Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

2 September 1970, Moscow

Slava!

Greetings from Masha and Dasha. How are you? How is your health? We haven’t heard from you since June so it seems as if you’ve stopped writing. Perhaps you’re busy at school. We are OK and have made some more friends among the staff and a few of the inmates. There are some nice people here. Olessya writes to us from her Old People’s Home, which isn’t far away but it’s a Closed Regime one, so she’s not allowed out to visit and of course we’re not allowed in. She doesn’t sound that happy, but there you are.

Aunty Nadya said you wanted records so we bought them. We hope you enjoy them. Aunty Nadya will send them but I wonder why you need them? Doesn’t your transistor work? How is school and everyone there? Give our love to Maria Petrovna, Valya Starozhika in the kitchens and the rest. And especially love to Valentina Alexandrovna, if she’s still there. If anyone comes to Moscow please tell them to visit us.

I waited and dreamed and waited but he still didn’t write back so I sent him a card of congratulations on October Revolution day. Finally, he sent us one too on 7 November. It just wished us health, happiness and a long life. The usual. I was a bit disappointed, but there you are. At least there’s hope again. All I need is hope.

A visitor comes out of the lift and walks across the hall, stopping by the bust of Lenin to do up her coat and I pull the rug a bit further over our legs. She doesn’t even glance at us.

‘I’m never going back to the dentist who comes here, Masha, not ever. I almost went through the roof when he dug that drill into me.’

‘What about me? He said he’d only just stopped himself from drilling right through an artery after I jumped two metres in the air. Maybe Aunty Nadya can get us some novocaine from SNIP…’

‘She’s cross enough about bringing us wine when it’s against the rules. It’s only because she can see how bored we are. Good thing that even Igor Semyonovich never dares to look at the bottom of her bag.’

‘That svoloch ,’ she mutters under her breath. Ivan Ivanovich was fired for not noticing that Uncle Styopa’s brother had smuggled in another two bottles of vodka. I shiver. Uncle Styopa got so crazily drunk that he went on the rampage and got sent to Stupino. We’ll never see him again… Or Ivan Ivanovich.

Sanya comes down, dressed in her felt boots and wrapped up in a rabbit fur coat. It’s the end of her shift. She sees us sitting there and sticks her nose in the air as she goes past.

‘Bitch. Thinks it’s OK to go stealing our money…’ mutters Masha.

Sanya and Masha aren’t talking any more. We used to give her money from our pension, to buy cigarettes, but Masha got it into her head that she was buying cheap cigarettes and telling us they cost more so she could pocket the difference. We don’t know the prices Outside. Maybe she was. Sanya got so angry. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she’d said, ‘waited on hand and foot here and lying back in your bed reading magazines and listening to music all day. I have to work, I do. I have to get up at dawn and slave away for you lot, living off the State like parasites.’ Masha was furious but didn’t reply. She never gets into an argument, she just refuses to talk to people who anger her. She refuses to talk to them ever again.

I go back to looking at the front door, waiting for Aunty Nadya. It’s what Masha would do actually, keep some money back, that’s why she suspects Sanya. But it’s against the rules to buy them for us and sneak them in, so Sanya was doing us a big favour. She deserves a few kopecks for that, and she does work hard, but she doesn’t understand I’d like nothing better than to be allowed to work. All I want is to be useful, to have a purpose in life. But Masha can’t see it. She doesn’t trust anyone, Masha doesn’t.

‘I wish you hadn’t just turned against her like that, Masha. You always do that.’

‘Don’t you start. Everyone’s out to get us. I hate this place. I hate it.’ She puts her head in her hands and says fiercely, ‘Where is she?!’

It wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t taken Masha’s beloved Lydia away from us.

It happened a few months ago, after Barkov called us in. We hardly ever see the Director, but this one time he called us in to his office, which was about twenty times the size of an inmate’s room and all panelled in wood. Three people could have laid end to end on his desk, it was that big. We sat on a high-backed chair on the rug in front of the desk. He’s fat like a pig. And pink. And bald.

‘So, girls,’ he said, tapping a pen on his desk. ‘I need to know if there is any slander going on among the staff or inmates.’ Barkov has this way about him that makes everyone shrink. Olessya used to say it was the Party way – Authority makes you shrivel like a salted slug. By slander we knew he meant criticism of the way he runs the Home. ‘I intend to crush dissent from within,’ he went on. ‘Crush it.’ He balled up a piece of paper in his fist to make his point. We just kept looking at him, not really knowing what to say. ‘And in order to do that, I need to have someone from within to give me information.’ He knows Masha lives for gossip. We both realized then that he wanted us to be informers, but everyone knows who the snitches are in an institution like this, and they’re despised. They get perks from the Administration, of course, but they’re despised by everyone for their denunciations.

I looked down at the floor.

‘I don’t know anything, Igor Nikolaevich,’ said Masha. ‘I sit in my room with her and her books and we don’t hear anything. We don’t see anything either. Nothing.’ She looked up at the ceiling.

He drew his breath in through his nose, picked up a pen and started rapping it on the table like a machine gun.

‘Is that your last word?’ He looked at Masha. We all three knew what was happening then. Masha nodded and kept looking at the ceiling.

The next morning Iglinka Dragomirovna came and took our sewing machine away.

I stare, for the millionth time, at the row of portraits of the Politburo members glowing with medals. They never change. Or perhaps they do but still all look the same. I wonder what it’s like inside the Kremlin Palace where the Tsars used to live, and now the Politburo do. All golden, probably. The door clatters open.

‘Here she is!’ We throw off the rug and run to her for a kiss. If we didn’t have Aunty Nadya, I don’t know what we’d do. She comes to see us every single week.

‘I can’t stay long, girls. I’ve brought some cabbage pies and a jar of pickled cucumber. How are you doing?’

‘My teeth are killing me,’ moans Masha as we get into the lift, still hugging her as she tries, with pretend anger, to push us off.

‘Well, and whose fault is that? How many times have I told you to brush your teeth?’ she tuts. ‘What do you expect when you drink sweet tea and don’t brush?’

She comes up to our room, empties out her bag, tells us a bit about her new patients in SNIP, then kisses us both on the top of our heads and goes.

As soon as the door closes, Masha hands me the wine bottle and gets me to push the cork down with my thumb. She’s excited.

‘C’mon, c’mon! Blyad! I want to get drunk so bad!’

‘I’m trying. It’s stuck.’ I want to get drunk too… It’s shameful, but I do. When I drink I forget. I forget we’re here, I forget who I am and I forget I’m with Masha. I’ve got it on the floor now and I’m pushing and panting. At last the cork pops in. The only place we can drink and not be seen is out on the balcony, lying down. It’s freezing outside but it doesn’t usually take me long to drink it. Two minutes. Maybe three.