Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

I look across at Mother, with her grey hair pinned back in a bun. She reminds me a bit of our mummy at the Ped. I wonder what our lives would have been like if she’d taken us home after giving birth to us? Or at least visited us in the Ped and sat there all day by our cot, like Mummy did, singing us bye-oo bye-ooshki bye-oo and bringing us presents. And she could have come to see us in SNIP on visiting days, and taken us back home every weekend to play with our little brothers… I’d have looked after them… I’d have…

‘ Nooka , Tolya dear, pass your sisters the potato salad,’ says Dina. He looks like he’s in a trance and hasn’t spoken at all. Dina’s husband, Boris, and Kira are ‘busy’ tonight, so it’s just the five of us. ‘That’s right, help yourselves,’ Dina goes on. ‘Katya made these cabbage pies, and the borsch beetroot soup. No meat in it, I’m afraid, we’ll have to wait for Communism to see meat, won’t we, haha, but she used a couple of nice meaty bones, didn’t you, Katyusha?’

Mother is sitting across the table from us and she nods, smiles and pushes the plate of warm cabbage pies across to us.

‘I’m so sorry, girls, I looked for meat everywhere,’ she says. ‘I asked everyone I knew…’ She has this way of taking a deep breath through her nose and then sighing as she shakes her head and speaks. I like it, but I know it’ll irritate Masha. All Masha wants is the vodka standing in the middle of the table, unopened. ‘But I used the scraps off the bones to make this jelly kholodets ,’ Mother goes on, pushing the dish towards us. I take a wobbly slice. I’ve never had it before. I push the dish across to Tolya. He’s dark like us, and thin, and he’s just sitting there, staring at us like he wants us not to exist. I can tell he doesn’t want to be here. Neither do I much, now.

‘Well, Seriozha should be here soon, no doubt a little worse for wear…’ says Dina, all bright and cheerful. Mother shakes her head again. ‘But he did promise… that’s if he can find his way here, of course… It’s the vodka, you know – opium of the masses. Takes after his father; they do say it’s in the genes. Tolya here would be the same, but he’s sworn off it. Doesn’t drink a drop now. He’s a tram driver, you know, so he’d lose his job… he’s such a good boy.’

‘Talking of opium of the masses,’ says Masha quickly, ‘this one here drinks like a priest.’ She jerks her thumb at me. ‘She needs her vodka. It’s in the genes, like you say. But I’m like Tolya. Don’t touch the stuff. Can’t stop her, though; it’s like trying to hold back the Volga River.’

I feel nauseous at the thought of drinking the oily vodka. And I don’t want to get drunk in front of Aunty Dina and Mother. Apart from the shame of it, she won’t want us to live with her if she thinks we’re alcoholics. Mother looks across at me sadly, shakes her head a little bit and says nothing.

‘Of course! Of course! What was I thinking,’ says Aunty Dina and reaches for the bottle. ‘We must have a toast.’ She pours a little for herself and some for me, in two shot glasses.

‘She’ll have a tumbler,’ says Masha and looks all sad and apologetic. ‘Started when she was fourteen, she did, and there’s no stopping her. I’ve tried everything.’ Aunty Dina looks a bit shocked, but goes to the kitchen for a bigger glass and fills it for me. I feel bile rising in my throat. If only Masha could keep vodka down for more than two seconds, she could do all the drinking herself. I hate it.

After that first visit on Wednesday, Mother came to visit us in the Twentieth two more times and brought a bottle of vodka each time because Masha asked her to. Van Vanich doesn’t search her bags. Everything’s topsy-turvy in the Twentieth now, with the inmates all leaving for different homes like cockroaches abandoning a burning cellar. Masha’s still so angry with Aunty Nadya she refuses to see her, and Olessya’s already left for the Sixth. Time’s running out. I look at the vodka and take a deep breath.

Just then there’s a scraping at the front door and after a bit the bell rings, long and hard. Aunty Dina sighs and gets up to unbolt the door and a man stumbles into the little hallway. It’s our brother Seriozha.

Mother stands and leads him to the chair next to her. ‘Sit down, sinochik ,’ she says in her quiet voice. ‘Sit down, little son, and behave.’

He staggers in so drunk he can hardly see us. He just keeps squinting across at us, all bleary-eyed. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m revolted by him. His eyes are slack, his nose has been half sliced off somehow, years ago, and he’s leering at us. Then he sees the bottle and makes a grab for it.

‘No you don’t,’ says Mother, still in her low, quiet voice, but firmly. She takes it and puts it in front of Tolya.

‘Needa drink…’ slurs Seriozha.

‘No you don’t,’ she repeats, just as firmly.

He frowns at the bottle, then at us, then at Tolya. ‘Zat her then?’ he asks him. ‘Our sister. The one with all the arms and legs?’

I pick up the tumbler then.

Aunty Dina looks flustered. ‘Well then, here we all are, let’s have that toast,’ she says, quickly picking up her little glass. ‘A toast to finding family!’ I don’t clink glasses with her. I just drink the whole tumbler down in one, while Masha watches me like a wolf to make sure I don’t spill any.

I don’t remember how we got home. The next time Mother visited, bringing our clean laundry and jars of pickled cucumbers (but no vodka), she didn’t mention the dinner at Dina’s. Masha didn’t talk to her at all as she sat chattering on in her low voice about how everything was changing in the country. She said that shops and restaurants and even some factories were privately owned now, instead of being run by the State. And that the media was able to publish things that were wrong in society, instead of only the things that were right. It didn’t concern us though. Nothing changes for us in here.

She’s coming again today and I’ve been thinking that perhaps I’ll ask what happened after she gave birth to us. But then again, perhaps I won’t, because we might not like what we hear. Or perhaps she might not want to tell us.

‘They’re all going, every single one of them,’ says Masha angrily as we walk down the empty corridor to our room. We’re coming back from the canteen, which was almost empty too. ‘They’ll be bringing those poor mad bastards in soon.’ She clenches her fists. ‘By the busload.’

‘We’ll think of something, Masha, we must.’

‘You’re all retch and no vomit.’ She looks up. ‘Oh God, that’s all I need. There she is – Mother Misery.’

She’s standing outside our room with a string bag, smiling wearily as we tap towards her on our crutches.

‘Shush, she’s good to us, Masha. And it’s a two-hour journey for her to get to us from Sokol by metro and tram. And all with heavy bags of our laundry.’

‘If she hasn’t bought vodka this time, she’s dead to me.’

‘Shush.’

‘Hello, dochinki ,’ says Mother, smiling as we walk up. ‘I didn’t want to walk into your room without you there.’ She kisses me on the cheek – she doesn’t even try with Masha any more. We walk in and she starts unpacking the bags.

‘Here’s your laundry, all washed and ironed. And the women I used to work with in the factory all had a whip-round when I told them about you, so I was able to get the batteries and coffee you asked for, off the black market, of course, and cigarettes…’ She starts taking them out of the bag and putting them carefully on the bed, then folds up her string bag and puts it in her pocket. There’s no vodka. I feel Masha tense. ‘It’s getting empty in the Home, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Why’s that?’ We haven’t told her about the re-profiling.