Page 76 of The Half Life of Valery K

After the train, humid with the rain drying on everyone’s clothes and the mouldy smell of damp wool, the clear air on the platform was glorious. Sergei put his scarf back on and Shenkov buttoned his coat. The leather creaked. He saw Sergei give it an uneasy glance, the same glance everyone gave it, but neither of them said anything. Sergei put up an umbrella and took his arm, and they walked close together out of the station, onto a street where the rain gleamed with amber whirls from the lamps, and the car tyres glimmered. Opposite them, outside a bakery with a huge sign that said bread, people were already queuing, though it wouldn’t be open for another two hours. Someone enterprising had set up a small tent.

‘I had to shoot a little girl’s dog today,’ Shenkov said out of nothing. He hadn’t meant to. The second he had, he felt exposed.

‘That,’ Sergei said with feeling, ‘is how I wish I’d spent my day. I work for MiniAg now.’ The Ministry of Agronomy. He glanced up at Shenkov. ‘They’re pushing the Ukrainian grain quotas up again. There are nationalists starting to make noises about not wanting to be in the Soviet Union. Funnily a lot of them are farmers.’

‘What about your sisters?’ he said, because Sergei was Ukrainian.

‘I’ve told them to get out. Kiev, or something, before everyone starves.’

‘You shouldn’t say things like that to me,’ Shenkov said helplessly.

Sergei looked up at him again, properly this time. ‘I would say anything to you.’

Shenkov pulled him into an alley behind a lamp and hugged him, probably too hard, but then stopped caring when he realised that Sergei was clinging to him too.

‘Jesus, it’s all such a mess, isn’t it?’ Sergei said, half-laughing. His voice had gone high.

‘Steaming.’ It was an unbelievable relief to say that and not just think it – think it furiously forty times a day, knowing that everyone else must be thinking it too, but never knowing it certainly enough to ever, ever offer it up aloud. ‘How’s your wife, how’s …’

‘She’s a secretary for MiniJust, and all she does now is explain how brilliant everyone is, even at home …’

‘The house is probably bugged—’

‘I know, and I do the same to her, she probably thinks I’m a brainless idiot—’

‘Anna too—’

‘And the kids are in the fucking Pioneers, they’re dead keen to find a spy …’

‘No, no, no, I win this one. My little boy cheerily told my boss we’d been to America and spoken to the CIA, I nearly had a heart attack. He’s two.’

‘What did your boss say!’

‘He said he was a pirate, in fairness.’

They had been talking over each other so much that neither of them ever quite stopped. It was the only moment in his life Shenkov came close to believing that telepathy was possible.

Sergei laughed. ‘My God.’ The laugh cracked, and his shoulders shook. ‘I’m so tired. I feel like I’m walled into a tower with no windows and no doors.’

‘Same.’

Sergei nodded. He let his head bump against Shenkov’s shoulder. All at once he seemed like a miracle, trusting a secret policeman enough to do that. ‘I don’t want to go home,’ he said miserably.

‘Me neither,’ said Shenkov, so they went to find a hotel.

They played dominoes, got drunk, cheated at dominoes, and fell asleep in a heap by the electric fire, because it was a cheap hotel and if you went further away than a metre from the grate, you froze to the thin carpet. Sergei kept his scarf on. They both had a separate nest of cushions and blankets, and Shenkov dozed looking at the pattern on the scarf, nice colours, Ukrainian embroidery on the hem; a risky thing to keep, but then, Sergei must have wanted something from home that was easily hidden.

It felt like an adventure to sleep on the floor, like one of those frozen Komsomol camping trips. He was almost asleep when he felt Sergei take his hand. At any other moment, he would have slapped him away, but now he didn’t care. He was a lot more drunk on honesty than on vodka, much more, and he would have done whatever Sergei wanted, even if it was helping to bomb the Kremlin. He dragged him close, worried instantly that he’d hurt him, and felt relief like nothing else when Sergei only shifted to get comfortable.

Someone banged on the door. Four loud, hard thumps.

The Lubyanka was silent. The long corridors were carpeted, so even the guards’ boots made no sound. Nobody spoke, and when he glanced to his right to watch another stream of prisoners being led the other way, the guard beside him put one hand on his neck to force his head down. Carpets, in a prison; that had always struck him as bizarre. Right on the edge of hearing, there was a soft wooden noise, like a woodpecker.

He bumped into the wall of the cell and stayed there with his hands against it until the door was locked, to be certain the guards didn’t think he meant to fight back. He had expected one of the big cells with a hundred people in it, but it was small, and he was alone. He couldn’t tell what that meant. He had only ever brought people to the prison, never gone inside.

He watched the door, expecting someone to step inside. Nobody did. A latch opened and a tray of bread came through. That was it.

Someone tapped on the other side of the wall. It was in a pattern; a code, but he had no idea what it was.