Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘I’ve always thought of you as being just Masha and Dasha,’ Olessya goes on slowly. ‘I never noticed that you’re Together. None of us did. You were just so different , you know – to each other, I mean. And then it turns out you were born like that: different. You didn’t become that way.’ She shakes her head, as if it’s come as a big surprise. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t change .’ The visitor trudges past us into the Home, wearing a blue headscarf and an air of deep despair. Olessya looks at us then, at Masha, at me. She looks right into my eyes. ‘You know what they say: life’s a journey, not a destination. We can all change, however old we are. We all have to work at making life as good as we can make it every step of the way.’

‘All right, Plato,’ says Masha, sniffing. ‘That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?’

‘ We . It should be we, not I, Masha. That’s what we’re talking about. Life’s about compromises. All relationships involve compromise.’

‘Thanks, but we’re OK. We’re like an old married couple,’ says Masha, sniffing again. ‘We’ve worked it out.’

‘But have you?’ She looks at me.

I pause for a moment and then say: ‘I think it’s easier to find a compromise when one of you can leave the room.’

‘So, you’ll never guess what…’ Sanya’s leaning against the balcony door in our room, picking her teeth with a matchstick – she never sits down in case Zlata Igorovna comes bursting in on one of her spot checks to make sure no one’s fraternizing with us or that we’re drinking. It’s nyelzya to lock the door when we’re in the room. Only when we leave. It’s midday and there are thunder-clouds gathering outside. It’s so hot nowadays it thunders every afternoon. I’m soaked in sweat. Most days we fill our shallow shower basin up with cold water and sit in it, fully dressed, to keep cool – and dry off in half an hour. Sanya’s telling us what she calls ‘a horrific scandal’ about the new cleaner, an Armenian girl called Zabel. ‘So then her boyfriend, who’s also Armenian – can’t remember his name for the life of me; those darkie languages are all abracadabra to me – follows her to the hairdressers where she’s getting her hair done…’

Masha’s leaning forward, all ears, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate. Joolka got back from her trip to Novocherkassk today and she said she’d come over to see us after she’d been home and seen the children. She wanted to go to our school because she said she needed to describe it, even if none of the teachers are still there. She says we can’t describe anyone or anything for the life of us. I think she gets a bit frustrated with us. I stopped her as she was leaving our room for the airport, before Masha could say anything, and asked if she could look for Slava’s family, just to find out what happened on that day after the party. Or perhaps to find out what he said about us… about me. But most of all, to find out how he died.

Me and Masha, we talk about that sometimes. Especially now – because we’re digging everything up with our autobiography. Masha says he wasn’t the type to give up and kill himself. And anyway, why would he? He was waiting for us to come to live with him. And he didn’t seem too interested in studying after we heard that we were all just flushed down the toilet, as she put it, after finishing school, whatever grades we got. But his dad would have found him carpentry work to do, or even accounting on the side. He could have been happy… and yet somehow, deep inside, I’m sure that he did do it. I do think he killed himself. How could he hold a birthday party for everyone and then just lie down and die the very next day? Just… die? What of? He was strong, he never fell ill. He was young. But if he did commit suicide, then he broke his promise to me that we’d always be together. If he…

‘Whaat? He never did!’ Masha leans even further forward with a jerk and I almost fall off the bed. ‘He actually pulled out a gun?’

‘Yes, yes, he did, Mash! He was so crazy about her, but she’d started sleeping with her hairdresser – a man, obviously – because she needed to get a Moscow propiska to stay here, and her Armenian wasn’t going to be able to give her that, although he was giving her everything else by the sounds of it. And she was pretty as a poppy, wasn’t she, with those big black eyes and red lips—’

‘Was? What do you mean “was”?’ says Masha, her mouth open.

‘I mean…’ Sanya pauses for effect. ‘I mean… he burst into the salon and gunned her down. Da-oosh! Yesterday. Right before everyone’s eyes. I tell you, it’s like Chicago out there. Everyone dived for the floor, and he walked over, cool as a python, and pumped a few more bullets into her head and then strolled out.’

‘She’s dead?’ I look at her, startled. ‘Zabel’s been killed?’

Sanya levers herself off the wall and nods. ‘Like I say, no one’s safe any more, what with the car bombings and the mafia. Anyone can get a gun. It’s mayhem. There are signs outside fancy restaurants saying Please leave your guns at the door. Seriously, I’ve seen them. And I was talking to Zabochka just the other day about Igor, her hairdresser. She was telling us that he wanted to marry her, and so I said: “ Nye byot? Nye pyot? ” And she smiles with all those gleaming teeth of hers and says, no, he doesn’t drink, or beat me, and I say, “You got a good ’un then… they’re rare.”’ Sanya puts her hand up to her mouth, which is swollen and bruised, and shakes her head. ‘Most of them do drink and knock you around – what do you expect? It’s a hard life. But it takes a real crazy to kill you in cold blood.’

No one talks for a bit and then Masha asks: ‘Any chance of getting us a box of slivochnaya pomada sweets, Sanya, like the one you brought last week? I felt like I was having an orgasm with each one of those.’ Not that Masha would know what an orgasm is like. Or me, for that matter.

Sanya sighs and shakes her head. ‘We’re all on rationing cards nowadays, Mashkip. That last box was a stroke of luck. Saw the queue and joined it, quick as a flash.’

I look at Masha, talking happily away about creamy sweets. I’m thinking that Zabel, beautiful Zabel with her dark brown eyes and happy smile, is dead. Murdered. Indifference is one thing, but you have to have at least a last spark of pity. Don’t you?

There’s a knock on the door and Sanya jumps like she’s been electrocuted and grabs her mop and pail, almost falling over them.

The door opens and we can hear Joolka’s voice: ‘Cuckoo! I’m back.’

Sanya relaxes with a fat sigh. ‘Well,’ she says, waddling across our rug, ‘if I don’t get to all the rooms on your floor in ten minutes flat, I’m dead meat myself, so I’m off. Just thought I’d tell you though, let you know. Bye, then.’

We nod. Joolka walks in with her rucksack. ‘Hey, girls,’ she says. ‘All good?’

She looks tired. But excited too. Instead of squatting down cross-legged on the rug in front of us like she normally does, she comes over to sit with me, but Masha grabs her hand and pulls her over to her side, pleased as a cat with butter to have her there. Masha starts kissing Joolka’s shoulder and neck and grinning that great big happy grin she has. I relax then, and grin too. It’s like Masha’s joyfulness always comes bouncing through to me. It really does.

‘So, that was an interesting trip,’ says Joolka, smiling too. ‘The school was much smaller than I thought it would be, and I forgot it used to be a rich merchant’s house in tsarist days. It was a lovely old building; obviously, a bit grim inside and crumbling on the outside, but still… lots of sweet little kids. Shy, but sweet. Still on trollies, by the way, and they still have the green krokodilchik wheelbarrows to take them to lessons. Hey, Mash, stop that, it hurts!’ Masha’s nibbling her ear now and she bats her away.