To the Lake

10 ‘STUFFED DUCK’

It’s a familiar scene in action movies – a bleeding hero lying on the ground and a screaming woman kneeling next to him: all of us had seen this a million times but still weren’t prepared for it, maybe because apart from these three elements – blood, a man on the ground and a woman next to him, – everything else was different. Marina only screamed once and fell silent straight away. It became very quiet because none of us standing around dared utter a word, we didn’t even move, as if there was a scenario which we had all been following and which we couldn’t deviate from by an inappropriate word or gesture. She didn’t throw herself to the ground next to her husband, didn’t hold his head to her chest – instead she carefully put the little girl down and lightly pushed her off – just a little away from herself, and then slowly made a few steps forward and lowered herself onto the snow, and sat very straight, white knees on white snow, on a spot where the snow wasn’t soaked in blood – and remained quite still, distant and impeccable, in her familiar style, and sat like this for a while, which seemed like forever. She didn’t touch him and said nothing, just looked at him. We stood around and didn’t know what to do, so when she finally lifted her perfect, thin hand, grabbed a lock of her long, silky hair and pulled it with force, then lifted her arm and touched her hair again intending to do the same thing, it was as if we woke from our torpor: we all started talking and doing something at once.

Everything started happening very quickly, as if during the short time we were watching this scene, each of us had spent the time thinking about what needed to be done: a second later Ira sat on the snow next to Marina and held her hands in hers, Andrey and Sergey began unfastening Lenny’s jacket and lifting his jumper, and Natasha was running towards us, trying to open the plastic box with a red cross on its lid as she ran. It was too dark, and Boris brought a torch, which shone a cold, bluish light on Lenny’s flesh. From where I was standing I could hardly see the wound – it didn’t look scary or deep, it was however swollen and somewhat rough – but there wasn’t much blood, or rather not as much as I expected: it continued to flow slowly, leaving dark, shiny stripes on Lenny’s pale stomach. Natasha finished wrestling with the first aid kit and was searching through it, crouched, her face desperate.

“Damn it, damn it, I don’t know what we need, some kind of wipes, dressings, bandages – oh here’s one, it says ‘haemostatic dressing’, only it’s really small, give me some light, somebody!” The box slipped out of her hands and the things scattered over the snow, and Natasha rushed to pick up the little packages – paper and cellophane ones, they looked very small and toy-like, she picked them up, brushed them off and put them back into the box but they fell out again – Boris pointed the light at us and said loudly:

“Anya, help her, we need to bandage him and get him into the car! We need to move; they might come back!”

One dressing wasn’t enough, we had to use two – Natasha tore the packages with her teeth and pressed them to the wound while I was bandaging Lenny’s stomach; I wasn’t doing a good job, he could barely sit and kept trying to fall sideways, Andrey and Sergey were holding him, but he was too heavy, and there was hardly any space near the open boot of the Land Cruiser, so we were in each other’s way all the time. When we finally fixed the ends of the last bandage and lifted Lenny – barely managing between the three of us – we pulled him onto the back seat of the Land Cruiser, Boris came up to Marina, still sitting on the snow, bent down and, pronouncing every word clearly said to her:

“I’ll drive, you sit next to him and hold the dressing; hold it tight, do you understand?” She lifted her eyes at him and nodded and then got up and walked to the car, still silent, like a robot, she didn’t even look at the little girl who stood still a few steps away – a little red chunk with a hood, pulled down to her eyes. Ira took the girl by the hand and walked her towards the Pajero, where Anton sat at the back. The child followed her, steadily moving her short, plump legs. Boris turned to me:

“Anya, will you cope on your own?”

“I will,” I said. “But cope with what? What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said and swore. “The main thing is to get away from here.”

“You know he won’t be able to stay on the back seat for a long time, don’t you, Dad,” Sergey said and put his hand at the back of my neck – I closed my eyes for a second, I really needed his touch. “He can’t even stretch his legs there. We have to find a place to stay the night.”

“So you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled then,” Boris answered. “There’s no radio in the Land Cruiser, we’ll follow you: look as hard as you can for some good place to stay. We can’t afford chancing upon some other scoundrels, even if it means that he’ll have to…, well, you understand.”

