To the Lake

6 THE JOURNEY BEGINS

I wanted to stop myself from looking back at the lonely, dark house we were leaving behind, so I opened the glove box – its lid flipped open and fell on Boris’s knees – and felt inside it for a pack of cigarettes. I lit one, and when Boris also clicked his lighter and the car filled with eye-stinging smoke, I angrily wound the passenger window all the way down. It wasn’t very polite, and I felt his eyes fixed on me, but nevertheless, I left the window down, and he, without saying a word, started tuning the shortwave radio. We drove slowly to the end of the village, Lenny’s Land Cruiser at the front, followed by Sergey. I don’t know if anyone looked left or right, but I saw only the red lights of Sergey’s car, until we left behind the sign with the crossed out name of the village. Five hundred meters, until the turning, the familiar bus stop (if I turned my head now I’d see our little village over to the right, a bright area in the middle of dark surroundings, framed by two tongues of woods, with mismatched houses, among which my eye picked out one very familiar roof.) I can’t turn my head yet for another hundred meters, no, two hundred – and then suddenly the forest encroached on both sides and it became dark; the motionless trees, the snow-sprinkled road and the two big cars ahead: it was OK to turn my head and look around, but I couldn’t see anything. All the roads in the unlit forest look the same, and it doesn’t matter if they’re a kilometre from your house or a thousand kilometres, your world immediately becomes restricted by the thin shell of the car, which stores the warmth and lights up a narrow strip of road in front of you.

The radio, which Boris had placed on the leather arm rest between our seats, started flashing lights and crackling – and then we heard Sergey speaking, in mid-sentence:

“…hardly moving, on this shit. I don’t know what kind of diesel this is. I hope, it isn’t a summer one, it’d be good to find a petrol station which is open, what do you think, Dad?”

While he was speaking I heard music through crackling and interference from Sergey’s car – he always turns the music down when he uses the radio, but it turns out you can hear it anyway. I could also hear the boy’s thin voice, but his words were indistinct. I saw his face through the rear window of the car – perhaps he was kneeling on the back seat and trying to reach the window to wipe the condensation off, but couldn’t reach and was just looking back at us; and next to him, the blonde hair of his mother. I only saw the back of her head. She didn’t turn, but probably said something to the boy, because I could hear Sergey:

“Leave him, Ira, let him sit the way he wants, it’s a long journey, he’ll get bored.”

I nearly waved to the boy but he couldn’t see me anyway; instead I reached for the radio, before Boris could pick it up to talk to Sergey about the petrol stations.

“Darling,” I said, “I think Lenny should go between us – he hasn’t got a radio. Do you want to overtake him, or shall I?”

Sergey was silent for a few seconds – then he said “OK, I will”, and started overtaking, without saying a word to contradict me. I never call him ‘darling’ for no reason – it was our code word which I only used as a last resort, a word I chose especially for those people who fell silent when we came into the room, and then looked from him to me and then back to him, and then came up to me on the balcony when I’d light a cigarette and asked ‘is everything OK with you two?’; for those who’d expect confessions and complaints about our failing relationship, because there should be confessions and complaints, shouldn’t there?

It was both of us who needed that word, not just me, because the woman who was sitting in the back of his car was never short of words when she wasn’t happy, – I know, he told me and I’d give my right arm not to become like her. And that’s why every time when I was suffocating among people who didn’t like me, I would simply say ‘shall we go home, darling?’ in a sweet voice, and smile, and then he would look at me carefully and we would leave. Bravo, darling, you know me so well.

The back of Lenny’s car was not so interesting. Nobody was peering through the back window – the little girl, strapped in the car seat, couldn’t look back, and the windows were tinted and I couldn’t see anything inside, so I could finally look around me. We left the first patch of woods, separating our village from the others, which looked like yellow spots in winter darkness. They were so close together that the black, dense air surrounding us suddenly became diluted with yellow glow from the street lights and windows. I thought that if I was to peer through the windows of the houses alongside the road, I would see a family around their dinner table under an orange kitchen lampshade, or the blue screen of a TV in the lounge; a car, parked outside, the glow of a cigarette near the front door: all these people, hundreds of people, staying put – unafraid, not driving around the surrounding towns in search of petrol, not packing up their belongings, just deciding to stay and sit out this horror, trusting the solidity of their homes, their doors and fences. So many lit up windows, so many smoking chimneys on the roofs, they can’t all be wrong, can they? Where are we going? Why are we going? Was this decision, made without me, right? Was I right when I agreed to it, without saying a word? To leave the only place where I could feel safe now without complaining, while all these people around me make dinner, watch the news, cut wood and wait until the epidemic ends, confident that it’ll end soon? My reality – the hurried packing, gunshots, a dead dog, a story about the dying city – is separated from their reality by an impenetrable screen: I can see them through it, but can’t reach them, can’t stay with them, I’m just passing through, with my son sitting behind me, and all I feel is unbearable loneliness.

