Яна Вагнер - To the Lake

He probably managed to get the attention of at least one of the men – I was sitting on the floor and couldn’t see anything – because the banging stopped. Waiting a moment to make sure they were listening, Boris continued:

“Now listen, boy, you’ll have to fire your gun, which you’re holding as if it’s a spade, and shoot through the thick timber, and I’m very much afraid that you might miss first time round, you might also miss second time, too. And with this sweetheart,” he waved the muzzle in the air, “I’ll make a hole in your skull in one go; and if I’m lucky – and I’m normally lucky – I’ll drill a hole in the petrol tank of your truck, and you won’t be able to take home that loot from the house across the road! And to start with, I’ll probably take out your driver. Now, we don’t want any of that to happen, do we?”

The air was still outside – it was so quiet. A snowflake drifted in through the window, then another, and they circled in the air in front of me, landing on the floor near my feet and starting to melt. Then I heard the truck door slam and the engine start. In half a minute, after the noise from the vehicle died down, Boris and I, without saying a word, jumped to our feet and rushed downstairs, then to the front door, and then across the snow-covered front garden. I didn’t have time to put my boots on and sank into the snow up to my ankles. Hurrying and missing the path, we flung the gate open and dashed across the road to Lenny’s house.

A few meters from the gate, to the left of the clean-swept path, we saw Lenny’s beloved pet dog, a beautiful white Asian shepherd, lying awkwardly with her front legs tucked under her, as if she had been stopped halfway through a jump. She was very obviously dead, and the snow around her was red and porous, like the flesh of a late summer watermelon. Lenny, with blood on his cheek – some his own, some the dog’s – was squatting next to her. When he heard us, he lifted up his head with a look of childish confusion on his face. I came up closer and half-whispered:

“Lenny…”

He put a finger to his lips for some reason and said, plaintively:

“Look what they’ve done,” and sat on the snow; he lifted the large, heavy, earless head, put it onto his knees and started stroking it with both hands. The dog’s head tilted backwards, the jaws opened slightly, and her pearly pink tongue fell out and dangled between the snow-white teeth.

I crouched by him and squeezed his shoulder while he buried his face in the thick, light fur and started swaying from side to side as if rocking the motionless dog’s body to sleep. At this moment the heavy wrought-iron door of their house opened and Marina stood there. She was pale and tearful, looked at Boris and me and without stepping out said:

“Anya, what’s going on, they took the fur coat and the telly, did you see them?”

“Be grateful, young woman, that they didn’t take you instead, and didn’t dump you somewhere in the middle of the woods about forty kilometres from here,” said Boris. “Pitiful idiots, as if they needed that shitty fur coat.”

Lenny lifted his head and looked at Boris, who was wearing his felt boots, a jumper of indeterminate colour with a stretched collar, and was still gripping the heavy hunting rifle, and said respectfully: “Wow, that means business.” Boris looked down at the long, scary object in his hands and said: “It does, yes. Only it’s not loaded. Damn it, when are we going to realise that things have changed for good, I wonder?”

For a reason which escapes me, we all thought at the same time that our wooden house, more elegant than solid, was safer to be in than Lenny’s brick fortress. This was now defiled by intruders: its door wide open, an upside down coffee table, a handful of scattered coins on the floor, boots and clothes dispersed throughout, the dirty footprints on the mosaic tiles and a dead dog on the snow outside, whereas so far we had managed to protect the fragile security of our place. And that’s why Lenny, now roused from his torpor, went over to Marina, who brought their little sleeping daughter, wrapped in a blanket – Boris and I were waiting outside, unmoving – and without putting their coats on they both ran across the snow-sprinkled road between our houses, and would have left their gate flung open, as well as their front door, if Boris hadn’t shouted to them: “Hey, whatever your name is, Lenny, you can’t leave it like this, you’ll scare the neighbours.” And Lenny stopped, blinked his eyes for a moment, and went back to close the door and the gate.

Half an hour later, the four of us were sitting in our lounge: I, Boris and Lenny, whose purple cheek was swelling up in front of our very eyes and who still had a face of an upset child, along with Marina, who, for the first time in my memory, wasn’t looking like an aloof and perfect beauty: her hair was a mess, her eyelids swollen, her hands shook. Boris, squatting near the fireplace, was trying to start the fire, and the chubby-cheeked little girl, dressed in pink pyjamas with teddy bears, had just woken up and now sat on the sofa, blinking. I went to the kitchen and fetched the bottle which Sergey and I had started the night before. Lenny’s eyes lit up with gratitude, he downed a glass of whisky in one go and pushed the empty glass back to me, to be filled up again.

“Pour me one, too, Anya,” Marina said. She sat next to Dasha on the sofa, and without letting go of the little girl’s small pink heel, lifted the glass to her lips. I could hear her teeth clatter on the edge of the glass as she drank it all up, not wincing once.

Finally, the wood flared up, crackling. Boris closed the glass door of the stove, turned to the table and looked at all of us with an expression of contentment. I caught myself thinking that, perhaps now, after a long break, he finally felt that his son needed him, that he liked it that all of us grown up, successful people, who had never asked him for advice, had turned into helpless children, now safe under his wing. I also realised that during the whole time since he had turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the night, not one of us had thanked him.

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.