Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘ Zdorovo! Zdorovo! Can we go again? Can we?’ shouts Masha as we come up the stairs and out of the exit into the sunlight and I can breathe again.

‘Certainly not, Masha. Your sister is scarcely alive with terror.’

‘Mwaah! She spoils everything, she does,’ Masha whines. And pinches me hard under the rug.

‘ Aaaaaarghh! ’ We’re both screaming our heads off because they’ve got us by the ankles and are dangling us over the windowsill, four floors up, just about to drop us.

‘See who’s Boss now, you little fuckers?’ It’s Boris. He’s back to have a new leg fitted and he wants revenge. They came up behind us. We didn’t see a thing. They’ll drop us, I know they will. We got dropped once before, and only survived because of the snow drifts. Now there’s only nettles. I can see them down there, I can, miles away. We’re going to die! My head’s all filling with blood, and I’m scrabbling at the wall, upside down.

‘Help! Help!’

‘Wrong. I’m the Boss. Bring them back up.’ I can hear a girl’s voice, but can’t see anything. Everything stops. ‘That’s if you don’t want your guts spilt on the floor like apple sauce,’ the voice goes on. Then slowly, we get pulled back up into the room and fall to a heap on the floor, all scraped and dazed. There’s a girl on a trolley with a great big knife. Its sharp point is touching Boris’s belly.

‘Crazy fucking witch,’ says Boris in a shaky voice.

‘Get out,’ she says in a low, threatening voice. ‘And don’t come back.’ They move away slowly. There’s four of them. We didn’t hear any of them coming up on us from behind. They grabbed us and threw us over the windowsill before we even knew what was happening. When they’ve gone, she sticks the knife back under her trolley into some sort of secret sheath. ‘So. Want to play draughts then?’ she asks.

‘All right,’ says Masha, getting up and pulling her pyjama top down. I’m just nodding madly and trying to stop my heart jumping out of my chest by pressing on it.

I’ve seen her around. She’s pretty, with the longest, thickest black eyelashes and the biggest brown eyes. Masha always said she looked like a cow, and probably just mooed, which is why she never talked to anyone, and so she hardly noticed her. But I did.

Her name’s Olessya. She was lent the draughts board by Galina Petrovna, the teacher.

‘You two can be the same turn,’ she says, once we’re back in the ward. ‘First you, then next time Dasha.’

‘Dasha doesn’t want to play,’ Masha says, leaning over the board and not looking up.

‘Well, I want her to,’ says Olessya simply. ‘OK?’ Masha glances up in surprise, then shrugs.

Khaa! I’m going to play! I’ve always just watched before. I hope Masha doesn’t make a wrong move that I’ve got to make up for!

‘You a Reject then?’ asks Masha, moving a black piece without really thinking.

‘Yeah. Actually, I’m a twin, like you two.’ She moves her orange counter. ‘My sister Marina’s blonde and blue-eyed. My dad said if we hadn’t been twins, he’d have killed the MosGas man, cos him and my mum are both dark-haired!’ We laugh.

I look and look at the board, and then take a deep breath and make a move. I hate that Masha’s got to make the next one for us.

‘We were born Healthy,’ says Olessya, looking at the board, ‘but Dad gave us his cold when we were five and we got polio. We had fevers for a week, but when we got better our legs had stopped working. Crippled, and that was that.’

She tips her head on one side, thinking, and then moves another counter.

‘Polio’s a bitch,’ says Masha. ‘SNIP’s filled with Polios.’ She looks back at the board. ‘You both get rejected then?’

‘Yeah. Never saw my parents again. We had a baby brother who was healthy so they had him to raise. I’ve got one eye that strays, so I got sent to an Uneducable place out of town and Marina stayed in Moscow in an Educable orphanage.’

‘Shit,’ says Masha. ‘Separated. That sucks.’

I carefully move my piece and look up at Olessya.

‘Are you g-getting schooling here, though?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. Been here five weeks and I can read and write and do maths now. Healthy! I’d stay here forever. You’re lucky. Good rations and nice staff.’

‘I know. We’re grateful. But we don’t get schooling because we’ve had our f-four years. They don’t do secondary here. It would be n-nice to have more lessons.’

‘Shame,’ says Olessya. ‘I’ve heard there’s a good boarding school for Defectives in the south of Russia somewhere. Galina Petrovna told me. She says I should get myself transferred there. Why don’t you go there?’

We both look at her like she’s crazy.

‘Go to live in a school?’ says Masha, lifting a counter from the board. ‘Oh yeah, why not? Might as well fly to the moon with Gagarin on his next trip while we’re at it!’ We both laugh. But Olessya doesn’t.

‘Everything’s possible,’ she says. ‘Everything. You just need to try.’

Olessya won at draughts because Masha kept making the wrong moves. I knew she would. I was so cross I actually felt like crying, but now we’re standing in the Room of Relaxation for the Young Pioneers ceremony, and it’s so exciting I’ve forgotten all about that and I’m nervous as anything. I wish we had the whole uniform and not just the red scarf to wear with our pyjamas. We’ve been wearing nothing but pyjamas indoors for eight years now and only get dressed if we’re being filmed by the Science Academy or go outside. But never mind that now, I’m going to be part of the Young Pioneers, and then the Young Communist organization – and then a Party member like Doctor Lydia Mikhailovna, Professor Boris Markovich and Doctor Anokhin… You have to be a member of the Party if you want to be a doctor, like I do. Aunty Nadya’s a physiotherapist. I wonder if you have to be a Party member for that? I don’t think so.

We’re a bit behind with joining up because you normally become a Pioneer when you’re ten, but never mind that either. We’ll catch up.

‘Attention!’ We all straighten up as Lydia Mikhailovna walks in to inspect us. She marches up and down the line like we’re proper soldiers on parade. There’s a great big mural all across the wall at the far end, showing Uncle Lenin patting a Young Pioneer on the shoulder. He’s a Healthy Pioneer (there aren’t any Defectives in the posters) and there are mountains, and ships in the sea, and peasants in fields of corn, and new factories with chimneys. There’s everything you could ever want to see out there in our beautiful Russia, and it’s always sunny. Aunty Nadya brought in a conch shell once and held it to my ear so I could hear the waves crashing as if they were right there, caught in the shell. I could really hear them.

‘One, two, three, march!’ Most of the kids are on trollies and can’t march, but we all get ourselves over to the Red Corner to where the big bust of Lenin is, and line up again.

The Komsorg, who’s come in from the local Young Communist Youth Organization, is looking sick and yellow. Aunty Nadya says it’s frightening for the Healthies from the Outside to see us kids when they’re not used to it. The Komsorg keeps looking at her watch as she goes through our oaths. There’s this loud patriotic music coming from the State Radio speaker on the wall, which reminds me of the time that engineer came in to mend our speaker on the wall in G Ward. He kept looking round at us from the top of his ladder, and was trembling so much that in the end he ran out, saying he couldn’t be expected to work under those conditions. I try to understand people, I really do, but I’ve never seen us so I can’t see what they can. I can only see Masha. And she’s pretty.