‘The Versity!’ the little boy called out, giving his sister a triumphant look.
‘The University,’ Homer confirmed. ‘When the Great War happened and the nuclear missiles started raining down, the magicians withdrew into their city and put a spell on the entrance, so the wicked people who started the war wouldn’t get in. And they live . . .’ He gagged and stopped.
Elena was standing there, leaning against the doorpost and listening to him: Homer hadn’t noticed her coming out into the corridor.
‘I’ll pack your knapsack,’ she said in a hoarse voice.
The old man walked up to Elena and took her by the hand. She put her arms round him awkwardly, feeling shy in front of the neighbours’ children, and asked:
‘Will you come back soon? Will you be all right?’
And Homer, astounded for the thousandth time in his long life by the invincible female love of promises, regardless of whether it was possible to keep them or not, said: ‘Everything will be just fine’.
‘You’re so old already, but you kiss like you were a young couple,’ said the little girl, making a spiteful face.
‘And our dad said it isn’t true, there isn’t any Emerald City,’ the little boy said in a surly voice, just to round things off.
‘Maybe there isn’t,’ Homer said with a shrug. ‘It’s just a story. But how can we get by here without stories?’
It was appallingly difficult to hear anything. The voice forcing its way through the crackling and rustling sounded vaguely familiar to Istomin – a bit like one of the team of three scouts sent to Serpukhov.
‘At Tula Station . . . We can’t . . . Tula . . .’ said the voice, straining to communicate something important.
‘I understand that you’re at Tula!’ Istomin shouted into the receiver. ‘What happened? Why don’t you come back?’
‘Tula Station! Here . . . Don’t . . . It’s very important . . . don’t . . .’ But the end of the phrase was swallowed up by the damned interference.
‘Don’t what? Say again, don’t what?’
‘You mustn’t storm it! Whatever you do, don’t storm it,’ the receiver suddenly said quite clearly and distinctly.
‘Why? What the devil is going on there? What’s happening?’ the commandant yelled impatiently.
But he couldn’t hear the voice any more; it was drowned in a massive surge of noise, and then the receiver went dead. But Istomin refused to believe it and he wouldn’t hang up.
‘What’s happening?’
CHAPTER 3
After Life
Homer thought he would never forget the look he got from the sentry who said goodbye to them at the most northerly guard post. It was the same look people give the body of a fallen hero as the honour guard fires that final volley in salute: a mournful, melancholy kind of look. Saying goodbye forever.
Looks like that aren’t meant for the living. Homer felt like he was climbing up a flimsy ladder into the cabin of a tiny plane that could take off but never land again, because devious Japanese engineers had converted it into a machine from hell. The imperial banner fluttered in the salty wind, mechanics bustled about on the airfield, engines hummed and sprang to life, and a potbellied general held his fingers tight up against the peak of his cap, his puffy eyes glittering with samurai envy . . .
‘What’s got you in such a cheerful mood?’ Ahmed asked, shattering the old man’s daydream.
Unlike Homer, he felt no urge to be first to discover what was going on at Serpukhov Station. He had left his wife behind on the platform, brooding silently as she clutched their first child’s little hand in her left hand and cradled their second child in her right arm, cautiously nestling the mewling bundle against her breast.
‘It’s like drawing yourself up to your full height – and launching yourself into the attack, charging the machine-guns. The same feeling of reckless elation. We’ll face a hail of deadly fire up ahead,’ Homer tried to explain.
‘What you have is a different kind of attack,’ Ahmed muttered, looking back towards the little patch of light at the end of the tunnel. ‘Custom-made for psychos like you. No sane man would voluntarily go up against a machine-gun. Who needs dumb heroics like that?’
‘Well you see, it’s like this,’ the old man replied after a brief pause. ‘When you feel your time coming, you start thinking: Have I really done anything? Will I be remembered?’
‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve got children. They’ll remember me all right . . . The oldest, at least,’ Ahmed added gravely after pondering for a moment.
