“Do you think you’ve just made me any wiser?”
“What?”
“Where’s the mine, you cretin? Have you installed the mine?”
“Didn’t you hear me? There isn’t going to be any invasion of Teatralnaya!”
“What do you mean?” Now it became clear that Dietmar was laughing.” Of course there is. Most certainly there is.”
CHAPTER 10
— RED —
“Hey, pal! What d’you want here?”
Artyom looked at the man who had asked: a raspberry-red star drifting in a blurred haze. He shrugged.
Weary flagstaffs with faded red banners stood, slanting crookedly, beside the archways. The curves of the arches were cut off slightly above the height of a man by suspended signs: RED LINE. STATE BORDER.
“Come on, move. That’s enough staring.”
The officer kept his eyes fixed on Artyom’s hands. The Red Army men behind him waited for an order.
“What do I want?” Artyom asked himself.
No matter what, he mustn’t do that: put his hands up and take a step forward. He mustn’t follow the unfortunate Umbach to that place where Pyotr Sergeevich was about to have his guts wound onto a stick. He mustn’t confess that he, and not Umbach, was the subversive radio operator they were searching for. Because they wouldn’t let him see Umbach in any case, and Artyom’s guts would be next for the stick.
Then what?
Then forget Umbach and what he’d heard on the tubercular Moscow airwaves, forget Homer, who was waiting for Artyom somewhere at Pushkin Station with a noose around his neck, forget Dietmar and his little assignment, forget the people who were sitting behind him right now and lapping up this garbage, who would soon be slaughtered with bayonets, say goodbye to the little raspberry-red star and stroll on to Novokuznetsk Station. And just let whatever happened behind him, happen. He didn’t have any eyes in his back.
And what was there at Novokuznetsk?
Nothing.
The same thing as at Exhibition.
A void filled with stuffy air. Mushrooms. The miserable life that Artyom was supposed to drag out uncomplainingly, until he croaked. Circle round, go back to Anya. Some time, whenever, using someone else’s dead documents.
Someone else’s documents, but the life would be his, Artyom’s, the same old life—as black, twisted, and dry as a burnt-out match. Did he want that life? Could he hack it?
Olga Aizenberg took off her bra. Without Pyotr Sergeevich’s hands to guide them the orphaned spotlights picked her out ineptly, in blindingly harsh light, casting Olga’s intense, black silhouette onto the walls.
The trumpet played too fast and with nauseating insinuation, churning Artyom’s guts, and the silhouetted woman on the pole flailed to its rhythm, swirling furiously, as if she were impaled on a stake.
“Are you deaf? Go on, push off!”
And while Artyom was searching for Umbach, while he was on his way here with Homer, for a while he had forgotten, hadn’t he, what it was like when you had nowhere to go to. The old man had given him something. A direction at least. Forgive me, granddad.
How can I save you? Follow that fiend’s orders? Help him set up a bloody massacre? And then what? Will they really let you go then? They won’t, granddad.
So that’s the choice, then: Whatever I choose, it’s hopeless.
“Right, search him!”
Artyom’s feet took a step back. His feet hadn’t decided yet.
The audience started turning round and shushing him.
Someone relaxing in a railway man’s uniform grabbed hold of Artyom. Was it Artyom he had really been waiting for while he watched with a bored air as the actress writhed on the stake?
If they moved the other way, forward, there was no way back; his feet knew that. It was too soon for his body to die. But his soul simply couldn’t stomach the idea of going back to the old life.
No, I don’t want her children, Artyom realized. He realized it quite simply and for good.
What was there at Exhibition Station? There was nothing. Or everything that Artyom had failed to become. And everything he would rather croak than become.
Using his mind, he forced himself to raise his hands: One crept up a bit faster than the other. Sweat ran down his temples into his eyes in a caustic trickle, with a raspberry-red star swimming in it.
