To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘Here, these are for you,’ Ira said and gave Sergey several crackly packets. ‘We found them in the shop. There were several bars of chocolate, too, which I gave to the kids. I don’t think we should stop to prepare the food – we’ll be fine for the night with just this.’ Then, turning to the boy, she said: ‘Stop it, Anton, I told you, you should eat the crisps yourself and not feed the dog!’ The boy lifted his head and looked at me, and whispered, ‘He’s eating.’ He smiled.

  Before getting back into the car, Andrey said, ‘There’s no point in spending the night here, Sergey. If they sucked the petrol station dry, I’m sure there’s nothing at either the bus depot or the boat station.’

  Sergey nodded and climbed back into the car.

  We came across another petrol station about fifteen kilometres further on, where the road split. One fork went back, towards the dead Vologda, and the other went left and upwards, up north; the sign said Vytegra 232, Medvezhiegorsk 540. I’d never heard of these places before and asked Sergey where our lake was in relation to these places, if it was further north than Medvezhiegorsk. And he nodded and smiled in a way that made me – for the first time since we’d left the house – want to check the map and see for myself whether the place we were going to existed. The hatches were open, all of them this time, without exception; we didn’t even bother going down because it was clear to us that they were hopelessly empty.

  This was where Boris switched over to the Land Cruiser, leaving Ira to drive my Vitara; to my surprise, Mishka decided to join her and the boy: without looking at me, he murmured something like It’s not good they’re on their own, I’ll take one of the guns and go with them, Mum, and slipped out of the car. I decided not to protest; I had no energy to do so. Instead I offered to give Sergey a little rest. ‘Let me drive for a while,’ I said, ‘why don’t you have a nap, we’re not leading the convoy anyway, I’ll manage,’ but he didn’t agree. ‘That’s OK, Anya, I’m not tired,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you have a nap instead, and we’ll swap when we absolutely have to.’

  Even though this long day, which seemed to have started about a week ago, had exhausted me, I couldn’t get to sleep straight away. It was only about six o’clock, although you couldn’t tell how late it was by looking out of the window; everything outside the tiny circle of light shaking around our cars, which were crawling along the empty road, was densely black: both the deep northerly sky and the massive trees on both sides of the motorway, and even the snow where the beams of our headlights couldn’t reach. Finally, when Ira and Mishka and the cloud of petrol they were emitting had gone, I could have a cigarette (the dog, curled up on the back seat, lifted his head and snorted in disapproval, but then immediately sighed and lay down again), and shaking the ash out of the open window, I saw the spray of orange sparks flying away with the wind backwards and downwards, under the wheels of the hatchback behind us. At least we have enough fuel to get to this mysterious Vytegra, I was thinking, sleepy; we definitely don’t have enough to reach Medvezhiegorsk, though, it’s pointless to argue with them, the most important thing is not to miss this Vytegra and stop them before they decide to drive on with half-empty tanks, I won’t miss it, it’s two hundred whole kilometres, if we drive at this speed we won’t be there before the morning, even if I fall asleep, I’ll manage to stop them, I thought – and fell asleep.

  ‌16

  In a Hole

  I woke up with the unpleasant feeling that we had stopped moving. I realised it before I woke up properly and opened my eyes; it was the same feeling you have when you travel in a sleeper train, stuck somewhere in the middle of the night at some godforsaken distributing station, when your body, used to the movement and rocking and the clanging of the train wheels, reacts to the unexpected silence and immobility. At first, I thought that while I’d been asleep everyone had decided to stop in some quiet place by the side of the road to take a break, and I almost fell asleep again, when I suddenly sat up in my seat and opened my eyes wide – there was clearly something wrong. There was nobody else in the car: the driver’s seat was empty, and even the dog wasn’t on the back seat.

  The engine was off, but the sidelights were on; their dim light revealed the familiar back door of the Vitara and the spare wheel with its silver cover and funny sticker that some child had put on it back in Chertanovo, when I used to park it outside the block of flats in which we lived. Even now, sick with worry, unsure what was going on, I still felt a twinge of jealousy: could I have imagined, when I was buying this car, that another woman would drive it – no, not another woman, that woman – and that my son would volunteer to join her rather than me, guarding her from the back seat with a gun? But I had no time to think about that: there was something happening on the road. Reaching over, I turned the switch and the lights went off; then I carefully opened the door and stepped outside to see what was going on.