Homer was stung by that, and felt he should make a sharp retort, but Ahmed’s final words had blunted his battle fervour. It was true: it was easy enough for an old man like him, with no children, to risk his moth-eaten skin, but the young man still had a long life ahead of him – too long to be concerned about immortality.
They moved beyond the final lamp – a glass jar with a little electric bulb inside it, set in a frame of thin metal rods. It was full of singed flies and flying cockroaches. The chitinous mass was heaving slightly: some of the insects were still alive and trying to crawl out, like condemned prisoners who had fallen into the common trench with everyone else who was shot, but hadn’t been finished off.
Homer paused involuntarily for an instant in the spot of light that this lamp-grave wrung out of itself – weak and yellow, flickering on the point of extinction. Then he filled his lungs with air and plunged on after the others into the ink-black gloom that extended from the boundary of Sebastopol all the way to the approaches to Tula – if, of course, any station with that name still existed.
She wasn’t alone, that sombre woman with two little children, standing rooted to the granite slabs, the platform wasn’t entirely deserted. A fat man with one eye and wrestler’s shoulders was standing motionless some distance away, watching as the soldiers left, and one step behind him stood a sinewy old man in a private’s pea jacket, talking quietly to an orderly.
‘All we can do now is wait,’ Istomin declared, absentmindedly switching a dead cigarette end from one corner of his mouth to the other.
‘You wait, I’ll get on with my job,’ the colonel retorted obstinately.
‘I tell you, that was Andrei. The leader of the team we sent out,’ said Istomin. He listened once again to the telephone-receiver voice still clamouring insistently in his head.
‘So now what? Maybe they forced him to say that under torture. The specialists know all sorts of different methods,’ said the old man, raising one eyebrow.
‘It didn’t seem like that,’ said the commandant, shaking his head thoughtfully. ‘You should have heard the way he said it. There’s something else going on there, something inexplicable. Something we can’t fix with a brisk cavalry sortie . . .’
‘I’ll give you an explanation as quick as a wink,’ the colonel assured him. ‘Tula’s been captured by bandits. They set up an ambush and killed our men or took some as hostages. They don’t cut off the power, because they use it themselves, and they don’t want to get on the wrong side of Hansa. But they cut off the phone. What weird sort of business is that – a phone that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t?’
‘But his voice, the way it sounded . . .’ said Istomin, sticking to his point.
‘What way did it sound?’ the colonel exploded, making the orderly move back a few steps. ‘Stick pins under your nails, and we’ll see what your voice sounds like! And with a simple pair of pliers you can change a bass to a falsetto for the rest of a man’s life!’
Everything was already clear to him, he had made his choice. And having resolved all his doubts, he felt as if he were back on his steed, and his cavalryman’s hand was itching for the sabre, no matter how dismally Istomin might whinge.
The commandant took his time before answering, giving the colonel a chance to cool off.
‘We’ll wait,’ he said at last, amicably but firmly.
‘Two days,’ said the old man, crossing his arms.
&nb
sp; ‘Two days,’ said Istomin, nodding.
The colonel spun round on the spot and tramped off to the barracks: he wasn’t going to waste the precious hours ahead. The commanders of the assault units had been waiting for him at HQ for the best part of an hour, lined up along both flanks of the long planking table. The only empty chairs were at the opposite ends: his and Istomin’s. But this time they would have to start without the commandant.
The station commandant didn’t notice that Denis Mikhailovich had gone.
‘It’s amusing, the way our roles have switched over, isn’t it?’ said Istomin, perhaps talking to himself, perhaps to the colonel.
Swinging round without waiting for a reply, he encountered the orderly’s embarrassed glance and waved his arm to dismiss him. ‘I don’t recognise the same colonel who refused to let me have a single extra man,’ the commandant thought. ‘The old war dog has scented something. But is that nose of his leading him astray?’
