Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘I won’t go in there! Let me go! I’d rather stay here…’

Sasha wasn’t joking or being capricious. It would be hard to think of anyone her father had hated more than the Reds. They had taken away his power, they had broken his back, but instead of simply finishing him off, out of pity or sheer prudishness they had condemned him to years of humiliation and torment. Her father hadn’t been able to forgive the people who rebelled against him. He hadn’t been able to forgive the men who inspired the traitors and egged them on, or those who supplied them with weapons and leaflets. The very colour red sent him into paroxysms of furious rage. And although at the end of his life he used to say that he bore no grudges against anyone and didn’t want revenge, Sasha had had the feeling that he was simply making excuses for his own powerlessness.

‘It’s the only way to get there,’ Leonid said in dismay.

‘We were going to Kiev! That’s not where you’ve brought me!’

‘Hansa has been fighting the Red Line for decades, I couldn’t let just anyone know that we were going to the communists… I had to lie.’

‘You can’t do anything without lying.’

‘The door is on the far side of Sport Station, as I said. And Sport is the last station on the Red Line before the ruined Metro bridge, there’s no way to get around that.’

‘How will we get in there? I don’t have a passport,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed warily on the musician.

‘Trust me,’ he said with a smile. ‘One person can always reach a deal with another. Long live corruption!’

Ignoring Sasha’s objections, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her after him. Blazing brightly in the glare of the searchlights in the second line of the frontier post, the gigantic red banners hanging from the ceiling rippled in the tunnel draught, making the girl feel as if she was looking at two glittering red waterfalls. A sign?

If what she had heard about the Line was right, the Reds ought to riddle them with bullets on the approaches… But Leonid strode forward calmly, with his lips set in a confident smile. About thirty metres from the frontier post the broad beam of a searchlight struck his chest. The musician simply set his flute case on the ground and raised his hands in the air. Sasha did the same.

The border inspectors walked up to them, looking sleepy and surprised. It seemed as if they had never met anyone from the other side of the border. This time the musician managed to take the senior officer off to one side before he asked for Sasha’s documents. Leonid whispered something delicately in his ear, there was a faint jingle of brass and the head of the border unit came back spellbound and pacified. He escorted them past the guard posts in person and even put them on a hand trolley that was waiting, ordering the soldiers to go to Frunze Station.

They started working the levers, puffing and panting, as they got the trolley started. Sasha frowned as she studied the clothes and the faces of these men her father had taught her to call enemies. Nothing unusual. Padded jackets; blotchy, washed-out caps with stars pinned to them, prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks… No, they didn’t have glossy skin, like the Hansa patrolmen, but they were certainly no less human. They had a gleam of absolutely boyish curiosity in their eyes, a feeling that was apparently completely unknown to those who lived on the Circle. These two had almost certainly never heard about what happened at Avtozavod Station almost ten years earlier. Were they Sasha’s enemies? Was it even possible to hate people you didn’t know, not just formally, but genuinely?

Not daring to strike up a conversation with their passengers, the soldiers merely grunted regularly as they leaned down on the levers.

‘How did you manage it?’ Sasha asked.

‘Hypnosis,’ said Leonid, winking at her.

‘But what were those documents you showed them?’ she asked, looking at the musician suspiciously. ‘How can they get you allowed in everywhere?’

‘Different passports for different occasions,’ he replied evasively.

‘Who are you?’ So that the others wouldn’t hear, Sasha was obliged to sit close beside Leonid.

‘An observer,’ he said with just his lips.

If Sasha hadn’t clamped her mouth shut, the questions would have come pouring out, but the soldiers were too obviously trying to catch the sense of their conversation, even trying to make the levers creak as quietly as possible. She had to wait until Frunze Station – withered, faded and pale, rouged with red flags. Pockmarked mosaics on the walls, columns nibbled on by time… Ceiling vaults like dark millponds, with feeble light bulbs dangling from wires stretched between the columns at a height slightly above the heads of the short local inhabitants, in order not to let a single ray of precious light go to waste. It was incredibly clean here: several cleaning ladies were scurrying around the platform at the same time. The station was crowded, but the strange thing was that whichever way Sasha looked, everyone started fidgeting and bustling about, although behind her back all the movement immediately ceased and subdued voices started murmuring. The moment she looked back, the murmuring stopped and people went back to their business. And no one wanted to look into her eyes, as if there was something indecent about it.

‘Are strangers unusual here?’ she asked, looking at Leonid.

‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ the musician said with a shrug.

‘Where are you at home?’

‘Where people aren’t so deadly serious,’ he laughed. ‘Where they understand that a man can’t be saved with just food. Where they don’t want to forget yesterday, even though the memories are painful.’

‘Tell me about the Emerald City,’ Sasha said in a quiet voice. ‘Why do they… Why do you hide?’

‘The rulers of the City don’t trust the inhabitants of the Metro.’

Leonid broke off to explain himself to the sentries on duty at the entrance to the tunnel and then, as he and Sasha dived into the intense darkness, he set a little light on the wick of an oil lamp with a metal cigarette lighter and continued.

‘They don’t trust them, because the people in the Metro are gradually losing their human nature. And because they still have among them the people who started that terrible war, although they’re afraid to admit it, even to their friends. Because the people in the Metro are beyond redemption. They can only be feared, avoided and observed. If they find out about the Emerald City, they’ll just gobble it down and puke it up, the same way they gobble everything they get their hands on. All the canvases of the great artists will be burnt. All the paper, and everything that was on it, will be burnt. The only society that has achieved justice and equality will be annihilated. Drained bloodless, the University building will collapse. The Great Ark will founder and sink. And there’ll be nothing left. Vandals…’

‘Why do you think we can’t change?’ asked Sasha, feeling offended.

‘Not everyone thinks that,’ said Leonid, giving her a sideways glance. ‘Some are trying to do something.’

‘They’re not trying very hard,’ Sasha sighed, ‘if even my old Homer hasn’t heard about them.’

‘But then some people have actually heard them,’ he remarked suggestively.

‘You mean… the music?’ Sasha guessed. ‘Are you one of those who hope to change us? But how?’

‘By coercing you into the love of beauty,’ the musician joked.

The wheelchair was pushed by an adjutant, and the old man walked alongside, barely managing to keep up and looking round every now and then at the burly security guard attached to him.

‘If you really don’t know the whole story,’ said Miller, ‘then I’m willing to tell you it. You can amuse your cellmates with it, if I see the wrong man at Borovitskaya… Hunter was one of the Order’s finest warriors, a genuine hunter, in more than just name. His intuition was positively feral, and he dedicated himself to the cause absolutely. He was the one who sniffed out those Black Ones a year and a half ago… At the Economic Achievements Station. Hasn’t anybody heard about that at all?’