Perhaps they haven’t killed you yet, Pyotr Sergeevich? Eh? I traveled halfway across the Metro to find you, didn’t I? And I got here. Now there’s nowhere for me to go on to. Come on, now, they haven’t killed you, have they?
“I have some information.”
“What are you mumbling about?”
Artyom sensed a spider’s gaze from the audience, making his skin creep. So he said it again in the same quiet voice.
“I have important information. About a planned armed coup. By the Reich. I want to talk. With an officer. Of the state security services.”
“I can’t hear you!”
Artyom wiped away the sweat and took a step forward.
* * *
The pedestrian passage to Okhotny Ryad was long, interminably long, as if it been built especially for Artyom, to give him time to change his mind.
From the outside the border of the Red Line looked flimsy: a movable barrier and a couple of sleepy soldiers. But on the inside, where outsiders couldn’t see, there were three layers of fortifications, with sandbags, barbed wire and machine guns. The gun barrels were staring at the walls, not inwards or outwards: They didn’t know yet which direction the enemy would advance from.
There were twin profiles stenciled in paint on the walls: two awfully similar bald, scowling men with fat cheeks, like a blurred image embossed on a medal, one of them either protecting or eclipsing the other. The Moskvin cousins, Artyom knew that. The one in the foreground was Maxim. The present general secretary. The one Maxim had been stamped over was the previous general secretary, who had died.
With every step away from Teatralnaya Station he heard the BolshoI Theater’s perverse trumpet less and less clearly, because tearing along the passage from the opposite direction, from Marx Prospect Station straight into his forehead, getting louder and louder, was the bracing polyphony of a bravura march generated by an entire military band. At the point where the second third of the passage began, the orchestral march collided with the languorous trumpet and drove it back out into the theater.
The place was lit miserably; there was only a moat of light along the barbed wire, and beyond that the gloom was as thick as jelly until the next strip of barbed wire. They didn’t meet any live people along the way, only sullen soldiers. Artyom was straining at the leash, eager to resolve his fate, but his armed escorts had no intention of hurrying—their own fates were too indefinite
He barely managed to hold out until Marx Prospect-Okhotny Ryad. Until the very last border post, which looked just like the first one: so flimsy that a good, hard puff would demolish it. Nothing else could be seen beyond it. The steps hid everything, and that made it seem as if no one here on the Red Line could give a damn for Teatralnaya.
But the band was absolutely genuine, and it was standing right at the entrance, beside the border, tootling and jangling and drumming. It made Artyom want to straighten up and square his shoulders, despite himself; and of course, no trumpet or any other theatrical sounds could force their way through that.
The station—as cozy, homey, and small as all of the earliest stations in the Metro—was full of people who were all the same color. It wasn’t dirty here, and there wasn’t any water running from the ceiling, and the lamps were lit: everything decent and decorous, in short.
But when the orchestra fell silent for a second to swap one march for another, the station’s other voice could be heard. An unusual voice: instead of the hubbub people are supposed to make, Okhotny Ryad was filled with a constant rustling. People rustled as they glanced round in the winding queues, where each of them had a number written on his hand; in the entran
ces of the archways, people rustled papers at tables, performing some kind of bureaucratic function that Artyom didn’t understand; the women rustled and children rustled. And suddenly, while the drums and timpanI were catching their breath, the station was no longer bright or clean enough. But then the orchestral conveyor belt started up again, and the merriment that it delivered changed the station back. The little lamps burned more brightly, the lips of people walking by stopped drooping, and the marble started gleaming.
There were slogans to buoy up the mood too, also stenciled in block letters: With The Red Line We Will Wipe Out Poverty, Illiteracy, And Capitalism!—No To The Plundering Of The Poor! Yes To Universal Equality!—Their Oligarchs Eat Our Children’s Mushrooms!—A Full Ration For Everyone! And Lenin, Stalin, Moskvin, Moskvin. A bald Lenin and mustached Stalin hung in gold frames on the end wall of the station. Standing beside them was a guard detail of pale little boys with little red rags round their necks, and there were flowers lying there: plastic ones.
