To the Lake

16 IN A HOLE

I woke up from an unpleasant feeling that we had stopped moving – I realised it before I woke up properly and opened my eyes; it was the same feeling you have when you travel in a sleeper train, stuck somewhere in the middle of the night at some god-forsaken distributing station, when your body, used to the movement, rocking and clanging of the train wheels, reacts to the unexpected silence and immobility. At first I thought that while I was asleep, everyone had decided to stop by the side of the road in some quiet place to take a break, and I almost fell back asleep again, when I suddenly sat up in my seat and opened my eyes wide – there was clearly something wrong. There was nobody else in the car: the driver’s seat was empty, and even the dog wasn’t on the back seat.

The engine was off, but the sidelights were on; their dim light revealed the familiar back door of the Vitara with a funny sticker on the silver cap of the spare – some child had stuck it on back in Chertanovo, when I used to park it outside the block of flats we lived in; even sick with worry, unaware what was going on, I still had a twinge of jealousy – could I imagine, when I was buying this car, that another woman would drive it – no, not another woman – that woman, and that my son would volunteer to join her rather than me – guarding her on the back seat with a gun? But I had no time to think about this: there was something going on on the road. Reaching over I turned the switch and the lights went off; then I carefully opened the door and stepped outside to see what was happening.

Walking around the Vitara from the road side, I carefully looked from behind it and had to narrow my eyes – I was blinded by the bright orange light of the rectangular hazard lights on the roof of the hatchback; dazzled, I automatically took a step backwards into the shadow of my car thinking, what the hell, why is the hatchback facing the opposite way, what’s going on? Suddenly the hatchback’s engine made a deafening roar – and straight away somebody shouted – the words were unclear but I think I recognised Dad’s voice. Unable to carry on waiting any longer, I took a deep breath, stepped out onto the road and started walking towards the glaring hazard lights.

“I said you needed rest,” a woman’s voice was piping over the ear-splitting noise of the engine – it was a high-pitched voice, almost sing-along.“You’ve been driving all day, I told you, you should have taken a break, I could drive; how are we going to pull it out now?” I couldn’t quite see who the unfamiliar wailing voice belonged to, but I immediately recognised the man who yelled back at her – desperately, angrily, as if he was saying the same thing again and again:

“I wasn’t asleep, damn you!” Dad shouted. “There’s a hole in the road, just a hole, look for yourself, all the wheels are on the road, we haven’t gone off the road, just move out of the way for goodness’ sake – come on, Andrey, try it once again!” And the engine roared with double the noise, the hatchback jerked – I saw the three bright rectangles jump on the roof.

“Careful, you’ll rip it off, oh God, help us!” howled Marina, now sounding like a caricature peasant woman – I finally recognised her: she was wringing her hands, dashing to and fro in her white ski suit in front of the hatchback, almost under its wheels, looking like a terrified rabbit in the spotlight of an under-barrel torch of a hunter’s gun. Dad – I could see him quite well, too – his jacket undone, with frost on his beard and savage eyes, jumped out from the darkness towards her and shouted – furious, mad:

“What are you doing, you fucking woman! Get out of here, Marina, really, otherwise I’ll kill you – Lenny, take her away, will you?”

Coming closer I finally saw what happened – although it was easy to guess by now: the heavy Land Cruiser, like a large clumsy animal stuck in mud, was sunk in the snow – so deep that it seemed it didn’t have any wheels; judging by the lifted boot, the front wheels had sunk in deeper than the back ones – it looked like it really did fall into a hole, but there was no way it could come out of it without help. The hatchback was free of its trailer and now, with its back to the Land Cruiser, it was jerking and roaring as it struggled to pull the Land Cruiser out. Andrey was driving, poking almost half his body out of the window and looking back at the Land Cruiser; the two cars were joined by a bright-yellow tow rope which stretched and shook between them. Mishka stood by the side of the road, holding a short spade; he had no hat on, and his ears were glowing red in the cold; Dad was holding another spade – there was probably no point in digging while the hatchback, strenuously growling, tried freeing the Land Cruiser from its snowy captivity. Sergey wasn’t there – I guessed he was driving the Land Cruiser.

