Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Go’way then, Dasha,’ he says. ‘Just get out of my life.’ Then he tips it up, drinks it to the dregs, and the last thing I hear as we go up the steps is it smashing against the wall.

We go back to bed. Masha’s banging her crutch around, trying to break everything. She realizes we’ve lost our last friend here in the school and she blames me. I lie back. The room’s going round and round but I can hear her, the other end of the bed, still raging.

‘I’m not staying in this fucking place with these blyadi. I’m gonna call Aunty Nadya and she’ll come as soon as she can and take us back to Moscow. I’m out of here. I’m leaving this shit-hole and all the arseholes in it. We’ll go back to live in SNIP, you can say goodbye to your yobinny sprat of a lover. You can say goodbye, that’s what you can do.’

But I already have, or rather he has. And now I know what I’m going to do. I knew the moment he told me in that cold voice to get out of his life. I knew as we were falling all over the courtyard and up the stairs to our dorm. I know now, clear as a bell what to do.

It’s just a question of how.

The next morning is sunny. Good. We can put the washing out on the line, standing on the upturned washing basket. I’ve got it all worked out. I’m going to hang myself. Just like Sunny Nina did. Well not just like her. Not from a window latch with a belt. I’m going to do it with the washing line, which we knot around a branch of the pear tree. Slava told me once that one of the other girls did it, before we came: she hung herself from the pear tree. No one knows why. She came out at night with a rope but I can’t do it at night, because Masha mustn’t suspect anything.

‘Not eating?’ she points at my bowl of buckwheat porridge.

‘No. Not hungry. You eat it.’

She does, without asking any more questions, and then we go out into the courtyard. Slava’s sitting there under the pear tree with Anyootka. Their dark heads are bent together over a book of poetry, and as we walk past, I see that it’s Pasternak. That should hurt, but strangely it doesn’t matter. It’s as if I’m so sad I couldn’t get any sadder. I’m just looking forward to stopping it all by dying. I’m looking forward to feeling nothing, ever again. He doesn’t look up at us. Good. That makes it easier. We walk to the laundry room. It’s our turn on the rota. They like to teach us how to cook and clean in school so we can be independent.

‘We’re well rid of the little rat,’ says Masha. ‘Sitting there with his next morsel, on the grass. See how much he cared for you?’ She snaps her fingers in my face. ‘This is how much. We’ll find a job in SNIP, that’s what we’ll do. In Moscow. We’re special, we are. Not like these morons. We’ll start again.’ She looks across at me, and I nod, feeling dead already.

Maybe Masha will be all right when I kill myself. It’s only my neck that will break. They’ll probably just amputate me, like they did our leg. They’ll give her another prosthetic leg in SNIP instead of mine, that’s what they’ll do. And if she isn’t all right… well I don’t care. I won’t know. I hate her.

It was quick, apparently. That’s what Slava said, when this girl hung herself. Snap. Like falling under a train. Or a bullet through the heart. It doesn’t hurt. I wouldn’t want it to hurt, like the poison with Little Lyuda, but if it did, I’d do it anyway. I didn’t choose Masha. I chose Slava. But I don’t want to hang myself right in front of him. I don’t hate him. Perhaps they’ll move away?

We walk to the laundry room. I pick up the wicker basket and throw the washing in. Then I pick up the washing line – it’s rough, so I know the knot won’t slip – and place it on the pile of washing. We walk back out into the sunshine. Everything seems to be in slow motion. It’s hard to balance with our crutches and the heavy basket full of wet washing, but we manage it. We manage everything, Masha and me.

I have to make a noose. She won’t notice because she doesn’t suspect and I’m so strangely calm that my heart isn’t even beating fast. Odd really, that we do everything in perfect physical harmony, and yet she doesn’t know I’m about to kill myself. The birds are singing fit to burst, and there’s the usual tinny music coming from Slava’s radio. Music for Anyootka now, instead of for me. We walk to the pear tree. The two of them are on the other side, with their heads still dipped together. They haven’t left. I’m sorry that they’ll have to see me die. We empty the washing on to a plastic sheet on the ground, and then turn the laundry basket over to stand on it. We can stand without crutches now – Aunty Nadya was right, it was all a question of balance. We got there in the end. Everything looks sharply in focus. I can see a tiny ladybird up there on the branch, as if it’s right in front of my nose. I throw the rope over the branch and tie a knot. Then I tie a noose. Then I put it over my head, lift my leg and kick the basket out from under us.

It didn’t work.

The knot didn’t hold and the noose slipped right off over my head. I’m an idiot, and I’m still here, standing outside Vera Stepanovna’s office waiting to be given what the kids here call ‘the suicide talk’. Turns out she gives it a lot. But I didn’t know that. They don’t tell us about the attempted suicides.

Masha’s so furious I think she’s going to kill me and save me the trouble.

‘What the hell were you thinking of?’ she says for the millionth time. ‘You didn’t think what would happen to me , did you? Your sister?’ She’s trembling. She may be angry, but she’s in shock too. ‘Well? Did you? If you’d known what you were actually doing with that noose – fat chance of that – we’d be goners.’

I shrug. All I can feel is this dull, aching despair that I’m still alive. ‘I thought… I thought they’d amputate you or something,’ I say in a sort of croak, ‘and then you’d be free of me.’

‘I don’t want to be free of you, moron! What would I do without you? Who’d wash our nappy? Who’d do everything for me? Who’d… who’d… always be there to talk to? I’d be alone, see? All… alone .’

I shake my head, thinking, And I just go on living half a life in your shadow? I think it. But I don’t say it.

‘Don’t you ever try anything like that again, you hear ?’ She shakes her fist in my face. ‘I’ll be watching you now.’ I remember the Director’s words at the Novocherkassk asylum: She’ll just keep trying, so best let the little poppet go first time. Masha probably remembers too. But it was easy for Little Lyuda and Sunny Nina. They weren’t Together like I am. How can you keep trying to kill yourself when you’re Together?

The door to Vera Stepanovna’s office opens, and we’re told to come in and stand on the red rug.

She’s furious too, of course.

‘ Pozor! It’s a disgrace for the school, Dasha, a disgrace! To have one of our pupils try to take their own life? You are lucky I’m not sending you to a psychiatric institution for the insane. That is the normal procedure for those who attempt suicide. One must be insane not to want to live in the Soviet Union. We have done everything for you, cared for you, educated you and this is how you show your gratitude?’ She’s doing her usual pacing up and down. Now she stops in front of us. ‘As Ostrovsky said, ‘we have been given this life only once, to live to the full…’ I squeeze my eyes closed and wish I could put my hands over my ears. I really don’t want to hear about Ostrovsky and Mankind right now.