To the Lake

20 MOB RULE

Half an hour later the Vitara was unloaded. The bags, which, it seemed, had filled it to the top, were distributed between other cars: the main bulk was moved into the trailer, and the rest squeezed under the cellophane, on to the Pajero’s roof. In order to fit everything, we had to sacrifice a large number of the petrol cans, to Dad’s great displeasure. He had been trying to fit them in somehow, mainly by putting them under our feet, but then gave up – there was simply no room left. The thought of leaving behind something useful which was irreplaceable in the current circumstances, was unbearable to him.

He was grumpily walking in between the cars, checking for more space, and pestering Sergey: “Maybe you can fit in some tyres? Just some tyres?”

“We can’t,” Sergey answered, “We need to go, Dad.”

“Wait, let me at least take the battery from the Vitara,” Dad replied, irritated. “Anya, how do you open your bonnet?”

I was hoping to avoid this – I just wanted to wait while they were taking everything possible from my car and then we’d get into the three cars and go, that I wouldn’t have to get inside the Vitara anymore – even just to open the bonnet. Of course it was silly of me to feel upset because of the car after everything we’d had to abandon, everything we’d lost – but it was my car. It was truly mine. I started driving late, most of my friends had changed cars more than once by then; when they were young they enthusiastically drove old Ladas that their parents had given them, or bought second hand, then they swapped them for more respectable and dignified brands, and I was still using the underground, hiding from people’s eyes behind a book, or isolating myself with earphones from chatty rogue drivers at the back of their battered old cabs. When I finally decided that I needed a car, it happened in an instant: as soon as the door softly closed behind me, leaving all the extraneous sounds and smells outside, I had put my hands on the cool surface of the steering wheel, breathed in the smell of the new plastic and regretted straight away that I had waited for such a long time and hadn’t done it earlier, because this was my territory, just mine, and nobody had any right to bother me while I was there. Sergey often said that I needed to replace it, that I’d had it for five years – ‘It’ll start falling to bits soon, let’s buy you something new’ – but it was really important for me to keep the car that I had bought myself, that car.

Dad was already expertly fussing under the bonnet, and I kept sitting on the driver’s seat trying not to hear the voices from outside. Grabbing hold of the door handle, instead of coming out I involuntarily closed the door; the voices became muffled but I could hear the metal tinkering from inside the car. Finally, the bonnet was closed and Dad proudly took away the battery he had just uprooted, and at the same moment Sergey – I didn’t even notice him come up – knocked on my window:

“Let’s go Anya. Come out.”

I jumped. With him standing outside and looking at me I felt embarrassed to be stroking the steering wheel and talking some sentimental nonsense, so I lifted the armrest between the front seats and started taking out CD cases – slowly, one by one, without paying any attention to his impatient, stubborn knocking, and left only after I had collected them all, even the empty one, from Nina Simone, which we had listened to ages ago, on the day we left the house.

“My CDs,” I said to Sergey, giving him hands full of cases, “you didn’t even collect my CDs.”

“Anya, that’s enough. This is only a car. Just a car,” he said in a suddenly irritated voice, quietly, and before I could reply to him – no, it’s not only a car – he had already turned to the others, raised his arms – holding a tin of food in one hand and a tin opener in the other – and tapped several times on the tin:

“Dear passengers,” he said happily and loudly, and everyone turned their heads to him, “Please take your seats and fasten your seatbelts. In a few minutes you’ll be offered a light dinner!” And then they all laughed, even Marina, even the boy, who most certainly hadn’t understood the joke but was glad to see the adults laughing at last.

Then we got in to the cars – Ira and the boy were in the hatchback, Mishka came back to our back seat, and Sergey went round the cars, one by one, poking his head into the windows:

“Meat or fish? What about you? Meat or fish? There you go…”

“But the tin isn’t open!” somebody’s voice said, I think it was Natasha’s.

“If you need a tin opener, please speak to one of the crew!” Sergey replied.

