To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  The dog followed me.

  It was only a few days later that we all understood I wasn’t going to die. Those days blurred into one and got muddled up in my memory, turning into one endless dull dream where my body switched from being hot to cold, thirsty to nauseous. Sometimes I saw the ceiling and the walls closing in on me again, like on that night in the attic, and it seemed that I only needed to close my eyes and the room would shrink to microscopic size and crush me; but at other times I could see that everything was in its place again, dreamy indifference replaced fear, and I found myself lying with my eyes open, looking at a sleeping bag zip pull near my cheek or a pile of woodchips on the floor near the stove.

  One thing I knew for sure; Sergey was in my room well before we realised I wouldn’t die. I opened my eyes and saw him sitting next to me on the bed, supporting my head with one hand and pressing a mug to my lips with the other. He didn’t have a mask on, but neither of us spoke of being cautious again, partly because there was no point any more. Throughout the whole time I believed I was dying, and then when it became clear I wasn’t, I was thinking about one thing: both Sergey and I had each made a decision at some point. He had taken off his mask and come into the room, and I had come back into the house and had let him stay with me.

  That was why, three days later, when the exhausting fever started to go down and I could sit in bed and hold a cup of tea, I didn’t ask him a single question. I just couldn’t, because if I’d asked him anything, if I’d spoken to him during the first few hours we realised I wouldn’t die, I would definitely have said it out loud. That’s why the whole time he sat next to me on the bed – readjusting my pillow, watching me, telling me I was going to be OK, that my temperature was down, telling me, ‘You’re getting better, Anya, I told you you’re not going to die,’ when he was smiling, and jumping to his feet to get me something, and pacing the floor, and sitting next to me again to check if my forehead was hot – all that time I was sitting in bed sipping hot tea, not saying a word, and trying not to look him in the eye. Then somebody scratched on the door from the other side and Sergey said, ‘Anya, you’ve got a visitor, you probably can’t remember, you let him in last night and now he keeps coming in and lying on the floor in your room, sometimes he disappears for a few hours but always comes back, and I don’t even close the gate any more.’ I turned my head and saw him. His fur was completely yellow, like a lion’s, and his eyes were yellow too, like amber; I’d never seen eyes like that in a dog. He simply came in and sat on the floor, very straight, and stared at me with his yellow eyes, and I stared at him, until I realised I could finally talk again.

  We never found out what my illness was. Was it the virus, deadly for so many people but sparing me for some reason, or was it the result of stress, several sleepless nights and hypothermia? That’s why during the next couple of days nobody dared come and see me, even Mishka. I wouldn’t have let him anyway; I could make that kind of decision again now I knew I wasn’t going to die.

  During those days Sergey and I would spend hours in front of the fire. He moved my bed to the central room, where the big stove was, and we sat in silence, like two old people who had lived together for such a long time that they had nothing more to say to each other. This was so unlike us in our previous life, where we had never been silent for so long, that every now and then Sergey or I would start a conversation about something insignificant, something not worth talking about, just not to be silent; these were strange conversations with lots of awkward pauses and clumsy attempts to change the subject because no matter what we talked about – and we had a lot of time and nowhere to rush to – we ended up running into the same wall, thick and impenetrable, which made us stumble over our words and look away. It turned out that we were completely unready to remember details of that life we’d left behind and couldn’t go back to, and people we’d known during that time. Perhaps that’s why we both wanted to end this forced reclusion, this pause in the middle of our journey which none of us had foreseen, as soon as we possibly could.

