The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

by Juliet Butler

  ‘Do buck up, girls,’ says Aunty Nadya as we pass under the red Kremlin walls. ‘Stop dawdling.’

  I’m not dawdling though, I’m going as fast as we can. Aunty Nadya got a taxi to bring us here but the driver can’t take us over the bridge. We have to walk all the way. Step by awful step. I keep my eyes down. We haven’t been out in public for a long time, so this is a trial. If we had a wheelchair and a rug like Olessya, no one would notice us, but we can’t fit into one. The Kremlin bells ring out as if to herald our coming. It doesn’t take long for people to realize what’s happening and the whispers rise to a babble as they come closer, circling round us. I don’t look up, so all I can see are their feet. I feel the familiar nausea rising in my stomach and the trickles of sweat running down my back. How would they like it? How would they like to be us? Won’t they ever understand and just leave us alone?

  ‘That’s right, take pictures, you morons!’ Masha’s shaking her fist at them. ‘Show the grandchildren you saw the great Masha and Dasha!’ She can’t help shouting at them, Masha can’t. Well, good for her. I can hear the clicking of their cameras and even though it’s still sunny, flash bulbs keep going off in my face.

  ‘Do calm down, Masha!’ hisses Aunty Nadya. ‘Remember your dignity.’

  ‘Where’s their dignity?’ growls Masha. ‘If someone comes up and spits in your eye, you spit right back.’

  Aunty Nadya tuts but she starts waving away the bystanders saying, ‘Comrades, leave them in peace. Where is your compassion?’

  I’m worried that when we get in the concert hall everyone’s going to forget Modern Talking and focus on us, but when we finally make it across the terrifyingly open Kremlin Square, and go through the doors, it’s almost empty. We got here early on purpose. We run down the aisle, whooping, and get settled in our soft blue seats, right at the very front, with Aunty Nadya on one side and Olessya in the aisle. I’m getting excited now, and Masha’s forgotten the crowds outside and is fiddling with her button and singing yo ma khat, yo ma sol and clapping. We all laugh. It’s a huge conference hall where all the Party congresses were held. We’re all half in love with Thomas and Dieter; even Aunty Nadya is, I think, though she’d never say so. Modern Stuff and Nonsense, more like, she said.

  Masha’s jiggling her foot up and down. ‘Let’s go backstage, come on, let’s nip up those steps and say hi to the boys!’

  ‘You’ll sit right there in your seat and calm down, my beauty,’ says Aunty Nadya sternly as Masha makes to get up, and she puts her hand firmly on her knee. We didn’t even drink before we came out because we thought they might not let us in if we did.

  I look around. People are starting to trickle into the hall. It’s nearly all women. I can’t believe we’re actually here, I can’t believe Modern Talking has finally come to Moscow! Slava would have loved this, he’d have loved their music. I wonder if he ever got to hear the Beatles before he died?

  There’s one more reason that I decided to steel myself and come to the concert. Sanya. Hearing the news about Sanya made me realize that we should take our pleasures where we find them. Baba Iskra came into our room about two months ago to tell us what happened. She knocked. She doesn’t normally knock. Masha had been playing a game on the computer and I was reading one of my Mills and Boon books: The Surgeon She’s Been Waiting For – funny how you remember little things when something terrible happens. We could tell straight away something was very wrong.

  ‘Bad news I’m afraid, girls.’ She sat down with a thump in the armchair by the bed. ‘Very bad news.’ Masha turned off the computer and I put my book down. We waited. She sighed heavily. ‘It’s about Sanya. I’m afraid she’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?!’ We both stared at her. Not Sanya, not dead. No, no! ‘She’s our age, she can’t be dead,’ exclaimed Masha. Baba Iskra shook her head.

  ‘It was that bastard of a husband of hers that did it. He came in, drunk as usual, apparently, and didn’t like the fact she hadn’t cooked him supper. So what did he do?’ We both keep gawping at her. What? ‘He picked up the empty frying pan and took an almighty swing at her. She went down like a felled tree, she did. But he didn’t stop there, he kept on battering her with everything that came to hand, just to make sure. The iron, a chair, even the butter dish. Seems he always used to beat her – but we knew that, didn’t we? She’d come in bruised as a fallen apple most days towards the end, but he always stopped himself before he did her to death. Something must have just clicked in his head.’

  ‘H-How – h-how do you know?’ I asked, still not able to believe that she’s gone. ‘About the butter dish and everything?’

  ‘Their daughter was there in the flat, hiding behind the door, watching her mother being smashed to a pulp on the kitchen floor.’

  ‘Yobinny moodak!’ Masha thumped the bed with her fist. ‘Vicious fucking bully! How could she put up with that? What sort of a person puts up with that?’

  Baba Iskra shrugged. ‘A Russian woman.’

