Page 94 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘I can’t go to Moscow,’ the last man managed. ‘My kids are—’

‘You will be shot for even knowing about this place if you don’t.’

‘He’s right,’ Shenkov said quietly. ‘Come on.’

Valery checked his watch again. How was it twenty to two, where had the minutes gone? Nanya should have been here by now. Fuck it. He pulled the vault door open again and hurried them across the lab, towards the ladder. The other researchers and the soldiers were unconscious, some of them soaked in blood from radiation lesions; perhaps dead already. Resovskaya was holding a bottle of iodine pills in her lap. Shenkov’s grey eyes flared with alarm. He looked like he was about to say something, but then there came a thunderous knock on the other door. The one that led to the bicycle tunnel.

Valery pulled it open, and there was Nanya, with a crowd of anxious people behind her. She nodded to him.

‘It worked,’ he said.

‘Of course it bloody worked,’ she said. ‘Where do we go, up this ladder? Hurry up then.’

What followed would have looked, to anyone watching, like that bizarre act where fifty clowns climb one by one out of a Morris Minor, balloons and all. Only this time, it was sixty-eight people coming out of what seemed to be a tiny storage shed, climbing into the back of a banana delivery lorry.

Dressed in blue overalls, Anna climbed down from the driver’s side to help the women with children, even while Valery stared stupidly and tried to think where she had managed to get a banana truck. She had also lined the whole cargo compartment with cushions, blankets, and bags and bags of food and water. Shenkov looked at her like he’d never seen her before.

‘The children, are they—’

‘At home,’ she said. ‘We’ll all be fine.’ And that was all. She didn’t say anything else, and Valery remembered that afterwards always. Even though the plan had been for her to come too, with Tatiana and the others. Something must have gone wrong. Maybe Tatiana was ill again, too ill to move. He never found out. ‘Into the banana lorry, sweetheart. Don’t we live excitingly, that I should have cause to say that?’

Shenkov had to catch the side of the truck’s cargo door. He could only just stand, and now there was horror in his eyes, and Valery realised he had no idea what to do if Shenkov refused to go anywhere without his children. ‘Anna—’

‘No time. Get in. You have no choice, Kostya; if you stand here then we’ll all be arrested and shot.’

Valery helped him in. Shenkov didn’t look at him. He had gone blank. He was going to hate Valery forever for this, Valery could feel it building, but as Anna said, there was no time, and all he could do was shut the door.

Anna drove. Valery stayed with her on the passenger side. She had got work overalls for him too, and a cap, which was just as well. He couldn’t think of anyone else at the Lighthouse with red hair.

The soldiers at the gate stopped the lorry like they stopped everyone.

‘You’re not Yuri,’ a soldier said to Anna.

‘No, I’m covering,’ Anna said cheerfully. ‘He gave me his badge and that.’

‘Not strictly okay, you know.’

‘Sorry. It was an emergency. He’s got this, er, swelling, where you sort of don’t want one, so he was embarrassed about—’

‘Ugh. Fine. Well,’ the soldier said, and then waved a dosimeter vaguely at the truck. The dosimeter squeaked. ‘Oh – fuck’s sake. Fucking bananas. On you go.’

Anna drove them all the way to Sverdlovsk, then pulled off her overalls to reveal normal clothes underneath, waved goodbye, and got into a taxi back to City 40. It was quick. She didn’t open the back of the lorry to say goodbye to Shenkov. It would have been stupid; they were just stopped at the side of the road in a lay-by in the middle of town, next to a whole row of busy grocery shops. There was a police patrol literally opposite, the officers watching the traffic idly over their sandwiches. One of them even watched her as she hailed the taxi. Valery studied the map enough to memorise the way to the main road west, then accelerated fast, certain he was going to hear a siren right behind them. But he never did.

34

The Embassy

Moscow, 1963

The interview room was small and sterile, but nobody wanted it to be frightening, or else they wouldn’t have sent the nice lady in with a tray of tea and Bourbon biscuits. Valery sat quietly and dissected a biscuit while he wrote down his statement with a black fountain pen. He did it in English, so nobody would have a chance to misread or mistranslate. He had to go slowly, because his hands had almost seized. Two days’ driving; it sounded straightforward enough, but he was so stiff now he wasn’t sure he’d ever move his arms properly again.

He looked up when the diplomat came back in. Harrison was exactly what he’d expected; a languid, willowy public schoolboy, the kind who’d definitely call himself a boy even though he was Valery’s age. Talking to him felt like meeting a dodo. Men like Harrison hadn’t existed in Russia since before Valery had been born. He had given Valery a wary twang, but he was surprisingly inoffensive.

‘I’ve been on the telephone,’ Harrison said. ‘It’s all going to take some time to go through channels, I’m afraid, given how extraordinary this is.’

Valery supposed it was extraordinary, to knock on the door of the British Embassy at four o’clock in the morning with four people perhaps dying of radiation sickness and seventy refugees from an irradiated research quadrant. ‘What does channels mean?’ he asked.

‘The bureaucracy,’ Harrison explained. ‘It has to go through a lot of telephones and over a lot of desks.’