  Sometimes there was a knock on the door and Sergey would drape his jacket over his shoulders and poke his head out. Sometimes it was Boris or Mishka, but none of them would come up to the veranda; they’d speak to Sergey through the window glass. They would share their news with us and we were really grateful, not because they were telling us anything important but because these unexpected visits would give us at least some kind of topic for conversation; coming home, Sergey would say, smiling: ‘These guys are amazing, Anya, who would have thought, a maths professor and a schoolboy, they’ve teamed up and broken into every house around here, climbed into somebody’s cellar and stolen a year’s stock of home-made jam, some other preserves, tinned food, diesel and even a gas chainsaw.’ I was sure he was dying to join them in those ‘raids’, to do something instead of sitting by my side for several days in a stuffy semi-dark house, but before I could persuade him to go off and help them he’d start making himself busy – he’d clean the rifles, start the fire in the stove or start cooking. Whatever he did, I was trying not to lose sight of him. ‘Get some sleep, Anya, you need to sleep a lot,’ he would say, lifting his eyes towards me, but I couldn’t sleep deeply during those days; I could only manage a light, interrupted doze, as if I was worried I’d wake up and find myself alone.

  When I finally managed to get up and walk a bit without holding the wall, Sergey heated the sauna for me. Blissfully closing my eyes, I lay on the bottom shelf in the dark steam room which smelt of heated resin and listened to the sound of the water bubbling on the hot stones, and with every careful breath I took, filling my lungs with burning steam, with every droplet of perspiration on my skin, I felt the fear disappearing that had taken such a strong hold on me during the past days. Then I got up and Sergey threw a bucket of warm water from the well over me, which was unbelievably refreshing: it washed off two sleepless, anxious days of travel and the five days filled with horror that had followed them; the water took it all away, down through the cracks in the floorboards. When we came out of the sauna, hot, with damp hair, the dog sat outside, near the entrance, motionless and indifferent, like a sphinx. He didn’t even look our way.

  ‘Do you think it’s his house? Is this why he came here? Maybe he used to live here?’ I asked Sergey while we were running back to the house.

  ‘Who?’ Sergey asked. ‘C’mon, quick, your hair’s wet.’

  ‘The dog, that’s who,’ I said, trying to look back to see if he was following us, but Sergey hurried to close the door, saving us from the freezing cold.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said, when we were inside. ‘There’s no kennel. Why does it matter? Dry your hair.’

  ‘It’s just strange,’ I muttered, obediently covering my head with a towel. ‘Where did he come from? There’s nobody here. Where does he sleep and get his food?’

  ‘I don’t know about earlier,’ Sergey said, laughing. ‘But I do know where he slept and ate in the last couple of days. Have some rest, and I’ll go and get you a clean jumper.’

  The house everyone else had moved into, terrified of my illness, was even smaller: there were two tiny rooms and a narrow kitchen which only had room for a wobbly table and several stools. In the middle of the house there was a huge brick stove, the same as in our house, warming the whole space; it was plastered, and its dirty white bumpy surface was covered in cracks and soot. The rest of the space was taken up by beds – mismatching, metal beds with sagging mattresses. There were too many of them; some had clearly been moved here from other houses. After the frosty air outside it seemed there was no oxygen inside that house, it was so stuffy, dusty and dry, and my throat started rasping. My God, I thought, this is like an overnight shelter for the homeless, nine people in two rooms, this was probably what a Victorian orphanage looked like, or a concentration camp. How could you live here, in this stuffy, congested, dusty place, among all this clutter? You surely couldn’t stand it for long.

  Marina and Lenny weren’t there. Andrey
lay facing the wall, with a rolled-up sleeping bag under his head, and didn’t even look at us when we came in. I glanced at Natasha’s tense, hostile back, and looking slightly left my eyes lit on Ira, who sat sideways at the top of the bed watching the children play on the floor by the stove.

  I froze at the door, fighting my cough. Everyone was busy talking and didn’t notice us come in, but I didn’t dare take another step, maybe because there wasn’t much room or maybe because I expected them to ask me to leave. These people, most of whom I hardly knew, had no reason to trust what Sergey and I already knew: that I was not going to die.

  It was an inexplicable, irrational panic attack. I wanted to turn around and run out into the air, to the wobbly snowman standing in the middle of the garden, a sole witness to how glum, unbearable and deadly boring these four days had presumably been for those who hadn’t been occupied either with their own death, like me and Lenny, or with the contents of neighbouring houses and basements, like Boris and Mishka. As I stood at the door I tried to imagine for the first time what our life was going to be like at the lake, staying together until the end of the winter in a small house like this one, without water, without electricity or toilet, without books and favourite programmes on TV but, most importantly, with no chance to be alone, just the two of us.

