The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

by Juliet Butler

  ‘Dasha?’ Matthius pushes the microphone closer. ‘And you, Dasha?’

  ‘Oh.’ I gaze around at the people passing us in the cobbled street. ‘N-no one looks at us,’ I say slowly. ‘It’s as if we’re not Together any more. It’s as if we magically stopped b-being Together on the flight over here. We’re free to walk around with everyone else. We can s-sit in a café for everyone else. We c-can stay in a hotel for everyone else. Over here, we are everyone else. We’re n-normal.’

  Matthius nods again and turns back to the cameraman. ‘Got that, Billy? Great soundbite. Really great.’ He gives me the thumbs up and I smile.

  After we moved into the Sixth, Joolka took us in her car on trips around Moscow to restaurants and parks and even some shops, all with Sashinka. Now the public knew who we were, they weren’t so shocked, but they still crowded round and asked questions. So we got fed up with that in the end and stopped going out. Joolka had raised so many thousands of American dollars for us from her appeal that we didn’t even know how much we’d got any more. Enough for Masha to buy an Atari and play all her killing games at top volume all day … They scare me stiff. Enough for a big TV and a video player and a cassette player to listen to Modern Talking on. And enough to bribe Garrick to go out to the nearest shop and buy vodka for us. Olessya doesn’t like that either. Baba Iskra looks after us in every way she can, but she won’t buy us vodka any more. Neither did Joolka.

  Joolka had a second baby, Anya, just before Masha fell out with her. Anya had blonde hair like the fluff on a poplar tree, and blue eyes, as blue as the River Don. Now there were two of them I could hold one while Masha held the other. I didn’t mind which one. I loved them both. Sasha was three by then and used to come toddling into our room saying, ‘Aunty Dasha! Aunty Masha!’ holding her arms out because she loved it when we lay back on the bed and swung her up in the air between us. But then after Sanya claimed Joolka was stealing from us, Masha started slamming the phone down every time she called up and eventually she just stopped calling. And we never saw Anya and Sashinka again.

  When Matthius first asked us if we wanted to go to Germany, Masha had said: ‘West Germany, right? East Germany’s not Over There. What’s the point?’ He’d laughed. ‘Technically it is Over There, now that the Berlin Wall’s come down. But yes, Cologne is in West Germany.’

  A little girl in a flowery dress walks past holding her mother’s hand. She glances at us but that’s all.

  ‘Right then, you two,’ says Matthius. ‘Let’s get over to the hospital. We’ve got that appointment with the urologist.’

  ‘I preferred that handsome psychiatrist,’ says Masha. ‘Johann, the one who speaks some Russian. He said he’d take us around, he did; said he’d give us a tour of the city.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he will then, Masha. Fine by me. Right, let’s get on. Quick march.’

  As we tap down the street I look up at the trees, which are starting to turn yellow. I can look around at everything here. In Russia I just look at the ground so I don’t see the eyes. I still get my nightmare about being in the glass well …

  ‘Maybe Johann can take us to the circus,’ Masha says to me. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to the circus.’

  I nod. ‘Yes, that would be nice. We’ll be able to sit anywhere we like.’

  At first she wouldn’t see him – Johann, that is, the psychiatrist. She said she didn’t need any shrink trying to scrabble about in her head, trying to prove she’s crazy. But he came to our room in the hotel with a bunch of roses one morning and told us his mother was born in Russia and he really wanted to practise the language and would we mind spending a bit of time with him? He’s young and fun, with his long blond hair and baggy suit, so Masha said yes.

  ‘Just don’t tell him you’ve always wanted to be a trapeze artist, Mash,’ I say with a smile. ‘He will think you’re crazy.’

  ‘I’ll tell him whatever I want,’ she says. And sniffs. ‘Hey, there’s a sweetie shop. Matthius, can we go in there and get chocolate? Can we?’ He smiles and nods at Billy the cameraman. ‘Sure you can. As much as you can eat.’

