Metro 2034

CHAPTER 10 After Death

What remains after people die? What will remain after each one of us?

Gravestones subside and become overgrown with moss, and it takes only a few decades for the inscriptions on them to become illegible.

Even in former times, when no one was left to take care of graves, the ground in a cemetery was redistributed among the newly deceased. The only people who came to visit the dead were their children or parents; grandchildren came far more rarely, great-grandchildren almost never.

In major cities, what was customarily referred to as ‘eternal peace’ meant a respite of only half a century before the bones would be disturbed, perhaps so that more remains could be crammed into the cemetery, or perhaps so that it could be ploughed up and a new residential district built on it. The earth was becoming too cramped for both the living and the dead.

Half a century is a luxury that only those who died before Doomsday could afford. Who can be concerned with a single dead man, when an entire planet dies? None of the inhabitants of the Metro has ever been afforded the honour of being buried, or been able to hope that his body will not be destroyed by rats.

Formerly, remains had the right to exist for exactly as long as the living remembered the people to whom they belonged. A man remembers his relatives, his schoolfellows and his workmates. But his memory is only long enough for three generations – for that same period of fifty-something years.

In the same careless manner as we all discard from our memory the image of our grandfather or school friend, some day someone will discard us into absolute oblivion. The memory of a man can last for longer than his skeleton, but when the last of those who still remember us departs, we dissolve into time with him. Photos? Who still has them made these days? And how many of them were kept, even when everyone used to take them? At one time, at the end of every thick family album there used to be a small reservation for old brownish snapshots, but not many of those who leafed through the albums could say for certain which of his ancestors they depicted. In effect, photographs of the departed can be regarded as death masks, cast from the body, but certainly not life masks cast from the soul. And then, photos decay only slightly more slowly than the bodies of the people they recorded.

So what does remain?

Children?

Homer touched the candle flame with his finger.

It was easy for him to intellectualise; what Ahmed had said was still tormenting him. Condemned to remain childless, deprived of any chance to continue his line, now the old man could only deny the reality of this route to immortality.

He picked up his pen again.

They can look like us. In their features we can see our own features, miraculously fused with the features of those we have loved. Recognising ourselves in their gestures, in the curve of their eyebrows, in their facial expressions, we will be moved to tenderness. Friends might tell us that our sons and daughters are like stencilled copies of us, that they are cast from the same mould. And this supposedly promises us some kind of continuation of ourselves after we cease to exist. But after all, none of us is an initial image from which subsequent copies are made, but merely a phantasmagorical combination, composed half-and-half of the external and internal features of our father and our mother, exactly as they, in turn, consist of halves of their own parents. Does this mean there is nothing unique about us, that there is only an eternal reshuffling of tiny little pieces of the mosaic, which exist in their own right, combining at random into billions of pictures that have no particular value and crumble away before our very eyes? If so, what sense does it make to be so proud of the fact that we see in our children this particular hook of the nose or that particular dimple in the cheek, which we are used to thinking of as our own, but which has really been wandering through thousands of bodies for half a million years already?

Will anything remain after me, in particular?

Homer had a harder time than other people. He genuinely envied those whose faith allowed them to hope for admission into an afterworld. As for him, when he heard it mentioned in conversation, the old man’s thoughts immediately flew back to Nakhimov Prospect. Quite possibly Homer did not consist only of the flesh that would be ground up and digested by the corpseeaters. But even if there was something else in him, that something was not capable of existing apart from the flesh and bone.

What remained after the kings of Egypt? Or after the heroes of Greece? Or after the artists of the Renaissance? Did anything at all remain of them? And did they remain in anything?

But what other immortality is left to man?

Homer reread what he had written, pondered for a moment and then carefully tore the pages out of the exercise book, crumpled them up, put them on a metal plate and set fire to them. A minute later a handful of ash was all that remained of the work on which he had spent the last three hours.

She died.

This was how Sasha had always imagined death: the final ray of light is extinguished, all the voices fall silent, you can’t feel your body, and all that’s left is eternal darkness. The blackness and silence from out of which people emerge and to which they inevitably return. Sasha had heard stories about heaven and about hell, but the Underworld had always seemed perfectly innocuous to her. Eternity spent in total inactivity, absolutely blind and deaf, seemed a hundred times worse to her than any cauldrons of boiling oil.

