That’s when Masha blew up. ‘Turn it off!’ Joolka shook her head in frustration, but she did. Everyone does what Masha tells them to. I was glad. They don’t realize, none of them, that she’s right, Masha is. She’s strong and I’m weak. Where would I be without her?
So that wasn’t going in her book either.
I hear an ambulance siren wailing from the highway. There are so many cars now that there are traffic jams and accidents all the time. The newspapers are full of stories of corruption and the new Russian mafia. And we get all these soap operas from Mexico about love and deception. It’s all happened so fast. Aunty Nadya says there’s more food in the shops now than you can shake a stick at, but most of it’s imported from the West and much too expensive to buy. ‘We’ve prostituted ourselves to them,’ Aunty Nadya always says gruffly. ‘Gorbachev’s fault for letting the Soviet Union fall apart.’
Some crows fly overhead, cawing sadly, and I yawn. None of that really concerns us. We get fed three meals a day by the State, and Joolka, Aunty Nadya and Baba Iskra keep bringing us supplies. Nothing’s too expensive for us to buy. I’d like to buy firmenni food for Aunty Nadya and Baba Iskra too, but Masha says they wouldn’t accept it. She’s probably right. Masha’s usually right.
‘Nooka,’ says Timur, taking up the oars, ‘come on then, my beauties, back to Home Sweet Home.’
We talk to Olessya about being us
As we circle back along the dusty path that leads from the lake to the gates, I see Olessya sitting in her wheelchair just behind the guardhouse. She likes to sit there on her own and look out at the people going past. No one notices her. Sometimes she’s there for hours. I’m not sure if she’ll talk to us, but she grins as we come through the gates and starts wheeling towards us.
‘Still trying to get in his pants, are you?’ jokes Masha, waving at the guard. ‘Bit young for you, even by your standards!’
‘Very funny, Masha.’ She’s still seeing Garrick, I think.
Timur gives us a nod, flicks his thumb and third finger under his ear to show he’s going off to get drunk, and walks away. Olessya turns her chair around and comes back down the drive with us to the Home entrance. It’s a warm late afternoon and none of us want to go inside, so we sit on the steps looking out across the fence at the blocks of flats opposite. A huge billboard has just gone up by the side of our road, advertising real estate in the countryside, with photos of bright new red-brick dacha country houses.
‘Looks like Amerika, doesn’t it,’ says Masha, nodding at it.
‘Remember when it was “Every Day of Labour is One More Step Towards Communism”?’ says Olessya. ‘Now it’s just buy, buy, buy.’ She looks down at the palms of her hands. ‘If you can.’
The gates to the Home swing open and the chauffeur-driven black Volga belonging to our Director, Zlata Igorovna, sweeps up the drive and parks in front of us, the engine idling, waiting to take her home. Perhaps to a dacha like the one in the billboard.
We should get back to our room to avoid meeting her, but just as we start to get up to go, the door swings open and Zlata Igorovna marches out. I shrink back, but she sees us and comes striding over.
‘So, I hear you two have been up to your usual games.’ She has this way of standing right over us. It’s what Dragomirovna and Barkov used to do. Intimidation. Power. Authority.
‘It’s in our genes, Zlata Igorovna,’ says Masha, jutting out her chin. ‘That’s what it is. Our father was an alcoholic and Dasha’s inherited his—’
‘That’s your excuse, is it?’ she interrupts sharply. ‘Everyone has an excuse, don’t they? Well, if I find out who’s bringing you vodka, I’ll fire them on the spot. And if it’s that English woman, I’ll refuse her entry.’ I nod. (It was Timur.)
‘We k-keep to our r-room,’ I say. ‘We s-stay quiet.’
‘Oh yes? And I should be grateful, should I? As if my nurses have nothing better to do than patch you up the next morning, Dasha. It’s not even as if you drink yourselves to death, more’s the pity, you just keep on going, don’t you?’ I nod again. We’re zhivoochi. Sorry about that.
She narrows her eyes at us. I don’t think she’s ever smiled in her life.
