To the Lake

2 PLANNING THE ESCAPE

I’ve had this dream for as long as I can remember – sometimes once a year, sometimes less often, but every time I began to forget it, it would come back: I needed to get somewhere, somewhere not too far away. I know my mum is waiting for me there, and I’m on my way but I’m moving very slowly – I bump randomly into some unimportant people, I get stuck in conversations with them, like a fly in a cobweb, and then, when I’m finally almost there, I realise that I’m late, that my mum isn’t there anymore and I’ll never see her again. I would be woken by my own cries, with a face wet from tears, frightening the man sharing my bed, and whenever he tried to comfort me and calm me down, I would fight and push his arms away, deafened by my unsurmountable loneliness.

On November 19th our phone fell silent for good; the internet cut out shortly after that. Mishka was the one who found out – the only one of us who was at least trying to pretend that life was running its normal course. Coming out of the sleepy coma induced by pills – Sergey would make me take them every time I couldn’t stop crying – I would leave my room and set off to find the two remaining people I had in my life. Sometimes I would find them both in front of the computer, going through the newsfeed, and sometimes Sergey would go outside and start chopping wood, although I could hardly imagine a more pointless way to spend time. Mishka would still sit in front of the computer, watching YouTube and playing online games – as kids often do when they want to hide from the adults’ problems – which drove me to paroxysms of crying and tears. Then the front door would bang open, letting in a stream of cold air, Sergey would come in, lead me to the bedroom and make me take one more pill.

The day we were cut off from the rest of the world I woke up because Sergey was shaking my shoulder:

“Wake up, baby, we need you. The phone’s dead, so is the internet. We can only watch satellite news now but our English isn’t good enough.”

When I came downstairs I found Mishka sitting on the sofa in front of the TV – he had a dictionary on his lap and a focused and unhappy expression on his face, as if he was sitting an exam. He was accompanied by Marina, our beautiful neighbour from the three-storey stone ‘castle’ with tasteless turrets opposite us, and her plump husband Lenny, Sergey’s billiards partner. Their little daughter was sitting on the floor near the sofa – she had a bowl with seashells in front of her, the ones we had brought back from our honeymoon. Judging by her bulging cheek she had one of the shells in her mouth, and a thin, sparkly thread of saliva was dripping from her chin into the rest of the ‘treasures’ in the bowl. Sergey helped me down the stairs – two days of sleeping pills and crying had probably taken their toll because Marina, looking me over (even early in the morning her makeup was perfect – there are women who look absolute angels any time of the day), brought her hand to her mouth and seemed about to leap up from the sofa:

“Anya, you look awful, are you unwell?”

“We’re fine, we’re healthy,” said Sergey immediately, and I was angry at him for saying it so quickly, as if it was we who were sitting in Marina’s lounge and our child was dribbling on possessions with sentimental value.

“Guys, we had something bad happen…”

Before he could finish the sentence – I don’t know why, it was important that I didn’t let him finish – I came up to the little girl and having unclenched the tiny wet fingers, ripped the bowl out of her hands and put it on a high shelf:

“Marina, why don’t you take the shell out of her mouth, she’ll choke, it’s not a sweet after all.”

“That’s my girl,” said Sergey under his breath, relieved; our eyes met and I couldn’t help smiling at him.

I couldn’t stand their company – neither Marina’s nor her simple, noisy husband’s, Lenny, stuffed full of money and vulgar jokes; Lenny had a pool table in the basement and sometimes Sergey would go and play there at weekends. During the first six months of our life in the village I made an effort to keep him company, but quickly realised that I couldn’t even pretend to enjoy it. “I’d rather have no social life at all than this idiotic imitation of it”, I said to Sergey, and he said, “You know, baby, you shouldn’t be such a fusspot; if you live in the country, you have to make friends with your neighbours,” and now these two were sitting in my lounge on my sofa, and my son, with a look of desperation on his face, was trying to translate CNN news for them.

While Marina was trying to hook the last shell from her daughter’s mouth, Lenny tapped lightly on the sofa with the palm of his hand, as if he was the owner of the house, and said, “Anya, sit down and translate. The phones are dead, the Russian news is all lies, and I want to know what’s going on in the world.”

