‘We’ll think of something, Masha, we must.’
‘You’re all retch and no vomit.’ She looks up. ‘Oh God, that’s all I need. There she is – Mother Misery.’
She’s standing outside our room with a string bag, smiling wearily as we tap towards her on our crutches.
‘Shush, she’s good to us, Masha. And it’s a two-hour journey for her to get to us from Sokol by metro and tram. And all with heavy bags of our laundry.’
‘If she hasn’t bought vodka this time, she’s dead to me.’
‘Shush.’
‘Hello, dochinki,’ says Mother, smiling as we walk up. ‘I didn’t want to walk into your room without you there.’ She kisses me on the cheek – she doesn’t even try with Masha any more. We walk in and she starts unpacking the bags.
‘Here’s your laundry, all washed and ironed. And the women I used to work with in the factory all had a whip-round when I told them about you, so I was able to get the batteries and coffee you asked for, off the black market, of course, and cigarettes …’ She starts taking them out of the bag and putting them carefully on the bed, then folds up her string bag and puts it in her pocket. There’s no vodka. I feel Masha tense. ‘It’s getting empty in the Home, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Why’s that?’ We haven’t told her about the re-profiling.
‘They’re dying of boredom,’ says Masha coldly. Mother looks confused.
‘Well, I got you a toilet brush too, Dashinka, as you asked, and a needle and thread to darn your socks. I can sit and do that now, if you like?’ She looks up at me hopefully, with her gentle blue eyes.
‘Thank you,’ I say. Masha would kill me if I called her Mother or Mummy. Our mummy was Anna Petrovna, in the Ped. We talk about her a lot nowadays, especially now we’ve found our real mother. We sometimes wonder who she was, and what happened to her. She must have been a nanny, paid to look after us. Paid to be our mummy because ours had rejected us … I wonder where she is now. I wonder why she never did come and visit us.
‘Well, give me your socks now, dochinki, they’re filled with holes.’
I reach over to get them from our clothes drawer but Masha gets up and pulls me out on to the balcony instead, so we just leave her standing there on her own in the room. It’s raining and the sky’s as flat as a lead lid.
‘I don’t want my yobinny socks darned every week for the next twenty years in here, I just want to get out,’ hisses Masha.
‘Shhh, Masha, she can hear.’
‘So what? Do you think cabbage pies and a tree stump for a mother are going to make life better for us in an asylum of lunatics banging their heads against the wall day and night? Do you? What use is she – pitying us with her charity.’
‘Teekha.’ I look back at our mother, who’s just standing there, looking lost.
‘It’s like having an older version of you around. Life’s a tragedy. It’s bad enough with the one of you – now I feel outnumbered.’
We stand there in silence. Masha’s holding on to the bars on our balcony, Mother’s standing in the room, and I’m half in and half out of the door. Eventually, Mother speaks.
‘Dochinki …’ I look back at her. ‘Have I done or said something to upset you?’
Masha sniffs and looks up at the sky. ‘We’ve lived thirty-eight years without her,’ she says loudly, to me, ‘and we’ll live another thirty-eight without her.’
There’s a pause when no one says anything at all and then I hear Mother start to cry in this sort of hushed way, which I know only too well. It’s how I cry. I want to go to her, but Masha’s still holding tight on to the bars of the balcony.
‘Meelinki, meelinki,’ says Mother. My darlings, my darlings. ‘Meelinki dochinki.’ I pull at Masha. I understand Mother’s pain. I understand it all. I can’t cause her any more. I want her to kiss me again. But Masha won’t move. I look back then at my mother, and her eyes meet mine.
‘Proshai,’ she says, and wipes her nose. ‘Farewell. The first time tortured me. And now I have to do it again … Such is fate. May God now take me away from this life.’
Then she picks up her empty string bag and walks slowly out.
After a bit, we go back into the room. I sit on the bed and pull our socks out of the drawer. They do need darning and Mother’s left her needles and wool behind so I try to thread a needle but can’t because my hands are shaking too much. There’s nothing to say really. Masha reaches over for painkillers for her toothache. She takes two and then puts her fingers in her mouth gingerly, to feel her broken teeth.
