To the Lake

26 INTO THE WOODS

As soon as we entered the forest it turned out that apart from the man in camouflage which we had seen in the beginning, I noticed another man, dressed in white; this other man definitely didn’t want to come into our view – treading carefully he was following us at about ten metres, and I wouldn’t have noticed him if it wasn’t for the branches occasionally crackling under his feet. I wanted to run to Sergey and talk to him about this man in white and about the man in the camouflage, I wanted to ask – why do you think that these people won’t do us any harm, especially after they’ve taken your gun and smashed your face? We have followed you leaving behind everything we had with us, cars, guns, food, without any security in the middle of taiga, why are you so sure they can be trusted? But Sergey was walking ahead, straight behind the man in the camouflage – he was making wide steps and walked fast, as if he was in a hurry, and didn’t look back once – even to make sure that the we all were following him.

It was probably a short cut through the woods, because with every step we were distancing ourselves from the road blocked with the truck. It was a hard way: sinking in the deep snow we walked in silence, without even talking to each other; we’re walking like hostages, I thought, voluntary hostages, another few minutes and this strange, illogical impulse, which we have all succumbed to, will start wearing off and then somebody – Dad, or maybe Ira – will stop and demand an explanation of where we’re being taken to and why, and the armed people in respirators most certainly won’t like it; what will they do then – leave us here? fire their guns? Fortunately, I never had to find out – the trees suddenly stopped, and we came out onto a clearing; on the one side there was a semicircle of woods, on the other – a huge, white lake. There were two newly-built, beautiful wooden houses, izbas about twenty steps from the shore – massive, one-storey, with wide flat roofs.

“What is this…” Dad said. He was panting, his chest wheezing, and had to stop grabbing the thin trunk of the tree.

“Don’t delay,” the man in camouflage said and went to the nearest house.

The other man – in the white canvass jacket and trousers – came out of hiding when we came out of the forest; he calmly walked behind us, resting his hands on the gun, hanging over his neck.

“Fuck, are we playing Outpost or something?” Dad said, panting, trying to catch up with Sergey – the doctor scurried behind him with concerned face, “camouflage, army respirators. And the houses – where are the houses from? There were no houses here.”

“They built them last year!” Sergey declared and finally looked back: “Can you imagine? Look at these cottages – each would house at least twenty people. That’s what I call civilisation!”

“And here are the twenty people,” Ira said quietly.

A small crowd was waiting by the entrance of the house we were about to come into – the people were standing silently and looked at us carefully; unlike our escorts, they weren’t wearing any respirators, and as soon as we came closer, they all hurriedly stepped backwards as if scared of our masks, – they looked at us apprehensively, in a hostile way, but I noticed that there were women in the group – only a few but their presence had calmed me down somehow. They don’t look like troops, I thought, they’re ordinary people, probably locals who have escaped from the villages dotted along the motorway, only during today we’d seen three or four villages like this, and they were all empty. Sergey was right, we’ll manage to come to an agreement with them; we must be able to.

The man in camouflage stomped his feet at the entrance, shaking the snow off his boots, and then entered the house and closed the door tightly behind him, leaving us outside. His white companion stood nonchalantly nearby and lit a cigarette – both he and the people standing a bit further away were still silent, but I felt that they were scrutinising us, unable to take their eyes off us. Finally, the door opened again and the camouflaged man poked his head out and beckoned us to come in; we perked up at this and obediently stepped inside one by one, into the cold and dark veranda, and then, after shuffling awkwardly by the entrance for a bit, like a crowd of shy schoolchildren in front of a headmaster’s office door, we came into a small, warm room, lit by the dim orange light of the kerosene lamp. We filled the space immediately and saw a tiny table perched near the huge stove, covered in a sweet plastic table cloth with flowers; a man – unshaven, with a sleepy face – sat at the table; as soon as we came in he raised his head and looked at us, unsmiling. By the stove, near his feet sat our dog, who jumped up when he saw us and sat with his paws underneath him and his tail neatly arranged on the floor; “You traitor,” I thought, and it looked like he heard my thoughts – his eyes glistened with guilt.

“Ivan Semenovich,” the camouflaged man said in a voice of a sulky child, “what about your mask, put your mask on!”

“Leave me alone with your masks,” the man at the table waved him off, “they’re wearing masks, we’re wearing masks, can’t understand a word.”

“Let me sit down,” Dad said, out of breath, and lurched forward, towards the chairs, standing along the wall.

“Are you ill?” the sleepy man said crossly and started standing up, moving the wobbly table noisily.

“No, no,” the doctor, elbowing his way through, tried to come closer to the man, “this is not what you think, he’s got a heart problem, he has cardiac arrest, he needs bed rest… I’m a doctor, I can guarantee that we’re all healthy.”

