‘I haven’t heard anything new yet,’ Homer growled contemptuously.
‘They say there’s a genuine underground city there,’ the musician continued dreamily. ‘A city in which the inhabitants – of course they didn’t die – have devoted themselves to the collection of lost knowledge, crumb by crumb, and the service of beauty. Sparing no resources, they send out expeditions to the picture galleries, museums and libraries that have survived. And they raise their children so that they don’t lose the sense of beauty either. Peace and harmony reign there, and there are no ideologies apart from enlightenment, and no religions apart from art. There are none of those ugly old-style walls, painted in two drab colours with linseed oil paint. Instead of the crudely barked commands and warning sirens, the loudspeakers broadcast Berlioz, Haydn and Tchaikovsky. And absolutely everyone – just imagine it – can quote Dante from memory. And these people have managed to stay the same as they were. Or no, they’re not the way they were in the twenty-first century, but like people were in ancient times . . . Well, you’ve read about that in Myths and Legends . . .’ The musician smiled at the old man as if he was feeble-minded. ‘Free, bold, wise and beautiful. Just. Noble.’
‘I’ve never heard anything of the sort!’ exclaimed Homer, hoping that the cunning devil wouldn’t win the girl over with this.
‘In the Metro,’ said Leonid, looking intently at the old man, ‘this place is known as the Emerald City. But according to the rumours, its inhabitants prefer a different name.’
‘And what’s that?’ Homer erupted.
‘The Ark.’
‘Drivel. Absolute drivel!’ the old man snorted and turned away.
‘Of course it’s drivel,’ the musician responded phlegmatically. ‘It’s just a story . . .’
Dobrynin had been overrun by chaos.
Homer looked around, perplexed and frightened. Could he be mistaken? Could something like this be happening at one of the calmer stations of the Circle Line? It looked to him as if someone had declared war on Hansa within the last half-hour. Peeping out of the parallel tunnel was a freight trolley with dead bodies piled up on it higgledy-piggledy. Military medical orderlies in aprons were dragging the bodies onto the platform and laying them out on tarpaulin sheets: one had been separated from its head, another one’s face had been reduced to pulp, the intestines were tumbling out of a third . . .
Homer covered Sasha’s eyes. Leonid filled his lungs with air and turned away.
‘What happened?’ one of the guards assigned to the threesome asked in a frightened voice.
‘It’s our watch from the large junction, with the Special Service Line. Every last man’s here. No one got away. And we don’t know who did it.’ The medical orderly wiped his hand on his apron. ‘Give me a light, will you, brother? My hands are shaking . . .’
The Special Service Line. A cobweb thread line that ran off behind the Pavelets radial line station, connecting four lines together – Circle, Grey, Orange and Green.
Homer had assumed that Hunter would choose that route, which was the shortest, although it was guarded by reinforced Hansa units.
What was all this bloodshed for? Did they open fire on him first, or did they not even spot him in the gloom of the tunnel? And where was he now? Oh God, another head . . . How could he do something like this?
Homer remembered the shattered mirror and what Sasha had said. Could she be right after all? Was the brigadier trying to restrain himself, trying to avoid killing unnecessarily, but unable to stop? And when he broke the mirror, was he really trying to strike the hideous, terrifying man that he was gradually turning into . . .
No, what Hunter had seen in the mirror wasn’t a man, but a genuine monster. That was who he had tried to crush. But he had only shattered the glass, transforming one reflection into dozens.
Or perhaps . . . The old man watched as the orderlies moved from the trolley to the platform . . . carrying the eighth man, the last . . . Perhaps it was the man who was still staring bleakly out of the mirror? The old Hunter? And that Other . . was already on the outside?
CHAPTER 14
What Else?
Really, what is it that makes man human?
