by Yana Vagner
I hit the accelerator and swerved into the oncoming traffic lane, continuing to press on the horn. I needed to see what Sergey was doing, but at the same moment the Land Cruiser also made a sharp turn back onto the road, deciding not to stop after all, and, speeding up, our caravan zoomed past the damaged patrol car and the other people waiting to ambush us. I could see in the rear-view mirror that the man in the hi-vis jacket had lowered his wand and was standing in the middle of the road, watching us drive away, and that those behind him had come out too, with no reason to hide any more.
‘I wish I could have shot them,’ said Boris through clenched teeth and took his hand off the horn. ‘Frigging vultures,’ he added and looked back again, turning as far back as the seat belt would allow. I was looking at the back of the Land Cruiser, which was swaying from side to side, and thinking I was going to dump Ira, overtake her and clear off without looking back. I didn’t have enough time to stop and think, I didn’t have a plan, I just saw a threat and hit the accelerator, and now we both knew it and would never forget it. If anything else happened, something as dangerous as this, I thought, I won’t take a risk, I won’t stop and won’t try to help. I also thought – I couldn’t help asking myself this – what if there had been no Land Cruiser, what if it had been Sergey’s car in front of me, what would I have done then?
Boris finally stopped looking back and took the microphone. ‘We need to stop, Sergey,’ he said. ‘Look at her, swinging from side to side. She needs to swap with Lenny.’
‘Got you,’ Sergey’s voice said. ‘But we need to find a place a bit further away from here.’
We all knew that it would make sense to drive for another twenty or thirty kilometres before we stopped, but one look at the Land Cruiser’s wobbles was enough to convince us to stop there and then, as Marina might either collide with one of us or simply skid off the road. As soon as the dim glow of the street lights behind was out of sight, Sergey slowed down and said:
‘Let’s have a quick break. I can’t remember how far the nearest village is, but there are plenty of them around here. If we don’t stop now we might not find a suitable place between here and Valday. Let’s get out, just don’t forget to turn your lights off.’ And he pulled over by the side of the road.
We stopped; Boris fished around looking for his gun, trying to heave it out from behind the seat. Catching my eye, he said: ‘I’ll take it with me, in case we meet some more good people who might want to talk to us. Come out, Anya, let’s swap. Looks like I’m done sleeping.’
I didn’t want to get out of the car; I would have been happy to stay where I was and wait until Marina swapped seats with Lenny, so as not to catch her eye. But I had no choice, so I unbuckled my seat belt and stepped out onto the road. The driver’s door of the Land Cruiser also opened and Marina jumped out. Even with the lights off her snowsuit seemed to be glowing in the dark; she started running towards me, sniffling. I sank my neck into my shoulders; I wanted to say that I didn’t have time to think, I was scared, I had Mishka in the car with me, I couldn’t stop. But she ran up to me and took my hands in hers. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, and I saw that she was crying. ‘I’m such an idiot, I’m just tired, the road was awful, I didn’t have time to think, I saw that stupid police uniform and nearly stopped, and then you beeped and turned the main beams on, and Lenny woke up. If it wasn’t for you, Anya, if it wasn’t for you…’ She hugged me, whispering something quickly into my ear, and I stood there – but I couldn’t make myself touch her. I was going to leave you, I kept thinking, I was going to leave you and you didn’t even notice, but I would have left you, I know I would.
Lenny came up and led her away, back to the car, then he came back and said:
‘I’ve only got a third of a tank left. We’ll be in Valday soon, and it’s about two hundred kilometres till Chudov. I’d rather top up here, before we’re on the Murmansk road. We might not get another chance.’
While they were topping up, Boris keeping watch with the gun while Lenny and Sergey were sorting out the cans, I stepped aside and lit a cigarette. The constant stress of focusing on the road, and the feeling of danger that had held me in its paralysing grip since we left home and which had made me hold the steering wheel tight throughout the whole journey, were abruptly gone, as if they had never been there. I was relieved that I didn’t even need to watch the road for newcomers, because now everything – planning the route, the fuel supply, our safety – wasn’t my responsibility any more; soon I would climb into my seat, push it back, close my eyes, and all of this would cease to exist, and when I’d open them again there would be dense taiga around, lakes and occasional villages with exotic northern names, and this crazy, aggressive rabbit warren would be left behind.
They finished filling up and it was time to go. I went up to Sergey and touched his sleeve.
‘I’m off to sleep,’ I said. ‘Boris will drive. Let’s move the Vitara to the front. Ira can drive, you need to get some sleep.’
