Page 83 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Comrade – are we going to get him back, once Mum’s here? It’s just a mistake. Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Valery. ‘We’ll try.’

‘But it must be a mistake,’ the girl said. ‘He doesn’t know any dissidents.’

Valery was quiet for a moment. ‘No. The police make things up sometimes.’

‘Why?’

‘Usually it happens if someone wants your job, or wants you to stop doing your job. It’s not fair but it happens. Your dad’s not a criminal. Right, sit tight, and I’ll be back.’

He gave the girl the key in the hope that they would feel a bit safer, and set out down the corridor. He found himself checking around corners before he walked them. If Resovskaya had managed, God knew how, to have Shenkov arrested, then it would not be long before someone came for Valery again too. In fact he was surprised they hadn’t already.

While he had been with the children, there had been the immediacies to think about, the blankets and coffee and whether or not Albert was going to try and squeeze himself into someone’s cup. Now, the quiet surged, and so did all the things that he had forced into the background before. He had told the children that he and Anna would try to get Shenkov back, but the truth was that they wouldn’t even be able to try. He had no idea where the police would have taken him. There must have been a prison here somewhere, but it was hard to think that the usual protocols would be followed if the arrestee was the head of the local branch of the KGB, and particularly not given that Shenkov already had a prison record. There would not be anything to discuss, no trial to hear.

It was possible that he was already in Chelyabinsk, being slung on to one of the red trains that would run north, and north, north.

Valery was halfway down the stairs when he had to lock his elbow over the rail and stand still while he waited to stop feeling dizzy.

31

The Red Trains

Moscow, 1957

There weren’t any secret railway stations. The red trains went from Moscow Central, just along the tracks from the Metro circle line. The carriages were cattle cars, so everyone sat down on the floor, very quiet, and once the car was full, the doors ratcheted closed and the guards pushed home the bolts. There was light, though, because there were sometimes gaps between the planks in the walls. Valery shifted so that, beside him, Shukov – the battered man who had taught him knock code and since become his best prison friend – could stretch his bad knee. Shukov nodded sheepishly. Other people were settling in the same. Everyone knew each other, because they were all from the Lubyanka, all from the same cell.

For Valery, at least, it was a relief to be going. City prisons were just holding stations. You did your ten years at a labour camp, and if he was being honest, he had been looking forward to it for months now. Maybe Siberia was going to be hellish and frozen and all the rest of it, but there was very definitely going to be space to stretch your arms out. Much as he liked everyone else from his cell, he was reaching the point where he would have sold his soul and probably other important pieces of himself just to breathe some air that a dozen other people hadn’t already breathed. As far as he was concerned, Siberia sounded like God’s own country.

The only thing making him anxious now was that those same fifty people had been crammed into the same carriage, which had even less space in it than the prison cell, and the journey to Siberia from here would take at least ten weeks.

Actually, the carriage had been divided into two. Down the middle was a thick piece of plyboard, but there was a tiny knothole in it and on the far side were women’s voices. As the train moved off, someone tapped gently on the other side.

‘Hello, gents,’ a cheerful voice said.

‘Ladies,’ everyone said automatically. Valery had a weird kind of relief. He hadn’t seen or heard a woman for months, and the sound of them was wonderful; there was something much cleaner about them than the way that men muttered, and he had a flash of a memory from when he’d been small and his mother had still taken him to church. They sounded like the choir.

Everyone else must have felt the same, because people started to relax, and the cold air smoked unevenly as everyone began to breathe properly and to talk. It felt like things would be basically okay, now that the women were here.

There was soon quite a lot to complain about, so it was just as well that everyone started more or less happy. There were so many prisoners that it took the guards two hours to get everyone out for toilet breaks, and given that the huge train went slowly anyway, creeping around the sweeps of bleak farmland track, it was completely unrealistic for them to try that more than once a day. It took exactly four days for sympathy to wear out and for the old men to be shunned down the far end of the carriage. Valery felt sorry for them, but not sorry enough to get too close or to stray too far from the stream of clean air coming in through a crack in the carriage wall.

Everyone was used to being hungry, so tempers didn’t wear too thin when it became clear there would be one cup of water a day and one meal. Valery was actually grateful about that. He much preferred being hungry to dealing with the old men if someone stuffed them with three meals a day. Jesus Christ.

‘Um … ?’ said the woman on the other side of the plywood barrier. ‘A.’

‘Nope,’ he said, and scratched the base of a tiny gallows. About eight of them were playing, but they had elected speakers so it didn’t get too chaotic.

‘We did agree that no Polish words are allowed, right?’

‘Racist,’ someone said.

Quiet giggles from the other side. It sounded like sunlight. Valery smiled and wondered for the hundredth time how Svetlana was doing. She didn’t giggle, she wasn’t that kind of person – she made a kind of muted hiss where most people would have laughed – but it felt warm in the same way.

After two weeks, the weather turned. Summer must have realised it was late and came on all in a rush. They woke up one morning to find that they were gliding under a blue sky, and that it was hot; so hot that it was dizzying. Valery woke with a jolt from a dream of being smothered. He sat up fast and breathed close to the crack in the wall. It made him jump when Shukov pushed him aside, too hard, to get at it instead.

‘Ow,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ Shukov said, back to being the same apologetic person who’d looked after Valery in the Lubyanka cell. ‘Sorry, thought I might be dying.’