The old man smiled softly. He seemed to be pleased that she had awoken again. Only now she recognized the same warm shine in his eyes which she had only seen in wit one other human. No she knew that she had been mistaken …
She was ashamed of herself.
“Forgive me.” She said. In the next moment she remembered the last minutes at the Pavelezkaya. With a strong movement she rose up. “How’s your friend?”
She didn’t know if she should cry or laugh. Maybe she just didn’t have the strength for it.
Luckily the razor sharp claws of the chimera had missed the girl; only the paws had hit her. But she had been unconscious for the whole day. The doctor had reassured Homer that her life was in no longer in danger. He hadn’t told his own problems to the doctor.
While Sasha had been unconscious Homer had gotten used to calling her that way, sank back into his chair and she leaned against her pillow. The old man returned to the table, where an opened notebook with ninety-six pages waited for him. He turned around the pen in his hand and continued at the place where had had been interrupted by the fevering girl.
“… But this time the return of the caravan had been delayed and so long that there was only one reason for it:
Something unknown must have happened, something terrible, something that not even the heavy armed and experienced soldiers who accompanied them nor their long and good relationship with hanza could have prevented.
The whole thing would have been a lot less unsettling if they could at least communicate with each other.
But there was something wrong with the telephone to the ring line, the connection had been gone since Monday and the troop who had been sent to the breaking point had returned without any success.”
Homer raised his eyes and winched, the girl was standing directly behind him and looking over his shoulder at what he had scribbled down. Her curiosity seemed to be the only thing that kept her on her feet.
Embarrassed the old man turned the notebook on the other side.
“Are you waiting for inspiration?” She asked him.
“I am only at the very beginning.” Mumbled Homer.
“And what happened to the caravan?”
“I don’t know”. He carefully framed the title with his pen. “The story isn’t over for a long time yet. Lay down, you need to rest”
“But you decide how your book ends”
“In this book nothing is decided by me. I just write down everything that happened”
“Then it is even more decided by you.” Said the girl sunken in thoughts. “Am I in it as well?”
Homer smiled. “I just wanted to ask for your permission”
“I’ll think about it” she answered serious.
“Why are you writing this book?”
Homer stood up to talk to her from eye to eye.
Already after his last conversation with Sasha he had realized that her youth and missing experience created a wrong picture in her mind. At the strange station where they had taken her from, a year must have seemed as two. So she didn’t answer the questions which he spoke out loud, but the ones that he left unspoken. And she only asked questions to which he himself had no answer.
He was counting on her honesty and how else could she ever be the heroine (not the drug, it is the female form of hero in English) of his book if not? He had to be honest as well, to not treat her like a child and to not cover her in silence. But he mustn’t say any less then what he had already admitted to himself.
He said: “I want that people remember me. ME and those who were close to me. They don’t know how the world was. The one that I have loved. That they hear the most important stuff that I have witnessed and realized. That my life wasn’t in vain. That something remains of me”
“You are putting your soul into it?” She put her head oblique. “But it’s just a notebook. It can be burned or lost”
“An uncertain place to store your soul, is it not?
Homer sighed. “No, I only need this notebook to bring everything into the right order. And so that I don’t forget anything important as long as the story isn’t finished.
When it is finished you would just have to tell it to some people. How I imagine it hopefully you don’t need paper or a body to spread it.”
“You have surely seen a lot that shouldn’t have been forgotten.” The girl shrugged her shoulder. “I don’t have anything that would be worth writing down. Leave me out of the book. Don’t waste paper on me.
“But you have everything in front of you…” Started Homer and had to think that he wouldn’t live to see it.
The girl didn’t react and homer already feared that she would close off to him again. He searched for the right words, trying to take everything back, but he tripped over and over again over his sorrows.
“What is the most beautiful thing that you can remember?” She suddenly asked. “The most beautiful?”
Homer hesitated. It was a strange idea to tell another person who he only had only known for two days his deepest inners. Not even Yelena he had told everything and she had always thought that on the wall of their chamber only a usual landscape of the city was hanging. Would a girl that had been underground for her whole live even be able to understand what he would tell her?
He decided that he would let it come to it: “Summery rain.” He said.
Sasha’s forehead got wrinkles, which looked strange.
“What is so beautiful about it?”
“Have you ever seen rain?”
“No.” The girl shook her head. “Father didn’t want me to go outside. I climbed up two or three times anyways, but I didn’t like it up there at all. It is terrible when all around you there are no walls.” Then she explained it to make sure that they were talking about the same thing. “Rain is when water comes from above, right?”
Homer didn’t listen anymore. Again that day emerged from the distant past. Like a medium his body let the summoned ghost use it, gazed at into void and didn’t stop speaking …
“The whole month had been dry and hot. My wife had been pregnant, she had always had breathing problems and then there was the heat … In the entire clinic there was only one fan and she complained how hot it was. I couldn’t breathe well myself and I was very sorry. It was bad: For years we had tried to get children but without success and now the doctors scared us that we could receive a stillbirth.
