‘Is it really evening?’ he asked Khan, puzzled.
‘It’s evening for me,’ Khan replied pensively.
‘What do you mean?’ Artyom didn’t understand.
‘See, Artyom, you obviously come from a station where the clock works and you all look at it in awe, comparing the time on your wrist watch to the red numbers above the tunnel entrance. For you, time is the same for everyone, just like light. Well, here it’s the opposite: nothing is anyone else’s business. No one is obliged to make sure there’s light for all the people who have made their way here. Go up to anybody here and suggest just that and it will seem absurd to them. Whoever needs light has to bring it here with them. It’s the same with time: whoever needs to know the time, whoever is afraid of chaos, needs to bring their own time with them. Everyone keeps some time here. Their own time. And it’s different for everybody and it depends on their calculations, but they’re all equally right, and each person believes in their own time, and subordinates their life to its rhythms. For me it’s evening right now, for you it’s morning – and what? People like you are so careful about storing up the hours you spend wandering, just as ancient peoples kept pieces of glowing coal in smouldering crucibles, hoping to resurrect fire from them. But there are others who lost their piece of coal, maybe even threw it away. You know, in the metro, it is basically always night-time and it makes no sense to keep track of time here so painstakingly. Explode your hours and you’ll see how time will transform – it’s very interesting. It changes – you won’t even recognize it. It will cease to be fragmented, broken into the sections of hours, minutes and seconds. Time is like mercury: scatter it and it will grow together again, it will again find its own integrity and indeterminacy. People tamed it, shackled it into pocket-watches and stop-watches – and for those that hold time on a chain, time flows evenly. But try to free it and you will see: it flows differently for different people, for some it is slow and viscous, counted in the inhalations and exhalations of smoked cigarettes, for others it races along, and they can only measure it in past lives. You think it’s morning now? There is a great likelihood that you are right: there’s a roughly twenty five percent likelihood. Nevertheless, this morning of yours has no sense to it, since it’s up there on the surface and there’s no life up there anymore. Well, there’re no more people, anyway. Does what occurs above have value for those who never go there? No. So when I say “good evening” to you, if you like, you can answer “good morning.” There’s no time in this station, except perhaps one and it’s very strange: now it is the four hundred and nineteenth day and I’m counting backwards.’
He went silent, sipping on his hot tea and Artyom thought it was funny when he remembered that at VDNKh the station clock was treated as a holy thing and any failure of it immediately put anyone nearby under the hot hand of blame. The authorities would be astonished to learn that time doesn’t exist, that the thought of it had just been lost! What Khan had just described reminded Artyom of a funny thing that he had been surprised by repeatedly as he grew up.
‘They say that before, when trains used to run, in the wagons they used to announce “Be careful of the closing doors, the next stop is x,y,z, and the next platform will appear on your left or right,” ’ he said. ‘Is that true?’
‘Does it seem strange to you?’ Khan raised his eyebrows.
‘How could they tell which side the platform would be on? If I’m coming from the south to the north then the platform is on the right. If I’m coming from the north to the south then it’s on the left. And the seats on the train were against the walls of the train if I remember right. So for the passengers, the platforms were either in front of them or behind them – half of them on one side and the other half on the other with different perspectives.’
‘You’re right.’ Khan answered respectfully. ‘Basically the train drivers were only speaking for themselves because they travelled in a compartment at the front and for them right was absolute right and left was absolute left. So they must have mostly been saying it for their own benefit. So in principle they might as well have said nothing. But I have heard these words since I was a child and I was so used to them that I had never stopped to consider them.’
Some time passed and then he said, ‘You promised to tell me what happened to your friend.’
Artyom paused for a moment, wondering if he should tell this man about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Bourbon; about the noise that he had heard twice now in the last twenty-four hours; about its destructive influence on human reason; about his sufferings and thoughts when he could hear the melody of the tunnel… And he decided that if there was anyone worth telling it all to, then it would be the person who sincerely considered himself to be the latest incarnation of Genghis Khan and and for whom time doesn’t exist. So he started to lay out his misadventure in a muddled, anxious way without observing the sequence of events, attempting to convey the various sensations he felt rather than the facts.
‘It’s the voices of the dead,’ Khan said quietly after Artyom had completed his narrative.
‘What?’ Artyom asked, surprised.
‘You heard the voices of the dead. You were saying that at the beginning it sounded like a whisper or a rustle? Yes, that’s them.’
‘Which dead?’ Artyom didn’t quite understand.