The locals didn’t seem to notice that Artyom was under armed guard: All the people he strode past somehow found more interesting business to distract them; he wasn’t able to meet anyone’s eyes at all. But the moment he was past someone the nape of his neck started burning as those scattered glances were immediately focused into intense beams by the lenses of their curiosity.
He walked along, trying to reach an agreement with Pyotr Sergeevich that he wouldn’t die for a little while longer or go away anywhere, that he would wait until Artyom got there. No more than an hour had gone by, so there was still a chance.
The Committee of State Security was located on the underside of the station: Below the floor that the monochrome citizens tramped across, there was another level with low ceilings that no one knew about, and the entrance to it was made to look like a cupboard, a place for sticking mops and buckets.
Inside, however, everything was familiar, the same as everywhere else in the world: a corridor painted with linseed oil paint, green up to waist-high and white above that, plasterwork turning brown from the damp, the eternal dangling lightbulbs, and a line of rooms.
An escort unlocked one and shoved Artyom into it.
“I’ve got urgent business! Something urgent to report!”
“They report things in the army,” he was told with a wink.” In this place you report people.”
The iron bolt on the outside of the door clattered in his ears, scraping across his naked nerves.
He looked at his cellmates: a woman with mascara eyes and a chemical-yellow fringe of hair, with all the rest gathered into a little clump at the back of her head, and a morose, undersized man with white eyebrows and eyelashes and a hit-and-miss haircut. He had tough, tanned-leather skin like an alcoholic’s.
Umbach wasn’t in the cell.
“Sit down,” said the woman.” No point in standing.”
The man blew his nose.
Artyom eyed the bench and remained standing, as if that meant he wouldn’t have to wait so long for them to see him, listen to his story, and agree to let the radio operator go as free as a bird.
“You think they’re going to sort everything out straightaway, right now, too, do you?” the woman sighed.” We’ve been stuck in here like this for more than two days now. And maybe that’s good. The way they sort things out here … it would be better if they didn’t bother.”
“Shut up,” the man groaned.” At least now keep your mouth shut will you?”
“Did they bring an old guy in here before me?” Artyom asked her.” With a mustache like this?” He demonstrated with his hands the feeble way that Umbach’s mustache dangled.
“No, they didn’t. And there wasn’t anyone without a mustache either. We’re stuck in here on own. Snapping at each other like that.”
The man turned away to face the wall and picked at it with his fingernail with an air of loathing.
“And what have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. I’ve got to get the old guy out.”
“And what’s the old guy done?”
Artyom looked at her flesh-colored tights, scarred all over with darns, and her hands—blue blood flowing just under the surface of the skin, bursting it open. At first the black borders made her eyes seem large and passionate, as if she was giving herself for the last time, but in fact they were just ordinary. A wrinkly smile. With tired wrinkles.
“The old guy hasn’t done anything either. We’re from Teatralnaya actually. We were just getting on with our lives.”
“And what’s life like there, at Teatralnaya? Lousy, I suppose?” she asked sympathetically.
“It’s fine.”
“But they tell us here that you’ve almost eaten each other up already. Are they lying, then?”
“Yulka! Are you stupid or what?” the man appealed to her.
“We have a good life here,” Yulka said, remembering.” Basically we couldn’t give a shit how things are at your place.” She paused and asked doubtfully.” Do you have to queue long for mushrooms?”
“What do you mean, queue?”
“Well, say you join the back of the line. What number would you be?”
“What line? If you’ve got money, you just buy them.”
“Money, you say? You mean coupons?”
“We don’t need any money here,” the man put in.” If someone works, then he eats. Not like at that Teatralnaya of yours. Our working man has protection.”
“All right,” said Artyom.
“You go eat your money,” the man added.
“Come on, Andriusha, why attack him like that?” Yulka interceded.
“They stick some fat-faced git in here and you want to show him your titties!” Andriusha hawked up and spat by his feet, but as if he was spitting at Artyom.
