To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  Mishka was still standing in the same spot, holding the gun in the middle, and when I saw the look on his face I hurried across to him on all fours, keeping my head low, and lifted it only when I saw that the threatening barrel, which he was holding in his arms, was pointing in a completely different direction.

  ‘Well done you,’ Boris was saying into Mishka’s ear, still not daring to put his hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s OK, let go, I’ll take it.’ But Mishka’s fingers were white and didn’t want to unclench, and then I said:

  ‘Shh, it’s OK, baby,’ and then he jerked his head, glanced at me then at the rifle and quickly stuck it into the snow, propping it against the car. I thought he was going to burst into tears, but he didn’t; his whole body was shaking all the time I was holding him and Sergey was patting him on the back and ruffling his hair.

  It turned out that everyone was here. Natasha was crying, and Andrey helped her to get up; Ira, Anton and Marina, in her white ski suit, the girl in her arms, were near us too.

  ‘Where’s that…’ Boris said through clenched teeth. The rifle was in his hands again. ‘I told him, the idiot, to take the rifle. Lenny, damn you, where are you?’

  He walked round the Land Cruiser and fell silent. Sergey and I looked at each other and hurried after him, leaving Mishka behind. Lenny was still sitting with his back to the boot. When we ran over, he tried to get up.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a thick coat… wow, that was just like in a fucking action movie!’ He tried to get up but couldn’t; his legs weren’t letting him. He looked surprised. Andrey and Marina came up with the little girl. As soon as the girl saw him she screamed, and he stubbornly continued trying to get up, slipping around in the snow, which was crumbly and black under his hand.

  ‘Lenny, you’re bleeding,’ I said.

  ‘Rubbish, it doesn’t hurt,’ he said, and only then looked down at his coat.

  ‌10

  ‘Stuffed Duck’

  It’s a familiar scene in action movies. A bleeding hero lies on the ground, a screaming woman kneeling next to him. All of us had seen this a million times, but we still weren’t prepared for it, maybe because apart from these three elements – the blood, the man on the ground and the woman next to him – everything else was different. Marina only screamed once and fell silent straight away. It went quiet because none of us standing around dared utter a word. We didn’t even move, as if we had all been following a scenario which we couldn’t deviate from with an inappropriate word or gesture. She didn’t throw herself to the ground next to her husband, didn’t hold his head to her chest. Instead she carefully put the little girl down and lightly pushed her just a little away from herself, and then slowly took a few steps forward and lowered herself onto the snow, and sat very straight, white knees on white snow, on a spot where the snow wasn’t soaked in blood. She remained still, distant and impeccable, in her familiar style, and sat like this for a while, which seemed like forever. She didn’t touch him and said nothing, just looked at him. We stood around, not knowing what to do. When she finally lifted her perfect, thin hand, grabbed a lock of her long, silky hair and pulled it out with force, then lifted her arm and touched her hair again, intending to do the same thing, it was as if we awoke from our torpor: we all started talking and acting at once.

  It all happened quickly, as if during the short time we had been watching this scene each of us had spent the time thinking about what needed to be done. A second later, Ira sat on the snow next to Marina and held her hands in hers, Andrey and Sergey began unfastening Lenny’s jacket and lifting his jumper, and Natasha ran towards us, trying at the same time to open the plastic box with the red cross on its lid. It was too dark, and Boris brought a torch, which shone a cold, bluish light on Lenny’s flesh. From where I was standing, I could hardly see the wound. It didn’t look scary or deep, although it was swollen and somewhat rough, but there wasn’t much blood, or rather not as much as I’d expected: it continued to flow slowly, leaving dark, shiny stripes on Lenny’s pale stomach. Natasha finished wrestling with the first aid kit and started searching through it, crouched, her face desperate.