‘All the people who have been killed in the metro since the beginning. This, basically, explains why I am the last incarnation of Genghis Khan. There won’t be any more incarnations. Everyone has come to their end, my friend. I don’t know quite how this has happened but this time humanity has overdone it. There’s now no more heaven and no more hell. There isn’t purgatory either. After the soul flies out from the body – I hope you at least believe in the immortal soul? Well, it has no refuge anymore. How many megatons and bevatons does it take to disperse the noosphere? It was as real as this kettle. And whatever you say, we weren’t sparing of ourselves. We destroyed both heaven and hell. We now happen to live in this strange world, in a world where after death the soul must remain right where it is. You understand me? You will die but your tormented soul won’t get reincarnated anymore and, seeing as there is no more heaven, your soul won’t get any peace and quiet. It is doomed to remain where you lived your entire life, in the metro. Maybe I can’t give you the exact theosophic explanation for why this is but I know one thing for sure: in our world the soul stays in the metro after death… It will rush around under the arches of these underground tunnels until the end of time because there isn’t anywhere for it to go. The metro combines material life with the hypostases of the other world. Now Eden and the Netherworld are here, together. We live amidst the souls of the dead, they surround us in a full circle – all those that were crushed by trains, shot, strangled, burnt, eaten by monsters, those who died strange deaths, about which no living being knows anything and won’t ever be able to imagine. Long ago I struggled to figure out where they would go, why their presence isn’t felt every day, why you don’t feel a light and cold gaze coming from the darkness… You are familiar with tunnel horror? I thought before that the dead blindly followed us through tunnels, step by step, hiding in the darkness as soon as we turn to look. Eyes are useless. You won’t see the dead with them. But the ants that run along your spine, the hair standing on end, the chill which shakes our bodies – they are all witness to the invisible pursuit. That’s what I thought before. But now your story has explained much to me. Somehow they get into the pipes, into the communication lines… Sometime a long time ago, before my father and even my grandfather was born, in the city of the dead, which lies above us, there was a little river. People who lived there knew how to lock this river and to direct it into pipes under the earth where it probably flows until today. And it looks like this time someone’s buried the River Styx itself in these pipes… Your friend was speaking not in his own words – no, it wasn’t him. Those were the voices of the dead. He was hearing them in his head and repeating them and
then they absorbed him.’
Artyom stared at Khan and could not avert his gaze from the man’s face for the duration of his monologue. Indistinct shadows skittered across Khan’s face and his eyes were flaring with some internal fire… Towards the end of the story, Artyom was almost sure that Khan was mad, that the voices in the pipes had whispered something to him too. And though Khan had saved him from death, and shown him such hospitality, the thought of staying with him for any length of time was uncomfortable and unpleasant. He needed to think about how to move on, through the most evil of all the tunnels in the metro, about which he had heard much – from Sukhareveskaya to Turgenevskaya and farther.
‘So, you’ll have to forgive me for my little lie,’ Khan added after a short pause. ‘Your friend’s soul didn’t go up to the creator, it won’t reincarnate and come back in a new form. It joined the other unhappy ones, in the pipes.’
These words reminded Artyom that he had planned to go back for Bourbon’s body, in order to bring it to the station. Bourbon had said that he had friends here, friends who would take Artyom back if they arrived successfully. This reminded him of the rucksack, which Artyom had not yet opened and in which, apart from Artyom’s machine gun, there might be something useful.
But to take it over was somehow frightening and superstitions of all kinds climbed into Artyom’s head and he decided to open it only slightly and to peek into it without touching or moving anything.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of it,’ Khan said to Artyom unexpectedly as though he could feel his trepidation. ‘The thing is now yours.’
‘I think what you did is called looting,’ Artyom said quietly.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of retribution, he won’t reincarnate,’ said Khan, not replying to what Artyom said but to what was flitting about in Artyom’s head. ‘I think that when they get taken into the pipes, the dead lose themselves and they become part of a whole, their will is dissolved into the will of the rest of them, and reason dries up. There’s no more individual. But if you’re afraid of the living and not the dead… Well, then drag this bag into the middle of the station and empty its contents onto the floor. Then no one will accuse you of thieving, and your conscience can be clean. But you tried to save the guy and he would be grateful to you for that. Consider that this bag is his repayment to you for what you did.’
He was speaking so authoritatively and with such conviction that Artyom gained the courage to put his hand into the pack and he started to take things out of it and lay them on the tarpaulin to see them in the light of the fire. There were four extra cartridges for Bourbon’s gun, in addition to the two that he had taken out when he gave the gun to Artyom. It was surprising that the trader had such an impressive arsenal. Artyom carefully wrapped up five of the cartridges he found in their cloth and put them into his rucksack and he put one in the Kalashnikov. The weapon was in excellent condition: thoroughly oiled and looked after. The lock moved smoothly, giving off a dull click when pushed and the safety catch was a bit stiff. All this indicated that the gun was practically new. The handle fitted comfortably into his hand and its shank was well polished. The weapon gave off a feeling of reliability and encouraged calmness and confidence. Artyom immediately decided that if he were to take any one thing from Bourbon it would be this gun.
The 7.62 cartridges that Bourbon had promised him for his ‘hoe’ weren’t there. It wasn’t clear how Bourbon had been planning to pay Artyom. Artyom thought about it and came to the conclusion that it may be that Bourbon hadn’t been planning to give him a thing but, having passed through the dangerous part, he would sling a shot into the back of Artyom’s head and throw him down a shaft and think no more of it. And if anyone had asked him about Artyom’s whereabouts then he would have any number of answers: anything can happen in the metro and well, the boy agreed himself to come along.
