Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘I’m proud of you.’ We’re sitting in Olessya’s little room, on her armchair. We bought it for her out of our savings. That was Masha’s idea. ‘I’m not crippling myself on that hard wooden chair of yours any more,’ she’d said, with a sniff. ‘I’m used to a bit of comfort, I am.’ But we both knew she wanted an excuse to do something nice for Olessya. Things are changing with Masha, slowly but surely. All we need to do now is to stop drinking.

‘I know it’s hard,’ Olessya goes on. ‘They say it’s much harder for women alcoholics to give up than men. But you can do it. I know you can. So is this doctor good?’

We shrug. ‘I don’t know much about her,’ I say. ‘She called up Zlata Igorovna and said she was a n-narcologist’ (the stammer monster fears me ) ‘and had a new method of curing alcoholism and that it was one hundred per cent guaranteed and free. She said she wanted to help us.’

Masha sucks on her teeth and raps her fingers on the arm of the chair. ‘Everyone’s just sooo sweet,’ she says tightly. ‘Like Edouard.’

She’s remembering the last narcologist who promised to cure us: Edouard. He came all the way from Omsk and sewed ampules into our arms containing a chemical that would react with alcohol in our blood and kill us. Getting ‘sewn up’ is a common enough cure, but it didn’t work on us. Neither did the hypnotist, or the koldoon sorcerer who came to put a magic spell on us. Masha found him. Masha loves reading about all the witches and extrasensories there are now, but I was cynical, even though Joolka says they employ them as members of staff in polyclinics nowadays.

But the ampules didn’t stop us drinking. We held out for a month of White Fever – throwing up, shaking all over, sweating, seizures, our heads filled with monsters – until even death seemed preferable, so we got a bottle and drank. And we woke up the next morning alive and kicking. And then Edouard wrote an ‘exposé’ in the newspapers all about how we’d fallen off the wagon. About how degraded we were. A hopeless case.

‘He seemed so nice…’ I say.

‘Your Timur seemed nice too…’ says Masha.

‘It was you who told him where we’d hidden the cash.’

‘It was you who invited him up for vodka.’

‘That was us. Not me, Masha. Us .’

She sniffs and looks out of the window. ‘Can’t trust anyone in this world. They’re all out to grab money now, in whatever way they can.’ I still miss Timur. I still find it hard to believe he’d do that – steal our thousand dollars we kept hidden in a tea caddy – after he got us dead drunk. And then he quit his job. We never reported it. What’s the point? And of course we never saw him again.

So when Zlata Igorovna walked in yesterday to tell us she was sending the narcologist to us this afternoon because she was fed up with her Home being notorious for harbouring the world’s only conjoined drunks, we agreed.

‘So tell us what’s happening out there, Olessinka,’ asks Masha, waving at the window, ‘in the land of the living.’ Olessya picks up her pile of newspapers and opens it at an article she’s been reading. She reads newspapers every day and listens to the news programmes on her radio, but we just let it all pass us by. We can’t change anything out there.

‘How’s our glorious drunken President then?’ asks Masha. ‘What a great example he is to us all. Has he fallen off any more bridges lately?’

‘ Pozor! Russia’s a great country, troubled but great. The greatest country in the world and yet, after Lenin, we had that tyrant Stalin, then the peasant Khrushchev who everyone laughed at after the shoe-throwing incident, then that old stuffed goose Brezhnev, another laughing stock, then a series of Party faithfuls on their deathbeds, and then Gorbachev, who was so weak he let the Soviet Union slip through his fingers like mushy peas. And now we have Yeltsin, a drunken buffoon.’

‘ Ei , calm down!’ Masha laughs. ‘Stalin was The Man. All we need is another Stalin.’

‘You were tortured under Stalin,’ says Olessya coldly.

‘And look how well we turned out! Cheer up. I only asked what’s happening. Gospodi! ’

‘Well, OK, in a nutshell,’ she rustles the newspapers again, ‘since you ask, all Russia’s gas and oil and wealth has been sold off for kopecks to the New Russian gangster businessmen for paltry bribes to the government. In fact, everything’s being sold off: factories, airlines, steel plants, land. It’s not very different to the Red Army looting the palaces after the revolution. We’ve gone from so-called altruistic Socialism with the distant goal of Communism, to dog eats dog. The country is being torn apart and the chunkiest, meatiest bits go to the most savage.’ She pauses for breath and we stare at her in surprise.

‘Um… Altruism?’ asks Masha, not really understanding much Olessya’s said. I’m not sure I do either. ‘What’s that?’

‘It means selfless concern for the wellbeing of others. Communism. That was what it was all supposed to be about, wasn’t it? But it got corrupted. That’s why Sunny Nina, Little Lyuda and Big Boris died. That’s why I’m in here with my one hundred per cent diploma doing nothing except sitting by the gates looking at the world go by. That’s why Dasha with her one hundred per cent diploma is drinking herself to death. That’s why you, Masha, with your energy and drive and spirit, are sitting in a room all day playing war games. It’s because we’re arrogant, we Russians are. We’re a great people, a cultured people, I truly believe we’re the best people in the world, but we’re fatally flawed by our own pride and arrogance. Do you know what arrogance is? It’s fear of thinking others are better than you. It’s vulnerability. We wanted to be the best, we wanted our country to be the best of all possible worlds, so we desperately hid our flaws. Like us. The Defectives!’

‘Wow, calm down, Olessinka,’ says Masha, waving her arms. We know Olessya gets political, but she seems particularly fired up this morning.

‘I won’t calm down! It’s such a waste. Such a waste of a great people. We should be led by a woman, not by men with all their screwed-up patriarchal weaknesses. Why did Gorbachev never tell us about Chernobyl and let everyone get irradiated? All those children splashing in puddles under the invisible radioactive cloud? Everyone in the world knew, except us. Why didn’t we know about the Novocherkassk riots either? We were living there, for God’s sake. Now it’s in the history books. The biggest riot in Soviet history, and did we know anything about it? No. And Chikatilo, the mass murderer who killed fifty-two children, children , down in the Novocherksassk region. He was happily killing away for fifteen years, while we were there. And the reason he could keep on murdering then was because no one was told. No one. Those mothers let their children wander around alone because they weren’t told, because having a mass murderer in your midst would have been a flaw, and Russia. Does. Not. Like. Flaws.’ She emphasizes each word with a thump on the side of her wheelchair, and then balls her fists up and looks down at her legs.

We can hear the black and white crows of Moscow cawing outside in the first snow squalls of winter. Cologne had birds that chirped in the branches of the cherry trees, tiny little songbirds. All we have in Moscow is crows. Slava said they had sparrows in his village, and cuckoos.

‘So… anyway, Olessinka, how’s Garrick doing?’ asks Masha, trying to change the subject. ‘We haven’t seen him around much recently. Is your cockerel up and running?’

‘Garrick died,’ she says flatly, and opens the newspaper again. ‘Didn’t you hear? Seems he had lymphoma but they told him it was flu. Until he died. Now it turns out it was lymphoma.’