Page 63 of The Half Life of Valery K

Moscow was full of healthy people. It had been odd enough in City 40, where the population was small, but Moscow was teeming. People poured from the Metro stations, all walking fast and effortless. Party women in fur collars; suited officials; kids in school uniforms, and everyone moved at twice the pace Valery remembered. He was sure there were more cars, swarms of them, beautiful soft-nosed Volgas with silver grilles or the boxy little Ladas; it must have been easier to be assigned a car now. The trolleybuses were still here, trundling along on their electric overhead wires, but like there’d been some kind of tropical invasion at the factory, some of them were bright orange. It was a mad contrast with the snow that fell in streams from the roofs. All of it was fast and bright and completely alien.

Every single person he had known at the camp had talked about trying to go home one day. He had too. It had never occurred to him that there would be no home to go back to. This wasn’t his Moscow. He felt indignant that no one had broken it to him beforehand. People were supposed to tell you. They didn’t just let you trip over your dead father on the pavement one day and say, oh, that’s right, old Vanya had too much to drink a few years ago, we forgot to say.

The Ministry of Medium Machine Building, code for all things nuclear, had its headquarters not at the Kremlin, but on Bolshaya Ordynka Street, which was where all the embassies were. It was a gigantic sandstone tower that looked more like a grand hotel from the outside than the state administrative centre for atomic energy. It did a pretty good hotel impression inside too. It had endless corridors and deep carpets that swallowed sound. Everything was new, and everywhere were flags and portraits of Lenin and Stalin. They waited for a long time to see the Minister on nicely upholstered chairs in a smart waiting room, clustered around a low table on which sat a box of brightly wrapped sweets. The box was in the shape of a treasure chest. Nobody took a sweet.

Valery waited longer than the others. He was only there because he was a walking abacus. He sat staring at the horrible carpet for a good twenty minutes (it had an anchor pattern on it – why? Had someone misunderstood in the early days and confused nuclear and nautical?) listening to the secretary unwrap sweets from her own smaller treasure chest on her desk. He quite liked her for doing that.

Shenkov leaned out and motioned for him to come in. He looked anxious. Valery got up, feeling shabbier than ever.

The Minister was a desiccated man in his sixties called Slavsky.

‘Come in, Comrade Kolkhanov. Shut the door. Welcome to MinMac.’

MinMac. It only made sense not to say the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, but MinMac made it sound like the place was doing its absolute best to seem little and friendly in a way that was so patently not true that Valery felt like he was meeting a boa constrictor dressed up hopefully with bunny ears and a fluffy tail.

‘Now,’ said Slavsky, over-gently, ‘there seems to be some disagreement about safety at City 40. The director here assures me that nuclear waste is being disposed of in strict accordance to Ministry standards, Dr Resovskaya believes there’s a fishy-looking anomaly that bears extra investigation, while Comrade Shenkov reports a major risk. I believe they are in danger of killing each other on my nice rug. I wonder if you’d tell me in your own words what it is you found.’ He smiled. The effect wasn’t good. If someone had admitted that, long ago, they had spilled coffee on him, put him in rice to dry, and then forgotten to take him out, Valery would have believed it.

‘Those three views are not mutually exclusive,’ Valery said quietly. ‘The director is right, nobody is at fault.’ The director looked shocked. It hadn’t occurred to him, Valery realised, that Shenkov wasn’t out to get him. ‘The waste has been buried underground in trenches, exactly as the Ministry guidelines say.’ He swallowed. He could hear Shenkov’s voice inside his head ordering him not to bugger this bit up or he was dead. ‘But nuclear waste as it is produced at the Lighthouse plant is liquid. It’s poured into those trenches, then covered over with earth. Unfortunately, over several years, the soil has separated out the liquid waste into its component elements according to density. There are now clear strata of caesium, strontium – and maybe others, the most concerning of which is leftover plutonium. This process has never been recorded before, which is why the guidelines do not allow for it, but we believe it is a kind of chromatography. The soil acts as a filter. Given the amount of waste buried around the facility, there could be enough plutonium in the ground now to completely destroy the plant and the city, and cause severe damage as far as Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk, if a thermonuclear reaction were to occur. It would be far worse than what happened in nineteen fifty-seven, and it would add significantly to the atmospheric radioactive trace left by that event. American stations in the Arctic would be able to detect it and trace it back to Kyshtym easily.’

‘What would cause a thermonuclear reaction?’

‘The introduction of water—’

‘Minister,’ Resovskaya said, low and reasonable and scholarly, ‘all of this is speculation. We found one section of affected soil, about a metre wide. Everything else is extrapolation—’

‘Let the man talk,’ Slavsky said flatly.

Valery wanted to unhear that. Not ‘our comrade’, which was what Slavsky should have said. A memory of an essay he’d read at school surfaced with an ugly bubbling. In any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

Slavsky studied him for a long time. His eyes were the colour that hay went right before it caught fire. ‘The trench method is exactly what they use at the plutonium refinery in Richland in the United States, and there has never been an accident there. Why would it be different for us, even if this chromatography effect is happening? Plutonium is dense, ergo it is one of the very lowest strata anyway.’

Valery nodded a little. ‘Richland is in the desert. City 40 is on marshland.’

‘And what action would you recommend?’

‘Drain the marsh, with extreme care, and concrete it over.’ It was out before he could think about it. That was just as well; he could see all his bridges with Resovskaya blazing into charred ruins. She was holding her expression open and polite, but she would never do otherwise in front of the minister who controlled the Lighthouse budgets. ‘But the entire city should be evacuated while that happens, and ideally Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk as well. If there is a clear layer of plutonium in the ground and if water hits it, we will lose the entire population of City 40 and a lot of people beyond it.’

Slavsky stood up. There was a bowstring silence. Valery could taste the future where they were all hustled away and shot in the back alley behind the Ministry. Others would be sent out to City 40 to replace them, others who had no idea what was going on but clear orders, and it would all start again.

There was a click that was Slavsky’s fingernails on his blazer button. ‘Well, comrades. It’s unfeasible to evacuate cities,’ he said, looking at Valery as if he suspected he had been speaking to a child dressed up as a chemist, ‘but I think I’d better come up with a normal-looking reason to ship you an awful lot of concrete.’

Outside, Valery risked a smile at Shenkov, who scooped him close by his neck and kissed his forehead. Valery hugged him back, not sure if he was going to laugh or collapse or both. The way Slavsky had said man was still clanging around inside his head.

Shenkov was laughing. ‘Christ, Valera. Come on, I’m taking you out.’

Valery tried to cover over how happy he was to be called Valera.

As they made for the stairs, they passed Resovskaya, who was waiting for the lift with the director and the ill engineer. The director gave them a watery smile, one that was clearly relieved to still have all the right organs, never mind a job. Valery hesitated. He couldn’t just run away from what Slavsky had done.

‘Dr Resovskaya – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’

‘Just piss off, Valery,’ she said, sounding utterly weary.

22

Do You Want to Dance?

The whole street was full of nice hotels and nice bars, so they chose one at random and set up there. It was cheerful and dim, strobing with neon lights, but more gently than a club would have. The bar was glass, with a multicoloured display of every sort of liquor bottle ever manufactured in an alcoholic rainbow. Shenkov, happier than Valery had ever seen him, played Spot the Murderer, and made up stories for everyone who ordered a drink. Moscow was, they concluded, full of murderers.