To the Lake

25 CATERPILLAR TRACKS

It was necessary for all of us to have short breaks, not just for the children who were exhausted by the monotonous journey, nor just for the dog, tormented by the cramped space, but for the adults too – just to stay sane, Sergey would come up to me and ask ‘how are you?’, and instead of an answer I’d always ask him the same question – ‘how long now?’, despite the fact that on the inside of my eyelids, with my eyes shut, I could still see the whitish circle of the speedometer with its dim digits, and couldn’t stop transforming them in my head into a countdown – another thirty kilometres closer, another fifty. I sometimes wondered if it would actually be possible for me, after these long hours of silence and worry, to lose count and forget how close we were, only some twenty kilometres, from our destination. The last time we stopped for a break, just after a turning, it was becoming dark and I got out of the car, still counting the kilometres in my head, and for some reason decided to take a few extra steps away from the road where the headlights couldn’t reach. I looked up, froze with horror, and then turned around and ran back.

“Sergey,” I whispered, trying to catch breath and he turned to me, surprised, “Sergey, there are houses, lot of houses… we can’t stay here, let’s go!”

“That can’t be right,” he answered, frowning suspiciously, “there’s nothing here, for miles ahead – nothing.” And started walking, taking the gun off his shoulder, and I followed him as if in a trance, until we both saw it, and then he laughed with relief:

“That’s not a house, you silly, look carefully. There hasn’t been a house here for at least forty years,” and then I looked closer and saw what I hadn’t noticed when I first looked: massive black planks of wood, dry from age and popped out of their grooves, window frames with no glass, broken rafters – there weren’t many of these houses, fewer than I had thought before, maybe four or five, and they were all irrecoverable, unrepairable, fallen apart, like a humungous wooden construction which its creator had become bored with; I reached over and touched the corroded wooden materials – once alive and warm they felt cold and dead to the touch.

“It’s called ‘a zone’,” Sergey said behind my back and I jumped, “a frontier exclusion zone. Don’t be afraid, Anya. There are lots of villages like this around here – when they moved the border in 1947, they evacuated everyone, there weren’t many people even then, but now there’s just nobody left, and it’s been like this for a long time. The houses are strong though, they’ll last another hundred years, but you can’t live in them anymore, look, no roofs, no windows, everything’s fallen to bits.”

It looks like a graveyard – a graveyard of abandoned houses, I thought, as we stood in an embrace among the frozen black wooden skeletons. In another hundred years there’ll be a thick forest here, an impassable taiga, which will have forgotten all about our feeble attempts to cut out a path in it, to leave a trace; in a hundred years, and maybe even earlier, the tall trees will finally join at the tops, and this tiny ghost-village will disappear as if it had never existed. I also thought that the same thing will happen in several decades with our house – our light, beautiful house – the amber coloured logs will crack and turn grey, the bricks in the chimney-breast will break and crumble, and the huge windows will first get overgrown with dust and then burst, exposing the house’s defenceless, fragile insides. If we don’t come back.

“How’s Dad?” I asked quietly, and he answered right above my ear:

“Not so great, Anya. He can barely sit up, he’s green, and we don’t have anything apart from nitro-glycerine. We shouldn’t have made him drive for twenty-four hours, I can’t stop blaming myself. He needs a hospital, the doctor said he needs bed rest, no stresses, but what can we do? when we get to the lake, we’ll put him on a mattress, and that’s the hospital for you.”

“But it’s not too far, is it?” I said, and turned to him, and touched his cold cheek, and the tantalizing crease between his eyebrows, “You’ll see, it’ll be all right. We have a doctor with us, he won’t let him die. The main thing is for us to get to the end of this road as soon as possible.”

“Yes,” he said, carefully freeing himself, “of course. Let’s go, baby, we really do need to go – we’ve got twenty kilometres left, we’re almost there, can you believe it?” And he started walking back, and I stayed for a moment longer to take another look at this place – abandoned, empty; for some reason it wasn’t letting me go – and as soon as Sergey had walked away the feeling of alarm came back to me; there’s nobody here, it’s not possible: we’re sixty kilometres from the nearest house, from the nearest decent road we had turned off a long time ago, so why do I have this feeling that we had missed something, hadn’t noticed something important? I looked down and crouched, to make sure, then hurriedly stood up and caught up with Sergey, grabbing his arm again:

“Are you saying nobody has lived here for many years?”

