by Yana Vagner
We were approaching the illuminated area in front of the hospital, and I started looking for the doctor’s short stocky figure. I couldn’t find it: the people in front of the hospital were standing too close to one another. Suddenly the small crowd shuddered and became even tighter knit, as if they had all decided to have a group hug, and then, as if ashamed of their inexplicable urge, the people moved away from each other again. Several of them took a few steps back and then froze on the spot, looking at an oblong object on the snow in front of them, and the others, pushing each other, rushed to the ambulance van, which had its doors open. Sergey pressed the window button; the cloudy, slightly frozen window lowered and we clearly saw Nikolai, the ambulance’s grumpy driver, lying prone on the snow with his thin, stubbled face turned to the road. His eyes were open, and his face had the same displeased expression as it had half an hour earlier, when he was telling us off on the woodland road and one of Boris’s cigarettes was still tucked behind his ear. There were no sounds, in spite of the lowered window: there was no sound from the street, not a single cry, there was a total, absolute, concentrated silence, only disturbed by the fussing and puffing of those pushing each other by the ambulance.
We continued rolling forwards, unable to take our eyes off the events in front of the hospital, when we heard a desperate cry: ‘This isn’t a vaccine, I’m telling you, it’s not going to help you, you don’t know how to take it, just wait, give me a chance—’ Straight after this everyone started shouting together, both the people standing by Nikolai’s body and the other group, which was much bigger. The air exploded with noise.
Then the ambulance started to rock so violently that it risked turning over and falling on its side, and two people jumped out, pushing the others. To start with, it seemed that they were together, but after running a short distance they started trying to rip a large bag from each other’s hands until it burst, spilling several hundred lightweight cardboard boxes onto the snow. As if they hadn’t noticed this, the men continued to fight and pull the handles of the bag towards themselves; it was almost empty, and the others were now running towards them, falling on their knees and scooping up the little boxes with both hands, together with the snow, and hurriedly shoving them into their pockets. At that moment another man with a bag got out of the ambulance, holding the bag high above his head. He tried desperately to break away from the crowd, but somebody must have pushed him or hit him from behind, because the bag suddenly shook and another dozen arms tried to get to it straight away. The man fell to the ground and disappeared in the melee of arms and legs. ‘Wait! Please, wait!’ the same voice shouted, breaking, barely audible, and then we saw him, crawling from inside the crowd. He had a white muslin rectangle over his face, but I recognised his round short-haired head and his shapeless jacket. The doctor was crawling towards the road, too afraid to get to his feet in case the fighting people noticed him. When he got to the road he finally dared to stand up, slowly and with difficulty, because of a bulky plastic case he was holding, and one of the fighting people noticed him and shouted, ‘Hey! Stop! Stop!’
The Land Cruiser in front of us revved deafeningly and took off. ‘Go, now!’ the radio shouted in Boris’s voice. ‘They’ll see us!’ And the trailer, accelerating fast, jumped along the bumpy, dark road. Sergey also pressed on the pedal and turned his head again to look at what was going on about twenty metres behind us. Without warning, he hit the brakes, changed gear and started reversing towards the hospital; after a short distance the Pajero stopped, Sergey turned back and said, ‘Mishka, give me the gun. It’s under your feet. Quick!’
There was no Land Cruiser or hatchback in sight, and we could only hear Boris’s distressed cries: ‘Sergey! You can’t help him! What are you doing, damn you!’ And while Mishka was frantically pulling the gun out from under the seats, Sergey was already outside on the road.
Opening the passenger door, Sergey reached out. ‘Come on!’ Grabbing the gun and breaking it in the middle with one hand, he took out two bright red plastic tubes with metal tops from his pocket, pushed them into the barrel, clicked the gun into place, then stood in the middle of the road with his feet wide apart and shouted as loud as he could: ‘Hey! Doctor! Here!’
Hearing this, the doctor turned his face, still covered in its mask, towards us, but instead of running over, he stopped and peered into the darkness, trying to see us. He didn’t notice that the person who had shouted ‘Stop’ to him had separated from the crowd and was running towards him while he stood frozen by the side of the road, stunned and unsure. There was only one man – the others were busy with the bags they’d just looted from the van – and it didn’t look as if he was going to ask for their help. He moved silently, gripping something long and heavy with a metal shaft, which I could see gleaming in the headlights of the cars parked by the hospital.
‘Run, doctor!’ Sergey shouted, raising the gun to his shoulder, and the doctor jumped, looked behind him, saw the man approaching and finally ran towards us, tripping over and floundering about with his plastic case. The man with the iron rod, perhaps the same man who had hit Nikolai several minutes earlier, suddenly threw the rod like a spear into his wide, unprotected back. The doctor fell.
