To the Lake

14 CLEANSED VILLAGES

The road was bad. Luckily it hadn’t snowed heavily yet, at least not since the day the thin line of traffic between Cherepovets and Belozersk – a tiny dot on the bank of a huge, cold northern lake, the first one we were to see during our journey – grew smaller and gradually disappeared. There was nothing to be transported by this road connecting one dead city with the other, nor was there anybody left to do it. It probably happened only a few weeks earlier, because the layer of snow covering the road wasn’t deep and we could still see the tracks from the last cars that had driven here.

Looking at Sergey’s focused profile, while the Pajero was confidently making its way forward, rocking only slightly, compressing with a crunching sound the fragile, frozen tyre prints of other cars on the snow, I was thinking about the last person who had driven along here. I wanted to know who that person was and where he was going, did he have a rescue plan similar to ours, or was he escaping, hurriedly loading his family, or whatever was left of it, into the car, without a particular destination in his mind, just wanting to run away from the death that was breathing down his neck; was he infected already? did he know that everything he was escaping from was awaiting him round every corner of his journey, in every little village he would go past? would he manage to do what he had planned? Of course his only goal was, in whatever way it had been articulated, to survive. Will we manage it?

On the back seat, which was much larger than the Vitara’s, the dog sat, folding his legs underneath him, alert and looking out of the window, as if trying not to see what was happening around him inside the car. It was probably his first car journey ever. When everything was packed, I took the last look at the street squeezed by enormous snowbanks – one of which I had thought only a few days back would be where I’d die – and criss-crossed by the tracks of our tyres. I suddenly saw the pair of yellow eyes. He sat a few steps away from me and his face didn’t have a particular expression – fear, worry, or flattery – he was simply looking at me calmly, and when I opened the back door of the car and told him ‘come on then, jump in’, he still stood for a little while, as if not sure that we were worthy of his company, and then reluctantly walked over to the car and in one graceful leap he was inside. Mishka immediately reached over and tried to touch him but the dog drew back from his hand as if saying ‘don’t touch me, I don’t need you, I’m only with you as long as I want to be and not a minute longer’. If anyone had asked me why I brought him with us, I probably couldn’t answer because I knew we had neither space in the car nor food, and I was ready to hear this question – what do you need him for? and would have answered simply ‘he’s coming with us, he’s coming, I owe him something, something very important, I feel calm when he’s near me’.

The question of who would be travelling in which car was resolved just as easily; Dad brought Ira’s bag and threw it onto the Vitara’s backseat, and then, picking up the boy under the arms, put him next to it. “Anya, Sergey, you’ll go first, we’ll follow you. Andrey – you’ll be at the back”. I expected there to be arguments and objections, I was almost sure that the boy would demand a place for himself and his mother in Sergey’s car again, like on the day we started our escape, and this would mean that once more I would face several painful days of not seeing his face, of not being able to reach over and touch him. Because when he’s near me, I know that everything will be all right. Unlike the day when I first met them – this tall alien woman and the boy, who never smiled at me – this time I was prepared to fight. I wasn’t feeling guilty anymore, as if I had paid all my debts to them in the summer cottage, while they were waiting for me to die in the house next door. But neither Ira, nor the boy said anything – settling at the back he immediately started breathing on the window and rubbing it with his hand to be able to see, and she, happy that he was comfortable, sat at the front and rested her hands on her knees, indifferent to us busily packing the car.

“Say goodbye to the federal roads,” Andrey said on the radio, interrupting my thoughts. “Watch out for the sign for Kirillov, we need to turn right straight after.”