  ‘…and I’m saying we should look again.’ It looked as if we had come in while they were arguing about something, because Natasha’s voice sounded both persistent and irritated. ‘There are fifty houses around here, maybe even more, there’s probably a better one!’

  ‘Natasha, they’re all the same,’ Andrey said. ‘It’s just that some of them have stoves and some don’t. It’s not a proper village, it’s a summer village near Cherepovets, for goodness’ sake. Do you really think we’re going to find a decent house here with an en suite bathroom and satellite TV?’

  ‘You don’t know for sure,’ she said hotly and turned halfway towards us; her cheeks were glowing. ‘You’ve been out of the house twice in four days. I’m sure we could find something better than this!’

  ‘Why are you all inside?’ Sergey asked from behind my back; his voice made me jump because I’d completely forgotten he was standing behind me. ‘I thought we agreed that one of us should stay outside to watch the road?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sergey.’ Andrey waved his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no life in this village. Not even a dog has run past in four days.’

  I noticed some movement in the corner of the room; throwing back his sleeping bag, a dishevelled and sleepy Mishka jumped out of bed and started lacing up his boots.

  ‘I’ll watch the road,’ he said gladly, and smiled at Sergey and me. ‘Mum, you can sit on my bed.’

  When the door closed behind him I looked around; there really was nowhere else to sit. Squeezing past the other beds, I headed towards the corner.

  ‘You don’t look well, Anya,’ Natasha said in a changed voice. ‘Boris said you felt better – have you really recovered now? You look so pale—’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Sergey said, cutting her off. ‘It was just a cold, and I haven’t come down with anything, there was no need to worry.’

  As if any of you really were worried, I thought, settling myself on Mishka’s crumpled, uncomfortable bed, and caught myself nearly saying it aloud. What’s wrong with me, I thought, I never say things like this out loud, I always say them to myself. Fat chance you were worried about me. How you rushed to escape from the house, only concerned about leaving your precious bag with your bits and pieces; if I look up now, I bet you anything you’ll still be looking at me as if I’ve got the plague, as if to stay in the same room with me is dangerous. During those four days none of you came to check on us, just Boris and Mishka, just family. It’d be good, I thought, to start a coughing fit right now, one of those I’ve been suffering from during the last few days, forcing me to double over, not letting me take a breath. I’d like to see your faces if I started coughing right now; covering my face with my hands, I would have a prolonged, horrible coughing fit, and some of you might even run out of the room. As I thought this, the mattress made a pitiful squeaky noise underneath me and sagged almost to the floor.

  I can’t believe they let him sleep on this awful bed – the narrowest, the most unstable. I wonder if any of you checked if he had anything to eat, if he’s warm enough in this corner, under the window, I thought. I’ll take him back to the big house today, and you can stay here, in this shelter for the homeless; it’s good that I didn’t die, I can take care of him myself now. I was surprised how fast the awkwardness which I felt when we came in was replaced by a blind rage I was barely able to conceal. Who would have thought that the first strong emotion, as soon as I found out that I wasn’t going to die, would be rage? I realised that I hadn’t hugged Sergey yet or touched my son, and now I was sitting here, on this sagging old bed, and couldn’t look up or else they’d see my expression.

  I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I missed a lot of the conversation they’d been having when we came in. When I finally managed to do something about my outraged face and lifted my head I only heard bits of Sergey talking. His voice sounded surprised and confused at the same time, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Natasha answered him.

  ‘It’ll be better this way, Serge.’ She always called him that, unceremoniously and as if this were his usual name; when we met it took me a year to learn to say his name – I still can’t say it sometimes. I would give him a thousand pet names, but I still found it hard to say his name and she said ‘Serge’ as if they’d gone to school together.