We drove through two more level crossings on our next leg of the journey – luckily they were both abandoned, with lifted barriers and dead signal posts. Every time Andrey warned us that we were approaching them via radio message – “we’re coming up to a crossing now” he would say, or “there’s a village on the right, we need to go faster.” I remembered that I also had a satnav in the glove box – Sergey’s present, a gadget which was no use to us here, because it only covered Moscow and the Moscow region; none of us thought that something desperately important would ever depend on this small thing, nor that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had to follow Andrey’s hatchback, relying on his warnings. He was looking for a suitable place to stop, safe and empty, where we could hide our cars so that they couldn’t be seen from the road, top up with fuel, feed the children and eat, but most importantly, where we could find out, finally, how serious Lenny’s wound was, no matter what consequences we had to face. Mishka sat next to me, holding the microphone and looking tensely through the window. From the moment he had let go of the rifle we hadn’t had time to say a word to each other; it’s ok, baby, it’s not too bad, just hang on for a little bit longer. The most important thing is to find that damn place where we could stop, I thought, and then I’ll talk to you about everything that has just happened, I promise I’ll talk to you.

Cherepovets was on our right – in the dark winter air it was difficult to see how much distance was separating us from the industrial chimneys with flashing red lights on top, as well as the residential areas hiding behind them; this was the first city we passed after Tver, and I was expecting anything – warning signs, checkpoints, long traffic queues, even people walking along the road – but there were none of these things, the city stretched along the road, taking its own course, dimly shimmering in the distance, and whatever was happening there at that moment – no matter how far – two kilometres away from us or twenty-two – I was grateful for the fact that we’d never know about it. The road suddenly curved and took us left and up, but I didn’t even bother to look in the mirror and thought: god bless you, people, we’re leaving you to deal with your own epidemics, your own fears, burnt cars and fights for survival, but I just want one thing: to be as far away from you as possible. “The road’s going to divide soon,” Andrey said quietly. “We need to make a decision before we reach the fork. Natasha and I have an idea – we checked the map, there’s plenty of summer cottages around here which should be empty in the winter. I don’t think we’d find a better place than that. But we’d have to deviate from our route and go a bit further towards Vologda. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Sergey replied straight away. “Show us the way. What would you say, Anya?”

I looked at Mishka and he looked at me, then he picked up the microphone and said:

“We don’t mind.” That was the first thing I had heard him say since we got into the car.

Summer cottage villages probably look the same everywhere, no matter where they are: narrow countryside roads, occasional trees, motley patchwork of prefab houses with domed roofs, garden beds covered with cellophane sheets and iron gates with padlocks. The first village we saw was too close to the main road, separated from it only by a thin coppice, but the second one was so well hidden we nearly skipped it. Nobody had cleared a path to it, naturally, so I had to let the heavy Land Cruiser lead our caravan to create tracks in the snow-covered roadway. It didn’t really help; I was trying to follow him closely, but throughout the short distance from the main road to the house I could feel the wheels sinking into the snow and was really worried we’d get stuck. When our car finally reached the gates, Boris and Sergey were wrestling with the lock and Andrey stood near them, holding a torch. I noticed a few lamp posts around us but it was pitch-dark – there was no power in the area.

I didn’t feel like leaving the car at all, but I pushed myself, climbed out and walked up to the Land Cruiser. Its engine was running, but through the tinted windows I could only see the dim bluish lights of the control panel. I opened the driver’s door – it was quiet inside, and a whiff of a strong, heavy smell came out of the car. The front passenger seat was pushed forward and on the floor, in between the seats, Marina sat in an awkward, squashed position, both of her hands pressed to Lenny’s stomach, her head low. Neither of them stirred when I opened the door, as if they had both fallen asleep and turned into a frozen sculpture.

“How is he?” I whispered as if afraid to wake them up, but she didn’t reply or lift her head, barely shrugging her shoulders without changing her position. “Is he still bleeding?” I asked, but she didn’t answer to that either, just shrugged her shoulders again.

I probably should have said something encouraging like ‘we’re nearly there’, or ‘it’s going to be ok’, but I couldn’t make myself say it – if she’d lifted her head at least, or looked at me, or cried, it would have been easier, but it seemed she didn’t need my words at all, and that’s why I closed the door as quietly as I could and went back to the gate. Boris and Sergey managed to saw through the lock, and open the iron, hefty parts of the gate – they creaked and gave after a while – and the headlights revealed another long street, disappearing into the darkness, with colourful fences framing it on both sides.

