‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Baba Iskra, shaking her head and sucking in her lips. She’s the cloakroom attendant from downstairs, but she’s come up to help us move in. We don’t really have any stuff to move in actually, so she’s walking around straightening the tables and rearranging cushions. ‘I never knew anything as splendid as this existed in the Sixth and I’ve been here since it opened. A proper VIP apartment. Your own kettle, look, and a fridge as big as me – and that’s saying something.’ She opens the door and peers in before closing it. There’s nothing there yet. ‘And you’ll be able to afford a TV now, to put there, by the bedside table.’
‘And a tape recorder. We’ll get a Modern Talking cassette and play it all the time, over and over, and dance on our rug,’ says Masha. ‘And we’ve got a phone too, see? Our very own phone.’ Masha picks up the receiver and speaks into it: ‘Kremlin Palace? Yes, it’s Mashinka here, could I have a quick word with Comrade Gorbachev?’ We all laugh again, even Olessya. She wasn’t too pleased that we didn’t use that opportunity to talk about the plight of invalids in the country, but she’s happy that we got what we wanted. She says we deserve it. We deserve the peace of mind.
‘I’m surprised it’s not ringing off the hook,’ she says, ‘with all those journalists wanting to interview you now.’
‘They don’t give out our phone number to journalists. Anyway, I’m done with that. All they want is to sell their newspapers with a story about the two-headed girl. Besides, we’ve got our American journalist. One foreign journalist in the hand is worth a thousand of our lot in the bush. We’re snug as a bug in a rug now. We don’t need anyone.’
‘B-British,’ I say. ‘Joolka’s B-British, not American.’ Masha shrugs.
Olessya tips her head on one side thoughtfully and looks at our reflection in the three-winged mirror on our dresser. There’s three of her from all angles. ‘But you could make a real difference now, you know. You have the power to make real changes. People will listen to you.’ I can’t see if she’s looking at me or at Masha; the sun’s shining in our eyes.
‘Don’t start that again, Olessinka,’ says Masha, picking up the kettle and stroking it. ‘We’ve got all the changes we want.’
‘Yes, but what about our rights?’ says Olessya in her calm voice. ‘The right not to be sterilized without our knowledge, the right to live independently, the right to be acknowledged? You two can be a mouthpiece for us. Who’s interested in anyone with palsy or polio? They won’t listen to us. But they’ll listen to you.’ She looks straight at me, but she knows it’s hopeless. Masha’s made up her mind. Masha’s found her place in the sun.
‘And we should be permitted to work,’ puts in Garrick, who’s leaning against the wall, lighting up a papirosa. He doesn’t know Masha very well so he’s not giving up the argument. ‘Just because I’m on crutches doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to go into an office and ask for work. Or walk into a shop or theatre. Why are we still considered to be such an ugly secret?’
‘Ei, speak for yourself, and smoke that out on the balcony,’ says Masha, clapping her hands at him. ‘You’ll be even uglier after I tip you off it. We’ve still got rules, you know. Don’t want to be kicked out on our first day because of morons like you with your nasty habits.’ He shrugs and goes over to open the balcony door. A cold blast of air hits us.
I wish Aunty Nadya could see all this. I really wish she could. She came in to visit us in the Stom the day after the interview. Our room was full of doctors and nurses, congratulating us on the show when the door flew open and in burst Aunty Nadya, her face as black as coal.
She marched right up to our bed, ignoring everyone. ‘How could you do this without telling me?’ she’d said in a low voice, standing over us. The room fell quiet. Masha just sniffed and looked out of the window. Masha hadn’t wanted to see her again after she sided with Barkov and ‘abandoned’ us. And then Sanya told us that Aunty Nadya was being paid by Barkov to keep us in the Twentieth, which made it even worse. I didn’t believe it for a minute, but Masha did. And then there she was, standing over us. ‘How? Without asking me? And how could you not say one word about me? Not one word? And I know it’s you, Masha, it’s no use putting your hard face on. I know it’s you, I know Dasha will be suffering. I know you two inside out. I know you better than anyone and you’ve just cut me out of your life as if you’re deadheading a flower, just like you did with your mother. Well?’
