‘There aren’t any bandits,’ he whispered, leaning down over the wounded man’s bed. ‘While you were delirious . . . You were talking all the time. I know everything.’
‘What do you know?’ Hunter grabbed Homer by the collar and jerked the old man towards him.
‘About the epidemic at Tula . . . Everything’s all right.’ Homer waved his hand imploringly to restrain the orderly, who had come dashing over to drag him off the brigadier. ‘I’ll manage. We need to have a talk, could I ask you, please . . .’
The orderly reluctantly complied, put the cap back over the needle of his syringe and walked out of the ward, leaving them alone.
‘About Tula,’ said Hunter, still holding the old man in his wild, inflamed stare, but gradually reducing the pressure. ‘Nothing else?’
‘That’s all. The station is the focus of an unidentified airborne infection . . . Our men have established a quarantine and they’re waiting for help.’
‘Right. Right,’ said the brigadier, letting go of him. ‘Yes. An epidemic. Are you afraid of getting infected?’
‘God helps those who help themselves,’ Homer replied warily.
‘True enough. It’s okay . . . I didn’t go close, the draught was blowing in their direction . . . I shouldn’t have it.’
‘Why that story about the bandits? What are you going to do?’ asked the old man, feeling bolder now.
‘First go to Dobrynin and reach an agreement. Then clean out Tula. We need flamethrowers. Otherwise there’s no way . . .’
‘Burn everyone at the station alive? What about our men?’
The old man was still hoping the remark the brigadier had passed about flamethrowers had been the same kind of decoy manoeuvre as everything else he told the top command at Sebastopol.
‘Why alive? The corpses. There’s no other way. Everyone who’s infected. Everyone they’ve been in contact with. All the air. I’ve heard about this disease . . .’ Hunter closed his eyes and licked his cracked lips. ‘There’s no cure. There was an outbreak a couple of years ago . . . Two thousand corpses.’
‘But it stopped, didn’t it?’
‘A blockade. Flamethrowers.’ The brigadier turned his mutilated face towards the old man. ‘There is no other way. If it breaks out . . . Just one man. It’s the end for everyone. Yes, I lied about the bandits. Otherwise Istomin wouldn’t have allowed me to terminate everyone. He’s too soft. But I’ll take men who don’t ask any questions.’
‘But what if there are men who are immune?’ Homer began timidly. ‘What if there are men there who aren’t sick? I . . . You said . . . What if they could still be saved?’
‘There is no immunity. All contacts get infected. There aren’t any healthy men, only tougher ones,’ the brigadier snapped. ‘But it’s only worse for them. They’ll suffer longer. Believe me . . . It’s what they need, for me to . . . to be terminated.’
‘But what do you need that for?’ the old man asked, moving back from the bed just to be on the safe side.
Hunter lowered his eyelids wearily, and Homer noticed once again that the eye on the mutilated half of his face didn’t close completely. The brigadier’s answer took so long to come that the old man was about to run for the doctor. But then, forcing out the words slowly and separately, as if a hypnotist had sent him back into the infinitely distant past for his lost memories, he said through his clenched teeth:
‘I must. Protect people. Eliminate any danger. That’s all. I’m for.’
Had he found the knife? Had he realised it was for him? What if he didn’t guess, or didn’t see it was a promise? She flew along the corridor, trying to drive away the thoughts that were tormenting her, still not knowing what she would say to him. What a pity that he had regained consciousness before she was at his bedside!
Sasha heard almost the entire conversation – she froze in the doorway and shrank back when the subject of killings came up. Of course, she couldn’t decipher everything, but she didn’t need to. She’d already heard all the most important things. There was no point in waiting any longer, and she knocked loudly.
As the old man got up to greet her, his face was a cramped mask of despair. Homer moved as laboriously as if he too had been given a debilitating injection, and the wicks had been unscrewed from the lamps of his eyes. He answered Sasha with a limp nod – as if someone had tugged on a hanged man’s rope from above.
