What if Artyom told him, explained?
What did he know about the Metro, Svyatoslav Konstantinovich? What Bessolov had ladled out for him. He’d probably had half the truth stuffed down his throat too. There was no way a hero could feel happy about changing into a roly-poly toy in a wheelchair—and not even in order to save the Metro, but because he hadn’t been trusted with the second half of the truth!
A plastic-bottle raft was bobbing about at the far end of the platform, with a drunken railway man sound asleep beside it. Artyom looked round and gathered his thoughts. Sail through the flooded Reich—it couldn’t be flooded right up to the ceiling, could it?—and he’d be at Polis. Demand to talk to Miller. Tell Miller everything that he didn’t know, give him the rest of the truth. If Miller didn’t come over to Artyom’s side, at least he could let Artyom’s people go.
As he walked towards the raft, he picked up a pig-fat lamp in some whorehouse. Not a torch, but at least it would provide some sort of glimmer in the tunnel. He sneaked up to the raft and prodded the sleeping man with the toe of his lackey’s shoe—like a log.
He untied the flimsy vessel, jumped onto it, and set off into the pipe on the murky water. Instead of an oar—a ladle on a stick; row with it on one side, then on the other. The raft was swung round on the water. It was reluctant to go back, but it crept into the blackness anyway. The lamp only lit up one step ahead—even the ladle reached further than that. The tunnel ran downwards and the water rose upwards; the ceiling sank lower, getting close to the top of Artyom’s head. Would there be enough air?
He couldn’t row standing up any longer—the ceiling wouldn’t let him—so he had to sit down.
A rat swam towards him, delighted to see dry land.
It clambered onto Artyom’s raft and sat on the edge modestly. He didn’t drive it away. He used to be afraid of rats, but he had gotten used to them a long time ago. Rats were just rats. Shit was just shit. Darkness was just darkness. A life like everyone else’s. And he wouldn’t even have noticed, just as no one else noticed, if he didn’t know there could be a different kind of life.
The lamp was the hanging kind; it tried to look not only forwards, but down, under the transparent hull.
Something splashed down there.
He thought about Sasha. Saying goodbye to her. Why didn’t Sasha want to tell people that they didn’t have to stay stuck under the ground? Why was she here herself? What made her prefer Bessolov?
There was a stink of pig fat. The rat breathed with relish.
A drowned man turned over under the raft and goggled at the lamp through the wall of bottles with his open eyes clogged with sand. He hadn’t seen light for a long time and was trying to remember what it was. He clutched at the raft from below with his fat fingers, hindering its passage, then let it go.
The ceiling moved even lower. Squatting down on his haunches, Artyom could reach the ribs of the ceiling with his hand now.
The rat thought for a moment or two—and leapt into the water. It swam towards TsvetnoI Boulevard after all, to its own kind.
Artyom stopped. He looked back: everything was just as dark there. Even darker in fact. He fumbled at his chest with one hand, but he had given the little cross back. Okay, he’d manage somehow. He asked without it.
And rowed on.
And then the water started receding.
Maybe he’d gotten past a hollow, a deep spot. The ceiling stopped pressing down on him and moved upwards, letting him breathe. Light glimmered up ahead. The lightbulbs that had climbed right up under the ceiling were trying to blink on. Apparently the generators had been protected against the flood somehow.
When he reached the station, the water turned really shallow. On the platform it was only knee-deep. But the owners were in no hurry to come back home just yet. Those who hadn’t escaped were bloating dejectedly, at a loose end. There was an intense stench that Artyom could feel all over his face.
The ground waters had washed out Darwin Station, and it had become Chekhov again. All of its cannibalistic trappings—the banners, the murals, the portraits—were floating belly-up in the liquid mud.
Never mind. They’d summon up their courage and put their house in order. They’d rebuild the menagerie. Dietrich would be there instead of Dietmar, but that was all; Yevgeny Petrovich would come back, one of the family, part of the system, even if he was a monster. Because everything had already been set up so gloriously and conveniently: This is where the little people climb in, and this is where the minced meat comes out. Like out at Balashikha. Like everywhere in the Metro.
