To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘We do need cans,’ said Lenny, who had also wound down his window and, like the rest of us, was listening in.

  ‘After you pay for your fuel, please come to the bus,’ said the guard. ‘Fifteen hundred roubles a can.’

  ‘For an empty can?’ Boris gasped, reaching over to my window and pressing against me with his shoulder. ‘That’s daylight robbery!’

  The guard turned to us and narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t smiling any more.

  ‘Robbery, mate, would be if we took you out to the field now, shot you, and then drove away in your nice shiny car. Leave now, if you want, and look for another petrol station that’s open. Do you think you’ll find one? I don’t think so. So, do you want spare cans or not?’

  ‘It’s OK, don’t argue with him,’ said Lenny amicably to Boris. Then, to the guard: ‘Yes, we do want the cans. I’ll be right there.’

  God, I thought, let’s hope he’s not going to take out his cash and count off the notes in front of everyone, otherwise we won’t leave this place in one piece. The final words of the trooper in the peaked cap, who had seemed friendly to start with, reminded me that there was nobody about, it was night time, there were at least four people with machine guns and God knows how many more inside the minibus. But luckily Lenny didn’t wave his cash around and instead defused the conversation, which was getting unpleasant, by leaning out of the window and shouting in a cheerful, positive voice, as if there was a queue behind us, we were on our way to a picnic and he was eager to be on the road again, ‘Move over to the pump, Sergey, let’s not hold these people up.’

  As well as the spare cans we had with us we filled six more – four with diesel and two with petrol. There were no more cans in the minibus. After the lucrative deal with the cans, the guards mellowed and allowed us to spend some more time under the lights to make space in the boots of our overloaded cars.

  We all had to get out of our vehicles. Marina freed the girl from the car seat, took her to the edge of the forecourt and started undoing her snowsuit. One of the guards came up to Lenny, who was unloading bundles and boxes with Sergey from the Land Cruiser, and put out his black-gloved hand with something on his open palm:

  ‘Here, the key to the toilet – it’s over there, it’s only for staff use, but that’s OK, tell your girls to take the kids, it’s quite nippy out.’

  Straight away, Marina picked up the girl and disappeared into the blue plastic cabin. Ira refused to go. She froze on the edge of the forecourt, holding the mask over her face with one hand and gripping her son’s shoulder with the other. The man who had brought the key started walking towards her and saying something, but she recoiled and shook her head vigorously. He shrugged and stepped back.

  I desperately wanted to smoke again – somehow I always feel the need to smoke at petrol stations – and, holding an unlit cigarette, I went to the side of the road, where the first guard with the machine gun still stood. When I came up he struck a match and handed it to me, sheltering it in his hands from the wind. I had to pull down the mask and was hoping that Ira wouldn’t notice. For some time we smoked in silence, watching the empty motorway, and then he asked:

  ‘How’s Moscow? The quarantine’s still on, isn’t it?’

  I knew that I was going to lie to this man, who didn’t know anything about the multiple deaths and widespread barriers and guards and who hadn’t the slightest idea what this quiet road would turn into in the next few days. I would lie to him because our three cars, with their doors hanging open, were here, right behind my back; because Marina in her Swiss ski suit had taken her little girl away to the cabin round the corner; and because these armed people had just swapped what was most likely their last chance to save their own lives for a stack of useless pieces of paper which they probably wouldn’t have a chance to use. The wave, I thought, and shrugged and said, with as much indifference in my voice as possible:

  ‘I don’t think so. We’ve come from Zvenigorod.’

  He didn’t turn his head; continuing to watch the road, he asked another question: ‘Where are you going, if it’s not a secret? So many of you—’

  ‘Anya!’ called Sergey loudly. ‘Where are you, come on, it’s time to go!’

  I quickly threw away my unfinished cigarette, and, relieved, started hurrying back towards the car without looking back or saying another word to this man, because I didn’t have an answer to his question.