The girl sat right on the edge of the still-warm stool, bit her lip and held her breath before stepping into this new, unexplored tunnel.
‘Did you like my knife?’
‘Knife?’ The man with the shaved head looked round and his gaze ran into the burnished black blade: he stared warily at Sasha without touching it. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘It’s for you.’ She felt as if someone had blown steam into her face.
‘Yours got broken. When you . . . Thank you . . .’
‘A strange present. I’d never accept anything like that from anyone,’ he said after a heavy silence. She thought she could hear a half-hint in his words, something important left unsaid, and she accepted the game, but without knowing all the rules, and started groping around for words. It all came out awkward and wrong, but then Sasha’s tongue was a completely inadequate tool for describing what was going on inside her.
‘Do you feel that I have a piece of you too? The part that was torn out of you . . . That you were looking for? That I could give it back to you?’
‘What are you babbling about?’ he asked. A dash of cold water in her face.
‘No, you do feel it,’ Sasha insisted, cringing on the stool. ‘That you’ll be complete with me. That I can be with you and I must. Otherwise why did you take me with you?’
‘I gave in to my partner.’ His voice was colourless and blank.
‘Why did you protect me from the men on the trolley?’
‘I would have killed them in any case.’
‘Then why did you save me from the beast at the station?’
‘I had to wipe them all out.’
‘I wish it had eaten me!’
‘Are you annoyed because you’re still alive?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Then take a walk up the escalator, there are plenty more of them up there.’
‘I . . . You want me to . . .’
‘I don’t want anything from you.’
‘I’ll help you to stop!’
‘You’re clinging on to me.’
‘Don’t you feel that . . . ?’
‘I don’t feel anything.’ The taste of his words was like rusty water.
Not even the terrible claw of that white monster could have wounded her so badly. Sasha jumped up, cut to the quick, and dashed out of the ward. Luckily her room was empty. She huddled up in the corner, curled into a tight ball. She looked for the mirror in her pocket – she wanted to throw it out – but didn’t find it: she must have dropped it beside the bed of the man with the shaved head.
When her tears dried up, she already knew what to do. It didn’t take her long to get ready. The old man would forgive her for stealing his gun – he would probably forgive her anything at all. The tarpaulin protective suit, cleaned and decontaminated, was waiting for her in the closet, dangling helplessly from a hook. As if some wizard had disembowelled the dead fat man and cursed him after death to follow Sasha everywhere and do her will. She clambered into it, dashed out into the corridor, rushed along the passage and up onto the platform. Somewhere along the way a rivulet of magical music licked at her, music from the same source that she hadn’t identified last time. She didn’t have a spare minute to search for it this time either. Halting for only a brief moment, Sasha overcame the temptation and moved on towards the goal of her trek.
In the daytime there was only one sentry on duty at the escalator: the creatures from the surface never bothered the station during daylight hours. It took her less than five minutes to come to an understanding: the way up here was always open, but it was impossible to come down the escalator. Leaving the
amenable sentry a half-empty sub-machine-gun clip, Sasha set her foot on the first step of the stairway that led straight up to the sky.
She hitched up her sagging trousers and began her ascent.
CHAPTER 12
Signs
Back home at Kolomenskoe, the surface was very close – only fifty-six shallow steps away. But Pavelets had burrowed much deeper under the ground. As she scrambled up the creaking escalator, mutilated by bursts of machine-gun fire, Sasha could see no end to this climb. All that her feeble flashlight could pick out of the darkness were the shattered glass covers of the lamps along the escalator and the rusty, twisted metal plates on the wall with images of pale, bleary faces and big letters that made up meaningless words.
Why should she go up there? Why should she die?
But who needed her down below? Who really needed her as a person, not as a character in a book that hadn’t been written yet?
Why bother trying to deceive herself any longer?
When Sasha walked away from the empty station at Kolomenskoe, leaving her father’s body there, it felt as if she was carrying out their old plan of escape, carrying away a little part of him in her and helping him to escape at least in that way. But since then she hadn’t dreamed about him even once, and when she tried to summon up his image in her imagination in order to share what she had seen and experienced with him, it came out vague and mute. Her father couldn’t forgive her and he didn’t want to be rescued like this.
