by Yana Vagner
‘Shall we take a different route?’ Andrey suggested, but Sergey brushed his suggestion off.
‘There’s no other route. Even one route is a miracle here.’
‘So where’s this road going?’
‘It’s going to our lake,’ said Sergey gloomily. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’ And before anyone had a chance to get a word in edgeways, he started talking again, looking every one of us in the eye. ‘Listen. We can’t go back now. There’s nowhere for us to go back to. We don’t have a plan B, and we won’t manage any plan B right now. We haven’t slept or eaten for twenty-four hours, and we’ve very little fuel left.’ We were silent, not knowing what to say, unsure it was worth contradicting him; Sergey presumably interpreted this silence in a different way, because he said almost defiantly, ‘OK. If you’ve got any other ideas, fire away. Where shall we go? Back to Medvezhiegorsk? Well, why the hell not. Or shall we stay here and fix one of these little houses, like this one, for instance? Or that one. Do you know how to build houses, Andrey?’
‘Oh, come on, Sergey,’ Andrey said gloomily, interrupting him. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘We’ll go slowly,’ Sergey said, then, ‘The order’s still the same: I’m in the front, Andrey behind me, Anya at the back. Keep your guns ready, look around. Don’t use the radios. And turn your top lights off, Andrey.’
And so we drove off, or rather crawled in single file; there was so much snow on the woodland road that if it hadn’t been for the wide tracks left by the lorry, we couldn’t have got through at all. I imagined us dumping our cars and walking the remaining twenty kilometres on foot, with a makeshift sledge behind us pulling our bags, boxes, children. We would never make it in this cold, in the deep snow, even if we left a large portion of our belongings behind, even if we left all our belongings behind, because neither Lenny nor Boris would be able to manage; they would have to be carried. And probably none of us women would make it either. If it hadn’t been for this stranger’s track, we would most likely have frozen to death halfway, right in the middle of the forest. We’ve been lucky again, I thought, looking at the flickering red lights of the trailer. Apart, of course, from the fact that the place where we were hoping to hide away from the rest of the world – deserted, unknown to anyone, safe – has turned out not to be uninhabited. For the first time in eleven days my mind stopped rushing ahead, counting kilometres, because I wasn’t sure what exactly awaited us at the end of the journey; and as always happens in this kind of situation, time started running fast, teasing me.
After forty minutes we were there. I realised this without even looking at the speedometer, even before the cars in front of me stopped. My heart sank, I pressed on the brakes, and Mishka pulled the gun from behind the seat. I reluctantly reached over to the door handle. I didn’t want to get out; it felt safer to stay inside, in the warm car with the air freshener still emitting a faint smell of oranges, and to wait, and to make Mishka wait too. But Marina, who was sitting in the back, moaned, ‘Anya, please don’t go, don’t go, let them…’ and I pushed the door, got out and walked towards the Land Cruiser, Mishka following me.
The truck was blocking the road. It was wide, almost square, looking stable on the snow with its massive black wheels; three small rectangular windows were staring out at us from the tall mud-green metal cabin like angry eyes. Mishka ran ahead of me and went to stand near Sergey as soon as we got out of the car. Coming closer, I saw what the others had already found out: the truck was empty.
‘Is this it? The lake?’ I asked, whispering.
‘It must be,’ Sergey said quietly. ‘It should be behind those trees, but I’m not entirely sure, it’s too dark, can’t see a damn thing, and the last time I came here was four years ago.’
‘Is this a military truck?’ asked Mishka. Sergey nodded.
‘Does it mean there are troops here?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Sergey answered, and I remembered the day before our departure, when another truck, very much like this one, had stopped by Lenny’s gate, and thought that even if these are troops, it doesn’t mean anything.
‘Why did they dump it here, without any guards?’ Mishka asked, excitedly looking around the truck.
‘Why do they need guards?’ Sergey said, shrugging. ‘You can’t drive past it through the woods. And they’re not too worried about people on foot, from what I understand.’ After a pause, he added: ‘So wait here. I’ll run ahead and see what’s there. Turn off your headlights and be quiet. It won’t take too long.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Mishka said quickly.
