Metro 2034

CHAPTER 2 The Return

The old man hovering by the door pricked up his ears: he hadn’t heard that name before at Sebastopol Station. Not even a name, but a nickname, like he had – he wasn’t really called Homer, of course, he was just common or garden Nikolai Ivanovich, who had been named after the Greek teller of myths here at the station, for his irrepressible love of all sorts of stories and rumours.

‘Your new brigadier,’ the colonel had said to the watchmen, who were examining with morose curiosity this broad-shouldered newcomer clad in Kevlar and a heavy helmet. Ignoring basic courtesy, he turned away indifferently: the tunnel and the fortifications seemed to interest him far more than the men entrusted to his command. He shook the hands of his new subordinates when they came up to make his acquaintance, but he didn’t introduce himself, nodding without speaking, committing each new nickname to memory, and puffing out bluish, acrid cigarette smoke into their faces to demarcate the limits of closeness. In the shadow of the raised visor his narrow gun-slit eye, framed by scars, had a ghastly, lack-lustre gleam to it. None of the watchmen had dared to insist on knowing his name, either then or later, and so for two months now they had been calling him simply ‘Brigadier’. They decided the station must have shelled out for one of those expensive mercenaries who could manage perfectly well without a past or a name.

Hunter. Homer silently worked the strange un-Russian word around on his tongue. Better suited for a Central Asian Shepherd Dog than a man. He smiled gently to himself: well, well, so he still remembered that there used to be dogs like that. Where did all this stuff in his head come from? A fighting breed with a short docked tail and ears clipped right in close to the head. Nothing superfluous.

And the name, if he kept repeating it to himself for a while, started sounding vaguely familiar. Where could he have heard it before? Borne along on an endless stream of gossip and tall stories, it had snagged his attention somehow and then settled on the very bottom of his memory. And now it was overlaid with a thick layer of silt: names, facts, rumours, numbers – all that useless information about other people’s lives that Homer listened to with such avid curiosity and tried so zealously to remember.

Hunter… maybe some jailbird with a reward from Hansa on his head? The old man tossed the idea like a stone into the deep millpond of his amnesia and listened. No, nothing. A stalker? He didn’t seem like one. A warlord? More like it. And a legendary one, apparently…

Homer cast another stealthy glance at the brigadier’s face, so impassive that it seemed almost paralysed. That dog’s name suited him remarkably well.

‘I need a team of three men. I’ll take Homer, he knows the tunnels around here,’ the brigadier went on, without even turning towards the old man or asking his permission. ‘You can give me another man you think will suit. A runner, a courier. I’ll set out today.’

Istomin jerked his head hastily in approval before he gathered his wits and raised his eyes enquiringly to look at the colonel. The colonel frowned and muttered gruffly that he had no objections either, although for days he had been battling desperately with the station commandant for every free soldier. It seemed like no one intended to consult Homer, but he didn’t even think of arguing: despite his age, the old man had never refused this kind of assignment. And he had his reasons for that.

The brigadier snatched his immensely heavy helmet up off the desk and headed towards the exit. Lingering in the doorway for a moment, he said brusquely to Homer:

‘Say goodbye to your family. Pack for a long journey. Don’t bring any bullets, I’ll give you those…’ And he disappeared through the opening.

The old man set off after him, hoping to hear at least some basic explanation about what he should expect on this expedition. But when he emerged onto the platform, Hunter was already way ahead, ten of his massive strides away, and Homer didn’t even try to catch up with him, but just shook his head and watched him go.

Contrary to his usual habit, the brigadier had left his head uncovered: perhaps, lost in thoughts of other things, he had forgotten, or perhaps he was feeling a need for air right now. He passed a gaggle of young women – pig herders idling away their lunch break – and there was a whisper of disgust behind his back: ‘Ooh girls, my God, what a repulsive freak!’

‘Where the hell did you dig him up from?’ asked Istomin, slumping back limply in his chair in relief and reaching out his plump hand to a pile of cut cigarette papers.

