Will anything remain after me, in particular?
Homer had a harder time than other people. He genuinely envied those whose faith allowed them to hope for admission into an afterworld. As for him, when he heard it mentioned in conversation, the old man’s thoughts immediately flew back to Nakhimov Prospect. Quite possibly Homer did not consist only of the flesh that would be ground up and digested by the corpseeaters. But even if there was something else in him, that something was not capable of existing apart from the flesh and bone.
What remained after the kings of Egypt? Or after the heroes of Greece? Or after the artists of the Renaissance? Did anything at all remain of them? And did they remain in anything?
But what other immortality is left to man?
Homer reread what he had written, pondered for a moment and then carefully tore the pages out of the exercise book, crumpled them up, put them on a metal plate and set fire to them. A minute later a handful of ash was all that remained of the work on which he had spent the last three hours.
She died.
This was how Sasha had always imagined death: the final ray of light is extinguished, all the voices fall silent, you can’t feel your body, and all that’s left is eternal darkness. The blackness and silence from out of which people emerge and to which they inevitably return. Sasha had heard stories about heaven and about hell, but the Underworld had always seemed perfectly innocuous to her. Eternity spent in total inactivity, absolutely blind and deaf, seemed a hundred times worse to her than any cauldrons of boiling oil.
And then a tiny, trembling flame appeared ahead of her. Sasha reached out to it, but it was impossible to catch: the dancing firefly ran away from her, moved back closer to tease her, and immediately darted away again, tantalising her, luring her after itself.
She knew what it was: the tunnel spark.
Her father used to say that when someone died in the Metro, their soul wandered in confusion through the pitch-dark tangle of tunnels, and every tunnel ended in a dead end. It didn’t understand that it wasn’t attached to a body any longer, that its earthly existence was over. It had to carry on wandering until somewhere far ahead it saw the light of a phantom campfire. And when the soul saw the light, it had to hurry towards it, because it was sent for the soul and would run away, leading the soul to a place where peace was waiting. But sometimes it happened that the little light took mercy on a soul and led it back to its lost body. Other people whispered about people like that, saying they had come back from the next world, although it would be more correct to say the darkness had released them.
The spark called for her to follow, it insisted and Sasha gave in. She couldn’t feel her legs, but they weren’t needed: in order to keep up with the light as it slipped away, all she had to do was not lose sight of it. To keep her eyes fixed on it intently, as if she were trying to win it over, to tame it.
Sasha managed to catch it after all, and the little light dragged the girl through the pitch darkness, through labyrinths of tunnels from which she would never have found a way out, to the final station on the line of her life. Things suddenly started becoming visible up ahead: Sasha fancied her guide was tracing out the contours of some distant room where she was expected.
‘Sasha!’ a voice called out to her, an amazingly familiar voice, although she couldn’t remember who it belonged to.
‘Dad?’ she asked warily, thinking she could hear a note of affectionate warmth in the other person’s voice.
They arrived. The spectral tunnel spark halted, turned into an ordinary flame and hopped onto the wick of a melted, spreading candle, settling down on it comfortably, like a cat that has just come back from a walk.
A cool, calloused palm covered her hand. Hesitantly, afraid of sinking to the bottom again, Sasha detached herself from the little light. Following her into wakefulness, pain stabbed through her torn forearm and her bruised temple started aching. Plain, official furniture surfaced out of the darkness, swaying close by – two chairs, a locker . . . Sasha herself was lying on a genuine bed, so soft that she couldn’t feel her back at all. As if her body was being returned to her by parts, and some were still waiting for their turn.
‘Sasha?’ the voice repeated.
She turned her eyes to the speaker and jerked her hand away. Sitting at her bedside was the old man she had travelled with on the trolley. There was nothing intrusive in his touch, it didn’t sting or insult her; she took her hand away because she felt ashamed that she could confuse a stranger’s voice with her father’s, and out of resentment that the tunnel spark had led her to the wrong place.
The old man smiled gently. It seemed to be quite enough for him that she had come round. Looking more closely, Sasha noticed a warm glint in his eyes, the kind of glint she had only ever encountered before in the eyes of one man. It wasn’t surprising that she had been deceived. And she suddenly felt awkward in front of the old man.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
And then, recalling her final minutes at Pavelets, she jerked up.
‘What happened to your friend?’
She seemed unable either to laugh or to cry, or perhaps she didn’t have enough strength left for either. The girl was lucky, the monster’s blade-like claws had missed her: that single blow had landed flat. But even that had been enough to leave her unconscious for twenty-four hours. Her life was in no danger now, the doctor assured Homer. The old man hadn’t talked to the doctor about his own troubles. Sasha – while she was unconscious, the old man had got into the habit of calling her that – went limp and slumped back down onto the pillow, and Homer went back to the desk, where the open exercise book, with a full ninety-six pages, was waiting for him. He twirled the pen in his hands and carried on from the place where he had abandoned his newly begun book to go over to the girl when she groaned deliriously.
