The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

by Juliet Butler

  Then I remember Aunty Nadya telling me once to remember that if there’s just one person who loves you for who you are, it doesn’t matter if a hundred thousand people hate you for what you look like. And Slava said I was his best friend.

  ‘Remember the words of the great novelist Nikolai Ostrovsky, crippled and deformed like you …’ Vera Stepanovna’s still going on at us. But we’re not crippled. Just deformed. She steps back, looking beyond our heads, up at the portrait of Brezhnev all shiny with his rows and rows of medals. ‘“Man’s dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years …”’ We’ve heard all this a million times before. ‘“… to so live that, on dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength was given to the finest cause in all the world – the fight for the Liberation of Mankind!”’

  She looks back at us, and I can see she doesn’t think we’re very hot on Mankind at the moment, so she goes back to looking sad and disappointed in us.

  ‘I will have to punish you, of course.’ She starts up with her pacing again. I hate being punished. They strip us to our vest and pants and make us sit on a chair in the corner of class facing the wall. I hate that Slava can see me like that. He never gets punished because he’s not naughty. But then I’m not naughty either. It’s Masha who’s naughty. And sitting in your underwear like that makes you feel so sad, I just want to crawl into a crack in the wall. And they make us sit there for hours and hours. ‘Yes, you will have detention every day all next week for an hour after class, and write one hundred times on the blackboard I will accept that my deformity traumatizes others. Accept and understand. I will remember my dignity.’

  Lines. That’s a relief. Even though I know who’s going to be doing all the writing on the blackboard as punishment for swearing at the Healthies. And it’s not Masha.

  Olessya gives me some advice

  Olessya comes over to our bed that evening. Masha’s playing Durak with Little Lyuda, slapping cards down and shouting, so she doesn’t much notice her.

  No one really talks about what happened at the zoo. What’s there to talk about? But Olessya’s heard about it.

  ‘Don’t be upset by those idiots, Dasha,’ she says quietly. ‘Being a Defective doesn’t make you worse than them; it makes you better, because you have to work twice as hard to succeed in life. And you have to be ten times as strong as them to put up with their prejudice.’

  I can’t even look at her. I just keep bunching our blanket up in my hands while Masha slaps down cards.

  ‘You know what I think?’ She touches my arm. ‘What I always tell myself?’ I do look up at her then. ‘Defects are given to ordinary people to make them extraordinary. That’s us. You and me.’

  I nod, but deep down all I want to be is ordinary without defects. Like everyone else. I don’t feel extraordinary in any way at all. I just can’t think the way Olessya does. Or Masha.

  ‘Ei! What’re you two mice whispering about?’ says Masha.

  ‘I’m just telling Dasha how you cheat,’ says Olessya with a laugh. ‘Look, you’ve got one up your sleeve …’ and she goes to tickle her under her arm. Masha bats her off but we all laugh then. Olessya’s like Slava. Olessya knows how to deal with my Masha, so she can stay friends with me.

  Masha gets the whole class to play truant

  ‘I hate Maths,’ says Masha as I’m washing our nappy in the morning. ‘First lesson too. Makes you want to puke.’

  ‘I like it. Valentina Alexandrovna’s really good at explaining the hard bits. I’ll help you.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘What?’ I stop washing and stare at her. ‘We’ve got to go. Zinaida won’t give us any more sick notes.’

  She’s leaning against the wall, balancing us. ‘I’m going to bunk off, that’s what. The sun’s out.’

  ‘The sun’s always out. And you can’t, Mash, we’ll miss the next stage in algebra. I can’t do that. I’ll never catch up …’

  ‘All right then. I’ll get the whole class to bunk off.’

  ‘Whaat?! No, no. They won’t go! No one will go, Masha. That’s crazy.’

  Ten minutes later we walk into class. Valentina Alexandrovna’s not in yet.

  ‘Right, everyone out,’ says Masha, clapping her hands to get attention. ‘Class Leader Maria Krivoshlyapova,’ she points at herself, ‘is giving you an order. Everyone out. This is officially the last sunny day of autumn, and we need our vitamin D.’

  Everyone just stares at her, so she starts pulling them off their chairs. ‘C’mon, c’mon, it’s a beautiful morning, follow me, quick, quick!’ I look across at Slava but he’s smiling.

