by Yana Vagner
‘Leave me alone with your masks,’ said the man at the table, waving him off. ‘They’re wearing masks, we’re wearing masks, I can’t understand a word.’
‘Let me sit down,’ Boris said, out of breath, and lurched forward, towards some chairs standing along the wall.
‘Are you ill?’ the sleepy man said crossly and started getting up, moving the wobbly table noisily.
‘No, no,’ the doctor said, elbowing his way through and trying to get closer to the man, ‘it’s not what you think, he’s got a heart problem, he had a cardiac arrest, he needs bed rest… I’m a doctor, I can guarantee we’re all healthy.’
‘A doctor?’ The sleepy man perked up. ‘A doctor’s good,’ he said, and then added mysteriously: ‘We haven’t got a doctor any more.’
‘What about you?’ Ira asked loudly. ‘Are you all healthy?’
The man with the crumpled face wasn’t offended. ‘We’ve been here two weeks,’ he answered. ‘If I understand anything about this plague, I somehow think it would have showed itself by now. So this is what we’re going to do,’ he continued. ‘Why don’t you settle your kids for the night, stuff like that, Ilya will show you… Ilya!’ he called, and the door opened immediately, as if Ilya had been waiting to be invited in. ‘Show them… where do we have space? Shall we put them up with the Kalinas, are they still awake—’
Sergey interrupted him. ‘Wait. We’ve left our cars on the road. We should bring them closer to the house here. And we need to talk.’
‘OK, let’s talk if we need to,’ the man addressed as Ivan Semenovich agreed readily, and he sat on his chair again. ‘Take a seat. And you guys – go, settle yourselves for the night. You can take off your masks.’ He waved his hand at us, and responding to Ilya’s telling look, he said to Sergey: ‘Look, don’t be angry at my guys for giving you a bit of a dusting. I hope you understand…’
When he came outside, Ilya pulled the respirator from his face, enthusiastically rubbed his cheeks with his hands and then looked around the crowd, still waiting outside, and called:
‘Kalina! Are you here? Petrovich?’
‘I am,’ said a female voice defiantly.
‘Take these people,’ Ilya said, gesturing at us with open arms. ‘You must have space, they need to stay the night.’
This idea didn’t seem to thrill the mysterious Kalina in the slightest. It was quiet for half a minute, and the same voice asked suspiciously, ‘What if they’re infected?’
‘They’re not,’ answered Ilya in an authoritative voice. ‘And this one’s even a doctor. Doctor, where are you? Come out.’ And the doctor stepped forward hesitantly, raising his hand and waving it in the air.
Kalina turned out to be a frail little man of unidentifiable age, with a small, wrinkly face. It was his wife who was negotiating on his behalf: a tall, large woman, twice the size of Kalina himself. The house they brought us to looked exactly the same as the first one – the same large veranda with garden furniture, dark and cold; the same kind of central room with a stove, which served as a dining room in this house. Several tables of various heights were in the middle of this room; they’d been crowded together and makeshift wooden benches positioned along each side. The room had the same standard interior, decor you’d find in a holiday chalet outside Moscow: rattling panelled doors with garish pictures on the glass, walls covered with wooden veneer, cheap onion-shaped lampshades and even a TV, which was no use in these circumstances. All the time we were coming in, taking off our coats, taking off our children’s coats, Kalina didn’t utter a word. Tucked away in the corner, he blinked frequently and watched us inscrutably.
His wife, looking at us without any joy, said in the same defiant manner, ‘I’m not going to feed you.’ And moving her legs with difficulty, she opened doors into both rooms; a waft of dusty air came out of each. ‘We’ve only two empty ones,’ she said drily. ‘You can sort yourselves out about who goes in where.’
‘Thank you, we don’t need feeding,’ Ira said coldly, popping her head round one of the doorways.
‘Where do you think you’re going in your boots?’ the woman roared. ‘I only cleaned the floor this morning!’
Ira stopped and turned around slowly. ‘Dear God,’ she said, stressing every word. ‘How. You. All. Make. Me. Sick. We’ve been running away for twelve days, not even knowing where we were going, like stray dogs. We haven’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. We need neither your food nor your damned hospitality. All we needed was to continue our journey. It was you who grabbed Sergey and dragged us here. And I don’t give a damn about your floor.’