Lenny and Marina walked past me towards the other, hushed cars – he was heavily leaning onto her shoulder and I could see she was walking too fast for him. When they overtook me, I heard him say:

“…they’ll sort it without you. Why the hell did you keep banging on – ‘you fell asleep, you fell asleep’, who cares? The main thing is to pull the car out; better tell me – where’s Dasha?” Ignoring him, she shouted over him, angrily, with tears in her voice:

“…why don’t you say something, how will we get there now, we should have been at the front, I told you, we shouldn’t have… we have so much stuff there, clothes, food, how will we go? did you think about it? We’ve lost our car…” And they walked past – back to the Pajero, I turned back to look at them, but then the hatchback roared again, this time in a particular desperate way: whirling the thick snow dust from under the wheels, the Land Cruiser suddenly jumped and started crawling upwards, back first, and the hatchback slowly moved forward, towards me; I jumped off to the side, and Dad, trying to outcry the roar, shouted:

“Go-go-go, come on, Andrey, again, again!” and suddenly there was a sharp, strange noise, and then a loud bang – looking carefully I saw that the tow rope had snapped; the Land Cruiser rolled back and sank its face in the snow in exactly the same place it had been before; the hatchback’s engine fell silent, the dazzling lights went out, the driver’s door opened and Andrey, hurriedly jumping onto the snow and running around the car, said, annoyed:

“We cracked the bumper. Good job it wasn’t the windscreen.”

“Because the tow rope was crap!” Dad has probably lost his voice, because he sounded really croaky; he looked upset – I wanted to come up to him, put my hand on his shoulder and say to him, don’t listen to this idiot, of course there was a hole, it’s not your fault, but he suddenly stuck his spade into the snow at full swing – it went in up to the middle of its short shaft, and I didn’t risk offering him my sympathy.

“Those flashy ropes of yours, you could’ve brought at least one metal one, fucking travellers! You’re only good enough to go Christmas shopping.”

“Your metal rope wouldn’t help,” Sergey said, who had climbed out of the Land Cruiser and was making his way onto the road with difficulty. “It’s sitting too deep, we would only rip the eyelets. We need to dig some more, it’s got a lot of snow under it again, Mishka, give me the spade.” And Dad and he started digging – probably not for the first and maybe not even for the second time. I told Mishka: “Put your hat on,” but he didn’t even turn his head to me, tensely watching Sergey and Dad working in between the Land Cruiser’s wheels.

Dad lifted his head and spoke to Andrey:

“What are you waiting for? Come on, bring your tow rope. We’ve ripped one, now time to rip yours.”

“If we don’t dig it out enough, mine’ll rip too,” Andrey retorted, still looking upset at the crack on the bumper. “Shall I go and bring another spade, and we’ll dig out some more together?”

The three of them dug the snow together for some time – giving it the whole of their concentration, frenziedly throwing the snow from the bottom of the heavily sunk Land Cruiser towards the side of the road. Mishka and I hovered around them, not daring to bother them with questions; I felt the bitter, unforgiving cold creeping up my legs, in spite of the warm boots I was wearing, and I was afraid even to look at Mishka, who had spent a lot longer outside than I had. Suddenly Sergey stood up, wiped his face and said sullenly:

“It’s no use. We’ve reached the ice, we won’t be able to pull it out like this.”

“Shall we try from the other side?” Andrey asked, coming out from behind the car; his breath steamy from the cold air, and his eyebrows and eyelashes white from frost, his eyes watery. “If I do it at high speed, maybe I could jump over this hole?’

“No, we can’t do that,” Dad said in his croaky voice, “We don’t know how big that hole is, if another car gets stuck – that’s curtains for us.”

“If we can’t go round this hole,” Andrey said slowly – and I suddenly understood the scale of the problem. Even though he hadn’t finished his sentence I knew what he was going to say, “It’s curtains anyway, because we won’t be able to continue going, and we have nothing to drive back in.”

This can’t be right, I thought. This simply cannot be true. I didn’t look at my watch – was it ten o’clock? Was it midnight? I hadn’t slept for longer than hour, maybe two, I just had a snooze, we couldn’t have driven very far.

“How far is it to Vytegra?” I asked hopelessly, and realising what sort of answer I would get, shrank away involuntarily, waiting for someone to tell me. But they all turned back and looked at me, as if I was mad, and Andrey asked, surprised: “What, Vytegra? We went past it ages ago.” I started pulling my sleeve back to look at my watch, but it got stuck, and I tried harder, almost ripping it, before I could see the time. It was half past three in the morning.

I heard somebody’s footsteps creaking behind my back.