Masha turned to face her then. ‘We’re not children, Aunty Nadya,’ she said coldly. ‘We’re all grown up. You wouldn’t help us, so we helped ourselves. We don’t … we don’t need you any more.’ My heart had lurched at those words. I felt physically sick. Oh yes we do! Of course we do. We’ll always need her! She’s been more than a mother to us. She’s been everything to us. But I hadn’t said anything, of course. What’s the point? I’d just looked down at the floor. Everyone in the room was listening as if their lives depended on it. I couldn’t look at either of them.
After a bit Aunty Nadya said, even more quietly: ‘Is that it then?’ Silence. ‘Now that you have all these new, so-called friends of yours? Now that you’re famous for a day?’ More silence. ‘You think you’re just wonderful, don’t you? You think you’re always right. No one else matters to you, do they? Well, I’ll tell you what you are, Masha Krivoshlyapova. You’re selfish and arrogant and spoilt and cruel, just like you’ve always been.’ I bit my lip hard but still didn’t look up. If I looked at her I’d cry, I just willed her to stop. Masha never forgives.
I could see her boots, the ones she always wears, furry and chunky, which make her look like a teddy bear. And the heavy woollen stockings she always wears too. I knew her eyes would be popping and her face all red. Aunty Nadya … don’t let Masha turn you away from me forever.
‘And I know you’ve been listening to Sanya and her petty gossip,’ she went on. ‘As if in a million years I’d take money from Barkov to harm you. But you can’t trust anyone to just be nice, out of the goodness of their heart, can you? Because there’s no goodness in yours – it all went to Dasha.’ I squirmed. Please stop talking. ‘Well, so be it. Enjoy the rest of your new life as celebrities without me.’ And then I’d heard the door slam and everyone started talking at once. But I heard Masha say under her breath ‘good riddance’.
I sit down on our bed, which is four times the size of the one in the Twentieth. I still can’t understand why Aunty Nadya wanted us to stay in the Twentieth. All this is wonderful, the new sheets, the shower and the wallpaper. But without Aunty Nadya to share it with us, it’s just … I don’t know … empty somehow. There’s a knock on the door and I look up with a thumping heart, I keep thinking she might …? But it’s only Timur, the caretaker, who’s come in to put a new lock on the door. Masha wants new keys.
‘All right, comrades?’ he says, tipping his cap back and looking around the room at us all. ‘Come to put the lock on, keep these two princesses safe in their tower.’ He chuckles.
‘As long as you’ve got a key, Timosha,’ grins Masha. ‘You can come in and see us any time. We could always do with a strong pair of male hands …’ Olessya rolls her eyes.
‘Cheeky bitch,’ he says, grinning back. ‘I’m a married man, Masha.’
‘Zhena ne stena – a wife is not a wall.’
He grins again and shakes his head. ‘Well, won’t take me boots off though, I’ll just stay out here in the corridor and keep out of temptation’s way. Won’t be long.’
‘Right then,’ says Olessya, ‘it’s supper-time. I’m off to get in the queue.’ Garrick gives us a mock salute and follows her.
‘Yes, yes, off you all go, down to eat with the starving masses,’ says Masha, happily waving them out. ‘We’re staying up here, we are, to get room service. And Baba Iskra said she’d buy us some apples, if she can find them. And vodka.’ Baba Iskra shakes her grizzly old head, but I think that means yes.
‘Double lock, Timosha, da?’ says Masha, standing over him and opening and
closing our cupboard door with a klik, klyak. He nods and starts telling us about how we should get some nice pot plants in our room. He’s the gardener too.
‘You’ll be getting us a bust of Lenin next, and portraits of the Politburo,’ jokes Masha. He laughs and while he works, he tells us a bit about what’s going on in the Outside. They’ve brought ration cards in for meat, cheese and other basics now. Just like in the Great Patriotic War. So much for Gorbachev. ‘You’re lucky,’ he says, talking with some screws between his teeth. ‘No queuing for rationed food in here. Just your room service. The only thing there’s no shortage of out there is vodka, now that they’ve stopped prohibition, thank God. I saw grown men dying in agony from drinking turps or cologne.’ He takes off the lock and cocks his head on one side, looking at the hole in the door. ‘Disaster, that was. The one thing that oils the works in this country is vodka.’ He looks round at us and winks. It’s nice to talk to a Healthy man for once.
There’s another knock at the door and this time it’s Joolka, who almost falls over him.
‘Ooh, yolki palki! Sorry, sorry! I’m Julietka,’ she says to Timur, and holds out her hand. He stares at it blankly. ‘Yes, sorry …’ She says, taking it back and looking embarrassed. ‘Hey, girls, guess what? Here it is – here’s the magazine article!’
Getting to know someone from the West who helps us
Joolka plonks something down outside the open door in the corridor and edges round Timur, who’s still gawping at her. He’s never seen a foreigner before. No one has.
‘Here’s the Sunday Times Magazine. You’re on the front cover, see?’ She holds it out to us. It’s us, all right, there on the glossy cover. Masha looks at it and sniffs. It shows us walking off across a field, taken from behind. Why didn’t they show our faces? Why have us walking off to nowhere, full-length, looking stupid and clumsy? I don’t like it. Neither does Masha. We don’t know what the words say because it’s all written in strange wiggly letters.
‘Brought any Western goodies then, Maht? In your Beriozka bag?’ asks Masha, turning from the magazine. She calls Joolka Maht – Mother – because she’s just had a baby girl, Sashinka. She says she’ll bring her in to see us, but I know she won’t. Lots of the staff in the Twentieth and the Stom had babies but they would have died rather than bring them in to see us. So we’ve never seen a baby before, not even out of the window.
‘Yes, yes, here you are, I dropped in on the way here.’
It turns out it’s not only Party big-wigs who can shop in the Beriozka food shops that are filled with any food and drink you want. It’s foreigners too. ‘Tinned cod roe, cheese balls, ham and chocolate biscuits, just like you asked.’ Masha takes the bag and looks for vodka, but there isn’t any. She sniffs again. At least everything’s firmennaya – goods from the West, labelled in that same squiggly writing. Joolka looks around the room as I put the food in the empty fridge. She doesn’t seem that impressed. I wonder what her Moscow flat is like.
‘So, anyway, here’s the article,’ she says, shrugging off her coat and kicking off her snow boots. She pulls her hat off too and runs her fingers through her hair. She doesn’t seem to own a hairbrush and her jeans are splattered with paint. We thought Westerners would dress in designer clothes and have manicures and perfect hair, but this one’s the opposite. Maybe they all are? She speaks good Russian because she’s married to one of us. A Soviet citizen. ‘Had the whole world to pick from with her Golden Passport and she goes for one of our cretins,’ Masha had said, tapping her finger to her temple.
We first met Joolka back in the Stom. She’s a journalist from England. She’d seen Vzglyad and wanted to interview us for this magazine. We decided to see her for two reasons. Firstly, we’d never met anyone from abroad before, so when Irina Krasnopolskaya told us she’d been contacted by a Western journalist, it was exciting. Secondly, we’d been in the Stom for a month and although we knew that, thanks to the publicity, we’d never have to go back to the Twentieth, we weren’t being allowed into the Sixth. The Director here said it was full and she had no rooms to assign us. She didn’t even say we could get on a waiting list, just told us to find another one. But Masha had other ideas.
‘Well, we’ve used the power of our press to keep us out of the Twentieth, now we need to use the power of the Western press to get us in the Sixth,’ she’d said.
Joolka turned up at the Stom in the same clothes she’s wearing today. Exactly the same clothes. I wonder if she even washes them? She must though. I wash our clothes all the time. She seemed really pleased to see us, just to meet us. She didn’t seem to notice we were Together; she was like Vlad, only interested in what had happened to us and how we’d been treated. When we told her we couldn’t get into the Sixth, she went back to her office and called up the Ministry of Protection, just like that, called them up and said she was writing this article and that her colleagues in the BBC and CNN wanted to do a report on us, and exactly why couldn’t we get into the Sixth? After that, we were told there was a room available, after all. The best room. Smeshno. We’ve spent seventy years despising the Imperialist, decadent, Western dogs, but when we come eye to eye with them, we just fawn, as if it’s us who are the dogs.
‘So, do you want me to translate it?’ she says, bouncing on to our bed, next to Masha, and leafing through the pages.
She came back twice to see us in the Stom to do more interviews for the article. We told her about SNIP and the school. Some of it, anyway. We didn’t mention Slava.
‘Gospodi!! What the fuck is that? A fucking doll?’ Timur jumps back into the room, pointing at the floor outside the door as if he’s seen a ghost.