‘Wait!’ she says excitedly. I jump and look at her, startled. ‘I’ve got it!’ She slaps her hand on my knee. ‘I have fucking got it!’
5 December 1988
We go on national TV to appeal to the Soviet public
We walk out on to the stage, blinded by the bright lights. I can hear all the applause from the TV audience but I can’t see a thing. Vlad Listyev, the presenter of Vzglyad, this new talk show everyone’s watching, takes me by the arm and leads me gently to a plush red sofa. He’s smiling and clapping too. When the applause finally ends, he shakes Masha’s hand and then my hand, like we’re important, respectable people.
‘So,’ he says, beaming at us, ‘my name’s Vlad, and you are Masha and Dasha.’ We nod. He’s got a friendly face and he’s wearing these big, round spectacles, and has a bushy moustache. I don’t look out at the audience, which has fallen silent now and is watching and listening somewhere out there in the darkness. ‘And you are Siamese twins,’ Vlad goes on. ‘A very rare occurrence in nature – I don’t believe many of our viewers will have heard the term. Named after two famous twins, Chang and Eng, from Siam who lived a century ago and were born together, like you.’ I haven’t heard the term either. And I haven’t heard of his Chang and Eng, but we just nod again.
‘Well now, girls – I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, but you both look so young – why don’t you tell me a bit about your situation, in your own words.’ He smiles warmly at us and leans in to listen.
I take a deep breath. This has happened so fast I’ve barely had time to panic. It started a month ago, with Masha’s Great Idea to get us transferred to the Stomatological Institute (the ‘Stom’) for a course of treatment on our teeth. We’d been there twice before over the years, and stayed there for up to two months. Our young dental surgeon, Doctor Shevchenko, always welcomes us with open arms. He’s a good man, and so is the Director of the Stom and all the staff. They love us there. They’d help us, Masha said. When they heard what was happening, they’d keep us at the Stom until we found a new Home.
It all worked like a dream to start off with. Barkov didn’t suspect a thing. We both went off and cried in front of Rita, the new nurse in the Twentieth, showing her our black stubs of teeth, and the poor girl couldn’t get us into the Stom quick enough.
We had a private room there with a double bed, and Doctor Shevchenko did all our treatments in the middle of the night so we wouldn’t be seen. When we finally explained the situation to him, he went off and asked some questions and then came back to tell us that all he could do was keep us in for as long as possible. ‘It’s against the law for you to stay here,’ he’d said. ‘The Ministry of Protection have decided you should live in the Twentieth. So that’s where you must live. But …’ We’d both looked up at him from our bed then, watching him pacing up and down. ‘But … perhaps you could go to the press? Things are changing now, with Gorbachev and his Openness campaign. There are all sorts of appeals for justice going on.’
Everything kicked off really quickly after that. He introduced us to a journalist who’d won a campaign in her newspaper, Moskovskii Komsomolyets, to get a bus stop built outside the Stom. She wanted to write a story about us, but her editor refused to believe in our existence, even when she showed him photos. He said a freak like that couldn’t possibly exist and now that he didn’t need to lie to his readers any more, he wasn’t going to give them a cock-and-bull story like that. So instead
she went to a cameraman friend who worked on Vzglyad. That was when Vlad Listyev, the creator and presenter of this new talk show, said he wanted us both on air, live, as soon as possible, and before we knew it, a car had come to pick us up from the Stom and take us to the studios. I was petrified, but Masha kept telling me this was our only chance. ‘They’ll hate us, they’ll spit and jeer,’ I’d said in the car on the way here, ‘on live TV.’ She shook her head. ‘No. We’ll be amazing. You heard what Doctor Shevchenko said – the Russian people have changed along with the times. They’ve become more open with all this … openness.’ She’d waved out of the window as if it was blowing in the breeze. ‘You can do it, you know you can.’ I’d taken a great big breath. ‘But I’ll stutter, Masha, I’ll stutter.’ She’d squeezed my hand then. ‘Even when you stutter, you still sound more intelligent than me, and you always know what to say.’ She’d taken my chin in her hand so I was looking right at her. ‘I trust you, Dasha.’ She never calls me by my name. ‘You have to do this. Just this once. You have to.’