Istomin’s own gut feeling told him something quite different: Lie low. Wait. The strange phone call had only intensified his dark premonition: at Tula their heavy infantry would come face to face with a mysterious, invincible adversary.
Vladimir Ivanovich rummaged through his pockets, found a cigarette lighter and struck a spark. And while the ragged smoke rings still rose into the air above his head, he stayed there, rooted to the spot, with his eyes riveted to the dark cavity of the tunnel, gazing spellbound at it, like a rabbit staring into the beckoning jaws of a boa constrictor. When he finished the cigarette, he shook his head again and set off to his office. The orderly emerged out of the shadows and followed him at a respectful distance.
A dull click – and the ribbed vaulting of the tunnel was illuminated for a good fifty metres ahead. Hunter’s flashlight was so large and powerful, it was more like a searchlight. Homer breathed a silent sigh of relief – for the last few minutes he had been tormented by the stupid idea that the brigadier wouldn’t switch on the light, because his eyes could manage perfectly well without it.
Once he set foot in the dark stretch of tunnel, the brigadier had started looking even less like an ordinary man, or any kind of man at all. His movements had acquired a graceful, impetuous, animal quality. It seemed as if he had switched on the flashlight for his companions, but he himself was relying on different senses. He often took off his helmet and turned one ear towards the tunnel, listening carefully, and even bolstered Homer’s suspicions by stopping dead now and then to draw in the rusty-smelling air through his nose.
Hunter glided along soundlessly several steps ahead of the others, without looking round at them, as if he had forgotten they even existed. Ahmed was baffled – he didn’t often stand watch at the southern frontier post and he wasn’t used to the brigadier’s eccentricities. He prodded Homer in the side, as if to ask: What’s wrong with him? The old man just shrugged – how could he explain that in a couple of words.
What did Hunter need them for anyway? He was the one who had cast Homer in the role of native guide, but he seemed far more at home in these tunnels than the old man. Of course, if he were asked, Homer could have told him a lot about the places around here, tall tales and true ones – which were sometimes far more fantastic and terrifying than the most incredible yarns spun by bored sentries sitting round a lonely campfire. He had his own map of the Metro in his head, nothing at all like Istomin’s. Where the station commandant’s map had yawning gaps, Homer could have filled all the blank space with his own markings and explanations. Vertical shafts, service facilities standing open or closed up and mothballed, spiderwebs of connecting tunnels between the main lines. On his map, along the stretch of tunnel between Chertanovo and Southern, just two stations down from Sebastopol, a branch line budded off and merged into the gigantic bulge of the Warsaw Metro Depot, criss-crossed with the fine veins of dozens of dead-ends and drainage tunnels. For Homer, with his reverential awe of trains, the depot was an eerie and mystical place, like an elephants’ graveyard. The old man could talk about it for hours at a time – if only he could find listeners willing to believe him.
Homer regarded the line between Sebastopol and Nakhimov Prospect as very tricky. The rules of safety and plain common sense required them to stick together, moving slowly and cautiously, examining the walls and the floor ahead of them closely. Even in this stretch of tunnel, where all the hatches and cracks had been bricked up and triple-sealed by engineering teams from Sebastopol, on no account could they afford to leave their rear uncovered. The darkness sliced open by the beam of the flashlight closed up again right behind their backs, the echoes of their footsteps fractured as they were reflected off the reinforcing ribs of countless sections of tunnel lining, and somewhere in the distance the wind howled, trapped in the ventilation shafts. Large, viscous drops gathered in cracks in the ceiling and fell – perhaps they were just water, but Homer tried to dodge them. Not for any particular reason – just in case.
In olden times, when the bloated monster of a city on the surface still lived its own feverish life, and the restless city-dwellers still thought of the Metro as a soulless transport system – back in those days the youthful Homer, who everyone still called Kolya, used to wander through its tunnels with a flashlight and a metal toolbox.
