by Yana Vagner
That was the end of their story. They both fell silent, and we all stood in the middle of this awful, bumpy road, in a place hardly suitable even for a short break: a caravan of three cars, loaded to the brim, with sleeping children inside – with a new addition, a fourth car, on the wrong side of the road. We were trying to come to terms with the fact that we were too late. Running away from the danger that was coming from the city that used to be our home, the city that no longer existed, we couldn’t imagine that we were driving towards the same kind of chaos we had been fleeing. We had thought it would be enough to slip away from the wave which was about to swallow us, but now it had become clear that there were plenty of other waves like the first, moving with a speed much faster than we were capable of; they were spreading like ripples in water around every city, around every crowded area, and if we wanted to save our lives we had to think of a new way of reaching the place we had chosen as our refuge, dodging those waves, not knowing when they would block our way again.
Nobody said a word, but I was sure we all had the same thoughts. I searched for Sergey’s hand in the dark and squeezed it, and he immediately started and said to Andrey:
‘You know what, move your car off the road and turn off your lights. There’s one nasty little village not too far from here. I hope they don’t wonder what’s going on under their noses. I’ll go and get the map – we should think of a new route. Come on, Dad, don’t put your rifle away just yet.’
Maybe there was no pause between Sergey saying this and Andrey turning and walking unhurriedly back to his car; maybe it only seemed to me that he thought for a moment, considering whether he should do what Sergey had told him or not. I don’t like him, I thought, or rather, I don’t like the kind of person Sergey becomes in his presence, but we have to take him with us, together with his permanently smiling wife, who had taken me by the elbow the day she met me, led me to one side and said so many words, none of which sounded sincere to me then nor later on, when I was remembering that strange conversation with her and trying to come to terms with my new role.
I went to the car to get my cigarettes so nobody could see my face – Mishka was still fast asleep, I didn’t want to wake him – and when I came back the hatchback was already on the side of the road with the engine turned off, facing the opposite way, and everyone was circled around a map laid out on the bumper. I came up and heard Sergey say:
‘…here’s the lake, can you see, Andrey? We wanted to avoid St Petersburg and get onto the Murmansk road through Kirishi and continue up north.’ He was holding a torch in one hand and was pointing at the map with the other. ‘This is the simplest and shortest way. We won’t be able to get there through Novgorod – we’ll have to take a detour. Let’s turn left at Valday and skirt round through Borovichi and Ustyuzhna, get up onto the A114 and come back on to the Murmansk road.’
‘The detour you’re talking about is some five hundred kilometres,’ Boris interrupted, gently pushing Lenny aside to be able to see Sergey. ‘Where will we find enough fuel? We’ll get stuck halfway.’
‘There must be something in Kirishi,’ Sergey said firmly. ‘There’s a processing plant, we’ll find fuel, I’m sure. Anyway, we don’t have any other choice, Dad. Even if we drove straight there, there wouldn’t be enough fuel.’
They went quiet. After a pause Andrey said:
‘Going via the Murmansk road isn’t a good idea. There are bridges everywhere – here and here, all the way to Petrozavodsk – and even if these bridges don’t all have traps like the one we nearly fell into, if you come across just one of them on your way, it’ll be the end of the journey. I hope you understand what I mean.’
Sergey nodded too quickly, I thought, and he moved the map closer to Andrey.
‘OK. What do you suggest?’
Andrey bent over the poorly lit sheet of paper upon which our salvation depended, frowned and fell silent for a long time, several minutes, and we stood around him and waited for his ‘verdict’, as if none of us was capable of thinking of anything useful. I even had the impression that nobody was looking at the map any more, only at Andrey’s face. I don’t know how long we would have stood like this if Boris, who had been standing a bit further away from us, holding his rifle and watching the road, hadn’t interrupted our thoughts.
‘Give it here,’ he said, unceremoniously pushing Andrey aside. He turned the map to himself and immediately poked at it much further to the right, with his nicotine-stained finger. ‘That’s where we’ll go. Instead of going up to the Murmansk road after Ustyuzhna, we’ll go further, through the Vologda region, past Cherepovets. We won’t have to go into the city, the road doesn’t run through it. Then we’ll go round past Lake Beloye and go up north, to Karelia.’
‘There are bridges there too,’ Andrey said.
‘Well, if you were trying to find a route from here to Karelia that avoided all rivers, then you’d have to spend another couple of hours working it out. We’re not in Kazakhstan, there are rivers everywhere. But after Ustyuzhna all the way to the Vongozero there isn’t a single big town, which means there aren’t many people. We’ll have to take a risk. Take your fingers off the map.’ Hinting that the discussion was over, Boris pulled the map from under Andrey’s hand and started folding it up in a businesslike manner.