“That’s a lot of snow,” Boris said. “Hope we don’t get stuck.”

“But at least we know there’s nobody there,” Andrey shone the torch onto the snow under his feet – it was untouched and very smooth. “We only need to pick a house,” and he started walking, sinking a little into the snow, with Boris, swinging the rifle onto his back, following.

“Andrey,” Boris said, “we need to find one with a chimney, it’s minus twenty and no electricity, we won’t live till morning in a cold house.”

They found a house almost immediately, in one of the side lanes not far from the entrance – the first floor was really small, only one window, it was probably more like a loft or a garret – but there were two chimneys on the roof. We were so pleased with it that we didn’t look any further. The plot was tiny, with some bushes tied with a string, and small fruit trees. There wasn’t enough space even for one car, let alone four, so we had to leave them outside, in the middle of the street. But there was a well, which was good news, – right behind the house, looking a bit like a dog’s kennel, topped with a snow hat on its triangular roof – and in the furthest corner of the plot we found a Russian banya, a small wooden sauna and a shed next to it, full to the brim with stacked wood.

It was bitterly cold outside – while Sergey was knocking the flimsy lock off the front door leading onto a small glass veranda, my ears went so numb I almost lost feeling in them. It wasn’t much better indoors, but at least there was no wind chill; I came in and automatically groped the wall for the light switch, forgetting there was no power. A cool, dingy house with boarded up windows had everything in it that was still making it a house though – a shelter from cold, rain and snow: a pile of books tied with a string in the corner on the veranda, three rooms, a dresser with solemn pyramids of cups and plates, a clock on the wall, but most importantly – a big, brick-built Russian stove, taking up most of the space in the middle of the house. As soon as we came in Sergey crouched in front of it and, holding the torch between his teeth, started stuffing the burner with the wood which he had found on the floor next to it. I sat down next to him and watched him for a while noting to myself how calm he was, this man I had chosen as my husband, how confident he was that everything would be all right, and I beat myself up for not managing to learn, after all the time I had spent with him, to be just as calm and confident as he was when I most needed to be, because I couldn’t help thinking about the house on the lake, next to which this tiny, musty cottage would seem a real palace.

“Don’t worry, Anya, in a couple of hours we’ll be walking around the house in just our underwear,” he said, and turned his face, reflecting the orange light of the fire to me: he was smiling.

“Lenny hasn’t got a couple of hours,” Boris said from behind my back. “We’ve already lost too much time. I sent Andrey to start the sauna – we’ll move him there. Anya, can you please dig out the medical book – we did bring it, didn’t we?”

“The book won’t help us, we don’t even know how to put a dressing on correctly,” I said, but nevertheless stood up and went back to the cars to find the book.

I found it quickly – when we were packing it was the last thing we remembered, so it was simply stuffed in between two big bags. I turned on the light in the car and sat down to look through the book on my own. There was no reason to return to the cold, dark house just yet, and it was warm and safe inside the car. I was almost sure I wouldn’t find anything useful – I assumed the book was just about the herbal remedies and childhood diseases. To my great surprise I found what I needed – it was a short article with every paragraph ending with the phrase ‘deliver the patient to hospital immediately’, but at least there was some information in it. I read it twice, slowly, thinking over every sentence, trying to memorize every detail, and then folded that page in half and, holding the book under my arm, went back to the house. When I came in, everyone looked up. They were all in the room, apart from Andrey, who was sorting out the sauna, and Lenny and Marina who had stayed in the Land Cruiser until it’d become warmer indoors. It was still too cold; a thick candle was flickering in the middle of the table with a sunflower-patterned cloth on it, and the light from its tiny flame was so dim that I could barely see their faces – only a faint, pale vapour from their breaths.

“The news is bad and very bad,” I said, because they expected me to say something – as if because I was holding the book, I knew what to do. “If the knife didn’t go in too deep, we need to stitch up the wound and stop the bleeding, and then if there’s no blood poisoning, he’ll pull through, but he needs to stay in bed for three or four days, and we’ll have to spend them here.”

