To the Lake

by Yana Vagner

  ‘Two hundred kilometres,’ Sergey said, as if hearing my thoughts. ‘Just hang on in there a bit longer, baby. If we’re lucky, we’ll get there by the end of the day.’

  We’ve been travelling for eleven days, I thought, each one of which, without exception, has begun with me thinking ‘if we’re lucky’. I was so tired of relying on luck. We had been lucky, unbelievably lucky, starting from the day Sergey had gone to collect Ira and the boy and came back alive and safe, and then later, when the many-headed, all-consuming wave had been hanging over us, ready to swallow us, we escaped, slipped away at the last minute, giving up everything we had held dear – our plans for the future, our dreams, our houses that we loved, and even those loved ones whose lives we hadn’t had enough time to save. We had even been lucky after Lenny was stabbed, because he could have died but hadn’t. Not one of these long, worrying eleven days had been easy for us; every single one had had a price and we’d had to pay it. And now that we only had a tiny bit of the journey left to drive, the last two hundred kilometres, we didn’t have anything left to pay for that luck – only ourselves.

  ‘What the hell?’ Sergey said suddenly.

  That’s it, I thought. How could I have assumed everything would be fine from now on? I looked up, ready to see anything – a fallen tree, a frozen loaded logging truck blocking the road, a concrete fence with rings of barbed wire on top or simply a sheer drop, a sudden deep, gaping, unsurpassable gully, appearing out of nowhere – but there was nothing like that, nothing at all, just a smooth, empty white canvas of snow and silent woods. I opened my mouth to ask what the matter was, and then noticed the Land Cruiser moving in a strange way, erratically, clumsily zigzagging from side to side as if it had a puncture. Sergey reached over for the microphone, but he didn’t have time to use it because the bulky black vehicle, swerving one last time, slowly slid off the road and collided with the bare branches of the bushes poking out of the verge.

  Sergey calmly pulled over, stepped out onto the road and carefully closed the door to avoid letting in the cold air. Only then did he start to run, maybe because he heard the cracking of the frozen branches and saw the massive wheels still spinning. The stout car with its solid tinted windows looked like nothing more than an enormous beast that had lost its mind. Moments later I also jumped out, not thinking about closing the door – not because of the spinning wheels and the cracking branches, but because I had seen Sergey run.

  I took several seconds to reach the struggling Land Cruiser. As I approached it, I saw Sergey rip open the driver’s door, disappear halfway inside and a second later reappear, holding the limp body of his father in his open, shapeless jacket. Sergey dragged him outside, Boris’s unresisting feet catching under the pedals as he went. Then Marina fell out of the car on the other side with a high-pitched shriek and had to crawl round to the driver’s door to help untangle Boris’s feet. I saw his listless head lolling terrifyingly from side to side.

  Boris lay on his back on the snow, with Sergey’s jacket folded under his head, which Sergey had rushed so fast to remove that he had ripped off some of the buttons. His eyes were open, staring past our faces and into the sky, the low-hanging cold sky; I noticed that his lips were completely blue and a thin thread of saliva glistened in the ginger-grey beard. Marina knelt by his side in her stark white ski suit and for some reason was stroking his hair, her hand shaking and red from the cold. Sergey stood helplessly nearby, without kneeling down, not even trying to shake his father by the shoulder, only saying, ‘Dad… Dad?’ over and over. He’s going to die now, I thought, looking into Boris’s staring, unseeing eyes with blunt curiosity. Maybe he’s dead already, I thought. Let Marina take her hand away so I can see, I’ve never seen a person die, only on-screen. Sergey’s voice kept going on in the background, and somehow I didn’t feel any fear or sympathy; I was simply curious, and I knew I would be ashamed of it later.

