Page 30 of The Half Life of Valery K

She only sighed and helped him up so that they could go to the X-ray machine. He tried to tell her again that there had been no lab, no accident, but he gave up quickly, because he understood. She must have come across people too frightened to tell the truth all the time, and perhaps even people involved in projects so secret that their staff cards showed a false profession. He swallowed and tasted iron again as she put on the lead apron. He couldn’t still the shudder in his hands any more. She was right, though; it was mild, or he’d be doubled over a bucket by now.

He wanted to think it was the village. But he hadn’t touched anything that no one else had, and just being there clearly wasn’t this harmful, or everyone else there would have been dead long ago. Radiation extreme enough to make you sick didn’t cause mutations in children; you would just end up with a lot of dead foetuses. So the radiation in the village was too low for this, even if it was generally bad.

No; the only thing he’d done differently to anyone in the village was that he’d sat out on the bare soil on the edge of the woods, waiting for the city perimeter to open for the morning.

Fifty roentgen, the doctor had said. That sounded right. It would have taken a hundred roentgen to get a healthy person feeling like this, but as she pointed out, he was a mess, such a mess that his bones were brittle. But fifty roentgen in what had it been – seven hours? And he had only been sitting on the ground for four of those hours.

So the ground immediately outside the plant was so contaminated it was giving off at least seven roentgen per hour. More; he had absorbed seven roentgen per hour.

Per hour.

‘Comrade? I need you to face the machine,’ the doctor said, brisk but gentle. Valery must have looked terrible now.

He did as he was told, his heart cantering. The machine banged and thumped, and each bang reverberated around his head.

Seven roentgen per hour.

No wonder they had to use stopwatches.

The X-ray showed a clean break, so it was all straightforward from there. There was a splint and a cast. The break started to hurt a lot and the doctor gave Valery some morphine, which made him feel floaty, and which chased off a good portion of the nausea. He almost didn’t notice when Shenkov came in, still looking distressed, and carrying a bar of chocolate.

‘How are you?’ Shenkov asked, awkward and quiet. He had withdrawn right in on himself, his usual tailored openness all gone.

‘Fine,’ Valery said, wondering why any KGB officer would care if he’d accidentally broken someone’s arm. When you professionally broke people’s arms, it was surely a sign of accomplishment.

No; obviously. He was here to ask about the radiation sickness. It was definitely the concern of the head of security if people were swanning around getting radiation sickness even when they were nowhere near the reactors or the physics labs.

‘Is it – is it a thing you’ve always had? The … bone weakness.’

But Shenkov didn’t only look sorry; he seemed horrified with himself, his whole frame tight, as though he expected to have the offending hand cut off.

‘It’s not a disease,’ Valery explained. ‘It’s a side effect of a period of starvation; your bones lose all their calcium. It won’t last long now, though.’

From the far corner, the doctor gave him a narrow stare over her glasses, one that opined he would definitely liquefy without proper medical supervision.

Shenkov looked haunted before he shut down his own expression. ‘Well, that’s for you.’ He nodded at the chocolate. ‘Calcium in there too, I suppose.’

Valery took it, still perplexed. ‘Thanks.’

‘I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have touched you if I’d known. I just – wanted to get you here, when you came over …’ he glanced towards the doctor ‘ … ill.’

‘It’s okay,’ Valery said, waiting for him to ask more about the radiation.

‘Is it really that bad in the camps, still, that you don’t get enough to eat?’

Completely without meaning to, Valery laughed and Shenkov flinched.

‘You must have met zeks before; don’t you know what a starving person looks like?’

Shenkov took a breath and then held it without speaking, and Valery realised that he didn’t know what starving people looked like; that not many people did, that most people seeing zeks would just think they were shabby and ugly in a general sort of way. It was a leap to understand that they could have looked better.

‘I was an athlete,’ Valery said. ‘Ice hockey. Before. For my university. I’m alive now because I was fit going in.’ He paused, aware he was laying it on thick for bad reasons. He wanted Shenkov to feel guilty. Not because he was angry about his arm, or the ignorance of an ordinary person, but because if Shenkov felt guilty, they would talk more.

‘Listen – open this, share it with me,’ Valery said at last, towards the chocolate. ‘Please. But don’t give any to the doctor, we don’t like her.’

The doctor made a gun out of her fingers and shot herself with it.

‘Or definitely not more than two pieces.’