We all saw it at the same time, before Lenny’s brake lights came on. I slammed on my brakes, I heard Lenny’s door shut, he jumped out heavily, walked round the car and headed for the side of the road. Boris poked his head out and shouted,“Lenny, wait, don’t go there!” and Lenny stopped but didn’t return to the car.

The fire had gone out – even a big house wouldn’t take a whole day to burn down, and this one wasn’t that big, judging by the other houses, all like peas in a pod. This was a small, neat private villa community, which they’d started building after we moved into our house, and every time I went past the fenced off building site, I was surprised at how fast it was growing. First, neat boxes with empty, unglazed windows, then identical brown roofs, low light-coloured fences, and after a year, they took down the tall fence and revealed a beautiful fairy tale village. It still looked like a fairy tale: the paths cleared of snow, the pale walls, framed by chocolate-brown logs, the brick chimneys – only, on the site of the house nearest to the road there was an oil-black ragged patch with the charred silhouette of the ruins. Through a dense cloud of white smoke, resembling what you often see above open-air swimming pools in winter, I could see that the front wall of the house had collapsed exposing its charred insides, and the greasy, ugly-looking blobs of what was left of the curtains and carpets or maybe cables, were hanging from the ceilings. And where the roof used to be, there were just the remains of the framework, impregnated with the smell of bonfire.

“Look, Mishka, you were wondering what it was this morning,” Boris said, turning to us.

“What happened?” asked Mishka quietly.

“Let’s put it this way: I doubt that the house burnt down because somebody was messing about with fireworks, although everything’s possible,” Boris said, and he poked his head out of the window and shouted to Lenny: “Did you get a good look? Now, let’s go, Lenny, let’s go!”

After the unplanned stop by the burnt gingerbread house, we paid no more attention to the road signs – we didn’t want to meander along looking at the surroundings any more. Sergey was the first to increase speed, then the Land Cruiser followed, sounding like a tractor – its exhaust started smoking and I wound the window up. The wretched radio was stopping me from steering properly. At every turn I caught it with my elbow, and the metal rectangle dangled, scratching the leather armrest. But the road was familiar – after two years of living here I knew every twist and turn, and we soon caught up with Lenny. After ten minutes we came out on to the motorway and drove towards the great orbital in single file. For some reason, after the ruined fairy-tale village was behind us, I expected to see people fleeing the dangerous outskirts of the dying city, in cars, or on foot, but we were the only ones on the road – there was no one following us or going in the opposite direction. Boris also seemed surprised to see the empty road – he even leaned down and checked the frequency of the radio, but there wasn’t a single sound, only silence and occasional interference. On the left, there was a dense wall of trees, and on the right we were expecting to see the slip roads to the little villages spread alongside the motorway. We had about forty kilometres to go to the outer ring road; I knew these places well, too – when Sergey and I were looking for a house, fed up with the rented flat with somebody else’s furniture and a soulless view from the window that I’d never got used to in the nine months I lived there, we drove around this vicinity – ‘It’s an anthill, baby, you don’t want to live in an anthill, do you? Let’s look somewhere else. It’s OK if it’s further away from the city, it’ll be fine, it’ll be quiet, just you and me and nobody else around.’ Our friends who live in the city thought we were mad to want to leave, but we didn’t listen to anyone, and couldn’t imagine that the distance, which seemed far enough to separate us from the rest of the world, would now seem so short to us.

I didn’t expect to arrive at the turning on to the outer ring road so suddenly: I’d only just seen its lights twinkling far ahead, but now noticed the large white road signs with the names of towns and distances in kilometres on them. And then I heard Sergey’s crackling voice over the radio:

“Anya, turn right here.”

