‘Whose frontier post is this?’ she asked, coming to a sharp halt.
‘What do you mean, whose?’ the musician asked, looking at her in amazement. ‘The Red Line’s, of course.’
Ah, how long Homer had dreamed of being back here again, how long it was since he’d been in these wonderful places . . .
At Borovitskaya Station, that residence of the intelligentsia, with its sweet smell of creosote and cosy little apartments, built right there in the arches, and its reading-room for Brahmin monks in the middle of the hall – long wooden tables piled high with books, low-hanging lamps with fabric shades – and its astoundingly precise reproduction of the spirit of the ‘debating-hall kitchens’ of the crisis period and pre-war years . . .
At regal Arbat Station, decked out in white and bronze, almost like the chambers of the Kremlin, with its austere manners and brisk military men, who still puffed out their cheeks, as if they weren’t involved at all in the Apocalypse . . .
At the old, indeed ancient, Lenin Library Station, which they’d never got round to renaming while it still made any kind of sense to rename it, which was already as old as the world when Kolya first arrived in the Metro as a little kid, the Library, with its connecting passage in the form of a romantic captain’s bridge, right in the middle of the platform, with its painstakingly and skilfully restored moulding work on the leaky ceiling . . .
And at Alexander Gardens, with its perpetually dim lighting, long-limbed and angular, in a way that reminded Homer of some weak-sighted gouty pensioner, constantly reminiscing about his young days in the Komsomol.
Homer had always wondered if the stations were like their creators. Could they be thought of as their designers’ self-portraits? Had they absorbed particles of the people who built them? One thing he knew for certain: each station left its own imprint on the people who lived in it, sharing its character with them and infecting them with its own moods and ailments. But Homer, with his peculiar cast of mind, his eternal pondering, and his incurable nostalgia, belonged, of course, not to stern Sebastopol, but to Polis, as bright as the past itself.
Only life had dictated otherwise.
And even now, when he had finally got here, he didn’t have even a few spare minutes to stroll through these halls, to admire the plaster mouldings and bronze castings, to indulge his fantasies.
He had to run. With a struggle, Hunter had managed to muzzle someone inside himself, to cage that terrible creature that he fed from time to time with human flesh. But once it bent apart the bars of that inner cage, a moment later there would be nothing left of the feeble bars on the outside. Homer had to hurry.
Hunter had asked him to find Miller. Was that a real name or a nickname? Or maybe a password? Spoken aloud, it had produced a startling effect on the sentries: talk of a court martial for the arrested brigadier had dried up, and the handcuffs that were about to be clicked onto Homer’s wrists were put back in the desk drawer. The pot-bellied head of the watch had volunteered to show the old man the way in person.
Homer and his guide walked up a flight of steps and along the connecting passage to Arbat. They stopped at a door guarded by two men in civilian clothes, with faces that stated very clearly that they were professional killers. Behind them he could see a vista of office rooms. The pot-bellied man asked Homer to wait for a moment and tramped off along the corridor. Less than three minutes later, he came back out, looked the old man over in amazement and invited him to go in.
The cramped corridor led them to a surprisingly spacious room with all its walls hung with maps and diagrams or overgrown with notes and coded messages, photographs and sketches. A bony, elderly man with shoulders as wide as if he was wearing a Caucasian felt cloak was enthroned at a broad oak desk. Only his left arm protruded from the tunic thrown across his shoulders, and when Homer looked closely, he realised why: the man’s right arm was almost completely missing. The owner of the office was immensely tall – his eyes were almost on the same level as the eyes of the old man standing facing him.
‘Thank you,’ he said, dismissing the pot-bellied officer, who closed the door from the other side with obvious regret. ‘Who are you?’
‘Nikolai Ivanovich Nikolaev,’ the old man said, disconcerted.
‘Drop the clowning. If you come to me, saying that you’re with my very closest comrade, whom I laid to rest a year ago, you must have a reason for it. Who are you?’