Sergey shook his head, and both Mishka and I understood that this was not the time to contradict him, and I thought, please don’t say something like If I don’t come back, don’t even think about saying it to me. And he didn’t; it was obvious that he wasn’t going to say anything. He simply took the gun off his shoulder and turned to walk around the truck, and then I said, ‘Wait,’ and he stopped and turned his face to me. I could have said Why you? or I could have offered to go with him, or hung on to his neck, or argued, or bought time and delayed him, I could have just said I love you, only all those words seemed pointless and unnecessary. If I believed in God I would have crossed you, I thought, but it would look silly from outside and I don’t remember how to do it – left to right or right to left. I looked him in the eye; his face was tired and frost-dew had started appearing around his mouth.
Sergey impatiently shifted from one foot to the other: ‘Yes, Anya?’
I wanted to say Nothing, just go but couldn’t, and at the same time Ira’s breathless voice came from behind.
‘Sergey!’ she said, running up to us, and he took his eyes off my face to look at her. She was holding a blue muslin band. ‘Here, take this.’ He bent down so that she could reach, and she pressed the cloth to his face and tied it at the back, quickly stroking his cheek. He left straight after that, and we stayed by the truck, waiting.
It was cold standing in the wind, really cold, but I couldn’t return to the car, climb into the warmth and listen to Marina’s whimpering. I’ll stand here and wait until he comes back, I thought. Taking out a cigarette, I tried to smoke, but the damn thing kept going out. I could have walked behind the wide cab of the truck, where it wasn’t so windy, but then I wouldn’t have been able to see the trees where the line of Sergey’s footprints was leading; now our car lights were off I didn’t want to take my eyes off those footprints, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find them in the dark.
‘He’ll be back,’ said Ira quietly somewhere nearby.
I shuddered and turned around. She stood with her back against the cab, her arms folded across her chest, looking at me. I don’t want to wait for him with you, I thought. You don’t think we’ll wait for him together, do you, holding hands?
‘You need to get warm,’ she said. I didn’t reply.
‘You’ll get ill again,’ she said. ‘What if he comes back in an hour, or more? What, are you going to wait for him here in the wind, like a bloody Penelope? This is silly, you can’t help him anyway.’ That’s not true, I thought, and rushed back to the car and threw the door open. Marina looked at me in horror and the dog jumped out, almost falling onto my feet. ‘Go!’ I told him; for some time he didn’t move, and I said, ‘Come on, go!’ and then, treading silently, he went around the back of the truck and disappeared into the darkness.
While we waited for a long time, stiffening from the cold, getting worried, Mishka inspected the whole truck: climbing onto the wheel, he reached the door handles and pulled them, finding that they didn’t give, and shone the torch inside the cab to make sure there was nothing interesting there, nothing that could be useful to us. I wanted to stop him and at the same time didn’t, because whereas we adults were stunned by the wait to the extent that we couldn’t talk any more, he was the only person who didn’t seem to feel our fear and alarm, as if Sergey’s return was only a matter of time rather than luck; and for some reason his excited bustle
around the truck was giving the rest of us hope too. Finally, even Boris got out of the Land Cruiser. He walked carefully, a bit unsteady on his feet, but he also went over to the truck, where it was less windy, and watched Mishka investigating it. Boris was followed by the doctor, who was visibly suffering from the cold without a hat, but, after brief consideration, he reluctantly closed the door separating him from the comfort of the warm car and ambled towards us with a fatalistic look.
‘Shall we drain the fuel?’ Mishka offered excitedly; he had run around the truck about ten times by then. Boris shook his head.
‘No point. It’s a shishiga, it runs on petrol – and we don’t need petrol. And I wouldn’t make myself at home just yet if I were you.’ He leaned heavily on the green metal side of the mysterious shishiga. What a name, I thought, and who would have thought there would be a truck that runs on petrol, I didn’t even know they existed.