‘Get up!’ Sergey shouted. The dog barked crazily in the back seat and I watched the doctor awkwardly trying to stand up, pressing the silly plastic case to himself with one hand, and I saw the man who had thrown the iron rod take two jumping strides, reach the rod which had rolled away and pick it up again. I realised he thought there was vaccine in the suitcase, so I shouted, ‘The case! Leave the case!’ and then the doctor, who was already on his knees, seemed to hear me and forcibly pushed it away from himself as far as he could. The case, rattling about with its lid open, started sliding on the firm snow, but the man with the rod pushed it away, uninterested. Instead he lifted the rod above his head, aiming a threatening blow. He’s going to strike, I thought; and then Sergey fired the gun.
I jumped and shut my eyes for a fraction of a second, and when I opened them again all the sounds had faded – the dog’s barking, the shouting and everything else. Everything that happened afterwards resembled a silent film: I saw the man with the rod lying flat on the ground, and the doctor, empty-handed, crawling towards us and then standing up and running; from the other direction I saw the Land Cruiser approaching us, swerving, reversing; I saw the crowd, which hadn’t paid any attention to us before, halt for a second and then shake itself and disperse into separate figures and start moving towards us, as if the single shot had not frightened them but attracted them to us; I saw Sergey turn to Mishka and shout something inaudible and Mishka open the back door and move to the opposite end of the seat, pressing the confused, barking dog against the door to make space for the doctor, and the doctor, with face mask askew, dive into the car, and Sergey throw the gun in ahead of himself and jump into the driver’s seat.
We revved up and took off, spraying whirling clouds of snow dust from under our wheels into the faces of the people chasing us on the frozen road. Almost crashing into the Land Cruiser, we dodged it at the last second – slowing briefly, it ended up behind us – and dashed away at the highest speed possible, and only then did my hearing return so I could make out the barking, the indistinct shouting of our pursuers and Andrey’s voice from the speakers, desperately asking, ‘Guys! Are you OK? What’s going on, guys?’
Only once we’d left the city did we catch up with the hatchback; it was waiting right in the middle of the road with its engine running. It pulled out as soon as we appeared, but we had to slow down a lot anyway – the heavy trailer, full to the brim, wouldn’t let the hatchback turn around or reverse and was stopping it from going faster. Making sure we were in sight, Andrey finally stopped talking and Boris’s angry voice burst onto the airwaves at the same second.
‘What the hell?’ he shouted. ‘What the hell? Fuck you! Do you understand how it might have ended, you frigging Boy Scout?’
Sergey didn’t answer.
Sergey was silent. He didn’t even turn his head. He behaved as if he hadn’t heard a word, as if he was alone in the car. Holding on to the steering wheel with both hands, he kept looking ahead, his face dimly lit by the trailer’s rear lights, with a look of simultaneous absence and concentration, as if he had forgotten something important and was trying hard to remember what it was. Then he reached over and turned the sound on the radio down to its minimum, cutting short Boris’s heated speech and turning it into a barely audible murmuring which stopped several minutes later. Now there was silence in the car and I could hear the overloaded hatchback’s shock absorbers squeaking, a piece of the frozen tarpaulin on the roof knocking against the roof panel and the dog panting heavily on the back seat.
‘No, I don’t feel anything,’ he said finally, and shook his head. ‘I was wondering when this would happen. From the very start I was thinking that I’d have to do it sooner or later. You see, Anya? That sooner or later I’d have to kill somebody. Because I killed him, didn’t I?’ He asked a question but didn’t even look at me, as if he was talking to himself, and that’s why I didn’t answer him. Nobody did.
‘I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to,’ he said. ‘Although, no, that’s not right. I knew that I could if I had to, but I always thought that afterwards… you know what they say in films – ‘you’ll always remember the first person you killed, you’ll never be the same man again…’ – you know, don’t you?’ Even though he still wasn’t looking at me, I nodded, lowering my chin slightly and lifting it up again.
‘Only for some reason I don’t feel anything,’ he said, as if he was suffering because of it and surprised at the same time. ‘I don’t feel anything at all. As if I’ve just been to a shooting club for practice. I shot, and he fell. That’s it. Then they ran and we drove, and I was thinking, OK, it’s going to come, it’ll catch up with me, and then, I don’t know, I’ll probably have to stop the car, I might be sick, I don’t know what people do in this kind of situation. My heart isn’t beating faster than normal, damn it. What’s wrong with me, Anya? What kind of person am I?’ And then he finally looked at me and I looked at him. I kept looking at him for some time. Then I said, with as much firmness in my voice as possible:
‘You’re a good person. Can you hear me? You’re good. It’s just that everything has turned into a shooting contest. This whole journey, this whole planet, is now like one huge fucking shooting contest.’
21
Breakdown
The doctor was quiet for a long time. We had passed the hospital and the frightening crowd in front of it quite a while ago, the whole infected, scared and dangerous town had disappeared out of sight and the road had become deserted and peaceful again. But he remained silent, hunched over uncomfortably on the back seat. There wasn’t much space for him there; Mishka had finally managed to calm the dog and had politely moved away as far as possible to give the doctor more room, but he seemed not to have noticed Mishka’s courtesy and had carried on sitting in the same tense position, not moving a muscle since he had first burst into the car, frightened and out of breath. Finally, he gave a big sigh and lifted his head.
‘I have to say thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘It looks like you’ve saved my life.’