  ‘OK. We’ve got to do what the Class Leader tell us to, right?’ he says. Everyone starts giggling then, and like a whole flock of sheep, we rush out into the morning sun and over to the patch of grass behind the kitchens where the pear trees are. Masha starts picking them off the tree and tossing them at everyone.

  ‘Breakfast of fresh fruit, last pears of the season, eat up!’

  It’s nyelzya to pick the fruit. Masha’s going crazy. But I eat one anyway because everyone else is. It doesn’t take long for Valentina Alexandrovna to find us.

  ‘And what exactly is the meaning of this?’ she says, standing there in her sharp high heels and knee-length skirt. I didn’t want her to be upset, or get into trouble, but she looks more surprised than angry.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault, Valentina Alexandrovna,’ pipes up Masha in this high, little girl voice she has when she’s getting round someone. ‘They all wanted to go out and I couldn’t stop them, I tried … I tried, I did … as Class Leader I really tried …’

  ‘A very likely story.’

  ‘Besides,’ goes on Masha, ‘Ostrovsky says we must live life so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years …’

  ‘I believe that quote lies within the context of fighting for the liberation of Mankind. Lying in the sun stuffing yourselves with forbidden pears hardly constitutes that.’ We all keep staring up at her, not knowing if she’s going to report us or punish us, but after a while she says a bit stuffily: ‘Well, since you’re here, I don’t see why we can’t have one lesson outside without our books.’ And she kicks her heels off, which are sinking into the grass, and sits down on a log. ‘But on the condition that this little trespass against authority is never to be repeated.’ We all nod like mad. She’s the best teacher ever. She really is. And Masha’s the best sister ever. Most of the time.

  Age 17

  January 1967

  We’re given our passports – or rather, passport

  ‘Well, girls, this is a momentous day for you.’

  We’ve been called into Vera Stepanovna’s office again and we’re standing on the red rug. But she’s not angry with us for once. She’s all puffed up and proud.

  She comes round to the front of her desk. ‘I have the pleasure of announcing that you are now officially citizens of the Soviet Union.’ She picks up a shiny red passport, and hands it across to us. Masha takes it, all excited. It says on the front in thick gold letters Citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She opens it quickly and flicks through.

  ‘This is Dasha’s,’ she says, giving it to me. ‘Where’s mine?’ She holds out her hand.

  ‘There is only one passport.’

  ‘But where’s mine?’ She’s still holding out her hand.

  ‘I told you, Masha. There is only one. You have both been issued with one passport.’

  ‘But there’s two of us.’

  ‘Yes. I know that. But you are considered to be one citizen in the eyes of the State. And in a way … you are … aren’t you … I mean … you have one body.’ She’s not looking at us. She’s looking up at Brezhnev again.

  ‘No. We have one body but we’re two persons.’

  ‘People, not persons. And that’s enough of that, Masha. The State has made a decision.’ Masha takes the passport back from me, and looks through it ag
ain, not saying anything, but I can feel her getting all tense, while Vera Stepanovna gives us this speech on our duties as citizens and the great honour of being a part of the movement towards Communism spreading across the world like wildfire. I actually think she’s going to get us to sing the Soviet anthem or something, but she finally winds down and goes back behind her desk and sits down. Masha’s still staring at the passport and I’m still looking down at the whirls on the rug, but I can feel her all balled up inside.

  ‘You may go,’ says Vera Stepanovna, and picks up a pen.

  We leave her office and walk out into the courtyard. We don’t say anything at all for a bit, then Masha suddenly spits on the passport. ‘Foo! What the fuck? Why do you get the passport? Like I don’t exist or something! Like I’m just a bit of you?’

  She thrusts it into my hands and I stare at it, thinking, are we just an it too? That’s what people on the Outside call us – it – not them. And now the State has confirmed, officially, that we’re only one person. ‘But, Masha, we’re not … are we?’ I’m starting to cry, I wish I wouldn’t, but it just comes over me. ‘Vera Stepanovna thinks we are too … she said so, she said we were—’

  ‘Stop bleating! Course we’re not! We’ll go to Valentina Alexandrovna.’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ says Valentina Alexandrovna, turning the passport over and over in her hand like it’s going to bite her or something. ‘Insulting! Now please stop sobbing, Dasha, it’s a bureaucratic mistake. It happens. I shall call your Aunty Nadya and she’ll sort it out, you’ll see. She’ll sort it all out for you and get things straight. It’s a mistake. I’ll call her right now.’

