Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

What else?

‘Is it true?’

‘What exactly?’ Leonid asked her with a smile.

‘About the Emerald City? About the Ark? That there is a place like that in the Metro?’ Sasha asked pensively, looking down at her feet.

‘There are rumours,’ he replied evasively.

‘It would be great to get in there someday,’ she said slowly. ‘You know when I was walking up on the surface, I felt so sad for people. So bitter that they made just one mistake… And they’ll never be able to put everything back the way it used to be. And it was so good there… probably.’

‘A mistake? No, it was an absolutely heinous crime,’ the musician replied seriously. ‘To destroy the entire world, to kill six billion people – is that a mistake?’

‘Even so… You and I deserve forgiveness, don’t we? So does everyone else. Everyone should be given a chance to make himself over and do everything over again, to try again one more time, even if it’s the last one…’ She paused. ‘I’d like so much to see what it’s really like up there… I wasn’t interested before. I was simply afraid, and everything on the surface seemed ugly to me… But it turns out I just went up in the wrong place. It’s so stupid. That city up there is like my life before. There’s no future in it. Only memories – and they’re not mine… Only ghosts. And I understood something very important while I was there, you know…’ Sasha hesitated. ‘Hope is like blood. While it still flows through your veins, you’re alive. I want to hope.’

‘But why do you want to go to the Emerald City?’ the musician asked.

‘I want to see, to feel what it was like to live before… You said yourself… I suppose the people there really must be very different. People who haven’t forgotten yesterday and who will definitely have a tomorrow must be quite, quite different.’

They strolled slowly round the hall of Dobrynin Station, under the watchful eyes of the sentries. Homer had left them alone with obvious reluctance, and now he had been delayed for some reason. Hunter still hadn’t put in an appearance.

Sasha saw hints in the marble features of Dobrynin’s marble hall. The large, marble-faced arches leading to the tracks alternated with small, decorative, blank arches. Large, small, large again, small again. Like a man and a woman holding hands, a man and a woman… And she suddenly wanted to put her hand into a broad, strong, male palm too. To shelter in it, if only for a short while.

‘You can build a new life here too,’ Leonid told the girl, winking at her. ‘You don’t necessarily have to go somewhere and search for something… It can be enough just to look round.’

‘And what will I see?’

‘Me,’ he said, lowering his eyes in theatrical modesty.

‘I’ve already seen you. And heard you,’ said Sasha, returning his smile at last. ‘I like what I heard, like everyone else… Don’t you need your cartridges at all? You gave away so many to get them to let us through here.’

‘I only need enough for my food. And I always have enough. It’s stupid to play for money.’

‘Then what do you play for?’

‘For the music.’ He laughed. ‘For the people. No, that’s not right either. For what the music does to the people.’

‘And what does it do to them?’

‘Well actually – anything at all,’ said Leonid, turning serious again. ‘I have music that will make people love and music that will make them weep.’

‘And the music you were playing the last time…’ Sasha looked at him suspiciously. ‘The music without a name. What does that make people do?’

‘This one?’ he asked and whistled the introduction. ‘It doesn’t make them do anything. It just takes away pain.’

‘Hey, mate!’

Homer closed the exercise book and squirmed on the uncomfortable wooden bench. The duty orderly was ensconced behind a little counter with a surface that was almost completely taken up by three old black telephones without buttons or discs. The little red light on one of the phones was winking amicably.

‘Andrei Andreevich is free now. He’s got two minutes for you from the moment you walk in. Don’t mumble, get straight to the point,’ the duty orderly admonished the old man strictly.

‘Two minutes won’t be enough,’ Homer sighed.

‘I warned you,’ the other man said with a shrug.

Even five minutes wasn’t enough. He didn’t have any real idea of where to start, or how to finish, or what questions to ask and what to ask for, but, apart from the commandant of Dobrynin Station, he had no one else to turn to right now.

But Andrei Andreevich, a large, fat man in a uniform tunic that didn’t close across his stomach, was already furious and streaming with sweat, and he didn’t listen to the old man for long.

‘Don’t you understand, or what? I’ve got a force majeure situation here, eight men have been mown down, and you start talking to me about some epidemic or other! There isn’t anything here! That’s enough, stop wasting my time! Either you clear out of here yourself, or…’ Like a sperm whale leaping out of the water, the commandant launched his meaty carcass forward, almost overturning the desk he was sitting at. The duty orderly glanced into the office enquiringly. Homer also got up off the low, hard chair for visitors.

‘I’ll go. But then why did you send forces into Serpukhov?’

‘What business is that of yours?’

‘They say in the station…’

‘What do they say? What do they say? You know what? To make sure you don’t go spreading panic around here… Pasha, come on, stick him in the cage!’

In the twinkling of an eye Homer was tossed out into the reception area and the duty orderly dragged the stubbornly resisting old man into a narrow side corridor, alternating reproaches with slaps to his face.

Between two slaps Homer’s respirator came off; he tried to hold his breath, but immediately received a jab to the solar plexus that set him coughing. The sperm whale surfaced in the doorway of his office, filling the opening completely.

‘Let him stay there for now, we’ll get to the bottom of this later… And who are you? By appointment?’ he barked at the next visitor.

Homer had already turned towards him.

Hunter was standing there stock still with his arms crossed, just three steps away from him. He was a wearing somebody else’s uniform that was tight on him and hiding his face in the shadow of the raised visor of his helmet. He showed no sign of recognising the old man and no intention of intervening. Homer had expected him to be smeared with blood, like a butcher, but the only crimson spot on the brigadier’s clothes was the small stain over his own wound. Hunter shifted his stony gaze to the station commandant, and suddenly started moving towards him slowly, as if he intended to walk straight through the fat man into the office.

The startled commandant started muttering and backed away, opening up the way through. The guard froze expectantly with his arms locked round Homer. Hunter squeezed through the door after the retreating fat man and ended the commandant’s resistance with a single lion’s roar that reduced him to silence. Then he switched to an imperious whisper.

Letting go of the old man, the orderly stole across to the door and stepped inside. A moment later he was swept back out by a torrent of filthy expletives, during which the commandant’s voice broke into a squeal.

‘And let that provocateur go!’ he shouted at the end, as if he was repeating someone else’s order under hypnosis.

Bright red, as if he had been scalded, the orderly closed the door behind him, stomped back to his post at the entrance and stuck his nose into a news flyer printed on wrapping paper. When Homer moved determinedly past his desk in the direction of the commandant’s office, he just huddled down even lower behind his little newspaper, to indicate that what happened from now on had nothing to do with him.