Yana Vagner
TO THE LAKE
MAP
1
MUM
My mother died on Tuesday, November 17th. It was her neighbour who rang me; ironically she was the last neighbour Mum or I ever wanted to have contact with; she was a grumpy woman, always whingeing. She had an unfriendly face which looked as if it was carved from stone; during the fifteen years my mum and I lived on the same floor with her, there were several years when I didn’t say hello to her at all, and would deliberately press the button inside the lift before she could make it to the doors, breathing heavily and moving her legs with difficulty. 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 when during that time (I was fourteen or fifteen) she would ring our door bell – Mum never invited her in – and convey her displeasure on various matters: water splashes from my boots in the corridor, a confused guest who rang her door bell 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. She never learnt how to bite back, and even the slightest squabble in a shop queue – when other shoppers, their eyes glinting, would get animated by the sight of people arguing – gave her a bad headache. It gave her palpitations and tears too. When I turned eighteen, our neighbour’s weekly attacks on our flat suddenly ended – perhaps she realised that I was old enough to answer the door myself, so she stopped her glowering assaults. After that I started saying hello to her again, every time feeling some kind of triumph inside, and then, shortly afterwards I left home (after I was gone the feud between them may have rekindled, but 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 once in the last ten years, but recognised her voice straight away as soon as she said ‘Anya’. She said my name and fell silent, and I realised at that moment 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 apart from my name. I cried, pressing the receiver harder into my ear with her heavy breathing in it, and 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 closing doors of the lift, her perennial complaining – allowed me to cry for ten seconds or maybe even longer, and only then spoke again. She said – I sat on the floor while she was talking – that Mum hadn’t been suffering at alclass="underline" “We saw such terrible things on the telly but she didn’t have none of that, it wasn’t all that scary, she didn’t have convulsions or suffocation, we kept the doors open, Anya, just in case, y’know – what if somebody’s worse and won’t have time to get to the door – I poked my head round – brought her some soup, 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 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 about closing the circus and cinemas as well, 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, like schoolchildren whose lessons had suddenly been cancelled, with conflicting feelings of alarm and relief. But none of this had happened yet.
I stopped by for a minute to pick up Mishka who had 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 so 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 only laughed: ‘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 just 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 suddenly, 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 barefooted, 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 up with a phone calclass="underline" “Check online, baby, there’s a horrendous traffic jam into the city. I haven’t budged for half an hour, impossible to move an inch.” He had the slightly irate tone of somebody who doesn’t like being late, but he didn’t sound alarmed – I remember well, 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 my laptop on – I think I passed by the kitchen on the way and poured myself a cup of coffee which was still warm. While I sipped the coffee I waited for Yandex to load on the computer in order to check the traffic, and above the search line, amongst other news – ‘No bodies found after plane crash in Malaysia’ and ‘Michael Schumacher returns to Formula 1’ – there was this line: ‘Entrance into Moscow is temporarily prohibited’. This phrase wasn’t at all frightening. In fact, it was dull, 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 picked up his phone 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 rang off 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?”