And then a tiny, trembling flame appeared ahead of her. Sasha reached out to it, but it was impossible to catch: the dancing firefly ran away from her, moved back closer to tease her, and immediately darted away again, tantalising her, luring her after itself.

She knew what it was: the tunnel spark.

Her father used to say that when someone died in the Metro, their soul wandered in confusion through the pitch-dark tangle of tunnels, and every tunnel ended in a dead end. It didn’t understand that it wasn’t attached to a body any longer, that its earthly existence was over. It had to carry on wandering until somewhere far ahead it saw the light of a phantom campfire. And when the soul saw the light, it had to hurry towards it, because it was sent for the soul and would run away, leading the soul to a place where peace was waiting. But sometimes it happened that the little light took mercy on a soul and led it back to its lost body. Other people whispered about people like that, saying they had come back from the next world, although it would be more correct to say the darkness had released them.

The spark called for her to follow, it insisted and Sasha gave in. She couldn’t feel her legs, but they weren’t needed: in order to keep up with the light as it slipped away, all she had to do was not lose sight of it. To keep her eyes fixed on it intently, as if she were trying to win it over, to tame it.

Sasha managed to catch it after all, and the little light dragged the girl through the pitch darkness, through labyrinths of tunnels from which she would never have found a way out, to the final station on the line of her life. Things suddenly started becoming visible up ahead: Sasha fancied her guide was tracing out the contours of some distant room where she was expected.

‘Sasha!’ a voice called out to her, an amazingly familiar voice, although she couldn’t remember who it belonged to.

‘Dad?’ she asked warily, thinking she could hear a note of affectionate warmth in the other person’s voice.

They arrived. The spectral tunnel spark halted, turned into an ordinary flame and hopped onto the wick of a melted, spreading candle, settling down on it comfortably, like a cat that has just come back from a walk.

A cool, calloused palm covered her hand. Hesitantly, afraid of sinking to the bottom again, Sasha detached herself from the little light. Following her into wakefulness, pain stabbed through her torn forearm and her bruised temple started aching. Plain, official furniture surfaced out of the darkness, swaying close by – two chairs, a locker… Sasha herself was lying on a genuine bed, so soft that she couldn’t feel her back at all. As if her body was being returned to her by parts, and some were still waiting for their turn.

‘Sasha?’ the voice repeated.

She turned her eyes to the speaker and jerked her hand away. Sitting at her bedside was the old man she had travelled with on the trolley. There was nothing intrusive in his touch, it didn’t sting or insult her; she took her hand away because she felt ashamed that she could confuse a stranger’s voice with her father’s, and out of resentment that the tunnel spark had led her to the wrong place.

The old man smiled gently. It seemed to be quite enough for him that she had come round. Looking more closely, Sasha noticed a warm glint in his eyes, the kind of glint she had only ever encountered before in the eyes of one man. It wasn’t surprising that she had been deceived. And she suddenly felt awkward in front of the old man.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

And then, recalling her final minutes at Pavelets, she jerked up.

‘What happened to your friend?’

She seemed unable either to laugh or to cry, or perhaps she didn’t have enough strength left for either. The girl was lucky, the monster’s blade-like claws had missed her: that single blow had landed flat. But even that had been enough to leave her unconscious for twenty-four hours. Her life was in no danger now, the doctor assured Homer. The old man hadn’t talked to the doctor about his own troubles. Sasha – while she was unconscious, the old man had got into the habit of calling her that – went limp and slumped back down onto the pillow, and Homer went back to the desk, where the open exercise book, with a full ninety-six pages, was waiting for him. He twirled the pen in his hands and carried on from the place where he had abandoned his newly begun book to go over to the girl when she groaned deliriously.

…the latest convoy had been delayed… delayed beyond any reasonable limit, long enough for the realisation to dawn that this time something terrible and unforeseen had happened, something against which not even heavily-armed, battle-hardened guards and a relationship built up over the years with the leadership of Hansa had been able to protect it.

And all this would not have been so bad, if only the lines of communication were functioning. But something had happened to the telephone line that led to the Circle: contact had been broken off on Monday, and the team sent out to search for the break had drawn a blank.

Homer looked up and started: the girl was standing behind him, deciphering his scribble over his shoulder. She seemed to be held up by nothing but curiosity. Feeling embarrassed, the old man turned the exercise book face down.

