Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘How old are you?’

‘Th-th-thirty-eight.’ It’s getting harder to get the words out. I can feel it. Masha’s stiffening by my side. She’s angry and that makes me stutter even more.

‘And in what year were you born?’

‘N-n-n-nineteen f-f-f-f…’ I can’t do it. I feel like bursting into tears, it’s like I have a splinter of wood in my tongue.

The speech therapist is tapping her pencil on the table, and interrupts me, asking: ‘Why do you stutter?’

‘Be-be-be-be-c-c-c…’ I still can’t get anything out. I look like an idiot. I sound like I’m mad. I should be in a Madhouse. The speech therapist takes off her glasses and looks at me. She’s got grey hair and quite a kind face so I try again, but this time I sound even worse so I just stop.

‘Hmm… Do you both stutter?’

‘No!’ Masha’s voice is high and angry and it rings around the big hall. Their eyes swivel across to her then. ‘No. I don’t stutter, and she only does it because a dog jumped out at her when she was little, and bit her, that’s all.’ I gawp at her. She’s always making stuff up. ‘She does it when she’s nervous,’ goes on Masha, ‘and she’s nervous now because we don’t want to end up in here, once it’s re-profiled. We have to battle every single day to prove that we’re sane, just because we’re Together, but if we’re left in here, we’ll have lost that battle. No one would believe us. We’d be driven insane in here.’

None of the three women say anything. Masha’s got her arm around me, and mine is around her, like we always do when we’re standing. She pulls me to her with a squeeze and the wooden floorboards creak as I lean into her.

‘She does it because she’s soft, that’s all, like a peach. She bruises at anything. That’s the only thing wrong with her. And that dog, it almost killed her, it did, almost savaged her to death in front of my very own two eyes, and she had to have all these rabies injections in her stomach afterwards.’ I think the speech therapist is smiling but the other two just look a bit amazed. So am I. She’s making the whole thing up. ‘She’s clever, she is,’ goes on Masha, glaring at them all, ‘she got top marks in her diploma, she got one hundred per cent, you can check, you can, and her tutors here said she could have been an atomic physicist or… or a professor if she wasn’t Defective… they said—’

‘Thank you, thank you, that’s quite enough, Maria, we do have others to see, you know,’ interrupts the psycho-neurologist, holding up her hand. Then she glances across to the speech therapist on her right and the defectologist on her left and they nod. I can scarcely breathe. What has Masha done? What have I done? They’re going to say no…

‘That’s fine, girls, I think we can safely say you’re as sane as any of us.’ She smiles. ‘You’ve passed. You may leave.’

‘This is the best news ever, the best ever,’ says Masha, bouncing up and down on our bed. Olessya’s sitting across from us in her wheelchair because everything’s going crazy in the Twentieth with the changes and she’s allowed in our Walking Block. Van Vanich, who’s been reinstated as the guard on reception, after the other one got drunk on duty, let her in. It’s so wonderful to have him back, we couldn’t stop hugging and kissing him, and he joked that his wife would leave him if she ever caught sight of the three of us all in a huddle like that.

Barkov has gone off to some conference today for a week, and Dragomirovna is off sick. Masha thinks they’re having an affair and have run away together to the Crimea. That’s what she’s telling everyone anyway. Masha’s crazy. Sanya’s here, too, leaning on the balcony door. She and Masha made up in the end because Masha got bored without her to talk to, although it’s never quite been the same. But that’s OK. As Masha says, Friendship stays green with a hedge in between.

‘The Sixth has got grounds with flowerbeds in it that the inmates are allowed to walk in,’ Olessya’s saying. ‘Not like here, where the garden is only for foreign delegations. And they’ve got two hundred and fifty rooms, single rooms with toilets, all empty. I’ve already got a place. You should apply as soon as you can, I bet they’re filling up like water in a bath.’

‘It’s OK. We put in our f-formal request for a transfer to the S-Sixth straight away, the very next day,’ I say.

‘I got my confirmation two days after I put the request in,’ says Olessya. ‘Almost everyone got passed by the commission. The babas are all dithering around like sheep in a pen.’

‘Well, I’ve applied for a job at the Sixth too,’ says Sanya. ‘Gotta give the Director there a bribe, of course; but a box of chocolates, if I can find one, should do it. I’m not staying here to mop up after dribbling loonies, I can tell you that.’

‘I’m not staying here either,’ says Masha. ‘No yobinny way. Mashinka’s off out to dance in the flowerbeds by the lake!’

Just then the door opens and Nina from Administration hands us a yellow note.

‘It’s the confirmation,’ says Olessya.

Masha grabs it and starts reading it out loud:

Dear Comrade Inmates!

We confirm receipt of your request for transfer, which is refused.

Her voice trails off.

‘ What?! You’ve read it wrong.’ I stare at her. It’s one of her stupid jokes. I take the note of confirmation from her. We confirm receipt of your request for transfer, which is refused.

‘It can’t have been refused,’ says Olessya. ‘On what possible grounds? No one’s been refused. Not one person. Why would they?’

‘Why would he , you mean,’ says Sanya putting her hands on her hips. ‘It’s Barkov, isn’t it? He hates your guts.’

‘We know he does. He always h-has,’ I say, ‘so why k-keep us h-here?’

‘To make your life a misery. He’d love that,’ says Sanya. ‘It would give him a little kick every day to know you’re both festering in here with the crazies. I know that man. He’d rather wish for his neighbour’s cow to die than have his own cow brought back to life. It’s peasant mentality.’ She pushes back her headscarf complacently. Masha’s still staring at the little yellow note. ‘What can we do?’ she says eventually in a small voice, and looks up at Olessya. ‘Olessinka, what can we do?’

‘Ask Aunty Nadya to talk to Barkov?’

‘You could try. But I don’t think that would help,’ says Sanya firmly. ‘He’d just love to see her humiliating herself, begging to let you go. He’d make her squirm for a century. And besides, she’s got this strange respect for him, hasn’t she? She never disagrees with him about anything, just sort of bows and scrapes like a serf before the master. I’ve seen her. He has that effect on people.’

We sit there then, not saying anything. I feel icy cold.

‘What about writing to the Ministry of Protection?’ says Masha slowly. ‘We’ve got to do something. He can’t be allowed to do it. The commission passed us. Olessya? Can we write to the Ministry?’

‘I’m not sure… they’re all in cahoots now, aren’t they, these bureaucrats. And the deeper you two are buried away, the better – they don’t want you out and about, dancing round flowerbeds, I can tell you. But you can try…’

‘I will, I will! We can’t stay here, we can’t!’ shouts Masha. ‘I won’t! What about all this Openness?’

‘Yes, yes, what about that organization you t-talk about, Olessya – the D-Defence of Invalids Group?’ I look at her pleadingly. It was set up a few years ago by Healthies who’d had an accident and ended up crippled and were shovelled aside like compost at the bottom of the Socialist garden, as Olessya puts it. ‘You said they have this campaign against the incarceration of invalids. Can’t they help us?’