“Children with two heads can be born to anyone in this cursed Metro of ours. Anyone!” Homer cried, jumping to his feet.” Poor, sick children. And your two-headed children here—what do you do with them?”
Ilya Stepanovich didn’t answer.
Homer didn’t say anything more either; he just breathed heavily. Artyom, who hadn’t gotten involved in the conversation, suddenly realized that the old man had turned out to be braver than him. And he suddenly wanted to kill someone for this old man, in order to be as brave as he was.
“Well now, why don’t we take a look at what our honorable historian writes in his book?” Dietmar leaned across the table, dipping his uniform jacket in the salad, and deftly grabbed the notebook out of Homer’s hands.
Artyom jumped to his feet, but Dietmar lowered his hand onto his holster.
“Sit down!”
“Stop this!” said the old man.
Narine came running in. Her face was wrinkled up, and her eyes were gleaming. It was too frightening to fight Dietmar in this little room: A stray bullet could hit anyone.
Narine huddled against her husband in fright.
“Everything’s all right, my dear.”
“Ilya Stepanovich, give me your opinion!” Keeping one hand on his holster, Dietmar handed the notebook to the teacher.
“Gladly,” the teacher said with a grin.” Right. Let’s say, the beginning then. Aha. They didn’t come back on Tuesday, or on Wednesday, or on Thursday, which had been agreed as the final deadline … Ummm. The handwriting, of course … The first guard post was standing duty. What’s this? Ah, round the clock. Listen, don’t you ever put any commas in anywhere? All right, so far it’s some kind of literary essay. Let’s try the middle … Boring … Boring … Oh! Homer—the mythmaker and painter of life—was only just being born into the world, like a bright-colored butterfly! And can you believe it, mythmaker is written with a hyphen! Myth-hyphen-maker. And that punctuation again. Agh, it’s giving me cramp in my temples. So is that how you write about yourself, colleague? Or this here … Alone against a legion of killers … She said stubbornly: I want a miracle. Oho-ho. Now that’s real pathos. But what of it? Streams started rustling … Aha, rustling. The wall’s breached, someone howled. It’s rain, she shouted. Ah! So she confuses a breach in the wall with rain. Romantic.”
Homer seemed to have lost his tongue. Artyom kept his eyes fixed on the holster.
“Well then, let’s try the end, although I think everything about your story is already clear. Softly, like a lullaby … What a hell of a mess … Aha … Homer didn’t find Sasha’s body … at Tula. And what else? The end. And about yourself in the third person again. Delightful, delightful! Here, take it!” The teacher slapped the notebook down on the wet oilcloth.” There’s nothing seditious here. Nothing but pretentious nonsense.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Homer, wiping the notebook on his trousers and stuffing it into his inside pocket.
“Ah, save it! Learn to write without mistakes first! And then you can sculpt your Iliad. You probably called yourself Homer; nobody else would have done it.”
“Fuck off,” Homer repeated stubbornly, with a sullen scowl.
“Why, half of the book is about you! What kind of damned history is that? There’s no room left for history!”
“It’s an old one. The new one will be different.”
“Well, may the new one turn out better!” Dietmar suddenly let go of his holster and picked up a shot glass.” We’ve had a row and quarreled a bit, and now that’s enough. Here’s to your new book. Eh, Ilya Stepanovich? We’ve been a bit rude with our guests … Please do forgive us. Your beautiful wife here is getting upset. As it happens, I rather like the passages that Ilya Stepanovich read out—those little passages. I’m no specialist on commas myself, but apart from that it’s all smooth enough. Forgive us, Homer Ivanovich. We got so heated because it’s a very sensitive subject. For everyone.”
“For everyone,” the teacher confirmed, placing his hand on his wife’s stomach.” What you said about children with two heads … That was simply tactless!”
“I think you understand that yourself, Homer Ivanovich? You do understand, don’t you?” Dietmar asked in a stern tone of voice.” We were tactless ourselves, but so were you. Let’s consider this incident closed, shall we?”
