by Yana Vagner
We were so busy that we didn’t even notice the dawn, which couldn’t have been instantaneous. The long winter night, which at one point had seemed endless, ended abruptly for us; I simply looked up at the sky during one of our forced stops and saw that it wasn’t depthless and black any more but hung over our heads like a low, muddy-grey ceiling.
‘It’s morning,’ I said to Sergey as we walked back to the car.
‘Damn it,’ he said, looking up worriedly. ‘We’re late. I was hoping we’d manage to skip by Medvezhiegorsk in the dark.’
Darkness didn’t help us much in Poudozh, I thought, settling on the passenger seat, and I doubt, I very much doubt it’ll help us in a city that we’ll have to go through and can’t go round. There’s no point relying on darkness; it’s not our ally any more. To break through the city we’ll need something more reliable than darkness. It had been three weeks, I remembered; almost three weeks since Petrozavodsk had died, the largest city in this region, releasing hundreds, maybe thousands, of scared and angry infected people just before it perished. They wouldn’t have been able to go too far, but they most certainly would have made it to this place. They wouldn’t know that by removing most of the obstacles on our journey they had done us a huge and terrible favour before they died; any one of these, even the most insignificant, could easily have killed us. Three weeks, I told myself, three weeks in a city located where two main northern roads meet. Nobody could have survived there, it’ll be empty, full of abandoned cars, plundered shops, deserted streets with the wind blowing prickly snow crumbs. We’ve nothing to fear. We’ll drive through it without a problem.
It turned out that soon, too soon, within a quarter of an hour, I was right to be wishing twenty-seven thousand people dead, people I had never met, people who were in no way responsible for this catastrophe. I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t choose the right words with Mishka in the car, who was too young to understand, and with the doctor there. Especially with the doctor. How could I admit that after these eleven terrible days on the road I had become indifferent to their suffering, even to their deaths, and that the most important thing was for them not to get in our way?
I was glad it took me a long time to find the right words, because in the end I didn’t need to say anything; first Andrey said, ‘We’re very close, careful now,’ and straight after that, the road, which had been so hostile during the last hundred kilometres – almost as if it had been trying to push us backwards – became completely different, spreading its smooth, even surface in front of us, showing that a lot of cars had driven on it recently rather than just one or two. It was similar to being in dry weather after a torrential downpour: one moment you’re being pressed to the ground by a solid, endless wall of water pouring from the sky, and then it disappears, without any transition, making your windscreen wipers squeak on the dry glass.
There was nothing friendly about this new road, and it didn’t look promising at all. It set off all sorts of alarm bells, and before we had time to get used to the road, something else happened: as soon as the woods finished, revealing the plain, gloomy buildings, we heard a long, undistinguishable crackling on the radio. It lasted for a minute or two and then stopped, but started again a second later, and while it was on – inanimate, sinister – I had a burning desire to turn off the radio, as if the small black box that had helped us out so many times on our journey now had the potential to harm us.
‘…to the back gate,’ the radio suddenly said clearly in an alien, unfamiliar voice and started crackling again.
I shuddered.
‘The signal’s bad,’ Sergey said, keeping his gaze on the road. ‘They’re about twenty-five to thirty kilometres away. This could be anywhere, Anya.’
You know too well they can only be in one place – on our way, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. There was no point in arguing, because the crackling increased, became more intense, closer, started to sound more and more like human speech, and we needed to hear it to decipher it, to be ready for whatever awaited us ahead.
‘…we won’t take it, we won’t!’ the radio shouted, and this cracked shouting choked on a long and hacking coughing fit. Then the crackling started again, as if only one of our invisible interlocutors could talk in a human voice, the one who had spoken about a back gate; as for the others, however many there were, they were only capable of expressing themselves through mechanical, inert crackling.
The Land Cruiser suddenly beeped loud and long, then, flashing its hazard lights, jerked to the left and almost stopped in the middle of the road. The road at this point was wide and completely empty, but we had to brake to avoid crashing into the hatchback. The driver’s window lowered and Boris, leaning almost half his body out, showed both his hands in a shape of a cross, holding them high above his head, and then shook them in the air. He kept holding them up until Andrey, who had also opened his window, lifted his arm and showed him an open palm. Sergey had to do the same thing; rolling his eyes, he also stuck out his palm and waved impatiently.
