To the Lake E-Book

Яна Вагнер

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 632

Beschreibung

A 2021 FT and Herald Book of the Year A deadly flu epidemic sweeps through Moscow, killing hundreds of thousands. Anya and her husband Sergey decide they have no choice but to flee to a lake in the far north of Russia. Joining them on their journey are her son and father-in-law; Sergey's ex-wife and son; and their garish neighbours. But then some friends of Sergey show up to complete Anya's list of people she'd least like to be left with at the end of the civilised world. As the wave of infection expands from the capital, their food and fuel start to run low. Menaced both by the harsh Russian winter and by the desperate people they encounter, they must put their hatreds behind them if they're to have a chance of reaching safety… Inspired by a real-life flu epidemic in Moscow, To the Lake was a number one bestseller in Russia, and has now appeared in a dozen languages and been adapted into a Netflix TV series.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

1. Mum2. Planning the Escape3. First Blood4. New Realities5. Face to Face6. The Journey Begins7. Singing on a Dark Road8. Encounters on the Road9. A Stabbing and a Shooting10. ‘Stuffed Duck’11. Temporary Accommodation12. Sickening13. Enter Dog14. Cleansed Villages15. Hatches16. In a Hole17. City Girls18. Pavel and Nikolai19. The Doctor’s Story20. Mob Rule21. Breakdown22. Unlevel Crossing23. Medvezhiegorsk24. Two Hundred Kilometres to Go25. Caterpillar Tracks26. Into the Woods27. Ends and Beginnings

‌1

Mum

My mother died on Tuesday, 17 November. It was her neighbour who rang me. Ironically, she was the last neighbour Mum or I ever wanted contact with; she was a grumpy woman, always whingeing. She had an unfriendly face which looked like it was carved from stone, and during the fifteen years my mum and I lived on the same floor as her, there were several years when I didn’t say hello to her at all. I would deliberately press the button inside the lift before she made it there, breathing heavily and struggling to move her legs. The doors would close just as she reached them, and she had this funny expression on her face, a look of permanent umbrage. She had the same expression during that period (I was fourteen or fifteen) when she would ring our doorbell – Mum never invited her in – and convey her displeasure on various matters: water splashes from my boots in the corridor, a confused guest who had rung her doorbell instead of ours after ten at night. ‘What does she want again, Mum?’ I used to call loudly from inside the flat when my mum’s voice started sounding helpless. Mum never learned how to bite back, and even the slightest disagreement in a shop queue gave her a bad headache, especially when other shoppers, their eyes glinting, became animated at the sight of people arguing. It gave her palpitations and led to tears too. When I turned eighteen, our neighbour’s weekly attacks on our flat ended; perhaps she stopped her glowering assaults because she realised I was old enough to answer the door myself. After that I started saying hello to her again, every time feeling some kind of triumph inside, and then shortly afterwards I left home (if the feud between them rekindled after I was gone, Mum never mentioned it) and the image of a bitter, hostile woman – whose name, Liubov, incongruously meant Love – faded and turned into an insignificant childhood memory.

I probably hadn’t spoken to her in the last ten years, but I recognised her voice as soon as she said ‘Anya’. She said my name and fell silent, and I realised that my mum was dead. She kept panting into the phone, noisily and intermittently, waiting while I slid down the wall on to the floor, while I tried to catch my breath, sobbing. She didn’t say another word. I cried, pressing the receiver, with her heavy breathing in it, harder into my ear, and I wanted to carry on crying for ever, so that I wouldn’t hear another word. And the angry woman, Love, who had long ago become a blurry picture from my childhood – the lift doors closing, her perennial complaining – allowed me to cry for ten seconds or maybe even longer, and only then spoke again. While I sat on the floor, she said that Mum hadn’t been suffering at all: ‘We saw such terrible things on the TV but she didn’t have none of that, it wasn’t all that scary, she didn’t have convulsions or suffocate, we kept the doors open, Anya, just in case, you know – what if somebody’s worse and won’t have time to get to the door – I brought her some soup, poked my head round, and she was just lying there in bed and her face was peaceful, as if she’d just stopped breathing in her sleep.’

