In that moment, for her he wasn’t a bandit, but a hero, not a murderer, but a warrior; and above all, he was a man. And there was another thought, unspoken, not even clearly formulated as yet, swirling round in her head: his knife was broken, he was wounded, he couldn’t wake up. Perhaps if he had a knife that was whole . . . It was like an amulet . . . She went ahead and bought it.
So now, standing by his bed, hiding the gift behind her back, Sasha was waiting for him to sense her, or at least sense the presence of the blade. The man with the shaved head twitched and snorted, he started hawking up words, but he didn’t come round: the darkness held him too tight in its grip. Until now Sasha had never spoken his name even to herself, let alone out loud. Before she called him in a loud voice, she whispered that name, as if she was trying it out, and finally made up her mind.
‘Hunter!’
The man with the shaved head went quiet and listened, as if she was somewhere unimaginably far away, and her voice only reached him as a faint echo, but he still didn’t respond. Sasha spoke the name again, louder, more insistently. She wasn’t going to back off until he opened his eyes. She wanted to be his tunnel spark.
Someone in the corridor called out in surprise, boots started scraping across the floor out there and Sasha squatted down and put the knife on the locker at the head of the bed, in order not to waste any more time.
‘This is for you,’ she said.
Steely fingers closed round Sasha’s wrist in a grip powerful enough to crush her bones. The injured man managed to raise his eyelids a little, but his gaze wandered about mindlessly without coming to rest on anything.
‘Thank you,’ said the girl, not even attempting to free her hand from the trap it was clasped in.
‘What are you doing here?’
A large, strapping man in a greasy white coat darted up to her and pricked the man with the shaved head in the arm with a syringe. The patient went limp and the orderly tugged Sasha sharply to her feet, hissing through his clenched teeth.
‘What’s wrong with you, don’t you understand? In his condition . . . The doctor strictly forbade . . .’
‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand! He has to have something to cling on to, and your jabs only make him loosen his grip.’
He shoved Sasha hard towards the door, but after flying a few metres, she swung round and flashed her eyes at him stubbornly.
‘Don’t let me see you in here again! And what’s this?’ he asked, spotting the knife.
‘That’s his . . . I brought it for him . . .’ Sasha said and hesitated. ‘If not for him . . . those creatures would have torn me to pieces.’
‘The doctor will tear me to pieces if he finds out,’ the orderly snarled. ‘Come on, get out of here!’
But Sasha lingered for another moment, turning back to Hunter, who was sunk deep in his curative coma, and finished what she was saying anyway.
‘Thank you. You saved me.’
She strode out of the ward and suddenly heard a quiet, cracked voice say:
‘I only wanted to kill it . . . The monster . . .’
The door slammed in her face and the key scraped in the lock.
No, that wasn’t what the knife was intended for, Homer realised immediately. It was enough just to hear the way the girl called the brigadier’s name as he floundered in the quagmire of his delirium – insistently, tenderly, plaintively. On the very point of intervening, the old man halted in confusion and pulled back: he didn’t need to save anyone here. The only way he could help was by making himself scarce as quickly as possible, in order not to frighten Sasha off.
Who could say, perhaps she was right? After all, at Nagornaya, Hunter had completely forgotten about his companions, abandoning them to be torn apart by the phantom giants. But in this battle . . . Could the girl really mean something to the brigadier after all?
Lost in thought, Homer wandered off along the corridor to his own ward. An orderly tramping in the opposite direction shouldered him aside, but the old man didn’t even notice. It was time to give Sasha the little trifle he had bought for her at the market, Homer told himself. It looked as if it might come in useful soon.
He took the little package out of the desk drawer and twirled it in his hands. The girl came bursting into the room a few minutes later – tense, distressed and angry. She clambered onto her bed, pulled her legs up and stared into the corner. Homer waited to see if the storm would break or pass over. Sasha didn’t say anything, she just started biting her nails. The time had come for decisive action.
‘I’ve got a present for you,’ the old man said, getting up from the desk and putting the package on the blanket beside the girl.
‘What for?’ she asked clattering her claws without peeping out of her shell.
‘What do people generally give each other presents for?’
‘To repay them,’ Sasha replied confidently. ‘For something good they’ve done for them, or something they’re going to ask for later.’
‘Then let’s just say I’m repaying you for the good things you’ve already done for me,’ Homer said with a smile. ‘I don’t have anything else to ask you for.’
‘I haven’t done anything for you,’ the girl objected.
‘What about my book? I’ve already put you in it. I have to repay you, I don’t want to be in debt. Come on now, open it,’ he said, allowing a faint note of humorous irritation into his voice.
‘I don’t like being in debt either,’ said Sasha, tearing open the wrapping. ‘What’s this? Oh!’
She was holding a red plastic disc, a flat little box that opened into two halves. It had once been a cheap powder compact, only now the two compartments, for powder and rouge, had been empty for a long time. But on the other hand, the little mirror on the inside of the lid was still in perfect condition.
‘I can see better in this than in a puddle,’ said Sasha gaping at the compact with funny, wide-open, eyes as she studied her own reflection. ‘What did you give me it for?’
