We had to bribe Katya in the Medical Room to look at our birth certificate and tell us which district we were born in, so Sanya would know where to look to find out where we were born in Moscow. (Aunty Nadya wouldn’t tell us. She’s doesn’t want us to find our mother either. Maybe she’s jealous?) It was Sokol District. Sanya looked up the name Krivoshlyapova and there was only one in Sokol. It’s such a rare name, she said, it’s virtually the only one in the whole of Moscow, so it must be her. It must.
‘So. You ready for this?’ says Sanya, picking up the receiver and looking over at us. Masha nods and Sanya starts dialling. We go and stand behind her.
‘Hello? Is this Yekaterina Alexeyevna? Yes? Krivoshlyapova?’ She nods across to us. ‘This is a cleaner at the Twentieth Home for Veterans of War and Labour. Did you give birth to twins who were born together thirty-eight years ago?’ There’s a long pause and then Sanya puts her hand over the receiver and mouths across to us, ‘She’s crying.’ Raising her voice, she shouts into the receiver. ‘They want you to visit them. This Wednesday. They live here at the Twentieth, number 12 Obrucheva Street … Yekaterina Alexeyevna? Hello?’ She pauses again and then puts the phone down. ‘She just kept crying,’ she says, looking up at us. I don’t know if she heard me. You’ll have to wait and see …’
We meet our mother
It’s Wednesday. We’ve been waiting all morning. It’s nearly 2 p.m. and no one’s come.
‘If she doesn’t come today, Mash, we’ll have to call again. She just didn’t hear, that’s all.’
‘She heard, all right. It’s easy enough to find the Twentieth without an address if you’ve got half a brain. If she doesn’t come, I’m not calling again. And that’s that.’
She has to come. We’ve washed our hair, put on clean shirts, scrubbed each other’s faces and combed each other’s hair. And now we’re sitting on the bed, looking at the door. Masha’s fiddling with her button. We don’t know anything about her. Is she still married to our father? Is she a doctor, like I imagined? Or does she work in a Ministry? Is she a member of the Communist Party? Why did she agree to come and see us if she abandoned us as babies? Does she feel guilty? Did she ever think of us? There are so many questions swirling in my head I can hardly breathe.
There’s a little tap on the door.
Two elderly women walk in. One of them is old and hunched, with her grey hair pulled back in a bun and tucked under a dark green headscarf. She’s wearing a shapeless woollen dress. The other one is younger and smarter and is holding a handkerchief over her nose. You don’t notice the smell in the Twentieth when you live with it. She has a little green beret on, and a grey suit. They stand there staring at us, and we sit there staring at them, not saying anything. Then the old one in the headscarf takes two steps towards us, bends down and kisses me softly on the cheek, and then she kisses Masha.
And it’s only then I realize that this is my mother. The mother I’d written all those undelivered letters to in SNIP. (Aunty Nadya finally told me she had just put them all in the bin. She had no idea if we had a mother or not, or where she might be.) This is the mother I imagined wearing a flower-print dress, with hair the colour of corn, and eyes as blue as the sky. The mother who was going to come to SNIP, take us in her arms and carry us back home.
Masha flinches when she’s kissed, and the old woman sits back heavily on the chair. The other one just stands there, holding her bag in front of her like a shield. Our mother has tears in her eyes. She can’t take her eyes off us, she keeps shaking her head and saying under her breath, ‘Alive … how can you still be alive … how?’
‘Nooka,’ says the other woman, as if waking from a dream. She puts her bag down on the floor with a thump, and tucks her handkerchief in her pocket. ‘We’d better introduce ourselves. I’m your Aunty Dina – Katya’s younger sister. Well, well, yolki palki, I had no idea you two existed until last Sunday when Katya called. No idea … Katya didn’t ever mention … so there we are, and you were here all the time. Tak, tak, so you have a room to yourselves, do you? That’s very nice, isn’t it? And a balcony and your own toilet, goodness! Better conditions than most of us on the Outside, I can tell you!’ She laughs cheerily, but a bit nervously, and keeps chattering on in a friendly way, while Masha looks sullenly at our mother, who’s sitting, slowly wiping her tears away and still shaking her head.
