Page 55 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Well,’ Dima said slowly. ‘That’s a thing some of my boys wouldn’t mind knowing how to do, a bomb like that.’

Valery nodded. He was about to get all his fingers broken, he could feel it coming.

Dima was studying him. ‘You’re such a little slip of a fox; you’re not going to last long without someone to look after you, you know that, right?’

‘No, I know.’ He blinked, because he couldn’t focus, then had to take off his glasses.

‘You’re a professor. You can teach.’

‘Yes. I’ll teach whoever you want.’

Dima smiled with just his teeth. ‘Really. You know mainly they can’t read.’

Valery put his glasses back on, but everything still felt dislocated. ‘I can teach them to read as well. It’s not difficult.’

‘Is it not?’ Dima said sharply. ‘Because it seems pretty fucking impenetrable to me.’

Valery looked up at him properly, because the part of him that had always been a teacher was annoyed. It was in the background, a very small, modest annoyance, but it was there. ‘If it seems impenetrable, it’s because your teachers were all idiots who didn’t take the time to explain it.’

Dima started to laugh. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘What?’ said Valery. ‘It’s just code. There are only thirty-three letters and Russian is written basically like it’s spoken. I mean it. I can teach you right now. Christ, you’re all clever thinking humans.’ Now he was having to think about it, he was getting angry. It was farcical that there could be people in nineteen fifty-fucking-seven who had been so failed by school that they couldn’t read. ‘How many of you here were never taught to read?’

The men with him glanced at Dima, and then few by few, every single man in the barracks flicked his hand up.

‘Right,’ Valery said, and he didn’t care any more if someone was coming along later to break all his fingers. ‘Everyone who wants to learn, sit down. Is there any chalk?’

‘Find him some chalk,’ Dima said over his shoulder to a gigantic man with only one eye and a spiderweb tattoo across his head.

‘I’m going to use this wall to write on. Get over here and sit down. Not a single one of you is leaving till you know the alphabet. I’m not having it. I know maybe some of you don’t think it’s for you, but it is, it’s for everyone, and if some moron teacher said you were stupid when you were little, then they can fuck off. All of you deserve to know how to do this. Jesus wept.’

All the men did exactly as they were told.

He’d known they would. There was power in looking harmless; people would do things for you that they wouldn’t for someone bigger. It happened consistently, in lecture theatre after lecture theatre. Far from being any kind of barrier to teaching, it had always helped. For the same reason, he suspected, that even big hulking men could be at the mercy of a determined kitten, people had a way of wanting to keep him happy.

He supposed it helped to have just blown up a building as well.

He ended up with forty men sitting or kneeling on the floor, a hunk of chalk from the quarry, and writing on the wall. He started with little words – politics and swear words, because you had to be realistic about what would keep people interested – and got everyone to play mix-and-match, and then spot the difference, building them up a few letters at a time so that they were never too lost. After an hour, like he’d thought, because they were all bright and normal, everyone was able to write their own name.

Some of them were so happy they sank in a kind of amazed stupor. Valery nearly cried when he saw that. He could absolutely believe that Moscow thought rapists and murderers were less harmful to the socialist economy than chemistry professors, but something in him just ground and stuck at the idea that there existed primary schoolteachers who would let kids leave school without even knowing the alphabet.

‘Same time tomorrow for anyone who wants to learn more,’ Dima said after the hour, quite bland, and then touched Valery’s shoulder to tilt him away from other people. ‘You don’t seem afraid. See that man there? He likes to murder redheads.’ He looked amused, insofar as a giant bear-person could do that.

Valery smiled a bit. Dima was hazing him, he was nearly sure, in which case, it was kind; and if he wasn’t, then being murdered would bring the day back around to plan. ‘Would you mind asking him to hold it in until he can spell properly?’

Dima gave a strange look, and tenderly, for no reason Valery could tell, he brushed a strand of Valery’s hair back. Beyond him, a lot of the men were still in clusters on the floor, practising carving letters with knives or marking the dust with slim sticks.

‘Come with me,’ Dima concluded. ‘We’re going to see the tattooist. You won’t last fifteen minutes on your side of the camp otherwise. Animals, the political prisoners. Present company excepted obviously.’

‘Hey,’ someone said quickly, a young man with a tattoo of a mermaid on his chest. ‘It’ll take ages. Can we come too and play that word game again?’

‘Yes please,’ said Valery, charmed. Usually, by the time they got to him, students were tired. He barely ever got to meet someone who was just delighted to learn things. Then, because nobody liked feeling as though you were Doing Them A Favour, ‘I think I’ll need the distraction.’

Dima smiled; a real, kind smile, the first Valery had seen since arriving at the camp. ‘You’ll be fine, little fox. We’ll look after you.’

18

Chromatography