‘No one . . .’ said Homer, with perfect sincerity. ‘But this isn’t about me. It’s true, he’s alive. You just have to come with me, and quickly.’
‘So now I’m wondering if this is a trap, an idiotic hoax or simply a mistake.’ Miller lit a papyrosa and blew smoke into the old man’s face. ‘If you know his name and you’ve chosen to come to me with this, you must know his story. You must know that we searched for him every day for more than a year. That we lost several men in the process. You must know, damn you, how much he meant to us. Perhaps even that he was my right hand.’ He gave a crooked smile.
‘No, none of that. He doesn’t tell me anything,’ said the old man, pulling his head down into his shoulders. ‘Please, let’s just go to Borovitskaya. There’s not much time.’
‘No, I won’t go running off anywhere. And I have a good reason for that.’
Miller put his hand under the table, made a strange movement with it and moved back in some incredible fashion, without getting up. It took Homer a few seconds to realise that he was sitting in a wheelchair.
‘So let’s talk calmly. I want to understand the meaning of your appearance here.’
‘Lord,’ said the old man, despairing of ever getting through to this blockhead. ‘Please, just believe me. He’s alive. And he’s sitting in the holding cell at Borovitskaya. At least, I hope he’s still there . . .’
‘I’d like to believe you,’ Miller said and paused to take a deep pull on his papyrosa – the old man heard the cigarette paper crackling as it curled up and caught fire. ‘Only miracles don’t happen. All right. I have my own theories about whose hoax this is. But they’ll be tested by specially trained men.’ He reached for the phone.
‘Why is he so afraid of black men?’ Homer asked unexpectedly, surprising even himself.
Miller cautiously put down the receiver without saying a word into it. He dragged the rest of the papyrosa into his lungs, right down to the end, and spat out the short cardboard butt into an ashtray.
‘Damn you, I’ll take a ride to Borovitskaya,’ he said.
‘I won’t go in there! Let me go! I’d rather stay here . . .’
Sasha wasn’t joking or being capricious. It would be hard to think of anyone her father had hated more than the Reds. They had taken away his power, they had broken his back, but instead of simply finishing him off, out of pity or sheer prudishness they had condemned him to years of humiliation and torment. Her father hadn’t been able to forgive the people who rebelled against him. He hadn’t been able to forgive the men who inspired the traitors and egged them on, or those who supplied them with weapons and leaflets. The very colour red sent him into paroxysms of furious rage. And although at the end of his life he used to say that he bore no grudges against anyone and didn’t want revenge, Sasha had had the feeling that he was simply making excuses for his own powerlessness.
‘It’s the only way to get there,’ Leonid said in dismay.
‘We were going to Kiev! That’s not where you’ve brought me!’
‘Hansa has been fighting the Red Line for decades, I couldn’t let just anyone know that we were going to the communists . . . I had to lie.’
‘You can’t do anything without lying.’
‘The door is on the far side of Sport Station, as I said. And Sport is the last station on the Red Line before the ruined Metro bridge, there’s no way to get around that.’
‘How will we get in there? I don’t have a passport,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed warily on the musician.
‘Trust me,’ he said with a smile. ‘One perso
n can always reach a deal with another. Long live corruption!’
Ignoring Sasha’s objections, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her after him. Blazing brightly in the glare of the searchlights in the second line of the frontier post, the gigantic red banners hanging from the ceiling rippled in the tunnel draught, making the girl feel as if she was looking at two glittering red waterfalls. A sign?
If what she had heard about the Line was right, the Reds ought to riddle them with bullets on the approaches . . . But Leonid strode forward calmly, with his lips set in a confident smile. About thirty metres from the frontier post the broad beam of a searchlight struck his chest. The musician simply set his flute case on the ground and raised his hands in the air. Sasha did the same.
