And without even saying goodbye, he strode off, thrusting his permanently freezing hands into his pockets. The little old man was left stuck on his comfortable little stool, still explaining something to Artyom’s back as it moved away. But Artyom had decided to go deaf.
He blinked, and his eyes adjusted; he didn’t need to squint any more.
It had taken them longer to adjust to the light up on the surface. A year. And that was fast! Most of the inhabitants of the Metro would have been blinded, probably forever, by sunlight, even the kind that was smothered by clouds. They had lived in the dark all their lives, after all. But Artyom had forced himself to see up there. To see the world in which he had been born. Because if you can’t tolerate the sun, then how can you go back up onto the surface when the time comes?
Everyone who was born in the Metro had grown without the sun, like mushrooms. It was okay. It turned out that people didn’t need the sun, just vitamin D. You could guzzle sunlight in the form of a pill. And you could live by touch.
There wasn’t any general system of lighting in the Metro. There wasn’t any common source of electricity. They didn’t possess anything in common: It was everyone for themselves. At some stations they had learned to generate enough electricity to light things up almost as bright as they used to be. At others they had only enough for a single lightbulb burning at the center of the platform. And some were crammed full of the same blackness as in the tunnels. If someone brought light there with them in their pocket, they could pick little bits out of the void—the floor, the ceiling, a marble column; and the inhabitants of the station would came creeping toward the beam of the torch to be able to see for at least a moment. But it was better not to show yourself to them: They had learned to live perfectly well without eyes, but their mouths hadn’t grown over.
At Exhibition, life was founded on a firm basis, and the people there were spoiled: Some individuals even had small light-emitting diodes, filched from up on the surface, glowing in their tents, and for public areas there was still the old emergency lighting—lamps with red glass shades. Lighting that would have been convenient for developing photographic negatives, for instance. In the way that the image of Artyom’s soul had been slowly developed in this red light, showing through the developing fluid, making it clear that the photograph had been taken back there, up on the surface, on a bright day in May.
And then exposed, fogging it, on a different day, an overcast one in October.
“A fine story, eh, Zhen? Remember the Dark Ones?” Artyom whispered; but it was always someone else who answered him. It was always the wrong people who answered him.
“HI there, Artyom!”
“Ho, Artyom!”
Everyone greeted him. Some smiled, some frowned, but they all greeted him. Because all of them, not just Zhenka and Artyom, remembered the Dark Ones. They all remembered that story, although no one knew it.
Exhibition Station. The end of the line. His native place. Two hundred meters long, with two hundred people in that space, which was just right. Any less and you wouldn’t be able to breathe freely; any more and you wouldn’t be able to get warm.
The station had been built a hundred years ago, in the times of the former empire, out of its usual imperial materials: marble and granite. It had been conceived as a triumphal structure, like a palace, but of course it was buried in the ground, so it had turned out like a cross between a museum and a sepulcher. The ancestral atmosphere here was absolutely ineradicable, as it was in all the other stations, even the newer ones. As if the inhabitants of the Metro were grown up, but they were still sitting on the bronze knees of ancient old men and couldn’t climb down—they were held tight.
The smoke-blackened columns spread wide at their tops, and in the archways between them, ancient, threadbare army tents had been pitched with a family, sometimes two, in each one. Those families could be simply shuffled about and probably no one would notice: When you live together at the same station for twenty years—when all there is between your secrets and your neighbors’, between all the groans and all the screams, is a single layer of tarpaulin—that’s the way things are.
In some places, maybe, people would already have eaten each other—out of envy, you know, and jealousy, because God loved someone else’s children more than yours, and it was impossible to share your husband or wife with others, and space for accommodation was quite valuable enough to strangle someone for it; but not here, not at Exhibition. Here things had turned out simple and friendly somehow.