‘Is that what you need inspiration for?’ she asked him.

‘I’m still right at the beginning,’ Homer muttered for some reason.

‘And what happened to the convoy?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, starting to draw a frame round the title. ‘The story’s not finished yet. Lie down, you need to rest.’

‘But it’s up to you how you finish the book,’ she objected, without moving from the spot.

‘In this book nothing’s up to me.’ The old man put his pen down on the table. ‘I’m not inventing it, just writing down everything that happens to me.’

‘That means everything depends on you even more,’ the girl said thoughtfully. ‘Will I be in it?’

‘I was just going to ask your permission,’ Homer chuckled.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she replied seriously. ‘But what are you writing it for?’

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.

Would they see that Sasha was different? Would she be able to hide in the crowd, pretend to be one of them, or would they attack the outsider, bite the albino to death, like a pack of rats? At first she fancied that everyone’s eyes were fixed on her, and every accidentally caught glance threw her into a fever. But after a quarter of an hour she got used to it. The people who looked at her included some who were hostile, or curious, or too insistent, but most of them were indifferent to her. They brushed their eyes gently over Sasha and pushed on through the crowd, taking no notice of her. It occurred to her that these absent-minded glances with nothing jarring about them lubricated the gear wheels of the human bustling, like machine oil. If they took an interest in each other, the friction would be too great and the entire mechanism would be paralysed.

In order to fit in with the crowd, she didn’t need to change her clothes or even cut her hair. Instead of that, it was enough to dive into other people’s pupils and coldly pull her glance back out after barely dipping it in. Once she had smeared herself with feigned indifference, Sasha could slip between the moving, intermeshing inhabitants of this station without getting stuck at every step.

For the first few minutes her nose was scalded by the simmering brew of human odours, but soon her nose became less sensitive as it learned to pick out the important components and skip all the others.

Weaving their way through the sour smells of stale bodies came the subtle, tantalising aromas of youth. Occasionally the crowd was bathed in waves of fragrance emanating from well-groomed women; and mingling with them was the smoke from meat on braziers, and the stink of the cesspits. In short, for Sasha the passage between the two Pavelets stations smelled of life, and the longer she listened to this deafening smell, the sweeter it seemed.

A full exploration of the boundless passage would probably have taken her an entire month. Everything here was astounding…

Stalls with jewellery woven out of dozens of little yellow metal discs with patterns stamped on them – she wanted to examine them for hours. And immense heaps of books containing more secret knowledge than she could ever master.

A man shouting his wares at a stand that had a sign saying ‘Flowers’ and a rich collection of greeting cards. The pictures on the cards were faded photographs of all sorts of fancy bouquets. Sasha had been given a card like that when she was little, but there were so many of them here!

Babies glued to their mothers’ breasts, and children a bit older, playing with real cats. Couples still only touching each other with their eyes, and couples already touching each other with their fingers.

And men who tried to touch her.

She might have taken their attention and interest for hospitality or a desire to sell her something, but the way they spoke, in a slippery, breathy kind of tone, gave her an awkward, slightly disgusting feeling. What did they want with her? Weren’t there enough local women here for them? And some of them were genuine beauties too, the bright-coloured fabrics they were wrapped in made them look like the half-open flower buds on the cards. Probably they were just laughing at her… Was she really capable of provoking a man’s curiosity anyway? She suddenly felt a prick of unfamiliar doubt – at that spot just below the triangular arch of her interlocking ribs, where the tender hollow began… Only deeper. In the place she had only discovered a day ago.

Trying to drive away her anxiety, she wandered along the stalls crammed with all sorts of goods – armour plate and trinkets, clothes and tools – but they didn’t hold her attention so strongly any more. It turned out that her internal conversation could be louder than the commotion of the crowd, and the human images drawn by her memory could be more vivid than live people

Was she worth his life? Could she condemn him after what had happened? And most important of all, what point was there to her stupid musings now? When she could no longer do anything for him…

And then, before Sasha even realised why this was happening to her, the doubts receded and her heart calmed down. Listening closely to herself, she caught the notes of a distant melody, seeping into her from the outside, where it was flowing along beside the murky current of the multitude of human voices, without mingling with it.