He’s been wandering the earth for more than a million years, but the magical transformation that changed a cunning and gregarious animal into something completely different, something absolutely unprecedented, happened to him only about ten thousand years ago. Just imagine, for ninety-nine per cent of his history, he sheltered in caves and chomped on raw meat. Without knowing how to get warm or make tools and genuine weapons, not even knowing how to talk properly! And the range of feelings he was capable of experiencing didn’t really differentiate him from monkeys and wolves: cold, fear, attachment, anxiety, gratification.
How was he able, in the space of a few centuries, to learn to build and think and record his own thoughts, to alter the matter around him and invent things, why did he feel the need to draw, and how did he discover music? How was he able to conquer the entire world and restructure it to suit his requirements? What exactly was it that was added to this animal ten thousand years ago?
Fire? The fact that man was given the ability to tame light and warmth, to carry them with him to cold, uninhabited regions, to roast his prey on campfires in order to satisfy his stomach? But what did that change, apart from allowing him to extend his domain? Rats managed to colonise the entire planet without any fire, and they remained what they were to begin with – quick-witted, gregarious mammals. No, it can’t have been fire; at least, not only fire – the musician was right. Something else . . . But what? Language? Now there was an undeniable difference from other animals. The precise faceting of rough thoughts into the glittering diamonds of words that can become a universal currency and circulate everywhere. The ability, not so much to express what is going on in your head, as to arrange it in proper sequence: the casting of unstable images, which flow like molten metal, into solid forms. The clarity of mind and coolness of judgement, the ability to transmit orders and knowledge by mouth clearly and unambiguously: which leads to the ability to organise and subordinate, to assemble armies and build states.
But ants manage without words, constructing genuine megalopolises on their own level, inconspicuous though it is to man, and all finding their own places in supremely complicated hierarchies, conveying information and commands to each other with precision, drafting thousands of thousands of soldiers into intrepid legions with iron discipline, which clash head on in the inaudible but remorseless wars of their tiny empires.
Perhaps letters?
Letters, without which the accumulation of knowledge would be impossible? Those bricks out of which the Babylonian Tower of world civilisation, reaching for the heavens, was built? Without which the unbaked clay of the wisdom mastered by one generation would crack and split apart, subside and disintegrate into dust, unable to support its own weight? Without them, every successive generation would have started building the great tower again from the previous level and spent its entire life fumbling with the ruins of the preceding wattle and daub hut before dying in its own turn, without ever erecting the next level. Letters and writing allowed man to export accumulated knowledge beyond the narrow boundaries of his own skull, and so preserve it undistorted for his descendants, relieving them of the need to rediscover what had already been discovered long ago and allowing them to build something of their own on the firm foundation inherited from their ancestors.
But it wasn’t only letters, was it?
If wolves could write, would their civilisation be like man’s? Would they have a civilisation? When a wolf is sated with food, he falls into a state of blissful prostration, devoting his time to endearments and play, until the griping in his belly drives him on again. But when a man is sated with food, a yearning of a different kind, elusive and inexplicable, awakens within him – the same yearning that makes him gaze at the stars for hours on end, scrape ochre onto the walls of his cave, decorate the bow of his war b
oat with carved figures, slave for centuries to erect stone colossi instead of reinforcing the walls of his fortress, and spend his life on honing his artistry with words instead of perfecting his mastery of the sword. The same yearning that makes a former engine driver’s mate devote the remainder of his life to reading and searching – searching for something and trying to capture it in words . . . Something special . . . The yearning that drives a dirty, impoverished crowd to listen to wandering fiddlers in an attempt to satisfy it, that makes kings welcome troubadours and patronise artists, and makes a girl who was born underground gaze for hours at a daub on a packet that once held a teabag. A vague but powerful summons that can drown out even the call of hunger – but only in a human being.
Is it not this call that expands man’s range of feelings beyond those accessible to other animals, giving him in addition the ability to dream, the audacity to hope, and the courage to show mercy? Love and compassion, which man often regards as his distinctive qualities, were not discovered by him. A dog is capable of loving and being compassionate: when its master is ill, it stays with him and whines. A dog can even suffer boredom and perceive the meaning of its own life in another creature: if its master is dying, it is sometimes prepared to perish, simply to remain with him. But it doesn’t have dreams and aspirations.
