“So are you going to come back now?”
She said it in a flat voice, as if she was the same on the inside as on the outside. As if her face was made of china and she had a wind-up key in her back.
Artyom’s own back was suddenly running with sweat.
There are some things you learn not to be afraid of. But he had never developed immunity to conversations like this. He strode along, counting off his silent steps to himself; and they simultaneously became the ticking meter of his awkwardness, cowardice, and misery.
“That’s what your father assumes. He gave me my name tag back.”
“I meant us.”
“Well … If I accept his offer … And I have accepted it. Then I won’t have … Anywhere to go … I can’t live at Exhibition, can I? I’ll be here. The barracks. There’s some kind of operation today. They’re sending me on it. And …”
“What’s that got to do with anything? Stop it.”
“Listen. I can’t … I can’t see. How. How we can start over again.”
“I want you to come back.”
She spoke in the same way—calmly, firmly, quietly. With an impassive face. There was nowhere at Arbat Station for two people to talk. Better among strangers than with your own folks on the other side of the wall. The crowd jammed the signal; in a crowd you could talk heart-to-heart.
“It didn’t work out for us, Anya. Everything went wrong for you and me.”
“It wasn’t going right. So what?”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all? Have you given up?”
“No. It’s not that.”
“So you didn’t want it anyway? And you just cut and run? You used some idiotic excuse to cut and run.”
“I …”
“I’m telling you that I need you. I need you, Artyom. Do you realize what saying that costs me? Me? What it costs me to say that?”
“We can’t glue it all back together.”
“Glue what back together?”
“The story of you and me. Everything in it happened wrong. This thing, and that thing … Everything. Too many mistakes.”
“So you just scuttle off. Too many mistakes, I think I’ll be off now. Was that it?”
“No.”
“Yes it was! And I was probably supposed to think: If he leaves, then okeydokey. It looks like there’s nothing to glue back together anyway. Was that it?”
“No. What are you … ? I’m not going to talk about this in public.”
“No? But you’re the one who brought me out for a walk. A real strategist.”
“Stop it.”
“Or was it like this? I’m a proud woman, I told you that myself. And you probably decided: Well then, she won’t grovel if I just run away from her without saying goodbye, will she? She’ll hang herself before she comes crawling to find out why I dumped her.”
“I didn’t dump you.”
“You ran away.”
“Anya. Come on, why are you doing this? Like some stupid woman? You’re not a woman, Anya. You’re a real man! You’re my brother-in-arms! You’re Letyaga with boobs!”
“Oh, please. Tell me ‘It’s all over for us, Anya.’ Tell me to my face, no more whining. And explain why.”
“Because it won’t work out for us anyway. Because everything was wrong.”
“But you really are like some stupid woman. Can you be a bit more specific? What’s wrong? The fact that my father was your commander? That he was against our marriage? That you had hangups? That you were more in love with him than with me? That he thought you were insane? That you were always comparing yourself with him? That he was a genuine hero and the savior of his homeland? That you wanted to be him first? That you couldn’t simply be with me?”
“Shut up.”
“Why? You can’t say all this out loud. Let me say it for you. Someone has to.”
“Because I don’t love you. Because I fell out of love with you. Because—yes, I don’t know how to tell you that.”
“Because you’re afraid of me.”
“No!”
“Because you’re afraid of my father.”
“Oh, go to hell. Just fuck off, will you? That’s all!”
“People are turning to look at you. It’s embarrassing.”
“I have someone else.”
“Ah, so that’s what you found. You looked for it and found it. You should have told me. You should have said, ‘Anya, I was simply looking in the wrong place. There wasn’t anyone up on the surface, but underground someone turned up in a week.’”
“Go ahead. Pile it on. You spent the whole year training those skills of yours on me. You never believed me. You didn’t believe me and you didn’t believe in me. Like your daddy. He called me schizo too. He still does, to this very day. You take after him!”
“I’m like my mother.”
“You’re like your daddy.”
Anya stopped walking. People stumbled into them, swore, gaped at Anya’s pedigree points, forgot their annoyance, and went frothing on with the current. They were very preoccupied with their underground business, as if there was nothing in the world but the Metro.
“Let’s have a drink.”
“I’d … I’d like to get some sleep. Before the operation.”
“You owe me. So shut up and let’s go.”
He’d already realized that he had to do it. And do it before this operation. Before finally doing something meaningful. He owed her more than he did anyone else.
They found themselves an intellectual dive in a pedestrian passage, sank down onto the stuffed sacks, and drew the curtains. Now it was as if they’d been left alone together.
“How come you’re here?”
“He sent his men for me. Told them to tell me that you’d given me my freedom. A fine way to separate. Sending the message via my father and two armed cretins.”
“I didn’t want it to be like that …”
“You’re a brave man, Artyom. I respect you.”
“I’m a shit, okay, accepted. But what now? You’ve come back to your ideal daddy now, haven’t you? Eh? That’s it! Hoorah! Why eat my brains out?”
“You’re a real cretin after all.”
“Accepted: a shit and a cretin.”