‘Now’s not the time for idle chatting,’ he said grumpily when we drove off again.
There were now more sounds on-air, and it was clear we were getting closer to the source of the broadcast. Finally, another voice was added to the first one, and then, a couple of kilometres later, several more came in. Swearing and shouting over each other, these people were trying to resolve some issue or other, and the way they shouted at the tops of their voices, sounding almost hysterical at times, left us in no doubt that the issue was something dangerous. We were able to drive fast now, and while the gloomy villages – still deserted, luckily – on the outskirts of Medvezhiegorsk kept flicking past we had nothing else to do; there was nothing else to distract us apart from this angry incoherent ramble, punctuated with outbursts of coughing and swearing. Worrying though it was, we kept listening to it, fascinated, as if it was an awful radio programme interfering with the comfortable, cosy little world inside our cars.
‘I might be wrong,’ the doctor said finally, with concern in his voice, ‘but I think at least one of them is infected—’
‘…from the other side, from the other side!’ the radio angrily shouted, and at the same time we heard a gunshot – a single gunshot, with a deafening echo, and straight after it another one, and then short volleys, close together, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, like a gigantic sewing machine. Sergey pressed the button to lower the window just as we were passing a stone slab with a funny drawing of a bear and a gaudy sign reading WELCOME TO MEDVEZHIEGORSK, and the same abominable metal squawk that we had heard from the radio burst into the car through the open window, together with the cold air. We don’t need the radio any more to hear this, I thought, it’s somewhere close, it could be anywhere, it could be behind that two-storey house with the peeling roof dotted with satellite dishes, or at the next turning, we’re driving too fast, this is a small town, another minute or two and we’ll drive straight into the middle of whatever’s going on there. I turned to Sergey and grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to shout Stop, but my throat seized and didn’t make a sound, and Sergey moved his shoulder impatiently, shook off my hand and hit the brakes so suddenly that I lurched forward; at the same time he pressed several times on the wide plastic centre of the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. The Pajero cried croakily three times and fell silent, and I, with my elbow against the dashboard, lifted my head and saw the heavy trailer of the braking hatchback skid to the right, towards the side of the road, nearly turning over, and then several seconds later I saw the Land Cruiser pass us and come to a stop about twenty metres ahead.
Stationary in the middle of a strange street, we listened carefully, but there were no more gunshots. The voices from the radio had stopped at the same time, and it was now peacefully hissing with the odd crackle from time to time, as if both the deafening rattle and the vehement cries had only been part of a dream. Looking carefully, I realised that I couldn’t see the other side of the wide, probably central street. We
could see neither houses nor trees; it was as if somebody had erected a cloudy, whitish wall there.
‘What is this, fog?’ I asked.
‘It’s smoke,’ Sergey answered. ‘Can’t you smell it?’ And I realised that he was right. Despite the cold, the air wasn’t fresh any more; it had become bitter, and every time I breathed in I had an unpleasant aftertaste of burnt paper in my mouth, like you get if you light the wrong end of a cigarette.
‘Any suggestions?’ Boris said, pulling up next to us.
‘Not really.’ Sergey shook his head, looking thoughtfully into the smoke-shrouded street. ‘Can’t see a damn thing.’
‘Let’s wait,’ said Marina and turned her white face towards us, twisted with fear, her lips shaking. ‘Let’s hide somewhere and go later, at least till it gets dark, I’m begging you, please—’
‘If you’re going to jump out of the car again,’ Boris said, furious, ‘I’m going to dump you right here.’ Marina nodded several times, frightened, and settled back in the seat again, pressing her fists to her face.
‘I suggest that we carry on driving,’ Sergey said. ‘Slowly, but making progress. If you notice anything, don’t turn into a side street – we don’t know this town, we might get stuck. If you see anything, just turn around and drive back the same way we came, OK?’