  She picks up the phone and after a bit we can hear Aunty Nadya on the other end of the phone shouting down the line. ‘Scandalous! Are they to get one wage? Will they give them one plate to eat off? One ration book? Put it in the post to me immediately and I shall deal with it! One person indeed! Pozor!’

  April 1967

  Aunty Nadya goes to the top to get us two passports and we have an anti-Soviet conversation in the cellar

  Three months later and we’re down in the cobbler’s cellar, with Olessya, Big Boris and Slava. It’s a Sunday so the school cobbler, Vyacheslav Tikhonovich, isn’t normally around, but today he’s lying in a corner, dead drunk, with an empty vodka bottle by his head.

  Aunty Nadya brought Masha her own passport last week.

  ‘See? I’ve got one too now!’ Masha’s waving her passport around like a flag. ‘I’m a person too now, see? It’s a miracle! Maria Krivoshlyapova – welcome to the world!’

  Slava’s got himself sitting right next to me. I can feel the heat coming through from him. People say he looks just like me with his big brown eyes and dark hair. They say he looks more like me than Masha does even. When I’m right next to him like we are now, I start trembling, because I want him to kiss me so much. It’s stupid, but I can’t stop it, I want to just hold him as tight as anything, and never let go. If Masha wasn’t here, we’d do nothing in the whole world but touch and hold each other, I swear.

  Normally I’d feel a bit lonely when Aunty Nadya leaves, but with Slava around I don’t feel lonely at all. She stayed for a week in the lodgings in town and visited us every day. It really was a miracle, getting that passport.

  To start off with, she queued for three days at the City Passport Office, and when she finally got to see the official, he didn’t even look up from his desk. He just told her we only have one birth certificate, so even if we had ten heads, we’d still be one person. That’s exactly what he said. Ten heads. Then she got an appointment with Anokhin, to see if he could do anything to help, but he just told her what Maternity Hospital we’d been born in, and said she should check the files to see if there was another birth certificate for us. She went off to the hospital then, but there wasn’t. It seems when we were born they issued us with just the one. I don’t know who named us Masha and Dasha, perhaps it was our mother? I don’t think Aunty Nadya asked about who our parents were when she was there – she didn’t say anything to us about them at any rate. And we didn’t ask. We’ve learnt not to ask questions. We just get told off and they never get answered anyway.

  The Maternity Hospital Administration said they couldn’t issue another certificate, so Aunty Nadya went back to Anokhin to ask him to write a formal letter saying we were two people for the Maternity Hospital. But he just told her not to bother him any more with it, so she went to Professor Dolyetsky instead, who’s known us since we were babies apparently. He was the one who was supposed to amputate our leg. He agreed to write the letter and got some other important professors to sign it. The letter explained that since we had two mouths and two digestive systems we needed to be provided for by the State as two people, which meant two passports. ‘Forgot about the two brains, hearts and souls, didn’t they,’ Masha had sniffed when Aunty Nadya told us.

  So then she took the letter to the Maternity Hospital Administration saying they needed to send the application to the State Registry office for a certificate because Masha was a person too, but they refused. She didn’t give up though. She kept fighting for us. She wrote to the Minister of Health, and he didn’t reply. Then she wrote to the Minister of Social Protection, and he didn’t either, so then she wrote to Anastas Mikoyan himself, explaining we were two girls who just happened, unfortunately, to be joined together, and by some miracle he wrote back on Kremlin stamped paper with one sentence, saying: Issue Maria and Daria Krivoshlyapova with two passports. And signed it himself.

  ‘Who’s Anastas Mikoyan?’ Masha had asked. But I knew. Everyone knows. Except Masha. He was Lenin’s comrade, then Stalin’s, then Khrushchev’s, and now he’s the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Or at least, he was. That’s almost as important as Brezhnev himself. We couldn’t believe our ears when she told us that Mikoyan knows about us and took the time to write that line. ‘Yes,’ Aunty Nadya told us proudly, ‘and when I took that letter to the Passport Office, they pretty much carried me right to the front of the queue over everyone’s heads! And that rude official, who hadn’t even looked up before, was turning somersaults to get the second passport issued as quickly as possible. He started grovelling and stammering as if I were a Presidium member myself! So you see, there is some justice in the world.’