  We make friends with Johann

  We wake up and go to look out of our thirteenth-floor window at the view over the blue river, sparkling away in the sunshine. I’m so happy I just feel like smiling all the time. I feel I belong here. Matthius has been busy with some story brewing back home. ‘Probably those blackies in the republics rioting again,’ Masha had said to me. So Johann has been taking us around instead. We haven’t been to the circus yet, but we visited a cathedral and went for a boat ride on the river, and to restaurants in the evenings.

  ‘So,’ Johann had said, yesterday morning, ‘I’ve got an interesting trip for you today. It’s a Home for the Disabled run by the Red Cross.’

  We thought it would be like the Sixth, but it wasn’t. It was like a gleaming hotel with all sorts of special equipment to make life as easy as possible for the residents. They don’t call them Defectives here, or even invalids. They call them people with Special Needs. ‘Told you we’re special!’ Masha had laughed. We walked through all the rooms with soft sofas and TVs and everyone smiled at us like we were the King and Queen of England rolled into one, and we chatted to Johann about the Twentieth. Or at least Masha did.

  Then last night, when Masha ordered vodka for me in the restaurant, she started telling Johann about Slava and how I kept trying to kill myself, and about our mother. He was really interested. Masha talked and talked that evening, while I drank. I don’t remember how we got home.

  ‘Mashinka,’ I say, pressing my forehead against the window in our hotel room, ‘maybe we could stay here, in that nice Red Cross Hotel? Perhaps they’d let us stay there? Then we could live a normal life?’

  The sun’s twinkling on the river. Masha shrugs. ‘Maybe.’ My heart jumps. Would she really agree? To live an invisible life? Would she?

  There’s a knock on the door then, and Matthius walks in. We turn from the window and he nods at us and goes over to switch the TV on. Then he picks up our phone and starts dialling.

  ‘Feel free,’ says Masha. ‘To use our phone. Why not take a shower in our bathroom while you’re at it?’ He looks up at her, frowning, not getting the joke.

  ‘Matthius,’ I say quickly, before Masha can stop me, ‘is there any way, do you think, that we could stay here? In the Red Cross place? Stay here to live?’ He looks surprised then and puts the phone down.

  ‘Here? Well … I suppose it might be possible. I could make some calls.’

  ‘Just for a bit,’ mutters Masha. ‘See what it’s like.’ She peels back our blanket. ‘Ei hande hoch! – they came to change our sheets yesterday, Matthius. We only slept in them once.’ He’s picked up the phone again and is speaking into it in German with one eye on the TV ‘Ei! Achtung!’ Masha says loudly. ‘We’re clean, we are! Tell them we have a bath every day. And what about that vodka? My sister here can’t go a day without her bottle.’ He waves her away, still talking on the phone, so Masha leans over and takes an apple out of a bowl of fruit by our bed. She eats it all, including the core, and swallows down the pips.

  Matthius starts flicking through the channels, then stops at one and sits down on the end of our bed to watch. There’s a big house by the sea being filmed from above on the screen. His phone rings again and he goes out of the room, talking into it urgently. We keep watching and realize the house is in Russia. The picture keeps flashing back to Moscow. There are tanks. Tanks in the streets of Moscow! But we can’t understand a word, so Masha switches it over to cartoons.

  Nobody else comes to our room after that, except a maid with a tray of food, and it’s only after about six hours that Matthius comes back and sits on our bed. His face is white and he keeps jiggling his foot.

  ‘Listen, there’s been a coup d’état in the Soviet Union by the Communist hardliners who oppose Gorbachev’s reforms. They’ve declared a State of Emergency and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his government dacha in the Crim
ea. Tanks have been rolling into Moscow all day and they’ve closed down the TV and radio stations. Muscovites are rioting, they’re out putting barricades round the White House to protect it from the Army. I have to go back to report on it. My flight’s in ninety minutes.’

  ‘B-but what about us? What about our t-trip?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dasha, we’ll have to scrap the documentary. This coup is huge news. It could well mean a return to hard-line Communism. Yanayev, Gorbachev’s deputy, has taken control of the country. We’ll arrange flights back for you, but it will have to be soon because they might close the borders.’

  He goes to the door and stops, then turns to look at us.

  ‘Unless … unless you’re serious about wanting to stay here? If they do close the borders, you won’t be permitted back in anyway, and then you’d have to be cared for here …’ There’s a pause as he waits for an answer.