  Walking around the Vitara from the roadside, I carefully looked out from behind it and had to narrow my eyes in the bright orange light from the rectangular hazard lights on the roof of the hatchback; dazzled, I automatically took a step backwards into the shadow of my car, thinking, what the hell, why is the hatchback facing the opposite way, what’s going on? The hatchback’s engine made a deafening roar, and straight away somebody shouted; the words were unclear, but I thought I recognised Boris’s voice. Unable to carry on waiting any longer, I took a deep breath, stepped out into the road and started walking towards the glaring lights.

  ‘I said you needed rest.’ A woman’s voice was piping over the ear-splitting noise of the engine; it was a high-pitched voice, almost sing-song. ‘You’ve been driving all day, I told you that you should have taken a break, I could have driven. How are we going to pull it out now?’ I couldn’t see who the unfamiliar wailing voice belonged to, but I immediately recognised the man who yelled back at her – desperately, angrily, as if he was saying the same thing again and again:

  ‘I wasn’t asleep, damn you!’ Boris shouted. ‘There’s a hole in the road, just a hole, look for yourself, all the wheels are on the road, we haven’t gone off the road, just move out of the way, for goodness’ sake. Come on, Andrey, try it once again!’ And the engine roared with double the noise and the hatchback jerked; I saw the three bright rectangles jump on the roof.

  ‘Careful, you’ll rip it off. Oh God, help us!’ howled Marina, now sounding like a caricature of a peasant woman. I finally recognised her: she was wringing her hands, dashing to and fro in her white ski suit in front of the hatchback, almost under its wheels, looking like a terrified rabbit in the beam of a hunter’s torch. Boris, who I could now see well, jumped out from the darkness towards her, his jacket undone, with frost on his beard and savage eyes, and shouted, furious:

  ‘What are you doing, you fucking idiot? Get out of here, Marina, otherwise I’ll kill you – Lenny, take her away, will you?’

  Coming closer, I finally saw what had happened, although it was easy to guess by now: the heavy Land Cruiser, like a large clumsy animal stuck in mud, had sunk into the snow so deeply that it seemed to have no wheels; judging by the raised boot, the front wheels had sunk in deeper than the back ones. It looked like it had fallen into a hole, but there was no way it could get out of it without help. The hatchback was free of its trailer and now, with its back to the Land Cruiser, was jerking and roaring as it struggled to pull the Land Cruiser out. Andrey was driving, poking almost half his body out of the window and looking back at the Land Cruiser; the two cars were joined by a bright yellow tow rope which stretched and shook between them. Mishka stood by the side of the road, holding a short spade; he had no hat on, and his ears were glowing red in the cold. Boris was holding another spade – there was probably no point in digging while the hatchback, strenuously growling, tried to free the Land Cruiser from its snowy captivity. Sergey wasn’t there; I guessed he was driving the Land Cruiser.

  Lenny and Marina walked past me towards the other, silent cars. He was heavily leaning on her shoulder and I could s
ee she was walking too fast for him. When they overtook me, I heard him say:

  ‘…they’ll sort it without you. Why the hell did you keep banging on – “you fell asleep, you fell asleep”, who cares? The main thing is to pull the car out. Where’s Dasha? You’d better tell me.’ Ignoring him, she shouted over him, angrily, with tears in her voice:

  ‘…why don’t you say something, how will we get there now, we should have been at the front, I told you, we shouldn’t have… we have so much stuff in there, clothes, food, how will we manage? Did you think about it? We’ve lost our car…’ And they walked past, back to the Pajero. I turned back to look at them, but then the hatchback roared again, this time in a particularly desperate way: whirling the thick snow dust from under the wheels, the Land Cruiser jumped and then started crawling upwards, back first, and the hatchback slowly moved forward, towards me; I jumped off to the side, and Boris, trying to outcry the roar, shouted:

  ‘Go-go-go, come on, Andrey, again, again!’ and there was a sharp, strange noise, and then a loud bang. Looking carefully, I saw that the tow rope had snapped; the Land Cruiser rolled back and sank its nose into the snow in exactly the same place as before. The hatchback’s engine fell silent, the dazzling lights went out, the driver’s door opened and Andrey, hurriedly jumping onto the snow and running around the car, said, annoyed:

  ‘We cracked the bumper. Good job it wasn’t the windscreen.’

