To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘Say goodbye to the federal roads,’ Andrey said over the radio, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Watch out for the sign for Kirillov, we need to turn right straight after.’

  We had no choice. If we had been courageous enough to drive along the left bank of the gigantic Onezhskoye lake, we wouldn’t have had to leave the wide, smooth but snow-covered surfaces of the federal roads for long; but that would have meant driving right through the last city in this scarcely populated area on our way: the three hundred thousand-strong Petrozavodsk, stretching along the highway at the northern end of the lake.

  Our last hope of fulfilling this plan had died during the week in the summer cottages. If at the beginning of our journey we had still thought we’d manage to get up north to the deserted lakes before the ruthless, all-absorbing plague blocked our way, it had now become clear that there wasn’t even a glimpse of hope of that any more. If we wanted to reach our destination, we needed to count on being able to go round Onezhskoye on the right, meandering between the strange, unfamiliar northern names of tiny settlements, which had been built three hundred years before to service northern trading routes and had remained there ever since. They were unwanted and forgotten, characterised by sparse populations and ancient wooden monasteries, cut off from the big world by frozen lakes, windy rivers, thick forests and bad roads.

  It was clear we could disappear at any point of this complicated route, which not many people would take a chance on even in the summer; we might simply get stuck in the snow, which nobody cleared any more, and freeze to death. Any minor trouble with the car in minus thirty, without telephones or any hope of help, would paralyse us and we would be doomed; we would risk coming up against the people who lived nearby, and they wouldn’t be happy to see us even if the disease hadn’t reached them yet. The fear of the virus we were facing was stronger, though, so we turned right, under the little blue road sign. To our surprise, the track we were following turned right as well, leaving behind the untouched snow-lined surface of the deserted highway. It was heading north to Belozersk, moving away from the big cities kilometre by kilometre, as if even the track itself was trying to stay as far away from them as it could.

  ‘What’s on the map? How far till the next village?’ Boris’s voice crackled through the radio.

  ‘Less than a kilometre,’ Andrey answered. ‘There’ll be a few small villages on the way to Kirillov, but we have nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘He came last night, the old man. He assured me that the surrounding villages aren’t dangerous at all. There’s nobody there.’

  ‘How does he know this, your old man?’ Boris said grumpily. ‘What does he mean, not dangerous? Why didn’t he go there if they’re not dangerous?’

  ‘There was a cleansing operation in those villages,’ Andrey said, and silence fell. For a while there wasn’t a sound coming out of the radio, apart from some interference, as if somebody had forgotten to release the button, and then Boris asked:

  ‘Cleansing operation?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ Andrey said, ‘when they were still thinking it could help, they started with the surrounding villages. They probably thought the virus would come from here, because Vologda was already dead, but Cherepovets was still standing. He said the army had made this decision. They couldn’t introduce quarantine, they just cleansed everything within a thirty-kilometre radius.’

  ‘What does he mean, cleansed?’ I asked Sergey, who continued to drive, focused, without entering the conversation, as if he wasn’t listening. Without taking his eyes off the road, he replied, ‘Looks like we’re going to see it for ourselves, baby. Look ahead.’

  The smoke was still hanging above this dreadful place. Gripped by the frost, it stopped halfway to the sky in broken lace, making indeterminate white patterns on a black background, as if unsuccessfully trying to conceal the ugly skeletons of burnt houses under its merciful pale shroud. There wasn’t a single house left intact; identical and black, with broken frames and empty windows – all the glass had exploded in the violent heat. They stood on both sides of the road, the only witnesses of the catastrophe, silent, unable to testify about it. This place was so hopelessly empty, so utterly dead that we slowed down. It looked as if there was nothing to be afraid of: not a single person, ill or healthy, could have survived here. We could even stop, get out of the car and peer into one of the houses if we wanted to.

