‘OK… You probably didn’t do it on purpose, you’ve just got shit for brains.’ Bourbon said in conciliation. ‘If I’m, like, not very nice to you, I’m sorry. This is stressful work. But, OK, seems we got out so that’s good. Now we have to trudge to Prospect Mir without being stopped. There we can, like, relax. If everything is quiet then it won’t take much time. But beyond that, there’s a problem.’
‘So it’s OK that we’re just walking along like this? I mean that when we go in a caravan from VDNKh, if there’s any less than three people then we don’t leave, you need a rearguard, and basically…’ Artyom said, looking behind himself.
‘Well, there are plusses of course to going in caravan with a rearguard and all that,’ Bourbon started to explain. ‘But listen here, there’s a concrete minus to that too. I used to be afraid. And forget three people, we used to not go anywhere without at least five people. You think it helped? Doesn’t help in the least. Once we were moving a cargo and so we had protection: two in front, three in the middle and a rearguard – everything as it should be. We were going from Tretyakovskaya to what’s it called… used to be called Marxistskaya. The tunnel was OK. But something about it I didn’t like straight away. A certain decaying… And there was a fog. You couldn’t see for shit, not five paces ahead – and the flashlights didn’t help much. But we decided to tie a rope to the rearguard’s belt, drawn from the belt of one of the guys in the middle, and up to the commander at the head of the group. So no one would get lost in the fog. And we’re moving at an easy pace, and everything’s normal, quiet, there was no need to rush, we hadn’t encountered anyone yet (touch wood) and we have about forty minutes to go… Though we did it faster than that in the end…’ His words twisted and he went silent for a little while.
‘Somewhere in the middle, this guy Tolyan asks the rearguard something. But the guy doesn’t answer. Tolyan waited and asked again. Nothing. Tolyan then pulls on the rope and the end of it appears. It’s been bitten right through. Really – bitten through and there’s even some wet gunk on the end of it… And the guy is nowhere to be seen. And they didn’t hear a thing. Nothing at all. And I was walking with Tolyan myself. He showed me the end of the rope and my knees quaked. Of course we shouted back at him for the sake of it but didn’t hear anything. There wasn’t anyone there to answer. So we exchanged glances – and went forward so that we were at Marxistskaya in no time.’
‘Maybe the guy was playing a joke?’ Artyom asked hopefully.
‘A joke? Maybe. But he hasn’t been seen since. So, there’s one thing I’ve understood: if it’s your time, it’s your time and no guard’s going to help you. Only you go a little slower. And I go everywhere in a twosome, with a partner if you like, except in one tunnel – from Sukharevskaya to Turgenevskaya, which is a particular situation. If something happens then they’ll drag you out. And quickly. Get it?’
‘Got it. So, they’ll let us into Prospect Mir? I still have this thing…’ Artyom pointed to his machine gun.
‘They’ll let us onto the radial. But to the Ring – definitely not. They wouldn’t let you in anyway, and with that cannon you don’t have a hope. But we don’t need to get in there. We don’t need to hang around there for much time anyway. We’ll just make a stop and then go on. You… have you ever been to Prospect Mir?’
‘Only when I was little. But otherwise not,’ Artyom admitted.
‘Well, why don’t I get you up to speed then? Basically, there aren’t any guard posts there, they don’t need them. There’s a market there, and no one lives there so everything is fine. But there’s a passage there to the Ring, which means to the Hansa… A radial station which doesn’t belong to anyone, but the Hansa soldiers patrol it, to keep order. Therefore you have to behave yourself, got it? Or else they’ll send you to hell and they’ll deny you access to all their stations. So when we get there, you crawl onto the platform and sit quietly. And that samovar of yours,’ he nodded at Artyom’s machine gun, ‘don’t go waving it around. I have a… I have to sort something out with someone so you’ll have to sit and wait. We’ll go to Prospect, we’ll have a talk about how to get through that damn passage to Sukharevskaya.’
