The Half Life of Valery K Page 2

  Remember you like doing that, remember how satisfying it is when the ice breaks?

  God, but that determinedly happy voice sounded hollow.

  ‘Hurry up,’ the KGB lady said.

  This would seem like a dream when he got to wherever he was going. Just to have some evidence, he tore the Valentina Tereshkova stamp off the brown paper package.

  The clothes fitted. It took him a long time to button the shirt. His fingers were definitely fractured from that pathetic knock this morning and that didn’t help, but what slowed him down was the feeling of the cotton. It was so soft. He had to hesitate again with the tie, because he’d nearly forgotten how to tie it.

  He wondered why she’d given him normal clothes. Probably because people wouldn’t like it if they realised unchained prisoners were being transported on the same plane. But then, why an airport, and not one of the red prison trains? Zeks were always transferred by train. A plane implied urgency. He knew a few things, but he couldn’t think that any of it would be relevant enough to merit being taken anywhere within hours. He was six years out of date.

  He pushed the stamp into his pocket. He had that, whatever was going on. He felt nervous when he wrapped the brown paper over his old clothes, worried that the KGB lady would check and find the stamp was missing, but she only gave him an odd look and slung the whole lot in the bin. He almost dived after it. That coat, with the labels on the back and on the breast pocket that said K 745, had kept him alive for years. He’d looked after it religiously. And he’d need it if they were going to another camp. He was in too much turmoil to think of a clever way to make her listen to him and let him have it.

  The KGB lady took him straight to the departure gates, where they boarded a small plane bound for a place called Sverdlovsk. Valery had never heard of it.

  2

  City 40

  Sverdlovsk was an ugly industrial city. Outside the airport, it was so warm that there was a misty rain glinting on the steps and the lamp posts and the bonnets of the taxis. There was no need for a coat, even. He was staring at the film of water moving under someone’s windscreen wipers when the KGB lady hailed a taxi and put him in it.

  Immediately Valery was enfolded in the glorious smell of hot leather and vodka, and what must have been a dab of furniture polish inside the heater. He moved along the back seat to leave room, but she didn’t get in; she was going to Moscow. Valery twisted round, taken completely by surprise. Wherever he was going, it wasn’t standard practice for the KGB to just leave a prisoner alone with a random cab driver.

  Again, he wanted to ask what was going on; but if she slammed his fingers in the door, his bones would turn to powder.

  She shut the door and thumped on the roof. The driver set off.

  Maybe the driver wasn’t just a cab driver. But none of the doors were locked. Valery could just hop out at the traffic lights. There was a set at red outside the airport. He could get out, and walk off. Perhaps the driver would be able to shoot him, but perhaps not. He touched the door handle, his fingertips aching with potential. Get out and go where, with no money and no other clothes? It was warmer here than Siberia, but that still wasn’t warm. Sleeping outside would be dangerous. But maybe that would be better than wherever he was going now. He couldn’t think properly. It was a shock. He’d wondered this morning – Jesus Christ, only this morning – how much of his mind had dissolved lately, but he hadn’t known it was this bad. He felt paralysed.

  The lights changed. The driver sped away. He was one of those people who plainly felt that the accelerator should be untouched or floored. Then they were going at forty kilometres an hour, and jumping out would have broken every bone in Valery’s body.

  Valery scraped up some courage. There was no sign of a gun. It was possible the man wasn’t KGB. ‘Where are we going?’ he tried.

  ‘Can’t tell you yet,’ said the driver, not in an unfriendly way. ‘Settle in, it’ll be an hour or so.’

  Valery nodded slowly. There were no more traffic lights.

  The steel giants that were the Sverdlovsk factories glided by, and soon the car passed the city limits. After that, it was only miles of arrow-straight road, punctuated every so often by more factory towns whose white tower blocks and grid streets looked like they’d all come from identical prefabricated kits. The thrum of the taxi engine was lulling, and he fell half-asleep, his head resting against the window. There was a vodka bottle on the front passenger seat, already three-quarters empty. It made a talkative sloshing sound whenever they went over a bump in the road.

