But Homer was listening. Listening and not eating.
“But those carriages … the little ones …” He coughed to clear his throat. “Instead of cars. On the roads …”
“Yes,” Artyom confirmed, perplexed.” With four places.”
“Did you see them? Did you see that? up there? On the surface?”
“I saw it. As if I was remembering a dream, you know? But you … How do you know?”
“That’s out of my book. Out of the notebook. It’s written in the notebook!” Homer screwed his eyes up, examining Artyom and blinking, trying to understand if this was some kind of mockery.
“Did you take it? My notebook? And read it? When?”
“I didn’t take it. And where is it anyway?”
“They confiscated it. Immediately. That Dietmar. My documents, the notebook. Everything. But what do you mean, you didn’t read it? How else could you know?”
“I told you, it was a dream!”
“It’s not your dream, Artyom. It isn’t even a dream.”
“What?”
“I told you about that girl. About Sasha. The one from Tula … She was drowned. At a flooded station.”
“Something … Yes, I remember something. When we got addled at TsvetnoI Boulevard.”
“Yes … That Sasha … It’s hers. That’s the way she pictured the world up on the surface. She was born in the Metro; she’d never been up on top. So that was her stupid … Her own naïve way.”
“Sasha? With white hair, you said?” Artyom’s head started spinning, and the world swayed as if it was caught in a wave of hot air. He rubbed his temples. His head was splitting.
“Eat. Why aren’t you eating?” a man with a swollen belly told him wearily as he dropped back from the trough: His beard was matted, and there was dark water streaming down it.” Enough of that idle chatter. They only feed us once a day!”
He strained and gave a long, drawn-out fart. Then he lay down on his back and started staring up at the ceiling. He’d done what he could to save Artyom. But Artyom couldn’t even glance into that trough today—he felt sick immediately.
“With white hair. She’s about eighteen … How do you know? How do you know?” Homer stood up too, with his hands on his waist.
“I don’t understand. I don’t remember how, where from. But I saw all of it myself. I can picture it to myself … With my own eyes.” Artyom raised his hand as if he wanted to catch a toy plane flying past him.
“You took it. My notebook. You took it!” the old man said angrily, absolutely convinced.” It couldn’t be anything else. Why are you lying to me now?”
“I didn’t take your fucking notebook!” Artyom yelled furiously.” What the hell would I want with you and your damn chronicles?”
“You’re making fun of me, right? You asshole!”
Artyom grabbed hold of his barrow without even waiting for the whistle. Afterwards he regretted it. While there was still time to regret it.
But then routine took over, things grew together: load, run, unload. Stone, earth, a dead body. One thing on top of another, one thing underneath another. His arms and legs first caught fire, and then fell silent, then turned weak and came to a halt. Then more life appeared in them from somewhere deep down on the bottom, and now through the dull aching pain, they jerked, lifted, lowered, walked and dragged the time along.
He started falling asleep as he moved—he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours—and they roused him with steel thorns. He tried to help those who fell, and they drove him away with chains. He stopped turning round and reacting when the door rumbled—he had already forgotten about Dietmar. He didn’t want to know about him; he didn’t want to hear the whining, miserable beast-people, to hear their stories about how they had ended up in here, who was punished for what kind of deformity. Some of them only mumbled anyway—not to Artyom, but to everybody there, so that everybody there would know a little bit about them and remember them when they died here and were covered over by the advancing bank of earth. And he had no more wits left to construct lines and chains from the shot radio operator to the KGB man Svinolup, from the loose-mouthed Zuev to the Lubyanka, from Miller to some Bessolov or other, from Bessolov to the Führer, from the Führer to Dietmar. None of this came together; none of it made any kind of meaning.
Instead of connections drawn in by an invisible pencil, instead of a dusty slaughterhouse, instead of troughs filled with slops, Artyom summoned the slow-moving planes into the concrete air and built houses reaching up to the sky in the cave. Those planes allowed him to wait for the “lights out” signal; they evacuated him into the world that the drowned girl had imagined for herself. But no, he had seen it all for himself, definitely. With his own eyes. But when? How?