“Have you never wondered why I went away to Exhibition Station with you? Never wondered what I saw in you? Back here the entire Order, the whole herd of studs, trailed after me, one hero after another, all drooling and trying to get a sniff under my tail. Including that Hunter of yours, by the way! So why you?”
“Yes, I wondered.”
“Well maybe I didn’t want a hero! I don’t want a psychopath, I don’t want a husband who saws a man’s head off with a knife and doesn’t even blink when the blood spurts out! I don’t want that! I don’t want a husband like my father! Is that clear? I wanted a good, decent, normal human being! Someone like you. Like you used to be. Who does everything he possibly can to avoid killing people. And I wanted him to have children like that. Kind.”
“People like that die underground.”
“People of all kinds die underground. So do we stop having children?”
“That’s right, we stop.”
“When were you planning to live? With me—have a life?”
They drank without clinking glasses. Artyom took a long swallow. His empty stomach soaked it up immediately. His blood warmed up and set the globe spinning.
“I can’t live, Anya. I don’t know how to anymore.”
“Who then?”
“Your father will pick someone for you. Someone worthy. Not a schizo.”
“Are you a cretin? Are you listening to me at all? Or just yourself? Who will my father pick for me? He washed me in the shower himself until I was thirteen! Thirteen! Do you understand that? I ran away from him—from him! To you! To have a normal life! To live! And you want to be him! Him or Hunter, I don’t know which!”
“I don’t … Dammit … Do I have to hear this?”
“Why
not? Are you afraid of getting all emotional? Are you afraid you’ll have to take me away?”
“No. But …”
“Then wait till you hear what happened to my mother!”
“She died. She was ill. You were still little.”
“She poisoned herself with bad vodka. She drank, because he beat her every other day. How do you like that? Eh? How’s that for a hero-daddy?”
“Anya.”
“Go and join his army. Has my daddy forgiven you?”
“But he adores you … Could he ever … ?”
“No. Beating the heart out of my mother was enough for him. Daddy takes good care of me. Yes, he adores me. Whatever I say, that’s the way things will be. Just as long as I sit on his knees.”
“Wait. He … Why did he … ? When I was in the radio center … When I was just about to … When they were about to storm the place … You … Where were you? Then?”
Anya finished off her drink in one; her eyes were red, quite unable to cry, just like Artyom’s. She’d made up her eyelashes with mascara, he realized suddenly. Anya. Eyelashes.
“I told him straight: if anything happens to my man … He has to be reminded about that from time to time.”
Artyom grinned—he tried to do it contemptuously, but his face didn’t have the strength.
“Hey! Another one!”
“And for me.”
“That’s what it’s for. That’s why.”
“To my mother!” Anya raised her glass tumbler. “To my mother, who drank because she married a hero. So you got it all wrong. I’m like her, not like him, Artyom.”
He reached out his own glass in his numb hand and struck glass against glass feebly and listlessly.
“She was from Vladivostok. When she put me to bed, she used to tell me about the beaches. About the ocean. Once she’d put me down, she reached for her hip flask. You see, I knew how to close my eyes as if I was asleep and peep through my eyelashes. How’s Vladivostok getting on? Does it answer?”
“Yes.”
* * *
“How are you doing, brother, okay? No temperature? Your cheeks are burning up.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure you want to drag yourself back up on top again?”
“I’m sure.”
“Did you go to the infirmary?”
“Yes. They painted my back with green antiseptic.”
“Okay. When we get back from the assignment, I’ll carry you there.”
The same off-roader was waiting in front of the Library with its engine running; and behind it was a large gray truck with toothy overriders on its bumpers. SaveliI and Lyokha, wearing black uniforms under their protective suits, exchanged glances.”
“This …” said Artyom.
“Our men are inside there. Don’t worry. Hansa just lent us the truck. Where would we get anything like that?”
“True enough.”
They started with a squeal and set off in convoy towards New Arbat Street. Letyaga took Artyom with him in the off-roader. He kept looking round at him with some unspoken thought from the front seat.
“What’s this assignment?” Artyom asked.
“It’s at Komsomol Station,” Letyaga explained. “You’ll see.”
They hurtled along empty New Arbat Street. Artyom didn’t have time to remember anything. Where had all the living beasts of Moscow disappeared to? Why had they fled? Moscow, a city of stone, stood as empty as if it was Babylon, smothered by the sands three thousand years ago.
They raced as far as the Garden Ring; turned where they needed to go, straight across the funny lines of prohibition on the asphalt; and drove past the massive hulks of hotels without any guests and office centers without any clerks, and then past the pointed building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a Bald Mountain for sorcerers.
“I wonder how foreign affairs are going now.”
“I don’t poke my nose in,” said Letyaga, looking straight ahead. “Everyone has his own job.”
“But someone listens to the radio, don’t they? To find out how people are doing in general … How the enemy’s getting on. What he’s getting up to. What cunning tricks.”
“How?” Letyaga objected. “With the jammers working away.”
“That’s true.” Artyom kneaded the rubber of his face.
After the Ministry of Foreign Affairs they dived into the narrow side streets and stopped at an abandoned mansion behind a tall fence. Some embassy or other. A ragged scrap of the unknown country’s flag was dangling there, washed white by the vicious rain.