  Then somebody grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me sharply so I nearly lost my balance, and the doctor’s red, angry face suddenly appeared in front of me. He was shouting, ‘First aid kit! Now!’ I presumably kept looking at him in a stupor, because he squeezed my arms painfully and almost threw me towards the Pajero. Only then did he push Marina aside, pouncing like a ridiculous fat bird onto the motionless, tilted body, and bent down straight to his face, squeezing his fingers under the stretched collar of Boris’s jumper, and because I still hadn’t moved, he roared at me without turning his head, ‘Are you still here? I said “first aid kit”!’ Raising his arms high above his head, the doctor hit Boris in the middle of the chest with all his might.

  There’s no point, I thought, while ambling towards the car – ten steps, fifteen – and taking the rectangular first aid kit from Mishka’s hands before walking back to the doctor, who was still kneeling by Boris, the wide soles of his unevenly worn shoes turned to the road. There’s no point in all this; there’s no point in this urgency, this shouting. You can do anything you like, you can tilt his motionless head, force air into his paralysed lungs and then push your crossed hands down on his chest, breathe into his mouth again, it won’t help. He’ll die anyway, I thought, he’s already dead, because one of us had to pay the price demanded of us if we’re to make it through these last two hundred kilometres trouble-free, otherwise we simply wouldn’t make it, why can’t anyone understand this except me?

  I went to Sergey and shoved the first aid kit into his hands; he took it and looked at me, stunned. He stood holding it in front of him, without opening it, and the doctor shouted, ‘Move, get out of the way!’ We staggered back, and Marina crawled away and sat on the road. Then the doctor bent down again to breathe into Boris’s mouth, to feel the pulse behind his yellowish ear, push his hands down on his chest again. It’s endless, I thought, it’s pointless, how long is it going to take him, too, to realise that his efforts are in vain, that he, like us, is helpless in the face of this sinister, ruthless symmetry? There can be no credit, no advance payment according to the rules of life in the current world; even if we had anything more substantial than this miserable first aid kit, still splattered with Lenny’s blood, it wouldn’t change anything.

  When several minutes later Boris’s cheeks turned pink again and his lungs produced the first, barely audible gurgling noise, when the doctor, straightening up, wiped his wet, sweaty face with the sleeve of his jumper and said, ‘Well, give me the first aid kit now,’ and Sergey finally started opening it, spilling the open packages of bandages and drapes, and asked, ‘What do you need, menthol valerate?’ and the doctor impatiently waved his hand and reached over to the kit, saying, ‘To hell with the valerate, have you got any nitroglycerin? Give it here,’ when everyone – even Lenny, who had climbed out of the car – circled around them and started talking all at once, fussing, picking up packages, crouching down, trying to be helpful, I caught myself walking backwards to the side of the road, towards the merciful shadow of the Land Cruiser, where nobody could see my face. Standing behind the car, which was still stuck in the bushes, and pressing my cheek against the wet glass, I was horrified to discover that I was holding a glowing cigarette, without any recollection of having taken it out or lit it. I had probably done it right in front of everyone, in front of Sergey: pulled out a pack, clicked the lighter. This can’t be happening, I thought, and then I quickly threw away the treacherous cigarette, which was still burning. It didn’t reach the ground but got stuck in the bare branches instead, and I dashed across to rescue it; something sharp scratched my cheek but I reached down, picked up the cigarette and sunk it deeper into the snow in order not to leave any trace, and then scooped up a handful of cold, burning snow and pressed it to my face, forcefully, with both hands.

  ‘Mum,’ Mishka said behind my back. ‘It’s OK, Mum. The doctor says it’s going to be OK.’ I nodded, without taking my hands off my face, thinking, no, no, there’s going to be something else.

