Khan waited at the entrance, standing on the iron stairs. He had had time to smoke some kind of home-made cigarette, while they, laughing away, completely relaxed, made the fifty paces.
Artyom was penetrated by a feeling of sympathy and compassion for the limping Ace who was moaning through his laughter. He was ashamed at the thoughts that had flashed through his mind back there when Ace had fallen. His mood was dramatically improved, and therefore the sight of Khan, tired, emaciated, scrutinizing them with a strange look of suspicion, seemed a little unpleasant to Artyom.
‘Thanks!’ Boots rumbled on the stairs and Ace climbed up onto the platform saying to Khan, ‘If it weren’t for you . . . You . . . Well, it would have all been over. But you . . . didn’t leave me there. Thank you! I don’t forget things like that.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Khan responded without any enthusiasm.
‘Why did you come back for me?’
‘You’re interesting to me as someone to talk to.’ Khan flung his cigarette butt on the ground and shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s all.’
After climbing a little higher, Artyom understood why Khan had gone up the stairs to the platform and not continued along the path. In front of the actual entrance to Kitai Gorod, the path was heaped with sandbags as high as a man. Behind the sandbags was a group of people sitting on wooden stools with a very serious look about them. Buzz cuts and wide shoulders under beaten-up leather jackets, shabby sports trousers - all this looked rather amusing but, for some reason, it hadn’t produced any merriment. Three of them sat there and on a fourth stool there was a deck of cards, which the thugs had strewn carelessly about. There was such abusive language being used that listening to it, Artyom couldn’t make out even one normal word in the conversation.
To get through the station you could only pass along a narrow path and up the little stairway, which ended with a gate. But diagonally across from the path, there was an even more imposing pack of four guards. Artyom threw them a look: shaved heads, watery-grey eyes, slightly bent noses, cauliflower ears, wearing training pants with a heavy ‘TT’ imprinted on the stripe. And there was an unbearable smell of fumes, which was making it hard to think.
‘So what do we have here?’ the fourth guard said hoarsely, examining Khan and Artyom behind him from head to foot. ‘Are you tourists or what? Or traders?’
‘No, we’re not traders, we’re travellers and we have no goods with us,’ Khan explained.
‘Travellers - grovellers!’ the thug rhymed and guffawed loudly. ‘Hear that Kolya? Travellers - grovellers!’ he repeated, turning to the card players.
They responded enthusiastically. Khan smiled patiently.
The bull of a man leant one hand against the wall blocking their way.
‘We have here, a kind of a . . . customs operation, you know what I mean?’ he explained. ‘Cash is the currency. You want to go through - you pay. You don’t want to then you can get lost . . . !’
‘Whose prerogative?’ Artyom protested indignantly.
That was a mistake.
The bull didn’t probably quite get what he’d meant but he’d understood the intonation and he didn’t like it. Pushing Khan to the side, he took a heavy step and got right up into Artyom’s face. He lowered his chin and gave the young man a severe look. His eyes were completely empty and seemed almost transparent, and they lacked any sign of a reasonable mind. Stupidity and malice, that’s what they emitted, and though it was hard to hold his gaze and Artyom was blinking from the tension, he felt how fear and hatred was growing in those eyes as they sat there at the tunnel entrance watching people come past.
‘What the fuck?’ the guard said threateningly.
He was taller than Artyom by more than a head and three times as wide. Artyom remembered the legend someone had told him about David and the Goliath. Though he was confused which was which, he knew that it ended well for the smaller and weaker of the two, and this gave him a certain optimism.
‘Whatever,’ he unexpectedly plucked up the courage to say.
This answer upset the man for some reason, and he spread out his short and fat fingers and, with a confident motion, he put all five of them on Artyom’s forehead. The skin on his palms was yellow, calloused and it stank of tobacco and car grease, and Artyom didn’t have time make out all the many aromas to it because the thug pushed him backwards.