In the meantime, Boris, sticking his hand inside the jacket, had fished out a crumpled pack of Java. The doctor ran up to him straight away.
‘You must be mad!’ he whispered vehemently. ‘After a heart attack! Do you understand you nearly died? I have no adrenalin, nothing! I pulled you round by mere luck, you need bed rest, and what are you doing? Put them away and don’t ever show them to me again!’
To my surprise, Boris humbly put away the cigarettes and grumbled, almost amicably, ‘OK, OK… It was automatic. There are almost none left, I’d have to quit soon anyway—’ He didn’t finish, because we heard the crackling of breaking branches somewhere close by, something for which we had all been waiting but were also afraid of. Forcefully pushing himself off the side of the truck, Boris reached over for the gun which Mishka had left, but Mishka was faster; he had already grabbed it and had even racked the slide, which clanked threateningly in the silence. ‘Sergey!’ I shouted, to make sure that it was him.
‘It’s me!’ Sergey answered. ‘It’s OK!’ His voice was quiet, presumably because of the mask, and I ran towards the voice before Andrey had time to turn on his torch. I saw Sergey come out from behind the trees, followed by a man in a camouflage jacket with a fur collar, his hood up. The other man had something in his hands – either a shotgun or a rifle, I couldn’t quite see – and it was clear that he was walking behind Sergey on purpose. The man’s face was covered by a wide black military respirator with thick flares of filters poking out at the sides; Sergey’s muslin protection looked childish compared to that mask.
‘Put your gun away, Mishka, I’m OK,’ Sergey said and Mishka reluctantly lowered his hands but didn’t let go of the gun.
The man stopped by the edge of the woods and said something inaudible, after which he stepped back into the darkness. Sergey took another ten steps forward, and as soon as he was close to us I saw that he had no gun, his zip was torn, and his mask was covered in blood, which was slowly seeping through the muslin. I started crying straight away, loudly, and hugged him. He hugged me back, his arms trembling, and said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. It’s all right now.’
‘Is it them… is it them? Why did they…?’ I cried and pulled the mask off his face.
He smiled, his lip split, and said, ‘Damn it, Anya, I knew you’d go mental. It’s OK, it happens, they didn’t know, I came out of the woods with a gun. Come on now, it’s embarrassing—’
‘Where’s your gun?’ said Boris crossly, and I stopped crying.
‘I had to leave it there,’ Sergey said simply, and waved his arm somewhere behind the truck. ‘I’ve arranged it with them. They’ll let us through, but we’ll have to walk. We’ll leave the cars here, and our stuff too. And no guns. It’s not far.’
‘To where?’ Ira asked.
‘You won’t believe your eyes. I wouldn’t believe mine either if I hadn’t seen it myself.’ And he smiled again.
‘Are you sure this is safe?’ asked Andrey.
‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ Sergey answered. ‘But yes, I’m sure. Mishka, put the gun into the car. Take the kids, Lenny, and let’s go.’
When we were all outside, I suddenly realised how many we were – five men, four women – but it didn’t give me more confidence, because walking like this, in a single line, empty-handed, we were a lot more vulnerable than one stranger hiding in the woods. We hadn’t reached the middle of the empty clearing where the truck was, before the man in camouflage came out from behind the tree and shouted through the respirator in a muffled voice:
‘The masks!’
‘Damn,’ said Sergey, annoyed. ‘I completely forgot, they want us to wear masks. Ira, do you have any left?’ He waved at the stranger. We waited while Ira dashed to the car to get them, but as soon as we put the masks on and were ready to continue walking, the stranger shouted again:
‘For the children too!’
‘Are they infected?’ Marina asked with fear in her voice, crouching in front of the little girl and trying to fix the muslin rectangle onto her tiny face.
‘I don’t think so,’ Sergey said. ‘I think they’re worried they’ll catch it from us.’
