Page 11 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Cheese,’ Ilenko decided.

That was it for the day. Dr Resovskaya passed around keys and directed everyone to an accommodation tower block just next to the facility. Valery expected shared dorms, but when a brand-new lift took them up to the eleventh floor, they each had their own rooms. Inside, it was like a hotel. A bed, a bathroom, a window that looked out over the black lake. And there, on the bed, was a neatly sealed paper bag with three new shirts, two new ties, underwear, pyjamas, and a roll-up wash kit containing the first sharp razor he’d seen in years.

Just because he could, he went straight into the shower and stood under the hot water for nearly half an hour. It was different from the airport. This was real, not a snatched five minutes halfway, perhaps, to somewhere horrible. He had forgotten what it was like to be clean. Not just functionally clean, but really clean, so clean that your hair squeaked and the ends of your nails were white. It only sank in slowly. He stood looking at the burns on his ribs from the cattle prod. He wasn’t going to die of an infection. He could say that with a decent amount of confidence for the first time since – well, since Before.

There was a telephone on the desk. Dry and dressed again, he touched the receiver, then stopped. He didn’t know anybody who would be interested to hear that he was out of the camp. He let his hand drop again.

It was six years since Valery had been in a room alone.

Camp barracks were never quiet. There would always be fifty men breathing and shifting and sniffing in their sleep, or whispering over dominoes long into the night; there would be rats, and the crunch of the guards’ boots as they patrolled outside. It was reassuring. What those rustling nights meant was that if you were ever so ill you couldn’t get up, or spiralling too far into bleakness, then there were other humans who would keep checking to see if you were still alive, who might even fetch food or a doctor. With people, it was safe. The only places without people were the solitary confinement cells, and the forest at night.

Nobody came back from either of those.

Even though his forebrain knew that he was safe in here, the rest was positive that he wasn’t.

He had to open the window to catch some background noise from the town. There wasn’t much; a little traffic, the distant roar of the forest. Better than nothing.

Standing still in the dark, he could hear a tiny, electrical whine, the same as he’d heard in the light switch in the presentation room downstairs. Puzzled, he followed it round the room and found that it was actually coming from three places. The phone, the lamp, and a plug. He wasn’t an electrician, though, so he decided it was probably better to leave it alone and tell someone in maintenance in the morning.

He lay down in bed and waited to feel tired. After half an hour, tiredness still wouldn’t come, only a rising panic. He tried the radio without much hope, but all the channels were already off-air. He left it on white noise. In the end, he had to build a makeshift person-shape from cushions and pillows next to him in bed, then curl up against it.

4

The River

There were cafes in town. Valery wasn’t alone in being excited about that; everybody was, and the next morning, Saturday, when he ventured out early so he could get the stamp in the prisoner book and leave at the same time, everyone else was up early too. Shenkov, the security officer, was at the front door handing out stopwatches. They were beautiful things, proper silver clockwork, all gleaming in a wooden box on a desk. When Valery took his, he paused over it, charmed.

‘These are nice. How come … ?’

‘Cheaper to pick these up from an antique shop than buy normal watches,’ Shenkov explained, sounding like he’d said it fourteen times today already. He stamped Valery’s book with the KGB seal and wrote his signature over it. ‘Set it off the second you’re out the door, and don’t stay outside within five hundred metres of this complex for more than thirty minutes a day. A day, not per journey.’

‘That’s some fierce radiation,’ Valery said.

‘No. The thresholds set from Moscow are very low, that’s all.’ Shenkov was just as polite now as he had been yesterday, but there was something muted about him today. He looked like he hadn’t slept either, and KGB or not, Valery felt friendlier towards him. It was good to know he wasn’t the only insomniac. ‘It’s only precautionary.’

Valery studied the silver watch. In his experience, Moscow did not spend money on only precautionary. Ilenko must have been right. He took a breath.

‘If you say a single word more about radiation,’ Shenkov interrupted, not sharply, but with flint that he could have sharpened with a couple of knocks, ‘I will not respond well.’

Valery had a stab of sympathy. It must have been a thankless job, to tell a lie to a whole group of people who were qualified to recognise it as such. ‘Sorry. I know it must be rough.’

Shenkov turned brittle, as though nobody had said sorry to him and meant it for a long time. Valery stepped back once, in case he had a truncheon. He didn’t. He only looked alarmed that Valery had thought he might. ‘The soldiers at the perimeter gate have dosimeters. You’re scanned as you come in and out, you’ll know if there’s anything on you.’

‘Up to what scale?’

‘Three roentgen.’

‘Oh,’ said Valery, pleased. Well; maybe it wasn’t so bad then. Maybe Moscow really was being careful about people here. Maybe he had been a zek for too long to have an accurate idea about the value of normal people’s lives. Three roentgen was thirty times higher than the annual acceptable dose for everybody except emergency workers, but it probably wouldn’t hurt anybody even so, and it was clearly at the very top end of what they expected here. ‘Okay. Well, thanks.’

Shenkov nodded once and crossed through a box on a long register, and wrote down the time. Valery slid his prisoner book into his breast pocket, feeling peculiarly safe. Everyone accounted for always, and him particularly; it was bliss after six years of being herded around with a machine gun in the back of his neck, and it meant they really were taking it all seriously.

He hesitated by the gate of the research facility and had to watch the soldiers checking other people’s papers before he was sure it was all right and nobody was going to say that no, there had been a silly mistake and he was supposed to be in a cell somewhere. He hoped he would see Ilenko, because in some of those sleepless hours he’d rehearsed asking her if she wouldn’t mind having some coffee with him, but there was no sign of her. All the while, he could feel the watch ticking in his pocket, so he went up before he was quite ready. Anxiety seeped through him as he reached the booth. The soldier looked at his paperwork, looked at him, made a note in a ledger, then waved him on, just as a truck came in from the other direction. A security guard climbed up to wave a dosimeter over the crates inside. It buzzed urgently.

‘It’s bananas,’ the driver called. ‘Sets your stuff off every time, sorry!’

Valery turned away, grinning. Bananas were full of potassium; if you could eat something in the region of a million and a half bananas at one go, you’d get radiation sickness. It was how Dr Resovskaya had taught them to think about amounts of radiation when he was an undergraduate. It worked out at about 0.0001 roentgen per banana, which meant a truck of bananas only needed to be carrying about fifteen hundred of them to get a squeak off a sensitive dosimeter.

He wondered who was getting the bananas. He hadn’t seen one since working in that lab in Berlin, or at least, not one you wouldn’t have to take out a mortgage to buy.