This was fun, really fun, which we all really needed – nobody had joked for ages, but somehow I couldn’t share their joy. Not now, I thought, some other time. Sergey was coming to me with the rest of the tins in his hands:

“Mishka, do you want meat or… meat? I’ve run out of fish, and I’m not going to get the other box right now.”

“Meat, probably,” said Mishka, smiling, and reached over to take the tin.

“There you are,” Sergey told him, walking around the Pajero, “I’ll get inside the car and open it for you,” and gave me the last two tins.

“Madam,” he said, and his voice sounded – or did it only seem like this – a little bit colder. “Meat, or meat?”

I could have played up to him – of course I could, it would be easy, just to lift my head, smile and say ‘I don’t even know… maybe meat? Although, I’ll probably have meat instead.’ Only I couldn’t lift my head and couldn’t smile either.

“I don’t care,” I said in a bland voice, without looking at him. My hands were still full of CDs, I hadn’t had time to find a place for them, and then he put the tin on the dashboard in front of me and shut the door.

It wasn’t much pleasure to eat the cold, threadlike meat with bendy, plastic forks, but we were hungry – terribly hungry, so we finished the food in an instant.

“Would be nice if we could heat it up,” Mishka said sadly, with his mouth full, unsuccessfully picking the cool fat on the bottom of the tin, “there’s so much left!”

“Seize the moment, Mishka,” Sergey answered, “a tin each is a luxury, but it looks like this is our last meal before the lake, and we don’t have time to start a fire and cook pasta. Next time we’ll have a maximum of two portions from a tin like this.”

“Shall we give him some, Mum?” Mishka asked and nodded towards the dog, who was trying very hard to pretend that our tinned meat didn’t interest him in the slightest.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

We let the dog out and fed him the rest of the whitish jellied fat in our tins, scraping it out onto the snow with Sergey’s knife; while he was eating – greedily, without chewing, swallowing whole pieces – the door of the hatchback opened and Ira and the boy came out onto the side of the road. Walking carefully, the boy was approaching us with small steps – he was holding a flat tin of tinned salmon.

“Be careful!” Ira said, “If you spill it, it’ll go down your snowsuit.” The boy stopped, looked at the tin and spilled a few drops straight away, and then quickly glancing back carried on walking. He came up to within two steps from the dog, carefully placed the tin on the snow and remained crouched near it.

“He didn’t want to go until he’d fed the dog,” Ira, laughing, said to Sergey as she walking over to us. “Here, I’ve brought some more.”

Standing in a circle we silently watched the dog licking out the fish brine from the tins. Sergey bent down and stroked the boy’s head.

We drove the remaining fifteen kilometres really fast – the ambulance, which had driven there shortly before us, left a shallow but essential track, which made our movement easier. The Land Cruiser was heading our column as before, but we decided to put the hatchback with the overloaded, dangerously swaying trailer in between two cars – so we were driving behind everyone. Don’t look back, I told myself. We let the other two cars pull out first, then drove off the side and joined the train at the end; don’t look, don’t turn around, you know very well what it looks like – gutted, abandoned – but I looked anyway, and looked while there was enough light from our headlights. First the Vitara turned into a barely visible dark spot, and then, very quickly, vanished out of site completely. Twenty minutes later we were entering Poudozh.

They were very much alike, these little northern towns. Their entire population would fit easily into a few Moscow tower-blocks – a handful of streets, occasional stone buildings, tall trees with little houses nestling between them, mismatching fences, and funny little signs of all shapes and colours above the shop fronts.