“A doctor?” the sleepy man perked up. “A doctor’s good,” he said, and then added mysteriously: “We haven’t got a doctor anymore.”

“What about you?” Ira asked loudly. “Are you all healthy?”

The man with a crumpled face wasn’t offended, and answered:

“We’ve been here two weeks. If I understand anything about this plague, I somehow think it would have showed itself by now. So this is what we’re going to do,” he continued, “why don’t you settle your kids for the night, stuff like that, Ilya will show you… Ilya!” he called, and the door opened immediately, as if Ilya was waiting to be invited in. “Show them, where do we have space? Shall we put them up with the Kalinas, they still awake?”

“Wait,” Sergey interrupted him, “we’ve left our cars on the road. We should bring them closer to the house here. And we need to talk.”

“Ok, let’s talk, if we need to.” The man who was addressed as Ivan Semenovich, agreed readily, and sat on his chair again.

“Take a seat. And you, guys – go, settle yourselves for the night. You can take your masks off,” he waved his hand at us, and responding to Ilya’s telling look he said to Sergey: “Look, don’t be angry at my guys for giving you a bit of a dusting, I hope you understand…”

When he came outside, Ilya pulled the respirator from his face, enthusiastically rubbed his cheeks with his hands and then looked around the crowd, which was still waiting outside, and called:

“Kalina! Are you here? Petrovich?”

“I am,” said a voice defiantly, a female voice, for some reason.

“Take these people,” Ilya said, gesturing at us with an open arm, “You must have space, they need to stay the night.”

This idea didn’t seem to thrill the mysterious Kalina in the slightest. It was quiet for half a minute, and the same voice asked suspiciously:

“What if they’re infected?”

“They’re not,” answered Ilya in an authoritative voice, “and this one’s even a doctor. Doctor, where are you? Come out.” And the doctor unsurely stepped forward, raised his hand and waved it in the air.

Kalina turned out to be a little fragile man of an unidentifiable age, with a small, wrinkly face; it was his wife who was negotiating on his behalf – a tall, large woman, twice the size of Kalina himself. The house they brought us to looked exactly the same as the first one – the same large veranda with garden furniture, dark and cold; the same kind of central room with a stove, which served as a dining room in this house – several tables of various heights were crowded together in the middle of it; they’d been put close together and makeshift wooden benches were positioned along each side. The room had the same standard interior, the decor you’d find in a family holiday chalet outside Moscow: rattling panelled doors with garish pictures on the glass, walls covered with wooden linings, cheap onion-shaped lampshades and even a telly, which was no use in these circumstances. All the time we were coming in, taking our coats off, taking our children’s coats off, Kalina didn’t utter a word – tucked away in the corner he blinked frequently and looked at us with an unclear expression on his face.

His wife, looking at us without any joy, said in the same defiant manner:

“I’m not going to feed you,” and moving her legs with difficulty she opened doors into both rooms; a waft of dusty air came out from each of them. “We’ve only two empty ones,” she said drily, “you can sort yourselves out about who goes in where.”

“Thank you, we don’t need feeding,” Ira said coldly, popping her head round one of the rooms.

“Where do you think you’re going in your boots!” the woman roared. “I’ve only cleaned the floor this morning!”

Ira stopped and turned around slowly.

“Dear God,” she said, stressing every word, “How. You. All. Make. Me. Sick. We’ve been running away for twelve days, not even knowing where to, like some kind of stray dogs. We haven’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. We need neither your food nor your damned hospitality. All we needed was to go on past. It was you who grabbed him, and dragged us here. And I don’t give a damn about your floor.”

“All right, all right, loudmouth,” the woman suddenly said, almost amicably, “D’you wanna blanket? I’ve got a woollen one. For the lil’un.”

As soon as she left, Kalina-husband suddenly became very active: moving closer to Lenny – out of all of us – who landed heavily on the bench, he whispered hotly and loudly into his ear:

“Do you have any vodka?”

Lenny, indifferent, shook his head, and Kalina, losing his interest in him straight away, froze again, resembling a small wrinkled tortoise.

“Right,” the doctor said looking at Dad, “right. You can say whatever you want, but you need to go to bed,” and he looked at Lenny. “And you, Lenny, as well.”

