To the Lake

17 CITY GIRLS

We woke up when it was getting dark, when the early northern twilights settled upon the small, hushed village; the children were the first to start stirring, and we were compelled to get up; when I opened my eyes my first thought was that I had never fallen asleep, and only when I looked at my watch did I realise that we had slept the whole day and that it was evening again which meant that we had lost another day, another whole day, while the road ahead we were going to drive on was becoming more difficult and more dangerous. Sleepy and exhausted after spending many hours in a small space, on a hard uncomfortable bed, we went to check what was going on in the room next to us – there was nobody there apart from the old dog, who was still sleeping by the stove. The men were probably still asleep, and the only evidence of the night conversation that had happened there was the almost finished bottle of spirit – the glasses had been put away. None of us wanted to leave the room on our own, so we opened the door wide in order to light up the dim gallery and together, like frightened flock of birds shuffled to the toilet and back, and then settled ourselves on a long bench by the simple wooden table with no table cloth; we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. There was a full kettle with chipped enamel – but we thought it’d be impolite to start rummaging for tea bags, and we were too afraid to go out because we remembered about the dogs that our host was going to let out.

“I would trade my soul for a hot shower right now,” Natasha said, “I feel so dirty after this smelly mattress, like I was sleeping on the floor. He probably never cleans here.”

We are still very much city girls, I thought with sadness, I wonder how long it will take us to stop wanting to have a hot shower and a clean toilet, or indeed wanting a toilet at all. “Let’s wake them up,” suggested Marina, unsure. “What time is it? We need to go. Only we should really eat something first, where’s that man gone?”

Ira and I rose simultaneously – me, to go upstairs and wake the men, and she, to go and look for our host who had disappeared somewhere in the depths of the house. But as soon as I came up to the ladder and she was about to take hold of the door handle, there was a deafening chorus of dog’s barking. Our dog immediately bristled, his fur stood on end, he tilted his head and started growling. We heard the outside front door open, somebody stomping inside shaking the snow off, and then – Ira quickly removed her hand from the handle and stepped back – the second door opened and two men barged into the house, both with beards framing their faces, red from the frost; the smell of the fresh frosty air rushed in to the house with them, mixed with a strong whiff of alcohol. They stood silent for a few moments, waiting in the door, looking at us in an unwelcoming way – the dog was growling louder at that point, dangerously baring his large yellowish teeth and that was why, perhaps, none of them made another step forward, even though they didn’t even look at him.

“Well, it’s just a load of women here,” said one of them, the one who was shorter, with small beady eyes; the other, who was taller and older, shook his head:

“Can’t be right. There’re four cars outside, you saw. We’ll ask Mikhalych then. Where’s Mikhalych?” he asked and looked up at us – his eyes were cloudy and expressionless, and I tried to remember if anyone had ever looked at me like this – with such empty indifference – and couldn’t; I just shrugged my shoulders without saying a word, not because I didn’t want to answer, but because I couldn’t make myself speak. I heard stirring in the loft – they’ve woken up, I thought, they’re going to come down, it’d be good if they brought the guns with them, I don’t think they left them in the car, not after what had happened to Lenny – but our host’s mighty figure appeared in the doorway and both unwelcome guests who frightened us in the beginning, suddenly shrank and looked insignificant and pitiful. The owner, standing behind the two men, instantly pushed them back out into the lobby with one quick movement of his shoulder, and closed the door – moment later we heard his thunderous voice:

“What do you want here?”

At this moment the loft hatch opened and Dad hurried downstairs – his face crumpled from sleep, but he had a rifle on his shoulder, which was what I had hoped for; Sergey followed him, also armed. They quickly glanced at us, and, satisfied that we were unhurt, went over to the door, listening close to what was happening behind it. Andrey, Mishka and – finally, Lenny who was finding going down the steps not so easy – hurried down from the loft. I could hear voices from behind the door – I could only hear separate words, but I thought our host was talking to more people than when he had started talking; somebody suddenly said – and we heard it very clearly:

“So you cleared the road again, have you? But we agreed…” And they started talking all together, their words fusing into one continuous blur, we could only hear the booming voice of the owner, whose every word could be heard distinctly above the common rumpus, like a professional actor: “women with kids”, he said first and then again – ‘I told you, they’re healthy!’, but the voices, which were now more than two, continued to sound with increased loudness, until the old man roared, swearing, we couldn’t quite understand what exactly he shouted; and then the noise suddenly stopped, and turned into a quiet grumbling, and the front door slammed shut – the dogs started barking again but immediately hushed, as if the people they saw were familiar to them.

