Page 77 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘I don’t understand,’ he said aloud.

A guard thumped one fist against the iron door. ‘Shut up. No speaking.’

There was a long quiet, and then another tap on the wall. Tap. Taptap. Tap – taptap. He shook his head at no one.

He understood, after three weeks, that the man in the cell next door was actually teaching him the alphabet. The man did it on a loop every day at nine o’clock, and followed it with something else. When, finally, Shenkov had copied out the knock alphabet in scratches on the wall, he had to rush to find each letter in the second part. His heart nearly broke when he put it together.

What’s your name?

He bumped his head against the bricks, full of so much joy that his eyes burned. Haltingly, he tapped his name back, and then, What’s yours?

Winston.

American?

Yes came to join the Communist cause hahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa.

He laughed, silently. Bad luck.

They talked on and off for the rest of the day. Shenkov fell asleep with his temple against the wall. For the first time since they’d brought him, he didn’t have nightmares. Even in the dream, he worried about that. Nightmares meant, at least, that none of this was normal. It was amazing how quickly he had got used to the cell otherwise. He had stopped smelling the mildew within a couple of days. He was hungry all the time now, but the hunger was just a presence in the room with him, rather than something urgent. And still, no one opened the cell door. No one asked anything. He would have thought they had forgotten about him, but they couldn’t have, or there would have been no food.

For days he’d gone out of his mind worrying about Anna and Dmitry, before coming to the strange calm realisation that there was nothing he could do about whatever it was that was happening to them. The same with Sergei.

He jolted awake when the door banged into the wall. He had no idea what time it was, or what day. A man in uniform stood there; the Commissioner. He could have been a dream from another life.

‘Shenkov!’ he said cheerily. ‘Got a new placement for you. Have you ever heard of City 40?’

28

The Cement Truck

City 40, 1963

In Valery’s nearly-empty apartment with its bare walls and the kettle sitting on the windowsill, Shenkov looked more elegant than ever, and out of place. He often seemed that way inside these bleak buildings – he was one of those creatures who, if the world had been arranged properly, nobody would ever have seen except at a distance at great diplomatic conventions, or walking away from a glass-walled boardroom in one of those cities where the tectonic plates of economies shifted; a spirit of the invisible industries, trade or politics or secrets. Impressions like that should have gone away once you’d seen a person ironing shirts, but it kept striking Valery as bizarre that Shenkov could possibly belong in the same room as a linoleum-floored kitchenette and a laundry basket.

Valery poured the coffee that had been brewing while Shenkov spoke. ‘They didn’t arrest you because of Sergei, though, did they.’ He was glad he could speak properly. In the lift on the way up, and for a good while after they were inside, he had been right on the edge of crying with a mixture of relief and shock. He couldn’t understand why. The asylum hadn’t been awful. But even the tiny zing of the bugs in the light switches was wonderful now.

‘What?’

‘They arrested you because they wanted Anna to work here,’ he said. ‘No? She would never have agreed to move out here, not from a tenure-track position at the Kurchatov Institute, so they went after you. They’d have got you for something, whatever happened.’

Shenkov, unlike Valery, usually looked straight at whoever he was speaking to; but all the time he had been talking he had rested his eyes on the floor. They flicked up to Valery now, but as though the sight of him was too heavy, they fell again.

Valery wanted to take his hands and folded his arms to stop himself. ‘Solitary for three weeks in the Lubyanka. That’s a holiday with full catering.’

Shenkov was leaning back against the wall, his shoulders flat to it as though he didn’t like being so tall. He looked at Valery through his lashes. ‘I expect your father made you eat roadkill and murdered you nightly in your Arctic shack when you were a lad.’

‘And I was grateful,’ Valery said, hurting with joy to be talking again.

The telephone rang, which was odd, because the only person who ever called him was Shenkov. He picked up the receiver. A nervous voice introduced itself as a junior security officer and asked for Shenkov. Valery handed the phone over, wondering if she had listened, through the bugs, to Shenkov’s whole story, or just that she had worked out where he would be if he wasn’t at home or in the office.

‘Yes?’

‘Evening, sir,’ the nervous voice said. Valery could hear her clearly. Shenkov motioned that it shouldn’t be long. ‘There’s a cement truck heading to the forest now.’ The young woman must have held the phone next to a speaker then, because there was a crackle of evening radio and someone singing in the wholehearted way most people only did when they thought they were alone. ‘I’ve just sent someone after him. You said to call if one went out that way.’

‘Good. Keep listening too, I want to know if he talks to anyone when he gets to where he’s going.’

‘Yes, sir. Night.’