Among the books he had found that Sasha managed to leaf through before exchanging them for food and cartridges, she had special memories of an old reference work on botany. The illustrations in it were strictly conventional: black-and-white photographs that had faded with age and pencil sketches. But in all the other books that came her way she didn’t find any pictures at all, and this one was Sasha’s favourite. And the plant she liked more than all the others in the book was the bindweed. No, it wasn’t even that she liked it – she felt sympathy for the bindweed because she recognised herself in it. She needed support in just the same way, didn’t she? In order to grow upwards. In order to reach the light.
And now her instinct demanded that she find a mighty trunk that she could cling to, embracing it and winding herself around it. Not in order to suck the juices out of someone else’s body and live on them, not in order to take away his light and warmth. Simply because without him she was too soft, too flexible and flabby to hold out, and on her own she would always have to trail across the ground.
Sasha’s father had told her she shouldn’t be dependent on anyone or rely on anyone. After all, in their forgotten way station, he was the only one she had to rely on, and he knew he wasn’t immortal. Her father wanted her to grow up as a tall, sturdy pine tree, not climbing ivy: he forgot that this contradicted a woman’s nature.
Sasha would have survived without him. She would have survived without Hunter too. But to her, fusion with another person seemed like the only reason to think about the future. When she wrapped her arms round him on the hurtling trolley, it felt as if her life had acquired a new core. She remembered that trusting other people was dangerous, and being dependent on them was unworthy, and she had to force herself to try to confess her feelings to the man with the shaved head. Sasha wanted to nestle up to him, and he thought she was clutching at his boots. Left without any support, trampled into the ground, she wasn’t going to demean herself by continuing her quest. He had driven her away, banished her to the surface. All right then: if anything happened to her up there, it would be his fault: he was the only one who could prevent it.
The steps finally came to an end and Sasha found herself on the edge of a spacious marble hall with a fluted metal ceiling that had collapsed in places. Incredibly bright beams of greyish-white light were pouring in through the distant gaps, and scattered rays from them even reached as far the nook where she was standing. Sasha switched off the flashlight, held her breath and started furtively creeping forward.
The bullet scars on the walls and marble splinters by the mouth of the escalators testified that human beings had been here at one time. But after only a few dozen steps she reached the domain of different creatures.
The heaps of dried dung, gnawed bones and scraps of skin scattered around the floor indicated that Sasha was at the very heart of the beasts’ lair. Covering her eyes so they wouldn’t be scorched by the light, she walked towards the exit. And the closer Sasha came to the source of the light, the thicker the darkness became in the secluded corners of the halls she was walking through. As she learned to look at the light, Sasha was losing the ability to sense the darkness.
The halls that followed were filled to overflowing with the skeletons of overturned kiosks, heaps of all sorts of incredible junk and the carcasses of machines that had been picked apart. It gradually dawned on her that people had turned the outer pavilions of Pavelets station into a staging post to which they dragged all the goods from the surrounding area, until more powerful creatures had forced them out of here.
Sometimes Sasha fancied she saw something stirring faintly in the dark corners, but she put it down to her advancing blindness. The darkness huddling there was already too dense for her to distinguish the ugly forms of the sleeping monsters from the mountains of garbage that they merged into.
The monotonous whining of the draught smothered the sound of their heavy, snuffling breathing and Sasha could only make it out when she passed within a few steps of a trembling heap. She listened warily, then froze, gazed hard at the outlines of an overturned kiosk and discovered a strange hump in its jagged profile. She was dumbfounded. The hill that the kiosk was buried in was breathing. And almost all the other mounds surrounding her were breathing as well. In order to make sure, Sasha clicked the switch of her flashlight and pointed it at one of them. The pale little beam landed on fat folds of white skin, ran on across an immense body and disintegrated before reaching the end of it. It was a fellow creature of the monster that had almost killed Sasha on the platform at Pavelets, but it was far bigger than that beast.