The woman came back carrying several old blankets, and the commotion started – while they were putting the kids to bed, moving furniture, making beds, I draped the jacket over my shoulders and came out onto the veranda again. The crowd in front of the house had disappeared, pushed back into their houses by the frost, leaving lots of foot prints on the snow. Looking closer I saw two men’s silhouettes behind the glass of the neighbouring veranda – a camouflage and a white one – and a dim light of a cigarette. He’s taking so long, I thought. Why did we leave him there? They told us ‘go’, and we went, humble, submissive, and I should have stayed there, at least I should have stayed, instead of bargaining now who’s going to sleep on the bed, who’s going to get a pillow; I put my hand in my pocket and fished out a cigarette pack – it was empty.

“So?” the door shut behind me and Lenny came out with a jacket draped over his shoulders. “Can you see anything?”

I shook my head.

“Oh come on, Anya, they’re all right,” he said, trying to calm me.

For some time we stood peering into darkness.

“I can go there if you want,” he said finally.

“I do,” I said, unexpectedly to myself and turned to him, “I’ll come with you.”

We reached the middle of the clearing, separating the houses – it was difficult for Lenny to walk, although he was trying not to show it – when suddenly we saw in the twilight the dim orange rectangle of the door open, and Sergey started walking towards us; a second later the camouflaged man Ilya followed him.

“Lenny, it’s good you’re here, we’re going to get the cars. Anya, have you got the keys?” Sergey said, coming up, and while I was looking for them in my pockets, he continued quietly: “Tell the girls not to go to bed before we come back – we need to talk,” and then added a bit louder, so that the camouflaged man could hear: “Tell Andrey to come out, we’ll wait here.”

When I got back, I noticed that both Kalinas had disappeared – they’d probably gone into their rooms. There was just the doctor sitting at the table; as soon as he saw us he quickly lifted his head with the look of a person who wasn’t in the least tired and was ready to help at any second; his eyes were red. The children, exhausted by the journey, had already been put to bed. The boy, with a dusty woollen blanket drawn up to his eyes, had curled up by Dad’s side – he’d fallen asleep on one of the two beds we’d been allocated; Ira sat at the foot of the bed, motionless, with a straight back, and tensely watched her son as he slept – she didn’t even turn around when I entered the room. Right there, on the boarded floor, I saw Mishka, asleep with his back against the wall, his head awkwardly thrown back and mouth open. I found the others in the next bedroom, hovering above the second bed; their faces were cross – perhaps the argument about who was going to sleep in it hadn’t finished yet.

“Don’t worry,” I told the doctor, sitting down next to him, when Andrey, looking relieved, jumped up, putting his coat on as he ran. “The men will bring the cars and we’ll find you a sleeping bag.”

“There’s no need at all,” the doctor said readily, “I can sleep on the floor, I have a jacket… look, it’s quite thick.”

“How many days didn’t you sleep?” I asked, and he smiled:

“I think I’m into my third day,” and while I was trying to count in my head, how long it’s been since any of us had a chance to have enough sleep or at least change their clothes, goodness, or even to brush our teeth, he put his head on his arms, which he’d folded on the table, and a few seconds later started snoring quietly.

The men came back after a quarter of an hour, burdened with luggage and folded up sleeping bags; soon after the dog came in timidly, trying to stay unnoticed – he slipped into one of the bedrooms and climbed under the bed. Barely taking his jacket off, Sergey quickly entered the room, and as soon as the rest of us followed him, he closed the door tightly, and standing with his back to it, looked at us and said:

“I had a chat with that guy. So, in my opinion, we shouldn’t stay here.”

He told us about the offer the man with a sleepy face had made him – they had spoken for about an hour in the other house. Sergey was talking quietly so as not to wake the little boy, and the water from his boots was leaking in muddy streaks across the uneven floor to the other wall. It wasn’t because they smashed his lip and hadn’t returned his gun that Sergey wanted to leave, there was something else. “I’m still surprised they haven’t shot me,” he said wearily and smiled sadly. “Ok, hear me out first, and then we’ll discuss everything ok?”

