by Yana Vagner
‘We only need about three hundred litres,’ Boris said in the same quiet voice. ‘We won’t take more, we just need to reach the place, you said yourself that the road’s bad, we’ve hardly found any fuel, and further along, if what you said’s true, it’ll be too dangerous to stop at all. Just don’t move, we’ll pour out the fuel – just a bit, you can watch us – and leave, and you’ll never see us again, you’re a good man, and if it weren’t for these circumstances, you know…’
The man was silent.
‘Why do you need so much diesel?’ said Boris a bit louder. ‘You’ve got enough here to clear the roads for the whole winter, and who needs them now, your roads? We can’t get to the lake without it, we’ll get as far as Poudozh and get stuck, we desperately need it, you see, we need it like fishes need water!’ Then he fell silent, defiant, continuing to look at the man from under his eyebrows, and in that silence we could only hear the nozzle clicking behind his back and the diesel gurgling with heavy, irregular splashes inside the plastic jerrycan.
The old man paused, as if waiting for Boris to carry on talking, and then shook his head slowly and said:
‘Boy, what a strange lot you are.’ He said it without anger, sounding maybe a touch surprised. ‘You’re not like normal people, I swear. Why do it this way? I have two and a half thousand litres there. Why didn’t you ask?’ And then he waited, indifferently, as if he had lost interest in us.
Sergey and Andrey fussed about with the cans, and then, when the last one was full, Boris, who had lowered the rifle by then, said again, ‘You see, three hundred exactly. I told you we wouldn’t take any more.’ While the men hurriedly shoved the weighty cans between the bags inside the boots of the cars, and even afterwards, when Sergey came back and, without looking up at the old man, asked, ‘Do you need cartridges? For the gun? Or medicines? We’ve got some chest pain relief, do you want some? Take some, you might need it, maybe not for you, but somebody else,’ even when we had finished and looked at him for the last time, standing in exactly the same way, without a hat, by the wall of his huge, empty house – even then he didn’t say another word. Not a single one.
When we drove back out onto the road to Nigizhma, it started snowing with small, intermittent flakes.
18
Pavel and Nikolai
We drove fast – as fast as was possible on the snow-sprinkled road – and I caught myself looking back to make sure the road behind us was empty. Somehow I was convinced that the man who had let us stay in his house and take his fuel wouldn’t chase us, but that the others, who had come to visit him earlier, were more likely to do so, especially after we had given them a reason and been the first to break the rules. Presumably we all felt the same, as we drove all the way to Nigizhma without stopping or talking over the radio despite our need to eat, feed the children and top up the fuel tanks. The continuing snowfall kept spurring us on; it was harmless for now but could easily become heavier and block our way, which would be fatal for us.
If it hadn’t been for the man’s warning that Nigizhma was alive, we would have never guessed it. Driving through the dark, hushed village, it was easy to assume that its people had left. I thought I saw a glimpse of a light in one of the windows, but it could easily have been the reflection of our headlights.
‘Do you think there’s anyone left here?’ I asked Sergey.
‘I don’t know, Anya. A week’s a long time these days. Anything could happen in a week, and the old man wouldn’t have known.’
And I thought: really, what’s a week? Two weeks ago we’d still been at home. The city was closed by then, but my mum was still alive, and Boris hadn’t yet arrived and knocked on our balcony door in the middle of the night to tell us that we were careless fools. Two weeks ago we’d still had several days before our world would completely collapse, leaving us without any hope that this horror would end on its own. There was no way we could simply hide and sit it out. It was impossible to believe that two weeks earlier Sergey, Mishka and I had probably been having dinner in our cosy modern kitchen with the stained-glass lampshade and my biggest worry had been what to cook for dinner the next day.
