As if reading my mind, Lenny put his glass noisily down on the table and said: “Looks like you took the situation more seriously than we did; what an idiot I am – opened the door to them, thought maybe they needed water, or got lost, perhaps. If it wasn’t for you…”
“Boris,” said Boris ceremoniously and stretched out his hand to Lenny, who hurriedly rose from his seat to shake it.
“So if it wasn’t for you, Boris, I’d have gone the same way as my dog. I didn’t even have time to unleash her – just went and opened the door, silly turd that I am, and wanted to shake his hand.”
He grabbed the bottle and poured himself another glass, then put it back, but then took it again and poured out one more glass which he moved towards Boris. I noticed Marina’s eager eyes and moved my glass and hers towards Lenny – it was a coquettish gesture, the sort of thing I might do at a party, and I immediately became ashamed of it – it dawned on me that everything didn’t rotate around us women any more. For a moment I thought that both glasses would remain unnoticed by Lenny, but he automatically filled them as well, even though he didn’t look at us. He was examining the hunting rifle, which was standing against the wall, with the muzzle upward. When he had come in Boris had loaded it and left it like this so he could quickly reach out and grab it if need be.
“Do you have a licence for it? You were just like Natty Bumppo, Boris, when you stuck it out of the window. I mean, they wouldn’t have gone otherwise…” He carried on talking but I was thinking that I hadn’t expected Lenny, with his square head and bawdy jokes, to know Fenimore Cooper. I couldn’t picture him playing Cowboys and Indians, as the Pathfinder, or Chingachgook. I looked up at him and heard him say: “She was a super dog, I got her from the best breeder I could find, as a guard dog. I had to escort our nanny past her, and my guests were afraid to step out for a fag. Marina moaned that we had a pet crocodile, but the dog was very clever – she knew who she mustn’t touch. Dasha could stick her fingers in her mouth. She never did nothing wrong. And they came and shot her, without a thought, as if she was some kind of scum…” His lips suddenly trembled.
I looked at him and felt tears welling up, which hadn’t flowed the whole day, since yesterday morning, when they were all sat here on the sofa (our honeymoon seashells in Dasha’s chubby mouth, Marina, still with perfect hair and with morning make-up on, Lenny, tapping his hand on the sofa). Suddenly they were rolling down my face – hot, abundant – but I didn’t even have time to sob, and nobody was looking at me anyway, because we all heard a car pulling up near our gate.
The next second was so intense that it could have lasted a minute. I saw Marina hug her daughter and sit down on the floor, crouching down; the rifle, which has just been propped up against the wall, like part of a set for a staged photograph, was in Boris’s hand, and he himself flew up the stairs to the window; Lenny disappeared into the kitchen and came out holding a knife. It became apparent in the light that the wide, dangerous blade was awkwardly covered in some kind of grease, as if somebody had been cutting ham for breakfast; I was the only person who hadn’t moved and I felt uneasy because I had no idea what exactly I needed to do – and at this moment Boris called from upstairs and said, in a relieved tone:
“The guys are back.”
For a while we were all busy parking the car in the driveway and unloading it – carrying big white rustling plastic bags, as if preparing for a grand family gathering. Sergey had brought in the last box and put it on the floor in the corridor. “Don’t take them any further,” said Boris, “leave them here, we’ll have to load them back into the car anyway.” Something clinked in the box, and Sergey said:
“We got almost everything, apart from petrol. There was a kilometre-long queue at the petrol station. We wanted to get home before dark. We’ll go again tomorrow.”
“That’s bad,” Boris said, “but you’re right, it’s not worth going now. We’ll have to wait till morning.”
“Oh it’s OK, Dad, we left a week for getting ready, and we’ve already got most things from the list – provisions, medicines – we only need petrol now. We’ll take our cans and nip out tomorrow. We’ll have to go round a few petrol stations as the guys in the queue were saying that they were rationing the petrol per customer. And the nearest guns and ammunition shop is in Krasnogorsk, and the other one’s in Volokolamsk, I think, but that’s not on our way, so perhaps we can buy some cartridges in Ryazan, near you?”
They came into the lounge. Sergey had a sheet of paper in his hand, covered on both sides with Boris’s compact writing. Mishka followed, with the keys to Sergey’s car. We hadn’t let him drive on a big road yet, but he went round the village as much as he liked and was pleased every time he got to drive the car into the driveway.
“We won’t buy anything there,” Boris said after a pause. “I doubt if we will find anything in Ryazan by the time we get there.”
Only now did Sergey raise his eyes from reading the list, looked around at us all and finally noticed Lenny’s bruised and swollen cheek, and the knife, which he was still gripping in his hand.
“What on earth has been happening here?” he asked after a pause, and Lenny, shy under his gaze, quickly put the knife down near his empty glass, and the blade clinked on the polished surface of the table. He wanted to say something, but Boris was first, and said what I’d been thinking since we came back to the house, but was afraid to say out loud:
“It’s not good, Sergey. We’ve had visitors. Judging by the vehicle they had and by their uniform, the units which patrolled the city have disbanded. They don’t have anyone to report to anymore, so they decided to do a bit of looting. We’re fine, don’t worry, it could have been worse,” he carried on, glancing at Lenny, “I hope I’m wrong, but in my view, this only means one thing: the city’s dead.”
Sergey sat down and his face became pensive, rather than worried.
“Damn!” he said, “I’m glad we didn’t venture out to Krasnogorsk, which is just outside the circular, that’s probably a right old mess there now.”
“So what’s up?” Lenny suddenly said, “what’s the plan? Are we going to hold the fort here? I see you loading up on food, cartridges, all this shit, that’s cool, only what’re we gonna do next time, when they come here in a tank?”
Sergey and Boris exchanged glances, and while they were thinking of a reply, I was looking at plump, loud Lenny, who had always irritated me with his banal remarks and his noisy laughter at his own jokes, his ability to fill any space with his presence and dominate in any company whether there were raised eyebrows and peeved faces or not. I surprised myself by saying:
“We can’t stay, Lenny, it’ll soon be a nightmare here. So we’re leaving, we’ve got almost everything we need, and I think you should come with us.”
“Sure,” Lenny said quickly. “Where you going?”
“My place in Levino is not an option, after all,” said Boris, with regret. “You’re twenty kilometres from the main road here, and look how quickly they got this far – I was hoping that all these elite villa communities on the New Riga road would keep them occupied for a bit longer. My village is quite a distance from Ryazan – but it’s only about six kilometres to the main road, we’d gain a couple of weeks max, and then they’d catch up with us. We need to find some dense forest, with nothing around. Wish we were in Siberia; it’s hard to find a place like that anywhere within reach, damn it.”
“Forest!” Sergey suddenly shouted and jumped up from his seat. “Of course, what an idiot I am. Anya, I know where we’re going.” He rushed out of the lounge and, after tripping over one of the rustling bags, which were piled in the corridor, disappeared through the study door. I could hear him, swearing under his breath, rummaging through the books. Something heavy fell with a thump, and in a moment he came out holding a book, which he plonked on the table, hurriedly pushing the glasses out of the way to one side. His face was alive, and all of us, even Marina and her little girl, who hadn’t made a single sound from the moment they stepped over the threshold of our house, leaned over the table to see what Sergey had found, – a book with a green cover with big white letters on it: ‘Road map. North-West Russia’.