Mum hadn’t told me that she was ill, but I somehow knew that it would happen. It was unbearable to live here and know that she was only eighty kilometres away from our quiet, comfortable house, some forty minutes in the car, and I couldn’t go and bring her here.

I’d last visited her about six weeks ago. Mishka’s school had already been quarantined by then. Universities were closed too, and I think there was talk of closing the circus and cinemas, but the situation still didn’t look like a disaster, merely like unplanned school holidays: there weren’t many people around wearing masks, and those who did felt awkward because everyone stared at them. Sergey was still going to the office, and they hadn’t cordoned off the city yet – there weren’t even any rumours. It hadn’t occurred to anyone at that point that a huge megalopolis, a gigantic warren of a thousand square kilometres, could be sealed off, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the outside world; that airports and railway stations could stop functioning in one day and that passengers would be ordered off commuter trains to stand on the platform in cold, startled crowds, gazing after empty trains leaving for the city, with conflicting feelings of alarm and relief, like schoolchildren whose lessons had suddenly been cancelled. But none of this had happened yet.

I had stopped by for a minute to pick up Mishka, who’d had tea with her, and my mum said: ‘Anya, please have some soup, it’s still hot,’ but I wanted to get home before Sergey, and I seem to remember I only had a quick cup of coffee and started getting ready without even talking to her, hurriedly pecking her on the cheek as I reached the front door, saying, ‘Mishka, hurry up, the rush-hour traffic will start soon.’

I didn’t even hug her.

Mum, Mummy, darling….

It had happened quickly. There were rumours on the internet, which I was reading out of boredom and then telling Sergey every time I read something new. But he’d only laughed, saying: ‘Anya, how do you think it’s possible to close down an entire city – thirteen million people, government, all that stuff, and also millions of commuters who work there? Don’t overreact. They’re trying to scare you to death if you have the sniffles, so that you’ll become paranoid and buy the whole stock of their medicines, and then everything will calm down again.’

They closed the city without warning, at night. Sergey never woke me up early, but I knew that he liked it when I got up with him, made coffee for him, followed him around the house barefoot, sat next to him, sleepy, while he was ironing his shirt, walked him to the front door and walked back to the bedroom to hide under the duvet and get some more sleep.

That morning he woke me with a phone call: ‘Check online, baby, there’s a horrendous traffic jam into the city. I haven’t budged for half an hour, it’s impossible to move an inch.’ He had the irritated tone of somebody who doesn’t like being late, but he didn’t sound alarmed. I remember well that he didn’t sound alarmed then. I sat up and put one leg out of bed and sat still for some time, trying to wake up. Then I shuffled to the study, turned on my laptop – I think I passed by the kitchen on the way and poured myself a cup of coffee. While I sipped my drink I waited for Yandex to load on the computer in order to check the traffic, and above the search line, among other news (‘No bodies found after plane crash in Malaysia’) there was this sentence: ‘Entrance into Moscow is temporarily prohibited’. This phrase wasn’t at all frightening; it was ordinary, even boring. ‘Temporarily’ sounded routine and safe. I read the whole text to the end – four lines – and while I was dialling Sergey’s number, the headlines started popping up with incredible speed, one after the other, replacing the first, boring one. I’d just read MOSCOW IS QUARANTINED when Sergey phoned me and said, ‘I know, they just said it on the radio but didn’t give much detail. I’ll call the office and then ring you back. Keep reading, OK? It’s bullshit,’ and rang off.

I didn’t read any more. I called my mum; nobody picked up. I hung up and rang her mobile. When she finally picked up the phone she sounded out of breath:

‘Anya? What happened, what’s wrong with your voice?’

‘Where are you, Mum?’

‘I went to the shops to buy some bread. What’s wrong, Anya? Why are you panicking? I always go out at this time.’

