Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Disgraceful! Disgraceful!’ Svetlana Petrovna’s all red in the face and standing at the front supporting herself on the driver’s chair. ‘How dare you, Masha! How dare you humiliate us, speaking in that language to townspeople! It’s disgraceful. Pozor! It’s humiliating. You will be punished for this, I can assure you.’ Masha has her hands balled into fists and just sort of stares back at her angrily. But she doesn’t talk back. You don’t talk back to Authority.

‘Aaakh, girls, girls! What am I to do with you? What am I to do?’

Vera Stepanovna, the head teacher, has called us into her office, and we’re standing on this red rug with lots of whirly patterns on it, while she’s pacing up and down in front of us.

‘But, Vera Stepanovna,’ says Masha, ‘they said we should be killed and not go upsetting people. I couldn’t just stand there—’

‘ Molchee! ’ She comes to a stop with all her pacing, right in front of us. ‘Do you really not understand by now? It is your duty to be patient with those who are traumatized by your appearance. To understand and forgive. It is your duty, Masha, to behave with dignity, and not dishonour our school with your vulgar, unforgivable outbursts.’ Masha looks sulky.

I keep looking down at the whirls on the rug. That’s exactly what Lydia Mikhailovna said to us that time after we went into the grounds and got shouted at by the passers-by. She said we should try and understand them, but I just can’t do it. Not yet.

Then I remember Aunty Nadya telling me once to remember that if there’s just one person who loves you for who you are, it doesn’t matter if a hundred thousand people hate you for what you look like. And Slava said I was his best friend.

‘Remember the words of the great novelist Nikolai Ostrovsky, crippled and deformed like you…’ Vera Stepanovna’s still going on at us. But we’re not crippled. Just deformed. She steps back, looking beyond our heads, up at the portrait of Brezhnev all shiny with his rows and rows of medals. ‘“Man’s dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years…”’ We’ve heard all this a million times before. ‘“… to so live that, on dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength was given to the finest cause in all the world – the fight for the Liberation of Mankind!”’

She looks back at us, and I can see she doesn’t think we’re very hot on Mankind at the moment, so she goes back to looking sad and disappointed in us.

‘I will have to punish you, of course.’ She starts up with her pacing again. I hate being punished. They strip us to our vest and pants and make us sit on a chair in the corner of class facing the wall. I hate that Slava can see me like that. He never gets punished because he’s not naughty. But then I’m not naughty either. It’s Masha who’s naughty. And sitting in your underwear like that makes you feel so sad, I just want to crawl into a crack in the wall. And they make us sit there for hours and hours. ‘Yes, you will have detention every day all next week for an hour after class, and write one hundred times on the blackboard I will accept that my deformity traumatizes others. Accept and understand. I will remember my dignity. ’

Lines. That’s a relief. Even though I know who’s going to be doing all the writing on the blackboard as punishment for swearing at the Healthies. And it’s not Masha.

Olessya comes over to our bed that evening. Masha’s playing Durak with Little Lyuda, slapping cards down and shouting, so she doesn’t much notice her.

No one really talks about what happened at the zoo. What’s there to talk about? But Olessya’s heard about it.

‘Don’t be upset by those idiots, Dasha,’ she says quietly. ‘Being a Defective doesn’t make you worse than them; it makes you better, because you have to work twice as hard to succeed in life. And you have to be ten times as strong as them to put up with their prejudice.’

I can’t even look at her. I just keep bunching our blanket up in my hands while Masha slaps down cards.

‘You know what I think?’ She touches my arm. ‘What I always tell myself?’ I do look up at her then. ‘Defects are given to ordinary people to make them extraordinary. That’s us. You and me.’

I nod, but deep down all I want to be is ordinary without defects. Like everyone else. I don’t feel extraordinary in any way at all. I just can’t think the way Olessya does. Or Masha.

‘ Ei! What’re you two mice whispering about?’ says Masha.

‘I’m just telling Dasha how you cheat,’ says Olessya with a laugh. ‘Look, you’ve got one up your sleeve…’ and she goes to tickle her under her arm. Masha bats her off but we all laugh then. Olessya’s like Slava. Olessya knows how to deal with my Masha, so she can stay friends with me.

‘I hate Maths,’ says Masha as I’m washing our nappy in the morning. ‘First lesson too. Makes you want to puke.’

‘I like it. Valentina Alexandrovna’s really good at explaining the hard bits. I’ll help you.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘What?’ I stop washing and stare at her. ‘We’ve got to go. Zinaida won’t give us any more sick notes.’

She’s leaning against the wall, balancing us. ‘I’m going to bunk off, that’s what. The sun’s out.’

‘The sun’s always out. And you can’t, Mash, we’ll miss the next stage in algebra. I can’t do that. I’ll never catch up…’

‘All right then. I’ll get the whole class to bunk off.’

‘Whaat?! No, no. They won’t go! No one will go, Masha. That’s crazy.’

Ten minutes later we walk into class. Valentina Alexandrovna’s not in yet.

‘Right, everyone out,’ says Masha, clapping her hands to get attention. ‘Class Leader Maria Krivoshlyapova,’ she points at herself, ‘is giving you an order. Everyone out. This is officially the last sunny day of autumn, and we need our vitamin D.’

Everyone just stares at her, so she starts pulling them off their chairs. ‘C’mon, c’mon, it’s a beautiful morning, follow me, quick, quick!’ I look across at Slava but he’s smiling.

‘OK. We’ve got to do what the Class Leader tell us to, right?’ he says. Everyone starts giggling then, and like a whole flock of sheep, we rush out into the morning sun and over to the patch of grass behind the kitchens where the pear trees are. Masha starts picking them off the tree and tossing them at everyone.

‘Breakfast of fresh fruit, last pears of the season, eat up!’

It’s nyelzya to pick the fruit. Masha’s going crazy. But I eat one anyway because everyone else is. It doesn’t take long for Valentina Alexandrovna to find us.

‘And what exactly is the meaning of this?’ she says, standing there in her sharp high heels and knee-length skirt. I didn’t want her to be upset, or get into trouble, but she looks more surprised than angry.

‘It wasn’t my fault, Valentina Alexandrovna,’ pipes up Masha in this high, little girl voice she has when she’s getting round someone. ‘They all wanted to go out and I couldn’t stop them, I tried… I tried, I did… as Class Leader I really tried…’

‘A very likely story.’

‘Besides,’ goes on Masha, ‘Ostrovsky says we must live life so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years…’

‘I believe that quote lies within the context of fighting for the liberation of Mankind. Lying in the sun stuffing yourselves with forbidden pears hardly constitutes that.’ We all keep staring up at her, not knowing if she’s going to report us or punish us, but after a while she says a bit stuffily: ‘Well, since you’re here, I don’t see why we can’t have one lesson outside without our books.’ And she kicks her heels off, which are sinking into the grass, and sits down on a log. ‘But on the condition that this little trespass against authority is never to be repeated.’ We all nod like mad. She’s the best teacher ever. She really is. And Masha’s the best sister ever. Most of the time.