Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Shhh, Mash!’ I look around nervously, but there’s no one within hearing distance. We’re sitting between two greasy palm trees and a bust of Lenin. She’s right though, I revived like a wilted flower in water after I got his birthday card. Olessya always used to say that happiness lies in three things: having someone to love, something to do and something to hope for. At least I’ve got the first and the last. But having nothing to do except sit and stare at our shiny brown wall, means I go over and over every look, every touch, every word and that last New Year’s love-making in my head, like I’m on some crazy hamster wheel.

I stare at the gloomy reception with its dark walls and yellow linoleum and wonder for the millionth time why he isn’t going to school. Could it be because I’m not there? Or is he sick? And what did he want to say to me? What did he want to give me? What? What?

… We now require the mobilization of all possible forces, highest possible labour productivity, improvement of discipline … Mayak State Radio is droning on, and I yawn. I’m so nervous I just can’t stop yawning. Not one working day, not one working hour is to be wasted … we’ve been sitting here on this chair for ages…

‘Hey, girls!’ Sanya, the cleaner, bangs in through the front door for the start of her shift. ‘What are you two doing, looking like two geese trussed up for dinner? What’s the gossip?’

‘Juliet here’s off to see her Romeo,’ says Masha.

‘Ooooh! Kept that quiet, didn’t you, Dashka. Handsome, is he?’

He’s the handsomest boy in the USSR but I don’t say that, I just smile happily.

‘Well, I want all the gossip, including intimate contact and whispered secrets. Got it?’ She wags her finger at Masha, who winks at her. Sanya and Masha hit it off as soon as she walked into our room with her bucket and mop. She’s quite young and plump and cheerful. She comes from Siberia, but she gets to share a communal room in a barracks in Moscow in exchange for working in a Home. She lives off gossip. So does Masha, come to think of it. They’re two of a kind. (Except Masha would die rather than mop anyone’s room for them.) ‘OK, girls, have fun. If you can’t be good be careful,’ and she waddles off.

I put the card and letter back in my pocket, then take them out again, then pat my hair.

‘For God’s sake, stop fiddling, you’re turning me into a nervous wreck,’ says Masha, slapping my arm. ‘And your hair looked fine before you kept running your fingers through it and turning it into rats’ tails.’ I stop smoothing back my hair then, and start biting my nails instead. I haven’t seen him for a year. How long will he be in SNIP for? Will he come and visit us when he’s better? Will we be able to talk? To… to kiss? My stomach twists inside me and Masha slaps me again.

‘Ei, girls!’ Ivan Ivanovich, the guard who sits in reception, has come out from behind his desk and is standing stretching in the doorway. ‘Are you two running off to get married?’

‘No, Van Vanich, we’re waiting for a proclamation of love from you!’ chirps Masha.

He laughs, showing his two rows of gold teeth. He’s quite old, he must be at least forty. ‘If you can cast one of your death spells on my old lady, I’m all yours!’

‘Bring her on!’

We all laugh together then. The death spell thing happened when we were down in the canteen in the first week or so after we got here. All the old babas were gawking and asking the usual questions like, how do we Do It with a man, and did we have the same dreams and the same thoughts, and if we had children would they be Together too…? And then this one baba came up and stuck her face in Masha’s and asked if it would be painful for the one left behind to die, and how long it would take? Masha just went crazy then. She pointed her finger right between this old woman’s eyes and said, Yooou are going to die before I do, granny, mark my words , which actually wasn’t rocket science, because she was like a hundred years old, and we’re only nineteen, but this old woman looked like she’d been struck by lightning and her eyes all bulged out in horror, because there’s this gossip going around that we’re the spawn of the devil or something and have evil powers. The next thing we knew, she’d had a heart attack and was lying there dead as a doormouse at our feet. So now all the babas keep away from us, like we’re real live witches.

‘Oh yes, Van Vanich, beware the Magic Finger!’ says Masha, wagging it at him. Sometimes I think she actually believes she does have magic powers. She’ll sit there and hold her finger up and just look at it.

‘Girls, girls!’ Aunty Nadya bangs open the doors and rushes in. We jump up and run over to her. ‘Right, right, that’s quite enough of the hugs, thank you very much, get off, get off, let me breathe. Have you got your day-release passes?’

‘Yes! Yes!’ We flash them at Ivan Ivanovich.

‘Don’t try and escape, will you?’ he says. ‘Who’ll I have to play cards with, when you’re gone?’

‘You’ll find a nice sprightly granny or two,’ shouts Masha as we jump outside into the warm spring sun.

The car from SNIP’s waiting and the journey is only ten minutes, but seems to last an age. We’re led up the back stairs, like we were the first time we got here, and then we walk along the corridor to his door. When we reach it, Aunty Nadya looks at us both and says that we look thin as weeds, so she’s going to get us some fresh vegetables from the kitchens and leave us alone with Slava.

We stand there outside the door for a bit, not saying anything, then Masha looks at me and I nod. She pushes the door open and we walk in. He’s sitting on the bed with his big dark eyes staring out of his white face. He looks like I feel.

‘ Yolki palki! You look like you’ve crawled out from under a stone!’ says Masha, as we walk over and sit on his bed.

‘Thanks, Mash, just what I need…’ He relaxes and smiles then, and glances at me. ‘You two look good. Pretty as pansies.’

‘Don’t get fresh with me.’ Masha punches him on the shoulder.

‘Ouch!’ He rubs his arm then smiles. ‘S’pose I should be thankful it wasn’t a slug in the face, given your usual form. Near broke my nose, you did.’

‘Should’ve knocked your head off, but there’s always a next time.’

‘Not if I see it coming… So, how’s things?’ He cocks his head on one side.

‘Yeah,’ says Masha, ‘so we’ve got a room to ourselves, with our own toilet, and we’ve just about worked out how to climb into it – one at a time, like a crab squeezing into a crack.’

‘ Kha … bet I know who gets in first…’

‘…yeah, Dasha knows her place, and that’s behind me. So our room may be small but it’s clean and dry, which is all I care about, and we’ve got our transistor to listen to all day, though the batteries keep running out, and there’s a shortage of batteries, so Aunty Nadya has to stand in queues for days when they appear in the shops.’

‘Which is never,’ says Slava. ‘We haven’t seen batteries or stamps in Novocherkassk for months, that’s why I didn’t write sooner…’ He flicks a quick look at me and my heart starts flapping around like a bat.

‘So the Director, Barkov, he’s nothing like our School Director,’ goes on Masha, twiddling her button, ‘he’s just there to skim off as much State money as he can. Sanya, our cleaner, says he’s got two Volga cars, and a dacha off the Rublyovsky Highway, with gardeners, cleaners, drivers – you name it. He nabs the money meant to buy a TV set for every floor, and trickles it into a private sauna at his dacha. You know what it’s like.’