To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  Pushing us out of the way, Boris ran past. Taking off his woolly mittens, he dashed towards the Vitara but then, swearing, turned back to the Land Cruiser and, opening the back door, started searching behind the driver’s seat. When he reappeared, he was holding the rifle.

  ‘Andrey!’ he shouted hoarsely into the darkness. ‘Come here, now!’ But Andrey was already on his way back. He stopped near us and stuck the spade into the ground by his feet.

  The spot gradually broke into several smaller dots. It appeared to be much closer to us than we had thought; a few minutes later we saw the orange flashing light on its top and four bright yellow lights, set apart from each other, underneath that. Then, breaking the silence that had settled while we were watching intensely, we heard a racket which didn’t sound like a car engine’s. It was low, dull, and somewhat measured, as if there were breaks in between the rotations; a sound which belonged to something much bigger than a car.

  ‘What is it, a tank?’ asked Natasha with fear in her voice.

  ‘I think it’s a snowplough,’ Andrey replied after a pause.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A snowplough. For clearing the road.’

  ‘God,’ continued Natasha, ‘who needs to clear the road now? And most importantly, what for?’

  ‘Looks like we’re going to find out now,’ Andrey answered.

  I felt something heavy against my legs and looked down. Pressing his back to my knees, the dog sat his bony bottom on my boot and stayed there, perfectly still.

  ‘Girls, go back to the cars,’ Boris said quietly. ‘We’ll deal with this.’ But Natasha and I, both fascinated by the blurry spot of light growing into something more defined, stayed where we were. The snowplough turned out to be something like a tractor; in fact it was a tractor, a big, yellow monster with three pairs of huge wheels. Rattling noisily, it stopped about ten metres away from the front of the Land Cruiser, dazzling us with its widely spaced headlights and its huge, threateningly lifted scoop, looking more like a gigantic dinosaur than a vehicle operated by a human, and we simply stood and watched it without trying to hide or run away, as if anything that could happen now was unlikely to be worse than the slow, painful death from cold we were all facing if we stayed on this side of the hole. The person in the cab had one undeniable advantage over us: he could see us very well, while we could only hear his voice, which sounded out as soon as the massive beast stopped and its deafeningly rattling engine fell silent.

  ‘Hey!’ a male voice called. ‘What happened?’ And before we could decide what we needed to say in answer to this strange question, and because the helplessly tilted Land Cruiser spoke for itself, Natasha took a step forward and started talking hurriedly and loudly.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘We’re stuck, there’s a really deep hole in the road here, that’s why we can’t get through, maybe you could give us a tow, we’re terribly cold, we’ve got kids in the car, could you possibly help, we only need to get out, but this road is awful!’ Having said that, she fell silent as suddenly as she had spoken, and for a few seconds her invisible interlocutor didn’t say a word; it was as if he needed time to look at us and convince himself that we didn’t present any danger. Finally, he asked one more question:

  ‘How many of you?’

  That was when I noticed that Boris had disappeared. He wasn’t in the circle of light from the tractor, where the five of us stood, and our main concern was for her not to let something slip that would make the man want to do us harm. He can clearly see we have four big cars, he’d never believe there’s only five of us, I thought, but she said:

  ‘We’ve got children with us, and there’s also a wounded man. Don’t worry, we’re healthy, we just need somebody to pull us out of this hole, we’re stuck, you see.’ She was talking insistently and pleadingly at the same time, and was also smiling to show she wasn’t expecting anything bad from the man in the tractor.

  ‘I could help, of course,’ the man said, prolonging his vowels, and it struck me that his friendly manner of talking and accent were the same as those of the man in the fox-fur hat, the one we had met a week ago on the woodland path near Cherepovets. ‘Why wouldn’t I help good people?’ he carried on. ‘Only if they really are good, those people. These are troublesome times, we should help each other, so let this man of yours who’s got a gun put the gun away and come out back onto the road so I can see him, and then maybe I won’t shoot either.’ He was talking slowly, as if with difficulty, like somebody who doesn’t often talk in long sentences. ‘Can you hear me, mate?’ His voice didn’t sound friendly any more. ‘You should come out, otherwise I’ll shoot. I’m asking nicely, but I won’t ask again. Then we can talk, since we all seem to be good people.’