“You ok?” Natasha asked, coming up. “How are we doing? Ira and the kids are asleep in the Vitara. Who’s got the keys? It’s freezing cold in the car, we should start the engine.”

I looked at Sergey. He didn’t answer. Come on, say something, I thought, tell her; let’s work out together how long we’ll survive with the petrol we’ve got left, if we just stay here, near this hole, this unsurmountable obstacle, cutting us off from our goal, in the middle of this cold, desolate place, where there’s no light to be seen all the way up to the horizon. Maybe it’ll be enough for one night and maybe even for the whole of the next day – and then we’ll start burning our things, one by one, piling them into a dismal, barely warm fire, and then we’ll take off the car tyres, first from one of the cars, then from all the others, too, and they’ll burn, enveloping us in a black, pungent smoke, and after that, towards the end, we’ll take off the seat covers, because they can burn, too, and even produce a bit of warmth, only Land Cruiser covers won’t burn, because they’re made of leather, which means that Lenny and Marina will have to freeze to death before the rest of us – bloody show-offs, leather interior… In horror, I heard myself laughing; I was terrifyingly calm, I had no fear whatsoever – only some kind of irrational, stupid exultation, I’m going look up at you and say – what did I tell you? and what have you got to say now?

“Mum,” Mishka said quietly. “Are you all right?”

I turned to him – he was looking at me, blinking, surprised, his eyelashes completely white and lips barely able to move from the cold. I shook off the silly, inappropriate smile, went to him, took off my mittens and squeezed his cheeks with both my hands, then his ears – so cold they seemed fragile, as if made of glass – my hands were too cold to warm them, I pressed harder, he squealed and shook his head, freeing himself from my hands.

“Are you cold? Can you feel your ears? Where’s your hat?” I started pulling my hat off my my head to give it to him, I won’t be able to make him warm, I won’t be able to, what shall I do, God, anyone, but not Mishka, I wish we’d stayed there, at home. He kept pushing my hands away and tried to free himself.

“Right then,” Sergey suddenly said, jumping over the huge pile of snow, which had separated the side of the road from the hole, which had swallowed the Land Cruiser. He quickly grabbed Mishka’s hat which I’d seen poking out of his pocket earlier, pulled it over the boy’s head, down to his eyebrows and said: “You get into the car and get warm, and we’ll dig some more.” Then, turning away as if to show that he’d finished talking to us, he said: “We should dig forward, Dad, there’s three of us chunky guys, I’m sure we’ll manage! After all we can chop down a tree, we’ve got axes, we’ll put boards under the wheels, we need to keep going forward, we can’t go back.”

“We need to have a fag,” Dad replied – in a croaky, but rather lively voice.

“You’ll have one on the way,” replied Andrey, in a similar tone, “I’m freezing cold, let’s go and take a look at that hole,” and without waiting for an answer started walking, slowly, sinking into the snow up to his knees, walked round the Land Cruiser and started digging, sticking the spade into the snow every two steps, calling to Sergey over his shoulder:

“Don’t start the engine, just turn on the light, can’t see a bloody thing,” and Dad followed him, walking round the car from the opposite side. Sergey climbed into the car.

Mishka, Natasha and I stood by the side of the road watching them, and forgot for some time about the cold, hoping to hear them say any moment that they’d reached the end of the hole, that it had turned out to be smaller than they had expected and they wouldn’t need much time to pull the frozen car out and make way for the other two, helplessly crowding on its edge. I hugged Mishka and pressed my cheek to the frozen sleeve of his jacket and felt him shaking from cold.

“What’s the matter, Sergey?” Andrey asked impatiently – he was about seven or eight steps away, almost invisible in the darkness. “Come on, turn the light on!” But Sergey didn’t react – we could see from the side of the road that he was sitting in the car without moving, and then suddenly he opened the door and stood on the step carefully looking ahead; and then we followed his gaze – in the direction where the starless sky and the trees and the snow all blurred into one – all the same, dense and black, as if there was nothing ahead – the edge of the Universe, complete darkness and in the middle of it we suddenly saw what Sergey was looking at: a tiny trembling dot, which kept growing – we had no doubt about that a few moments later – and becoming brighter, which could only mean one thing – it was coming towards us.

“What is it?” Mishka asked and freed himself from my arms. I took several steps forward, as if these several steps would allow me to see the mysterious dot better; it kept growing and was turning into a bright spot with blurry edges.