I sat down on the edge of the coffee table – I didn’t want to sit next to them – turned to the telly and the sound from the television almost drowned Marina’s helpless cooing – ‘Dasha, spit it out, spit it out now’ – and Lenny’s booming roars of laughter – ‘We don’t have a nanny now, because of the quarantine, so Marina had to remember her maternal instincts – and she’s not doing great, as you can see.” I raised my hand and they all fell silent. While I listened and read through the running messages, ten or fifteen minutes passed, and there was dead silence, then I turned to them – Marina now frozen on the floor, clutching a wet seashell which she excavated from Dasha’s mouth, and Lenny holding his daughter in his arms, with his hand over her mouth and his face very serious. I had never seen him with such a tense expression. Mishka sat quite still, next to Lenny, with his thin face and long nose, and the corners of his mouth turned down and eyebrows raised, like a Pierrot at a carnival. The dictionary had slid to the floor – perhaps his English was good enough after all to grasp the most important news.

Without glancing at Sergey, who stood behind the sofa, I said:

“They’re saying it’s the same everywhere. About seven hundred thousand infected in Japan, the Chinese aren’t saying how many, Australia and Britain have closed their borders – only this didn’t help, looks like they were too late; planes aren’t flying anywhere. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston – all the large cities in the US are under quarantine and Europe is in the same kind of shit – that’s it in a nutshell. They say an international organisation has been set up to work on a vaccine but that there will be nothing useful for at least two months.”

“What about us?” Lenny took his hand off the girl’s mouth and she started sucking her thumb straight away; father and daughter were both looking at me and I noticed for the first time how similar they were: poor little baby, she hadn’t inherited anything from the thin-boned well-bred Marina, but had small close-set eyes, chubby white cheeks, and a little pointed chin which was sticking out beneath the cheeks.

“Why would they bother about us? They haven’t said much about us so far. Everything’s bad, everywhere – especially in the Far East, since you can’t close the Chinese border, they say a third of the population is infected; St Petersburg is closed, Nizhny Novgorod is closed.”

“What about Rostov, what’re they saying about Rostov?”

“Lenny, they’re not talking about Rostov, they’re talking about Paris and London.”

It was somewhat gratifying – four pairs of frightened eyes watching my face, listening to every word I said, as if something very important depended on it.

“My mother’s in Rostov,” Lenny said quietly. “I’ve tried calling her all week, and now the phone’s dead – Sergey, is Anya all right? Anya, are you OK?”

While Sergey was ushering our guests towards the door (Lenny holding the little girl in his arms and Marina looking puzzled: ‘Did I say anything wrong? Did anything happen? Do you need any help?’), I was trying to catch my breath. I could feel a lump in my throat – ‘don’t tell them, don’t tell them, be quiet’ – and caught Mishka’s eye. He was looking at me, biting his lip, his face helpless and desperate. I reached over to him and he jumped from the sofa to me, the table treacherously cracking under his weight, grabbed my shoulder and whispered hotly into my collarbone:

“What’s going to happen now, Mum?”

And I said, “Well, as sure as hell we’re going to break this coffee table” – and he immediately burst out laughing. He’s done this since he was very little, – it was always easy to make him laugh – whatever the problem, this was the easiest way to calm him down when he was crying. Sergey came into the lounge:

“What’s so funny?”

I looked at him over Mishka’s head and said:

“I think it’ll only get worse. What shall we do?”

For the rest of the day, we all – Sergey, I and even Mishka, who had abandoned his games – sat in the lounge in front of the television, as if we had only just come to value this last link with the outside world, and were eager to absorb as much information as possible before the link was finally broken. But Mishka said:

“Even if they disconnect all the channels nothing will happen to the satellite, Mum, it’ll just continue circling the world.” But he sat with us until he settled his dishevelled head on the armrest and fell asleep.