  ‘Because the tow rope was crap!’ Boris must have lost his voice, because he sounded really croaky. He looked upset and I wanted to go up to him, put my hand on his shoulder and say to him, Don’t listen to this idiot, of course there was a hole, it’s not your fault, but he suddenly stuck his spade into the snow with full force. It went in up to the middle of its short shaft, and I didn’t risk offering him my sympathy.

  ‘Those flashy ropes of yours, you could have brought at least one metal one, fucking travellers! They’re only good enough to go Christmas shopping with.’

  ‘Your metal rope wouldn’t help,’ Sergey said, who had climbed out of the Land Cruiser and was making his way onto the road with difficulty. ‘It’s sitting too deep and we would only rip the eyelets. We need to dig some more – it’s got a lot of snow under it again. Mishka, give me the spade.’ And Boris and he started digging, probably not for the first and maybe not even for the second time. I told Mishka to put his hat on, but he didn’t even turn his head to me, tensely watching Sergey and Boris working in between the Land Cruiser’s wheels.

  Boris lifted his head and spoke to Andrey. ‘What are you waiting for? Come on, bring your tow rope. We’ve ripped one, now it’s time to rip yours.’

  ‘If we don’t dig it out enough, mine’ll rip too,’ Andrey retorted, still looking upset at the crack in the bumper. ‘Shall I go and bring another spade, and we’ll dig out some more together?’

  The three of them dug the snow together for some time, giving it the whole of their concentration, frenziedly throwing the snow from the bottom of the heavily sunk Land Cruiser towards the side of the road. Mishka and I hovered around them, not daring to bother them with questions; I felt the bitter, unforgiving cold creeping up my legs in spite of the warm boots I was wearing, and I was afraid even to look at Mishka, who had spent a lot longer outside than I had. Sergey stood up abruptly, wiped his face and said sullenly:

  ‘It’s no use. We’ve reached the ice, we won’t be able to pull it out like this.’

  ‘Shall we try from the other side?’ Andrey asked, coming out from behind the car; his breath was steamy from the cold air, his eyebrows and eyelashes white from frost, his eyes watery. ‘If I do it at high speed, maybe I could jump over this hole?’

  ‘No, we can’t do that,’ Boris said in his croaky voice. ‘We don’t know how big that hole is. If another car gets stuck, that’s curtains for us.’

  ‘If we can’t go round this hole,’ Andrey said slowly, and I suddenly understood the scale of the problem. Even though he hadn’t finished his sentence, I knew what he was going to say: It’s curtains anyway, because we won’t be able to continue, and we have nothing to drive back in.

  This can’t be right, I thought. This simply can’t be true. I didn’t look at my watch – was it ten o’clock? Was it midnight? I hadn’t slept for longer than an hour, maybe two, I’d just had a snooze, we couldn’t have driven very far.

  ‘How far is it to Vytegra?’ I asked hopelessly, and realising what sort of answer I would get, shrank away involuntarily, waiting for someone to tell me. But they all turned back and looked at me, as if I was mad, and Andrey asked, surprised, ‘What, Vytegra? We went past it ages ago.’ I started pulling back my sleeve to look at my watch, but it got stuck and I tried harder, almost ripping the fabric before I saw the time. It was half past three in the morning.

  I heard somebody’s footsteps creaking behind my back. ‘You OK?’ Natasha asked, coming up. ‘How are we doing? Ira and the kids are asleep in the Vitara. Who’s got the keys? It’s freezing cold in the car, we should start the engine.’

