by Yana Vagner
‘Hang on, let me try.’
The girl, who stood outside on the snow, her snowsuit half undone and her head uncovered, started whimpering, but Marina didn’t seem to hear her. The man with the case managed to push the seats forward and his top half disappeared inside the big black car; we could only see his legs on the step. Marina ran around the Land Cruiser from the other side and, opening the driver’s door, also stuck her head into the car, continuing to talk in a worried voice. The girl cried louder and then Natasha, who was crouching by the car, exclaimed: ‘What’s going on, damn it, she didn’t put a hat on her,’ and stood up. ‘Marina!’ Natasha shouted. ‘Where’s Dasha’s hat?’ There was no answer, so she went up to the little girl and started pulling the hood over her head, grumbling. ‘As if they’ve only just hurt him with a knife, goodness, what a drama queen, don’t cry, sweetheart, it’s OK, the doctor’s come to see Daddy, it’s OK, let’s zip up your snowsuit…’
The rest of us, still crouching behind the cars, were feeling silly. Nobody tried to call Marina or Natasha. Andrey, drawing himself up to his full height, came out from his hiding place and walked towards his wife, and then Mishka, who was hiding behind the Vitara, looked back at me, unsure, and followed him – I was surprised to see he was holding one of Sergey’s guns in his hands. Boris spat on the ground, annoyed, and was the last to give in; as soon as he reached the Land Cruiser, the man with the case poked his head out and, still standing on the step, shouted towards the car:
‘Nikolai! Bring me my black bag, it should be somewhere behind the seat! Nikolai, can you hear me? Ah, I’ll go and get it.’ Lightly jumping off the step, he walked quickly across the road, just as his untrusting partner was coming towards him. The other man had left the engine running and the door open, and now as he walked around the car he continued to talk to the man with the case in the same displeased, alarmed voice:
‘I don’t know where your bag is, you always dump it all over the place, go and look for it yourself!’
And while the doctor was rummaging about inside the car, almost disappearing inside it and revealing to us the worn-out shoes he was wearing, disproportionately large for somebody so short, the frowning Nikolai, who had a long, thin face with grey stubble, stood nearby, looking at us grimly and without a trace of friendliness. He was gripping a heavy iron bar.
Several painfully long minutes later, the black bag was discovered and moved to the Land Cruiser. Having spent some time hovering by the car, Nikolai finally turned the engine off and began rooting around inside it. He took out something shapeless and soft, and then, still tucking the bar under his arm – he was definitely not ready to part with it – gave us a prickly, contemptuous look as he went past the Land Cruiser and said grumpily to the large, rust-brown back, ‘Put your coat on, Pavel Sergeyevich, you’ll get cold, it’s freezing outside,’ and tried to shove the shapeless package inside the car. This turned out to be a thick winter jacket, but ‘Pavel Sergeyevich’ only brushed him off without looking back, and then Nikolai pressed the jacket to his chest and remained standing like that close by, shaking his head, like a parent who had got tired of the antics of his naughty child, mumbling to himself: ‘“Don’t worry”, he says. I mean, they have him at gunpoint and he says “Don’t worry”. And we only have an iron bar, and that’s the only weapon we’ve got. How many times did I tell him, “Don’t meddle, damn you,” but no, he definitely needs to meddle!’ Nikolai lifted his head and glared at us. ‘And look at you. You’re offered help, and what do you do? Point a gun at the man who’s offered to help you!’ He snorted grudgingly and fell silent. A few seconds later he said, in a completely different voice: ‘Have you got a fag? We haven’t smoked for five days.’
Ten minutes later, after two cigarettes which Boris had reluctantly given him, Nikolai, tucking another cigarette behind his ear for later, said, ‘If anyone’s cold they should sit in the car, because if Pavel Sergeyevich gets to a patient, there’s no stopping him, he’ll treat them to death.’ Boris was still looking at Nikolai in the same unfriendly manner, but Nikolai walked up and down next to our parked cars, looking them over like an expert, kicked some of the wheels, and, stopping by the Land Cruiser, said, ‘This one must be a really thirsty car, you’re probably spending all your time at the petrol station,’ and lovingly glanced towards his van, parked on the other side. I thought he was desperate for us to ask him questions, but as soon as I asked him something, he turned sulky again and grumbled something like, ‘When Pavel’s free, you can talk to him, I don’t know nothing, my job’s to drive.’