Bourbon went silent again and Artyom was left to himself. The tunnel wasn’t too bad here, the ground was a little damp, and there was a dark, thin stream following the rails, headed in the same direction as they were. But, after a while, there was a quiet rustle and squeaking sound which sounded to Artyom like a nail scratching along glass and it made him wince in aversion. The little beasts weren’t visible yet but their presence could already be felt.
‘Rats!’ Artyom spat out the vile word, feeling a chill pass along his skin. They still visited his nightmares, although his memories of that terrible dark moment when his mother and their entire station were drowned in a flood of rats were almost erased from his memory. Were they actually erased? No, they had just gone deeper, like a needle that wasn’t pulled out but gets stuck in the body. It travels around, having been pushed in by an insufficiently trained doctor. At first it will hide and stay still but after a time an unknown force will set it in motion and it will make its pernicious way through the arteries, the nerve ganglions, ripping up vital organs and dooming its carrier to intolerable torment.
The memory of that time, of the blind fury and insatiable cruelty of those beasts, of the experiences of horror that the steel needle left deep in his subconscious only came to disturb Artyom at night. And the mere sight of them, even the vague smell of them, created a sort of electrical discharge in him, forcing his body to shudder in reflex. For Artyom and for his stepfather, and maybe for the other four who escaped with them on the trolley that day, rats were something much more frightening and loathsome than for the other inhabitants of the metro.
There were almost no rats at VDNKh: there were traps everywhere and poison had been spread around so Artyom had become unused to them. But they swarmed through the rest of the metro, and he’d forgotten about that or, rather, avoided thinking about it when he had taken the decision to go on this journey.
‘What’s up boy – you afraid of rats?’ Bourbon inquired maliciously. ‘Don’t like them? You’re painfully spoilt… but get used to it. They’re everywhere… But that’s OK, it’s good even: you won’t go hungry,’ he added and winked while Artyom was starting to feel nauseous. ‘But really,’ Bourbon continued seriously, ‘you’re better to be afraid where there’s no rats. If there’s no rats then there’s been some bad trouble. And if there’s no people either then you want to be afraid. But if the rats are running then everything’s normal. Business as usual. Get it?’
There’re people and there’re people and Artyom definitely didn’t want to share his suffering with this guy. So he nodded and didn’t say anything. There weren’t that many rats, and they ran away from the light of the flashlight and you hardly noticed them. But all the same one of them managed to get underfoot and Artyom stepped on something soft and slippery only to hear a shrill squeal. Artyom lost his balance and almost fell face down with all his equipment…
‘Don’t be afraid boy, don’t be afraid,’ Bourbon cheered him up. ‘It gets worse. There’s a couple of passages in this shit-hole teeming with them and you have to walk on the rails. And you’re walking and crunching them underfoot.’ And he snorted meanly for effect.
Artyom frowned. He was silent but he was squeezing his fists. He would have punched Bourbon right in his grinning face with pleasure!
Suddenly an indecipherable din came from far off and Artyom immediately forgot the insult and clasped the handle of his automatic weapon and looked at Bourbon questioningly.
‘Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. We’re coming up to Prospect,’ Bourbon reassured him and patted him patronizingly on the shoulder.
Even though he’d warned Artyom that there were no guard posts at Prospect Mir, this was all very unusual for Artyom – to just go straight into another station without first seeing the weak light of a fire designating the border, wi
thout any obstacles along the way. When they got to the tunnel’s exit, the din got louder and a glow of light became noticeable.
Finally, there were some cast-iron stairs to the left and a little bridge which took you up to the level of the platform. Bourbon’s boots rattled up the iron steps and after a few steps the tunnel turned to the left and opened up and they were in the station.
There was a bright white beam of light in their faces: invisible from the tunnel, there was a little table on the side at which sat a man in a strange and unfamiliar old-fashioned, grey uniform, wearing a peak cap.
‘Welcome,’ he greeted them, averting the flashlight. ‘Trading or transit?’