‘All right, all right, loudmouth,’ the woman said, almost amicably. ‘Do you want a blanket? I’ve got a woollen one. For the little ’un.’
As soon as she left, Kalina-husband suddenly became active. Moving closer to Lenny – out of all of us, why did he pick him? – who had landed heavily on the bench, he whispered hotly and loudly into his ear, ‘Do you have any vodka?’
Lenny, indifferent, shook his head, and Kalina, losing interest in him straight away, froze again, resembling a small wrinkled tortoise.
‘Right,’ the doctor said, looking at Boris. ‘Right. You can say whatever you want, but you need to go to bed.’ He turned to Lenny. ‘And you as well, Lenny.’
The woman came back carrying several old blankets, and the commotion started. While they were settling the kids, moving furniture, making beds, I draped the jacket over my shoulders and went out onto the veranda again. The crowd in front of the house had disappeared, pushed back into their houses by the frost, leaving lots of footprints on the snow. Looking closer, I saw two men’s silhouettes behind the glass of the neighbouring veranda – a camouflage and a white one – and the dim light of a cigarette. He’s taking so long, I thought. Why did we leave him there? They told us to go and we went, humble, submissive, and I should have stayed there, I should have stayed at least, instead of bargaining over who’s going to sleep in a bed, who’s going to get a pillow. I put my hand in my pocket and fished out a cigarette pack; it was empty.
‘So?’ The door shut behind me and Lenny came out with a jacket draped over his shoulders. ‘Can you see anything?’
I shook my head.
‘Oh, come on, Anya, they’re all right,’ he said, trying to calm me.
For some time we stood peering into the twilit darkness.
‘I can go there if you want,’ he said finally.
‘I do,’ I said, and turned to him. ‘I’ll come with you.’
We reached the middle of the clearing separating the houses; it was difficult for Lenny to walk, although he was trying not to show it. As we noticed the dim orange rectangle of the open door, Sergey started walking towards us. A second later the camouflaged man, Ilya, followed him.
‘Lenny, it’s good you’re here, we’re going to get the cars. Anya, have you got the keys?’ Sergey said, coming over. While I was looking for them in my pockets, he continued quietly, ‘Tell the girls not to go to bed before we come back – we need to talk,’ and then added a bit louder, so that the camouflaged man could hear: ‘Tell Andrey to come out, we’ll wait here.’
When I got back, I noticed that both Kalinas had disappeared; they’d probably gone to their rooms. There was just the doctor sitting at the table. As soon as he saw us, he quickly lifted his head with the look of a person who wasn’t in the least tired and was ready to help at any second; his eyes were red. The children, exhausted by the journey, had already been put to bed. The boy, with a dusty woollen blanket drawn up to his eyes, had curled up by Boris’s side – he’d fallen asleep on one of the two beds we’d been allocated. Ira sat at the foot of the bed, motionless, with a straight back, and tensely watched her son as he slept, not even turning around when I entered the room. Right there, on the boarded floor, I saw Mishka, asleep with his back against the wall, his head awkwardly thrown back and mouth open. I found the others in the next bedroom, hovering above the second bed. Their faces were cross; perhaps the a
rgument about who was going to sleep in it hadn’t finished yet.
‘Don’t worry,’ I told the doctor, sitting down next to him as Andrey, looking relieved, jumped up, putting on his coat as he ran. ‘The men will bring the cars and we’ll find you a sleeping bag.’
‘There’s no need at all,’ the doctor said straight away. ‘I can sleep on the floor, I have a jacket… look, it’s quite thick.’
‘How many days haven’t you slept?’ I asked, and he smiled.
‘I think I’m into my third day.’
And while I was trying to count in my head how long it had been since any of us had had a chance to get enough sleep or at least change our clothes, or even to brush our teeth, he put his head on his arms, which he’d folded in front of him on the table, and a few seconds later started snoring quietly.
The men came back after a quarter of an hour, burdened with luggage and folded-up sleeping bags; soon afterwards, the dog came in timidly, trying to stay unnoticed, slipping into one of the bedrooms and crawling under the bed. Sergey quickly entered the room, and as soon as the rest of us followed him, he closed the door tightly, and standing with his back to it, looked at us and said:
‘I had a chat with that guy. In my opinion, we shouldn’t stay here.’