The border inspectors walked up to them, looking sleepy and surprised. It seemed as if they had never met anyone from the other side of the border. This time the musician managed to take the senior officer off to one side before he asked for Sasha’s documents. Leonid whispered something delicately in his ear, there was a faint jingle of brass and the head of the border unit came back spellbound and pacified. He escorted them past the guard posts in person and even put them on a hand trolley that was waiting, ordering the soldiers to go to Frunze Station.
They started working the levers, puffing and panting, as they got the trolley started. Sasha frowned as she studied the clothes and the faces of these men her father had taught her to call enemies. Nothing unusual. Padded jackets; blotchy, washed-out caps with stars pinned to them, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks . . . No, they didn’t have glossy skin, like the Hansa patrolmen, but they were certainly no less human. They had a gleam of absolutely boyish curiosity in their eyes, a feeling that was apparently completely unknown to those who lived on the Circle. These two had almost certainly never heard about what happened at Avtozavod Station almost ten years earlier. Were they Sasha’s enemies? Was it even possible to hate people you didn’t know, not just formally, but genuinely?
Not daring to strike up a conversation with their passengers, the soldiers merely grunted regularly as they leaned down on the levers.
‘How did you manage it?’ Sasha asked.
‘Hypnosis,’ said Leonid, winking at her.
‘But what were those documents you showed them?’ she asked, looking at the musician suspiciously. ‘How can they get you allowed in everywhere?’
‘Different passports for different occasions,’ he replied evasively.
‘Who are you?’ So that the others wouldn’t hear, Sasha was obliged to sit close beside Leonid.
‘An observer,’ he said with just his lips.
If Sasha hadn’t clamped her mouth shut, the questions would have come pouring out, but the soldiers were too obviously trying to catch the sense of their conversation, even trying to make the levers creak as quietly as possible. She had to wait until Frunze Station – withered, faded and pale, rouged with red flags. Pockmarked mosaics on the walls, columns nibbled on by time . . . Ceiling vaults like dark millponds, with feeble light bulbs dangling from wires stretched between the columns at a height slightly above the heads of the short local inhabitants, in order not to let a single ray of precious light go to waste. It was incredibly clean here: several cleaning ladies were scurrying around the platform at the same time. The station was crowded, but the strange thing was that whichever way Sasha looked, everyone started fidgeting and bustling about, although behind her back all the movement immediately ceased and subdued voices started murmuring. The moment she looked back, the murmuring stopped and people went back to their business. And no one wanted to look into her eyes, as if there was something indecent about it.
‘Are strangers unusual here?’ she asked, looking at Leonid.
‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ the musician said with a shrug.
‘Where are you at home?’
‘Where people aren’t so deadly serious,’ he laughed. ‘Where they understand that a man can’t be saved with just food. Where they don’t want to forget yesterday, even though the memories are painful.’
‘Tell me about the Emerald City,’ Sasha said in a quiet voice. ‘Why do they . . . Why do you hide?’
‘The rulers of the City don’t trust the inhabitants of the Metro.’
Leonid broke off to explain himself to the sentries on duty at the entrance to the tunnel and then, as he and Sasha dived into the intense darkness, he set a little light on the wick of an oil lamp with a metal cigarette lighter and continued.
‘They don’t trust them, because the people in the Metro are gradually losing their human nature. And because they still have among them the people who started that terrible war, although they’re afraid to admit it, even to their friends. Because the people in the Metro are beyond redemption. They can only be feared, avoided and observed. If they find out about the Emerald City, they’ll just gobble it down and puke it up, the same way they gobble everything they get their hands on. All the canvases of the great artists will be burnt. All the paper, and everything that was on it, will be burnt. The only society that has achieved justice and equality will be annihilated. Drained bloodless, the University building will collapse. The Great Ark will founder and sink. And there’ll be nothing left. Vandals . . .’
‘Why do you think we can’t change?’ asked Sasha, feeling offended.