People said the leaves that were smoked with such relish at the station were gathered by the stalkers at some spot on the surface almost as far away as Bitsevsky Park. Once, for a joke, the colonel had held a radiation dosimeter to a packet of ‘tobacco’, and it had started chattering away menacingly. The old man had given up smoking on the spot, and the cough that had been tormenting him at night, terrifying him with thoughts of lung cancer, had gradually started to ease. But Istomin had refused to believe the story of the radioactive leaves, reminding Denis Mikhailovich, with good reason, that in the Metro absolutely anything you picked up was more or less ‘hot’.

‘We’re old acquaintances,’ the colonel replied reluctantly; then he paused and threw in: ‘He didn’t used to be like this. Something happened to him.’

‘That’s for sure, if his face is anything to go by, something definitely happened to him,’ the commandant snorted, and immediately glanced towards the door, as if Hunter could have been loitering there and overheard him by chance.

The commander of the defensive perimeter had no right to grumble about the brigadier’s unexpected return from out of the cold mists of the past. From the moment he showed up at the station, he had effectively become the backbone of the perimeter’s defence. But even now Denis Mikhailovich couldn’t entirely believe that he had come back.

The news of Hunter’s strange and terrible death had flashed round the Metro the previous year, like an echo racing through the tunnels. And when Hunter turned up on the doorstep of the colonel’s little room two months ago, the colonel had hastily crossed himself before opening the door. The suspicious ease with which the resurrected man had passed through the guard posts – as if he had walked straight through the soldiers there – made the colonel doubt that this miracle was entirely benign.

Through the steamed-up spyhole of the door he saw what seemed to be a familiar profile: a bull neck, a cranium scraped so smooth that it shone, a slightly flattened nose. But for some reason the nocturnal visitor had frozen in semi-profile, with his head lowered, and he didn’t make any attempt to lighten the heavy silence. Casting a reproachful glance at the large, open bottle of home-brew beer standing on the table, the colonel heaved a deep sigh and pulled back the bolt. The honour code required him to help his own, and it drew no distinctions between the living and the dead.

When the door swung open Hunter looked up from the floor, making it clear why he had been hiding the other half of his face. He was afraid the other man simply wouldn’t recognise him. Even a hardboiled veteran like the old colonel, for whom the command of the Sebastopol garrison was like honorary retirement on a pension, compared with the turbulent years that came before it, winced when he saw that face, as if he had burned his fingers, and then started laughing guiltily – he couldn’t help himself.

His visitor didn’t even smile in reply. Over the months the terrible scars that mutilated his face had healed over slightly, but even so almost nothing about him reminded the colonel of the old Hunter. He flatly refused to explain his miraculous escape or why he had been missing for so long, and simply didn’t answer any of the colonel’s questions, as if he hadn’t even heard them. And worst of all, Hunter presented Denis Mikhailovich with an old debt for repayment and made him promise not to tell anyone that he had shown up. The colonel had been obliged to leave Hunter in peace and stifle his own commonsense reaction, which cried out for him to inform his commander immediately.

The old man had, however, made some cautious enquiries. His visitor was not implicated in anything shady and no one was looking for him any more after his funeral rites had been read so long ago. His body, admittedly, had never been found, but if Hunter had survived, someone would certainly have heard from him, the colonel was confidently informed. Definitely, he agreed.

On the other hand, as often happens when people disappear without a trace, Hunter, or rather, his simultaneously blurred and embellished image, had surfaced in at least a dozen myths and legends that had the ring of half-truth about them. Apparently this role suited him just fine, and he was in no hurry at all to disabuse the comrades who had buried him so prematurely.