When it got late, Sergey turned off the light, lit the fire in the fireplace and brought a bottle of whisky from the kitchen, with two glasses. We sat on the floor in front of the sofa where Mishka, covered with a rug, was asleep, and sipped the whisky; the warm orange light of the fire mixed with the bluish glow of the TV screen, which was murmuring quietly and showing mostly the same footage we had seen in the morning: – presenters in front of world maps with red dots on them, empty streets of various cities, ambulances, soldiers, distribution of medicine and food (the faces of people queuing differentiated only by the colour of their masks), the closed doors of the New York Stock Exchange. I wasn’t translating anything anymore, we just sat and looked at the screen and for a moment it felt like just a regular night in, which we’d had plenty of before, as if we were just watching a boring film about the end of the world, with the beginning a bit dragged out. I put my head on Sergey’s shoulder, and he turned to me, stroked my cheek and said into my ear, in order not to wake up Mishka: “You were right, baby. It’s not going to end any time soon.”

The noise that woke me up stopped as soon as I opened my eyes; it was dark in the room – the fire had gone out and the last of the red embers weren’t creating any light. I could hear Mishka’s breathing behind me, and Sergey was asleep next to me, sitting up, with his head thrown back. My back was stiff from hours of sitting on the floor, but I sat still trying to understand what exactly had woken me. For a few seconds, which seemed endless, I sat in complete silence listening hard, and just as I was beginning to think that I had dreamt the strange noise, I heard it again, right behind my back – an insistent, loud rapping on the window. I turned to Sergey and grabbed him by the shoulder. In the dim light I saw that his eyes were open; he put his finger to his lips, and then, without standing up, reached over and found an iron rake, hanging by the fireplace, which made a clinking noise when he took it off the hook. For the first time in the two years that we had spent in this beautiful house, full of light and comfort, I bitterly regretted that instead of a sullen-looking brick fortress with barred arrow-slits, like most of our neighbours’ houses, we had chosen an airy wooden construction with a glass front, made up of enormous windows, stretching to the ridge of the roof. I suddenly realised how insecure this glass protection felt, as if our lounge and the whole house behind it, with all our lovely little possessions, favourite books, light wooden staircase, with Mishka, peacefully asleep on the sofa, was only a doll’s house without a front wall, which a gigantic alien arm could penetrate, destroying our comfortable living, turning everything upside down, scattering everything, and snatching any of us in a blink of an eye.

We glanced towards the window, near the balcony door which led to the veranda, and saw a silhouette clearly visible against the night sky.

Sergey tried to stand up, and I clung to his hand, which was holding the rake, and whispered:

“Wait, don’t get up, don’t!” and then we heard a voice from behind the glass:

“So how long are you going to hold out for in your fortress? I can see you through the window. Open up, Sergey!”

Sergey dropped the rake, which fell with a loud clang, and rushed to the balcony door. Mishka woke up, sat up on the sofa and rubbed his eyes, looking around him as if he didn’t know where he was. The door opened, letting the scents of the fresh frosty air and cigarette smoke into the house, and the man standing behind the window came in and said:

“Turn the light on, damn you.”

“Hi Dad,” Sergey said, groping for the light switch, and only then did I breathe out, stood up and came closer.

Shortly after we met three years ago, Sergey introduced me to his father. He had waited about six months after his ex-wife had finally loosened her grip on him, post-divorce fervour had calmed down and our life had started becoming normal. Sergey’s dad won my heart from the moment he entered the small flat on the outskirts of Moscow which Sergey and I had rented to be able to live together. He looked me up and down as if devouring me, gave me a mighty and not entirely fatherly hug and demanded that I call him ‘Papa Boris’, something I could never bring myself to say, so I simply avoided addressing him at all. Then, a year or so later, I settled on a neutral ‘Boris’, and we never became more informal than that. But I felt at ease with him from the very start. It was easier in his company than among Sergey’s friends, who were used to seeing him with another woman, and paused obviously and politely every time I spoke, as if they needed time to remember who I was. I was constantly catching myself trying to make them like me at any cost. It was a childish, pointless competition with a woman whose ex-husband I was living with. I hated myself for feeling guilty about that. Boris didn’t visit us often. Sergey and he had some complicated history from Sergey’s childhood, which neither of them liked talking about; it always seemed to me that Sergey was both proud and ashamed of his father. They rarely called each other and saw each other even less – he didn’t even come to our wedding. I suspect simply because he didn’t have a decent suit. A long time ago, to the surprise of his friends and family, he gave up his career as a university professor, rented out his small Moscow flat and left, to live in the country near Ryazan, where he had lived ever since, in an old house with an antiquated furnace and an outside toilet, rarely leaving the place. He did a bit of poaching from time to time, and according to Sergey, drank a lot of vodka with the locals, apparently earning a great and undeniable reputation.