And of course, someone would have to finish writing the history textbook for Yevgeny Petrovich. Ilya Stepanovich, probably. The teacher would have to carry the can alone, since Miller had gobbled up Homer. Never mind. Ilya Stepanovich would spell out everything the way it had to be: At Schiller he’d have a heroic defense of the station against the Reds, and the freaks at the station wouldn’t be defending, but attacking. Yes, and then some kind of soulful, uplifting finale. About the Reich being flooded due to the nefarious scheming of enemies, but not broken, and a phoenix would rise from the ashes, better than the one before.
How could Sasha sleep with this going on?
He scattered a skin of sodden paper with his ladle. Looking closer, he saw it was blurred newspapers. On some he could still read the word “Iron,” on others “Fist.” The fragments of someone’s days. They had a print shop somewhere here as well, didn’t they? Dietmar hadn’t been lying; he seriously intended to print ten thousand bricks of correct history.
The station came to an end, and the tunnel started again.
* * *
He’d thought through various ways of getting past the guard post and what lies to tell there. But he didn’t get a chance for any lies: The men on watch weren’t the scatterbrained Polis guards, but the taciturn graven images of the Order.
So they wouldn’t shoot him. He shouted to tell them that he was Artyom, on his way to see Miller. They approached him distrustfully, slapped the pockets of his jester’s outfit, and seemed to recognize him, but didn’t take off their own masks. They took the Nagant, then led him through the service corridors, in order not to disconcert the air-headed local citizens.
But they didn’t take him to Miller.
A door into some little box of a room. Bars. Guards.
They led him in and shoved him viciously in the back, like strangers.
But inside there was joy!
All alive: Lyokha, Letyaga, Homer. And even, for some reason, Ilya Stepanovich.
They complimented Artyom on not having died, on looking much fresher and on being dolled up so smartly. They laughed. And hugged each other.
He discovered that they had all been raked in back there at TsvetnoI Boulevard. After all, it was only two stations from Polis, and one of the Order’s soldiers had gone to shag the girls and recognized both Letyaga and Lyokha. They’d taken Homer and the worthless Ilya Stepanovich for good measure: They were having supper together and hadn’t split in time.
“And you—where were you?”
Artyom paused. Gathered his thoughts. He looked dubiously at Ilya Stepanovich, the Führer’s darling. And then he realized that this shouldn’t be kept secret from anyone. Secrets were their weapon, but Artyom’s was telling it like it is.
He dumped it all on them. Everything.
The bunker, the tavern, the salads, the shots of vodka, the fat drunks in suits, the antibiotics, the wax Stalin, the inexhaustible electricity, the foreign bottles—and what lay behind them: the puppets on strings, the wars of fools, the slimy affection of the security services, the necessary famine, the necessary cannibalism, the necessary skirmishes in blind tunnels. The necessary and ever-present Invisible Observers.
He told all of it to them—and himself. And he himself was surprised by the neat way everything lined up, how well it all seemed to knit together. There was nothing useless in this building of Bessolov’s, nothing inexplicable. All questions
received an answer. Apart from one: What for?
“In other words … while we chew on shit here … Down there … They … Eat sawads?” Lyokha wheezed in a sudden fit of hatred. “Dwink foweign vodka? And the meat’s pwobabwy a bit fwesher that ours … Eh?”
“And they don’t finish up their food. There are plates full of leftovers standing there. And down there … They were probably guzzling then too. Guzzling, at the precise time when we were with all the others … At Komsomol Station… . Facing the bullets.”
“Bastards,” said Lyokha. “What bastards. And medical care, you say?”
“Can’t you see for yourself? Look, they … put me back on my feet. I don’t know for how long. But! See what I mean?”
“I see. But we have a diffewent kind of medical care here, wight? The kind where they grab a man by the balls and tell him: cwawl to the graveyard yourself, man. We can’t do anything to help you with your cancer anyway. That’s the way we get tweated. Of all the wotten bastards.”