‘Not now,’ he said straight away, with a little irritation in his voice, as if he was waiting for me to say that and knew I was going to insist. ‘You see, Anya, there’s a difficult bit of the journey coming up – Valday, Novgorod. After St Petersburg we can swap, it’ll become easier after Kirishi. I can’t let her drive now.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t she have some more rest, poor love, she’s so tired, what with all the lying down on the back seat since yesterday.’ Before I had finished my sentence I regretted saying this, because he was right and we both knew it. I said it to get back at him because he had left me a few days back, in the middle of the night, and had gone to Moscow to pick them up without saying anything; because if it wasn’t for her, it would have been him and not Boris asleep on the seat next to me for the last four hours, and I wouldn’t need to worry about him. Because she called me baby. Because I didn’t like her. Because I’d never be able to get rid of her. And despite being ashamed of these thoughts, I would never be able to think of her differently.
I didn’t want him to see my face, but I couldn’t let the conversation finish like this. I turned away; I needed to regroup, to put on a carefree expression, a smile, say something light-hearted, but however hard I tried I could manage neither smile or joke. He put his hand on my shoulder, brought his face to my ear and whispered:
‘I know how you feel, but if you knew how bad a driver she is, you wouldn’t let her behind the wheel in the dark either.’ And he gave me one of his beaming smiles, which I hadn’t seen for ages.
‘I’m off to sleep,’ I said with relief. ‘Since I don’t need to worry about my driver.’
We hadn’t yet set off again – Boris was readjusting the mirrors, I was fastening my seat belt while trying not to disturb the sleeping Mishka – when the radio spoke in Sergey’s voice.
‘Attention all listening to this channel, there are gunmen on the motorway near Vypolzov. Be careful, I repeat…’ I froze, holding my belt buckle.
‘Why’s he doing this? Who will hear this except those bandits? It’s not as if the road is crammed with cars.’ Boris, frowning, shook his head disapprovingly and started saying something to me, when the radio suddenly came to life again and we heard an excited voice, barely audible because of the interference.
‘Sergey? Is that you?’ And, without waiting for an answer, the voice went on hurriedly, as if worried that the signal would disappear: ‘Sergey! Wait, which way are you going? St Petersburg or Moscow? Where are you?’
Sergey was silent. Perhaps he didn’t recognise the voice, which was almost impossible to distinguish through the crackling on the radio. There could be other people called Sergey, I thought, or maybe somebody had been listening to us earlier and was trying to make us talk, because if we were on-air that could only mean one thing: that we had petrol, food and a car, and that someone probably wanted to take it all away from us.
‘What’s the coverage for this radio?’ I asked Boris.
‘About fiftee
n to twenty kilometres of good reception. So he’s somewhere near.’
‘Give me the radio,’ I said, and reached over. ‘I won’t tell them anything. Give it to me before he answers back!’ And when he passed it to me, I pressed the button and slowly and clearly said: ‘Don’t say a word. Can you hear me? We don’t know who this is.’ And the unfamiliar voice, which I could hear even better now, shouted with even greater excitement:
‘Anya! I know it’s you! You suspicious bastards, it’s so great to hear you, are you going to St Petersburg? We’re coming towards you, wait, I’ll turn my roof lights on, you’ll spot me easily, don’t go too fast.’ I still couldn’t understand who it was – he kept talking so nobody could get a word in edgeways – and when he finally stopped for a second, Sergey said, laughing:
‘I thought you’d never take your finger off the radio button, Andrey.’ At the same time, we saw a yellow spot, slowly growing in the predawn haze, and a few minutes later a solitary car, with three bright orange lights on its roof, was rushing towards us.
‘Who’s Andrey?’ asked Boris, straining to see in the darkness ahead of him.
‘A family friend,’ I said, watching Sergey jump out of the car and run towards a silver hatchback with a tightly covered, snow-sprinkled trailer behind. Ira followed, hastily putting on her coat on the way, and two people stepped out of the hatchback, a man and a woman, and the four of them, forgetting about all health precautions, stood in the road, talking animatedly.
‘Which family friend?’ asked Boris.
‘Well, how can I put it…’ I said with a sigh, unbuckling my seat belt and opening the door. ‘Not mine, I’m afraid.’
How is it possible, I was thinking, walking slowly towards the group of people standing in the middle of the road, that there isn’t a single person among this strange party, apart from Mishka, who I really want to take with me on this journey, who I could rescue because I need to rescue them? My mum was no longer there, and Lena, my darling friend, had presumably perished in the city too, on a dirty mattress in some makeshift medical emergency station. And everyone else I held dear, who I loved, who I could talk to openly, even just exchange knowing glances with – they had all disappeared, vanished, maybe even died. I had banned myself from thinking about them, at least for a while, until we stopped running, until we reached the lake where I could lose myself in the forest, sit on the ground, hug a tree and shut my eyes. But could someone explain to me what the likelihood was of meeting someone you knew, on a deserted road, seven hundred-odd kilometres long, at night, and why on earth it had to be these people and not the ones I so badly needed?