‘Sometimes it can be useful to see yourself from the outside,’ Homer chuckled. ‘It helps to understand a lot of things about yourself.’
‘And what do I need to understand about myself?’ she asked warily.
‘There are people who’ve never seen their own reflection and all their lives they think they’re someone different. It can often be hard to see clearly from the inside, and there’s no one in here to give them a hint . . . So until they stumble across a mirror by accident, they’ll carry on making the same mistake. And even when they do look at a reflection, they often can’t believe that it’s themselves they’re seeing.’
‘And who do I see in the mirror?’ she asked insistently.
‘You tell me,’ he said, crossing his arms.
‘Myself . . . Well . . . a girl.’ Just to make sure, she presented first one cheek and then the other to the little mirror.
‘A young woman,’ Homer corrected her. ‘And a rather scruffy one.’
She twisted and turned for a little bit longer, then flashed her eyes at Homer, intending to ask him something, but changed her mind and said nothing, then finally screwed up her courage after all and blurted out something that made the old man gag.
‘Am I ugly?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ he said, struggling to prevent the corners of his lips from spreading into a smile. ‘I can’t see under all the dirt.’
‘So that’s what’s wrong?’ Sasha’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You mean men can’t sense a woman’s beauty? You need to have everything shown to you and explained?’
‘That’s probably right. And it’s often used to deceive us,’ Homer laughed. ‘Painting can work genuine miracles with a woman’s face. But in your case we’re not talking about restoring the portrait, it’s more like an archaeological excavation. It’s hard to judge how beautiful an antique statue is from a foot sticking up out of the ground. Although it almost certainly is very beautiful,’ he added condescendingly.
‘What does “
antique” mean?’ asked Sasha, suspecting a trick.
‘Ancient,’ said Homer, carrying on with his joke.
‘I’m only seventeen!’ she protested.
‘They’ll discover that later. When they dig you up.’
The old man sat back down at the desk with an imperturbable air, opened the exercise book at the last full page and started reading his notes, gradually turning more and more sombre.
If they dug her up. The girl, and him, and everyone else. There was a time when he used to amuse himself with thoughts like that: what if, in thousands of years’ time, archaeologists studying the ruins of old Moscow, when even its name had been forgotten, were to come across one of the entrances to the underground labyrinth? They’d probably think they’d found a gigantic mass burial site – it was unlikely to occur to anyone that people could actually have lived in these dark catacombs. A culture that was once highly developed had obviously degenerated in the twilight of its existence, they would decide: these people buried their leaders in vaults, together with all their possessions, weapons, servants and concubines.
He still had eighty-something pages left in his exercise book. Would that be enough to fit both worlds into – the one lying on the surface and the one in the Metro?
‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying?’ said the girl, shaking his arm.
‘What? Sorry, I was lost in thought.’ He rubbed his forehead.
‘Are ancient statues really beautiful? I mean, is what people used to think was beautiful before still beautiful today?’
‘Yes,’ the old man said with shrug.
‘And will it still be tomorrow?’
‘Probably. If there’s anyone here to appreciate it.’
Sasha started pondering and fell silent. Homer slipped back into the rut of his own grim reflections and didn’t try to force the conversation.
‘You mean beauty doesn’t exist without people?’ Sasha asked eventually, puzzled.
‘Probably not,’ he replied absentmindedly. ‘If there’s no one to see it . . . After all, animals aren’t capable, are they?’
‘And if animals are different from people because they can’t see the difference between what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,’ Sasha pondered, ‘does that mean people can’t exist without beauty either?’
‘Oh, yes they can,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘Lots of people don’t need it at all.’
The girl put her hand in her pocket and pulled out a strange object: a little square of polythene or plastic with a design on it. Sasha held it out to Homer timidly, and yet somehow proudly, as if she were revealing a great treasure to him.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘You tell me,’ she said with a sly smile.
‘Well now,’ he said, carefully taking the little square from her, reading the words on it and handing it back, ‘it’s the outside package from a tea bag. With a little picture.’
‘With a painting,’ she corrected him. ‘With a beautiful painting. If not for it, I would have . . . turned into an animal.’
Homer looked at her, feeling his eyes filling up with tears and his breath faltering. You sentimental old fool, he thought, chastising himself. He cleared his throat and sighed.
‘Haven’t you ever gone up onto the surface, into the city? Apart from this time?’
‘Why?’ asked Sasha, putting the little packet away. ‘Do you want to tell me everything up there isn’t like it is in the painting? That things like that don’t even exist? I know all that already. I know what the city looks like – the buildings, the bridge, the river. Creepy and empty.’
‘On the contrary,’ the old man responded. ‘I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than that city. But you . . . you’re judging the entire Metro from a single sleeper. I probably can’t even describe it to you. Buildings higher than any cliffs. Broad avenues, teeming like mountain torrents. The sky that’s always bright, the glowing mist . . . A vainglorious city, living for the moment – like every one of its inhabitants. Crazy and chaotic. Made up entirely of contradictory combinations, constructed without any plans. Not eternal, because eternity is too cold and static. But so alive!’ He clenched his fist and then waved his arm in the air. ‘You can’t understand that. You have to see it for yourself . . .’
