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The letter sits unopened on the table for three days before he finally has the courage to open it.
There's no question whom it's from, despite the hurried curves Valery's handwriting is neat and familiar; the true question is how is this letter here in the first place.
After the trial and their forced separation, there's been no real way to stay connected, all means of contact (letters, phonecalls, the grapevine) snubbed, nibbed right by the bud before there was a way to know if it worked. It's been a year already, and the agents he's been assigned to are greeted by name. They do not care.
So how can this letter be here? Through a mutual friend, perhaps? But the only one who would be coaxed into such risk is Ulana, and the last he heard she defected to Germany, or Belgium, and is now unreachable behind the other side of the Iron Curtain. Whatever amount of life she has left, Boris hopes it'll be peaceful and merciful, void of the pain that's familiar in his own chest, in his lungs. It is wishful thinking, she was exposed almost as severely as they were, but maybe the time she spent running between Chernobyl and Moscow was enough to grant her at least a few extra years.
Him and Valery, though... They became dead men walking the second that damned helicopter touched spoiled land. He wishes he could talk to Valery, to ask him the questions eating him alive. Had known back then that what Valery said was true and not just alarmist bogus of an alarmist scientist, would've he accepted to overlook the situation? Would've he given away his life unknowingly, so effortlessly, for those to whom he amounts merely as an dispensable bureaucrat, had they in reality stopped for a second to consider the real horror of the situation?
It is a stupid question to mull over. He and Valery did not always share the same worldview, but on this they agreed on; duty comes first, before everything else. Duty for the Party, for the country, for its people. Those alive and dead, for those who sacrificed themselves for the greater good not truly understand the magnitude of their sacrifice and how immensely lot of lives they saved doing so.
Five years, Valery had estimated. Five years until world continues turning without them, their replacements already named and getting comfortable in a new chair. It has been two years and four days since Chernobyl, since incompetence and cheapskating ruined good soil so far into the future there was no true way to fathom it (Not in our lifetimes, the echo whispers). If Valery's estimation held true, and Boris had no reason to believe otherwise, he's just around halfway through the time when he still has his wits left and reason exists. What he's seen and heard of those who beared the worst of the radiation is enough – he has no mind to let his body literally rot away in an empty hospital room behind plastic curtains, unsure of everything else except the intense pain of skin dripping away, agony as his solitary companion.
No.
He will skip it altogether, the second his mind begins to deteriorate. He will go by his own hand, in dignity, if death has no mind to be merciful. Until now, there was no honor in suicide, but Valera had honor, and if Valera accepted it as his way of dying, so would Boris as well; it would be another link of mutuality between tying them tighter together. All he hopes is that it doesn't hurt for long; that much he is owned at least.
Oh damned be all of it! If only he could talk to Valery, his Valera, and share these thoughts with him. Valera would talk sense into him, would laugh at his ridiculous fear of pain yet tenderly call it humane afterwards, would light a cigarette and blow the smoke on Boris' face only to kiss the taste from his skin and lips with a devious smirk.
Valera should be here. They should be sharing this slow death together, withering away together. Instead Boris is utterly, completely, alone, and for the first time in his life eager to hurry up the rest.
They hadn't had allowed him to attend the funeral either, extending the exile beyond grave only out of spite. It is nothing but egoistical blustering stemming from the need to remind him who holds the strings to his life – a reminder Boris does not need. He is a party man after all.
It is not hard to find out where they buried Valera, there are still friends in Kremlin, so the day after the small funeral (three people, the napkin had said, in addition to the officiator a workmate from the Institute and the neighbour who had found him) Boris spends the lunch break roaming the paths of Novodevichy cemetery until he finds the right headstone, and the evening driving in paranoia to another city to call Valera's number from a random phone booth to hear the familiar voice in the voicemail. It is the last piece of Valera he has left, a piece even the KGB can't rip away from him, so he calls again and again and again and again and again until all he has left are pockets light of coins and heart aching in a way even radiation couldn't eat away.
Valera should be here – with him, in his stead, however possible as long as he was here, in Boris' kitchen on a rainy Saturday afternoon with the sounds of the city bursting through the thin walls.
But Valera is not here and the forced distance between them can't now ever be bridged over, so Boris readies a cup of tea, then another, sets the other on the empty place at the table next to him. He sits down and begins reading a dead man's letter that should not exist, and hopes he doesn't have enough time to forget what his voice sounds like.