To the Lake

4 NEW REALITIES

For a reason which escapes me, we all thought at the same time that our wooden house, more elegant than solid, was safer to be in than Lenny’s brick fortress. This was now defiled by intruders: its door wide open, an upside down coffee table, a handful of scattered coins on the floor, boots and clothes dispersed throughout, the dirty footprints on the mosaic tiles and a dead dog on the snow outside, whereas so far we had managed to protect the fragile security of our place. And that’s why Lenny, now roused from his torpor, went over to Marina, who brought their little sleeping daughter, wrapped in a blanket – Boris and I were waiting outside, unmoving – and without putting their coats on they both ran across the snow-sprinkled road between our houses, and would have left their gate flung open, as well as their front door, if Boris hadn’t shouted to them: “Hey, whatever your name is, Lenny, you can’t leave it like this, you’ll scare the neighbours.” And Lenny stopped, blinked his eyes for a moment, and went back to close the door and the gate.

Half an hour later, the four of us were sitting in our lounge: I, Boris and Lenny, whose purple cheek was swelling up in front of our very eyes and who still had a face of an upset child, along with Marina, who, for the first time in my memory, wasn’t looking like an aloof and perfect beauty: her hair was a mess, her eyelids swollen, her hands shook. Boris, squatting near the fireplace, was trying to start the fire, and the chubby-cheeked little girl, dressed in pink pyjamas with teddy bears, had just woken up and now sat on the sofa, blinking. I went to the kitchen and fetched the bottle which Sergey and I had started the night before. Lenny’s eyes lit up with gratitude, he downed a glass of whisky in one go and pushed the empty glass back to me, to be filled up again.

“Pour me one, too, Anya,” Marina said. She sat next to Dasha on the sofa, and without letting go of the little girl’s small pink heel, lifted the glass to her lips. I could hear her teeth clatter on the edge of the glass as she drank it all up, not wincing once.

Finally, the wood flared up, crackling. Boris closed the glass door of the stove, turned to the table and looked at all of us with an expression of contentment. I caught myself thinking that, perhaps now, after a long break, he finally felt that his son needed him, that he liked it that all of us grown up, successful people, who had never asked him for advice, had turned into helpless children, now safe under his wing. I also realised that during the whole time since he had turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the night, not one of us had thanked him.

As if reading my mind, Lenny put his glass noisily down on the table and said: “Looks like you took the situation more seriously than we did; what an idiot I am – opened the door to them, thought maybe they needed water, or got lost, perhaps. If it wasn’t for you…”

“Boris,” said Boris ceremoniously and stretched out his hand to Lenny, who hurriedly rose from his seat to shake it.

“So if it wasn’t for you, Boris, I’d have gone the same way as my dog. I didn’t even have time to unleash her – just went and opened the door, silly turd that I am, and wanted to shake his hand.”

He grabbed the bottle and poured himself another glass, then put it back, but then took it again and poured out one more glass which he moved towards Boris. I noticed Marina’s eager eyes and moved my glass and hers towards Lenny – it was a coquettish gesture, the sort of thing I might do at a party, and I immediately became ashamed of it – it dawned on me that everything didn’t rotate around us women any more. For a moment I thought that both glasses would remain unnoticed by Lenny, but he automatically filled them as well, even though he didn’t look at us. He was examining the hunting rifle, which was standing against the wall, with the muzzle upward. When he had come in Boris had loaded it and left it like this so he could quickly reach out and grab it if need be.

“Do you have a licence for it? You were just like Natty Bumppo, Boris, when you stuck it out of the window. I mean, they wouldn’t have gone otherwise…” He carried on talking but I was thinking that I hadn’t expected Lenny, with his square head and bawdy jokes, to know Fenimore Cooper. I couldn’t picture him playing Cowboys and Indians, as the Pathfinder, or Chingachgook. I looked up at him and heard him say: “She was a super dog, I got her from the best breeder I could find, as a guard dog. I had to escort our nanny past her, and my guests were afraid to step out for a fag. Marina moaned that we had a pet crocodile, but the dog was very clever – she knew who she mustn’t touch. Dasha could stick her fingers in her mouth. She never did nothing wrong. And they came and shot her, without a thought, as if she was some kind of scum…” His lips suddenly trembled.