“I know,” I said, irritated, and realised as I was saying it that he couldn’t hear me because the microphone was still in the cup holder, where I usually kept my cigarettes – but nobody in the car pointed that out to me. The next moment the radio crackled again – but this time it was a new, unfamiliar voice: “Hey mate”, it said, sounding tense, “did you come across any open petrol stations on your way? I only need to get to Odintsovo, they’ve shut them all, motherf…”

Before Sergey could reply, I took the microphone, pressed the button and said: “Don’t go to Odintsovo. I’d turn around, if I were you.”

The man on the other end sounded worried: “What’s happening in Odintsovo, then? Do you know something?”, and then, without waiting for an answer: “Where are you?”

“Don’t tell him, Anya,” Boris said before I could reply. Then he reached over and took the microphone out of my hand and clasped it in his fist, as if trying to block any sound, in case I was going to answer this unknown voice, who was still shouting into the air: “Hello? Where are you at the moment? What’s happening in Odintsovo? Hello?”

“It could still be safe in Odintsovo, you know,” I said to Boris without turning my head, as we were leaving the motorway.

“Odintsovo’s ten kilometres from Moscow, Anya, how do you think it could be safe? And also, we’re on the same channel as everyone else, so no personal information – who we are, where we are and what car we’ve got, do you understand? If this man isn’t lying about petrol, even our small amount of fuel makes us a target for any ‘decent citizen’ running away from the city who’ll shoot us in the head to fill his tank. Let alone the usual crazies who infested this road even in the good times, before all this started’.

“I know that,” I said, still irritated, and we stayed silent after that. Sergey was silent too; in complete silence our three cars left the motorway and drove under the sign to Novopetrovskoye, beyond which we passed residential areas on both sides of the road. I noticed a petrol station and next to it, by the slip road, two long curtain-sided trucks with their lights off; the petrol station was lit up but very obviously shut: there was nobody near the pumps or the cashier’s window. We drove straight past, without even slowing down. I thought I saw a broken window and bits of glass glinting on the clear, dry pavement, but before I had a chance to take a proper look, there was a bend, and I lost sight of the petrol station.

“Did you see that, Dad?” Sergey asked; he was obviously avoiding talking to me, and I regretted being short with him earlier, and then – after I remembered that he hadn’t heard my reply anyway – I was sorry that instead of talking to him, I had talked to a stranger on the radio, who, as if on purpose, had just stopped hogging the frequency with his endless questions and finally fallen silent.

Boris brought the microphone to his mouth and said softly, “Don’t talk on the way, Sergey, we’ll talk later.”

After the fire at the gingerbread village the rural calm that surrounded us was no longer free from danger, even though everything seemed normal at first glance: the lighted windows, the parked cars in front of the houses, – but what seemed bizarre to me at the moment was the absence of people on the streets. It wasn’t late yet but nowhere could I see anyone walking, or children playing, or dogs running, or the usual old grandmothers selling their garish towels, potatoes and suspicious mushroom concoctions in glass jars of every size. There was an alarming, deadly stillness in the air, as if something really bad was waiting for us behind every corner and every bend of the road, and I was glad that we weren’t walking past these lifeless houses but zooming past them at hundred kilometres per hour – too fast for anything to stop us.

We passed a small building with a green roof and grilles on the windows, the size of a bus stop; underneath the roof we could just see the sign ‘Mini-market’. Despite the name, it looked more like a roadside kiosk. Maybe because the ill-fated ‘Mini-Market’ was closer to the road than the petrol station we left behind, the iron door had been ripped off its hinges and the windows broken; but there was nobody here either. Perhaps the unfortunate incident had happened in the morning, or maybe even the day before.

The deafening silence which was ringing in my ears must have affected everyone else as well, because Mishka suddenly said:

“Mum, put some music on, please, it’s so quiet…”

I reached out, pressed the tuner button and instead of the radio station I was used to, the empty, dead hissing noise reminded me that the city which we had left behind, was no longer there; I imagined a deserted studio, scattered papers, telephone receiver off the hook, – why on earth is my imagination so fertile? – and quickly switched to the CD player. Nina Simone’s deep, husky voice started– Ne me quitte pas, il faut oublier, tout peut s’oublier, qui s’enfuit déja’, and the silence, beating on my ears, suddenly ebbed and allowed her voice to fill the space – so much that for a second I forgot what we were doing there – three cars on a long, empty road, as if we were friends, out for a day in the country, rather than fleeing as fast as we could, unable to take our eyes off the road.

