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Somehow, the three of them made it out alive.
It was an atrocity, of course. Valery knew that. Every man and woman and child who still lived in the exclusion zone - their lives were the price for Valery and the Shenkovs to get out alive, buying their lives with silence. And he knew there was something wrong with him, that he could make that deal and still sleep at night. Chelyabinsk 40 faded into the fog of his brain along with fifty-three zeks and three human test subjects and the lives of every man and woman Shenkov had shot. In the end, he was still a reptile.
But he was a free reptile, now. Valery didn’t know exactly what strings had been pulled to get his pardon; when he had asked, Shenkov had gotten that brittle look on his face, and Valery had hurried to change the subject. If Shenkov didn’t want to tell him, that was okay. It had to be okay, because there were so many other things they couldn’t talk about.
They didn’t talk about Anna, either. Anna and Shenkov had made up, somehow - another thing Valery didn’t dare ask about. But he had some idea. He could see it in the easy, familiar way they were around each other, and in the way Shenkov looked at Anna sometimes, as if the sun shone in her eyes. He could see how they must have been when they were young and in love, and it only hurt him a little to know that he would never be part of that.
He was still sleeping with Shenkov. He felt guilty about it, sometimes, but it was hard to remember the guilt, and harder still to justify it to himself when he knew how much worse he’d done.
Freedom wasn’t so different from slavery. Conditions were slightly worse - they’d been banished to a middle-of-nowhere research facility in Kazakhstan, where Anna and Valery struggled to produce results on a shoestring budget and Shenkov did work that made him wake up screaming sometimes in the night. Because of Shenkov’s position and the size of his family, the Shenkovs had been awarded a tiny, shabby two-room flat all to themselves. Valery, meanwhile, was assigned a bunk in the worker’s dormitory where he would be freezing in the winter and burning up in the summer.
It was still better than the Gulag, but he had only been living there for about a week when Shenkov said, “Why don’t you move in with us? The kids have their own room - and Anna and I have space in ours. Besides, you don’t take up much space anyway.”
It sounded insane to Valery. Live in the same room with the man he was having an affair with, and his wife? He made excuses. He liked living in the dormitory, he said. It helped with the loneliness.
But it was a lie. The cold ate at his bones and sometimes he woke up and thought he was back in the Gulag. News had gotten around about his tattoos, and the other workers treated him like a leper despite his increasingly desperate attempts to court their friendship.
So a week later, when Anna repeated the offer - in a deliberately casual tone that told Valery she’d discussed this with Shenkov beforehand - he gave in. He was already Shenkov’s dirty little secret. He would manage somehow. And at least he’d have a soft bed to sleep on while he was managing.
Somehow, it worked. There were two beds in the room now, one for Anna and Shenkov and one for Valery. Valery made sure to go in to work early every morning, so that Anna and Shenkov could have some time alone together, and if he came home in the evenings to find Shenkov there and Anna still at work, he basked in Shenkov’s undivided attention. They only ever made love in Valery’s smaller bed, not in the big one that Shenkov shared with Anna - Valery refused to do it there. That was Anna’s territory; he wouldn’t cross over into it.
And if he could forget that he was sleeping with her husband, his relationship with Anna was quite smooth as well. During the day, he worked closely with her on their research, and he began to look forward to it as much as to his assignations with Shenkov. Shenkov was beautiful and kind and brilliant in his own way, but there was something exciting about working with Anna, the way he would start to outline a theory and then she would jump on it, following it to its conclusion. The way they understood each other. Valery remembered what Resovskaya had said about his mind being in a different gear than other people’s. He thought he sort of understood that now, because Anna’s mind was in the same gear as his.
In the evenings, he helped out with the children and did housework so that Anna could rest. He was proud of his work; really, he thought, every marriage would benefit from having a weird little abacus gremlin to do one third of the work. Four children were really too much for two people to handle on their own - especially when one of them was deathly ill. Valery discovered that he got along well with the children. They liked to listen to his stories while he did the dishes or mopped.
And at night, sometimes, Valery would lie in bed and watch Shenkov and Anna lying peacefully side by side in their big bed, and want desperately to be there between them.
Anna seemed to like having him around the house. She started to get him little gifts as a thank-you. Some of them were useful, calcium pills or physics textbooks, but once, after Valery had mentioned that he liked science fiction, she had come home with a copy of The Land of Crimson Clouds by the Strugatskis for him. And when spring came, and the steppe bloomed with wild tulips, Valery found that someone had put together a bouquet and put it on his desk.
She must have felt sorry for him, this half-starved zek who her husband had invited into their house like a stray dog. The kindness made something bloom in Valery’s chest, warm and intoxicating, and he wanted to beg her to stop. Please stop, or I’ll fall in love with you too, and I don’t think I could bear that . . .
But he couldn’t bring himself to say it, and the gifts continued.