Like in a village or a commune. There weren’t any children that weren’t yours: if your neighbors had a healthy child, it was general celebration: If you had a sickly one, they would help you with the burden, each in whatever way they could. If you had nowhere to settle in, other people would move over. If you had a scrap with a friend, the cramped conditions would soon reconcile you. If your wife left you, you’d forgive her sooner or later. She hadn’t really left at all; she was still here, in this marble hall with millions of tons of earth piled up on top of it. It was just that she was sleeping behind a different piece of tarpaulin. And you would meet her every day, and not just once, but a hundred times. You would have to come to an understanding; there was no way you could imagine that she had never existed. The important thing was that everyone was alive, and beyond that … Like in a commune or in a cave.
There was a way out of here—the southern tunnel, which ran to Alekseevskaya and beyond, into the Greater Metro, but … Maybe that was the point, that Exhibition was at the end of the line. And the people who lived here were those who couldn’t go anywhere else any longer. Who needed a home.
Artyom stopped by one tent and froze. He stood there, shining his torch in through the threadbare tarpaulin, until a middle-aged woman with a puffy face came out.
“Hello, Artyom.”
“Hello, Yekaterina Sergeevna.”
“Zhenya’s not here, Artyom.”
He nodded to her. He wanted to stroke her hair, take hold of her hand. As if to say, Yes, I know, I know. I know everything really, Yekaterina Sergeevna. Or are you saying that to yourself?
“Go on, Artyom. Go on. Don’t stand here. Go over there and have some tea.”
“Right you are.”
Both ends of the station had been cut short at the escalators—they had walled themselves in and sealed up the exits, so that poisoned air wouldn’t flow in from the surface … And they could keep out visitors of various kinds. The end with the “new” exit was completely sealed off. At the other end, with the old exit, they had left an airlock for getting up into the city.
At the end with the blank wall there was a kitchen and a club. Stoves for cooking on, housewives in aprons fussing about, concocting lunch for their children and husbands; water flowed through the pipes of charcoal filters and gurgled as it ran out, almost transparent, into the tanks; every now and then a kettle would start whistling and a courier from the farms would run in to get some hot water, wiping his hands on his trousers and looking for his wife so he could grab her in someplace soft and remind her about love, and at the same time wolf down a piece of something still only half-cooked.
The stoves and the kettles, the dishes and the chairs and tables, weren’t personal property. They were communal, but people still treated them with care and didn’t damage them.
Everything, apart from the food, had been brought down from the surface: You couldn’t cobble together anything decent in the Metro. If was good that when the dead still intended to live, they had laid in all sorts of goods and equipment for future use: lightbulbs, diesel generators, wire, guns, bullets, plates and dishes, furniture—and they had had masses of clothes made. Now these could be worn like hand-me-downs from older brothers and sisters. There would be enough for a long time. In the entire Metro there were no more than fifty thousand people. And there used to be fifteen million in Moscow. That meant that everyone had three hundred relatives like that, crowding round silently, holding out their castoffs without saying a word: Take min
e, take them, take them, they’re almost new, I’ve grown out of them already.
You just had to check their things with a Geiger counter, to see if it clicked too loudly, and say thank you. Then you could wear them.
Artyom reached the queue for tea and tacked himself on at the end.
“Artyom, where are you going, like some kind of stranger? He wants to stand in the queue now! Sit down, take the load off your feet … Shall I pour you a good hot one?”
The person in charge here was Fur-Coat Dashka, a woman who was clearly about fifty, but had absolutely no desire to think about the fact. She had come to Moscow from some dump near Yaroslavl three days before the big bang. To buy a fur coat. She had bought one, and since then she had never taken it off by day or by night, not even to go to the toilet. Artyom had never laughed at her. What if he still had a piece of his own former life like that? A piece of May, or ice cream, or the shade from the poplars, or his mother’s smile?
“Yes, thanks, Aunty Dasha.”
“Enough of that ‘Aunty’ business!” she reproached him flirtatiously.” Well, how are things up on top? What’s the weather like?”
“It’s raining a bit.”
“Agh, are we going to get flooded again, then? Hear that, Aigul? Rain, he says.”
