Istomin rose from his Metro plan and smiled tiredly. He wanted to dial the number for the adjutant when the telephone ringed. Both were startled and looked at each other. They hadn’t heard that sound for a week. If the officer on duty wanted something he knocked on the door and there was no one else in the station that was able to call the foreman directly.
“Istomin here.” he answered carefully.
“Vladimir Ivanowitsch! The Tulskaya is on the phone” he heard the hastily voice of the adjutant, “but the connection is very bad… probably our men… but the connection.”
“Connect me already!” Istomin screamed into the receiver and hammered his fist on the table with such force that the telephone ringed in pain.
The adjutant turned silent immediately. Istomin could hear a ringing sound, then static and then he heard a distant, almost unrecognizable voice.
Yelena had turned her face towards the wall, to hide her tears. What could she still do to hold him back?
Why did he always reach for the first possibility to leave the station? His miserably excuses “Orders from above” and “Desertion” – she had heard them a hundred times. What wouldn’t she have given, wouldn’t have tried to get rid of his nonsense in these 15 years? But once again it drew him to the tunnels, as if he thought to find something other than darkness, emptiness and doom in it. What was he searching for?
Homer knew exactly what she thought, as if she had spoken it out loud. He felt miserably, but it was too late to retreat. He opened his mouth to say something excusing, something warm, but he remained silent, with every one of his words he would just added oil to the flame.
Over Yelena’s head Moscow cried. A carefully framed color-picture of the Tverskaya Uliza, shining through the translucent midsummer rain, cut out of a shiny almanac, was hanging on the wall. A long time ago, when he was able to move through the Metro freely, all of his fortune was made up by his clothes and this one picture. Others carried crumpled, torn out pages from man oriented magazines in their pockets. But for Homer that wasn’t a replacement. But this picture reminded him of something unspeakable beautiful… something that has been lost forever.
Helplessly he whispered: “Forgive me”, stepped out into the hallway, closed the door carefully behind him and sat himself in front of his apartment. The door of the neighboring apartment was open and two sickly pale children played on the doorstep – a boy and a girl. When they saw Homer they stopped. The patched up teddy bear, about whom the children had argued just one second ago, fell to the ground.
“Uncle Kolya, uncle Kolya! Tell us a story! You promised to tell us one when you returned!”
Homer couldn’t hold back a smile. He forgot the argument with Yelena immediately. “About what?”
“Headless mutants!” screamed the boy excited.
“No! I don’t want mutants!” said the girl shocked.
“They are so terrible, they scare me!”
Homer sighed: “What story do you want, Tanyuscha?”
But the boy answered before her: “Than about the fascists! Or the partisans!”
“I want the story about the Emerald city!” said Tanya and smiled.
“But I told it yesterday. Maybe about the war of Hanza against the Reds?”
“About the Emerald city, about the Emerald city!” both yelled.
“Ok”, agreed Homer. “Somewhere, behind the end of the Sokolnitscheskaya line, behind the seven abandoned stations, the three destroyed bridges and a thousand times a thousand doorways, there lies a mysterious, secret city. It is magical so humans can’t enter. Wizards live there and only they can leave through their portals and enter the city through them again. On top of it, on the surface there is a castle, with towers where once the wizards lived. The name of the castle was…”
“Virsity!” Yelled the small boy and looked at his sister triumphal.
“University”, Homer nodded his head.”When the war began and the atomic bombs were dropped on the earth, the wizards retreated into the castle and laid a spell on the entrance so that the bad humans, that started the war, wouldn’t be able to reach them. And then they lived…”
Homer cleared his throat and stopped.
Yelena was leaning at the doorway, she had listened. He hadn’t seen her when she stepped on the hallway.
“I’ll pack your things”, she said huskily. Homer walked over to her and took her hand. She clumsily laid his arms around him, it was embarrassing for her in front of the children, and asked silently: “You’ll come back soon? Nothing is going to happen to you, right?”
For the thousandth time in his long life he realized how much women longed for promises – it didn’t matter if he could fulfill them or not. “Everything is going to be alright.”
“You are so old and you still kiss like you two just married”, said the girl, making a grimace. The boy yelled after them cocky: “Daddy says that nothing of the story is true. There is no emerald city!”
“Maybe,” Homer shrugged his shoulders. “It is a fairy tale. What would we do without fairy tales?”
The connection was truly bad. A vaguely familiar voice fought against the terrible static: It seemed it was one of the recon team that they had sent to the Serpuchovskaya on the railcar.
“At the Tulskaya… we can… Tulskaya”, he tried to give their position.
“Understood, you are at the Tulskaya”, Istomin yelled into the receiver. “What happened? Why haven’t you returned?”
“Tulskaya… here… you can’t… everything but…”
Again and again parts of his sentence were swallowed by the static.
“What can’t we do? Repeat, what can’t we do?”
“Don’t storm the station! Everything but storming the station!” it sounded out of the telephone clearly for once.
“Why?” asked Istomin “What by the devil is going on?”
But the voice was no longer to be heard. The static became louder and louder, then the line went dead. Istomin didn’t want to believe it at first and kept the telephone in his hand.
“What is going on there?” he whispered.
CHAPTER 3
Afterlife
That look that the guard on the northern post gave him, Homer would never forget it, as long as he lived.
A look filled with admiration and melancholy, like for a fallen hero.
He could hear the salute shots of the honor regiment in the background. Like a farewell forever.
The living didn’t get those looks. Homer felt like he climbed the shaky ladder of a small cabin of a plane, unable to land, that the Japanese engineers had outfitted wit bombs. The emperor’s flag, with the red stripes flattered in the salty wind, on the summery airfield mechanics ran around, motors roared and a thick general with wet eyes, filled with the envy of the samurai, raised his hand in a military salute…
“Why are you so excited?” asked Achmed grimly. He on the other hand wasn’t in a rush to find out what happened at the Sevastopolskaya.
His wife was standing near the train track, his oldest son on one hand, a screaming bundle in the other, holding it carefully.
“It is like a sudden banzai attack: You stand up and run directly at the machine guns”, Homer tried to explain.
“Courage out of distress. In front of us lies a deadly fire…”
“No wonder why you call it a suicide-attack” growled Achmed and looked back to the tiny bright light at the end of the tunnel. “The right thing for somebody as crazy as you. A normal human doesn’t run straight into a machinegun. Those heroics don’t bring anyone far.”
The old one didn’t answer immediately. “Well, that’s the thing. When you feel that your time is over you are starting to think: What remains when I am gone? What have I accomplished?”
“Hm. I don’t know about you, but I have my children. “They won’t forget me.” After a short pause he added: “At least not my oldest.”