Page 2 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘The thermometer on the tower. It’s only saying minus seventeen. What a joke.’

‘What – how does a thermometer go wrong?’

‘Probably someone breathed on it while they were doing the reading.’

‘Yeah, must have,’ the new guard said. He looked confused. ‘Yeah.’ He put the cattle prod back on his belt as if he’d forgotten why he was holding it.

Abracadabra.

The administrator opened the door before Valery had to knock, freshly ironed like always, despite the hour, but looking anxious. His eyes skipped between Valery and the guards. He hated breaking up fights; it was too undignified. ‘Come in then, 745; I’ll make your coffee and you can tell me what you’ve got for me today.’

The heat inside the office was so intense that Valery was instantly too hot. Firewood crackled in the open stove, casting amber light everywhere, nearly as bright as the three gleaming kerosene lamps. He breathed out and let his shoulders sink. It was much easier to inhale in here than it had been outside. The ache down his ribs pulsed.

Valery sat down at the table and skim-read the next section of the textbook for a second time. As the kettle boiled, he touched the dog-eared pages and wondered how much of the science was still up to date. Probably not much. The world would have moved on in six years. One of the upsetting things about any sort of science was that it had about the same half-life as radioactive caesium; after thirty years, at the most, fifty per cent of it turned out to be wrong.

‘By the way,’ the administrator said, bringing across the coffee, ‘today’s your last day.’

Something like snow, something heavy and cold, settled over Valery’s mind. If he was going to be led away into the woods and shot tonight, then he hadn’t done a single useful thing in his life.

‘Yes,’ the administrator continued, ‘you’re being sent somewhere else.’

Valery would have been less surprised if the ceiling had fallen in. ‘I’m what, sorry?’

‘I’ve got a transfer order for you. Not sure where, funny name, I didn’t recognise it. Kyshtym mean anything to you? Me neither. Anyway, I’m supposed to put you in a car later this morning.’

‘In …’ Valery trailed off, unable to speak. At some point in the last few years, one he couldn’t find now he was looking for it, the world beyond the camp had taken on the feeling of something imaginary – like the Winter King’s house, or the grove of silver trees where the dancing princesses danced.

There was no point asking why; the administrator wouldn’t know. Valery poured milk into the coffee. It was another of the things he looked forward to, watching it. The spinning patterns were hypnotic.

A transfer order. If the government had remembered his name, it wouldn’t be for anything good. It would be because they had realised he had never been properly interrogated. They had noticed, finally, that there might be some useful information sitting in his weakening skull.

It had all been a bit rushed on the day he’d been arrested. They’d had dozens of names to get through at the Lubyanka that morning, and the police had been quite grateful when he’d told them that yes, he’d definitely done whatever it was they had on their list, and they could tick him off straight away thank you, no need to show him the chair with the straps.

‘Well? Drink your coffee,’ the administrator said.

Valery drank it.

The worst possible approach was to complain. It wasn’t because the entire camp administration was evil; they weren’t. But if someone complained about normal life, the overwhelming human instinct was to kick them in the head. It was exactly the same feeling that Valery had used to have when he overheard some morose and paunchy faculty member whingeing about how a younger woman was ignoring him.

If you wanted help, you had to let someone arrive at that conclusion alone. You had to make the outline, but never fill it in. He had all morning; maybe he could do it.

‘Oh,’ said the administrator, annoyed. ‘The car’s early.’ He was looking out the window.

A prison transport van was just pulling in through the camp gates, below the wrought-iron archway sign that said, work is honourable, glorious, valiant, and heroic.

‘Right, well. Off you go, I suppose. Come along.’

Numbly, Valery followed the administrator as he bustled out to the courtyard, the concrete pink now in a dawn that had cathedrals in the clouds. The van was big enough for twenty people in the back, but when the administrator helped him in, Valery was the only one, except for a woman in a KGB uniform, reading a newspaper. The administrator shackled his hands to the wall on a considerately long chain, patted his shoulder, then shut the doors with a clang, which left Valery in the windowless metal cabin with nothing but the KGB lady and a light bulb screwed sideways into the ceiling. Someone banged on the side of the truck, and it rumbled off.

He lost his sense of time. After a while, the KGB lady tipped the newspaper at him to ask if he wanted to read it. He nodded, and stared uncomprehendingly at the front-page articles. It had been six years since he had last seen a copy of Truth. They’d changed the font. He read slowly, unable to shake the feeling that he was doing something forbidden. It was all ordinary stuff; the economy, a Lenin Day parade in Moscow, a nicely staged picture of banners and crowds and tanks in Red Square. He read everything, including the weather and the classifieds at the back, and had a strange, untrustworthy warm feeling that after so long away from it all, the world was holding one hand out to him again. When he noticed the feeling, he shut the paper. It was dangerous to start wanting things like that.

He wanted to ask the KGB lady about where they were going, but he couldn’t bring himself to. She wouldn’t tell him anyway, and if she got angry, she had a baton at her hip. Even though he was only imagining an angry person, not dealing with one, the burn from the cattle prod ached down his ribs again and his heart started to buzz.

He was still working up the courage to try when they stopped. She opened the back doors, and daylight javelined in.

It was an airport. There were people everywhere, normal people, with suitcases and children. When Valery got out of the transport van, the KGB lady gave him a package. It was bulky, brown paper; the paper had been used before, because it was soft from old creases, marked with the address of a KGB station in Moscow and a ten-kopek postage stamp. He hadn’t seen stamps for years. It was enchanting – it showed a miniature portrait of Valentina Tereshkova, the cosmonaut, on a blue and black background that must have been space.

‘Clothes,’ the KGB lady said. Then an envelope. ‘Papers. Right, let’s go.’