“Allah is punishing us. For our sins. Look out, or that pork of yours is going to burn.”
“Why go bringing your Allah into things like that! She always wants Allah involved straightaway! Ah, right, it is sticking a bit … How’s your Mehmet? Back from Hansa yet?”
“He’s been gone three days. Three.”
“Don’t get so worried about it …”
“I swear to you on my heart, Dasha, he’s found himself someone there! One of your kind! In sin …”
“Your kind, my kind … What are you going on about? We’re all here, Aiguliushka … All in the same boat together.”
“He’s found himself some easy lay, I swear by Allah …”
“Agh … You should give him it more often yourself … Men are like kittens, aren’t they? They keep on nuzzling until they find it …”
“What’s all this nonsense? He’s away on commercial business!” put in a little man almost as small as a child, with a face that was childish, but ravaged by alcohol: something had stopped him from growing properly.
“All right, all right, Kolya. Don’t you go covering up for your sidekicks! And you, Artyom, pay no attention to us women. There now. Blow on it; it’s hot.”
“Thanks.”
A man walked up, covered with the lines of old white scars and completely bald, but not fearsome at all because of his bushy eyebrows and smooth speech.
“Greetings to all here present, and in particular the ladies. Who’s here for tea? I’m after you then, Kolyun. Have you already heard about Hansa?”
“What about Hansa?”
“The border’s shut. As the great classic put it, ‘on came the red light, no crossing now, so sit tight.’ Five of our people are stuck in there.”
“There now, that’s it, Aigulka. Stir your mushrooms there, your mushrooms.”
“And my man’s in there. What about me? By Allah … What d’you mean, it’s closed? Eh, Konstantin?”
“They just closed it and that’s it. None of our lousy business. An order’s an order.”
“They’re fighting again, I suppose! Fighting with the Red Line again, probably, eh? I wish the whole lot of them would croak!”
“But who knows, eh, Konstantin? Who should I go to? My Mehmet …”
“It’s a preventative measure. I’ve just come from there. Some kind of quarantine on trade. They’ll open it soon. Hello.”
“Oh, hello there, dear sir. Visiting here? Who are you, where from?”
“I’m from Sebastopol. May I take a seat here?”
Artyom stopped breathing the scalding steam and looked up from the chipped white mug with a narrow gold rim. The old man had staggered all the way here, looking for him, and was now studying him stealthily out of the corner of his eye. So all right. Artyom couldn’t run away from him.
“So how did you sneak through to us, Granddad? If they’ve closed everything?” asked Artyom, challenging the old man with a direct stare.
“I was the last to slip through,” the old man said without flinching or batting an eyelid.” They closed the border just behind me.”
“We could live our lives well enough without them, without that Hansa! But let them try living without our tea, without our mushrooms, the spongers! We’ll get by with the help of God.”
“They’ll open it, you say! But what if they don’t? What about my Mehmet!”
“You go and talk to Sukhoi, Aigulka. He’ll have your Mehmet out of there in no time. He’ll not abandon him. How about some tea? Have you tried ours before?”
“I won’t say no,” the self-styled Homer replied, waggling his beard.
He sat there facing Artyom, sipping their local mushroom infusion, which was proudly but groundlessly called tea—all the genuine tea had been drunk ten years ago, of course—and waiting. Artyom waited too.
“Who’s waiting for hot water?”
Artyom’s heart leapt into his throat. Anya had walked up. She stood there with her back to him, as if she hadn’t even noticed him.
“Working today, Anyut?” Fur-Coat asked, immediately trying to draw her into conversation and wiping her hands on her balding fur pockets.” The mushrooms?”
“Yes,” said Anya, still with her back to everyone, determined not to turn round. So she had noticed everything.
“Hard on the waist, eh? All that bending.”
“It’s killing me, Aunty Dasha.”
“Mushrooms aren’t pigs,” slant-eyed, thickset Aigul declared with a disapproving sniff.” Has to bend, does she? You try puddling about in shit!”