I looked at him and felt tears welling up, which hadn’t flowed the whole day, since yesterday morning, when they were all sat here on the sofa (our honeymoon seashells in Dasha’s chubby mouth, Marina, still with perfect hair and with morning make-up on, Lenny, tapping his hand on the sofa). Suddenly they were rolling down my face – hot, abundant – but I didn’t even have time to sob, and nobody was looking at me anyway, because we all heard a car pulling up near our gate.

The next second was so intense that it could have lasted a minute. I saw Marina hug her daughter and sit down on the floor, crouching down; the rifle, which has just been propped up against the wall, like part of a set for a staged photograph, was in Boris’s hand, and he himself flew up the stairs to the window; Lenny disappeared into the kitchen and came out holding a knife. It became apparent in the light that the wide, dangerous blade was awkwardly covered in some kind of grease, as if somebody had been cutting ham for breakfast; I was the only person who hadn’t moved and I felt uneasy because I had no idea what exactly I needed to do – and at this moment Boris called from upstairs and said, in a relieved tone:

“The guys are back.”

For a while we were all busy parking the car in the driveway and unloading it – carrying big white rustling plastic bags, as if preparing for a grand family gathering. Sergey had brought in the last box and put it on the floor in the corridor. “Don’t take them any further,” said Boris, “leave them here, we’ll have to load them back into the car anyway.” Something clinked in the box, and Sergey said:

“We got almost everything, apart from petrol. There was a kilometre-long queue at the petrol station. We wanted to get home before dark. We’ll go again tomorrow.”

“That’s bad,” Boris said, “but you’re right, it’s not worth going now. We’ll have to wait till morning.”

“Oh it’s OK, Dad, we left a week for getting ready, and we’ve already got most things from the list – provisions, medicines – we only need petrol now. We’ll take our cans and nip out tomorrow. We’ll have to go round a few petrol stations as the guys in the queue were saying that they were rationing the petrol per customer. And the nearest guns and ammunition shop is in Krasnogorsk, and the other one’s in Volokolamsk, I think, but that’s not on our way, so perhaps we can buy some cartridges in Ryazan, near you?”

They came into the lounge. Sergey had a sheet of paper in his hand, covered on both sides with Boris’s compact writing. Mishka followed, with the keys to Sergey’s car. We hadn’t let him drive on a big road yet, but he went round the village as much as he liked and was pleased every time he got to drive the car into the driveway.

“We won’t buy anything there,” Boris said after a pause. “I doubt if we will find anything in Ryazan by the time we get there.”

Only now did Sergey raise his eyes from reading the list, looked around at us all and finally noticed Lenny’s bruised and swollen cheek, and the knife, which he was still gripping in his hand.

“What on earth has been happening here?” he asked after a pause, and Lenny, shy under his gaze, quickly put the knife down near his empty glass, and the blade clinked on the polished surface of the table. He wanted to say something, but Boris was first, and said what I’d been thinking since we came back to the house, but was afraid to say out loud:

“It’s not good, Sergey. We’ve had visitors. Judging by the vehicle they had and by their uniform, the units which patrolled the city have disbanded. They don’t have anyone to report to anymore, so they decided to do a bit of looting. We’re fine, don’t worry, it could have been worse,” he carried on, glancing at Lenny, “I hope I’m wrong, but in my view, this only means one thing: the city’s dead.”

Sergey sat down and his face became pensive, rather than worried.

“Damn!” he said, “I’m glad we didn’t venture out to Krasnogorsk, which is just outside the circular, that’s probably a right old mess there now.”