“Yes. All right.”
Homer raked a shot glass off the table and drained it in one.
Artyom followed his example.
“Got any tobacco?” he asked across Dietmar.
“Let’s make it my treat.”
“Smoke in the toilet, please,” said Narine.
Artyom offloaded the chicken, locked himself in the toilet, sat down on the genuine human toilet, rolled himself a cigarette with the enemy’s tobacco, struck a match, set the glowworm against the roll-up, and took a drag, quietly releasing the vicious demons from inside him. He wanted to cool off.
He remembered about the wall that was warmed by the beauty of the carpet.
He felt the nap with his hand: Was it even cool? Then what was it for? He slipped his fingers under it. There was just an ordinary wall, not cold at all. So why lie about the carpet?
Artyom finished off his roll-up in a hurry, drowned the butt in the water, and listened to see if anyone was getting killed in the room. Not so far. Dietmar was laughing, the merry fellow.
He clambered up onto the toilet bowl, felt to find out how the carpet was held up on the wall, lifted it up with an effort, and took it down.
What did he think he would find there?
A little door with a little lock that a little golden key would fit into? For the local Pinocchios the country of magic began on this side of the carpet, but what was on the other side?
There wasn’t anything. It was a bare wall. Bricks smeared with plaster. The carpet simply cheered things up a bit.
Now he had to hang the incredibly heavy carpet back up, get the little loops onto the nails. He desperately didn’t want to.
Artyom pressed his forehead and his cheek against that rough wall anyway. It didn’t help him to cool down. The roll-up had done more good.
But …
Something there … He was imagining things, wasn’t he?
He turned his head and pressed his ear against the abrasive plaster.
Behind the wall, on the other side, someone was howling quietly.
They were howling and yelling so quietly that he could hardly hear them, because it was a thick wall, but the yelling was still bestial and spine-chilling. They shut up for a second to draw air into their lungs, then started howling again. They wept, implored unintelligibly, and beseeched again. They broke off, сhoking, then screamed again. As if someone was being boiled in oil there: It was that kind of howling.
Artyom tore himself away from the wall.
What was behind it?
Schiller Station. That was the passage to Schiller Station, wasn’t it? And it was a dead end, because Schiller was being reconstructed. They’d taken the dungeons out of Tver Station and transferred them to Pushkin. So much for all the reforms.
“Hey, stalker?” Dietmar’s voice asked outside the door.
“I really had to go! I’m on my way.”
Artyom strained and lifted the incredibly heavy carpet off the floor, just hoping that the toilet bowl wouldn’t come unstuck. He just barely managed to guess where to hang it before the strength in his arms ran out.
He climbed down carefully and quietly.
The toilet was filled with impervious silence once more.
Now it was possible to shit in peace again.
* * *
“Well, how do you like the apartment?” Dietmar was loitering right outside; he must be desperate to go too.
“It’s really fantastic.”
“I can tell you in secret that there’s another one the same beside it. And it’s still free.”
Artyom stared at him.
“Social housing. They’re finishing the re
novations. They give us a quota for the soldiers. Would you like to live in one? Eh?”
“It’s my dream.”
“Well now, we could reward a hero of the Legion. As an example to the others. For a feat of valor.”
“What feat of valor?”
Dietmar blew out smoke and grinned.
“Still angry because we tweaked your old man’s nose for him? Don’t be. That was a little check. For adequacy of response. You handled it pretty well.”
“What feat of valor?”
“A little apartment with a separate toilet. Eh? Sounds good. And a military pension. You could quit all your excursions. The doctor told you, but you …”
“What do I have to do?”
The Unteroffizier shook his ash onto the floor. He ran his glance over Artyom again. Coldly. His smile had passed off, and the black mole looked like a bullet hole in his dispassionate face.