  In a few hours, it became clear that these long, dragging two hundred kilometres would be ha
rder for me than any of the previous journey, maybe because Sergey wasn’t in the car with me. He had stayed in the Land Cruiser and taken the doctor with him in case Boris started to feel worse; before leaving us alone again once more, he had made me promise not to use the radio (‘If there’s no emergency, don’t say anything, but keep it on, OK? Look at me! The road’s quite easy, no turnings for a hundred and twenty kilometres, and then go right. After that there’ll be a little bit of zigzagging, but we’ll drive slowly, you won’t fall behind, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid of anything’). Marina had swapped places with the doctor and held the little girl on her lap right behind my back, trying to stay as far away from the dog as possible, and maybe the journey seemed so arduous because she was talking non-stop in a high, monotonous voice (‘I was so scared, so scared, he just fell forward, onto the steering wheel, it was lucky we drove slowly, he would have died, Anya, he would definitely have died, it’s so good we have a doctor with us, I said, didn’t I, I said it would be good’). I clenched my teeth and tried not to listen to her, but she couldn’t stop and tried to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. She even smiled – unsurely, ingratiatingly – and said, ‘It’s going to be all good now, Anya, you’ll see.’ Shut up, I thought, for goodness’ sake, you didn’t say that much to me in the two years we were neighbours. Nothing will be good, it can’t be good, you’re not letting me think, you’re not letting me wait, we haven’t paid the price yet, we haven’t paid it, it can’t be right.

  Nothing in this life had been given to me for free: not a single blessing, not a single victory. I remembered being in an ambulance when Mishka was three months old and a grim doctor with alcohol-laden breath saying, ‘Pray, Mum, to get him there alive,’ and I prayed. I said, Take anything you want, whatever you want, just let me keep him, and when six months later Mishka’s father was taken away from me suddenly, completely, without a trace, as if he had never existed, I didn’t complain. I almost wasn’t shocked, because I had set the price myself, without any bargaining. And then there was my mum’s ruthless diagnosis, and I prayed again – Please, don’t take her, take something else – and then realised that I shouldn’t offer ‘anything’, because I already knew the terms of this bloodthirsty exchange. Just not Mishka, I said, anything, just not Mishka, and I got twelve long, empty years of loneliness but my mum lived. I pay a high price for everything, every time, without failure; it can’t be otherwise. When finally Sergey came into my life, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, I was prepared, I knew that I’d have to pay; and I did, and the price was again high. And that’s why, listening to Marina’s incoherent murmuring, I could only think of the fact that we’d paid for a pass that had let us escape: paid with the lives of my mum, who I hadn’t said goodbye to, Ira’s sister, Natasha’s parents. But these payments were clearly not going to be enough to buy us out, not enough to protect us. And, I thought, if it’s not Lenny, not me, not Boris, who is it then? One of us?

  For the five long hours to the turning I held the steering wheel with both hands and looked at the back end of the trailer jumping and rocking in front of me. I looked around at the wall of indifferent trees floating past, and backwards at the snaking, empty road, ploughed by our wheels. I couldn’t talk and didn’t hear anything because every one of those three hundred minutes was full of anticipation. Something needed to happen, it had to, but what, and when, and would I have time to prepare for it?

  Marina finally caught my eye in the damn rear-view mirror, even though I was trying not to look at her, and swallowed everything she was going to say, stopping mid-sentence. She breathed in noisily and didn’t say another word, hiding her face in the little girl’s furry hood.

  ‌25

  Caterpillar Tracks

  It was necessary for all of us to take short breaks, not only for the children who were exhausted by the monotonous journey, nor just for the dog, tormented by the cramped space, but for the adults too. To stay sane, Sergey would come up to me and ask how I was, and instead of an answer I’d always ask him the same question – ‘How long now?’ – despite the fact that on the inside of my eyelids I could still see the whitish circle of the speedometer with its dim digits and couldn’t stop transforming them in my head into a countdown: another thirty kilometres closer, another fifty. I sometimes wondered if it would be possible, after these long hours of silence and worry, for me to lose count and forget how close we were to our destination, only some twenty kilometres.

  The last time we had stopped for a rest, just after a turning, it had been getting dark and I had got out of the car, still counting the kilometres in my head. For some reason I decided to take a few extra steps away from the road, where the headlights couldn’t reach. I looked up, froze with horror, and then turned around and ran back.

  ‘Sergey,’ I whispered, trying to catch my breath and he turned to me, surprised. ‘Sergey, there are houses, lot of houses… we can’t stay here, let’s go!’

