To the Lake

1 MUM

My mother died on Tuesday, November 17th. It was her neighbour who rang me; ironically she was the last neighbour Mum or I ever wanted to have contact with; she was a grumpy woman, always whingeing. She had an unfriendly face which looked as if it was carved from stone; during the fifteen years my mum and I lived on the same floor with her, there were several years when I didn’t say hello to her at all, and would deliberately press the button inside the lift before she could make it to the doors, breathing heavily and moving her legs with difficulty. The doors would close just as she reached them, and she had this funny expression on her face – a look of permanent umbrage. She had the same expression when during that time (I was fourteen or fifteen) she would ring our door bell – Mum never invited her in – and convey her displeasure on various matters: water splashes from my boots in the corridor, a confused guest who rang her door bell instead of ours after ten at night.‘What does she want again, Mum?’ I used to call loudly from inside the flat, when my mum’s voice started sounding helpless. She never learnt how to bite back, and even the slightest squabble in a shop queue – when other shoppers, their eyes glinting, would get animated by the sight of people arguing – gave her a bad headache. It gave her palpitations and tears too. When I turned eighteen, our neighbour’s weekly attacks on our flat suddenly ended – perhaps she realised that I was old enough to answer the door myself, so she stopped her glowering assaults. After that I started saying hello to her again, every time feeling some kind of triumph inside, and then, shortly afterwards I left home (after I was gone the feud between them may have rekindled, but Mum never mentioned it) and the image of a bitter, hostile woman, whose name, Liubov – incongruously – meant Love, faded and turned into an insignificant childhood memory.

I probably hadn’t spoken to her once in the last ten years, but recognised her voice straight away as soon as she said ‘Anya’. She said my name and fell silent, and I realised at that moment that my mum was dead. She kept panting into the phone, noisily and intermittently, waiting while I slid down the wall on to the floor, while I tried to catch my breath, sobbing. She didn’t say another word apart from my name. I cried, pressing the receiver harder into my ear with her heavy breathing in it, and wanted to carry on crying for ever, so that I wouldn’t hear another word, and the angry woman Love, who had long ago become a blurry picture from my childhood – the closing doors of the lift, her perennial complaining – allowed me to cry for ten seconds or maybe even longer, and only then spoke again. She said – I sat on the floor while she was talking – that Mum hadn’t been suffering at all: “We saw such terrible things on the telly but she didn’t have none of that, it wasn’t all that scary, she didn’t have convulsions or suffocation, we kept the doors open, Anya, just in case, y’know – what if somebody’s worse and won’t have time to get to the door – I poked my head round – brought her some soup, and she was just lying there in bed, and her face was peaceful, as if she’d just stopped breathing in her sleep.”

Mum hadn’t told me that she was ill, but I somehow knew that it would happen. It was unbearable to live here and know that she was only eighty kilometres away from our quiet, comfortable house, some forty minutes in the car, and I couldn’t go and bring her here.

I visited her about six weeks ago. Mishka’s school had already been quarantined by then. Universities were closed too, and I think there was talk about closing the circus and cinemas as well, but the situation still didn’t look like a disaster, merely like unplanned school holidays: there weren’t many people around wearing masks, and those who did felt awkward because everyone stared at them. Sergey was still going to the office, and they hadn’t cordoned off the city yet – there weren’t even any rumours. It hadn’t occurred to anyone at that point that a huge megalopolis, a gigantic warren of a thousand square kilometres could be sealed off, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the outside world; that airports and railway stations could stop functioning in one day, and that passengers would be ordered off commuter trains to stand on the platform in cold, startled crowds, gazing after empty trains leaving for the city, like schoolchildren whose lessons had suddenly been cancelled, with conflicting feelings of alarm and relief. But none of this had happened yet.

I stopped by for a minute to pick up Mishka who had had tea with her, and my mum said: ‘Anya, please have some soup, it’s still hot,’ but I wanted to get home before Sergey, and I seem to remember I only had a quick cup of coffee and started getting ready, without even talking to her, hurriedly pecking her on the cheek as I reached the front door, saying ‘Mishka, hurry up, the rush-hour traffic will start soon.’

I didn’t even hug her.

Mum, mummy, darling….

It had happened so quickly. There were rumours on the Internet, which I was reading out of boredom and then telling Sergey every time I read something new. But he only laughed: ‘Anya, how do you think it’s possible to close down an entire city – thirteen million people, government, all that stuff, and also millions of commuters who work there? Don’t overreact – they’re trying to scare you to death if you just have the sniffles, so that you’ll become paranoid and buy the whole stock of their medicines and then everything will calm down again’.