A few months after the tulips bloomed, Anna came back from the doctor’s office with good news: her thyroid cancer had shrunk. The battle wasn’t over, but for the first time, she seemed to believe that she might survive. And if there was hope for her - maybe there could be hope for the kids. Just maybe, they could snatch a happy ending out of the jaws of fate.
“Will you come out for lunch with me?” Anna asked Valery one day. “I brought a picnic basket from home.”
Valery looked up at her, leaning over his desk. She was wearing her hair loose, so that it framed her round, soft face. Her eyes were bright and intelligent under striking dark brows. It occured to Valery that Shenkov had very good taste in women, even if Anna didn’t share Shenkov’s movie-star looks. What did he need with Valery, when he had Anna? Valery didn’t understand it.
“I should really finish my work here,” Valery said, smiling his cheerful, harmless smile and hoping she’d take the out. “Besides, you must value your time to yourself - with me, and Shenkov, and the kids all in the house all the time.”
Anna gave him a look, fond and long-suffering. “Valera, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I won’t hold it against you. But if you want to come, do. Don’t try to be self-sacrificing about this. You’ve already sacrificed enough for us, and besides, I’m not trying to be nice. I’m not nice at all, actually, I’m very selfish. And I want to have lunch with you, so come on.”
Valery couldn’t hold out. He was wanted, and that was addictive, even if he knew she only wanted his company because she didn’t know he was sleeping with Shenkov.
“All right,” he said, leaning into her as if he could absorb the warm glow of her affection into himself. “I’ll come. But you’ll have to promise not to tell Shenkov. He always eats lunch in his office and he’ll be jealous of us.”
Anna laughed. “Too late. He helped me make the pirozhki.”
They walked out on the banks of the river, the tulips blooming all around them. They each took a side of the blanket, and started to lay it out - but as Anne bent over to lay it down, she wavered on her feet, stumbled, and fell -
Instinctively, Valery dived to catch her, but he was half her size and had overestimated his own strength, so they wound up going down together. Valery found himself lying on top of her, the soft bulk of her body protecting him from the hard ground. And she was looking up at him, her hair tousled by the wind and the fall, and Valery wanted her very badly. He wanted to be part of their lives, to be part of their marriage, not just some stray they’d brought in together, not just a parasite who would eventually destroy their marriage.
Anna brought a hand up and combed it through his hair, and he frowned, not understanding the gesture. “Anna Ivanovna - ” he started, very formal.
“Anya,” she said. “Please. We live together, after all. And we’re sleeping with the same man.”
Shame seized Valery in a vise-grip. He rolled off of her and curled up, as if he was afraid she’d hit him. But it was worse than that. He was used to being hit. But he didn’t think he could handle being ejected from their lives. He had finally done what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do: he had let his guard down, and let himself believe in this new life. He didn’t want to go back to being alone. He didn’t want to go back to the barracks. “I,” he started out, his voice shaking. “When - when we started, I thought - we thought - I thought you were going to leave him. I’m sorry.” And then, a terrible thought: what if Anna did decide to leave Shenkov, and it was all because of Valery? Valery had seen how much she meant to him. “No, it’s,” he started. “It was all my idea, Anna Iva - Anya, I - I seduced him. It’s not his fault.” Would she believe that? Valery knew he didn’t look like he could seduce anyone.
But Anna was giving him that look again, fond and long-suffering. “Valera. It’s okay. You don’t need to panic. I’ve known since we got here.”
Valery swallowed. “Anya - ” he started.
And then she was leaning across the distance between them, and Valery’s words were cut off by lips pressed against his own, and he thought, Oh.
He didn’t know what he was doing, acting on pure instinct for a moment, leaning into her but not quite daring to touch her, even as her hands came up to cup his head. His heart was singing with happiness before he could even start to think through the implications.
When they parted, she ran her fingers through his hair, and Valery tilted his head, still confused but drifting on a cloud of endorphins.
“I’ve always wondered,” she said, “If your hair was as soft as it looks. Kostya said it was. He was right.”
When they got home that evening, after all of the dishes had been done and the kids had been put to bed, Valery stepped into their bedroom, and saw Shenkov and Anna curled up together on the bed, kissing. He hesitated, and they broke the kiss, both of them staring up at him.
“Kostya - ” Valery started. “Anya - I - ”
“Oh, come and lie down with us already,” Shenkov said, smiling. “I’ve been waiting all year to have you both to myself.”
And then it was all right, and it seemed very natural for Valery to cross the metre between the doorway and the bed, and lie down next to Shenkov, with Anna on his other side. Shenkov looped an arm around him, and pulled him close until his head was resting on Shenkov’s chest. Anna reached out and ran her fingers through his hair again. Valery shut his eyes, thinking that if he died right now, he’d die happy.
“I’m so lucky,” Shenkov said, softly. “To have the both of you.”
Valery thought, I’m the lucky one. Not them. I never did anything to deserve this. But he didn’t say anything - just listened to the steady rhythm of Shenkov’s pulse and let Anna stroke his hair.