Apart from various rags, a map of the metro imprinted with notations that only its dead owner would understand, and a hundred grammes of weed, he found a few pieces of smoked meat in plastic bags and a notebook at the bottom of the rucksack. Artyom didn’t read the book and he was disappointed in the rest of the stuff. In the depths of his soul, he had hoped to find something mysterious, maybe something precious – the reason that Bourbon was so intent on getting through the tunnel to Sukharevskaya. He decided that Bourbon was a messenger or maybe a smuggler or something of the kind. This, at least, explained his determination to get through the damn tunnel at any price and his readiness to be generous. But since there was not much left in the rucksack after he’d pulled out the last pair of linen pieces, Artyom decided that the reason for his insistence had to have been something else. Artyom wracked his brains for a long while about what Bourbon needed at Sukharevskaya but he couldn’t think of anything plausible.
Then he remembered that he had left the poor man in the middle of the tunnel, left him to the rats, even though he had planned to go back and do something about the body. True, he had only a vague idea of how to give the trader his final honours and what to do with the corpse. Burn it? But you needed strong nerves for that, and the suffocating smoke and the stink of the burning meat and burning hair was sure to filter through to the station, and then he wouldn’t be able to avoid unpleasantness. Dragging the body to the station would be heavy and awful. It’s one thing to pull a man along by the wrists if you think he’s alive and you’re pushing away all thoughts of the fact that he is not breathing and has no pulse, but it’s another thing to pull along a corpse. So what, then? Just like Bourbon lied to him about his payment, he might have been lying about his friends here at the station. Then Artyom, having dragged the body back here, might just be putting himself in a worse situation.
‘So what do you do here with those that die?’ Artyom asked Khan after a long bout of thinking.
‘What do you mean, my friend?’ Khan answered a question with a question. ‘Are you talking about the souls of the deceased or about their perished bodies?’
‘About the corpses,’ Artyom growled. He was becoming fed up with his talk of the netherworld.
‘There are two tunnels that go from Prospect Mir to Sukharevskaya, ’ Khan said and Artyom thought to himself that trains went in two directions so they always needed two tunnels. So why would Bourbon, knowing about the second tunnel, want to go towards his fate? Was there an even greater danger hiding in the second tunnel? ‘But you can only go through it alone,’ the man continued, ‘because in the second tunnel, near our station, the ground sags, the floor has collapsed and now there’s some kind of deep ravine where, according to local legend, a whole train fell through the ground. If you stand on one end of this ravine, it doesn’t matter which, then you can’t see the other end, and the light of even the strongest flashlight won’t illuminate the depths. And so all sorts of blockheads say that it’s a bottomless abyss. This ravine is our cemetery. We put all our corpses in there.’
Artyom started to feel ill when he realized that he would have to go back to the place where Khan had picked him up, to drag Bourbon’s rat-gnawed body to the station and then to the ravine in the second tunnel. He tried to convince himself that throwing the corpse into the ravine was the same, in essence, as throwing it into a tunnel because you couldn’t call either one a burial. But just when he was ready to believe that leaving everything as it was was the best solution to the situation, Bourbon’s face appeared in front of his eyes with amazing clarity saying, ‘I’ve died.’ Artyom immediately was drenched with sweat. He got up with difficulty, put his new machine gun on his shoulder and said:
‘OK, I’m off. I promised him. We had an agreement. I need to.’ And with that he started to walk down the hall with stiff legs and onto the iron stairs which led down to the tunnel from the platform.
It was necessary to turn on his flashlight even before he went down the stairs. Thundering down the stairs, Artyom stopped dead for a moment, not wanting to step any further. A heavy air blew a rotting smell in his face, and for an instant his musc
les refused to obey him. He tried to force himself to take another step. When he overcame his fear and repulsion and started to walk on, a heavy palm was placed on his shoulder. He cried out in surprise and turned around sharply, his chest tight, understanding that he wouldn’t have time to grab the machine gun from his shoulder, he wouldn’t have time for anything…
It was Khan.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he said to Artyom to calm him. ‘I was just testing you. You don’t need to go. Your friend’s body isn’t there anymore.’
Artyom stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘While you were sleeping, I completed the funeral rite. You have no reason to go. The tunnel is empty.’ And, turning his back to Artyom, Khan wandered back toward the arches.
Feeling enormous relief, the young man hurried after him. Catching up to Khan in ten paces, Artyom asked him in an emotional voice:
‘But why did you do that and why didn’t you tell me? You told me yourself that it didn’t matter if he stayed in the tunnel or if he was brought to the station.’
‘For me it doesn’t matter at all.’ Khan shrugged his shoulders. ‘But to you it was important. I know that your journey has a purpose and that your path is long and difficult. I don’t understand what your mission is but its burden will be too heavy for you alone so I decided to help you a bit.’ He looked over at Artyom with a smile.
When they had returned to the fire and sat down on the creased tarpaulin, Artyom couldn’t help but ask:
‘What did you mean when you mentioned my mission? Did I say something in my sleep?’
‘No, my friend, you were silent as you slept. But I had a vision and in it I was asked to help by a person who shares part of my name. I was warned of your arrival, and that’s why I went out to meet you and picked you up, when you were crawling along with your friend’s corpse.’
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