  ‘Damn it, damn it, I don’t know what we need, some kind of wipes, dressings, bandages – oh, here’s one, it says haemostatic dressing, only it’s really small, give me some light, somebody!’ The box slipped out of her hands and the things scattered over the snow, and Natasha rushed to pick up the little packages of paper and cellophane, which looked small and toylike. She picked them up, brushed them off and put them back into the box, but they fell out again. Boris pointed the light at us and said loudly:

  ‘Anya, help her, we need to bandage him and get him into the car! We need to move, they might come back!’

  One dressing wasn’t enough; we had to use two. Natasha tore the packages with her teeth and pressed them to the wound while I was bandaging Lenny’s stomach. I wasn’t doing a good job; he could barely sit and kept slipping sideways. Andrey and Sergey were holding him, but he was too heavy, and there was hardly any space near the open boot of the Land Cruiser, so we were in each other’s way all the time. When we finally fixed the ends of the last bandage we lifted Lenny, barely managing between the three of us, and pulled him onto the back seat of the Land Cruiser. Boris went over to Marina, still sitting on the snow, bent down and, pronouncing every word, clearly said to her:

  ‘I’ll drive, you sit next to him and hold the dressing. Hold it tight, do you understand?’ She lifted her eyes to him and nodded, then got up and walked to the car, still silent, like a robot. She didn’t even look at the little girl, who stood still a few steps away, a little red chunk with a hood pulled down to her eyes. Ira took the girl by the hand and walked her towards the Pajero, where Anton sat in the back. The child followed her, steadily moving her short, plump legs.

  Boris turned to me. ‘Anya, will you cope on your own?’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘But cope with what? What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and swore. ‘The main thing is to get away from here.’

  ‘You know he won’t be able to stay on the back seat for a long time, don’t you, Dad?’ Sergey said, and put his hand on the back of my neck. I closed my eyes for a second; I really needed his touch. ‘He can’t even stretch his legs there. We have to find a place to stay the night.’

  ‘You’ll have to keep your eyes peeled then,’ Boris answered. ‘There’s no radio in the Land Cruiser. We’ll follow you. Look as hard as you can for a good place to stay. We can’t afford to chance upon any other people like that, even if it means he has to… well, you understand.’

  We drove through two more level crossings on the next leg of our journey. Luckily they were both abandoned, with lifted barriers and dead signal posts. Every time, Andrey warned us via radio message that we were approaching them. ‘We’re coming up to a crossing now,’ he would say, or, ‘There’s a village on the right, we need to go faster.’ I remembered that I also had a satnav in the glove box – Sergey’s present, a gadget of no use to us here because it only covered Moscow and the Moscow region; none of us had thought that something desperately important would ever depend on that small thing, nor that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had to follow Andrey’s hatchback, relying on his warnings. He was looking for a suitable place to stop, safe and empty, where we could hide our cars so they couldn’t be seen from the road, top up with fuel, feed the children and eat, but most importantly, a place where we could find out, finally, how serious Lenny’s wound was, no matter what the consequences. Mishka sat next to me, holding the microphone and looking tensely through the window. From when he had let go of the rifle, we hadn’t had time to say a word to each other. It’s OK, baby, I wanted to tell him, it’s not too bad, just hang on a little bit longer. The most important thing is to find that damn place where we can stop, I thought, and then I’ll talk to you about everything that just happened, I promise I’ll talk to you.

  Cherepovets was now o
n our right. In the dark winter air it was difficult to see how much distance separated us from the industrial chimneys with their flashing red lights on top and the residential areas hiding behind them. This was the first city we had passed since Tver, and I was expecting anything – warning signs, checkpoints, long traffic queues, even people walking along the road – but there were none of these. The city stretched along the road, taking its own course, dimly shimmering in the distance, and whatever was happening there right now, no matter how far away, two kilometres away from us or twenty-two, I was grateful that we’d never know about it. The road curved tightly and took us left and up, but I didn’t even bother to look in the mirror. God bless you, people, I thought. We’re leaving you to deal with your own epidemics, your own fears, burnt cars and fights for survival, but I just want one thing: to be as far away from you as possible.

