Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

After what seems like years, he shifts his weight a bit on the chair. He’s still looking at the floor when he says:

‘I’m sorry, Dasha.’

That’s all. Just, I’m sorry?

I feel a hard lump of anger inside me.

‘Dasha,’ he adds, quietly. ‘I can’t.’

I feel the lump getting bigger and bigger, rolling up from my stomach. He doesn’t love me enough to live here, in our room in the Twentieth. The anger turns to grief and I can’t help it, I just burst into tears then, and I’m crying like I’ve never cried in my whole life before, as this crazy, hopeless sea of despair washes right over me. I can hear myself yelling at him, as if someone else is shouting the words, Go then! Go on! Go back to your village! Masha starts screaming at him too, telling him not to keep on hurting her sister, and then Inna runs back in, swearing her head off, to take him out. But before she can, he leans towards me and pushes a scrap of paper into my hand with a terrible look in his eyes. And then he’s taken away.

Masha’s looking around for something to throw and is screaming, ‘Bitch with Balls! Pizduk! Zalupa! Yobinny stik! ’ She hasn’t even noticed the note. I just can’t stop crying my heart out though. I can’t do anything but wail.

Later, when she’s gone to sleep, and I’m lying my end, on the pillow covered in snot and tears and still hiccup-sobbing, I uncurl my fist and read it.

Dasha, I’ll find a way for us to be together. I promise. It’s our secret. Please wait.

I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and heave a great, juddering sigh. And then I lie back.

And start hoping all over again.

‘Get a move on, you’ve got a thousand pipettes in that box.’

‘I’m trying, Masha, but my fingers are cold. It’s not easy, getting these rubber bulbs on. If you tried it, you’d know…’

We’ve just had another box delivered. They pay us kopecks, but it keeps Masha in cigarettes, which we now hide beneath a loose tile under the sink and even Iglinka Dragomirovna with her X-ray eyes hasn’t found them. Masha sniffs and goes back to looking at the recipes in her magazine, Krestyanka – Peasant Woman – which Dazdraperma brought her.

‘I should be doing my history studies, not this,’ I say.

‘Stop whining.’

It’s been five months since Slava left, and I haven’t heard from him. Not yet. We haven’t talked about it, Masha and me. She just said if he ever showed up again she’d smash him to a pulp. But she’s forgiven him before, and she’ll forgive him again. Meanwhile, I’m waiting and waiting, and thinking of what plans he has for us to be together. It must be in the village… with the hens and the pond, and…

‘Aunty Nadya had better hurry up with getting those new batteries, my transistor sounds like a can of snakes.’

She jabs me to get an answer, so I say, ‘Doctor Golubeva said she’d look for some too.’

It gave us the shock of our lives (haha) when Dr Golubeva pushed open the door two weeks ago. We half expected her to have the helmets in tow, to fry our heads again, but all she had with her were home-made sour cream buns. She said she thought about us often and would we mind if she started visiting? Masha said if she kept bringing sour cream buns she could come as often as she liked. But I thought it was odd somehow… Our old doctor from the Ped turning up with gifts.

‘Yeah, old Golubeva. I thought we’d be falling over Anokhin next, down in reception,’ says Masha, turning a page of her magazine to an article on vegetable plots.

‘No chance of that. Anokhin’s lost interest in us… everyone’s lost interest in us…’

‘Ei! Don’t say that, girls! I still love you!’

Uncle Styopa, one of the inmates, has pushed open the door and is standing there, waving a little padlock and chain. ‘See what your old Uncle has got for you!’

‘ Ooraa! ’ Masha jumps up, knocking my box of pipettes over. ‘Now we can lock up our thermos flask.’

‘You have to chain everything down in this place, girls. Sooner you learn that, the better. How many have you had stolen? Three? Well, the best place is the leg of your bed, here we go.’ He gets down on the floor and starts chaining the thermos down. He was wounded as a teenager in the Great Patriotic War and was put in here nearly twenty years ago. He likes us. He knows what it’s like to be nineteen and locked up for life.

‘Heard from your girlfriend then?’ asks Masha, grinning. ‘She was the only one worth talking to in here.’

‘ Baba Yulia? Nope, haven’t heard from her. Gone from the eye, gone from the heart.’ He shakes his head. ‘Shame. Bright as a scythe, she was. That’s a rarity in this House of Rejects…’

Baba Yulia lived on the corridor below, and we used to visit her every day because she was so cheerful and interesting. Her husband was killed in the War and she brought up their baby son, Dima, in a communal flat until he got married. Then Dima went to court and had her put in here, so he could have the room to himself. She still loves him though. She says you never stop loving your own child, whatever happens… blood is thicker than water.

‘If I’d been her, I wouldn’t have gone back to that moodak son of hers,’ spits Masha, balancing me while I hang off the bed trying to pick the pipettes up from the floor. ‘He only took her in because of that new Decree of Brezhnev’s saying war widows living with families could get a two-room flat.’

‘She was so h-happy though, to be going to live with her f-family and g-grand-daughter.’ I look up at Uncle Styopa.

‘Yes, yes, and I’m happy for her,’ he says. But he doesn’t look happy, he looks sad. They were the same age and really liked each other. And she hasn’t written to him for months. Once people get to the Outside, they forget about us lot on the Inside. ‘Well, she made the right decision. Better than staying here,’ he says. ‘No one usually leaves the Twentieth on their own two feet. They leave it feet first.’

‘Got any vodka for her, Uncle Styopachka?’ says Masha in her little girl voice. She points at me then tips her head on one side and opens her eyes wide. He shakes his head.

‘My brother got caught last time with two bottles down his felt-boots. Now they virtually strip-search him.’

I’ve recovered all the pipettes and go back to popping the rubber bulbs on. I’m glad for Baba Yulia. I wonder for the thousandth time where our own mother is. If she’s still alive, she must be about forty now. Maybe she’s got other children? I sort of imagine her as a doctor. Maybe she’s operating on someone right now? Or maybe she’s sitting somewhere, thinking of us? Looking for us even? Does she know our names? Did she name us, or did…

‘ Nooka? Want some gossip?’ Sanya the cleaner has popped her head around the door. She sits down on the chair with her mop between her legs and pushes her headscarf back, nodding at Uncle Styopa, who’s still on his knees by the leg of our bed. ‘Baba Agafia went so crazy in the queue for the kettle in the kitchen that she hit out at the old crone in front and knocked her clean out. Before she knew what was happening, the nurses were on top of her with their syringes and she woke up in Stupino! Serve her right. Right mad ’un, she was.’

‘Stupino?! Chort! ’ say Masha and me together. It’s the prison for Rejects. We know all about Stupino. You don’t live long there. If you’re not killed by another inmate, you’re killed by the guards. And you don’t need to stand before a judge and jury to get sent there. It’s up to the Director of whatever Home you’re in. We’re all scared stiff of the threat of Stupino. You can get sent there for anything, from Spreading Slander to Unacceptable Behaviour.