Long Way Round

Maldives, Dubai, Milan · February 2020 · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

In February 2020 the new virus was a story about somewhere else. It lived on the television between the weather and the football, in a city most of us could not have found on a map, and we treated it the way you treat a storm in another ocean. We had other things on our minds. We were going to the Maldives, all of us, for the first time, and the whole family had been counting down the days on the fridge door like prisoners marking a wall.

The most convenient flight left from Milan, so we drove. I had just bought a Mercedes V-Class, a van, brand new, the kind of car a man buys when he finally admits that three children in the back of anything smaller is a form of civil war. It still smelled of the showroom. The sliding doors closed themselves with a soft electric sigh, and the children fought over who was allowed to press the button. The baby, six months old, slept through the whole of Piedmont. At Malpensa I left the van in the long-stay car park, third level, beside a concrete pillar with a number painted on it, and I took a photograph of the number, because I am that kind of man.

Paradise, it turns out, is very good at keeping the news out. The island was a strip of white sand with a wooden jetty and a restaurant on stilts over water the colour of a swimming pool in an advertisement. There was one television, in the bar, and it showed cricket. The staff wore white and walked barefoot. Nobody wore shoes for ten days, including me, and I am a man with opinions about shoes. The children snorkelled beside small sharks of apparently gentle temperament. My wife read three novels. I read nothing at all and felt I had earned it.

On the eighth evening I switched on my phone to check the weather at home. That was the mistake. The phone woke up and began to shiver in my hand as though it had been holding its breath. Messages from friends, from the bank, from people I had not heard from in years. A small town south of Milan called Codogno had been sealed off. Then ten towns. Police at the roadblocks. Schools shut across Lombardy. Photographs of supermarket shelves with nothing on them but the price labels.

I walked down the jetty and showed my wife. She read it in silence, scrolling with one finger, the way she reads a restaurant bill. Then she handed the phone back and said, “We are not flying into Milan with a baby.” It was not the opening of a discussion. In a marriage there are discussions and there are announcements, and I have learned to tell them apart from the first syllable.

So I sat in the bar, with the cricket on, and looked for tickets. It was the school holidays in France. Every direct seat to Nice from anywhere warm had gone months ago, to people with better planning and, as it turned out, worse luck. Frankfurt, full. Paris, full, then one seat at a price that made me laugh out loud, alone, at the cricket. At about midnight I found it: a flight to Dubai in two days, and from Dubai, a week later, a direct flight to Nice with just enough seats left for all of us, together. I booked it before the website could change its mind.

“A week in Dubai,” my wife said at breakfast. “Instead of Milan.” “Instead of Milan,” I said. She considered this for about as long as it takes to butter toast. “You see,” she said, “you can organise things when you want to.”

Dubai was absurd and wonderful. We went from bare feet to air conditioning in four hours. The children ate ice cream in a shopping centre that contained an aquarium and a ski slope, which after the Maldives struck them as perfectly reasonable. We drove into the desert and the baby slept through that too. Every evening I checked the news from Italy, and every evening the red on the map had spread a little further, like wine on a tablecloth. And somewhere in the middle of that red, on the third level of a car park, stood my new van, with barely three hundred kilometres on the clock.

We landed in Nice at the start of March. The Riviera was sunny and slightly nervous. On the seventh, Lombardy was closed. Two days later, on the evening of the ninth, the Italian prime minister went on television and closed the whole country. Italy was the first in Europe to do it. Sixty million people told to stay at home. Shops, bars, schools, borders, all of it. And one brand new van, alone, in a long-stay car park that had presumably stopped being long-stay and started being permanent.

I lasted two days. On the third I printed the Italian self-certification form that everyone was suddenly carrying, and wrote on it a reason that was true and slightly ridiculous: recovery of a vehicle. My wife looked at the form, then at me. I waited for an announcement. Instead she picked up her coat. “You are not doing that drive alone,” she said. “And you are not driving back alone either. Two cars, two drivers.” We left at dawn in our second car. At the border a young policeman in a mask read my form for a very long time, looked at the two of us, and waved us through with the expression of a man who had seen stranger things that week.

Then Italy. Not a car in front of us, not a car behind. The toll booths were open and empty. The service stations had chairs stacked on the tables. We drove through Genoa at eleven in the morning and did not see a single person on a single balcony. At Malpensa the signs were lit and the terminal was dark. I drove up the ramp of the long-stay car park to the third level, and there it was, next to its pillar, the only vehicle on the whole floor, grey with three weeks of dust. I pressed the key. Nothing. No lights, no sigh from the doors. I pressed it again. Then, from the far end of the empty floor, footsteps, and a man's voice, very loud in all that concrete: “Signore. Cosa fate qui?”

Paradise, desert, an empty motorway: what do you call a trip home like that?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.