To the Lake

3 FIRST BLOOD

I woke up and looked at the window, trying to work out what time it was, but because it was one of those grey, semi-dark, November mornings, it was impossible to tell whether it was morning or afternoon. The other half of the bed next to me was empty, and for some time I lay listening: the house was quiet. Nobody had woken me up, and for a few moments I was fighting the temptation to close my eyes and go to sleep again, as I’d often done over the previous few days, but then I made myself get up, drape a dressing gown over my shoulders and come downstairs. I was right – the house was empty. The kitchen smelt of Boris’s cigarettes again, and amongst various breakfast leftovers there was a cafetière, still warm; I poured myself a cup of coffee and started gathering the plates from the table – and at that moment I heard the front door slam, and Boris entered the kitchen.

“The car’s given up the ghost,” he said in a rather triumphant tone, as if he was glad that his expectations had been fulfilled. “We’ll have to dump the old jalopy here. Good job you both have 4x4s. I don’t know what we’d do if you had some kind of girly yogurt pots on wheels.”

“Good morning, Boris,” I said.“Where are Sergey and Mishka?”

“We didn’t want to wake you, Anya,” he came up and put his hand on my shoulder, “you looked so exhausted last night. Come on, drink up your coffee, we’ve got a lot to do, you and I. I sent Sergey and Mishka to do some shopping – don’t worry, they won’t get any further than Zvenigorod, not that they need to, anyway – we’ve got a long list but we can get everything locally. If we’re lucky and our neighbours haven’t worked out yet what they really need to stock up on, instead of vermouth and pitted olives, we’ll manage to get everything we need in a couple of days and leave.”

“So where could we go?”

“The most important thing is to leave here. You’re too close to the city, Anya, and it’s best to be as far away as possible. Sergey and I talked earlier and decided that to start with we’ll go to my place, in Levino, – after all it’s two hundred kilometres from Moscow, a small village, far from the road, there’s a river, woods, good hunting prospects; we’ll go there first, and see.”

In daylight, in the usual comfort of our kitchen – the smell of coffee, plates on the table, bread crumbs, Mishka’s orange hoodie draped over the back of a chair, – everything that had been discussed at this table last night seemed so untrue, so surreal. I heard a car going past… I imagined Boris’s pokey, dark, two-roomed house, which would somehow have to accommodate us all after our sensible, comfortable world, but I had no energy to argue with him.

“What shall I do?” I asked. He had probably guessed what I was thinking by the expression on my face, and was relieved that I didn’t object.

“Don’t worry, Anya, it’ll be like going for a ride in the country; it’s not as if you had plans, is it,” he said amicably, “and if by any chance I’m wrong, you can always come back. Let’s go and see where you keep your warm clothes, I’ve compiled a list – try and think if you want to take anything else.”

Within an hour, our bedroom floor was covered in tidy piles of clothes – warm jackets, woollen socks, jumpers, underwear. Boris was particularly pleased with the solid sheepskin-lined boots, which Sergey had bought for both Mishka and me before we went to Lake Baikal. ‘You guys are not completely hopeless!’ he declared, holding them up. I kept bringing clothes from the wardrobe and he sorted them out; from time to time I would come to the window and look at the road – it was getting darker and I was eager for Sergey and Mishka to come home soon. The light went on in the house opposite. When I came up to the window again I noticed a man’s silhouette on the balcony. It was Lenny, coming out for a smoke, as Marina wouldn’t let him light up indoors. When he saw me he waved, and I thought, again, that I must finally buy some black-out curtains – when we moved to the countryside we weren’t prepared for the fact that our neighbours could see everything happening in our house, until Lenny, in his usual unceremonious manner said to Sergey: “Since you guys moved here it’s been a lot more fun to smoke on the balcony. It’s bloody great to live next door to newlyweds!” I waved back, and heard Boris say behind my back:

“That’s enough clothes, Anya, let’s see what kind of medicines you’ve got.”

I was about to turn away from the window when I saw a green military-style truck stopping near Lenny’s automatic gate.

The driver was a man in a camouflage overall and a black beanie. I could see his white mask through the windscreen. The door banged and another man jumped out of the truck. He was dressed identically to the first one and had a machine-gun hanging over his shoulder. He dropped his unfinished cigarette, crushed it out on the pavement with the tip of his boot, then came up to Lenny’s gate and pulled it. It didn’t give, it was locked. I looked up at Lenny and pointed down at the truck but he’d already noticed it and was now closing the balcony door. Half a minute later the gate opened, and I saw Lenny in the gateway. He had a jacket thrown over his shoulders. I saw him stretch his hand to greet the man in camouflage, who ignored the gesture and stepped back waving his machine-gun towards Lenny, as if ordering him to move out of the way. The canvas cover of the truck opened, the side dropped, and another man jumped down, also wearing a mask and carrying a machine-gun. He didn’t come up to the gate, but stayed near the truck.

For some time, nothing happened. Lenny just stood in the frame of the gate. He retracted his hand but carried on smiling. They were talking, and I could only see the back of the man in camouflage.

“What’s going on, Anya?” Boris called from inside. “Are they back?” And at that moment the man with Lenny suddenly made several quick steps towards him and pushed him in the chest with the muzzle of the machine-gun, and they both disappeared behind the gate. Seconds later, another man who had jumped out of the truck followed them inside. I couldn’t see anything behind Lenny’s three-meter high fence but I heard Lenny’s dog barking and then a strange, short, dry bang which I immediately realised was a gunshot, although it sounded nothing like those rolling echoing volleys from Hollywood films and Mishka’s computer games. I dashed to open the window, not realising why I was doing it, but somehow at that moment it was important for me to look out and see what was going on. Another man wearing a mask jumped out of the truck and ran through the gate, and the next thing I felt was a heavy hand on my shoulder, pulling me back and nearly making me fall over.

