Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Well, his parents are alcoholics and they’ve just been deprived of their parental rights by the militia, which is the same, of course, as Rejection. So he could be sent to an orphanage.’

Masha sits up, interested.

‘But we can’t let that happen, of course, so we’ve decided…’ she gets up then and goes over to the window and looks out, then looks back at us, all red in the face ‘…we’ve decided to adopt him. Our little Vasinka.’

When she says that, I go all hot and then all cold and then hot again, I can feel it. I’ve hoped every day for eight years that she’d take us home, like she took Uncle Vasya home. I’d hoped she’d adopt us . All we State kids want, every minute of every day, is to be adopted into a family. But she’s not adopting us. She’s adopting a Healthy boy. And he’s not even her own flesh and blood, either. He’s Uncle Vasya’s flesh and blood. She’s adopting someone else. I feel that stupid hard ball of sadness, which is what makes me cry, pushing up from my chest to my throat. I won’t cry.

‘Prick,’ says Masha again, louder. And this time Aunty Nadya hears, but doesn’t say anything.

‘I know that you always wanted me to adopt you, girls.’ She comes back to the bed, sits down again and goes to pat my hand, all apologetic and still flushed in the face, but I take it away and rub my nose. I take a deep breath to force the ball back down. ‘I couldn’t, you see. It’s difficult to explain, but with all the red tape and bureaucracy and you being so unusual, and Anokhin and his research, you know… You need to be hidden away, not live in a normal flat to go wherever you please…’

‘Blood is thicker than water,’ says Masha, looking up at the ceiling and sniffing.

‘Now that’s not true. You know I never had children of my own…’

‘We know that, all right.’ Masha takes the shoelaces we were playing with and wraps them tight round her fingers like she’s strangling them.

‘It’s just… Little Vasya would be helpless without us… he hasn’t got a patron like Doctor Anokhin. So I’ll bring him in to visit then, shall I? You’ll be like his sisters now.’

Masha pulls the laces even tighter, and knots them viciously.

‘Yes,’ she hisses. ‘Bring him in. You just bring him on in to his big sisters.’

So that’s that.

When she’s gone and I’ve finished crying, we go outside to sit on the tail end of a lorry in the back yard.

‘Right. Fuck it. We’re out of here,’ says Masha.

‘How do you mean?’

‘We’ll go and ask Professor Popov to let us go to Olessya’s school in Novocherkassk.’

‘He’ll never let us.’

‘How do you know? You can’t eat honey ’til you’ve smoked out the bees.’

‘But we’ve already tried asking people, haven’t we? We’ve tried. Galina Petrovna just cried. And Aunty Nadya said over her dead body, and Lydia Mikhailovna told us never to speak of it again. We can’t go to Professor Popov… can we, Masha?’

‘Course we can. Haven’t smoked the last of the little buggers out yet, have we?’

‘Lydia Mikhailovna will kill us. So will Aunty Nadya.’

‘Fuck them. Let’s think about us. I’m not sitting around waiting for our yobinny pain-threshold week, even if you are. And how many more years of cabbage soup on Monday, fish soup on Tuesday and living life in pyjamas can we stick?’

‘Yes.’ I swing my leg, thinking about it, and she does too. So we sit there swinging our legs. ‘And if we don’t get a diploma,’ I say, after a bit, ‘I can’t be a doctor.’

The lorry driver walks up.

‘Want a lift to the meat factory, Mashdash?’

‘ Nyetooshki! You’d bring us back as sausages, Ivan Ivanovich!’ laughs Masha.

‘Don’t worry, no one would eat them – too tough!’ He laughs too and climbs into the cab.

We hop off and start weaving round the skips to the back door. ‘And if we don’t go to school, I can’t be a lorry driver going all over Siberia,’ says Masha. ‘We’ll make an appointment when he gets back. You can do the talking.’

Professor Popov sits down on the edge of his horse-hair sofa with us and gives us each a boiled sweet. I pop mine in straight away before Masha can take it. I suck on it slowly, wondering if his bulging eyes would come off with his glasses? I’ve never seen him without them.

‘Well, girls. This is an unexpected audience. To what do I owe the honour?’

I think he’s asking us why we’re here so I just start talking quickly.

‘We want to go to a p-proper school, B-Boris Markovich, so we can get a d-diploma and learn a profession and work to build C-Communism like everyone else.’

‘Well, well, well!’ He looks from me to Masha and then back again. ‘A noble desire, indeed. And whose idea was this, pray? Hmm?’ He looks at Masha, but she’s twiddling with the button on our pyjamas and looking up at the ceiling. ‘The problem with you two is that one can never take you aside, Dasha, to get to the truth… One never knows if young Masha here is the instigator and you simply the reluctant mouthpiece?’

I don’t know what he’s saying. He talks all complicated.

‘Umm… the truth?’ I say.

‘Yes. The truth. Do you really want to leave us, Dasha? Listen to me. Is that what you want?’ He leans right forward and looks straight into my eyes.

‘Oh yes! Yes! I want to get an education m-more than anything in the whole wide world! I want to g-go to school and be t-taught.’

‘Hmm… Well, in that case I shall call Konstantin Semyonovich, the Director, a good kind man whose own son is an invalid. I know him, as does Lydia Mikhailovna, personally.’

‘ Oooraaah! ’ Masha jumps up and down on the sofa, making Professor Popov bounce, and we all laugh like mad.

‘Well, let’s not count our piglets ’til they’re in the pot, but I think this is as good a time as any. As you know, we have another new General Secretary now and times might perhaps be changing after our little… ah… post-Stalin thaw.’ He looks out of the window across the room for ages and ages, and we’re just wondering if he’s forgotten us or has gone to sleep with his eyes open when he says: ‘As it happens, I was thinking of moving on myself now. I shall be stepping down. And the new Director here… well, suffice to say that he knows Soldatyenko, the Deputy Minister of Social Protection, in person and it seems that word is getting out around town about you two little bed-bugs. Yes. Word is getting out and the rumours are growing. The crowds around the perimeter fence here are as thick as ever, and yes, Comrade Soldatyenko is not a happy man and would be quite content to have you both disappear like a piece of fluff.’ He holds the palm of his hand out and blows on it. ‘Yes, and a Deputy Minister is more important, I’m afraid, than a Professor. Or even… someone with an international reputation like our friend Anokhin. Hmm.’

He gets up with a massive sigh and pours himself a small glass of cognac before flopping down in his own armchair. ‘Yes, girls, yes, I shall be going too. I’ve planted enough bushes in our grounds here, and now I shall plant them at my dacha instead. We’re beginning a new, and I hope, exciting, era of Socialism. An era of communal leadership, hope and change. We old guard can take our leave and hand over the banner to the new…’

Masha rolls her eyes. He always goes rambling on when he starts on the cognac. We half listen, but we’re so happy to be going to school with Olessya where there’s peaches and white bread and sunshine that we’re both bursting with laughter inside and keep catching each other’s eye and trying to stop giggling. Then Masha lets out a massive pookh of wind and we laugh out loud, all three of us together.