  ‘Dad,’ Sergey called quietly, but I heard the creaking of footsteps from the right-hand side, and, without hurrying, Boris came out of the dark and stood next to us, sticking his rifle into the snow and holding it by the barrel at arm’s length. His lips were tightly shut. He looked annoyed.

  Perhaps the owner of the voice thought that since we were in front of him while he himself remained invisible to us, nothing posed a threat to him, because he spoke again in a much calmer voice.

  ‘That’s better. Just put it down on the snow, there’s no need to hold it, your gun.’ He stopped, waiting for Boris’s reaction; Boris called out hoarsely towards the yellow headlights, where we could barely see the silhouette of the cab:

  ‘You’re a good person, from what I can tell! But you’ve got a gun as well! And you can see me, but I can’t see you, so I’ll hold off putting my gun onto the snow. Let’s talk first!’

  This suggestion seemed to make the man consider it for a while, because he fell silent again, and we waited for his answer, feeling exposed in the yellow circle in which we stood, like a bunch of night butterflies falling into the trap of a spotlight whose glow, though impalpable, was nevertheless capable of holding us in its power.

  ‘OK then,’ he said finally. ‘Stay where you are, I’ll come to you.’ And somewhere high above our heads, under the four bright lights, the door opened and somebody jumped down heavily onto the snow and started walking towards us.

  Even in the light we couldn’t see him well: the collar of his sheepskin coat was up and his hat was pulled down to his eyes. Judging by his voice he wasn’t young, and that’s why I was surprised how tall and stout he turned out to be – the heavy coat was a tight fit on him. Spreading his feet wide apart, he stopped by the massive metal scoop and put his hand on it. He really was carrying a gun, and he slipped the strap off his shoulder and held it in his other hand.

  ‘There’s no point pulling it,’ he said. ‘It’s not a hole, it’s a dip in the road. It’s an uneven surface, with a slope, and because it’s exposed, the snow has piled up. There’s about four to five kilometres of the road like this. You won’t manage without my help.’

  ‘What do you want as payment for helping us?’ asked Natasha, and he smirked gloomily.

  ‘What do you have that I need?’

  ‘We have cartridges, medicines and some food,’ I said quickly, because the men were still silent, alarmed, and I knew we had to keep the conversation going. I somehow felt that this man wasn’t dangerous and that the important thing was to prove to him that we weren’t dangerous to him either, that we really were ‘good people’. I wanted to say something else, or maybe wake the children and bring them here so he could see them, but Sergey put his hand on my shoulder and asked the man:

  ‘And what are you doing here?’

  The tall man with the gun turned his head. He scrutinised Sergey before he spoke. ‘Who, me?’ he answered. ‘I live here. We don’t have tarmac here, so we need the tractor in the winter, and in the spring, after the snow melts, otherwise you can’t get through. So I clear the road.’

  ‘What about now, you clear it now as well?’ Sergey narrowed his eyes.

  ‘No, there’s no point,’ the man replied seriously. ‘Even before, there weren’t many peo
ple going past here, and now there’s even less, which might be a good thing, for what it’s worth. Our village is on top of a hill, and we can see the road clearly. I don’t sleep well at night in my old age, so I saw you, and I thought, why don’t I come and see what sort of people you are. So do you need help, or shall we do some more talking?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ Natasha rushed to say, and nodded. ‘We really do need your help. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Well then,’ answered the man, ‘I’ll clear the snow in front of the car as much as I can, you dig under the wheels and then follow me, and then you’ll climb out.’ He turned to go back to the tractor but then stopped and looked back over his shoulder at Boris. ‘And you can put your gun away, mate, and pick up your spade. That’ll be more useful now.’