‘You’ve been shut down, Mum, the city’s been shut down. I don’t know anything yet, I heard it on the news. Did you listen to the news this morning?’

She fell silent for a moment and then said, ‘I’m so glad you’re not in Moscow. Is Sergey at home?’

Sergey called several times on his way home. I read the news off the internet to him. All the messages were short, details coming through in snippets, many lines starting with ‘according to unconfirmed data’ or ‘a source in the city administration told us’. Then it said that the chief health official would give an update on the midday news. I kept reloading the page until my eyes became blurry reading the headlines and updates, my coffee went cold. More than anything else, I wanted Sergey to come home. After my third phone call he said that drivers had shut off their engines and been wandering up and down the road, poking their heads into other people’s cars, listening to the news on their radios, but now the traffic had finally started moving. ‘Baby, it’s insane, the news is only once every half hour, they play music and adverts all the time, damn it.’ After they had all returned to their cars, the long stream of vehicles started creeping towards the city; about forty minutes later, it turned out that they had to turn around at the next slip road and drive away from the city. Sergey called again and said:

‘It seems they’re not lying; the city’s closed.’ As if there was still doubt, as if, while crawling those last five kilometres, he’d been counting on all this being a prank, a bad joke.

Mishka woke up, came downstairs, and I heard the fridge door shut; I came out of the study and said:

‘The city’s closed.’

‘Meaning?’ He turned around and for some reason his sleepy eyes, ruffled hair and mark on his cheek from the pillow made me feel calm again.

‘Moscow is quarantined. Sergey’s coming back home. I rang Grandma, she’s fine. We won’t be able to get into the city for some time.’

‘Cool,’ said my skinny carefree boy, whose worst problem ever had been a broken games console. He wasn’t thrown in the slightest by this news – maybe he thought that the school holidays would carry on longer, or maybe he thought nothing at all. He smiled at me sleepily and, picking up a carton of orange juice and a biscuit, shuffled back to his bedroom.

All this was not so scary. It was impossible to imagine that the quarantine period would not end within a few weeks. They were saying things on TV like ‘it’s a temporary measure’, ‘the situation is under control’, ‘the city has enough medicine, and food arrangements are in place’. The news wasn’t coming as an endless stream with running text at the bottom of the screen, with live reports from strangely empty streets, with the few remaining pedestrians in masks. Instead, the channels still had all the usual entertainment programmes and adverts, and nobody was actually afraid yet – neither those in the city nor those outside it. My morning started with the news, and calls to Mum and my friends. Sergey was working from home, which was nice, a break in our usual routine. Our connection with the city wasn’t broken yet, it was just restricted. It didn’t seem urgent to find a way to get into the city and bring my mum here. When we first talked about it, we weren’t serious. It was at dinner, I think, during the first day of quarantine, and in those early days Sergey (as well as some of our neighbours, it turned out) drove out several times during the day. Rumour had it that only the main roads were closed and lots of minor ones were still open, but he didn’t manage to get into the city on any of those attempts and came back feeling defeated every time.

We got properly scared when they announced that the underground was closed. Then everything happened at once, as if a curtain had been raised, and information poured over us like churning waters. We were horrified at how complacent we had been: four hundred thousand people were infected. Mum called and said there were empty shelves in the shops (‘But don’t worry, I managed to stock up on things,’ she told me. ‘I don’t need much, and Liubov says that the city authorities are going to issue food stamps and will be distributing groceries any time now.’ And she added: ‘You know, darling, I’m starting to feel a bit uneasy now everyone’s wearing a mask outside.’) Then Sergey couldn’t get in contact with work because the network was as busy as New Year’s Eve, and towards the end of the day the headlines came in a torrent – curfew restrictions, a ban on moving through the city, patrols, medicine and food stamps, closure of all offices, emergency medical care stations at schools and nurseries. My friend Lena got through to us at night and cried into the phone: ‘Anya, they’re talking about medical care, but where is it? These places are like infirmaries, mattresses on the floor with sick people on them, like it’s a war.’