“Somebody’s coming towards us from that side?” Natasha asked.

Pushing us out of the way, Dad ran past – taking off his woolly mittens he dashed towards the Vitara but then, swearing, turned back to the Land Cruiser, and opening the back door, started searching behind the driver’s seat; when he reappeared outside, he was holding the rifle.

“Andrey!” he shouted hoarsely into the darkness. “Come here, now!” But Andrey was already on his way back; he stopped near us and stuck the spade into the ground by his feet – its shaft was too short to lean on.

The spot gradually broke into several smaller dots – it appeared to be much closer to us than we had thought; a few minutes later we saw the little orange flashing light on its top and four bright yellow lights, wide apart from each other, underneath it; then, breaking the silence that had settled while we were watching intensely we heard a racket which didn’t sound like a car engine’s – it was low, dull, and somewhat measured, as if there were breaks in between the rotations, a sound belonging to something much bigger than a standard-size car.

“What is it – a tank?” asked Natasha with fear in her voice.

“I think it’s a snow plough,”Andrey replied after a pause.

“A what?”

“A snow plough. For clearing the road.”

“God,” continued Natasha, “who needs to clear the road now? And most importantly – what for?”

“Looks like we’re going to find out now,” Andrey answered.

I felt something heavy landing on my foot and looked down – pressing his back to my knees, the dog sat his bony bottom on my boot and stayed there perfectly still.

“Girls, go back to the cars,” Dad said quietly, “We’ll deal with this,” but Natasha and I, both fascinated by the blurry spot of light growing into something more defined, stayed where we were. The grader turned out to be something like a tractor – in fact, it was a tractor: a big, yellow monster with three pairs of huge wheels. Rattling noisily, it stopped about ten metres away from the front of the Land Cruiser, dazzling us with its widely spread headlights, with a huge, threateningly lifted scoop, looking more like a gigantic dinosaur than a vehicle operated by man, and we simply stood and watched it – without trying to hide or run away, as if anything that could happen now was unlikely to be worse than the slow, painful death from cold we were all facing if we stayed on this side of the hole. The person in the cab of the grader had one undeniable advantage over us – he could see us very well, while we could only hear his voice, which sounded out as soon as the massive beast stopped and its deafeningly rattling engine fell silent:

“Hey!” the voice called.“What happened?” And before we could decide what we need to say in answer to this strange question – because the helplessly tilted Land Cruiser spoke for itself – Natasha suddenly took a step forward and started talking hurriedly and loudly:

“Hello!” she said. “We’re stuck, there’s a really deep hole on the road here, that’s why we can’t go through, maybe you could give us a tug, we’re terribly cold, we’ve got kids in the car, could you possibly help, we only need to get out, but this road is awful!” Having said that, she fell silent as suddenly as she had spoken, and for a few seconds her invisible interlocutor didn’t say a word, as if he needed time to look at us and get convinced that we don’t present any danger. Finally, he asked one more question:

“How many of you?”

At that moment I noticed that Dad had disappeared – he wasn’t in the circle of light from the tractor, where the five of us stood; the main thing was that she didn’t let slip something that would make the man want to do us harm. He could clearly see, I thought that we have four big cars, he’d never believe that there’s only five of us, but she said:

“We’ve got children with us, and there’s also a wounded man, don’t worry, we’re healthy, we just need somebody to pull us out of this hole, we’re stuck, you see.” She was talking insistently and pleadingly at the same time, and was also smiling to show she wasn’t expecting anything bad from the man in the grader.

“Of course I could help,” the voice said, prolonging his vowels, and it struck me that it was this friendly manner of talk, as well as his accent, that the man in the fox-fur hat had, the one we met a week ago on the woodland path near Cherepovets. “Why wouldn’t I help good people,” he carried on,“Only if they really are good, those people. It’s troublesome times, we should help each other, so let this man of yours who’s got a gun put the gun away, and come out back onto the road so I can see him, and then maybe I won’t shoot either.” He was talking slowly, as if with difficulty, like somebody who doesn’t talk in long sentences very often. “Can you hear me, mate?” His voice didn’t sound friendly anymore. “You should come out, otherwise I’ll shoot. I’m asking nicely, but I won’t ask again. Then we can talk, since we all seem to be good people.” “Dad,” Sergey called quietly, but I heard the creaking of footsteps from the right hand side, and, without hurrying, Dad came out from the dark and stood next to us, sticking his rifle in the snow and holding it by the barrel at arm’s length. His lips were tightly shut. He looked annoyed.