“I’ll tell you what,” said the host, coming back to us, his face glum, “the road’s bad and I wanted to offer you another night here, but it looks like you’ll have to go right now.”

We looked at him, silent, and then he glanced at us and added, wincing in frustration: “They’re not going to touch you now, but I can’t hold them back for long. They’re not bad people; well, they’re just normal, simple folk, but you’ve got quite a lot of stuff with you. They’re not starved – well, they won’t be, we’ve got a lake and have a lot stocked up – but your other stuff, cars, guns,” he was talking as if he was cross with us for disrupting his calm and quiet world and upsetting some fine balance which he had struggled to achieve, and it would be really difficult to restore it again, even if we were to leave straight away: “In short, get ready and leave right now, God bless you.”

Despite our hunger – we hadn’t eaten for over a day – and knowing that even a half-hour delay would give us the chance to feed the children at least, something in his voice made us hurriedly gather our possessions without contradicting him; disappearing for a short time – he went out to lock up the dogs who would still bark nervously in the outside darkness every now and then – he came back to help us move our stuff into the cars, which had become cold during the short winter day. All four engines were running, but without talking to each other, none of us turned our headlights on – the hatchback’s parking lights were glowing dimly, which was the only thing to provide us with any light while we, trying to be quiet and not to shut the doors with too much noise, put the sleeping bags and other stuff back into the car. The village didn’t seem so sleepy and deserted as it had done when we first arrived – there was still no people on the streets, but the windows looked a lot more alert, as if people were watching us from behind the curtains, and we felt particularly uncomfortable at this undetectable watching, which may have existed only in our imaginations. The children sat in the cars, Lenny settled on the back seat of the Land Cruiser, and even the dog, who had run off for a while to relieve himself and came back straight away, took his usual place – but we were still delaying our departure because we had one vitally important thing on our minds, which for some reason we couldn’t get to. To win some more time the men started smoking, standing in between the quietly rumbling cars, and the owner kept on saying something about Nigizhma, “the third house down on the right, Ivan Alekseyevich lives there, he’s my friend, go to him, do you hear, do you hear me?” addressing Sergey, only Sergey wasn’t looking at him, he simply couldn’t look him in the eye, and kept turning to Dad, trying to catch his eye, and when their eyes finally met – I held my breath, because I knew it was going to happen – Ira suddenly stepped forward, obstructing the huge man with her figure, and cutting him off, put her small, gloveless hand on the massive, stiff sleeve of his sheepskin, said with intent, clearly:

“You’ve got a cow in there, haven’t you? A cow?” and as soon as he nodded, confused, she carried on: “Can we have a little bit of milk for the kids, they haven’t eaten for over a day, just a little bit of milk? Please?”

Even the man was surprised by this strange request, which seemed to come altogether at the wrong time and in the wrong place, but he didn’t show it – glancing down at her briefly, he nodded and walked back into the house. As soon as he disappeared she waited for a moment or two, as if listening, – the rest of us stood motionless, too surprised to move – and then in two leaps Ira reached the Vitara, and, with the driver’s door open, suddenly reversed, with a lot of revving, blocking the wide, round-topped front door of the house with the car’s bumper – the stiff frozen plastic hit the wooden slats with a dull sound.

“What are you waiting for?!” she said, turning to Sergey and glancing at him angrily. “Why are you waiting? Where are the petrol cans? Or were you going to hijack the grader?” and her call made Sergey jump, dump his unfinished cigarette, and rush to the car – he opened the boot; Andrey followed him, and Dad, jerking the rifle off his shoulder went towards the fuel tank and started digging up something bulky, which was stuck to the end of the tank closest to us.

