very hard to get rid of the notion that the earth would stop turning because you commanded it to do so.
To take the life of a human you didn’t really need much power; to bring somebody back to life, though, was in nobody’s hands.
He knew that too well: tuberculosis killed his wife and he wasn’t able rescue her. In that moment something in him broke.
Sasha had just turned four but could still remember her mother very well. Sasha remembered the horrible emptiness of the tunnels after she died. The close death of her mother had opened a bottomless abyss in her small world and she had looked straight into it. The edges of the abyss only grew back slowly – two or three years passed until she no longer yelled for her mother in her sleep.
Her father did that to this day.
Maybe Homer didn’t approach the whole thing right. When the hero of his epic didn’t want to appear then why shouldn’t he start with his lover? Maybe he could get him out of hiding with her beauty and youth? When Homer started to draw her outline first, would his hero just step forward out of nowhere? For their love to be complete those two figures had to complement each other ideally and completely.
Therefore the hero of Homers poem had to appear as a completed, finished character.
In their thoughts and facets of their character they would match each other like the shards of the glass mosaics at the Novoslobodskaya. Then when they were once whole, they would be determined to become one again… Homer didn’t find anything bad in “stealing” that plot from the old classics.
It was easier said than done. To form a young woman out of ink and paper was a task that Homer didn’t think he was able to accomplish. He doubted that he was able to describe feelings convincingly as well.
His relationship with Yelena was one of softness; he had learnt too late how to love without holding back. In their age it was no longer about satisfying their passion but to come together and leave the shadows of their pasts behind them and ease their loneliness.
Nikolai Ivanovitsch’s had left his one and only true love on the surface of Moscow. But the facets of her personality had faded over the centuries so that there was no example for his novel anymore. Also there had been nothing heroic about his relationship with his wife.
On the day the atomic thunderstorm broke over Moscow, they had offered Nikolai to take the place of the train driver Serov who had retired shortly before. That meant twice the pay. Before he would take on the new post he was to take a few days off. He had called his wife and she had said that she would bake a Scharlottka, then leave the house to go shopping and take a stroll with their kids.
But before he could go on vacation he just had to bring another shift behind him. When Nikolai Ivanovitsch entered the driver cabin of the train he knew he would be the captain of, happily married, at the beginning of a tunnel that lead to a beautiful and bright future. Half an hour later he had aged twenty years. When he came to the end of the lane, Nikolai was a broken, poor and lonely man. Maybe that was why every time he stumbled onto a miraculously preserved train he felt the strange need to take the place of the train driver, letting his hands glide over the instruments on the dashboard, to look through the front windshield into the network of tunnels. To imagine starting the vehicle again…
And put it in reverse…
It was like the brigadier created some kind of field that shielded them from all dangers. And he seemed to know it.
They didn’t even need an hour back to the Nagornaya.
This time the line didn’t resist them.
Homer had felt it again: Scout, merchant from the Sevastopolskaya or any other human, as soon as they ventured into the tunnels they became foreign matter for the blood flow of the metro. As soon as they left their station the air around them went up in flames, reality cracked and unbelievable creatures emerged seemingly out of nowhere and threw themselves against the humans of the metro.
Hunter on the other hand was no stranger to the dark tunnels and he didn’t seem to bother the leviathan in which veins they moved. He even turned off his light to transform himself into the darkness that filled the tunnels. Then it seemed that he was gripped by an invisible stream and flew on twice as fast. Even though Homer followed him with all his strength he fell behind and had to yell so that Hunter would wait for the old man.
On their way back they passed the Nagornaya without being disturbed. The fog had disappeared and the station slept.
Now you could see from one end of the station to the other. Where the ghostly giants hid themselves was a riddle that Homer was unable to solve. It was a common, abandoned stop: salt had gathered itself on the wet ceiling, a soft layer of dust was on the platform; here and there somebody had written something indecent on the walls with charcoal and the walls were blackened from smoke. Only on your second look you could see the strange markings on the ground, doing some kind of strange dance through the station and the dried brown stains on the pillars and the ceiling which were cracked and broken as if something had scratched itself on them.
But even the Nagornaya just flickered shortly and then was left behind. They flew on. As long as Homer followed the brigadier his magical cocoon of invincibility seemed to surround him as well. The old man started to wonder, where did he take the strength for this enormous march?
But he didn’t have enough air to talk and Hunter probably wouldn’t have answered. For the hundredth time Homer asked himself why he had joined the silent and merciless brigadier that seemed to forget about him again and again.
The numbing smell of the Nachimovski prospect approached. Homer would have liked to leave this station behind him as quickly as possible but the brigadier slowed down. While the old man was only able to stand the smell through his gasmask Hunter even sniffed around as if he could smell something out of the thick and heavy rotten air.
Again the corpse eaters retreated away from them out of respect, threw away their half gnawed on bones and spit out shreds of flesh onto the ground. Hunter climbed the mountain in the middle of the station, sinking into the rotting body parts up to his ankles, scanning the area with his eyes. He didn’t find what he was looking for and satisfied he made a gesture with his hand into Homers direction and continued to march on.
Homer on the other hand had found something. He had tripped and fallen to the ground; scaring away a young corpse eater that was just disemboweled a wet bulletproof vest.
Homer saw a helmet from the Sevastopolskaya that had rolled to the side. One moment after that the glass of his gasmask steamed up – he was covered in cold sweat.
He desperately tried to fight his nausea, crawled to the bones and started to fish for the dog tags.
Instead he found a small, dark-red smudged notebook. The first page he opened was the last one of the entries: “Do not storm the station, under any circumstances!”
Even when she was just a child her father had taught her not to cry but now she had nothing which she could throw against fate anymore. Tears flowed over her face automatically and out of her chest you could hear a thin, painful whining. She had realized immediately what had happened and now she had been trying for hours to deal with it.
Did he yell for her to help him? Had he wanted to tell her something important? She no longer remembered when exactly she had fallen asleep and she didn’t know if she was awake now. Maybe there was a world where her father was alive. Where she hadn’t killed him with her sleep, her weakness and egoism. Sasha held the cold but still soft hand of her fathers to warm it and talked to herself: “You’re going to find a car. We will go up there, sit inside and drive away. You will laugh again like on the day you brought the recorder with the music CDs…”
Her father had sat upright at first, leaning on the pillar and his chin pressed to his chest so that you could have thought that he was sleeping. But then his body had slipped down into the puddle of blood.
Like if he had been tired of playing alive, no longer wanting to put on a show to her.
The wrinkles that ran through her father’s face had smoothened.
She let go of his hand, helped him to sit more comfortably and covered him from head to toe in a torn blanket.
There was no way to bury him. Of course she could have left him on the surface where he could see the sky when it brightened one day. But long before that his body would have become the victim of the creatures.
In their station nobody would touch him. Out of the lost southern tunnels was no danger to be feared, the only creatures that lived there where flying roaches. In the north the tunnel ended into a rusted, half broken metro bridge. Humans lived there but they would have never thought about crossing the bridge.
