To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  Finally, I heard Sergey, who was the first to wake from this strange torpor, shut the door and jump onto the snow; he took the fuel hose from the boot and ran to the lorry. I saw Boris climb out, too, inseparably attached to his rifle, and, looking around him, follow Sergey. I had no energy to leave the car, so I lowered the window and watched them walk to the lorry. Boris carefully peered inside, as if somebody might still be in the overturned cab, and Sergey kicked the enormous fuel tank – which looked like a silver barrel – on the side of the truck facing me, between the first and the second row of wheels, and listened to the sound it gave out. The sound was unclear: dull, maybe promising. Sergey tried to unscrew the filler cap, which didn’t open, then he took off his gloves and grabbed the cap with both hands, wincing as the cold metal touched his skin, unscrewed it, pushed the hose inside the tank, missing the opening a couple of times, and started pumping, looking tensely at the long transparent tube. When he noticed the movement of liquid inside, he turned to us with a wide smile; seeing that we all had our eyes glued to him, he shouted, ‘Yes!’

  All the jerrycans we had with us – the ones we had bought in Nudol, or had taken from home, or had found in Andrey’s trailer – were immediately displayed on the snow in a short line after Sergey’s triumphant cry. There weren’t many of them, but within a quarter of an hour it turned out that even of this small number only some could be filled: the stream at the sixth can started thinning. Sergey stood up, turned to us and said, with a long face, ‘That’s it, no more.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Boris said in what seemed to me an exaggeratedly cheerful voice, and patted Sergey on the shoulder. ‘We’ve enough for about four hundred kilometres, which is half the way, Sergey. We’ll find more. Let’s go and see what else we can lay our hands on.’

  They couldn’t open the container, which was fixed inside the truck’s trailer, and therefore we never found out what kind of goods were so important to the people who had decided to risk the driver’s life and sent him off on a journey – to Vologda or Cherepovets – in these terrible times. Even if we had managed to break the locks and the steel bolts holding the doors tightly shut, whatever was inside this container hanging dangerously above the ground would have spilt out and buried anyone brave enough to be standing beneath it, so we took what we managed to find in the cab and left it at that: a first aid kit, a toolkit and an expensive-looking thermos, which still contained the dregs of long-cold coffee. The most precious thing we managed to find, apart from the fuel, was an excellent radio. Risking his neck, Boris climbed on top and unscrewed the antenna attached to the roof of the cab, and holding the valuable possession to his chest immediately ran to fix it onto the Vitara. There was nothing else we could do in that place.

  Later, in the car, watching Sergey drive carefully, not looking at me even out of the corner of his eye, desperately trying to pretend that nothing had happened and we hadn’t had an argument, hadn’t shouted in front of everyone, losing our tempers, I was thinking: for three whole years I’ve been afraid you’d see me for real, that you’ll realise I’m an ordinary, mortal woman who can be moody, angry, who can shout; for three years I’ve always put you first so you wouldn’t notice there was no difference between me and the other woman you were married to for such a long time, it’s been so important that it didn’t occur to you; but as soon as we faced a life-and-death situation, as soon as I was properly scared, that whole effort was wasted in a flash. I didn’t even have time to think about how I should behave – I just did what I’ve always done when I’ve felt cornered: I showed my teeth; and even though I hadn’t had my own way, even though the lorry with the measly hundred litres of fuel had delayed our imminent final stop and we all started thinking that it had been worth taking this journey, you’ll never forget this argument, you’ll always remember that I – who had never argued with you before and always agreed with you – am not your absolute ally any more.

  For some reason, just as I was thinking this he turned to me and said:

  ‘There you go, baby, there was no reason to panic. We’ve found fuel and will find more, you’ll see, we mustn’t give up.’

  I could have told him that we were incredibly lucky to come across this lorry in the middle of nowhere, far from the usual long-distance routes. I could even have continued arguing that we should go back, because if we were still some eight hundred kilometres away from our destination it made no difference if we froze to death after driving one hundred kilometres or four hundred. But I said:

  ‘Never do this again, do you hear? Never make a decision for me.’