They closed the city suddenly, at night. Sergey never woke me up early, but I knew that he liked it when I got up with him, made coffee for him, followed him around the house barefooted, sat next to him, sleepy, while he was ironing his shirt, walked him to the front door and walked back to the bedroom to hide under the duvet and get some more sleep.

That morning he woke me up with a phone call: “Check online, baby, there’s a horrendous traffic jam into the city. I haven’t budged for half an hour, impossible to move an inch.” He had the slightly irate tone of somebody who doesn’t like being late, but he didn’t sound alarmed – I remember well, he didn’t sound alarmed then. I sat up and put one leg out of bed, and sat still for some time, trying to wake up. Then I shuffled to the study, turned my laptop on – I think I passed by the kitchen on the way and poured myself a cup of coffee which was still warm. While I sipped the coffee I waited for Yandex to load on the computer in order to check the traffic, and above the search line, amongst other news – ‘No bodies found after plane crash in Malaysia’ and ‘Michael Schumacher returns to Formula 1’ – there was this line: ‘Entrance into Moscow is temporarily prohibited’. This phrase wasn’t at all frightening. In fact, it was dull, even boring. ‘Temporarily’ sounded routine and safe. I read the whole text to the end – four lines – and while I was dialling Sergey’s number, the headlines started popping up with incredible speed, one after the other, replacing the first, boring one. I’d just read ‘MOSCOW IS QUARANTINED’ when Sergey picked up his phone and said “I know, they just said it on the radio, but didn’t give much detail – I’ll call the office and then ring you back. Keep reading, OK? It’s bullshit,” and rang off.

I didn’t read any more, I called my mum, nobody picked up, I rang off and rang her mobile. When she finally picked up the phone she sounded out of breath:

“Anya? What happened, what’s wrong with your voice?”

“Where are you, Mum?”

“I just went to the shops to buy some bread – what’s wrong, Anya. I always go out at this time, why are you panicking?”

“You’ve been shut down, Mum, the city’s been shut down. I don’t know anything yet, I heard it on the news. Did you listen to the news this morning?”

She fell silent for a moment and then said:

“I’m so glad you’re not in Moscow. Is Sergey at home?”

Sergey called several times on his way home. I read the news off the internet to him – all the messages were short, the details were coming through in snippets, many lines starting with ‘according to unconfirmed data’, ‘a source in the city administration told us’. Then it said that the chief health official would give an update in the news at midday. I kept reloading the page until the screen became blurry from headlines and letters, my coffee got cold, and more than anything else I wanted Sergey to come home. After my third phone call he said that drivers had shut off their engines and been wandering up and down the road, poking their heads into other people’s cars, listening to the news on their radios, but now the traffic had finally started moving. ‘Baby, it’s insane, the news is only once a half hour, they play music and adverts all the time, damn it’. After they had all gone back to their cars, the long stream of vehicles started creeping towards the city; in about forty minutes and five kilometres it turned out that at the next slip road they had to turn around and drive away from the city. Sergey called again and said:

“It seems they’re not lying; the city’s closed.” As if there was still doubt, as if, while crawling these last five kilometres until he had to turn around, he was counting on all this being a prank, a bad joke.

Mishka woke up, came downstairs and I heard the fridge door shut; I came out of the study and said:

“The city’s closed.”

“Meaning?” He turned around and for some reason his sleepy look, his ruffled hair and a mark on his cheek from the pillow made me feel calm again.

“Moscow is quarantined. Sergey’s coming back home. I rang Grandma, she’s fine. We won’t be able to get into the city for some time.”

“Cool,” said my carefree skinny boy, whose worst trouble ever had been a broken game console; he wasn’t thrown in the slightest by this news – maybe he thought that school holidays would carry on longer, or maybe he thought nothing at all; he smiled at me sleepily and, picking up a carton of orange juice and a biscuit, shuffled back to his bedroom.

All this was really not so scary. It was impossible to imagine that the quarantine period would not finish within a few weeks – they were saying on TV ‘it’s a temporary measure’, ‘the situation is under control’, ‘the city has enough medicine, and food arrangements are in place’. The news wasn’t coming like an endless stream with a running message at the bottom of the screen, with live reports from strangely empty streets, with rare pedestrians in masks. Instead, all channels still had all the usual entertainment programmes and adverts and nobody was properly scared yet – neither those who were in the city, nor those who were outside. My morning started with the news and calls to Mum and my friends. Sergey worked from home, which was nice – like an unexpected holiday. Our connection with the city wasn’t broken yet, it was just restricted. Finding a way to get into the city and bring my mum here didn’t seem urgent. When we talked about it first, we weren’t serious. It was at dinner, I think, during the first day of quarantine, and in those early days Sergey (as well as some of our neighbours, as it turned out) drove out several times during the day. Rumour had it that only the main roads were closed down, and lots of secondary ones were still open – but he didn’t manage to get into the city on any of those attempts and came back defeated every time.