“Well, yes, I told you… it’s very near the border. Come on, let’s go…”

“Then what’s this doing here?” I asked and, following the direction I was pointing he stopped and bent down, putting his hand into the centre of a wide, clear print on the snow, just where we had stood, which disappeared into darkness, in the same direction where we needed to move.

“Look how huge it is. This isn’t an ordinary vehicle, they don’t leave prints like this. It’s from a caterpillar track, isn’t it?”

Sergey lifted his head.

“No,” he said finally. “It’s not from a caterpillar track. It’s from a lorry – a large, heavy one. And the prints are quite fresh.”

“So what are we going to do?”

We stood above the clear print of the heavy wheels which the heavyweight lorry had left here recently – several million brittle cells, dried by frost, with sharp edges, looking like large honeycomb, painted white. How could we not notice this trace, I thought, we had probably been driving right on top of it for some time.

“Shall we go by a different way?” Andrey suggested, but Sergey brushed his suggestion off:

“There’s no other way. Even one way is a miracle here.”

“So where’s this road going?”

“It’s going to our lake,” said Sergey gloomily, “There’s nowhere else to go.” And before anyone had a chance to get a word in edgeways, he started talking again, looking every one of us in the eye: “Listen. We can’t go back now. There’s nowhere for us to go back to. We don’t have a plan B, and we won’t manage any plan B right now. We haven’t slept or eaten for twenty-four hours, and we’ve very little fuel left.”

We were silent, not knowing what to say, unsure it was worth contradicting him, but Sergey probably interpreted this silence in a different way, because he said almost defiantly:

“Ok. If you’ve got any other ideas, fire away. Where shall we go? Back to Medvezhiegorsk? Well, why the hell not. Or shall we stay here and fix one of these little houses, like this one, for instance? Or that one. Do you know how to build houses, Andrey?”

“Oh come on, Sergey,” Andrey interrupted him gloomily, “what’s got into you?”

“We’ll go slowly,” Sergey said then, “The order’s still the same: I’m in the front, Andrey behind me, Anya at the back. Keep your guns ready, look around. Don’t use the radios. And turn your top lights off, Andrey.”

And so we drove off – or rather, crawled in a single file – there was so much snow on this woodland road that if it hadn’t been for the wide track, left by the lorry, we couldn’t have gone through here at all; I imagined us dumping our cars and walking the remaining twenty kilometres on foot, with some make-shift dragging device behind us carrying our bags, boxes, children; we would never make it in this cold, in the deep snow, even if we had left a large portion of our belongings behind – even if we had left all our belongings behind – because neither Lenny nor Dad could make it – they would have to be carried – and probably none of us, women, either. If it hadn’t been for this stranger’s track, we would have probably frozen to death halfway, right in the middle of the forest. We’ve been lucky again, I thought, looking at the flickering red lights of the trailer – apart from the fact, of course, that the place where we were hoping to hide away from the rest of the world – deserted, unknown to anyone, safe – turns out not to be so uninhabited. For the first time in eleven days my mind had stopped rushing ahead, counting kilometres, because I wasn’t so sure what exactly awaited us at the end of the journey; and as always happens in this kind of situations, time started running very fast, teasing me. After forty minutes we were there – I realised this without even looking at the speedometer – even before the cars in front of me stopped; my heart sank, I pressed on the brakes, and Mishka pulled the gun from behind the seat. I reluctantly reached over to the door handle. I didn’t want to get out, it felt safer to stay inside, in the warm car with the air freshener still emitting a faint smell of oranges, and wait, and make Mishka wait, too; but Marina, who sat at the back, moaned ‘Anya, please don’t go, don’t go, let them…’ and I pushed the door and got out, and walked towards the Land Cruiser, Mishka following me.

The truck was blocking the road – it was wide, almost square, looking very stable on the snow with its massive black wheels; three small rectangular windows were staring out at us like angry eyes from the tall muddy-green metal cabin. Coming closer – Mishka ran ahead of me as soon as we got out of the car and was standing near Sergey – I saw what the others had already found out – the truck was empty.