  I glance quickly at Masha.

  ‘Nyet,’ she says.

  He shrugs and closes the door.

  ‘Masha, why not?’ I ball up my hands into fists because I want to shake her. ‘Masha, think about it, we could stay here, we’d learn German, we’d be able to work, we’d be treated like the Healthies … We don’t have any friends back home. Olessya won’t talk to us because of our – my – drinking … we could start a new life, we could travel—’

  ‘Molchee! Russia is my home, not Germany. Russia is my Motherland. I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone or joke with them. I’m not staying here forever. What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you a patriot? Aren’t you?’ She thumps the bed. ‘We’re Russian, we love Russia. Russians are the greatest people in the world. What are you? A Nazi, that you want to live here? A Fascist?’

  ‘No, no, Masha, it’s just that if the Communists come back in, everything will go back to how it was. We’ll lose our room in the Sixth. We might get sent back to the Twentieth … Don’t you see, Mashinka? It’s all going to go back to how it was. Please? Just this once, just this once. Listen to me.’

  Her eyes flicker with her chortik.

  ‘Nyet.’ She turns away from me, and points at our suitcase. ‘You’d better get packing.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea. Just pie in the sky.’

  Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation 1991–99

  Age 45

  1995 Summer

  We go back to the Sixth, and reconnect with Joolka and Aunty Nadya

  ‘You know you want it, you’ve always wanted it …’ He pushes her roughly against the hot mud wall of the hut and she gasps faintly, pressing one pale hand to her fluttering heart. She looks past him to the rolling desert sands and feels as shaky as the shimmering heat waves dancing in the dunes. He leans forward and brushes his dry lips against hers, his hard body pressing against her thin dress. ‘No, no,’ she moans, ‘oh no …’ But it’s too late, far too late … his deep green eyes, flecked with gold, glitter hungrily as …

  ‘Bang, bang bang!! Yay, dead, dead, dead!’ Masha jumps up, knocking the book out of my hand. Blood splatters the TV screen and she whoops and presses reverse to play the battle scene again on her Atari.

  I pick The Sheik and the Factory Girl up again. I want to read more, I wish I could just go away and read by myself. I’ve got a stack of Mills and Boon books by the bedside table, hidden under some magazines because Masha says it’s embarrassing. But I love reading them. Why shouldn’t I? I escape in them. I need an escape.

  The military coup by Yanayev failed, and after coming back from Germany, I collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union. Masha says I’m just like the old woman in the fairy tale who keeps getting a wish from the fish her husband catches in the sea but throws back in. First she wishes their hovel was a log cabin. Then that it was a brick house, then a mansion and finally a castle. And she’s still never happy. Perhaps Masha’s right. But all I really want is to be in a country where I’d be invisible …

  Gorbachev was too soft, too intellectual, too weak. That’s what everyone said. He was forced out of the way by a battling Boris Yeltsin, who stood on a tank in front of Moscow’s White House when it was under siege from the hardliners trying to bring back true Socialism. They shot big black holes into the government White House. I don’t remember watching the news at the time, I was a big black hole myself, I think. But it seems that while Yanayev was on State Radio reassuring us all that Gorbachev was simply ‘resting’ (because ‘over the years he has become rather tired and needs to get better’), Yeltsin was on TV, showing everyone that there had actually been a military coup to overthrow the government, and that Gorbachev was imprisoned in his dacha in the Crimea.

  They didn’t win, though, the hardliners. So we’re still here in the Sixth and it seems that now Russia is like Amerika – a democracy. After all that talk about spreading Communism like wildfire across the world, it all went phuut, and Yeltsin got rid of Gorbachev and then dissolved the Communist Party. Just like that. The Communist Party! And then all the republics slipped away to proclaim their own independence. So now it seems we’re back to being Russia again, like we were under the Tsars, except there’s no Tsar now. There’s a President.

  It was all a bit like our lives, me and Masha. You’re hopeful one moment and then disappointed the next. You think everything’s going well and then there’s some change and you realize it wasn’t going well at all. You realize it was all going wrong and that you’d been lied to. So then you start all over again, believing it’s all going to be right this time. You keep on and on, hoping.

