Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Ooh, and did you hear that your Baba Yulia’s coming back?’ We all look at her with our mouths open. Uncle Styopa rocks back on his heels. ‘Yes, that monster of hers, Dima, has moved his wife’s parents into the flat and kicked her back in here.’

‘B-but he c-can’t do that!’ I exclaim. ‘He got the flat because of h-her! So she c-could stay there!’

‘Course he can do that. And I bet you anything, he’ll be round here, cap in hand, shaking with the White Fever, and begging her for vodka money from her pension. Just like he always used to. Bet you anything.’

Uncle Styopa jumps up now, looking all excited. He keeps running his hands through his hair and pulling his ear.

‘Well, well, better be off,’ he says, smiling all over his face. ‘All done, girls.’

‘ Mwaah , you’re running back to the girlfriend – and I thought I was in with a chance there,’ says Masha, pretending to look upset. He laughs and runs out.

Aunty Sanya shakes her head. ‘ Da-oosh . Little children bring headaches, and big ones bring heartaches.’

‘Well,’ says Masha. ‘If I had a mother who hadn’t thought I was a monster and left me to die, like ours did, I’d help her through every bog and burrow. Not stick her in here to suffocate in her old age.’

‘There are monsters and there are monsters,’ says Sanya, and then goes over to look at Masha’s Krestyanka magazine with her. And I go back to fixing the rubber bulbs on to the pipettes.

‘Do you think they have sex?’ I ask Masha. It’s the same evening, and dark as death outside. The transistor has finally died and I’m halfway through the box now. Masha’s been fiddling with her button for the last half hour, yawning. She looks at me.

‘Who?’

‘Baba Yulia and Uncle Styopa. Do you think they do?’

‘Course not! They’re like, what… forty, fifty years old?’ I shrug. ‘Anyway,’ she goes on, sniffing, ‘what’s the big deal about sex and all that kissing stuff? I’ve never wanted it and never will.’

‘But don’t you feel… you know, urges, down there? Like it’s this little thumping box or something, waiting to be opened and explode with… with, I don’t know, fireworks or something?’ She stares at me as if I’m mad. ‘And didn’t you like it,’ I go on quickly, ‘when you used to kiss those boys in school? Didn’t you feel like you were just melting and hot and wanted to go on and on doing it because it felt so good? That you wanted them, you know, right inside you?’

‘ Foo! ’ She spits at me. ‘Of course not! When I kissed those rats it was only to get something out of them. I’d rather have been kissing a toilet seat.’

‘Really? But don’t you feel a sort of need for boys and for getting with them? Like a proper ache?’

‘Are you talking about when you rub yourself down there, like you’re trying to scratch an itch? I wish you’d lay off that, it’s disgusting, and don’t think I don’t know you’re doing it when I’m half asleep.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Masha. It’s natural, isn’t it? Why should I not want sex, just because you and me are Together?’

I pop another bulb on the pipette. I do rub myself and she’s right, I know I could explode if I only knew how. I get close when I think of me and Slava. But I don’t. Perhaps because I can only do it when I think she’s asleep and have to be careful because we’re so close together down there. ‘It’s just strange that you don’t feel anything like that too…’

She shrugs. ‘I’d rather be me, than you, sitting there, miserable as a cow with colic, waiting for your kisses and sex from that little prick. You can’t think straight, you lot can’t, once you start feeling. Look at Uncle Styopa, running about like a headless chicken. You should be like me – Masha’s the only one I love.’ She keeps flicking through the magazine pages, looking at the patterns for making clothes, and the recipes, then, after a few minutes, she says she wants to go and see Ivan Ivanovich. ‘He’s on duty tonight. I’m bored stiff.’

We go down in the lift, and find him in the dark reception hall with his feet up at his desk, reading Sovietskyi Sport newspaper and half watching a film from India on his black and white TV. We squeeze in.

‘Ooooh, can we watch the film with you, Van Vanich, can we? We’ll hide under your chair if anyone comes! I love watching those beautiful dark Indian women in those sparkly, silky dresses. Their teeth are so white!’

He chuckles a bit and nods. He’s got a kind face, like an apple. ‘All right then, girls. Man the fort while I slip out for a fag.’ Masha puts her face in her hands and settles down to watch the film. I look up into the pigeonhole box under the letter K to see if there’s anything there. There is! Slava! But there are about fifty of us with surnames beginning with K. It’s probably not for us. No, probably not for us at all. But my heart’s thumping like mad.

‘Calm down, you pervert,’ says Masha, not taking her eyes off the TV set, ‘he’s not that handsome.’ I look at the screen and see a young Indian man in a turban, dancing and singing. No, he’s not handsome; he’s nothing like Slava. I look up at the box again, just as Ivan Ivanovich comes back in.

‘Oh yes, almost forgot, there’s a letter for you two. Came yesterday.’ He reaches up for it. It’s a blue airmail one, and when he hands it to us, I can see from the writing it’s from Slava! Masha can tell too. She grabs it and opens it with her thumb, while my heart goes on pounding. I’m sweating. She leans away from me so I can’t see it, and starts reading it. I watch her face and her eyes, but she has no reaction. When she’s finished, she tears it in half and then tears those pieces in half, and drops them in the waste-paper bin.

‘That’s what he thinks,’ she says. ‘He might as well be asking us to go and see the President of Amerika.’

Ivan Ivanovich doesn’t look up from his newspaper, and she goes back to watching the TV. After a bit, when she’s laughing at a dance scene, I lean down slowly and pick up all the bits of paper from the bin, and then piece them together on the desk. She doesn’t look across or say anything. She doesn’t stop me.

3 November 1969

Hello girls, greetings from Slava!

I hope you are well.

I’m still at home but doing some studies. I was sorry to leave you that way. I hope you forgive me. To be honest, I still don’t want to go to school but it seems I must. Everyone thinks it’s for the best and I suppose it is, though I’ll be put down a year now. Can you come for the end of year school party? How are you? How is your health and how is Aunty Nadya? She’s told Vera Stepanovna that I can come up for treatment in SNIP, so I’m planning on coming next spring. Maybe you could come and see me? I expect Aunty Nadya will tell you the exact date.

Mother sends her love. I don’t see the village boys much now, as they have motorbikes.

I put the pieces in my pocket. I’ll find a way to stick them together later. New Year. That’s only a few weeks away. Just a few weeks. If I can only persuade Masha to let me go.

Nyet.

Masha didn’t want to go down to Novocherkassk for the New Year’s party. She said she wasn’t doing that long trip to see an icy bitch who’d stolen all her photographs and a little pizdyuk who’d insulted her sister. I couldn’t say anything to change her mind. I felt like I’d been hollowed out with a spoon. Slava went to the party though, and he started back at school after New Year. He sent us a card for our twentieth birthday. It was a bit late. I expect he couldn’t find stamps…