Page 20 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Well,’ said Valery, not liking to say that Germans were infants who didn’t know how to recognise things going wobbly, ‘I’ll bet you a glass of wine. Is … that a jar of eyeballs?’ he added, because the researcher was unpacking his briefcase.

‘It is indeed,’ the man said, setting it down on Valery’s desk, ‘a jar of eyeballs. Present for you.’

‘I love it!’ Valery beamed, feeling very happy about the way life was going. He was doing his degree for free, unlike the Germans, who had looked crestfallen when Dr Resovskaya explained that your education all the way up to PhD was free in the Soviet Union; he’d managed by pure blind luck to get a third-year supervisor who was a genius, which undergrads hardly ever did; after university, the government would send him somewhere to do a job that involved being a specialist in radiobiology, unlike the poor Germans who’d have to scrabble around applying for things for ages and then end up running a pharmacy somewhere instead. And now, he had his own jar of actual eyeballs. It was the devil’s own work to get human tissue at home if you weren’t part of the medical school. The medical school were snobs.

The researcher laughed. ‘Right, well, here’s a challenge for you. See if you can make the irises turn blue. There’s a paper here about the possibility of doing it with the right application of radiation; we need to see if we can replicate the findings.’

‘Oh,’ said Valery, intrigued. He had to blink twice at the journal article to make his brain perceive the German alphabet as sounds and not meaningless lines. It always happened in the first split second, even now that he was close to fluent. ‘Why?’

‘Peer review.’

It wasn’t what Valery had meant, but he decided he didn’t care. He scanned the article for numbers and doses. Once he had them, he held up the eyeballs. They bobbed cheerily in their formaldehyde. Some of them spun to look at him. All of them were brown. They looked surprised. He widened his own eyes back at them.

‘I’ve given Valery the eyeball thing,’ the German man aimed at Dr Resovskaya, who was just on her way in. She hadn’t had to barge anywhere; she was the sort of woman who people let through on the off-chance that she would smile at them.

‘Good,’ she said, and Valery recognised the tone. She must have demanded they give him something interesting that might help his thesis, not just washing up other people’s test tubes.

The German researcher edged away.

Outside, there was some crowd-chanting. Valery couldn’t catch the slogan, but people sounded angry. The back of his neck itched. Someone was going to open fire soon, he could feel it coming, so he concentrated on the article, and on replicating the test conditions.

Dr Resovskaya paused by him towards mid-morning to see how he was doing.

‘Oh, excellent,’ she said, because she had arrived just in time to find a perfectly grey eyeball on Valery’s workbench.

‘Strips the melanin out pretty well,’ Valery said, tapping the syringe, which held a mixture of vicious radioactive isotopes, vicious enough that he was having to wear lead-lined gloves. He paused. ‘Funny thing to do, though. You’d blind whoever you injected with this.’

‘I wonder if that isn’t rather the point,’ she said, and film-star walked away. She always wore heels, he suspected as an up yours to the head German researcher, who had made disapproving mumbling noises through his moustache about having women in the lab. Germans were weird about women. For people who seemed very concerned about the economy, they were mad keen to cut off fifty per cent of their workforce. Apparently this was normal in the West. Normal or not, Valery had spent a contented evening yesterday threading horsehair into the head German researcher’s cigars.

‘I don’t … understand; never mind,’ Valery sighed, not loudly enough for her to hear. It was rare to understand Dr Resovskaya. He had a theory that people who were high up in any organisation spoke a special oblique dialect unknown to normal people.

Outside, there were gunshots. He poked the German researcher who’d given him the eyes, and who now looked scared.

‘I like red wine,’ he said, to distract him.

‘Right! Right.’

Valery forgot about the eyeballs until a few days later, when a severe man in SS uniform arrived. There was instant silence and, almost imperceptibly, Dr Resovskaya moved in front of Valery. It had been on the radio that foreign nationals might like to look into buggering off if they’d be so kind, but it hadn’t been made law yet, and Dr Resovskaya said they were leaving when they were sent and not before. Valery agreed, because he was more afraid of her than the Nazis. The Nazis weren’t marking his thesis.

‘Dr Resovskaya and Dr … Kolkhanov?’ The SS officer pronounced it Kolkhanoff, but he was smiling. ‘Letter for you from the Ministry.’ He handed Resovskaya a brown envelope with the eagle stamp on the corner.

He left, and everyone breathed.

Resovskaya opened the envelope and set it on the desk so that Valery could read it too. As always, the German letters were only squiggles for a second.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, having finished first by far. ‘Hah.’

‘I’m still reading,’ Valery admitted.

‘The eyeball thing,’ she said, unusually bright. ‘The results that you confirmed? This is from the researcher who wrote the paper. He says your results were even better than his, he wants to know what you changed. He’s inviting us to his lab.’

‘Oh,’ Valery said, because he had expected to be in trouble.

‘Well. Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, here we come,’ she said happily.

Across from them, the head German researcher finally lit one of the cigars Valery had tampered with. The horsehair burned nearly as well as cannon fuse and the whole thing caught fire, and someone had to put the man’s stupid moustache out with a cup of tea. Dr Resovskaya gave Valery an assessing look. Valery did his best innocent face. She waited till they were outside before she laughed.

The Institute was a long, white building, part of Berlin University, and it was intimidatingly nice on the inside. A secretary sent them to a well-lit lab on the ground floor, where a big man with a monocle flew out and wrung them both by the hand.