For a long time he didn’t have to strain himself when it was about women. They had always come to him. Corrupted by their compliance he had always satisfied his longings at the first night so that the seduced had lost every interest for him before he could fall in love with her. His stormy nature and his fame clouded the girl’s eyes and none tried the good old strategy of letting the man wait so that they could get to know him better.
He couldn’t impress Sasha’s mother with his awards, his rank and his triumphs on the real battlefield and on the battlefield of love as well. She didn’t react to his looks and his jokes only made her shake her head. To storm this young woman would be a challenge. A challenge more important than the conquest of the neighboring station.
She should have been only another mark on the stock of his rifle. But soon he understood: The further the unity with her faded into the distance, the more important she became to him. Being with her about one hour per day felt like a triumph for him. But it seemed that she only agreed to it to torment him. She doubted his service, laughed about his principles, cursed his coldness and shook his conscience until he was at the end of his strength.
He endured everything. He even liked it. With her he started to think. To question. And then to feel: Helplessness, when he didn’t know how to approach her, regret for all the minutes he couldn’t spend near her, yes even fear to lose what he had never won. Love. Then she rewarded him with a sign:
A silver ring.
Only when he no longer knew how to live on without her she gave in.
One year later Sasha was born.
He could never abandon these two lives and he himself couldn’t just die anymore.
When you command the strongest army in your known part of the world at the age of twenty-five it is very hard to get rid of the notion that the earth would stop turning because you commanded it to do so. But to take the life of a human you didn’t really need much power, to bring somebody back to life wasn’t in the hands of anyone one though.
He knew that too well: Tuberculoses killed his wife and he wasn’t able rescue her. In that moment something in him broke.
Sasha had just turned four but she could still remember her mother very good. Sasha remembered the horrible emptiness of the tunnels after she died. The close death of her mother had opened a bottomless abyss in her small world and she had looked straight into it. The edges of the abyss only grew back slowly – two or three years passed until she no longer yelled for her mother in her sleep.
Her father did that to this day.
Maybe Homer didn’t approach the whole thing right.
When the hero of his epos didn’t want to appear then why shouldn’t he start with his lover? Maybe he could get him out of hiding with her beauty and youth?
When Homer started to draw her outline first, would his hero just step forward out of nowhere? For their love to be complete those two figures had to complement each other ideally and completely. Therefore the hero of Homers poem had to appear as a completed, finished character.
In their thoughts and facets of their character they would match each other like the shards of the glass mosaics at the Novoslobodskaya. Then when they were once whole, they would be determined to become one again … Homer didn’t find anything bad in “stealing” that plot from the old classics.
It was easier said than done. To form a young woman out of ink and paper was a task that Homer didn’t think he was able to accomplish. He doubted that he was able to describe feelings convincingly as well.
His relationship with Yelena was one of softness; he had learnt to late how to love without holding back. In their age it was no longer about satisfying their passion but to come together and leave the shadows of their pasts behind them and ease their loneliness.
Nikolai Ivanovitsch’s had left his one and only true love up there. But the facets of her personality had faded over the centuries so that there was no example for his novel anymore. Also there had been nothing heroic about his relationship with his wife.
On the day the atomic thunderstorm broke over Moscow they had offered Nikolai to take the place of the train driver Serov who had retired shortly before. That meant twice the pay. Before he would take on the new post he was to take a few days off. He had called his wife and she had said that she would bake a Scharlottka (an apple cake), then leave the house to buy champagne and take a stroll with their kids.
But before he could go on vacation he just had to bring another shift behind him. When Nikolai Ivanovitsch entered the driver cabin of the train he knew that he would be its new captain, happily married, at the beginning of a tunnel that lead to a beautiful and bright future. Half an hour later he had aged twenty years. When he came to the end of the lane, Nikolai was a broken, poor and lonely man. Maybe that was why every time he stumbled onto a miraculously preserved train he felt the strange need to take the place of the train driver, letting his hands glide over the instruments on the dashboard, to look through the front windshield into the network of tunnels. To imagine starting the vehicle again …
And put it in reverse …
It was like the brigadier created some kind of field that shielded them from all dangers. And he seemed to know it.
They didn’t even need an hour back to the Nagornaya.
This time the line didn’t resist them.
Homer had felt it again: Scout, merchant from the Sevastopolskaya or any other human, as soon as they ventured into the tunnels they became foreign matter for the blood flow of the metro. As soon as they left their station the air around them went up in flames, reality got cracks and unbelievable creatures emerged seemingly out of nowhere and threw themselves against the humans of the metro.
Hunter on the other hand was no stranger to the dark tunnels and it didn’t seem to bother the leviathan in which veins they moved. He even turned off his light to transform himself into the darkness that filled the tunnels. Then it seemed that he was gripped by an invisible stream and flew on twice as fast. Even though Homer followed him with all his strength he fell behind and had to yell so that Hunter would wait on the old man.
