There was nobody in the lounge. I walked into the kitchen and saw Ira standing by the cooker, and Marina at the table with the little girl on her lap, and next to them, on the chair – the boy, sitting quietly; there were plates in front of them and a jar of jam. As I’d been approaching the kitchen I could hear them talking, but as soon as I came in they fell silent. Marina looked up at me, and Ira, without turning round, said:
“I hope you don’t mind, I’m making porridge for them. They need to eat before the journey.”
“Of course,” I said,“there’s also cheese and salami. Do you want to make some sandwiches? We can also fry some eggs – we all need to eat, the frying pan’s on the cooker.”
She didn’t reply and didn’t move, just kept on stirring the porridge, and then I went to the fridge, opened it and started taking out eggs, sausage and cheese.
“I’ll tell them to come and eat in half an hour, I still need to pack some stuff,” I said.
Without looking at me she stepped out of my way, and I turned to Marina and said: “Lenny’s here, are you sure he brought everything we need? Do you think it’s worth checking?”
Marina stood up, put her little girl down on the chair she was sitting on, and said to Ira “Can you watch her?” and left the kitchen.
The girl stayed sitting still. I could only see the top of her face above the table. She hadn’t noticed her mother go and didn’t look bothered that she’d gone; reaching over, she carefully touched the empty plate with her short, plump fingers, and a moment later froze again. I looked at Ira, who was still stirring the porridge, and said to the back she was showing me stubbornly: “In half an hour.” And left the kitchen.
I went upstairs to the bedroom, found Sergey’s hunting rucksack and two holdalls and packed all the warm clothes that Boris and I had prepared the day before. I should probably have asked Ira if she needed any clothes, but I didn’t feel like going back downstairs and talking to her again. Instead, having checked through the wardrobe, I packed a few more jumpers into the bag and after a bit of thought, a couple of T-shirts and underwear, too. ‘I don’t know her sizes,’ I thought, ‘and anyway it’s not my problem; if she needs anything, I’ll give it to Sergey, why on earth is she standing there, in my kitchen, with her back to me? We’ve got a lot of clothes, so we’ll sort something out.’
It felt like packing for a holiday – I always did it the night before departure; I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I would put a DVD on and bring the clothes one by one, pausing for a cigarette on the balcony or coffee downstairs, or stopping to watch a favourite scene – and then carry on, sometimes remembering something I’d forgotten to pack. To be honest, I would just put the clothes on the bed, and Sergey would pack them, but he was busy with something else – I heard his voice through the open window. It had been a kind of a game we played: I pretended I couldn’t pack the suitcase properly so I’d ask him for help, although before we met I had always done it for myself. So I didn’t wait for him and when I finished packing, there was still room in both bags. I straightened the coverlet, sat on the bed and looked around the bedroom. The room was tidy and calm, with the packed bags by the door. I imagined that in a few hours we would leave here for good and everything I hadn’t packed would stay here. It would shrink, get covered in dust and disappear forever. What else would I need, apart from sturdy boots, food, medicines, warm clothes, and spare underwear for a woman who is most probably not going to wear it? As a child I liked looking at all my prized possessions before going to sleep and in the morning I would ask everyone, ‘what would you take with you if there was a fire? You can only take one thing, only one’. Everyone would turn it into a joke and my mum would say ‘of course I’d take you, silly,’ and I got cross and said ‘you need to choose a thing, you see, a thing!’ When Mishka was born, I understood why Mum had said that, but now I sat in the bedroom of a house we built two years ago and where I’d been really happy, and this house was full of things which were meaningful to us, and there was still room in the bags. Not a lot of room, so I needed to choose carefully.
I heard voices downstairs. The men had come back into the house. I got up, went into the dressing room and picked up a cardboard box, containing a jumble of photographs, all sorts of sizes and dates, black and white, colour. There was my parents’ wedding, my grandparents, little Mishka, me in my school uniform, but there wasn’t a single one of Sergey. I never found the time to sort them out because we stopped printing photos at some point and stored them on our computer. I emptied the box, put the photos into a plastic bag and packed it into one of the holdalls, then closed the door and went downstairs.
I bumped into Lenny and Marina near the stairs. They were quietly arguing about something. When I came up, she looked at me and said: “I can’t go back into our house. Lenny forgot a lot of stuff – Dasha’s clothes, bedding and lots of other little things. I wanted to go and get them, but I can’t – I’m scared, and there’s this smoke as well.” She turned to Lenny: “I’m not going, let’s not waste any time, look, I’ve made a list, Dasha’s red snowsuit is in the wardrobe on the right, you’ll need to bring my ski suit as well, the white one, it’s very warm – I’m not going away in this awful jacket – and thermal underwear; Lenny, you know where it is, you were the one to put it there.” Lenny rolled his eyes, took the list from her hands and went to the exit, and she shouted to him: “And don’t forget my jewellery box, it’s on the table near the mirror.”
“Marina,” Lenny said from the door, “we’re not going to Courchevel, why the hell do you need your jewellery,” and, without waiting for an answer, he left.
“My grandma,” Marina said quietly – she was calm and even smiling,“always said to me that the reason diamonds have such high value is because you can always swap them for a loaf of bread. They don’t take up much space in the luggage, and you’ll see, Anya, they’ll come in handy, so if I were you, I’d take everything you’ve got, too.”
We were carrying bags to the car for the next two hours, with a small break for lunch. Having fed the children (even Mishka ate the porridge without complaining), Ira fried the eggs after all, and everyone ate them on the go, without sitting down at the table. I didn’t even regret not sitting round our lovely big table for the last meal in the house. I felt the odd one out, a bit awkward and uncomfortable with this particular group. Ira made sandwiches of the remaining bread and cheese, which she wrapped and distributed between the cars. Each time we thought everything was ready, somebody would remember something very important – ‘I’ve forgotten tools!’ Sergey would say, and he and Boris would disappear into the basement, shouting to me on the way ‘Anya, can you pack a medical dictionary, if you have one?’ And Marina would answer ‘we’ve got one,’ and Lenny would dash across the road to his empty house with dark windows, and we’d have to make space for the new thing, moving the bags around, rearranging boxes and suitcases. The three cars parked in front of the house with open back doors looked like a bizarre group of sculptures. The stripped Niva was there, too. Boris disconnected its long antenna and removed the shortwave radio. Sergey had given it to him after he’d bought a new one for himself, and now he tried to install it inside my car. I always hated that radio – ‘you’ve got an antenna, as if you’re a taxi driver,’ I would tell him – but really I was angry at Sergey’s habit of eavesdropping on conversations between long-distance lorry drivers – ‘anyone selling fuel?’, ‘there’s a traffic patrol on the forty-fifth kilometre, keep your eyes peeled, guys’. It had become Sergey’s favourite toy, and when we sometimes drove in the same car he would turn it on trying to decipher other people’s chats with each other, while I was smoking out of the window, annoyed.