. . . the latest convoy had been delayed . . . delayed beyond any reasonable limit, long enough for the realisation to dawn that this time something terrible and unforeseen had happened, something against which not even heavily-armed, battle-hardened guards and a relationship built up over the years with the leadership of Hansa had been able to protect it.
And all this would not have been so bad, if only the lines of communication were functioning. But something had happened to the telephone line that led to the Circle: contact had been broken off on Monday, and the team sent out to search for the break had drawn a blank.
Homer looked up and started: the girl was standing behind him, deciphering his scribble over his shoulder. She seemed to be held up by nothing but curiosity. Feeling embarrassed, the old man turned the exercise book face down.
‘Is that what you need inspiration for?’ she asked him.
‘I’m still right at the beginning,’ Homer muttered for some reason.
‘And what happened to the convoy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, starting to draw a frame round the title. ‘The story’s not finished yet. Lie down, you need to rest.’
‘But it’s up to you how you finish the book,’ she objected, without moving from the spot.
‘In this book nothing’s up to me.’ The old man put his pen down on the table. ‘I’m not inventing it, just writing down everything that happens to me.’
‘That means everything depends on you even more,’ the girl said thoughtfully. ‘Will I be in it?’
‘I was just going to ask your permission,’ Homer chuckled.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she replied seriously. ‘But what are you writing it for?’
The old man stood up, so that he wouldn’t be looking up at her from below.
After his last conversation with Sasha he’d realised that her youthfulness and inexperience created a false impression; it was as if at the strange station where they had picked her up, every year was worth two normal ones. She had a way of not answering the questions that he asked out loud, but the ones that hadn’t been asked. And Sasha only asked Homer about things that he didn’t know himself.
And it also seemed to him that if he wanted to rely on her being sincere and open – and how else could she become his heroine? – then he would have to be honest with her himself, not leave things unsaid and tell her everything he would have told himself.
‘I want people to remember me. Me and those who were dear to me. I want them to know what the world I loved was like. To hear the most important things that I learned and understood. So that my life won’t have been in vain. So that something will be left after me.’
‘Are you putting your soul into it?’ She leaned her head to one side. ‘But it’s just an exercise book. It can get burned or lost.’
‘An unreliable place for keeping a soul, right?’ Homer sighed. ‘No, I need the exercise book to line everything up in the right order, and so I won’t forget anything important before the story’s been written right to the end. After that it will be enough to tell it to a few people. And if everything goes right for me, I won’t need any paper or even a body any more.’
‘I suppose you’ve seen lots of things it would be a shame to forget forever,’ the girl said with a shrug. ‘But I haven’t got anything to write down. And I don’t need to be in your exercise book. Don’t waste paper on me.’
‘Ah, but you’re only just beginning . . .’ the old man began, and broke off: he wouldn’t be there. The girl didn’t respond, and Homer felt frightened that now she would clam up completely. He tried to find the right words to take everything back, but only tangled himself even more tightly in his own doubts.
‘And what’s the most beautiful thing out of everything you remember?’ she suddenly asked. ‘The most beautiful, beautiful thing?’
Homer paused, hesitating. Sharing his most intimate thoughts with a person he had known for less than two days felt strange. He hadn’t trusted Elena with this – even she thought the picture hanging on the wall in their little room was just an ordinary city view. And how could a young girl who had spent all her life underground possibly understand what he might tell her?
‘Summer rain,’ he said, deciding to try.
‘What’s so beautiful about that?’ she asked with a funny kind of frown.
‘Have you ever seen rain?’
‘No.’ The girl shook her head. ‘My father wouldn’t let me go outside. I did go out once or twice anyway, but I felt bad out there. It’s frightening without any walls around you. Rain is when water comes falling down,’ she said, just to be sure.
But Homer wasn’t listening to her any longer. He was suddenly back in that day from the distant past; like a medium who has lent his body to the spirit he has summoned, he stared into empty space and talked, on and on . . .
‘It was dry and very hot for the whole month. And my wife was pregnant, it was hard enough for her to breathe anyway, and then this blazing heat . . . In the maternity home there was just one fan for the entire ward, she kept complaining all the time about how stuffy it was. And because of her I could hardly breathe myself. I was in a terrible state: we’d tried so hard for years, but nothing worked, and now the doctors were frightening us with a miscarriage. And she was supposed to be in there so she could keep the baby, but she would have been better off lying at home. Her time had come and nothing was happening. There were no contractions, and I couldn’t keep asking my boss for the day off every day. And someone told me that if a child is carried too long, it can be stillborn. I was beside myself, I dashed straight from work to stand guard under her window. My phone had no signal in the tunnels, and I checked at every station to see if I had any missed calls. And then I got a text message from the doctor: “Call urgently”. Like a real fool, before I could find a quiet spot, in my own mind, I had my wife and the child buried already. I dialled the number . . .’
