‘But where’s Ahmed? What happened to Ahmed?’ asked Homer, suddenly remembering and starting to shake again.
‘He’s dead,’ the brigadier said indifferently.
‘He’s dead,’ the old man repeated resignedly.
When the monster tore his comrade’s hand out of his, Homer had realised no living soul could ever wriggle out of those claws. He’d just been lucky that Nagornaya’s choice had not fallen on him. The old man looked round again – somehow he couldn’t believe straight away that Ahmed had disappeared forever. Homer looked at his own palm – it was torn and bleeding. He hadn’t been able to hold on. He suddenly felt short of air.
‘But Ahmed knew he was doomed,’ he said quietly. ‘Why did they take him, and not me?’
‘There was a lot of life in him,’ the brigadier replied. ‘They feed on human lives.’
‘It’s not fair,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘He’s got little children, he still has so much to live for! He had . . . And I’m just a wanderer, tumbleweed.’
‘Well, would you eat dry moss?’ asked Hunter, breaking off the conversation and setting Homer on his feet in one swift movement. ‘That’s it, let’s go. Or we might be too late.’
Trotting awkwardly after Hunter, who had moved up into a jog, the old man racked his brains, trying to figure out how they could have gone back to Nagornaya. The station had drugged them with its narcotic exhalations, like some predatory orchid, luring them back to itself. They hadn’t turned back at all – Homer could have sworn to that. He was almost prepared to believe in the spatial distortions that he once loved to tell stories about to his gullible comrades in the watch, but then he realised it was all much simpler than that. The old man stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: the reversing tunnel! A few hundred metres beyond Nagornaya, between the bores of the right and left tunnels, a single-track line branched off, running off to the side at a narrow angle: it was for reversing the direction of trains. Feeling their way along the wall, first they’d got onto the parallel line, and then – when the wall disappeared – they’d turned back towards the station by mistake. ‘Nothing mystical about it,’ Homer thought uncertainly. But there was something else he wanted to get clear.
‘Hey!’ he called to Hunter. ‘Wait!’
Hunter carried on marching forwards as if he was deaf, and the old man had to fight his breathlessness and pick up his own pace. Drawing level with the brigadier, Homer tried to glance into his eyes and blurted out:
‘Why did you abandon us?’
‘I abandoned you?’
The old man thought he heard a note of mockery in the passionless, metallic voice, and he bit his tongue. It was true, he and Ahmed were the ones who had fled from the station, leaving the brigadier to face the demons alone.
Remembering how furiously and yet fruitlessly Hunter had fought at Nagornaya, Homer couldn’t rid himself of the impression that the inhabitants of the station had simply rejected the battle that the brigadier tried to impose on them. Were they afraid? Or did they sense a kindred spirit in him? The old man plucked up his courage: there was one question left, the simplest of all.
‘Tell me, Hunter, back there in Nagornaya . . . Why didn’t they touch you?’
Several minutes passed in heavy, painful silence – Homer didn’t dare to insist – until the brigadier finally gave him a brief, morose, almost inaudible answer.
‘They couldn’t stomach me.’
‘Beauty will save the world,’ her father used to joke.
Sasha would blush and hide the empty plastic packet that once contained powdered tea in the breast pocket of her overalls. This little square of plastic, which, against all the odds, had kept its aroma of green tea, was her greatest treasure. It was also a reminder that the universe was not confined to the headless trunk of their station with its four stumps of tunnel, dug at a depth of twenty metres below the graveyard city of Moscow. It was a magical portal that could transport Sasha through decades of time and across thousands of kilometres. And there was something else, something boundlessly important. In the damp climate here, any paper faded and withered as rapidly as a consumptive. The mould and putrefaction devoured more than just the books and magazines – they exterminated the past itself. Without images or records of events, human memory was left like a lame man without crutches – it stumbled about in confusion and lost its way.
But that little packet was made of plastic impervious to mildew and time. Sasha’s father once told her it would be thousands of years before it started to decompose. That meant her descendants would be able to pass it on as an heirloom, she thought. It was an absolutely genuine picture, even if it was a miniature. The golden border, still as bright as the day the little packet came off the production line, framed a view that took Sasha’s breath away. Sheer cliff faces submerged in dreamy mist, wide-spreading pine trees clinging to the almost vertical slopes, tumultuous waterfalls crashing down from the heights into the abyss, a scarlet glow in the sky and the sun just on the point of rising . . . Sasha had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.
She could sit for ages with the packet laid out on her palm, admiring it, and her gaze was drawn right into that early morning mist shrouding the distant mountains. Although she devoured all the books that her father found before she sold them on for cartridges, the words she read in them were not enough to describe the way she felt when she gazed at those centimetre-high cliffs and breathed the scent of those painted pine trees. The impossibility of this dream world – which was also what made it so incredibly attractive . . . The sweet yearning and eternal anticipation of what the sun would see for the first time . . . The endless re-examination – what could be hidden behind the idiotic block of colour with the name of the brand of tea on it? An unusual tree? An eagle’s nest? A little house clinging to the slope, where she and her father could live?