From then on Sergey and I spent our evenings planning how we could breach the quarantine, break through the cordons guarded by glum-looking armed men in masks. At first the roadblocks were made up of red and white plastic cubes, the sort you find at any police checkpoint and easy to scatter if you drive at full speed. The concrete beams with metal trimmings which rusted in the wet November weather appeared later. I argued with Sergey about our plans: ‘Look, they’re not going to shoot at us. We have a big heavy car – we could go through the fields. Let’s bribe them,’ and, ‘We must collect Mum and Lena, we must at least try!’

During one of those evenings, after the argument reached its peak, I forced us out of the house. Sergey stuffed his pockets with money, silently laced up his boots without looking at me, went outside, then came back to pick up the car keys. I was so worried he’d change his mind that I grabbed the first coat from the hook and shouted to Mishka, ‘We’re going to collect Grandma. Don’t open the door to anyone, OK?’ and without waiting for his answer ran out after Sergey.

On the way to the cordons we were silent. The road was empty and dark, and we had to drive for another twenty or so kilometres before reaching the streetlit stretch of the road. We saw a few cars going the opposite way. As we approached a bend we saw a cloud of white light which then flashed at us and turned into a pale yellow low beam, and these flashes, like a greeting, made me feel less worried. I looked at Sergey; his lips were tightly closed, and I didn’t dare reach over and touch his hand in case I destroyed that impulse which after a few days of arguments, tears and doubts had made him listen to me. I was looking at him and thinking, I’ll never ask you for anything else, just help me bring my mum here, please help me.

We drove past the idyllic luxury villages, with their windows peacefully glimmering in the dark, and came out on to the lit-up part of the road. I looked out at the street lights, which bent their yellow heads over both sides of the wide motorway like trees, at the huge shopping centres on both sides, which were dark at night, at the empty parking lots, lowered barriers and the billboards advertising expensive villas and plots for sale. When we saw the cordon, blocking the entrance into the city, I didn’t even grasp what it was at first. There were two patrol cars parked askew, one of which had its headlights on; a small green lorry at the side of the road; and a pile of several long concrete beams, which looked like marshmallow sticks from a distance, or a man’s lonely dark silhouette. All this looked so basic, like children’s toys arranged on the floor, that I started thinking that we’d be OK to get into the city. While Sergey was slowing down I dialled Mum’s number, and when she answered, I said: ‘Don’t say anything, we’re coming to pick you up,’ and rang off.

Before getting out of the car Sergey opened and closed the glove box but didn’t take anything out of it; he left the engine running and for a few seconds I watched him walk towards the cordon. He was moving slowly, as if trying to plan what he was going to say. I watched his back and then jumped out of the car; I heard that the door hadn’t shut properly behind me but decided to leave it and instead ran after him. When I caught up with him he was facing a big, bearlike man dressed in camouflage; it was cold and the man had a mask under his chin, which he started hurriedly pulling over his face as soon as he saw us coming over. He struggled for some time, trying to grab its edge with his thick black glove. He had a half-smoked cigarette in his other hand. I could see a few silhouettes in one of the patrol cars, and a lit-up screen. These people are watching TV, they’re ordinary people just like us, we’ll manage to make a deal, I thought.

Sergey stopped about five steps away, and I told myself that this was a clever thing to do: the man’s rush to pull on his mask meant only one thing, that they didn’t want us to come close. I stopped too, and Sergey said in an exaggeratedly cheerful voice, the one we use to talk to traffic police, ‘Hey mate, how do we get into the city?’ And I could sense by his tone and by the tightness of his mouth how difficult it was for him to act in this carefree manner, how uncomfortable this artificial friendliness was, so unlike him, how unsure he was that it would work. The man adjusted his mask and rested his hand on the machine gun on his shoulder. It wasn’t a threat, it just looked natural, as if he had no other place to rest his arm. He was silent and Sergey carried on, in the same artificially easy-going voice: ‘I really need to get there, mate, how many of you, five? Can we make a deal?’ And he put his hand in his pocket. We saw the door of the patrol car open slightly, and then the man, who still had his hand resting on the machine gun, said in what sounded like a teenage voice that hadn’t broken yet, ‘Not allowed. Special orders. You’ll have to go back,’ and waved the hand holding the glowing cigarette towards the central reservation. We both automatically looked in that direction: there was now a gap cut into the metallic barrier, and we could see tyre tracks in the snow both sides of it.

