Page 27 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘On one of my nice coffee mornings with the lovely KGB man up at the plant?’

He smiled. After the blindfolded drive here and the lamplit walk through the woods, the fight with Shenkov felt like it had happened a long time ago. ‘You’ve met Shenkov, then.’

‘Met him; he led the crew who evicted us from our town and burned all the buildings there so we wouldn’t come back.’ She didn’t say it bitterly, only as she might have talked about someone who had said something rude at a dinner party. In the candlelight, she looked more like a terribly weathered statue of a person than a person, the shadows vaulting over her knotted knuckles and the hunger-sharp tendons in her throat. Somewhere in the murk behind her, another animal scuffled. Not the dog; the dog was sitting with its paw on her knee.

No, not another animal; it was outside. When he looked, he jumped, because there were people just outside the window, staring in, silent and unembarrassed.

Nanya had seen them too, but she ignored them. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to tell us?’

‘Yes. I can give you a list of plant species that we’ve found to be more radiation resistant than others. And – if you’d like me to, I can take samples of any crops you’re growing and find out which are safest.’

The two men looked at her quickly. They weren’t so unfussed about living off radioactive land as they had said at the lake, then.

‘Sounds sensible,’ she said.

‘May I have some jam jars?’ he asked, looking at her sizeable collection on the kitchen worktop. The candles made them gleam. ‘For the samples.’

‘If you bring them back. We don’t get much glass out here.’

He straightened up. ‘I can tell you how to make forest glass if that would help.’

‘You what?’

‘I’m a chemist, I know how to make glass. It won’t be brilliant, but you can do it with what you’ve got here. All the dead wood will be perfect.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘aren’t you a gem.’ She inclined her head. The candle shadows leapt across her again. ‘You still haven’t said why you want to help.’

‘Because I’ve seen enough pointless loss of human life already,’ he said. He aimed it towards the window too. The people were still there.

She was quiet for a moment, and her eyes ticked over him, and then she seemed satisfied. ‘Right, you’re a zek,’ she said, as if gulag prisoners were as recognisable a breed as woodpeckers or huskies. ‘All right. Kusnetsov’s our blacksmith, so you can show him about the glass. And then you can take samples of whatever you want. But if you tell anyone at the Lighthouse where we are—’

‘They blindfolded me—’

‘You seem bright, love, I imagine you could work it out,’ she said. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll send some lads to cut your hands off; fair?’

He nodded, and then took a fast breath when two and two clicked together in his head. ‘Nanya – are you missing a man? A young man, about twenty.’

All of them glanced at each other.

‘Why would you ask that?’ she said, a little hard. The dog was examining Valery too.

‘We found a body. He died of radiation sickness.’

There was a small quiet.

‘Shit,’ one of the men said.

‘Sasha,’ said the other.

‘We thought he just left,’ Nanya sighed. ‘Well. There you are.’

‘He was found in a hospital gown,’ Valery said. ‘Was he going somewhere for treatment? Is there a town you go to, for doctors, check-ups … ?’

The others all snorted. It took Nanya so by surprise that she inhaled at the same time and made a noise that was almost an oink. ‘Doctors! No. No; but a hospital gown?’

‘Yes. In the middle of the forest.’

‘He wasn’t sick,’ one of the men said. He looked confused. ‘Picture of health, Sasha. That’s why we thought he’d gone. He could have walked to Sverdlovsk, worked at a factory … he was getting tired of living here. Not like we have any mod cons.’