Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

We’re leaving SNIP!

We’re on the train, a great big, steaming green locomotive!

‘No you don’t, my beauty! You sit right here and don’t budge a centimetre,’ says Aunty Nadya, grabbing Masha’s shirt to stop her climbing up to the top bunk. She’s taking us to the school in Novocherkassk to settle us in. ‘I’ll go and get our bags from the corridor.’

‘C’mon, you, quick,’ says Masha, as soon as Aunty Nadya’s squeezed out of the door, and she starts climbing the ladder to the top bunk. But the train starts off with a massive jolt, throwing me backwards, and when Aunty Nadya comes back in she finds Masha holding on to the top rung and me swinging around upside down, trying to catch on to something.

‘Well, this is a fine start! Almost killed yourselves before we leave the station.’ She grabs me and shoves us crossly into the bottom bunk.

‘I didn’t wave goodbye to Stepan Yakovlich!’ shouts Masha, pressing her nose to the window. ‘Where is he? I want to wave goodbye!’

‘He’s long gone. You should have thanked him for giving you that piggyback along the station.’

‘That was so healthy! No one noticed us at all,’ I say, pressing my nose to the window too. ‘I want a piggyback all my life through, then we can see the whole world.’

‘Let’s just get to Novocherkassk in one piece first, shall we…’ She looks like she’s grumpy as she packs our bags away. But she’s not. She’s excited too, I can tell.

We wave at everyone on the platform, but no one waves back. They’re all too busy. Then we’re out of the Yaroslavsky Station and going past rows and rows of housing blocks with wildflowers springing up everywhere, and then, a bit further along, there’s factories with red banners shouting Forward to More Feats of Labour! Or: Unity and Strength of Labour Towards Communism! I can’t even read them all, there’s so many and they’re going past so quickly. Then we’re outside Moscow for the first time ever, and there are all these little log cabins painted in different colours with cows in the yard, real live cows, and hens and ducks and wood piles and…

‘Look!’ shouts Masha. ‘A horse and cart! I’m going to drive a horse and cart and work on a collective farm when I graduate.’

‘You said ten minutes ago you were going to be a locomotive driver,’ sniffs Aunty Nadya, unpacking pickled cucumbers and dried fish from some newspaper. I don’t say anything, but I still want to be a doctor.

‘I am!’ shouts Masha. ‘I’m going to be both. I’m going to keep changing jobs all over the place.’

I look back out at Russia. I thought it would be more like the mural in the Room of Relaxation with fields of corn and mountains and lakes and combine harvesters and peasants in headscarves in the fields, but it’s all flat as anything and it’s just grass. And most of the time, there’s trees along the tracks, so you can’t see behind them anyway. Every time we stop at a little station we wave like mad out of the window at the fat women selling boiled potatoes or apples or salted lard from metal buckets, but they don’t wave back either. They’re only interested in trying to sell stuff. Me and Masha play a game to see who can see the bust of Lenin at the station first. Ten points for Lenin and one hundred for Stalin and five points for a painting or mosaic of Brezhnev.

When it gets to night time, Aunty Nadya puts us to bed. Masha gets to have her head at the window end and I’m at the foot of the bed. Aunty Nadya snores in the bunk above, even louder than the train going klyak-brr-klyak along the tracks, rocking us like babies. I love trains. I could stay on one forever.

Next morning we’re coming up to our station. It’s August so it’s hot and sunny and we’re both sweating buckets. Aunty Nadya told us that Anokhin was Categorically Against us being taken away from Moscow because he said we’d die in two minutes in the sub-tropical climate. But Soldatyenko, the Deputy Minister, is more important even than him. And Soldatyenko didn’t want us in Moscow any more. I don’t think he cares if we die or not. Masha was pleased as anything that we’re so important that a Deputy Minister knows about us, but I’m not sure I was…

‘Here we are then, this is our stop. All ready?’ Aunty Nadya’s got everything packed neatly by the sliding door to our cabin. ‘Hair combed? Faces washed? Yes, yes, well let’s wait ’til everyone’s off and then we’ll hop off last. We’re being met by a driver from the school.’

The station’s packed solid with people. So solid you can’t even see the platform. The platform looks like it’s alive with people or something, not like any of the other ones we passed. There’s even children up in all the trees and standing on the walls.

‘ Chort! ’ Aunty Nadya’s looking all black. ‘That’s really too bad. It really is.’

And then I realize with a bump, which comes just the same time as the train stops, that they’ve all come to see us. I try to get down under the little table but Masha won’t let me, although she realizes too. Aunty Nadya’s got all our bags in her hands now and is red in the face and her eyes are bulging; she’s saying over and over ‘Who can have told them? It really is too bad…’ She goes out with the bags into the corridor. In a moment she’s back.

‘The platform’s not long enough, we’ll have to jump out on to the rails.’

‘N-no, no, no!’ I hold on to the table leg.

‘You must, Dasha, you must!’ She pulls us so hard my slippery hand lets go of the table leg and then she pulls us along the corridor to the open door. The crowds are down on the rails as well as the platform, and everyone’s shouting at the passengers: Where’s the Girl with Two Heads? Aunty Nadya pushes us out of the doorway, but we’re both clinging on to either side of it. ‘Look! Here’s the railway guard,’ she says. ‘Quick! Jump down and he’ll catch you.’ I look down. He’s in a green uniform with red stripes, shoving everyone aside and holding his arms up.

‘Jump!’ he says. ‘Jump!’

It’s miles down and they’ve seen us now, so there’s all this shouting and mad pushing. I can’t do it, I can’t.

‘You must jump!’ It’s Aunty Nadya behind us, trying to pull our fingers off the door. ‘If you don’t we’ll end up in Rostov – you must!’

I close my eyes and we both let go at the same time and jump. His cap’s knocked off as he staggers back but he grips us hard, and starts pushing through everyone on the platform. I’ve got my head in his collar and my eyes squeezed tight shut still, and everyone’s battering against me, and I can hear Aunty Nadya shouting: ‘Comrades! Comrades! Please! Please! Let them through!’ And the crowd shouting: ‘There it is! Look! Look!’ Then we’re out of the station and a car door opens and we’re thrown in the back. Aunty Nadya puts her coat over us, slams the door on everyone and we drive away.

‘Well, I do apologize, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, I do regret it, we did swear the staff to secrecy, but you know how gossip flies in these small provincial towns… News like that, well, it’s like trying to draw water in a sieve.’

We’re sitting in the corner on a narrow, metal-framed bed in our dorm. It’s empty because the kids are all out somewhere, but I can’t hear them and we didn’t see them when we came through the big double gates into the courtyard. The head teacher, Vera Stepanovna, told us they were out singing in the choir or something, when she brought us up the wooden staircase. She’s standing with Aunty Nadya, who’s still shaking her head.