They continued to look at me expectantly, and I carried on, feeling glad that Marina wasn’t here and that her little girl was too young to understand what I was saying:

“But if the knife went in deep, perforated the abdominal wall and damaged something inside, we won’t be able to help him, even if we stitch up the wound and stop the bleeding – he’ll die anyway. We only don’t know, when,” I added, because they were still silent, “it doesn’t say in the book. And I imagine it’ll be a painful death.”

“What do you need to stitch up the wound?” Sergey asked, finally.

“What do you mean? Why me?” I asked, surprised. “Do you really think that I’m going to do it?”

Nobody argued with me but my question remained unanswered. Andrey came back and reported that the sauna had started getting warm; standing on the porch I watched the men sinking into the snow as they took Lenny out of the car and slowly carried him into the sauna. The Land Cruiser’s door remained open and in the dim light from inside the car I could see Marina still sitting there, her hands on her lap – I don’t know how long she’d have sat like that, motionless, unresponsive, if Natasha hadn’t called her and hadn’t brought her into the house. As soon as she came in, she sat down in the corner, by the table and froze again; her beautiful white ski suit was now stained – sleeves, chest and knees were covered in ugly brown spots, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. Mishka brought a bucket of water from the well – ‘take it to the sauna, to the sauna’, Natasha told him, ‘let them put it on the stove to warm up’, – she was poking around in the first aid kit again. I didn’t dare move or say a word – do they really think that I can take a needle and poke it into Lenny’s pale, dreadful-looking, blood-stained stomach? What if he shouts or suddenly moves, or what if I can’t help him, what if I cause him only more suffering, and then he’d die anyway, in spite of all our efforts? What if he dies while I’m stitching him?

Boris came in:

“It’s all ready, girls,” he said standing in the doorway. “Time to go. Ira, you should probably stay with the children, and maybe Natasha could help Anya,” and after we didn’t budge, raised his voice: “Come on then! Sewing’s a woman’s job.”

“No-no-no,” Natasha said quickly. “I can’t do it, don’t even ask me, I faint at the sight of blood, so here’s a needle, here’s a thread – the thickest I could find, there’s plenty of bandages, anything you want, but I’m not going there.” She came up to me and thrust the first aid box into my hands, and I thought, oh how lovely, I’ll be going on my own, it probably smells there, it’s probably the same smell as there was in the car: fresh blood and fear. I stepped towards the door, and suddenly Ira said:

“Wait. I’ll come with you.”

It wasn’t properly warm in the sauna yet but we could take our coats off; the smell inside was rather pleasant – of heated wood and resin. We left our outerwear in the lobby and went into the tiny steam room. Lenny was lying on the upper shelf, on the untreated, unpainted wooden boards; couldn’t they put something underneath him first, Ira said grumpily. They had taken off his boots, jumper and jacket, but they had kept his trousers on; he lay there, stock-still, with his eyes shut, very pale, and his whole body was yellowish, so if it wasn’t for his obvious, interrupted breathing, I would have thought he was dead. The men had tied several torches together and attached them to the ceiling – this was the only light in the room – the flickering, patchy circle of light they were emitting was so dismal that it didn’t even cover the whole of Lenny’s body so that his bare feet with short, flat toes were outside the circle’s reach, in complete darkness.

I put my first aid box on the lower shelf and looked at Ira – she took off her woollen jumper and revealed a light-coloured t-shirt with short sleeves. Without the thick jumper she seemed really skinny – a long neck, poking out collarbones like a young girl’s and thin, white arms with light fluff of short hair. I felt awkward eyeing her up but couldn’t help it; luckily she didn’t notice I was looking at her – she tied back her hair, lifted her head and said:

“Let’s wash our hands, the water’s probably warm enough by now.”

The door to the steam room opened, and Boris came in.

“There you go,” he said, holding out a bottle and a small flask. “You can probably do with that, it contains novocaine to numb it at least a little bit, and here’s some spirit for disinfection. And we also found this –” he opened the door a bit wider and brought in a glass kerosene lamp, carefully holding it with both hands and said: “Put it somewhere safe, it’ll give you a bit more light, but mind you don’t knock it off.”