We had no choice – if we had been courageous enough to drive along the left bank of the gigantic Onezhskoye lake, we wouldn’t have had to leave for long the wide, smooth, although already snow-covered, surfaces of the federal roads; but that would have meant driving right through the last city in this scarcely populated area which was on our way: three-hundred thousand strong Petrozavodsk, stretching along the highway in the top part of the lake. Our last hope of fulfilling this plan died during the week we spent in the summer cottages – if in the beginning of our journey we had still thought to manage to get up north to the deserted lakes, before the ruthless, all-absorbing plague would block our way, it became clear that there wasn’t even a glimpse of hope for that anymore. If we wanted to reach our destination we only needed to count on being able to go round Onezhskoye lake on the right – meandering in between the strange, unfamiliar northern names of tiny settlements, which had been built three hundred years before to service northern trading routes and had remained there ever since. They were characterised by sparse populations and ancient wooden monasteries, cut off from the big world by frozen lakes, windy rivers, thick forests and bad roads – unwanted and forgotten.

It was clear that we could vaporise and disappear at any point of this complicated route, which not many people would take a chance to go by even in the summer; we could simply get stuck in the snow – which nobody cleared anymore – and freeze to death; any negligible trouble with the car in minus thirty, without telephones or any hope of help, would paralyse us and we would be doomed; if this happened we would risk coming up against the people who lived there and they wouldn’t be happy to see us even if the disease hadn’t reached them yet. Only the fear of the virus we were facing was stronger, so we turned right, under the little blue road sign. To our surprise, the track we were following turned right as well, leaving behind the untouched snow-lined surface of the deserted highway. It was heading north to Belozersk, moving away from the big cities kilometre by kilometre, as if even the track itself was trying to stay away from them as far as it could.

“What’s on the map? How far till the next village?” Dad’s voice crackled in the radio.

“Less than a kilometre”, Andrey answered. “There’ll be a few small villages on the way to Kirillov, but we have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Why do you think so?”

“He came last night – the old man. He assured me that the surrounding villages are not dangerous at all – there’s nobody there”.

“How does he know this, your old man?” Dad said grumpily. “What does he mean – not dangerous? Why didn’t he go there if they’re not dangerous…?”

“There was a cleansing operation in those villages,” Andrey said and silence fell – for a while there wasn’t a sound coming out of the radio, apart from some interference, as if somebody had forgotten to release the button, and then Dad asked again:

“Cleansing operation?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Andrey said, “when they were still thinking it could help. They started with the surrounding villages – they probably thought that the virus would come from here, because Vologda was already dead, but Cherepovets was still standing. He said the army had made this decision – they couldn’t introduce quarantine, they just cleansed everything in the radius of thirty kilometres towards the north.”

“What does he mean – ‘cleansed’?” I asked Sergey, who continued to drive, focused, without entering the conversation, as if he wasn’t listening. Without taking his eyes off the road he replied:

“Looks like we’re going to see it for ourselves, baby. Look ahead.”

The smoke was still hanging above this dreadful place. Gripped by the frost it stopped half way to the sky in broken lace, making obscure white patterns on a black background, as if unsuccessfully trying to conceal the ugly skeletons of burnt houses under its merciful white shroud. There wasn’t a single house left intact – identical and black, with broken frames and empty windows – the glass had all exploded in the violent heat – they stood on both sides of the road, the only witnesses of the catastrophe, silent, unable to testify about it. This place was so hopelessly empty, so utterly dead that we slowed down – it looked as if there really was nothing to be afraid of: not a single person, whether ill or healthy could have survived here. We could even stop, get out of the car, and peer into one of the houses if we really wanted to.

“They used a flamethrower,” Dad said, following it with a convoluted and long bout of swearing. “Look, there are tracks on the ground”. I looked closer and saw burnt tracks, which started from the road and led to the houses, melting the snow and burning black the colourless winter grass under it.

I kept looking for – and was afraid to find – a trench or a pit; for some reason I imagined that the bodies of the people who had lived in these houses would be lying at the bottom of a pit, in a pile, on top of each other; they’d probably be frozen stiff: whoever had burnt their houses surely wouldn’t stop to cover the trench with some snow. But I couldn’t see bodies anywhere – anywhere outside – so the only place they could be was the houses, or rather what was left of them.

