Page 32 of The Half Life of Valery K

At the door, they both started the silver stopwatches. The dawn was a brilliant pink against a violet sky, though cold, and they walked a little way from the complex, around the lake, where there was now a well-worn path in the long grass. Lots of people must have done the same thing. They stood on an outcrop overlooking the water. Behind them, the noise of traffic on the main road mingled with the hiss of the breeze in the newly planted trees along the pavement. Ahead, there was only the silent lake and muddy glimmer of the marshes.

‘We need to be very, very careful now,’ Shenkov said after a little quiet. ‘I’m the head of security here and no one has mentioned to me, not once, that there is that much radiation, that close to the city. So it’s dangerous for me to know, never mind for you.’

‘So shut up about it and ideally forget about it altogether? You didn’t need to bring me outside to say that,’ Valery said wryly. He was drained even after the short walk. Shenkov had twice had to take his arm to help him navigate around puddles. He felt like he was a hundred years old.

‘No; no. Clearly someone’s made some kind of – mistake.’

Valery gazed up at him and wondered for the first time, with a strange clarity, how frightened Shenkov must have been these last few years, to talk in code even now, outside, with someone he knew would agree with him. ‘Whatever it is, it is not a mistake,’ he said. ‘I can’t be the first person in six years to fall sick on the forest border. Or to notice that something isn’t right. How many people have the KGB had to shoot?’

Shenkov looked away. ‘A good few.’

Valery inclined his head. ‘Why didn’t you believe any of them?’

‘Because none of them collapsed in my office,’ Shenkov said tightly. ‘Because no one came to me and said, look, this is what I think and why, here’s my data; because they just went out and started telling people to get out, or going to the papers, or … it just looked like trouble-stirring. We can’t have that here. This is the largest nuclear facility in the Soviet Union. If people spook – Moscow will send in the army to get them back to work. I’d rather shoot ten people than have riots and soldiers firing live rounds into crowds.’

‘Okay.’

‘So you think it’s secret because the radiation could hurt people – here? Inside the city.’

‘I can’t think of any other reason.’ Valery paused. ‘And, I think the ground is more radioactive the closer to the Lighthouse you measure. Seven roentgen an hour is insane. I’ve never heard of it outside Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and even those places wouldn’t have had readings this high, years later. You wouldn’t get that without an exposed reactor core. That’s a – hah, I want to say significant explosion, but I don’t mean that, I mean a terrifying, destroy-a-whole-reactor explosion.’

Shenkov was ashen now. He half-turned away, and then pushed his hands hard into his coat pockets. Valery saw him clench them inside the fabric.

‘How long have you been here?’ Valery ventured. ‘Do you have any idea about what actually happened?’

‘They told us it was safe,’ Shenkov said. ‘Afterwards, they said again and again that it had all been cleaned up and that everyone would be fine.’

Valery’s scalp prickled. ‘After what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Shenkov said. He sounded helpless. It was strange to hear that from him, when he’d been so unassailable before. Even in distress, he didn’t slouch, but he turned breakable. Valery had a surge of protectiveness for him, and a sudden but indelible impression that whoever had hacked Shenkov into shape from that flint bedrock of his character, they had abandoned him out in the elements alone, all his edges too sharp to touch, all prone to fissuring after a determined enough knock. ‘Nobody knows, even the people who saw it.’

‘Did you see anything?’

Shenkov glanced at his stopwatch. They had already been outside for five minutes. When he spoke next, he spoke fast.

11

Crop Blight

29th September 1957, Chelyabinsk

Shenkov had never imagined he’d be relieved to be in hospital with broken ribs and a shard of bone poking through one lung, but when he came to in the white bed, he was so happy he would have kissed the first person who walked in, even if it was the horrifying Ukrainian nurse with the teeth. He lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the wonderful peaceful sound of other people snuffling in their sleep, or turning the pages of magazines. The sheets were so crisp that the creases were sharp. He had been certain that he was dead, after that fall. He had been fourteen rungs up a ladder, above concrete. Just a lightbulb, at home.

‘Where are we?’ he asked the man in the next bed.

‘Hospital Four.’

‘In?’

‘Oh.’ The man laughed. ‘Chelyabinsk.’

He let his head bump down back on to the pillow again, turning his face to it so that the cotton scratched his eyelashes, and two days’ stubble. He was propped up, but he could hardly remember having been so comfortable. It was warm, the whole ward, and clean, and there was a big window right opposite. They were high up; he could see half the town and the gleam of the railway beyond as it looped off into the forest. Sitting and looking at it – at the traffic moving on the main road and the people on the pavements, the lady putting out laundry in the tower block opposite – seemed a lot like the best possible thing in the world.

He did exactly that for a couple of hours, then started to doze as twilight smoked rust through the sky. Distantly, he heard a nurse ghost by and check something close to him, morphine or saline or something, but he didn’t feel it. Rain clicked on the windowpane, and then hardened into a cosy clatter. He had forgotten how it felt to be outside the Lighthouse; he had been there so long already that being trapped was normal, and he was numb to the presence of the barbed wire, the checkpoints, the tapped phones, the nagging background fear that one of the children would say something wrong at school. To be away from it unexpectedly; he could breathe. It would feel even worse to go back into it, but for now, he could lie here and soak in all this blessed ordinariness.

Every door and window in the building slammed. It jolted him awake, and it made the nurse jump so badly she knocked into the wall. For a shocked, silent moment, they only looked at each other.

‘The hell was that? Was it an explosion?’ the nurse said, and ran to the window. She slung it open. Down the ward, other people, nurses and patients, were doing the same, but there was nothing to see. There was no smoke, no fire anywhere on the street below, though people there were getting out of cars and hurrying away from buildings.