“Is this it? The lake?” I asked, whispering.

“It must be,” Sergey said quietly, “it should be behind those trees, but I’m not entirely sure, it’s too dark, can’t see a damn thing, and then the last time I came here was four years ago.”

“Is this a military truck?” asked Mishka. Sergey nodded.

“Does it mean, there are troops here?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Sergey answered, and I remembered the last day before our departure, when another truck, very much like this one, stopped by Lenny’s gate, and thought that even if these are the troops, it doesn’t mean anything.

“Why did they dump it here, without any guards?” Mishka asked, excitedly looking around the truck.

“Why do they need guards?” Sergey shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t drive past it through the woods. And they’re not too worried about people on foot, from what I understand.”

“So, wait here, I’ll run ahead and see what’s there,” he said after a pause. “Turn your headlights off and be quiet. It can’t take too long.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mishka said quickly.

Sergey shook his head and both Mishka and I understood that this was not the time to contradict, and I thought, please don’t say something like ‘if I don’t come back’, don’t even think about saying this to me, – and he didn’t, it was obvious that he wasn’t going to say anything. He simply took the gun off his shoulder and turned to walk around the truck, and then I said:

“Wait,” and he stopped and turned his face to me; I could have said ‘why you?’, or I could have offered to go with him, or hang on to his neck, or argue, or buy time and delay him, I could have just said ‘I love you’, only all these words seemed pointless and unnecessary, and if I believed in God I would have crossed you, I thought, looking him in the eye – his face was tired and the frost-dew started appearing around his mouth – but it would look silly from outside, and I don’t really remember how to do it – left to right or right to left; he impatiently shifted from one foot to the other: “Yes, Anya?”

I wanted to say ‘nothing’, ‘just go’, but couldn’t, and at the same time Ira’s breathless voice came from behind:

“Sergey!” she said, running up to us, and he took his eyes off my face to look at her – she was holding a blue muslin band. “Here, take this.” He bent down so that she could reach, and she pressed the cloth to his face, and tied it at the back, quickly stroking him on the cheek.

He left straight after that, and we stayed by the truck, waiting.

It was cold standing in the wind, really cold, but I couldn’t return to the car, climb into the warmth and listen to Marina’s whimpering; I’ll just stand here and wait until he comes back. I took out a cigarette and tried to smoke, but the damn light kept going out – I could have walked behind the wide cab of the truck, where it wasn’t so windy, but then I wouldn’t be able to see the trees where the line of Sergey’s foot prints was leading – when the lights of our cars were off I didn’t want to take my eyes off those footprints because I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to find them in the dark.

“He’ll be back,” said Ira quietly somewhere very near.

I shuddered and turned around – she stood with her back against the cab, her arms folded across her chest, looking at me. I don’t want to wait for him with you, I thought, you don’t think that we’d wait for him together, do you, holding hands?

“You need to get warm,” she said. I didn’t reply.

“You’ll get ill again,” she said, “what if he comes back in an hour, or more? What, are you going to wait for him here in the wind, like a bloody Penelope? This is silly, you can’t help him anyway.” And then I thought, that’s not true, and rushed back to the car, and threw the door open – Marina looked at me in horror – and the dog jumped out, almost fell out onto my feet. I told him ‘Go!’ and for some time he didn’t move, and I said – ‘Come on, go!’, and then, treading silently, he went around the back of the truck and disappeared in the darkness.

While we waited – for a long time, stiffening from cold, getting worried – Mishka inspected the whole truck: climbing onto the wheel he reached the door handles and pulled them – they didn’t give, he shone the torch inside the cab to make sure there was nothing interesting there, nothing that could be useful to us. I wanted to stop him and didn’t because whereas we, adults, were stunned by the waiting – to the extent we couldn’t talk anymore – he was the only person who didn’t feel our fear and alarm, as if Sergey’s return was only a matter of time rather than luck, and his excited bustle around this truck was giving the rest of us hope too, for some reason. Finally, even Dad came out of the Land Cruiser – he walked carefully, a bit unsteady on his feet, but he also came up to the truck, where it was less windy, and watched Mishka investigating it. Dad was followed by the doctor, who was visibly suffering from the cold without a hat, but, after a moment’s consideration, he regretfully closed the door which was separating him from the comfort of the warm car and ambled towards us with a fatalistic look.