‘Hang on, mate,’ Sergey protested, but I sensed there and then by looking into the machine-gunner’s eyes that there was no point in calling him ‘mate’ or offering him money, that he would call for help now and we would have to get back into our car, turn around and follow the same tracks as the others who had tried to sneak into the sealed city and rescue their loved ones. I gently pushed Sergey aside, walked four steps towards the man with the machine gun and stood right in front of him, and then finally saw how young he was, probably no older than twenty. He turned his face away from me and I spoke, trying to catch his attention. ‘Listen,’ I began, even though I would never normally address anyone like that. It’s always been important to me to be polite and keep my distance, but here I was, an educated, successful grown woman, standing in front of this boy whose acne scars were visible round the sides of his mask, and I knew this was the way I needed to talk right now. ‘Listen. My mum’s there, you see, I have my mum there, she’s completely alone, she’s healthy. Do you have a mum? Do you love her? Please let us in, nobody’ll notice. Do you want me to go on my own? He can wait here, I have a child at home, I’ll be back I promise, I’ll be back in an hour, please let me in.’

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, clutching 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.

He stood in our lounge, which now had its lights on, squinting at the brightness; he wore Sergey’s old shooting jacket, which had seen better days, and a pair of felt winter boots with no overshoes which had oozed a small but growing puddle on the warm floor. Sergey lurched forward towards him but then stopped, and they both froze a step apart and didn’t embrace. Instead, both turned to me and I stood between them and hugged them both. Through the warm, thick smells of smoke and cigarettes I smelled alcohol, and I thought it was bizarre he’d made it here without being stopped, but then it dawned on me that it was unlikely anyone was bothered about policing minor roads these days. I pressed my cheek against the worn collar of his coat and said:

‘It’s so good that you came. Are you hungry?’

In a quarter of an hour, fried eggs were sizzling on the cooker and all of us, including Mishka, who was desperately trying to stay awake, sat around the kitchen table. It was half past four now and the kitchen was full of the appalling smell of Boris’s cigarettes – he only smoked the cheap and strong Java brand and waved away Sergey’s offer of Kent. While the food was cooking, they’d had time for one shot of vodka each, and when I put the steaming food in front of them and Sergey wanted to pour another one, Boris unexpectedly covered his glass with his large hand and nicotine-stained fingers and said: ‘Enough of the high life for me, I think. I came to tell you kids that you’re idiots. What the hell are you doing in this glass house, frying eggs and pretending everything is OK, eh? You didn’t even lock your gate. I know your fancy gate, and the rickety fence, if you can call it that, and this whole apology for a safe house won’t stop a child from breaking in, but still, I expected you to be smarter than that.’

He was half-joking, but his eyes were serious. I noticed that his hand, holding another cigarette, was shaking from tiredness and the ashes were falling straight onto the plate with the fried egg. His face was grey and there were dark circles around his eyes. Wearing a jumper of an indefinable colour, with an overstretched collar (probably Sergey’s too), thick trousers and felt boots, which he hadn’t even thought to take off, sitting in our stylish, modern kitchen, he looked like a huge, exotic bird. The three of us sat around him like scared children, catching every word he was saying.

‘I was hoping that I wouldn’t find you here, that you had enough brains to understand what’s going on and had boarded up your silly doll’s house and run away,’ he said, cutting off half the fried egg with his fork and holding it up in the air. ‘But, since I know your unthinking carelessness of old, I decided to check if I was right and, unfortunately, I was.’