  To get rid of the crumbly snow that covered the Land Cruiser up to the bumper, the tractor needed to make two manoeuvres: it span around itself unbelievably lightly for this kind of bulky vehicle, stood side-on, and revealed another scoop behind its front wheels, much thinner and longer than the other one. It came forward, like the blade of a penknife, and cut off the fluffy snowy pillow that had been stopping us from moving – easily and without any effort, like a shaver removing foam from a chin – and then, using the front, wider scoop, picked up the new pile of snow that had formed and pushed it off the road into the field. The rattle from the tractor, which looked like a huge insect with all its blades spread out, woke everyone sleeping in the cars. Marina ran up to us, her eyes big with fright, and looking first at the tractor and then failing to hear our explanations above the deafening roar about what it was doing there, finally gave up and ran back, and then returned with Lenny. Ira came a bit later, when the tractor had finished its work and moved away a little. She was holding the boy by the hand, and maybe that was why, when the driver came out onto the road again, he didn’t have a gun in his hands.

  ‘I’m done!’ he shouted. ‘You can dig now!’ And while Sergey, Boris and Andrey were scraping out the remaining snow from the Land Cruiser’s undertray and in between the wheels, he walked up to us and stopped in front of the boys.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Anton, and his tone, which I was beginning to get used to, didn’t change a bit even though he was talking to a child. He didn’t speak louder, like many people do who rarely speak to children; he didn’t even smile, just asked the boy a question in the same voice he’d been using to speak to us earlier.

  The boy stepped back, buried his face in Ira’s coat and whispered into it: ‘Anton.’

  ‘And where are you going, Anton?’ the man asked the boy, and he answered, even quieter:

  ‘To the lake.’

  The man straightened up and looked at us again – the three men fussing by the Land Cruiser; Lenny, heavily leaning on Marina’s shoulder; Mishka, almost frozen stiff, and said:

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Anton. Looks like your lake’s a bit far from here, and it’s late, how about you spend the night in the warm,’ and continued, addressing Ira:

  ‘Follow me on this road when you finish. It’s not far, about four kilometres, there’s no need to go driving on a road like this at night. You’ll have a rest, your kids will get warm, and then you can carry on tomorrow.’ Without waiting for our reply, he started walking back to his huge tractor, as if this was decided.

  Half an hour later the job was done. The freed Land Cruiser’s studded tyres clung to the ice which the cleared snow had revealed, and the car finally climbed out of its frozen trap and rolled towards the tractor, and the others, slowly and cautiously, followed it. Straight after that the tractor moved off, unhurriedly clearing the snow in front of us. It wasn’t as deep as where we had got stuck, but deep enough to complicate and even block our way; every now and then the man would open the door and signal for us to wait while he ironed out the crumbly white surface of the road.

  It was half past six in the morning when we finally reached the village. We were exhausted, cold and so desperate for some rest that nobody raised objections to the invitation to spend the night in his house from this large, strange man who had initially caused us some alarm and put us on our guard.

  The rest of the village was a few hundred metres away. It was tiny, only eight or ten log houses facing us, with their dark three-window frontages and thick caps of snow on their roofs like on Christmas cards; only our host’s massive log house stood alone, right by the road. Once we had parked our cars (we had to turn off the road and drive round this tall house with its strange, asymmetrical roof, one slope of which was twice as long as the other and resembled a ski slope, almost reaching the ground) it became clear to us why this house was separate from the others: there was a clearing behind it, and by the awning where he presumably kept his tractor there was a huge, tightly wrapped fuel tank, resting on thick metal legs.

  ‘Is this diesel?’ Sergey asked with fake indifference, nodding towards the tank, and the man answered, ‘It is.’ He shook snow off his boots and walked into the house.

  I found it difficult to believe that the man lived alone in this house. It had looked quite big from the outside, but when we followed him indoors, we saw a large unlit two-floor gallery, leading far to the right and obviously continuing further round the corner. Somewhere in the depths of the gallery there was a large animal, a cow or a pig, which started moving and making a noise when it heard us come in. This strange lobby was so huge that all eleven of us and our host could easily fit in; only when the front door was finally closed did he open another one, which led inside the house.