‘Girls?’ says Vlad again, still leaning in, like we’re in his living room or something. There’s complete silence in the studio, as if everyone’s holding their breath. They clapped as we walked in, they actually clapped. And now they’re listening.
‘W-we’ve been kept in institutions all our l-l-lives,’ I start. ‘H-hospitals to start off with, then a s-school in Novocherkassk. Everyone was very k-kind. We hoped to w-work. But when we were eighteen we were s-sent to a Home, for V-veterans of War and L-Labour.’ A sort of collective gasp goes up in the audience, I’m not sure why. Don’t they know that’s where the Reject children go to from orphanages?
‘At eighteen?’ says Vlad, edging a bit closer. ‘Teenagers? To an Old People’s Home?’
‘That’s because we’re D-Defective. There aren’t any homes for D-Defectives.’
‘Of course, of course, because the official line has always been that we have no invalids in the Soviet Union. But now, of course, we’re finding out that there are. There most certainly are – but they are still kept out of the public eye. So you two sisters were kept hidden away all your lives?’
‘Y-yes. We’ve been living there for n-nearly t-twenty years. B-but it’s being reprofiled into a Psycho-neurological Home for the insane now, and w-we’re not insane. S-so we don’t w-want to s-stay there. We w-want to go to …’ I don’t finish because there’s a little ripple of applause which gets louder and louder, and Vlad’s sitting there, looking out at the audience and nodding slowly in this Aren’t they just great? way and Masha’s nodding hard at me too. Encouraging me.
The applause dies away and Vlad asks: ‘You want to go where?’
‘Anywhere. Anywhere but the Twentieth.’
‘The Sixth,’ says Masha quickly. ‘It’s Open Regime and looks over a lake.’
‘I see. And that’s why you’ve decided to come here tonight? To appeal to the Russian people,’ Vlad waves at a camera with a red light on, not the audience, ‘to help you escape from this life worse than death? This terrible injustice?’
‘Y-yes.’ I swallow. ‘P-people have always thought w-we’re not right in the head, j-just because we’re T-together.’ I look at Masha, who’s nodding again and fiddling with the button on our trousers. This is her line and she says it along with me. ‘All our lives we’ve had to prove we’re normal, but if we stay there, we’ll have lost the battle.’ When she speaks along with me, I don’t stutter.
‘Of course, of course.’
‘And as for her,’ Masha suddenly adds, ‘she only stutters because she got savaged by a dog. When she was little. That’s the reason she stutters. People stutter all over the place.’
‘Of course,’ says Vlad encouragingly.
‘She got top marks in her school diploma.’
‘I’m not at all surprised,’ he says. ‘It’s a travesty to have been locked away like convicts all your lives as punishment for having been born physically different.’ He looks out at the audience again, which gives another little collective sigh of agreement. I can scarcely believe this is happening. Where are all the people who shouted at us outside the gate at SNIP? Or the ones at the zoo in Novocherkassk? Perhaps it’s because Vlad accepts and likes us? And I like him. He’s not asking how we’re going to die or how we have sex. He’s asking about us. It’s as if he understands us. ‘And so, girls, tell us how it is that you were able to come on our show tonight? How have you been able to escape the Twentieth?’
‘It was M-Masha’s idea,’ I say. ‘We g-got ourselves into the S-Stomatological Institute for dental treatment, but w-we’re being sent back to the T-twentieth in three days. We’re being sent back. And then we’ll never get out. Please help.’ I steel myself then and glance quickly out at the blackness. ‘Please, please help.’
There’s a sort of sucked-in silence in the room. And it’s then that I panic. They don’t want to help. Of course they don’t. They hate us. Like everyone does.
‘And how can we help, Dasha? How?’
‘W-we want to be sent to a Home with our friends. W-we want … to be treated like everyone else, that’s all.’
‘And what does that mean for you?’
I pause, thinking. There’s still no sound from the audience. The cameras are swirling around the stage on wheels. My mind goes a blank. Vlad lowers his glasses on his nose and looks at me over them and I know Masha’s staring at me, willing me to talk.
‘We w-want our own sheets,’ I say. ‘C-clean sheets.’
