Her father still called out to her sometimes, even now.
Maybe Homer was approaching things from the wrong angle. If the hero of his epic refused to reveal himself, maybe he should start with the hero’s future beloved? Tempt him out with her beauty and youthful freshness?
If Homer discreetly described her charms first, then maybe the hero would step out of non-existence to meet her. For their love to be perfect, he would have to be her ideal complement, which meant he would have to appear in the epic complete and fully formed. Their curves and contours, their very thoughts would have to match each other as precisely as fragments of the shattered stained-glass panels at Novoslobodskaya Station. After all, they also were once parts of a single whole, so it was their destiny to be reunited. Homer couldn’t see anything wrong in appropriating this effective plotline from the long-departed classics. But although the solution looked simple, there were still problems: sculpting a living girl out of paper and ink proved to be a task beyond Homer’s power. And he probably couldn’t write convincingly about feelings any longer either.
His present relationship with Elena was filled with the tender feelings of old age, but they had met each other too late to abandon the past completely in their love. At that age people strive to appease their loneliness, not quench their passion.
Nikolai Ivanovich’s one true love had been entombed up on the surface. In the decades that had passed since then, all the details of her appearance, apart from one, had faded away, he couldn’t have described the affair from life any longer. And in any case, there had been nothing heroic about that relationship.
On the same day when Moscow was hit by the nuclear deluge, Nikolai was offered the chance to become a driver, replacing old Serov, who had been retired. His pay would almost double, and they even gave him a few days off before his promotion took effect.
He phoned his wife, who said she would bake an apple cake, and then she went out to buy champagne, taking the children along for the walk.
But he had to finish his shift.
Nikolai Ivanovich climbed into the cabin of the locomotive as its future master, a happily married man right at the very beginning of a tunnel that led off into a miraculously bright future. In the next half hour he aged twenty years in one fell swoop, arriving at the final station a broken man, with no one and nothing. Perhaps that was why every time he came across a train that had survived by some miracle, he was always overwhelmed by the desire to take his legitimate place in the driver’s seat, stroke the control panel with a master’s hand and glance out through the windscreen at the lacework pattern of tunnel liners. To imagine that the train could still be made to work.
That it could be put into reverse.
No doubt about it, the brigadier definitely created a special kind of field round himself, a field that diverted any kind of danger away from him. And what was more, he seemed to know it. The journey back to Nagornaya took them less than an hour. The line didn’t offer them any resistance at all.
Homer had always felt that the scouts and shuttle traders from Sebastopol, and all the other ordinary people who plucked up the courage to enter the tunnels, were alien organisms in the Metro’s body, microbes that had infiltrated its circulatory system. The moment they stepped beyond the frontiers of the stations, the air around them became irritated and inflamed, reality ruptured and all the incredible creatures ranged against man by the Metro suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
But Hunter wasn’t an extraneous body in the dark stretches of tunnel, he didn’t trigger the Leviathan’s resentment as he journeyed through its blood vessels. Sometimes he would switch off his flashlight, becoming just another patch of the darkness that filled the tunnel’s space, and seemed to be caught up by invisible currents that carried him onward twice as fast. Struggling with all his might to keep up with the brigadier, Homer shouted after him, and then Hunter came to his senses, stopped and waited for the old man.
On the way back they were even allowed to pass through Nagornaya in peace. The murky vapours had dispersed, the station was sleeping. They could see every centimetre of it lying open to view now, and it was impossible to imagine where it could have concealed those spectral giants. Just an ordinary, abandoned station: incrustations of salt on the damp ceiling, a soft, feathery bed of dust spread out across the platform, obscenities scribbled with charcoal on the smoky walls. But then other details caught the eye: strange scrapes left on the floor by some frantic, scrabbling dance, crusty, reddish-brown spots on the columns, ceiling lights that looked scraped and battered, as if someone had rubbed hard against them. Nagornaya flashed by and they went flying on. As long as Homer could keep up with the brigadier, he felt as if he too were enclosed in a magical bubble that rendered him invulnerable. The old man was amazed at himself – where was he getting the energy for such a long forced march?
But he had no breath left for making conversation. And in any case, Hunter no longer condescended to answer his questions. For the hundredth time in that long day Homer wondered why the taciturn and pitiless brigadier needed him at all, if he spent all his time trying to forget about him.
The foul smell of Nakhimov Prospect crept up and enveloped them. This was a station that Homer would gladly have dashed through as quickly as possible, but instead the brigadier slowed down. The old man was almost overcome by the stench, even in his gas mask, but Hunter sniffed it in, as if he could distinguish specific notes in the Prospect’s oppressive, choking bouquet of odours.
This time the corpse-eaters dispersed respectfully as they advanced, abandoning half-gnawed bones and dropping scraps of flesh out of their mouths. Hunter walked to the precise centre of the hall and up onto a low heap, sinking calf-deep in flesh. He cast a long, slow glance round the station and then, still dissatisfied, abandoned his suspicions and moved on, without finding what he was looking for.
But Homer found it.