Her chauffeur has jumped out and is holding the car door open for her, so she gives us one last evil look and sweeps off.
‘So, how’s the book coming along then?’ asks Olessya once the car has driven off.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Joolka s-seems to have got to everyone j-just in time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re dying like flies,’ says Masha cheerfully. ‘Joolka wanted to ask Lydia Mikhailovna more about Anokhin, so she called up and was told she’d dropped dead. So’s Golubeva. So’s Mother Misery.’
‘Your mother?’ Olessya looks shocked. ‘She’s died?’
‘Da-oosh. You’d better not let Joolka interview you, Olessinka. It’s like the Curse of the Book – one interview and bang! You keel over!’
Olessya looks at me and bites her lip. ‘I’m sorry, girls. About your mother.’
Masha shrugs. ‘Good riddance. Finally found her release.’
We heard about her death last week. We’d been sitting on our bed one evening when the phone rang. It’s on Masha’s side, so she always picks it up. I talk in public and she talks on the phone because only close friends have our number. She listened for a bit without saying anything, and then said: ‘No thanks,’ and put the phone down. I waited for her to tell me who it was. She picked up the controller for her Atari and turned it on. ‘That was Aunty Dina,’ she said as it started up. ‘Didn’t know she still had our number. She says Mother Misery died yesterday and did we want to go to the funeral.’ She sniffed and pressed play. I stared at her, trying to take it in. Our mother’s dead? I feel as if someone’s just kicked my leg out from under me and I’m falling … falling. Our poor, kind, sad mother who lost us twice. Mother with her soft kisses …
‘I want to go, Masha,’ I said, sitting up. ‘I want to go to the funeral. At least we can do that. Call her back and say we’re going. Where’s her number?’ I started scrabbling over her to get at our phone book.
‘Stop babbling,’ she said crossly, pushing me away from her. ‘I’m not going off to stand by her graveside in the middle of a media circus and be insulted by our darling brothers.’
‘I want to though, I want to!’ We hadn’t seen her in over seven years, but I thought about her a lot and hoped that one day Masha would let us go and visit her. Or let her come to us. But Masha didn’t need her any more. I did, though. I didn’t know how much I needed her until the moment I heard she’d gone. ‘Call her! Call her!’
Masha slapped my face sharply.
‘Nyet!’
I put my hand to my stinging cheek and the tears squeezed silently out of my eyes. Just like Mother’s tears when we last saw her …
But there was nothing I could do. Nothing.
We sit here now on the steps, watching the gates closing behind Zlata’s Volga.
‘So, yes,’ continues Olessya, ‘I read the dissertation. It’s medical torture. They should be locked up.’
‘That’s too good for them,’ exclaims Masha. ‘They should be lined up against a wall and shot!’
I give a big sigh. ‘They’re dead now, most of them. They were old.’
The sun’s setting slowly over the rooftops.
Olessya shifts in her chair. ‘I didn’t realize … I think I’ve never understood fully, quite how … hard it must be, you know, to be you two.’
Masha’s about to say, ‘Try living with this shipwreck for a day …’ but strangely, she stops herself.
‘It’s not just being taken away from your parents and having those things done to you – although it did make me realize how lucky I was to have most of my childhood with my mother and father. They were kind. It’s just that after my twin and I got polio, I never saw them again. I suppose at least your mother wanted to see you when you got back in touch …’ Masha still
doesn’t say anything. But she’s listening. ‘No, it was reading about how different you both were, character wise, right from the beginning. You, Masha, being so feisty and well … defiant as you grew older. Knocking down their bricks, refusing to do their so-called “games” – like being told to press that rubber bulb every time you saw a light or whatever, and throwing it down and telling them “Press it yourselves!” I laughed when I read that. And then you, Dasha, being so desperate to please, you know. Longing so much, even at that age, for approval, wanting so badly to … well, do everything they asked you to and do it well. Even if it hurt …’
We still don’t speak, me and Masha, we just watch as a visitor shows her passport to the guard at the gates and then walks slowly up the drive carrying two string bags of goods. Somebody’s daughter, I suppose.
