Page 40 of The Half Life of Valery K

She gave him another iodine pill and a plastic cup of water, and a lecture about overdoing it. He let it wash over him, too glad to be sitting down to complain. In his pocket, the photographs felt like they had a heat of their own. He found himself gripping Shenkov’s security card as hard as anyone ever held a cross.

‘Doctor,’ he said carefully. ‘Do you have a minute for something else?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking politely attentive and clearly expecting some kind of troublesome rash.

He laid the images out on her desk. Everything was labelled, so there was no need to explain. As he did, her expression shut down. He saw her glance desperately at the light switch. He shook his head a little to say that he wasn’t going to start a lecture about film dosimetry. ‘I was just wondering if you see problems related to this sort of thing a lot.’

‘Oh. No, I’m afraid not, extremely rare,’ she said, aiming bright and clear at the light switch.

Valery leaned over to catch her notepad and wrote, I’m not an informant.

She wrote back, You’re friends with Shenkov, I’m not stupid.

Valery tapped the photograph taken by the school field, urgently. Shenkov has kids. I did this test FOR him. He wants to make things safer.

She was twisting and untwisting her hands. Whatever was on her mind, it must have been bothering her for a long time. First do no harm; it must have been hard to keep quiet about anything that was doing harm.

‘I’m afraid it’s really not my area,’ she said, quite loudly, but she took down a file and opened it on the desk for him. Her hands were shaking.

The file was full of pages of tables.

Valery took it slowly and read down the rows. It was done by date, and it was a simple chart: it showed patients diagnosed with low white blood cell counts, the classic hallmark of radiation problems. There was the blood-sample reading, followed by the action taken; discharged, or sent up to Chelyabinsk to see a specialist. At the top of the page was the first of the month, and at the bottom the thirty-first. When he checked back, it was all done like that, calendar month by calendar month. Each month, on the fifteenth, was a red line marked across the whole chart in highlighter pen.

There were a lot of worrying readings; a lot of people with barely enough white blood cells to fight off a cold, far more than he would have expected for one practice in one medium-sized city, and those readings were uniform right down the month. But only the people who were tested before the red line, before the fifteenth, were ever sent to Chelyabinsk to see the specialists. After the fifteenth of each month, everyone, even if they obviously had leukaemia, was discharged with vitamin supplements only.

They had a quota.

‘So I’m just on iodine,’ he said, and wrote, Is this the same for every practice in the city?

‘Yes, just as a precaution,’ she said tightly. She picked up the pen again. It is illegal to share this data across practices.

No wonder Shenkov hadn’t heard anything. The only record of the real number of people suffering radiation-related difficulties sat on individual doctors’ desks, the data uncollated. Maybe people here generally had noticed that they got colds a lot, that their children had allergies, that there was a high rate of miscarriages, but even someone digging through medical records at the hospitals in Chelyabinsk would find nothing, because the admission rates were artificially low. Nothing after the fifteenth of each month.

Valery swallowed. ‘Well. I’ll get out of your hair. Thanks, comrade.’

She nodded, and raked her hands through her hair, as if there really was something in it, something poisonous and sticky.

Shenkov wasn’t in the office for the rest of the day, so Valery had to wait until the following morning to tell him about the health quota and the photographs. He went to fetch some coffee from the canteen first, though, and while he was in the queue, he saw the morning papers on the rack. The locals all carried the same story.

Two houses had burned down in the night. One belonged to a young man – the editor of another local – and his mother; the other, only a street away, to a professional gardener. Sadly, all three had perished in the respective blazes. In both cases, the fire brigade had found the cause to be chip-pan fires. The articles urged readers to be extra careful about their cooking habits.

‘I had to,’ Shenkov said when Valery let himself into the office and held up the paper. He looked pale, and although he was still perfectly turned out, he had a heavy jumper on over his shirt, as though he was too tired today to pretend not to feel the cold. He was softer than normal; it was because there was no wax in his hair to hold it swept back, and it was long enough to fall forward on one side, half-redacting him from any conversation. ‘Someone called from Moscow after I reported the case last night.’

Valery didn’t say anything, but he gave him a chocolate bar. He had a feeling that Shenkov would interpret sympathy in about the same way he would interpret having faggot screamed at him across a room.

‘Thank you,’ Shenkov said, muted.

‘Just the prisoner book again,’ Valery said for the benefit of the bugs, but laid out the radiation photographs.

Shenkov didn’t have to study them for long before he understood. He looked up at Valery wordlessly, raw shock in his eyes.

Valery leaned down against the back of his chair. ‘I spoke to the doctor,’ he whispered, so quietly he could only just hear himself. ‘They have quotas for diagnosing radiation-related illness. They don’t diagnose any after the fifteenth of every month. No one looking would know the real extent, and it is illegal for doctors to compare their results across practices.’

‘How the hell did you get her to tell you that?’

‘I’m a funny harmless little science elf, people tell me things. She showed me the quota sheet.’

Shenkov was turning the pages of his desk diary. He stopped at some point in February and sat still. He didn’t write notes to himself there at all; there were crosses by some of the dates, and times that might have been meetings, but nothing else. More security requirements, Valery supposed. ‘The fifteenth is the cut-off.’