Bearing in mind his unpaid debts and drawing the appropriate conclusions, Denis Mikhailovich had kept his mouth shut and even started playing along: he avoided calling Hunter by name in the presence of outsiders and let Istomin in on the secret, but without going into detail. It was basically all the same to Istomin: the brigadier earned his issue of rations in spades, spending all his time, day and night, on the front line in the southern tunnels. He was hardly ever spotted at the station where he put in an appearance once a week, on his bath day. And even if he had only jumped into this hellhole so that he could hide there from unknown pursuers, that didn’t bother Istomin, who had never been squeamish about employing the services of legionaries with dark pasts. Just as long as he was a fighter – and there were no problems on that score.

The soldiers of the watch had grumbled among themselves about their new commander, but they stopped after the first engagement. Once they saw the cold, methodical, inhuman euphoria with which he annihilated everything they were supposed to annihilate, they all understood his true value. No one tried to make friends with the unsociable brigadier any longer, but they obeyed him implicitly, so he never needed to raise his dull, cracked voice. There was something hypnotic about that voice, even the station commandant started nodding dutifully every time Hunter spoke to him, without even waiting for him to finish, for no special reason, it was simply an automatic response.

For the first time in recent days it felt easier to breathe in Istomin’s office, as if a silent thunderstorm had swept through it, relieving the tension in the air and bringing welcome release. There was nothing left to argue about. There was no finer warrior than Hunter – if he disappeared in the tunnels, the Sebastopolites would be left with only one choice.

‘Shall I give instructions to prepare for the operation?’ asked the colonel, bringing up the subject first, because he knew the station commandant would want to talk about it anyway.

‘Three days ought to be enough for you,’ said Istomin, clicking his cigarette lighter and screwing up his eyes. ‘We won’t be able to wait for them any longer than that. How many men will we need, what do you think?’

‘We’ve got one assault brigade awaiting orders, I can handle the other men, there’s another twenty or so. If by the day after tomorrow we haven’t heard anything about them—’ the colonel jerked his head in the direction of the door ‘—declare a general mobilisation. We’ll break out.’

Istomin raised his eyebrows, but instead of objecting, he took a deep drag on his cigarette, which crackled faintly. Denis Mikhailovich raked together several well-scribbled sheets of paper that were lying around on the desk, leaned down over them shortsightedly and started sketching mysterious diagrams, writing surnames and nicknames inside little circles.

Break out? The station commandant looked through the drifting tobacco smoke, over the back of the colonel’s head, at the large schematic map of the Metro hanging behind the old man’s back. Yellowed and greasy, covered with markings in ink – arrows for forced marches, rings for ambushes, little stars for guard posts and exclamation marks for forbidden zones – the map was a chronicle of the last decade. Ten years, during which not a single day had passed peacefully.

Below Sebastopol the marks broke off immediately beyond Southern Station: Istomin couldn’t remember anyone ever coming back from there. The line crept on downwards like a long, branching root, immaculately chaste all the way. The Serpukhov line had proved too tough a nut for the Sebastopolites to crack; even if the entire toothless, radiation-sick human population combined its most desperate efforts, it probably wouldn’t be enough down there.

And now a white, swirling fog of uncertainty had obscured the stub end of their line that reached obstinately northwards, to Hansa, to the human race. Tomorrow none of the men that the colonel ordered to prepare for battle would refuse to fight. The war for the extinction or survival of humankind, begun more than two decades ago, had never stopped for a moment at Sebastopol. When you live by side with death for many years, the fear of dying gives way to indifference, fatalism, superstitions, protective amulets and animal instincts. But who knew what was waiting for them up ahead, between the Nakhimov Prospect and Serpukhov stations? Who knew if it was even possible to break through this mysterious barrier – and if there was anywhere to break through to?

He recalled his latest trip to Serpukhov Station: market stalls, tramps’ makeshift beds and dilapidated screens behind which the slightly better-off inhabitants slept and made love to each other. They didn’t produce any food of their own, there were no hothouse chambers for growing plants, no pens for cattle. The nimble-footed, light-fingered Serpukhovites fed themselves from profiteering, reselling old surplus goods picked up for a song from convoy merchants who were running behind schedule, and by providing citizens of the Circle Line with services for which those citizens would have faced trial at home. Not a station, but a fungus, a parasitic growth on the mighty trunk of Hansa.