“Anya,” said Boris, annoyed, “is this a funeral march or something? Can you find something more cheerful?”

“It depends how you listen to it, Boris,” I said, turning off the song, “I don’t know if there’s anything more cheerful, but in any case all other CDs are buried under your lovely radio, so either it’s Nina Simone or we’ll have to sing ourselves.”

“‘The wheels on the bus go round and round’” Mishka chanted suddenly from his back seat, quite out of tune; I caught his eye in the mirror and he smiled at me, which made me feel better straight away.

I saw Lenny’s brake lights come on, so we realised he was slowing down. We fell silent trying to work out why he was stopping. Boris, swearing in a low voice, struggled to find the button to wind the window down, and started poking his head out before the window was properly open. I couldn’t see anything from my side, but, in order not to bump into the back of Lenny’s car, I also braked. Even though there was no one at the side of the road, it made me anxious and afraid to drive slowly.

“It’s only a level crossing,” Boris said with relief, and I saw the signalman’s cabin, with dark windows and a raised red and white barrier, and next to it a road sign and railway lights. The black circles of the lights, like the eyes of a toy robot, were flashing red intermittently, and we could just about hear the quiet melodic ringing through the open window. The Land Cruiser came to a halt; I wound the window down and saw Sergey’s car stop right in front of the rails.

“But the barrier’s up,” I said, and Boris grabbed the radio and shouted into it:

“Sergey, why are you waiting?”

“Wait, Dad,” Sergey replied, “the light’s red, can’t see a damn thing, wouldn’t want to run into a train…”

He didn’t have time to finish his sentence, because the door of the signalman’s cabin, which had looked deserted, flung open and two people came out and started walking quickly towards us.

“Step on it! Anya, go!” shouted Boris but we had all already seen them – even Lenny, who wasn’t taking part in the conversation – and with foot on accelerator we all drove off at the same time – so fast, that I nearly collided with the shiny back of the Land Cruiser.

We zoomed past several villages at full throttle, and my panic started easing off only after the level crossing was left far behind. The black, impenetrable walls of the forest which flanked the road now seemed a lot more appealing than any of the villages lurking in distance – illuminated windows, empty streets, vandalised food stalls. I found a cigarette and lit it, glad that my hands weren’t shaking.

“That was a good place for an ambush,” Boris said into the microphone. “We’ll know next time.”

“Yes, that was smart of them,” Sergey replied. “Good job they couldn’t put down the barrier and raise the metal road blocks – I’m sure I could drive through the barrier, but none of us would be able to leap over the blocks, even Lenny in his show-off four-by-four.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t an ambush,” I suggested, remembering that the people who came out of the cabin didn’t have anything in their hands – guns or sticks, “we don’t know for sure.”

“Of course we don’t,” Boris agreed readily. “Maybe they just wanted to nick a couple of ciggies. Only I wouldn’t want to check, Anya, honest to God, I wouldn’t.”

The comfortable feeling of safety, which we had while driving through the dark, uninhabited forest, didn’t last long. Within about ten kilometres, there were lights ahead again. People, I was thinking, looking at the road nostalgically, there’s so many of you everywhere, you live so close to each other, and there’s no way to get away from you, however far we go. I wonder if there’s a place anywhere for hundreds of miles that is free of people – completely free, so that you could dump the car on the side of the road and go into the woods, and stay there, without being afraid that somebody would find your footprints or the smoke from your fire, and would follow them. Who invented this way of living? – where you live a mere couple of steps from the door or the window of a neighbour. Who decided that it would be safe, when people just like you, your neighbours and friends, can soon become your enemies if they know you have something they really want?

We had only been on the road for a few hours, and I was already feeling sick just thinking about driving through another village, another level crossing, torn between my aversion to taking my eyes off the road and my inability to prevent it.

Perhaps I sighed, or pressed my foot a bit harder on the accelerator, because Boris, who was also looking at the lights which were approaching fast said:

“Oh come on, Anya, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just a small village. I think this is Noudol – we don’t even have to drive through it, it’s a bit off the road, we can have a nice, peaceful drive all the way to Klin now.”

“Are we going to drive through Klin?” I asked, my blood running cold. The thought of driving through a city – any city – was terrifying me. “Weren’t we going to avoid cities?”

