“…hardly moving, on this shit. I don’t know what kind of diesel this is. I hope, it isn’t a summer one, it’d be good to find a petrol station which is open, what do you think, Dad?”
While he was speaking I heard music through crackling and interference from Sergey’s car – he always turns the music down when he uses the radio, but it turns out you can hear it anyway. I could also hear the boy’s thin voice, but his words were indistinct. I saw his face through the rear window of the car – perhaps he was kneeling on the back seat and trying to reach the window to wipe the condensation off, but couldn’t reach and was just looking back at us; and next to him, the blonde hair of his mother. I only saw the back of her head. She didn’t turn, but probably said something to the boy, because I could hear Sergey:
“Leave him, Ira, let him sit the way he wants, it’s a long journey, he’ll get bored.”
I nearly waved to the boy but he couldn’t see me anyway; instead I reached for the radio, before Boris could pick it up to talk to Sergey about the petrol stations.
“Darling,” I said, “I think Lenny should go between us – he hasn’t got a radio. Do you want to overtake him, or shall I?”
Sergey was silent for a few seconds – then he said “OK, I will”, and started overtaking, without saying a word to contradict me. I never call him ‘darling’ for no reason – it was our code word which I only used as a last resort, a word I chose especially for those people who fell silent when we came into the room, and then looked from him to me and then back to him, and then came up to me on the balcony when I’d light a cigarette and asked ‘is everything OK with you two?’; for those who’d expect confessions and complaints about our failing relationship, because there should be confessions and complaints, shouldn’t there?
It was both of us who needed that word, not just me, because the woman who was sitting in the back of his car was never short of words when she wasn’t happy, – I know, he told me and I’d give my right arm not to become like her. And that’s why every time when I was suffocating among people who didn’t like me, I would simply say ‘shall we go home, darling?’ in a sweet voice, and smile, and then he would look at me carefully and we would leave. Bravo, darling, you know me so well.
The back of Lenny’s car was not so interesting. Nobody was peering through the back window – the little girl, strapped in the car seat, couldn’t look back, and the windows were tinted and I couldn’t see anything inside, so I could finally look around me. We left the first patch of woods, separating our village from the others, which looked like yellow spots in winter darkness. They were so close together that the black, dense air surrounding us suddenly became diluted with yellow glow from the street lights and windows. I thought that if I was to peer through the windows of the houses alongside the road, I would see a family around their dinner table under an orange kitchen lampshade, or the blue screen of a TV in the lounge; a car, parked outside, the glow of a cigarette near the front door: all these people, hundreds of people, staying put – unafraid, not driving around the surrounding towns in search of petrol, not packing up their belongings, just deciding to stay and sit out this horror, trusting the solidity of their homes, their doors and fences. So many lit up windows, so many smoking chimneys on the roofs, they can’t all be wrong, can they? Where are we going? Why are we going? Was this decision, made without me, right? Was I right when I agreed to it, without saying a word? To leave the only place where I could feel safe now without complaining, while all these people around me make dinner, watch the news, cut wood and wait until the epidemic ends, confident that it’ll end soon? My reality – the hurried packing, gunshots, a dead dog, a story about the dying city – is separated from their reality by an impenetrable screen: I can see them through it, but can’t reach them, can’t stay with them, I’m just passing through, with my son sitting behind me, and all I feel is unbearable loneliness.
We all saw it at the same time, before Lenny’s brake lights came on. I slammed on my brakes, I heard Lenny’s door shut, he jumped out heavily, walked round the car and headed for the side of the road. Boris poked his head out and shouted,“Lenny, wait, don’t go there!” and Lenny stopped but didn’t return to the car.
The fire had gone out – even a big house wouldn’t take a whole day to burn down, and this one wasn’t that big, judging by the other houses, all like peas in a pod. This was a small, neat private villa community, which they’d started building after we moved into our house, and every time I went past the fenced off building site, I was surprised at how fast it was growing. First, neat boxes with empty, unglazed windows, then identical brown roofs, low light-coloured fences, and after a year, they took down the tall fence and revealed a beautiful fairy tale village. It still looked like a fairy tale: the paths cleared of snow, the pale walls, framed by chocolate-brown logs, the brick chimneys – only, on the site of the house nearest to the road there was an oil-black ragged patch with the charred silhouette of the ruins. Through a dense cloud of white smoke, resembling what you often see above open-air swimming pools in winter, I could see that the front wall of the house had collapsed exposing its charred insides, and the greasy, ugly-looking blobs of what was left of the curtains and carpets or maybe cables, were hanging from the ceilings. And where the roof used to be, there were just the remains of the framework, impregnated with the smell of bonfire.
“Look, Mishka, you were wondering what it was this morning,” Boris said, turning to us.
“What happened?” asked Mishka quietly.
“Let’s put it this way: I doubt that the house burnt down because somebody was messing about with fireworks, although everything’s possible,” Boris said, and he poked his head out of the window and shouted to Lenny: “Did you get a good look? Now, let’s go, Lenny, let’s go!”
After the unplanned stop by the burnt gingerbread house, we paid no more attention to the road signs – we didn’t want to meander along looking at the surroundings any more. Sergey was the first to increase speed, then the Land Cruiser followed, sounding like a tractor – its exhaust started smoking and I wound the window up. The wretched radio was stopping me from steering properly. At every turn I caught it with my elbow, and the metal rectangle dangled, scratching the leather armrest. But the road was familiar – after two years of living here I knew every twist and turn, and we soon caught up with Lenny. After ten minutes we came out on to the motorway and drove towards the great orbital in single file. For some reason, after the ruined fairy-tale village was behind us, I expected to see people fleeing the dangerous outskirts of the dying city, in cars, or on foot, but we were the only ones on the road – there was no one following us or going in the opposite direction. Boris also seemed surprised to see the empty road – he even leaned down and checked the frequency of the radio, but there wasn’t a single sound, only silence and occasional interference. On the left, there was a dense wall of trees, and on the right we were expecting to see the slip roads to the little villages spread alongside the motorway. We had about forty kilometres to go to the outer ring road; I knew these places well, too – when Sergey and I were looking for a house, fed up with the rented flat with somebody else’s furniture and a soulless view from the window that I’d never got used to in the nine months I lived there, we drove around this vicinity – ‘It’s an anthill, baby, you don’t want to live in an anthill, do you? Let’s look somewhere else. It’s OK if it’s further away from the city, it’ll be fine, it’ll be quiet, just you and me and nobody else around.’ Our friends who live in the city thought we were mad to want to leave, but we didn’t listen to anyone, and couldn’t imagine that the distance, which seemed far enough to separate us from the rest of the world, would now seem so short to us.