‘Where are you from?’
None of this was of interest to Artyom, but the chatting of his unshaven neighbour helped him to fill his head. It didn’t matter what it was filling it with. He didn’t want to think about VDNKh. He didn’t want to think about the mission that he had been charged with. He didn’t want to think about what was happening in the metro. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to!
‘I’m from Kievskaya. You know it? We call it sunny Kiev . . .’ Ruslan smiled, showing a row of white teeth. ‘There are lots of my people there . . . I have a wife, children - three children. The oldest one has six fingers on his hands!’ he added proudly.
. . . Something to drink. Just a mouthful. Even if it’s tepid. he wouldn’t mind tepid water. Unfiltered even. Any water. A mouthful. And to be forgotten about again, until the escorts come to get him. He wanted an empty mind again, and not to be bothered. He wanted his head to stop spinning, to stop itching, to stop his thoughts from telling him that he’d made a mistake. He didn’t have the right to do what he did. He should have gone off. Turned his back. Covered his ears. Carried on. Made it from Pushkinskaya to Chekhovskaya. And from there it was just one transfer. So easy. Just one transfer and it would all have been done, his task completed. He would be alive.
Something to drink. His hands had become so numb that he didn’t feel them.
It’s so much easier for people to die when they believe in something! For those who believe that death isn’t the end of everything. For those in whose eyes the world is separated into black and white - who know exactly what they need to do and why, who hold the torch of an idea, of beliefs, in their hands, and everything they see is illuminated by it. Those who have nothing to doubt and nothing to regret. They must have an easy time of dying. They die with a smile on their face.
‘We had fruit big like this before! And the beautiful flowers! I give them to the girl for no money and she give me the smile . . .’ The words reached Artyom but couldn’t distract him anymore.
Steps could be heard from the depths of the hall. Several people were approaching and Artyom’s heart tightened and turned into a small nervous lump. Were they coming for him? So soon! He thought forty minutes would have lasted longer . . . Or had his devilish neighbour told him that more time was left because he had wanted to give him some hope? No, it couldn’t be . . .
Three pairs of boots stopped at his cage. Two of them were in spotted military trousers, one in black trousers. The lock made a grinding sound and Artyom only just managed not to fall over as the cage door he was leaning on opened.
‘Pick him up,’ someone said . . .
He was grabbed under the arms and he soared towards the ceiling.
‘Break a leg!’ Ruslan wished him, as a parting gesture.
There were two machine gunners, but not those that he’d talked to. However, these were just as anonymous looking. A third guy with a bristling moustache and watery blue eyes was wearing a black uniform and a small beret. ‘Follow me,’ he ordered and they dragged Artyom to the other end of the platform. He tried to walk himself. He didn’t want them to drag him like he was a helpless doll . . . If he had to leave this life, he wanted to do it with pride. But his legs wouldn’t obey him, they buckled, and he could only clumsily place them on the floor, hampering the forward motion so that the man in the black uniform looked at him severely.
The cages didn’t continue to the end of the hall. The row was interrupted in the middle where the escalators to the next level down were situated. There, in the depths, torches were burning and ominous crimson light reflected on the ceilings. There were cries of pain coming from below. Artyom suddenly had a thought about the underworld and he felt a certain relief when they had led him past the escalators. From the last cage, someone yelled to him, ‘Farewell my friend!’ But Artyom didn’t pay him any attention. He could only see a glass of water looming before his eyes.
On the opposite wall there was a guards observation post, a roughly knocked-together table with two chairs and there was a sign with that symbol which said no entry for black people. He couldn’t see any gallows anywhere and, for a moment, Artyom had the crazy hope that they had only wanted to scare him and that they weren’t really leading him to his hanging but they were taking him to the end of the station so that he could be let go without the others seeing it.
The man with the moustache, who was walking ahead, turned at the last archway, towards the pathways, and Artyom began to believe in his rescue fantasy even more strongly . . .