So it’s a yearning for beauty and the ability to appreciate it? The remarkable ability to take pleasure in combinations of colours, sequences of sounds, the angles of lines and the elegance of verbal structures? To extract from them a sweet vibration that wrings the heart and soul. That rouses any soul, whether it is bloated with fat or hard and calloused or seamed with scars, and helps it purge itself of extraneous excrescences.
Perhaps. But not only that.
In order to drown out the stuttering bursts of sub-machine-gun fire and the despairing howls of naked, bound human beings, other human beings played the majestic operas of Wagner at full volume. No contradiction arose: one thing merely emphasised the other. Then what else?
And even if man does survive as a biological species in this present-day hell, will he preserve this fragile, almost impalpable, but undoubtedly real particle of his essential being? The spark that ten thousand years ago transformed a half-starving beast with a dull gaze into a creature of a new order? Into a being tormented more by hunger of the soul than hunger of the flesh? A rebellious being, fluctuating eternally between spiritual grandeur and ignominy, between an inexplicable mercy quite inappropriate for predators and an unjustifiable cruelty unequalled even in the soulless world of insects. Who erects magnificent palaces and paints incredible canvases, rivalling the Creator in his ability to synthesise pure beauty – and invents gas chambers and hydrogen bombs in order to annihilate everything that he himself has created and economically annihilate his own fellows. Who painstakingly builds sandcastles on the beach and blithely destroys them. Did that spark transform him into a being who knows no limits in anything? An irrepressibly restless being who doesn’t know how to satisfy his strange hunger, but devotes his entire life to the attempt to do it? Into man? Will this remain in him? Will this remain after him?
Or will it be lost in his past, merely a brief peak in the graph of history, leaving man to revert from this strange one-per-cent deviation to his perennial torpidity, an habitual, customary state of stagnation, in which innumerable generations follow each other, chewing the cud without even raising their eyes from the ground, and the passing of ten years or a hundred or five hundred thousand is equally imperceptible?
What else?
‘Is it true?’
‘What exactly?’ Leonid asked her with a smile.
‘About the Emerald City? About the Ark? That there is a place like that in the Metro?’ Sasha asked pensively, looking down at her feet.
‘There are rumours,’ he replied evasively.
‘It would be great to get in there someday,’ she said slowly. ‘You know when I was walking up on the surface, I felt so sad for people. So bitter that they made just one mistake . . . And they’ll never be able to put everything back the way it used to be. And it was so good there . . . probably.’
‘A mistake? No, it was an absolutely heinous crime,’ the musician replied seriously. ‘To destroy the entire world, to kill six billion people – is that a mistake?’
‘Even so . . . You and I deserve forgiveness, don’t we? So does everyone else. Everyone should be given a chance to make himself over and do everything over again, to try again one more time, even if it’s the last one . . .’ She paused. ‘I’d like so much to see what it’s really like up there . . . I wasn’t interested before. I was simply afraid, and everything on the surface seemed ugly to me . . . But it turns out I just went up in the wrong place. It’s so stupid. That city up there is like my life before. There’s no future in it. Only memories – and they’re not mine . . . Only ghosts. And I understood something very important while I was there, you know . . .’ Sasha hesitated. ‘Hope is like blood. While it still flows through your veins, you’re alive. I want to hope.’
‘But why do you want to go to the Emerald City?’ the musician asked.
‘I want to see, to feel what it was like to live before . . . You said yourself . . . I suppose the people there really must be very different. People who haven’t forgotten yesterday and who will definitely have a tomorrow must be quite, quite different.’
They strolled slowly round the hall of Dobrynin Station, under the watchful eyes of the sentries. Homer had left them alone with obvious reluctance, and now he had been delayed for some reason. Hunter still hadn’t put in an appearance.
