To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘Unrest?’ the doctor asked with a sad smile. ‘Where is there a place without unrest?’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Marina firmly, in a tone I had never noticed in her speech before, ‘it’s safer to go together, don’t you understand? God only knows what may have happened in Poudozh in the last three weeks. Just wait a little while, we’re almost ready. We are almost ready, aren’t we?’

  ‘No,’ Ira said. ‘We’re not ready.’ We all looked at her in surprise.

  ‘OK, we haven’t eaten,’ Marina said with energy, ‘but we can eat on the way, Ira, or now, quickly. It’ll take ten minutes, they can’t go on their own—’

  ‘That’s not my point,’ Ira said slowly. ‘We can’t go because the Vitara has run out of petrol.’

  I had been expecting this. The petrol situation was a continuous and ongoing worry: all the time we’d been moving forward, reducing the distance between ourselves and the small house on the lake which promised us the calm and safety we longed for, I couldn’t help wondering if we had enough fuel to get there. I thought about it while I was driving, watching the thin red needle that didn’t move smoothly; it would stay in the same place for an hour or more and then make a sudden jump, and every time it did this my heart would jump too, because the car – not just the Vitara, but any of our four cars – was keeping us alive on this long dangerous road. Our cars had become symbols of life itself. I thought about it when we found the abandoned lorry, and then again at the empty petrol stations near Kirillov, and when we were stealing fuel from the old man’s tank. We’d been lucky several times in the last few days, and the three diesel cars had enough fuel in them to get to the lake, but we hadn’t found petrol anywhere, other than the few litres Boris had found in the summer cottages. Still, I wasn’t ready for it to happen so quickly, and that’s why I asked, feeling silly for doing so, ‘What do you mean, run out? Already?’

  ‘Well, there’s enough for ten or fifteen kilometres,’ Ira answered. ‘But the warning light is on and we thought it’d be better to sort it out here and not in a city where there could be trouble going on—’

  ‘I didn’t have time to tell you,’ Sergey said, interrupting her quickly. ‘The Vitara will have to stay here. We’ll move all the stuff and we’ll have to make space for ourselves in the other cars. It’s OK, we’ve only got about three hundred and fifty kilometres left. We’ll manage somehow.’ He continued, addressing the doctor: ‘Listen, why don’t you wait for us? We just need to move our stuff from one car to the other, it won’t take more than half an hour.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ the doctor answered guiltily, holding his broad hand to his chest, ‘but we can’t delay any longer. They’ve been waiting for us for three weeks, and we don’t have the right, you see? We’re not taking any vaccine to them, of course, but they need to know… so thank you, but we’re going to go now.’

  Sergey shrugged. ‘Well, good luck. All the best.’ He stretched his hand out and the doctor shook it with a lot of enthusiasm, and then Sergey turned around and started walking towards the hatchback. ‘Andrey, open up your trailer, we’ll have to move most of the stuff there, I suppose.’

  ‘We won’t be able to fit much in,’ Andrey replied, concerned. ‘We’ve filled it to the brim. Maybe we could get rid of the old jerrycans?’

  ‘Just not all of them, please,’ Boris answered, and they all, including Mishka, gathered around the trailer and started arguing, as if the chapter with the encounter on the night road was closed and the shy doctor and the gloomy, incredulous Nikolai, who had pinched every single cigarette from Boris, hadn’t existed.

  ‘You shouldn’t go on your own,’ Marina repeated to the doctor. ‘Half an hour is neither here nor there, it won’t change anything.’ But he shook his head vigorously and with an urgent expression started walking backwards cautiously, as if he was worried she’d grab his arm and wouldn’t let go. ‘Oh, but wait! It’s late, your chief doctor is probably long asleep—’

  ‘Well, that’s not true,’ Nikolai butted in hotly, ‘that one’s definitely not asleep,’ and they both exchanged understanding glances. ‘Him? You don’t know the bloke! That one never sleeps! I wish he was asleep, but no, we’ll get it in the neck from him for being so late. Come on, Pavel Sergeyevich, say goodbye, and I’ll go and run the engine for a bit.’