The signal for “lights out” came after all.
They were prodded into the corner and heaped up onto each other. Artyom fell asleep, expecting to see that city. Sasha’s city. But he saw cells, Svinolup arisen from his ashes, and himself fleeing. Only in the dream he didn’t run along a straight corridor to freedom, but through an enchanted maze that had no exit.
And after that the dream ended and the whistle of the new shift sounded.
It was still day, or was it night—twenty-four hours during which Artyom had learned to slurp the swill together with everyone without getting sick; during which he hadn’t gone over first to the old man when he was hurt; during which he had stopped counting the barrows of earth and the barrows with dead bodies.
His clothes were all ripped and tattered by barbed wire; the scratches from the thorns constantly oozed a red liquid, and the liquid kept getting more and more transparent, more and more futile and useless. The group A, rhesus negative, flowed out like diluted compote. There was no one to compensate for it, to fill Artyom up with fluid of his own. Letyaga had obviously gone on standing there, catching those spots of light on his hands, until he turned away and went tramping back. He couldn’t do anything without orders. And there could only be one order about Artyom from Miller: Scratch him off the list. And Dietmar hadn’t come for him. hadn’t taken him off to be hanged. He was busy at the front.
Artyom had neither rescue nor execution coming to him.
Then he ran through another day and night.
He took away Homer’s stones without speaking, and Homer let him have them without speaking. NikolaI Ivanovich looked bad: He had turned yellow and was swaying on his feet. Artyom would have felt sorry for him, but the old man wouldn’t allow it. He was offended about the chronicle, and because Artyom had given him hope.
He forced himself to talk with the exhausted Lyokha: How were they building this vast hall, who was directing the workers, who told them to take the tunnel liners apart? Lyokha pointed to a slant-eyed individual: That’s Farukh. He built Moscow City. He has his own people, Abdurahim and Ali, and they’ve been trusted with the job. They couldn’t find any other specialists. Farukh strode around everywhere with his assistants, and with no shackles, full of himself. But he too scooped the swill out of the common trough with his own hands. He guided the construction work confidently, deciding who should dig, who should mix cement, who should put up props.
“We’ve got to escape,” Artyom told the broker.” Otherwise we’ll croak.”
“Croaking is the surest way to escape from here,” the broker said with a feeble smile.
“Well, you go first then.” Artyom laughed with half his face.” To scout out the way.”
On the fourth day Dietmar still didn’t come; and Letyaga didn’t come either. And Artyom had no strength left even to think about escaping. But he definitely wanted to keep on living for a while, and the desire became more desperate with every hour. Not in order to get his business done, take revenge, find out the truth and see his nearest and dearest, but simply to live for a little while.
For this Artyom learned not to acquire fresh wounds from the barbed wire. The repulsive taste of the swill made him feel sick to the stomach, but he forced himself to keep go
ing back to the trough, in order to draw at least a little bit of strength from it. He learned how to work so that he didn’t see anything around him apart from the dragonfly airplanes.
But his blindness came at a price. When people lying beside you have their heads broken open and you say nothing, then what is left unsaid accumulates, turns sour and rots. When they lashed him with the metal thorns, the purulence in his soul flowed out together with the pain and the blood. But when his wounds began drying up and growing over with scabs, Artyom started fermenting on the inside.
“Lights out” sounded, but he couldn’t get to sleep: He tossed and turned, scratching at his scabs, opening them up.
Scabs.
And the sleeplessness, and the sweltering heat, and the excessive corporeal closeness with other people, like being in a ditch with dead bodies, set him drifting. Who was it that had spoken to him about scabs? Who had wanted to wash those scabs off him? Eh?