The alliance of rich trading stations on the Circle Line, aptly dubbed ‘Hansa’ in memory of its Teutonic prototype, was an enduring bulwark of civilisation in a Metro that was sinking into a swamp of barbarity and poverty. Hansa was a regular army, electric lighting even at the poorest way station and a guaranteed crust of bread for everyone whose passport contained the coveted stamp of citizenship. On the black market passports like that cost an absolute fortune, but if Hanseatic border guards discovered anyone with a counterfeit, the price he paid was his head.

Of course, Hansa owed its wealth and power to its location: the Circle Line ringed the central tangle of radial lines, with its transfer stations allowing access to all of them and harnessing them together. Shuttle traders carrying tea from the Economic Achievements Station and trolleys delivering ammunition from the arms factories at Bauman Station preferred to offload their goods at the closest Hansa post and go back home. Better to let the goods go cheap than set off right round the Metro in pursuit of profit, on a journey that could be cut short at any moment.

Hansa had annexed some of the adjacent radial line stations, but most of them had been left to themselves and became transformed, with Hansa’s connivance, into grey areas, where people conducted the kind of business in which the disdainful bosses of Hansa preferred not to be implicated.

Naturally, the radial transfer stations were flooded with Hansa’s spies and they had been bought, lock, stock and barrel, by its merchants, but they remained nominally independent. Serpukhov Station was one of these. A train had halted forever in one of the stretches of line leading from it, after failing to reach the next station, Tula. Rendered habitable by the Protestant sectarian believers who now occupied it, the train was indicated on Istomin’s map with a laconic Latin cross: it had become an isolated homestead, lost in a black wasteland. If not for the missionaries roaming round the neighbouring stations, with their insatiable greed for lost souls, Istomin wouldn’t have had any complaints about the sectarians. But in any case these sheepdogs of God didn’t roam as far as Sebastopol, and they didn’t cause any particular hindrance to passing travellers, except perhaps by delaying them slightly with their intense conversations about salvation. And apart from that, the other tunnel from Tula to Serpukhov was entirely clear, so the local convoys used that one.

Istomin ran his glance down the line again. Tula Station? A settlement gradually running to seed, picking up the crumbs dropped by Sebastopolite convoys marching through and the sly traders from Serpukhov. The people lived on whatever they could turn their hand to: some mended various sorts of mechanical junk, some went to the Hansa border to look for work, squatting on their haunches for days at a time, waiting for the next foreman with the high-handed manners of a slave driver. ‘They live poorly too, but they don’t have that slippery, villainous Serpukhov look in their eyes,’ thought Istomin. ‘And there’s a lot more order there. It’s probably the danger that binds them together.’

The next station, Nagatino, was marked on his map with a short stroke of the pen – empty. A half-truth: no one loitered there for long, but sometimes there was a motley swarm of rabble at the station, leading a subhuman, twilight existence. Couples who had fled from prying eyes twined their limbs together in the pitch darkness. Sometimes the glow of a feeble little campfire sprang up among the columns, with the shadows of tunnel bandits and murderers swarming around it. But only the ignorant or the absolutely desperate stayed here overnight – by no means all the station’s visitors were human. If you stared hard into the trembling, whispering gloom that filled Nagatino, you could sometimes glimpse silhouettes straight out of a nightmare. And every now and then the homeless vagabonds scattered, if only briefly, when a bloodcurdling howl rang through the stale air as some poor soul was dragged off into a lair to be devoured at leisure.

The tramps didn’t dare set foot beyond Nagatino, and from there all the way to the defensive boundaries of Sebastopol, it was ‘no-man’s-land’. A strictly notional name – of course, the area had its own masters, who guarded its boundaries, and even the Sebastopolite reconnaissance teams preferred not to come up against them.