“Anya, get away from the window and don’t even think of leaning out.”

Boris, swearing, ran downstairs to the ground floor. I heard his heavy steps on the stairs and then the door of the study slammed shut. I was scared to stay alone upstairs, and ducked and followed him, but as soon as I reached the stairs I saw him running back up. He was holding a rectangular black plastic case, which, swearing under his breath, he was struggling to open while running. I pressed myself against the wall and let him go past me back to the bedroom and then followed him, as if drawn by a magnet, back to the window.

Without turning to me he waved his arm furiously at me, and I stepped back and froze behind him, peering over his shoulder. I still couldn’t see anything, but through the open window I heard Marina’s high-pitched screaming, and two men came out through the gate frame. They were walking slowly, without hurrying, carrying Lenny’s huge flat screen TV. The cables were dragging behind them on the snow; one of them had a pearl-grey fur coat over his shoulder, and something else – I couldn’t quite see – I think it was a handbag. While these two were messing about near the truck, putting their loot inside, the third one came out. He stood there for a split second, holding a machine-gun pointed inside Lenny’s gate, and then suddenly turned towards our house. I had a feeling he was looking me straight in the eye. For a second I thought it was Semionov, the young boy with the dark pock marks where the mask didn’t cover his face, the one Sergey and I had seen a week earlier at the quarantine cordon. I automatically stepped towards the window to be able to see him better and tripped over an open plastic case, and then Boris, who stood near the window, turned to me and shouted angrily:

“Anya, fuck it, will you move away now?!”

I collapsed on to the floor and then finally looked up at him – he was holding a long hunting rifle, which smelt strongly of gun oil; he cocked the trigger and, squatting, stuck the barrel out through the open window, resting his elbow on the window sill.

I heard a dull, metal thud which sounded as if ‘Semionov’ was trying to kick our gate down. During the two years that we’d been living here, we never got round to getting a proper bell at the gate, and now I was really pleased we hadn’t. People who want to break in shouldn’t be given the opportunity to ring the doorbell. To hear a sweet chime – I particularly liked the one which sounded like somebody hitting a copper plate with a little hammer, ‘bo-bong’ – would be totally inappropriate now, after the gunshot, after Marina’s screaming, after what I had seen from the window; kicking against the thin metal gate fitted the picture better. Boris moved but didn’t lean out of the window – instead he pressed himself against the wall and shouted: “Hey, you lot, look up!” and quickly freeing his hand from holding the rifle, he tapped on the window glass.

He probably managed to get the attention of at least one of the men – I was sitting on the floor and couldn’t see anything – because the banging stopped. Waiting a moment to make sure they were listening, Boris continued:

“Now listen, boy, you’ll have to fire your gun, which you’re holding as if it’s a spade, and shoot through the thick timber, and I’m very much afraid that you might miss first time round, you might also miss second time, too. And with this sweetheart,” he waved the muzzle in the air, “I’ll make a hole in your skull in one go; and if I’m lucky – and I’m normally lucky – I’ll drill a hole in the petrol tank of your truck, and you won’t be able to take home that loot from the house across the road! And to start with, I’ll probably take out your driver. Now, we don’t want any of that to happen, do we?”

The air was still outside – it was so quiet. A snowflake drifted in through the window, then another, and they circled in the air in front of me, landing on the floor near my feet and starting to melt. Then I heard the truck door slam and the engine start. In half a minute, after the noise from the vehicle died down, Boris and I, without saying a word, jumped to our feet and rushed downstairs, then to the front door, and then across the snow-covered front garden. I didn’t have time to put my boots on and sank into the snow up to my ankles. Hurrying and missing the path, we flung the gate open and dashed across the road to Lenny’s house.

A few meters from the gate, to the left of the clean-swept path, we saw Lenny’s beloved pet dog, a beautiful white Asian shepherd, lying awkwardly with her front legs tucked under her, as if she had been stopped halfway through a jump. She was very obviously dead, and the snow around her was red and porous, like the flesh of a late summer watermelon. Lenny, with blood on his cheek – some his own, some the dog’s – was squatting next to her. When he heard us, he lifted up his head with a look of childish confusion on his face. I came up closer and half-whispered:

“Lenny…”

He put a finger to his lips for some reason and said, plaintively:

“Look what they’ve done,” and sat on the snow; he lifted the large, heavy, earless head, put it onto his knees and started stroking it with both hands. The dog’s head tilted backwards, the jaws opened slightly, and her pearly pink tongue fell out and dangled between the snow-white teeth.

I crouched by him and squeezed his shoulder while he buried his face in the thick, light fur and started swaying from side to side as if rocking the motionless dog’s body to sleep. At this moment the heavy wrought-iron door of their house opened and Marina stood there. She was pale and tearful, looked at Boris and me and without stepping out said:

“Anya, what’s going on, they took the fur coat and the telly, did you see them?”

“Be grateful, young woman, that they didn’t take you instead, and didn’t dump you somewhere in the middle of the woods about forty kilometres from here,” said Boris. “Pitiful idiots, as if they needed that shitty fur coat.”

Lenny lifted his head and looked at Boris, who was wearing his felt boots, a jumper of indeterminate colour with a stretched collar, and was still gripping the heavy hunting rifle, and said respectfully: “Wow, that means business.” Boris looked down at the long, scary object in his hands and said: “It does, yes. Only it’s not loaded. Damn it, when are we going to realise that things have changed for good, I wonder?”