Page 12 of The Half Life of Valery K

Just outside the facility was an extremely clean road, bisected with silver birch trees that threw a pleasant shade over the pavements. It was too warm here for frost, incredibly; even though it was October. He stepped out slowly, unable to believe that he was allowed to do it. But, here were people, real people, chatting outside grocery shops and restaurants, and nobody pointed at him or marched him away. Under his hand, the pocket watch ticked. He took it out, meaning to stop the timer, but then hadn’t the heart. The watch was old; it must have sat around not doing anything for a long time now. It deserved to run.

He paused outside a stationer’s, because there were newspapers, a stand of cigarettes – really good cigarettes too, and chocolate; things no one had been able to get even before the war, even in Moscow. And eggs; God, there were hundreds of eggs, just on display. Everything must have been in steady supply too. There was no crowd of people fighting to buy it all, nobody hurrying away with a hundred eggs in a basket looking like they’d won a million roubles. Surreal. He had a powerful urge to steer clear. It would be terrible to get used to things like that.

Because this wasn’t going to last forever, whatever Shenkov had said. No one had given him a pardon; he was still in the penal system, even if they were letting him walk about now.

It was tentatively that he went into the cafe. Even then he had to slow down, because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Carpets, radiators, nicely made tables, newspapers in a rack – among them the Lake News, which had a headline that screamed aliens in kyshtym!! That made him laugh and think of the song his mother had made up, that there was no truth in Truth and no news in News.

And there on the counter, a bowl full of grapes. He thought they must just have been for show, but someone saw him looking and said you could buy some; they weren’t even expensive. So he did, along with coffee that tasted like it belonged to another age, and sat staring at the bunch of grapes, hypnotised. Real grapes. From another country. Peru, was it, where you got grapes? All he knew about Peru was that there was gold there, and jungles. Unbelievably far away, and yet here was a little part of it.

It was sunny for the first time since he could remember, so he sat outside on the terrace. It overlooked the river, the Techa. The Techa was a broad, inviting span of water, and on the far bank were marshlands where groves of reeds bowed as if there were an invisible tsar in the water.

Cows were nosing around in the shallows. Valery swallowed. He could see how they were swirling up the mud on the river bed. The mud would be nearly as radioactive as on the day it had been contaminated. Caesium-137 and its counterpart isotope, strontium-90, got through only half the neutrons they had to blast out in thirty years; it had only been six years. All those tiny storm systems of neutron shards, still going strong. He wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those cows. The thought made him look down at his own coffee and wonder where the milk came from. Not here, hopefully. No – definitely. People would have set off the dosimeters at the Lighthouse perimeter if they were drinking radioactive milk.

Resovskaya was right. He had to relax. It was safe here. Even if she was downplaying the real figures for the students, the city was clearly fine.

He would have loved to know if there was a microscope now that could watch what those neutron shards did inside blood, or how they sliced between the atoms of your bones, atoms so wide-spaced as far as single neutrons were concerned that they would have looked like loosely linked solar systems, through those fragile DNA chains, tearing them to elegant bits, and then going on and on. From the outside, in an acute case, the result looked terrible. A human just melted. But from the point of view of that one neutron, blasted from the heaving core of an unquiet atom, it must have been bewitching.

He decided to ask someone about the state of modern microscope technology.

There was a splash.

Just a short way off was a tiny waterfall where the current rushed over a projecting rock. There were kids playing in it, taking it in turns to jump off, splash, swim to the bank and go again, squeaking with laughter.

What.

Valery stood up. ‘Hey.’ He found his voice properly. ‘Hey!’

They didn’t think he was talking to them and paid no attention. He searched for a way down, found some wooden steps, and ran. He grabbed the nearest boy, not caring that he’d never seen a human look so scared as the child did then.

‘Don’t play in the water. It’s toxic, do you understand?’

‘What …’

‘Oi!’ The boys’ fathers were smoking not far away. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

It was the first time Valery had been grateful to see a group of angry men. ‘I’m from the Lighthouse,’ he said. ‘The water is toxic. The lake is full of nuclear waste; you must know that? Don’t let the children anywhere near it.’

‘What are you talking about?’ one of the men said, but they all glanced at each other.

‘Please. That is a plutonium refinery,’ Valery said, pointing to the new towers opposite the research facility, ‘and that is where they put quite a lot of radioactive waste.’ He waved at the lake. He could hear his voice breaking high, but he couldn’t stop it; he couldn’t believe the men didn’t know. ‘That water runs into this river, please – hasn’t anyone said? – they cannot be in this water.’

‘Why don’t you just fuck off and leave them alone?’ the man said. He was holding a vodka bottle by the neck.

Valery lifted his hands and backed away, hot with a rush of fear. Once he was almost back at the cafe, though, the men hurried the boys out of the water.

Shaken, he trudged back up the terrace and sank back down at the table.

‘Are you all right?’

It was the lady who had told him about the grapes. She must have seen everything. Being spoken to unexpectedly by a stranger proved, for the first time since he’d been about six, paralysing, and all he could do was smile and nod.

Horrifyingly, she moved from her table to his.

‘You must be new here,’ she said, full of kindness.

‘Yes.’ He managed to laugh, or sort of. ‘How can you tell?’

‘I’ve been here donkey’s. I came when you weren’t allowed to leave at all. Used to be a chemical engineer at the Lighthouse. Retired now, obviously,’ she said, and patted her hair, which was bright white. ‘In those days they didn’t even let you tell your family, it was so secret. They all thought I’d gone missing. Can you imagine! They had a shock when I telephoned after eight years, I tell you. You look suspiciously like a scientist too. Let me guess; physics?’