‘Yes.’
‘A solution can always be found!’ He put down his tray, jerked across a free stool from the next table and sat down on Sasha’s left before she could protest.
‘Just remember I didn’t invite you,’ she warned him.
‘Will granddad scold you then?’ the musician asked with a knowing wink. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Leonid.’
‘He’s not my granddad,’ said Sasha, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.
‘So that’s the way it is?’ asked Leonid, stuffing his mouth as full as he could and arching up one eyebrow.
‘You’re brazen,’ she remarked.
‘I’m assertive,’ he said, raising his fork in the air didactically.
‘You’re too sure of yourself,’ Sasha said with a smile.
‘I believe in people in general, and myself in particular,’ he mumbled indistinctly as he chewed.
The old man came back, stood behind the intruder and pulled a sour face, but sat down on his own stool anyway.
‘Aren’t you feeling a bit crowded, Sasha?’ he enquired peevishly, looking straight past the musician.
‘Sasha!’ the musician repeated triumphantly, glancing up from his bowl. ‘Pleased to meet you. Let me remind you that my name’s Leonid.’
‘Nikolai Ivanovich,’ Homer introduced himself, squinting at the young man sullenly. ‘What was that melody you were playing today? It sounded familiar . . .’
‘That’s not surprising, this is the third day I’ve been playing it here,’ the young man replied. ‘Actually it’s my own composition.’
‘Yours?’ said Sasha, putting down her knife and fork. ‘What’s it called?’
‘It’s not called anything,’ Leonid said with a shrug. ‘I hadn’t really thought about a title for it. How can I transcribe it in letters? And what for, anyway?’
‘It’s very beautiful,’ the girl admitted. ‘Really incredibly beautiful.’
‘Then I can name it in your honour,’ the quick-witted musician replied. ‘You’re worthy of it.’
‘No, don’t,’ she said and shook her head. ‘Leave it as it is, without any name. There’s a point to that.’
‘And there’s a definite point in dedicating it to you, too.’ He tried to laugh, but choked and started coughing.
‘Well, are you ready?’ The old man picked up Sasha’s tray and stood up. ‘It’s time. Excuse us, please, young man . . .’
‘That’s all right! I’ve finished eating already. May I see the young lady on her way?’
‘We’re leaving,’ Homer said abruptly.
‘Great! So am I. Going to Dobrynin.’ The musician put on an innocent air. ‘Are you by any chance going my way?’
‘Yes we are,’ said Sasha, surprising even herself. She tried not to look in Homer’s direction and her gaze kept slipping across to Leonid.
There was something light and easy about him, a good-humoured affability. Like a little boy fencing with a twig, he struck with light jabs that didn’t hurt and were impossible to feel angry about. And he presented his hints to Sasha so affectedly and amusingly, that she never even thought of taking them seriously. And what was wrong with him liking her?
And then, she had fallen in love with his music long before she met him. And the temptation of taking this magic with her on her journey was simply too great.
It was all down to the music, no doubt about that. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, this damned youth enticed innocent souls with that sleek flute of his and used his gift to debauch all the girls he could get his hands on. Now he was trying to get his hands on Alexandra, and Homer didn’t know what to do about it!
The old man found it hard to swallow Leonid’s brash jokes, and before long they started sticking in his throat. And Homer was also annoyed by how quickly the musician had managed to reach an agreement with the obstinate Hansa boss for the three of them to be allowed to walk the stretch of the Circle Line to Dobrynin, even without any documents! The musician had walked into the spacious offices of the station commandant – a bald, aging dandy with a moustache like a cockroach’s whiskers – with his heavy flute case full of cartridges, and come back out smiling, with his load lightened.
Homer had to admit that Leonid’s diplomatic abilities had come in handy at just the right moment for them: the motor trolley on which they had arrived at Pavelets had disappeared from the parking area at the same time as Hunter disappeared, and going the long way round could have taken them up to a week. But what provoked the old man’s suspicions most of all was the flippant way the minstrel had uprooted himself from a profitable station and parted with all his savings, just so that he could set off into the tunnels after Homer’s Sasha. In different circumstances, this flippancy would have been a sign of being in love, but in this case the old man could see nothing but frivolous intentions and the habit of rapid conquests.