I feel Masha tense then, but Vlad nods understandingly. ‘You want to be rescued, so you can finally live a normal life with that small luxury the rest of us all take for granted. Your own sheets.’
I nod.
‘Thank you, girls.’ He stands up then and looks out at the audience.
‘I think we can give these two very brave girls a big round of applause.’ We stand up too, but there’s still silence. He starts clapping his hands slowly, still looking out at them. And then there’s this sound, like the patter of rain in the distance, which gets closer and closer until it’s all thundering in my ears. They’re applauding. They really are, all of them. But why? What for? I feel as if I’ve only been talking on that sofa for two minutes. I didn’t say enough. I should have told him about how our lives have been good compared to other Defectives in orphanages or asylums like the one in Novocherkassk. I shouldn’t have just talked about us. I should have spoken up for Little Lyuda, Sunny Nina and Big Boris. Or told them about Stupino and the Isolation Hut. I feel stupid. But Vlad takes my arm and starts guiding us off the stage, waving his arm and smiling a huge smile at the audience. I want to go back – I didn’t even mention Aunty Nadya and all she’s done for us … and how there are people like Olessya, fighting for invalids’ rights. As I turn in the wings, to look back, without the light in my eyes, I can see them all standing on their feet, clapping and clapping like they’re about to burst. And then I think of Slava. I remember him telling me to stand up for myself. And now I have. Not against Masha, but with Masha. Yes, I think Slava would be proud of me.
SIXTH HOME FOR VETERANS OF WAR AND LABOUR, MOSCOW
1988–2003
‘When I came to power in Russia I started to restore the values of “openness” and freedom.’
Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party 1985–91
Age 39
January 1989
Enjoying a life of luxury in the Sixth!
‘One hundred million viewers? One hundred million?’ Sanya’s in our new room in the Sixth, sitting on our bed with her mouth open, repeating the viewing figure over and over again. If I’d known, I’d never have been able to go on. Never. It was bad enough facing the hundred-odd people in the audience.
‘Yes, yes, that’s what they said,’ says Masha, pulling our fancy net curtains closed and then swinging them open again with a flourish. ‘Vzglyad’s the most popular TV show in the country. We’re celebrities, we are. Famous!’ She swooshes
the curtains closed and open again, then looks out at the frozen lake beyond the fence bordering our grounds, as if to make sure it’s still there.
‘You are!’ agrees Sanya. ‘I was in the hairdresser’s the other day and everyone was talking about it. They were talking about you at the bus stop too, and I could hear them behind me when I was standing in line for fish.’
‘Fish! We can buy fish now – we can buy sturgeon, if we want. They’ve been sending money to us like there’s no tomorrow. Sending money to poor little Mashinka who needs her caviar. Meow …’ We all laugh at that. It’s so nice of them.
We moved in yesterday and I still feel dizzy with all the space and luxury. The first thing I did was put all Slava’s letters under the pillow. The door to our room locks, so I know they’re going to be safe now. Olessya’s sitting with us because her room’s only four doors down and Garrick, her boy from the Twentieth, has been transferred here too. The large window leading on to our balcony lets in lots of light and we have flowery, textured wallpaper. I want to keep touching it. That’s stupid though, so I bend down instead to pick some white fluff off our red rug.
‘Gospodi! You’re gonna break my back if you keep doing that for the next forty years,’ says Masha, but I know she loves having a rug as much as I do. A rug just like Vera Stepanovna’s or Barkov’s. Or Aunty Nadya’s … Masha’s paced out the room, over and over again and it’s five times bigger than the one in the Twentieth. The bed’s at one end and there’s a sofa with cushions the other end. I can’t stop laughing when I look around, neither of us can, it’s more than we could ever have hoped for.
It’s like waking from a lifelong nightmare.
And that’s not all. We have an entrance hall with a big cupboard for our clothes (we’ll have to get some clothes) and we have our own toilet and shower, which is so wide and deep at the bottom we’ll be able to sit in it together and have a bath. If we had a little kitchen it would be like having our own flat. But this is even better, because we get cooked for and have all our friends and cheerful staff around to chat to. And no one bullies us now we’re famous. Fame brings respect.
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 30