Perhaps the owner of the voice thought that since we were in front of him while he himself stayed invisible to us, nothing posed a threat to him, because he spoke again in a much calmer voice:

“That’s better. Only put it onto the snow, there’s no need to hold it, your gun,” and stopped, waiting for Dad’s reaction; Dad called out hoarsely towards the yellow headlights, where we could barely see the silhouette of the cab:

“You’re a good person, from what I can tell! But you’ve got a gun as well! And you can see me, but I can’t see you, so I’ll hold off putting my gun onto the snow, let’s talk first!”

This suggestion seemed to make the man pause and consider it for a while, because he fell silent again, and we waited for his answer, feeling exposed in the yellow circle we stood in, like a bunch of night butterflies, falling into the trap of a spot lamp, whose glow, though nonmaterial, was nevertheless capable of holding us butterflies in its power.

“Ok then,” he said finally.“Stay where you are, I’ll come to you.” And somewhere high above our heads, under the four bright lights, the door opened and somebody jumped down heavily onto the snow and started walking towards us.

Even in the light we couldn’t see him well: the collar of his sheepskin coat was up, and his hat was pulled down to his eyes; judging by his voice he wasn’t young, and that’s why I was surprised how tall and stout he turned out – the heavy coat was a tight fit on him. Spreading his feet wide apart he stopped by the massive metal scoop and put his hand on it; he really did carry a gun and he slipped the strap off his shoulder and held it in his other hand.

“There’s no point pulling it,” he said, “it’s not a hole, it’s a dip in the road; it’s an uneven surface, with a slope, and because it’s exposed, the snow piled. There’s about four to five kilometres of the road like this, you won’t manage without my help.”

“What do you want as payment for helping us?” asked Natasha, and he smirked gloomily: “What do you have that I need?”

“We have cartridges, medicines and some food,” I said quickly, because the men were still silent, alarmed, and I knew we had to keep the conversation going. I somehow felt that this man wasn’t dangerous and the important thing was to prove to him that we weren’t dangerous to him either, that we really were ‘good people’. I wanted to say something else, or maybe wake the children and bring them here so that he could see them, but Sergey put his hand on my shoulder and asked the man:

“And what are you doing here?” The tall man with a gun turned his head. He scrutinised Sergey for a few moments before he spoke.

“Who – me?” he answered. “I live here. We don’t have tarmac here, so we need the grader in the winter, and in the spring, after the snow melts, otherwise you can’t go through. So I clean the road.”

“What about now, you clean now as well?” Sergey narrowed his eyes.

“No, there’s no point”, the man replied seriously,“even before there weren’t many people going past here, and now there’s even less, which might be a good thing, for what it’s worth. Our village is on top of a hill, we can see the road well. I don’t sleep well at night in my old age, so I saw you, and thought why don’t I come and see what sort of people you are. So do you need help or shall we do some more talking?”

“Of course we do,” Natasha rushed to say, and nodded, “We really do need your help. Thank you very much.”

“Well then,” answered the man, “I’ll clear the snow in front of the car, as much as I can, you dig under the wheels and then follow me, and you’ll climb out.” He turned to go back to the grader but suddenly stopped and looked back over his shoulder at Dad: “And you can put your gun away, mate, and pick up your spade, that’ll be more useful now.”

To get rid of the crumbly snow that covered the Land Cruiser up to the bumper, the grader needed to make just two manoeuvres: it span around itself – unbelievably lightly for this kind of bulky truck, stood sideways, and revealed another scoop behind its front wheels, much thinner and longer than the other one; it came forward, like the blade of a penknife, and cut off the fluffy snowy pillow, that had been stopping us from moving, – easily and without any effort, like a shaver removing foam from a chin; and then, picking up the pile of snow which formed after that with the front, wider scoop, pushed it off the road into the field. The rattle from the grader, which looked like a huge insect, with all its blades spread out, woke up everyone sleeping in the cars: Marina ran up to us, her eyes big with fright, and looking first at the grader and then failing to hear our explanations about what it was doing there in the deafening roar, finally gave up and ran back, and then returned with Lenny; Ira came a bit later, when the grader had finished its work and moved away a little; she was holding the boy by the hand, and maybe that was why, when the grader’s driver came out onto the road again, he didn’t have a gun in his hands – it looked like he decided to leave it in the cab.