“So what’s up?” Lenny suddenly said, “what’s the plan? Are we going to hold the fort here? I see you loading up on food, cartridges, all this shit, that’s cool, only what’re we gonna do next time, when they come here in a tank?”

Sergey and Boris exchanged glances, and while they were thinking of a reply, I was looking at plump, loud Lenny, who had always irritated me with his banal remarks and his noisy laughter at his own jokes, his ability to fill any space with his presence and dominate in any company whether there were raised eyebrows and peeved faces or not. I surprised myself by saying:

“We can’t stay, Lenny, it’ll soon be a nightmare here. So we’re leaving, we’ve got almost everything we need, and I think you should come with us.”

“Sure,” Lenny said quickly. “Where you going?”

“My place in Levino is not an option, after all,” said Boris, with regret. “You’re twenty kilometres from the main road here, and look how quickly they got this far – I was hoping that all these elite villa communities on the New Riga road would keep them occupied for a bit longer. My village is quite a distance from Ryazan – but it’s only about six kilometres to the main road, we’d gain a couple of weeks max, and then they’d catch up with us. We need to find some dense forest, with nothing around. Wish we were in Siberia; it’s hard to find a place like that anywhere within reach, damn it.”

“Forest!” Sergey suddenly shouted and jumped up from his seat. “Of course, what an idiot I am. Anya, I know where we’re going.” He rushed out of the lounge and, after tripping over one of the rustling bags, which were piled in the corridor, disappeared through the study door. I could hear him, swearing under his breath, rummaging through the books. Something heavy fell with a thump, and in a moment he came out holding a book, which he plonked on the table, hurriedly pushing the glasses out of the way to one side. His face was alive, and all of us, even Marina and her little girl, who hadn’t made a single sound from the moment they stepped over the threshold of our house, leaned over the table to see what Sergey had found, – a book with a green cover with big white letters on it: ‘Road map. North-West Russia’.

“I don’t understand,” said Marina in a complaining voice.

“Lake Vongozero, Anya, remember? I’ve been trying to persuade you to come there with me for the last three years,” Sergey sounded excited. “Dad, we were there before Anton was born.” He grabbed the road atlas and started flicking through the pages, but Boris reached over and stopped him.

“Brilliant idea, son,” he said quietly. “I don’t think there’s a better place. We’re going to Karelia.”

“There’s a house there, Anya, I told you, remember? A house on a lake. There’s an island in the middle of the lake, you can only get to it by boat.” Sergey started rustling pages again, but I already remembered the surface of the lake, grey and shiny, like quicksilver, and the faded, almost transparent reeds growing in the water, several mounds of scattered islands, overgrown with dark forests: this was the leaden, bleak Karelian September, which, as soon as I looked at it in the photos Sergey showed me, left me permanently scared – it seemed so cold and alien compared with our warm, sunny, orange and blue autumn. ‘And in the winter!’ I thought, ‘What must that be like?’ Even here, I’d try not to look out the window at the slippery black branches and grey sky. I’m always cold no matter how warmly I wrap up. Sergey would tell me ‘you’re like a badger inside a burrow, come on, go out, you’ve been in for three days’. ‘I don’t want to’, I’d say, ‘I hate the cold and the winter. I keep it away from me with the fire and cognac.’

But how much cognac will I be able to take with me? How long will I be able to store the warmth in me – the warmth of our climate, which I can’t live without – in a small house of weathered wood, soaked with the damp of the glacial lake?

“There’s no electricity there, Sergey,” I added. I knew that it was pointless to protest, that we really didn’t have anywhere else to go, but I couldn’t help saying something, it was important for me to voice my fear of this place. “And there’re only two rooms. It’s really small, your hunting lodge.”

“There’s a wood stove, Anya. And trees everywhere. And a whole lake of pure water. As well as fish, fowl, mushrooms and a forest full of lingonberry. And you know what else, the most important thing of all?”