Mother. She has a kind, placid face and pale blue eyes folded in wrinkles. She’s older than I thought she’d be. She looks about eighty, and she still hasn’t said a word to us. Aunty Dina’s talking on and on though.
‘Yes, well, I’d heard rumours, you know, about the girl with two heads in Moscow – those rumours have been going around for years and years, but I never imagined … not for a moment …’ she looks over at Katya, who’s still staring mournfully at us. ‘So I don’t expect you knew that you have two younger brothers, Seriozha and Tolya? No, of course not. Well, Seriozha hasn’t been sober in ten years, but Tolya’s a good boy. They’re both in their thirties, and live with Katya in her flat. It’s only a one-roomer, but at least it’s not communal. We’ve winterized the balcony so Tolya sleeps there, and Seriozha crashes wherever he crashes. Usually in the stairwell outside! So you see, you two have got it made here, living for free off the State. Marvellous. Marvellous. Isn’t it marvellous how they care for you?’ She can’t stop talking. I can feel Masha hating the whole situation. ‘Your mother here survives on cabbage soup,’ she goes on. ‘What with her pension being so small. That’s what you get after a lifetime of service, wearing yourself to the bone on a factory floor. But there you are. There you are indeed. Much cosier to be cared for in here, I’d say. Marvellous. Wonderful that you decided to contact her after all this time. Really wonderful.’ She looks around our tiny brown room with its bare walls, narrow bed and bedside tumbochka and tries to smile.
Masha’s not saying anything, just watching and listening as we see our only escape route slowly closing off. Two brothers and a one-room flat. And a factory-floor mother living on a State pension and cabbage soup. No room for us then.
‘So yes,’ goes on Dina, ‘your father passed away in 1984 – a drink too many, you know, a drink too many. Misha, his name was; yes, he led your mother a merry dance with his wicked ways – if Katya won’t mind me speaking ill of the dead. But there you go … he was an army driver, drove the officers around in the Great Patriotic War. In the Far East, wasn’t it, Katyoosh?’
But Mother isn’t listening. She’s looking at us with those sad blue eyes that just keep on filling with tears.
Eventually, Aunty Dina stops talking, and a thick silence fills the room. After a while Mother heaves a sigh.
‘Dochinki – my little daughters, why didn’t you come to me before? Why did you never come?’
‘We didn’t need you,’ says Masha coldly.
Dina looks a bit nervous then, and shifts from one foot to the other, smoothing down her jacket and patting the pockets.
‘Right, yes, well perhaps we should be off then. Things to do, you know …’ At that, Mother stands up and takes a step towards us. She kisses my cheek again, but when she goes to kiss Masha, she jerks away to avoid her touch. Mother looks startled but then turns to me.
‘What can I do, now that we’ve found each other, dochinki? I can do your laundry, and you can tell me what you need me to buy for you.’ Neither of us say anything. What we really need is to be rescued from the Madhouse. ‘Yes, just tell me and I’ll buy it for you, if I can.’ We still say nothing, so she says, ‘Well, I’ll bring you my home-made cabbage pies next time.’ Then she gently strokes my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says quietly.
And then they both leave …
I look across at Masha. She’s gone all black like she does with her chortik.
‘Sorry? Sorry??’ she shouts once the door has closed. ‘Chto yebyot! Sorry for what?’ She thumps her pillow. ‘Sorry for being a peasant woman as stupid as a tree stump? Or sorry that she buried us in that maternity hospit
al and left us for dead?’
‘We don’t know that’s what happened, Masha … She didn’t say that.’
‘Well, what else did she do? Why didn’t she at least come and see us when we were little? Why didn’t you ask?’
‘I wanted to. I wanted to, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I thought … I thought it would upset her.’
‘Upset her?! For fuck’s sake! Listen to yourself. Haven’t we been upset enough for the past thirty-eight years of our lives? Stuck with all the other Rejects, obsessing about their darling lost mothers when we were growing up?’