  Why are they pretending the place they’re going to still exists? I thought, watching the tall Nikolai busily checking the damaged wheel of the van, seeing whether it could last the fifteen kilometres separating them from the long-awaited Poudozh. In the last twenty-four hours we hadn’t seen a single live city, not a single one, only two tiny villages, hidden in the snow, where people were trying to survive by any means and naively believed that twenty-odd kilometres of snowbound road were capable of protecting them both from the illness and from those who hadn’t been affected by it. You saw the same things as us, I thought, so why are you two funny, harmless men, in your clapped-out van, acting as if the idea of saving your own lives – the idea we are all obsessed by – has never occurred to you?

  ‘Tell me, are you really not afraid?’ I said, interrupting Marina’s monologue, and she fell silent, frightened. ‘Do you not understand that there’s most likely no city left there, no chief doctor? Three weeks have gone by… you saw for yourselves how quickly… There’s probably nothing left there, maybe a bunch of dying people you can’t help anyway.’

  The doctor turned to me slowly, and carefully looked at me with a serious face. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ he answered after a pause, ‘but even if… I don’t know how to explain. You see, if you’re right, then there’s even more reason for us to be there.’

  ‘Pavel!’ Nikolai called from the driver’s seat in a pleading voice. ‘We need to go, come on!’ And the doctor, nodding to us once again, turned around and walked hurriedly to the van. After struggling with the door for some time, he finally opened it with what looked like help from Nikolai, but instead of climbing inside, he started shoving his case and jacket into the car and then slapped himself on the forehead and rushed back towards us, accompanied by Nikolai’s angry calls.

  ‘I completely forgot,’ he said, when he reached us, out of breath. ‘Our hospital’s on your way, 69 Pionerskaya Street, a two-storey yellow building, you can’t miss it – when you finish, drop by. I can’t guarantee you any luxurious conditions, but I can settle you for the night.’ He caught my eye and said in a different tone: ‘Well, that is if everything’s good there.’

  ‘The best place to spend the night,’ Natasha said, as we watched the ambulance van bounce up and down on the bumpy road and finally disappear, ‘is a hospital full of infection, of course. The doctor must be mad.’

  ‘We should never have let him go!’ Marina said hotly. ‘Why were you silent? He’s such a lovely man, and the only words you found to say to him were “good luck”!’ she said, addressing the men, who were busy carrying the luggage from the Vitara. ‘He’ll die, they’ll both die there!’

  ‘What makes him a “lovely man”?’ shouted Natasha. ‘Why? He’s a doctor, yes, is that what this is about? Is that why you’re so worried about him? You won’t have a personal doctor, Marina, sorry. And we didn’t provide you with a personal masseur, either.’

  ‘Natasha…’ said Ira.

  ‘All right. I’m sorry,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It’s just that we don’t have any space for him. We just don’t. OK, let’s go and help the guys with the luggage.’

  ‌20

  Mob Rule

  Half an hour later the Vitara was unloaded. The bags which had filled it to the top were distributed between the other cars, the main bulk moved into the trailer, and the rest squeezed under the tarpaulin on the Pajero’s roof. To fit in everything, we had to sacrifice several of the jerrycans, to Boris’s great displeasure. He had been trying to fit them in somehow, mainly by putting them under our feet, but then gave up: there was simply no room left. The thought was unbearable to him of leaving behind something useful which
was irreplaceable in the current circumstances.

  Boris grumpily walked between the cars, checking for more space, and started pestering Sergey about it: ‘Maybe you can fit in some tyres? Just some tyres?’

  ‘We can’t,’ Sergey answered. ‘We need to go, Dad.’

  ‘Wait, let me at least take the battery from the Vitara,’ Boris replied, irritated. ‘Anya, how do you open your bonnet?’

