Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘They’re dying of boredom,’ says Masha coldly. Mother looks confused.

‘Well, I got you a toilet brush too, Dashinka, as you asked, and a needle and thread to darn your socks. I can sit and do that now, if you like?’ She looks up at me hopefully, with her gentle blue eyes.

‘Thank you,’ I say. Masha would kill me if I called her Mother or Mummy. Our mummy was Anna Petrovna, in the Ped. We talk about her a lot nowadays, especially now we’ve found our real mother. We sometimes wonder who she was, and what happened to her. She must have been a nanny, paid to look after us. Paid to be our mummy because ours had rejected us… I wonder where she is now. I wonder why she never did come and visit us.

‘Well, give me your socks now, dochinki , they’re filled with holes.’

I reach over to get them from our clothes drawer but Masha gets up and pulls me out on to the balcony instead, so we just leave her standing there on her own in the room. It’s raining and the sky’s as flat as a lead lid.

‘I don’t want my yobinny socks darned every week for the next twenty years in here, I just want to get out,’ hisses Masha.

‘Shhh, Masha, she can hear.’

‘So what? Do you think cabbage pies and a tree stump for a mother are going to make life better for us in an asylum of lunatics banging their heads against the wall day and night? Do you? What use is she – pitying us with her charity.’

‘ Teekha. ’ I look back at our mother, who’s just standing there, looking lost.

‘It’s like having an older version of you around. Life’s a tragedy. It’s bad enough with the one of you – now I feel outnumbered.’

We stand there in silence. Masha’s holding on to the bars on our balcony, Mother’s standing in the room, and I’m half in and half out of the door. Eventually, Mother speaks.

‘ Dochinki …’ I look back at her. ‘Have I done or said something to upset you?’

Masha sniffs and looks up at the sky. ‘We’ve lived thirty-eight years without her,’ she says loudly, to me, ‘and we’ll live another thirty-eight without her.’

There’s a pause when no one says anything at all and then I hear Mother start to cry in this sort of hushed way, which I know only too well. It’s how I cry. I want to go to her, but Masha’s still holding tight on to the bars of the balcony.

‘ Meelinki, meelinki ,’ says Mother. My darlings, my darlings. ‘ Meelinki dochinki .’ I pull at Masha. I understand Mother’s pain. I understand it all. I can’t cause her any more. I want her to kiss me again. But Masha won’t move. I look back then at my mother, and her eyes meet mine.

‘ Proshai ,’ she says, and wipes her nose. ‘Farewell. The first time tortured me. And now I have to do it again… Such is fate. May God now take me away from this life.’

Then she picks up her empty string bag and walks slowly out.

After a bit, we go back into the room. I sit on the bed and pull our socks out of the drawer. They do need darning and Mother’s left her needles and wool behind so I try to thread a needle but can’t because my hands are shaking too much. There’s nothing to say really. Masha reaches over for painkillers for her toothache. She takes two and then puts her fingers in her mouth gingerly, to feel her broken teeth.

‘Wait!’ she says excitedly. I jump and look at her, startled. ‘I’ve got it!’ She slaps her hand on my knee. ‘I have fucking got it!’

We walk out on to the stage, blinded by the bright lights. I can hear all the applause from the TV audience but I can’t see a thing. Vlad Listyev, the presenter of Vzglyad , this new talk show everyone’s watching, takes me by the arm and leads me gently to a plush red sofa. He’s smiling and clapping too. When the applause finally ends, he shakes Masha’s hand and then my hand, like we’re important, respectable people.

‘So,’ he says, beaming at us, ‘my name’s Vlad, and you are Masha and Dasha.’ We nod. He’s got a friendly face and he’s wearing these big, round spectacles, and has a bushy moustache. I don’t look out at the audience, which has fallen silent now and is watching and listening somewhere out there in the darkness. ‘And you are Siamese twins,’ Vlad goes on. ‘A very rare occurrence in nature – I don’t believe many of our viewers will have heard the term. Named after two famous twins, Chang and Eng, from Siam who lived a century ago and were born together, like you.’ I haven’t heard the term either. And I haven’t heard of his Chang and Eng, but we just nod again.

‘Well now, girls – I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, but you both look so young – why don’t you tell me a bit about your situation, in your own words.’ He smiles warmly at us and leans in to listen.

I take a deep breath. This has happened so fast I’ve barely had time to panic. It started a month ago, with Masha’s Great Idea to get us transferred to the Stomatological Institute (the ‘Stom’) for a course of treatment on our teeth. We’d been there twice before over the years, and stayed there for up to two months. Our young dental surgeon, Doctor Shevchenko, always welcomes us with open arms. He’s a good man, and so is the Director of the Stom and all the staff. They love us there. They’d help us, Masha said. When they heard what was happening, they’d keep us at the Stom until we found a new Home.

It all worked like a dream to start off with. Barkov didn’t suspect a thing. We both went off and cried in front of Rita, the new nurse in the Twentieth, showing her our black stubs of teeth, and the poor girl couldn’t get us into the Stom quick enough.

We had a private room there with a double bed, and Doctor Shevchenko did all our treatments in the middle of the night so we wouldn’t be seen. When we finally explained the situation to him, he went off and asked some questions and then came back to tell us that all he could do was keep us in for as long as possible. ‘It’s against the law for you to stay here,’ he’d said. ‘The Ministry of Protection have decided you should live in the Twentieth. So that’s where you must live. But…’ We’d both looked up at him from our bed then, watching him pacing up and down. ‘But… perhaps you could go to the press? Things are changing now, with Gorbachev and his Openness campaign. There are all sorts of appeals for justice going on.’

Everything kicked off really quickly after that. He introduced us to a journalist who’d won a campaign in her newspaper, Moskovskii Komsomolyets , to get a bus stop built outside the Stom. She wanted to write a story about us, but her editor refused to believe in our existence, even when she showed him photos. He said a freak like that couldn’t possibly exist and now that he didn’t need to lie to his readers any more, he wasn’t going to give them a cock-and-bull story like that. So instead she went to a cameraman friend who worked on Vzglyad . That was when Vlad Listyev, the creator and presenter of this new talk show, said he wanted us both on air, live, as soon as possible, and before we knew it, a car had come to pick us up from the Stom and take us to the studios. I was petrified, but Masha kept telling me this was our only chance. ‘They’ll hate us, they’ll spit and jeer,’ I’d said in the car on the way here, ‘on live TV.’ She shook her head. ‘No. We’ll be amazing. You heard what Doctor Shevchenko said – the Russian people have changed along with the times. They’ve become more open with all this… openness.’ She’d waved out of the window as if it was blowing in the breeze. ‘You can do it, you know you can.’ I’d taken a great big breath. ‘But I’ll stutter, Masha, I’ll stutter.’ She’d squeezed my hand then. ‘Even when you stutter, you still sound more intelligent than me, and you always know what to say.’ She’d taken my chin in her hand so I was looking right at her. ‘I trust you, Dasha.’ She never calls me by my name. ‘You have to do this. Just this once. You have to.’