‘Don’t swear, Masha—’
‘I’ll swear if I fucking want to …’ She punches the wall. ‘“Sorry?!” Sorry that she only has one tiny room, which she shares with our brothers, so there’s no room for two more? Well, I’d rather live with the crazies than with an old woman who can only wag her head in pity and cry – just like all the other daft dandelions in here. I’m not going to live with a silly old bat and a drunken sot of a brother. I’d never do that. Never!’
I put my hands over my ears.
‘No, I liked her, Masha. She’s still our mother, she called us dochinki, Mashinka, dochinki … no one’s called us that before. Who have we got to call us that, except a mother? No one …’
‘Liked her? What’s there to like? You liked her because she’s the same as you, sitting there with her eyes welling up all the time. Two of a kind, you are. Two sheep, two idiots. The apple doesn’t roll far from the tree. Well, I bet I take after our father. Mikhail, that’s a good strong name. Stop crying, see what I mean? Two of a yobinny kind, can’t stop the waterworks for two seconds.’
‘Please, let her come again, Mashinka, if she wants to … please, Mash. She said she’d do all our laundry for us and bring us home-made food … perhaps they’ll invite us to meet them all, perhaps one of the family can think of some way of getting us out of here … please …’
She shrugs and gets up to go and fetch the pack of cigarettes she keeps behind the sink.
‘What we need is to get out of here,’ she says. ‘Not meet the fucking family.’
November 1988
We meet the family
‘Well now, help yourselves, girls, eat what you like,’ says Aunty Dina and waves her hand at the spread on the table.
We’re sitting in her flat with our mother and our brother Tolya. Our other brother, Seriozha, is late. Masha reaches out for a slice of white bread, slaps a thick slab of lard on it and pushes it hungrily into her mouth. I’m not quite sure how I got her here, to be honest. She said it was only because they’d have vodka. But it helped that Dina arranged for a friend to pick us up in his car and bring us over – any trip away from the Twentieth is a luxury. And deep down, I think we’re both holding on to the idea that Aunty Dina might ask us to live with her in this two-room flat she shares with her husband and her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Kira. It’s got rugs on the walls, dark wall cabinets and a fold-out sofa. It reminds me of when we lived with Aunty Nadya. Bit of a squash. Not much room for us … But if Aunty Nadya can’t have us, then why should a woman we’ve only met once fight the authorities to take us in? Is blood really thicker than water?
I look across at Mother, with her grey hair pinned back in a bun. She reminds me a bit of our mummy at the Ped. I wonder what our lives would have been like if she’d taken us home after giving birth to us? Or at least visited us in the Ped and sat there all day by our cot, like Mummy did, singing us bye-oo bye-ooshki bye-oo and bringing us presents. And she could have come to see us in SNIP on visiting days, and taken us back home every weekend to play with our little brothers … I’d have looked after them … I’d have …
‘Nooka, Tolya dear, pass your sisters the potato salad,’ says Dina. He looks like he’s in a trance and hasn’t spoken at all. Dina’s husband, Boris, and Kira are ‘busy’ tonight, so it’s just the five of us. ‘That’s right, help yourselves,’ Dina goes on. ‘Katya made these cabbage pies, and the borsch beetroot soup. No meat in it, I’m afraid, we’ll have to wait for Communism to see meat, won’t we, haha, but she used a couple of nice meaty bones, didn’t you, Katyusha?’
Mother is sitting across the table from us and she nods, smiles and pushes the plate of warm cabbage pies across to us.
‘I’m so sorry, girls, I looked for meat everywhere,’ she says. ‘I asked everyone I knew …’ She has this way of taking a deep breath through her nose and then sighing as she shakes her head and speaks. I like it, but I know it’ll irritate Masha. All Masha wants is the vodka standing in the middle of the table, unopened. ‘But I used the scraps off the bones to make this jelly kholodets,’ Mother goes on, pushing the dish towards us. I take a wobbly slice. I’ve never had it before. I push the dish across to Tolya. He’s dark like us, and thin, and he’s just sitting there, staring at us like he wants us not to exist. I can tell he doesn’t want to be here. Neither do I much, now.