  He was silent, he didn’t reply, just carried on driving, looking straight in front of him, although he could have argued that he had been making decisions for me from day one and had continued to do so for the three years we had been together, and that this was what made me happy, because before then I’d had to make too many decisions by myself and I had been really, really tired of it. This was what I thought as soon as I said ‘Never do this again’, because I wasn’t sure I wanted him never to make decisions for me again; but he continued to drive, keeping his eyes glued to the road as if he hadn’t heard me, and that’s why I decided to speak again.

  ‘You know what,’ I said, carefully looking at the puddle of melted snow on the rubber mat under my boots. ‘Enough calling me “baby”. I’m thirty-six, my son’s sixteen, and I’m not a bloody baby.’

  ‌15

  Hatches

  When we drove into Kirillov, which we reached in early twilight, we had no idea what lay in store for us. We didn’t know whether there would be checkpoints and barricades, built by the citizens in the hope of protecting themselves from their infected neighbours, or looters, or the perpetrators of the atrocious cleansing which had taken place some sixty kilometres from here, or the helpless indifference and death which we saw in Ustyuzhna. We were prepared for anything, but there was one thing we utterly failed to predict: that the small town, with its wooden houses and whitewashed churches, schools and bus stops, would be abandoned, empty, as if all its inhabitants, to the last one, scared by the fate of the neighbouring villages, had packed up and left for somewhere further north.

  It was clear at first sight that there was no one left in town – maybe because the road we were driving on was covered in snow with a firm, frosty crust, or perhaps because the town which stretched in front of us was almost completely dark: the ridges of the simple double-sloped roofs hung above us in the growing dusk, and we could barely see the shadowy snow-covered side streets, with dense trees on both sides, and there wasn’t a single lit-up window. The lack of working street lamps could be explained by the lack of electricity, but if there had been even one person behind a road-facing window, we would have noticed the flickering of a candle flame or oil lamp, or seen slight movements, at least a hint of movement. There was none of this, none at all, only silent, low houses abandoned by their owners and dim pavements untrodden for a long time.

  ‘Look to your left, children.’ Boris’s voice came out of the speaker, and we shuddered, not expecting it, as it was so inappropriate in the ringing silence. ‘There, can you see it? Behind this long stone wall there’s a huge ancient monastery. Ivan the Terrible stopped there once. You can’t see much from here, but I’m telling you, you’ve never seen anything like it. There’s a whole city there behind these walls: towers, churches, palaces. It’s a real fortress.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Boris?’ Andrey responded.

  ‘I came here as a student.’

  ‘So can we stop by and take a look round? When will we have another chance—’

  ‘No we can’t,’ Boris said sternly. ‘And it looks as if we couldn’t get in there anyway. They must have locked the gate when they were leaving. It is a fortress, after all.’

  From the road we could just about see the long stone wall, looming over the ice-bound lake and mirroring the soft curves of its coastline, as well as the fat peaked towers with gun slots, like enormous rooks from
chess, rising where the walls met. Far away, behind this, I could imagine more than see the onion domes of the churches. This was a proper medieval fortress, majestic and grand, and I suddenly felt full of bitter regret that we couldn’t stop the car and walk along this wall, sinking into the snow to touch these old stones, couldn’t look for hidden gates in one of the towers and peer inside. It would have been the smallest thing we could do without disturbing this sleeping giant, in case we, a handful of scared people trying to save our own lives, were the last to see it. One day we’d disappear – we’d already started disappearing – and this unmoved colossus would remain standing on the bank of the lake, calm and imperturbable, and would last for many more centuries even if there was nobody left to admire it.

  We were driving very slowly; everyone was silent. Only when the wall was almost completely out of sight, giving way to small wooden houses which seemed miserable and fragile against this stone grandeur, did I turn round to look at it for the last time.