And at that moment he really believed that if Sasha went up onto the surface, the ghost of that city would reveal itself to her too; he believed that, completely forgetting that for that to happen, she would have had to know the city when it was still alive.
The old man managed to arrange things somehow, and she was allowed inside the borders of Hansa: they led her right through the station with an armed guard, as if they were taking her to be shot, all the way to the service area, where the local bathhouse was.
The only thing the two Pavelets stations had in common was the name, as if two sisters had been separated at birth and one had ended up in a rich family, and the other had been raised at a hungry way station or in the tunnels. The station on the radial Zamoskvorechie Line had turned out a bit bawdy and frivolous, but light and airy. The station on the Circle Line was low and squat, well lit and polished until it shone, making its house-proud, stingy character obvious from the very first glance. At this time of day there weren’t many people about – probably everyone who didn’t work there preferred the fairground atmosphere of the radial line station to the grave severity of the one on the Circle.
She was the only person in the changing room. Walls covered in neat yellow tiles, a floor of chipped, multifaceted stoneware slabs, little painted metal lockers for shoes and clothes, electric bulbs dangling on shaggy wires, two benches upholstered with roughly trimmed imitation leather . . . Everything inside her quivered in delight.
The skinny female attendant with a moustache handed her an incredibly white towel and a hard little brick of grey soap and allowed her to lock the shower cabin with the bolt. The little squares on the waffle towel and the nauseating soapy smell – it all belonged to the far-distant past, when Sasha was a commandant’s beloved, pampered little daughter. She had forgotten that all these things still existed somewhere.
Sasha unfastened her overalls that were stiff with dirt and clambered out of them as quickly as she could. She pulled off her singlet, took off her shorts and skipped over to the rust-coated pipe with its improvised showerhead. With a great effort, her fingers slipping over the scorching valve wheel, she released the hot water . . . It was boiling! Squeezing up against the wall to escape from the scalding spray, she twisted the other wheel. Eventually she managed to mix cold and hot in the right proportions, stopped dancing about and dissolved into the water.
And all the dust, soot, machine oil and blood flowed down through the grille of the drain with the bubbling water, along with Sasha’s and other people’s weariness and despair, guilt and anxiety. It was quite a while before the water ran clear.
Would this be enough for the old man to stop teasing her, Sasha wondered, examining her pink, steamed feet as if they belonged to someone else and studying her unfamiliar white palms. Would it be enough for men to notice her beauty? Perhaps Homer was right and it was stupid of her to go to the wounded man without tidying herself up first? She would probably have to learn about that kind of thing.
Would he notice how Sasha had changed? She screwed in the valve wheels, shuffled through into the changing room and opened the mirror she had been given . . . Yes, it was impossible not to notice it.
The hot water had helped her loosen up and overcome her doubts. The man with the shaved head hadn’t been trying to rebuff her with his strange words about the monster. He simply hadn’t come round yet, and anyway he wasn’t talking to her, he was just carrying on a violent quarrel he was having with someone else in his nightmare. She just had to wait until he surfaced, and be there with him when it happened, so that . . . So that Hunter would see her straight away and understand everything straight away. And what then? She didn’t have to think about that. He was experienced enoug
h for her to leave everything up to him. Recalling how the man with the shaved head thrashed about in his delirium, Sasha felt, even though she couldn’t explain it, that Hunter was searching for her, because she could calm him, bring him relief from his fever and help him recover his balance. And the more she thought about that, the more feverish she started feeling herself. They took away her filthy overalls, promising to wash them, and gave her a pair of threadbare, light-blue trousers and a sweater with holes in it and a high neck. The new clothes felt tight and awkward – and apart from that, while they were taking her back through the frontier posts to the infirmary, almost every man’s eyes were glued to the trousers and the sweater, and when Sasha reached her own bed, she felt like taking another shower. The old man wasn’t in the room, but she wasn’t left to brood alone for long. A few minutes later the door creaked open and the doctor glanced in.
‘Well now, congratulations. You can visit him. He’s come round.’
‘What date is it?’
The brigadier propped himself up on one elbow, turning his head laboriously to peer at Homer. The old man grabbed at his wrist for some reason, although it was a long time since he had last worn a watch, and shrugged.
‘The second. The second of November,’ the orderly prompted him.
‘Three days,’ said Hunter, slipping down onto the pillow. ‘Three days I’ve been lying here. We’re behind schedule. We have to go.’
‘You won’t get very far,’ said the orderly, trying to reason with him. ‘You’ve got hardly any blood left in you.’
‘We have to go,’ the brigadier repeated, ignoring him. ‘We’re running out of time . . . The bandits . . .’ He suddenly broke off. ‘Why do you need the respirator?’
The old man had been preparing for that question; he’d had three whole days to draw up his lines of defence and plan a counter-offensive. Hunter’s unconscious state had spared him the need for superfluous confessions, and now he could replace them with well-considered lies.
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