No matter how hard we tried to stay close to the side of the road, trying to leave as much space as we could to potentially turn around, no matter how slowly we crawled along, trying not to break the sinister, suspicious, oppressive silence with the noise of our engines, I didn’t feel any safer than I would have if we had tried to race through the small city at full throttle. For some reason this prolonged anticipation was much more difficult to endure than a reckless jump forward; I would have happily kept my eyes tight shut, buried my head between my knees and waited until it was all over, but I had to be vigilant and look around, scrutinising every broken window, every plundered shop, glancing quickly at scattered rubbish on the snow, peering into side streets that led into darkness. It seemed as if the tiny part we could see of each street was moving along with us in a solid milky haze, as if somebody were pointing a spotlight at us.
Suddenly a huge, blackened building loomed out of the whitish vacuum, with a high, solitary square tower sticking up in the middle and a driveway which was blocked by two concrete bars. Sitting with his back against one of these slabs, in a calm, relaxed pose, his head drooping, was a dead man; his open palms were full of snow. And as soon as the building disappeared the fog revealed another body, lying face down on the road, and I realised that if we had to turn around and rush back, we would have to drive over him. After another hundred metres, when we couldn’t see the body any more, we stopped by the turning onto one of the side streets. The junction was blocked by an ambulance; the ambulance’s windscreen had a crack in the middle and the door was open. Inside, sitting nonchalantly, his boots unlaced, we saw a man. He was clearly alive.
It was obvious that the man sitting inside the ambulance wasn’t a doctor, and not because he wasn’t wearing a white coat. There was something in his carefree pose, in the way he looked at us with a complete lack of interest, that made us think the place we had found him was completely random: he could have been sitting on a park bench wrapped in old newspapers. In spite of the frost he didn’t have a hat on, but he was wearing a warm, tightly closed jacket. The front of the jacket was covered in dark spots from the chest down and had a belt to go with it. Next to him, on the ribbed rubber floor, was an open tin, and he was taking something out of it with dirty fingers and with visible pleasure putting it into his mouth; another tin, still unopened, was on the floor beside him next to two bottles of champagne. One of the bottles was almost empty; the other was sealed but the foil had already been ripped and was piled in little golden flakes on the snow, between the wheels.
‘Hey there, in the ambulance,’ Boris said loudly, and I wondered why he said ‘in the ambulance’ because there was nobody else on this wide, milk-washed street. ‘Are you warm enough?’
The man carefully licked his dirty fingers, making sure nothing was wasted, and only after that did he turn his attention to us. He didn’t look old, but his face was swollen and red, the weather-beaten face of a drunkard. His breathing was erratic and noisy.
‘I am,’ he answered finally.
‘Are you alone here?’ Boris asked.
The stranger laughed hoarsely and answered, ‘Everyone’s alone now,’ and his laughter changed into a fit of coughing, which made him double up. I desperately wanted to close the window and cover my face with my sleeve. While the man was spitting and choking, the doctor pushed Mishka away from the window and moved forward.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to me quietly. ‘You can’t catch it at this distance.’ And he continued a bit louder, talking to the stranger: ‘You’re unwell!’ he said intently. ‘You need help.’
Without standing up, the man lifted his oil-covered hand with fingers wide apart and waved it in the air.
‘I need vodka,’ he said, coughing. ‘Do you have any vodka?’
‘Vodka?’ the doctor asked, confused. ‘No, we don’t—’
‘Never mind,’ the man said in a happy and groggy voice, and winked at the doctor. ‘I’ll manage today somehow. We’ve nothing to eat,’ he said. ‘There’s been no food for the last two weeks. I haven’t eaten for two days, and this morning I popped round to my neighbour’s – my neighbour died, you know, so I popped round, I’ve nothing to be afraid of – and imagine, she had no food in her apartment, but I found a larder, so there you go, I’ve got tinned anchovies and champagne.’ He dipped his fingers into the tin again and I saw him pick up a slippery oily little fish and add a few more greasy spots to his jacket. ‘She was probably stocking up for Christmas. She was a good woman,’ he said with his mouth full.
