Back on the boulevard, Dmitri and I took our anti-radiation suits off. Vadim kept his on.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that was good. Yes, I enjoyed that. Did you get what you need?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘For two hundred dollars I expected more than a sewer.’
Vadim was visibly ill at ease. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What else do you need?’
‘Bunkers, for example. Maybe a locked room with a few stores for a nuclear apocalypse, some gas masks lying around.’
‘There really aren’t many of those left. They’re all locked, or the gas masks are gone.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Forget the gas masks. But I want tramps. I want to see the underground city of bomzhi.’
‘What?’
I thought of the photo in Vadim’s album, of the documentary I had seen on Manhattan so long ago, and the opposite of these images: Sergei’s mythical permanent underground settlement of intellectuals and artists. ‘They exist, don’t they? And it’s winter. We should be able to find some.’
Vadim stared into the distance. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘The magazine needs a picture.’
‘OK,’ said Vadim. ‘There’s a place on Tverskaya where they hang out. We can ask them the way to their underground base. But you’ll need to bring an offering.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll need to bring a gift.
’ ‘What kind of gift?’
‘Vodka, of course.’
There was a 24-hour kiosk nearby that sold nothing but drink, chocolate bars and cold cabbage pies. The window faced directly onto the manhole we had emerged from. The woman behind the counter was staring at Vadim, still dripping wet in his radiation suit. She stared at me too. I realised she had been watching all along, as I crawled out of that hole, all the way up to the entrance to her shop, through the door and then inside, where I looked around once, and then said in a foreign accent:
‘Give me your cheapest vodka.’
I returned with the vodka. Vadim wasn’t happy. I didn’t care. It had taken almost two months to get this far: two months of phone calls, demands, denials, rejections, sudden changes and generally difficult behaviour. Of course, that was what happened when you dealt with the Digger, and I had walked right into it, so I had no right to complain …
But whether I had the right or not, at that moment it meant nothing to me. I was worn out on bullshit. Maybe if I’d met him just the once it would have been fine. But this repeated exposure to his world, this repeated necessity of entering into his reality and playing along … I couldn’t take it any more. It was time to assert my own will, and to infiltrate his fantasies with mine. All the other stuff, the mysteries, the history, the diplomacy fell away. And at that moment, all I had were the bomzhi, and the photograph I had seen in Vadim’s house the very first night we had met. Out of nowhere, it returned, and it gripped me, just like that. The original myth of the subterranean colony of intellectuals and artists was gone; in its place only this dismal, twisted parody remained. But I had to go. I had to find them. I could not leave Vadim until I had done so.
Don’t ask me why.
Vadim said nothing for a while. Then he started discussing something with Dmitri. Meanwhile, across the street from us, a man with a long straggly beard was attempting to unwrap a loaf without falling off his crutches into the mud. I watched as slowly and painstakingly he got the plastic off, dropped it, then lowered his head to take a bite. It was a complicated procedure. And it was freezing too. He didn’t have a hat, his hands were gloveless. But he really tore into that bread. He was starving.
But no one was looking at him. No: it was Vadim who was getting all the attention, standing there in his suit, crowbar over his shoulder. Two girls walked past: ‘Are you making a movie? Take our picture!’ Dmitri pointed his camera, pretended to shoot. They giggled and walked away.
‘So what are we doing now?’ Vadim asked innocently.
‘The bomzhi,’ I said. ‘We need bomzhi.’
We wandered about for a long time, skirting Moscow’s centre, crawling about in backstreets. We walked on, and on. Vadim mustered some high spirits and improvised a song about his crowbar: Moi Droog Lom.* Some old ladies looked at him strangely. He greeted them on behalf of the Underground Planet. Some boys looked at him with curiosity. He invited them to join the Diggers.
