Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Well, girls, this is a momentous day for you.’

We’ve been called into Vera Stepanovna’s office again and we’re standing on the red rug. But she’s not angry with us for once. She’s all puffed up and proud.

She comes round to the front of her desk. ‘I have the pleasure of announcing that you are now officially citizens of the Soviet Union.’ She picks up a shiny red passport, and hands it across to us. Masha takes it, all excited. It says on the front in thick gold letters Citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She opens it quickly and flicks through.

‘This is Dasha’s,’ she says, giving it to me. ‘Where’s mine?’ She holds out her hand.

‘There is only one passport.’

‘But where’s mine?’ She’s still holding out her hand.

‘I told you, Masha. There is only one. You have both been issued with one passport.’

‘But there’s two of us.’

‘Yes. I know that. But you are considered to be one citizen in the eyes of the State. And in a way… you are… aren’t you… I mean… you have one body.’ She’s not looking at us. She’s looking up at Brezhnev again.

‘No. We have one body but we’re two persons.’

‘People, not persons. And that’s enough of that, Masha. The State has made a decision.’ Masha takes the passport back from me, and looks through it again, not saying anything, but I can feel her getting all tense, while Vera Stepanovna gives us this speech on our duties as citizens and the great honour of being a part of the movement towards Communism spreading across the world like wildfire. I actually think she’s going to get us to sing the Soviet anthem or something, but she finally winds down and goes back behind her desk and sits down. Masha’s still staring at the passport and I’m still looking down at the whirls on the rug, but I can feel her all balled up inside.

‘You may go,’ says Vera Stepanovna, and picks up a pen.

We leave her office and walk out into the courtyard. We don’t say anything at all for a bit, then Masha suddenly spits on the passport. ‘ Foo! What the fuck? Why do you get the passport? Like I don’t exist or something! Like I’m just a bit of you?’

She thrusts it into my hands and I stare at it, thinking, are we just an it too? That’s what people on the Outside call us – it – not them. And now the State has confirmed, officially, that we’re only one person. ‘But, Masha, we’re not… are we?’ I’m starting to cry, I wish I wouldn’t, but it just comes over me. ‘Vera Stepanovna thinks we are too… she said so, she said we were—’

‘Stop bleating! Course we’re not! We’ll go to Valentina Alexandrovna.’

‘This is outrageous,’ says Valentina Alexandrovna, turning the passport over and over in her hand like it’s going to bite her or something. ‘Insulting! Now please stop sobbing, Dasha, it’s a bureaucratic mistake. It happens. I shall call your Aunty Nadya and she’ll sort it out, you’ll see. She’ll sort it all out for you and get things straight. It’s a mistake. I’ll call her right now.’

She picks up the phone and after a bit we can hear Aunty Nadya on the other end of the phone shouting down the line. ‘Scandalous! Are they to get one wage? Will they give them one plate to eat off? One ration book? Put it in the post to me immediately and I shall deal with it! One person indeed! Pozor! ’

Three months later and we’re down in the cobbler’s cellar, with Olessya, Big Boris and Slava. It’s a Sunday so the school cobbler, Vyacheslav Tikhonovich, isn’t normally around, but today he’s lying in a corner, dead drunk, with an empty vodka bottle by his head.

Aunty Nadya brought Masha her own passport last week.

‘See? I’ve got one too now!’ Masha’s waving her passport around like a flag. ‘I’m a person too now, see? It’s a miracle! Maria Krivoshlyapova – welcome to the world!’

Slava’s got himself sitting right next to me. I can feel the heat coming through from him. People say he looks just like me with his big brown eyes and dark hair. They say he looks more like me than Masha does even. When I’m right next to him like we are now, I start trembling, because I want him to kiss me so much. It’s stupid, but I can’t stop it, I want to just hold him as tight as anything, and never let go. If Masha wasn’t here, we’d do nothing in the whole world but touch and hold each other, I swear.

Normally I’d feel a bit lonely when Aunty Nadya leaves, but with Slava around I don’t feel lonely at all. She stayed for a week in the lodgings in town and visited us every day. It really was a miracle, getting that passport.

To start off with, she queued for three days at the City Passport Office, and when she finally got to see the official, he didn’t even look up from his desk. He just told her we only have one birth certificate, so even if we had ten heads, we’d still be one person. That’s exactly what he said. Ten heads. Then she got an appointment with Anokhin, to see if he could do anything to help, but he just told her what Maternity Hospital we’d been born in, and said she should check the files to see if there was another birth certificate for us. She went off to the hospital then, but there wasn’t. It seems when we were born they issued us with just the one. I don’t know who named us Masha and Dasha, perhaps it was our mother? I don’t think Aunty Nadya asked about who our parents were when she was there – she didn’t say anything to us about them at any rate. And we didn’t ask. We’ve learnt not to ask questions. We just get told off and they never get answered anyway.

The Maternity Hospital Administration said they couldn’t issue another certificate, so Aunty Nadya went back to Anokhin to ask him to write a formal letter saying we were two people for the Maternity Hospital. But he just told her not to bother him any more with it, so she went to Professor Dolyetsky instead, who’s known us since we were babies apparently. He was the one who was supposed to amputate our leg. He agreed to write the letter and got some other important professors to sign it. The letter explained that since we had two mouths and two digestive systems we needed to be provided for by the State as two people, which meant two passports. ‘Forgot about the two brains, hearts and souls, didn’t they,’ Masha had sniffed when Aunty Nadya told us.

So then she took the letter to the Maternity Hospital Administration saying they needed to send the application to the State Registry office for a certificate because Masha was a person too, but they refused. She didn’t give up though. She kept fighting for us. She wrote to the Minister of Health, and he didn’t reply. Then she wrote to the Minister of Social Protection, and he didn’t either, so then she wrote to Anastas Mikoyan himself, explaining we were two girls who just happened, unfortunately, to be joined together, and by some miracle he wrote back on Kremlin stamped paper with one sentence, saying: Issue Maria and Daria Krivoshlyapova with two passports. And signed it himself.

‘Who’s Anastas Mikoyan?’ Masha had asked. But I knew. Everyone knows. Except Masha. He was Lenin’s comrade, then Stalin’s, then Khrushchev’s, and now he’s the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Or at least, he was. That’s almost as important as Brezhnev himself. We couldn’t believe our ears when she told us that Mikoyan knows about us and took the time to write that line. ‘Yes,’ Aunty Nadya told us proudly, ‘and when I took that letter to the Passport Office, they pretty much carried me right to the front of the queue over everyone’s heads! And that rude official, who hadn’t even looked up before, was turning somersaults to get the second passport issued as quickly as possible. He started grovelling and stammering as if I were a Presidium member myself! So you see, there is some justice in the world.’