There was a small platform on wheels standing on the rails, and it was arranged in such a manner that its floor was level with the station floor. There was a thickset man in a spotted uniform, checking a loop of rope that was hanging from a hook screwed into the ceiling. The only difference between him and the others was that his rolled up sleeves showed powerful forearms, and he had a knitted hat pulled over his head with holes cut into it for his eyes.
‘Is everything ready?’ the man in the black uniform said and the executioner nodded at him.
‘I don’t like this construction,’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t we use the good old stool? Then it’s - pow!’ He punched his fist into his other palm. ‘Break his neck! But with this thing . . . While he’s choking, he’ll squirm like a worm on a hook. And when they choke, there’s so much to clean up afterwards! There’s like guts everywhere . . .’
‘Enough!’ the man in the black uniform said. Then he took the executioner aside and furiously hissed something at him.
As soon as their superior had stepped away, the soldiers quickly went back to their interrupted conversation.
‘So?’ the one on the left impatiently asked the one on the right.
‘OK, so,’ the one on the right whispered loudly, ‘I pushed her up against the column and shoved my hand under her skirt and she turned all soft and said to me . . .’ But he didn’t manage to finish because his superior had returned.
‘Never mind the fact that he’s Russian - he transgressed! . . . The traitor, the turncoat, degenerate, and traitors should be painfully punished!’ He was encouraging the executioner.
They untied his hands, and took off his jacket and jumper so that Artyom stood there only wearing his dirty undershirt. Then they tore the cartridge case that Hunter had given him off the string around his neck. ‘A talisman?’ the executioner inquired. ‘I’ll put it in your pocket, it might still come in handy.’
His voice was far from evil, and it was curiously soothing.
Then they pulled his hands together behind his back and pushed Artyom onto the scaffold. The soldiers remained on the platform since they weren’t needed. He couldn’t escape anyway since it required all the strength Artyom had just to stand there while the executioner fitted the loop over his head. To stand up, not fall and make no noise. Something to drink. That’s all that he could think about. Water. Water!
‘Water . . .’ he croaked.
‘Water?’ The executioner threw up his hands in disappointment. ‘Where am I going to get you any water now? It’s not possible, my dear, we’re already way behind schedule - now just be patient, not long now . . .’
He jumped off onto the path with a thud and spat on his hands before taking up the rope attached to the scaffold. The soldiers were lined up and their commander had assumed a significant and even solemn look.
‘As an enemy spy, who has viciously betrayed his people,’ he began.
In Artyom’s head there was a dance of thought fragments and images that said wait, it’s too early, I haven’t yet managed to do what I had to do, and then Hunter’s strict face appeared before his eyes and disappeared immediately in the crimson twilight of the station, then Sukhoi’s tender gaze appeared and vanished too. Mikhail Porfirevich . . . ‘You will die’ . . . the dark ones . . . they can’t . . . Wait! And over all this, interrupting his memories, the words, his desires, shrouding them in a stuffy dense haze, hung a great thirst. Something to drink . . .
‘ . . . degenerate, who
discredits his own nation . . .’ the voice continued to burble.
Suddenly there were shouts in the tunnel and a burst of machine gun fire, and then a loud bang and everything went quiet. The soldiers grabbed their machine guns. Their superior in black turned nervously and quickly said, ‘Punishment by death. Go ahead!’ And he gave the signal.
The executioner grunted and pulled the rope, planting his feet on the cross-ties. The boards slipped away from Artyom’s feet, though he tried to keep touching them, so that he could stay on the scaffold, but they moved further off and it was getting harder and harder to stand. The rope was dragging him back, towards death, and he didn’t want it, he didn’t want to die . . .
Then the floor slipped out from under him and the loop tightened from the weight of his body. It squeezed his neck, cut into his windpipe, and a rattle issued from his throat. His sight lost its sharpness, and everything was twisted inside him. His body was begging for air, but he couldn’t inhale, no matter what he tried, and his body started to coil, convulsively, and there was an awful tickling feeling in his stomach. The station clouded with a poisonous yellow smoke and gunshots roared nearby, and then he lost consciousness.