Yes, little by little Homer was turning into a crotchety chaperon. But he had good reasons to be on his guard and grounds for jealousy. The last thing he needed now was for the muse who had been miraculously restored to him to run off with a wandering minstrel! With an absolutely superfluous character, who had no place waiting for him in the novel, but had simply dragged in his own stool and churlishly seated himself right smack in the middle of it.
‘Is there really no one left anywhere on Earth?’
The trio was striding towards Dobrynin, accompanied by three guards: the correct use of cartridges could make even the boldest dreams come true.
The girl, who had just given the others a gushing account of her expedition to the surface, broke off and turned sad. Homer and the musician exchanged glances: Who would be first to dash in and console her?
‘Is there life beyond the Moscow Orbital Highway?’ the old man snorted. ‘Does the new generation wonder about that?’
‘Of course it does,’ Leonid declared confidently. ‘The trouble is that no one else survived, there’s simply no contact!’
‘Well I, for instance, have heard that somewhere beyond Taganka Station there’s a secret passage that leads to a certain curious tunnel,’ said the old man. ‘A normal-enough looking tunnel, six metres in diameter, only without any rails. It lies deep, forty or even fifty metres below ground. And it runs way off to the east . . .’
‘Would that be the tunnel that leads to the bunkers in the Urals?’ Leonid interrupted. ‘And is this the story about the man who wandered into it by accident, then came back with a supply of food and . . .’
‘Walked for a week with short halts, then his provisions started to run out and he had to turn back. There was still no sign of the tunnel coming to an end,’ Homer concluded scrappily, put off his folk-narrative tone. ‘Yes, according to the rumours it leads to the Urals bunkers, where there could still be someone left alive.’
‘That’s not very likely,’ said the musician, yawning.
‘And then an acquaintance of mine in Polis told me how one of the local radio operators had established contact with the crew of a tank who had battened down their hatches and withdrawn to somewhere so remote that no one ever even thought of bombing it,’ said the old man, ostentatiously speaking to Sasha.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Leonid, nodding. ‘That’s a well-known story too. When they ran out of fuel, they buried the tank in the ground on a hill, and laid out a whole farm around it. And for a few more years they talked to Polis on the radio in the evenings.’
‘Until the radio broke down,’ Homer concluded irritably.
‘Right, and what about the submarine?’ his rival drawled. ‘The nuclear submarine that was on a long-range mission, and when the strikes and counter-strikes began, it simply didn’t have enough time to move into battle position. And when it did surface, everything had already been over for ages. So then the crew put it on permanent mooring not far from Vladivostok . . .’
‘And to this day an entire village is powered by its reactor,’ the old man put in. ‘Six months ago I met a man who claimed to be the first mate of
that submarine’s captain. He said he’d crossed the entire country on a bicycle, all the way to Moscow. He was travelling for three years.’
‘Did you talk to him in person?’ Leonid asked in polite surprise.
‘In person,’ Homer snarled.
Legends had always been his hobbyhorse, and he simply couldn’t allow this young smart alec to get the better of him. He had one more story left in reserve, a closely guarded one. He had been intending to tell it on a quite different occasion, not waste it in a pointless argument . . . But seeing Sasha laughing at this grifter’s latest joke, he made up his mind.
‘But have you heard about Polar Dawns?’
‘What dawns?’ asked the musician, turning towards him.
‘Oh, come on now!’ said the old man said, restraining a smile. ‘The Far North, the Kola Peninsula, Polar Dawns City. A Godforsaken place. Fifteen hundred kilometres from Moscow, and at least a thousand to Peter. Nothing anywhere near it except Murmansk, with its navy bases, but even that’s a fair distance away.’
‘The middle of nowhere, basically,’ said Leonid, encouraging him.