  It had become much more crowded inside the car. Some of the luggage from the boot had been moved to the back seat, squeezing Mishka into the corner, but everyone perked up after the brief stopover. Happy to take the mask off, Boris announced:

  ‘We’ve got enough for at least half the journey, if not more. It was so lucky we came across this place. Although Lenny’s now skint – you can’t imagine how much they charged him, frigging crisis prices! Screw them! Come on, Anya, the others are already on their way, let’s join them. We’ll get to Tver and then I’ll swap with you. One of us needs some sleep.’

  The other cars were already on the motorway, and I saw in the rear-view mirror that one of the guards, standing by the minibus, was waving at us. The man by the side of the road stepped back to let us pass, caught my eye and smiled faintly at me. As I passed him, I slowed down, wound down the window, looked him straight in the eye and said quickly:

  ‘There’s no Moscow left. Don’t wait till tomorrow, take everything you’ve got and leave. Get as far away as you can, do you hear me?’

  He continued smiling but his eyes looked different now, and then I put my foot on the accelerator and after turning on to the road I turned back to him and said again, hoping the wind wouldn’t blow my words away:

  ‘As far away as you can! Do you hear?’

  For the thirty kilometres to Klin we drove in silence. Perhaps what I’d said to the guard at the petrol station had upset everyone. The silence was only broken by the quiet crackling of the radio. There was still no talking on-air, and if it hadn’t been for the lights in the villages on both sides of the road, it would have been easy to assume that we were the last people to drive on this road, that there was no one left.

  This impression disappeared when we saw Klin. It was the first city we needed to go through, with its crossroads and traffic lights which could slow us down, separate us or make us stop. I straightened up in my seat, trying to stay focused, and gripped the steering wheel better.

  As often happens in small towns, the houses on the outskirts were very rural-looking – single-storey, with sloping roofs and wooden fences. The urban area was a bit further in, but even here the buildings were reassuringly low, surrounded by trees, with orange bus stops, typical small-town street signs and advertising billboards at the side of the road.

  We hadn’t gone more than a kilometre into the town when Mishka suddenly said: ‘Mum, there are people, look!’

  It was true, the streets weren’t empty: there were people about, although not many, and I mechanically started counting them – two, no, three people on one side of the road, two more on the other. They were walking in a peaceful, unworried manner and had no masks on their faces. While I was counting, a lorry with BREAD written along its dirty blue metallic side came out of one of the side streets and followed us for a while until it turned into another side road. We went past a small red church and a bit further away saw a lit-up sign for a McDonald’s, at which Mishka said, with hope in his voice, ‘I really fancy a burger… Can we stop?’

  Despite the closure of the McDonald’s – the car park in front of it was empty, and inside, behind the glass walls, it was unusually dark – and the petrol stations, generously planted here and there, this city was definitely alive. The wave we were running from hadn’t reached it yet, hadn’t made the people hide, hadn’t blocked their roads. This meant that we still had time, and that for us, clearly, it wasn’t too late.

  We reached a crossroads with flashing yellow traffic lights, turned a corner, saw freshly painted, bright road markings on the dry tarmac, and a b
lue sign swam past over our heads: TVER, NOVGOROD, ST PETERSBURG.

  ‘Here we are,’ Boris said, satisfied. ‘The Moscow–St Petersburg motorway.’

  The city hadn’t petered out yet. For some distance there were houses on either side of the motorway and the slip roads were still marked with street names, but the trees gradually increased until the city was finally behind us. As soon as the road became dark again, the long eventful day and the previous sleepless night suddenly caught up with me, and I realised that Lenny’s red lights were becoming blurry because I was exhausted and couldn’t drive another kilometre.

  ‘Boris,’ I said in a low voice, ‘can we swap for a while? I’m afraid I won’t make it to Tver.’ And without waiting for his reply, I started braking and unbuckling my seat belt, not paying attention to the radio, which had started talking anxiously in Sergey’s voice. I fell into a deep sleep as soon as we swapped seats, before our Vitara pulled back out onto the road. I don’t think I even heard Boris shut the driver’s door.