But now something new had appeared in the tunnels. Something unprecedented, swallowing up everyone who tried to follow a route that supposedly had been thoroughly explored long ago. And who knew if Istomin’s station, even if it called on every inhabitant who was fit to bear arms, would be able to marshal a force strong enough to overcome it. Istomin got up laboriously off his chair, shuffled over to the map and marked with an indelible pencil the stretch of line running from the point labelled ‘Serpukhov’ to the point labelled ‘Nakhimov Prospect’. He drew a thick question mark beside it. He meant to put it beside the Prospect, but it ended up right beside Sebastopol.

At first glance Sebastopol Station appeared deserted. On the platform there was no sign of the familiar army tents in which people usually lived at other stations. There were only forms vaguely perceived by the light of a few dim bulbs, the anthill profiles of machine-gun emplacements, built out of sandbags, but the firing positions were empty, and dust lay thick on the slim square columns. Everything was arranged to make sure that if an outsider found his way in here, he would be certain to think the station had been abandoned long ago.

However, if the uninvited guest got the idea of lingering here, even for a short while, he risked staying forever. The machine-gun squads and snipers on twenty-four-hour duty in adjacent Kakhovka Station occupied their positions in those emplacements in a matter of seconds and the weak light was drowned in the pitiless glare of mercury lamps on the ceiling, searing the retinal nerves of men and monsters accustomed to the darkness of the tunnels.

The platform was the Sebastopolites’ final, most comprehensively planned line of defence. Their homes were located in the belly of this stage-set, in the technical area under the platform. Below the granite slabs of the floor, hidden away from the prying eyes of strangers, was another storey, with a floor area as large as the main hall, but divided up into numerous compartments. Well-lit, dry, warm rooms, smoothly humming machines for purifying air and water, hydroponic hothouses… When they retreated down here, even further underground, the station’s inhabitants were enfolded in a sense of security and comfort.

Homer knew the decisive battle he would face was not in the northern tunnels, but at home. He made his way along the narrow corridor, past the half-open doors of other people’s apartments, dragging his feet slower and slower as he approached his own door. He needed to think through his tactics one more time and rehearse his lines: he was running out of time.

‘What can I do about it? It’s an order. You know what the situation’s like. They didn’t even bother to ask me. Stop acting like a little child! That’s just plain ridiculous! Of course I didn’t ask to be taken! I can’t do that. What are you saying? Of course I can’t. Refuse? That’s desertion!’ he mumbled to himself, switching between determined outrage and a wheedling, cajoling, affectionate tone.

When he reached the doorway of his room, he started mumbling it all over again. No, there was no way tears could be avoided, but he wasn’t going to back down. The old man pulled his head into his shoulders, readying himself for battle, and turned down the door handle.

Nine and a half square metres of floor space – a great luxury that he had spent five years waiting in line for, shifting about from one dormitory to another. Two square metres were taken up by a two-tier army bunkbed and one by a dining table, covered with an elegant tablecloth. Another three were occupied by a huge heap of newspapers, reaching right up to the ceiling. If he had been a solitary bachelor, then one fine day this mountain would certainly have collapsed, burying him underneath it. But fifteen years earlier he had met a woman who was not only prepared to tolerate this huge pile of dusty junk in her tiny home, but even willing to keep it neat and tidy, so that it wouldn’t transform her domestic nest into a paper Pompeii.

She was prepared to tolerate very many things. The interminable newspaper cuttings with alarming headlines like ‘Arms Race Heats Up’, ‘Americans Test New Anti-Rocket Defence’, ‘Our Nuclear Shield is Growing Stronger’, ‘Provocative Acts Continue’ and ‘Our Patience is Exhausted’, which covered the walls of the little room, like wallpaper, from top to bottom. His all-night sessions, hunched over a heap of school exercise books with a well-chewed ballpoint pen in his hand and the electric light burning – with a heap of paper like that in their home, candles were completely out of the question. His humorous, clownish nickname, which he bore with pride and others spoke with a condescending smile.