We got properly scared when they announced that the underground was closed. Then everything happened at once, as if a curtain had been raised, and the information poured over us like churning waters. We were horrified at how unworried we had been: four hundred thousand people were infected. Mum called and said there were empty shelves in the shops, ‘but don’t worry, I managed to stock up on things, I don’t need much and Liubov says that the city authorities are going to issue food stamps and will be distributing groceries any time now’, and then she added: “You know, darling, I’m starting to feel a bit uneasy, everyone’s wearing a mask outside.” Then Sergey couldn’t get through to work, the network was as busy as it was sometimes on New Year’s Eve, and towards the end of the day the headlines came in a torrent – curfew restrictions, a ban on moving through the city, patrols, medicine and food stamps, closure of all offices, emergency medical care stations at schools and nurseries. My friend Lena got through to us at night and cried into the phone: “Anya, they’re talking about medical care, but where is it? These places are like infirmaries, mattresses on the floor with sick people on them, like it’s a war.”

From then on Sergey and I spent our evenings making plans for how to breach the quarantine, break through the cordons guarded by glum-looking armed men in masks. At first the cordons were just made up of red and white plastic cubes, the sort you find at any police checkpoint and easy to scatter if you drive at full speed. The concrete beams with metal trimmings, rusting in wet November weather, appeared later. “Look, they’re not going to shoot at us,” I argued with Sergey,“We have a big heavy car. We could go through the fields, let’s bribe them”, and I added angrily,“We must collect Mum and Lena, we must at least try!” During one of those evenings, after the argument reached its peak, I forced us out of the house – Sergey stuffed his pockets with money, silently laced his boots up without looking at me, went out of the house, then came back to pick up the car keys. I was so worried that he’d change his mind that I grabbed the first coat hanging on the hook and shouted to Mishka: “We’re going to collect Grandma, don’t open the door to anyone, ok?”, and without waiting for his answer, ran out after Sergey.

On the way to the cordons we were silent. The road was empty and dark and we had to drive for another twenty odd kilometres before reaching the lit up stretch of the road. We saw a few cars going the opposite way. As we approached a bend in the road we could see a cloud of white light first which then flashed at us and turned into a pale yellow low-beam, and these flashes, like a greeting, made me feel less worried. I looked at Sergey, his lips tightly closed, and didn’t dare reach over and touch his hand in case I destroyed that impulse, which, after a few days of arguments, tears and doubts had made him listen to me. I was just looking at him and thinking: I’ll never ask you for anything else, just help me bring my mum here, please help me.

We drove past the idyllic luxury villages, with peacefully glimmering windows in the dark, and came out on to the lit up part of the road – the street lights, like trees, bending their yellow heads over both sides of the wide motorway, huge shopping centres on both sides, dark at night, empty parking lots, lowered barriers, billboards advertising expensive villas and plots for sale. When we saw the cordon, blocking the entrance into the city, I didn’t even grasp what it was at first, – two patrol cars standing askew, one had its headlights on, a small green lorry at the side, a pile of several long concrete beams on the road, which looked like marshmallow sticks from distance, a man’s lonely dark silhouette. All this looked so basic, as if they were children’s toys arranged on the floor, that I started thinking that we’d be OK to get into the city, and while Sergey was slowing down I dialled Mum’s number, and when she answered, I said: “Don’t say anything, we’re coming to pick you up,” and rang off.

Before getting out of the car Sergey opened and closed the glove box, but didn’t take anything out of it; he left the engine running and for a few seconds I watched him walk towards the cordon. He was walking slowly, as if trying to imagine what he was going to say. I watched his back and then jumped out of the car – I heard that the door hadn’t shut properly behind me but decided not to return and ran after him. When I caught up with him he was facing a big, bear-like man, dressed in camouflage; it was cold and the man had a mask on his chin, which he started hurriedly pulling over his face as soon as he saw us coming from our car. He struggled for some time trying to grab its edge with his thick black glove. He had a half-smoked cigarette in his other hand. I could see a few silhouettes in one of the patrol cars, and a lit-up screen. I thought ‘these people are watching telly, they’re ordinary people, just like us, we’ll manage to make a deal’.