Nothing bad could happen to anyone in a place like this, I thought, looking out of the window as we passed droopy, useless benign-looking street lamps alternating with snow-covered trees which looked for all the world as if they were coated in sugar. I guess no driver would speed on these streets, so one can let the children play outside the gates without any fear. Everyone knows each other – if not by name, then by face – and on the outskirts of these towns, overgrown with weeds as tall as a man in the summer, you might easily see a lonely cow or a gaggle of fat geese crossing the road. Military trucks with red crosses, quarantine checkpoints and protective masks on people’s faces would look out of place here. We went past several towns like this: they were empty but hadn’t been burnt or plundered, it was as if they had fallen asleep for a while, until the people came back. This town we were now driving through was still inhabited – we realised as soon as we turned around the first corner.

“Look, there’s light over there!” Mishka exclaimed, excitedly rising on his seat, and Sergey asked into the radio:

“Dad, what is it? Can you see anything?”

“I don’t know,” Dad replied. “I can’t see clearly yet. But don’t even think about stopping. Whatever it is, we go past it, you all understand?”

“But this must be the hospital, the one they were talking about,” Andrey said, unsure. “Looks like there are people outside…”

The two-storey building, whose façade with dark windows and the front door under the triangular metal canopy were facing the street, really did look like a hospital. There was no fence, no railings which would separate it from the road – just a small space cleared of snow, where several cars were parked with headlights on – this was the source of faint, diffused light that we had seen earlier. There weren’t a lot of people, maybe fifteen or twenty, they stood in a small, tight group, very close to each other; I recognised the familiar ambulance van in one of the car parks. So it turns out he was right, I thought, and they really were waiting for him, it wasn’t in vain he wasn’t hurrying to get there. They had been waiting in that hospital for three whole weeks, counting the patients, first putting them in wards, then in corridors, and then, very quickly, when people started dying, giving their places to new patients, but they continued waiting anyway. Even if the medicine which they had sent him for was pointless, he came back – because he had promised them he would. They don’t have electricity – like everywhere else around here, and no telephone lines either – so to gather all these people in front of the building somebody probably had to keep watch by the window for a long time – day after day, night after night, in order not to miss that moment when the ambulance would turn up; and when it finally appeared, the first person to notice it had to give a signal to the others, and they all rushed here to get their dose of hope.

We were approaching the lit up space in front of the hospital, and I started looking for the doctor’s short stocky figure and couldn’t find it – the people in front of the hospital were standing too close to each other. Suddenly the small crowd shuddered and became even tighter as if they had all decided to have a group hug for some reason, and then they, as if ashamed of their inexplicable urge, moved away from each other again; several of them took a few steps back and then froze on the spot, looking at an oblong object on the snow in front of them, and the others, pushing each other, rushed to the ambulance van, which had its doors open. Sergey pressed the window button – the cloudy, slightly frozen window lowered and we clearly saw Nikolai, the ambulance’s grumpy driver, lying on the snow on his front, with his thin, stubbled face turned to the road – his eyes were open, and his face had the same displeased expression as he had had half an hour earlier when he was telling us off on the woodland road, and one of Dad’s cigarettes was still tucked behind his ear. There were no sounds – in spite of the lowered window – there was no sound from the street, not a single cry, there was a total, absolute, concentrated silence, only disturbed by the fussing and puffing of those pushing each other by the ambulance.

We continued rolling forwards unable to take our eyes off the events on the small lit-up clearing in front of the hospital, when suddenly we heard a desperate cry: “This isn’t a vaccine, I’m telling you, it’s not going to help you, you don’t know how to take it, just wait, give me a chance to…” and straight after this everyone started shouting together – both the people who were standing by Nikolai’s body and the other group, which was much bigger. The air exploded with noise.