I came closer and took Sergey lightly by the hand. He turned to me and said:
‘You won’t believe it, Anya! Can you imagine? We could have easily gone past each other in silence—’
‘You were the one who kept on about CB radios to me years ago, so there wasn’t much chance of us going past in silence!’ Andrey interrupted, putting his arm around Sergey’s shoulders and beaming. It was strange to see him so open, so naturally happy; I remembered him as an arrogant, gloomy type. Sergey had known him since school or university – I couldn’t remember for sure – and as often happens in long-term friendships, each of them had chosen a persona they were going to play in this friendship a long time ago, and it didn’t matter what kind of person each of them really was now because they still had those childhood masks on, the masks welded to their skins while they were getting to know each other. For my part, I had never managed to understand Sergey’s relationship with Andrey.
‘Anya,’ the woman standing next to him said loudly and excitedly, and she turned to her husband. ‘I told you it was Anya’s voice and not Ira’s!’
‘Good to see you too, Natasha,’ I answered. I didn’t have to be polite and try to hide my sarcasm; she wouldn’t have noticed anyway, as she had never been sensitive to that kind of thing. Natasha, smiling, slowly looked round at all of us. Her smile was getting bigger and bigger, although it couldn’t carry on growing forever.
‘Is this how you’re travelling, in your little ménage à trois?’ she asked with enthusiasm, and I immediately remembered why I’d never liked her.
There was no time for an awkward pause as everyone turned their attention to Lenny, who had just come over, and Boris, who had climbed out of the car and was walking towards us holding his rifle ready, defiant in spite of everything. For some time, the men were shaking each other’s hands and exchanging obligatory pleasantries, and when they finished, Sergey finally asked the question which had been on the tips of everyone’s tongues since we’d seen the silver hatchback in front of us.
‘Guys,’ he asked, smiling, ‘why the hell are you going in the opposite direction?’
Neither of them answered but their faces darkened, as if somebody had turned off a light, and they were silent for a few seconds. Then Natasha looked up at her husband and lightly pushed him with her elbow and only then he said, now in all seriousness, ‘We’re going the opposite way, Sergey, because the road from Moscow to St Petersburg ends before Novgorod.’
‘What do you mean, ends?’ I asked, not believing my ears.
‘I mean,’ he said, looking me in the eye, ‘that near the bridge across the Msta – I think the place is called Belaya Gora – they’ve blocked the road with trucks. When we were driving towards it, it was still possible to get onto the bridge, but there was no way across it. We were lucky to notice in time.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, it was impossible not to notice. There were about twenty or thirty of them, they were armed, and we couldn’t see if they were troops or not.’
‘We weren’t the first to fall into that trap,’ Natasha said quietly. She wasn’t smiling any more. ‘If you could only see what they’ve done there.’
We were silent. Everyone needed time to think over the bad news. Then Andrey said:
‘In short, wherever you’re going, you need to go back. The federal road’s gone.’
‘Well, this is just ridiculous.’ Ira’s voice sounded demanding and almost angry, and it occurred to me that I was beginning to get used to her intonation. ‘There must be a way round. We can’t go back, we’ve nowhere to go back to, let’s go by a different road. Isn’t that possible? Surely there’s more than one way to get to St Petersburg from Moscow?’
‘Screw St Petersburg,’ Lenny interrupted gloomily. ‘Why do you want to go there? Do you think there’s anyone left alive?’
‘Well, that’s where we were going, actually,’ Natasha said, and when we all looked at her, surprised, she carried on, impatiently, as if defending herself. ‘And there’s no reason to look at me like that. OK, not quite to St Petersburg, near Vsevolozhsk, my folks have a house there. Last week it was all fine there, I spoke to my dad every day while the phone was still working. It was much better there than here. There’s a lake there, we’ve got a boat with us.’ She couldn’t stop talking quickly, almost choking on her own words – she said that the house was really big, that they’d have died had they stayed in Moscow, that the phone lines were dead but she knew for a fact that her parents were fine, and it became clear to me that she had said this so many times, that she and her husband had had so many arguments, and then they had both made the decision to leave, and one of them wasn’t sure if it was the right decision while the other had no other choice but to pretend they were sure it was right, just to make the other one leave too. Their story reminded me of our trip to the checkpoint, when I was afraid not so much of the disease waiting in ambush somewhere ahead, but of Sergey changing his mind and us having to go back, and never seeing my mum again and not even knowing what had happened to her. It was unbearable to listen to Natasha, how she talked, spitting out her words, hurriedly, incoherently, her eyes glaring, and I realised that this woman, who had managed to upset me within two minutes of being here, was on the brink of a breakdown, and I wanted both to support her and make her shut up at the same time, but I didn’t have the right words, so I came a bit closer and lightly
squeezed her arm just above the elbow. She quickly pulled her arm away from my hand and scowled at me, her face distorted.