‘It’s up to you,’ Andrey muttered and stepped back from the car. Boris turned to him and held out the folded map.
‘You have a better idea? Show me,’ he said, smiling. ‘Only do it quick, we’ve been here for a whole hour, right in front of this lot.’ And he pointed towards the village.
‘OK, OK, it’s not a bad route you’re suggesting.’ Andrey didn’t take the map, and turned away with a grumpy face.
Sergey was watching them without interrupting, and Lenny was also silent, moving his glance from one speaker to the other. I caught Ira’s eye and was surprised to see that she was hiding a smile. So you don’t like him either, I thought. That’s interesting.
‘So,’ said Boris cheerfully. ‘Are we ready to go?’
‘OK then, Natasha, we should go,’ Andrey said. ‘Good luck, guys.’ He patted Sergey on the shoulder and Sergey instinctively turned to him to give him a hug in return but suddenly stopped.
‘Hang on, are you seriously going to Vsevolozhsk?’ he said, confused.
Falling asleep in the passenger seat – my car was leading the convoy now, because Sergey had finally given in and let Ira drive – I was thinking: whatever happens, whatever my worries, I’ll be asleep, even if we come across a bridge with a trap, even if somebody stops us and makes us get out of the car they’ll simply have to carry me, because I’ll be asleep and won’t give a shit. The burst of energy I’d felt after the short rest in Tver had long gone. I had never driven all night before, so I was looking forward to closing my eyes and letting go, making all this disappear: the road, the danger waiting behind every corner, and these people I hardly knew. How many burdens do you have to put up with, how many missed heartbeats, how many shocks do you have to bear until you finally become numb and perceive everything that happens as senseless and unreal, background noise?
It was a good thing I was exhausted; my thoughts had become slow and lazy, and everything that had happened to us in the last few days had suddenly stopped worrying me. So we were a company of eleven people who would soon have to live together in a two-room hunting lodge with no bathroom or toilet, people who would never have chosen to do this, who wouldn’t even have gone on holiday together. While Sergey was trying to convince them and they were fervently whispering to each other, it was clear to me that they would agree in the end and come with us, because all the time they had been on the road since the bridge, and maybe even earlier, they had known there was no Vsevolozhsk left, that it was gone and so was the safe, comfortable parents’ house, and the parents too. They knew it and were simply refusing to admit it because they didn’t have another plan. I wondered how long he was going to pretend we would each go our own way. I was wonderin
g, half asleep, if Andrey would really have taken his wife, climbed into his hatchback and set out on a quest to find a mythical safe way to a dead city if Sergey had not insisted on them coming with us straight away. This seemed strange to me; I could never do this, could never pretend I didn’t need help, could never not lift a finger and calmly wait until others offered their help and support. And funnily enough, there is always someone who will persuade people like Andrey that they need to be saved, and who will be grateful to them for accepting their help. You can’t learn this kind of attitude to life; you have to be born with it. I could never do this, I thought, and finally fell asleep.
9
A Stabbing and a Shooting
This time I woke up suddenly, as sometimes happens, especially when you know that the day doesn’t look promising and you can’t protect your ears from the noise and your eyes from the light but you cling as hard as you can to the safe place of unconsciousness. As if saying to yourself If I can’t hear it or see it, then I’m not here. I would have resisted even longer if the noises weren’t intruding straight into my dream, ripping it apart. Right now there was too much noise, as if someone had shouted right in my ear. I opened my eyes and sat up.
We were driving though a town. Somehow it was obvious that it was a town and not a village, despite the two-storey low wooden houses with chimneys on top. There were domes overlooking the roofs from several sides, and it occurred to me that a village wouldn’t have so many churches. Then I saw the first stone house – also two-storey, but urban in appearance, although all windows on the ground floor were boarded up. The sun had nearly set and the air had a pinkish-blue haze but I kept looking around and couldn’t work out why I felt alarmed among these quiet houses in the shadow of the golden domes which seemed to be hanging in the translucent air, but there was clearly something wrong.
