“Where are you, Mum?”
“I just went to the shops to buy some bread – what’s wrong, Anya. I always go out at this time, why are you panicking?”
“You’ve been shut down, Mum, the city’s been shut down. I don’t know anything yet, I heard it on the news. Did you listen to the news this morning?”
She fell silent for a moment and then said:
“I’m so glad you’re not in Moscow. Is Sergey at home?”
Sergey called several times on his way home. I read the news off the internet to him – all the messages were short, the details were coming through in snippets, many lines starting with ‘according to unconfirmed data’, ‘a source in the city administration told us’. Then it said that the chief health official would give an update in the news at midday. I kept reloading the page until the screen became blurry from headlines and letters, my coffee got cold, and more than anything else I wanted Sergey to come home. After my third phone call he said that drivers had shut off their engines and been wandering up and down the road, poking their heads into other people’s cars, listening to the news on their radios, but now the traffic had finally started moving. ‘Baby, it’s insane, the news is only once a half hour, they play music and adverts all the time, damn it’. After they had all gone back to their cars, the long stream of vehicles started creeping towards the city; in about forty minutes and five kilometres it turned out that at the next slip road they had to turn around and drive away from the city. Sergey called again and said:
“It seems they’re not lying; the city’s closed.” As if there was still doubt, as if, while crawling these last five kilometres until he had to turn around, he was counting on all this being a prank, a bad joke.
Mishka woke up, came downstairs and I heard the fridge door shut; I came out of the study and said:
“The city’s closed.”
“Meaning?” He turned around and for some reason his sleepy look, his ruffled hair and a mark on his cheek from the pillow made me feel calm again.
“Moscow is quarantined. Sergey’s coming back home. I rang Grandma, she’s fine. We won’t be able to get into the city for some time.”
“Cool,” said my carefree skinny boy, whose worst trouble ever had been a broken game console; he wasn’t thrown in the slightest by this news – maybe he thought that school holidays would carry on longer, or maybe he thought nothing at all; he smiled at me sleepily and, picking up a carton of orange juice and a biscuit, shuffled back to his bedroom.
All this was really not so scary. It was impossible to imagine that the quarantine period would not finish within a few weeks – they were saying on TV ‘it’s a temporary measure’, ‘the situation is under control’, ‘the city has enough medicine, and food arrangements are in place’. The news wasn’t coming like an endless stream with a running message at the bottom of the screen, with live reports from strangely empty streets, with rare pedestrians in masks. Instead, all channels still had all the usual entertainment programmes and adverts and nobody was properly scared yet – neither those who were in the city, nor those who were outside. My morning started with the news and calls to Mum and my friends. Sergey worked from home, which was nice – like an unexpected holiday. Our connection with the city wasn’t broken yet, it was just restricted. Finding a way to get into the city and bring my mum here didn’t seem urgent. When we talked about it first, we weren’t serious. It was at dinner, I think, during the first day of quarantine, and in those early days Sergey (as well as some of our neighbours, as it turned out) drove out several times during the day. Rumour had it that only the main roads were closed down, and lots of secondary ones were still open – but he didn’t manage to get into the city on any of those attempts and came back defeated every time.
We got properly scared when they announced that the underground was closed. Then everything happened at once, as if a curtain had been raised, and the information poured over us like churning waters. We were horrified at how unworried we had been: four hundred thousand people were infected. Mum called and said there were empty shelves in the shops, ‘but don’t worry, I managed to stock up on things, I don’t need much and Liubov says that the city authorities are going to issue food stamps and will be distributing groceries any time now’, and then she added: “You know, darling, I’m starting to feel a bit uneasy, everyone’s wearing a mask outside.” Then Sergey couldn’t get through to work, the network was as busy as it was sometimes on New Year’s Eve, and towards the end of the day the headlines came in a torrent – curfew restrictions, a ban on moving through the city, patrols, medicine and food stamps, closure of all offices, emergency medical care stations at schools and nurseries. My friend Lena got through to us at night and cried into the phone: “Anya, they’re talking about medical care, but where is it? These places are like infirmaries, mattresses on the floor with sick people on them, like it’s a war.”
From then on Sergey and I spent our evenings making plans for how to breach the quarantine, break through the cordons guarded by glum-looking armed men in masks. At first the cordons were just made up of red and white plastic cubes, the sort you find at any police checkpoint and easy to scatter if you drive at full speed. The concrete beams with metal trimmings, rusting in wet November weather, appeared later. “Look, they’re not going to shoot at us,” I argued with Sergey,“We have a big heavy car. We could go through the fields, let’s bribe them”, and I added angrily,“We must collect Mum and Lena, we must at least try!” During one of those evenings, after the argument reached its peak, I forced us out of the house – Sergey stuffed his pockets with money, silently laced his boots up without looking at me, went out of the house, then came back to pick up the car keys. I was so worried that he’d change his mind that I grabbed the first coat hanging on the hook and shouted to Mishka: “We’re going to collect Grandma, don’t open the door to anyone, ok?”, and without waiting for his answer, ran out after Sergey.
On the way to the cordons we were silent. The road was empty and dark and we had to drive for another twenty odd kilometres before reaching the lit up stretch of the road. We saw a few cars going the opposite way. As we approached a bend in the road we could see a cloud of white light first which then flashed at us and turned into a pale yellow low-beam, and these flashes, like a greeting, made me feel less worried. I looked at Sergey, his lips tightly closed, and didn’t dare reach over and touch his hand in case I destroyed that impulse, which, after a few days of arguments, tears and doubts had made him listen to me. I was just looking at him and thinking: I’ll never ask you for anything else, just help me bring my mum here, please help me.
We drove past the idyllic luxury villages, with peacefully glimmering windows in the dark, and came out on to the lit up part of the road – the street lights, like trees, bending their yellow heads over both sides of the wide motorway, huge shopping centres on both sides, dark at night, empty parking lots, lowered barriers, billboards advertising expensive villas and plots for sale. When we saw the cordon, blocking the entrance into the city, I didn’t even grasp what it was at first, – two patrol cars standing askew, one had its headlights on, a small green lorry at the side, a pile of several long concrete beams on the road, which looked like marshmallow sticks from distance, a man’s lonely dark silhouette. All this looked so basic, as if they were children’s toys arranged on the floor, that I started thinking that we’d be OK to get into the city, and while Sergey was slowing down I dialled Mum’s number, and when she answered, I said: “Don’t say anything, we’re coming to pick you up,” and rang off.