  It often happens on the way home from somewhere. No matter how fast asleep you were in the back seat of a taxi, you’ll wake up exactly one minute before the driver tells you that you’re home and pulls to a stop. I woke up straight away, without any gradual coming to the surface, just lifted my head and opened my eyes, and saw immediately that we were not alone. Cars were going both ways, and the radio was no longer silent. Through the familiar bubbling and whistling noises, we could hear the long-distance drivers talking to each other.

  ‘We’ve passed Emmaus,’ Boris told me, without turning his head. ‘We’re approaching Tver.’

  ‘Quite a crowd,’ I said, looking around. ‘Where did they all come from?’

  When I looked closer, I saw that most cars were parked at the side of the road with their lights on, windows down and doors open. Some of them were empty, and their drivers were walking up and down nearby.

  ‘Why aren’t they moving?’ I asked, but then saw that this endless, motley string of cars was a queue, several hundred metres long, for petrol.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be in that queue right now,’ Boris said. ‘Look how many Moscow number plates there are. I bet those masks won’t help.’

  As soon as we’d left the last petrol station behind, the traffic thinned out – there weren’t many people going the same way as us who could afford to ignore the opportunity to refuel. In spite of that, Sergey, who was driving at the front, braked hard, and we started braking too. The wide road was splitting into two and the few other vehicles started taking the road to the left, because the right fork, leading to the centre of town, was blocked by a familiar concrete barrier, behind which was a low armoured vehicle with massive wheels, lit by the street lights and looking like a thick bar of soap with sharp edges. Above the road sign was a huge yellow placard: ATTENTION DRIVERS. THE ENTRANCE INTO THE CITY OF TVER IS CLOSED. FOLLOW DIVERSION SIGNS, 27 KM.

  ‘I see,’ said Boris pensively as the cars in front sped up after looking at the barrier and we accelerated again. ‘How clever of them. I wonder if they’re going to let us through further on. The diversion idea is good, but the bridge across the Volga is in the city anyway.’

  ‘I don’t believe they can close a federal road,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine what’ll happen if they block the road here? It’ll be chaos.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we’re going to find out,’ he said with a grimace.

  We saw the same kind of yellow signs a few more times. They were set up on the right side of the road near every slip road leading into a town, and under each of them we could see the white blocks of concrete, with silent, motionless armoured vehicles waiting behind them. We went past two or three turnings with signs like this, and then saw the built-up areas of the town. The road was free, there were no barriers, except that under the sign for Tver there was one more sign, a white one, with this message: ATTENTION! NO STOPPING! MINIMUM SPEED 60 KM/H.

  Looking further ahead I saw a whole succession of these banners, mounted on either side of the road every hundred metres or so. We always knew that they would have to let us through, because the city was unlucky enough to be split into two by a monstrous motorway connecting two dying capitals and it wasn’t possible to cut this artery and then deal with hordes of confused, scared, and presumably already infected people who would have to abandon their cars and roam around the area before inevitably pouring into the city in search of food, fuel and shelter – on foot, through the fields, around the closed-off illuminated barriers. And because this city of four hundred thousand people could not be kept isolated behind a wall, there was only one way to protect it: to open the petrol stations and sell fuel to everyone passing through, while at the same time closing the road into the city centre and making sure that those who wanted to cross the bridge to the other bank of the Volga river would cross the town as quickly as possible without slowing down, much less stopping.

  We were in the city, driving through its narrowest part. I checked the speedometer. We were under the sixty-kilometre minimum, because those in front of us couldn’t help slowing down to gaze around. The traffic lights at the crossroads were flashing amber, and in all the side streets leading into the heart of the city, and sometimes even alongside the main road, were the same low, eight-wheeled armoured vehicles. Now, in the light, it was clear that they had small windows like portholes, with raised metal shutters, and on the roofs, between the circular searchlights, were the thick black barrels of machine guns.

