Page 48 of The Half Life of Valery K

A week later, the man arrested him on his way to the ice rink for hockey practice and took him to the Lubyanka, along with four other people in the back of a Black Maria from which there was no swift escape. When they arrived, they were herded into a cell that already had thirty men in it.

He hadn’t panicked. He could remember that clearly. He just felt like he had lost the game of hide and seek. He listened to the rules with almost no feelings at all.

No talking.

Hands in view at all times.

Move when the guards tell you.

That was that. Some of the others banged on the door and tried to shout that there had been a mistake. One of them was dragged away and returned some hours later with a black eye and blank, shell-shocked stare. The men already in the cell were unsurprised.

Valery slumped into a space by the wall, listening to floorboards creak as thirty silent men shifted. A lot of them had colds, so sometimes there was a cough or a sniff. And very, very softly, there were patterned knocks. He watched the man next to him doing it with his far neighbour and touched his arm to ask what it was. The man nodded and showed him the alphabet scratched out on the floor, and taught him the knocks. The man was slow and thin, dirty, with a scattering of burn scars up his arm and something military about the way he sat. Once he could, Valery asked,

How long have you been here?

Three months.

Valery felt a powerful, bizarre relief. It was all over. No more running or dodging, no more terse awareness of the black uniforms always just in view on the street, the stations, the glint of a red badge when they checked internal passports on the Metro. He let his head bump back against the wall. He had done everything he could and now it was finished: out of his hands.

A guard called his name.

‘Confess to whatever they want you to and it’ll be fine,’ the man next to him whispered. ‘It’s all made up but you only get the one set of teeth.’

It was fine, in the sense that he didn’t come away bleeding. It made him forget the knock code, though, and all he could do when he came back was stare unseeing at the alphabet scratched on the floor, with a hollow where his usually excellent memory stood.

His attention kept catching on the inky mark on the middle finger of his right hand. The pen he’d signed the confession with had been leaky. The document had been full of names he didn’t even know, but again, with the peculiar intuition that had seen him straight through the far door of the police car ten years ago, he could see that there was nothing he could do about that. He was dead already and so were all those people. If he’d said no, the interrogator just wouldn’t have given back his clothes.

Not Svetlana’s name, though, and that was telling. It should have been there. Only informants were immune.

She’d done it, then.

Thank God.

The man shook his arm gently.

OK?

He did it slowly, pointing at the letters.

Valery looked up and wanted to say no; but it would have been precious to make a fuss. The man was missing three teeth and two fingers.

Am fine.

What did you get?

Ten years. Want to play hangman?

The man smiled, relieved.

I’m Shukov btw.

In the deep silence of the cell, the scratch of Shukov’s broken fingernail on the letters carved into the floor sounded so loud that someone hissed at him to shut up. Shukov quailed, so Valery stuck his tongue out in the direction of the annoyed someone and got a silent laugh in return.

The silence was already an itch right in the back of his mind.

He didn’t speak aloud for six months.

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