In their strange torpid state the creatures didn’t seem to notice her. But then the closest one suddenly growled, sucked in air noisily through the angled slits of its nostrils and started stirring restlessly. Coming to her senses, Sasha put the flashlight away and hurried on. Every step she took through this appalling dormitory cost her a greater and greater effort: the further she moved away from the way down into the Metro the more tightly the monsters were packed together, and the harder it became to find a way through between their bodies. It was too late to turn back. Sasha wasn’t concerned at all about how she could get back into the Metro. Just as long as she could get past these creatures unheard, without alarming a single one of them, and make her way outside, look around and . . . Just as long as they didn’t awaken from their dormant state, just as long as they let her out of here: she wouldn’t need to look for a way back. Not daring to breathe deeply, trying not even to think – what if they heard her! – she moved slowly towards the way out. A broken tile crunched treacherously under her boots. One more wrong step, an accidental rustle – and they would wake up and tear her to pieces in an instant.
And Sasha couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that only very recently – yesterday, or perhaps even today – she had been wandering between sleeping monsters like this . . . At least, the strange feeling was familiar to her from somewhere.
She froze on the spot.
Sasha knew that you could sometimes feel someone else’s gaze on the back of your head. But these creatures didn’t have eyes, and what they used to probe the space around them was far more material and insistent than any gaze.
She didn’t need to look round to know that despite all her caution a creature had woken up and was staring hard at her back. But she looked round anyway.
The girl had completely disappeared, but just at that minute Homer didn’t have the slightest desire to go dashing off to search for her, just as he didn’t have any other desir
es.
The signal officer’s diary might have left the old man a smidgen of hope that the sickness would pass him by, but Hunter had been quite ruthless. In launching into his thoroughly planned conversation with the brigadier, the old man had, in effect, been lodging an appeal against his death sentence. But Hunter hadn’t shown him any mercy – and he couldn’t have done in any case. Homer alone was to blame for what would inevitably happen to him.
Only a couple of weeks or even less. Only ten pages covered with writing. And all the other things that had to be compressed and squeezed into the remaining clean pages of that exercise book with the oil cloth cover. But quite apart from his own desires, Homer also had a duty, and their enforced halt at Pavelets seemed to be coming to an end.
He smoothed out the paper, intending to pick up the narrative from where he had broken off the last time at the sound of the doctors’ shouts. But instead of that his hand traced out the same old question: ‘What will be left after me?’ And what would be left after the unfortunates locked in at Tula, he thought, perhaps despairing, perhaps still waiting for help, but doomed to a cruel reckoning either way. A memory? But there were so few people who could be found to remember anyone.
And memories were a frail mausoleum anyway. Soon the old man would be gone, and everyone he had known would disappear along with him. His Moscow would disappear into nowhere too. Where was he now, on Pavelets Station? The Garden Ring Road was bare and dead now – during the final hours military vehicles had cleared it and cordoned it off, in order to allow the rescue services to go about their work and give the cortèges of cars with flashing lights freedom to move. The thoroughfares and side streets grinned with their rotten, gap-toothed rows of detached buildings . . . The old man could easily imagine the local landscape, although he had never gone up out of the Metro at this station.
Before the war he had been here quite often: he used to arrange to meet his future wife for a date in a café beside the station, then they would go to the evening session in the cinema. And not far from here he had gone through the remarkably superficial medical examination that he was obliged to pay for when he was planning to get his driving licence. And this was the station where he had got into a suburban train when he joined an outing into the summer forest with his workmates, to cook kebabs over a campfire . . . Looking at the paper ruled off into little squares, he saw the square in front of the station, shrouded in autumn mist, and two towers melting into the haze: the pretentious new office block on the Garden Ring Road – one of his friends worked there – and a little further away, the twisted spire of an expensive hotel, tacked on to an expensive concert hall. Nikolai had checked the ticket prices once: they cost slightly more than he earned in two weeks.
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