Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Masha. We just kissed all the children on the tops of their heads.

She’s standing at the door now, rummaging in her bag.

‘Yes,’ she goes on, ‘sorry I haven’t been able to visit for so long, but here we are, I’ve got something. You know the Sunday Times Magazine want me to do another feature on you – a where-are-they-now type thing? Well I was going through my old documents folder, and I found this envelope that Anna Yefimovna, the doctor from the Paediatric Institute, had given to me. I didn’t take much notice at the time, it’s only a photo of people in white coats, but then I looked on the back and it says that it’s a photo of your two researchers, you know, the scientists who carried out all the experiments. Not a very cheery birthday present, I know, but I thought you’d like to have it since I’m leaving soon.’ She puts the photo down on the table. ‘Here we are, T. T. Alexeyeva and A. P. Kryuchkova. ‘I’ve got some other stuff you might like too…’ She goes back to rifling through her bag.

‘ Foo! ’ spits Masha, not looking at it. ‘May they both rot in hell.’

I pick up the photo and look at it. They’re standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder in their white lab coats and caps, smiling out at the camera. Two colleagues, two friends. Doctor Alexeyeva on the right, and on the left…

Anna Petrovna Kryuchkova.

Mummy.

I feel cold as I walk back to our room holding the photo. The photo of the two scientists who ‘observed’ conjoined twins in a laboratory fifty years ago. I didn’t say anything when I picked it up. Nothing at all. I didn’t tell Joolka, or Masha.

I put it down on the bedside table and we go to clean our teeth and wash our nappy. Masha’s chattering on as we get into bed, saying that Aunty Nadya should go to a doctor with that limp of hers, then she tucks the Guinness Book of Records under her pillow. We lie in silence in the dark for a while.

‘What’s wrong?’ she says, after a bit.

‘It’s that photo.’

‘What about that photo?’

‘The one of those two scientists, the two scientists who studied us.’

‘Yes?’

‘One of them was Mummy.’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes. Mummy.’

She doesn’t say anything. She’s thinking.

‘No, it wasn’t. Mummy wouldn’t have done that to us.’

‘It was. It said A. P. Kryuchkova. Anna Petrovna. Mummy. It said so on the back. And it’s her in the photo.’

I’m waiting for her to jump up and start swearing, but she doesn’t. She just lies quiet at the other end of the bed, in the darkness.

Then she says in a whisper, ‘Mummy?’

‘Yes,’ I say, and I can feel this slow pain coming across to me from her, so I add quickly, ‘But she was only doing her job. I think she loved us, Masha. I do think she loved us. How could we have loved her so much if she didn’t love us back?’

There’s still a dark silence.

‘She sang us bye-oo bye-ooshki bye-oo , remember? Every night,’ I go on. ‘She kissed us. She kissed us, Masha. No one else in there did that.’

We lie there in the darkness of our room, in our big bed. I know she wants to cry. I move over a bit and reach for her hand. Like we did in the cot when I was scared of the cockroaches.

And then she does.

I reach for one of the lipsticks in the drawer of our dresser and lean forward towards the mirror, pouting.

‘Who’re you hoping to meet down there – Prince William of England?’

‘Just taking a bit of pride in my appearance, Masha, nothing wrong with that.’

‘Here, I’ll do it, you’re getting it all over the place.’ She takes the lipstick from me and frowns, sticking her tongue out as she applies it carefully. ‘Might as well do me too. Don’t want to look like the ugly sister, and a bit of war paint never hurt anyone.’

I paint her lips, then she picks up the comb and runs it through my hair. When she’s finished I comb her hair for her and we walk over to the sofa to put our boots on.

We never talked about Mummy again. What’s the point? She’s still Mummy to us. I don’t regret that we found out. Knowledge is power, and I don’t blame her either. She was doing her job.

‘Why do we have to go down now, Dasha? The Medical Commission’s not even starting for half an hour…’ whines Masha.

‘You know that the later we leave it, the longer we’ll have to stand in line.’

‘Can’t believe we have to go through this every year to prove we’re still Together so we can get our pension – as if we’re going to magically drift apart or something…’

‘Chance would be a fine thing. Right, got everything? Passports?’

‘Yes, yes, gospodi , it’s like having God Almighty and the Holy Trinity at my side nowadays… lya lya topolya …’ She flaps her thumb and forefingers at me like a quacking beak.

‘God Almighty is part of the Holy Trinity,’ I say, picking up my crutch. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘ Davai, davai .’

‘ Da-oosh ,’ says Masha with a little salute. ‘When the Komsomol says You Must, the People say We Will.’ I laugh. Masha’s funny.

We tap down the empty corridor with its shiny dark green walls and brown linoleum floor, turn the corner, down another empty corridor, two more corners and then take the lift.

The queue’s already halfway across the entrance hall. I don’t know why reception halls are so big in these Homes, they’re like aquariums, lined with big plants and mirrors. We used to have the Politburo up on the wall and now we’ve got Putin, a framed portrait in pride of place with two half-furled Russian flags on either side, like wings. There’s a curved text above his head, a bit like a halo now I come to look at it, one of his inspiring quotes probably, but I’ve never read it. We saw his latest one, in a headline in Izvestia – Russia needs a strong state power, and Russia will have a strong state power. Our avenging angel. Masha’s starting to like him now. She says he’s becoming more like Stalin day by day. As if that’s a good thing… Everyone else is starting to like him more too. He’s someone tough. Someone for us to be proud of. Well, apart from Olessya, that is. Not after the Kursk submarine tragedy when all those young sailors died and Putin did what every Russian leader does – Olessya says – he lied. Because an explosion on board a submarine was another flaw. And it seems Putin doesn’t like flaws either. None of them do. I look around for her, but she’s not here yet.

‘We’ll be standing in this line for an hour at least,’ says an elderly lady with two sticks who’s just joined the queue behind us. She sighs. ‘You’d think since they’re assessing invalids they’d give us appointments, wouldn’t you? Or at least give us chairs, not make us stand like this.’

‘Why should they, babulya ?’ says Masha. ‘They’ve got nice comfy chairs behind that desk in the assessment room, haven’t they?’

‘We should get up a petition or something.’

‘Our friend Olessya tried that,’ says Masha cheerfully. ‘It was put in the trash bin. The Administration don’t listen to the ignorant masses. Never have. Never will.’

‘Well, well, no use poisoning the mind by dwelling on injustice, is there,’ she goes on. ‘There’s enough people out there trying to poison our lives without us making it worse for ourselves. Better just to accept.’

I nod at her and smile. Joolka used to say that what she loved most about Russia was how we didn’t have trite, English conversations. She said you couldn’t take a ten-minute taxi ride without the driver giving you a treatise on politics, love and religion.