“The Reds are going to try to take Teatralnaya Station. It’s a neutral station, always has been. And that’s a sore point with them. They have Okhotny Ryad and Revolution Square, but no direct passage between them. They can only go back and forth via Teatralnaya. Our intelligence service says they’ve decided to connect them together. We can’t allow that. Teatralnaya Station is only one stretch of line away from here. The next blow will be struck at the Reich. Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“We have an operation all prepared to save Teatralnaya from them. We have to cut off the passages from Teatralnaya to Okhotny Ryad, to the Red Line. So they won’t be able to move their forces through them. There are three connecting passages. You’ll get the upper one, via the vestibule. You’ll go over the surface, along Tverskaya Street. You’ll go into the vestibule and lay a mine there. You’ll set up your radio and report. And wait for our signal.”
Artyom breathed in a chestful of the other man’s smoke.
“But why don’t you send your own men? Don’t you have any stalkers?”
“We’ve run out. Two days ago a group of four soldiers went up there on the same mission and disappeared. There’s no time to train any more. We must take urgent action. The others might be spotted at Teatralnaya. The Reds could attack at any second.”
“And the vestibule at Teatralnaya … Is it open? Not caved in?”
“You don’t know? It’s your district, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Will you do it?”
“If the old man goes with me. I need him.”
“Oh no!” The Unteroffizier smiled, and the bullet hole became a mole again.” I need him more. I need him because if you don’t get in contact in time, or you don’t blow up that fucking passage in time, or if you don’t get back here in time, then for that I’ll have to … finalize someone’s examination.”
Artyom took a step towards him.
Dietmar whistled, and the door immediately swung open with a crash. Suddenly there were three men in black uniforms in the room, automatic rifles at the ready. And they already knew where the holes would be in Artyom.
“Agree,” said the Unteroffizier.” You’ll do something great. Something truly good and necessary.”
CHAPTER 9
— THEATER —
He spat in the lenses of the gas mask and rubbed them with his finger, so that they wouldn’t steam up. Then he clicked the switch on the radio and turned it to the right frequency.
“Come in.”
“Contact in one hour. Everything must be installed already.”
“This is the surface. I can’t promise in one hour.”
“If you don’t get in touch in an hour’s time, you’ve either run out on us or croaked. Either way the old man’s dead meat.”
“You haven’t been able to contact your own men in three days. But you give me—”
“Good luck.”
Blank noise again.
He sat there for another minute, listening to it, and turned the handle. In order not to hear what? Then he closed his knapsack, pulled on the straps cautiously, got to his feet, and carried it away delicately, like an injured child. Ten kilos of explosive inside it.
He pushed open the badly scratched transparent door and clambered out into a pedestrian passage. A row of trading kiosks with no end to it in sight, all the display windows smashed, filth everywhere, everything covered in graffiti. He didn’t switch on his torch: A torch could be seen from a long way away. He wondered where the four stalkers had been taken out. Four of them. All armed. With a radio. And not one of them had managed to say a damn word on that radio.
He walked forward along the wall—past the kiosks. Who knew what they used to trade in here. Books. And smartphones, probably. There were so many of those smartphones in the Metro … All the flea markets were choked with them. They sold them by the kilogram, and they were almost all dead. People had bought them somewhere. They bought them to call their nearest and dearest. Put that tiny, flat box to your ear … and out comes your mother’s voice. Artyom had once made SukhoI buy him one like that at Peace Prospect, when he was still little. He played with it for six months, calling his mother at night from under the blanket, until the batteries acidified.
And then he made calls on the broken phone for another three years.
But now if you wanted to talk, then lug this box of tricks around with you. If only you could get through to the next world … If it could just call the next world, eh?
He walked up the steps, squinting. Twilight.
Hello, Moscow.
