We hop off and start weaving round the skips to the back door. ‘And if we don’t go to school, I can’t be a lorry driver going all over Siberia,’ says Masha. ‘We’ll make an appointment when he gets back. You can do the talking.’
Professor Popov gives us a talk
Professor Popov sits down on the edge of his horse-hair sofa with us and gives us each a boiled sweet. I pop mine in straight away before Masha can take it. I suck on it slowly, wondering if his bulging eyes would come off with his glasses? I’ve never seen him without them.
‘Well, girls. This is an unexpected audience. To what do I owe the honour?’
I think he’s asking us why we’re here so I just start talking quickly.
‘We want to go to a p-proper school, B-Boris Markovich, so we can get a d-diploma and learn a profession and work to build C-Communism like everyone else.’
‘Well, well, well!’ He looks from me to Masha and then back again. ‘A noble desire, indeed. And whose idea was this, pray? Hmm?’ He looks at Masha, but she’s twiddling with the button on our pyjamas and looking up at the ceiling. ‘The problem with you two is that one can never take you aside, Dasha, to get to the truth … One never knows if young Masha here is the instigator and you simply the reluctant mouthpiece?’
I don’t know what he’s saying. He talks all complicated.
‘Umm … the truth?’ I say.
‘Yes. The truth. Do you really want to leave us, Dasha? Listen to me. Is that what you want?’ He leans right forward and looks straight into my eyes.
‘Oh yes! Yes! I want to get an education m-more than anything in the whole wide world! I want to g-go to school and be t-taught.’
‘Hmm … Well, in that case I shall call Konstantin Semyonovich, the Director, a good kind man whose own son is an invalid. I know him, as does Lydia Mikhailovna, personally.’
‘Oooraaah!’ Masha jumps up and down on the sofa, making Professor Popov bounce, and we all laugh like mad.
‘Well, let’s not count our piglets ’til they’re in the pot, but I think this is as good a time as any. As you know, we have another new General Secretary now and times might perhaps be changing after our little … ah … post-Stalin thaw.’ He looks out of the window across the room for ages and ages, and we’re just wondering if he’s forgotten us or has gone to sleep with his eyes open when he says: ‘As it happens, I was thinking of moving on myself now. I shall be stepping down. And the new Director here … well, suffice to say that he knows Soldatyenko, the Deputy Minister of Social Protection, in person and it seems that word is getting out around town about you two little bed-bugs. Yes. Word is getting out and the rumours are growing. The crowds around the perimeter fence here are as thick as ever, and yes, Comrade Soldatyenko is not a happy man and would be quite content to have you both disappear like a piece of fluff.’ He holds the palm of his hand out and blows on it. ‘Yes, and a Deputy Minister is more important, I’m afraid, than a Professor. Or even … someone with an international reputation like our friend Anokhin. Hmm.’
He gets up with a massive sigh and pours himself a small glass of cognac before flopping down in his own armchair. ‘Yes, girls, yes, I shall be going too. I’ve planted enough bushes in our grounds here, and now I shall plant them at my dacha instead. We’re beginning a new, and I hope, exciting, era of Socialism. An era of communal leadership, hope and change. We old guard can take our leave and hand over the banner to the new …’
Masha rolls her eyes. He always goes rambling on when he starts on the cognac. We half listen, but we’re so happy to be going to school with Olessya where there’s peaches and white bread and sunshine that we’re both bursting with laughter inside and keep catching each other’s eye and trying to stop giggling. Then Masha lets out a massive pookh of wind and we laugh out loud, all three of us together.
We’re leaving SNIP!
SCHOOL FOR INVALIDS, NOVOCHERKASSK
1964–68
‘Khrushchev denounced the cult of Stalin after his death and we have denounced the cult of Khrushchev in his own lifetime.’
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, 1964–82
Age 14
August 1964
Taking the train to our school in Novocherkassk
We’re on the train, a great big, steaming green locomotive!
‘No you don’t, my beauty! You sit right here and don’t budge a centimetre,’ says Aunty Nadya, grabbing Masha’s shirt to stop her climbing up to the top bunk. She’s taking us to the school in Novocherkassk to settle us in. ‘I’ll go and get our bags from the corridor.’