He told us about the offer the man with the sleepy face had made him – they had spoken for about an hour in the other house. Sergey was talking quietly so as not to wake the little boy, and the water from his boots was running to the other wall, leaving muddy streaks across the uneven floor. It wasn’t because they had split his lip and not returned his gun that Sergey wanted to leave; there was something else. ‘I’m still surprised they haven’t shot me,’ he said wearily and smiled sadly. ‘OK, hear me out first, and then we’ll discuss everything, OK?’
It turned out that everyone we had seen – the Kalinas couple, the armed and camouflaged Ilya, his friend dressed in white, the man with the sleepy face and the other men and women who had come out in the middle of the night to take a look at us when we were coming out of the woods – were all from the same village, the last one we had passed before we turned off the motorway.
‘But they’re obviously from the army,’ Andrey said, ‘at least those who have guns.’
‘Those really are,’ Sergey said, ‘and Ivan Semenovich, and a few others we haven’t seen yet. They had a border command post of sorts in the village, it’s a massive village, about three thousand people, they have a hospital there, a school. There were infected people from the start, somebody brought the infection from Medvezhiegorsk, and a week later there was no point in quarantine, plus they didn’t have an order to declare quarantine – the last thing they were ordered to do was to restrict people’s movement. You see, they weren’t guarding the border here, there’s no point in guarding a border like this, try and walk for eighty kilometres through an exclusion zone, through villages that have been abandoned for forty-odd years. They’re not an outpost, there are no conscripts, nothing, just a commandant’s office.
‘In short, when they turned off the phones, their special services communication continued working, and the last order from Petrozavodsk was not to let anyone get any further towards Finland. And that’s it, you see, that was it. They probably couldn’t have done anything else anyway. There were too few of them, and then when the panic started and the people began dashing in all directions, they had a choice. They could fulfil the order and stay, and try and make the three thousand villagers stay there too, or they could load as much as possible into the shishiga, fuel, guns, provisions, take their families and – I don’t know – neighbours, and come here, to the lake, to this holiday camp, without waiting until it went fucking mental there, which it already did, as we’ve seen.’
‘And where did the others go?’ Marina asked.
‘Who knows?’ Sergey replied. ‘There’s no phone connection here, and although their radios are more powerful than ours, the village is too far. Some might have stayed there, in the village, some maybe went further, towards the lakes, and then got ill, a lot of them got ill at the beginning, so I don’t know… He did say something about another party which was supposed to come here later – apparently they needed more time packing, I didn’t quite understand – but nobody else has made it here. This holiday camp has been here for a year and a half, and many people must know about it, but we’re the first people they’ve seen in two weeks. It’s possible that there are simply no more people left around here.’
And then I asked: ‘So why do you think we shouldn’t stay here, with them?’
‘There are thirty-four of them,’ Sergey said simply, ‘And only nine of us. Adults, I mean. He said they use a “common pool” principle – everything is shared, fair dos – but I don’t know how they do it, what they’ve brought with them. I don’t know what kind of people they are, and that’s not really the point.’ He carefully touched his split lip. ‘It’s just that there’ll be no democracy here, you see? They’re troops. They have a different kind of brain. No better, no worse, just different. And there’s more of them. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they’re here, just the opposite, it’s good, because… well, for many reasons. But I’ll feel better if they stay here and we’re there on the island, on our own.’ He fell silent.
For some time we stood in silence above the sleeping child, in the dark, airless room, coat sleeves touching, and I thought that somebody would start arguing now. I wondered who’d be the first person to say Look around you, there’s so much space, we could live much better here, in almost humane conditions, but nobody spoke, and then Lenny suddenly asked:
‘Are you sure they’ll let us go?’
‘That’s a good question,’ Sergey replied. ‘I’ve asked him to let me think until morning. And honestly, I wouldn’t delay any further, because tomorrow morning – I’m almost sure – they’ll still let us leave, but the longer we hang around here with our cars and provisions, the less chance we’ve got of doing so.’
We spent some more time in silence.
