The day we were cut off from the rest of the world I woke up because Sergey was shaking my shoulder:
“Wake up, baby, we need you. The phone’s dead, so is the internet. We can only watch satellite news now but our English isn’t good enough.”
When I came downstairs I found Mishka sitting on the sofa in front of the TV – he had a dictionary on his lap and a focused and unhappy expression on his face, as if he was sitting an exam. He was accompanied by Marina, our beautiful neighbour from the three-storey stone ‘castle’ with tasteless turrets opposite us, and her plump husband Lenny, Sergey’s billiards partner. Their little daughter was sitting on the floor near the sofa – she had a bowl with seashells in front of her, the ones we had brought back from our honeymoon. Judging by her bulging cheek she had one of the shells in her mouth, and a thin, sparkly thread of saliva was dripping from her chin into the rest of the ‘treasures’ in the bowl. Sergey helped me down the stairs – two days of sleeping pills and crying had probably taken their toll because Marina, looking me over (even early in the morning her makeup was perfect – there are women who look absolute angels any time of the day), brought her hand to her mouth and seemed about to leap up from the sofa:
“Anya, you look awful, are you unwell?”
“We’re fine, we’re healthy,” said Sergey immediately, and I was angry at him for saying it so quickly, as if it was we who were sitting in Marina’s lounge and our child was dribbling on possessions with sentimental value.
“Guys, we had something bad happen…”
Before he could finish the sentence – I don’t know why, it was important that I didn’t let him finish – I came up to the little girl and having unclenched the tiny wet fingers, ripped the bowl out of her hands and put it on a high shelf:
“Marina, why don’t you take the shell out of her mouth, she’ll choke, it’s not a sweet after all.”
“That’s my girl,” said Sergey under his breath, relieved; our eyes met and I couldn’t help smiling at him.
I couldn’t stand their company – neither Marina’s nor her simple, noisy husband’s, Lenny, stuffed full of money and vulgar jokes; Lenny had a pool table in the basement and sometimes Sergey would go and play there at weekends. During the first six months of our life in the village I made an effort to keep him company, but quickly realised that I couldn’t even pretend to enjoy it. “I’d rather have no social life at all than this idiotic imitation of it”, I said to Sergey, and he said, “You know, baby, you shouldn’t be such a fusspot; if you live in the country, you have to make friends with your neighbours,” and now these two were sitting in my lounge on my sofa, and my son, with a look of desperation on his face, was trying to translate CNN news for them.
While Marina was trying to hook the last shell from her daughter’s mouth, Lenny tapped lightly on the sofa with the palm of his hand, as if he was the owner of the house, and said, “Anya, sit down and translate. The phones are dead, the Russian news is all lies, and I want to know what’s going on in the world.”
I sat down on the edge of the coffee table – I didn’t want to sit next to them – turned to the telly and the sound from the television almost drowned Marina’s helpless cooing – ‘Dasha, spit it out, spit it out now’ – and Lenny’s booming roars of laughter – ‘We don’t have a nanny now, because of the quarantine, so Marina had to remember her maternal instincts – and she’s not doing great, as you can see.” I raised my hand and they all fell silent. While I listened and read through the running messages, ten or fifteen minutes passed, and there was dead silence, then I turned to them – Marina now frozen on the floor, clutching a wet seashell which she excavated from Dasha’s mouth, and Lenny holding his daughter in his arms, with his hand over her mouth and his face very serious. I had never seen him with such a tense expression. Mishka sat quite still, next to Lenny, with his thin face and long nose, and the corners of his mouth turned down and eyebrows raised, like a Pierrot at a carnival. The dictionary had slid to the floor – perhaps his English was good enough after all to grasp the most important news.
Without glancing at Sergey, who stood behind the sofa, I said:
“They’re saying it’s the same everywhere. About seven hundred thousand infected in Japan, the Chinese aren’t saying how many, Australia and Britain have closed their borders – only this didn’t help, looks like they were too late; planes aren’t flying anywhere. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston – all the large cities in the US are under quarantine and Europe is in the same kind of shit – that’s it in a nutshell. They say an international organisation has been set up to work on a vaccine but that there will be nothing useful for at least two months.”
“What about us?” Lenny took his hand off the girl’s mouth and she started sucking her thumb straight away; father and daughter were both looking at me and I noticed for the first time how similar they were: poor little baby, she hadn’t inherited anything from the thin-boned well-bred Marina, but had small close-set eyes, chubby white cheeks, and a little pointed chin which was sticking out beneath the cheeks.
“Why would they bother about us? They haven’t said much about us so far. Everything’s bad, everywhere – especially in the Far East, since you can’t close the Chinese border, they say a third of the population is infected; St Petersburg is closed, Nizhny Novgorod is closed.”
“What about Rostov, what’re they saying about Rostov?”
“Lenny, they’re not talking about Rostov, they’re talking about Paris and London.”
It was somewhat gratifying – four pairs of frightened eyes watching my face, listening to every word I said, as if something very important depended on it.
“My mother’s in Rostov,” Lenny said quietly. “I’ve tried calling her all week, and now the phone’s dead – Sergey, is Anya all right? Anya, are you OK?”
While Sergey was ushering our guests towards the door (Lenny holding the little girl in his arms and Marina looking puzzled: ‘Did I say anything wrong? Did anything happen? Do you need any help?’), I was trying to catch my breath. I could feel a lump in my throat – ‘don’t tell them, don’t tell them, be quiet’ – and caught Mishka’s eye. He was looking at me, biting his lip, his face helpless and desperate. I reached over to him and he jumped from the sofa to me, the table treacherously cracking under his weight, grabbed my shoulder and whispered hotly into my collarbone:
“What’s going to happen now, Mum?”
And I said, “Well, as sure as hell we’re going to break this coffee table” – and he immediately burst out laughing. He’s done this since he was very little, – it was always easy to make him laugh – whatever the problem, this was the easiest way to calm him down when he was crying. Sergey came into the lounge:
“What’s so funny?”
I looked at him over Mishka’s head and said:
“I think it’ll only get worse. What shall we do?”
For the rest of the day, we all – Sergey, I and even Mishka, who had abandoned his games – sat in the lounge in front of the television, as if we had only just come to value this last link with the outside world, and were eager to absorb as much information as possible before the link was finally broken. But Mishka said: