Page 58 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘You know people,’ Valery said, admiring.

Shenkov looked wry. ‘That was my wife.’

Valery started to nod, but then stopped. ‘Hang on, your wife is Anna Shenkovna? The Anna Shenkovna, the nuclear physicist from the Kurchatov Institute.’

‘She … is.’

‘She’s royalty. She wrote the standard monograph on the dating of decayed radioactive lead, I’ve read all her papers.’

‘I took her name,’ Shenkov said, nodding very slightly in the way of someone still judging whether or not he was being called a dullard who had no business knowing geniuses.

‘Okay,’ Valery laughed, mainly to hide how funny he was failing to find it. All that felt like a shove in the chest. It had no business feeling that way. He had known Shenkov had a wife, but for reasons that shimmered past him when he tried to grasp them, the prospect of meeting her flooded him with dread.

19

Anna Shenkovna

At the gates of the reactor complex, the soldiers waved them through, and Shenkov led the way inside. Valery thought they would be ushered carefully to a canteen – neutral territory – by one of the security guards, but instead they went straight upstairs to a lab. People were on lunch break, their lab coats and visors hung up by the door, arrayed now across workbenches.

Anna Shenkovna was a round, luminous person with a bright blonde buzz cut who, when they came in, was reading a physics journal and holding an unlit cigarette like it was a mortal enemy. She had on a black Ukrainian embroidered dress for which she would probably have been arrested in Moscow, socks over black stockings, builder’s boots, and despite the backless stool and the extra weight she carried, she sat like a ballerina. About Valery’s age, but much better worn.

‘Kolkhanov! How are you, infamous one?’ she asked, and Valery had a surge of belonging mixed with real fear. God knew what Shenkov had been saying. ‘Sit down, sit down, nothing too radioactive lying about just now. Hello, sweetheart,’ she added to Shenkov. ‘Isn’t he a good trophy husband?’ she said to Valery. ‘He’s terribly presentable and sometimes he brings me new things. I’ve been hearing about you for ages.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘No, no, good things.’

Valery glanced at Shenkov. ‘Well, he’s lying. I just sort of attached myself to him, I go to bits if you leave me by myself.’

Had in fact been going to bits, these last few weeks alone in his own apartment.

She kept a dead-straight face, but she was a terrible actress and there was glitter in her eyes. ‘Well, if he was the first thing you saw when you hatched.’

Valery burst out laughing. ‘Ugly duckling yourself!’

‘Swan, it was a swan, Kolkhanov!’ she shouted back at him, as if they’d known each other always. Then, ‘Tea, coffee?’

‘Coffee, if there is …’

She put a kettle over a Bunsen burner and turned it up to full blast, the flame blue. The underside of the kettle looked like it had recently re-entered the atmosphere. ‘So, what’s going on? Kostya said you needed to ask me things and now I feel desperately important.’

Valery nearly asked who Kostya was before he remembered that obviously Shenkov had a first name and that obviously it was Konstantin.

It was like talking to a delighted pheasant. When he showed her what they thought was going on, she watched him draw, bird-bright, thought about it, then lit her cigarette in the Bunsen burner.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see what’s happened. The waste is buried in concrete-lined trenches in the ground. They’re twenty metres deep, and so they aren’t sealed with concrete on top. We just use the topsoil. It’s plenty to block out any radiation from the slurry, so there was no need to go to the expense of the concrete. We thought. At what depth did you find the caesium?’

‘Only about half a metre.’

‘And what’s the soil like at that level?’

‘Dry for now, but it’ll soak the second we get a thaw.’

She blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Right, so of course you all need to know where the trenches are so that none of your students explode when they’re out tagging ducks on the lake.’

‘Right. Mark it out, leave it alone, simple.’

‘Yes, it would be if the trenches weren’t everywhere.’