  ‘The road’s going to divide soon,’ Andrey said quietly. ‘We need to make a decision before we reach the fork. Natasha and I have an idea. We checked the map, and there’s plenty of summer cottages around here which should be empty in the winter. I don’t think we’d find a better place than that. But we’d have to deviate from our route and go a bit further towards Vologda. What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ Sergey replied, straight away. ‘Show us the way. What would you say, Anya?’

  I looked at Mishka and he looked at me, then he picked up the microphone and said, ‘We don’t mind.’ That was the first thing I had heard him say since we’d got back into the car.

  Summer cottage villages presumably look the same everywhere, no matter where they are: narrow country roads, occasional trees, motley patchworks of prefab houses with domed roofs, flower beds covered with plastic sheets, and iron gates with padlocks. The first village we saw was too close to the main road, separated from it only by a thin coppice, but the second one was so well hidden we nearly missed it. Nobody had cleared a path to it, naturally, so I had to let the heavy Land Cruiser lead our caravan to create tracks in the snow-covered roadway. It didn’t help; I was trying to follow him closely, but throughout the short distance from the main road to the house I could feel the wheels sinking into the snow and was worried we’d get stuck. When our car finally reached the gates, Boris and Sergey were wrestling with the lock and Andrey stood near them, holding a torch. I noticed a few lamp posts around us, but it was pitch-dark – there was no power in the area.

  I didn’t feel like leaving the car at all, but I pushed myself, climbed out and walked up to the Land Cruiser. Its engine was running, but through the tinted windows I could only see the dim bluish lights of the control panel. I opened the driver’s door. It was quiet inside, and a strong, heavy smell came out of the car. The front passenger seat was pushed forward, and on the floor, in between the seats, Marina sat in an awkward, squashed position, both of her hands pressed to Lenny’s stomach, her head low. Neither of them stirred when I opened the door, as if they had both fallen asleep and turned into a frozen sculpture.

  ‘How is he?’ I whispered as if afraid to wake them, but she didn’t reply or lift her head, instead shrugging slightly without changing her position. ‘Is he still bleeding?’ I asked, but she didn’t answer that either, just shrugged again.

  I probably should have said something encouraging, like We’re nearly there, or It’s going to be OK, but I couldn’t. If she’d lifted her head at least, or looked at me, or cried, it would have been easier, but it seemed she didn’t need my words at all, and that’s why I closed the door as quietly as I could and went back to the gate. Boris and Sergey managed to saw through the lock and open the hefty iron doors, which creaked and gave after a while. The headlights revealed another long street, disappearing into the darkness, with colourful fences framing it on both sides.

  ‘That’s a lot of snow,’ Boris said. ‘Hope we don’t get stuck.’

  ‘But at least we know there’s nobody there.’ Andrey shone the torch onto the snow under his feet – it was untouched and smooth. ‘We only need to pick a house.’ He started walking, sinking a little into the snow, with Boris, swinging the rifle onto his back, following.

  ‘Andrey,’ Boris said, ‘we need to find one with a chimney. It’s minus twenty and no electricity, we won’t survive till morning in a cold house.’

  They found a house almost immediately, in one of the side lanes not far from the entrance. The first floor was small, with only one window, and looked more like a loft or a garret, but there were two chimneys on the roof. We were so pleased with it that we didn’t look any further. The plot was tiny, with small fruit trees and some bushes tied with string. There wasn’t even enough space for one car, let alone four, so we had to leave them outside, in the middle of the street. But there was a well, which was good news – it was right behind the house, looking a bit like a dog’s kennel, its triangular roof topped with a snow hat – and in the furthest corner of the plot we found a small wooden sauna. The banya had a shed next to it, full to the brim with stacked wood.

  It was bitterly cold outside; while Sergey was knocking the flimsy lock off the front door, which led onto a small glass veranda, my ears went so numb I almost lost feeling in them.

