Naturally, the radial transfer stations were flooded with Hansa’s spies and they had been bought, lock, stock and barrel, by its merchants, but they remained nominally independent. Serpukhov Station was one of these. A train had halted forever in one of the stretches of line leading from it, after failing to reach the next station, Tula. Rendered habitable by the Protestant sectarian believers who now occupied it, the train was indicated on Istomin’s map with a laconic Latin cross: it had become an isolated homestead, lost in a black wasteland. If not for the missionaries roaming round the neighbouring stations, with their insatiable greed for lost souls, Istomin wouldn’t have had any complaints about the sectarians. But in any case these sheepdogs of God didn’t roam as far as Sebastopol, and they didn’t cause any particular hindrance to passing travellers, except perhaps by delaying them slightly with their intense conversations about salvation. And apart from that, the other tunnel from Tula to Serpukhov was entirely clear, so the local convoys used that one.
Istomin ran his glance down the line again. Tula Station? A settlement gradually running to seed, picking up the crumbs dropped by Sebastopolite convoys marching through and the sly traders from Serpukhov. The people lived on whatever they could turn their hand to: some mended various sorts of mechanical junk, some went to the Hansa border to look for work, squatting on their haunches for days at a time, waiting for the next foreman with the high-handed manners of a slave driver. ‘They live poorly too, but they don’t have that slippery, villainous Serpukhov look in their eyes,’ thought Istomin. ‘And there’s a lot more order there. It’s probably the danger that binds them together.’
The next station, Nagatino, was marked on his map with a short stroke of the pen – empty. A half-truth: no one loitered there for long, but sometimes there was a motley swarm of rabble at the station, leading a subhuman, twilight existence. Couples who had fled from prying eyes twined their limbs together in the pitch darkness. Sometimes the glow of a feeble little campfire sprang up among the columns, with the shadows of tunnel bandits and murderers swarming around it. But only the ignorant or the absolutely desperate stayed here overnight – by no means all the station’s visitors were human. If you stared hard into the trembling, whispering gloom that filled Nagatino, you could sometimes glimpse silhouettes straight out of a nightmare. And every now and then the homeless vagabonds scattered, if only briefly, when a bloodcurdling howl rang through the stale air as some poor soul was dragged off into a lair to be devoured at leisure.
The tramps didn’t dare set foot beyond Nagatino, and from there all the way to the defensive boundaries of Sebastopol, it was ‘no-man’s-land’. A strictly notional name – of course, the area had its own masters, who guarded its boundaries, and even the Sebastopolite reconnaissance teams preferred not to come up against them.
But now something new had appeared in the tunnels. Something unprecedented, swallowing up everyone who tried to follow a route that supposedly had been thoroughly explored long ago. And who knew if Istomin’s station, even if it called on every inhabitant who was fit to bear arms, would be able to marshal a force strong enough to overcome it. Istomin got up laboriously off his chair, shuffled over to the map and marked with an indelible pencil the stretch of line running from the point labelled ‘Serpukhov’ to the point labelled ‘Nakhimov Prospect’. He drew a thick question mark beside it. He meant to put it beside the Prospect, but it ended up right beside Sebastopol.
At first glance Sebastopol Station appeared deserted. On the platform there was no sign of the familiar army tents in which people usually lived at other stations. There were only forms vaguely perceived by the light of a few dim bulbs, the anthill profiles of machine-gun emplacements, built out of sandbags, but the firing positions were empty, and dust lay thick on the slim square columns. Everything was arranged to make sure that if an outsider found his way in here, he would be certain to think the station had been abandoned long ago.
However, if the uninvited guest got the idea of lingering here, even for a short while, he risked staying forever. The machine-gun squads and snipers on twenty-four-hour duty in adjacent Kakhovka Station occupied their positions in those emplacements in a matter of seconds and the weak light was drowned in the pitiless glare of mercury lamps on the ceiling, searing the retinal nerves of men and monsters accustomed to the darkness of the tunnels.