“Well, you can’t really call it a city,” Boris said. “It’s hardly bigger than a Moscow suburb. I think it should still be OK there – we should be able to drive through without much trouble. You see, it’s like a big wave – it’s following us, and the faster we move, the more likely it is that it won’t overwhelm us. We’ve got neither the time nor the fuel to roam around country lanes – plus, there’s no guarantee that they’re safer. The most important thing for us now is speed, and the sooner we escape from the vicinity of Moscow, the better. And we have Tver to look forward to – you can’t go round that, with the Volga running through it.”

What he was saying reminded me of a scene in a film I saw once: cars squeezed in between houses, full of terrified people, with an approaching steel-coloured, gigantic, wall of water – higher than the surrounding skyscrapers – heavy, like a concrete slab, with a white foamy crown on top, drawing closer and closer… ‘Like a wave,’ he says. If we don’t hurry, it’ll swallow us – in spite of our fast cars, guns, provisions, in spite of the fact that we know where we’re going – unlike those who stayed put, waiting for a lucky escape and won’t see it, and will die under this wave – and unlike many others, who will take off as soon as they see it on the horizon, without any preparation, without packing – and they’re also doomed to failure. I can’t believe I used to enjoy films like that.

The radio under my right elbow crackled and said:

“Petrol station, Anya, look – on the left, there’s an open petrol station!”

“Slow down, Sergey,” Boris said immediately, but Sergey was already slowing down, and Lenny, brake lights lit up, did the same. I drove a bit further ahead to level with the Land Cruiser, and lowered the passenger side window.

“I know, I know,” Lenny shouted to us, “why are we waiting?”

“Let’s take a good look at it first,” Boris said, “and you, Lenny, don’t jump out of the car as if you’re going to a birthday party, understand? We need to be careful.”

There was no queue – which was understandable considering the empty motorway, the absence of radio chatter and the sinister level crossing. Apart from us, there were no strangers on the motorway, and the locals probably didn’t want to venture out for petrol in the dark. It was an ordinary roadside petrol station, with a peacefully glowing blue and white sign casting light on a couple of trucks staying overnight at the side, three cars with lit headlights near the pumps, the illuminated cashier’s window, some silhouetted people inside. Everything seemed more or less normal, other than the bright banner saying ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING THE CRISIS’, a dark blue minibus parked nearby with ‘SECURITY’ written on its side in yellow, and four people with machine guns in identical black uniforms. They had writing on their fronts and backs, impossible to read from a distance, and peaked caps, which, for some reason, underlined the difference between them and the kind of people who kicked at our gate yesterday morning. One of them stood next to the road, holding a cigarette in a hollowed palm as the military do.

“I think this looks fine, Dad,” Sergey said, “these guys with machine-guns look like they’re the company’s security men. We could really do with topping up. I think we should go in. They might tell us what’s going on, too.”

“Crisis’!” Dad spat out sarcastically, and hawked on to the road through the open window.“They think it’s just a crisis? Just listen to them. They just have no idea, bastards. It’s the bloody apocalypse.” He used several longwinded, fruity swearwords, then looked back and apologised: “Sorry, guys, forgot you were here for a second.”

“That’s OK,” Mishka said, impressed.

The radio started crackling again, and Ira spoke – for some reason, she was speaking to me:

“Anya, there are masks in the bag with sandwiches on your back seat. You should put them on. Tell Lenny, too.”

“Oh come on, Ira,” Boris answered, “there’s hardly anyone there, they look fine, we’ll only scare them with our masks.”

I could hear Sergey, saying irritably: “Ira, why do we need the masks now”, and she immediately shouted:

“Because we must always wear them, do you hear me, we must, you don’t understand, you haven’t seen a thing!” And then I grabbed the microphone from Boris and said: “I got it, Ira, we’ll put them on. I’ll tell Lenny.” I turned to Mishka and said: “Give me the bag with sandwiches.”

When we’d managed to put our masks on – Boris, swearing under his breath, was the last to pull on the pale-green rectangle – we slowly drove into the petrol station forecourt. A guard, who was smoking on the side of the road and had been watching us for some time, flicked his cigarette end away and started walking towards us, resting his arms on the machine gun hanging around his neck. Having caught up with him, Sergey stopped and wound the window down, and I could hear his voice clearly in the quiet, crisp frosty air:

“Good evening, we’d like to get some petrol.”