  He woke up because the taxi had accelerated. It pressed him back into the seat, and then slung him forward as the driver changed gear. Confused, he looked behind them, then jumped when the driver snapped his fingers at him. The man didn’t speak, but he pointed to a sign coming up fast now.

  attention: do not stop for the following 30km. proceed at the fastest possible speed for your vehicle.

  They shot past it at eighty kilometres an hour.

  ‘Because of the poison in the ground,’ the driver said.

  Valery didn’t know what to say to that.

  Coming up on their left now were the skeletons of burnt-out houses. The roofs were just blackened sticks, and all that was left of the structures were the stone chimneys. Chimney after chimney, set at angles to each other. The houses would have been wide-spaced, with big gardens – for crops maybe, and animals. Grass and weeds grasped at the ruins. In another few years, they would cover them, and nobody passing by would know what the oddly shaped hillocks had been.

  ‘It was a bomb,’ the driver told him. ‘You know, an atom bomb, from the Americans. Destroyed everything. All one night. Boom.’

  Valery looked up. ‘This damage is too widespread for a bomb.’

  ‘Why are the houses burnt, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily. On the right, a blasted church soared by, scraps of gold still winking on its broken domes. Beyond it was an old brick factory, the rafters poking through the roof like ribs.

  ‘I’m telling you. Bomb.’ The driver made a bomb noise and opened his hand to sketch a mushroom cloud. ‘Yup. We’re coming into proper rust country now.’

  Valery wondered what that meant.

  Apart from those brief open stretches where the burnt towns were, most of the way was forest. Valery had lost the ability to think about anything much except the feeling of violin strings tightening around his lungs, and visions of whatever gutted place lay waiting at the end of this endless road, but he did see that the trees were dying. They were silver birches, but instead of a tall stand of perfect white trunks, the forest was cluttered with trees that listed, trees that had fallen, trees that had shed all their leaves and shrunk to skeletons. They made holes in what should have been a dense thicket. He could see through it in places, sometimes to swampy stretches, sometimes to glimpses of more burnt villages. Whatever the cause, the driver was right about poison in the ground: the land here was sick.

  They must have been going uphill, because the birches gave way to pines. Then, even if he had been comatose, he wouldn’t have been able to miss it. The birch trees had been unhealthy, but the pines were dead. The whole woodland had turned a weird rust colour. The road was a line of red, dead pine needles; the trees were gingery ruins, and everywhere the trunks had cracked, so badly that it couldn’t have been safe to drive beneath them. Even going at eighty kilometres an hour, there was a skitter of falling needles on the roof.

  This was right for radiation damage; maybe there had been a bomb, but it would need to have been the bomb to end all bombs. And he would have heard. No; actually, he wouldn’t. They got no proper newspapers in Kolyma. Half the Soviet Union could have been vaporised for all he knew.

  Whatever had happened – was happening – it would kill people just as thoroughly as pines. Maybe they were using zeks to clean it up.

  They couldn’t be giving every single incoming zek his own personal taxi, though. The two thoughts, radiatio
n clean-up labour versus private taxi, chased each other round his head like two horribly mutated cartoon characters.

  The taxi sped on, and above it the dying forest groaned.

  Long before they came to any proper buildings, there was a fence. It was metal netting topped with barbed wire, and it stretched out for as far as Valery could see in either direction. It was broken only by a manned checkpoint, with barriers that swung up and down. The driver pulled up too fast and the wheels skidded. It must have been a regular trick of his, because the soldier in the booth only gave him a wry look.

  Valery rolled down his window and handed over his new papers. The guard studied them with no expression. His eyes flicked up to Valery, then down again, then handed the papers back.

  ‘Welcome to Chelyabinsk 40, Dr Kolkhanov.’

  Chelyabinsk 40; but this was not Chelyabinsk. That was ninety kilometres back the way they’d come. He’d seen the road signs. And there were not forty Chelyabinsks.