I meanwhile had the vodka in my hand, and was concentrating on staying on the ice. It was past ten now, and I hadn’t eaten in hours. I was cold, I was tired. Suddenly Vadim turned away from the centre and started leading us through another web of back alleys, lined with old crumbling houses, mansions, offices, all looming in the darkness above us, black silhouettes with blackened window panes. Nobody was home. ‘There’s a secret entrance not far from here,’ Vadim said. ‘It’s in the basement of one of these buildings. There’s a door in an old bomb shelter that leads below the surface to where the bomzhi often congregate.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Good …’
Two girls walked by. ‘Good evening, ladies,’ said Vadim. ‘Do you have a kiss for the Lord of the Underworld?’
‘No, we don’t,’ they said, stepping up the pace to get away as fast as possible.
Finally, we reached a square courtyard lined with tall apartment buildings. Underfoot it was sand, then mud, then ice, then slush, then mud again. Just ahead of us there was a wire fence, beyond which lay a vast foundation pit.
‘Bollocks,’ said Vadim.
‘What?’
‘This is the entrance to the bomzh zone!’
‘This hole?’
‘Yes. But last time I was here it was a building. Now Luzhkov has torn it down.’ He laughed.
‘What?’
‘He’s torn it down to make offices! Nobody lives here any more.
The bomzhi have moved on. They can’t get in through the rubble.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Pity,’ said Vadim.
‘So what now?’ I said.
Vadim shrugged. ‘There’s another place … near Proletarskaya …’
I looked at my watch. It was past 10:30; Proletarskaya was an hour away. I imagined following Vadim out there, wandering around in some more backstreets, only to find that that zone had also vanished …
I couldn’t take it any more. ‘Let’s do it tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Yes, tomorrow. That’s a good idea.’
‘I can’t do it tomorrow,’ said Dmitri.
‘Then how about the day after?’
‘OK, we’ll do it the day after.’
‘We’ll go to Proletarskaya.’
‘Yes, Proletarskaya.’
‘Because I need to see bomzhi.’
‘Yes.’
We walked the rest of the way back to the Digger’s flat. It was a long journey, along black ice, following a noisy road that was lined with boutiques. Above the boutiques were apartments: the Soviet elite had lived there. Now it was all lawyers, pop stars, actors.
Vadim didn’t say much; he was walking ahead of Dmitri and me all the time now. But then, just as we were passing Mayakovskaya metro station he stopped suddenly and turned to us:
‘You know,’ he said, ‘what you can see of Mayakovskaya is only half the station. There’s another part that extends backwards, towards the Peking hotel. But it’s closed off to the public. Stalin used it as a bunker in World War II. It has a really interesting design. Maybe I could show you …’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
‘We couldn’t go now, of course. I’d have to talk to a man I know who works for the metro, to get permission from him. It would take about two weeks. But maybe that would be interesting for you …’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, and kept on walking. Dmitri stopped me. ‘Daniel, didn’t you hear what he said? That would be amazing.’
I had always been fascinated by the idea of the secret metro. Just the thought of that network of rails carrying the ubersadists and super-butchers of Soviet history thrilled me. And how were the stations designed, I wondered? With what mosaics, sculptures? And what were their names? I had once worked in a building that contained an archive of plans for lines and stations that were never built, and I had studied them obsessively. I had even made a special trip to the Moscow residence of Leonid Brezhnev, just so I could step into a room that a man whom I knew to be a liar had told me was a former entrance vestibule to the M2, the DI or the D6, whatever it was called. Whether it was or not I couldn’t say, because by the time I got there this alleged vestibule had become a showroom for hi-end home-cinema equipment. But the liar had told me that also, so all along I had known what I was going to find.
And I loved the other Moscow metro, the visible, non-mythic one that I rode every day. And I loved Mayakovskaya in particular. I liked the fact that it was named after Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in despair shot himself when he saw the way Stalin’s USSR was going, instead of waiting to become sausages as so many of his contemporaries did. I also liked a line from one of his poems that had been written on the wall of the Futurist cafeteria on Myasnitskaya Street in 1913: I like watching children die.
