‘Say it straight, comrade Artyom, I don’t have any secrets from my fighters,’ the commissar cautiously responded.
‘You see . . . I am very grateful to you all for saving me. But I have nothing with which to repay you. I would really like to remain with you. But I can’t. I have to go on. I . . . have to.’
The commissar said nothing in reply.
‘Well, where are you going?’ Uncle Fyodor interjected unexpectedly.
Artyom pressed his lips together and looked at the floor. An awkward silence hung in the air. It seemed to him that they were now looking at him tensely and suspiciously, trying to guess at his intentions. Was he a spy? Was he a traitor? Why was he being so secretive?
‘Well, if you don’t want to say, then don’t,’ Uncle Fyodor said in a conciliatory tone.
‘To Polis.’ Artyom couldn’t resist telling them. He couldn’t risk losing the trust for the sake of some silly conspiracy theory.
‘You have some kind of business there?’ Uncle Fyodor enquired with an innocent look.
Artyom nodded silently.
‘Is it urgent?’ The man continued to probe.
‘Well, look, we’re not going to hold you back. If you don’t want to talk about your business then fine. But we can’t just leave you here in the middle of the tunnel! Right guys?’ He turned to the others.
Bonsai resolutely nodded, Maximka took his hands from the barrel of his gun and also confirmed the sentiment. Then comrade Rusakov stepped in.
‘Are you prepared, comrade Artyom, in front of the fighters of this brigade, who have saved your life, to swear that you are not planning any harm to the revolutionary cause?’ he asked severely.
‘I swear it,’ Artyom answered readily. He had no intentions of harming the revolution. There were more important things to consider.
Comrade Rusakov looked him in the eye, long and hard, and finally gave his verdict:
‘Comrade fighters! Personally I believe comrade Artyom. I ask you to vote for helping him to reach Polis.’
Uncle Fyodor was the first to raise his hand, and Artyom thought that it was probably him who had lifted him out of the noose. Then Maxim voted, and Bonsai just nodded.
‘You see, comrade Artyom, not far from here, there is a passage that is unknown to the wider masses. It joins the Zamoskvoretskaya branch and the Red Line,’ said the commander. ‘We can set you on your way . . .’
He didn’t manage to finish his sentence because Karatsyupa who had been lying quietly by his feet until then jumped up suddenly and started to bark deafeningly. Comrade Rusakov whipped his pistol out of its holster with a lightning fast movement. Artyom didn’t have the time to see what everyone else did: Bonsai had already pulled the cord, starting the engine. Maxim took up his position at the rear and Uncle Fyodor took a bottle with a match sticking out of its top from the box that had held his home-brew.
The tunnel at that point dived downwards, so visibility was very bad but the dog continued to strain, and Artyom felt anxious.
‘Give me a machine gun too,’ he asked in a whisper.
Not far away a powerful flashlight flashed and went out. Then they heard someone barking out orders. Heavy boots trudged along the cross-ties, and someone stumbled quietly and then everything fell silent. Karatsyupa, whose muzzle had been clamped shut by the commissar, struggled free and started to bark again.
‘It’s not starting,’ Bonsai mumbled, slightly defeated. ‘We have to push it!’
Artyom was first to climb off the section car and behind him leapt Uncle Fyodor and then Maxim. With effort they wedged the soles of their feet against the cross-ties, and got the large object moving forward. It was shifting too slowly and when they had finally awoken the engine, which started off by making coughing sounds, boots were thundering very near to them.
‘Fire!’ came the order from the darkness and the narrow space of the tunnel filled with sound. At least four cartridges roared past them, and bullets beat randomly around them, ricocheting, spitting sparks, and hitting pipes and making them ring out.
Artyom thought that they had no way out, but Maxim, straightening out to his full height, held his machine gun in his hands and maintained fire for a long time. The automatic weapons went silent. Then the section car moved a bit more easily and they had to start running after it to jump up onto its platform.
‘They’re retreating! Push ahead!’ was the cry from behind, and the automatic machine guns rattled away behind them with redoubled strength but most of the bullets hit the walls and ceiling of the tunnel.