He probably didn’t have to apply much force but Artyom flew a metre backwards and knocked Ace, who was standing behind him, over too. They both fell onto the little bridge while the thug returned to his place. But a surprise awaited him there. Khan, who’d thrown his bag on the ground, was standing there gripping Artyom’s machine gun in his hands. He demonstratively clicked open the safety catch and with a quiet voice that indicated that nothing good could come of all this - so much so that even Artyom’s hair was standing on end upon hearing it - he pronounced:
‘Now why so rude?’
He hadn’t said anything much but, to Artyom, who was floundering on the floor, trying to get to his feet, burning with shame, these words seemed like a dull precautionary growl which would likely be followed by a quick and hard attack. He stood up, finally, and tore his old machine gun off his shoulder and trained it on the offender, with the safety catch undone. Now he was ready to pull the trigger at any moment. His heart was beating hard and hatred definitely outweighed fear on the scales of his feelings and he said to Khan:
‘Let me take care of him.’ And he was surprised himself at how unhesitatingly ready he was to kill the man for pushing him over. The sweaty shaved head was clearly visible in the cross-hairs of his scope, and the temptation to pull the trigger was strong. After that, what would be, would be, but most important was to get rid of this piece of filth right now, to wash him in his own blood.
‘Alert!’ the bull bawled.
Khan pulled the pistol out of his belt with lightning speed, and slid to the side and he took aim at the ‘customs officers’ who had leapt from their places.
‘Don’t shoot!’ he managed to yell to Artyom, and the animated scene was frozen again: the bull standing there with his hands up on the little bridge and a motionless Khan, aiming at the three thugs who hadn’t managed to grab hold of their machine guns from the pile they made nearby.
‘There’s no need for blood,’ Khan said quietly and imposingly, not asking but more like giving an order. ‘There’s a rule here, Artyom,’ he continued, not taking his eyes off the three card-players, who were frozen in absurd poses.
The skinheads probably knew the price of the Kalashnikov and its lethal force at such a distance, and therefore they didn’t want to cause any unnecessary suspicion in the man who held them in his sights.
‘Their rules force us to pay duty to enter. How much do you take?’ Khan asked.
‘Three cartridges each,’ the guy on the bridge responded.
‘Shall we haggle?’ Artyom suggested mockingly, pointing the barrel of his machine gun at the guy’s belt area.
‘Two.’ The man offered some flexibility, giving Artyom the evil eye. But he didn’t seem sure of what Artyom was going to do.
‘Give it to him!’ Khan ordered Ace. ‘Pay for me too and consider it payback.’
Ace readily pushed his hand into the depths of his travelling bag and approaching the guard, he counted out six shining and sharp cartridges. The man quickly squeezed his fist around them and poured them into the protruding pockets of his jacket, and then raised his hands again and looked at Khan, waiting.
‘So the duty is paid?’ Khan raised his eyebrows questioningly.
The bull nodded sullenly, without taking his eyes off Khan’s weapon.
‘The incident is settled?’ Khan asked.
The thug kept silent. Khan reached into his auxiliary bag and took out another five cartridges and put them in the guard’s pocket. They tinkled into the pocket and disappeared together with the tense grimace on the bull’s face, which had resumed its usual lazy and suspicious expression.
‘Compensation for moral damage,’ Khan explained but the words didn’t have any effect.
It was likely that the bull hadn’t understood them, as he hadn’t understood the previous question. He was guessing at the meaning of Khan’s wise statements by Khan’s preparedness to use money and force. This was the language he understood perfectly, and probably the only one he spoke too.
‘You can put your hands down,’ Khan said and carefully lifted his gun upwards, taking his aim away from the three gamblers.
Artyom did the same but his hands were shaking - he had been ready to take out the shaved skull of the thug at any moment. He didn’t trust these people. However, his agitation was unfounded. The thug, having relaxed and lowered his hands, growled to the rest of his buddies that everything was fine and, leaning with his back to the wall, he assumed an indifferent attitude, letting the travellers go by him into the station. As he passed, Artyom gave him an obnoxious look but the bull didn’t take the bait and was looking off to the side.