“What did they do to them?” I asked Sergey. “Did they burn them alive?”

Sergey put his hand on my knee without looking at me.

“Perhaps there was nobody left to burn,” he said, unsure. “Maybe they died before they…”

“Had they been alive, they’d probably fight,” I interrupted, not because I was sure about that, but because I wanted to believe it. “Somebody would come out of the house, we would see at least someone…”

“Anya, don’t look to your right,” he suddenly said quickly, and I heard a strange noise from the back – that was Mishka sucking air – I looked, I just couldn’t help looking, and before I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands, I realised that they had been alive, maybe not all of them, but some of them were definitely alive when all this had happened.

“Let’s leave this place now,” I said, keeping my eyes shut. “Sergey, please let’s leave now.”

As soon as we had got past the village, the hatchback which was driving at the back of our convoy suddenly stopped, the passenger door opened and Natasha popped out without a jacket and vomited right by the wheel of the car. Without saying a word, we stopped and waited too, while she, unbending and turning her face away from us, breathed the cold air; we moved off only after she came back to the car.

“Tell me before we reach another village,” I asked Sergey. “I don’t want to see this anymore.” He nodded.

We came across two more ‘cleansed’ villages, similar to the one we saw earlier, and while we were driving from one towards the other I tried to keep my eyes glued to the speedometer, working out when these damn thirty kilometres from the city would finish; the city, which first destroyed all life around as far as it could reach in an unsuccessful attempt to save itself, and then perished; when these thirty kilometres finished, the track, which helped us move relatively fast, finished too.

“We’re driving too slowly,” Dad said, and these were his first words since we left the burnt-out village. “We’ll burn too much fuel, we need to let the Land Cruiser get to the front, Sergey, pull over.”

We stopped and Dad went to the Land Cruiser. Everyone, except Lenny also came out into the fresh cold air to have a break – it was empty and snowy in that place, and it felt safe.

“I haven’t got the radio,” Marina was protesting in a worried, high-pitched voice. “Let the hatchback go to the front, it’s quite heavy, too.”

“You have to understand,” Dad was telling her patiently. “The Land Cruiser is about three tons heavy, the Mazda is much lighter, and then they have a trailer, they’ll get stuck on this kind of road with a trailer.”

“Well, can we not attach their trailer to us,” she continued, unsure, “or give us somebody’s radio?”

“I won’t let you take the trailer off,” said Andrey decisively. “We’ll never find you if you take our trailer.”

“What do you mean?” Marina immediately reacted, and Dad, standing between them, raised his arms in a gesture of making peace.

“Ok, now, this is what we’ll do. I’ll take the radio off the Vitara and put it on the Land Cruiser. While it’s still light, you’ll drive, and when it gets dark I’ll get Ira to drive my car, and I’ll get into yours: you won’t manage in the dark on your own. Our job is to drive faster, we’ll run out of fuel even earlier than we’d thought if we drive so slowly.”

“Our main job,” Andrey said very quietly, looking at his feet, “is to find more fuel. Natasha and I were on our way to Vsevolzhsk, I only have a third of a tank, and the trailer is really heavy, I won’t make it even to Kirillov with this load. Can you share some of your supplies?”

“We’ve no supplies left,” Dad said gloomily, “didn’t Sergey tell you? We’ve no more fuel. We searched left, right and centre in the village and found nothing, just half a can with petrol for the Vitara. I doubt that this petrol’s good, but we’ve no choice. But as for diesel – it’s all in the tanks, we’ve no more left. We can each give you about ten litres, but that means we won’t be able to drive further than two hundred kilometres, and if we don’t find fuel before that, that’s where we’re going to stay forever.”

