‘Sit down, girls, and you, Stepan Yanovich, do sit down.’
He’s only just moved in but already he’s got his walls all covered from top to bottom with photos and pictures, and he has bright curtains and a bedspread from home.
‘So, now then, how can I help?’
‘Well, it’s M-Masha,’ I say. ‘She’s got this p-pain in her back, just here,’ I point at the bit where we join, ‘and since you’re a d-doctor, we wondered if you’d l-look at her?’
‘Certainly, certainly, lie down on my bed here, my dear, that’s right.’ He pushes and prods her a bit, and asks her some questions, and then sits back and says he thinks it’s a large kidney stone that she can’t pass.
‘You’ll need to see a urologist urgently. I know a very good one who will come here and see you at no cost. A good man. I’ll organize it. Tea, anyone?’ He gets up and puts a kettle on. A kettle! In his own room. And a TV set. All to himself.
‘So why are you in here with us lot, Yemil Moseyevich?’ asks Masha, feeling a bit more relaxed now.
‘Well now, Mashinka, I married a War Widow with a baby son, you see. We brought him up, but when she died, my stepson, who has a growing family now, decided there was no room for an old fool like me … rightly so, I’m sure … and a doctor like myself, you know, earns less than a welder in our Worker’s State. No doubt that’s a good thing, no doubt it is. Wonderful, all this equality. So we decided on this option, instead of me staying in my flat. Must make way for the young generation, you know. My time is past. But I do like my creature comforts. I couldn’t do without those, I’m afraid. And the others on this floor are generally from the … ahh … intelligentsia, so very pleasant to converse with.’ He smiles. He’s got a rug on the floor and loads of books too, all stacked up on a bookshelf. He sees me looking at them. ‘Your body can be imprisoned, my dear …’ he’s looking right into my eyes ‘… But not your mind.’
Masha sniffs. ‘Got a TV too. All right for some. I’d watch Spartak footballers playing day and night, I would.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m very lucky. My stepson is deputy director of the Mikoyan Meat Factory – hence the eighth-floor option.’ He winks at us. ‘He’s very good to me, my stepson is.’
We nod, but I’m thinking that throwing your stepfather out of his own flat isn’t being very good. Meanwhile, Barkov’s getting paid in all the meat chops that he and all his cronies need, while we get boiled bones and cabbage.
‘Now then,’ he says, once we’ve got our Georgian tea – in proper glasses too, not cracked tin mugs – ‘how about a little game of chess?’ We nod again although neither of us have ever played chess before. I could stay up here forever. It’s like being back in Aunty Nadya’s flat, it’s cosy, it’s like … being on the Outside.
‘I expect you know about the great chess match,’ he goes on, ‘the USSR versus the Rest of the World? Hmm?’ We shake our heads this time, and I feel stupid. He pats his purple jacket. ‘Ahh, well, we won of course. Of course we won. We always win. Now then, here’s the board, let me see, black or white? Do you mind if I have a cigar? Since I’ve got my smoking jacket on, eh?’ He smiles and pats his silky waistcoat again. He reminds me of Professor Popov. He starts puffing on his sweet-smelling cigar and tells us about how he used to train dogs in the Great Patriotic War to run under the wheels of oncoming German tanks with explosives strapped to their collars. ‘We used to always feed them under tanks you see, working on Pavlov’s theory of conditioning.’
‘Poor dogs,’ I say.
He shrugs. ‘Well, they weren’t told, were they? What you don’t know can’t harm you, they say … And it was all a sacrifice for the greater Soviet good. Better dogs than people …’
Masha winces in pain. I hope he gets us that urologist.
A tale of Soviet reality
We couldn’t work today. It’s been a week since we saw Yemil Moseyevich, and Masha’s getting worse. She keeps groaning and moaning, and clutching at her back, and she’s been sick three times. We went to Katya, the nurse, for painkillers, and she wanted to take her to hospital, but Masha wouldn’t go, so now we’re just sitting here, hoping this urologist is going to turn up soon.
‘I really think you should’ve gone to hospital, Mash, you look green, you really do.’ We’re just sitting on the bed, staring at the shiny brown wall.
‘I don’t want to be laid out on a slab and mauled by perverts, even if you do. I’d rather suffer in silence.’
‘Hardly silence. Our entire floor thinks you’re being tortured.’
‘I am being tortured. By this yobinny kidney stone. All right for you, sitting there like a cat on a cushion.’
‘I’m not, I’m worried about you.’
‘Like fig you are, you’re just being smug, because you got your precious diploma.’
Yes. I finally did it. I got top marks – one hundred per cent. One hundred! Dazdraperma cried when she brought me the diploma. She said my physics teacher cried too. They were crying because it was such a waste. Such a waste of an incredible brain, they said.
‘Waste of space, more like,’ Masha had muttered. ‘Dear Dashinka, lovely Dashinka, clever Dashinka, pretty Dashinka … makes you want to gag.’ Dazdraperma had looked a bit shocked at that. And left. I asked her to take the diploma with her, in case it got stolen.
We both look up as the tacks on the floor go tic tic tic. But it’s only Sanya, not the urologist.
‘I was just going home, girls, but thought I’d drop by for a bit of gossip.’ Masha perks up a bit then. ‘Right,’ she goes on, ‘so I’ve got three really juicy bits for you today. Ready? First off, Nyusha – you know, the tart from accounts who’s been having it off with Viktor Vladimirovich, the head accountant?’ We both nod, no one has any secrets in the Twentieth. ‘Well, he chucked her, so she tried to blackmail him. She said she’d tell his wife and kids if he didn’t siphon off something from the Twentieth’s pocket for her. And what do you think he did?’
‘What?’ we say together.
‘He went straight to Barkov and told him everything. Informed on her, he did.’
‘What about Nyusha?’ I say. ‘Did she go and inform on him – to his wife?’
‘Yeah, but turned out the wife was having an affair with her boss too, so she couldn’t care less.’ I shake my head. If I married Slava, I’d never cheat. And neither would he. No, not if … when … when I marry Slava. I clench my fists. He’ll write soon. I’ll deal with Masha. I will. I’ll be strong.
‘So next up is Baba Keesa, the old bag who’s in with Baba Yulia. She makes funeral wreaths, right?’ I shiver. That’s the only other job we’re allowed to do here, along with the pipettes and the nappies. We can make funeral wreaths. But I won’t. We see dead bodies in here all the time, either laid out in their rooms, or being wheeled around on gurneys, or even outside in the yard in open coffins. I won’t make wreaths.
‘So she made one for herself, see, a really fancy one, took her forever, and then she refused to take any food or water until she shrivelled away and died. Yesterday it was, that she went. No one’s gonna force-feed you in here, are they?’
‘What’s number three then?’ says Masha, wincing again. The pain seems to come in bouts.
‘Yemil Moseyevich, that snooty doctor on the eighth floor.’ We both stare at her. What? What? ‘So, turns out his stepson stopped supplying Barkov with his steaks or whatever, so he’s being moved down to the third floor. He’ll have three roommates there – nice little troika they are, I can tell you. One’s a zek ex-con who’d bite your arm off soon as look at you, the other’s an alkash who’s always thrashing around with the White Fever because he can’t get vodka, and the other’s got less sense than a duck.’
‘No!’ We both say it at once.
‘Yeah. Why, what’s the big deal?’
‘He’s getting me a urologist,’ says Masha, ‘that’s the big deal. He might forget or something if he’s down there. He might …’
We both know what Yem
il Moseyevich might do.
‘Yeah, well, he won’t be able to put all his pretty pictures up on the wall on the third floor, I can tell you that.’
When Aunty Shura’s gone, me and Masha try to get up to the eighth floor to see him, but the old toad in the lift won’t let us. So we go back to our room and sit there on our bed. Neither of us feels like going down to the canteen for the evening meal. It’s still warm out, so after a bit, we both stand up without saying anything and go on to the balcony. It’s strange, but we always do that – get up at the same time and do the same thing, without even talking about it. Masha thinks it’s because we read each other’s minds, but it’s not exactly that. She can’t read my mind. I think it’s just when one starts moving it’s like, I don’t know, instinctive for the other to move too, and we don’t even know which one started it.
We both hold on to the bars and look up into the blocks of flats around our courtyard wall. It’s dusk and we can see the Healthies coming out on to the balconies to smoke, or take in washing, or put a baby in its pram out to sleep in the fresh night air. Some balconies have flowers, and some have sledges, car-tyres, ice-hockey sticks, Spartak football banners, bicycles …
‘He shouldn’t be moved down there. It’s all so wrong,’ I say after a bit, pressing my forehead against one of the bars. ‘How can these things happen?’
‘How does it happen that my little budding atomic physicist here is stuck sewing nappies?’ snaps Masha. ‘Or Miracle Masha the Trapeze Artist is trapped behind bars? Shit happens.’
She doesn’t seem to care, but I can’t stop thinking what state of mind Yemil Moseyevich must be in right now. I just can’t stop it. We can hear music from over the wall. It’s not Soviet marching bands or ballads or the Red Army Choir. It’s popsa music.
‘D’you think that’s the Beatles?’ she says.
I remember Slava talking about the Beatles. Masha starts tapping her fingers on the bars to the beat. She likes it.
Just then we see something fall to the right of us, about three rooms over. It looks like a piece of sacking someone’s getting rid of. But it’s not. When it hits the ground with a thud it moves around for about two or three minutes, which is when we know it’s a person. And when the yard lights go on, we see it’s a person wearing a purple waistcoat with bright blobs of yellow on it.
March 1970
Slava comes back to Moscow to see me
The next morning Sanya told us that after Yemil Moseyevich was informed he was being moved, he wrote a note to his stepson, smoked a last cigar, tidied his room and then walked on to his balcony with no bars, and tipped himself off it. I can’t bear to think of him, still moving down there on the ground. I can’t bear to.
That afternoon we got a visit from Mikhail Ilyich, a urologist who says he received an urgent call the day before, from a friend who asked him to come and see us.
He examined Masha and told her she did have a kidney stone and he massaged her a bit to try and help her pass it, then told her to drink three litres of water a day and if that didn’t help, she’d need to come into hospital.
‘I’m going to pop if I drink any more,’ she says, screwing up her face as she forces more water down herself.
We’re sitting on our bed the next morning. She still doesn’t feel like doing any sewing, so we’re just sitting there. We’ve done our morning exercises in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, we’ve been down for breakfast and now we’re back here, with nothing to do all day. Except imagine. When Masha’s not talking, I go into this other world I have, of living in the village with Slava. I’m not Together with Masha there, and Slava and me are both Healthy. He works as an accountant and I’m a science teacher in the primary school. I can picture it all in my head: the stove, the tables and chairs, the rug on the wall, the books we have and the vegetable plot in the garden. I have all these different situations I think up and I go through the conversations, word by word, in my head. It’s my other world. My real world.
‘Girls! Girls! I have great news!’
Aunty Nadya bursts into our room all out of breath and red in the face. We weren’t expecting her.
‘What! What!’ we say together.
‘Slava’s here! Slava’s in SNIP. His mother sent him up for urgent treatment and he didn’t want me to say anything until he was actually here. He wants you to visit.’
I look across at Masha.
‘Nyet,’ she says, and looks out of the window.
There’s this shocked silence, which bounces off the walls.
No, she can’t do this. No! Slava! Slava’s here! She can’t stop me going – she can’t! Not this time, not now he’s here, just ten minutes away, waiting for me!
‘What do you mean, nyet?’ splutters Aunty Nadya. ‘Of course you’re going. The car’s waiting outside. Get up this minute!’
‘Nyet.’
‘Da! Da! I’m going, Masha, I’m going.’ I struggle to stand up, but she doesn’t move, so I grab her arm and tug at her, but she still won’t budge. She’s like a dead weight. I keep trying to get up, and end up half on the floor. Aunty Nadya picks me up and puts me back on the bed. I’m sobbing now and still pulling to go, lifting my arms to Aunty Nadya for help, but it’s no good. Masha’s made up her mind and we both know it.
‘How can you be so … so … selfish and heartless and cruel!’ shouts Aunty Nadya, going even redder in the face. ‘They want to see each other, can’t you see how you’re hurting her? Can’t you see what torture this is for her?’
‘You haven’t seen her crying every time he hurts her!’ Masha shouts back. ‘You haven’t been together with her when she’s tearing herself into a million pieces with her pain! That’s torture! He’s the one who’s torturing her and he wants to do it again. He thinks he can whistle and she’ll just crawl back into the boxing ring, to get punched to the floor again. I can’t go on seeing her being mutilated like that all the time – she’s my sister, I love her. I’m not going! You couldn’t get me to see the little moodak if you chained me to a locomotive.’
‘No, Masha, no! You don’t understand,’ I sob, still pulling at her, ‘not being able to see him is the torture. He only hurts me because you and me are Together, which means we can’t be together … him and me … it’s so hard for him, can’t you see that? Can’t you?’ I’m trying to talk through my tears, trying to get her to understand. ‘I must see him, I must talk to him … he promised …’
‘Promised what?’ She looks at me sharply. ‘And why would you believe his stupid promises anyway?’
‘He … he …’
‘I’m not letting him make you miserable as sin all over again. It’s like dragging the devil along beside me …’
‘If you don’t let me go I’ll be so miserable you’ll wish you were dead! I will, I will, I swear I’ll never talk to you again!’ I thump the bed. ‘Let me make my own mistakes!’
She looks back out of the window. ‘Nyet.’
‘Well, Masha,’ says Aunty Nadya, going almost purple in the face now, ‘if you can’t see that you’re burning down the house to get rid of the mouse, there’s only one thing for it. I’ll tell the little lad to come here to see you. That’s what I’ll do.’ She nods firmly at me and stalks out.
When I finally stop crying, hours and hours later, I won’t talk to her. I’ll show her what our life will be like if she doesn’t let me see Slava when he comes here. It’s the only thing I can do. I’ll stand up to her, I will. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll stand up to her. Just like he said.
‘Finally stopped all that bawling?’ she says. ‘About time too. Here’s me, downing all this water, and you’re crying it all out again as fast as it goes in.’ She’s trying to be funny, thinking a stupid joke will make it all right again. I hate her. I turn the other way.
By evening Masha’s passed her kidney stone and wants to go and see Ivan Ivanovich down in reception. I don’t want to do anything she wants to do, but I also don’t want her to ruin Slava’s vi
sit, so I get up.
He’s watching Vremya news.
‘Heard the rumours, girls? About the Americans having landed on the moon?’
‘That’s just rumour, spread by Uncle Sam, everyone knows that,’ sniffs Masha. ‘No one except us can land on the moon. And we’d have read about it if they had. Or it would be on the news.’ She points at the TV set.
Ivan Ivanovich shrugs. ‘Not everything gets reported in our news …’
‘They just hate us because we’re better than them,’ says Masha angrily. ‘They want to drop one of their atomic bombs on us. They’re bullies. And they’re jealous.’
‘All right, all right, Miss Politics. You should join the Politburo,’ he chuckles. ‘That’d shake them up.’
We sit and watch the news for a bit. It’s all about our Five-Year Plan and more Over-fulfilled Quotas and Brezhnev opening the biggest dam in the world, which has just been built here in the Soviet Union. I wonder if Slava will come tomorrow. I wonder how long he’s been here. I wonder why he needed urgent treatment.
Masha yawns.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘back off to the cell,’ and she gets up to go. We tap across the dark hallway to the lift. The doors open and we step inside. Then, as if as an afterthought, she holds the closing doors and pops her head out.
‘Van Vanich!’ she shouts. ‘If someone called Slava Dionego comes to visit us, tell him we’re busy, OK?’
He nods and goes back to watching the TV.
The lift doors close on us.
December 1970
I punish Masha by not talking to her and she relents, then we down wine on the floor of the balcony
‘I wish Aunty Nadya would hurry up. I need a drink like a camel needs water,’ says Masha.
It’s December now, and we’re sitting in reception on two chairs pushed together with a rug over our legs. Barkov has said we can’t come down here any more, unless we sit on the two chairs with this rug, as he’s had complaints from visitors who were traumatized. There are hardly any visitors in the Twentieth though, because all the inmates here are unwanted. So I don’t know who we managed to traumatize this time.
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 25