We were silent – there was nothing to say. Boris looked regretfully at the fried egg shaking on his fork, put it back down and moved the plate away. It was obvious that he was looking for words, and part of me already knew what he wanted to say, and to delay the moment I moved to get up and clear the table, but Boris made a motion with his hand to stop me and said:

‘Wait, Anya, it won’t take long. The city was closed two weeks ago.’ He sat with his hands folded in front of him and his head bent. ‘And it’s been just over two months since the first people got infected – if, of course, they’re not lying to us. I don’t know how many people needed to die before they decided to close the city, but given that they turned the phones off, everything’s happening faster than they were expecting.’ He lifted his head and looked at us. ‘Come on, kids, look more intelligent. Have you never heard of mathematical modelling of epidemic diseases?’

‘Yes, I remember, Dad,’ said Sergey.

‘What’s modelling of epidemic diseases?’ Mishka asked. His eyes were wide with surprise.

‘It’s an old technique, Mishka,’ Boris said, looking at me. ‘It was in use even in the seventies, when I worked at the research institute. I know I’m out of practice now, but I should think the general principles are still the same. I still remember it – it’s like riding a bike. Once you learn, you don’t forget it. Briefly, it depends on the disease – the way it spreads, how infectious it is, how long its incubation period is, and what the death rate is. What also counts is what the government does to fight the disease. Back then we made calculations for seventeen infections, from bubonic plague to common flu. I’m not a doctor, I’m a mathematician, and I don’t know much about this new virus and I’m not going to bore you with differential equations, but judging by how quickly the situation is progressing, the quarantine hasn’t helped. Instead of getting better, people are dying, and dying fast. Maybe the authorities are not using the right medicine, maybe they don’t have anything to treat it with, or maybe they’re still looking for the way to treat it, whatever it is. I don’t think the city has died yet, but it’ll die soon. And before the chaos begins, I’d try to get away as far as possible if I were you.’

‘What chaos?’ I asked, and then Sergey spoke.

‘They’ll try to get out of the city, Anya – those who aren’t ill yet, together with those who are already infected but don’t know it, and they’ll also bring those who are already ill, because they can’t leave them behind. They’ll go past our house, they’ll knock on our door and ask for water or food, or to let them stay overnight, and as soon as you agree to do any of that, you’ll get infected.’

‘And if you don’t agree, Anya,’ said Boris, ‘they might get upset with you. The situation as it stands doesn’t sound very promising.’

‘How much time do you think we have, Dad?’ Sergey asked.

‘Not much. I think a week max, if it’s not too late already. I know I had a go at you, but I’m no better. What was I thinking? I should have come to you straight away, as soon as they announced the quarantine, instead of binge drinking in my village. I’ve brought some stuff with me – not everything that’s needed, of course, I didn’t have much cash on me, and I was in a hurry, so we’ll have to scramble to get away as soon as possible. Sergey, open the gate, I need to bring my car in. I’m afraid the old banger won’t make it if I drive her again. For the last few kilometres I was seriously worried I’d have to walk the rest of the way.’

And while he was getting up and rummaging through his pockets for the keys, I looked at him and thought that this clumsy, loud man, who we’d forgotten about and hadn’t called once to check on since the epidemic had started, this man had left his safe village, loaded the car with his simple possessions and was prepared to dump it in the middle of nowhere if the twenty-year-old Niva died, and to walk in the freezing cold to make sure we were still here, and to make us do what he thought would save our lives. I looked at Sergey and saw that he was thinking the same. I thought he was going to speak, but he simply took the keys from Boris and went outside.

When the door closed behind him, the three of us stayed in the kitchen. Boris sat down, looked at me, unsmiling, and said:

‘You don’t look great, Anya. And your mum?’

I felt my face crumpling and quickly shook my head. He took my hand and blundered on:

‘Have you heard from Ira and Anton?’

I felt my tears drying up before I’d even started crying, because I had forgotten, completely forgotten, about Sergey’s first wife and their five-year-old, Anton. I pressed my hand to my mouth and shook my head, horrified. He frowned and asked, ‘Do you think he’ll agree to leave without them?’ before answering his own question: ‘Although first we need to know exactly where we’re going.’

