Page 26 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘What do you want?’

‘You can’t. It’s all contaminated—’

‘Yes, fuckwit, we know that!’ It was real rage, and Valery stepped backwards, once, carefully controlled, which was the halfway point between wanting to stand his ground, and the screaming involuntary need to run away. The man wasn’t angry with anyone personally. It was the rage of a starved animal, justified and unmalevolent. Easier to work with.

‘The KGB cleared us off in no uncertain terms and burned our fucking houses, didn’t they!’ The man motioned off towards the woods with his rifle.

Valery nodded, keeping himself very measured. People would copy you, sometimes. ‘Then why did you come back?’

The man looked at him as if he were growing a third eye. ‘Why do you think? Have you seen what’s going on in the countryside? There’s a famine. Potato blight. Where are any of us supposed to get food? You’ve shut all this off and whether it’s got radiation or not it’s still good hunting territory. So fuck off back to the fucking Lighthouse.’

The fear was draining away under the gravity of what the man was telling him. The rifle tip had swung back towards his face, but it didn’t matter so much now. Valery touched it with the crook of his finger, to aim it over his shoulder. ‘Can you take me back to where you live? I can help you. I can show you which plants are least irradiated, and which lakes. This one is the worst, but – please? I mean it.’

‘You’ll tell the KGB where we live, they’ll clear us out.’

‘Blindfold me,’ Valery said.

The man hesitated, but then lowered the gun, and flashed his lamp out towards his friend in the fishing boat.

The men had come in through the perimeter fences with wire cutters. They hadn’t bothered to be subtle – there were person-shaped holes in the two fences – but they had chosen places immediately at the edge of the reach of the halogen searchlights, places which, to anyone watching from the guard towers, would have seemed the very darkest. Valery still felt sure they were going to hear the rattle of a machine gun at any second as they made the hundred-metre run across open grass to the treeline. His whole spine hurt with the certainty, even though both of the men whispered that they’d done it before.

Nothing, though. The relief made him dizzy. He had closed his hand over the silver watch in his pocket before he remembered it was there. When he took it out, his sense of time went into shock to see that it had only been sixteen minutes since he’d stepped outside.

Tucked into the shadow of a sickly oak was an old farm truck. Valery sat in the back beside the sack of fish, which he couldn’t convince them to throw away. When the blindfold went on, his stomach screwed itself into an unhelpful knot, but he could hardly argue now, so he sat rigid, telling himself in a loop that it was fine, it wasn’t a trick, no one was taking him back to prison. He should have been freezing, sitting out like that at half past three in the morning, but his shirt was soaked by the time the truck stopped and someone said he could take off the blindfold. He wrenched it off.

One of the men must have noticed. ‘You all right, mate?’

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

It could not, Valery thought, have been more than about ten miles, because he hadn’t had time to go out of his mind. He checked the stopwatch. An hour since leaving the Lighthouse; yes, they’d only driven for forty-five minutes.

They were at the edge of a dense portion of the birch forest. With their silvery undersides, the leaves shimmered in the headlights. Every fourth or fifth tree was dead.

There was no road leading into the forest; they had to leave the truck and walk the last kilometre. They went slowly, half because they had only candles in their lamps, and the way led over fallen trees and patches littered with dead branches, but half because the men kept glancing at him and then at each other, and reining themselves back from going at full pace. He must have looked fragile even to them. The candlelight threw keen shadows over the prints of their boots in the mud.

When Valery saw the first rooftops, he couldn’t believe what was in front of him.

The houses were thatched log cabins, made from pale wood that must have been cut from close by. The chimneys were built of fire-blackened bricks that looked like they might have been scavenged from somewhere else. At least ten. Ten houses, ten families. They even had a clearing full of allotments, and another for a graveyard. It would have looked like a perfect medieval village if not for the relics of newer things; a tractor, a tyre swing, even a radio perched on someone’s workbench, hooked up to a generator. All of it was spectral in a thin mist and tiny lamps hanging from eaves and trees.

The village was alive already, even though dawn was still four hours away. People looked round when they saw the men had someone new with them, and Valery felt exposed. If they decided not to let him leave, they’d have no trouble stopping him, and no shortage of places to hide a body.

The air was smoky. Someone was cooking pork, and bread.

The men, who looked cheerful now to have brought in such a novelty as a new person, led him to one of the cottages. Its windows – the panes were mosaics of broken glass newly soldered together – were full of candlelight, which cast square patches of gold on to the grass. Inside was an old lady and a dog that might have been mainly wolf. The dog hurried up to them and snuffled at them all.

‘Who’ve you got there?’ the lady said.

The men introduced her only as Nanya. Valery couldn’t tell if it was her name or her title, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was plainly in charge, and plainly the person they had brought him to see. Once they had explained where they’d got him from, she nodded for him to sit down at the kitchen table; solid, well-scrubbed, with flour in the scratches. They had no paper, so he drew out a rough map in chalk on the tabletop to show them where the radiation was. His eyes began to ache in the insufficient light, even though Nanya had moved five or six candles onto the table.

‘The radiation is stronger than anyone will tell you,’ he said. ‘We aren’t allowed dosimeters, so I can’t tell you how strong, but you can tell from the trees. The more dead trees there are per acre, the more radiation there is in the ground. Try and avoid the lakes completely.’

‘This is the first I’m hearing about the lakes,’ Nanya remarked, sceptical.

‘I know,’ he said, feeling helpless. ‘I know. The scientists at the facility aren’t allowed to tell people in town. I saw some kids playing in the river the other day and someone arrested me when I tried to tell them to stop.’

She gave him a frank study. ‘What are you telling us for then, if you might get arrested?’

‘I’m hoping none of you will tell anyone I told you.’