26
Into the Woods
As soon as we entered the forest I realised that apart from the man in camouflage we had seen earlier, there was another man, dressed in white. This other man obviously didn’t want to be seen; treading carefully, he was following us from about a ten-metre distance, and I wouldn’t have noticed him if it wasn’t for the branches occasionally crackling under his feet. I wanted to run to Sergey and talk to him about this man in white and about the man in camouflage, I wanted to ask him why he thought these people wouldn’t do us any harm, especially after they’d taken his gun and smashed in his face. We have followed you through the middle of the taiga, I thought, leaving behind everything we have – cars, guns, food – without any security. Why are you so sure they can be trusted? But Sergey was walking ahead, right behind the man in camouflage. He was taking big strides and moving fast, as if in a hurry, and he didn’t look back once, not even to make sure that we were all following him.
It was presumably a shortcut through the woods, because with every step we were distancing ourselves from the road blocked by the truck. It was a difficult route: sinking in the deep snow, we walked in silence. We’re moving like hostages, I thought, voluntary hostages; another few minutes and this strange, illogical impulse we’ve all succumbed to will start wearing off and then somebody – Boris, or maybe Ira – will stop and demand an explanation of where we’re being taken and why, and the armed people in respirators most certainly won’t like it. What will they do then, leave us here? Fire their guns? Fortunately, I never had to find out an answer; the trees suddenly stopped, and we came out into a clearing. On one side there was a semicircle of woods, and on the other a huge, white lake. There were two newly built, beautiful wooden izbas about twenty steps from the shore – massive, one-storeyed houses, with wide flat roofs.
‘What is this…’ Boris said, panting. His chest was wheezy, and he had to let go of the thin tree trunk he was holding.
‘Don’t delay,’ the man in camouflage said, and went to the nearest house.
The man in the white canvas jacket and trousers came out of hiding when we stepped out of the forest; he calmly walked behind us, resting his hands on the gun hanging over his neck.
‘Fuck, are we playing Outpost or something?’ Boris said, panting, trying to catch up with Sergey. The doctor scurried behind him with a concerned expression. ‘Camouflage, army respirators? And the houses, where did the houses come from? There were no houses here.’
‘They built them last year!’ Sergey declared, and finally looked back at us. ‘Can you imagine? Look at these cottages – each would house at least twenty people. That’s what I call civilisation!’
‘And here are the twenty people,’ Ira said quietly.
A small crowd was waiting by the entrance of the house we were about to go into. The people were standing silently and watched us carefully; unlike our escorts, they weren’t wearing any respir
ators, and as soon as we came closer, they all hurriedly stepped backwards as if scared of our masks. They looked at us apprehensively, in a hostile way, but I noticed that there were women in the group – only a few, but their presence calmed me down somehow. They don’t look like troops, I thought, they’re ordinary people, probably locals who have escaped from the villages dotted along the motorway. Only we’d seen three or four villages like this today, and they had all been empty. Sergey was right, I thought, we’ll manage to come to an agreement with them; we must be able to.
The man in camouflage stamped his feet at the entrance, shaking the snow off his boots, and then went into the house and closed the door tightly behind him, leaving us outside. His white-clad companion stood nonchalantly nearby and lit a cigarette. Both he and the people standing a bit further away were still silent, but I felt that they were scrutinising us, unable to take their eyes off us. Finally, the door opened again and the camouflaged man poked his head out and beckoned us to come in. We perked up at this and obediently stepped inside one by one, over the cold and dark veranda, and then, after shuffling awkwardly by the entrance for a bit, like a crowd of shy schoolchildren in front of a headmaster’s office door, we found ourselves in a small, warm room, lit by the dim orange light of a kerosene lamp. We filled the space immediately and saw a tiny table perched near the huge stove, covered in a sweet floral plastic tablecloth. An unshaven man with a sleepy face sat at the table; as soon as we came in he raised his head and looked at us, unsmiling. By the stove, near his feet, sat our dog, who jumped up when he saw us and sat with his paws underneath him and his tail neatly arranged on the floor. You traitor, I thought, and it looked as if he had heard my thoughts – his eyes glistened with guilt.
‘Ivan Semenovich,’ the camouflaged man said in the voice of a sulky child. ‘What about your mask, put your mask on!’