On their way back they passed the Nagornaya without being disturbed. The fog had disappeared and the station slept.
Now you could see from one end of the station to the other. Where the ghostly giants hid themselves was a riddle that Homer was unable to solve. It was a common, abandoned stop: Salt had gathered itself on the wet ceiling, a soft layer of dust was on the platform; here and there somebody had written something indecent on the walls with charcoal and the walls were blackened from smoke. Only on your second look you could see the strange markings on the ground, doing some kind of strange dance through the station and the dried brown stains on the pillars and the ceiling which were cracked and broken as if something had scratched itself on them.
But even the Nagornaya just flickered shortly and then was left behind. They flew on. As long as Homer followed the brigadier his magical cocoon of invincibility seemed to surround him as well. The old man started to wonder, where did he take the strength for this enormous march?
But he didn’t have enough air to talk and Hunter probably wouldn’t have answered. For the hundredth time Homer asked himself why he had joined the silent and merciless brigadier that seemed to forget about him again and again.
The numbing smell of the Nachimovski prospect approached. Homer would have liked to leave this station behind him as quickly as possible but the brigadier slowed down. While the old man was only able to stand the smell through his gasmask Hunter even sniffed around as if he could smell something out of the thick and heavy rotten air.
Again the corpse eaters retreated away from them out of respect, threw away their half gnawed on bones and spit out shreds of flesh onto the ground. Hunter climbed the mountain in the middle of the station, sinking into the rotting body parts up to his ankles and he was looking around for quite some time. It didn’t find what he was looking for and satisfied he made a gesture with his hand into Ho
mers direction and continued to march on.
Homer on the other hand had found something. He had tripped and fallen to the ground; scaring away a young corpse eater that was just disemboweled a wet bulletproof vest.
Homer saw a helmet from the Sevastopolskaya that had rolled to the side. One moment after that the glass of his gasmask steamed up – he was covered in cold sweat.
He desperately tried to fight his nausea, crawled to the bones and started to fish for the dog tags. Instead he found a small, dark-red smudged notebook. The first page he opened was the last one of the entries: “Do not storm the station, under any circumstances!”
Even when she was just a child her father had taught her not to cry but now she had nothing which she could throw against fate anymore. Tears flowed over her face automatically and out of her chest you could hear a thin, painful whining. She had realized immediately what had happened and now she had been trying for hours to deal with it.
Did he yell for her to help him? Had he wanted to tell her something important? She no longer remembered when exactly she had fallen asleep and she didn’t know if she was awake now. Maybe there was a world where her father was alive. Where she hadn’t killed him with her sleep, her weakness and egoism. Sasha held the cold but still soft hand of her fathers to warm it and talked to herself:” You’re going to find a car. We will go up there, sit inside and drive away. You will laugh again like on the day you brought the recorder with the music CD’s …”
Her father had sat upright at first, leaning on the pillar and his chin pressed to his chest so that you could have thought that he was sleeping. But then his body had slipped down into the puddle of blood. Like if he had been tired of playing alive, no longer wanting to put on a show for her.
The wrinkles that ran through her father’s face had smoothened.
She let go of his hand, helped him to sit more comfortable and covered him from head to toe in a torn blanket.
There was no way to bury him. Of course she could have left him on the surface where he could see the sky when it brightened one day. But long before that his body would have become the victim of the creatures.
In their station nobody would touch him. Out of the lost southern tunnels was no danger to be feared, the only creatures that lived there where flying roaches. The northern tunnel ended at a rusted, half broken metro bridge. Past the bridge humans lived but they would have never thought about crossing the bridge just out of curiosity. Everybody knew that there was nothing on the other side but burned wasteland.
And on the edge of this wasteland there was a guard station where two castaways sat out their death sentence.
Her father would have never allowed her to stay here on her own and now it was completely pointless. Also Sasha kne It didn’t matter how far she ran, id didn’t matter how desperately she tried to escape but she knew that she would never be able to free herself from this cursed dungeon. Not anymore.
“Papa … Forgive me.” She sobbed. There was nothing there anymore with which she could have earned his forgiveness.
She pulled the silver ring from his finger and dropped it into the pocket of her overall. Then she took the cage with the rat that was still uneasy and walked slowly to the north.
Her boots left bloody prints on the granite.
She had already stepped onto the rails and entered the tunnel when suddenly; in the empty station, something astonishing happened. A long flame reached at the body of her father.
But it didn’t reach him and retreated unwillingly back into the deep darkness, as if it respected his right for his last rest. (In this moment Sasha’s part of the book is ahead of this chapter, this happens after Homer and Hunter leave again – chapter 7)
“They are coming back! They are coming back!” It sounded out of the loudspeaker.