  ‘What if they never left?’ I said. ‘Maybe they’re inside, it’s a fortress, it’s a lot more durable than the old wooden houses, look, it’s huge, it could accommodate the whole town. They probably have everything they need – water, a roof above their heads – and this wall would protect them from the infection, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Anya,’ Sergey said quietly and looked back as well. ‘I honestly don’t. But it would be great.’

  Two hundred metres further on we saw a car in one of the side streets, sunk in the snow up to its wheel arches. ‘Wait, we need to check if it’s got any petrol,’ Sergey said into the radio, and stopped the car.

  This time nobody else got out. Even Boris stayed inside with his rifle, so desolate and deserted this place looked. Holding a torch in one hand, Sergey bent down, brushed off the crusty snow which had sealed the hatch of the fuel tank and fiddled with it for some time, trying to open it. Finally, he pushed the hose in, but then stood up and walked back, shaking his head.

  ‘It’s empty,’ was all he said, getting back into the car, and we carried on.

  We saw a few more cars on the way, also abandoned and snowbound, but none of them were any use to us. Perhaps that’s why they had been left there, on the streets, instead of being loaded with possessions and driven away. It occurred to me that if all we had managed to find in the city were several cars, one of which was pulled to pieces, windows broken, wheels taken off and tank empty like every other we had found before, our chances of finding fuel further up north were small. It looked as if the people here had taken all their fuel with them, without leaving us so much as a drop.

  ‘They must have a bus depot here,’ said Sergey confidently. ‘And a boat station, too. We need diesel, at least two hundred litres—’

  ‘But how can we find this bus depot?’ replied Boris. ‘It’s pitch-dark, and we don’t have a map. What does your satnav say, Andrey?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Andrey said gloomily. ‘The map’s incomplete, this place is just a dot, no streets, nothing. We won’t find it.’

  ‘OK,’ Sergey said, obstinate. ‘Let’s spend the night here and tomorrow, and in daylight we’ll find the bus depot and the boat station. There must be something left!’

  ‘We’ll lose a lot of time,’ Boris said with doubt in his voice. ‘It’s not four o’clock yet, we’ve made no more than ninety kilometres in one day, if we stay the night and spend time looking for it tomorrow, we’ll lose the whole day. We’re going too slowly anyway – one heavy snowfall will be enough for us to get stuck for good.’ And he fell silent, waiting for others to object, but Sergey didn’t argue with him; perhaps the thought of spending a night in an empty ghost city didn’t appeal to him after all. After our long forced delay near Cherepovets we were scared to stop again, as if stopping would attract more unknown dangers and the only way to avoid them was by continuing to move forward.

  ‘Wait!’ Andrey exclaimed. ‘The map says there’s a petrol station on the edge of the city. If there’s fuel left anywhere, that’s the place.’

  We crossed the city at its narrowest part, which was hemmed in by a lake on either side, and several minutes later we reached its end. It was completely dark, and we would have gone past the building with its red and white rectangular roof had we not been looking for it. The building was completely covered in snow, even the outer walls, and this made it especially difficult to see in the dark.

  We stepped out into the cold; when Mishka opened the back door, the dog jumped out and dashed like a streak of yellow lightning towards the trees, beyond the bright spot of light from our headlights, and vanished in the dark.

  ‘Why did you let him go?’ I said helplessly. ‘He won’t come back!’

  ‘He will,’ Sergey replied, smiling. ‘Let’s go and see what they’ve got.’

  ‘There’s no light,’ Mishka said, unsure, starting to head after the dog. ‘How would the pumps work?’

  ‘The reservoir must be somewhere near,’ Boris said, coming up to us. ‘Look for the hatch in the ground – they’re normally on the perimeter, closer to the road. They might have got snowed up, so look carefully.’

  At first I thought we wouldn’t be able to find any reservoirs under this snow, but then Mishka triumphantly shouted:

  ‘I’ve found it!’ and then, after a short pause, a bit quieter: ‘But they look a bit strange.’

