Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

Vyacheslav Tikhonovich groans and turns over, and we look at him to see if he’s going to wake up. But he doesn’t. He just starts snoring really loudly. Masha throws a few tacks at him.

‘So anyway,’ says Slava eventually, ‘I thought you’d need a pardon from Brezhnev to save you last week, Mash, after you refused to answer the question about how Nikolai Ostrovsky is your ideal.’

‘Well, why should I write a whole exam essay about why he’s my ideal, when he’s not? We’re all supposed to love him to bits because he wrote that stupid novel and was crippled in the War.’ I bite my lip. I didn’t think it was that stupid; in fact I quite liked How the Steel Was Tempered . It was… I don’t know, so passionate somehow. I wonder if Slava liked it. ‘He just married that young fool of his,’ Masha goes on, ‘and bullied her into doing everything for him. She had no life; she was his slave. It’s plain selfishness to shackle someone to you like that… And he was given his big apartment in Moscow, and his villa in Sochi, and juicy sturgeon steaks to eat every day. Just for writing about how great everything was.’

‘It’s not all great, though, is it…’ says Slava slowly. His hair falls over one eye. Olessya looks nervously up the steep wooden steps leading to the courtyard. He shouldn’t be saying stuff like that. ‘Well, Masha’s right, isn’t she?’ he goes on quietly. ‘Why are we all told to think Ostrovsky’s our ideal? Why don’t we have a choice? Why do we have to listen to the Red Army Choir night and day,’ he points at the little transistor radio he carries around everywhere, which is playing Soviet marching music, ‘when there’s this English group called the Beatles that everyone else in the world’s listening to?’ He’s whispering now and we all lean in closer. ‘Why can’t we listen to the Beatles? Why not? And Pravda is packed full of propaganda about achievements and goals and quotas and heroes and honesty and sobriety and plentiful food. But you can’t leave a kopeck lying around for two seconds without it getting pinched. And half the nation seems to be drunk.’ He waves at Vyacheslav Tikhonovich. ‘You can see them all collapsed in the street outside our dorm. And my mum queues for eight hours for toilet paper or sugar. You can’t buy meat or butter or milk anywhere on the Outside – you could queue a lifetime and not get that.’ Olessya glances up the stairs again. If Icy Valya is hiding up there and listening… ‘And you can’t find fault with anything. You can only agree that we live in the Best of all Possible Worlds.’

‘Unless you’re Masha,’ says Big Boris.

‘Yeah, but the only reason she wasn’t put on trial in the Young Communist court was because Valentina Alexandrovna rescued her.’ He looks at me and smiles. As soon as Masha said that she wasn’t going to write the essay, Valentina Alexandrovna swooped in without batting an eyelid and said she’d actually prepared two questions for the two of us because Masha ‘has a tendency’ to copy from me. No one, not even Valya, dared say anything.

‘What about us then?’ says Big Boris in a low voice. ‘The newspapers don’t say anything about criminals and drunks and dissenters and shortages, because that’s all bad stuff, and can’t be talked about. But they don’t say anything about Defectives either. Us lot. What does that make us? Bad stuff too?’

‘No, no, not at all!’ I sit up straight. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. No! We’re the p-p-privileged ones, we are. We get milk and b-butter and b-bread. Well, sometimes we do. We get an education. The State is Systematically P-Perfecting Support for us all the time. Remember the b-banner. We should be G-Grateful. Don’t you understand?’ I look round at them pleadingly. I want them to stop talking about things I don’t want to hear. ‘In Amerika cripples have to b-beg on the street or humiliate themselves by dancing in side-shows for kopecks,’ I go on. ‘But here in the Soviet Union, we’re cared for by defectologists.’ Masha nods. ‘We have nice teachers, and p-people who cook for us and do our laundry and, and… mend our shoes for us,’ I say, pointing at Vyacheslav Tikhonovich. ‘And we have extra-curricular activities like d-dancing and sewing and orchestra and choir.’ (Although we don’t do any of them because Masha doesn’t want to.) ‘The State looks after us, like p-parents. We’re special. We are. Maybe there are some things they don’t tell us, but it’s for our own good.’ Slava’s looking at me with his dark eyes, but I can’t see what he’s thinking.

‘That’s right.’ Masha’s nodding but the others aren’t. ‘The less you know, the sounder you sleep.’

Olessya shakes her head. ‘I’m not so sure, girls. I think I’d sleep a lot sounder if I knew the truth.’

We always have this party on New Year’s Eve in school. It’s held in the Hall for Extra-Curricular Activities, and the nannies lay a long table of food, which is the best ever food we have all year. They make potato salads with salted cucumber and peas, and we have salted herring, and slabs of lard with white bread. There’s grated carrot and raisin salad, grated beetroot salad, and even sliced tongue, if we’re lucky. We’re not allowed alcohol, but Slava’s smuggling in some vodka for him and me. We’re going to get really, really drunk, and then we’re going to Do It for the first time ever. We haven’t talked about it, of course; we can’t do that because of Masha. But we both know. We’ve said it with our eyes. I don’t care if I die. But we won’t. Olessya says Zinaida was only trying to stop us doing it to protect herself. She says Zinaida doesn’t know a heart from a brain.

‘Right, I’m going,’ says Masha. We’re lying on our bed under the duvet because the heating’s off, and it’s minus twenty outside, and piled sky-high with snow. We’ve got a heater, but all the girls are crowded around it at the other end of the dorm. They’re not talking to us. Or rather not talking to Masha, so that means me too.

She gets upset with people, and when she does, she bears a grudge forever. Her big mistake was making an enemy of Icy Valya. She got it into her head that Valya had stolen our food parcel from Aunty Nadya about six months ago. I don’t know if she did steal it, but Masha took her to our School Komsomol Court to be put on trial. Valya wasn’t found guilty because there wasn’t any proof, but now she’s turned everyone against Masha. If I’m honest, I think they were turning anyway because the others don’t like the way she beats me up at night sometimes. I’m used to it and I understand why she does – it’s because she can’t stand me always being there, and being so weak, not strong like her. It’s upsetting for her. But the kids don’t like her for it. Olessya and Little Lyuda tried to stop her to start with, but that made her even angrier. They both still talk to us, but they’re the only ones now. They’re sitting snuggled up together under the duvet in Olessya’s bed, reading a book.

Masha gets out of our bed.

‘I’m not lying here watching those yobinny idiots tarting up,’ she says loudly. The girls have managed to get some lipstick and mascara from somewhere and they’re making each other up, and giggling. I’d love to wear lipstick and mascara too, but Masha’s not into anything like that. Not at all. She doesn’t care what boys think. We’re not even wearing our nice blouses. Just our plain flannel shirts and trousers. ‘Come on, we’ll go to the Hall and wait. Get our coats.’

I don’t care. Not tonight. Slava’s got vodka. His brother dropped it off last week, and he’s been keeping it at the bottom of the woodpile. Masha’s fed up with everything so she wants to get blind drunk. We haven’t talked about me and Slava, but I think she knows because my heart’s been racing like a mad thing all day.