We didn’t talk any more that night: when Sergey came back into the house, bent under the weight of the huge canvas rucksack, Boris jumped to his feet to help, quickly giving me a warning glance, and the conversation stopped. For the next half hour, both of them – stamping hard on the mat outside to shake the snow off their boots every time they returned – brought in Boris’s luggage from the Niva, which was now parked outside the house, as well as some bags, sacks and canisters. Sergey suggested leaving some of the stuff in the car (‘We don’t need it right now, Dad’) but Boris was adamant, and soon the whole of his motley belongings were piled in the study, where he insisted he wanted to sleep, refusing the bed linen I offered him.

‘No need to make up a bed, Anya,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine on the sofa. We don’t have much time left for sleep anyway. Lock the doors and go to bed, we’ll talk again in the morning.’ Then, still in his felt boots, he trotted into the study, leaving a wet trail behind him, and shut the door.

His orders to call it a day were what was needed. First, without saying a word, Mishka went off to bed and I heard his door shut upstairs. Sergey locked the front door and left for bed too. I went through every room downstairs, turning off the lights. Ever since we moved here, this had become one of my favourite routines. After guests left, or after our usual, peaceful family evening together, I would wait until Sergey and Mishka had gone to bed and then empty the ashtrays, remove the dishes from the table, adjust the cushions on the sofa, have a last cigarette in a quiet, warm kitchen, and retreat up the stairs, leaving behind the cosy, sleepy darkness. Then I’d stand outside Mishka’s door for a while, and finally enter our dark airy bedroom, take off my clothes, slip under the blanket and cuddle up to Sergey’s warm back.

‌3

First Blood

I awoke and looked towards the window, trying to work out what time it was, but because it was one of those grey semi-dark November mornings, it was impossible to tell whether it was morning or afternoon. The other half of the bed was empty, and for some time I lay listening: the house was quiet. Nobody had woken me up, and for a few moments I was fighting the temptation to close my eyes and go to sleep again, as I’d often done over the previous few days, but then I made myself get out of bed, drape a dressing gown over my shoulders and come downstairs. I was right – the house was empty. The kitchen smelled of Boris’s cigarettes again, and among various breakfast leftovers there was a cafetière, still warm. I poured myself a cup of coffee and started gathering the plates from the table, and then I heard the front door slam. Boris entered the kitchen.

‘The car’s given up the ghost,’ he said in a triumphant tone, as if he was glad his expectations had been fulfilled. ‘We’ll have to dump the old jalopy here. Good job you both have four-by-fours. I don’t know what we’d do if you had girly yogurt pots on wheels.’

‘Good morning, Boris,’ I said. ‘Where are Sergey and Mishka?’

He came up and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘We didn’t want to wake you, Anya, you looked so exhausted last night. Come on, drink up your coffee, we’ve got a lot to do, you and I. I sent Sergey and Mishka to do some shopping. Don’t worry, they won’t get any further than Zvenigorod, not that they need to, anyway. We’ve got a long list, but we can get everything locally. If we’re lucky and our neighbours haven’t worked out yet what they need to stock up on instead of vermouth and pitted olives, we’ll manage to get everything we need in a couple of days and leave.’

‘Where could we go?’

‘The most important thing is to leave here. You’re too close to the city, Anya, and it’s best to be as far away as possible. Sergey and I talked earlier and decided that to start with we’ll go to my place in Levino – after all, it’s two hundred kilometres from Moscow, it’s a small village, far from the road, there’s a river, woods, good hunting prospects. We’ll go there first, and see.’

In daylight, in the usual comfort of our kitchen – the smell of coffee, plates on the table, breadcrumbs, Mishka’s orange hoodie draped over the back of a chair – everything that had been discussed at this table last night seemed so untrue, so surreal. I heard a car going past. I imagined Boris’s poky, dark, two-roomed house, which would somehow have to accommodate us all after our sensible, comfortable world, but I had no energy to argue with him.