‘I’ve always thought of you as being just Masha and Dasha,’ Olessya goes on slowly. ‘I never noticed that you’re Together. None of us did. You were just so different, you know – to each other, I mean. And then it turns out you were born like that: different. You didn’t become that way.’ She shakes her head, as if it’s come as a big surprise. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t change.’ The visitor trudges past us into the Home, wearing a blue headscarf and an air of deep despair. Olessya looks at us then, at Masha, at me. She looks right into my eyes. ‘You know what they say: life’s a journey, not a destination. We can all change, however old we are. We all have to work at making life as good as we can make it every step of the way.’
‘All right, Plato,’ says Masha, sniffing. ‘That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?’
‘We. It should be we, not I, Masha. That’s what we’re talking about. Life’s about compromises. All relationships involve compromise.’
‘Thanks, but we’re OK. We’re like an old married couple,’ says Masha, sniffing again. ‘We’ve worked it out.’
‘But have you?’ She looks at me.
I pause for a moment and then say: ‘I think it’s easier to find a compromise when one of you can leave the room.’
Sanya comes in with some more gossip and Joolka tells us something about Slava
‘So, you’ll never guess what …’ Sanya’s leaning against the balcony door in our room, picking her teeth with a matchstick – she never sits down in case Zlata Igorovna comes bursting in on one of her spot checks to make sure no one’s fraternizing with us or that we’re drinking. It’s nyelzya to lock the door when we’re in the room. Only when we leave. It’s midday and there are thunder-clouds gathering outside. It’s so hot nowadays it thunders every afternoon. I’m soaked in sweat. Most days we fill our shallow shower basin up with cold water and sit in it, fully dressed, to keep cool – and dry off in half an hour. Sanya’s telling us what she calls ‘a horrific scandal’ about the new cleaner, an Armenian girl called Zabel. ‘So then her boyfriend, who’s also Armenian – can’t remember his name for the life of me; those darkie languages are all abracadabra to me – follows her to the hairdressers where she’s getting her hair done …’
Masha’s leaning forward, all ears, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate. Joolka got back from her trip to Novocherkassk today and she said she’d come over to see us after she’d been home and seen the children. She wanted to go to our school because she said she needed to describe it, even if none of the teachers are still there. She says we can’t describe anyone or anything for the life of us. I think she gets a bit frustrated with us. I stopped her as she was leaving our room for the airport, before Masha could say anything, and asked if she could look for Slava’s family, just to find out what happened on that day after the party. Or perhaps to find out what he said about us … about me. But most of all, to find out how he died.
Me and Masha, we talk about that sometimes. Especially now – because we’re digging everything up with our autobiography. Masha says he wasn’t the type to give up and kill himself. And anyway, why would he? He was waiting for us to come to live with him. And he didn’t seem too interested in studying after we heard that we were all just flushed down the toilet, as she put it, after finishing school, whatever grades we got. But his dad would have found him carpentry work to do, or even accounting on the side. He could have been happy … and yet somehow, deep inside, I’m sure that he did do it. I do think he killed himself. How could he hold a birthday party for everyone and then just lie down and die the very next day? Just … die? What of? He was strong, he never fell ill. He was young. But if he did commit suicide, then he broke his promise to me that we’d always be together. If he …
‘Whaat? He never did!’ Masha leans even further forward with a jerk and I almost fall off the bed. ‘He actually pulled out a gun?’
‘Yes, yes, he did, Mash! He was so crazy about her, but she’d started sleeping with her hairdresser – a man, obviously – because she needed to get a Moscow propiska to stay here, and her Armenian wasn’t going to be able to give her that, although he was giving her everything else by the sounds of it. And she was pretty as a poppy, wasn’t she, with those big black eyes and red lips—’
‘Was? What do you mean “was”?’ says Masha, her mouth open.
‘I mean …’ Sanya pauses for effect. ‘I mean … he burst into the salon and gunned her down. Da-oosh! Yesterday. Right before everyone’s eyes. I tell you, it’s like Chicago out there. Everyone dived for the floor, and he walked over, cool as a python, and pumped a few more bullets into her head and then strolled out.’