“Shall we drain the fuel?” Mishka offered excitedly; he had run around the truck about ten times by then. Dad shook his head:

“No point. It’s a ‘Shishiga’, it runs on petrol – and we don’t need petrol. And I wouldn’t make myself at home just yet if I were you,” and he heavily leant on the green metal side of the mysterious shishiga.

What a name, I thought, and who would have thought – a truck that runs on petrol, I didn’t even know they existed. In the meantime, Dad, sticking his hand in the jacket, had fished out a crumpled pack of Yava. The doctor ran up to him straight away.

“You must be mad!” he whispered vehemently. “After a heart attack! Do you understand you nearly died? I have no adrenalin – nothing! I pulled you round by mere luck, you need bed rest, and what are you doing? Put it away and don’t ever show it to me again!”

To my surprise, Dad humbly put the cigarettes away and grumbled – almost amicably:

“Ok, ok… It was automatic. There’re almost none left, I’d have to quit soon anyway…” He didn’t finish, because we heard the crackling of breaking branches somewhere very close, which we were all waiting for and were afraid of; forcefully pushing himself off the side of the truck, Dad reached over for the gun which Mishka had left but he was faster and had already grabbed it and even had racked the slide, which clanked threateningly in the silence, and then I shouted: “Sergey!” to make sure that it was him.

“It’s me!” Sergey answered. “It’s ok!” his voice was quiet, probably because of the mask, and I ran towards the voice before Andrey had time to turn his torch on and saw Sergey come out from behind the trees, followed by a man in a camouflage jacket with a fur collar and hood up. He had something in his hands – either a gun or a rifle, I couldn’t quite see, but it was clear that this man was walking behind Sergey on purpose. The man’s face was covered by a wide black military respirator with thick flares of filters poking out on the sides; Sergey’s muslin protection looked childish compared to that mask.

“Put your gun away, Mishka, I’m ok,” Sergey said and Mishka reluctantly lowered his hands, but didn’t let go of the gun.

The man stopped by the edge of the woods and said something inaudible, after which he stepped back into darkness and Sergey made another ten steps forward and as soon as he was close to us I saw that he had no gun, his zip ripped, and his mask was covered in blood, which was slowly seeping through the muslin; I started crying – straight away, loudly, and hugged him – he hugged me back, his arms were trembling, and said:

“It’s ok, it’s ok. It’s all right now.”

“Is it them… is it them? Why did they…?” I cried and pulled his mask off his face and he smiled, his lips smashed, and said:

“Damn it, Anya, I knew you’d go mental, it’s ok, it happens, they didn’t know, I came out of the woods, with a gun – come on now, it’s embarrassing…”

“Where’s your gun?” said Dad crossly, and I stopped crying.

“I had to leave it there,” Sergey said simply, and waved his arm somewhere behind the truck, “I’ve arranged it with them, they’ll let us through, but we’ll have to walk, we’ll leave the cars here and our stuff, too. And no guns. It’s not far.”

“To go where?” Ira asked.

“You won’t believe your eyes. I wouldn’t believe either, if I hadn’t seen it myself,” and he smiled again.

“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Andrey.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Sergey answered, “But yes, I’m sure. Mishka, put the gun into the car, take the kids, Lenny, and let’s go.”

When we were all outside, I suddenly realised how many we were – five men, four women, but it didn’t give me more confidence, because walking like this, in a single line, empty handed we were a lot more vulnerable than a stranger hiding in the woods. We hadn’t reached the middle of the empty clearing where the truck was, when the man in camouflage poked out from behind the tree and shouted – muffled, through the respirator:

“The masks!”

“Damn,” said Sergey, annoyed, “I completely forgot – they want us to wear masks – Ira, do you have any left?” and waved at the stranger; we waited while Ira dashed to the car to get them, but as soon as we put them on and were ready to continue walking, the stranger shouted again:

“For the children too!”

“Are they infected?” Marina asked with fear in her voice, crouching in front of the little girl, and trying to fix the muslin rectangle onto her tiny face.

“I don’t think so,” Sergey said, “I think they’re worried they’ll catch it from us.”