“I’m done!” he shouted, “You can dig now!” And while Sergey, Dad and Andrey were scraping out the remaining snow from the Land Cruiser’s undertray and in between the wheels, he came up to us and stopped in front of the boys.

“What’s your name?” he asked, and his tone, which I was beginning to get used to, didn’t change a bit even though he was talking to a child – he didn’t speak louder, like many people do who rarely speak to children, he didn’t even smile – just asked the boy a question in the same voice he’d been speaking to us earlier.

The boy stepped back and buried his face in Ira’s coat and whispered into it: “Anton.”

“And where’re you going, Anton?” the man asked the boy, and he answered, even quieter:

“To the lake.”

The man straightened up and looked at us again – the three men, fussing by the Land Cruiser, Lenny, heavily landing on Marina’s shoulder, Mishka, almost frozen stiff, and said:

“I’ll tell you what, Anton. Looks like your lake’s a bit far from here, and it’s quite late, how about you spend the night in the warm,” and continued, addressing Ira:

“Follow me on this road when you finish – it’s not far, about four kilometres, there’s no need to go driving on a road like this at night – you’ll have a rest, your kids’ll get warm, and then you can carry on tomorrow,” and without waiting for our reply, as if this was decided, started walking back to his huge tractor.

Half an hour later the job was done – the freed Land Cruiser’s studded tyres clung to the ice which the cleared snow had revealed, and the car finally climbed out of its frozen trap and rolled towards the grader, and the others, very slowly and cautiously, followed it. Straight after that the grader moved off, unhurriedly clearing the snow in front of us – it wasn’t as deep as where we had stuck, but deep enough to complicate and even block our way; every now and then the man would open the door and signal for us to wait while he ironed out the crumbly white surface of the road.

It was half past six when we finally reached the village – we were exhausted, cold and so desperate for some rest that nobody raised objections to the invitation from this large, strange man, who had initially caused us some alarm and put us on our guard, to spend the night in his house. The rest of the village was a few hundred metres away – it was tiny, only eight or ten logged houses facing us, with their dark three-window frontages and thick caps of snow on their roofs, like on Christmas cards; only our host’s massive log-house stood alone, right by the road. When we parked our cars (we had to go off the road and go round this tall house with its strange, asymmetrical roof, one slope of which was twice as long as the other and resembled a ski slope– it almost reached the ground) it became clear to us why this house was separate from the others: there was a clearing behind it, and by the awning where he probably kept his grader, there was a huge, tightly wrapped fuel tank, resting on thick metal legs.

“Is this diesel?” Sergey asked with fake indifference, nodding towards the cistern, and the man answered, “It is.” He shook snow off his boots and walked into the house.

It was difficult to believe that the man lived alone in this house – it looked quite big from the outside but when we followed him indoors, we saw a large unlit two-level gallery, leading far to the right and obviously continuing further round the corner; somewhere in the depths of the gallery there was a large animal – a cow or a pig – which started moving and making a noise when it heard us come in. This strange lobby was so huge that all of us – eleven people and the host – could easily fit in; only when the front door was finally closed did he open another one, which led inside the house.

Our host took off his coat and hat and invited us with a gesture to do the same – and I had a chance to look at him properly. He was completely bald, with thick, bushy eye-brows and white beard, but it was impossible to tell his age – he could be sixty or seventy-five. He was unusually large – bigger than any of our men – and kept his back very straight; I wouldn’t have been surprised if at that moment a young woman had appeared from within this enormous, odd house and introduced herself as his wife. But the only creature to greet us was an old, shaggy dog, lying on the floor by the stove; when we came in it turned its head and looked at us with teary, cloudy eyes, but didn’t get up, just wagged its tail feebly. He bent down and patted it on the back, and then said, as if apologising:

“She’s old, her bones get cold, bless her; I keep the others outside, but this one I had to take in, I feel sorry for her. Bring your dog in, too, he’ll be safer here. The other dogs are locked up, but I’ll have to let them out in the morning – they’ll rip him to shreds if he stays out.”