‘She’s dead?’ I look at her, startled. ‘Zabel’s been killed?’
Sanya levers herself off the wall and nods. ‘Like I say, no one’s safe any more, what with the car bombings and the mafia. Anyone can get a gun. It’s mayhem. There are signs outside fancy restaurants saying Please leave your guns at the door. Seriously, I’ve seen them. And I was talking to Zabochka just the other day about Igor, her hairdresser. She was telling us that he wanted to marry her, and so I said: “Nye byot? Nye pyot?” And she smiles with all those gleaming teeth of hers and says, no, he doesn’t drink, or beat me, and I say, “You got a good ’un then … they’re rare.”’ Sanya puts her hand up to her mouth, which is swollen and bruised, and shakes her head. ‘Most of them do drink and knock you around – what do you expect? It’s a hard life. But it takes a real crazy to kill you in cold blood.’
No one talks for a bit and then Masha asks: ‘Any chance of getting us a box of slivochnaya pomada sweets, Sanya, like the one you brought last week? I felt like I was having an orgasm with each one of those.’ Not that Masha would know what an orgasm is like. Or me, for that matter.
Sanya sighs and shakes her head. ‘We’re all on rationing cards nowadays, Mashkip. That last box was a stroke of luck. Saw the queue and joined it, quick as a flash.’
I look at Masha, talking happily away about creamy sweets. I’m thinking that Zabel, beautiful Zabel with her dark brown eyes and happy smile, is dead. Murdered. Indifference is one thing, but you have to have at least a last spark of pity. Don’t you?
There’s a knock on the door and Sanya jumps like she’s been electrocuted and grabs her mop and pail, almost falling over them.
The door opens and we can hear Joolka’s voice: ‘Cuckoo! I’m back.’
Sanya relaxes with a fat sigh. ‘Well,’ she says, waddling across our rug, ‘if I don’t get to all the rooms on your floor in ten minutes flat, I’m dead meat myself, so I’m off. Just thought I’d tell you though, let you know. Bye, then.’
We nod. Joolka walks in with her rucksack. ‘Hey, girls,’ she says. ‘All good?’
She looks tired. But excited too. Instead of squatting down cross-legged on the rug in front of us like she normally does, she comes over to sit with me, but Masha grabs her hand and pulls her over to her side, pleased as a cat with butter to have her there. Masha starts kissing Joolka’s shoulder and neck and grinning that great big happy grin she has. I relax then, and grin too. It’s like Masha’s joyfulness always comes bouncing through to me. It really does.
‘S
o, that was an interesting trip,’ says Joolka, smiling too. ‘The school was much smaller than I thought it would be, and I forgot it used to be a rich merchant’s house in tsarist days. It was a lovely old building; obviously, a bit grim inside and crumbling on the outside, but still … lots of sweet little kids. Shy, but sweet. Still on trollies, by the way, and they still have the green krokodilchik wheelbarrows to take them to lessons. Hey, Mash, stop that, it hurts!’ Masha’s nibbling her ear now and she bats her away.
‘But you’re so pretty, Maht, and you never get near me. Least you can do is let me love you a bit.’
‘If you were a man, I’d hit you! Stop pawing at me, Mashinka – listen, listen.’
‘I’m listening,’ I say quickly. ‘Was there anyone there we knew?’ What I really want to know was did she find Slava’s family.
The storm clouds have burst and the rain’s thundering down on our balcony and against the windows like a wild animal trying to get in.
‘Wow, glad I made it before that broke,’ she says. ‘So, right. There were no teachers still there who knew you, but they told me where Vera Stepanovna, the headmistress, lived and I went to see her. She remembered you very well. She says hello. She lives in a log cabin on the outskirts of town and was sitting in a big armchair, looking small and frail. Also not what I imagined. She says she reads about you in the papers and that she saw Vzglyad and you hardly looked any older. But she looks as old as the world. She told me that Valentina Alexandrovna left the school soon after Slava died. She didn’t know where she is now.’
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 35