Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

Her eyes flicker with her chortik .

‘ Nyet. ’ She turns away from me, and points at our suitcase. ‘You’d better get packing.’

‘You know you want it, you’ve always wanted it…’ He pushes her roughly against the hot mud wall of the hut and she gasps faintly, pressing one pale hand to her fluttering heart. She looks past him to the rolling desert sands and feels as shaky as the shimmering heat waves dancing in the dunes. He leans forward and brushes his dry lips against hers, his hard body pressing against her thin dress. ‘No, no,’ she moans, ‘oh no…’ But it’s too late, far too late… his deep green eyes, flecked with gold, glitter hungrily as…

‘Bang, bang bang!! Yay, dead, dead, dead!’ Masha jumps up, knocking the book out of my hand. Blood splatters the TV screen and she whoops and presses reverse to play the battle scene again on her Atari.

I pick The Sheik and the Factory Girl up again. I want to read more, I wish I could just go away and read by myself. I’ve got a stack of Mills and Boon books by the bedside table, hidden under some magazines because Masha says it’s embarrassing. But I love reading them. Why shouldn’t I? I escape in them. I need an escape.

The military coup by Yanayev failed, and after coming back from Germany, I collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union. Masha says I’m just like the old woman in the fairy tale who keeps getting a wish from the fish her husband catches in the sea but throws back in. First she wishes their hovel was a log cabin. Then that it was a brick house, then a mansion and finally a castle. And she’s still never happy. Perhaps Masha’s right. But all I really want is to be in a country where I’d be invisible…

Gorbachev was too soft, too intellectual, too weak. That’s what everyone said. He was forced out of the way by a battling Boris Yeltsin, who stood on a tank in front of Moscow’s White House when it was under siege from the hardliners trying to bring back true Socialism. They shot big black holes into the government White House. I don’t remember watching the news at the time, I was a big black hole myself, I think. But it seems that while Yanayev was on State Radio reassuring us all that Gorbachev was simply ‘resting’ (because ‘over the years he has become rather tired and needs to get better’), Yeltsin was on TV, showing everyone that there had actually been a military coup to overthrow the government, and that Gorbachev was imprisoned in his dacha in the Crimea.

They didn’t win, though, the hardliners. So we’re still here in the Sixth and it seems that now Russia is like Amerika – a democracy. After all that talk about spreading Communism like wildfire across the world, it all went phuut , and Yeltsin got rid of Gorbachev and then dissolved the Communist Party. Just like that. The Communist Party! And then all the republics slipped away to proclaim their own independence. So now it seems we’re back to being Russia again, like we were under the Tsars, except there’s no Tsar now. There’s a President.

It was all a bit like our lives, me and Masha. You’re hopeful one moment and then disappointed the next. You think everything’s going well and then there’s some change and you realize it wasn’t going well at all. You realize it was all going wrong and that you’d been lied to. So then you start all over again, believing it’s all going to be right this time. You keep on and on, hoping.

Olessya says hope stops your heart from breaking. Masha says Olessya thinks too much.

‘She’s coming soon,’ she says, switching off the Atari. ‘Joolka. She’s coming soon.’

‘Do you think she’ll bring the children? I haven’t seen Bobik yet, her little boy.’

‘She pops them out like piglets, so she’ll probably have a fourth one by the time she gets here.’ Masha grins and gets up to put the kettle on. Or rather gets up so I can put the kettle on.

‘Don’t know how I allowed her to interview our stupid mother though…’ she says, sitting back down with a thump.

I was so upset when we had to leave Germany that Masha finally agreed to call up Joolka and Aunty Nadya to ‘bring me back to life’. Also, we’d run out of money and Masha missed her firmenni food products. Matthius never got back in touch. As for me, I just missed Aunty Nadya and Joolka – and her little girls. I missed Olessya too. She doesn’t like my drinking. She knows it’s Masha who makes me drink, so I get the feeling she doesn’t like Masha much either. Perhaps she never did? She came into our room last month and just sat there in front of our bed, looking at me. I looked a mess, I know I did, all bruised and swollen with dried blood on my eye and lip. After a bit she said: ‘Are you ever going to do anything about this, Dasha?’ I didn’t say anything. Masha normally gives some excuse about how I slipped in the shower, but she doesn’t bother to tell those lies with Olessya. ‘Well, are you?’ She looked at me then as if she was as disappointed in me as she was with Masha. What could I say? Because what can I do?

She hasn’t been back since then, and we haven’t been into her room either.

I pick up my Factory Girl book again.

‘Put that yobinny book down; makes me sick just looking at all that sex and mushy love.’

‘I don’t much like World War Three going on right in front of me all the time either.’

‘Stop bleating.’

Joolka called to say that she had a book agent from England who wanted us to write our autobiography – with Joolka’s help. Masha liked the idea straight away. She wanted to make more money. Roubles were like pebbles, she said. All the money the Russians sent us just sank to the bottom of the stream, but greeni dollars were like sifted nuggets of gold. She wanted valyuta – foreign currency. When we first called Joolka up and asked if she’d visit, she was happy to see us again and met us as if nothing had happened. So did Aunty Nadya. Masha had called her on the phone. ‘Aunty Nadya?’ she’d said. ‘It’s me. How are you? We wondered if you could come and see us?’ There was just a slight pause and then she agreed. ‘Well, girls?’ she’d said when she walked into our room. ‘How many winters, how many years?’ And that was that.

Joolka said she’d need to research our autobiography, and that the best place to start was with our mother. She went to see her in her flat yesterday. Now she’s here, all excited, holding her tape recorder like a baby. She’s on her own though, without the children. This is work.

‘Here it is then,’ she says, sitting on the floor in front of us like she always does, so she can see both of us. ‘Let’s listen. It was so interesting, I think you’ll both be amazed.’

She switches it on and we can hear Mother’s slow, deep voice talking about her childhood in a village in Siberia with her nine siblings. Masha picks up Krestyanka magazine and starts leafing through it. Mother goes on to describe how she’d been sent away to live with her aunt in Moscow when she was eight, and lived in their communal flat, beaten by the drunken uncle whenever he got close enough to her, and sleeping on a cot with three other children.

‘Breaks my bleeding heart,’ said Masha, picking up another magazine.

Mother left school at fourteen and moved out of the flat – to her aunt’s delight – to work in a metalworks factory. There were no men left after the First and Second World Wars, not to mention the Great Famine and Stalin’s Purges, so she was lucky to get Misha. She talked about how he needed her room in Moscow, in the factory workers’ barracks, and she needed a man and father for her children. There was no love involved. It was a transaction. All she wanted by then was babies, and she was already thirty-four. Misha loved life and was a womanizer. He beat her, got drunk and controlled her. Mother fell pregnant straight away. She started her contractions in the middle of a blizzard at night, and the woman in the next room helped her on the forty-minute walk through the snow to Maternity Hospital 16, because Misha was working as a night-watchman in a factory.