  The taxi driver went at normal speed now. He had to, because right after the checkpoint they were in a town. A clean, freshly built town. There were people on the pavements and gleaming speed-limit signs. Valery leaned against the window to see out properly, completely discombobulated. All along the road on the way here had been those ominous drive fast signs, the burnt buildings, deserted land, but here were ordinary people doing ordinary-people things; people with perambulators stopping to talk, kids rushing across the road in school uniform, workers in blue and white caps just starting to cluster outside cafes. There was even a theatre, with pretentious columns outside. On the other side of the road, beyond a row of pretty birch trees – almost healthy, these ones – a tanker was beetling by, cleaning the tarmac. Everything was immaculate.

  As well as road signs, there were other signs, bigger. Some of them were billboards set up by traffic lights, some on the sides of buildings. They were bright and colourful, and full of the delicate images of atoms.

  glory to soviet science!

  our friend the atom!

  anything you hear here, stays here!

  And then one more, a huge poster on the side of a block of flats. In lovely blues and greens, all simple lines, it showed two scientists leaning over something that glowed.

  we are kyshtym! we are the shield!

  He had no idea what that meant. Whatever it was, all the colours looked over-hopeful in the grey day. It must have been afternoon by now, but he couldn’t find the sun. Only low clouds, and the same fine rain there had been in Sverdlovsk. Further off, it was mist. The taxi’s wipers squeaked.

  It was only a few more minutes before they came to another fence, and another set of gates. This set was even heavier than the first, and beyond the checkpoint, where another soldier scrutinised Valery’s papers again, everything was concrete, and every car – shining black and brand new – was identical.

  And then they were at the side of a lake, pulling up to a tall building that looked like a prison, and his heart slung itself under his tongue. The people coming in and out were in lab coats. Valery slid down the seat a little way, feeling giddy. Scientists; radiation. God almighty, he was here to be a test subject of a human radiation trial. No wonder no one had told him.

  He should have run away at those bloody traffic lights in Sverdlovsk. But oh no, he was too easily confused and too tired, and now he was going to get a dose of intravenous polonium stuck in his arm and dissolve like an idiot.

  No; but you didn’t give radiation-test subjects their own taxi from the airport.

  Did you?

  He didn’t know how the world worked any more. He’d been out of it for too long. He felt like he might come apart at the seams. People were glued together with logic a lot more than they were glued with the strong nuclear force, and not one atom of any of this made sense.

  The taxi was running slowly by the lake shore. The lake itself was black and still. In the middle, some kind of chimney or flue stretched up from the water like a monstrous submarine periscope. There was something wrong about the lake, something odd and dead, and he had to examine it for a clear minute before he could place what it was. A whole section of the nearer half was a lighter colour. It wasn’t clouds reflecting on the water; it was that the water was only about a metre deep. Under it was a swathe of solid concrete.

  ‘We’re here,’ the driver said triumphantly. ‘See you round.’

  Valery got out, nearly too weak to stand as the car drove away.

  At first, he only saw the closest building. It was long and rectangular, and at one end there was a high tower where he could make out washing lines in some of the windows. The whole lot was painted yellow, which couldn’t have suited the gloom less. He couldn’t tell if it was a prison or not. Beyond it, on a great stretch of land full of diggers and construction supplies, the ground nothing but bare earth and sand, there was another set of buildings, with more fences and gates. Five of them, square, with cooling towers and outbuildings that thrummed, even from here, pipes plunging underground and heavy wheel-locks exposed to the weather. Without meaning to, he glanced at the lake. Wide, cold, unpopulated; he was damned if those buildings didn’t house nuclear reactors.

  Even as he watched, a crane swung a concrete block into place on a new building. It looked like it was going to be just like the other five. Christ, six reactors; he’d never seen so many. Six nuclear reactors and a whole forest close by that was plainly suffering radiation damage – there must have been some kind of accident.

