Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

I won’t think of that. This morning is the day of the end-of-term school trip. We have it every summer and we all love it. Last year we drove along the banks of the River Tuzlov, and watched the swans flying over the golden-domed churches. It was all like something out of a real Russian fairy tale. We always sit next to Slava. Everyone’s already on the bus when we go running up to it, because I had to wash our nappies, so we’re a bit late, and when we clamber on, we see he’s saved a seat at the back for us. He’s got himself on the right side of the bus, which means I’m the one pressed up against him. We sit down and wait for the bus to start. Everyone’s so excited, it’s like a real holiday.

‘ Nyet. ’ Mikhail Ivanovich, the driver, is standing at the front and pointing at us. ‘You can’t sit in one seat when there’s two of you.’ He only came to work here a few months ago, but he doesn’t like us. That’s what happens. Some people just like us, and some people just don’t. Masha says it’s their problem, not ours.

‘B-but we always sit on one s-seat.’

‘Not with me you don’t.’

Icy Valya’s at the front and she starts tittering into her friend’s shoulder. Then her friend starts tittering, and soon the whole little bus is laughing at us.

The driver smiles. ‘Right, anyone offering to give up their seat for these two beauties?’ He knows they won’t.

‘I will,’ says Slava, and starts to get off his seat, but I push him back down and Masha’s so angry she doesn’t even want to go any more. We stand up slowly, and walk back down the aisle of the bus, past everyone, all watching us, and get off.

When the bus has driven off, we walk straight to the empty Hall for Extra-Curricular Activities without saying a word. We go into the middle of it, hold each other’s arms and dance slowly round and round. Without a word, without music. We just dance.

‘There’s nothing to do here. Let’s go and sit with Valentina Alexandrovna,’ says Masha, throwing the blanket off our bed and climbing out. It’s strange seeing Little Lyuda’s bed next to ours, all empty now. And Olessya’s and Sunny Nina’s empty too. The others are back from the school trip and are all yapping at the other end of the dorm about what they saw, as if it’s the most amazing trip they’ve ever been on or something.

‘OK, Mash,’ I say. I like it when Valentina Alexandrovna tells us about her boyfriend (he’s called Slava too), who’s an engineer in the Locomotive Factory, and how they go out at weekends to his parents’ dacha, and play with their dog Tima, or walk down to Baba Kira who keeps a cow to drink the fresh milk. ‘ Foo! ’ Masha had said. ‘Milk straight from a cow’s tits!’ Valentina Alexandrovna had laughed at that, and said it was all warm and frothy.

We knock on her door. There’s no reply but we can see a light from a crack under the door and there’s a strange noise coming from inside.

‘Go on, open it,’ says Masha.

‘We can’t just barge in, I’ll knock again.’ There’s still no reply so Masha goes and opens the door a crack and tells me to poke my head around. She’s sitting at her desk with only the table lamp on, leaning over awkwardly with her head bent. I think she’s crying.

‘What is it?’ whispers Masha and pushes the door open some more so she can see too. Valentina Alexandrovna looks up then, and sees us.

‘Girls! Oh, girls!’

She says it like her heart’s breaking in two, so we take a step back into the shadows. It’s scary.

‘Come in, come in!’ She gets up then, and comes walking, well maybe more staggering really, over to us, with her arms open, and hugs us so tight she almost knocks us clean over. She smells strongly of sweet cherries. She said Baba Kira made her own cherry liqueur infusion… is she drunk? She can’t be. Nice, educated, intelligent women don’t get drunk.

We all kind of stagger over together to her desk, because she’s still clinging on to us, then she sits down with a thump in our armchair and puts her hands over her face.

‘I saw them, girls, I went to visit…’ Her voice is muffled, but me and Masha can hear anything when we want to. ‘I wanted to see if they needed anything. The guard wouldn’t let me through the gates. He said I needed a special pass from the Ministry of Social Protection. It took me three weeks to get it and by then I was too late… too late…’ She starts crying again. She just can’t stop.

‘Too late for what?’ says Masha, getting up and shaking her by the shoulder. ‘Too late for what?’

‘Oh, girls, girls, it’s not a Home at all, it’s an Asylum for the Unwanted. The conditions there… like a Madhouse… the stench, metal beds crammed into small rooms, excrement, people lying on the floor, the elderly there starve to death, and the wailing, the wailing, it’s hell in there… the staff are little more than beasts… they beat them for nothing, I saw them, they don’t feed those who can’t feed themselves, so they’re skeletons… death is everywhere…’ She keeps sobbing, and talking, and then sobbing again. Her face is all blotchy and puffy.

‘Little Lyuda, our Little Lyuda, must have known somehow, or suspected. She took a bottle of insecticide with her from our storeroom… I found her alone in agony. It took her twenty-four hours to die, my Little Lyuda… Little Lyuda… the Director refused to have her hospitalized. He said she’d just keep on trying, so best to let her go first time. That’s what he said: “Let the little poppet go first time.”’

We don’t move, me and Masha. We can’t move. I feel dead with shock.

‘I got them to call her mother in Moscow, the one who adopted her before she had her accident. She flew down the next morning, she was weeping over her and pulling out her hair, saying: How could you punish me like this, Lyudochka? How could you punish me? And all Lyuda could say was: I didn’t want to live in a world without love. It’s not so terrible to die among strangers. That’s what she said. And her mother wept even more, and said she did love her, she said she’d always loved her, and had always missed her so much it broke her heart, which is why she cut off all contact. But it was too late to save her then. Oh, girls! Girls! What have we done?’ She looks up at us with her eyes all smudged and wild like she’s been possessed. ‘What have we done?’

Masha and I take a step back.

‘I had no idea… no idea…’ she goes on, babbling like she’s mad. ‘The other teachers here, they didn’t say, they don’t talk about it… they’ve never visited… Aaakh, Sunny Nina, pretty blonde little Nina, she hanged herself from the window latch with her belt. Boris has gone, he escaped somehow, but if they catch him – and they will – he’ll be sent to a prison for invalids… I had no idea… the other teachers suspect, but they don’t go and see for themselves because they only want what’s best for you, girls, they want to believe it’s all for the best… Are we wrong? Aaakh! Are we wrong?’

We take another step back, and then turn and just run like mad, out of the room. We run and run, our crutches clattering on the wooden floor, leaving the sound of her crying behind. We run out into the courtyard and around the walls of the courtyard, until we get to the closed gate. And then there’s nowhere else to run, so we climb down to the cobbler’s cellar, and sit down with a thump on the floor among the sawdust and leather cut-offs, panting. I look at Masha. Her eyes are glassy, like she’s not seeing anything. And then I start crying, like I’ll never stop, bent over forward with my head in the sawdust. While Masha just sits very still and stares at the wall.