Surprisingly, the bandage was still there – it was wet and twisted but it still firmly held the dressing on the wound. I tried to untie the bandage but to no avail. ‘Let me’, Ira said – she had a pair of scissors in her hand; she squeezed the blade under the twisted fabric of the bandage and I jumped, noticing how Lenny’s stomach twitched where she touched it with the blade: I don’t want to do it, I thought, I simply can’t, I didn’t even see what was underneath the dressing yet and I already feel nauseous. Without looking up I tried to pull the thread through the needle, and couldn’t, because my hands were shaking. When I dropped the needle for the second time, Ira, who stood near me, said:

“You know what, let me do it.”

“Can you do it?” I asked, looking up at her.

“Can you?” she said with a smirk. “Give me the needle. My signature dish is stuffed duck, so I’m an expert in sewing skin.” I cringed; she noticed it and continued, slightly raising her voice: “I can’t see what difference there is between Lenny and a duck, apart from the former having fewer brains,” she said loudly and confidently, but her face and her position – feet wide, arms hugging her shoulders – betrayed her panic: she was afraid just as much as I was. Why are you doing this, I wondered, what do you want to prove to me – that we’re friends, or that you’re stronger than me?

She took the bottle of spirit, opened it with a quiet pop, and, pausing for a second, took a sip. It made her squirm, she winced, held the bottle out to me and said: “Have some.”

I took the bottle from her hands and carefully smelt it – the strong odour made my eyes water.

“It tastes even worse,” Ira pointed out, her pale cheeks starting to turn pink. “But I would take a sip if I were you anyway.”

I held the bottle to my lips; the foul-tasting burning liquid filled my mouth and triggered a spasm in my throat. I won’t be able to swallow this, not in a million years, I thought – and swallowed it. I felt a bit better straight away.

Lenny woke up after some time – perhaps he was too weak from blood loss, or maybe the novocaine was working – but he was asleep the whole time we cleaned his wound with spirit, trying to wash off both dried and fresh blood streaks from his yellowish, pale skin – and he didn’t even move when Ira stuck the needle into him for the first time. I looked away, and she immediately said:

“You’ll have to watch this too, honey, I’m not doing it on my own. Just make sure you don’t faint right here, OK?” Lenny suddenly woke up. His stomach moved, and he started trying to sit up; I quickly grabbed his shoulders, bent down and said into his ear:

“It’s ok, wait a bit, you’ve got a hole in your stomach, we need to stitch it up.” He gave me a sorrowful look and said nothing, just blinked several times.

“Anya, blot the blood and take the scissors to cut the thread,” said Ira through clenched teeth, and I immediately took the paper tissue – her voice sounded tense, so I didn’t really know who needed comforting more, she or Lenny, but her hands didn’t shake at all – a puncture, another puncture, a knot; cut off the thread, blot the blood. Another puncture, and again, then a knot. I glanced at Lenny’s face – tears were streaming down his cheeks, he was crying like a child, but silently, biting his lip, his eyes shut tight. Every time Ira stuck the needle in, he sucked the air.

I watched the light-coloured top of Ira’s head; the roots of her hair were darker than the rest of it – two weeks in the dying city, with a door locked, scared of leaving the flat even to buy food – you weren’t in the mood for dying hair, I thought, I wonder if you brought hair dye with you, and if not, won’t you look a bit bizarre in a couple of months – a puncture, another puncture, a knot – god, what am I thinking about, I thought, I’m lucky nobody can hear what’s going on in my head. He had a padded jacket on and his stomach is quite fat, and the knife was small – a short, wide blade, only why is there so little blood? What if we stitch him up now, bandage him and tomorrow he’ll swell up, his skin will go dark and he’ll start dying, slowly and painfully; how many days does one need to die of internal bleeding – a day, two days? And we’ll be just waiting here until he dies, because we won’t be able to leave him here, alone, in a cold house, so we’ll just wait and hurry him up in our minds, because every extra day spent here reduces our chance of reaching the lake. And when it’s all over we’ll feel relieved, and then we’ll bury him right here, in the garden, behind the house. The grave won’t be deep because the ground is certainly frozen at least a metre and a half deep – a puncture, another puncture, a knot, cut the thread, blot the blood.