Suddenly the ambulance started to rock so violently that it risked turning over and falling on its side; two people jumped out, pushing the others – to start with it seemed that they were together, but running off a short distance they started trying to rip a rectangular bag from each other’s hands, until it burst, spitting out several hundred lightweight cardboard boxes, spilling on the snow – and as if not noticing this, the men continued to fight and pull the handles of the bag towards themselves; it was almost empty, and the others were running towards them, falling on their knees and trying to scoop up the little boxes with both hands together with the snow and hurriedly shoving them into their pockets. At that moment another man with a bag came out of the ambulance – he was holding it high above his head; he tried to desperately break from the crowd but it looked as if somebody pushed him or hit him from behind, because the bag suddenly shook, and another dozen arms tried to get to it straight away. The man fell to the ground and disappeared in the medley of arms and legs. “Wait! Please, wait!” the same voice shouted, breaking, barely audible, and then we saw him – he crawled from inside the crowd – he had a white muslin rectangle on his face, but I recognised his round head with short hair and his shapeless jacket. He was crawling towards the road, too afraid to get to his feet in case the fighting people would notice him. When he got to the road he finally dared to stand up – slowly and with difficulty, because of a bulky plastic case he was holding– and at the same moment one of the fighting people noticed him and shouted: “Hey! Stop! Stop!”

The Land Cruiser in front of us revved deafeningly and took off. “Go, now!” the radio shouted in Dad’s voice. “They’ll see us!” And the trailer, accelerating fast, jumped along the bumpy, dark road. Sergey also pushed the pedal and turned his head again to look at what was going on about twenty metres behind us. Suddenly he hit the brakes, changed gear and started reversing, back towards the lit-up space; after a short distance the Pajero stopped, Sergey turned back and said: “Mishka, give me the gun. It’s under your feet. Quick!” There was no Land Cruiser or hatchback in sight, we could only hear Dad’s distressed cries:

“Sergey! You can’t help him! What are you doing, damn you!”, and while Mishka was frantically pulling the gun out from under the seats, Sergey was already outside, on the road. Opening the passenger door, he reached out:

“Come on!”

Grabbing the gun and breaking it in the middle with one hand he took out two bright red plastic tubes with metal tops from his pocket, pushed them into the barrel, clicked the gun into place, then stood in the middle of the road with his feet wide apart and shouted as loud as he could: “Hey! Doctor! Here!”

Hearing this the doctor turned his face, still covered in a mask, towards us – but instead of running to us, he stopped and started peering into the darkness trying to see us; he didn’t notice that the person who had shouted ‘stop’ to him, had separated from the crowd and was running towards him, while he stood frozen by the side of the road, stunned and unsure. There was only one man as the others were busy with the bags they’d just looted from the van, and it didn’t look as if the man was going to ask for their help: shouting only once he moved silently, gripping something long and heavy, with a metal shaft which I could see gleaming in the headlights of the cars parked by the hospital.

“Run, doctor!” Sergey shouted, raising the gun to his shoulder, and the doctor jumped, looked behind him, saw the man approaching him and finally ran towards us, tripping over and floundering about with his plastic case; and the man with an iron rod – perhaps the same man who had hit Nikolai several minutes earlier – Nikolai was still lying on the snow – suddenly threw the rod like a spear into his wide, unprotected back. The doctor fell.

“Get up!” Sergey shouted. The dog barked crazily on the back seat and I watched the doctor awkwardly trying to stand up, pressing the silly plastic case to him with one hand, and I saw the man who had thrown the iron rod take two jump strides, reach the rod which had rolled away, and pick it up again; he thought that there was vaccine in the suitcase, I realised, so I shouted: “The case! Leave the case!”, and then the doctor, who was already on his knees, seemed to hear me and forcibly pushed it away from himself as far as he could, and the case, rattling about with its lid open, started sliding on the firm snow; but the man with the rod just pushed it away, uninterested. Instead he lifted the rod above his head, aiming a threatening blow; he’s going to strike, I thought, and then Sergey fired the gun.

