As soon as I stopped watching the wretched road, I felt a bit better. I went to the bathroom, opened the bedding cabinet and started taking out bath towels. First, three large chocolate ones (something’s happened, he’s not coming back), then another three big ones, only blue; I took out new ‘guest’ toothbrushes from under the sink, several tubes of toothpaste, soap, a pack of tampons – I’ll have to ask Sergey (he won’t come back) if they remembered to buy some more for me, I never keep more than one pack at home, or I can ask Marina, people living in the country are normally good at stocking up. We’ll probably need washing powder or soap flakes, I think it was on the list, only where can I find soap flakes? Although, they’ve probably bought some. I opened the medicine chest – iodine, Nurofen, nasal drops – Mishka can’t sleep if he has a blocked nose. What a feeble medicine chest we have – it’s only good for holidays, for a week by the sea, and definitely not for half a year in the woods. We don’t even have any bandages, just a few strips of plaster for a rubbed toe after wearing a new pair of shoes. We’ll probably need antibiotics, what if somebody has pneumonia or something worse? I need to check what they bought yesterday at the chemist’s.
I’ll get on with the packing and if I don’t go to the window once he’ll come back. Woollen socks, warm hats, ski gloves, underwear, yes, underwear, there are no windows in the dressing room, maybe I should go downstairs, to the storage room. We need pulses and tins, they’ve probably bought all this, but it’d be silly to leave it here. Sugar, this is laughable – two bags, a kilo each, we need a big sack of sugar, a sack of rice, a sack of everything, there’s seven of us, how many potatoes do seven people need for the winter? how many tins of meat? it’s just surrounded by woods, a cold, empty, wooden house, no mushrooms or berries – everything under the snow, what are we going to eat? how are we going to sleep? seven of us, in two rooms. We need to take sleeping bags, we only have two, we need seven, no, nine, because he’s bringing two more. I’ll smile at her, I’ll become her best fucking friend, only please let him come home, let him be safe. I think I heard a door shut upstairs – I’m not listening, it’s just Mishka waking up, or Lenny coming back, I’m not trying to listen if it’s Sergey’s voice, if I try not to listen, if I pretend that I’m not waiting for him, then he’ll come back, it’s a shame there’s no radio in the storage room, I could turn the music on and it’d drown any outside noise, I’m not listening, not listening…
It suddenly became brighter in the storage room, I turned around – the door was open and Mishka stood in the doorway; he was saying something and looked surprised. I took my hands away from my ears and heard:
“Mum, we’ve been calling you for ages, didn’t you hear? Why did you cover your ears? They’ve come back, everything’s OK.”
And then I could breathe out – as if I’d only been breathing with half my lungs. Of course he’d come. I pushed Mishka aside and ran into the corridor. Sergey was taking his jacket off and next to him, sideways to me, stood a tall woman in a dark quilted coat with the hood up. She was holding a boy by the hand, he had a dark blue snowsuit on, zipped up all the way to his chin. They were standing still, not making the slightest effort to take their coats off. Sergey looked at me and smiled, but I could see he was terribly tired:
“We got held up, couldn’t come back by the same road, had to make a detour via the ring road, hope you haven’t been worried, baby.”
I wanted to run up to him, to touch him, but I would have to push aside the tall woman and the little boy standing near her, so I stopped a few steps away and just said: “You forgot your watch.”
At the sound of my voice, the woman turned, took off her hood and shook her head to release long blonde hair, trapped by her collar.
“This is Ira, baby,” Sergey said. “And this is Anton.”
“Nice to meet you,‘baby’” said the woman slowly, and looked me calmly in the eye. Our eyes met, and although she didn’t say anything else, this gaze was enough for me to understand that I probably had little chance of keeping my promise to become her best friend.
“Ira,” Boris said, “thank goodness, you’re all fine.”
Smiling, he came up closer but didn’t hug her or the boy. I stepped out of the way, letting him through, and thought that it looked as if this family wasn’t used to giving each other hugs at all before I joined it. She lifted the corners of her lips slightly, outlining a faint smile in reply, and said:
“Anton and I’ve spent two weeks in the flat. I’m not entirely sure, but I think, apart from us, there’s no one left on our staircase.”
Mishka came up, then Marina popped her head out of the study, and Ira finally took her coat off and gave it to Sergey, and then, bending down to the boy and undoing his snowsuit, started talking. Without raising her head, in a plain, ordinary voice, she described to us how the city was dying; how the panic began straight after they announced the quarantine, and people started fighting in groceries and chemist’s shops; how the troops came in and masked soldiers were giving out food and medicines off the military trucks; how a neighbour who used to babysit Anton had fingers on both of her hands broken when somebody tried to snatch her bag, and after that they only went out in groups of eight or ten. How buses and trams had stopped running and only ambulances circled the streets, soon replaced by military trucks with red crosses – first they were red stripes clumsily stuck to their canvas tops, and then – which looked more permanent – they painted them on. They stopped picking up infected people from their homes, and the families had to walk them to the trucks, which would come twice a day to start with, and then several times a day. How those ‘field ambulances’ stopped coming altogether and notices were put up on the front doors saying ‘The nearest emergency medical aid station is located at ______’, and people had to take their infected family members by themselves. Sometimes they had to take their dead bodies. She said that when her sister’s son got ill – ‘Do you remember Lisa, Sergey?’ – Lisa took him to the ‘field ambulance’ and afterwards had to search for him around various hospitals and couldn’t find him – phones still worked then. And then Lisa came to her late at night, on foot, and rang the doorbell, and Ira could see through the peephole that she was unwell – her face was covered in beads of sweat and she had a hacking cough. ‘I didn’t open the door, we would have caught it straight away, and then Lisa sat by our door and didn’t go away for a long time, and I think she was sick on the stairs, and when I went to the door again, she had gone’. After that, she realised they must not leave the flat. The TV continued saying that the situation was under control, the number of deaths was down as the peak of the epidemic was about to be passed, and she still had some food at home. She hoped they could sit it out. But after one week it became obvious that what they had was not enough, and she started eating very little, but the food ran out anyway, and in the last two days she and Anton were eating old jam from a jar they found on the balcony – four spoons in the morning, four in the afternoon and four in the evening, – and were drinking cool boiled water.
She said that she had spent all her time by the window, and towards the end there was hardly anyone left in the streets – day or night – and she was really afraid that she would miss an announcement about evacuation or a vaccine, and kept the TV on, even slept next to it, and then was afraid that they would turn off electricity and water, but everything was working. Only the windows in the building opposite did a strange thing – some of them were permanently dark, and others had the light on all the time, even during the day, and she would pick a window and watch it, trying to determine if there were any survivors there. She said that when Sergey came and rang the doorbell, she looked at him through the peephole for a long time and made him come closer and take his jacket off so that she could see that he was not sick, and when they were running to the car together, they saw a woman’s body in the snow, lying face down, and she even thought for a second that it was Lisa, although it couldn’t have been Lisa, of course, because Lisa had been there a week earlier.