It occurred to me that while we were driving to the house, while we were parking and taking out the stuff we needed for the night, I didn’t see anything where the dogs could be kept; there was nothing outside apart from the cistern and the awning for the grader – there wasn’t a stack of wood, or a well, or even a shed. The mystery was solved after Marina, very shyly, asked our host to show her where the toilet was – following the man, cautiously walking down the dark gallery we understood that the toilet, the stacks of wood, and even the well – everything that would normally be outside, in the yard, was under the roof of this house; in fact, most of the house was the yard, hidden behind the thick, log walls. Giving strict orders not to light matches – ‘I’ve got hay upstairs, I’ll leave the door open so you could get light, and you’ll find the way back yourself’ – he left, leaving us to ourselves, and while Marina was desperately wrestling with her snow white ski suit in the dark, and the rest of the women had to wait their turn, I turned to Ira and whispered, barely audibly, what occupied everyone’s – I was confident in it – head:

“Did you see the fuel tank? If it’s even half full…” And she silently nodded and pressed her finger to her lips.

In spite of the large space indoors there were only two tiny rooms in the house, built around the stove, and we would never have been able to fit into them if we hadn’t had our sleeping bags. Without asking any questions, the man sorted out all potential issues and arguments, ordering ‘men to sleep in the attic, and women and kids downstairs, on the stove’; and while the men walked up one by one, each one creaking with the steps of the almost vertical staircase, which was more like a stepladder, we found a proper spacious area on top of the stove for all of us, which was probably where the man himself slept. While we struggled to settle ourselves on the stove – because there was still not enough room for four women and two children – the stairs to the loft started creaking again: somebody was coming down, and the dog, curled up on the floor, suddenly jumped to his feet and growled, so I had to put my hand on his head.

“Where is he?” I heard Dad’s voice from the other room; he was talking quietly, almost whispering.

“He probably went to get some wood,” Sergey answered, “he was here a second ago.”

“Just don’t start talking about it too early,” Dad began, but the front door banged, and the familiar rolling voice, which seemed unable to ever speak quietly, asked:

“Why aren’t you in bed?”

“Well, it seems a bit uncivil of us,” Dad uttered, and something clanked on the table, “you helped us come out of the hole, you brought us to your house, we should properly meet, I think.”

“Why not,” he agreed, “but what do we need vodka for? It’s morning, I don’t drink in the mornings.”

“That’s not vodka, that’s spirit,” Dad said, offended. “Let’s have at least a small one, as a greeting, and we’ll go up – we won’t stay long at your place, so we do really need to get some sleep.”

“Well, let’s – if it’s just a small one,” answered the man.

In spite of being dog-tired, I couldn’t sleep, so I just lay with my eyes open listening to the conversation in the other room through the door which wasn’t properly shut; maybe I couldn’t sleep because the place I got on the stove was the least comfortable – right on the edge, where the mattress couldn’t reach, but mostly because I tried to guess what exactly Dad and Sergey, who had come down from the loft with a bottle of spirit, had on their minds. Instead of getting some rest after the day’s extremely tough journey, did they want to make this big strong man drunk and steal the fuel which we so desperately needed, or would they try to coax him into giving it to us? From the moment we saw the fuel tank we hadn’t managed to talk about it, because the man was always near – perhaps only after they were left on their own in the loft, they were able to make a decision. I was desperately trying to understand what exactly they were going to do.

If our host had a reason to drive out in the middle of the night in his grader, after noticing the light from our cars on the deserted road, and then, without asking any questions, inviting eleven completely strange people to his house for the night, there could be only one reason – curiosity. As he had said earlier all links with outer world, which hadn’t been great in that area even before the epidemic, had completely stopped: after the mobile signal died in the middle of November, followed by television, then radio, the only way he could find out the news was through passers-by; only during the last week and a half not a single car had gone past so the news had disappeared altogether. Mikhalych (which was what he called himself, insisting that his full name and patronymic were too long) listened to the story of our journey with a lot of attention – but he didn’t believe that Moscow was dead, saying ‘they’re just hiding, waiting for the medicine – as soon as the medicine comes they’ll creep out’; it turned out that he, as well as everyone else he had talked to, was convinced that some kind of order did exist – somewhere faraway, in the capital, there must still be a safe area of normal life. He was clinging to this idea so fiercely, as if the thought that everyone else had been left to die of an unknown disease without any doctors, any food supply, any help wasn’t as scary as the realisation that there was nobody left to provide this help. For this reason, he’d decided not to believe that we were from Moscow – despite our Moscow number plates – or anything else that Dad and Sergey were telling him, or at least that that we were an odd kind of Muscovite – who for some unknown reason had been forbidden permission to wait out the disease in a safe place.