  It wasn’t much better indoors, but at least there was no wind chill. I went into the house and automatically groped for the light switch, forgetting there was no power. The cool, dingy house with its boarded-up windows had everything else in it that made it a home, though: shelter from the cold, rain and snow; a pile of books tied with string sitting in the corner of the veranda; three rooms; a dresser with solemn pyramids of cups and plates; a clock on the wall; and most importantly, a big, brick-built stove, taking up most of the space in the middle of the house. As soon as we came in Sergey crouched in front of it and, holding the torch between his teeth, started stuffing the burner with the wood he had found on the floor next to it. I sat down beside him and watched him for a while, noting to myself how calm he was, this man I had chosen as my husband, how confident he was that everything would be all right, and I beat myself up for not having managed to learn, after all the time I had spent with him, to be as calm and confident as him when I most needed to be, because I couldn’t help thinking about the house on the lake, next to which this tiny, musty cottage would seem a real palace.

  ‘Don’t worry, Anya, in a couple of hours we’ll be walking around the house in just our underwear,’ he said and turned to me, his face reflecting the orange light of the fire: he was smiling.

  ‘Lenny hasn’t got a couple of hours,’ Boris said from behind my back. ‘We’ve already lost too much time. I sent Andrey to start the sauna – we’ll move him there. Anya, can you please dig out the medical book. We did bring it, didn’t we?’

  ‘The book won’t help us. We don’t even know how to put on a dressing correctly,’ I said, but nevertheless stood up and went back to the cars to find it.

  I found it quickly – when we’d been packing it was the last thing we’d remembered, so it was simply stuffed between two big bags. I turned on the light in the car and sat down to look through the book on my own. There was no reason to return to the cold, dark house yet, and it was warm and safe inside the car. I was almost sure I wouldn’t find anything useful, having assumed the book was just about herbal remedies and childhood diseases. To my great surprise, I found what I needed. It was a short article, every paragraph ending with the phrase ‘deliver the patient to hospital immediately’, but at least there was some information in it. I read it twice, slowly, thinking over every sentence, trying to memorise every detail, and then folded that page in half and, holding the book under my arm, went back to the house.

  When I came in, everyone looked up. They were all in the room, apart from Andrey, who was sorting out the sauna, and Lenny and Marina, who had stayed in the Land Cruiser until it warmed up indoors. It was still too cold; a thick candle was flickering in the middle of the table, which was covered with a sunflower-patterned cloth, and the light from the candle’s tiny flame was so dim that
I could barely see their faces – only the faint, pale vapour of their breath.

  ‘The news is bad and very bad,’ I said, because they expected me to say something, as if because I was holding the book I knew what to do. ‘If the knife didn’t go in too deep, we need to stitch up the wound and stop the bleeding, and then if there’s no blood poisoning, he’ll pull through, but he needs to stay in bed for three or four days, and we’ll have to spend them here.’

  They continued to look at me expectantly, and I carried on, feeling glad that Marina wasn’t here and that her little girl was too young to understand what I was saying.

  ‘But if the knife went in deep, perforated the abdominal wall and damaged something inside, we won’t be able to help him. Even if we stitch up the wound and stop the bleeding, he’ll die anyway. We only don’t know when,’ I added, because they were still silent. ‘It doesn’t say in the book. And I imagine it’ll be a painful death.’

  ‘What do you need to stitch up the wound?’ Sergey asked, finally.

  ‘What do you mean? Why me?’ I asked, surprised. ‘Do you really think I’m going to do it?’

  Nobody argued with me, but my question remained unanswered. Andrey came back and reported that the sauna had started getting warm; standing on the porch, I watched the men sinking into the snow as they took Lenny out of the car and slowly carried him into the sauna. The Land Cruiser’s door remained open and in the dim light from inside I could see Marina still sitting there, her hands on her lap. I don’t know how long she’d have sat like that, motionless, unresponsive, if Natasha hadn’t called her and brought her into the house.

  As soon as Marina came in, she sat down in the corner, by the table, and froze again. Her beautiful white ski suit was now stained, the sleeves, chest and knees covered in ugly brown spots, but she didn’t seem bothered.