Then there is the station itself, which is simply stunning, with its elegant arced titanium pillars, and bright, optimistic mosaics of Soviet progress on the ceiling: views from the ground of sportsmen, airships, aeroplanes, parachutists sailing through the sky. And yet for all this imagery of liberation through flight, its main designer, Alexei Dushkin, actually drew inspiration from the masters who constructed the underground labyrinths of the Egyptian tombs. His wife played Bach and Prokofiev while he transformed ancient tombs into futuristic shrines to rapid movement.
Sometimes I would get off at the station just to walk around this majestic work of art, as if I were in a museum or a gallery. Mayakovskaya won an award for Dushkin, from the capitalist United States at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. And not only that, but it had a unique and fascinating history. During the war, the Anti-Aircraft Defence Forces moved its HQ there; it also served as an air-raid shelter.* In 1941 the celebrations for the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution were held on the platform. Stalin, it is claimed, had a secret office built beneath it. Certainly, he arrived on numerous occasions to give speeches, and I had read that this was the origin of the legends of the secret metro – after all, Stalin would not ride to Mayakovskaya on any normal metro carriage, nor could so godlike a figure be expected to use a common set of rails. I recall photographs of the Generalissimo, the master butcher with the cockroach moustache, huddling over maps with his marshals, beneath the mosaics, between the stainless-steel pillars. But did I actually see them, or did I imagine them? Does it make a difference?
Suddenly, though, my interest had been killed. Vadim had rendered it completely inert. After months of preparation, of listening to myths, of feeding dreams, it had all culminated in a trip to a sewer. I had made a fatal mistake, of course. I should have left it all in the realm of rumour and legend. A secret metro was never going to be more than a train in a tunnel with bureaucrats on it, anyway, so why give a fuck? I didn’t believe that this secret Mayakovskaya existed, and more importantly, and what was new this time, I didn’t care that I didn’t believe. I was driven only by an overwhelming determination to put an end to my time spent in Vadim’s reality. It was exhausting me. And so we walked on, the cars hammering past us, the icy wind stripping the skin from our faces, all the way to the Digger’s flat.
Visiting a replica of Mayakovskaya metro station at the New York World’s Fair, 1939
Once we arrived Vadim disappeared into the kitchen with his mum. Dmitri and I went through to his room, and sat among the toy Kalashnikovs. An hour went by. Our stomachs rumbled. Outside a train trundled past, ferrying passengers to the earthly paradise of Belarus. It was now well past midnight. ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked. Dmitri shrugged.
We went through to press for the bomzhi, though I already knew the time for that had passed. Vadim was sitting on a stool, leaning forward, his head pressed against the kitchen counter. His mum was standing by his side.
‘Vadim,’ said Dmitri, ‘what about the pictures … ?’
Vadim exploded.
He railed against my perverted demands, against the world, against us, who were paid for our work – but who paid him? Of course, the magazine had, and it had paid him well. But that was hardly the point now.
The Digger was much bigger than me; and though Dmitri looked like he knew how to handle himself, this was not his fight. Nor was it mine. Nor was it anybody’s. In fact, exactly what was going on, what I was doing, or why, I no longer understood. That being the case I decided it was time to vanish, before the rising madness left someone bleeding.
I understood Vadim’s anger: I was forcing him to back up his outrageous claims. I was asking him to prove everything he had told me, though of course, both of us knew this was impossible. We were in the end zone of the game: I was now invading and challenging his reality. Naturally, he didn’t like that. Maybe I should have just left it. I was leaving it now.
I stepped out onto the landing, through Vadim’s open door, and half ran down the steps, Dmitri following behind me. The night air was freezing, but fresh, and it felt good to be in it. I left the vodka next to a bin, for the first bomzh that came along to find. It wouldn’t be there long.
I felt exhausted, but free. And with that sense of my own liberation, I knew that the entrance to the Underground Planet had closed on me for ever. My last image of that strange world was this: Vadim resting his head against his mother’s apron. She was nodding to us, as if to say, just go. But I didn’t see anger in her eyes, or accusation –only sadness. Sadness and suffering and a bottomless but tormented love.