Finally, both the doctor and Marina got out, leaving Lenny lying on the back seat of the car.
‘Here,’ the doctor said, ‘take it.’ He gave her a small white tube. ‘Use it sparingly, because I don’t have any more. You need to treat the wound twice a day minimum: that’ll be enough for five or six days. And – did you hear me saying? – don’t rush to remove the stitches. You’ll understand when it’s safe to do so.’ And she stood clutching the precious tube in her hands. Marina was almost a head taller than this short, stocky man and looked like a fine-boned thoroughbred Arabian horse next to a hard-working and simple donkey. She nodded at every word he was saying, and somehow it seemed that she was looking up at him: her face was showing awe and admiration.
The doctor took a few steps towards us, obviously relieved to escape Marina’s gratitude. Maybe he feared that she’d go down on her knees next or start kissing his hands or something: certainly her outpouring of thanks was threatening to become unstoppable.
‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. There’s a slight inflammation, but the local antibiotic will heal it. I would prescribe something orally, too, in normal circumstances, but my stocks are very low and I might need them for more serious cases. Well done to the person who stitched him up – the seam’s good, really neat, I can see a man’s steady hand in it.’ And he, smiling pleasantly, looked at Boris, who grumpily nodded at Ira, who now stood nearby, with the boy peeking out from behind her leg.
‘She did it, actually.’
‘Oh!’ said the doctor and looked at her. ‘Oh,’ he said again, when she looked at him, and didn’t say anything else for another two or three minutes.
‘Listen,’ Sergey said. ‘Your name is Pavel Sergeyevich, right?’ The doctor finally took his gaze off Ira and started nodding vigorously. ‘What are you two doing here in this place, at this hour? Where are you going? Where from?’
‘That’s because somebody has ants in their pants.’ Nikolai’s long face popped up from the darkness and hung above the doctor’s solid shoulder.
The doctor laughed. ‘Nikolai likes metaphors, but I’m afraid he’s absolutely right there.’
And, interrupting each other, they started talking – or rather, it was the doctor who spoke the most, and the glum Nikolai, when he thought that the story lacked an important detail or two, who added a few words here and there.
19
The Doctor’s Story
Almost three weeks ago, after they had found out that Moscow and St Petersburg had been placed in quarantine, the chief doctor of the hospital where they both worked was on the phone with Petrozavodsk for a long time, and they heard his irritated voice from behind the door of his office saying, ‘No, you tell me what to do!’ and ‘I have five cases in town, and another one coming in from a nearby village with similar symptoms!’ and then the sound of him slamming the receiver down before he came out to his staff waiting outside and said gloomily: ‘So. We need to go to Petrozavodsk.’
