Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘Oh, yes they can,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘Lots of people don’t need it at all.’

The girl put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a strange object: a little square of polythene or plastic with a design on it. Sasha held it out to Homer timidly, and yet somehow proudly, as if she were revealing a great treasure to him.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

‘You tell me,’ she said with a sly smile.

‘Well now,’ he said, carefully taking the little square from her, reading the words on it and handing it back, ‘it’s the outside package from a tea bag. With a little picture.’

‘With a painting,’ she corrected him. ‘With a beautiful painting. If not for it, I would have… turned into an animal.’

Homer looked at her, feeling his eyes filling up with tears and his breath faltering. You sentimental old fool, he thought, chastising himself. He cleared his throat and sighed.

‘Haven’t you ever gone up onto the surface, into the city? Apart from this time?’

‘Why?’ asked Sasha, putting the little packet away. ‘Do you want to tell me everything up there isn’t like it is in the painting? That things like that don’t even exist? I know all that already. I know what the city looks like – the buildings, the bridge, the river. Creepy and empty.’

‘On the contrary,’ the old man responded. ‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than that city. But you… you’re judging the entire Metro from a single sleeper. I probably can’t even describe it to you. Buildings higher than any cliffs. Broad avenues, teeming like mountain torrents. The sky that’s always bright, the glowing mist… A vainglorious city, living for the moment – like every one of its inhabitants. Crazy and chaotic. Made up entirely of contradictory combinations, constructed without any plans. Not eternal, because eternity is too cold and static. But so alive!’ He clenched his fist and then waved his arm in the air. ‘You can’t understand that. You have to see it for yourself…’

And at that moment he really believed that if Sasha went up onto the surface, the ghost of that city would reveal itself to her too; he believed that, completely forgetting that for that to happen, she would have had to know the city when it was still alive.

The old man managed to arrange things somehow, and she was allowed inside the borders of Hansa: they led her right through the station with an armed guard, as if they were taking her to be shot, all the way to the service area, where the local bathhouse was.

The only thing the two Pavelets stations had in common was the name, as if two sisters had been separated at birth and one had ended up in a rich family, and the other had been raised at a hungry way station or in the tunnels. The station on the radial Zamoskvorechie Line had turned out a bit bawdy and frivolous, but light and airy. The station on the Circle Line was low and squat, well lit and polished until it shone, making its house-proud, stingy character obvious from the very first glance. At this time of day there weren’t many people about – probably everyone who didn’t work there preferred the fairground atmosphere of the radial line station to the grave severity of the one on the Circle.

She was the only person in the changing room. Walls covered in neat yellow tiles, a floor of chipped, multifaceted stoneware slabs, little painted metal lockers for shoes and clothes, electric bulbs dangling on shaggy wires, two benches upholstered with roughly trimmed imitation leather… Everything inside her quivered in delight.

The skinny female attendant with a moustache handed her an incredibly white towel and a hard little brick of grey soap and allowed her to lock the shower cabin with the bolt. The little squares on the waffle towel and the nauseating soapy smell – it all belonged to the far-distant past, when Sasha was a commandant’s beloved, pampered little daughter. She had forgotten that all these things still existed somewhere.

Sasha unfastened her overalls that were stiff with dirt and clambered out of them as quickly as she could. She pulled off her singlet, took off her shorts and skipped over to the rust-coated pipe with its improvised showerhead. With a great effort, her fingers slipping over the scorching valve wheel, she released the hot water… It was boiling! Squeezing up against the wall to escape from the scalding spray, she twisted the other wheel. Eventually she managed to mix cold and hot in the right proportions, stopped dancing about and dissolved into the water.

And all the dust, soot, machine oil and blood flowed down through the grille of the drain with the bubbling water, along with Sasha’s and other people’s weariness and despair, guilt and anxiety. It was quite a while before the water ran clear.

Would this be enough for the old man to stop teasing her, Sasha wondered, examining her pink, steamed feet as if they belonged to someone else and studying her unfamiliar white palms. Would it be enough for men to notice her beauty? Perhaps Homer was right and it was stupid of her to go to the wounded man without tidying herself up first? She would probably have to learn about that kind of thing.

Would he notice how Sasha had changed? She screwed in the valve wheels, shuffled through into the changing room and opened the mirror she had been given… Yes, it was impossible not to notice it.

The hot water had helped her loosen up and overcome her doubts. The man with the shaved head hadn’t been trying to rebuff her with his strange words about the monster. He simply hadn’t come round yet, and anyway he wasn’t talking to her, he was just carrying on a violent quarrel he was having with someone else in his nightmare. She just had to wait until he surfaced, and be there with him when it happened, so that… So that Hunter would see her straight away and understand everything straight away. And what then? She didn’t have to think about that. He was experienced enough for her to leave everything up to him. Recalling how the man with the shaved head thrashed about in his delirium, Sasha felt, even though she couldn’t explain it, that Hunter was searching for her, because she could calm him, bring him relief from his fever and help him recover his balance. And the more she thought about that, the more feverish she started feeling herself. They took away her filthy overalls, promising to wash them, and gave her a pair of threadbare, light-blue trousers and a sweater with holes in it and a high neck. The new clothes felt tight and awkward – and apart from that, while they were taking her back through the frontier posts to the infirmary, almost every man’s eyes were glued to the trousers and the sweater, and when Sasha reached her own bed, she felt like taking another shower. The old man wasn’t in the room, but she wasn’t left to brood alone for long. A few minutes later the door creaked open and the doctor glanced in.

‘Well now, congratulations. You can visit him. He’s come round.’

‘What date is it?’

The brigadier propped himself up on one elbow, turning his head laboriously to peer at Homer. The old man grabbed at his wrist for some reason, although it was a long time since he had last worn a watch, and shrugged.

‘The second. The second of November,’ the orderly prompted him.

‘Three days,’ said Hunter, slipping down onto the pillow. ‘Three days I’ve been lying here. We’re behind schedule. We have to go.’

‘You won’t get very far,’ said the orderly, trying to reason with him. ‘You’ve got hardly any blood left in you.’

‘We have to go,’ the brigadier repeated, ignoring him. ‘We’re running out of time… The bandits…’ He suddenly broke off. ‘Why do you need the respirator?’

The old man had been preparing for that question; he’d had three whole days to draw up his lines of defence and plan a counter-offensive. Hunter’s unconscious state had spared him the need for superfluous confessions, and now he could replace them with well-considered lies.