He readily believed the fall of Vologda and Cherepovets, as if he was prepared for this kind of ending for them and expected it, but the news that people had abandoned Kirillov and Vytegra seemed to please him: “So they left,” he said with a satisfied look, “they must have finally worked out there was nothing to do in the city,” as if continuing a dispute which had started a long time ago. After Sergey told him about the ‘cleansed’ villages, he fell silent for a long time but didn’t seem surprised; after a long period of silence, broken only by the sound of liquid poured over the glasses, he said ‘well, let them try and come here, we’ll meet them,’ and then told us how two weeks earlier two men had come on foot to the village – either monks or priests – ‘there’s a monastery on the cape, in between the lakes, there’s no path at all, just taiga and marshes, and in the summer you can only go through there in a boat, but it’s quite far, about fifteen kilometres along the river and over the lake, and in the winter you can only walk on ice when it becomes hard enough’ – and offered the villagers shelter in their invincible monastery, which was cut off from the infested, dying cities by kilometres of marshy woods and water and therefore, safe. They gave everyone who wanted to accept their invitation a week by the end of which – and they were very clear about it – they would shut down the monastery and wouldn’t let anyone in, in order not to risk the lives of its inhabitants.“We don’t need no monastery,” said the man, “we live in a quiet place, we never had any newcomers before, let alone now, we’ve lived here for many years, we’ve got a smallholding and livestock, we don’t need anything; it’s a bit hard without electricity, but we’ve managed, we had lived like this before. We’ll go hunting, fishing, we can sit it out, we’ll be fine. Two families left for the monastery – because they’ve got little ones – and three or four families from Oktiabrskoye village, but the others all stayed. When you mentioned the lake, I thought you meant you were going to the monastery, but they’ve probably closed it, like they said they would, nobody else’s come from there again.”

To my surprise, Sergey decided to tell him where we were going – maybe because this man was the first person on our journey who didn’t need anything from us, and who, on the contrary, was helpful to us; or maybe he was counting on getting his advice on our forthcoming journey of four hundred kilometres – the most unpopulated but the hardest, too. He was right, because when he told him what route we were going to take, the old man said: “We had somebody visit us from Nigizhma – Nigizhma’s all alive, so be careful, they’re not expecting anyone; if they give you aggro, tell them you’re from me, just say you’re my family, then they’ll let you through.” But as for the rest of the journey after Nigizhma, the man wasn’t optimistic at all. “It’s quiet here, because there’s no road,” he said glumly, “If I don’t clear the road, there’s no way you can pass, but the further you go, the more people, the more difficult your journey will be. There are some infected in Poudozh, and before that you’d have to go through Medvezhiegorsk – surely there are infected ones there too, and I heard there are gunshots too, some bad people decided to take a chance. So the infection, gunshots, – I don’t know, it’s a bad road, very bad – but you don’t have a choice, you can’t go back, so the sooner you go, the better, just don’t stop anywhere.”

If Dad and Sergey planned to make him drunk, their plan failed – the alcohol only made him more talkative, whereas they – without sleep or food for the whole day – were slurring their words. Nothing had been said about the fuel tank when the man, chuckling, started ushering them upstairs, saying:

“I’ll let the dogs out, so if you need the bog, be careful when you come down, and better not come down without me at all. I won’t sleep any more, call me if you need anything.” While Dad and Sergey were climbing the flimsy ladder to the loft, swearing as they went, I felt relieved for the first time since the start of their conversation: all the time these three men had been drinking spirit and talking peacefully and amicably, I had felt anxious, as if preparing myself to flee this house that had welcomed us. It was still completely dark outside, and there was only a dim light visible under the door from the kerosene lamp in the next room. When unsteady walking finally stopped upstairs, and the man left the house with a creak of the door and it became completely silent, I lay on my back for some more, on the hard bit of the mattress, sleepless – puzzled by the fact that I was bitterly disappointed that whatever I was preparing myself for hadn’t happened. He did nothing bad to you, I thought, nothing at all, just saved you from death – what happened to you, what’s going on with you, damn it, if you can’t sleep because you can’t get rid of these unwanted, nasty thoughts? The boy, who was squeezed between Ira and me, stirred and sighed in his sleep; I turned a bit to get more comfortable, and saw that she was awake, too, and was staring tensely into the darkness, like me.