“I don’t understand,” said Marina in a complaining voice.
“Lake Vongozero, Anya, remember? I’ve been trying to persuade you to come there with me for the last three years,” Sergey sounded excited. “Dad, we were there before Anton was born.” He grabbed the road atlas and started flicking through the pages, but Boris reached over and stopped him.
“Brilliant idea, son,” he said quietly. “I don’t think there’s a better place. We’re going to Karelia.”
“There’s a house there, Anya, I told you, remember? A house on a lake. There’s an island in the middle of the lake, you can only get to it by boat.” Sergey started rustling pages again, but I already remembered the surface of the lake, grey and shiny, like quicksilver, and the faded, almost transparent reeds growing in the water, several mounds of scattered islands, overgrown with dark forests: this was the leaden, bleak Karelian September, which, as soon as I looked at it in the photos Sergey showed me, left me permanently scared – it seemed so cold and alien compared with our warm, sunny, orange and blue autumn. ‘And in the winter!’ I thought, ‘What must that be like?’ Even here, I’d try not to look out the window at the slippery black branches and grey sky. I’m always cold no matter how warmly I wrap up. Sergey would tell me ‘you’re like a badger inside a burrow, come on, go out, you’ve been in for three days’. ‘I don’t want to’, I’d say, ‘I hate the cold and the winter. I keep it away from me with the fire and cognac.’
But how much cognac will I be able to take with me? How long will I be able to store the warmth in me – the warmth of our climate, which I can’t live without – in a small house of weathered wood, soaked with the damp of the glacial lake?
“There’s no electricity there, Sergey,” I added. I knew that it was pointless to protest, that we really didn’t have anywhere else to go, but I couldn’t help saying something, it was important for me to voice my fear of this place. “And there’re only two rooms. It’s really small, your hunting lodge.”
“There’s a wood stove, Anya. And trees everywhere. And a whole lake of pure water. As well as fish, fowl, mushrooms and a forest full of lingonberry. And you know what else, the most important thing of all?”
“I know, yes,” I said wearily, “There isn’t. A single. Sole. There.”
So the matter was settled.
What I didn’t quite expect was Lenny’s excitement over our imminent escape. He looked like a child who’d been allowed to join a grown-ups’ party at the last minute. Within five minutes he was talking louder than everyone else, poking the map with his finger – ‘Let’s not go through St Petersburg, there’s bound to be chaos there’, pulling the shopping list, which everyone forgot about, from under Sergey’s glass, ‘potatoes – ok, we’ve got three sacks in the basement. Marina, you’ll need to check, we’ve got plenty of pulses, I think, and I’ll buy more tinned meat, I’ll go first thing tomorrow’. And then suddenly he became silent, frowning, like a child who didn’t find a present under the Christmas tree. ‘I haven’t got a proper gun,’ he said, ‘I’ve only got one that fires rubber bullets’. Sergey said comfortingly ‘I’ll give you a gun, I’ve got three’, and they sat together, heads down, – Boris, Sergey and Lenny – talking away, Mishka next to them, with burning bright eyes, caught up in the general excitement. I poured the rest of the whisky into the two remaining glasses and gave one of them to Marina, who grabbed it with her free hand (the other holding her daughter), as if she’d been following my every move. Our eyes met and I saw in this withdrawn woman, whom I barely knew, with whom I’d hardly exchanged a word in the two years that we had lived here, I saw the same kind of emotion in her eyes, which was suffocating me, too: a helpless, paralysing fear of what had happened to us, and of what was unquestionably still awaiting us ahead.
An hour later, we all decided to go to bed – nobody was hungry, so with no cooking to do Marina and I felt rather useless. I tried to assert my authority by raising my voice to Mishka to send him to bed, and after a short protest he went gloomily upstairs. The others followed, still talking away. Lenny bent down to pick up the little girl from Marina’s lap, but she suddenly pulled her to her chest and said, her voice sounding surprisingly brusque:
“Anya, can we stay here for the night? I don’t want to go back there.”
We all had the same thought at the same time and looked out of the window at the black sky, the snow glittering in the street lights, an empty road disappearing in the woods. I imagined the ransacked house opposite, the beautiful dead dog, lying in the red snow – the blood stains had probably become black in the dark, and the dead dog’s white fur would be covered with frost now.
In the sudden silence Sergey said:
“That’s a good idea, Marina. You should stay here. Dad’ll sleep in the lounge, and you can take the study. I also think that we should take turns and watch the road. If they dared to come here during the day, it would be daft to assume they’ll spare us at night.”
Sergey volunteered to be the first to keep guard and he went upstairs to collect his guns from the metal cabinet, which was inside the dressing room. Boris started moving his sleeping bag from the study into the lounge and Marina went to bathe the little girl. I didn’t go with her, because they wouldn’t need me, but just said, ‘you can find towels in the cabinet in the bathroom’, and then stood in the middle of the lounge, watching them go. The child, like a pet monkey on a chain, was peeping out from behind her back, turning her head to me, blurry-eyed – a shapeless, plump cheek, resting on Marina’s shoulder. I thought to myself, again, how strangely inactive this tiny, plain little girl was. If it had been Mishka when he was little, he would have explored the whole room and climbed onto everyone’s lap. As I was trying to remember if I had ever heard this little girl speak, Lenny, who stood behind me, said: “She doesn’t say a word, not even ‘mummy’. We’ve seen many doctors and they all say ‘you need to wait’, so we’re waiting. But she doesn’t say a word, just looks, little dumbo.”
I turned to him. He was standing near the window and peering to one side, as if trying to see his own house in the dark, even though it wasn’t visible from the window of our lounge. Then he turned to me and said: “I’d go and bury the dog, but Marina would panic. Anya, please find us some bedding,” and he set off towards the study, and I followed him, almost glad that at last somebody needed my help.
5
FACE TO FACE
I woke up in the middle of the night. It was dark and a dog was barking somewhere far away. It was a comforting noise, the noise of a peaceful life. Somehow I knew there was nobody in bed with me – I didn’t even need to turn over to check; however, I turned and even stretched my arm over to the other side. The pillow was untouched, and it was clear Sergey hadn’t gone to bed. I didn’t feel sleepy at all, I lay on my back in the quiet, dark bedroom and felt angry, cold tears streaming down my cheeks, trickling into my ears. I was fed up waking up in an empty bed, not knowing anything, having to wait until things were decided for me, feeling like an inert and useless body.