Homer fell silent, listening to the ringing of the phone, waiting for an answer. The girl didn’t interrupt him, saving her questions for later.
‘And they tell me: Congratulations, you have a son. It sounds so simple now: You have a son. But at that moment they gave me my wife back, raised her from the dead . . . and then there’s another miracle . . . I go up to the street – and it’s raining. Cool rain. And the air was suddenly so light and transparent. As if the city had been wrapped in dusty cellophane, and now it had suddenly been taken off. The leaves started glowing, the sky was moving at last, the houses suddenly got younger. I ran along Tver Street to a flower kiosk, and I was crying from happiness too. I had an umbrella, but I didn’t bother to open it, I wanted to get soaked through, I wanted to feel it, that rain. I can’t express it properly now. My son had been born, but it was like I’d been born again myself, and I looked at the world as if I was seeing it for the very first time. Now everything was going to be new: if anything wasn’t going right, if anything was wrong, I could fix it, everything. Now it was like I had two lives. If I couldn’t get something finished, my son would do it.
‘We had everything ahead of us. Everyone had everything ahead of them . . .’
The old man stopped: he was gazing at Tver Street’s ten-storey Stalin-era buildings in the pink evening haze, luxuriating in the businesslike rumble of traffic, breathing in the sweetish, fumeladen air, and he closed his eyes, turning his face to the summer downpour. When he came to his senses the raindrops were still glistening on his cheeks and in the corners of his eyes, proof of his journey back to that day.
He wiped them away quickly with his sleeve.
‘You know,’ said the girl, seeming just as embarrassed as Homer, ‘I suppose rain can be beautiful after all. I don’t have any memories like that. Can I remember yours? And if you like,’ she smiled at him, ‘I’ll be in your book. The way it ends has to depend on someone, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s still too soon,’ the doctor snapped.
Sasha simply couldn’t explain to this dry stick how important her request was to her. She filled her lungs with air for another attack, but didn’t use it: instead she just gestured with her healthy arm and turned away.
‘Never mind, be patient. But since you’re on your feet, you can take a gentle stroll.’ He gathered his instruments into a worn plastic bag and shook the old man’s hand. ‘I’ll call back in a couple of hours. My boss told me to keep an eye on things. As you realise, we’re in your debt.’
The old man put a soldier’s camouflage jacket round Sasha’s shoulders and she went out, following the doctor past the other wards of the infirmary, though a string of rooms and cubbyholes crammed with tables and beds, up two flights of stairs and through an inconspicuous low door into the vast, long hall. Sasha froze in the doorway and took a long time to pluck up the courage to step out into it. She had never come across so many people at once before; she could never have imagined that there were so many people alive in the world. Thousands of them – without masks! And all so different from each other . . . There were completely decrepit old people and little babies. A huge number of men – men with beards or clean-shaven, tall men and dwarfs, exhausted and drained, red-blooded and muscular. Mutilated in battle or ugly from birth, excessively handsome or attractive for some elusive reason, despite their poor looks. And just as many women – market women with broad backsides and red faces, wearing headscarves and padded jackets; and delicate, pale young women in incredibly bright-coloured clothes and elaborate beads.
Would they see that Sasha was different? Would she be able to hide in the crowd, pretend to be one of them, or would they attack the outsider, bite the albino to death, like a pack of rats? At first she fancied that everyone’s eyes were fixed on her, and every accidentally caught glance threw her into a fever. But after a quarter of an hour she got used to it. The people who looked at her included some who were hostile, or curious, or too insistent, but most of them were indifferent to her. They brushed their eyes gently over Sasha and pushed on through the crowd, taking no notice of her. It occurred to her that these absent-minded glances with nothing jarring about them lubricated the gear wheels of the human bustling, like machine oil. If they took an interest in each o
ther, the friction would be too great and the entire mechanism would be paralysed.
In order to fit in with the crowd, she didn’t need to change her clothes or even cut her hair. Instead of that, it was enough to dive into other people’s pupils and coldly pull her glance back out after barely dipping it in. Once she had smeared herself with feigned indifference, Sasha could slip between the moving, intermeshing inhabitants of this station without getting stuck at every step.
For the first few minutes her nose was scalded by the simmering brew of human odours, but soon her nose became less sensitive as it learned to pick out the important components and skip all the others.
Weaving their way through the sour smells of stale bodies came the subtle, tantalising aromas of youth. Occasionally the crowd was bathed in waves of fragrance emanating from well-groomed women; and mingling with them was the smoke from meat on braziers, and the stink of the cesspits. In short, for Sasha the passage between the two Pavelets stations smelled of life, and the longer she listened to this deafening smell, the sweeter it seemed.
A full exploration of the boundless passage would probably have taken her an entire month. Everything here was astounding . . .
Stalls with jewellery woven out of dozens of little yellow metal discs with patterns stamped on them – she wanted to examine them for hours. And immense heaps of books containing more secret knowledge than she could ever master.
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