His head was lying on some woman’s knees. See how this person is overgrown with some kind of scabs, isn’t he? Better be gentle with him, baby … Everything was blurred, as if he was looking through dirty polythene. But no—it wasn’t a dream. It was true. His head really was lying on her knees … The girl’s knees. He looked up into her eyes and she looked down at him, leaning over. From below her breasts looked like white little half-moons. She was naked. And Artyom was naked. He turned his head and kissed her on her soft, hollow stomach. There were crimson marks there. Like dots. Cigarette burns. Old ones. The traces of lazy torture. He kissed her on that burn. That spot was more tender, more vulnerable. Thank you, Sasha. She touched his hair with her fingers and moved her hand, stroking, and the hair was soft, but as soon as her fingers moved on, it straightened up stubbornly. Her smile was abstracted. Everything was drifting. Close your eyes. Do you know how I used to imagine the world up on the surface?
On the next shift Artyom kept looking round to see when Homer would finally accumulate enough stone: He couldn’t wait to tell him, to share this with him, bring him this joy—and to justify himself.
But the old man worked very slowly, as if he was in no hurry at all. He had become scraggy, and his skin hung loose on him; the gaze of his eyes wandered. Homer struck at the wall sparingly. The pieces that broke off it were small, and mostly he just left scratches on it.
And then, before he’d gathered enough stone, he suddenly sat down on the ground.
He leaned back against the wall, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes.
Artyom noticed first, before the overseers, and he tossed a stone at Lyokha: Distract them. He loaded the dried-out old man in his barrow and trundled him off towards the tunnel, as if to bury him, but dumped him with the sleepers. Then he took a dose of the whip for walking along with an empty barrow, but not for the old man.
Artyom asked God not to write the old man off yet. He had asked for a lot this last week—how could he pay everything back? But this time he was allowed to extend his credit. Homer didn’t die: He woke up at the whistle along with the other shift.
Artyom managed to meet him at the trough. He was impatient to talk to him.
“Listen, granddad! I’ve remembered. I’ve remembered where those planes got into my head.”
“Eh?” The old man was still stunned.
“That time on TsvetnoI Boulevard. When you got me drunk. I think I saw her. Right there in front of my eyes, you know. It’s kind of vague. Only … You won’t be angry with me, will you?”
“You saw her?”
“I saw her. There, at Tsvetnoi. It was her who told me everything. Your notebook had nothing to do with it. Honestly.”
“She was at Tsvetnoi? How … ? What was she … ?”
“A girl. With white hair. Frail. Sasha. Sashenka.”
“You’re not lying now, are you?” The old man’s voice had turned weak. He wanted to believe Artyom; he was trying.
“I’m not lying. I’m not mocking you,” Artyom replied firmly.
“Alive? But you … You ate that garbage there … It gives you all sorts of …”
“I saw her. I talked to her. I remember it. I’ve just remembered.”
“Wait. Sasha? My Sasha. In that hellhole? In a whorehouse? What was … What was she doing? Did you see how … What she was doing?”
“Nothing, granddad. She was … She was just fine. A week ago she was alive.”
“But how could she … How did she get out? How is she?”
“I got them from her. Those pictures. The planes and the rain. She said, ‘Close your eyes and imagine … ’”
“But in a whorehouse. Why was she in a whorehouse?”
“Calm down … Calm down, granddad. You mustn’t get so … upset. She’s in a whorehouse, but just look where the two of us are … See. Perhaps a whorehouse isn’t the worst place to be.”
“We have to get her out. We’ve got to get here out of that place.”
“We’ll do that, Granddad. We’ll definitely get her out. If only someone gets us out. Sit down, sit down. What have you jumped up for?”
Sasha had given Homer strength, and hope had deceived his body. But the deception didn’t last for long. The old man waved his pick feebly, and he wasn’t the one controlling his tool now; it was controlling Homer, setting him swaying. He and Artyom never had anywhere to escape to from the station anyway—but now it was just impossible.