‘Well, Seriozha should be here soon, no doubt a little worse for wear …’ says Dina, all bright and cheerful. Mother shakes her head again. ‘But he did promise … that’s if he can find his way here, of course … It’s the vodka, you know – opium of the masses. Takes after his father; they do say it’s in the genes. Tolya here would be the same, but he’s sworn off it. Doesn’t drink a drop now. He’s a tram driver, you know, so he’d lose his job … he’s such a good boy.’
‘Talking of opium of the masses,’ says Masha quickly, ‘this one here drinks like a priest.’ She jerks her thumb at me. ‘She needs her vodka. It’s in the genes, like you say. But I’m like Tolya. Don’t touch the stuff. Can’t stop her, though; it’s like trying to hold back the Volga River.’
I feel nauseous at the thought of drinking the oily vodka. And I don’t want to get drunk in front of Aunty Dina and Mother. Apart from the shame of it, she won’t want us to live with her if she thinks we’re alcoholics. Mother looks across at me sadly, shakes her head a little bit and says nothing.
‘Of course! Of course! What was I thinking,’ says Aunty Dina and reaches for the bottle. ‘We must have a toast.’ She pours a little for herself and some for me, in two shot glasses.
‘She’ll have a tumbler,’ says Masha and looks all sad and apologetic. ‘Started when she was fourteen, she did, and there’s no stopping her. I’ve tried everything.’ Aunty Dina looks a bit shocked, but goes to the kitchen for a bigger glass and fills it for me. I feel bile rising in my throat. If only Masha could keep vodka down for more than two seconds, she could do all the drinking herself. I hate it.
After that first visit on Wednesday, Mother came to visit us in the Twentieth two more times and brought a bottle of vodka each time because Masha asked her to. Van Vanich doesn’t search her bags. Everything’s topsy-turvy in the Twentieth now, with the inmates all leaving for different homes like cockroaches abandoning a burning cellar. Masha’s still so angry with Aunty Nadya she refuses to see her, and Olessya’s already left for the Sixth. Time’s running out. I look at the vodka and take a deep breath.
Just then there’s a scraping at the front door and after a bit the bell rings, long and hard. Aunty Dina sighs and gets up to unbolt the door and a man stumbles into the little hallway. It’s our brother Seriozha.
Mother stands and leads him to the chair next to her. ‘Sit down, sinochik,’ she says in her quiet voice. ‘Sit down, little son, and behave.’
He staggers in so drunk he can hardly see us. He just keeps squinting across at us, all bleary-eyed. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m revolted by him. His eyes are slack, his nose has been half sliced off somehow, years ago, and he’s leering at us. Then he sees the bottle and makes a grab for it.
‘No you don’t,’ says Mother, still in her low, quiet voice, but firmly. She takes it and puts it in front of Tolya.
‘Needa drink …’ slurs Seriozha.
‘No you don’t,’ she repeats, just as firmly.
He frowns at the bottle, then at us, then at Tolya. ‘Zat her then?’ he ask
s him. ‘Our sister. The one with all the arms and legs?’
I pick up the tumbler then.
Aunty Dina looks flustered. ‘Well then, here we all are, let’s have that toast,’ she says, quickly picking up her little glass. ‘A toast to finding family!’ I don’t clink glasses with her. I just drink the whole tumbler down in one, while Masha watches me like a wolf to make sure I don’t spill any.
Mother comes to visit for the last time, then Masha plans our great escape
I don’t remember how we got home. The next time Mother visited, bringing our clean laundry and jars of pickled cucumbers (but no vodka), she didn’t mention the dinner at Dina’s. Masha didn’t talk to her at all as she sat chattering on in her low voice about how everything was changing in the country. She said that shops and restaurants and even some factories were privately owned now, instead of being run by the State. And that the media was able to publish things that were wrong in society, instead of only the things that were right. It didn’t concern us though. Nothing changes for us in here.
She’s coming again today and I’ve been thinking that perhaps I’ll ask what happened after she gave birth to us. But then again, perhaps I won’t, because we might not like what we hear. Or perhaps she might not want to tell us.
‘They’re all going, every single one of them,’ says Masha angrily as we walk down the empty corridor to our room. We’re coming back from the canteen, which was almost empty too. ‘They’ll be bringing those poor mad bastards in soon.’ She clenches her fists. ‘By the busload.’
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 29