“Sure,” said the guard, “that’s fine.”

Sergey’s mask didn’t faze him, but he kept his distance from the car, even stepped back a bit. “Just the driver out of the car, please – it’s one person at a time at the till. There’s still plenty of fuel, everything’s OK so far.”

“Is there a limit on how much we can buy?” asked Sergey, without moving.

“No queue – no limit,” said the guard in an official tone, and then smiled and added, in a normal voice:

“Are you from Moscow? Do you need some spare cans, guys? I’d buy some, if I were you, the fuel tankers haven’t been for a couple of days – we’re selling off the petrol that’s left, and then wrapping up by the looks of it.”

“We do need cans,” said Lenny, who had also wound his window and, like the rest of us, was listening in.

“After you pay for your fuel, please come to the bus,” said the guard, “fifteen hundred roubles a can.”

“For an empty can?” Boris gasped, reaching over to my window and pressing against me with his shoulder, “that’s daylight robbery!”

The guard turned to us and narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t smiling any more:

“Robbery, mate, would be if we took you out to the field now, shot you, and then drove away in your nice shiny car. Leave now, if you want, and look for another petrol station that’s open. Do you think you’ll find one? I don’t think so. So, do you want spare cans or not?”

“It’s OK, don’t argue with him,” said Lenny amicably to Boris, “yes, we do want the cans, I’ll be right there.”

God, I thought, let’s hope he’s not going to take out his cash and count off the notes in front of everyone, otherwise we won’t leave this place in one piece. The final words of the trooper in the peaked cap, who had seemed so friendly to start with, reminded me that there was nobody about, it was night time, there were at least four people with machine-guns and God knows how many were inside the minibus. But luckily Lenny didn’t wave his cash around, but instead defused the conversation which was getting unpleasant, by leaning out of the window and shouting in a cheerful, positive voice, as if we were on our way to a picnic and he was eager to be on the road again.

“Move over to the pump, Sergey,” he said, “let’s not hold these people up,” as if there was a queue behind us.

As well as the spare cans we had with us we filled six more – four with diesel and two with petrol – there were no more cans in the minibus. After the lucrative deal with the cans, the guards mellowed and allowed us to spend some more time under the petrol station lights to make space in the boots of our very overloaded cars.

We all had to get out of the cars. Marina freed the girl from the car seat, took her to the edge of the petrol station forecourt and started undoing her snowsuit. One of the guards came up to Lenny, who was unloading bundles and boxes with Sergey from the Land Cruiser, and put out his hand with something on his open palm in a black knitted glove:

“Here, the key to the toilet – it’s over there, it’s only for staff use, but that’s OK, tell your girls to take the kids, it’s quite nippy out.”

Straight away, Marina picked up the girl and disappeared into the blue plastic cabin. Ira refused to go. She just froze on the edge of the petrol station area, holding the mask on her face with one hand and gripping her son’s shoulder with the other. The man who brought the key started walking towards her and saying something, but she recoiled and shook her head vigorously without saying a word; he shrugged his shoulders and stepped back.

I desperately wanted to smoke again – somehow I always feel the need to smoke at petrol stations – and, holding an unlit cigarette, I went to the side of the road where the first guard with the machine-gun still stood. When I came up he struck a match and handed it to me, sheltering it from the wind in his hands. I had to pull the mask down and was hoping that Ira won’t notice. For some time we smoked in silence, watching the empty motorway, and then he asked:

“So how’s Moscow? The quarantine’s still on, isn’t it?”

I knew that I was going to lie to this man, who didn’t know anything about the multiple deaths, and widespread barriers and guards, and hadn’t got the slightest idea what this quiet road would turn into in the next few days. I would lie to him, because our three cars, with doors hanging open, were here, right behind my back; because Marina in her Swiss ski suit had taken her little girl away to the cabin round the corner; and these armed people had just swapped what was probably their last chance to save their lives for a stack of useless pieces of paper, which they probably wouldn’t have a chance to use. ‘The wave’, I thought, and shrugged my shoulders, and said – with as much indifference in my voice as possible:

“I don’t think so. We’ve come from Zvenigorod.”

He didn’t turn his head, continuing to watch the road, asked another question: “So where are you going, if it’s not a secret? So many of you…”

“Anya!” called Sergey loudly, “where are you, come on, it’s time to go!”