  There were three identical grey hatches where Mishka was standing. Two were open, revealing wide rectangular inlets; when we peered inside I saw two metallic wells, a small one with a lot of little tubes poking out and a slightly wider one, a round steel hatch barely closing it.

  ‘Move a bit,’ said Boris to Mishka, walking over fast and getting down on his knees with difficulty. He opened the hatch and started peering into it with the light from his torch, and then said, ‘I can’t see anything, it’s as dark as a monkey’s arse. We’ll have to go down.’

  ‘What do you mean, go down?’ I asked. ‘Down there?’

  ‘There are steps.’ Boris’s voice was bouncing off the metal walls. ‘It’s just a tank, Anya, just buried in the ground, and we can get down there.’

  ‘Let me!’ Mishka said pleadingly. ‘I’ll be quick, I’ll manage to squeeze in there, just give me the torch.’

  ‘No,’ I said in horror. ‘Don’t even think about it, I won’t let you, do you hear?’

  Ignoring my words, Boris stood up. Something cracked loudly in his back, and, wincing with pain, he passed the torch to Mishka.

  ‘OK then, you go, Mishka,’ he said, and while Mishka, taking off his jacket and holding the torch between his teeth, was climbing into the hatch and I was standing nearby, thinking, nobody listens to me, even my little boy doesn’t listen any more, Boris instructed him: ‘Go slowly, look down carefully. If there’s any fuel left, you’ll be able to see it, do you see?’ When Mishka’s head disappeared somewhere in the depths of the tank, Boris shouted down into the hatch: ‘And don’t dare touch the wall with the torch, even lightly. One spark and everything’ll blow up!’ I was scared stiff, but then, turning to me, he said soothingly: ‘Don’t worry, Anya, he’s skinny and supple, he’ll be fine. He doesn’t smoke, does he?’ And he started laughing, but he presumably saw something in my eyes that made him choke on his laughter; he started coughing loudly and hoarsely. Shut up, I thought helplessly, shut up, I need to hear what’s happening down there, inside this tank, I want to hear his every step on this shaky ladder.

  ‘How are things?’ Sergey came up from behind, holding a jerrycan in each hand.

  ‘I doubt there’s anything left,’ Boris said after he stopped coughing; his face was completely serious. ‘Everything was open. Looks like somebody was one step ahead of us.’

  ‘So why did you send him down there?’ I said and stepped towards the hatch. I wanted to shout to Mishka, Come back now, do you hear? but at the same time we heard his muffled voice: ‘There’s nothing here! The bottom of the tank’s wet, that’s all!’ and a few seconds later we saw his
dishevelled head above the hatch.

  There was no fuel under the second hatch either, as we found out several minutes later. There was only the third one left, and it had a padlock on which would be too risky to knock off. After some tinkering with it the men found a way of opening it too: wrapping a cloth round a long fire hook which Andrey had found at the petrol station, they managed to break the lock. But their efforts were in vain: the last tank hadn’t been open because it had presumably been emptied before the electricity was turned off and the pumps stopped working.

  Disappointed, we stood around the hatches. Mishka, whose clothes smelt strongly of petrol, said in a sad voice:

  ‘So it was all in vain?’ Nobody replied to him, and even Sergey, who not long ago had been convinced that there was plenty of fuel around, couldn’t find the words to answer him. After a while, as if somebody had given us an order, we all turned around and shuffled off back to the cars. I desperately wanted to smoke.

  The others were milling around in the spot of light cast by the cars’ headlights. Lenny was the only one who hadn’t come out – even sitting on the wide, comfortable seat of the Land Cruiser he still felt unwell. Looking up at us, Ira asked, ‘How are things?’ and Sergey shook his head.

  The boy stood next to her, holding on to her knee with one hand, showing total concentration as he fed the dog with crisps from a bright packet which he awkwardly held in one mittened hand. He held out the other hand, without a mitten, unsure, as if ready to retract it any moment. The dog would first sniff at the boy’s unmittened hand before opening his enormous jaws and carefully taking the bright yellow triangle with his front teeth. He did this every time.