‘Hey, hangman! Come on, come on now. Don’t pretend. We’ve felt your pulse so you can’t feign death.’ And he was hit across the cheeks, bringing him round.
‘I refuse to do mouth-to-mouth on him again!’ the other person said.
This time Artyom was absolutely sure that it was a dream, the last seconds of unconsciousness before the end. Death was so close, and the moment her iron fist closed around his neck was as indisputable as the moment the floor fell away from underneath him and he hung over the rails.
‘That’s enough blinking, you’ll be fine!’ the first voice insisted. ‘We got you out of the loop so you could enjoy life again and you’re rolling all over the floor on your face!’
Someone shook him hard. Artyom shyly opened an eye and then closed it, having decided that he was probably in the process of dying prematurely and that the afterlife had already begun. A being was leaning over him and it looked a bit like a person but it was so unusual looking that it reminded Artyom of Khan’s calculations about where souls go when they are separated from their transitory bodies. The skin of the being was a matte-yellow, which you could even see in the light of a lantern nearby, and instead of eyes, he had narrow slits, as though a sculptor who was sculpting a person out of a tree had almost finished the face, but had only made an outline of the eyes, and he forgot to chip open the eyes so it could look out onto the world. The face was round with high cheek bones and Artyom had never seen anything like it.
‘No, this is not working,’ someone declared resolutely from above and they sprayed water in his face.
Artyom swallowed it convulsively and stretched out his hands for the bottle. At first he just held onto the neck of the bottle and only after that did he get up and look around.
He was rushing through a dark tunnel with head-spinning speed, lying on a section car that was no less than two metres long. There was a light smell of burning in the air, and Artyom thought with astonishment that it must be fuelled with petrol. There were four people apart from him sitting on the section car, and there was a big, brown dog with a black undercoat. One of them was the guy who had hit Artyom across the cheeks. There was a bearded guy in a hat with ear-flaps that had a red star sewn onto it and onto his quilted jacket too. He had a long machine gun dangling down his back, one just like the ‘hoe’ that Artyom had before, but there was a bayonet-knife screwed onto its barrel. The third person was a big fellow whose face Artyom didn’t see at once but when he did, he almost jumped off the car: his skin was very dark. Artyom looked at it a bit more and calmed down. He wasn’t a dark one, his shade of skin wasn’t the same as theirs - and he had a normal, human face with slightly out-turned lips and a flattened nose like a boxer’s. The last guy had a relatively regular appearance but he had a beautiful brace face and a strong chin - which reminded him of something on a poster at Pushkinskaya. He was dressed in a beautiful leather coat, which was tied with a wide belt with two rows of holes in it and an officer’s sword belt, and from the belt hung a holster of impressive size. There was a Degtyaryov machine gun at the back of the section car and a fluttering red flag. When a beam from the lantern accidentally fell on the flag, he could see that it wasn’t really a flag but a ragged piece of material with the red and black face of a bearded man on it. All this seemed more like some kind of terrible delirium than the miraculous rescue that Hunter had made for him when he ruthlessly cut his way through Pushkinskaya.
‘He’s regained consciousness!’ the narrow-eyed man said joyfully. ‘So, hangman, what did they get you for?’
He spoke totally without accent, his pronunciation was no different than Artyom’s or Sukhoi’s. That was very strange - hearing pure Russian speech from such an unusual being. Artyom couldn’t shed the feeling that this was some kind of farce and the narrow-eyed man was only moving his lips while the bearded guy or the man in the leather coat spoke from behind him.
‘I shot one of their officers,’ he admitted reluctantly.
‘Well, good for you! You’re just the kind we like! That’s what they deserve!’ the man with the high cheek bones said enthusiastically, and the big, dark-skinned guy who was sitting at the front turned to Artyom and raised his eyebrows respectfully. Artyom thought that this guy must mispronounce words.
‘That means we didn’t create such a scene for nothing.’ He smiled broadly. He also had a flawless accent, so that Artyom was confused and now didn’t know what to think.