However, Artyom heard a disgusted ‘P-puppydog . . .’ and heard spittle hit the floor. He had wanted to turn around but Khan, walking a pace ahead of him, grabbed him by the hand and dragged him along so that Artyom was torn between satisfying his urge to turn back and show the sorry guy a thing or two, and the other cowardly part of him that just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
When they had all stepped onto the dark granite floor of the station, they suddenly heard a bellow of stretched vowels behind them: ‘He-ey, gimme my piece!’
Khan stopped, took the cartridge clip labelled ‘TT’ with its rounded bullets and flung it over to the bull. The man rather deftly caught the pistol and put it in his belt, watching annoyed at how Khan had let some extra cartridges fall on the floor.
‘Sorry,’ Khan opened his palms, ‘a prophylactic. Isn’t that what it’s called?’ He winked at Ace.
Kitai Gorod differed from other stations that Artyom had seen: it didn’t have three arches like
VDNKh
but was one large hall with a wide platform, with tracks on either side of it, and it gave the alarming impression of an unusual space. The accommodations were lit in the most disorganized way, weak pear-shaped lamps dangling here and there. There weren’t any fires here at all, apparently they weren’t allowed. In the centre of the hall, generously pouring light around itself, there was a white mercury-vapour lamp - a real miracle for Artyom. But there was bedlam surrounding it so one’s attention was distracted and you couldn’t keep your eyes on the marvel for more than a second.
‘What a big station!’ He exhaled in surprise.
‘You’re only really seeing half of it,’ Khan reported. ‘Kitai Gorod is about twice as big as this. Oh, this is one of the strangest places in the world. You have heard, I guess, that all the lines meet here. Look at those rails, to the right of us - that’s the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya branch. It’s hard to describe the craziness and disorder that goes on there, and here at Kitai Gorod it meets your orange Kaluzhasko-Rizhskaya, and no one from the other lines believes what goes on there. Apart from that, this station doesn’t belong to any of the federations, and its inhabitants represent themselves completely. It’s a very very curious place. I call it Babylon. With affection,’ Khan added, looking around the platform at all the people who were scurrying to and fro.
Life at the station was bubbling. It was vaguely like Prospect Mir but the latter was more modest and more organized. Artyom remembered Bourbon’s words about the fact that there were better places in the metro than that wretched market which they walked through at Prospect.
There were rows of trays along the endless rails and the whole platform was filled with tents. Several of them were made into commercial stalls, others were used as shelter for people. The letters SDAYu were painted on some of them, and that’s where travellers could spend the night. They made their way through the crowds and, looking sideways, Artyom noticed on the left-hand track that there was an enormous grey-blue figure of a train. It wasn’t complete; there were altogether only three wagons.
There was an indescribable roar at the station. It seemed that the inhabitants never fell silent for a moment and they just constantly talked, screamed, sang, argued desperately, laughed or cried. In several places, overlapping the din, there was a rush of music and this created an unusual holiday mood in underground life there.
At
VDNKh
there were also people who sang enthusiastically, but it was different there. There were only a couple of guitars there, and sometimes people would gather at someone’s tent to relax after work. Yes and and there was music sometimes at the three-hundredth metre border where you didn’t have to listen hard to hear it coming from the northern tunnel. At the little patrol fire they sang with guitars, but mostly about things that Artyom didn’t really understand: about wars that he hadn’t taken part in, and which were conducted according to different, strange rules; about life there, above, before.
He especially remembered songs about some Afghanistan place which Andrei really loved to sing - although there wasn’t much not to understand in these songs, they were all about sadness for fallen friends and hatred for the enemy. But Andrei could sing so well that everyone who listened was touched so much that their voices quivered and they had goosebumps.
Andrei explained to the younger ones that Afghanistan was quite a country and he described its mountains, the passes, the bubbling brooks, the villages, the helicopters and coffins. Artyom knew what a country was pretty well, since Sukhoi had spent worthwhile time explaining things to him. But while Artyom knew something about governments and their histories, mountains, rivers, and valleys remained as abstract notions to him, and they were mere words which were defined for him by the discoloured pictures his stepfather had shown him in a geography textbook.