Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘So, do you want me to translate it?’ she says, bouncing on to our bed, next to Masha, and leafing through the pages.

She came back twice to see us in the Stom to do more interviews for the article. We told her about SNIP and the school. Some of it, anyway. We didn’t mention Slava.

‘ Gospodi!! What the fuck is that? A fucking doll?’ Timur jumps back into the room, pointing at the floor outside the door as if he’s seen a ghost.

‘Oh no, no, don’t worry, that’s my baby, Sashinka. She’s asleep. She’s fine.’

‘Baby?’ He jumps back even further. ‘A real live baby? On the floor like yobinny Moses in a basket?’

Joolka gets up, laughing. ‘I thought you’d like to see her,’ she says, looking back at us over her shoulder as she goes to the door. ‘She’s a bit of a handful but sleeps a lot, thank goodness. Here we are, she’s in her car seat.’

A baby! She’s brought us her baby? I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s actually done it. Babies are kept swaddled in cots, away from germs and people for the first year of their lives. She walks back in, swinging the car seat, and places it between us. I can smell her, the softness and milkiness. She’s waking up, she yawns slowly, the biggest yawn ever, and I can see two little tooth buds in her gums and her pink tongue. I slowly reach out my hand to hers and she wraps her fingers around mine, like… like she never wants to let go.

‘You can hold her, if you like,’ says Joolka, and plucks her right out of her chair like she’s a piece of fruit. Masha holds out her arms, ‘Me! Me!’ Joolka gives her the baby, just gives it to her like that, pulling her little fat fingers off mine as she does, and I want to grab her back and kiss her fluffy head and breathe her in, but I can’t. Masha’s got her now. Masha holds her out in front of her, swinging her a bit and laughing. Bye-oo bye-ooshki bye-oo , she sings, and Sashinka yawns that big yawn again. I’m laughing too. I’m laughing and laughing.

‘So anyway,’ Joolka goes on, ‘I put at the bottom of the article that if anyone wants to donate money for you, to get you a cassette player and TV, you know, that they should send it to an account I’ve set up in your name.’ She looks down at the magazine. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a big response.’

Sashinka’s wearing a soft blue flannel jumpsuit. I reach out to touch her, just to touch one of her fat toes and perfect skin, but Masha swings her away from me. I don’t mind, I can’t stop laughing because there’s a baby here, right in front of me. She looks just like my Lyuba did when she was a baby.

‘Well, I’ll bring her in every time, if you’d like,’ says Joolka. ‘She goes everywhere with me. I keep her in a sling mostly. I don’t live far away.’

Sashinka starts gurgling and smiling as Masha bobs her up and down in the air, and then somehow we’re all laughing, even Timur.

‘Yes, I’d like that,’ I say. ‘I’d like that a lot.’

‘So… Masha and Dasha, this is your first time in West Germany, your first-ever trip outside the Soviet Union. Can you tell us what your first impressions are?’ Matthius, the German TV reporter, sticks his microphone towards us as the camera rolls. We’re standing on the cobbled streets of Cologne. It’s a beautiful sunny autumn day and I feel like I’ve been transported into a fairy tale.

‘Well,’ says Masha, and he tilts the microphone towards her expectantly. ‘I like the bright colours and the shop displays. And it’s clean.’ He nods encouragingly. ‘And there are no queues and everyone’s dressed in yellow and red and all sorts of bright colours instead of black. And then there’s all these lights everywhere and advertisements, and there’s every single sort of thing you could want to buy packed on to the shelves. Everyt hing’s different!’

He looks across at me then. ‘And you, Dasha?’

I blink at him.

Matthius came to interview us in the Sixth a month ago. Masha said we needed another Western journalist after she fell out with Joolka. That was because of Sanya again. She came in one day and whispered that she’d found out that Joolka hadn’t given us all the money from the Sunday Times Magazine readers, but had kept half back for herself. Sanya also said Joolka was selling photos that her husband Kolya took of us for the article for big bucks. She was exploiting us, just like Ronnie and Donnie were exploited in Amerika. ‘She wouldn’t do that, Mash,’ I’d protested. ‘You can tell by her face, by everything she says, that she wouldn’t do that. And she’s a Christian, she goes to church, she’s good… you can tell… by her face, you just can. And Kolya too.’ But Masha had said, ‘Everyone’s out for themselves, Christians or not. Christians are the worst. All they want is to get to Heaven. Foo! Good thing I’m not a naïve spud in the soil like you. Someone needs to protect us.’ So that was that.

‘Dasha?’ Matthius pushes the microphone closer. ‘And you, Dasha?’

‘Oh.’ I gaze around at the people passing us in the cobbled street. ‘N-no one looks at us,’ I say slowly. ‘It’s as if we’re not Together any more. It’s as if we magically stopped b-being Together on the flight over here. We’re free to walk around with everyone else. We can s-sit in a café for everyone else. We c-can stay in a hotel for everyone else. Over here, we are everyone else. We’re n-normal.’

Matthius nods again and turns back to the cameraman. ‘Got that, Billy? Great soundbite. Really great.’ He gives me the thumbs up and I smile.

After we moved into the Sixth, Joolka took us in her car on trips around Moscow to restaurants and parks and even some shops, all with Sashinka. Now the public knew who we were, they weren’t so shocked, but they still crowded round and asked questions. So we got fed up with that in the end and stopped going out. Joolka had raised so many thousands of American dollars for us from her appeal that we didn’t even know how much we’d got any more. Enough for Masha to buy an Atari and play all her killing games at top volume all day… They scare me stiff. Enough for a big TV and a video player and a cassette player to listen to Modern Talking on. And enough to bribe Garrick to go out to the nearest shop and buy vodka for us. Olessya doesn’t like that either. Baba Iskra looks after us in every way she can, but she won’t buy us vodka any more. Neither did Joolka.

Joolka had a second baby, Anya, just before Masha fell out with her. Anya had blonde hair like the fluff on a poplar tree, and blue eyes, as blue as the River Don. Now there were two of them I could hold one while Masha held the other. I didn’t mind which one. I loved them both. Sasha was three by then and used to come toddling into our room saying, ‘Aunty Dasha! Aunty Masha!’ holding her arms out because she loved it when we lay back on the bed and swung her up in the air between us. But then after Sanya claimed Joolka was stealing from us, Masha started slamming the phone down every time she called up and eventually she just stopped calling. And we never saw Anya and Sashinka again.

When Matthius first asked us if we wanted to go to Germany, Masha had said: ‘ West Germany, right? East Germany’s not Over There. What’s the point?’ He’d laughed. ‘Technically it is Over There, now that the Berlin Wall’s come down. But yes, Cologne is in West Germany.’