‘So let’s do the following,’ Sergey said. ‘We still have time. We don’t have to decide now. I’ll wake you up at six and we’ll talk then.’ He opened the door. Kalina-wife jumped away from it like a scalded cat. As she was walking away, she said grumpily: ‘Why aren’t you going to bed? There’s a bucket full of water by the stove, if anyone needs any.’
In the middle of the night I awoke and spent some time enjoying the pleasure of lying in the warm, cosy darkness, listening to the others breathing, trying to work out what exactly had made me wake up – the floor was hard in spite of the thick sleeping bag, but that wasn’t the reason. I wriggled out from under Sergey’s arm and, propping myself up on my elbows, could just about see Mishka, his face buried in the thick winter jacket. Boris was also there; I could hear his uneven, hoarse breathing. And on the bed next to him the boy slept as soundly as before. His woollen blanket was messed up and had almost fallen down, and I carefully climbed out of the sleeping bag and lifted the blanket then bent down to cover him, noticing how prickly the wool was, before breathing in the pure, hot air that little children radiate when they’re asleep. Only then did I realise that Ira wasn’t in the room.
It was also dark in the lounge; the kerosene lamp on the table had long since gone out and the room seemed empty in the occasional orange flashes from the cooling stove. Then I heard a sound – a quiet, barely audible sound – and looked harder and saw that our grumpy, unfriendly host was sitting in the corner, on the long, makeshift bench, and next to her, her face buried in the woman’s shoulder, Ira was crying bitterly, helplessly and hugging her, her arms round the woman’s neck.
‘Alone,’ Ira said into the big shoulder, which was wrapped in a woollen cardigan. She carried on crying for a bit and then repeated: ‘Alone.’
‘There, there,’ the woman replied and stroked Ira’s blonde hair with the palm of her wide hand. She rocked slightly from side to side with a calming, lulling movement. ‘It’s all right
.’
I waited by the door for a little while – not for long, maybe a minute or two – and then tiptoed back into the bedroom, trying as hard as I could not to make the floorboards creak under my feet, and lay down on the floor again, under Sergey’s heavy arm; I drew up the edge of the warm sleeping bag and closed my eyes.
27
Ends and Beginnings
None of us, of course, were able to wake up at six in the morning. I became frightened that it was too late, and started shaking Sergey, shouting, ‘Wake up, wake up, we’ve overslept, do you hear, we’ve overslept.’ It was light, and normal morning noises were coming out of the lounge: the clinking of dishes, doors slamming, hushed conversations. It was clear that it would be impossible to talk again properly without these strangers noticing, so we’d have to make a decision quickly – to stay with these strange people or leave, to go, right in front of them. Sergey was presumably thinking the same, because he didn’t rush to get up. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, gloomy and focused. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘Come on.’ He reluctantly threw back the sleeping bag and sat up.
‘Shall I wake Anton?’ Ira asked, and, turning towards her, I saw that she was propped on one elbow, looking at Sergey. Her face was sleepy, her blonde hair messed up.
‘Yes,’ Sergey said. ‘We need to have breakfast and then go.’
‘Do you think they’ll come with us?’ she said, and nodded towards the other room.
‘We’ll find out in a minute,’ Sergey said, shrugging and standing up. He opened the door and went through to the lounge; I heard him say ‘good morning’ and I tried to count the voices that answered back but couldn’t. For some reason I thought that they all – all thirty-four people he’d talked about yesterday – might be gathered outside our room waiting until we woke up, and this thought made me get up and run into the other room, just so he wasn’t there alone.
Contrary to my expectations, there was hardly anyone in the lounge. Breakfast had finished, judging by the mess on the table, but an unpleasant food odour lingered in the air. The small Kalina sat very still on the bench in the corner, grumpily scrutinising the contents of the bowl in front of him; it had a picture of boisterous red cockerels on the side. His corpulent wife was working through the jumble of plates she was washing in a large enamel basin. This was propped on top of a wobbly stool which stood by the stove, and Kalina-wife was passing the plates one by one to another woman, who stood nearby with a grubby towel. A third woman, very young, with short blonde hair, was wrapped in a woollen shawl which criss-crossed her body. Heavily pregnant, she was absent-mindedly clearing the plates from the table; when I entered the room, she neatly swept a pile of breadcrumbs from the cloth and, with the same empty expression on her face, expertly threw them into her mouth.