The platform was the Sebastopolites’ final, most comprehensively planned line of defence. Their homes were located in the belly of this stage-set, in the technical area under the platform. Below the granite slabs of the floor, hidden away from the prying eyes of strangers, was another storey, with a floor area as large as the main hall, but divided up into numerous compartments. Well-lit, dry, warm rooms, smoothly humming machines for purifying air and water, hydroponic hothouses . . . When they retreated down here, even further underground, the station’s inhabitants were enfolded in a sense of security and comfort.
Homer knew the decisive battle he would face was not in the northern tunnels, but at home. He made his way along the narrow corridor, past the half-open doors of other people’s apartments, dragging his feet slower and slower as he approached his own door. He needed to think through his tactics one more time and rehearse his lines: he was running out of time.
‘What can I do about it? It’s an order. You know what the situation’s like. They didn’t even bother to ask me. Stop acting like a little child! That’s just plain ridiculous! Of course I didn’t ask to be taken! I can’t do that. What are you saying? Of course I can’t. Refuse? That’s desertion!’ he mumbled to himself, switching between determined outrage and a wheedling, cajoling, affectionate tone.
When he reached the doorway of his room, he started mumbling it all over again. No, there was no way tears could be avoided, but he wasn’t going to back down. The old man pulled his head into his shoulders, readying himself for battle, and turned down the door handle.
Nine and a half square metres of floor space – a great luxury that he had spent five years waiting in line for, shifting about from one dormitory to another. Two square metres were taken up by a two-tier army bunkbed and one by a dining table, covered with an elegant tablecloth. Another three were occupied by a huge heap of newspapers, reaching right up to the ceiling. If he had been a solitary bachelor, then one fine day this mountain would certainly have collapsed, burying him underneath it. But fifteen years earlier he had met a woman who was not only prepared to tolerate this huge pile of dusty junk in her tiny home, but even willing to keep it neat and tidy, so that it wouldn’t transform her domestic nest into a paper Pompeii.
She was prepared to tolerate very many things. The interminable newspaper cuttings with alarming headlines like ‘Arms Race Heats Up’, ‘Americans Test New Anti-Rocket Defence’, ‘Our Nuclear Shield is Growing Stronger’, ‘Provocative Acts Continue’ and ‘Our Patience is Exhausted’, which covered the walls of the little room, like wallpaper, from top to bottom. His all-night sessions, hunched over a heap of school exercise books with a well-chewed ballpoint pen in his hand and the electric light burning – with a heap of paper like that in their home, candles were completely out of the question. His humorous, clownish nickname, which he bore with pride and others spoke with a condescending smile.
Very many things, but not everything. Not his juvenile urge to plunge into the epicentre of the hurricane every time, in order to see what things were really like in there – and this at the age of almost sixty! And not the frivolity with which he accepted any assignment from his superiors, forgetting that he had barely escaped with his life and managed to scramble back home after one of his recent expeditions.
Not the thought that she might lose him and be left all alone again. After seeing Homer off to the watch – his turn to stand duty came round once a week – she never stayed at home. To escape from her distressing thoughts, she called on neighbours, or went to work even when it wasn’t her shift. The male indifference to death seemed stupid, egotistic and criminal to her.
‘Kolya, has something happened? Aren’t you on duty until late?’
Homer suddenly lost all desire to tell her about the decision that had been taken. He hesitated: maybe if he just calmed her down for the time being, he could slip the news into the talk over dinner?
‘Only don’t you even think of lying,’ she warned him, catching his wandering gaze.
‘You know, Lena . . . The thing is . . .’ he began.
‘Has someone . . . ?’ – she asked the most important question immediately, about the most terrible thing of all, not wishing even to pronounce the word ‘died’, as if she believed her dark thoughts might materialise as reality.
‘No! No,’ said Homer with a shake of his head. ‘They just took me off duty. They’re sending me to Serpukhov,’ he added in a matter-of-fact voice.