  Vyacheslav Tikhonovich groans and turns over, and we look at him to see if he’s going to wake up. But he doesn’t. He just starts snoring really loudly. Masha throws a few tacks at him.

  ‘So anyway,’ says Slava eventually, ‘I thought you’d need a pardon from Brezhnev to save you last week, Mash, after you refused to answer the question about how Nikolai Ostrovsky is your ideal.’

  ‘Well, why should I write a whole exam essay about why he’s my ideal, when he’s not? We’re all supposed to love him to bits because he wrote that stupid novel and was crippled in the War.’ I bite my lip. I didn’t think it was that stupid; in fact I quite liked How the Steel Was Tempered. It was … I don’t know, so passionate somehow. I wonder if Slava liked it. ‘He just married that young fool of his,’ Masha goes on, ‘and bullied her into doing everything for him. She had no life; she was his slave. It’s plain selfishness to shackle someone to you like that … And he was given his big apartment in Moscow, and his villa in Sochi, and juicy sturgeon steaks to eat every day. Just for writing about how great everything was.’

  ‘It’s not all great, though, is it …’ says Slava slowly. His hair falls over one eye. Olessya looks nervously up the steep wooden steps leading to the courtyard. He shouldn’t be saying stuff like that. ‘Well, Masha’s right, isn’t she?’ he goes on quietly. ‘Why are we all told to think Ostrovsky’s our ideal? Why don’t we have a choice? Why do we have to listen to the Red Army Choir night and day,’ he points at the little transistor radio he carries around everywhere, which is playing Soviet marching music, ‘when there’s this English group called the Beatles that everyone else in the world’s listening to?’ He’s whispering now and we all lean
in closer. ‘Why can’t we listen to the Beatles? Why not? And Pravda is packed full of propaganda about achievements and goals and quotas and heroes and honesty and sobriety and plentiful food. But you can’t leave a kopeck lying around for two seconds without it getting pinched. And half the nation seems to be drunk.’ He waves at Vyacheslav Tikhonovich. ‘You can see them all collapsed in the street outside our dorm. And my mum queues for eight hours for toilet paper or sugar. You can’t buy meat or butter or milk anywhere on the Outside – you could queue a lifetime and not get that.’ Olessya glances up the stairs again. If Icy Valya is hiding up there and listening … ‘And you can’t find fault with anything. You can only agree that we live in the Best of all Possible Worlds.’

  ‘Unless you’re Masha,’ says Big Boris.

  ‘Yeah, but the only reason she wasn’t put on trial in the Young Communist court was because Valentina Alexandrovna rescued her.’ He looks at me and smiles. As soon as Masha said that she wasn’t going to write the essay, Valentina Alexandrovna swooped in without batting an eyelid and said she’d actually prepared two questions for the two of us because Masha ‘has a tendency’ to copy from me. No one, not even Valya, dared say anything.

  ‘What about us then?’ says Big Boris in a low voice. ‘The newspapers don’t say anything about criminals and drunks and dissenters and shortages, because that’s all bad stuff, and can’t be talked about. But they don’t say anything about Defectives either. Us lot. What does that make us? Bad stuff too?’

  ‘No, no, not at all!’ I sit up straight. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. No! We’re the p-p-privileged ones, we are. We get milk and b-butter and b-bread. Well, sometimes we do. We get an education. The State is Systematically P-Perfecting Support for us all the time. Remember the b-banner. We should be G-Grateful. Don’t you understand?’ I look round at them pleadingly. I want them to stop talking about things I don’t want to hear. ‘In Amerika cripples have to b-beg on the street or humiliate themselves by dancing in side-shows for kopecks,’ I go on. ‘But here in the Soviet Union, we’re cared for by defectologists.’ Masha nods. ‘We have nice teachers, and p-people who cook for us and do our laundry and, and … mend our shoes for us,’ I say, pointing at Vyacheslav Tikhonovich. ‘And we have extra-curricular activities like d-dancing and sewing and orchestra and choir.’ (Although we don’t do any of them because Masha doesn’t want to.) ‘The State looks after us, like p-parents. We’re special. We are. Maybe there are some things they don’t tell us, but it’s for our own good.’ Slava’s looking at me with his dark eyes, but I can’t see what he’s thinking.