Somehow they were all convinced a vaccine existed. Maybe just a small batch, untested in proper clinical trials, but they were sure it did exist and that for some unknown reason their small town hadn’t received it, perhaps because the major cities were seen as needing it more than the provinces, which the government had never cared much about. It was decided to send an expedition to the Ministry of Health’s office (‘and Nikolai and I were ideal candidates because neither of us have families,�
� the doctor said, and, looking at Ira, turned slightly pink). Before they left, the head of the hospital said to them, ‘Pavel, go and sit in the waiting room and don’t leave until they give you the bloody medicine, do you hear me? And don’t come back without the vaccine.’ Then they drove in an ambulance van all night, almost four hundred kilometres on a really bad, frozen road, and arrived in Petrozavodsk the following morning. The Ministry of Health was not interested in them, as had been expected, so having waited in the reception area till lunchtime, the doctor decided to break all possible and impossible rules and forced his way into the deputy head’s office, interrupting a departmental meeting which had been going on all morning, and spurted out his angry speech, which had been going through his head the whole time he’d been sitting on the uncomfortable passenger seat on the sleepless journey to Petrozavodsk. But he didn’t quite manage to finish it; an elderly, exhausted man with a face as sad as a spaniel’s, who sat at the top of the table, shouted at him with unexpected energy, ‘You said five cases? I’ve had five thousand cases in two weeks! And another five hundred every day! And there’s been no phone connection with St Petersburg since yesterday! I don’t have a vaccine, nobody does, they’re simply waiting for us all to die, damn it!’ He paused to draw breath, and then said in a calmer voice, ‘Your main advantage, my dear man, is that you live far away from here, and there aren’t that many of you. Trust me, you’re much luckier there than we are here, so take your van and fuck off to where you came from, and start praying, damn you, for your five cases.’ The doctor didn’t give up upon hearing this, of course, and spent the rest of the day pushing through the narrow corridors of the department, grabbing random people by the sleeves, eavesdropping on conversations, trying to get through to somewhere else, explaining things to various people, and only towards the end of the day did he realise that the exhausted man who had shouted at him in the office was absolutely right: the epidemic had got out of control – if there ever had been any control – and whatever was going on was an avalanche-like catastrophe.
The only thing he managed to get hold of was a stamped piece of paper, stating that the holder of that paper, Pavel Krasilnikov, was entitled to receive two thousand doses of an antiviral drug at a Petrozavodsk drug storage facility. ‘Only it won’t help you,’ somebody told him. ‘It’s for the flu, but not that kind of flu.’ And when he ran outside, clutching the precious piece of paper, it turned out that Nikolai and the van had been temporarily ‘borrowed’ for the forced hospitalisation of the infected, and then he had to run to the pharmacy, asking occasional passers-by the way, staring in horror at the empty streets with ambulances parked at the sides, people with no faces wearing identical white and green masks, the makeshift grocery and medicine distribution points with queues of silent, alarmed people – everything that we all knew too well by then without him telling us.
By the time Nikolai turned up, with his face mask askew, completely exhausted and scared to death, Pavel had already got his hands on the two thousand doses, packed into three small rectangular bags, and despite the tiredness and shock they were both willing to go home, to escape the city of three hundred thousand people which, as they could see, was already in agony. Luckily, they had filled the van’s tank with petrol before they set out on this desperate trip, so they jumped into it and dashed away from the city. Only they didn’t manage to leave so quickly: a few kilometres from the edge of the city they got stuck in a huge traffic jam consisting of vehicles full of people who, like Nikolai and Pavel, were scared stiff. There were suitcases and bundles hurriedly fixed on roofs and stuffed into boots and these were poking out, and while Pavel stayed in the van and kept looking back at the carefully stacked bags of medicine, Nikolai ran ahead and came back with the news that they couldn’t leave the city: the road was blocked by lorries and armed people who weren’t letting anyone out. With great difficulty they turned back through the side streets and tried to leave the city by various other routes, but it was the same story everywhere; finally, with a full week’s delay, they had announced quarantine in Petrozavodsk. This desperate measure was taken not to save the doomed city, which was beyond saving, but rather to protect those who were outside the city from the ruthless disease.
They didn’t say much about what they did in a besieged city for three weeks (‘I told you, he has to meddle,’ Nikolai said with sad pride, and sourced himself another cigarette from Boris’s stocks); they said that they only had to use one of the bags of medicine from the exhausted drug storage unit, and it was presumably that, or maybe unexplainable luck, that had saved both of them from the disease despite the fact that they had spent twenty days in close contact with dying people. ‘You see, it’s a priceless clinical experience,’ said the doctor with a lot of emotion, looking each of us in the eyes, as if it was vitally important to him to convince us. ‘This virus is undoubtedly dangerous, but it’s not the virus that kills. I’m absolutely convinced that an infected person can be saved if the haemorrhagic pneumonia, which starts on day four to six, can be prevented. The incubation period is very short, atypically short – sometimes it’s only a few hours, and twenty-four hours maximum – and this is really bad for a patient, but generally speaking this is good, you see? If people had been diagnosed properly from the start and the infected isolated, a lot of lives could have been saved, but they pretended that nothing was happening to avoid causing panic, like they always do, and then it was too late!’ he said, finishing with despair in his voice.