He stood in our lounge, now with the lights on, squinting at the brightness; he had Sergey’s old shooting jacket which had seen better days and a pair of winter felt boots with no overshoes which oozed a small but growing puddle on the warm floor. Sergey lurched forward towards him but then stopped, and they both froze a step apart and didn’t hug, and instead both turned to me and I stood between them and hugged them both. Through the warm, thick smells of smoke and cigarettes I suddenly smelt alcohol and thought to myself that it was bizarre how he made it here without being stopped, but then it dawned on me that it is unlikely anyone bothered about this kind of thing on the road these days. I pressed my cheek against the worn collar of his coat and said:

“It’s so good that you came. Are you hungry?”

In a quarter of an hour fried eggs were sizzling on the cooker and all of us, including Mishka, who desperately tried to stay awake, sat around the kitchen table; it was half past four and the kitchen was full of the appalling smell of Boris’s cigarettes – he only smoked the cheap and strong Yava brand and waved away Sergey’s offer of Kent. While the food was cooking they had time to have one shot of vodka each and when I put the steaming food in front of them and Sergey wanted to pour another one, rather surprisingly Boris covered his glass with his large hand and nicotine-stained fingers and said: “Enough of the high life for me, I think. I came to tell you kids that you’re idiots. What the hell are you doing in this glass house, frying eggs and pretending everything is ok, eh? You didn’t even lock your gate. I know that your fancy gate, and the rickety fence, if you can call it that, and this whole apology for a safe house won’t stop a child from breaking in, but still, I expected you to be smarter than that.”

He was half-joking, but his eyes were serious. I suddenly saw that his hand, holding another cigarette, was shaking from tiredness and the ashes were falling straight on to the plate with the fried egg. His face was grey and there were dark circles around his eyes. Wearing a jumper of an indefinable colour, with an over-stretched collar (probably Sergey’s, too), thick trousers and felt boots, which he didn’t even think to take off, sitting in our stylish, modern kitchen, he looked like a huge, exotic bird. The three of us sat around him, like scared children, catching every word he was saying.

“I was hoping that I wouldn’t find you here, that you had enough brains to understand what’s going on, and that you’d boarded up your silly doll’s house and run away,” he said, cutting off half the fried egg with his fork and holding it up in the air. “But, since I know your unthinking carelessness of old, I decided to check if I was right and, unfortunately, I was.”

We were silent – there was nothing to say. Boris looked regretfully at the fried egg shaking on his fork, put it back on the plate and moved the plate away. It was obvious that he was looking for words and part of me already knew what he wanted to say, and to delay this moment I moved to get up and clear the table, but Boris made a motion with his hand to stop me and said:

“Wait, Anya, it won’t take long. The city was closed two weeks ago,” he sat with his hands folded in front of him and his head bent, “And it’s been just over two months since the first people got infected, if, of course, they’re not lying to us. I don’t know how many people needed to die before they decided to close the city, but given that they turned the phones off, everything’s happening faster than they were expecting.” He lifted his head and looked at us. “Come on, kids, look more intelligent, have you never heard of the mathematical modelling of epidemic disease?”

“Yes, I remember, Dad,” said Sergey suddenly.

“What’s modelling of epidemic disease?” Mishka asked. His eyes were wide with surprise.

“It’s an old technique, Mishka,” Boris said, looking at me, “It was in use even in the seventies, when I worked at the research institute. I know I’m out of practice now, but I should think the general principles are still the same; I still remember it – it’s like riding a bike, once you learn, you don’t forget it. Briefly, it depends on the disease – the way it spreads, how infectious it is, how long its incubation period is, and what the death rate is. What also counts is what the government does to fight the disease. Back then we made calculations for seventeen infections – from plague to common flu. I’m not a doctor, I’m a mathematician, and I don’t know much about this new virus and I’m not going to bore you with differential equations but judging by how quickly the situation is progressing, the quarantine hasn’t really helped. Instead of getting better, people are dying, and dying fast – maybe the authorities are not using the right medicine, maybe they don’t have anything to treat it with, or maybe they’re still looking for the way to treat it – whatever that is. I don’t think the city has died yet, but it’ll die soon. And before the chaos begins, I’d try to get away as far as possible if I were you.”