‘C’mon, you, quick,’ says Masha, as soon as Aunty Nadya’s squeezed out of the door, and she starts climbing the ladder to the top bunk. But the train starts off with a massive jolt, throwing me backwards, and when Aunty Nadya comes back in she finds Masha holding on to the top rung and me swinging around upside down, trying to catch on to something.
‘Well, this is a fine start! Almost killed yourselves before we leave the station.’ She grabs me and shoves us crossly into the bottom bunk.
‘I didn’t wave goodbye to Stepan Yakovlich!’ shouts Masha, pressing her nose to the window. ‘Where is he? I want to wave goodbye!’
‘He’s long gone. You should have thanked him for giving you that piggyback along the station.’
‘That was so healthy! No one noticed us at all,’ I say, pressing my nose to the window too. ‘I want a piggyback all my life through, then we can see the whole world.’
‘Let’s just get to Novocherkassk in one piece first, shall we …’ She looks like she’s grumpy as she packs our bags away. But she’s not. She’s excited too, I can tell.
We wave at everyone on the platform, but no one waves back. They’re all too busy. Then we’re out of the Yaroslavsky Station and going past rows and rows of housing blocks with wildflowers springing up everywhere, and then, a bit further along, there’s factories with red banners shouting Forward to More Feats of Labour! Or: Unity and Strength of Labour Towards Communism! I can’t even read them all, there’s so many and they’re going past so quickly. Then we’re outside Moscow for the first time ever, and there are all these little log cabins painted in different colours with cows in the yard, real live cows, and hens and ducks and wood piles and …
‘Look!’ shouts Masha. ‘A horse and cart! I’m going to drive a horse and cart and work on a collective farm when I graduate.’
‘You said ten minutes ago you were going to be a locomotive driver,’ sniffs Aunty Nadya, unpacking pickled cucumbers and dried fish from some newspaper. I don’t say anything, but I still want to be a doctor.
‘I am!’ shouts Masha. ‘I’m going to be both. I’m going to keep changing jobs all over the place.’
I look back out at Russia. I thought it would be more like the mural in the Room of Relaxation with fields of corn and mountains and lakes and combine harvesters and peasants in headscarves in the fields, but it’s all flat as anything and it’s just grass. And most of the time, there’s trees along the tracks, so you can’t see behind them anyway. Every time we stop at a little station we wave like mad out of the window at the fat women selling boiled potatoes or apples or salted lard from metal buckets, but they don’t wave back either. They’re only interested in trying to sell stuff. Me and Masha play a game to see who can see the bust of Lenin at the station first. Ten points for Lenin and one hundred for Stalin and five points for a painting or mosaic of Brezhnev.
When it gets to night time, Aunty Nadya puts us to bed. Masha gets to have her head at the window end and I’m at the foot of the bed. Aunty Nadya snores in the bunk above, even louder than the train going klyak-brr-klyak along the tracks, rocking us like babies. I love trains. I could stay on one forever.
Next morning we’re coming up to our station. It’s August so it’s hot and sunny and we’re both sweating buckets. Aunty Nadya told us that Anokhin was Categorically Against us being taken away from Moscow because he said we’d die in
two minutes in the sub-tropical climate. But Soldatyenko, the Deputy Minister, is more important even than him. And Soldatyenko didn’t want us in Moscow any more. I don’t think he cares if we die or not. Masha was pleased as anything that we’re so important that a Deputy Minister knows about us, but I’m not sure I was …
‘Here we are then, this is our stop. All ready?’ Aunty Nadya’s got everything packed neatly by the sliding door to our cabin. ‘Hair combed? Faces washed? Yes, yes, well let’s wait ’til everyone’s off and then we’ll hop off last. We’re being met by a driver from the school.’
The station’s packed solid with people. So solid you can’t even see the platform. The platform looks like it’s alive with people or something, not like any of the other ones we passed. There’s even children up in all the trees and standing on the walls.
‘Chort!’ Aunty Nadya’s looking all black. ‘That’s really too bad. It really is.’
