Page 38 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘There’s … something I need you to look at.’

‘Is it an alien?’ Valery asked. ‘I want an alien.’

‘Well,’ said Shenkov, sounding pensive, ‘I was hoping you could tell me what it is.’

The News office wasn’t so much an office as the editor’s front room. It had a desk with a lamp on it, an old-fashioned printing press in the far corner, and two bespectacled men at high desks scalpelling lines of copy. The walls must have once had wallpaper, but it had either peeled off or been peeled, because now they were bare, paper-stained plywood. Everything smelled of onions, and there was steam drifting through from the kitchen, where a lady in fluffy slippers and hair rollers was making something complicated. Shenkov could not have looked more out of place if he’d tried. He was waiting at the desk with the editor, a young man with lamp eyes and receding hair.

‘Hi,’ said Valery, curious. ‘So what’s going on?’

‘He won’t believe me about the alien,’ the young man with the eyes said. ‘State oppression, that is.’

Valery thought it was nice that young people felt able to say things like that now. Shenkov looked weary already.

‘Show him, please.’

‘If you confiscate it, I’ll print that too,’ the young man said bravely. ‘It’ll be proof it’s something suspicious.’

‘Comrade, if you had anything even faintly suspicious, I’d have burned your house down and blamed it on a kitchen accident,’ Shenkov sighed.

The young man baulked and came to the side table just by Valery, on which sat a longish box. ‘So why’s a biologist here, then?’

‘Because I want to know what that thing is. Given that what it is not, is an alien,’ Shenkov added. Like always, he kept his tone courteous and even quite gentle, but it was translucent. Talking to him, Valery thought, was a lot like ice skating and watching something swimming under you where the water was still liquid, something which knew very well that you couldn’t make out whether it was a dolphin or a polar bear, and which quietly enjoyed the confusion.

‘Why can’t it be an alien? We—’

‘Oh,’ Valery said, because the young man had opened the box.

Inside, resting on a cotton lining, was a small body. It was a little larger than a standardly sized doll. But it was not a doll. It was a mummified corpse, and it was all wrong. The skull was elongated, reaching what was nearly a point at the crown, and ridged clearly where the bone plates fused. There was no jaw, just a frothy malformation of bone, and the suggestion of a miniature beak of a nose. The arms, crossed over the chest, were too long, there were too many ribs, and the legs were too small.

Shenkov had come up next to him. ‘What is it?’

It was a baby.

Valery forced himself to smile. ‘It is a very deformed monkey with the tail removed. Whoever gave you this is having you on,’ he said to the young editor, who looked briefly crestfallen, before he clawed his way back up to suspicious.

‘You’re just saying that.’

‘Right, comrade, it’s definitely an alien.’ Valery touched Shenkov’s back, wanting to get him away from here right now. ‘Let him publish whatever he wants, Konstantin, it’s a joke. Come on.’ He pushed his fingertips into Shenkov’s spine, hoping Shenkov would feel it through his coat and understand.

He did. ‘Well,’ Shenkov said to the editor, ‘enjoy your monkey corpse.’

They left together in silence, and only once they were in the street, outside the theatre with its silly Corinthian columns, did Shenkov stop him. ‘Valery?’

‘That thing was a human foetus,’ Valery said softly. He tried to lean close, but he was still getting dizzy spells if he moved too suddenly, and he had to put one hand on Shenkov’s lapel to catch his balance. He took it away again, embarrassed, but Shenkov held his shoulders. ‘It’s been mutated in utero to an extent I’ve never seen before, but it is human. It was a little girl. If she was ever born, she wouldn’t have lived more than a week. Those mutations, the prominent seals of the skull plates, that lacy bone formation in the face – those are radiation deformities. I see them in our mice. They will have occurred because the mother was exposed for a long time.’

Shenkov’s briskness had cracks in it now. ‘Are you sure it’s human?’

‘Positive.’

‘I didn’t know humans could go that wrong.’

Valery inclined his head, because he would have thought Shenkov would have seen, or indeed personally inflicted, worse than that on a few humans himself. Some of the officers at the Lubyanka had been quite imaginative. It was strange to see him rattled by it. ‘They can be a lot wronger, but usually a foetus as malformed as that would never make it to term. It’s rare that they reach that size.’

‘And that’s what they look like, after enough radiation to the mother.’

‘That’s what they look like,’ Valery confirmed.

‘How many people would know that that’s what they look like?’