It turned out that everyone we saw – the Kalinas couple, the armed and camouflaged Ilya, his friend dressed in white, the man with a sleepy face and the other men and women who’d come out in the middle of the night to take a look at us when we were coming out of the woods, were all from the same village, the last one we passed before we turned off the motorway. But they’re obviously from the army, Andrey said, at least those who have guns; those really are, Sergey said, and Ivan Semenovich, and a few others we haven’t seen yet – they had a border command post – of sorts – in this village, it’s a massive village, about three thousand people, they have a hospital there, a school – there were infected people from the very start, somebody brought the infection from Medvezhiegorsk, and a week later there was no point in quarantine, plus they didn’t have an order to declare a quarantine; the last thing they were ordered to do was to restrict people’s movement. You see, they weren’t guarding the border here, there’s no point in guarding a border like this, try and walk for eighty kilometres through an exclusion zone, through villages that had been abandoned for forty odd years; they’re actually not an outpost, no conscripts, nothing – just a commandants office; so, in short, when they turned the phones off, their special services communication continued working, and the last order from Petrozavodsk was not to let anyone get any further towards Finland. And that’s it, you see, that was it. They probably couldn’t do anything else anyway – there were too few of them, and then when the panic started and the people started dashing in all directions, they had a choice – to fulfil the order and to stay and to try and make the three thousand villagers stay there too, or to load everything they could into the ‘shishiga’ – fuel, guns, provisions, take their families and – I don’t know – neighbours, and come here, to the lake, to this holiday camp, without waiting until it went fucking mental there, which it already did, as we’ve seen. And where did the others go, Marina asked. Who knows, Sergey replied, there’s no phone connection here – although their radios are more powerful than ours, the village’s too far. Some might have stayed there, in the village, some have gone further, towards the lakes, and then they were ill, a lot of them had become ill at the very beginning, so I don’t know… He did say something about ‘another party’ which was supposed to come here later, apparently they needed more time packing, I didn’t quite catch – but actually, nobody else has made it here. This holiday camp has been here for a year and a half, and many people must know about it, but we’re the first people they’ve seen in two weeks. It’s quite possible that there are simply no more people left around here.

And then I asked:

“So why do you think we shouldn’t stay here, with them?”

“There’s thirty-four of them,” Sergey said simply, “And only nine of us. I mean adults. He said they use a principle of a ‘common pool’, everything is shared, fair do’s, but I don’t know how they were going to do it, what they’d brought with them, I don’t know what kind of people they are, and this isn’t the point, really,” and he carefully touched his smashed lip, “it’s just there’ll be no democracy here, you see? They’re troops. They have a different kind of brains. No better, no worse, just different. And there’s more of them. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they’re here, just the opposite, it’s good, because… well, for many reasons. But I’ll feel better if they stay here and we’re there, on the island, on our own.”

He fell silent – for some time we just stood in silence above the sleeping child, in a dark, airless room, sleeves of our coats touching, and I thought that somebody would definitely start arguing now; I wondered who’d be the first person to say – look around you, there’s so much space, we could live much better here, in almost humane conditions, but nobody said anything, and then Lenny suddenly asked:

“Are you sure they’ll let us go?”

“That’s a good question,” Sergey replied. “I’ve asked him to let me think until morning. And honestly, I wouldn’t delay any further, because tomorrow morning – I’m almost sure – they’ll still let us leave, but the longer we’ll hang around here with our cars and provisions, the less chance we’ve got of doing so.”

We spent some more time in silence.

“So, let’s do the following,” Sergey said, “we still have time. We don’t have to decide now. I’ll wake you up at six and we’ll talk then,” and opened the door.

Kalina-wife jumped off the door like a scalded cat. As she was walking away she said grumpily:

“Why aren’t you going to bed? There’s a bucket full of water by the stove, if anyone needs any.”

In the middle of the night I woke up and spent some time enjoying the pleasure of lying in the warm, cosy darkness, listening to the others breathing, trying to work out what exactly had made me wake up – the floor was hard in spite of the thick sleeping bag, but this wasn’t the reason; I climbed out from under Sergey’s arm and, propping myself up on my elbows, could just about see Mishka, his face buried in the fourfold jacket; Dad was also there – I could hear his uneven, hoarse breathing, and on the bed next to him the boy slept just as soundly as before. His woollen blanket was messed up and almost fell down, I carefully climbed out of the sleeping bag and lifted the blanket, then bent down to cover him – I remember noticing how prickly it was – and breathed in the pure, hot air that little children radiate when they’re asleep, and only then realised that Ira wasn’t in the room.

It was also dark in the lounge – the kerosene lamp, which was on the table, had long gone out and in the scarce orange flashes of the cooling stove the room seemed empty; and then I heard a sound – a quiet, barely audible sound – and looked harder and saw that our grumpy, unfriendly host was sitting in the corner, on the long, make-shift bench, and next to her, with her face buried in the woman’s shoulder, Ira was crying – bitterly, helplessly – and hugging her, her arms round the woman’s neck.

“Alone,” Ira said into the big shoulder, wrapped into a woollen cardigan. She carried on crying for a bit and then repeated: “Alone.”

“There, there,” the woman replied and stroked her blonde hair with the palm of her wide hand, and rocked slightly from side to side with a calming, lulling movement, “It’s all right.”

I waited by the door for a little while – not for long, maybe a minute or two – and then tiptoed back into the room, trying as hard as I could not to make the floor boards creak under my feet, and lay down on the floor again, under Sergey’s heavy arm; I drew up the edge of the warmed up sleeping bag and closed my eyes again.