  I’d been hoping to avoid this. I wanted to wait while they were taking everything possible from my car and then for us to get into the three cars and leave; I didn’t want to sit inside the Vitara any more, even to open the bonnet. It was silly of me to feel upset after everything we’d had to abandon, everything we’d lost, but it was my car. It was truly mine. I learnt to drive late, and most of my friends had changed cars more than once by then; when they were young they had enthusiastically driven old Ladas that they had bought second-hand or which their parents had given them, then swapped them for more respectable and dignified marques, while I was still using the underground, hiding from people’s eyes behind a book or using earphones in the back of battered old cabs to isolate myself from chatty drivers. When I finally decided to buy my own car, I fell in love in an instant: as soon as the door softly closed behind me, leaving all the sounds and smells outside, I put my hands on the cool surface of the steering wheel, breathed in the smell of new plastic and regretted straight away that I had waited for such a long time and hadn’t done it earlier, because this was my territory, just mine, and nobody had any right to bother me while I was there. Sergey had often said that I needed to replace it, that I’d had it for five years (‘It’ll start falling to bits soon, let’s buy you something new’), but it was important for me to keep that car, the car I had bought myself.

  Boris was already expertly fussing under the bonnet, and I kept sitting in the driver’s seat, trying not to hear the voices outside. Grabbing hold of the door handle, instead of getting out I instinctively shut the door; the voices became muffled, but I could hear the metal clanking inside the engine. Finally, the bonnet was closed and Boris proudly took away the battery he had just uprooted, and at the same moment Sergey, who I hadn’t even noticed, knocked on my window.

  ‘Let’s go, Anya. Come out.’

  I jumped. With him standing outside and looking at me I felt embarrassed to be stroking the steering wheel and talking sentimental nonsense, so I lifted the armrest between the front seats and started taking out CD cases slowly, one by one, without paying any attention to his impatient, stubborn knocking, and left only after I had collected them all, even the empty case from the Nina Simone album we had listened to ages ago, on the day we’d left the house.

  ‘My CDs,’ I said to Sergey, my hands full of cases. ‘You didn’t even collect my CDs.’

  ‘Anya, that’s enough. This is only a car. Just a car,’ he said in a suddenly irritated voice, quietly. Before I could reply No, it’s not only a car, he had already turned to the others, raised his arms – holding a tin of food in one hand and a tin opener in the other – and tapped several times on the metal container.

  ‘Dear passengers,’ he said happily and loudly, and everyone turned their heads to him. ‘Please take your seats and fasten your seat belts. In a few minutes you’ll be offered a light dinner!’ And then they all laughed, even Marina; even the boy, who certainly hadn’t understood the joke but was glad to see the adults laughing at last.

  Then we got into the cars – Ira and the boy sat in the hatchback, Mishka returned to our back seat, and Sergey went round the cars one by one, poking his head in through the windows:

  ‘Meat or fish? What about you? Meat or fish? There you go…’

  ‘But the tin isn’t open!’ somebody’s voice said, I think it was Natasha’s.

  ‘If you need a tin opener, please speak to one of the crew!’ Sergey replied.

  This was fun, really fun, something we all needed. Nobody had joked for ages, but somehow I couldn’t share their joy. Not now, I thought, some other time.

  Sergey came to me with the rest of the tins in his hands.

  ‘Mishka, do you want meat or… meat? I’ve run out of fish, and I’m not going to get the other box right now.’

  ‘Meat, probably,’ said Mishka, smiling, and reached over to take the tin.

  ‘There you are,’ Sergey told him, walking around the Pajero. ‘I’ll get inside the car and open it for you.’ He gave me the last two tins. ‘Madam,’ he said, his voice seeming a little bit colder to me, ‘would you like meat, or meat?’

  I could have played up to him, of course I could. It would have been easy just to lift my head, smile and say, I don’t even know… maybe meat? Although I’ll probably have meat instead. Only I couldn’t make myself lift my head and couldn’t smile either.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said in a bland voice, without looking at him. My hands were still full of CDs – I hadn’t had time to find a place for them – and then he put the tin on the dashboard in front of me and shut the door.

  It wasn’t much pleasure to eat the cold, threadlike meat with bendy, plastic forks, but we were hungry, terribly hungry, so we finished the food in an instant.

  ‘Would be nice if we could heat it up,’ Mishka said sadly, with his mouth full, unsuccessfully picking at the cool fat in the bottom of the tin. ‘There’s so much left!’

  ‘Seize the moment, Mishka,’ Sergey answered. ‘A tin each is a luxury, but it looks like this is our last meal before the lake, and we don’t have time to start a fire and cook pasta. Next time we’ll have a maximum of two portions from a tin like this.’