“What chaos?” I asked, and then Sergey spoke:

“They’ll try to get out of the city, Anya, – those who’re not ill yet, together with those who’re already infected, but don’t know it, and they’ll also bring those who are already ill, because they can’t leave them behind. They will go past our house, they will knock on our door and ask for water or food, or to let them stay overnight, and as soon as you agree to do any of that, you’ll get infected.”

“And if you don’t agree, Anya,” said Boris. “They might get very upset with you. So the situation as it stands at the moment doesn’t sound very promising.”

“How much time do you think we have, Dad?” Sergey asked.

“Not much. I think a week max, if it’s not too late already. I know I had a go at you, guys, but I’m no better. You’re just a couple of brainless yuppies, but what was I thinking? I should have come to you straight away, as soon as they announced the quarantine, instead of binge drinking in my village. I’ve brought some stuff with me – not everything that’s needed, of course, I didn’t have much cash on me, and I was in a hurry, so we’ll have to scramble to get away as soon as possible. Sergey, open the gate; I need to bring my car in. I’m afraid the old banger won’t make it if I drive her again. For the last few kilometres I was seriously worried that I’d have to walk for the rest of the way.”

And while he was getting up and rummaging through his pockets for the keys, I looked at him and thought that this clumsy, noisy man, who we’d forgotten about and hadn’t called once since the epidemic had started to ask if he was all right, this man left his safe village, loaded the car with his simple possessions and was prepared to dump it in the middle of nowhere if the twenty-year old Niva died, and walk in the freezing cold, just to make sure we’re still here, and to make us do what he thinks will save our lives. I looked at Sergey and saw that he was thinking the same. I thought he was going to say something, but he simply took the keys from Boris and went out.

When the door closed behind him, the three of us stayed in the kitchen. Boris sat down, looked at me, unsmiling, and said:

“You don’t look great, Anya. And your mum?”

I felt my face crumpling and quickly shook my head. He took my hand and blundered on:

“Have you heard from Ira and Anton?”

I felt my tears drying up before I’d even started crying, because I had forgotten, completely forgotten, about Sergey’s first wife and their five-year old, Anton. I pressed my hand to my mouth and shook my head, horrified. He frowned and asked:

“Do you think he’ll agree to leave without them?” and answered his own question, “Although, first we need to know exactly where we’re going.”

We didn’t talk any more that night: when Sergey came back into the house, bent under the weight of the huge canvas rucksack, Boris jumped to his feet to help, quickly giving me a warning glance, and the conversation stopped. For the next half hour, both of them – stamping hard on the mat outside to shake the snow off their boots every time they came back – brought in Boris’s luggage from the Niva, now parked outside the house, as well as some bags, sacks and canisters. Sergey suggested leaving some of the stuff in the car – ‘we don’t need it right now, Dad’ – but Boris was adamant, and soon the whole of his motley belongings were piled in the study, where he insisted he wanted to sleep, and refused the bed linen I offered him.

“No need to make up a bed, Anya,” he said, “I’ll be fine on the sofa. We don’t have much time left for sleep anyway. Lock the doors and go to bed, we’ll talk again in the morning.” Then, still in his felt boots, he trotted into the study, leaving a wet trail behind him, and shut the door.

His orders to call it a day were just what was needed. First, without saying a word, Mishka went off to bed and I heard his door shut upstairs. Sergey locked the front door and left for bed, too. I went through every room downstairs, turning off the lights – ever since we moved here, this had become one of my favourite routines. After guests left, or after our usual, peaceful family evening together, I would wait until Sergey and Mishka had gone to bed, and then empty the ashtrays, remove the dishes from the table, adjust the cushions on the sofa, have a last cigarette in a quiet, warm kitchen, and retreat up the stairs, leaving behind the cosy, sleepy darkness. Then I’d stand outside Mishka’s door for a while, and finally enter our airy dark bedroom, take off my clothes, slip under the blanket and cuddle up to Sergey’s warm back.