‘But isn’t it . . . ?’ Elena said and faltered. ‘Isn’t that . . . Have they come back then? That’s where . . .’
‘Oh, come on, it’s all a load of nonsense. There’s nothing there,’ he said hastily.
Elena turned away, walked over to the table, shifted the salt-cellar from one spot to another and straightened out a fold in the tablecloth.
‘I had a dream,’ she said and coughed to clear the hoarseness out of her voice.
‘You have them all the time.’
‘A bad dream,’ she went on stubbornly and suddenly broke into pitiful sobs.
‘Oh come on, now. What can I do? It’s an order,’ he mumbled, stroking her fingers and floundering as he realised his entire well-prepared speech wasn’t worth a damn.
‘Let that one-eyed bastard go himself,’ she yelled furiously through her tears, jerking her hand away. ‘Let that other fiend go, in his little beret! All they ever do is give orders. What does he care? All his life he’s slept with a machine-gun beside him instead of a woman. What does he know?’
Once you’ve reduced a woman to tears, you can only demean yourself by turning round and trying to console her. Homer felt ashamed, and genuinely sorry for Elena, but it would have been all too easy now to break down, promise to refuse the assignment, reassure her and dry her tears, only to regret later missing his chance – this chance that had fallen to him, which could be the last one in a life that was already unusually long by today’s standards.
So he said nothing.
It was already time to go, gather the officers together and brief them, but the colonel carried on sitting in Istomin’s office, taking no notice of the cigarette smoke that usually irritated and tempted him so badly.
While the station commandant whispered something thoughtfully, running one finger over his battle-scarred map of the Metro, Denis Mikhailovich kept trying to understand why Hunter wanted to do this. There could be only one thing behind his mysterious appearance at Sebastopol, his desire to settle here and even the cautious way in which the brigadier almost always showed up at the station wearing his helmet to conceal his face: Istomin must be right, Hunter was on the run from someone after all. In order to earn extra points, he had made the southern guard post his base: by doing the work of an entire brigade, he was gradually making himself indispensable. At this stage, no matter who demanded that they hand him over, no matter what reward they offered for his head, neither Istomin nor the colonel would even think of letting them have him.
He had chosen the perfect place to hide. There were no outsiders at Sebastopol and, unlike the garrulous shuttle traders from other stations, the local convoy merchants weren’t loose-tongued, they never gossiped when they got out into the Greater Metro. In this little Sparta, clinging to its patch of earth at the very end of the world, the qualities valued most highly were reliability and ferocity in battle. And people here knew how to keep secrets.
But then why would Hunter abandon everything, volunteer for this expedition and set out for Hansa, risking being recognised? Even Istomin wouldn’t have had the heart to assign him a sortie like this. Somehow the colonel didn’t believe the brigadier was really alarmed about the fate of the missing scouts. And he wasn’t fighting for Sebastopol out of love for the station, but for reasons of his own, known only to him.
Maybe he was on a mission? That would explain a lot: his sudden arrival, his secrecy, the obstinacy with which he spent the nights in a sleeping bag in the tunnels, his decision to set out for Serpukhov Station immediately. But then why had he asked the colonel not to let anyone else know? Who could have sent him, if not them?
Who else?
The colonel forced himself to ignore the desire to take a drag from Istomin’s cigarette. No, it was impossible. Hunter – one of the pillars of The Order? The man to whom tens, maybe hundreds of them owed their lives, including Denis Mikhailovich himself?
‘That man couldn’t . . .’ he objected cautiously to himself. ‘But was the Hunter who returned from the abyss still that man?’ And if he was acting on instructions from someone . . . Could he have received some kind of signal now? Did this mean that the disappearance of the armaments convoys and the three scouts was no coincidence, but part of a carefully planned operation? But then what part was the brigadier playing in it?