Her father had brought Sasha the little packet when she was not yet five – and it was full then, a great rarity! He wanted to amaze his daughter with genuine tea. She drank it stoically, like medicine, but she was genuinely astounded by the plastic packet. At the time he had had to explain to her what the naïve picture showed: a generalised landscape from a mountainous Chinese province, perfectly suited for printing on packs of tea. But ten years later Sasha still examined her present just as wonderingly as on the day she first received it.
Her father, however, thought the packet was Sasha’s pitiful substitute for the whole world. And when his daughter fell into a blissful trance, contemplating this daubed fantasy by some failed artist, he felt as if she was rebuking him for her own meagre, homeless life. He always tried to repress the impulse, but he could never hold out for long: barely even concealing his irritation, he asked Sasha for the hundredth time what she saw in a scrap of packaging from a gramme of tea dust.
And she hid the little masterpiece in the pocket of her overalls and answered awkwardly: ‘Dad . . . I think it’s so beautiful!’
If not for Hunter, who didn’t stop for a second all the way to Nagatino, Homer would have taken three times as long to cover the distance. He would never have risked dashing self-assuredly through these tunnels like that.
Their team had paid a terrible toll for the passage through Nagornaya – but two out of three had survived. And all three would have survived, if they hadn’t lost their way in the fog. The charge was no higher than usual; nothing had happened to them at Nakhimov Prospect or Nagornaya that hadn’t happened there before.
So the problem lay in the stretches of tunnel that led to Tula? They were quiet now, but it was a bad silence, filled with tension. Hunter could sense danger hundreds of metres away, it was true, he could tell what to expect at stations he’d never been to before – but what if his intuition betrayed him down in these tunnels, just as it had betrayed many experienced soldiers before him?
Maybe it was Nagatino, moving closer with every step they took, that held the answer to the riddle? Struggling to restrain his wild thoughts, whic
h were churning rapidly because he was walking too fast, Homer tried to imagine what could be waiting for them at the station he used to love so much. The old man with an unquenchable passion for collecting myths could easily picture the scene if the legendary Embassy of Satan had been set up at Nagatino or it had been gnawed away by rats migrating in search of food through their own tunnels, inaccessible to humans.
Yes, if the old man had found himself in these stretches of tunnel on his own, he would have moved far more slowly, but nothing would have made him turn back. During the years spent at Sebastopol, Homer had forgotten how to fear death. He had set off on this expedition, well aware that it could be his last adventure, and he was prepared to give all the time he had left for it.
But barely half an hour after his encounter with the monsters at Nagornaya, he had already forgotten his terror. And beyond that, he could sense a vague, timid stirring somewhere inside himself, somewhere in the depths of his soul. Something was being born, or awakening – the thing he had been waiting for, asking for. The thing he had sought for in his most dangerous expeditions, the thing he couldn’t find at home.
So now he had a cogent reason for struggling with all his might to postpone death for a while. He couldn’t allow himself to die before he had completed his work. The Final War had been much fiercer and more violent than any that preceded it – which was why it had been over in a matter of days. Three entire generations had passed since World War Two, and its final veterans had gone to their eternal sleep, leaving the living without any real fear of the memory of war. From being a form of mass insanity that deprived millions of people of everything that was human, it had once again become a standard instrument of politics. The stakes had been raised too fast, there simply wasn’t enough time to make correct decisions. The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons had been brushed aside in passing, in the heat of the moment: the shotgun hung on the wall in the first act of the drama had been fired after all in the penultimate act. And it didn’t matter any longer who had pressed the fateful button first.
Almost all the major cities on earth had simultaneously been reduced to rubble and ash. Those few cities that were protected by anti-rocket defence shields also gave up the ghost, although at first sight they appeared almost untouched: hard radiation, military poisons and biological weapons wiped out their populations. The fragile radio contact established between the scattered handfuls of survivors was finally broken off only a few years later, and from then on for the inhabitants of the Metro the world ended at the frontier stations on the inhabited lines.
The Earth, which had seemed so thoroughly studied and so small, had once again become the boundless ocean of chaos and obscurity that it used to be in ancient times. One by one, the tiny islands of civilisation sank into its murky depths: deprived of oil and electric power, man rapidly reverted to a wild state. An era of stagnation was beginning.
For centuries scientists had lovingly restored the fabric of history from scraps of papyruses and parchments that they discovered, from fragments of legal codes and old folios. With the invention of printing and the appearance of newspapers, the presses had carried on weaving the fabric out of events covered by the newspapers. There were no gaps in the chronicles of the last two centuries: every gesture and every utterance of the leaders who controlled the destinies of the world had been thoroughly documented. Then suddenly, in a single instant all the world’s printing presses had been destroyed or abandoned forever.
The looms of history had stopped weaving. Few had any interest in it, in a world with no future. The broad fabric came to a sudden end, leaving only a slim thread intact.
For the first few years after the catastrophe Homer – who was still Nikolai Ivanovich then – roamed through the overcrowded stations, desperately hoping to find his family in one of them. When hope departed, he carried on wandering, orphaned and lost, through the darkness of the Metro, not knowing what to do with himself in this afterlife. Existence had lost its meaning, the ball of thread that could have shown him, like Ariadne, the right path to follow through the endless labyrinth of tunnels, had fallen from his grasp.