Very many things, but not everything. Not his juvenile urge to plunge into the epicentre of the hurricane every time, in order to see what things were really like in there – and this at the age of almost sixty! And not the frivolity with which he accepted any assignment from his superiors, forgetting that he had barely escaped with his life and managed to scramble back home after one of his recent expeditions.

Not the thought that she might lose him and be left all alone again. After seeing Homer off to the watch – his turn to stand duty came round once a week – she never stayed at home. To escape from her distressing thoughts, she called on neighbours, or went to work even when it wasn’t her shift. The male indifference to death seemed stupid, egotistic and criminal to her.

It was pure chance that he found her at home: she had dropped in to change after work, and now she froze just as she was, with her arms threaded into the sleeves of her darned woollen sweater. Her dark hair, visibly streaked with grey – although she wasn’t even fifty yet – was tangled, her brown eyes were bright with fear.

‘Kolya, has something happened? Aren’t you on duty until late?’

Homer suddenly lost all desire to tell her about the decision that had been taken. He hesitated: maybe if he just calmed her down for the time being, he could slip the news into the talk over dinner?

‘Only don’t you even think of lying,’ she warned him, catching his wandering gaze.

‘You know, Lena… The thing is…’ he began.

‘Has someone…?’ – she asked the most important question immediately, about the most terrible thing of all, not wishing even to pronounce the word ‘died’, as if she believed her dark thoughts might materialise as reality.

‘No! No,’ said Homer with a shake of his head. ‘They just took me off duty. They’re sending me to Serpukhov,’ he added in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘But isn’t it…?’ Elena said and faltered. ‘Isn’t that… Have they come back then? That’s where…’

‘Oh, come on, it’s all a load of nonsense. There’s nothing there,’ he said hastily.

Elena turned away, walked over to the table, shifted the salt-cellar from one spot to another and straightened out a fold in the tablecloth.

‘I had a dream,’ she said and coughed to clear the hoarseness out of her voice.

‘You have them all the time.’

‘A bad dream,’ she went on stubbornly and suddenly broke into pitiful sobs.

‘Oh come on, now. What can I do? It’s an order,’ he mumbled, stroking her fingers and floundering as he realised his entire well-prepared speech wasn’t worth a damn.

‘Let that one-eyed bastard go himself,’ she yelled furiously through her tears, jerking her hand away. ‘Let that other fiend go, in his little beret! All they ever do is give orders. What does he care? All his life he’s slept with a machine-gun beside him instead of a woman. What does he know?’

Once you’ve reduced a woman to tears, you can only demean yourself by turning round and trying to console her. Homer felt ashamed, and genuinely sorry for Elena, but it would have been all too easy now to break down, promise to refuse the assignment, reassure her and dry her tears, only to regret later missing his chance – this chance that had fallen to him, which could be the last one in a life that was already unusually long by today’s standards.

So he said nothing.

It was already time to go, gather the officers together and brief them, but the colonel carried on sitting in Istomin’s office, taking no notice of the cigarette smoke that usually irritated and tempted him so badly.

While the station commandant whispered something thoughtfully, running one finger over his battle-scarred map of the Metro, Denis Mikhailovich kept trying to understand why Hunter wanted to do this. There could be only one thing behind his mysterious appearance at Sebastopol, his desire to settle here and even the cautious way in which the brigadier almost always showed up at the station wearing his helmet to conceal his face: Istomin must be right, Hunter was on the run from someone after all. In order to earn extra points, he had made the southern guard post his base: by doing the work of an entire brigade, he was gradually making himself indispensable. At this stage, no matter who demanded that they hand him over, no matter what reward they offered for his head, neither Istomin nor the colonel would even think of letting them have him.