Swiftly setting the stub of the bottle on fire, Uncle Fyodor wrapped it in some rags and threw it onto the path. A minute later there was a bright flash and the same clap of noise that Artyom heard when he was standing with the noose around his neck rang out.
‘And again! More smoke!’ Comrade Rusakov ordered.
A motorized section car is simply a miracle, Artyom thought as their persecutors fell far behind, trying to fight their way through the curtain of smoke. The vehicle was moving easily forward and, scaring away the staring bystanders, it swooped through Novukuznetskay station where comrade Rusakov flatly refused to stop. They were carried through so quickly that Artyom had barely any time to make out the station at all. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, apart from the meagre lighting. There was a fair number of people there but Bonsai whispered to him that the station was not good at all and its inhabitants were also a bit strange, and the last time that they tried to stop there they had seriously regretted it and only just managed to drag themselves out.
‘Sorry, comrade, but we won’t be able to help you like we thought,’ comrade Rusakov said to Artyom in a more familiar tone than usual. ‘Now we won’t be able to return here for a while. We’re going to our reserve base at Avtozavodskaya. If you want you can join the brigade.’
Artyom had to steel himself again and refuse the offer but it was easier this time. He was seized by a cheerful sort of desperation. The whole world was against him, everything was going awry. However, the obstacles that the tunnels put in the way of his mission had awoken in Artyom a rage, and this obstinate rage re-lit his weakening vision with a rebellious fire, devouring in him any fear, sense of danger, reason and force.
‘No,’ he said firmly and calmly. ‘I have to go.’
‘In that case, we’ll go together until Paveletskaya and then we’ll part ways,’ said the commissar who had remained silent until this point. ‘It’s a shame, comrade Artyom. We need fighters.’
Near Novokuznetskaya, the tunnel forked and the section car took the left-hand path. When Artyom asked what went on down the right-hand path they explained that that way was barred to them: a few hundred metres into it there was an advance post of the Hansa, a veritable fortress. This unremarkable tunnel, it seemed, led directly to the three Ring stations: Oktyabrskaya, Dobrynskaya and Paveletskaya. The Hansa didn’t intend to destroy this little inter-tunnel passage and its very important transport link but it was only used by Hansa secret agents. If someone else tried to approach the advance post, they would be destroyed immediately without even being given the chance to explain themselves.
After travelling a while along this passage, they came upon Paveletskaya. Artyom thought how right his friend at
VDNKh
had been when he had told him that in the old days you could cross the whole metro system within an hour - and he hadn’t believed it at the time. Ah, if only he had a section car like theirs . . .
But anyway, a section car wouldn’t really have helped since there were lots of places that you couldn’t just pass through like a breeze. No, there was no point in dreaming about it, in this new world there wouldn’t be anything like it anymore - in this world each step required an improbable effort and searing pain. The old days were long gone. That magical, wonderful world was long dead. It didn’t exist anymore. And there was no point in whining about it for the rest of your life. You had to spit on its grave and never look back.
CHAPTER 10
No Pasarán!
There were no patrols visible in front of Paveletskaya station, just a group of dishevelled people sitting thirty metres from the station’s exit, moving aside to let the revolutionaries’ trolley pass and watching it respectfully.
‘What, nobody lives here?’ asked Artyom, trying to make his voice sound calm. He certainly did not want to be left alone in this deserted station, without weapons, food, and documents.
‘At Paveletskaya ?’ Comrade Rusakov looked at him with surprise. ‘Of course they do!’
‘So why is there no border guard?’ Artyom persisted.
‘Because this is Pa-ve-lets-ka-ya!’ Bonsai interrupted, enunciating the syllables for emphasis. ‘Who would bother it?’
Artyom thought to himself how much he agreed with the ancient sage who said, as he was dying, that the only thing he knows, is that he knows nothing. They all talked about the inviolability of Paveletskaya station as if it needed no explanation, as though it was something everybody understood.
‘What, you mean you don’t know?’ Bonsai was incredulous. ‘Just wait, and see it for yourself!’