‘Not everyone thinks that,’ said Leonid, giving her a sideways glance. ‘Some are trying to do something.’
‘They’re not trying very hard,’ Sasha sighed, ‘if even my old Homer hasn’t heard about them.’
‘But then some people have actually heard them,’ he remarked suggestively.
‘You mean . . . the music?’ Sasha guessed. ‘Are you one of those who hope to change us? But how?’
‘By coercing you into the love of beauty,’ the musician joked.
The wheelchair was pushed by an adjutant, and the old man walked alongside, barely managing to keep up and looking round every now and then at the burly security guard attached to him.
‘If you really don’t know the whole story,’ said Miller, ‘then I’m willing to tell you it. You can amuse your cellmates with it, if I see the wrong man at Borovitskaya . . . Hunter was one of the Order’s finest warriors, a genuine hunter, in more than just name. His intuition was positively feral, and he dedicated himself to the cause absolutely. He was the one who sniffed out those Black Ones a year and a half ago . . . At the Economic Achievements Station. Hasn’t anybody heard about that at all?’
‘At Achievements . . .’ the old man repeated after him absent-mindedly. ‘Well yes, invulnerable mutants who could read people’s minds and make themselves invisible . . . I thought they were called the Dark Ones?’
‘That’s not important,’ Miller snapped. ‘He was the first to dig up the rumours and sound the alarm, but just then we didn’t have the men or the time . . . I told him no. I was busy with other matters . . .’ He gestured with his stump. ‘Hunter went up there on his own. The last time he was in contact with me, he said that those creatures suppressed people’s will and spread terror throughout the district. And Hunter was a simply incredible fighter, a born soldier who was worth an entire platoon all on his own . . .’
‘I know,’ muttered Homer.
‘And he was never afraid of anything. He sent us a boy with a note saying he was going up onto the surface to deal with the Black Ones. If he disappeared, it meant the threat was worse than he had thought. He disappeared. He was killed. We have our own reporting system. Everyone who’s alive is obliged to let us know every week. Obliged to do so! He hasn’t been in touch for more than a year.’
‘And what about the Black Ones?’
‘We flattened the entire area thoroughly with Whirlwind rocket salvoes. Since then nothing has been heard of the Black Ones either,’ Miller chuckled. ‘They don’t write, they don’t phone in. The exits at Achievements were closed off and life there has returned to normal. That boy also had mental problems, but as far as I know, he’s be
en restored to health. He lives a normal human life, he got married. But Hunter . . . He’s on my conscience.’
He trundled down the steel ramp from the steps, startling and scattering the book-loving monks at the bottom of it, then swung round, waited for the panting old man and added:
‘Don’t tell your cellmates that last part.’
A minute later the entire procession finally reached the holding cell. Miller didn’t open the door of the cell: bracing himself on the adjutant, he gritted his teeth, stood up and pressed his eye to the spyhole. A split second was enough.
Absolutely exhausted, as if he had covered the entire distance from Arbat on foot, with his infirmities, Miller fell back into his chair, ran his dead gaze over the old man and pronounced sentence.
‘It’s not him.’
‘I don’t think my music belongs to me,’ Leonid said with sudden seriousness. ‘I don’t understand where it comes into my head from. It seems to me that I’m just a channel . . . Simply an instrument. In the same way as I put my lips to my flute when I want to play, someone else puts his lips to me – and a melody is born . . .’
‘Inspiration,’ Sasha whispered.
‘You can call it that.’ He spread his arms in a shrug. ‘Whatever way it is, it doesn’t belong to me. I don’t have any right to keep it inside me. It . . . travels through people. I start playing, and I see these rich people and beggars gather round, all covered in scabs or shiny and greasy, angry ones and wretched ones and great ones. Everyone. And my music does something to them that tunes them all to the same key. I’m like a tuning fork . . . I can bring them into harmony, if not for long. And they’ll chime so pure and clear . . . They’ll sing. How can I explain that?’
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