Although that hadn’t been the case, of course not; two weeks ago Sergey and I had tried to enter the city and had started to worry about those inside it, beyond the checkpoints – but we’d still had hope. We hadn’t lost anyone yet, the bad people hadn’t shot Lenny’s dog yet, the gingerbread house hadn’t burnt down in the neighbouring village and we hadn’t even considered leaving, convinced we were safe within the walls of our beautiful, newly built house. It was impossible to imagine that all this had happened only two weeks ago.
This was why it was easy to believe that, although there had been no contact with Nigizhma, a week had been enough for the illness to reach it and kill the few people there; or for those ‘bad people’, as the old man had called them, to find their way there. It was easy to believe that this village seemed deserted and dead because it really was deserted and dead, and that there was no Ivan Alekseyevich in the third house down on the right whom we could have asked for help if we’d had the decency to do so at the time. I could have been wrong. Maybe the villagers had seen the four large cars approaching from a long way away and had decided to lock up their houses and hide. Maybe they were watching us from the darkness of their windows, following us with their gaze. Who knows, maybe there was somebody watching us with fear and distrust, watching us through the sights of their hunting rifle.
‘I don’t like it here,’ I said, scrunching down into my seat. ‘Let’s go faster.’
‘Dad, let’s skip this one a bit quicker,’ Sergey said into the microphone straight away, as if he had been waiting for me to say this, and Boris answered grumpily:
‘I can’t go quicker, the road’s bad, the last thing we want is to get stuck in the middle of the village. Don’t panic. If they didn’t jump out on us straight away, they’ll let us pass.’
I couldn’t relax for three or four kilometres after Nigizhma disappeared behind the bend as if it had never been there and the seemingly endless fields of snow on either side of the road were replaced again by thick forest.
Andrey’s voice came over the radio:
‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve used up my fuel, the tank’s empty, we can’t go any further, let’s stop.’
‘Let’s drive for another five kilometres,’ Boris suggested. ‘It doesn’t seem a good idea to do it right under their noses—’
‘I’ve made the last fifteen kilometres by the skin of my teeth.’ Andrey spoke quietly, almost whispering, but we could hear how difficult it was for him to restrain himself from shouting. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, I’ve used up my fuel pulling out your Land Cruiser, so if I say we’re not going to last any longer that means we’re not going to last any longer.’ As soon as he said that, he pulled over, and we had no choice but do the same.
As soon as I opened the passenger door, the dog squeezed past the back of my seat and the side column and jumped out. He ran to the woods, zigzagging between the trees, and disappeared. I watched him in alarm, thinking that instead of choosing one of our companions on this journey to add to a short list of those I cared about, I had instinctively chosen this big, unfriendly beast. This list, or rather circle, had never been large in my previous life, and over the last few years it had shrunk dramatically and included only those closest to me: my mum, Sergey, Mishka. Even Lena, my best friend, had been more outside of it than inside recently. It didn’t have anything to do with how well they got on with Sergey, but since he had appeared in my life, the rest of the world had somehow lost its colour and retreated into the background. It had become unimportant, as if somebody had separated me from the people I had known before. It was as if somebody had put me under a bell jar which had muted all sounds and smells of the outer world, and everyone outside had become shadows on the walls, still recognisable but no longer important to me. And this big, gloomy dog, who came and went as he pleased, was ma
king me search for him, making me worry that he wouldn’t come back in time for us to leave and that I wouldn’t manage to persuade the others to wait for him.
I got out of the car and, taking the crumpled pack out of my pocket, grabbed the last cigarette from it. The men behind me were concentrating on taking out the heavy twenty-litre jerrycans, each one splashing reassuringly as they moved it. They were calling to each other – ‘Hey, Dad, give us some light, I can’t see the fuel door’; ‘That’s enough, Mishka, it’s full now’ – and I started walking along the frozen edge of the road with an unlit cigarette in my hand and couldn’t make myself stop. I suddenly had a burning desire to move away from the headlights, from the human voices for a short time, at least for a minute, to be alone for five minutes in this frosty, fresh darkness; I needed a break after a night spent with strange women in a small, stuffy room. I had taken five steps, then ten, when Sergey called:
‘Anya! Where are you going?’