And then I realize with a bump, which comes just the same time as the train stops, that they’ve all come to see us. I try to get down under the little table but Masha won’t let me, although she realizes too. Aunty Nadya’s got all our bags in her hands now and is red in the face and her eyes are bulging; she’s saying over and over ‘Who can have told them? It really is too bad …’ She goes out with the bags into the corridor. In a moment she’s back.
‘The platform’s not long enough, we’ll have to jump out on to the rails.’
‘N-no, no, no!’ I hold on to the table leg.
‘You must, Dasha, you must!’ She pulls us so hard my slippery hand lets go of the table leg and then she pulls us along the corridor to the open door. The crowds are down on the rails as well as the platform, and everyone’s shouting at the passengers: Where’s the Girl with Two Heads? Aunty Nadya pushes us out of the doorway, but we’re both clinging on to either side of it. ‘Look! Here’s the railway guard,’ she says. ‘Quick! Jump down and he’ll catch you.’ I look down. He’s in a green uniform with red stripes, shoving everyone aside and holding his arms up.
‘Jump!’ he says. ‘Jump!’
It’s miles down and they’ve seen us now, so there’s all this shouting and mad pushing. I can’t do it, I can’t.
‘You must jump!’ It’s Aunty Nadya behind us, trying to pull our fingers off the door. ‘If you don’t we’ll end up in Rostov – you must!’
I close my eyes and we both let go at the same time and jump. His cap’s knocked off as he staggers back but he grips us hard, and starts pushing through everyone on the platform. I’ve got my head in his collar and my eyes squeezed tight shut still, and everyone’s battering against me, and I can hear Aunty Nadya shouting: ‘Comrades! Comrades! Please! Please! Let them through!’ And the crowd shouting: ‘There it is! Look! Look!’ Then we’re out of the station and a car door opens and we’re thrown in the back. Aunty Nadya puts her coat over us, slams the door on everyone and we drive away.
The kids in school hate us, but Mashinka wins them around
‘Well, I do apologize, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, I do regret it, we did swear the staff to secrecy, but you know how gossip flies in these small provincial towns … News like that, well, it’s like trying to draw water in a sieve.’
We’re sitting in the corner on a narrow, metal-framed bed in our dorm. It’s empty because the kids are all out somewhere, but I can’t hear them and we didn’t see them when we came through the big double gates into the courtyard. The head teacher, Vera Stepanovna, told us they were out singing in the choir or something, when she brought us up the wooden staircase. She’s standing with Aunty Nadya, who’s still shaking her head.
‘Was it really necessary to inform the staff? Surely they’re used to deformity?’ They’re speaking in low voices, but we can hear everything. Aunty Nadya knows we’ve got hearing like a bat.
‘I’m afraid it was Konstantin Semyonovich, the Director, who decided to hold a meeting for all the pupils and staff to explain …’
‘Pupils as well?! Aaakh!’
‘Yes, yes, pupils too, he just wanted to tell them that though the girls may be ah … together … they should be given the same respect and—’
‘Of course they should!’ interrupts Aunty Nadya crossly. ‘Does that really need explaining in a school like this?’
Vera Stepanovna undoes a button on her collar. She’s wearing a shiny, grey suit that looks like the pearly buttons are going to pop off.
‘Yes, yes, perhaps it was a mistake, I think it must have been the kitchen staff …’ Masha rolls her eyes. (Telling kitchen staff a secret is like handing them a megaphone and a platform.) ‘The worst thing,’ she goes on ‘is that the children, who are already upset that our school is nicknamed the Cripple Can, in town, now think that with …’ she starts whispering, ‘so-called freaks coming here, the school will be turned into a circus. There are dozens of townspeople outside the gates as we speak.’
‘What exactly are you saying?’
‘Um … the children might not be too … welcoming … just to start with. Although Olessya has, of course, told them all about them … Poor Olessya. She’s in the Sanatorium at the moment with pneumonia, but we hope for the best … Well,’ she raises her voice then, looks over to us, beaming, and shouts as if we’re deaf or something, ‘I’ll be off, girls. You make yourselves comfortable!’