Slipping and falling onto his hands and knees, he startled away a young corpse-eater who was eviscerating a soaking-wet bulletproof vest. Spotting the Sebastopol uniform helmet that went tumbling aside, Homer was blinded by the condensation that instantly coated the lenses of his gas mask on the inside.
Repressing the impulse to gag and puke, Homer crept over to the bones and raked through them, hoping to find the soldier’s ID tag. But instead he spotted a little notepad, smeared with thick crimson blood. It opened immediately at the last page, with the words: ‘Don’t storm the station, no matter what’.
Her father had got her out of the habit of crying when she was still little, but now she had no other answer for fate. The tears streamed down her face of their own accord and a bleak, high-pitched whine rose up from her chest. She realised straight away what had happened, but it took her hours to come to terms with it.
Had he called for her help? Had he tried to tell her something important before he died? She couldn’t remember the exact moment when she sank into sleep and wasn’t entirely sure that she was awake now. After all, there could be a world where her father hadn’t died, couldn’t there? Where she hadn’t killed him with her weakness and egotism.
Sasha held her father’s hand – already cold, but still soft – between her palms, as if she was trying to warm it, trying to persuade him, and herself, that he would find a car, and they would go up onto the surface and get into it, and drive away. And he would laugh like the day when he brought home that radio with the music CDs.
At first her father sat there with his back leaning against the column and his chin braced against his chest – he could have been taken for someone in a doze. But then his body started slowly slipping down into the puddle of congealed blood, as if it was tired of pretending to be alive and didn’t want to deceive Sasha any longer.
The wrinkles that always furrowed her father’s face had almost completely smoothed out now.
She let go of his hand, helped him lie more comfortably and covered him from head to foot with a tattered blanket. She had no other way of burying him. She wou
ld have liked to take her father up onto the surface and leave him lying there, gazing up at the sky that would turn bright and clear again one day. But long before that his body would become the prey of the eternally hungry beasts that roamed about up there.
Here on their station no one would touch him. There was no danger to be expected from the deadly southern tunnels – nothing could survive in there except the winged cockroaches. And to the north the tunnel broke off at a rusty, half-ruined Metro bridge with only a single track still intact.
At the other end of the bridge there were people, but none of them would ever dream of crossing it out of mere curiosity. They all knew what was on the far side: a lookout station on the edge of a scorched wilderness – with two doomed exiles living in it.
Her father wouldn’t have allowed her to stay here alone, and there wasn’t any point in it anyway. But Sasha also knew that no matter how far she ran, no matter how desperately she tried to break out of the torture cell she had been condemned to, she would never be completely free of it.
‘Dad, forgive me, please,’ she sobbed, knowing that she could never earn his forgiveness.
Sasha took the silver ring off his finger and put it in the pocket of her overalls. She picked up the cage with the quiet, subdued rat and stumbled off to the north, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps behind her on the granite. When she climbed down onto the rails and walked into the tunnel, an unusual omen occurred at the empty station that was now a funeral bark. A long tongue of flame emerged from the mouth of the opposite tunnel, straining towards her father’s body – but it couldn’t reach it and retreated back into the dark depths, reluctantly conceding that Sasha’s father had a right to his peace now.
‘They’re coming back! They’re coming back!’
Istomin took the telephone receiver away from his ear and gazed at it distrustfully, as if it was some animate creature that had just told him a ridiculous fairytale.
‘Who’s coming back?’
Denis Mikhailovich jumped up off his chair, spilling his tea, which settled on his trousers in an embarrassing dark stain. He cursed the tea and repeated the question.
‘Who’s coming back?’ Istomin repeated mechanically into the receiver.
‘The brigadier and Homer,’ the receiver crackled. ‘Ahmed was killed.’
Vladimir Ivanovich blotted his bald patch with his handkerchief and wiped his temple under the rubber strap of his piratical eye patch. Reporting soldiers’ deaths to relatives was one of his responsibilities. Without waiting for the operator to switch the line, he stuck his head out of the door and shouted to his adjutant:
‘Bring both of them to me! And tell the orderlies to set the table!’
He walked across his office, straightened the photos hanging on the wall, whispered something in front of the map and turned to Denis Mikhailovich, who was sitting there with his arms crossed, blatantly grinning.
‘Volodya, you’re just like some girl before a date,’ the colonel chuckled.
‘I see you’re excited too,’ the station commandant snapped back, nodding at the colonel’s wet trousers.
‘Why should I worry? I’ve got everything ready. Two assault units assembled, they can be mobilised in twenty-four hours.’ Denis Mikhailovich lovingly stroked the light-blue beret lying on the desk, then picked it up and stuck it on his head to make himself look more official.
In the reception office, feet started scurrying about, knives and forks jangled, and an orderly held up a dewy bottle of spirits through the crack of the door. Istomin waved him away – later, all of that later! Then at last he heard a familiar booming voice, the door flew open and the opening was filled by a broad, massive figure. Hovering behind the brigadier’s back was that old storyteller he’d dragged along with him for some reason.
‘Welcome back!’ said Istomin, sitting down in his chair, then getting up and sitting down again.