They sounded the agreed signal on the horn. The silent gates opened to let the convoy into the courtyard. Inside, figures with the badges of the Order swarmed over the vehicles, making sure their visitors hadn’t picked anyone up along the way. Artyom clambered out and thought he saw a familiar pair of eyes behind glass saucers.
“What’s this?”
No one explained. Doors opened, and the figures dragged green zinc boxes with stenciled inscriptions out of the mansion and into the truck—two at a time, three at a time, then more, and more …
Boxes of cartridges.
They worked deftly and got the job done in a minute. They saluted, signed some kind of document for irrelevant bookkeeping, saw the vehicles out through the gates, and the mansion became uninhabited again.
“Why so many?” Artyom asked Letyaga.
“For Komsomol Station,” Letyaga repeated.
“What’s there? The Red Line intersects with Hansa …” said Artyom, suddenly realizing. “Is that where the front line is now? Has Hansa already joined in the war?”
“Yes, it has.”
“What are we doing? Are our men there already? We’re pitching in for Hansa, right? I mean us, the Order?”
“That’s right.”
Letyaga had obviously been forbidden to talk openly with Artyom: He spat the words out through his teeth, but since Artyom was guessing everything for himself, he couldn’t refuse to confirm things.
“Our boys are there already? Are the cartridges for them? Are they holding the Reds?”
“Yes.”
“This … This is the bunker all over again, eh? Right, brother? It’s us again, with the Reds again … And the same thing: If we don’t hold them, no one will hold them?”
“It could all happen again,” Letyaga admitted reluctantly.
“I’m glad we’re going there,” Artyom declared out loud. “That’s the right kind of assignment.”
* * *
And it happened again at night. The Garden Ring Road, the rusty lumps of cars in the headlights, the chasm between the buildings, plastic bags flying through the air, the oxidized moon outlining the clouds faintly; the engines growled and Artyom felt drowsy. Past TsvetnoI Boulevard, along the ramps of the flyover, through tricky side streets and along secret trails that the dead didn’t know, along jolting tramlines to the station square, to Komsomol Station.
Three stations: trains to the east from one, all the way as far as Anya’s Vladivostok; trains to the north, to St. Petersburg, from the second; and trains to Kazan and onward, into the underbelly of Russia, from the third. Wherever you wanted to go, there were the tracks; they started right behind the buildings. Put a trolley on them, lay into the levers, and roll on and on for as long as your strength holds out. All the wonders of the world are waiting for you. But no—you can’t go anywhere, right? What do you mean, there isn’t any lid, Svyatoslav Konstantinovich? There it is; there’s the lid.
They drove up onto the pavement and set their vehicles right up against the doors of the Metro pavilions.
“Now move it,” Letyaga ordered. “This isn’t our ground.”
They opened the doors instantly, dispersed to form a circle round the vehicles, and lowered their night-vision goggles onto their foreheads: At night on enemy ground anything could happen. They unloaded the zinc boxes, passing them along a line of men. Artyom was the last, standing by the cracked wooden doors. He took the
boxes and stacked them in a pyramid. He had a strange feeling: calm. He saw himself behind the breastwork of a trench, clutching the stock of an automatic rifle in his finger and catching bullets with his forehead. It had been good in the bunker: everything clear, everything comprehensible. He really wanted to go into the bunker again. He wanted to use up these cartridges, every single one of them. Or as many as he had time for.
Now he didn’t need to say goodbye to Sasha, to make up with SukhoI or see Hunter. He had nothing to say to all of them. He didn’t have any full stops for them, let everything break off at a comma.
“Now follow me!”
They each took two zinc boxes and stepped into the half-ruined pavilion with them in the dark, as if they were carrying children in their arms. Letyaga had forbidden them to switch on their torches. They started moving down the chipped escalator, groping at the cold contours with their night vision. The only thermal glimmers blazing red on their screens came from below: the heat of human bodies trying to warm the earth from the inside.
And from down there, below, they heard an indistinct buzzing, like the moaning of a beehive. It seemed to come from below, but also from everywhere at the same time.
They couldn’t look round—they were running down the slippery steps in a line, and it would be a bad idea to stumble. But from out of some ventilation openings or other, or perhaps through the thin walls, they heard hoarse howling and muffled roaring, like the wind in pipes, but in pipes welded shut; with no hope; and with every step down it got louder, and it got hotter and hotter.
“What is that?” Lyokha panted as he ran.
“The Red Line’s down there. There’s something going on there. But that’s not where we’re going.”
They stopped somewhere.
“Now to the left.”
They set off without any shadows, moving along the walls: flashes of red in the blackness. The warmth flowing out through cracks in the wall meant that somewhere here there was something alive, warming itself, breathing out steam. But there wasn’t anyone coming towards them. Maybe it was some kind of secret passage? Were they coming at the enemy from the rear? Was there an ambush here? Why couldn’t they hear the battle? hadn’t it begun yet? had they gotten there just ahead of the beginning? All those cartridges. With that many you could hold the line for a month. But where were the other men from the Order waiting? Was that why they couldn’t turn on their torches—so they wouldn’t give them away?
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