I quickly threw away my unfinished cigarette, and, relieved, started hurrying back towards the car, without looking back or saying another word to this man, because I didn’t have an answer to his question.

It had become much more crowded inside the car. Some of the luggage from the boot had been moved to the back seat, squeezing Mishka into the corner, but everyone perked up after this brief stopover. Happy to take the mask off, Boris announced:

“We’ve got enough for at least half the journey, if not more. It was so lucky we came across this place. Although Lenny is now skint – you can’t imagine how much they charged him, frigging crisis prices! Screw them! Come on, Anya, the others are already on their way, let’s join them. We’ll get to Tver and then I’ll swap with you – one of us needs some sleep.”

The other cars were already on the motorway, and I saw in the rear view mirror that one of the guards, standing by the minibus, waved at us. The man by the side of the road stepped back letting us pass, caught my eye and smiled faintly to me. As I passed him, I slowed down, wound the window down, looked him straight in the eye and said quickly:

“There’s no Moscow left. Don’t wait till tomorrow, take everything you’ve got and leave. Get as far away as you can, do you hear me?”

He continued smiling but his eyes looked different now, and then I put my foot on the accelerator and after turning on to the road, I turned back to him and said again, hoping the wind wouldn’t blow my words away:

“As far away as you can! Do you hear?”

For the thirty kilometres to Klin we drove in silence. Perhaps what I said to the guard at the petrol station had upset everyone. The silence was only broken by the quiet crackling of the radio. There was still no talking on air, and if it hadn’t been for the lights in the villages scattered on both sides of the road it would have been easy to assume that we were the last people to drive on this road, that there was no one left. This impression disappeared when we saw Klin. It was the first city we needed to go through, with its crossroads and traffic lights, which could slow us down, separate us or make us stop. I straightened up in my seat, trying to stay focused, and took a better grip of the steering wheel.

As it often happens in small towns, the houses on the outskirts were very rural-looking– single-storey, with sloping roofs and wooden fences. The urban area was a bit further in – but even here the buildings were reassuringly low, surrounded by trees, with orange bus stops, the typical small-town street signs, advertising billboards on the side of the road.

We hadn’t gone more than a kilometre into the town when Mishka suddenly said: “Mum, there are people, look!”

It was true, the streets weren’t empty: there were people about, although not many, and I mechanically started counting them – two, no, three people on one side of the road, two more on the other. They were walking in a peaceful, unworried manner, and had no masks on their faces. While I was counting them, a lorry with ‘BREAD’ written along its dirty blue metallic side came out from one of the side streets and followed us for a while until it turned into another side road. We went past a small red church, and a bit further away saw a lit-up sign for ‘McDonalds’, at which Mishka said, with hope in his voice: “I really fancy a burger… Can we stop?”

Despite McDonalds being closed – the car park in front of it was empty, and inside, behind the glass walls, it was unusually dark – as were the petrol stations, generously planted here and there, this city was definitely alive. The wave, which we were running from, hadn’t reached it yet, hadn’t made the people hide, hadn’t blocked their roads. This meant that we still had time, and that for us, clearly, it wasn’t too late.

We reached a crossroads with flashing yellow traffic lights, turned a corner, and suddenly saw the freshly painted, bright road surface markings on the dry tarmac, and a blue sign swam past over our heads saying TVER, NOVGOROD, ST PETERSBURG.

“Here we are,” Boris said, satisfied, “the Moscow-St Petersburg motorway.”

The city hadn’t petered out yet. For some way there were houses on either side of the motorway and the slip roads were still marked with street names, but there were more and more trees, until the city was finally behind us. As soon as the road became dark again, the long day, so eventful, and the previous sleepless night suddenly caught up with me, and I realised that Lenny’s red lights were becoming blurry because I was tired, exhausted, and couldn’t drive another kilometre.

“Boris,” I said in a low voice,“can we swap for a while. I’m afraid I won’t make it to Tver,” and without waiting for his reply, I started braking and unbuckling my seat belt, not paying attention to the radio, which had started talking anxiously in Sergey’s voice. I fell into a deep sleep as soon as we swapped seats, before our Vitara pulled out into the road. I don’t think I even heard Boris shut the driver’s door.

