Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

Masha flinches when she’s kissed, and the old woman sits back heavily on the chair. The other one just stands there, holding her bag in front of her like a shield. Our mother has tears in her eyes. She can’t take her eyes off us, she keeps shaking her head and saying under her breath, ‘Alive… how can you still be alive… how?’

‘ Nooka ,’ says the other woman, as if waking from a dream. She puts her bag down on the floor with a thump, and tucks her handkerchief in her pocket. ‘We’d better introduce ourselves. I’m your Aunty Dina – Katya’s younger sister. Well, well, yolki palki , I had no idea you two existed until last Sunday when Katya called. No idea… Katya didn’t ever mention… so there we are, and you were here all the time. Tak, tak, so you have a room to yourselves, do you? That’s very nice, isn’t it? And a balcony and your own toilet, goodness! Better conditions than most of us on the Outside, I can tell you!’ She laughs cheerily, but a bit nervously, and keeps chattering on in a friendly way, while Masha looks sullenly at our mother, who’s sitting, slowly wiping her tears away and still shaking her head.

Mother. She has a kind, placid face and pale blue eyes folded in wrinkles. She’s older than I thought she’d be. She looks about eighty, and she still hasn’t said a word to us. Aunty Dina’s talking on and on though.

‘Yes, well, I’d heard rumours, you know, about the girl with two heads in Moscow – those rumours have been going around for years and years, but I never imagined… not for a moment…’ she looks over at Katya, who’s still staring mournfully at us. ‘So I don’t expect you knew that you have two younger brothers, Seriozha and Tolya? No, of course not. Well, Seriozha hasn’t been sober in ten years, but Tolya’s a good boy. They’re both in their thirties, and live with Katya in her flat. It’s only a one-roomer, but at least it’s not communal. We’ve winterized the balcony so Tolya sleeps there, and Seriozha crashes wherever he crashes. Usually in the stairwell outside! So you see, you two have got it made here, living for free off the State. Marvellous. Marvellous. Isn’t it marvellous how they care for you?’ She can’t stop talking. I can feel Masha hating the whole situation. ‘Your mother here survives on cabbage soup,’ she goes on. ‘What with her pension being so small. That’s what you get after a lifetime of service, wearing yourself to the bone on a factory floor. But there you are. There you are indeed. Much cosier to be cared for in here, I’d say. Marvellous. Wonderful that you decided to contact her after all this time. Really wonderful.’ She looks around our tiny brown room with its bare walls, narrow bed and bedside tumbochka and tries to smile.

Masha’s not saying anything, just watching and listening as we see our only escape route slowly closing off. Two brothers and a one-room flat. And a factory-floor mother living on a State pension and cabbage soup. No room for us then.

‘So yes,’ goes on Dina, ‘your father passed away in 1984 – a drink too many, you know, a drink too many. Misha, his name was; yes, he led your mother a merry dance with his wicked ways – if Katya won’t mind me speaking ill of the dead. But there you go… he was an army driver, drove the officers around in the Great Patriotic War. In the Far East, wasn’t it, Katyoosh?’

But Mother isn’t listening. She’s looking at us with those sad blue eyes that just keep on filling with tears.

Eventually, Aunty Dina stops talking, and a thick silence fills the room. After a while Mother heaves a sigh.

‘ Dochinki – my little daughters, why didn’t you come to me before? Why did you never come?’

‘We didn’t need you,’ says Masha coldly.

Dina looks a bit nervous then, and shifts from one foot to the other, smoothing down her jacket and patting the pockets.

‘Right, yes, well perhaps we should be off then. Things to do, you know…’ At that, Mother stands up and takes a step towards us. She kisses my cheek again, but when she goes to kiss Masha, she jerks away to avoid her touch. Mother looks startled but then turns to me.

‘What can I do, now that we’ve found each other, dochinki? I can do your laundry, and you can tell me what you need me to buy for you.’ Neither of us say anything. What we really need is to be rescued from the Madhouse. ‘Yes, just tell me and I’ll buy it for you, if I can.’ We still say nothing, so she says, ‘Well, I’ll bring you my home-made cabbage pies next time.’ Then she gently strokes my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says quietly.

And then they both leave…

I look across at Masha. She’s gone all black like she does with her chortik .

‘Sorry? Sorry?? ’ she shouts once the door has closed. ‘ Chto yebyot! Sorry for what? ’ She thumps her pillow. ‘Sorry for being a peasant woman as stupid as a tree stump? Or sorry that she buried us in that maternity hospital and left us for dead?’

‘We don’t know that’s what happened, Masha… She didn’t say that.’

‘Well, what else did she do? Why didn’t she at least come and see us when we were little? Why didn’t you ask?’

‘I wanted to. I wanted to, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I thought… I thought it would upset her.’

‘Upset her? ! For fuck’s sake! Listen to yourself. Haven’t we been upset enough for the past thirty-eight years of our lives? Stuck with all the other Rejects, obsessing about their darling lost mothers when we were growing up?’

‘Don’t swear, Masha—’

‘I’ll swear if I fucking want to…’ She punches the wall. ‘“Sorry?!” Sorry that she only has one tiny room, which she shares with our brothers, so there’s no room for two more? Well, I’d rather live with the crazies than with an old woman who can only wag her head in pity and cry – just like all the other daft dandelions in here. I’m not going to live with a silly old bat and a drunken sot of a brother. I’d never do that. Never!’

I put my hands over my ears.

‘No, I liked her, Masha. She’s still our mother, she called us dochinki , Mashinka, dochinki … no one’s called us that before. Who have we got to call us that, except a mother? No one…’

‘Liked her? What’s there to like? You liked her because she’s the same as you, sitting there with her eyes welling up all the time. Two of a kind, you are. Two sheep, two idiots. The apple doesn’t roll far from the tree. Well, I bet I take after our father. Mikhail, that’s a good strong name. Stop crying, see what I mean? Two of a yobinny kind, can’t stop the waterworks for two seconds.’

‘Please, let her come again, Mashinka, if she wants to… please, Mash. She said she’d do all our laundry for us and bring us home-made food… perhaps they’ll invite us to meet them all, perhaps one of the family can think of some way of getting us out of here… please…’

She shrugs and gets up to go and fetch the pack of cigarettes she keeps behind the sink.

‘What we need is to get out of here,’ she says. ‘Not meet the fucking family.’

‘Well now, help yourselves, girls, eat what you like,’ says Aunty Dina and waves her hand at the spread on the table.

We’re sitting in her flat with our mother and our brother Tolya. Our other brother, Seriozha, is late. Masha reaches out for a slice of white bread, slaps a thick slab of lard on it and pushes it hungrily into her mouth. I’m not quite sure how I got her here, to be honest. She said it was only because they’d have vodka. But it helped that Dina arranged for a friend to pick us up in his car and bring us over – any trip away from the Twentieth is a luxury. And deep down, I think we’re both holding on to the idea that Aunty Dina might ask us to live with her in this two-room flat she shares with her husband and her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Kira. It’s got rugs on the walls, dark wall cabinets and a fold-out sofa. It reminds me of when we lived with Aunty Nadya. Bit of a squash. Not much room for us… But if Aunty Nadya can’t have us, then why should a woman we’ve only met once fight the authorities to take us in? Is blood really thicker than water?