Entry to those places was barred to ordinary mortals, whose access was restricted to the 150 or so marble halls, polished to a high gleam, and the congested carriages, pasted with bright-coloured advertisements. The millions of people who spent two or three hours in the rumbling, swaying trains every day were unaware that they were only permitted to see a mere tenth of this incredibly vast underground kingdom that extended far and wide below the surface. And to make sure they didn’t start speculating about its true size and where all those inconspicuous little doors and iron shutters led to, or where the dark little branch-lines and connecting passages closed for never-ending repairs actually went, they were distracted by pictures bright enough to dazzle their eyes, provocatively stupid slogans and wooden-voiced commercials that prevented them from relaxing on the escalators. At least, that was how it seemed to Kolya after he first started penetrating the secrets of this state within a state. The frivolous rainbow-coloured schematic of the metro that hung in the carriages was intended to convince the curious that they were looking at an exclusively civilian system. But in reality its cheerfully coloured lines were intertwined with the invisible branches of secret tunnels, from which military and state bunkers dangled like bunches of grapes – and some stretches of tunnel linked up with the tangled catacombs dug under the city by ancient pagans.
During the early days of Kolya’s youth, when his country was too poor to vie with the power and ambition of others, Judgement Day had seemed very far off, and the bunkers and shelters built in anticipation of its arrival had gathered dust. But money brought the return of former arrogance and, with it, of enemies. The rustcoated, multi-ton doors of cast iron were opened again with a rasping creak, the stocks of food and medications were renewed, the air and water filters were rendered fully operational.
And all just in the nick of time.
For Kolya, a poor young man from out of town, to be accepted for a job in the Metro was like joining a Masonic lodge. It transformed him from an unemployed reject into a member of a powerful organisation that paid generously for the modest services he was able to provide and promised to initiate him into the arcane mysteries of the universe. The wages offered in the job announcement seemed very tempting to Kolya, and almost no requirements were specified for would-be trackwalkers.
It was some time before he began to understand, from the reluctant explanations of his new colleagues, just why the Metropolitan was obliged to entice employees with high salaries and bonus payments for occupational hazards. It wasn’t a matter of a heavy schedule, or the voluntary renunciation of daylight. No, it had to do with dangers of an entirely different kind.
Homer had a sceptical mind, he didn’t believe in the ever-present dark rumours of ghosts and ghouls. But
one day his friend failed to return from checking a short dead-end stretch of tunnel, and for some reason they didn’t bother to search for him – the shift foreman just shrugged helplessly. And his friend’s disappearance was followed by the disappearance of all the documents testifying that he had ever worked in the Metro. Kolya was the only one still so young and naïve that he refused to accept this disappearance and eventually one of his senior colleagues whispered in his ear, gazing around as he did it, that his friend had been ‘taken’. So who, if not Homer, should know that bad things used to happen in Moscow’s subterranean depths long before life in the megalopolis died, scorched by the withering breath of Armageddon.
After losing his friend and being initiated into forbidden knowledge like that, Kolya could have taken fright and run, abandoned this job and found another. But instead, his marriage of convenience with the Metro developed into a passionate love affair. When he’d had his fill of wandering around the tunnels on foot, he underwent the rites of initiation as a driver’s mate and established himself in a more solid position in the complex hierarchy of the Metropolitan.
And the better he got to know this unacknowledged wonder of the world, this labyrinth with a nostalgic yen for antiquity, this ownerless, cyclopean city that was an inverted reflection in the brown Moscow earth of its prototype up above, the more deeply and selflessly he fell in love with it. This man-made Tartarus was indisputably worthy of the poetry of the genuine Homer, or at least the fleet pen of Swift, who would have seen it as a greater joke than Laputa. But the man who became its secret admirer and artless singer was Kolya – plain, simple Nikolai Ivanovich Nikolaev.
It was absurd.
Anyone reading the Russian folk tale The Stone Flower might feel that he could love the Mistress of the Copper Mountain – but love the Copper Mountain itself? And yet the day came when Kolya’s love was requited with a jealous passion that took away his family, but saved his life.
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