Sasha saw hints in the marble features of Dobrynin’s marble hall. The large, marble-faced arches leading to the tracks alternated with small, decorative, blank arches. Large, small, large again, small again. Like a man and a woman holding hands, a man and a woman . . . And she suddenly wanted to put her hand into a broad, strong, male palm too. To shelter in it, if only for a short while.
‘You can build a new life here too,’ Leonid told the girl, winking at her. ‘You don’t necessarily have to go somewhere and search for something . . . It can be enough just to look round.’
‘And what will I see?’
‘Me,’ he said, lowering his eyes in theatrical modesty.
‘I’ve already seen you. And heard you,’ said Sasha, returning his smile at last. ‘I like what I heard, like everyone else . . . Don’t you need your cartridges at all? You gave away so many to get them to let us through here.’
‘I only need enough for my food. And I always have enough. It’s stupid to play for money.’
‘Then what do you play for?’
‘For the music.’ He laughed. ‘For the people. No, that’s not right either. For what the music does to the people.’
‘And what does it do to them?’
‘Well actually – anything at all,’ said Leonid, turning serious again. ‘I have music that will make people love and music that will make them weep.’
‘And the music you were playing the last time . . .’ Sasha looked at him suspiciously. ‘The music without a name. What does that make people do?’
‘This one?’ he asked and whistled the introduction. ‘It doesn’t make them do anything. It just takes away pain.’
‘Hey, mate!’
Homer closed the exercise book and squirmed on the uncomfortable wooden bench. The duty orderly was ensconced behind a little counter with a surface that was almost completely taken up by three old black telephones without buttons or discs. The little red light on one of the phones was winking amicably.
‘Andrei Andreevich is free now. He’s got two minutes for you from the moment you walk in. Don’t mumble, get straight to the point,’ the duty orderly admonished the old man strictly.
‘Two minutes won’t be enough,’ Homer sighed.
‘I warned you,’ the other man said with a shrug.
Even five minutes wasn’t enough. He didn’t have any real idea of where to start, or how to
finish, or what questions to ask and what to ask for, but, apart from the commandant of Dobrynin Station, he had no one else to turn to right now.
But Andrei Andreevich, a large, fat man in a uniform tunic that didn’t close across his stomach, was already furious and streaming with sweat, and he didn’t listen to the old man for long.
‘Don’t you understand, or what? I’ve got a force majeure situation here, eight men have been mown down, and you start talking to me about some epidemic or other! There isn’t anything here! That’s enough, stop wasting my time! Either you clear out of here yourself, or . . .’ Like a sperm whale leaping out of the water, the commandant launched his meaty carcass forward, almost overturning the desk he was sitting at. The duty orderly glanced into the office enquiringly. Homer also got up off the low, hard chair for visitors.
‘I’ll go. But then why did you send forces into Serpukhov?’
‘What business is that of yours?’
‘They say in the station . . .’
‘What do they say? What do they say? You know what? To make sure you don’t go spreading panic around here . . . Pasha, come on, stick him in the cage!’
In the twinkling of an eye Homer was tossed out into the reception area and the duty orderly dragged the stubbornly resisting old man into a narrow side corridor, alternating reproaches with slaps to his face.
Between two slaps Homer’s respirator came off; he tried to hold his breath, but immediately received a jab to the solar plexus that set him coughing. The sperm whale surfaced in the doorway of his office, filling the opening completely.
‘Let him stay there for now, we’ll get to the bottom of this later . . . And who are you? By appointment?’ he barked at the next visitor.
Homer had already turned towards him.
Hunter was standing there stock still with his arms crossed, just three steps away from him. He was a wearing somebody else’s uniform that was tight on him and hiding his face in the shadow of the raised visor of his helmet. He showed no sign of recognising the old man and no intention of intervening. Homer had expected him to be smeared with blood, like a butcher, but the only crimson spot on the brigadier’s clothes was the small stain over his own wound. Hunter shifted his stony gaze to the station commandant, and suddenly started moving towards him slowly, as if he intended to walk straight through the fat man into the office.
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