Page 47 of The Half Life of Valery K

In 1946, some elementary tallies would tell an observant person that the NKVD – that was the KGB in their older jackets – had arrested a quarter of the entire population of Leningrad. At the start of the purge, they’d had fun with it, to the point of being theatrical. The first time Valery was arrested, it was by someone who had seemed to be a train conductor, until he was right up close and whipped out the red NKVD identity card. Valery had quite admired that; the officer had the train conductor’s uniform down to a pin, except maybe that he’d taken a lot more pride in his shoe polish than did most train conductors. Thinking about it later, Valery wondered if there had been officers in theatres and pubs, pretending to be waiters or concierges, dressed up in feather boas and all sorts. He hoped so.

That first time had been unnerving for the opposite reason of the one he’d have expected.

Maybe it was his education. He had been trained to think in formulae, and all a formula was, was a way not to bother explaining something pedantic for a paragraph and a half. The most efficient notation was always the laziest. So it had struck him as utterly unrealistic that anyone in any police district could possibly be keeping coherent files on everyone. The scale was too huge and there wasn’t enough paper in the Soviet Union. That the NKVD had extensive, omniscient files on everyone was an inefficient explanation for what was happening. The efficient explanation was that it was, more or less, random. Every district would have a quota for arrests, and so sometimes they just snatched whoever. It was about numbers, not humans.

If you thought there was a logical system, then when you were arrested, you thought it had to be a mistake; you went along with it because you didn’t want to get in any more trouble, and trusted it would all be cleared up. Logically.

If you were pretty damn certain you were being arrested not because you had spent a year once in a capitalist country, but because the officer in question just didn’t like redheads, there was no urge to think there had been a mistake, or to clear your name.

You did what Valery had done.

You let the officer put you in the back of a car, you waited while he got into the front passenger seat, and then you dived out the other side and ran away, knowing that they weren’t going to bother chasing you when there was a whole street full of other less troublesome people they could arrest.

That afternoon, he put his few things into a suitcase and got on a train to Moscow to see his friend Svetlana, who was now just senior enough in the army to have a nice apartment of her own away from barracks, and then he mysteriously forgot to come back.

She thought the whole thing was so hilarious she inhaled her vodka.

‘Ah, mate,’ was the verdict, after she’d stopped coughing. Valery was terrible at keeping in touch with friends – he was happy to have lunch with anyone and he had moved around too much to have a consistent group of people, what with university and military service – but Svetlana was insistent, and ever since they’d left school, she had scooped Valery up for a drink or for dinner once a month. She had even managed it during the war, and now, if he was upset about someone at work, she offered to kill people for him.

There was no one else who he would even have considered running to. It would have been a risk and a burden for anyone else. But German tanks hadn’t bothered Svetlana. Valery definitely didn’t bother her, however much trouble he was in. At the most extreme, he was just the evening’s entertainment.

‘Listen, I’ll write to the university in Leningrad and imply there was a super-secret military emergency, and then you can write yourself a reference letter to the Kurchatov Institute here and I will stamp it with the all-powerful nameless stamp of the research unit.’ She inclined her head. ‘No drama.’

It was Valery’s turn to laugh. ‘No drama, you dick. If you went to the Grand Ballet they’d all drop dead.’

‘I would enjoy that,’ she said solemnly.

But she was right; they did exactly what she had said they would, and through only a couple of well-placed lies and one intimidation visit to the office of the director of the Kurchatov Institute, she managed, despite knowing nothing about the intricate power structures within universities, to convince everyone that Valery had had to leave the Leningrad doctoral programme for an unnamed project here, and that she would prefer now that he continued his university work nearer to hand than the other side of the country.

No one, not a single person, asked any questions. Of course they didn’t. An army colonel had said that she preferred; that meant the army preferred, and even the local KGB wouldn’t argue there.

It worked for ten years. But then, almost to the day, Valery began to notice a man in a black coat who made no secret of following him everywhere. Valery stopped him once to ask, was shown the red badge, and told pleasantly to get on with his day.

‘Svetlana,’ Valery said, late the same night. The man was smoking just outside Svetlana’s dining-room window, leaning against a lamp post. Valery showed him to her.

‘Well. Off we go to Archangel or somewhere,’ she said, unbothered as always.

It was the we that hurt so badly. If she had said you, he would have said yes. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

She lifted her eyebrows. ‘If they’re going to arrest you, they’ll be coming for me as well. Known associates.’

‘Yes, exactly.’ He swallowed. ‘Svet – you can get out of it. Denounce me. Now. I’m going to be arrested anyway, so just – get ahead of the curve. Actually, it will work even better if we get married. If you throw your husband to the NKVD, you’ll be a hero at work, and they’ll leave you alone forever.’

She studied him for a while. She wasn’t one of those people who hurried out of work clothes and into softer things when she got home; she would drink wine at eleven o’clock in full uniform, except for the beret, which sat next to the teapot now, the hammer and sickle insignia winking gold under the laurels of her unit. She didn’t have any hair to let down, just a blunt crew cut. ‘Or,’ she said, as if he was slow, ‘we could go to Archangel or Minsk or Kiev.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Valery said. This was the line he couldn’t cross. She had spent her whole life looking after him, matter-of-factly beating up anyone who called him weird, and if he wasn’t careful now, she was going to be shot for doing it. ‘If you run with me, they’re going to come for you no matter what.’

‘Not really your decision to make though, mate, is it?’

‘I’m not going,’ he said, quietly, because he had never fought her before, and he didn’t know how. ‘I’m never going to do anything useful, but you could be a general soon, you could – do something. For God’s sake, look at it like it’s numbers and not people. If you get yourself arrested unnecessarily I’ll explode from the sheer bloody inefficiency of it all.’ He couldn’t tell why, but he had both hands around his throat and he couldn’t move them. ‘Please. I’m not trying to be high-handed, I’m just – I hate it when there’s an inefficient equation, it drives me insane and if you go to the gulag because of me I’ll kill myself with a belt.’

She nodded slowly. She wore plain gold rings on three of her fingers; she kept those in her pockets at work and put them on at home, because her mum had given them to her and she felt guilty if she didn’t get a few hours’ wear out of them daily. She took off one from her index finger and put it on him, very gently.

He had to fight the urge to sling it away. It was a symbol of a thing he’d always known he couldn’t have. The days of the Tsar were gone: men couldn’t go round expecting, like entitled capitalist nutsacks, to get a wife just because they were paid lots of money and they had an impressive job. Everyone was paid the same now. Women were free to marry people who were kind and charming, instead of trudging over to whoever could keep a roof above them. He wasn’t charming. He was unsettling. So that was that.

He hadn’t realised that he was still sad about it, but it was just under the surface, and now, the weight of the gold was enough to break the ice. It was lonely enough, to know that none of that was for him. It was horrible to imagine dressing up as the very thing he couldn’t be. Like having always wanted to be a physicist, but doomed to play a mad scientist on a radio advert for toothpaste.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and made himself smile. ‘Registry office, then?’