It often happens on the way home from somewhere. No matter how fast asleep you were in the back seat of a taxi, you’ll wake up exactly one minute before the driver tells you ‘here you are’ and stops. I woke up straight away, without any gradual coming to the surface, just lifted my head and opened my eyes, and saw immediately that we were not alone. Cars were going both ways, and the radio was no longer silent. Through the familiar bubbling and whistling noises we could hear the long distance drivers talk to each other.

“We’ve passed Emmaus,” Boris told me, without turning his head, “we’re approaching Tver.”

“Quite a crowd,” I said, looking around, “where did they all come from?”

When I looked closer, I saw that most cars were parked at the side of the road with lights on, windows down and doors open. Some of them were empty, and the drivers were walking up and down nearby.

“Why aren’t they moving?” I asked, but then saw that this endless, motley string of cars was just a queue, several hundred metres long, for petrol.

“I wouldn’t want to be in that queue right now,” Boris said, “look, how many Moscow number plates there are. I bet those masks won’t help.”

As soon as we’d left the last petrol station behind, the traffic thinned out – there weren’t many people going the same way as us who could afford to ignore the opportunity to refuel. In spite of that, Sergey, who was driving at the front, suddenly braked, and we started braking, too. The wide road was splitting into two and the few other cars on the road started taking the road to the left, because the right fork, leading to the centre of town, was blocked by the familiar concrete barrier, behind which was a low armoured vehicle with massive wheels, lit by the street lights, and looking like a thick bar of soap with sharp edges. Above the road sign was a huge yellow placard: ATTENTION DRIVERS, THE ENTRANCE INTO THE CITY OF TVER IS CLOSED. FOLLOW DIVERSION SIGNS, 27 KM.

“I see,” said Boris pensively, as the cars in front speeded up, after looking at the barrier and we accelerated again. “How clever of them. I wonder if they’re going to let us through further on. The diversion idea is good, but the bridge across the Volga is in the city anyway.”

“I don’t believe they can close a Federal road,” I said, “can you imagine what’ll happen if they block the road here? It’ll be chaos.”

“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out,” he said, with a grimace.

We saw the same kind of yellow signs a few more times. They were set up on the right side of the road near every slip road leading into a town, and under each of them we could see the white blocks of concrete, with silent, motionless armoured vehicles waiting behind them. We went past two or three turnings with signs like this, and then suddenly saw the built-up areas of the town. The road was free, there were no barriers, except that under the sign for Tver there was one more sign, a white one, with the message: ‘ATTENTION! NO STOPPING! MINIMUM SPEED 60 KM/H’.

Looking further ahead I saw a whole succession of these banners, mounted on either side of the road every hundred meters or so. We always knew that they had to let us through, because the city was unlucky enough to be split into two by a monstrous motorway connecting two dying capitals, and it wasn’t possible to cut this artery and then deal with hordes of confused, scared, and probably already infected people, who would have to abandon their cars and roam around the area, before inevitably pouring into the city – on foot, through the fields, around the lit up closed off barriers – in search of food, fuel and shelter. And because this city of four hundred thousand people could not be kept isolated behind a wall all the way round, there was only one way to protect it – to open the petrol stations and to sell fuel to everyone who was passing through, at the same time as closing the road into the city centre, and making sure that those who wanted to cross the bridge to the other bank of the Volga river would cross the town as quickly as possible without slowing down, much less stopping.

We were in the city, driving through its narrowest part. I checked the speedometer. We were under the sixty kilometre minimum, because those driving in front of us couldn’t help slowing down to gaze around. Traffic lights at the crossroads were flashing amber, and in all the side streets, leading into the heart of the city, and sometimes even alongside the main road, were the same low, eight-wheeled armoured vehicles. Now, in the light, it was clear that they had small windows like portholes, with raised metal shutters, and on the roofs, between the circular searchlights, were the thick black barrels of machine-guns.

“They’ve got a whole battalion here,” Mishka gasped.

He was right – there wasn’t a single person in civilian clothes, and there were no police or traffic control patrols, only people in military uniforms and identical respirators covering their faces. They sat in their armoured cars or stood along the road, watching the slow flow of traffic.

Two kilometres further on we saw a bridge, which marked the city limits, and beyond it there were no more men in military uniforms, armoured cars, or white signs with black writing and exclamation marks, apart from one more banner after we crossed the bridge, with the briefest message of just two words: ‘GOOD LUCK!’