‘What shall I do?’ I asked. He had presumably guessed what I was thinking by the expression on my face and was relieved that I didn’t object.

‘Don’t worry, Anya, it’ll be like going for a ride in the country. It’s not as if you had plans, is it,’ he said amicably. ‘And if by any chance I’m wrong, you can always come back. Let’s go and see where you keep your warm clothes – I’ve made a list. Try and think if you want to take anything else.’

Within an hour, our bedroom floor was covered in tidy piles of clothes – warm jackets, woollen socks, jumpers, underwear. Boris was particularly pleased with the solid sheepskin-lined boots which Sergey had bought for both Mishka and me before we went to Lake Baikal. ‘You guys are not completely hopeless!’ he declared, holding them up. I kept bringing clothes from the wardrobe and he sorted them out. From time to time I would come to the window and look at the road; it was getting darker and I was eager for Sergey and Mishka to come home soon. The light went on in the house opposite. When I went to the window again I noticed a man’s silhouette on the balcony. It was Lenny, coming outside for a smoke, as Marina wouldn’t let him light up indoors. When he saw me he waved, and I thought, again, that I must finally buy some blackout curtains – when we’d moved to the countryside we hadn’t been prepared for the fact that our neighbours could see everything happening in our house, until Lenny, in his usual unceremonious manner, said to Sergey, ‘Since you guys moved here it’s been a lot more fun to smoke on the balcony. It’s bloody great to live next door to newlyweds!’ I waved back, and heard Boris say behind my back:

‘That’s enough clothes, Anya. Let’s see what kind of medicines you’ve got.’

I was about to turn away from the window when I saw a green military-style truck stopping near Lenny’s automatic gate.

The driver was a man in camouflage overalls and a black beanie. I could see his white mask through the windscreen. The door banged and another man jumped out of the truck. He was dressed identically to the first one and had a machine gun hanging over his shoulder. He dropped his unfinished cigarette, crushed it out on the pavement with the tip of his boot, then walked over to Lenny’s gate and pulled it. It didn’t give; it was locked. I looked up at Lenny and pointed down at the truck, but he’d already noticed it and was now closing the balcony door. Half a minute later the gate opened and I saw Lenny in the gateway. He had a jacket thrown over his shoulders. I saw him stretch his hand to greet the man in camouflage, who ignored the gesture and stepped back, waving his machine gun towards Lenny, as if ordering him to move out of the way. The canvas cover of the truck opened, the side dropped, and another man jumped down, also wearing a mask and carrying a machine gun. He didn’t come up to the gate but stayed near the truck.

For some time, nothing happened. Lenny stood framed in the gateway. He retracted his hand but carried on smiling. They were talking, and I could only see the back of the man in camouflage.

‘What’s going on, Anya?’ Boris called from inside. ‘Are they back?’ The man with Lenny took several quick steps towards him and pushed him in the chest with the muzzle of the machine gun, and they both disappeared behind the gate. Seconds later, the other man who had jumped out of the truck followed them inside. I couldn’t see anything behind Lenny’s three-metre-high fence, but I heard Lenny’s dog barking and then a strange, short, dry bang which I immediately realised was a gunshot, although it sounded nothing like those rolling echoing volleys from Hollywood films and Mishka’s computer games. I dashed to open the window, not realising why I was doing it, but somehow it was important for me to look out and see what was going on. Another man wearing a mask jumped out of the truck and ran through the gate, and the next thing I felt was a heavy hand on my shoulder, pulling me back and nearly making me fall over.

‘Anya, get away from the window and don’t even think of leaning out.’

Boris, swearing, ran down to the ground floor. I heard his heavy steps on the stairs, and then the door of the study slammed shut. I was scared to stay alone, and ducked down to follow him, but as soon as I reached the staircase I saw him running back up. He was holding a rectangular black plastic case, which he was struggling to open while running, swearing under his breath. I pressed myself against the wall and let him go past me back to the bedroom and then followed him, as if drawn by a magnet, back to the window.