‘Don’t touch me! We just need to find another road. We were going to turn right and try the Pskov motorway, and then you turned up. Why are you looking at me like that? Andrey, tell them it’s possible!’
Andrey winced, uncomfortable. I could see it was hard for him to listen to her. It had probably been the only subject of their conversations during the time they had spent in the car together. He didn’t touch her, just pushed her lightly aside and said:
‘Sorry, guys, we’re a bit overwhelmed, this damn bridge did us in, we’d been going for about a hundred kilometres at full throttle until we heard you on the radio.’
And then they told us their story. Interrupting, shouting over each other, they told us how they had driven for half a day and all night, only stopping once near Tver to top up with fuel; how, approaching the fateful bridge, Natasha had been driving and Andrey was asleep, and she didn’t understand straight away what had happened. First they crossed a quiet, deserted bridge across a small river, and she didn’t pay any attention to it, it was just a bridge, and the road after it was wonderful. There were several kilometres of beautiful, silent woods, and they were glad to be able to relax after the stressful hours of driving through villages and towns, and were, like we had been, happy to have a break. As soon as the woods finished, they were passing fields on both sides of the road. There were no villages (‘Yes, there were,’ Andrey interjected. ‘They were just a bit further away from the road.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she shouted. ‘You were asleep, the road was deserted and it was dark, it was just a field.’ ‘OK, just a field,’ he agreed, adding, ‘It was a kilometre to the bridge, it was well lit, you must have been able to see her—’ ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘The bridge was too far and the road was dark, and then I thought maybe she was infected, she was walking in the road, right in the middle, I nearly ran her over!’), and in the darkness the headlights suddenly revealed somebody walking in the road. Natasha hit the brakes and the hatchback skidded because of the heavy trailer, but she managed to straighten up the car. She didn’t have enough time to take a proper look, but she thought it was a woman. Her face was covered in blood and she was staggering, and a few metres further on they saw a car in the ditch. It was one of those little girly cars, and it was lying on its side, like a small turtle, and a dark spot of oil was growing around it. Things were scattered along the road – bags, clothes – and it was difficult to drive around them, especially after Natasha briefly lost control of the car, and then Andrey finally woke up. She was shaking and he said they should stop, but she refused; it was unclear what had happened, and she was afraid of stopping. They had barely had time to talk about it before they saw the bridge, which was brightly lit, long, and supported by huge concrete piles. They’d usually drive through the lit-up gaps of the road as fast as they could; that’s why she hit the accelerator and would probably have run straight into the trap if another car hadn’t been reversing towards her; she wouldn’t have understood that it was reversing if it wasn’t for the white rear lights, which were glowing even through the dirty snow that stuck to them; she had to swerve to one side to avoid crashing into the other car, and that’s why she slowed down. Then they both saw the truck blocking their way at the other end of the bridge, a truck with blue lettering on a dirty grey flapping tarpaulin, plus five or six cars with open doors and several bodies on the ground – somehow they guessed they were bodies, although there was lots of other stuff around. The bridge was at least four lanes wide, perhaps even more, and was covered in various kinds of junk. Andrey shouted, ‘Reverse, Natasha, reverse!’ when they saw people running towards them – a lot of people. Perhaps they were chasing the car which had been reversing and was now gone. The people were firing guns. Natasha and Andrey couldn’t hear the shots but could see the flashes of light, and it was scary, properly scary, and Natasha realised that she wouldn’t be able to reverse with the heavy trailer, so she swerved sharply to the right, bringing the car close to the iron fence, and then turned the wheel all the way to the left, praying for there to be enough room to turn around. For a second she thought there wasn’t enough room and that the trailer would ram into the fence and break through it, dragging them into the freezing black water, but it only lightly scraped the sturdy iron posts, and the hatchback, wobbling and speeding up, screeched away from the bridge. They drove so fast that they missed the overturned car as well as the woman with the bloody face they had seen only minutes before.