  ‘They used a flamethrower,’ Boris said, following it with a convoluted and long bout of swearing. ‘Look, there are tracks on the ground.’ I looked closer and saw burnt tracks, which started from the road and led to the houses, melting the snow and burning black the colourless winter grass underneath.

  I kept looking for – and was afraid to find – a trench or a pit; for some reason I imagined that the bodies of the people who had lived in these houses would be lying at the bottom of a pit, in a pile, on top of each other. They’d probably be frozen stiff: whoever had burnt their houses surely wouldn’t have stopped to cover the trench with some snow. But I couldn’t see bodies anywhere outside, so the only place they could be was the houses, or rather what was left of them.

  ‘What did they do to them?’ I asked Sergey. ‘Did they burn them alive?’

  He put his hand on my knee without looking at me.

  ‘Perhaps there was nobody left to burn,’ he said, unsure. ‘Maybe they died before they—’

  ‘Had they been alive, they’d probably have fought,’ I interrupted, not because I was sure about that, but because I wanted to believe it. ‘Somebody would have come out of the house, we would see at least someone—’

  ‘Anya, don’t look to your right,’ Sergey said quickly, and I heard a strange noise from the back – Mishka sucking air. I looked, I couldn’t help looking, and before I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands, I realised that they had been alive, maybe not all of them, but some of them had definitely been alive when all this had happened.

  ‘Let’s leave this place now,’ I said, keeping my eyes shut. ‘Sergey, please let’s leave now.’

  As soon as we had got past the village, the hatchback at the back of our convoy stopped unexpectedly, the passenger door opened, and Natasha popped out without a jacket and vomited right by the wheel of the car. Without saying a word, we stopped and waited too, while she, unbending and turning her face away from us, breathed the cold air; we moved off only after she got back into the car.

  ‘Tell me before we reach another village,’ I told Sergey. ‘I don’t want to see this any more.’ He nodded.

  We came across two more ‘cleansed’ villages similar to the one we’d seen earlier, and while we were driving from one towards the other I tried to keep my eyes glued to the speedometer, working out when these damned thirty kilometres from the city would finish, a city which in an unsuccessful attempt to save itself had first destroyed all life around it as far as it could reach and then itself perished; when these thirty kilometres finished, the track, which had been helping us move relatively fast, finished too.

  ‘We’re driving too slowly,’ Boris said, and these were his first words since we’d left the burnt-out village. ‘We’ll burn too much fuel, we need to let the Land Cruiser get to the front. Sergey, pull over.’

  We stopped and Boris went to the Land Cruiser. Everyone except Lenny also got out into the fresh cold air to have a break. It was empty and snowy in that place, and it felt safe.

  ‘I haven’t got the radio,’ Marina was protesting in a worried, high-pitched voice. ‘Let the hatchback go to the front, it’s quite heavy too.’

  ‘You have to understand,’ Boris was telling her patiently, ‘that the Land Cruiser weighs about three tons, the Mazda is much lighter, and then they have a trailer, they’ll get stuck on this kind of road with a trailer.’

  ‘Well, can we not attach their trailer to us,’ she continued, unsure, ‘or give us somebody’s radio?’

  ‘I won’t let you take the trailer off
,’ said Andrey decisively. ‘We’ll never find you if you take our trailer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Marina immediately reacted, and Boris, standing between them, raised his arms in a gesture of making peace.

  ‘OK now, this is what we’ll do. I’ll take the radio off the Vitara and put it on the Land Cruiser. While it’s still light, you’ll drive, and when it gets dark I’ll get Ira to drive my car and I’ll get into yours: you won’t manage in the dark on your own. Our job is to drive faster. If we drive this slowly, we’ll run out of fuel even earlier than we expected.’

  ‘Our main job,’ Andrey said very quietly, looking at his feet, ‘is to find more fuel. Natasha and I were on our way to Vsevolozhsk, I only have a third of a tank, and the trailer is really heavy. I won’t even make it to Kirillov with this load. Can you share some of your supplies?’