“As if you suddenly needed my titties.” She smiled at the man.
“I’m not a stooge,” said Artyom, telling himself.
“I don’t want to know anything,” said Andriusha.” It’s none of my business.”
They said nothing for a while.
Artyom pressed his ear against the door. It was quiet.
He looked at his watch. What was Dietmar up to? Did he still trust Artyom? And how much longer would he agree to trust him?
“You mean there aren’t any queues at all for mushrooms?” Yulka asked.” So how many do they give each person?
“As many as he has the money for. The cartridges,” Artyom explained, just to be sure.
“Well, would you ever!” Yulka exclaimed in delight.” And what if two of you come together?”
“What?”
“Do you both get as many as you have money for?”
“Well, yes.”
“Greedy bastards,” said Andriusha.” Whose mushrooms do you think they’re guzzling? Yours and mine! Our kids are bloated from hunger, and they’re pigging themselves.”
“They’re not bloated!” Yulka exclaimed in fright.” And we haven’t got any children.”
“I was being imagistic. Figural, that is, I was.”
He stared at Artyom with an air of anguish and a feeling of just having made an irreparable mistake. Blushing bright crimson.
“He didn’t say that,” Yulka implored Artyom.” All right?”
Artyom shrugged and nodded.
“You watch your own tongue,” Andriusha barked at his wife.” You cunt! If you hadn’t blabbed, we’d be at home. As if you didn’t learn anything from the Yefimovs.”
“The Yefimovs didn’t say anything, did they, Andriusha?” she whispered.” They took them anyway. They never said a single word against … Against.”
“Then it must have been for something else! There must have been something!” he shouted in a whisper. How could they just take them like that, without any rhyme or reason and …” He hawked and spat.” And the whole family too.”
“How’s that, the whole family?” Artyom asked.
“It’s nothing. None of your business!”
“
What was it I said, anyway? That there wouldn’t be enough mushrooms this year. That the crop had failed in the state farm, because of the plague. Because of the white rot. We’ll go hungry. And that was all. I didn’t get it all out of my own head. But they said it was slander … Propaganda …”
“Who did you say it to? You stupid blabbermouth! Svetka Dementieva, that’s who! Are you telling me you don’t know about the Dementievs?”
“The Dementievs’ Dasha works in the canning shop, and it’s like she doesn’t understand anything.”
“She stands there and keeps her mouth shut, then! People get taken for less than that! What about Vasilieva? The one who said ‘Lord, have mercy’ and crossed herself! And what did they take Igor from section 105 for? During a break he prattled about people from the outside showing up at Cherkizovo Station.”
“From where outside? And what happened?”
“From outside Moscow. From somewhere up on top. Another city, like. And supposedly they came without protective suits. So what’s wrong with that? What about it? It’s obviously a load of bullshit. Like, they picked up all those outsiders in a single sweep, and the same day …” He ran his finger across his throat.
“Don’t show that on yourself!” Yulka exclaimed in fright.
“Bullshit, right? Garbage, isn’t it? The bastard Yanks flattened everything for us. Even a little child knows there’s only Moscow still standing. What other city! And the next day they snatched Igor Zuev. Yudin was listening, and Yudin’s another … You have to be a real wanker to talk in front of Yudin …”
“What city?” Artyom asked, tensing up.” What city did they come from? Those outsiders at Cherkizovo?”
“Uh-huh,” Andriusha said to him.” Like I’ll just tell you.”
Artyom pulled away from the door, took a step towards the man, and leaned down towards him.
“But he said it, didn’t he? He said it? This Igor?”
“And look where it got him.”
“Tell me! Tell me, it’s important.”
“You haven’t given them the dirt on the old guy yet! You can’t rake everything in!” Andriusha chuckled balefully.
“You witless idiot! Just tell me! Where from?” Artyom grabbed the man by the collar, wound the material onto his fists and pressed him against the wall.
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