“I know, yes,” I said wearily, “There isn’t. A single. Sole. There.”

So the matter was settled.

What I didn’t quite expect was Lenny’s excitement over our imminent escape. He looked like a child who’d been allowed to join a grown-ups’ party at the last minute. Within five minutes he was talking louder than everyone else, poking the map with his finger – ‘Let’s not go through St Petersburg, there’s bound to be chaos there’, pulling the shopping list, which everyone forgot about, from under Sergey’s glass, ‘potatoes – ok, we’ve got three sacks in the basement. Marina, you’ll need to check, we’ve got plenty of pulses, I think, and I’ll buy more tinned meat, I’ll go first thing tomorrow’. And then suddenly he became silent, frowning, like a child who didn’t find a present under the Christmas tree. ‘I haven’t got a proper gun,’ he said, ‘I’ve only got one that fires rubber bullets’. Sergey said comfortingly ‘I’ll give you a gun, I’ve got three’, and they sat together, heads down, – Boris, Sergey and Lenny – talking away, Mishka next to them, with burning bright eyes, caught up in the general excitement. I poured the rest of the whisky into the two remaining glasses and gave one of them to Marina, who grabbed it with her free hand (the other holding her daughter), as if she’d been following my every move. Our eyes met and I saw in this withdrawn woman, whom I barely knew, with whom I’d hardly exchanged a word in the two years that we had lived here, I saw the same kind of emotion in her eyes, which was suffocating me, too: a helpless, paralysing fear of what had happened to us, and of what was unquestionably still awaiting us ahead.

An hour later, we all decided to go to bed – nobody was hungry, so with no cooking to do Marina and I felt rather useless. I tried to assert my authority by raising my voice to Mishka to send him to bed, and after a short protest he went gloomily upstairs. The others followed, still talking away. Lenny bent down to pick up the little girl from Marina’s lap, but she suddenly pulled her to her chest and said, her voice sounding surprisingly brusque:

“Anya, can we stay here for the night? I don’t want to go back there.”

We all had the same thought at the same time and looked out of the window at the black sky, the snow glittering in the street lights, an empty road disappearing in the woods. I imagined the ransacked house opposite, the beautiful dead dog, lying in the red snow – the blood stains had probably become black in the dark, and the dead dog’s white fur would be covered with frost now.

In the sudden silence Sergey said:

“That’s a good idea, Marina. You should stay here. Dad’ll sleep in the lounge, and you can take the study. I also think that we should take turns and watch the road. If they dared to come here during the day, it would be daft to assume they’ll spare us at night.”

Sergey volunteered to be the first to keep guard and he went upstairs to collect his guns from the metal cabinet, which was inside the dressing room. Boris started moving his sleeping bag from the study into the lounge and Marina went to bathe the little girl. I didn’t go with her, because they wouldn’t need me, but just said, ‘you can find towels in the cabinet in the bathroom’, and then stood in the middle of the lounge, watching them go. The child, like a pet monkey on a chain, was peeping out from behind her back, turning her head to me, blurry-eyed – a shapeless, plump cheek, resting on Marina’s shoulder. I thought to myself, again, how strangely inactive this tiny, plain little girl was. If it had been Mishka when he was little, he would have explored the whole room and climbed onto everyone’s lap. As I was trying to remember if I had ever heard this little girl speak, Lenny, who stood behind me, said: “She doesn’t say a word, not even ‘mummy’. We’ve seen many doctors and they all say ‘you need to wait’, so we’re waiting. But she doesn’t say a word, just looks, little dumbo.”

I turned to him. He was standing near the window and peering to one side, as if trying to see his own house in the dark, even though it wasn’t visible from the window of our lounge. Then he turned to me and said: “I’d go and bury the dog, but Marina would panic. Anya, please find us some bedding,” and he set off towards the study, and I followed him, almost glad that at last somebody needed my help.