‘Oh no, no, don’t worry, that’s my baby, Sashinka. She’s asleep. She’s fine.’
‘Baby?’ He jumps back even further. ‘A real live baby? On the floor like yobinny Moses in a basket?’
Joolka gets up, laughing. ‘I thought you’d like to see her,’ she says, looking back at us over her shoulder as she goes to the door. ‘She’s a bit of a handful but sleeps a lot, thank goodness. Here we are, she’s in her car seat.’
A baby! She’s brought us her baby? I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s actually done it. Babies are kept swaddled in cots, away from germs and people for the first year of their lives. She walks back in, swinging the car seat, and places it between us. I can smell her, the softness and milkiness. She’s waking up, she yawns slowly, the biggest yawn ever, and I can see two little tooth buds in her gums and her pink tongue. I slowly reach out my hand to hers and she wraps her fingers around mine, like … like she never wants to let go.
‘You can hold her, if you like,’ says Joolka, and plucks her right out of her chair like she’s a piece of fruit. Masha holds out her arms, ‘Me! Me!’ Joolka gives her the baby, just gives it to her like that, pulling her little fat fingers off mine as she does, and I want to grab her back and kiss her fluffy head and breathe her in, but I can’t. Masha’s got her now. Masha holds her out in front of her, swinging her a bit and laughing. Bye-oo bye-ooshki bye-oo, she sings, and Sashinka yawns that big yawn again. I’m laughing too. I’m laughing and laughing.
‘So anyway,’ Joolka goes on, ‘I put at the bottom of the article that if anyone wants to donate money for you, to get you a cassette player and TV, you know, that they should send it to an account I’ve set up in your name.’ She looks down at the magazine. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a big response.’
Sashinka’s wearing a soft blue flannel jumpsuit. I reach out to touch her, just to touch one of her fat toes and perfect skin, but Masha swings her away from me. I don’t mind, I can’t stop laughing because there’s a baby here, right in front of me. She looks just like my Lyuba did when she was a baby.
‘Well, I’ll bring her in every time, if you’d like,’ says Joolka. ‘She goes everywhere with me. I keep her in a sling mostly. I don’t live far away.’
Sashinka starts gurgling and smiling as Masha bobs her up and down in the air, and then somehow we’re all
laughing, even Timur.
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ I say. ‘I’d like that a lot.’
‘That terrible Communist experiment brought about repression of human dignity … we abandoned basic human values in the name of Communism.’
Mikhail Gorbachev, President of Russia
Age 41
16 August 1991
Our first trip beyond the Iron Curtain, to Germany where we become invisible
‘So … Masha and Dasha, this is your first time in West Germany, your first-ever trip outside the Soviet Union. Can you tell us what your first impressions are?’ Matthius, the German TV reporter, sticks his microphone towards us as the camera rolls. We’re standing on the cobbled streets of Cologne. It’s a beautiful sunny autumn day and I feel like I’ve been transported into a fairy tale.
‘Well,’ says Masha, and he tilts the microphone towards her expectantly. ‘I like the bright colours and the shop displays. And it’s clean.’ He nods encouragingly. ‘And there are no queues and everyone’s dressed in yellow and red and all sorts of bright colours instead of black. And then there’s all these lights everywhere and advertisements, and there’s every single sort of thing you could want to buy packed on to the shelves. Everything’s different!’
He looks across at me then. ‘And you, Dasha?’
I blink at him.
Matthius came to interview us in the Sixth a month ago. Masha said we needed another Western journalist after she fell out with Joolka. That was because of Sanya again. She came in one day and whispered that she’d found out that Joolka hadn’t given us all the money from the Sunday Times Magazine readers, but had kept half back for herself. Sanya also said Joolka was selling photos that her husband Kolya took of us for the article for big bucks. She was exploiting us, just like Ronnie and Donnie were exploited in Amerika. ‘She wouldn’t do that, Mash,’ I’d protested. ‘You can tell by her face, by everything she says, that she wouldn’t do that. And she’s a Christian, she goes to church, she’s good … you can tell … by her face, you just can. And Kolya too.’ But Masha had said, ‘Everyone’s out for themselves, Christians or not. Christians are the worst. All they want is to get to Heaven. Foo! Good thing I’m not a naïve spud in the soil like you. Someone needs to protect us.’ So that was that.
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 31