  The man took off his coat and hat and invited us with a gesture to do the same, and I had a chance to look at him properly. He was completely bald, with thick, bushy eyebrows and a white beard, but it was impossible to tell his age – he could be sixty or seventy-five. He was unusually large, bigger than any of our men, and kept his back very straight; I wouldn’t have been surprised if a young woman had appeared from within the enormous, odd house and introduced herself as his wife. But the only creature to greet us was an old, shaggy dog, lying on the floor by the stove; when we came in it turned its head and looked at us with teary, cloudy eyes, but didn’t get up, just wagged its tail feebly. He bent down and patted it on the back, and then said, as if apologising:

  ‘She’s old, her bones get cold, bless her. I keep the others outside, but this one I had to take in, I feel sorry for her. Bring your dog in too, he’ll be safer here. The other dogs are locked up, but I’ll have to let them out in the morning. They’ll rip him to shreds if he stays out.’

  It occurred to me that while we had been driving to the house, while we’d been parking and taking out the stuff we needed for the night, I hadn’t seen anywhere where the dogs might be kept; there was nothing outside apart from the fuel tank and the awning for the tractor. There wasn’t a stack of wood, or a well, or even a shed. The mystery was solved after Marina, very shyly, asked our host to show her where the toilet was. Following the man, cautiously walking down the dark gallery, we understood that the toilet, the stacks of wood and even the well, in other words everything that would normally be outside in the yard, was under the roof of this house; most of the house was the yard, hidden behind the thick log walls.

  Giving strict orders not to light matches – ‘I’ve got hay upstairs, I’ll leave the door open so you have light, and you’ll find the way back yourselves’ – he left, leaving us alone, and while Marina was desperately wrestling with her snow-white ski suit in the dark and the rest of the women had to wait their turn, I turned to Ira and whispered, barely audibly, what I was confident was occupying everyone’s head: ‘Did you see the fuel tank? If it’s even half full…’ And she nodded and pressed her finger to her lips.

  In spite of the large space indoors there were only two tiny rooms in the house, built around the stove, and we would never have been able to fit into them if we hadn’t had our sleeping bags. Without asking any questions, the man sorted out all potential issues and arguments, ordering men to sleep
in the attic and women and kids downstairs, on the stove; and while the men walked up one by one, each step creaking as they climbed the almost vertical staircase, which was more like a stepladder, we found a properly spacious area on top of the stove for all of us, which was presumably where the man himself slept. While we struggled to settle ourselves, because there was still not enough room for four women and two children, the steps to the loft started creaking again: somebody was coming down, and the dog, curled up on the floor, jumped to his feet and growled. I put my hand on his head.

  ‘Where is he?’ I heard Boris’s voice from the other room; he was talking quietly, almost whispering.

  ‘He probably went to get some wood,’ Sergey answered. ‘He was here a second ago.’

  ‘Just don’t start talking about it too early—’ Boris began, but the front door banged and the familiar rolling voice, which seemed unable to speak quietly, asked:

  ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’

  ‘Well, it seems a bit uncivil of us,’ Boris muttered, and something clanked on the table. ‘You helped us get out of the hole, you brought us to your house, we should meet properly, I think.’

  ‘Why not,’ the man agreed. ‘But what do we need vodka for? It’s morning, I don’t drink in the mornings.’

  ‘It’s not vodka, it’s spirit,’ Boris said, offended. ‘Let’s have at least a small one, as a greeting, and we’ll go up. We won’t stay long at your place, so we really need to get some sleep.’

  ‘Well, let’s – if it’s just a small one,’ answered the man.

  In spite of being dog-tired, I couldn’t sleep, so I lay with my eyes open, listening to the conversation in the other room through the door which wasn’t properly shut. Maybe I couldn’t sleep because my place on the stove was the least comfortable, right on the edge, where the mattress didn’t reach; maybe it was because I was trying to guess what exactly Boris and Sergey, who had come down from the loft with a bottle of spirit, had on their minds. Instead of getting some rest after the day’s extremely tough journey, did they plan to get this big strong man drunk and steal the fuel we desperately needed, or would they try to coax him into giving it to us? From the moment we’d seen the fuel tank we hadn’t managed to talk about it, because the man had always been near; perhaps they’d only been able to make a decision after they were left on their own in the loft.