  ‘Shall we give him some, Mum?’ Mishka asked and nodded towards the dog, who was trying very hard to pretend our tinned meat didn’t interest him in the slightest.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I said.

  We let the dog out and fed him the rest of the whitish jellied fat in our tins, scraping it out onto the snow with Sergey’s knife; while the dog was eating greedily without chewing, swallowing whole pieces, the door of the hatchback opened and Ira and the boy got out onto the side of the road. Walking carefully, the boy was approaching us with small steps, holding a flat tin of salmon.

  ‘Be careful!’ Ira said. ‘If you spill it, it’ll go down your snowsuit.’ The boy stopped, looked at the tin and spilled a few drops straight away, and then, quickly glancing back, carried on walking. He came within two steps of the dog, carefully placed the tin on the snow and remained crouched near it.

  ‘He didn’t want to go until he’d fed the dog,’ Ira said to Sergey, laughing, as she walked over to us. ‘Here, I’ve brought some more.’

  Standing in a circle, we silently watched the dog licking out the fish brine from the tins. Sergey bent down and stroked the boy’s head.

  We drove the remaining fifteen kilometres really fast – the ambulance that had left shortly before us had created a shallow but essential track which made our movement easier. The Land Cruiser was heading our column as before, but we had decided to put the hatchback with the overloaded, dangerously swaying trailer in between two cars, so we were driving behind everyone else. Don’t look back, I told myself. We had let the other two cars pull out first and then driven off the side and joined the train at the end. Don’t look, don’t turn around, you know what it looks like – gutted, abandoned, I told myself, but I looked anyway, while there was enough light from our headlights. First the Vitara turned into a barely visible dark spot, and then very quickly vanished out of sight completely. Twenty minutes later we were entering Poudozh.

  They were very much alike, these little northern towns: a handful of streets, occasional stone buildings, tall trees with little houses nestling between them, mismatching fences and funny little signs of all shapes and colours above the shopfronts. Their entire population would fit easily into a few Moscow tower blocks.

  Nothing bad could happen to anyone in a place like this, I thought, looking out of the window as we passed droopy, benign-looking street lamps alternating with
snow-covered trees which looked for all the world as if they were coated in sugar. I guess no driver would speed on these streets, I thought, you could let the children play outside the gates without any fear. Everyone would know each other, if not by name then by face, and on the outskirts of these towns, overgrown in the summer with weeds as tall as a human, you might easily see a lonely cow or a gaggle of fat geese crossing the road. Military trucks with red crosses, quarantine checkpoints and protective masks on people’s faces would look out of place here. We had gone past several towns like this which were empty but hadn’t been burnt or plundered; it was as if they had fallen asleep for a while, until the people came back.

  The town we were now driving through was still inhabited; we realised as soon as we rounded the first corner.

  ‘Look, there’s light over there!’ Mishka exclaimed, excitedly rising in his seat, and Sergey asked into the radio:

  ‘Dad, what is it? Can you see anything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Boris replied. ‘I can’t see clearly yet. But don’t even think about stopping. Whatever it is, we go past it, you all understand?’

  ‘But this must be the hospital, the one they were talking about,’ Andrey said, unsure. ‘Looks like there are people outside…’

  The two-storey building, whose dark-windowed facade and metal-canopied front door faced the street, did look like a hospital. There was no fence, no railings to separate it from the road, just a small space cleared of snow where several cars were parked with headlights on. This was the source of the faint, diffuse light we had seen earlier. There weren’t a lot of people, maybe fifteen or twenty, and they stood in a small, tight group. I recognised the familiar ambulance van in one of the car parks. He was right, I thought, they really were waiting for him, it wasn’t in vain he’d been hurrying to get there. They had been waiting in that hospital for three whole weeks, counting the patients, first putting them in wards, then in corridors, and then, when people started dying, quickly giving their places to new patients, but they continued waiting anyway. Even if the medicine they had sent him for was pointless, he had come back, because he had promised them he would. They didn’t have electricity, the same as everywhere else around here, and there were no telephone lines either, so to gather all these people in front of the building someone probably had to keep watch by the window for a long time – day after day, night after night, in order not to miss the moment the ambulance turned up. And when it finally appeared, the first person to notice it would have had to give a signal to the others, and they must have all rushed here to get their dose of hope.