Without saying a word, Sergey nodded.
‘No, listen,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m really very grateful. If it wasn’t for you…’ He didn’t finish his sentence, leaving it hanging in the air, and for some time he continued to stare at the back of Sergey’s head, looking worried. It was obvious that he needed to hear something in reply, anything, and I looked at him and desperately tried to find encouraging words: I wanted to say something like Don’t worry, it’s all over now or The most important thing is that you’re alive, but then I remembered Nikolai lying motionless on the snow, his open eyes and the absurd cigarette behind his ear, and said nothing.
‘I don’t understand,’ said the doctor and, frowning, rubbed his forehead with his hand. ‘I can’t understand how it could have happened… we were their last resort, you see? They had to wait for three weeks, and they… in short, they thought we would never come back. That nobody would come to their rescue. And when we finally came, they… Imagine…’ He stopped, interrupting his speech, and because Sergey didn’t react again, he turned to Mishka and grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘…imagine you’re waiting for help. You wait a long time, several weeks. And people around you keep dying. And you keep waiting. And you might be infected too, or one of your family is, your child maybe. Or your mum. Can you imagine?’
Mishka nodded, his eyes full of fear, and the doctor stopped shaking his shoulder, moved his hand and shrank into his place again, staring at the floor, his spirit weakened and depressed.
‘It’s all my fault,’ he said after a pause. ‘I tried to explain to them, but I didn’t want to take their hope away, and I said it was medicine. I was hoping they’d listen, that I’d explain that it wasn’t a vaccine, that it wouldn’t help, at least it wouldn’t help the infected… I should have explained it differently.’ He said this with despair and hit himself on the knee with his fist, and then lifted his head again and looked at me this time. ‘I should have stayed,’ he said. ‘Because now they’re definitely going to die. They would have died anyway, but I could have helped to make it easier for them… and now there’s nobody to do it. It’s my fault.’
‘They would have killed you,’ said Sergey, and his voice sounded dull and hostile. ‘They killed Nikolai and would have killed you, and then they would have shot at each other for some time too, and then they would possibly have read the instructions and understood that your medicine wouldn’t help them.’
‘Yes, Nikolai,’ the doctor said, forcibly rubbing his forehead again, his eyes shut tight. He sat quietly for some time, without taking his hand away from his face, and then suddenly sat up straight and lurched forward and started talking very fast, with a lot of energy. ‘Just don’t think ill of them, please. I know many of them… I knew them personally, they’re ordinary people and would have never done anything like that, they’re just all really ill, you see?’
I have to stop him, I thought, have to stop him talking, because none of us, especially not Sergey, need his excuses, we don’t need to know any of this, who these people were and what their names were, because if he tells us all this we won’t be able to continue thinking that Sergey killed a brainless, dangerous beast and not a human being. Not a human being. The same thought presumably came to the doctor too, because he muddled up his words and fell silent, staring through the window at the white frosty trees we were slowly passing.
‘And what about the chief doctor?’ I asked, just to say something. ‘The one who had sent you to get the vaccine? Was he there?’
‘He died,’ the doctor said, without turning his head. ‘Very early, at the end of the first week. He got infected and died.’
After several minutes of negotiations over the radio, the content of which we had missed as we’d had the volume turned right down, the hatchback slowed and the Land Cruiser, which had been at the back of our convoy all the time, moved to the front. As it came level with us, the big black car stopped for a minute, the passenger window lowered, and we saw Marina’s pale profile. Next to her was Boris, angry and glum. Reaching across Marina, who sat without moving, Boris stuck his head out of the window and gestured to Sergey to open the window.
‘Turn your radio on,’ he said. ‘Andrey says there’ll be another village after ten kilometres.’
‘Dad—’ Sergey started, but Boris interrupted him.
‘Just turn your radio on. This is not the time. We’ll talk later.’
Sergey nodded, agreeing, and reached for the radio, but suddenly a strange noise came from the Land C
ruiser. It was an unusual sound, like a dog howling inside the car, and when we looked up we saw Marina pushing Boris with her shoulder and struggling with the door as she tried to open it.
‘Marina… what’s wrong, Marina?’ Boris said, surprised, but she had already opened the door. She jumped out on to the snow and ran across the road, to the trees, clumsily throwing her legs out sideways, and stopped by the edge of the woods as if unable to go on in; then she took several steps back towards the car and finally stopped. She squatted down and clutched her hair in both hands.
Perhaps I went over to her before the others because the Pajero was the closest to where she was sitting. Car doors started slamming behind my back and I was already close, and that strange noise, the long, low howling, came again, and I realised in horror that it was coming from Marina. She was making it without opening her mouth, her whole body shaking at the same time. I stood above her, not knowing what to do next, not daring to speak to her or touch her on the shoulder for fear that if she felt my touch she might do anything – push me off, hit me, or maybe even bite. Then she let go of her hair and looked me straight in the eyes.
‘I can’t bear this any longer,’ she said through clenched teeth, like somebody who was freezing and whose jaws had stopped moving. ‘I can’t.’
