Page 6 of The Half Life of Valery K

Okay; hence six reactors. They were trying to keep up with American plutonium production, for bombs. Valery swallowed. What the hell did radioecological mean?

Don’t let it be human studies. Do not.

‘You’re here because you’re a biochemist,’ Shenkov said, looking doubtful that someone as shabby as Valery could be something that useful, and very open to the possibility of some kind of mix-up. For a second – not for two, but certainly a whole second – he looked at Valery’s boots, which still had the dust of the camp barracks on them. They were the only things the KGB lady hadn’t replaced.

It was bewildering to remember he had been a biochemist. It belonged to another time and another Valery, years and miles away.

He must have looked bewildered too, because Shenkov did not seem inspired.

‘Come with me.’

Valery had to jog to catch up with him.

‘So,’ said Shenkov. His grey eyes swept over Valery and he slowed down. Valery felt naked. ‘This city is Chelyabinsk 40 or City 40; more informally you might hear it called the Lake. We are a closed city; any written communication reaches us via PO Box 40 in Chelyabinsk. You cannot leave the city without KGB approval; that means you come to my office –’ he pointed at it as they passed the door ‘– and get your papers stamped every time you want to go through the gates. This includes research field trips in the wider Kyshtym area. You will not discuss your research with anyone outside this facility—’

‘Sorry, I’m doing the research?’

‘What did you think you’d be doing?’ Light, polite, gentle, and weighted with the suspicion that Valery was a cauliflower in disguise.

‘Dying of radiation in a human trial,’ Valery said.

‘Pardon?’

Valery shook his head once, fascinated despite himself. Men like Shenkov, stark beautiful security officers, generally barked when they spoke. They didn’t have this glassen courtesy. It was nearly as confusing as this place, with its drive fast warnings and the we are kyshtym! banners on the apartment blocks.

‘I’ve just come here from the gulag. Six years’ hard labour. I was – supposed to do ten.’

‘Yes. You’ll serve out the rest of your sentence working here as a prisoner scientist,’ said Shenkov.

Everything went bright and strange. Valery thought he might faint. He touched the wall and only just managed to hang onto what Shenkov was saying.

‘You will not speak to anyone from outside the city. You will submit all your experimental data to me, to be passed on to a special commission that will decide which parts of it are suitable for wider publication.’ It had the ring of a required script. ‘Meanwhile, someone from my department will be watching your bank account, your post, your telephone calls. This is, we all hope, purely precautionary. I struggle to imagine how stupid you’d have to be to try to communicate with a journalist or a foreigner, but people do surprise me sometimes.’

He didn’t look like Valery could ever surprise him.

‘Yes. I – Comrade Shenkov, sorry, I don’t know anything yet. What experimental data? What’s being researched here exactly?’

‘Someone will explain in a minute.’

‘I don’t have a bank account,’ Valery added.

‘We opened one for you here last week. You can collect the bank book from HR.’

Last week. Someone had known he was coming here that long ago. This time last week he had been curled up in the corner of the guards’ coal shed with a spoon and the monthly can of condensed milk, feeling like a king because there was honestly no better treasure in the world. If someone had told him he had such a ridiculous thing as a bank account, he would have asked if he could have some of whatever they’d been smoking.

‘Meanwhile, this,’ Shenkov said, holding out a small cardboard envelope with a booklet inside, like the kind that came inside library books, pristine and new, ‘is a prisoner check-in book. You must come to the security office at eight every morning and eight every night. Another officer or I will stamp it to confirm that you did so. We have a duplicate. If you miss a check-in, it will be treated as an escape attempt. Please do not miss a check-in.’

‘No,’ Valery agreed numbly.

Shenkov opened a glass door and stepped to one side to let Valery go first. He made it look like the deference of a strong person to a slight one, not an order.

Being told to go first only ever meant a cell.

Shenkov inclined his head to say, on you go. Valery wished Shenkov would just shove him. Somehow, being asked politely to make that last step himself was worse than being thrown in.

It wasn’t a cell.

It was a laboratory; a standard, baldly lit lab, full of glass boxes where mice and rabbits scuffled, and young people – students or recent graduates – perched around the work benches, chatting and clearly just as newly arrived as he was, backpacks propped against stools and table legs, still marked with airport luggage tags from Moscow.