Page 42 of The Half Life of Valery K

She whistled sharp at a pair of girls close by, and they dashed to help.

‘That was good of you,’ said Nanya. ‘Now come along.’

The girls got to the cottage ahead of them, and by the time Valery was sitting down at the kitchen table, Nanya was already sorting through supplies. She had an abacus by the oven, and now she clicked the beads for a short while, and then began dividing up the bags into small portions; one for each family, Valery realised. She was doing it by value of the goods.

‘Can I help?’ he asked.

‘You can make me some coffee.’

Valery did as he was told, glad for something to do. The stove was the old-fashioned kind with a boiler built into the side, so he ladled some water from there into the kettle, which was a tremendously heavy iron thing, and set it on the stove top, where the water soon began to bubble. He listened to it and imagined what the radioactive isotopes inside would look like if you could just see well enough for them. Excitable, swooping around in spirals as they rose up, cooled, sank, and rose again. Little whirlpools of poison. Still, it wasn’t like there was anything you could do about that.

‘The blacksmith,’ Nanya said as he poured the coffee through a makeshift filter – a cloth square from a jam jar, ‘is pleased with you, by the way. Your forest-glass instructions worked a treat. He wants to see you, when you’re done here, to show you the furnace.’

‘Oh, that’s excellent,’ Valery said, pleased too. ‘Did he manage to make some glass?’

‘Look at my new jars.’

The new jars on the windowsill were all greenish and irregularly shaped, but they were smooth and solid, and they would last forever if no one dropped them. He used two of them as coffee cups and handed her one.

He was glad his job was over just then, because he felt frayed. He’d had three restless nights with the wretched cast now, and three maddening mornings so stiff that he’d barely been able to stand under the bloody shower, never mind iron a shirt properly and get into it. The latter was a process of trial and error whose results seemed to change daily. And, even though he had been sure when he spoke to Shenkov that he was feeling pretty sunny about the whole thing, he’d had nightmares about radiation sickness: about finding hanks of his hair on the pillow, about that iron taste. He’d jolted awake sweating and shaking, and wished he was back in the frozen barracks at the camp.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked once Nanya had tried the coffee. ‘The real thing.’

‘I imagine it’s an acquired taste.’

They both laughed.

Across the table, he noticed now, there was a neat arrangement of clockwork parts, each one laid out on a broad cloth with a grid drawn on it in marker pen. It looked complicated, and so did the plans open next to it. Whatever she was making, it would be a fair size. He wondered if they could be engine parts; no, engine parts didn’t have cogs. Did they?

‘It’s the mechanism for a combine harvester,’ she explained when she saw him looking. ‘The lads have been taking in the crops by hand, but scythes are a bugger to use and we were never farmers, before.’

‘You’re an engineer?’

‘Like I say, we were from an engine factory. Big machinery.’ She studied the different packages she’d made up, and then finally came to sit down with him at the table. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘There was a big talk about whether to ask you back, and I mention the glass because that’s what convinced people in the end. You wouldn’t have gone to that trouble if you didn’t care what happens here. Or are you one of those who gets more annoyed about people being inefficient than people being unhappy?’

It was so straightforward that he didn’t even consider lying. ‘Both. But I think it amounts to the same thing.’

She nodded with what might have been approval as she picked up her pipe. ‘Light that for me. Now; we’ve got a problem. Another of our boys is missing. A little boy this time, he’s only ten. We can’t find him; we’ve been looking for a day already. I’m not saying we’re wonderful trackers here, we’re not. But we’ve had enough people out in the woods that we’re pretty sure he’s not just lost.’

Valery frowned into her pipe as he held a match to the bowl. ‘Is he ill, is there a chance he collapsed somewhere, or … ?’

‘No. He’s the picture of health. Has been always. The other kids suffer here, you saw that I expect, but not Pyotr. Have you heard anything up at the Lighthouse? Have the KGB arrested someone, or the soldiers, or anything like that?’

‘I can find out,’ he said slowly. ‘But I don’t think they have. I know the head of security and I think he’d have told me if they had a child in custody.’

Her expression sharpened. ‘You mean Shenkov.’

‘Yes.’ He weighed what he wanted to say next with a lot more care than normal, because the way she had said Shenkov’s name was a warning she was watching very, very closely for short measures. ‘I think he would want to help find Pyotr, if he knew where he was meant to be looking.’

‘No. No KGB. Imagine having to say that to someone,’ she said, half-angry and half-quizzical. ‘I’m not asking him for piss.’

‘You know it wasn’t him personally who cleared you out, it was orders from Moscow—’

‘Well, he personally set fire to my house,’ she snapped. ‘They just snatched people and drove us up to some godforsaken hole outside Sverdlovsk. Kicked us out at the bus stop. No money, nowhere to stay, nothing. In the middle of a famine. You can imagine what the local people had to say about that. They’re hard up already and then in we come, not even farmers.’

Valery liked her less. There wasn’t much that really irritated him now, but whining was on the list. ‘What did you expect, a hotel? You’re telling me that you honestly think Moscow didn’t give him orders to have you all shot in case you talked about the radiation? In a place in the middle of nowhere, when they could easily have told everyone’s relatives that you died in an explosion at the engine factory? Christ, you ended up alive and with your family at a bus stop in Sverdlovsk? Dry your eyes, mate.’

She looked like she might hit him. He didn’t move, too unimpressed. But at last, she sat back. ‘What’s it like, in the gulag? Bad?’