Page 17 of The Half Life of Valery K

When he looked around, everyone was watching him. Nobody said how they knew. Dr Resovskaya must have mentioned it – she wouldn’t think it was anything remarkable. He felt exposed. Ilenko wasn’t here still; she must have been assigned to some other lab.

‘I did a year abroad as part of my degree, I went to Berlin. It went on record somewhere, and I was arrested in … fifty-six.’

‘That’s all?’ a girl said.

Valery took care not to laugh. ‘If you spend any time in a capitalist country you’ll be sent to the gulag, whatever you did there.’

Unsettled looks slithered between them all.

One boy was annoyed. ‘If you were truly loyal to the Party, you’d have been shot before you worked for the enemy though, wouldn’t you.’

‘They weren’t the enemy then, the borders were open. It was nineteen thirty-seven. The Party sent me.’

‘But then …’

‘Every third person in the gulag is an academic,’ he said, slowly, because it was bizarre to stumble across someone who didn’t know that. He had thought the whole world knew. It had all come out after Stalin died, which was why Valery had almost laughed when he found himself being arrested a good three years after that. You could have papier-mâchéd Siberia with the reams of newsprint written about the arrests and the trials, but under no cover but a penitent air, the Kremlin had kept it going all the same. ‘People aren’t sent because of what they’ve done, they’re sent because of what they might do under the right conditions.’

‘Why doesn’t anyone know that? If there’s that many people then why haven’t we met any?’

Valery wanted to ask what the boy meant by anyone; anyone under twenty-five, it sounded like. But that would have been cruel. ‘Because most of those people have no trade skills, so they’re assigned to general labour, which is usually mining, in minus sixty degrees, so they die. So you never hear from them.’

‘It can’t be all that many people then,’ the boy said, and Valery heard exactly how maddening he must have sounded when he had tried to tell Ilenko she wasn’t on mum duty.

Valery admired her all the more for not having punched him. ‘The population of the Soviet Union is now about a hundred and twenty million.’ The numbers came quite easily. ‘According to the KGB’s own records, which have been publicly released to the West and are therefore conservative estimates, twenty million people went through labour camps at some point between nineteen thirty-two and fifty-three. There is no information from before that, and the current numbers are classified. Official estimates are that two million of those twenty million died at the camps, but I should tell you that if someone looks like they’re about to die of cold or starvation, they go down on the records as released, not deceased. So one in seven people has been to a labour camp, and if you believe KGB record-keeping, then one in ten of those is dead.’

The phone rang into the silence that followed. It was by Valery, so he picked it up. ‘Biology lab.’

‘Can you not,’ Shenkov said at the other end without bothering to say who it was or how he had overheard from two hundred metres away in the security office, from beyond eight closed doors, ‘whip the student population into dissident protests in your first week?’

‘Actually they don’t look very convinced, I think we’re all right,’ Valery said.

‘It is interesting to have such a determined tightrope walker on staff,’ Shenkov told him in his devastatingly mild way, and hung up.

Valery shrugged a little at the students. ‘That was Comrade Shenkov telling me to shut up. So draw your own conclusions.’

‘That can’t be right,’ someone else said, sounding angry. ‘Everyone would know.’

Valery shook his head, because he had thought about it for years and he still couldn’t come up with a way to make it sound factual. A labour camp, the whole witless idea, was the kind of thing fantasists and snuff movie-makers came up with. It felt idiotic to even imagine treating people the way they were treated there. If you spoke for hours and hours, perhaps you’d shift that; but he didn’t want to talk about it for five minutes, never mind five hours. ‘Everyone does know,’ he said.

No doubt they thought he was trying to be mysterious and interesting, and who could blame them; he would have to be philosophical about it if one of them hit him in the head with an ice pick.

Dr Resovskaya stepped out of her office. ‘This sudden silence sounds suspiciously like you’re all covering up a row,’ she said, bright as always. Her shoes sparkled.

The young man turned on her crossly. ‘Comrade, we all have to share a lab with a traitor. That’s going to look bad on our records, all our records. I worked my arse off to be here, and now—’

‘And now the Party has placed you here. Problem?’ Resovskaya said mildly. If she was flustered to find the beginnings of a mutiny in her lab, she didn’t look it.

‘No,’ he said, but he was still simmering.

‘You’re dreaming if you imagine that even one in a thousand people sent to the gulag is guilty. Stalin himself said that it was worth arresting a thousand people to find one spy. You understand, don’t you, that people were arrested indiscriminately and then tortured into confessing?’

There was a charged quiet that crackled with resentment. Nobody wanted to believe things like that, and they certainly didn’t want to believe it of someone standing in the room with them. Valery wished she hadn’t said it, because he understood why people resented hearing it. If you were the victim of something foul, it gave you the moral high ground, forever. Which meant that all of them now felt defensive about not liking him, because that dislike was a genuine concern, but now it had been made to look frivolous because wasn’t he a wonderful martyr and weren’t they despicable.

That was a dangerous thing to make anyone feel.

‘Not me, though,’ Valery said. ‘I ratted on everyone I knew the second I got into the Lubyanka, let’s not pretend I stood on principle even for forty seconds. Kudos to those people, but I’m a reincarnated mouse.’

Like he’d hoped, it broke the charge and some of the students even laughed.