Page 69 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Do you think the coffee will be ready soon?’

‘It’s ready now,’ Shenkov said as he came out of the office with it. He looked wrecked but steadier. When he put their cups down beside them, he squeezed Valery’s shoulders, very softly. It felt like it might mean they weren’t going to have a row quite yet.

Shenkov came back in the evening without her. He was washed out. Valery had just finished replacing the water in Albert’s tank. Now, Albert was back inside, flashing alternately red and black to the tune of the nine o’clock news. Valery was on the floor by the coffee table so that he could watch it without his glasses. The newer prescription was giving him a headache in the evenings still, while he got used to it. He had found a patch where the heating pipes ran right underneath. He’d meant only to stay for a minute or two, just for the headlines, while he tried to decide what to do with Albert and the tank now that he wouldn’t be coming in here any more.

‘I’m sorry, I thought you’d be at home till tomorrow,’ Valery said, horribly conscious that Shenkov had probably expected to come back to a nice, empty apartment. He got up fast, meaning to go.

Shenkov dropped down next to where Valery had been on the floor and seemed not to hear. ‘The doctor rushed it straight off. Anna’s with her in Chelyabinsk,’ he said.

Valery nodded a little. ‘Good.’

‘They’re talking about bone marrow transplants. They tested all of us to see if we’re …’ He couldn’t find the word and looked at Valery for it.

‘Compatible. There’s a high chance one of you will be.’

Shenkov looked up. ‘Where are you going?’

Valery sat back down again. They watched the news, right into the local-interest stories.

Then, ‘Do you remember the story about Sverdlov, from school?’ Shenkov said.

‘Do I?’ Valery asked aloud, because consulting memories from Before felt like requesting them from someone separate, someone who he knew, but not well.

‘Early days of the Party. He was sitting in the canteen at headquarters after the revolution. He’d been separated from his family years before in the fighting, hadn’t seen them in all that time. Anyway, a soldier comes up to him and she says, Comrade Sverdlov, I recognise you, you’re my father. May I have three roubles to buy lunch? And Sverdlov says, Of course, everyone should be able to afford lunch, here you are. And he goes back to his work.’

Valery had a distant memory of school, and of Svetlana pretending to be sick under the table. ‘That rings a bell, now you say.’

‘Yes.’ Shenkov was quiet for a moment. ‘I used to want a chance to be that way. And now this is it. Labour before family.’

Valery wrinkled his nose. ‘Really? He sounds like he needed pushing off a bridge.’

Shenkov laughed. ‘There’s you with your golden halo looking angelic and then what do you come out with? Filth.’

‘Angelic isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,’ Valery said, over the instinct to tell Shenkov not to take the piss. He was beginning to wonder, very cautiously, if Shenkov wasn’t doing anything of the kind. Self-conscious, he straightened out a curl of his hair to see it. Shenkov was right, it had turned proper gold again. ‘I was a choirboy before the war. I was in the Komsomol, I enforced kolkhozes in Ukraine, I reported my parents to the police and everything, sent them to prison. The Party gave me a special award.’

‘You did not,’ Shenkov said. He looked urgently relieved to have something to think about other than Tatiana, so Valery told him about it.

24

Sand

It had been two weeks since Moscow, and the concrete still hadn’t come. Every morning, Valery went down to the KGB office to have the prisoner book stamped and to see if there was any word, and every morning, there was nothing. Shenkov stamped the book and signed it every day, and as Valery had thought, that was all the overlap they had. Talking about Tatiana hadn’t mended anything. Valery suspected Shenkov was ashamed of having had to talk to him at all.

The evenings, endless, were in the lab with the radio if there was any conceivable work to do, and in the silent flat if not. He stopped sleeping, again. The nights were all useless panic and the radio or the television tuned to the hallucinatory things that aired at three in the morning. Every ten minutes or so, on a clockwork goldfish loop, he wanted to go and see who was on duty at the security office, as if that would do anything except get him a punch in the eye.

At the start of the third week, he arrived at the security office in time to hear what sounded like the tail end of a row. Anna Shenkovna was there, not shouting exactly but speaking very clearly and fluently in the way people do when they intend to continue even if somebody else comes in with an axe.

‘—false economy, given that the not unlikely outcome is the necessity of replacing, this time, not one but six reactors—’

‘Anna, I know—’

‘—and so it seems short-sighted to just nod to Moscow and say yes. Oh, morning Kolkhanov. Have you heard about this?’

‘About what?’ Valery asked, who was insomnia-slow and hadn’t got together the basic wit to stop walking before he reached the door. He wanted to promise he hadn’t been eavesdropping, but trying to catch words this week was like trying to judge distances without his glasses on. He couldn’t think of an excuse to turn around and retreat to the lab. Mouse emergencies weren’t very common, and Anna was already talking again.

‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘they’re sending not cement but a large quantity of sand.’

He forgot about everything else. ‘Sand.’