flashing traffic lights in the centre. We had gone through it without stopping, as we had with the other two similar-looking deserted villages with blind windows and sporadic lamp posts along the roadside. Soon afterwards I had noticed the pale light of the street lamps on the road ahead, and right in front of a sign I didn’t have time to read, there appeared a white and blue traffic patrol car, parked at a right angle to the road, with its lights off; near it stood a man in a fluorescent safety jacket with reflecting stripes. We were about three hundred metres from the car when the man noticed us, lifted his wand and pointed to the opposite side of the road. The Land Cruiser slowed down, indicated right and started pulling over to where the man had pointed. What are you doing, idiot, I thought in despair, do you think they’re a real traffic patrol? I shouted ‘Marina!’ as if she could hear me, and Boris immediately woke up, lifted his head, and in a flash, leaning on me, blew the horn. Its harsh, loud noise made me jump. I switched to full beams, which exposed the patrol car with a cold, bright blue stream of light, and we saw that one of its windows was smashed and the side facing us was dented. There was something wrong about the way the man standing next to it looked: his hi-vis jacket was worn over a dirty mud-splattered tracksuit, which seemed odd for a traffic officer, and to the left of the car, in the bushes, we saw more people, wearing plain clothes. I’m going to overtake her and leave her here, I thought, helpless, and she’ll have to sort it out on her own. I don’t believe Sergey will pull over, I don’t even have enough time to warn him on the radio, he must have realised this isn’t a real traffic patrol.