  But he couldn’t see any zeks on the building site. Just people in proper work clothes and fluorescent jackets, and hard-hats. Whatever this place was, it wasn’t in the middle of a clean-up operation, and they weren’t using prison labour. You didn’t get a jacket and a hard-hat if you were on prison labour.

  It began to rain, properly. The sound of it on the concrete ground was like stars glittering. Rain, real rain; all the way above zero degrees. Yes, of course it was. It was only October. He had managed to forget that winter wasn’t six months long everywhere.

  Beyond the construction site was the vast shining stretch of marsh. It was so flat that the horizon seemed much further away than it should have, the sky a grey vault. Somewhere over the wetlands, a blast of mud spurted up about ten metres into the air; there must have been geysers out here.

  He should run away.

  Only, there was nowhere to run to. They had just come in through the hefty fence around the facility. He had never been here before. He had no idea where to go. Serious people, with the right kind of mind, didn’t let that kind of thing bother them. He had seen men escape the gulag before. They were straightforward. They just walked off the second the opportunity presented itself, some of them hadn’t been shot, and he’d never seen them again. Maybe they’d lived.

  ‘Dr Kolkhanov?’ A woman in a white cap was standing at the doors. ‘Come inside, it’s cold.’

  Doctor; that was the second time someone today had called him doctor. Nobody called zeks anything but a number. He had the exact opposite of foreboding; a sort of creeping hope, seeping through his chest. The KGB agent had just left him, the driver had just left him. No one was behaving like he was a security risk.

  ‘Today,’ the woman in the cap prompted him.

  He followed her through the glass doors. They were heavy and they banged shut right behind him. Inside was a broad, pale hallway lined with framed portraits (Lenin, Stalin, Marx) and cork noticeboards with little adverts pinned on them – the nearest had one for a set of political lectures, and someone’s lost hat. So definitely not a prison. They wouldn’t have glass or drawing pins at a prison. He couldn’t convince himself, though. Maybe this was just an administration block.

  The woman was looking at him as if she disapproved. ‘Wait here, and Comrade Shenkov will come for you shortly.’

  Valery wanted to say, I’ve got no idea what’s going on and I’d be obliged if you’d tell me before I have a nervous attack and collapse, but it seemed like too much immediately a
fter hello.

  He sat down on a plastic chair to wait. Everything was silent. After a few minutes, he had to pull open his collar and yank off his tie, and tell himself firmly that everything was fine.

  What was important to notice, the indefatigable over-bright voice in his head said, was that this wasn’t like the Lubyanka at all. The Lubyanka was actually rather a nice building, with parquet floors in the main hall and carpets in all the corridors. You couldn’t go around linking two places just because they both happened to be sepulchrally quiet. He seriously doubted that this place was silent by law. Nobody was going to lean in and tell you to shut up if you whispered.

  As clear as though it were happening right now, with no echo whatever despite the long passageway of the years, he heard someone knocking on the other side of the wall just next to him. Tap tap, tap-tap-tap.

  He snapped his fingers so he could show his brain the difference between remembered sound and real sound. It helped. The lady in the white cap looked at him like he was insane. He nearly admitted that he probably was. He still dreamed in the Lubyanka knock code.

  He’d hoped Shenkov would be a scientist, but the man who came out from a door down the hall to fetch him wore a tailored dark suit and good shoes. KGB, he had to be; nobody else was ever so polished.

  ‘Are you Dr Kolkhanov?’ Shenkov said, entirely polite, but looking a lot like he’d hoped for someone different. Valery could see why. Shenkov was tall and powerful, probably about Valery’s age, but with the grace of somebody who considered failure to keep fit a betrayal of the Soviet duty of labour. Being little and ill was, Valery suspected, hardly better than mooning the Kremlin.

  ‘Um – yes.’

  Shenkov didn’t actually say outstanding, but he managed to clang it on to the floor like an anvil anyway.

  ‘I’m Konstantin Shenkov, I’m the head of security.’ He had an ice-shard of an accent that Valery couldn’t place, and he brought with him a clear impression of flint; but it might only have been because of his hair, which was just that colour.