Now she was under constant watch, but it would’ve been better for her to remain at home. The date for the birth had already passed but the pains didn’t start. I couldn’t take off every day of course. Somebody had once said that if you carry a child to long the risk of a stillbirth would increase. I didn’t know what to do. As soon as I was finished with work I ran to the clinic and kept watch under her window. In the tunnels there was no cell phone network so at every station I checked if I had missed any calls. And then, suddenly there was the message from the doctor: >Please call back right away<. Until I had found a quiet place to think I had already buried my wife and child in my thoughts, the old, fearful idiot I was”
Homer went silent as if he was listening to the sound of the signal from the phone, waited if somebody picked up.
The girl didn’t interrupt him. She spared her answers for later.
“Then a stranger’s voice said: Congratulations, it’s a boy. It sounds so easy: It’s a boy. From the dead they had brought my wife back and then this miracle … I ran up and it was raining. A cold rain. The air had become so light, so clear. As if the city had lain under a dusty plastic foil and suddenly somebody had taken it away. The leaves shined, finally the sky was moving again and the houses looked so fresh. I ran along the Tverskaya, to the flower booth and cried because I was so happy. I had an umbrella but I didn’t open it,
I wanted to get wet, wanted to feel the rain. I can’t recount … It was like I had been born and saw the world for the first time. And also the world was fresh and new, as if they had just cut its life cord and bathed it for the first ti
me.
As if everything had become new and as if it trying to make up for all the bad things that had happened. I would now have a second live: What I hadn’t been able to accomplish, my son would accomplish. Everything there was just for us. In front of us …”
Again Homer was silent. He saw the ten storey high Stalin houses, the sinking, gradually pink turning nightly fog, heard the busy noise of the Tverskaya, breathed in the sweet, polluted air, closed his eyes and put his face into the summery monsoon. When he came back to himself, small raindrops shimmered on his cheeks and eyes.
Hastily he wiped them off with his sleeve.
“You know.” Said the girl, not any less embarrassed.
“Maybe rain is something beautiful. I don’t have memories like that. Can you spare some of them? If you want.” She smiled at him. “You can include me in your book. Somebody has to be in charge how everything ends”
“It is still too early” said the doctor serious.
Sasha didn’t know how she could explain this autocrat the importance of what she was asking him. She took a deep breath and readied another attack, but left it to a surly gesture of her hand and turned around.
“You are going to have to be patient. But because you are already on your feet and apparently feeling well you can go for a walk.” The doctor packed his instruments into an old plastic bag and shook Homer’s hand. “I’ll be back in an hour.
The leadership of the station has ordered an especially thorough treatment in your case. After all we are in your debt”
Homer threw a dirty military jacket over to Sasha.
She stepped out of the room, followed the doctor past the other areas of the hospital, past a row of rooms and chambers full of desks and stretchers, then two staircases upwards, through an inconspicuous low door and then into a giant long hall. Sasha froze at the doorstep, unable to go on.
She had never seen something like that. It was past her imagination how many living people could live in one place.
Thousands of faces without masks! And so distinct from each another! There were humans of all ages, from old man to baby. Uncountable amounts of men: With beards, shaven, tall, small, tired, awake, emaciated and with muscles.
Those who had been mutilated in battle, those with birth errors, bright beauties and those that were unattractive on the outside, but emitted a mysterious pull. And not any less amount of women: Those with big butts, red faced broads, but also thin, pale girls with unbelievable colorful dressers and interlacing necklaces.
Would they recognize that Sasha was different?
Would she so she could vanish into this crowd act like she was one of them or would they gang up on her and tear her to pieces like a horde of rats would do to a strange albino? At first it seemed to her that all eyes were resting on her and with every new look she felt warmer and warmer. But after fifteen minutes she got used to it: Some looked at her hostile, some curious, some others too intrusive, but most weren’t interested in her. They only passed Sasha indifferently with their eyes and pushed onwards immediately without taking notice.
It seemed to her that the scattered and blurry looks were the machine oil that lubricated the gears of this hectic mechanism. If those humans would be interested at each other the friction would be too big and the whole spectacle would stand still in the shortest amount of time.
To go under in this group you didn’t need a new disguise or a new haircut. It was enough if you didn’t look too deeply into the eyes of others but to leave their eyes after a short look. Every time she did that she still shivered. When Sasha would use this indifference it would be easy to continuously pass the interlocking inhabitants of the station without getting stuck at one place.
In the first minutes the cooking mix of human smell had numbed her nose but shortly after that her smell had learnt to filter out the important ones and ignore everything else. Through the sour smell of unclean bodies she smelled a luring, young, yes even pleasant aroma that went over the group like a wave. It was the perfume of a woman. The smell of grilled meat and the miasma of the trash pit mixed together. With one word: For Sasha this smell of the Pavelezkayas was the smell of life and the longer she took it in, the sweater it became for her.