‘Far away from the big cities, the secret factories and the military bases. Far away from all the main targets. The cities that our antirocket shield couldn’t defend were reduced to dust and ashes. The ones that had a shield, where the interceptors had time to cut in . . .’ The old man looked upwards. ‘You know for yourself. But there were other places that no one was aiming at . . . because they didn’t represent any kind of threat. Polar Dawns, for instance.’
‘No one has any interest in the place now either,’ the musician responded.
‘But they should,’ the old man snapped. ‘Because right next to Polar Dawns was the Kola Atomic Power Station, one of the most powerful in the country. It supplied power to almost the entire north of Russia. Millions of people. Hundreds of factories. I come from those parts myself, from Arkhangelsk. I know what I’m talking about. And I visited that station as a school kid, on a guided tour. A genuine fortress, a state within a state. Its own little army, its own agricultural land, its own farm. They could survive autonomously. Even if there was a nuclear war, it wouldn’t change anything in their life,’ he chuckled darkly.
‘So what you’re trying to say . . .’
‘Petersburg went, Murmansk went, and Arkhangelsk, millions of people perished . . . All the factories, along with the cities . . . reduced to dust and ash. But Polar Dawns City is still there. And the Kola Atomic Power Station wasn’t damaged. Nothing but snow for thousands of kilometres on every side, expanses of snow and ice, wolves and polar bears. No contact with the centre. And they have enough fuel to supply a large city for several years, but for them, even including Polar Dawns, it will last for a hundred years. They’ll easily make it through the winter.’
‘It’s a genuine ark,’ Leonid whispered. ‘And when the flood comes to an end and the waters recede, down from the summit of Mount Ararat . . .’
‘Exactly,’ the old man said with a nod.
‘How do you know about this?’ There wasn’t a trace of irony or boredom left in the musician’s voice now.
‘I used to work as a radio operator once,’ Homer replied evasively. ‘I really wanted to find at least one person alive in my own native parts.’
‘Will they hold out for long there, in the north?’
‘I’m sure they will. Of course, the last time I was in contact was about two years ago. But can you imagine what that means – another entire century with electricity? In the warmth? With medical equipment, with computers, with electronic libraries on disks? There’s no way you could know about that . . . There are only a couple of computers in the entire Metro, and they’re no more than toys. And this is the capital,’ the old man laughed bitterly. ‘And if there are still people left somewhere – not solitary individuals, I mean, but at least villages . . . They’ve been back in the seventeenth century for a long time already, or maybe even the Stone Age. Wooden spills for light, cattle, witchcraft, every third child dying at birth. Abacuses and birch-bark manuscripts. And apart from the two nearest farms, there’s nothing else in the world. Empty land and desolation. Wolves, bears, mutants. Why, the whole of modern civilisation is built on electricity. When the power runs out, the stations will die, and that’s it. Billions of people took centuries to construct this building, brick by brick, and it’s all been reduced to dust. Start all over again. Only can we do it? But there they have a breathing space, a whole century! You were right, it’s Noah’s Ark. An almost unlimited supply of energy! Oil has to be extracted and processed, gas has to be drilled for and pumped through thousands of kilometres of pipes! Do we have to go back to steam engines, then? Or even further? I’ll tell you what,’ he said, taking Sasha by the hand. ‘People aren’t in any danger. People are as resilient as cockroaches. But civilisation – that’s what I’d like to preserve.’
‘And have they got real civilisation, then?’
‘Don’t you worry about that. Nuclear engineers, the technical intelligentsia. And their conditions are definitely better than ours are here. Polar Dawns has grown quite a lot in the last twenty years. They set up a transmitter with a repeating message: “Calling all survivors . . .” and it gives their coordinates. They say people still come crawling in, even now . . .’
‘Why haven’t I ever heard about this?’ the musician muttered.
‘Not many have. It’s hard to pick up their wavelength here. But you try it sometime if you’ve got a couple of years to spare,’ the old man chuckled. ‘The call sign is “Last Harbour”.’