Of course I knew this would happen, I thought, while we were gliding along the freshly made track behind the heavy Land Cruiser. The Vitara, without the radio contact, followed the Land Cruiser and the hatchback, about twenty litres of fuel lighter, was still bringing up the rear. We all knew that we wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the lake, but why didn’t anyone tell me that there is so little of it left? Didn’t we – the women and the children – have the right to know, while we were making the decision to leave the summer cottages, that if we don’t find fuel before the end of today, our cars’ engines will die one by one, and we’ll be left freezing to death in the middle of this icebound, deserted land? Would we have agreed to that if they had told us? We would have stayed, if we’d known, we’d definitely have stayed, the city’s dead anyway and there isn’t a single surviving village left, how many escapers were we likely to meet – five, ten? And what could they do to us, apart from dying of hunger before our eyes? Is this really better than what we would have faced if we’d stayed? I would never have said yes to this. I would never have let us leave, let Mishka leave, no, never.

“Baby”, Sergey said quietly, and his hand landed on my knee again.

“Don’t touch me,” I said through clenched teeth. I couldn’t even look at him. How could you, how could you decide for me, for your son, for mine, how could you dare make such an important decision by yourself? She doesn’t even know, she hasn’t heard, she’s driving in the radioless Vitara, and I can’t even tell her what they’ve done. “Give me the radio,” I said. Nervous, I pressed the wrong button and wasted a few moments talking to nobody, but then realised and repeated – the radio clicked – and everyone heard me, except for Dad: “Marina, stop. We need to go back before it’s too late, otherwise we’re all going to die on this road.”

The Land Cruiser slowed down and stopped straight away, followed by the Vitara. Sergey, swearing, also pressed on the brakes, and before we stopped completely I opened the door and ran out, ran forward, telling myself you idiot, idiot, what were you thinking “Sleep on the back seat, open my eyes only when we arrive at the lake when all troubles would be left behind “ this isn’t how it works, it never had, I yanked the Vitara’s passenger door: Dad looked at me gloomily from behind the wheel, as if knowing what I was going to say. I looked into Ira’s eyes and blurted out:

“They didn’t tell us. We haven’t enough fuel. We need to turn back to the summer cottages while there’s still fuel for the return journey.”

And then we stood in the middle of the road, my husband and I, on the burning cold wind, and shouted at each other. God, he probably never saw me like this, I thought – but this wasn’t even a proper thought, it was more of a fragment of a thought, I was so enraged I couldn’t stop myself. When we met, I became much quieter than I usually was, as if somebody had turned my volume right down, and rubbed out my rough edges with an invisible rubber, smoothed all my sharp corners; boy, didn’t I have a lot of sharp corners he had no idea about. I was hoping that I had hidden them so well that he’d never guess that they existed, and he didn’t, up until that moment – I could tell by the way he looked at me.

“Stop this fit, Anya, what the hell, we couldn’t stay there!”

“That’s rubbish! How long do we have left – a hundred kilometres, two hundred? And then what? You suggest we walk?”

“And what do you suggest? Go back and die from the plague in that village?”

“I suggest being honest, to start with! We’ve children with us, how could you make this decision without us? We could wait in the village, we could drain the fuel into one car and make trips out, search the neighbouring villages, find some kind of a tractor after all – well, anything! We could wait until spring and then come back to Cherepovets – there’d be nobody left by then, and we could find fuel, there are petrol stations, oil depots, there are piles of abandoned transport after all – and what are you going to do here, in this desert?”