While Bourbon stated the purpose of their visit, Artyom peered at the Prospect Mir metro station before him. On the platform, along the pathways, twilight reigned, but there were arches lighted from the inside with a soft yellow light from which Artyom unexpectedly felt a squeeze in his chest. He wanted to be done with all the formalities and to look at what was going on in the station, there, where the arches were, from which this light was coming, so familiar and comforting that it almost hurt. And though it seemed to Artyom that he hadn’t seen anything like it before, the sight of this light brought him back to the distant past and suddenly a strange image appeared to him: a small home, flooded with warm yellow light, a woman is half-reclined on a wide ottoman and she is reading a book but you can’t see her face amidst the pastel wallpaper and the dark blue square of the window… The vision flashed in front of his mind but melted a second later, leaving him puzzled and excited. What had he just seen? Could it be that the weak light coming from the station could project an old slide of his childhood that had been lost in his subconscious onto an invisible screen? Could that young woman who was peacefully reading a book on the spacious and comfortable ottoman be his mother?
Artyom impatiently thrust his passport at the customs officer after agreeing, despite Bourbon’s objections, to put his machine gun in their storage room for the duration of his visit. Then Artyom hurried along, attracted to the light behind the columns like a moth, towards the light and the din of a bazaar.
Prospect Mir was different from VDNKh, from Alekseevskaya, from Rizhskaya. The prosperity of the Hansa meant that they had better illumination than the emergency lights that gave light to the stations that Artyom had known during his conscious life. No, these weren’t the same lamps that lighted the metro in the old days, they were weak, glowing lights which hung overhead every twenty feet, drawn along a wire that went across the whole station. But for Artyom, who was used to the cloudy-red emergency glow, to the unreliable light of fires, to the weak radiance from tiny pocket flashlights illuminating the inside of tents, the light at this station was totally strange. It was the same light that lit his early childhood, as far back as the time when life was at the surface, and he was charmed to be reminded of something that had long ago ceased to exist for him. So, arriving at the lighted part of the station, Artyom didn’t rush into the rows of traders like the others but leant his back against a column and, partly covering his eyes with his hand, he stood and looked at the lamps, again and again, until there was a sharp pain in his eyes.
‘You what – gone crazy or something? Why are you staring at them so hard – you want to lose your eyes? You’ll be as blind as a puppy, and what’ll I do with you?’ Bourbon’s voice resounded in Artyom’s ears. ‘You’ve already gone and given them your balalaika, so you might as well go and have a look around… at what the lamps are trying to show you!’
Artyom cast a hostile look over at Bourbon but he obeyed him anyway.
There weren’t all that many people at the station but they spoke so loudly, trading, beckoning, demanding, trying to out-yell each other, that it became clear why it was all so audible from afar, from the approach to the tunnel. On both tracks there were scraps of train structures – and some wagons were converted for habitation. Two rows of trays were arranged along the platform that displayed various utensils – some in orderly piles, others in sloppy heaps. On one side of the station there was an iron curtain which stood in the place where there was once an exit to the surface, and on the opposite side there was a line of grey bags which clearly demarcated a line of firing positions. An unnaturally white banner hung from this ceiling on which was painted a brown circle, the symbol of the Ring. Beyond the firing line were four escalators, which led to the Ring circuit, and that’s where the territory of the powerful Hansa began (which was closed to foreigners). The frontier guards beyond the fences were dressed in waterproof overalls with the usual camouflage, but for some reason they were grey in colour.
‘Why do they have grey camouflage?’ Artyom asked Bourbon.
‘They’re fat animals, that’s why,’ he answered contemptuously. ‘You, now… You go ahead and look around while I do a little trading here.’
