Page 31 of The Half Life of Valery K

The doctor smiled.

Shenkov did as he was told. ‘Kolkhanov … where the hell were you, to get radiation sickness?’ he asked, well out of the doctor’s hearing. ‘I need to know. We’ve got a dead body, and now you. Were you in one of the labs, or … ?’

‘No.’ He couldn’t tell any more if it was a stupid idea to tell the truth. The morphine and the radiation were making it hard to think in a straight line. He could still taste iron. He was only upright because he was propped on two pillows. ‘I was sitting on exposed soil at the edge of the forest for four or five hours. I was waiting for the perimeter to open.’

Shenkov lifted his eyes, and Valery expected to have another fight, but Shenkov didn’t fight. He looked like he was fracturing at the edges. ‘How far from the fence?’

‘About … a hundred metres.’ Valery let himself sink into a whisper. ‘I think we’re talking about seven or eight roentgen per hour, from the soil. I – believe me or don’t, but it’s easy to test. Go and sit out there for a day and you’ll get radiation sickness too if I’m right.’

‘No. I believe you.’ Shenkov hesitated. ‘I believe you,’ he said again.

Valery felt so vindicated that he didn’t care any more that he had radiation sickness and a broken arm, or that they’d fought before.

‘Is that enough to have killed Sasha? If he was out there for three days.’

‘Ah … maybe? I don’t know. But why would he sit out there for three days in a hospital gown?’

Shenkov glanced at the machinery beside them, the light switch, the doctor. ‘We can’t talk about this here.’

So they watched the news on the small, grainy television in silence, but it was nice silence, and the chocolate was wonderful. Valery couldn’t remember the last time he’d watched television properly. He’d never owned a television. He said so. Shenkov called him a savage and seemed to leave it there, but by the time Valery got back to his flat that night, someone had been in and installed a television on the desk.

He went down to the KGB office the next morning. Boiling water plinked in a samovar. Shenkov was reading a report with a green pen in his hand, hovering the tip down the lines as he read, sometimes underlining things, fast and accurate. Valery stood in the doorway without knocking, just to breathe the scent of the place; coffee and brand-new paper and, nearly imperceptible from here unless you knew to search for it, the bright woodlands in Shenkov’s cologne. It was all so clean.

‘Valery. How are you?’ Shenkov said it so lightly he sounded like a boy, the stones sifted out of his voice.

Accurately, wrecked was the answer. Valery had slept badly because the cast had locked his elbow bent, and the joint had ached more than the broken bone. The radiation headache had got worse around midnight, too intense to sleep through. Then it was a struggle to wash and dress properly in the morning. Getting into a shirt had been such an expedition that he’d nearly called down to the infirmary for help; the only thing that had stopped him was that any human being who made their living as a nurse, looking after people, would be either frightened or angry when they saw the tattoos. He didn’t want to frighten anyone, and he couldn’t cope with any more angry people.

Shenkov did not need to hear any of that.

‘Well entertained. Thank you for the educational equipment you installed in my room, it’s already been edifying.’ Valery spoke half into the light switch, which scritched with the familiar noise of the bugs. Next door, in the KGB listening room, the officer stationed there in heavy-looking headphones gave him a wave and a thumbs-up. He waved back. He had been telling the light switches jokes as they occurred to him all evening yesterday.

That was all the standing up he could do. He sat down in the Chair of Doom. It was eight o’clock, but the light was getting sparser in the mornings now, and Shenkov had been working by the light of a desk lamp. It threw shadows over the diamond-shaped creases down Shenkov’s nearer sleeve, and in the Hoover tracks on the carpet.

Shenkov smiled. It was the first time Valery had seen him do it, and it made him look like someone else altogether, but it faded too quickly as he made the coffee.

‘I’m fine,’ Valery said, ducking a little to catch his eye. ‘I’m up to here in morphine, I’m having the most wonderful time.’

It was true. He was still merry and floaty, even though he was exhausted. It was enough to make him wonder if something similar had happened to Sasha. If a doctor had given him enough morphine – and they would have given him morphine, because extreme radiation sickness was painful – he might have thought he could leave whichever hospital had him, and make it home to Nanya’s village on that illusory opioid strength. The haziness that morphine brought might even explain why Sasha had gone out in only the hospital gown instead of his real clothes. Even with much less radiation sickness and much less morphine, Valery suspected that someone could have convinced him that almost anything was an excellent idea now. Walk ten kilometres in the woods in a cotton smock? Great.

Shenkov nodded. ‘Milk?’ he asked quietly.

‘Please.’

Shenkov glanced up. ‘How is milk in coffee? Do you like it or is it just for the calcium?’

‘I like it.’

‘My father always said it was effeminate, so I never tried.’ It wasn’t an accusation, just a request for permission.

What a nightmare, to be Shenkov’s size with that kind of father. It was amazing he hadn’t become one of those men who felt it was correct and exemplary to hit women over the head with bricks.

Valery tipped his cup. ‘But don’t you find usually that the people who are most worried about seeming effeminate are the ones with a permanent Friday-evening appointment with a sailor?’

Shenkov choked on the coffee but, thank God, he was laughing. ‘Let’s take this outside. It’s nice seeing the sunrise over the lake. If it – won’t make you more sick.’

‘It won’t for ten minutes. Anyway, everyone should put milk in coffee,’ Valery said as he stood up. He lifted the cup carefully by the handle. ‘If you’re having a wobbly moment, it’s reassuring to see that fluid dynamics are the same in a cup as in planetary cloud.’

Shenkov thought about it, then emptied the last of the milk into his cup and followed.