The first thing that struck me was the snowdrifts. They were enormous, too tall for the streets with their low houses, and almost reached the windowsills. The car was moving with some difficulty; I peered out of the front windscreen and saw that the road was covered in snow. The snow was compressed, as if several large vehicles had driven here and left a twisty track behind, and we were driving along this track, slowly, swaying from side to side. And then I saw a woman. She had a headscarf on, a grey, woollen one, tied under her chin. She was walking along the side of the road, slowly, struggling through the piles of snow, pulling a sledge behind her, an ordinary sledge with scratched metal runners, its back missing. And on the sledge, clumsily hanging over the edges, there was an oblong, black plastic bundle.
I was all eyes. Her silhouette, her tense, hunched back, the slowness of her walking, the sledge: all this reminded me of something disturbing, hostile, and I couldn’t remember what exactly. We overtook her and I looked back, trying to get a better look, but then our car turned off, freeing itself from the gripping snow, moved faster and reached a wide, deserted crossroads.
‘Left here,’ the radio crackled, and I jumped, as if not expecting to hear a human voice, as if I was alone in the car. When I turned my head I saw Boris – he was looking in front of him, holding the steering wheel with both hands, and didn’t even notice that I’d woken up. He looked focused and grim.
The road we turned into was presumably the town’s main street. It was wider and with a more compressed surface, but the snow banks on both sides were still enormous, concealing the pavements, and the people – there were a lot more people on this street – were walking in the road, slowly and silently; they were all going the same way, keeping their distance as if trying to stay away from each other, and most of them were pulling along sledges with identical oblong plastic bundles. One woman stopped to try and push her bundle back up on to the sledge. I could see that it was heavy, and she was circling around it, trying to lift each end of the bundle in turn. Another man went past her, leaving a lot of space between them, his face wrapped by a scarf.
That was when I heard an intermittent horn behind us. I couldn’t see from my seat what was happening, but Boris grabbed the microphone and almost shouted into it:
‘Ira, stop panicking, they’re not dangerous, stop speeding, you’ll crash into something and then we’ll be stuck here!’ But there was no answer, and a second later, swaying from side to side and beeping, Sergey’s car overtook us, almost getting bogged down in the deep snow. ‘Bloody idiot,’ said Boris and accelerated, trying to catch up with the disappearing Pajero. I thought we were making a lot of noise in this quiet street, but the people around us didn’t seem to notice. Only the woman struggling with her heavy load straightened up and briefly looked our way. The lower part of her face was covered by a headscarf, but I was still able to see that she was young. By the time we caught up with her, she had lost interest in us and carried on wrestling with her bundle.
Sergey’s car was quite far ahead. Throwing up whirling clouds of snowy dust and tilting dangerously, it kept moving further away from us, but Boris stopped trying to catch up with it – our car started rocking in the shallow snow track, and we slowed down again. I heard a strange sound, muffled by the tall snowdrifts and the houses crowded along the road. The sound was barely audible but reminded me of something terribly familiar, so I pressed the button and wound down the window halfway to hear where it was coming from.
‘You’re lucky Ira can’t see you,’ Boris said. ‘In Borovichi, Lenny tried to get out of the car. Ira made such a scene, it took us a while to calm her down.’
‘What’s going on here?’ I asked. After Boris broke the silence, it was easier for me to talk, as if he’d given me permission by speaking himself.
‘It’s the second town like this we’ve driven through. I didn’t understand at first – there’s no quarantine – but look around you,’ he replied, and all the signs I was struggling to put together suddenly made sense, as if I only needed Boris’s hint: the streets that hadn’t been cleared for ages, the boarded-up windows, the people with sledges, the oblong, heavy bundles, the covered faces and the silence, the unnatural, dead silence, broken by a monotonous ringing sound coming from behind the low, wide houses at regular intervals.
We soon reached the place the sound was coming from. To the right of the road, I saw a gap between the houses which revealed a small square, a clearing surrounded by low stone houses. We got a glimpse of the obligatory Lenin statue – a grey figure on a plinth, with white snowy epaulettes – but further into the square there was a church. We couldn’t see the whole of it, just five green and blue snow-sprinkled cupolas, and next to it stood a peaked belfry. This was where the caravan of people with sledges was making for; I only had time to notice a small pile of dark bundles on the snow and a man’s black-clad figure, standing near a makeshift platform, with an iron rod attached to it by a rope. The man in black, holding a long, heavy bar, was striking it rhythmically with a practised swing. We went past the square, but the resounding of the metal blows was heard for some time afterwards. When we drove past side streets, I noticed that some of them were laden with a thick layer of virgin snow. From then on we didn’t see a single footprint in the side streets that we passed. ‘How’s this possible?’ I said. ‘It looks like they were left without any support. No medical help, no ambulances – nothing?’