Freezing cold air burnt my throat, I started coughing, my knees wobbled, my legs started to feel weak, I grabbed the warm bumper of the Vitara in order not to fall, the voices of others seemed to be coming from miles away. “Anya, are you ok?” “Hold her, she’s going to fall!”, I wanted to shout ‘don’t touch me, wait, let me finish’, but only a whisper came out, even my lips disobeyed me. I closed my eyes and inhaled Sergey’s familiar smell, he was holding me with both hands, saying ‘calm down baby, it’s going to be ok, you’ll see’; nothing’ll be ok, I was thinking, we’re all going to die here. “Put her in the car, quick”, Dad said, and Sergey picked me up and carried me to the car; hasn’t anyone said anything, I was thinking, why is she silent, now that she knows the truth? The door was open; I felt the seat was still warm from my sitting there before I jumped down, and from somewhere at the back rhythmical, dull growling was heard. They’re going to drive me away and I won’t be able to argue any more, this is so stupid; the doors started slamming in all the cars – they just got back into their cars as if nothing happened, like visitors who had involuntarily become witnesses of a sudden, indecent brawl between the hosts and were now hurrying to leave as quickly as possible, overcome with that inevitable cocktail of gloating and embarrassment because of what they had seen. I felt listless and angry, I closed my eyes and thought – I can’t shout any more, I can’t even talk, not now anyway. I need only a few minutes, well, maybe half an hour, I need us to stop for a while and then I’ll try to convince them again, they simply didn’t understand, I didn’t have time to explain properly, I’ll try again, I just need to calm down, gather my thoughts. I tried to breathe slowly and deeply, and not to look at Sergey. It was quiet in the car, I just heard Mishka’s upset snuffle in the back seat, when suddenly the Land Cruiser slowed down and stopped, the radio crackled – several empty clicks, hissing, and then finally Marina’s voice in the radio:

“Look! There, on the side! Isn’t that a lorry?”

It was impossible to tell how far from us it was on this snowy plain – from our road which blended with the surrounding fields and looked slightly different only because it was higher than the fields by half a metre. The distance between ourselves and the lorry (or to what we thought was the lorry) could be several hundred metres, or a kilometre, or even two. While we were driving forward there was no point in arguing anymore and everyone fell silent. We drove slowly, approaching the unknown frozen silhouette in front of us for an unbearably long time, and the tiny dot by the side of the road kept growing and finally did turn into a lorry. Even when it became absolutely clear that it was a lorry, everyone was still silent, as if not wanting to jinx it, to frighten away the luck, because this lorry could have been burnt, looted, bled dry – there must have been a reason it was dumped in this place, thirty kilometres from the nearest settlement. Finally, we drove up to it and stopped. Surprisingly, for the first several moments we just parked up beside the lorry without turning our engines off, overcome with superstitious fear; four cars loaded to the brim, and none of us had the guts to get any closer to it.

It was a large articulated lorry with a long metallic trailer, with writing in large faded letters on the side; the lorry seemed to have been broken into two, like a child’s toy taken to pieces – the cab separated from the trailer, facing down, and the trailer hoisted up at an angle, as if trying to spill its contents onto the road. Left in this defenceless position, it looked like a horse in a circus, bending down for a bow – I kept looking at it and tried to understand what could have happened, where was the driver, why did he leave his lorry? Maybe he was trying to detach the trailer to win a few more kilometres from death, so his vehicle was lighter and he could reach his destination where he could get help? Or perhaps something had broken down and he was trying to fix it – alone, his hands numb with cold – but there was no trace of fire near the lorry, nor any trace of human kind being here. If the lorry did break down, did the driver walk away from here? And what happened next – did he reach the village, which we had left behind, and were the people in it still alive when he got there?

Finally, I heard Sergey, who was the first to wake up from this strange torpor we were all in, shut the door and jump onto the snow; he took the fuel hose from the boot and ran to the lorry. I saw Dad climb out, too, inseparably attached to his rifle, and looking around him, follow Sergey. I had no energy to leave the car, so I just lowered the window and watched them walk to the lorry; Dad carefully peered inside (as if somebody might still be in the overturned cab), and Sergey kicked the enormous fuel tank on the side of the truck facing me, which looked like a silver barrel, between the first and the second row of wheels, and listened to the sound it gave out – it was unclear: dull, maybe promising. Sergey tried to unscrew the tank top, which didn’t open, then he took his gloves off and grabbed it with both hands, wincing from the cold metal on his skin, unscrewed it, pushed the hose inside the tank, missing the opening a couple of times, and started pumping, looking tensely at the long transparent tube. When he noticed the movement of liquid inside, he turned to us with a wide smile and shouted – of course we all had our eyes glued to him and saw the same thing: “Yes!”

