To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  I could see hesitation in his eyes and was about to say something else, but then another man came up behind him, also with a machine gun over his shoulder:

  ‘Semionov, what’s up?’ he said, and I tried to catch the men’s eyes so that they wouldn’t look at each other and decide not to let us through, and I started talking in a rush, before they had a chance to make the wrong decision:

  ‘Guys, please let me in, I only need to collect my mum, she’s there on her own, my husband will wait here, I’ll be back in an hour, you don’t even have to let him sit in your car – Sergey, you’ve got a warm jacket, haven’t you? – just walk about for an hour, I’ll be quick.’

  The older one stepped forward, pushing aside the young Semionov, whose cigarette was almost finished, and said, almost shouting:

  ‘It’s forbidden! I’ve got my orders. Turn around right now! Go back to your car!’ He waved his machine gun, and, as with the young man, it wasn’t a threat, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything else because Semionov, throwing the cigarette butt on the ground with regret, said, almost sympathetically:

  ‘There’s barbed wire all round the inner ring road, and another cordon. Even if we let you in, you wouldn’t make it through there.’

  ‘Come on, baby, let’s go, they won’t let us, it won’t work,’ Sergey said, taking me by the hand and forcing me to come away. ‘Thank you, guys, got it,’ he said to the two guards, dragging me behind him, and I knew that it was pointless to argue, but I was still thinking there must be something I could tell them so that they let me in, and nothing, nothing came into my head, and when we got into the car, Sergey opened and closed the glove box again, and before we drove off he told me: ‘This isn’t the police or a road patrol. Look at their uniforms, Anya, they’re from the regular army,’ and while he was turning the car round and the snow was rustling under the wheels of our car, I took the phone and dialled my mum’s number, the first one in the ‘M’ list. She answered straight away and said, ‘Hello, Anya, what’s going on?’

  And I said, almost calmly, ‘It didn’t work, Mum. We’ll have to wait. We’ll need to think of another plan.’

  For a few moments she didn’t say anything. I could only hear her breathing, as clearly as if she was sitting next to me. Then she said, ‘Of course, sweetheart.’

  ‘I’ll call you later, OK?’

  I hung up and started rummaging through my pockets with a fury that lifted me from the seat. We were on our way back, the lit part of the road was soon going to end, I could already see the border of the yellow street lamps and the twinkling lights of the luxury villages further ahead. Mishka was waiting for us at home.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ I said to Sergey. ‘I’ve left my cigarettes at home!’ Then I burst into tears.

  Exactly one week later, on Tuesday, 17 November, Mum died.

  ‌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 begin to forget it, it comes back. I need 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 almost there, I realise I’m late, that my mum isn’t there any more and I’ll never see her again. I am woken by my own cries, my face wet with tears, frightening the man sharing my bed, and whenever he tries to comfort me and calm me down, I fight and push his arms away, deafened by my unsurmountable loneliness.

  On 19 November 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, which Sergey would make me take every time I couldn’t stop crying, I would leave my room and set off to find the two remaining people 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 adults’ problems, which drove me to paroxysms of crying. 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, and so is the internet. We can only get satellite news, 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 sitting an exam. He was accompanied by Marina, our beautiful neighbour, and her plump husband Lenny, Sergey’s billiards partner. They had come over from their house opposite, a three-storey stone monstrosity with tasteless turrets. Their little daughter was sitting on the floor near the sofa, and had a bowl of 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 bowl.

  Two days of sleeping pills and crying must have taken their toll because Marina, looking me over (even early in the morning her make-up 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 quickly as if it was we who were sitting in Marina’s lounge and our child dribbling on their things. ‘Guys, something bad happen—’

  Before he could finish the sentence – I don’t know why, but it was important that I didn’t let him finish – I went over 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.’

  ‘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; he had a billiards 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 had 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’d said to Sergey, and he said, ‘You know, baby, you shouldn’t be so fussy. 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 the news on CNN 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 on the edge of the coffee table, not wanting to sit next to them, then turned to the TV. The sound from the television almost drowned out 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 when there was dead silence, I turned to them. Marina was now frozen on the floor, clutch
ing a wet seashell which she’d excavated from Dasha’s mouth, and Lenny was holding his daughter in his arms, his hand over her mouth and his face serious. I had never seen him look so tense. Mishka sat quite still, next to Lenny, looking like a Pierrot at a carnival with his thin face and long nose and the corners of his mouth turned down and eyebrows raised. 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 away from 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 fine-boned, well-bred Marina but had small close-set eyes, chubby white cheeks and a little pointed chin.

  ‘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 are 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 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 was holding the little girl in his arms and Marina was looking puzzled: ‘Did I say anything wrong? Did anything happen? Do you need any help?’), I was trying to catch my breath. I felt a lump in my throat and caught Mishka’s eye – Don’t tell them, don’t tell them, be quiet. 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 ominously creaking under his weight, grabbed my shoulder and whispered hotly into my collarbone:

  ‘What’s going to happen now, Mum?’

  ‘Well, we’re sure as hell going to break this coffee table.’

  Mishka immediately burst out laughing. He’s done this since he was very little; it’s always been easy to make him laugh. Whatever the problem, it’s the easiest way to calm him down when he’s upset.

  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 – 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 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 hearth and brought a bottle of whisky from the kitchen, along 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 in 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 any more; we just sat and looked at the screen and it briefly felt like a regular night in, as if we were watching a boring film about the end of the world, with an overly drawn-out introduction. 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 Mishka: ‘You were right, baby. It’s not going to end any time soon.’

  The noise that had woken me 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 on the sofa behind, 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 endless seconds, 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, 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 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 realised how insecure this glass protection felt, as if our lounge and the whole house behind it, with all our lovely 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 life, 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:

  ‘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 awoke, 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 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’d met three years ago, Sergey had introduced me to his father. He had waited about six months after his ex-wife had finally loosened her grip on him, the post-divorce fervour had calmed down and our life had started becoming normal. Sergey’s dad won my heart 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 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 this was simply because he didn’t have a decent suit. A long time ago, to the surprise of his friends and family, he had given 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 been 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.