‘What’s out there?’ snapped the colonel.
The brigadier shifted his dark, heavy gaze from one man to the other and spoke to the station commandant.
‘Tula’s been occupied by nomads. They’ve slaughtered everyone.’
‘All our men too?’ asked Denis Mikhailovich, raising his shaggy eyebrows.
‘As far as I can tell. We got as far as the entrance of the station, there was a fight, and they sealed it off.’
‘They closed the hermetic door?’ said Istomin, half-rising out of his chair and clutching the edge of the desk with his fingers. ‘So now what do we do?’
‘Storm them,’ the brigadier and the colonel rasped simultaneously.
‘We can’t storm them!’ Homer suddenly chimed in from the reception office.
She simply had to wait for the agreed time. If she hadn’t got the day wrong, the trolley should appear out of the damp darkness of the night very soon now. Every additional minute spent here on the edge of the cliff, where the tunnel emerged from the thickness of the earth like a vein from a slashed wrist, cost her a year of her life. But the only choice she had now was to wait. At the other end of the interminably long bridge she would run into a locked hermetic door that was only unlocked from the inside – once a week, for market day.
Today Sasha had nothing to sell, and she needed to buy much more than ever before. But she couldn’t care less now what the men on the trolley might ask for in exchange for letting her back into the land of the living. Her father’s chilly indifference in death had been communicated to her.
Sasha used to dream so much about going to another station some day with her father, to a place where they could be surrounded by people, where she could make friends with someone, meet someone special. . . . She used to ask her father about his young days, not just because she wanted to revisit her own bright childhood, but because she was secretly setting herself, as she was now, in her mother’s place, setting some nebulously handsome man with shifting features in her father’s place and awkwardly imagining love to herself. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to find any common ground with other people if they really went back to the Greater Metro. What would they have to talk to her about?
But now there were only hours, or perhaps minutes, left to go until the ferry arrived, and she couldn’t give a damn for the other people – the women or the men – and even the thought of returning to a human existence seemed like a betrayal of her father. She would have agreed to spend the rest of her life at their station, without hesitating for a single moment, if that could have helped to save him.
The candle stub in the glass jar fluttered in its death agony and she transferred the flame to a new wick. On one of his trips to the surface her father had found an entire crate of wax candles, and Sasha always carried several of them in the pockets of her overalls. She would have liked to think their bodies were like candles, and a little particle of her father had been transferred to her after his light was extinguished.
Would the men on the trolley see her signal in the mist? Before this she had always guessed the time right, so she never had to waste an extra moment lingering outside. He father forbade her do that, and the swollen goitre on his throat was enough of a warning in itself. At the cliff edge Sasha usually felt as agitated as a trapped shrew, gazing around anxiously and only occasionally daring to go as far as the first span of the bridge, in order to look down from it at the black river flowing past below.
But she had too much time. Huddling up and shuddering in the damp, chilly autumn wind, Sasha took several steps forward, and the crumbling summits of high-rise apartment blocks appeared behind the gaunt trees. Something huge splashed in the oily, viscous river, and in the distance unknown monsters groaned in almost human voices.
Then suddenly their wailing was joined by a plaintive, dismal creaking.
Sasha jumped to her feet, raising her lamp high in the air, and they answered from the bridge with a stealthy, slippery beam of light. A decrepit old trolley was moving towards her, barely able to force its way through the dense white gloom, thrusting the we
dge of its feeble headlamp into the night and prising its way through. The girl backed away: it wasn’t the usual trolley. It strained its way along jerkily, as if every turn of its wheels cost the man working the levers a great effort.
Eventually it shuddered to a halt about ten steps away from Sasha and a tall, fat man wrapped in tarpaulin jumped down off the frame onto the stone chips. Demonic spots of reflected light danced in the lenses of his gas mask, concealing his eyes from Sasha. In one hand the man was clutching an ancient army Kalashnikov with a wooden butt.
‘I want to leave here,’ Sasha declared, thrusting out her chin.
‘Lea-eave,’ the tarpaulin scarecrow echoed, drawling the sound in either surprise or mockery. ‘And what have you got to sell?’
‘I haven’t got anything left,’ she said, staring hard into those blazing eye sockets bound in iron.
‘Everyone has something that can be taken, especially a woman,’ the ferryman grunted, then he had a thought. ‘Are you going to leave your daddy then?’
‘I haven’t got anything left,’ Sasha repeated, lowering her eyes.
‘So he croaked after all,’ said the mask, sounding relieved, but also disappointed. ‘And he did right. Or he’d have been upset now.’ The barrel of the automatic caught the shoulder strap of Sasha’s overalls and slowly dragged it downwards.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she shouted hoarsely, jerking back.
The jar with the candle fell, shattering on a rail, and the darkness instantly licked out the flame.
‘No one comes back from here, can’t you understand that?’ The scarecrow gazed at her indifferently with its blank, dead lenses. ‘Your body won’t even be enough to cover the cost of my journey in one direction. Let’s say I accept it in payment of your father’s debt.’