Pining for times gone by, he started collecting magazines that allowed him to remember a bit, to dream a bit. As he pondered the question of whether the apocalypse could have been avoided, he became fascinated by the articles and analyses in newspapers. Then he started writing a bit himself, imitating the news articles, and describing events at the stations where he had been.
And so it happened that Nikolai Ivanovich picked up a new guiding thread to replace the one he had lost: he decided to become a chronicler, the author of a modern history – from the End of the World to his own end. His haphazard and purposeless collecting acquired meaning. Now he had to make a painstaking effort to restore the damaged fabric of time and continue weaving it by hand. Other people regarded Nikolai Ivanovich’s passion as harmless eccentricity. He would happily hand over a day’s ration for old newspapers, and at every station destiny took him to, he fitted out his own little corner, transforming it into a genuine archive. He joined the watches, because round the campfires at three hundred metres from the station, stern-faced men started telling tall stories, and Nikolai Ivanovich could fish information out of them about what was happening at the far end of the Metro. He collated and compared dozens of rumours in order to sift the facts out of them, then neatly filed the facts away in his school exercise books. The work was a good way of occupying his mind, but Nikolai Ivanovich was always haunted by the feeling that he was doing it in vain. After he died, the terse news reports collected with such loving care in the herbariums of his exercise books would simply crumble into dust without proper care. If he failed to come back from watch duty some day, his newspapers and chronicles would be used for lighting fires, and they wouldn’t last long.
Nothing would be left of the pages that had darkened over the years but smoke and soot: the atoms would form new compounds and assume a different form. Matter is almost indestructible. But what he wanted to preserve for posterity, the elusive, ephemeral substance that dwelt on the newspaper pages, would vanish forever, completely. That was the way a man was made: the content of his school textbooks survived in his memory until the final examinations and no longer. And forgetting everything he had learned off by rote gave him a feeling of genuine relief. ‘The memory of man is like sand in the desert,’ thought Nikolai Ivanovich. ‘Numbers, dates and the names of secondary political figures remain in it no longer than notes written on a sand dune with a stick. It all gets swept away and covered over, not a trace is left.’
In some miraculous fashion, the only things that were preserved were those capable of capturing the human imagination, setting the heart beating faster and engaging people’s minds and feelings. The gripping story of a great hero and his love could outlive the story of an entire civilisation, infecting the human brain like a virus that was transmitted from fathers to children over hundreds of generations.
It was this realisation that led the old man to his deliberate transformation from a self-styled scholar into an alchemist, from Nikolai Ivanovich into Homer. And now his nights were devoted, not to compiling chronicles, but to searching for the formula of immortality. A storyline that would be as long-lived as the Odyssey, a hero with a lifespan to rival Gilgamesh. Homer would try to thread the knowledge he had accumulated onto this storyline. And in a world where all the paper had been squandered for heat, where the past was gladly sacrificed for a single moment in the present, the legend of a hero like that could infect people and rescue them from mass amnesia.
But the mystical formula wouldn’t come to him. The hero refused to be born into the world. Rewriting newspaper articles could not possibly have prepared the old man for making myths. For breathing life into golems, transforming invention into enthralling reality. Torn-out and crumpled sheets of paper filled with uncompleted first chapters of the future saga, with unconvincing characters who lacked life, transformed his desktop into an abortion clinic. The on
ly fruits of his nocturnal vigils were the dark circles under his eyes and the bite marks on his lips.
However, Homer refused to abandon his new destiny. He tried not to think that he was simply not born for this, that creating universes required a talent that he had been denied.
It’s just the inspiration that’s lacking – that was what he told himself. And where could he draw inspiration from in a stuffy station, locked into the routine of drinking tea at home and agricultural work? Even the watches and patrols were routine, and they took him on them less and less often because of his age. He needed a shake-up, an adventure, intense passions. Perhaps then the pressure would sweep clear the blocked channels in his mind and he would be able to create?
Even in the most difficult times people had never completely abandoned Nagatino. It wasn’t really fit for habitation: nothing grew here and the exits to the surface were closed off. But many found the station useful for staying out of sight and lying low for a while, for sitting out disgrace or as a secluded spot with a lover. Right now, though, it was empty.
Hunter flew soundlessly up a ladder that should have creaked obstinately and stopped on the platform. Homer followed him, puffing and panting, looking round warily. The hall was dark, and dust hung in the air, shimmering silver in the beams of their flashlights. Scattered sparsely across the floor were the heaps of rags and cardboard on which visitors to Nagatino usually spent the night.
The old man leaned back against a column and slid down it slowly. There was a time when Nagatino, with its elegant coloured panels, assembled out of various kinds of marble, had been one of his favourite stations. But now, dark and lifeless, it resembled its former self no more than a ceramic photo on a gravestone resembles the person who had the photo taken for a passport a hundred years ago, never suspecting that he was not just gazing into a camera lens, but into eternity.
‘Not a soul,’ Homer murmured disappointedly.
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