‘I’d have known about it,’ the young man said seriously, shaking his head. ‘I collect cases like that . . . You really mean there wasn’t any war there?’
‘How can I put it? Wilderness on all sides, even if there were any villages or small towns nearby, they went wild quickly enough. Sometimes the barbarians attacked. And the animals, of course, if you can call them that. But they had the arsenal to hold them off. All-round defences, a fortified perimeter. Electrified barbed wire, guard towers. A genuine fortress, I tell you. And during the first ten years – the worst time – they put up another barrier, a log stockade. They reconnoitred everything around them, even got as far as Murmansk, two hundred kilometres away. There isn’t any more Murmansk, just a fused crater where it used to be. They were even planning to organise an expedition southwards, to Moscow. I tried to talk them out of it. Why cut the umbilical cord? When the background radiation falls, they’ll be able to bring more land under cultivation – and then . . . But in the meantime there’s nothing they can do here. This place is just one big graveyard,’ Homer sighed.
‘That would be amusing, if the human race that destroyed itself with the atom, is saved by the atom too.’
‘There’s nothing amusing about it,’ said the old man, giving him a stern glance.
‘It’s like the fire that Prometheus stole,’ the musician explained. ‘The Gods forbade him to give fire to humans. He wanted to drag man out of the mud, the darkness and stagnation . . .’
‘I’ve read it,’ Homer interrupted acidly. ‘The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece.’
‘A prophetic myth,’ Leonid remarked. ‘The Gods had good reason to be against it. They knew how it would end.’
‘But it was fire that made man into man,’ Homer objected.
‘And you reckon that without electricity he’ll turn back into an animal?’ the musician asked.
‘I reckon that without it we’ll be thrown back at least two hundred years. And taking into account that only one in a thousand survived and everything has to be rebuilt, brought back under control and studied all over again – at least five hundred. And maybe we’ll never recover. Why, don’t you agree?’
‘I do,’ Leonid replied. ‘But is it really just a matter of electricity?’
‘Well what do you think it is?’ Homer erupted, throwing his hands up.
The musician gave him a strange, long, lingering glance and shrugged
.
The silence dragged on. Homer could definitely regard this outcome of their conversation as a victory for him: the girl had finally stopped devouring the impertinent rogue with her eyes and started thinking about something else. But just as they were getting very close to the station, Leonid suddenly declared:
‘All right. Why don’t I tell you a story?’
The old man tried his best to appear exhausted, but he replied with a gracious nod.
‘They say that beyond Sport Station and before the ruined Sokolniki Bridge, a dead-end tunnel branches off the main one, running down at a steep angle. It ends at a metal grille, with a tightly closed hermetic door behind it. They’ve tried to open the door several times, but never got anywhere. And any solitary travellers who set out to find it almost never come back, and their bodies are found over at the far side of the Metro.’
‘The Emerald City?’ Homer asked, twisting up his face.
‘Everybody knows,’ Leonid carried on, taking no notice, ‘that the Sokolniki Bridge collapsed on the first day and all the stations beyond it were cut off from the Metro. It’s usually believed that no one left on the other side of the bridge was saved, although there’s absolutely no proof of that.’
‘The Emerald City,’ Homer said, waving his hand impatiently.
‘Everybody also knows that Moscow University was built on unstable ground, which was only able to support the immense building thanks to powerful cold generators working away in its basements, freezing the swampy earth. Without them it would have slid into the river a long time ago.’
‘A stale old cliché,’ the old man put in, realising where all this was leading.
‘More than twenty years have gone by, but for some reason the abandoned building is still standing there . . .’
‘Because it’s hogwash, that’s why!’
‘Some rumours say that what lies under the University is not just a basement, but a large strategic bomb shelter that goes ten storeys down, and apart from the cold generators, it contains its own nuclear reactor, and living space and connections to the closest Metro stations, and even to Metro-2 . . .’ Leonid made terrible eyes at Sasha and she smiled.
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