He had chosen the perfect place to hide. There were no outsiders at Sebastopol and, unlike the garrulous shuttle traders from other stations, the local convoy merchants weren’t loose-tongued, they never gossiped when they got out into the Greater Metro. In this little Sparta, clinging to its patch of earth at the very end of the world, the qualities valued most highly were reliability and ferocity in battle. And people here knew how to keep secrets.

But then why would Hunter abandon everything, volunteer for this expedition and set out for Hansa, risking being recognised? Even Istomin wouldn’t have had the heart to assign him a sortie like this. Somehow the colonel didn’t believe the brigadier was really alarmed about the fate of the missing scouts. And he wasn’t fighting for Sebastopol out of love for the station, but for reasons of his own, known only to him.

Maybe he was on a mission? That would explain a lot: his sudden arrival, his secrecy, the obstinacy with which he spent the nights in a sleeping bag in the tunnels, his decision to set out for Serpukhov Station immediately. But then why had he asked the colonel not to let anyone else know? Who could have sent him, if not them?

Who else?

The colonel forced himself to ignore the desire to take a drag from Istomin’s cigarette. No, it was impossible. Hunter – one of the pillars of The Order? The man to whom tens, maybe hundreds of them owed their lives, including Denis Mikhailovich himself?

‘That man couldn’t…’ he objected cautiously to himself. ‘But was the Hunter who returned from the abyss still that man?’ And if he was acting on instructions from someone… Could he have received some kind of signal now? Did this mean that the disappearance of the armaments convoys and the three scouts was no coincidence, but part of a carefully planned operation? But then what part was the brigadier playing in it?

The colonel shook his head briskly to and fro, as if he were trying to toss off the leeches of doubt that had fastened onto it and were rapidly swelling up with blood. How could he think like this about a man who had saved his life? Especially since, so far, Hunter had served the station impeccably and given no reason at all to doubt him. And Denis Mikhailovich, refusing to label the man a ‘spy’ or a ‘saboteur’ even in his thoughts, took a decision.

‘Let’s have a cup of tea, and then I’ll go to and talk to the men,’ he declared with exaggerated cheerfulness, cracking his knuckles. Istomin tore himself away from the map and gave a weary smile. He was just reaching out to his ancient disc-dial phone to summon his orderly when the phone started ringing. The two men glanced sharply at each other, startled – it was a week since they had heard that sound: if the duty orderly wanted to report something, he always knocked at the door, and no one else at the station could call the commandant directly.

‘Istomin here,’ he said warily.

‘Vladimir Ivanovich, I’ve got Tula Station on the line,’ the operator jabbered. ‘Only it’s very hard to hear anything. I think it’s our men but the connection…’

‘Just put it through, will you?’ the commandant roared, slamming his fist down hard on the desk and setting the telephone jangling pitifully.

The startled operator fell silent and Istomin heard crackling and rustling sounds in the earpiece, and a distant voice, distorted beyond recognition.

Elena turned away to the wall, hiding her tears. What more could she do to hold him back? Why was he so glad to grab the first opportunity to get away from the station, using that moth-eaten old excuse about orders from the command and punishment for desertion? What had she failed to give him, what else should she have done in all these fifteen years, in order to tame him? But here he was, longing to get back into the tunnels again, as if he hoped to find something out there, apart from darkness, emptiness and death. What was it he was looking for?

Homer could hear her reproaches in his own head as clearly as if she were speaking out loud. He felt mean and shabby, but it was too late to retreat now. He almost opened his mouth to apologise, to speak warm, tender words, but he choked, realising that every word would only throw more fuel on the flames.

And above Elena’s head Moscow cried – hanging on the wall, lovingly set in a little frame, was a colour photograph of Tver Street in a transparent shower of summer rain, cut out of an old glossy calendar. At one time, a long time ago, during his old wanderings round the Metro, Homer had owned nothing but his clothes and that photo. Other men’s pockets held crumpled pages with photos of naked beauties, torn out of men’s magazines, but for Homer they couldn’t take the place of a real, live woman, even for a few brief, shameful minutes. That photo reminded him of something that was infinitely important, inexpressibly beautiful… And lost forever.