The world unfolded in a cross. A huge square, with ten-story buildings like the walls of a canyon, burnt and charred, Tverskaya Street crammed with rusty cars that had crashed into each other, with their doors splayed out, as if they were trying to flutter those four doors like a dragonfly’s wings, break free from the traffic jam and make their escape. Everything was gutted: seats torn out, trunks broken open. And the boulevard ring ran across Tverskaya Street: a black thicket. Naked, knotted roots reaching out along the ground towards each other from both sides, trying to close the circle, impatiently pushing aside the skeletons of the cars.
Huge advertising hoardings on the buildings. Without old people’s help there was no way to tell what they were trying to sell. Watches? Soft drinks? Clothes? Those crooked Latin letters, each the height of a man, didn’t mean anything; Artyom wouldn’t even have realized that they were advertisements if his seniors hadn’t explained that to him. Gibberish. The memories of the demented. Now the exposed roots and black branches, the wandering dogs, the tumbleweed and bones laid bare by looters could buy this gibberish.
He took a closer look at the thickets: Was there anyone there? Better not go close. The city seemed dead, but someone here had gobbled up four fully equipped soldiers. It wasn’t far to Teatralnaya Station: only a fifteen-minute walk. That’s what they’d thought too. It if hadn’t happened to them here, by the boulevards, then it must have happened somewhere up ahead.
Should he walk along the buildings or down the middle? Moving straight along the road, between the cars, he’d be too obvious. Walking along the pavement, he’d have to listen and watch all the time: The buildings might only look empty. Maybe everyone at Exhibition knew Artyom, but here …
He adjusted the hang of his automatic, took a grip on the stock, and stepped out along the pavement, past the huge, two-story-high shop windows. Everything out as far as the roadway was littered with fine debris, sprays of smashed glass, and various dummies lying there, killed—some looking like human beings and some looking like Dark Ones made of shiny black plastic, but faceless, with no noses or mouths. All lying there together. No one got away.
A ransacked jewelry shop, a ransacked clothes shop, a ransacked and burnt-out God-knows-what shop. And the same thing on the other side of the road. A fine street, Tverskaya. Good pickings. The people living in the local stations were lucky. But unfortunately there weren’t any food shops.
The buildings stood close-packed in a solid wall; and the evening sky was settling
down, laying the quilted jacket of its paunch straight onto them, making Tverskaya look like an immense tunnel, and the frozen metal torrent of the roadway looked like railway tracks to Artyom.
In the jaws at the far end of this tunnel the Museum of the Revolution flourished its towers like fangs, with the Kremlin’s fangs at one side. The stars on them were extinguished; all their bewitching power had fizzled out, leaving only their vague, black-paper silhouettes against the dirty clouds. They made a dismal sight: After all, a walking corpse is more cheerful than the ordinary kind.
And another thing: It was quiet.
Absolutely quiet, the way it never was in the Metro.
“What do you think, Zhen? The city probably used to be noisy; it must have been noisy. All these cars growling away and sounding their horns at each other! And all those people clamoring away together, because every one of them needed to say what he wanted to say more than all the others did; and the echoes from these buildings as well, like from cliffs … But they’ve all shut up now. It turned out that none of it mattered. It’s just a shame that not everyone got a chance to say goodbye. And they needn’t have bothered to say all the rest of it at all.”
And then Artyom saw something ahead.
On the pavement.
Not a shop dummy. Dummies can’t lie like that. They’re always contorted by convulsions, like tetanus: Their arms don’t bend; their legs jut out; their backs are like rigid sticks. But this one had huddled up tight like a little child. And died.
Artyom looked round quickly. No one there.
A black uniform protective suit. Clutching an automatic rifle. His helmet knocked off, lying beside him. Staring into the asphalt, into the dried-up blood. A hole in the back of his head. On a closer look, his stomach had leaked a lot too—a ribbon of blood ran across the ground. So they wounded him, then walked up and finished him as he crawled. And he was obviously in a really bad way, too busy trying not to die in order to crawl anymore, totally focused on it. He didn’t even glance back to look into the faces of the men who had shot him. And they weren’t interested either.