For Sasha music had begun, as it does for everyone, with her mother’s lullabies. But it had also ended with them: her father had no ear for it and he didn’t like to sing – wandering musicians and similar buffoons were not welcomed at Avtozavod. And the sentries droning their dolefully hearty soldiers’ songs round the campfire were incapable of drawing real music from the drooping strings of their plywood guitars or the taut strings of Sasha’s heart.

But what she could hear now wasn’t dismal strumming on a guitar… It was more like the tender, living voice of a young woman, or even a little girl – but too high, beyond the range of the human larynx, and at the same time unnaturally powerful. But what else did Sasha have to compare this miracle with?

The song of the unknown instrument enchanted the unwary, bearing them off to somewhere infinitely far away, to worlds that no one born in the Metro could know, worlds that were impossible – only they weren’t supposed even to suspect that. The song set them dreaming and suggested that any dreams could come true. It aroused a vague, indefinite yearning and immediately promised to satisfy it. It made Sasha feel good, as if she had been lost in an abandoned station, but suddenly found a flashlight and the light of its beam had shown her the way out.

She was standing at a bladesmith’s booth, right in front of a tall sheet of plywood with various kinds of knives attached to it – from little baby folding penknives to predatory hunting knives. Sasha froze, gazing spellbound at the blades, with the two halves of her inner self clashing in a frantic struggle. The idea that had come into her head was simple and tempting. The old man had given her a handful of cartridges, and there were just enough of them for a knife with a broad, sharp serrated, burnished blade, which was absolutely perfect for what she had in mind.

A minute later Sasha had made up her mind and smothered her doubts. She hid her purchase in the breast pocket of her overalls – as close as possible to the spot with the pain she wanted to stop. She walked back to the infirmary, no longer feeling the weight of the soldier’s jacket and with her aching temples forgotten.

The crowd was a whole head taller than the girl, and the distant musician, breathing out his amazing notes, remained invisible to her. Yet the melody was still trying to overtake her, turn her back, make her change her mind.

But it was futile.

Another knock at the door.

Homer got up off his knees with a grunt, wiped his lips with his sleeve and tugged the chain of the cistern. A short brownish streak was left on the dirty-green fabric of his padded jacket. It was the fifth time he had puked in twenty-four hours, although he hadn’t really eaten anything to speak of.

His illness could have several explanations, the old man tried to convince himself. Why did it have to be accelerated development of the disease? It could be something to do with…

‘How much longer in there?’ a woman squealed impatiently in a high falsetto.

Oh God! Had he really been in such a hurry that he’d confused the letters on the doors? Homer blotted his sweaty face with his dirty sleeve, put on an imperturbable air and clicked the latch.

‘Drunken lout!’ the gaudily dressed floozy exclaimed. She pushed him out of the way and slammed the door shut.

‘Never mind,’ thought the old man. ‘Better for her to think I’m a drunkard…’ He took a step towards the mirror above the washbasin and leaned his forehead against it. As soon as he recovered his breath, he noticed the glass was steaming up and realised his respirator had slid down and was dangling under his chin. Homer hastily pulled the mask back up onto his face and closed his eyes again. No, thinking about how he was transmitting death to every person he met on his journey was unbearable. But it was too late to turn back now: if he was infectious, if he wasn’t confusing the symptoms, the entire station was already doomed in any case. Starting with this woman, who was guilty of nothing more than getting taken short at the wrong moment. What would she do if he told her now that she would die in a month’s time at the latest? How stupid it all was, thought Homer, stupid and tawdry. He was dreaming of immortalising everyone that life and fate brought him into contact with, but instead he had been appointed an absurd, bald, powerless angel of death. His wings had been clipped and he had been ringed, setting him a fixed term of thirty days, and that had galvanised him into action.

Had he been punished for his presumptuousness, for his arrogance?

No, the old man couldn’t keep quiet about it any longer. But there was only one person in the world he could make his confession to. Homer wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long in any case, and it would make the game simpler for both of them if they showed their cards.

He set off to the hospital wards, walking hesitantly.

The ward he needed was at the very end of the corridor, and usually there was an attendant on duty at the door, but now the post had been abandoned, and staccato wheezing could be heard coming out through the crack. It assumed the rough forms of words, but constructing meaningful phrases out of them was beyond even Homer as he stood there hiding.

‘Harder… Struggle… Must… Still makes sense… Resist… Remember… Still possible… Wrong… Condemned… But still…’

The words merged into a growl, as if the pain had become too intolerable for the man speaking to lasso his scurrying thoughts. Homer stepped inside.