Then they told us that when the checkpoints were abandoned three weeks later, because half the troops got infected and the other half fled, Nikolai and Pavel had boarded the ambulance van and tried to leave again. They left the city without any trouble, but on the way to Medvezhiegorsk, before they reached Shuya, they came across a crumpled, badly damaged car with a woman inside it whose face was white with horror, her hair all messed up. When she saw the red cross on the van she got out of the car and practically threw herself in front of the ambulance, and when they stopped (‘He just has to meddle!’ said Nikolai again, with gloomy satisfaction), it turned out that this woman’s husband was lying in the back of the car with a bullet in his stomach, and while the doctor made desperate but fruitless attempts to save him, the woman stopped sobbing and sat on the ground, wiped out, with her back to the muddy wheel of the car; she told them, interrupting her story with sharp, convulsive gasps, that Shuya, which was on the left side of the motorway, had been plundered and burnt, and that straight after Shuya she and her husband had been ambushed and had to force their way through a line of cars blocking their way. Some shots were fired from behind them; one shot cost the car its rear window, and the other – confirmed by Pavel shortly afterwards – cost her husband his life.
They took the woman with them. When she saw her husband was dead, she let them lead her into the van without emotion; she didn’t take a single thing from her mangled car and didn’t say a word during the journey. In the forty minutes they were driving all they heard was the regular knocking of her head on the window every time the van went over a bump, which gave them a scare every time. In the centre of the city she asked them to pull over, and listlessly waved them off in spite of their trying to persuade her to come back and stay with them and their promises that they would try to break out of the town together. Instead, she slowly walked away. They watched her disappear round the corner of one of the side streets and then decided to go back via a different road, going round Lake Onega, through Vytegra and Nigizhma. No one would dare choose that route at this troublesome time, but the wide Murmansk road was no longer available, and if they did want to get home, albeit three weeks late and with medicine that they’d become convinced couldn’t help anyone, they didn’t have any other choice.
Several times they got into serious trouble. The first time was when they got stuck in a dip in the road similar to the one we had been in yesterday and which had almost cost us our lives, but their dip was shallower, and that’s how, together, working non-stop
for several hours, they were able to clear the road. The second time was when, ploughing through the crumbly snow, they got a puncture for some inexplicable reason and it turned out that the spare wheel was no longer there, having disappeared during the evacuation in Petrozavodsk. Nikolai, swearing mightily and freezing to the bones, worked for two seemingly endless hours, trying to repair the tyre with what he had to hand. He managed to take the frozen tyre off and fix it; even though they had to pump it up every thirty or forty kilometres, it was still good enough to carry on their journey. They spent eighteen hours on the road without a break, and all this time Nikolai had been driving (‘I can’t drive, I somehow never got round to learning, you know,’ the doctor said shyly). Wary of potential ambushes, they didn’t risk asking to stay the night in any of the villages they went past, but when they saw our cars on the side of the road, they decided to stop. (‘You see, I saw this little boy.’ The doctor pointed at Anton, clinging to Ira’s leg. ‘Nikolai was against us stopping, especially now, when we’ve almost reached home, but I thought, you have children with you, maybe you need help.’ And he fell silent and smiled again, as if apologising for the fact that the story was so long.)
Everyone was quiet for some time; we were digesting the interrupted account he had just given us.
‘Where’s your hospital?’ Sergey finally asked.
‘In Poudozh. Didn’t I say?’ The doctor sounded surprised. ‘It’s not far from here, about fifteen kilometres.’
‘Listen,’ Marina said, and put her thin hand on the sleeve of the crumpled jacket which Nikolai had draped over the doctor’s shoulders sometime in the middle of his speech; several times he’d huffily lifted it up after it had slid down when the doctor was waving his arms in a particularly lively fashion. ‘We’ve heard that there’s unrest in Poudozh. You shouldn’t go there on your own. Wait for us, we’ll just top up the fuel and go with you, OK?’