“You puddle about in it. Everyone chooses work to suit their own taste,” Anya retorted in an even voice.
Her voice was even, but Artyom knew it was precisely when she spoke in that calm way that she could lash out. She could do anything at all, she’d been well taught. With a father like that.
“Stop quarrelling, girls,” purred Konstantin with the slash scars.” All professions are necessary, all professions are important, as the great classic wrote. Without mushrooms, what would we feed the pigs?”
The champignon mushrooms grew in one of the two caved-in northern tunnels that used to lead to the Botanical Gardens Station. Three hundred meters of mushroom plantations, and then a pig farm after that. The pigs had been stuck as far away as possible, to keep the stink down. As if three hundred meters was enough to save anyone. What saved them was something different: the way human senses worked.
New arrivals smelled the vile odor of pigs for a day or two. And then they got used to it. Anya took a while to get used to it. The locals had stopped smelling anything a long time ago. They had nothing to compare it with. But Artyom did.
“It’s good if you happen to be fond of mushrooms,” he said in a clear, distinct voice, looking directly at the back of Anya’s head.” It’s easier to reach an understanding with mushrooms than with people.”
“And some people shouldn’t be so scornful of mushrooms,” she said.” There are people you can’t tell apart from mushrooms at first glance. They even have the same diseases.” Anya finally swung round towards him.” Take today, for instance. Half of my mushrooms had some kind of mold on them. Rot has set in, do you understand that? Where did it come from?”
“What kind of mold’s that?” Aigul asked in alarm.” Mold’s all we need now, Allah preserve us!”
“Tea for anyone?” Fur-Coat intervened.
“I collected a crate that size of mold,” Anya said, looking Artyom straight in the eye.” But they used to be perfectly normal mushrooms. Healthy.”
“Well, what a disaster!” Artyom said with a shake of his head.” The mushrooms have gone off.”
“Agh, what are we going to eat?” Fur-Coat asked reaso
nably.
“Of course, what kind of disaster is that?” Anya answered him in a quiet, steely voice.” Now, when no one takes the great hero and savior of the entire Metro seriously any longer—that’s a real disaster!”
“Come on, Aigulka, let’s take a breath of air,” said Fur-Coat, jerking up one painted eyebrow.” It’s getting a bit hot round here.”
“Ahem …” said Homer, getting to his feet after the others.
“No,” said Artyom, gesturing to stop him.” Right. You wanted to hear about the hero? About Artyom, who saved the entire Metro? Then listen. Listen to the truth. You think people are interested in that?”
“Because people have their own business to deal with. Real business. Work. To feed their families. And raise their children. And when certain people mope about and can’t find anything to occupy themselves and invent all sorts of bullshit for themselves, now that is a disaster.” Anya had taken up position and opened fire on him in bursts: short, short, long.
“No, the disaster is when a human being doesn’t want to live like a human being, but wants to live like a pig or like a mushroom,” Artyom replied.” When he’s only concerned about one thing …”
“The disaster is when a mushroom thinks he’s a human being,” said Anya, no longer trying to conceal her hatred.” And no one tells him the truth, in order not to upset him.”
“Is it true, there really is mold on the mushrooms?” asked Fur-Coat Dasha, who had almost decamped already.
“Yes, it’s true.”
“Oh hell!”
“Allah is punishing us!” Aigul proclaimed loudly from a distance.” For our sins! For eating pork, that’s why!”
“Go on now … Go … The mushrooms are calling …” said Artyom, shoving Anya, who had frozen on the spot.” Coughing and sneezing. ‘Where are you, mummy?’ they’re saying.”
“You useless bastard.”
“Go!”
“Mushrooms would be more use in bed.”
“Go on! Go!”
“You go. You go. Go on, clear off to where you belong, up there. Run that aerial right round the city. Tear your throat out with your wailing. There’s no one there, got that? No one. They all croaked. You amateur radio enthusiast. You useless jerk.”