“Milk for the children?” I asked, still not believing what I had heard, and she answered quietly and tiredly, as if she had spent the whole of her energy on that leap to the car and the sharp manoeuvre, which probably had cost the Vitara its bumper: “Well, it’s better than what they were going to do.”

“He’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” I said, desperate, “as soon as he realises why you’ve sent him off, he must have heard the racket, the whole village must have heard…”

“Anya,” she said slowly and bitterly, her head low, and I thought – this is the first time she’s called me by my name – not ‘baby’, but ‘Anya’, as if we were just friends, as if nothing had happened. “He won’t be back,” she said, “he’ll have realised what we were after,” she said. “Probably yesterday, as soon as we saw the fuel tank – he was just waiting to see what we were going to do – and they kept drinking this damned spirit with him and chatted and did nothing, and now they have no time left to do it properly.”

How can you do it properly, I thought, slowly realising that she was right, we’ve been ‘good people’ – that’s what he called us, ‘good people’; I left Ira and opened the boot, too. It’ll be a long job, I thought, to pour so much diesel into the petrol cans, one by one, in a hurry, in the dark. We’ll never make it, unless he really did realise and won’t come back because he decided to let us leave without too much noise and scaring the kids. There were only two cans in the tightly packed Vitara’s boot – small, ten-litre ones, which Dad had brought with him from Riazan; I grabbed them and ran to the cistern, where the men were already working, and when I almost reached them, Dad suddenly straightened up, aimed the gun in front of him and said quietly: “Stop.”

He was looking over my head and slightly to the right; if was clear he was addressing somebody else, not me – I stopped and slowly turned my head, and saw the old man by the wall of the house; he had no hat on, and his sheepskin was undone, as if he had put it on in a hurry, but he stood calm, and there was no gun in his hands. For some reason the first thought that sprang to my head was ‘his head’s going to get cold, he probably dropped his hat while running around the house, of course, it can’t be right that such a huge house had only one exit, how stupid’, and then I thought, ‘and he came back. He came back – but she said he wouldn’t.’

“We only need about three hundred litres,” Dad said in the same quiet voice, “We won’t take more, we just need to reach the place – you said yourself that the road’s bad, we hardly found any fuel, and further along – if what you said’s true – it’ll be too dangerous to stop at all. Just don’t move – we’ll pour out the fuel – just a bit, you can watch us – and leave, and you’ll never see us again, you’re a good man, and if it weren’t for these circumstances, you know…”

The man was silent.

“Why do you need so much diesel?” said Dad a bit louder, “You’ve got enough here to clear the roads for the whole winter – and who needs them now, your roads? We can’t get to the lake without it, we’ll get as far as Poudozh and get stuck, we desperately need it, you see, we need it like fishes need water!” and then fell silent, defiant, continuing to look at the man from under his eyebrows, and in that silence we could only hear the petrol gun clicking behind his back and the fuel gurgling with heavy, irregular splashes inside the plastic petrol can.

The old man held a pause – as if waiting for Dad to carry on talking, – and then shook his head slowly and said:

“Boy, what a strange lot you are,” he said it without anger, only maybe a touch surprised. “You’re not like normal people, I swear. Why do it this way? I have two and a half thousand litres there. Why didn’t you ask?” And then he just waited, indifferently, as if he had lost interest in us. Sergey and Andrey were fussing about with the cans, and then, when the last one was full, Dad, who had lowered the rifle by then, said again ‘you see, three hundred exactly, I told you we wouldn’t take any more.’ While the men hurriedly shoved the weighty cans between the bags inside the boots of the cars, and even afterwards, when Sergey came back and without looking up at him asked ‘do you need cartridges? For the gun? Or medicines? We’ve got some chest pain relief, do you want some? Take some, you might need it, maybe not for you, but somebody else? No?’ and even when we had finished and looked at him for the last time, standing in exactly the same way, without a hat, by the wall of his huge, empty house – even then he didn’t say another word. Not a single one.

When we drove out onto the road to Nigizhma, it started snowing with small, infrequent snowflakes.