To explore this long corridor she probably would have needed a month. Everything here was so overwhelming …
There were places where you could buy jewelry which was made out of dozens of yellow and minted metal discs which she could stare at for hours. There was a giant selection of books that had more secret knowledge in them than she would ever be able to accumulate.
A shopkeeper lured passing people with a stand with the words FLOWERS. He had a giant selection of feel better soon cards on which different bouquets of flowers were printed on. As a child she had once received a card like that, but how many of them were here!
She saw infants on the breasts of their mothers and older children that played with real cats. Couples that touched each other with their eyes and other that did the same with their hands.
Men tried to touch her. They could have mistaken her interest for some kind of invitation or as a wish to sell something to her, but a certain tone in their words was unpleasant to her, yes even disgusted her. What did they want from her? Weren’t there enough women here? Many beauties were under them, covered in colorful dresses they looked like the open heads of the flowers on the cards. Sasha guessed that these men made fun of her.
Was she even able to get man curios because her?
Suddenly doubts started to bite deeper that she didn’t even know she had. Maybe she understood everything wrong … But why should it be different? Something awoke painfully in her chest, under her rips, at that certain place that she only had discovered for herself a short while ago.
To get rid of her unrest she wandered along the shops again, where all kinds of wares were, bulletproof vests, normal clothing, machines, but she was almost no longer interested in them. Her inner voice had pushed out the noisy crowd into the background and the picture that her memories had painted were more plastic looking then the living humans around her
Had she been worth his life? Would they still be able to judge him for what he had done? And before all: What sense made those stupid thoughts now? Now that she couldn’t do anything for him anymore …
Suddenly even before Sasha realized why, all doubts faded and her heart calmed down. She listened into herself and heard …. It was the faint echo of distant melody that came from where a large group of people had gathered.
Music that remembered Sasha like many people off the first goodnight songs her mother had sung for her. But she had to be content with only her mother’s songs for years: Her father hadn’t had any place for music and only sparsely ever sung, even wandering musicians and jesters hadn’t been welcome at the Avtosvodskaya.
And when the guardsmen on their campfires croaked their heavy hearted and fiery military song neither the wrongly tuned wooden guitars nor Sasha’s inner cords had swung with the melody.
But what she heard now was no boring jingling. It sounded like the soft voice of a young woman, yes of a girl but unreachable high for the human throat. It sounded uncompromised and powerful at the same time. But with what could she even compare this miracle?
The song of the unknown instrument cast a spell over the people who stood around, raised them high and carried them into to a never ending place, into worlds which all who had been born in the metro had never seen and which they probably couldn’t have guessed. This music let the people dream and made them believe that all dreams could become reality. It awoke an incomprehensible longing and promised to fulfill it at the same time. And it gave Sasha the feeling as if she had wandered through an abandoned station for a long time when she had suddenly found a lamp and in the shine of the lamp, immediately the exit.
She was standing in front of the arms-smith. Directly in front of her was a plank of wood where different knives were screwed on, from a small pocked knife to murderous hand long dagge
rs. Sasha watched them frozen, like the blades had cast a spell on her.
Inside of her a wild fight took place. A small tempting feeling emerged. The old man had given her a handful of bullets, just enough for the giant black knife with the jagged edge, a wide, sharp exemplar, that which was better suited for her plan than anything else.
After one minute Sasha had made a decision. She hid her treasure in the chest-pocked of her overall, if possible at the place where she wanted to fight the pain. When she stepped back into the hospital, she didn’t feel the weight of her military jacked nor the pounding in her forehead.
The crowd towered over the girl and the musician who created these wonderful sounds in the distance remained invisible for her. The melody on the other hand seemed to catch up to her, to make her go back, as if it wanted to talk her down.
In vain.
Again it knocked on the door.
Homer rose groaning from his knees, wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled the chain to flush. On the dirty green fabric of his jacked a brown stain had remained.
It had been the fifth time that he had thrown up in one day even though he actually hadn’t eaten anything.
The symptoms could have had a different cause, he told himself. Why had the speed of the sickness been accelerated at all? Maybe it was because …
“Are you going to be finished soon?” Yelled an impatient voice. It was the voice of a woman.
Oh! Had he misread the letters on the door in his haste? Homer wiped the dirty sleeve over his sweat covered face, put on an unwavering face and pushed the bar to the side.
“Typical drunk!” A woman dressed up to the nines pushed him to the side and shut the door behind her.
Ok, thought Homer. They could believe that he was a drunk, which was a lot better than the truth. He stepped in front of the mirror which was over the sink and put his hot forehead against it. With time he could breathe again, he watched how the glass steamed up and winched: His respirator had slid down and was hanging under his chin.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 17