The colonel shook his head briskly to and fro, as if he were trying to toss off the leeches of doubt that had fastened onto it and were rapidly swelling up with blood. How could he think like this about a man who had saved his life? Especially since, so far, Hunter had served the station impeccably and given no reason at all to doubt him. And Denis Mikhailovich, refusing to label the man a ‘spy’ or a ‘saboteur’ even in his thoughts, took a decision.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea, and then I’ll go to and talk to the men,’ he declared with exaggerated cheerfulness, cracking his knuckles. Istomin tore himself away from the map and gave a weary smile. He was just reaching out to his ancient disc-dial phone to summon his orderly when the phone started ringing. The two men glanced sharply at each other, startled – it was a week since they had heard that sound: if the duty orderly wanted to report something, he always knocked at the door, and no one else at the station could call the commandant directly.
‘Istomin here,’ he said warily.
‘Vladimir Ivanovich, I’ve got Tula Station on the line,’ the operator jabbered. ‘Only it’s very hard to hear anything. I think it’s our men but the connection . . .’
‘Just put it through, will you?’ the commandant roared, slamming his fist down hard on the desk and setting the telephone jangling pitifully.
The startled operator fell silent and Istomin heard crackling and rustling sounds in the earpiece, and a distant voice, distorted beyond recognition.
Elena turned away to the wall, hiding her tears. What more could she do to hold him back? Why was he so glad to grab the first opportunity to get away from the station, using that moth-eaten old excuse about orders from the command and punishment for desertion? What had she failed to give him, what else should she have done in all these fifteen years, in order to tame him? But here he was, longing to get back into the tunnels again, as if he hoped to find something out there, apart from darkness, emptiness and death. What was it he was looking for?
Homer could hear her reproaches in his own head as clearly as if she were speaking out loud. He felt mean and shabby, but it was too late to retreat now. He almost opened his mouth to apologise, to speak warm, tender words, but he choked, realising that every word would only throw more fuel on the flames.
And above Elena’s head Moscow cried – hanging on the wall, lovingly set in a little frame, was a colour photograph of Tver Street in a transparent shower of summer rain, cut out of an old glossy calendar. At one time, a long time ago, during his old wanderings round the Metro, Homer had owned nothing but his cloth
es and that photo. Other men’s pockets held crumpled pages with photos of naked beauties, torn out of men’s magazines, but for Homer they couldn’t take the place of a real, live woman, even for a few brief, shameful minutes. That photo reminded him of something that was infinitely important, inexpressibly beautiful . . . And lost forever.
With an awkward whisper – ‘I’m sorry’ – he edged out into the corridor, carefully closed the door behind him and squatted down, absolutely drained. The neighbours’ door was ajar, and two puny, pasty-faced little children, a boy and a girl, were playing in the opening. Catching sight of the old man, they froze: the crudely sewn bear stuffed with rags that they had just been arguing over flopped to the floor, forgotten.
‘Uncle Kolya! Tell us a story! You promised you’d tell us one when you got back!’ they exclaimed, dashing at Homer.
‘Which one do you want?’ he asked, unable to refuse.
‘About the mootants with no heads!’ the little boy howled gleefully.
‘No! I don’t want a story about mootants!’ the little girl exclaimed sulkily. ‘They’re frightening, I’m afraid!’
‘So which story do you want, Taniusha?’ the old man sighed.
‘In that case, the one about the fascists! And the partisans!’ the little boy interrupted.
‘No . . . I like the one about the Emerald City . . .’ Tanya said with a gap-toothed grin.
‘But I told you that one only yesterday. Maybe the one about how Hansa fought the Reds?’
‘The Emerald City, the Emerald City!’ they both clamoured.
‘Oh, all right,’ the old man agreed. ‘Somewhere far, far away on the Sokolniki Line, out beyond seven empty stations, out beyond three ruined Metro bridges, a thousand, thousand sleepers away from here, lies a magical underground city. This city is enchanted and ordinary people can’t get into it. Magicians live there, and only they can come out through the gates of the city and go back in again. And up on the surface of the ground is a huge, mighty castle with towers, where these wise magicians used to live. This castle is called . . .’
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