I didn’t stop; I couldn’t say anything. I just waved back and took another step, and then another. I won’t go far, I thought, just far enough not to see anyone, I’m exhausted from having people’s bodies so close to me, leave me for some time, please, give me a little time. I knew well that I wouldn’t go too far; I didn’t need solitude, but I needed its illusion, its safe substitute. As soon as I reached a place where the light became barely noticeable and the sounds blended into one undifferentiated noise, I stopped and stood still. They won’t look for me straight away, I thought, I have five minutes, maybe even ten, I’ll stand here, in silence, and when they’re ready, they’ll call me, I’ll be able to hear them and come back.
The snow along the road was virgin white, and ignoring how I would look to anyone seeing me, I knelt down and then lay on my back. Only then, looking up, did I notice that it had stopped snowing; it stopped as quickly as it had started. It was cold and soft to lie on the snow, like on a feather bed in a cold bedroom. In the black, moonless sky I could clearly see large, bright stars, and I lay on my back, smoking, enjoying every minute of it, without rushing. It’s dark here, I thought, they’re not going to see me and won’t ask me why on earth I’m lying in the snow, it’s impossible to explain, I couldn’t possibly explain it to them, to any of them, even to Sergey, why I need to do this.
I could still hear their voices and the doors closing, but these sounds seemed distant, almost illusionary. It seemed that with a slight effort I could block these sounds completely, and I almost managed to do so, but soon I realised that my quiet and peaceful reverie was being disturbed by a new noise, one totally out of place. For some time I kept on lying still, trying to understand what sort of noise it was, and even took a couple of pulls on my cigarette. Then, propping myself on one elbow, I started looking carefully into the pitch darkness masking the twisting road to Nigizhma – and then I realised. I jumped up, threw down the unfinished cigarette and ran back to the cars, trying to reduce the distance separating me from the others as fast as I could.
When I ran up to them, they had almost finished topping up the fuel, although they hadn’t put away the jerrycans which were piled on the snow. Sergey turned at the sound of my footsteps and I shouted to him, out of breath:
‘A car! There’s a car!’ and by the way he desperately turned towards the thick wall of the woods, I realised that it was too late, that we wouldn’t make it. I started searching for Mishka and saw him near the cars; then I recognised Lenny’s massive figure on the back seat of the Land Cruiser and next to him the white of Marina’s suit; Boris, Andrey, Natasha. Everyone was here and only the Vitara was empty, with the door wide open: neither Ira nor the boy were in it.
‘Ira!’ I shouted as loudly as I could, and as soon as the echo of my voice stopped, the noise of the approaching car became obvious and its lights pierced the seemingly impenetrable row of bare, frozen trunks a few hundred metres away from us, flashing on snowy branches.
‘Anya, go to the woods,’ Sergey breathed out, looking for the rifle among the clutter behind the Pajero’s seats. ‘Girls, all go to the woods!’ And because we were too shocked and frightened to move, he turned back, painfully grabbed me by the shoulder and barked straight in my face, ‘Anya, can you hear me? Go to the woods!’ and pushed me so hard that I almost lost my balance, and continuing to look at me intently, carefully, said again: ‘Find Ira and Anton, and stay there until I call you. Do you understand?’ And then I slowly started walking backwards, still looking at him, and he said again: ‘Do you understand?’ I nodded, and he turned away and walked back to the road, only I didn’t have a chance to take another step, because the car, which I had noticed too late, was already very close. It slowed down about thirty metres away and, slowing even more, as if reluctantly, drove closer, so close I could see it clearly. It was a squat, loaf-shaped mud-green UAZ minivan, with small round wide-set headlights. When it reached us, it pulled to the left, into the oncoming traffic lane, and stopped. All the doors remained shut and nobody got out onto the road, but its engine continued rumbling, puffs of smoke coming from the exhaust pipe.
