Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

It’s been a week since she told us about our mother. Masha won’t talk about the interview, but I think it’s a shame that she wanted us and we wanted her and we were kept from each other. It’s upsetting. But I’m glad I know, because it means that I was loved and not rejected. I asked Masha if we could go and see Mother again, now that we know what happened, but of course she said no. One thing I can’t understand is why Mother was told by the scientists we’d died. Why? She could have come in and held us. Joolka’s sitting on a log now holding little Anya on her knee and Bobik suckling on her breast. All we wanted was to be picked up by someone other than the porter. Mummy – Anna Petrovna – didn’t cradle us like that; she kissed us over the bars of our cot. And sang to us. Our own mother, though, our real mummy, could have picked us right up and held us to her.

Sasha pokes me. ‘Aunty Dasha, I’ve got a swing at the dacha, it’s so high I can’t see the top of it because our dyedushka climbed right up to the highest branch of a pine tree to make it, and it swings so far it’s like flying.’

‘That sounds fun, Sashinka. You’re so lucky,’ I say. I don’t stutter with the children. It’s odd.

Masha’s tapping her leg to the sound of Modern Talking playing on the car radio and has a twig with a marshmallow on it, which she’s poking in the fire. She’s not interested in the children any more because the novelty’s worn off. It’s like with Marusya, my doll. She played with her for a bit and then got bored and gave her to me. It’s her fifth marshmallow but the twigs keep burning and the marshmallows drop into the flames and burn. She’s irritated because she wants vodka. What’s the point of a picnic without vodka? I can hear her saying it in her head. To be honest, I want vodka too. I feel all jittery without it.

Anya and Sasha are a bit afraid of Masha, they can see her chortik .

‘We’ve got hens, too, loads of them.’ Sasha’s still chattering away to me. Even the dogs on the street snarl and bark at us because we’re Together, but Joolka’s children just see us as Aunty Masha and Aunty Dasha. Three-year-old Anya looks at you like she’s looking into you. She’s white-skinned and has blue eyes like my Lyuba, and Sasha’s dark and dusky like my Marat. No one would believe they were sisters. As different as God’s gift and an omelette, they are. And even though me and Masha are supposedly identical, we’re just as different as them.

Vodka. I want vodka but Joolka won’t let us drink with the children around. She’s right.

Sasha pokes me again to get my attention. ‘The hens go running after Bobik when he’s having an outside air bath. Babushka says that’s because they think his pipiska’s a worm. When Babushka wants to make us soup, she takes them on to the back step and chops off their heads with an axe. The blood goes everywhere, all into her face and hair too. She goes to the back step so I can’t see her, but I’ve seen her do it. I hide, and see her. And she leaves their heads and claws in the soup to make it taste nice, so you have to not spoon them out. We’ve got pigs too, they’re called Obyed and Oozhin , Lunch and Supper. I wish you could come to our dacha.’ She stops talking then and blows her breath out, making both cheeks puff. She reminds me of Masha when she was young. ‘But my babushka says over her dead body. I don’t know why she says that, she’s not even met you. She likes dead bodies. I asked her what she’d wish if she had one wish and she said she’d like to find the dead body of a gangster out on the path outside the dacha, one who’d been gunned down, with wads and wads of dollars in his pockets so she could steal them. My one wish is to find dinosaur bones. What’s your one wish, Aunty Dasha?’

I smile at her and raise my eyebrows.

My one wish is to have a child like her.

Instead I say, ‘I’d like to be invisible.’

‘Me toooo!’ she says excitedly.

‘Time for shashlik then,’ says Kolya loudly, waving a skewer of pork meat around. ‘Any helpers, Sashkip?’

She pulls a face but goes over to her father. I asked Joolka once, if Sasha and Anya had been born Together, would she have kept them? ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Just as your mother would, if she’d been able.’

Masha’s marshmallow falls into the fire again and she swears and throws the stick in angrily. Vodka makes the world soft and sweet.

Joolka’s finished feeding Bobik and she lies him face down along her leg and pats his back, then bends down and kisses the top of his head.

‘They’re like gypsies, these foreigners,’ Masha says under her breath. ‘I know they’ve got vodka in the car.’ She glances across at it. ‘That baby looks like a poached egg, don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

‘Would you like to hold him?’ Joolka stands up and passes Bobik to me, just like that.

‘So,’ she says, sitting down in front of us, cross-legged. Anya leans on Joolka’s back and wraps her arms around her neck. ‘Now we’re all settled, here’s the latest. I talked to your Doctor Golubeva on the phone, just briefly – I’ll interview her properly later – and she said that you were kept in the Paediatric Institute to be studied by scientists. She worked in the Brain Institute with Anokhin and he brought her over sometimes to do that helmet thing on you. She said there were two women doctors who were in charge of you, and one wrote a dissertation about you.’

Bobik starts wriggling in my clumsy arms and then he begins squalling and goes bright red in the face. He wants his mummy. She smiles apologetically, takes him back and tucks him in the makeshift sling she’s wearing. Anya’s still hanging around her shoulders. He calms down straight away and goes to sleep like a light turning off. It’s instinctive to want your own mother. Mothers are like magnets.

‘It was Red Level, back then,’ she goes on, ‘so no one could access it, but now, what with all this democracy and the papers full of scandalous stories about what really happened under Stalin, it’s a huge can of worms that’s been opened. It’s momentous. I mean, all the archives are wide open now, so I shouldn’t have any problem getting it. She said it was published in 1959 and was written by Doctor Alexeyeva. It’ll be interesting, won’t it? To see what it says. But you can’t remember anything? No? Just your “Mummy” and some of the other nannies?’

We both shake our heads. Ground rice and butter is what we remember, and Jellyfish, our toy. We had him for one day. Mummy gave him to us. Sasha has swimming pools and swings… I don’t care that we didn’t have that though. We had Mummy, at least we had her. I do care that we could have had our own birth mother too – if they hadn’t told her we’d died.

‘I got it, I finally got it,’ said Joolka, bursting into our room two days later. She puts her rucksack down with a bang and fishes some crumpled papers out of it. ‘Here it is. I went to the library of the Academy of Medical Sciences and asked to see it. I had the title and the reference number, but they said it wasn’t accessible. But you know how it is, I got one of the librarians on her own and said that I’d be “very grateful” and she said, “Well, it might be possible to just let you look at it, but not make a copy.” So I quietly slipped her a hundred-dollar bill and all of a sudden it was possible. She brought it out and I was on my own at the table, taking notes. I tell you, I just couldn’t believe what was in there. Literally, couldn’t believe it. Every page I turned over was more horrific than the one before. No wonder they told your mother you’d died. No mother would have allowed anything like that to happen to her babies. Not in a million years…’