  ‘We’ve no supplies left,’ Boris said gloomily. ‘Didn’t Sergey tell you? We’ve no more fuel. We searched left, right and centre in the village and found nothing, just half a can with petrol for the Vitara. I doubt that this petrol’s good, but we’ve no choice. As for diesel, it’s all in the tanks, we’ve no more left. We can each give you about ten litres, but that means we won’t be able to drive further than two hundred kilometres, and if we don’t find fuel before that, that’s where we’re going to stay forever.’

  I knew this would happen, I thought while we were gliding along the freshly made track behind the heavy Land Cruiser. The Vitara, without the radio contact, followed the Land Cruiser, and the hatchback, about twenty litres of fuel lighter, was still bringing up the rear. We all knew we wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the lake, I thought, but why didn’t anyone tell me there’s so little left? Didn’t we, the women and the children, have the right to know, while we were making the decision to leave the summer cottages, that if we don’t find fuel before the end of today, our cars’ engines will die one by one and we’ll be left freezing to death in the middle of this ice-bound, deserted land? Would we have agreed to that if they had told us? We would have stayed, if we’d known, we’d definitely have stayed, the city’s dead anyway and there isn’t a single surviving village left. How many escapees were we likely to meet? Five, ten? And what could they do to us, apart from dying of hunger before our eyes? Is this really better than what we would have faced if we’d stayed? I would never have said yes to this. I would never have let us leave, let Mishka leave, no, never.

  ‘Baby,’ Sergey said quietly, and his hand landed on my knee again.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I said through clenched teeth. I couldn’t even look at him. How could you, how could you decide for me, for your son, for mine, how could you dare make such an important decision by yourself? I thought. She doesn’t even know, she hasn’t heard, she’s driving in the radioless Vitara and I can’t even tell her what they’ve done. ‘Give me the radio,’ I said. Nervous, I pressed the wrong button and wasted a few moments talking to nobody, but then realised and tried again. The radio clicked, and everyone heard me, except for Boris. ‘Marina, stop. We need to go back before it’s too late, otherwise we’re all going to die on this road.’

  The Land Cruiser slowed down and stopped straight away, followed by the Vitara. Sergey, swearing, also pressed on the brakes, and before we stopped completely I opened the door and jumped out, ran forward, telling myself, You idiot, idiot, what were you thinking? ‘Sleep on the back seat, open my eyes only when we arrive at the lake, when all our troubles will be left behind.’ This isn’t how it works, it never has. I yanked open the Vitara’s passenger door; Boris looked at me gloomily from behind the wheel, as if knowing what I was going to say. I looked into Ira’s eyes and blurted out:

  ‘They didn’t tell us. We haven’t enough fuel. We need to turn back to the summer cottages while there’s still fuel for the return journey.’

  And then we stood in the middle of the road, my husband and I, in the burning cold wind, and shouted at each other. God, he’s probably never seen me like this, I thought, but this wasn’t even a proper thought, it was more of a fragment of a thought; I was so enraged I couldn’t stop myself. When we’d first met, I’d become much quieter, as if somebody had turned my volume right down and rubbed out my rough edges with an invisible eraser, smoothed all my sharp corners; and I had a lot of sharp corners he had no idea about. I hoped I’d hidden them so well that he’d never know they existed, and he didn’t, up until then – I could tell by the way he looked at me.

  ‘Stop this tantrum, Anya, what the hell, we couldn’t stay there!’

  ‘That’s rubbish! How long do we have left, a hundred kilometres, two hundred? And then what? You suggest we walk?’

  ‘And what do you suggest? Go back and die from the plague in that village?’

  ‘I suggest being honest, to start with! We have children with us, how could you make this decision without us? We could wait in the village, we could siphon the fuel into one car and make trips out, search the neighbouring villages, find some kind of tractor – well, anything! We could wait until spring and go back to Cherepovets, there’d be nobody left by then and we could find fuel, there are petrol stations, oil depots, there are piles of abandoned vehicles. And what are you going to do here, in this desert?’