I jumped and shut my eyes – but only for a fraction of a second, and when I opened them again, it turned out that my ears were blocked, because all the sounds had disappeared – the dog’s barking, the shouting and everything else; everything that happened afterwards resembled a silent film: I saw the man with the rod lying flat on the ground, and the doctor, empty-handed, crawling towards us and then standing up and running; from the other direction I saw the Land Cruiser approaching us, swerving, reversing; I saw the crowd, that hadn’t paid any attention to us before, halt for a second and then shake itself and disperse into separate figures and start moving towards us, as if the single shot had not frightened them, but rather attracted them to us; I saw Sergey turn to Mishka and shout something inaudible, and Mishka open the back door and move to the opposite end of the seat, pressing the confused, barking dog against the door, to make space for the doctor, and the doctor, with facemask askew, dive into the car, and Sergey throw the gun in and jump into the driver’s seat.

I got my hearing back later: we revved up and took off, spraying whirling clouds of snow dust from under our wheels into the faces of the people chasing us on the snowy road. We almost crashed into the Land Cruiser, dodging it at the last second – delaying for a moment it ended up behind us – and we dashed away at the highest speed possible, and only then did I hear the barking, the indistinct shouting of our pursuers, and Andrey’s voice from the speakers desperately asking: “Guys! Are you ok? What’s going on, guys?” We caught up with the hatchback only at the exit from the city – it was waiting with its engine running right in the middle of the road; as soon as we turned up from behind the turning, it pulled out, but we had to slow down quite a lot anyway – the heavy trailer, full to the brim, didn’t let the hatchback turn around or reverse and was stopping it from going faster. Making sure we were in sight, Andrey finally stopped talking and Dad’s angry voice burst onto the airwaves at the same second:

“What the hell?!” he was shouting, “What the hell, fuck you! Do you understand how it could end, you frigging boy-scout?”

Sergey didn’t answer.

“…what if they were armed? – eh? If they had any kind of fire arms! Just one shot! Only one!” Dad was shouting. “Who needs your shitty heroism? You’ve got your wife in the car with you! A child! A hundred litres of diesel in the boot!”

Sergey was silent. He didn’t even turn his head. He behaved as if he hadn’t heard a word, as if he was alone in the car; holding on to the steering wheel with both hands, he kept looking ahead, his face dimly lit by the the trailer’s rear lights, with a look of absence and concentration at the same time, as if he had forgotten something very important and was trying hard to remember what it was. Then he reached over and turned the sound on the radio down to its minimum, cutting Dad’s heated speech short and turning it into a barely audible murmuring which stopped several minutes later; there was silence in the car and I could hear the overloaded hatchback’s shock absorbers squeak, and a piece of the frozen cellophane on the roof knock against the roof panel and the dog panting heavily on the back seat.

“No, I don’t feel anything,” he said finally and shook his head. “I was wondering when this would happen. From the very start I was thinking that I’d have to do it sooner or later. You see, Anya? That sooner or later I’d have to kill somebody. Because I’ve killed him, haven’t I?” He asked a question but didn’t even look at me, as if he was talking to himself, and that’s why I didn’t answer him – nobody did.

“I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to,” he said. “Although, no, that’s not right. I knew, that I could, if I had to, but I always thought that afterwards… you know what they say in films – ‘you’ll always remember the person you killed first, you will never be the same man again…’ you know, don’t you?” And although he still wasn’t looking at me, I nodded, just lowered my chin slightly and then lifted it up again.

“Only for some reason I don’t feel anything,” he said, as if he was suffering from it and surprised at the same time, “I don’t feel anything at all. As if I’ve just been to a shooting club for practice. I shot – and he fell. That’s it. Then they ran and we drove, and I was thinking – ok, it’s going to come, it’ll catch up with me, and then, I don’t know, I’ll probably have to stop the car, I might be sick, I don’t know what people do in this kind of situation? My heart isn’t beating faster than normal, damn it. What’s wrong with me, Anya? What kind of person am I?” And then he finally looked at me and I looked at him. And kept looking at him for some time. Then I said – with as much firmness in my voice as possible:

“You’re a good person. Can you hear me? You’re good. It’s just that everything suddenly turned into a shooting match. This whole journey, this whole planet is now like one huge frigging shooting match.”