Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

The old man stood up, so that he wouldn’t be looking up at her from below.

After his last conversation with Sasha he’d realised that her youthfulness and inexperience created a false impression; it was as if at the strange station where they had picked her up, every year was worth two normal ones. She had a way of not answering the questions that he asked out loud, but the ones that hadn’t been asked. And Sasha only asked Homer about things that he didn’t know himself.

And it also seemed to him that if he wanted to rely on her being sincere and open – and how else could she become his heroine? – then he would have to be honest with her himself, not leave things unsaid and tell her everything he would have told himself.

‘I want people to remember me. Me and those who were dear to me. I want them to know what the world I loved was like. To hear the most important things that I learned and understood. So that my life won’t have been in vain. So that something will be left after me.’

‘Are you putting your soul into it?’ She leaned her head to one side. ‘But it’s just an exercise book. It can get burned or lost.’

‘An unreliable place for keeping a soul, right?’ Homer sighed. ‘No, I need the exercise book to line everything up in the right order, and so I won’t forget anything important before the story’s been written right to the end. After that it will be enough to tell it to a few people. And if everything goes right for me, I won’t need any paper or even a body any more.’

‘I suppose you’ve seen lots of things it would be a shame to forget forever,’ the girl said with a shrug. ‘But I haven’t got anything to write down. And I don’t need to be in your exercise book. Don’t waste paper on me.’

‘Ah, but you’re only just beginning…’ the old man began, and broke off: he wouldn’t be there. The girl didn’t respond, and Homer felt frightened that now she would clam up completely. He tried to find the right words to take everything back, but only tangled himself even more tightly in his own doubts.

‘And what’s the most beautiful thing out of everything you remember?’ she suddenly asked. ‘The most beautiful, beautiful thing?’

Homer paused, hesitating. Sharing his most intimate thoughts with a person he had known for less than two days felt strange. He hadn’t trusted Elena with this – even she thought the picture hanging on the wall in their little room was just an ordinary city view. And how could a young girl who had spent all her life underground possibly understand what he might tell her?

‘Summer rain,’ he said, deciding to try.

‘What’s so beautiful about that?’ she asked with a funny kind of frown.

‘Have you ever seen rain?’

‘No.’ The girl shook her head. ‘My father wouldn’t let me go outside. I did go out once or twice anyway, but I felt bad out there. It’s frightening without any walls around you. Rain is when water comes falling down,’ she said, just to be sure.

But Homer wasn’t listening to her any longer. He was suddenly back in that day from the distant past; like a medium who has lent his body to the spirit he has summoned, he stared into empty space and talked, on and on…

‘It was dry and very hot for the whole month. And my wife was pregnant, it was hard enough for her to breathe anyway, and then this blazing heat… In the maternity home there was just one fan for the entire ward, she kept complaining all the time about how stuffy it was. And because of her I could hardly breathe myself. I was in a terrible state: we’d tried so hard for years, but nothing worked, and now the doctors were frightening us with a miscarriage. And she was supposed to be in there so she could keep the baby, but she would have been better off lying at home. Her time had come and nothing was happening. There were no contractions, and I couldn’t keep asking my boss for the day off every day. And someone told me that if a child is carried too long, it can be stillborn. I was beside myself, I dashed straight from work to stand guard under her window. My phone had no signal in the tunnels, and I checked at every station to see if I had any missed calls. And then I got a text message from the doctor: “Call urgently”. Like a real fool, before I could find a quiet spot, in my own mind, I had my wife and the child buried already. I dialled the number…’

Homer fell silent, listening to the ringing of the phone, waiting for an answer. The girl didn’t interrupt him, saving her questions for later.

‘And they tell me: Congratulations, you have a son. It sounds so simple now: You have a son. But at that moment they gave me my wife back, raised her from the dead… and then there’s another miracle… I go up to the street – and it’s raining. Cool rain. And the air was suddenly so light and transparent. As if the city had been wrapped in dusty cellophane, and now it had suddenly been taken off. The leaves started glowing, the sky was moving at last, the houses suddenly got younger. I ran along Tver Street to a flower kiosk, and I was crying from happiness too. I had an umbrella, but I didn’t bother to open it, I wanted to get soaked through, I wanted to feel it, that rain. I can’t express it properly now. My son had been born, but it was like I’d been born again myself, and I looked at the world as if I was seeing it for the very first time. Now everything was going to be new: if anything wasn’t going right, if anything was wrong, I could fix it, everything. Now it was like I had two lives. If I couldn’t get something finished, my son would do it.

‘We had everything ahead of us. Everyone had everything ahead of them…’

The old man stopped: he was gazing at Tver Street’s ten-storey Stalin-era buildings in the pink evening haze, luxuriating in the businesslike rumble of traffic, breathing in the sweetish, fumeladen air, and he closed his eyes, turning his face to the summer downpour. When he came to his senses the raindrops were still glistening on his cheeks and in the corners of his eyes, proof of his journey back to that day.

He wiped them away quickly with his sleeve.

‘You know,’ said the girl, seeming just as embarrassed as Homer, ‘I suppose rain can be beautiful after all. I don’t have any memories like that. Can I remember yours? And if you like,’ she smiled at him, ‘I’ll be in your book. The way it ends has to depend on someone, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s still too soon,’ the doctor snapped.

Sasha simply couldn’t explain to this dry stick how important her request was to her. She filled her lungs with air for another attack, but didn’t use it: instead she just gestured with her healthy arm and turned away.

‘Never mind, be patient. But since you’re on your feet, you can take a gentle stroll.’ He gathered his instruments into a worn plastic bag and shook the old man’s hand. ‘I’ll call back in a couple of hours. My boss told me to keep an eye on things. As you realise, we’re in your debt.’

The old man put a soldier’s camouflage jacket round Sasha’s shoulders and she went out, following the doctor past the other wards of the infirmary, though a string of rooms and cubbyholes crammed with tables and beds, up two flights of stairs and through an inconspicuous low door into the vast, long hall. Sasha froze in the doorway and took a long time to pluck up the courage to step out into it. She had never come across so many people at once before; she could never have imagined that there were so many people alive in the world. Thousands of them – without masks! And all so different from each other… There were completely decrepit old people and little babies. A huge number of men – men with beards or clean-shaven, tall men and dwarfs, exhausted and drained, red-blooded and muscular. Mutilated in battle or ugly from birth, excessively handsome or attractive for some elusive reason, despite their poor looks. And just as many women – market women with broad backsides and red faces, wearing headscarves and padded jackets; and delicate, pale young women in incredibly bright-coloured clothes and elaborate beads.