Asking the guards to spare Homer would have been to condemn him to immediate death. There was only one thing delaying the execution: The arrival of new workers had been disrupted, and the overseers had become more condescending to the old ones. And so Homer held out for another day.
Then they came for him.
* * *
“Nikolaev!” someone shouted through a megaphone from the door. “NikolaI Nikolaev!”
Homer pulled his head down into his shoulders and started striking more rapidly with the pick in order to grind out his norm before he was shot.
Artyom crept towards the door with his barrow to scout things out; standing there in the doorway, backed up by men with automatic rifles and gazing round with an air of fright and revulsion was the teacher Ilya Stepanovich, looking a bit puffy-faced, but unhurt, and in uniform. He raised the megaphone to his beard and called again:
“Nikolaev! Homer!”
Then the guard remembered, took a closer look, and dragged the old man over to Ilya Stepanovich. The teacher walked down one step, and then a second. He mumbled something into the old man’s dirty ear, wincing at the stink. Homer didn’t look at him, but down at the floor. Artyom received a lash of the whip for his pensive pause and curiosity and had to move on. Ilya Stepanovich stood there for a while, then gestured despairingly at NikolaI Nikolaev with his clean hand and left.
“What did he want?” Artyom asked the old man, seizing his moment at the trough.
“He wanted to take me out. He sat down to write his book, but it won’t come. They gave him everything he needs … A separate study. Special rations. But no. He says he’s read my notebook. And he wants me to help him. Give him pointers. He’ll get me out of here for good.”
“Go on! Agree!”
“Agree to what? To write his book?’
“What difference does that make to you? You’ll croak in here!
“Write him a book about the glory of the Reich in my own words?”
“This way there won’t be any kind of book! You’ll be gone and there’ll be nothing left after you!”
Homer sucked in his gruel and swallowed; the taste was all right, more or less like life.
“I told him I won’t go without you.”
“Yes you will, granddad! Go!”
“He can’t do that. He only got permission for one man to help; he says they won’t let him have two.”
“But what … What about Dietmar?”
“Dietmar’s been killed. At Teatralnaya. The Reds broke through somehow and killed him. And lots of others too. That very day. Now the teacher works directly for the Führ
er. He liked the little idea of a book.”
Dietmar’s been killed.
Artyom was suddenly suspended in the void of a tunnel.
Now there was no one here who knew him or remembered him: He wasn’t a hostage, a prisoner or a double agent any longer—he was a nameless freak, a disposable slave. There was no point in waiting for anything any longer, nothing left to be afraid of, no straws to clutch at. He was lost here, in this boundless living space, and there was no one to look for him. He’d taken all the strength out of himself and put it into the tunnel: The tunnel was stuffed full of Artyom’s strength, like a length of gut, but Artyom’s energy was dwindling; he was getting weak. He couldn’t eat a thing; he had a rusty taste in his mouth and a ringing sound in his ears. A man, damn the bastard, was an exhaustible resource. And now it looked like the end of Artyom’s tunnel was looming into view.
“Go on, granddad. Go anyway.”
“How can I leave you? You came here to get me.”
“This way at least there’s some hope. They don’t need me anymore. But now they do need at least one of us. If you die, then I’ll die too, that’s for sure. Ask them to bring the teacher back. And go with him.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then how are you going to get that girl of yours out, if you kick the bucket? I’m sorry, but you don’t have much time left. You can barely stay on your feet! Well?”
“I can’t.”
But that night, before “lights out,” after they had trundled away the man with the swollen goiter who worked next to Homer in order to pile up stones over him, the old man finally scraped together enough fragments for Artyom to go over to him.
“If I agreed, then … I could get fixed up there somehow and then try to rescue you too, couldn’t I?”
“Of course!” said Artyom. “That’s what I’ve been talking about!”
“You think I should ask …”
“Ask!”
“But will you hold out? How long can you hold out?”
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