  The freezing cold air burnt my throat and I started coughing; my knees wobbled and my legs started to feel weak, and I grabbed the warm bumper of the Vitara in order not to fall. The voices of the others seemed to be coming from miles away: ‘Anya, are you OK?’ ‘Hold her, she’s going to fall!’ Don’t touch me, wait, let me finish, I wanted to shout, but only a whisper came out: even my lips disobeyed me.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled Sergey’s familiar smell. He was holding me with both arms, saying, ‘Calm down, baby, it’s going to be OK, you’ll see.’ Nothing will be OK, I thought, we’re all going to die here.

  ‘Put her in the car, quick,’ Boris said, and Sergey picked me up and carried me to the car. Why hasn’t anyone said anything? I thought; why is Ira silent now she knows the truth? The door was open; I felt the seat, still warm from before I had jumped out of it, and from somewhere at the back I heard a rhythmical, dull growling. This is stupid; they’re going to drive me away and I won’t be able to argue any more, I thought. All the cars’ doors started slamming – everyone just got back into their vehicles as if nothing had happened, like visitors who had involuntarily become witnesses to a sudden, indecent brawl between the hosts and were now hurrying to leave as quickly as possible, overcome with that inevitable cocktail of gloating and embarrassment at what they had seen. I felt listless and angry; I closed my eyes. I can’t shout any more, I thought, I can’t even talk; not now, anyway. I need only a few minutes, well, maybe half an hour, I need us to stop for a while and then I’ll try to convince them again, they simply didn’t understand, I didn’t have time to explain properly, I’ll try again, I need to calm down, gather my thoughts. I tried to breathe slowly and deeply and not to look at Sergey.

  It was quiet in the car; I could just hear Mishka’s upset snuffle in the back seat. Suddenly the Land Cruiser slowed down and stopped. The radio crackled – several empty clicks, hissing, and then finally Marina’s voice in the radio:

  ‘Look! There, on the side! Isn’t that a lorry?’

  It was impossible to tell how far from us it was on this snowy plain; our road blended with the surrounding fields and looked different only because it was half a metre higher than them. The distance between ourselves and the lorry (or what we thought was the lorry) could be several hundred metres, or a kilometre, or even two. While we were driving forward there was no point in arguing any more, and everyone fell silent. We drove slowly, approaching the unidentifiable frozen silhouette in front of us for an unbearably long time, and the tiny dot by the side of the road kept growing and finally did turn into a lorry. Even when it became clear that it was a lorry, everyone remained silent, as if not wanting to jinx it, to frighten away the luck, because the lorry could have been burnt, looted, bled dry. There
must have been a reason it was dumped in this place, thirty kilometres from the nearest settlement. Finally, we drove up to it and stopped. We parked up beside the lorry for a while without turning our engines off, overcome with superstitious fear; four cars loaded to the brim, and none of us had the guts to get any closer to it.

  It was a large articulated lorry with a long metallic trailer, with writing in large, faded letters on the side; it seemed to have been broken into two, like a child’s toy taken to pieces: the cab was tipped forward and separated from the trailer, and the trailer was hoisted up at an angle, as if trying to spill its contents onto the road. Left in this defenceless position, it looked like a horse in a circus bending down for a bow. I kept looking at it and tried to understand what could have happened; where was the driver, why had he left his lorry? Maybe he’d been trying to detach the trailer to win back a few more kilometres from death, to make his vehicle lighter so he could reach his destination, somewhere he could get help? Or perhaps something had broken down and he’d been trying to fix it alone, his hands numb with cold; but there was no trace of fire near the lorry, nor any other trace of humankind. If the lorry had broken down, had the driver walked away from here? And what happened after that – had he reached the village we had left behind, and had the people in it still been alive when he got there?