Aunty Nadya comes over to say the car’s waiting to take her to her lodgings in town. She’s going to stay here in Novocherkassk for a few weeks to make sure we have everything we need. She kisses us goodbye quickly, then stomps out.
Masha thumps the pillow. ‘Olessya’s sick? That’s all we fucking need.’
‘What did she mean, she “hopes for the best”? Will she be all right? Do you think we can contact her?’
‘In the San? No chance, she’ll be in quarantine a month.’
There are footsteps on the stairs and we look up as the other girls come in. They don’t even look at us.
‘Screw them,’ says Masha. ‘If they don’t need us, we don’t need them.’ She pulls our blanket over her head and lies down on the pillow. I don’t have a pillow at the foot of the bed, so I fold my hands under my head and close my eyes tight to stop the tears squeezing out. I’m worried about Olessya, that’s all. I don’t care about the girls. I don’t care at all. I’ve got Masha, I have. I’ve always got Masha.
Next morning the kids get washed and dressed and go off to their lessons, still not looking at us, and we’re taken down to a little classroom for a test to see which class we should go in.
I’m feeling a bit dizzy. Everything smells different. Everything looks different. We went to breakfast in the food hall, but everyone sat away from us like we stink or something. I hoped we’d get a boiled egg at least, like Olessya said, a real fresh egg instead of powdered eggs, but it was just buckwheat porridge with water and salt.
‘Right, girls. I’ve made this board, you see, to put between you, so we can have no copying.’
‘Chort!’ says Masha under her breath. She always copies from me.
‘Here’s the test. Nothing too daunting. I do understand you’ve only had a primary education. Off you go.’
I get writing. It’s not too hard; basic maths and Russian grammar. Our elbows clash as we write. Seems odd if we really did split in two from one person, like Anokhin said, that we use our inside arms not our outside ones. Masha keeps sucking her pencil and looking up in the air. She finishes way before me.
Next morning we get black bread (not white) and lard (not butter) and are taken to the 8th form classroom of fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds like us. None of them even look up. They’re just ignoring us. Vera Stepanovna’s at the front by the blackboard. We slip into a desk right at the back, and Masha starts dipping her fingers in the inkwell and flicking ink at me, which makes me really cross as I’ll never get it off my blouse.
‘This is Masha and Dasha, girls and boys, I’m sure you’re all acquainted …’ No one says anything or looks round. ‘Yes, well now, I hav
e just had the results of your test back, girls,’ she flaps our test papers at us, ‘and I’m afraid we have a problem. You, Dasha, attained good marks, so in theory should go in the 7th form; but you, Masha, need a lot more catching up on the four years you’ve both missed, and should really go down into the 5th form.’
There’s some titters round the class.
‘That’s no problem, Vera Stepanovna,’ says Masha, sticking her inky hand up. You can put us both in the 7th form and knock a hole between the two classes. Then I’ll just poke my head through into the other one!’ The kids turn round to look at her then and start laughing a bit, in a nice way, not a nasty way.
Vera Stepanovna raps her ruler on the desk, but she sort of smiles too.
‘I think we can find a better compromise than that, Masha. You shall both go into the 6th form. I might as well take you there now. You children sit quietly and read your text.’ Some of them sneak looks at us as we walk out, but they’re not unkind. Just interested.
The 6th form looks the same as the 8th form, but the kids are younger. The only free desk is at the front, so we have to walk right through the classroom and sit down. It’s dark in here. I’m glad. There’s no electricity or hot water in the school in summer. There’s this bright red slogan above the blackboard saying Indoctrinate the Next Generation into the Collective Way of Life! But everything else is kind of dim and brown.
‘So, yes, where were we …’ says our history teacher, Irina Konstantinovna, once Vera Stepanovna has gone. She’s all jittery and jumpy, and looking everywhere except at us as Masha clatters around looking for pencils in the desk. The teacher’s fat and has got purple hair. She’s scared stiff of us. We can always tell when new people are scared stiff. Some aren’t, like the head teacher and the kids, of course, but some are. She turns to write on the blackboard, but keeps dropping the chalk because her hands are trembling.
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 12