  ‘They’ve got a whole battalion here,’ Mishka gasped.

  He was right. There wasn’t a single person in civilian clothes, and there were no police or traffic control patrols, only people in military uniforms and identical respirators covering their faces. They sat in their armoured cars or stood along the road, watching the slow flow of traffic.

  Two kilometres further on we saw a bridge which marked the city limits, and beyond it there were no more men in military uniforms, armoured cars, or white signs with black writing and exclamation marks, apart from one more banner after we crossed the bridge, with the briefest message: GOOD LUCK!

  ‌7

  Singing on a Dark Road

  Tver was behind us now, along with a couple of small villages which had zoomed by on our way – one on the left and the other on the right of the road. We had left the snowy fields behind too, and thick forest appeared on both sides again, but all of us remained silent. Resting my forehead on the cold window, I looked at the dark trees rushing past and tried to work out whether those who had stayed behind in Tver had really succeeded in delaying the catastrophe, and what the final trigger for chaos would be, what would happen first. Will they run out of fuel, I wondered, bled dry by those travelling through, or will those who hid in the city run out of food stocks? How long will the solid, impenetrable checkpoints hold out for? How soon will the soldiers start wondering if it’s worth guarding what’s doomed anyway, leave their posts and point their guns at those they have been protecting? Or maybe none of that would happen, because the stream of people and cars would start thinning out and eventually stop; and the wave which we could vividly imagine coming after us would become so shallow that it wouldn’t be able to break through the cordon built to stop it, and the small town would survive. It would be an island, a centre which would allow the people hiding there to sit out the worst, and then, gradually, resume normal life.

  ‘Are you awake, Anya? You need to get some sleep,’ Boris said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘We haven’t slept for two days, neither of us, and if we carry on staring into the darkness, we’ll have to stop for the night somewhere, which is foolish when you have two drivers.’

  He was right, but I didn’t want to sleep at all, maybe because I’d had so much sleep during these last few blurred and aimless weeks we’d spent waiting for something, and I was sick of sleeping and being out of it all, of being a spare. Or maybe it was due to the short break I’d had before Tver.

  I looked at Boris. He didn’t look well. He’s s
ixty-five, I thought, he hasn’t slept a wink for forty-eight hours, and before that he spent half the night in the car, driving to us from Ryazan. I wondered how long he would last at this rate before his heart gave out or he simply fell asleep behind the wheel.

  ‘Let’s do it like this,’ I said, trying not to sound worried. ‘You get some sleep now and I’ll drive. How far are we from Novgorod, about four hundred kilometres? The road’s quiet during the night, it’s easy. But when we get closer to St Petersburg it’ll be harder for me, and that’s when we’ll swap again.’

  To my relief, Boris didn’t argue – he was probably not sure himself that he’d be able to drive till dawn without a rest. He glanced at me quickly, picked up the microphone with his right hand and told Sergey:

  ‘We need a break. Pull over, Sergey, but find a good place first.’

  We didn’t have to wait long; there were hardly any cars on the road, maybe because most of them were still stuck in the long queue for petrol. Sergey soon saw a place: there was a forest that started a few steps from the road, and the snow didn’t seem deep. Everyone was glad to be able to get out and stretch their numb arms and legs. As soon as all the cars stopped, we got out on to the side of the road and immediately sank into the slushy snow.

  ‘Girls go left, boys go right,’ Lenny ordered cheerfully and disappeared among the trees; Mishka followed him, lifting his legs up high so as not to sink in the snow.

  When Marina’s white snowsuit disappeared in the darkness (‘Can you watch Dasha – she’s asleep, I don’t want to wake her up’), Sergey, Boris and I were left waiting by the side of the road. Boris politely walked away, turned to the road and started smoking, and I opened the flaps of Sergey’s jacket and wrapped my arms tightly around him to feel his warmth, standing still without saying a word, wanting to be close to him and breathe in his smell for as long as possible.

  ‘How are you, baby?’ he asked, pressing his lips to my temple.