Homer stood there without saying anything. He couldn’t believe something like this with the same eager speed as Lyokha.
“But why do they tweat us wike shit, then?” the apostle asked. “If we’we in the shit, evewyone should be in the shit! There shouldn’t be some in it up their necks, while others carve up their sawads with table knives. And where is this bunker? Maybe we should flood it, eh?”
“They put a bag over my head when we left … And I was unconscious on the way there … I don’t know where it is.”
“But I’ve been there. In that museum,” said Homer. “I was there before the war. On a guided tour. Its full name was the Tagansky PCС. Protected command center. Tagansky because it was right there on Taganskaya Square. There was one entrance from the street. The old Moscow side streets, beside the Moscow River. Old mansion houses. And one mansion, with two stories, that’s really a dummy. They explained to us at the time that behind the wall there was a concrete cap, to protect the lift shaft against bombs. Twenty stories down, and there was the bunker. And yes, it was all just as you describe it. The neon light, the restaurant, the refurbishment.”
“But how do they get into the Metro?”
“There was an exit. Not just one. To a station—Taganskaya, in fact—and into a tunnel, to the Circle Line.”
“Taganskaya Station … But that’s only two stations away from Komsomol …” said Artyom. “Only two. Surely they must have heard the shouting and screaming? If we heard it even up on the surface?”
“The Invisible Observers …” Homer shook his head. “It would be better if the Emerald City had turned out to be real.”
“We can shake them out of there!” Artyom said ardently. “Force them out, drive them into the Metro. Show these creeps to the people. Let them confess for themselves. Let Bessolov confess that they’ve been lying for all these years. Let them say that there is a world on the surface and we’re just dying down here for nothing. Let them order their men to turn off the jammers. We really can pull the whole thing off! There aren’t many guards there. We just have to work out how to get inside …”
“But where did they get so much gwub fwom?” Lyokha asked.
“Depots. State storage facilities. But I think they take some from the Metro too. From Hansa … They’ve got Hansa in their pocket. They’ve got everyone in their pocket. The Reds drive their prisoners out to their construction sites, Hansa feeds them and the Order … It cleans up after them. Did you know about that? Eh, Letyaga?”
“No.” He was looking past Artyom, at the wall.
“And Miller?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We have to tell him!”
“You can tell him. You’ll get your chance.”
“Has he spoken to you? Have you seen him at all?”
“Yes. There’s going to be a court-martial. In other words, he’ll decide for himself. And Anzor will sign on the dotted line. Desertion. Basically, for that I should get … And Lyokha too. He was sort of taken on as one of us. So he has to answer for it. And now you as well. You know what the penalty is. The max.”
“Well, as for me, that wasn’t what my mama had me for. Actuawy, she pwophesied a great future …” Lyokha informed them.
“But what about you?” Artyom asked Homer. “Why did they pick you up?”
“I’m classified as a witness.” Homer shrugged. “What did I do? Miller doesn’t even remember me. Maybe they’ll let me go.”
“A witness,” Artyom repeated. “Do you think he needs witnesses? I’m not exactly a deserter either. If we don’t convince him … If he turns pigheaded … We’re all done for.”
“What about Ilya?”
Artyom turned round and looked at Ilya Stepanovich. He was sitting on the cold floor, with his eyes fixed on Artyom. Their glances met and he came to his senses.
“Is it all true? About the Reich? About Yevgeny Petrovich? About his daughter?”
“There was an envelope with photographs. I held it in my own hands. And that’s what Bessolov said. I think it’s true.”
“He ran away. The Führer. Ran away.”
“I know. Now they’re searching for him, want to bring him back. They say they’ll build a new Reich there, all of them together.”
“I had … a daughter … too,” said Ilya Stepanovich, gulping with a dry throat. “And they took her away. And … And you say he … He kept his daughter. For himself.”
Artyom nodded. Ilya Stepanovich hid behind his knees, in a shell.