With an awkward whisper – ‘I’m sorry’ – he edged out into the corridor, carefully closed the door behind him and squatted down, absolutely drained. The neighbours’ door was ajar, and two puny, pasty-faced little children, a boy and a girl, were playing in the opening. Catching sight of the old man, they froze: the crudely sewn bear stuffed with rags that they had just been arguing over flopped to the floor, forgotten.

‘Uncle Kolya! Tell us a story! You promised you’d tell us one when you got back!’ they exclaimed, dashing at Homer.

‘Which one do you want?’ he asked, unable to refuse.

‘About the mootants with no heads!’ the little boy howled gleefully.

‘No! I don’t want a story about mootants!’ the little girl exclaimed sulkily. ‘They’re frightening, I’m afraid!’

‘So which story do you want, Taniusha?’ the old man sighed.

‘In that case, the one about the fascists! And the partisans!’ the little boy interrupted.

‘No… I like the one about the Emerald City…’ Tanya said with a gap-toothed grin.

‘But I told you that one only yesterday. Maybe the one about how Hansa fought the Reds?’

‘The Emerald City, the Emerald City!’ they both clamoured.

‘Oh, all right,’ the old man agreed. ‘Somewhere far, far away on the Sokolniki Line, out beyond seven empty stations, out beyond three ruined Metro bridges, a thousand, thousand sleepers away from here, lies a magical underground city. This city is enchanted and ordinary people can’t get into it. Magicians live there, and only they can come out through the gates of the city and go back in again. And up on the surface of the ground is a huge, mighty castle with towers, where these wise magicians used to live. This castle is called…’

‘The Versity!’ the little boy called out, giving his sister a triumphant look.

‘The University,’ Homer confirmed. ‘When the Great War happened and the nuclear missiles started raining down, the magicians withdrew into their city and put a spell on the entrance, so the wicked people who started the war wouldn’t get in. And they live…’ He gagged and stopped.

Elena was standing there, leaning against the doorpost and listening to him: Homer hadn’t noticed her coming out into the corridor.

‘I’ll pack your knapsack,’ she said in a hoarse voice.

The old man walked up to Elena and took her by the hand. She put her arms round him awkwardly, feeling shy in front of the neighbours’ children, and asked:

‘Will you come back soon? Will you be all right?’

And Homer, astounded for the thousandth time in his long life by the invincible female love of promises, regardless of whether it was possible to keep them or not, said: ‘Everything will be just fine’.

‘You’re so old already, but you kiss like you were a young couple,’ said the little girl, making a spiteful face.

‘And our dad said it isn’t true, there isn’t any Emerald City,’ the little boy said in a surly voice, just to round things off.

‘Maybe there isn’t,’ Homer said with a shrug. ‘It’s just a story. But how can we get by here without stories?’

It was appallingly difficult to hear anything. The voice forcing its way through the crackling and rustling sounded vaguely familiar to Istomin – a bit like one of the team of three scouts sent to Serpukhov.

‘At Tula Station… We can’t… Tula…’ said the voice, straining to communicate something important.

‘I understand that you’re at Tula!’ Istomin shouted into the receiver. ‘What happened? Why don’t you come back?’

‘Tula Station! Here… Don’t… It’s very important… don’t…’ But the end of the phrase was swallowed up by the damned interference.

‘Don’t what? Say again, don’t what?’

‘You mustn’t storm it! Whatever you do, don’t storm it,’ the receiver suddenly said quite clearly and distinctly.

‘Why? What the devil is going on there? What’s happening?’ the commandant yelled impatiently.

But he couldn’t hear the voice any more; it was drowned in a massive surge of noise, and then the receiver went dead. But Istomin refused to believe it and he wouldn’t hang up.

‘What’s happening?’