Page 89 of The Half Life of Valery K

Valery lifted his eyes to find hers. ‘If we do that, we have to get him out the country. Ourselves too, and all your children. There’s no … going back to normal.’

‘Obviously,’ she said, as if he had just asked her to fetch down some crockery. ‘What’s the lab like, how hard is this going to be?’

‘I don’t know if it’s manned at night. I can go down early in the morning, four or five, and see.’ He pulled his hand through his hair. ‘If there are soldiers there twenty-four hours a day, I’m not sure what to do. We’d need some kind of accident. We need them to evacuate the lab, or close it for a few days. But I don’t know it well enough to know what would trigger that.’

Anna tipped her head. ‘Well. We’re living in a plutonium refinery, it would speak to a lack of imagination if I couldn’t think of something. How long do you think he has?’

‘I don’t know,’ Valery said softly. ‘I think they’re trying to find exactly the amount the most resistant person can cope with. They’re not trying to kill people. But – I don’t think he’ll be able to move much if we wait long. Within two or three days, he’s going to be very ill.’

‘Two days,’ she said, and nodded. ‘I’ll think of something.’

Valery risked a study of her. ‘Are you sure you’re okay to do this?’

She lifted her eyebrows. ‘I don’t get much fun, Kolkhanov.’

‘I’m glad you’re a lunatic,’ he said. ‘But it’s a bit much to ask you this. With the divorce, and …’ He wished immediately that he hadn’t mentioned it.

‘I have terminal cancer,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a toss if I’m arrested or not. Being shot would be far more dignified than what’s coming for me otherwise.’

As if someone had pressed hard on his shoulders, they tacked back by themselves. He should have guessed.

‘Does Konstantin know?’

‘No. He’s already tying himself in knots about Tatiana. I’m not very good with people who tie themselves in knots. Guilt like that, it’s a sort of arrogance, you know? An assumption that everything is your own fault when that’s clearly absurd. I couldn’t watch him do it any more, but likewise this thyroid thing means I’m too exhausted to lie to him all the time. Do you see what I mean?’ She sighed. ‘I’m not covering myself in glory here. But, I draw the line at letting him liquidise in a basement.’

‘What … happens to the kids, without him and without you? If this goes wrong.’

‘Oh, they’d go to my sister in Moscow where they would live unirradiated ever after. And then once we have him,’ she said, as if she hadn’t had to pause and think about her children, ‘we need to get away fast. I think we’re going to have to fling ourselves at the Americans or the French.’ She paused. ‘Having the children will be a good thing there. They’re more likely to give asylum to a family. Sentimental like that, aren’t they, capitalists.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and felt the enormity of it hanging above him, brushing the crown of his head. ‘Yes.’

Anna was scrutinising him as though he were something in a vial. ‘Are you all right to do this? You only came here a couple of months ago, but you didn’t phrase this as my problem, it’s been us since I walked in.’

‘It’s the gulag, it screws you up that way. He was kind to me, so I worship the ground he walks on.’ He shrugged slightly. It felt like a lie even though it wasn’t. ‘It’s fucking creepy but that’s what it is.’

Anna laughed. ‘No, he loves it when he has something fragile to look after. Hence the horde of children. Actually he’s desperately unhappy when he doesn’t have one, I wasn’t surprised when he picked you up.’

Valery nodded once. He couldn’t tell if she was talking down to him because she knew, or because she was just such a genius that she sometimes slipped into talking down to anyone and the edge of bitterness in her voice, like over-stewed tea, was just his imagination. He had to click his teeth shut against the chance that she did know, and that she might be angry enough to just abandon them with no way to escape, and leave them to enjoy the gulag together.

Valery was up at four and in Resovskaya’s lab by half past. There were indeed two soldiers there, sharing an electric heater that only just brushed the deep night-time cold beneath the lake. They nodded to him, friendly enough. He put the kettle on and made coffee for them, drifted away to do some paperwork for a little while and then, trying to look as absent-minded as he could, started up the steel steps to the sealed vault door that led into the isolation rooms. The second he touched it, one of the soldiers banged the butt of his gun against a pipe with a boom that echoed and echoed.

‘Can’t go up there without Resovskaya’s say-so.’

‘But – I was going to ask them if they wanted any coffee,’ Valery said.

‘Step away from the door, comrade. Now.’

He stepped away from it and retreated to his own bench, his mouth going dry. It was possible to get by that sort of discipline, but you had to have time to build some trust and some routine: weeks. However proud he was of his shabby little collection of magic tricks, he had none that would get him through that door in forty-eight hours.

When Dr Resovskaya arrived towards eight, she watched him with more attention than usual as he put the morning’s blood samples through the spectrometer, but she did not say, aha, Valery, Shenkov is in my vault, your move; he wished that she would, because he still wasn’t sure. Anna was right, it was the elegant solution for Resovskaya, pulling Shenkov in for the trial, but he had no idea what other solutions were open to her. Many, perhaps.

When he asked if he could see the patients in the vault, Resovskaya said no. She was at a delicate moment and she wanted – he would understand of course – not to have people traipsing in and out, the trial was her baby, he had to let her have a few eccentricities. He smiled and said yes, and went back to the blood samples. None of them was named, only tagged with medical numbers. He wasn’t surprised. The researchers must routinely come across people they knew. It would be hard to crush the instinct to quietly lose the data.

It was a good sign, the cheery gulag voice said inside his head, that she wasn’t letting him in. She had no reason not to unless there was a new patient she didn’t want him to see.

Or there wasn’t, and she really was just feeling possessive about the trial, and Shenkov was already en route to Siberia.

There was nothing he could do, no way to check. He wasn’t tall or strong; he couldn’t punch Resovskaya and knock out the two men between himself and that door, nor the two soldiers – new ones, because the shift had changed at seven – who were reading magazines at a table in the corner. All he could do was sit here and run two hundred blood samples from six Chelyabinsk hospitals.