Hunter was lying there unconscious, sprawled across damp, crumpled sheets. The bandages bound tightly round the brigadier’s cranium had crept right down over his eyes, his protruding cheekbones were covered in perspiration and his stubbly lower jaw was hanging open helplessly. His broad chest rose and fell arduously, like a blacksmith’s bellows, struggling to maintain the fire in the body that was too large.

The girl was standing at the head of the bed, facing away from Homer with her thin hands clasped behind her back. The old man didn’t look closely at first, but then he noticed the black knife that almost merged into the fabric of her overalls – she was clutching the handle tightly in her fingers.

A ringtone beep.

Then another. And another.

One thousand, two hundred and thirty-five. One thousand two hundred and thirty-six. One thousand two hundred and thirty-seven.

Artyom wasn’t counting them to impress the commander with his diligence. He had to do it to feel that he was moving in some direction. If he was moving away from the point at which he had begun counting, that meant every beep brought him closer to the point at which this insanity would come to an end. Self-deception?

So okay. But listening to those beeps and thinking they would never break off was unbearable. Although at the beginning, on his very first watch, he had actually liked it: the beeps had introduced order into the cacophony of his thoughts, like a metronome, they had emptied his head, subjugating his galloping pulse to their own unhurried rhythm.

But the minutes that they sliced up became exactly like each other, and Artyom had started to feel that it was true, he was stuck in some kind of time trap and he could never get out of it until the beeps stopped. In the Middle Ages there was a torture like that: they shaved the offender’s head bare and sat him under a barrel with water dripping out, drop by drop, onto the top of his head, gradually driving the poor victim out of his mind. Where the rack was powerless, ordinary water produced excellent results.

Tethered by the telephone wire, Artyom had no right to leave his post for a second. He tried not to drink at all during his watch, so that the call of nature wouldn’t distract him from the beeps. The previous day he’d given in, darted out of the room, rushed to the toilet and then straight back. He paused to listen in the doorway, and his blood ran cold: the speed had changed, the signal was running faster, it had broken away from its usual measured pace. Only one thing could have happened, and he understood that perfectly well. The moment he had been waiting for had arrived when he wasn’t there. Glancing back in fright towards the door – had anyone noticed? – Artyom hastily redialled the number and pressed his ear to the receiver.

The phone clicked and the beeps started up in their usual rhythm. Since then it hadn’t given the ‘engaged’ signal even once and no one had answered it. But even so Artyom didn’t dare put the receiver down, he just moved it from his sweaty ear to his frozen one, trying not to lose count.

He hadn’t told the commander about that incident straight away, and now somehow he didn’t really believe the beeps could have sounded any different. He had been ordered to get through, and for a week now that was what he had been living for. If he violated that order, he would end up at a court martial that saw no difference between a blunder and sabotage.

The phone also told him how much time was left to the end of his watch. Artyom didn’t have his own wristwatch, but he had checked the time from the commander’s when he made his round. The signal was repeated every five seconds. Twelve beeps was a minute. Seven hundred and twenty was an hour. Thirteen thousand, six hundred and eighty was a complete watch. They fell like grains of sand out of one incredibly vast glass flask into another, bottomless one. And Artyom sat in the narrow throat between these two invisible vessels, listening to the time.

The only reason he didn’t dare put the phone down was because the commander could show up at any moment to check on him. But otherwise… What he was doing made absolutely no sense. There was definitely not a single living soul left at the other end of the line. When Artyom closed his eyes, he could see the picture in front of him again…

He saw the commandant’s office barricaded from the inside and its occupant sitting with his face resting on the desk, clutching a Makarov pistol in his hand. Naturally, with his ears shot to shreds, he can’t hear the phone ringing its head off. The men outside haven’t managed to force open the door, but the keyhole and the cracks are still open, and the desperate jangling of the old telephone leaks out through them, creeping through the air above the platform that is heaped up with swollen corpses. There was a time when the ringing of the phone couldn’t be heard above the incessant hubbub of the crowd, the patter of footsteps and the crying of children, but now it’s the only sound that disturbs the dead. The crimson glow of the emergency batteries blinks in its death throes.

A beep.

And another.

One thousand, five hundred and sixty-three. One thousand, five hundred and sixty-four.

No one answers.