“Can they really still be there?” said Homer. “Right until now? The state authorities? And they run the whole Metro?”
“Yes, they do. But that’s what makes them vulnerable. If we can smoke them out of there … Arrest them … We can let everyone out at last! Onto the surface! We can all go out. Eh?”
“Well, yes.”
“We just have to convince Miller. Explain to him how they pulled the wool over his eyes too.”
They pondered for a while. Each focused on his own thoughts, probably.
Feet scraped in the corridor. A tiny window at face height grated open. A figure appeared behind the wire grille. It wasn’t tall enough.
“Artyom!”
He shuddered. Walked over to the door. Whispered.
“Anya?”
“Why did you come here? What have you come back for? He’ll get rid of you.”
“I have to get my guys out. And I want to see your father … One more time. The last time. Talk to him. He doesn’t know everything . He won’t … He’ll change his mind. I just need to talk to him. Can you ask?”
“I can’t do anything. He doesn’t listen to me anymore.”
“I need to explain to him! You tell him that. About the Invisible Observers!”
“Listen. He’s arranged a trial. Today. There’ll be a comrades’ court instead of a court-martial.”
“A comrades’ court?” Letyaga asked with a start. “What does he want that circus for?”
“Yes, what for?” Artyom asked.
“I don’t know …” Anya said in a broken voice. “Because of me. He wants everyone to condemn you. All of you. So it’s not just his personal decision.”
“Anechka … Let him do it. A comrades’ court is good … It’s good everyone will be there. Let them listen. I’ll tell all of them. Then we’ll see who comes out on top. Don’t worry. Thanks for telling me.”
“It won’t do any good. More than half of them are from Hansa. They’ll vote the way they’re supposed to. Even if all of ours … They won’t have enough votes.”
“But we’ll give it a try. Give it a try. Thank you for coming. I was wondering how I could get to talk to the boys. And now here he himself … He’s giving me a chance.”
“Hey, Anya!” someone hissed in the corridor. “Cut it out.”
“Artyom …” The little shutter slid shut. Anya disappeared. “I …”
They took her away.
“Listen. We can do this. Letyaga? Do you hear me? If
you back me up—it will all work out.”
“How?”
“Bessolov has to come for Sasha soon. To TsvetnoI Boulevard. If we just have even a few fighting men … He always has only a couple of bodyguards with him. We’ll take him. Deliver him to the bunker. To Taganskaya Station, via KitaI Gorod. And the bunker itself has almost no defenses. If they open it … For Bessolov … From the inside …”
“You can’t decide anything with just a couple of men.”
“I thought about that. I sailed here through the Reich. The water level has already gone down. Chekhov is almost dry. And there are newspapers floating everywhere. Homer? Don’t they have a print shop there? At Chekhov Station?”
“Yes, at Chekhov,” said Homer. “In the service premises.”
“And there’s electricity there in some places. I saw it, maybe the printing press didn’t get flooded either. What if we print a leaflet instead of their little rag? Tell the people how they’re being fooled. Tell them about the Observers. About the jammers. What do you think, can the two of us handle that? Eh?”
“When I was there I … They showed it to us. To me.”
“If we can get in there … We can use their whole system … We’ll print a couple of thousand leaflets at least! And hand them out to people at Taganskaya Station. And along the way too … Read this and pass it on to someone else. At KitaI Gorod … And right there in the leaflet we’ll tell them about the bunker! Take a crowd of people to the entrance. Bessolov will open up for us, the bastard. He won’t have any choice … And that’s all! Let them tell the people the truth to their faces! Then we won’t be alone, Letyaga. And even storming the place doesn’t work immediately … The leaflets will spread round the Metro anyway!”
“Do we have to wet the people from Taganskaya Station into the bunker?” Lyokha asked. “Aw of them, weawy?”
“The more, the better. Let them take a look for themselves at the cushy life these greasy bastards have and always have had. When they see that, maybe they’ll believe all the rest. Eh? Right, Lyokha! Can we do it, granddad?”