Another gunshot fired somewhere close, but the stranger, busy eating his anchovies, didn’t even bat an eyelid.
‘Where are they shooting?’ asked Sergey right by my ear.
‘Shooting? Shooting’s in the port,’ was the answer. ‘There’s a food storage unit there. Sounds like they’re storming it again. These guys aren’t local, they come here every other day and start firing guns. All ours are gone. Some are dead, others were shot during the first few days.’ Then he picked up the tin and inspected it, and then, satisfied there was no fish left, smacked his lips and drank up the rest of the oil.
‘Listen,’ Sergey said. ‘If we turn right over there, heading towards the motorway, we won’t get ourselves caught up in some kind of trap, will we?’
‘No,’ the man said and smiled again. A streak of oil came out of the corner of his mouth onto his stubbled chin. ‘I think it’s quiet there. Just don’t go to the port.’ He reached over and grabbed the bottle nearest to him, the one with the foil ripped off.
‘I like it when it pops,’ he said, and rocked the bottle gently. ‘I don’t like the taste, but I like how it pops. Do you want me to pop it?’
‘Listen,’ said the doctor again. ‘Please listen to me. You’ll feel worse soon. Find yourself a warm place, get some water. Do you realise you won’t be able to walk soon?’
The dreamy expression disappeared from the stranger’s unshaven face. He stopped smiling and, frowning, gave the doctor a hostile look.
‘“Get some water”,’ he teased, and screwed up his face. ‘I’m not going to be here for that. When it gets bad enough, I’ll get down to the port and – bang! Job done.’ Another, more severe coughing fit made him bend over again; before he stood up again he spat out what was in his mouth, and it spread on the snow in a small red puddle.
‘You’ve got the fever,’ the doctor said. ‘This disease develops very fast. You need to get warm.’
‘You know what, get out of here, smartarse,’ said the stranger angrily. ‘Otherwise I’m gonna come up and breathe on you, do you hear?’
While we were driving off, lining up again on the plundered central street, I t
urned back to see the white ambulance with the open door and the legs in their unlaced boots poking out. The man seemed to have forgotten all about us; bending down, he tensely focused on undoing the wire which held the plastic cork in place, and just before his hunched figure disappeared out of sight, there was a pop and a short, hoarse laugh.
‘We should have given him some food,’ the doctor said in a dull voice. ‘At least a little. We shouldn’t have left him like this… You presumably have some?’
‘He doesn’t need our food,’ Sergey replied. ‘He doesn’t need anything.’ We drove under the railway bridge without any delay or difficulty; we could hear single gunshots far behind, but the stone buildings had already given way to different ones: plain, small, wooden houses that looked almost rural, and we went past them as fast as we could, accelerating. This scary city, the scariest of all we had seen so far, was about to come to an end.
‘You just don’t understand!’ the doctor shouted. ‘You don’t! You can’t do this. It’s… inhumane. I’m a doctor, can’t you understand, this is my duty – to help, to relieve suffering – and now every day, every hour I have to do exactly the opposite of what I believed all my life… I can’t… carry on like this.’
He fell silent, burning the back of Sergey’s head with his eyes. A crossed-out sign with MEDVEZHIEGORSK written on it flicked past us, and then another, blue sign: LENINGRAD – YUSTOZERO – MURMANSK.
‘You wouldn’t understand anyway,’ the doctor said bitterly, when we were on the motorway.
‘Why not?’ said Sergey, his voice strangely flat. ‘I killed a man yesterday.’
24
Two Hundred Kilometres to Go
So this is it, I thought, once the last small house, almost buried under the snow, its skewed fence squeezed on both sides by tall snow banks, disappeared from sight. The scary city had finally let us go, spitting out its last volley of gunfire, and the channel became clear and quiet. This is it, I thought as we passed the wide ribbon of traffic-bound federal road connecting the dead Petrozavodsk and the distant Murmansk; this is it. There will be none of this again – no stone houses, bridges, streets full of abandoned cars, broken shop windows or deserted buildings. No miserable anticipation of death. No fear.