  Olessya says hope stops your heart from breaking. Masha says Olessya thinks too much.

  ‘She’s coming soon,’ she says, switching off the Atari. ‘Joolka. She’s coming soon.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll bring the children? I haven’t seen Bobik yet, her little boy.’

  ‘She pops them out like piglets, so she’ll probably have a fourth one by the time she gets here.’ Masha grins and gets up to put the kettle on. Or rather gets up so I can put the kettle on.

  ‘Don’t know how I allowed her to interview our stupid mother though …’ she says, sitting back down with a thump.

  I was so upset when we had to leave Germany that Masha finally agreed to call up Joolka and Aunty Nadya to ‘bring me back to life’. Also, we’d run out of money and Masha missed her firmenni food products. Matthius never got back in touch. As for me, I just missed Aunty Nadya and Joolka – and her little girls. I missed Olessya too. She doesn’t like my drinking. She knows it’s Masha who makes me drink, so I get the feeling she doesn’t like Masha much either. Perhaps she never did? She came into our room last month and just sat there in front of our bed, looking at me. I looked a mess, I know I did, all bruised and swollen with dried blood on my eye and lip. After a bit she said: ‘Are you ever going to do anything about this, Dasha?’ I didn’t say anything. Masha normally gives some excuse about how I slipped in the shower, but she doesn’t bother to tell those lies with Olessya. ‘Well, are you?’ She looked at me then as if she was as disappointed in me as she was with Masha. What could I say? Because what can I do?

  She hasn’t been back since then, and we haven’t been into her room either.

  I pick up my Factory Girl book again.

  ‘Put that yobinny book down; makes me sick just looking at all that sex and mushy love.’

  ‘I don’t much like World War Three going on right in front of me all the time either.’

  ‘Stop bleating.’

  Joolka called to say that she had a book agent from England who wanted us to write our autobiography – with Joolka’s help. Masha liked the idea straight away. She wanted to make more money. Roubles were like pebbles, she said. All the money the Russians sent us just sank to the bottom of the stream, but greeni dollars were like sifted nuggets of gold. She wanted valyuta – foreign currency. When we first called Joolka up and asked if she’d visit, she was happy to see us again and met us as if nothing had happened. So did Aunty Nadya. Ma
sha had called her on the phone. ‘Aunty Nadya?’ she’d said. ‘It’s me. How are you? We wondered if you could come and see us?’ There was just a slight pause and then she agreed. ‘Well, girls?’ she’d said when she walked into our room. ‘How many winters, how many years?’ And that was that.

  We learn what happened at our birth

  Joolka said she’d need to research our autobiography, and that the best place to start was with our mother. She went to see her in her flat yesterday. Now she’s here, all excited, holding her tape recorder like a baby. She’s on her own though, without the children. This is work.

  ‘Here it is then,’ she says, sitting on the floor in front of us like she always does, so she can see both of us. ‘Let’s listen. It was so interesting, I think you’ll both be amazed.’

  She switches it on and we can hear Mother’s slow, deep voice talking about her childhood in a village in Siberia with her nine siblings. Masha picks up Krestyanka magazine and starts leafing through it. Mother goes on to describe how she’d been sent away to live with her aunt in Moscow when she was eight, and lived in their communal flat, beaten by the drunken uncle whenever he got close enough to her, and sleeping on a cot with three other children.

  ‘Breaks my bleeding heart,’ said Masha, picking up another magazine.

  Mother left school at fourteen and moved out of the flat – to her aunt’s delight – to work in a metalworks factory. There were no men left after the First and Second World Wars, not to mention the Great Famine and Stalin’s Purges, so she was lucky to get Misha. She talked about how he needed her room in Moscow, in the factory workers’ barracks, and she needed a man and father for her children. There was no love involved. It was a transaction. All she wanted by then was babies, and she was already thirty-four. Misha loved life and was a womanizer. He beat her, got drunk and controlled her. Mother fell pregnant straight away. She started her contractions in the middle of a blizzard at night, and the woman in the next room helped her on the forty-minute walk through the snow to Maternity Hospital 16, because Misha was working as a night-watchman in a factory.