Before getting out of the car Sergey opened and closed the glove box, but didn’t take anything out of it; he left the engine running and for a few seconds I watched him walk towards the cordon. He was walking slowly, as if trying to imagine what he was going to say. I watched his back and then jumped out of the car – I heard that the door hadn’t shut properly behind me but decided not to return and ran after him. When I caught up with him he was facing a big, bear-like man, dressed in camouflage; it was cold and the man had a mask on his chin, which he started hurriedly pulling over his face as soon as he saw us coming from our car. He struggled for some time trying to grab its edge with his thick black glove. He had a half-smoked cigarette in his other hand. I could see a few silhouettes in one of the patrol cars, and a lit-up screen. I thought ‘these people are watching telly, they’re ordinary people, just like us, we’ll manage to make a deal’.
Sergey stopped about five steps away, and I said to myself that this was a clever thing to do: seeing how the man was rushing to pull his mask on meant only one thing, that they didn’t want us to come close. I stopped too, and Sergey said in an exaggeratedly cheerful voice – the one we use to talk to traffic cops, “Hey mate, how do we get into the city?” And I could sense by his tone and by the tightness of his mouth, how difficult it was for him to act in this carefree manner, how uncomfortable was this artificial friendliness, so unlike him, how unsure he was that it would work. The man adjusted his mask and rested his hand on the machine-gun which he had on his shoulder. It wasn’t a threat, it just looked natural, as if he had no other place to rest his arm. He was silent and Sergey carried on, in the same artificially easy-going voice: “I really need to get there, mate, how many of you, five? Can we make a deal?” and he put his hand in his pocket. We saw the door of the patrol car open slightly, and then the man who still had his hand resting on the machine-gun, said in the voice of a teenager, that you might have thought hadn’t broken yet: “Not allowed. Special orders. You’ll have to go back” and waved his hand, holding a glowing cigarette, towards the central reservation, and we both automatically looked there: there was now a gap cut into the metallic barrier, and we could see tyre tracks on the snow on both sides of it.
“Hang on, mate,” Sergey protested, but I sensed there and then by looking into the machine gun owner’s eyes, that there was no point in calling him ‘mate’, or offering him money, that he would call for help now and we would have to get back into our car, turn around and follow the same tracks as the others who had tried to sneak into the sealed city and rescue their loved ones. I gently pushed Sergey aside and walked four steps towards the man with the machine gun and stood right in front of him, and then finally saw how young he was, probably no older than twenty. I tried to catch his attention – he looked away – and said: “Listen.” I said “listen”, even though I never address anyone in this way. It’s important to me to be polite and keep my distance, but here I was, an educated, grown-up, successful woman, standing in front of this boy with dark pock marks on his face where the mask didn’t cover it, but I knew that right now this was the way I needed to talk: “Listen, you see my mum’s there, I have my mum there, she’s completely alone, she’s healthy, do you have a mum? do you love her? please let us in, nobody’ll notice, do you want me to go on my own? he can wait here, I have a child at home, I’ll be back I promise, I’ll be back in one hour, please let me in.”
I could see hesitation in his eyes, and was about to say something else, but then another man came up behind him, also with a machine gun over his shoulder:
“Semionov, what’s up?” he said, and I tried to catch the men’s eyes so that they wouldn’t look at each other and decide not to let us through, and I started talking in a rush, before they had a chance to make the wrong decision:
“Guys, please let me in – I only need to collect my mum – she’s there on her own, my husband will wait here – I’ll be back in an hour – you don’t even have to let him sit in your car – Sergey, you’ve got a warm jacket haven’t you – just walk about for an hour – I’ll be quick,” and the one who was older suddenly stepped forward, pushing aside the young Semionov, whose cigarette was almost finished, and said, almost shouting:
“I said it’s forbidden! They’re not my orders, turn around right now! I’ve got my orders, go back to your car!” and he waved his machine gun, and, as with the young man, it wasn’t a threat, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything else, because Semionov, throwing the cigarette butt on the ground with regret, said, almost sympathetically:
“There’s barbed wire all round the inner ring road, and another cordon. Even if we let you in, you wouldn’t make it through there.”
“Come on, baby, let’s go, they won’t let us, it won’t work,” Sergey said, taking me by the hand and forcing me to come away.
“Thank you, guys, got it,” he said, dragging me behind him, and I knew that it was pointless to argue, but I was still thinking there must be something I could tell them so that they let me in, and nothing, nothing came into my head, and when we got into the car, Sergey opened and closed the glove box again, and before we drove off he told me: “This isn’t the police or a road patrol. Look at their uniforms, Anya, they’re from the regular army,” and while he was turning the car round and the snow was rustling under the wheels of our car, I took the phone and dialled my mum’s number, the first one in the ‘M’ list. She answered straight away and said “Hello, Anya, what’s going on?”
And I said, almost calmly:
“It didn’t work, Mum. We’ll have to wait. We’ll need to think of another plan.”
For a few moments she didn’t say anything. I could only hear her breathing, as clearly as if she was sitting next to me. Then she said:
“Of course, sweetheart.”
“I’ll call you later, ok?”
I hung up and started rummaging through my pockets with a fury that lifted me from the seat. We were on our way back, the lit-up part of the road was soon going to end, I already saw the border of the yellow streetlamps and the twinkling lights of the luxury villages further ahead. Mishka was waiting for us at home.
“Can you imagine,” I said to Sergey, “I’ve left my cigarettes at home!”, and I burst into tears.
Exactly one week later, on Tuesday, November 17th, Mum died.
2
PLANNING THE ESCAPE
I’ve had this dream for as long as I can remember – sometimes once a year, sometimes less often, but every time I began to forget it, it would come back: I needed to get somewhere, somewhere not too far away. I know my mum is waiting for me there, and I’m on my way but I’m moving very slowly – I bump randomly into some unimportant people, I get stuck in conversations with them, like a fly in a cobweb, and then, when I’m finally almost there, I realise that I’m late, that my mum isn’t there anymore and I’ll never see her again. I would be woken by my own cries, with a face wet from tears, frightening the man sharing my bed, and whenever he tried to comfort me and calm me down, I would fight and push his arms away, deafened by my unsurmountable loneliness.
On November 19th our phone fell silent for good; the internet cut out shortly after that. Mishka was the one who found out – the only one of us who was at least trying to pretend that life was running its normal course. Coming out of the sleepy coma induced by pills – Sergey would make me take them every time I couldn’t stop crying – I would leave my room and set off to find the two remaining people I had in my life. Sometimes I would find them both in front of the computer, going through the newsfeed, and sometimes Sergey would go outside and start chopping wood, although I could hardly imagine a more pointless way to spend time. Mishka would still sit in front of the computer, watching YouTube and playing online games – as kids often do when they want to hide from the adults’ problems – which drove me to paroxysms of crying and tears. Then the front door would bang open, letting in a stream of cold air, Sergey would come in, lead me to the bedroom and make me take one more pill.