Page 73 of The Half Life of Valery K

The asylum was cold. So were the thin white clothes. Valery sat by the window, watching the snow. He hadn’t said anything on the way, or during processing, when a doctor had explained, doing his absolute best to keep a straight face but not quite succeeding, that Moscow had raised concerns about Valery’s mental stability, and it had been decided he ought to stay here for a while. Mixing science and politics was a telltale sign of – well, troubles. Valery didn’t ask for how long. He would find out, he supposed, soon enough.

A young man who spoke like a little boy shuffled up to him and gave him a child’s story book about a polar bear, so Valery settled him on the windowsill and read it to him. The big room, where patients seemed to be free to do what they liked, smelled of damp. Valery breathed slowly and tried to think, but that was proving difficult.

He was reading the polar-bear story to the young man for the third time when he got himself calm enough to watch the doctors and nurses. They were clipping to and fro casually, without burly orderlies. Nobody here was dangerous, then. That was something.

What he couldn’t understand was why anyone had bothered to do this to him when he was still a zek. He could have been sent back to Kolyma if Slavsky were irritated enough. The prison trains went from Chelyabinsk; Tatiana had seen them. It would have been much easier, and no doubt less paperwork.

Unless this was an example. Unless his name was, right now, going in the newspapers here: lighthouse scientist deemed unstable after deviant activities. It would stick, because every student in the lab knew he was odd anyway, and quietly, people would take note, and make sure not to take an interest in soil chromatography, in caesium, or the geysers on the marsh. Perhaps this was happening not because it was easier to send him here, but easier to send other scientists here if they did what he had done. Perhaps even Slavsky was tired of ordering Shenkov to shoot people. This was as good a threat as a gun. Better. They didn’t admit to shooting people. Resovskaya had told the students that Ilenko had been called back to Moscow, not killed. This could be a public cautionary tale.

Even that didn’t sound right. He was sure he was missing something, but then, that confidence in things being logical was what got you killed. None of it was ever logical. Maybe he was here because it had struck some administrator as a bit more interesting than the gulag, or because the train timetables were being re-done, or a coin toss.

In the evening, they put him in a room on his own. There was a bed and sink, so it was much better than prison. He sank on to the edge of the thin mattress and felt grateful for small mercies. Down the echoey corridor, people were talking. Some were laughing, some were upset or unsettled, he suspected because he was a new person.

The front part of his mind tried to surface, and tried to wonder whether he would be allowed visitors, whether Shenkov knew where he was, if it was worth escaping or if this was just a warning shot and really he would be here only for a month and all he needed to do was wait it out. He didn’t have enough information to decide one way or another. The possibilities just chased each other around and around.

A doctor stopped in the doorway, holding a clipboard. She looked as if she had been awake all week.

‘I expect you want to ask someone for a lawyer or a phone call,’ she said exhaustedly, ‘but I’m afraid that isn’t going to happen. The application to have you committed has come from your employer, who, because you’re a zek, is also your sponsor, so there’s no appeal. Sorry about that.’

‘Can’t do anything if the Ministry says so,’ Valery said. ‘I understand, don’t worry.’

‘Not many people are so quiet and polite as you. Are you plotting something?’ she said, with the shreds of good humour.

He smiled. ‘No. No, it just doesn’t seem fair to throw a tantrum. It’s not your fault.’

She paused. ‘It wasn’t the Ministry. In your file I’ve got down a Dr Resovskaya.’ She looked up. She was gaunt, but there was a glint in her. ‘Think you probably have the right to know who did this to you, comrade.’

‘Thanks,’ he said softly.

Of course; if he was demonstrably insane, then everything he had said to Slavsky could be labelled hysteria. Resovskaya was stopping the changes to the marshland and the contamination levels. She might save her human study after all.

He pressed his hands over his eyes. Maybe it really had been hysterical to insist like he had. After all, Resovskaya was right; he had one strip of caesium from one dig site and Anna’s guess about some geysers. There was every chance he was wrong, and every chance Resovskaya was right. Historically, she tended to be right. Which would mean that she had done exactly what she had to, to keep together integrity of a study so vital it easily outbalanced one small life.

It was early in the morning and silence was crouched bristling over the ward when a doctor unlocked Valery’s door, looking flustered.

‘Um, Comrade Kolkhanov; you’re to come with me.’

Valery stood up slowly. Yes; of course there was a mistake. Someone had looked at a ledger and realised it was far cheaper to provide for a zek than a mental patient, and the red train was waiting.

26

The Raid

Shenkov was standing in the foyer while five KGB officers destroyed the records office. They were emptying cabinets, taking files, stacking everything into boxes. One of the doctors was trying to protest as Valery came by, and got a truncheon smack over the arm for it. Shenkov had his hands in his coat pockets, flint and austere like always, and managing to hold himself separate from the disinfectant smell of the corridor, and the cold that crept through the high windows. Valery had to stop walking, because it felt like taking a baseball bat to the chest. It was joy and dread at the same time. They’d sent Shenkov to arrest him. Jesus Christ, that was ironic justice right there.

Someone who might have been the director of the place came pounding down the stairs.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing! This is—’

‘One of your doctors is a Western spy,’ Shenkov told him. Valery had time to wonder what could possibly be going on. ‘Someone seems to be drugging scientists from the Lighthouse with truth serum and taking notes, which are being sent to an embassy in Moscow.’ Shenkov held out an envelope to the director. ‘This is a search warrant. Your facility will close while we analyse the evidence. Comrade Kolkhanov here will remain in our custody for his own security. You will cooperate with my officers.’

‘What! But—’

‘Thank you,’ Shenkov said, and the director shrank back from him.

Valery’s doctor had abandoned him and retreated. Shenkov held both his wrists out to show what he expected Valery to do, then put a pair of handcuffs on him with an efficient click. He did it very gently, fastening them over Valery’s sleeves rather than against his skin. Then he turned him by his shoulder and steered him towards the front doors.

Grain by tipping grain, the possibility that there was no train and no camp trickled down into Valery’s mind. He tried to stop it. This wasn’t rescue, it couldn’t be, Shenkov didn’t have that sort of authority. It was much more likely that Shenkov was about to explain that he had orders to shoot him. Maybe there would be a chance to run, maybe as far as Nanya’s village, but God, it was minus ten now, and the snow was deep.