‘What’s your name, hero?’ the handsome man in leather asked him and Artyom introduced himself.
‘I’m comrade Rusakov. This is comrade Bonsai.’ He pointed to the narrow-eyed man. ‘This is comrade Maxim.’ The dark-skinned one grinned again. ‘And this is comrade Fyodor.’
The dog came last. Artyom wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been called ‘comrade’ too. But the dog was simply called Karatsyupa. Artyom shook their hands one by one, the strong, dry hand of comrade Rusakov, the narrow, firm palm of comrade Bonsai, Maxim’s black shovel of a hand and the fleshy hand of comrade Fyodor. He earnestly tried to remember all their names especially the hard to pronounce ‘Karatsyupa.’ But it seemed that they called each other different names anyway. They addressed the main guy as ‘comrade commissar,’ and the dark-skinned one they called Maximka or Lumumba, the narrow-eyed one was simply ‘Bonsai’ and the bearded one with the hat with ear-flaps they called ‘Uncle Fyodor.’
‘Welcome to the First International Red Fighting Brigade of the Moscow Metropolitan in the name of Ernesto Che Guevara!’ comrade Rusakov triumphantly announced.
Artyom thanked him and fell silent, looking around. The name was very long and the ending of it generally blended into something quite unclear - for a while, the red colour had had an effect on Artyom not unlike its effect on a bull and the word ‘brigade’ was associated for him with Zhenya’s stories about the gangster lawlessness somewhere near Shabolovskaya. Most of all, he was intrigued by the face trembling on the cloth in the wind and he timidly asked:
‘And who have you got there on your flag?’ At the last second he decided on the word ‘flag’ having almost said ‘rag.’
‘That, my brother, is Che Guevara,’ Bonsai explained to him.
‘Which chegavara?’ Artyom hadn’t understood, but seeing rage fill Rusakov’s eyes and the mocking smile on Maximka’s face, he figured out that he’d done something foolish.
‘Comrade. Ernesto. Che. Guevara.’ The commissar rapped the separate syllables. ‘The great. Cuban. Revolutionary.’
Now the sounds were all more distinct though it still wasn’t intelligible to Artyom, but he decided to widen his eyes enthusiastically and say nothing. After all, these people had saved his life, and angering them right now with his ignorance would be impolite.
The tunnel’s soldered ribs flashed past fantastically quickly,
and during the length of their conversation they had already managed to fly through one half-empty station and stopped in the twilight of the tunnel beyond it. Here, at the side, there was a little dead-end off-shoot where they could stop.
‘Let’s see if the fascist reptiles dare to go after us,’ said comrade Rusakov.
Now they had to whisper very quietly because comrades Rusakov and Karatsyupa were attentively listening for sounds coming from the darkness.
‘Why did you do it? I mean, rescue me?’ Artyom asked, trying to choose the right word.
‘It was a planned sortie. Some information arrived,’ explained Bonsai, smiling mysteriously.
‘About me?’ Artyom asked in the hope that he could believe Khan’s words about his special mission.
‘No, just in general.’ Bonsai made an indistinct gesture. ‘We heard they were planning some kind of atrocity. So comrade commissar decided we had to stop it. Besides, it’s our mission - to bother them constantly.’
‘They haven’t put up road blocks on this side, not even a bright torch, just a few outposts with simple fires,’ Maximka added. ‘We ran over them straight away. Sadly, we had to use the machine gun. But then, there was the smoke bomb, we had gas masks and we took you, our home-grown SS man, and went back.’
Uncle Fyodor, silent and smoking some kind of weed in a pipe, the smoke from which started to make his eyes tear up, suddenly said, ‘Yes, my young friend, it’s good that you were appropriated. Do you want a little brew?’
And picking up a half-empty bottle of some kind of murky swill from an iron box, he shook it and offered it to Artyom.
It was going to take a lot of bravery to take a sip. It went down like sandpaper but he felt as though a vice that had been clamped inside him this last twenty-four hours had relaxed.