‘Get behind the car,’ Sergey said quietly, but we were already instinctively retreating to hide behind our massive, overloaded vehicles. Bending down, he carefully walked around the hatchback, rested his elbows on the bonnet and aimed the gun.
A branch snapped behind me. I turned round and saw Ira with the boy, slowly coming out of the woods. She must have heard the noise of the car, I thought, she’s always so careful – but she wasn’t even looking our way; she was looking under her feet, stepping over the fallen tree trunks sticking out of the snow and talking to the boy:
‘…what do you mean you’re not hungry, you need to eat, you must, we’ll ask Daddy to open a tin of lovely meat—’
‘Shall we give the meat to the dog as well?’ asked the boy in a high voice, but Ira didn’t reply because she finally saw our tense, frozen figures, Sergey holding a gun, and somebody else’s car on the other side of the road, and then she suddenly pressed her hand against the boy’s mouth. He squealed in protest and tried to free himself, and with the other hand she pulled him towards her, fell onto the snow with him, and lay very still.
While I was watching Ira, I heard a noise from the road. I looked towards it and saw that the passenger door of the car was open and a man – a short, stocky man wearing a jumper of some ridiculous, rusty colour – had started clumsily climbing out of it. Then he did something even more strange. Instead of trying to take a proper look at us or address us, he finished climbing out of the car, promptly turned around, stuck his head into the open door and shouted, with laughter in his voice rather than irritation:
‘It doesn’t open, your window, I told you! Nothing frigging works in your car!’
Somebody invisible inside the car, presumably the driver, said something in a persistent and alarmed voice, and the person standing on the road waved him off with a comical, exaggerated gesture, perhaps meaning There’s no point in talking to you, and then turned around and started walking briskly towards us, shouting, ‘Don’t worry! I’m a doctor! A doctor!’ He lifted his hand in front of him, which was holding a plastic case like the ones paramedics carry in ambulances. Something rattled inside the case.
‘Stop!’ shouted Boris, and stepped into the light so the man walking towards us could see the rifle he was holding. The man stopped but didn’t put down the case. Instead, he lifted it higher and said in the same loud voice:
‘I told you, I’m a doctor! Are you all OK? Do you need help?’ and I looked at the car again and saw a bright white rectangle with red letters on it – AMBULANCE – and lower, a red cross inside a white circle.
‘We don’t need a doctor!’ Boris shouted to the man with the case. ‘Drive away!’
‘Are you sure?’ asked the man, carefully looking ahead as if better trying to see the face of his armed interlocutor. ‘So why are you here then? What happened?’
‘We’re fine, you fucker!’ roared Boris angrily. ‘We don’t need an
yone!’
The person with the case stood there for some time, as if waiting for Boris to say something else, then lowered his hand and said in what sounded like a disappointed voice, ‘Well, if you don’t, then you don’t,’ and turned around to go back to his car.
‘Wait!’ a thin voice from somewhere on the right shouted, and he froze and lifted his head. ‘Don’t go! We need a doctor!’
‘Marina,’ hissed Boris, turning to her, ‘go back to your place.’ But she had already come out onto the road and was running to the man with the case and didn’t look back at us once. When she had almost reached the man she slipped and nearly fell on the ice so he had to hold her with his free hand, and while he was helping her get up, she was telling him in a hurried and complaining tone: ‘Please don’t go, they won’t do anything, my husband’s there, he was hurt with a knife, it’s not healing well, come with me, I’ll show you,’ and dragged him towards the car, where Lenny sat, helplessly curled up on the back seat. We watched them come up to the Land Cruiser, Marina lifting her arm and finding the button to turn on the light inside the car and then hurriedly taking the little girl out of the car, and then the child’s car seat, dropping it next to the vehicle. With a lot of effort, she tried to push the front seats forward. They didn’t move, and she was struggling with them until the man with the case said:
