The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

by Juliet Butler

  Valentina Alexandrovna

  ‘Flaws should no longer be concealed.’

  Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party 1985–91

  Age 38

  October 1988

  Olessya is transferred to the Twentieth

  ‘Morning, my Dashinka …’ Slava leans over me and kisses my cheek as we lie in bed. ‘Time to get up and make breakfast for the kids. I’m starving.’ He pushes my long hair out of my eyes, and kisses me again. His lips are warm and soft, and he smells of sleep. I yawn and stretch. ‘We’ll go into the woods and pick mushrooms,’ he says. ‘It’s a lovely sunny day. The meadows are full of flowers.’

  ‘Mama, mama!’ Lyuba bursts open the door in her flannel nightie with her curly hair all knotted, and jumps into bed between us to snuggle up. She kisses me too, and pushes her little head into my neck while Slava tuts and tries to smooth out the knots.

  ‘Is Marat up yet?’ he asks.

  ‘Course not, he’d sleep ’til the cows came home …’ she says.

  ‘That’s what being a teenager does for you … good thing it’s a Sunday,’ I say, hugging her. ‘What shall we have for breakfast then? Ground rice with butter?’

  ‘And honey! I’m going to get some more from the hives today. I didn’t get stung, not once, last time.’

  ‘Fuck me! That’s enough for today,’ says Masha, and flops down on our bed. We do our exercises for fifteen minutes every morning, and while I exercise, I go on with my life with Slava and our two children Lyuba (age six) and Marat (age fourteen). I go on with it through the day too, whenever there’s time to dream, which is a lot of the time. It’s like Yemil Moseyevich said, that time we visited him: your body can be imprisoned, but not your mind.

  ‘Can’t believe Olessya’s been moved here,’ says Masha. ‘It’s gonna be so healthy having her here.’

  ‘Except she’s in the Lying Down Block next door, so we can’t visit …’

  ‘She’s allowed out though. We can meet her outside every day for as long as we like.’

  ‘It’s minus twenty out now.’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop moaning. I thought this would cheer you up for once in your miserable life … C’mon, let’s put our coats on, she’ll be waiting.’

  When Brezhnev died six years ago, everyone thought the world was coming to an end. Like when Gagarin died. Just like I thought the world was coming to an end when Slava died. It wasn’t though. More’s the pity. We’ve got a new General Secretary now, Gorbachev. He’s much younger. ‘Not going to keel over dead as soon as he’s sworn in like the two old horse radishes before him,’ Masha had cackled when we heard the news. We’ve seen him on TV promising changes and condemning the old order for not telling the people the truth. For concealing flaws. Flaws like us. He has kind eyes, Gorbachev does. But then, so did Stalin. So life goes on, and me and Masha play cards with each other, day in, day out.

  But now Olessya’s here. My Olessya. I haven’t seen her in twenty years.

  As we go out of the back door into the walled yard, we pass Uncle Zhenya, sitting bolt upright on the bench.

  ‘Ei, Uncle, you’ll freeze to death sitting there!’ Masha pokes him but he’s fast asleep. ‘Yobinny stik, stay there then, I’m not your nanny.’ Masha pulls her scarf over her nose, and we crunch into the snow, careful not to slip over. The Lying Down Block (called the Goners Block by the staff), for inmates who can’t walk, is at the far end of the Home. One of the kitchen staff, Lala, is acting as our go-between and we don’t even have to bribe her to take messages. She’s sweet, Lala is.

  ‘You should’ve let me put those plastic bags on over our socks, Mash. My foot is freezing already …’

  ‘Stop bleating … c’mon.’

  We pick our way along the path, packed hard with ice. I can hardly believe Olessya is waiting for us just around the corner. We don’t know why, but she’s been transferred to the Twentieth with lots of other Defectives – except they call us invalids now. There still aren’t any proper Homes for adult invalids, because it seems that officially there are still no invalids in the Soviet Union – so how can there be Homes for them? There are still only perfectly formed citizens in our country. I’m sure Olessya will have something to say about that. Olessya hates injustice.

  ‘Look! Oh my God! There she is! Olessinka!’ I squeak, and start laughing and laughing.

  We run up to her through a snow drift, almost falling over, and then all hug and kiss and laugh some more.

  ‘Well, girls, how many winters has it been? Twenty? You haven’t changed a bit, you really haven’t.’

  ‘Neither have you, Olessinka,’ I say. I mean it. She’s just as beautiful as ever with her soft skin and big dark eyes. Like Slava’s eyes.

  ‘Look at you in your fuck-off wheelchair!’ says Masha, laughing. ‘What happened to the trolley with the sheath?’

  ‘You know me, Mashinka, I know my rights. I get the Komsorg in the Thirteenth to bring me the latest decrees from the Ministry of Protection and it said we can get one wheelchair per five invalids.’

  ‘B-Barkov’s dead set against inmates having wheelchairs,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, I know. He says the Lying Down Block means you lie down and stay there, so it was a battle to bring it to the Twentieth. But here I am. With a wheelchair.’

  ‘I want one,’ says Masha. ‘Why can’t I have one?’

  Olessya laughs. ‘We’ll work on it, Mash. So what’s been happening then?’ she asks. ‘Two decades in the Twentieth … what’s been happening? You hardly ever wrote to me.’

  Masha and I look at each other.

  ‘Nothing,’ we say together.

  ‘We get up,’ says Masha, ‘we eat, and we go to bed. Every day. Over and over again.’

  ‘I d-don’t want to talk about it,’ I say. ‘But now you’re here, Olessinka!’ I lean down and hug her again.

  ‘So why did they send you and all the other Defectives over here to the Twentieth from the Thirteenth then?’ asks Masha, rubbing her cold nose. ‘Did they run out of rooms? Or run out of patience?’

  ‘Bit of both. It’s all those young soldiers coming back from the war in Afghanistan with bits of them missing. Thousands of them, and nowhere to put them. So they’ve had to start transferring us Congenitals to Homes that wouldn’t have taken us before. Shame, in a way – some of those lads were gorgeous …’ She smiles slowly. Her teeth are still white and even. Ours are awful. All brown and rotting. ‘But as soon as those poor boys saw what they were in for, they were topping themselves so fast they couldn’t get enough coffins in. These Homes take some getting used to when you’ve lived life as a Healthy.’

  ‘Well, my shipwreck here was born Defective,’ says Masha, nodding across at me as if she wasn’t, ‘but she’d be topping herself too, given half a chance. You heard about Slava?’ Olessya nods and glances at me with those eyes that still see right inside me. ‘Well, after we got that letter from Valentina Alexandrovna, she wouldn’t eat. Got it into her head she could starve herself to death, so I had to stuff my face all day and every day to keep us going until she realized it wasn’t going to work. Just as well – I’d have ended up like a lard balloon!’

  Olessya smiles but puts her gloved hand on my arm and tips her head on one side.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dashinka. Slava was a good boy. Aaakh …’ Her breath puffs in a cloud around her head. ‘It all seems so long ago now … But you know what they say: death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal … right?’

  Masha rolls her eyes but I whisper, ‘Right.’ I’m not sure she is, though. Memories are painful. The only time I’ve ever felt really alive was when I knew Slava. Since he died, I’ve been living half a life.

  ‘Oh, gospodi, don’t remind her, she’ll be at it again – trying to end it all,’ says Masha. ‘First it was boric acid powder. Swiped it off the kitchen counter, she did, and was tipping it down her throat before I knew what was happening. That was two days of tort
ure for me, being turned inside out while she threw up after all the emetics they gave her. Then it was a knife, the idiot; she tried to cut her throat, but I got to her first that time. Just about. Don’t know why I bother.’ I rub the scar on my neck. Olessya’s shaking her head. ‘And her next little stunt,’ Masha goes on, ‘was when we managed to get up to the eighth floor to get chocolate from the buffet, and what does my moron here do? Only tries to chuck us out of the open window. If I hadn’t grabbed on to the curtains, we’d be two metres under by now. Lucky for us they didn’t send us to a Madhouse for attempted suicide. Both of us. And what am I supposed to say if we’re put in front of a psychiatric panel? Am I gonna stick my little hand up and quack: “But I’m not depressed, comrades. I’m sane. I love Socialism, just like everyone else – so send her off to your Madhouse, please do; but not me, comrades. No, not me.”’ We all smile and Olessya shakes her head again.

  ‘Same old Masha.’

  ‘Life’s just a constant process of waiting to die for her. And if she had chucked us out of that window, chances are, knowing our luck, we’d just be maimed, so then we’d be in a Goners Block like you. I have to have eyes in the back of my head to keep her from ending it all. I was scared to go to sleep, Olessya, I tell you I was, in case she strangled me. No offence and all that, but there’s three things I’m frightened to death of – being in a Madhouse, being in a Goners Block and waking up dead.’

  Olessya smiles again and shrugs. ‘We’re all afraid of the Madhouse – and Stupino, come to that – aren’t we? That’s how they keep us in line. And as for the Goners Block, yeah, they die like snowflakes in the sun in there. But the worst thing is the humiliation.’ Her eyes flash. ‘It’s run like a prison camp and the staff treat us like animals, just because we can’t walk. The Administration drags in the cheapest possible village idiots from god-knows-where, instead of employing professionals, and then they pocket the difference in wages for themselves. And what makes those peasants think they’re so superior to us? Just because they have straight legs and don’t squint?’ She bangs her mittened fist on the arm of her wheelchair.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ says Masha. ‘They think we have porridge for brains if we look different. And Dragomirovna barks at us like a mad dog if we so much as fart.’

  ‘Exactly! They treat us like subhuman pigs!’ Olessya bangs her fist against the chair again. ‘There’s all this talk about this new Openness of Gorbachev’s, but no one writes about invalids in the press – the so-called Organs of Enlightenment.’ She snorts. ‘That’s a laugh.’

  ‘Or they could at least change the management,’ I say. ‘Barkov and Dragomirovna have been here forever. Everyone knows they’re crooks. And cruel. Everyone. They must have both been here since Stalin …’

  ‘Gold sinks and shit floats,’ says Masha.

  ‘And you know what they say in their Organs of Enlightenment?’ goes on Olessya. I shrug. We don’t read the newspapers. ‘That the campaign for human rights is an imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet State. What crap! Giving us wheelchairs instead of trays with wheels is an imperialist plot? Chort!’

  ‘Well, Gorbachev might change things …’ I suggest, and blow on my hands. It’s freezing out here. My eyelashes have iced over and my nose is going numb. I rub it, then rub Masha’s nose and pull her fur hat down over her ears. (We always wear men’s hats and men’s clothing because she likes them better.) ‘He seems different … Gorbachev does.’

  ‘He is different,’ says Olessya. ‘I’ve heard one half of his forehead is covered by a red birthmark – that’s enough to get you put in a Home from birth. He must have had one strong mum.’

  ‘But Gorbachev hasn’t got a birthmark,’ I say, frowning. ‘We see him on TV in the guard room. And his portrait’s up with all the rest of the Politburo in reception. He hasn’t got a birthmark.’

  ‘They airbrush it out, that’s what they do. He’s got one, all right. But if he’s flawed himself, you’d think he’d help the Defectives, wouldn’t you? Not hide his own defect. He’s like all the rest of them; if you can crawl out of the dung heap into the garden you stay there … it’s one big cover-up …’

  ‘Shhh …’ Masha says, looking around. An old woman is shuffling about in the snow not far away, muttering to herself. ‘You should be careful, Olessya, you’ll get put in the Isolation Hut for slander. You won’t survive a week in there.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m going to get a petition up to have the food improved. We get fed slops a dog wouldn’t eat here. It was much better in the Thirteenth.’

  ‘A petition?’ I say, gawping at her. ‘No, no – don’t do that, Olessya. We’ll get Aunty Nadya to bring you oranges. And tomatoes.’

  ‘I want everyone to have oranges and tomatoes. Not just me. And bananas and green beans too – fresh ones.’

  ‘Well, don’t get me involved in your little uprising. I’m not signing any bananas petition,’ says Masha. ‘It’s hard enough keeping our heads below the parapet as it is.’

  ‘Good for you, Olessya,’ I say. ‘Someone’s got to do it.’

  ‘As long as it’s not me,’ says Masha. ‘I look after Number One, I do, and that’s a full-time job. Well, I’m freezing my tits off out here. Let’s meet tomorrow, yeah? Same time?’

  Olessya nods. ‘OK, OK … Just give me a hand up the ramp, girls. Forward to Communism. Haha! That’ll be the day.’

  As we walk back, I feel things are getting better. I feel things can change. Olessya’s inspiring. She always was.

  ‘She’s crazy, Olessya is,’ says Masha. ‘Getting up a petition, for God’s sake! Where does she think we are – Amerika?’

  ‘But maybe she’s right. Maybe this is the—’

  ‘Hang on a minute – how long’s Uncle Zhenya been out here?’

  She’s stopped in front of him by the bench. He’s only forty-seven but after he was crippled in a car accident his wife put him in here and took another husband. A Healthy one, of course. He loves being outside in the yard. He’s in the Lying Down Block because he’s crippled, but he always sits on the bench outside our Walking Block as if he thinks one day he might simply stand up and be invited in. We sometimes sit with him and listen to him talk about his old life in his country dacha where he had a log stove and grew giant marrows and taught his kids how to ride a bicycle. Like me and Slava … in my dreams …

  I lean down and push his dog-fur hat back. He’s dead. We both realize it immediately – we’ve seen enough corpses. Masha shrugs.

  ‘You can’t teach a fool how to die well.’

  We walk away from him then, and up the steps. It’s a common enough way for the men to go here. Drink a lot of vodka, and then go and sit outside and hope to freeze to death.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ I say as we step inside, into the warmth.

  ‘What’s so terrible about it? Haven’t you seen enough people die?’

  ‘Yes.’ I stop inside the door. ‘That’s the point. It’s not terrible about Uncle Zhenya, it’s terrible that I don’t feel anything any more.’ I look at her in growing alarm. ‘I’m like you.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Not feeling saves your sanity,’ says Masha shortly and starts us off walking again, past the Politburo. ‘You torture yourself in these places if you allow yourself to feel everyone’s pain. Or allow yourself to feel something for someone. Because they always go, one way or another … like Lucia … and Slava.’

  I stop her again.

  ‘But, Masha, compassion makes you human. Doesn’t it? Have they killed my compassion?’

  ‘Compassion makes you weak,’ she snaps, and pulls us over to the lift. ‘If it’s gone, then good riddance to it.’ The door opens. The Toad is still working here and she watches us walk in with her cold, loathsome eyes.

  As the doors close I feel empty. I feel that they’ve won. Because when I think of Uncle Zhenya, a frozen block on the bench, I feel indifference.

  We meet Olessya again and learn something shocking


  When we go back outside the next day, Uncle Zhenya’s still sitting there, but now he has a sack over his head. There’s a militiaman next to him, because the cause of death was unknown. He’s smoking a papirosa.

  We’ve seen this militiaman before at other deaths, so Masha says in a friendly way, ‘Hey, you keeping him out here all winter then, Fedya? ’Til he thaws out?’

  He spits tobacco on to the snow. ‘No hurry, is there? He’s not going anywhere.’ Then he looks away. We disgust him, I can tell. I don’t care.

  We walk on. Olessya’s out there with a group of her friends who were moved with her from the Thirteenth. They’re all laughing. I’m so happy she’s here. I’ve been lonely in the Twentieth.

  ‘Yolki palki – I think our Olessya has a boyfriend,’ says Masha as we make our way slowly towards them through the snow. The narrow raised path of packed snow is still icy and worn down by footsteps, but our crutches sink deep into the snowdrifts either side, so we’re wobbling all over the place.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Look – he’s got his hand on the back of her neck. He’s not bad-looking, is he?’

  ‘She could do better, but a starving dog makes do with scraps. And just look at him standing there like the king of the farmyard.’

  ‘I’m pleased for her.’

  ‘Wonder if she’s Doing It with him?’

  ‘Well, why not? There aren’t many pleasures in life …’

  By the time we finally get close, they’ve all rolled back indoors except Olessya, who’s sitting waiting for us, rubbing her nose with her mitten to warm it up.

  ‘So who’s the cockerel then?’ cackles Masha.

  ‘Him? Garrick. He’s OK, we have fun.’ She smiles her slow, white-toothed smile, showing her dimples.

  ‘Good in bed?’

  ‘Good enough, Masha, thank you for asking, good enough.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of … you know …’ I bite my lip, not sure if I can really ask her about getting pregnant, but it’s still our Olessya, so I do.