Sergey stopped about five steps away, and I said to myself that this was a clever thing to do: seeing how the man was rushing to pull his mask on meant only one thing, that they didn’t want us to come close. I stopped too, and Sergey said in an exaggeratedly cheerful voice – the one we use to talk to traffic cops, “Hey mate, how do we get into the city?” And I could sense by his tone and by the tightness of his mouth, how difficult it was for him to act in this carefree manner, how uncomfortable was this artificial friendliness, so unlike him, how unsure he was that it would work. The man adjusted his mask and rested his hand on the machine-gun which he had on his shoulder. It wasn’t a threat, it just looked natural, as if he had no other place to rest his arm. He was silent and Sergey carried on, in the same artificially easy-going voice: “I really need to get there, mate, how many of you, five? Can we make a deal?” and he put his hand in his pocket. We saw the door of the patrol car open slightly, and then the man who still had his hand resting on the machine-gun, said in the voice of a teenager, that you might have thought hadn’t broken yet: “Not allowed. Special orders. You’ll have to go back” and waved his hand, holding a glowing cigarette, towards the central reservation, and we both automatically looked there: there was now a gap cut into the metallic barrier, and we could see tyre tracks on the snow on both sides of it.

“Hang on, mate,” Sergey protested, but I sensed there and then by looking into the machine gun owner’s eyes, that there was no point in calling him ‘mate’, or offering him money, that he would call for help now and we would have to get back into our car, turn around and follow the same tracks as the others who had tried to sneak into the sealed city and rescue their loved ones. I gently pushed Sergey aside and walked four steps towards the man with the machine gun and stood right in front of him, and then finally saw how young he was, probably no older than twenty. I tried to catch his attention – he looked away – and said: “Listen.” I said “listen”, even though I never address anyone in this way. It’s important to me to be polite and keep my distance, but here I was, an educated, grown-up, successful woman, standing in front of this boy with dark pock marks on his face where the mask didn’t cover it, but I knew that right now this was the way I needed to talk: “Listen, you see my mum’s there, I have my mum there, she’s completely alone, she’s healthy, do you have a mum? do you love her? please let us in, nobody’ll notice, do you want me to go on my own? he can wait here, I have a child at home, I’ll be back I promise, I’ll be back in one hour, please let me in.”

I could see hesitation in his eyes, and was about to say something else, but then another man came up behind him, also with a machine gun over his shoulder:

“Semionov, what’s up?” he said, and I tried to catch the men’s eyes so that they wouldn’t look at each other and decide not to let us through, and I started talking in a rush, before they had a chance to make the wrong decision:

“Guys, please let me in – I only need to collect my mum – she’s there on her own, my husband will wait here – I’ll be back in an hour – you don’t even have to let him sit in your car – Sergey, you’ve got a warm jacket haven’t you – just walk about for an hour – I’ll be quick,” and the one who was older suddenly stepped forward, pushing aside the young Semionov, whose cigarette was almost finished, and said, almost shouting:

“I said it’s forbidden! They’re not my orders, turn around right now! I’ve got my orders, go back to your car!” and he waved his machine gun, and, as with the young man, it wasn’t a threat, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything else, because Semionov, throwing the cigarette butt on the ground with regret, said, almost sympathetically:

“There’s barbed wire all round the inner ring road, and another cordon. Even if we let you in, you wouldn’t make it through there.”

“Come on, baby, let’s go, they won’t let us, it won’t work,” Sergey said, taking me by the hand and forcing me to come away.

“Thank you, guys, got it,” he said, dragging me behind him, and I knew that it was pointless to argue, but I was still thinking there must be something I could tell them so that they let me in, and nothing, nothing came into my head, and when we got into the car, Sergey opened and closed the glove box again, and before we drove off he told me: “This isn’t the police or a road patrol. Look at their uniforms, Anya, they’re from the regular army,” and while he was turning the car round and the snow was rustling under the wheels of our car, I took the phone and dialled my mum’s number, the first one in the ‘M’ list. She answered straight away and said “Hello, Anya, what’s going on?”

And I said, almost calmly:

“It didn’t work, Mum. We’ll have to wait. We’ll need to think of another plan.”

For a few moments she didn’t say anything. I could only hear her breathing, as clearly as if she was sitting next to me. Then she said:

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“I’ll call you later, ok?”

I hung up and started rummaging through my pockets with a fury that lifted me from the seat. We were on our way back, the lit-up part of the road was soon going to end, I already saw the border of the yellow streetlamps and the twinkling lights of the luxury villages further ahead. Mishka was waiting for us at home.

“Can you imagine,” I said to Sergey, “I’ve left my cigarettes at home!”, and I burst into tears.

Exactly one week later, on Tuesday, November 17th, Mum died.