All the petrol cans we had with us – the ones we had bought in Noudol, or had taken from home, or had found in Andrey’s trailer – were immediately displayed on the snow in a short line after Sergey’s triumphant outcry; there weren’t many of them but within a quarter of an hour it turned out that even out of this small number only some could be filled: the stream at the sixth can started thinning, Sergey stood up, turned to us and said with a long face:

“That’s it, no more.”

“That’s all right,” Dad said in what seemed to me an exaggeratedly cheerful voice, and patted Sergey on the shoulder. “We’ve enough for about four hundred kilometres, which is half the way, Sergey, we’ll find more. Let’s go and see what else we can lay our hands on.”

They couldn’t open the container which was fixed inside the truck’s trailer, and therefore we never found out what kind of goods were so important to the people who had decided to risk the driver’s life and sent him off on a journey – to Vologda or Cherepovets – in these terrible times. Whatever was inside this container which was hanging dangerously above the ground – even if we had managed to break the locks and the steel bolts holding its doors tightly shut – it would have spilt out and buried anyone brave enough to be standing beneath it, so we took what we managed to find in the cab and left it at that – a first aid kit, a tool kit and an expensive-looking thermos, which still contained the remains of long-cold coffee. The most precious thing we managed to find, apart from the fuel, was an excellent radio – risking his neck, Dad climbed on top and unscrewed the antenna attached to the roof of the cab, and holding the valuable possession to his chest, immediately ran to fix it on to the Vitara. There was nothing else we could do in that place.

Later, in the car, watching him drive carefully, not looking at me even out of the corner of his eye, desperately trying to pretend that nothing had happened and we hadn’t had an argument, hadn’t shouted in front of everyone, losing our tempers, I was thinking: for three whole years I was afraid that you’d see me for real, that you’d realise that I’m just an ordinary, mortal woman who can be moody, angry, who can shout; I had always put you first in exchange for you not noticing that there was actually no difference between me and the other woman you had been married to for such a long time, it was so important that you didn’t notice, that it didn’t occur to you; but as soon as we faced a life and death situation, as soon as I was properly scared, that whole effort was wasted in a flash, I didn’t even have time to think about how I should behave – I just did what I had always done when I felt cornered: I showed my teeth; and even though I hadn’t had my own way, even though the lorry with the measly hundred litres of fuel delayed our imminent final stop, and we all started thinking that it had been worth taking this journey, you will never forget about this argument, you will always remember that I – who had never argued with you and always agreed with you – wasn’t your absolute ally anymore.

For some reason just as I was thinking this he turned to me and said:

“There you go, baby, there was no reason to panic – we’ve found fuel and will find more, you’ll see, we mustn’t give up.”

I could have told him that we were incredibly lucky to come across this lorry in the middle of nowhere, so far from the usual long-range routes. I could even continue arguing that we should go back, because it made no difference if we freeze to death after driving one hundred kilometres or four hundred, if we were still some eight hundred kilometres away from our destination. But I said:

“Never do this again, do you hear? Never make a decision for me.”

He was silent, he didn’t reply, just carried on driving looking straight in front of him – although he could argue that he had been making decisions for me from day one and had continued to do so for the three years we had been together, and this was what actually made me happy, because before I had to make too many decisions by myself, and I was really, really tired of it. In any case this was what I thought as soon as I said ‘never do this again’, because I just wasn’t sure that I really wanted him never to make decisions for me again; but he continued to drive on, keeping his eyes glued to the road, as if he hadn’t heard me, and that’s why I decided to say something else:

“You know what,” I said, carefully looking at the rubber mat with a puddle of melted snow under my boots. “Enough calling me ‘baby’. I’m thirty-six, my son’s sixteen and I’m not a bloody ‘baby’.”