There was nothing of particular interest to Artyom. There was tea, sticks of sausage, storage batteries for lamps, jackets and raincoats made from pig skin, some tattered books, most of which were pornography, half-litre bottles of a suspicious looking substance with the inscription ‘home-brew’ written on crooked labels. And there really wasn’t one trader selling weed which you used to be able to get hold of anywhere. Even the gaunt little man with the blue nose and watery eyes who was selling the dubious home-brew told Artyom to get lost when he asked if he had a little ‘stuff’. There was a trader selling firewood, knotty logs and branches that some stalker had brought down from the surface. It was said to burn for a long time and produce little smoke. Here you paid for things in dimly gleaming Kalashnikov cartridges. A hundred grammes of tea was five cartridges; a stick of sausage was fifteen cartridges; a bottle of home-brew was twenty. They fondly called them ‘little bullets’: ‘Listen, man, look at this, what a cool jacket, it’s cheap, just thirty little bullets – and it’s yours! OK, twenty-five and you’ll take it now?’
Looking at the neatly arranged rows of ‘little bullets’ on the counters, Artyom recollected the words of his stepfather: ‘I once read that Kalashnikov was proud of his invention, that his automatic weapon was the most popular gun in the world. They say that he was particularly happy that thanks to his device the borders of his homeland were kept safe. I don’t know, if I had invented that thing I think I would have gone mad. To think that most murders have been committed with the help of your device! That’s even scarier then being the inventor of the guillotine.’
One cartridge – one death. Someone’s life removed. A hundred grammes of tea cost five human lives. A length of sausage? Very cheap if you please: just fifteen lives. A quality leather jacket, on sale today, is just twenty-five so you’re saving five lives. The daily exchange at this market was equal in lives to the entire population of the metro.
‘Well, so, did you find anything for yourself?’ Bourbon came up and asked.
‘Nothing interesting here for me.’ Artyom brushed the question away.
‘Aha, you’re right, it’s full of garbage. But, boy, this little station used to be the one place in this stinking metro station where you could find everything you want. You go there and they’re all vying with one another: weapons, narcotics, girls, fake documents.’ Bourbon sighed dreamily. ‘But these cretins,’ he nodded at the Hansa flag, ‘have made this into a nursery school: you can’t do this, you can’t do that… OK, let’s go and get your hoe – we need to keep going.’
After getting Artyom’s machine gun, they took a seat on the stone bench before entering the southern tunnel. It was murky there, and Bourbon had picked this spot especially in order to get their eyes used to the weaker light.
‘Basically, this is the deal: I can’t vouch for myself. I’ve never done this and so I don’t know what I’m doing and if we’ll run into trouble. Touch wood, of course, but even so, if we run into something… Well, if I start snivelling or go deaf, then that should be OK. As far as I heard, everybody goes crazy in their own way. Our boys didn’t make it back to Prospect. I think that they di
dn’t get far, and we might bump into them today… So you… get ready for that, because you’re a little soft after all… And if I start to see red, I’ll shut you up. That’s the problem, you see? I don’t know what to do… Well, OK.’ Bourbon finally felt resolved after his hesitations. ‘Boy, you’re all right I guess, and you won’t shoot a guy in the back. I’m going to give you my gun while we go through this passage. Watch it,’ he warned, looking Artyom tenaciously in the eyes, ‘and don’t be funny. I have a limited sense of humour.’
He shook some rags out of his rucksack, and then carefully pulled out a machine gun that was wrapped in plastic packaging. It was also a Kalashnikov but it was cut-off like the ones held by the Hansa border guards, with a hinged butt and a short socket instead of the long one that Artyom had. Bourbon took the magazine out of it and put it back in his rucksack, throwing the rags in after it.
‘Hold this!’ he gave Artyom the weapon. ‘And don’t pack it away. It might prove useful. Though the passage looks quiet…’ And Bourbon didn’t finish his sentence but jumped onto the pathway. ‘OK, let’s go. The sooner you go, the sooner you get there.’
It was frightening. When they went from VDNKh to Rizhskaya, Artyom knew that anything could happen, but at least people went back and forth along those tunnels every day, and he knew that there was an inhabited station ahead of them where they were expected. It was just as unpleasant as it always was for anyone leaving a lighted and peaceful place. Even when they were headed for Prospect Mir from Rizhskaya, despite his doubts, he could amuse himself with the thought that ahead of him lay a Hansa station: that there was somewhere to go where he could relax in safety.
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