  I looked at Sergey. He didn’t answer. Come on, say something, I thought, tell her; let’s work out together how long we’ll survive with the petrol we’ve got left, if we stay here, near this hole, this unsurmountable obstacle cutting us off from our goal, in the middle of this cold, desolate place, where there’s no light to be seen all the way up to the horizon. Maybe it’ll be enough for one night and maybe even for the whole of the next day, and then we’ll start burning our things, one by one, piling them into a dismal, barely warm fire, and then we’ll take off the car tyres, first from one of the cars, then from all the others too, and they’ll burn, enveloping us in a black, pungent smoke, and after that, towards the end, we’ll take off the seat covers, because they’ll burn too, and even produce a bit of warmth, only Land Cruiser covers won’t burn, because they’re made of leather, which means that Lenny and Marina will have to freeze to death before the rest of us – bloody show-offs, leather interior.

  In horror, I heard myself laughing. I was terrifyingly calm; I had no fear whatsoever, only a kind of irrational, stupid exultation. I’m going to look at you, I thought, and say, What did I tell you? What have you got to say now?

  ‘Mum,’ Mishka said quietly, ‘are you all right?’

  I turned to him. He was looking at me, blinking, surprised, his eyelashes completely white and lips barely able to move from the cold. I shook off the silly, inappropriate smile, went to him, took off my mittens and squeezed his cheeks with both my hands, then his ears – they were so cold they seemed fragile, as if made of glass, and my hands were too cold to warm them. I pressed harder, and he squealed and shook his head, freeing himself from my hands.

  ‘Are you cold? Can you feel your ears? Where’s your hat?’ I started pulling my hat off my head to give it to him. I won’t be able to get him warm, I thought, I won’t be able to, what shall I do, God, anyone but not Mishka; I wish we’d stayed there, at home. He kept pushing my hands away and tried to free himself.

  ‘Right then,’ Sergey said, jumping over the huge pile of snow separating the side of the road from the hole which had swallowed the Land Cruiser. He quickly grabbed Mishka’s hat, which I’d seen poking out of his pocket earlier, pulled it over the boy’s head down to his eyebrows, and said: ‘You get into the car and get warm, and we’ll dig some more.’ Then, turning away as if to show that he’d finished talking to us, he said: ‘We should dig forward, Dad, we’re three strong guys, I’m sure we’ll manage! After all, we can chop down a tree, we’ve got axes, we’ll put boards under the wheels, we need to keep going forward, we can’t go back.’

  ‘We need to have a fag,’ Boris replied in a croaky but animated voice.

  ‘You can have one on the way,’ replied Andrey, in a similar tone. ‘I’m freezing cold, let’s go and take a look at that hole.’ And without waiting for an answer he started walking, slowly, sinking into the snow up to his knees. He walked round the Land Cruiser and started digging, sticking the spade into the
snow every two steps, calling to Sergey over his shoulder: ‘Don’t start the engine, just turn on the lights, can’t see a bloody thing,’ and Boris followed him, walking round the car from the opposite side. Sergey climbed into the car.

  Mishka, Natasha and I stood by the side of the road watching them, and forgot for some time about the cold, hoping to hear them say that they’d reached the end of the hole, that it had turned out to be smaller than they had expected and they wouldn’t need much time to pull out the frozen car and make way for the other two helplessly crowded around the hole’s edge. I hugged Mishka and pressed my cheek to the frozen sleeve of his jacket, and felt him shaking from the cold.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sergey?’ Andrey asked impatiently from about seven or eight steps away; he was almost invisible in the darkness. ‘Come on, turn the lights on!’ But Sergey didn’t react; we could see from the side of the road that he was sitting in the car, unmoving. Suddenly he opened the door and stood on the step, carefully looking ahead. We followed his gaze in the direction where the starless sky and the trees and the snow all blurred into one, all the same, dense and black, as if there was nothing ahead, complete darkness, as if it were the edge of the universe, and in the middle of it we saw what Sergey was looking at: a tiny trembling dot, which kept growing and becoming brighter – we had no doubt about that shortly afterwards. That could only mean one thing: it was coming towards us.

  ‘What is it?’ Mishka asked, and freed himself from my arms. I took several steps forward, as if this would allow me to see the mysterious dot better. The dot kept growing and turned into a bright spot with blurred edges.

  ‘Is somebody coming towards us from that side?’ Natasha asked.