Paveletskaya station captured Artyom’s imagination at first glance. The ceilings were so high that the flickering flashes of light from the torches that protruded through rings hammered into the walls, did not reach the ceiling, creating a frightening and bewitching sense of the infinite directly overhead. Enormous round arches were supported by slender columns that somehow managed to support the mighty vaults. The space between the arches was filled with bronze castings, tarnished, yet evocative of their past greatness; and although these were only the traditional hammers and sickles, framed as they were by arches, these half-forgotten symbols of a destroyed empire looked as proud and defiant as they did when they were forged. A never-ending row of columns, interspersed with the wavering, blood-coloured torchlight, faded off into the incredibly distant haze, and even there, it seemed never to stop. The flames that licked the graceful marble pillars a hundred or a thousand paces away, seemed simply unable to penetrate the dense, almost palpable, gloom. This station once was, to be sure, the residence of the Cyclops, and therefore everything here was gigantic . . .
Did no one dare to encroach upon it simply because it was so beautiful?
Bonsai shifted the engine to idle, the trolley rolled slower and slower, gradually coming to a halt, while Artyom kept looking intently at the strange station. What was it all about? Why did nobody bother
Paveletskaya?
What was so sacred about it? Certainly not only because it looked more like a fairy-tale underground palace than a building built for the transportation industry?
A whole crowd of ragged and unwashed urchins of all ages gathered around the stopped trolley. They enviously eyed the machine, and one even dared to jump down onto the track and touch the engine, respectfully silent, until Fyodor drove him away.
‘That’s it, comrade Artyom. Here our paths diverge,’ the commander interrupted Artyom’s thoughts. ‘I talked things over with the other comrades and we decided to give you a little present. Here you go!’ And he handed Artyom a submachine gun, probably one of those taken off the killed security guards. ‘And here’s something more.’ He placed in Artyom’s hand the lamp that had lit the way of the fascist in the black uniform with the moustache. ‘These are all trophies, so take courage from them. They are rightfully yours. We would stay here longer, but we mustn’t delay. Who knows how far the fascist bastards will decide to chase us? But they certainly won’t dare to stick their noses into the Paveletskaya.’
Despite his newly acquired firmness and resolve, Artyom’s heart throbbed unpleasantly when Bonsai shook his hand, wishing him success. Maxim slapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way, and bearded Uncle Fyodor thrust him a half-drunk bottle of his potion, not knowing what else to give him:
‘There you go, buddy, we’ll meet again. And we’ll be alive - we won’t die!’
Comrade Rusakov shook hands once again, and his handsome, manly face grew serious.
‘Comrade Artyom! In parting, I would like to tell you two things. First, believe in your star. As comrade Ernesto Che Guevara said, Hasta la victoria siempre! And second, and most important, NO PASARÁN!’
All the other soldiers raised their right hand in a fist and repeated the slogan: ‘No pasarán!’ There was nothing left for Artyom to do but to also raise his fist and shout the refrain, with just as much resolve and revolutionary fervour: ‘No pasarán!’, although for him personally, the whole ritual was just gobbledygook. But he didn’t want to spoil the solemn moment of his departure with stupid questions. Apparently he did everything right, as comrade Rusakov looked at him with pride and satisfaction, and then solemnly saluted him.
The motor revved louder, and, enveloped in a blue-grey cloud of smoke, accompanied by an escort of delighted children, the trolley vanished into the darkness. Artyom was completely alone again, and farther from home than he had ever been before.
The first thing he noticed, as he wandered along the platform, were the clocks. Artyom counted four of them right away. At the
VDNKh,
time was something rather symbolic: like books, like attempts to set up schools for the children - a demonstration that the station residents continued to care, that they did not want to degenerate, that they were still human beings. But here, it seemed, clocks played some other kind of role, a much more important one. Wandering about some more, Artyom noticed other strange things. First, there were no living quarters of any kind at the station, except for some hitched-up subway cars on the second track and on into the tunnel. Only a small part of the train was visible in the hall, which is why Artyom did not notice it right away. Tradesmen of every imaginable kind, and workshops were all over the place, but there wasn’t a single tent to live in, not even a simple screen behind which one could spend the night. Some beggars and tramps were lying around on bedding made just of cardboard. People bustling about the station approached the clocks from time to time; some, who had their own watches, would anxiously check them against the red numbers on the display panel, and then go about their business again. If Khan were here, thought Artyom, it would be interesting to hear what he would have to say.