  I looked at her more carefully. She sat with one leg underneath her, her chin slightly up, and looked at him. Her tone was patronisingly patient, as if she was talking to a child.

  ‘We’ve been here for five days and haven’t seen anyone yet. There’s nobody here, you see? It’s safe here.’

  ‘It’s safe? Here?’ echoed Sergey. ‘Ten kilometres from the city? Don’t make me laugh. Andrey, tell her—’

  ‘I don’t know, Sergey,’ said Andrey without looking at him, and shrugged. ‘I think it’s a good place to sit it out.’

  ‘To sit it out?’ repeated Sergey; I could tell by his voice that he was beginning to get cross. ‘To sit what out? For how long? We don’t even know what’s going on in Cherepovets! Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week there could be dozens, or even hundreds of people here!’

  ‘We saw what’s been happening in the cities,’ Natasha said. ‘People were already ill a week ago, and in another week’s time there’ll be nobody left there.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Sergey almost shouted, but he managed to calm down and continued in a different voice: ‘OK, let’s assume that nine tenths of the population in the city will die, but think about it, Natasha, there are three hundred thousand people there. A hundred people coming here will be enough to make our life difficult, and there’ll be thousands, you see? It’s a miracle that they haven’t come here yet. You can walk to Cherepovets from here, that’s how close it is. We should go to the lake.’

  The door to the other room opened and we saw Marina. Her glamorous ski suit was immaculately white again, but her hair was messy. You washed the blood off your clothes, I thought, but you didn’t wash your hair; I wonder what you’ve been doing during these four days. Did you sleep by his side, looking at his face while he was asleep, listening to his breathing, praying Please don’t die, don’t leave me, or did you spend the time making sure that, despite your stupid anxieties, they’re not going to leave you here if he dies?

  Marina closed the door tightly behind herself, leaned on it and said:

  ‘Lenny can’t go yet.’ Natasha turned to her with a question on her face, and Marina nodded to her. ‘He’s asleep, yes – finally.’

  ‘Anya can’t go either,’ Sergey said firmly. ‘I’m not saying we need to go today. We can wait for two or three days, but then we must go, do you hear me? Even if it means I have to drive all day every day, and whate
ver people feel, we’ll go, because I’m absolutely sure it’s not safe to stay here.’

  ‘We don’t even know if we can make it there,’ Marina said loudly, as if the fact that her husband had finally fallen asleep in the next room wasn’t important any more. ‘We’ve changed the route, again, and we might run out of petrol, Lenny said we don’t have enough as it is to get to the lake, and God knows what else might happen to us on the way?’

  Her tone sounded as if she was blaming us for what had happened to Lenny, as if it was we who had persuaded them to come with us to the lake; as if she was saying that none of this would have happened if only they had stayed in their show-off house, which they had been unable to protect the day it all started, when the checkpoints around the city had been abandoned.

  ‘It could happen anywhere,’ Sergey said amicably, and I was surprised to notice that her recriminatory tone had affected him and that he felt guilty. ‘And it’s a lot more likely to happen here than on the lake. There are no people on the lake there—’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘There’s nothing there either, on the lake! How many rooms did you say there were, two?’

  He nodded and then she stepped towards him – suddenly, unexpectedly. She almost jumped at him and said, pointing at the room:

  ‘Can you see this? Can you see this nightmare? No, look at me. Can you see what it’s like here? And it’s only nine of us here. And there, on the lake, there’ll be eleven of us, you see, eleven, in two bedrooms. How are you going to fit us all in there, I wonder? Here at least we have beds, but what about there? Will we sleep on the floor? Will we have to keep each other warm?

  ‘But at least we’ll be alive,’ Sergey said quietly, and silence fell after his words. Nobody said anything else, and we could hear the crackling of the fire in the stove and the wind howling outside. It’s time to stop this madness, I thought, my son is outside, all alone, and there isn’t even a veranda here; he’s probably cold, it’s time to bring him back in, and if they want to continue arguing, they can do so to their hearts’ content.