“I’m done,” Ira sighed and straightened her back, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “Let’s fix the dressings with plasters and let the men bandage him, we won’t be able to lift him anyway.”

Having finished we came out on to the porch, jackets draped over our shoulders, and sat on the shaky wooden steps – we didn’t feel the cold yet. She held the bottle of spirit again – as soon as we sat down, she opened it and took another sip, much bigger than the previous one. This time she almost didn’t wince and passed the bottle to me. I groped for my cigarettes in my pocket and lit one.

“Give me one, too,” she asked. “I don’t smoke, actually, my mum died of cancer two years ago.”

“My mum died too,” I said, unexpectedly, and thought straight away that so far I hadn’t been able to say these words aloud, even to Sergey, even to myself.

She held the cigarette awkwardly, like a schoolgirl who’d been taught to smoke in the back yard of a school, her fingers stained in iodine or blood – I couldn’t tell in the dark. For some time, we smoked in silence and sipped from the bottle; the night was quiet, still, the boarded windows didn’t let out a single spot of light, it was pitch-dark – both torches and the kerosene lamp were left in the sauna, where Lenny was lying on the shelf with his stomach covered in a criss-cross pattern of plasters. He had fallen asleep the moment we stopped torturing him and that’s why we first heard somebody’s footsteps approaching. A few moments later a white ski suit came out of the darkness, but we only realised it was Marina when she was right in front of us.

She stood there without saying a word – just looked straight ahead. We waited a bit but it seemed she was going to stand like this forever, so Ira told her:

“We’ve stitched up his stomach, but you’ll have to sort out his clothes yourself.”

She didn’t answer, her face didn’t change, she didn’t even look up.

“You know, he could do with a cold compress, to stop the bleeding, you should get some snow in a bag,” I said; but she just stood there, unmoving; I wanted to go up to her, take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake. I almost rose to my feet, but she finally lifted her head and looked at us.

“You’re not going to leave me, are you?” she said.

“What?”

“Please don’t leave me,” she said, her eyes glistening. “I have a small child, you can’t leave us here, I’ll do everything you say, I can cook, I’ll wash your clothes, just don’t leave me,” she pressed her hands to her chest in a begging gesture, and I saw that they were covered in dried up blood which started crackling when she clenched her fists; she didn’t seem to be bothered by it. So that’s what you were thinking of, I thought, while you sat in the car, crouched, holding the bandage on your husband’s stomach, the whole time we were rushing here, worried that he wouldn’t make it, while we were stitching up his stomach, while we were drinking this awful spirit, that’s what you were concerned about all this time. I was surprised.

“Are you an idiot?” Ira said and both Marina and I jumped at the sound of her voice, so harsh it sounded. “Go back to the house, find a bag, fill it with snow and take it to your husband, he’s all alone in there, and it’s time you did something for him, do you hear me?”

Marina stood there for another moment – her eyes wild – and then quietly turned and disappeared into the darkness.

“What an idiot,” Ira said again, and threw her cigarette end into the snow. “Give me another one.”

“You know”, I said holding out the cigarette pack to her. “He didn’t tell me he’d gone to pick you up that night.”

She turned her head to me, but didn’t say anything, as if waiting to see what I else I was going to say.

“I just want you to know,” I continued, already sensing that this was going the wrong way, that I shouldn’t be saying this, especially now. “That if he had told me he wanted to bring you, I wouldn’t have minded.”

For some time, she sat in silence, without moving and looking at me – I couldn’t see her face in the dark; then she got up.

“Why do you think”, she said calmly, looking away. “Why do you think he left me for you?”

I didn’t answer. Then she suddenly brought her face close to me and looked me straight in the eye – cold, hostile.

“It’s very simple”, she said. “I gave birth to Anton, I had a difficult birth, I was busy with the baby and lost interest in sex for a short while, you see. I simply stopped having sex with him. Nothing else. Do you get it? I just stopped sleeping with him. If it wasn’t for that, he’d still be with me, and we would live in that beautiful wooden house of yours, and you’d just fucking die in the city, together with all your relatives.”

She threw the unlit cigarette on the snow and walked back to the house, leaving me alone on the steps. I wanted to say, hang on, it was my idea to move to the country, and there was a lot more I wanted to say but I didn’t get a chance because she left.