  ‘That can’t be right,’ he answered, frowning suspiciously. ‘There’s nothing here, for miles ahead – nothing.’ And he started walking, taking the gun off his shoulder. I followed him as if in a trance until we both saw it, and then he laughed with relief. ‘That’s not a house, you silly, look carefully. There hasn’t been a house here for at least forty years.’ Then I looked closer and saw what I hadn’t noticed when I first looked: massive black planks of wood, dry from age and popped out of their grooves, window frames with no glass, broken rafters. There weren’t many of these houses, fewer than I had thought before, maybe four or five, and they were all irrecoverable, unrepairable, fallen apart, like a humungous wooden construction which its creator had become bored of. I reached over and touched the rotting wooden materials: once alive and warm, now they felt cold and dead to the touch. ‘It’s called a “zone”,’ Sergey said behind my back, and I jumped. ‘A frontier exclusion zone. Don’t be afraid, Anya. There are lots of villages like this around here. When they moved the border in 1947, they evacuated everyone. There weren’t many people even then, but now there’s nobody left, and they’ve been like this for a long time. The houses are strong though – they’ll last another hundred years – but you can’t live in them any more. Look, there are no roofs, no windows, everything’s fallen to bits.’

  It looks like a graveyard of abandoned houses, I thought, as we stood in an embrace among the frozen black wooden skeletons. In another hundred years there will be thick forest here, impassable taiga that will have forgotten all about our feeble attempts to cut a path through it, to leave a trace; in a hundred years, maybe even earlier, the tall trees will finally join at the tops and this tiny ghost village will disappear as if it had never existed. I also realised that the same thing would happen with our house over several decades, our light, beautiful house: the amber-coloured logs would crack and turn grey, the bricks in the chimney breast would break and crumble and the huge windows would first get overgrown with dust and then burst, exposing the house’s defenceless, fragile insides. If we don’t come back, I thought.

  ‘How’s Boris?’ I asked quietly, and Sergey answered right above my ear.

  ‘Not so great, Anya. He can barely sit up, he’s green, and we don’t have anything apart from nitroglycerin. I can’t stop blaming myself – we shouldn’t have made him drive for twenty-four hours. He needs a hospital, the doctor said he needs bed rest, no stress, but what can we do? When we get to the lake, we’ll put him on a mattress, and that’s the hospital for you.’

  ‘But it’s not too far, is it?’ I said, and turned to him. I touched his cold cheek, and the tantalising crease between his eyebrows. ‘You’ll see, it’ll be all right. We have a doctor with us, he won’t let him die. The main thing is for us to get to the end of this road as soon as possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, carefully freeing himself. ‘Of course. Let’s go, baby, we really do need to go. We’ve got twenty kilometres left, we’re almost there, can you believe it?’ And he started walking back. I stayed a little longer to
take another look at this abandoned, empty place which for some reason wasn’t letting me go, and as soon as Sergey walked away the feeling of alarm came back to me. There’s nobody here, I told myself, it’s not possible for anyone to be here, we’re sixty kilometres from the nearest house, we turned off the nearest decent road a long time ago, so why do I have the feeling we’ve missed something, haven’t noticed something important? I looked down and crouched, to make sure, then hurriedly stood again and ran to catch up with Sergey, grabbing his arm.

  ‘Are you saying nobody has lived here for many years?’

  ‘Well, yes, I told you… it’s very near the border. Come on, let’s go—’

  ‘Then what’s this doing here?’ I asked and, following the direction I was pointing, he stopped and bent down, putting his hand into the centre of a wide, clear print in the snow where we had stood. The trail disappeared into the darkness, in the direction we were travelling.

  ‘Look how huge it is. This isn’t an ordinary vehicle, they don’t leave prints like this. It’s from a caterpillar track, isn’t it?’

  Sergey lifted his head. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘It’s not from a caterpillar track. It’s from a lorry – a large, heavy one. And the prints are fresh.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  We stood above the clear print of the heavy wheels which the massive truck had left here recently: several million brittle sharp-edged cells, dried by frost and looking like a large, white-painted honeycomb. I wondered how we hadn’t noticed the track; we must have been driving right on top of it for some time.