Istomin put down the receiver from his ear and looked at him unbelievingly.
“Who’s >they<?” Denis Michailovitsch jumped up from his chair and spilled his tea. A dark stain spread on his pants. He cursed the tea and repeated his question.
“Who’s >they<?” Asked Istomin again mechanically.
“The brigadier and Homer, Achmed is dead.” It sounded out of the receiver through the static.
Vladimir Ivanovitsch wiped the sweat of his forehead with a handkerchief and scratched himself under the black rubber of his pirate-like eye patch. Whenever a fighter died it was his responsibility to inform their family.
Without letting himself be connected again he put his head out of the door and yelled for the adjutant: “Both of them to me, immediately! And I want the table ready!”
He went into his office, straightened the pictures on the wall for some reason, stopped at the map of the metro, whispered something to himself and then turned to Denis Michailovitsch. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest and had a broad smile on his face.
“Wolodya, you act like a girl before her rendezvous.” The colonel said grinning.
“And you aren’t nervous at all?”
Answered the leader of the station and pointed with his head at the colonel’s wet trousers.
“Me? I am ready. The two strike teams are ready. Just another day and we can go”
Dennis moved his finger over the blue beret, stood up and put it on his head. He looked more official that way.
They heard hasty steps from the hallway; the adjutant looked at them asking while holding a dim glass bottle with something alcoholic in it through the almost closed door.
Istomin made a gesture with his hands: Later, Later!
Then they finally could hear the familiar, dump voice, the door sprang open and a broad figure entered. Behind the brigadiers back was the old storyteller that Hunter had carried around for some reason.
“I welcome you!” Istomin sat into his seat, stood up and sat back down.
“Now, what is it?” Asked the colonel. The brigadier looked from one man to the other and turned to Istomin.
“The Tulskaya has been captured by a wandering group of bandits. They have killed everyone”
Dennis Michailovitsch raised his bushy eyebrows. “Our men too?
“As far as I can tell. We only got to the stations door. There it came to a fight and then they closed the
hermetic door”
“The hermetic door?” Istomin held on to the edge of the table and stood up.
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“Storm the station” Both the brigadier and the colonel answered completely synchronized.
“No we can’t storm the station”
It was Homers voice that sound out of the background.
She just had to wait for the right hour. If she hadn’t confused the days, the railcar would soon emerge from the wet mist of the night. Every other minute she remained in this place, this abyss, there were the tunnel emerged from the earth like an open vein would one day cost her life. But there was nothing to do but to wait. On the other side of this never ending bridge she would find a closed hermetic door that you could only open from the other side and that once a week on market day.
Today Sasha had nothing to offer, but this time she had to buy more than ever before. She didn’t care what the people on the railcar would want in return for her to pass into the world of the living – the grave coldness and the lifeless lack of emotion of her father had passed to her.
How often had she dreamt to one day get into another station, to be surrounded by other people, establish friendships and to meet someone special …
She had asked her father about his youth, not just to go back to her bright lit childhood but because instead of her mother she saw herself and instead of her father she saw the blurry picture of a beautiful young man in her own naïve imagination of love. She doubted that she would be able to get along with other people if one day she would be able to go back to the metro. About what these people would would talk about?
But now, mere hours before the arrival of the ferry, yes maybe even minutes, the other men an
d women didn’t matter to hear. Even the thought about an existence worthy of a human being felt like she was betraying her father. Without hesitating one second she would have agreed to spend the rest of her days in this station, if that would have been able to save him.
When the candle stump in the glass started to fight its last fight she put the fire on a new wick. On one of his expeditions her father had found a whole chest full of wax candles and she always carried one of them in her overall’s pocket. Sasha enjoyed imagining that their bodies were exactly like the candles and that a part of her father had passed to her when he faded.
If the people on the railcar would recognize her signal through the mist?
Until now she had only looked outside from time to time to remain outside as less as possible. Her father had prohibited her from doing so and his swollen head was warning enough for her. On the slope Sasha always felt uneasy, like a trapped mole, looking around restless and only daring to venture to the beginning of the bridge to watch down into the black river. But now she had too much time. Leaning forward and trembling in the wet and cold wind Sasha made a few steps forward. Through the dawn and boney trees she saw the fallen skyscrapers; in the oily, thick waters of the rivers something massive swam around and in the distance she heard an inhuman scream. Suddenly a familiar sound emerged, the familiar squeaking sound of the railcar.
Sasha jumped up, holding the glass with the candle up high and from the bridge a small ray of light answered.
The old railcar approached, struggling against the thick fog. The weak shine of the spotlight cut through the night and Sasha made one step back. It wasn’t the same railcar as normal. It moved slowly, like every rotation of the wheels cost the people pushing the levers a lot of strength.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 10