  I felt an icy-cold chill run through me as if someone had walked over my grave. Sanya, our Sanya, dead? We see the inmates dying all the time. And poor Zabka was murdered – it was Sanya who told us that news …

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Masha, maybe thinking the same thing. ‘No more gossip from Sanochka. You’ll have to fill us in now, Baba Iskra.’

  ‘Masha,’ she said, frowning. ‘Show some common decency.’

  Masha just shrugged. ‘If I cried for everyone who died I’d be a puddle on the floor.’

  Baba Iskra shook her head and wiped some of her own tears away with her hand. Then she got up to go because Masha had turned the computer back on. After she’d left, I got to thinking that Masha could take anything to hand when she beats me and we’re blind drunk. She could take the heavy telephone, the thermos, even a knife, but she never does. She only ever uses her fists and nails. She can’t kill me with those. And then I realized that, however drunk she is, however angry, however vicious, she never wants to kill me. Because then she’d be killing herself.

  There’s a low excited buzz behind me as the concert hall fills up. Olessya puts her hand on my arm. ‘All OK, Dashinka?’

  I nod. Olessya seems to see right into my mind, just like Slava did. More than Masha ever could. She’s been trying to help me in all sorts of ways. She came into our room and showed me a site about stuttering to see if I could learn to get better. It was all about taking control. The site was for children, because most of these sites are, it seems, and talked about the ‘stammer monster’ which is crafty and wants you to fight him because he knows he’ll win – he thrives on taking away your power and humiliating you. But like all bullies he has a weakness – he’s secretly terrified that one day you will find out that he needs to be fed fear in order to exist. And that fear is only in your head.

  I’d sat there, looking at the screen with her while Masha flicked through a magazine on black and white magic, running her finger down all the adverts from witches and wizards hawking their various spells. Fear. Fear is only in your head. Only? The head is an important place. But thinking about the stammer monster as being secretly terrified of me helped. I concentrate on that thought, over and over again. And it’s working.

  ‘Oh my God, are you crazy, Dieter is to die for, just to die for. How can you like Thomas? I’m going to orgasm as soon as Dieter comes on stage! Literally, I’m going to come as he comes on!’ Two girls have sat down behind us and are giggling and squealing together as they settle down. Olessya grins at me and Masha’s clapping again and singing, ‘The Night Is Yours – The Night Is Mine’. The hall’s filling up with people who love them like we do. I suddenly feel a part of them, like a bee in a hive, part of a happy, humming community. It makes me feel invisible, like everyone else here in the hall, looking up to the stage, waiting for the curtains to open. I have a sudden blinding flash of recollection of me and Masha up on the stage in SNIP at Anokhin’s conferences. That’s all in the past though. I won’t think of that.

  T
he hall darkens and everyone screams. Masha screams and I laugh and scream too. The music starts thumping so loud and so deep that I feel it deep down inside of me, like a heartbeat. And then we hear the opening bars of ‘You’re My heart, You’re My Soul’ and everyone screams even louder and stands up together in a sort of fanatical ecstasy. I’m so happy! I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my whole life! Everyone’s waving their arms and cheering in a frenzy of excitement and love, waiting for them, and then, there they are! Right in front of us! Walking on stage with the cone spotlights following them and they take the microphones, smiling and clapping and then like some miracle from Heaven they start singing the song we know so well, the song the whole of Russia knows better than our own national anthem and I feel like I’m bursting with joy. You’re my heart you’re my soul … deep in my heart there’s a fire … I’m dying in emotion, it’s my world in fantasy, I’m living in my, living in my dreams … Girls are rushing past me to get to the stage and give them bouquets of flowers and they’re saying spasibo in Russian, which makes everyone scream even more, and then they start singing ‘You Can Win If You Want’, and Masha grabs my hand with hers and lifts them up high, waving them from side to side. We’re here, we did it, we’re happy! I sing along at the top of my voice, like everyone else in the whole hall is singing along: I’ll be holding you forever, stay with me together.

  ‘I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling the hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future in one fell swoop.’

  Boris Yeltsin’s resignation speech, 1999

  Age 49

  August 1999

  We try to stop drinking

  We decided in the end not to publish the book in Russia. We haven’t been giving interviews to the press, but that doesn’t stop them printing mean and hurtful articles in our new tabloid press, based on gossip and lies. Times have changed so much in the ten years since we appeared on Vzglyad. That kind presenter, Vlad Listyev, was shot dead in his stairwell four years ago. Who knows why people are being assassinated everywhere nowadays? Usually because of money, I suppose. Masha wanted to go to his funeral but we didn’t in the end, of course. I didn’t want to be among people any more. There’s no one as loyal and loving and kind as a Russian who knows you like Aunty Nadya, Baba Iskra, Slava, Olessya, Little Lyuda and Sunny Nina … But if you’re Together you can’t be loved for you alone, you’re a Mashdash–Mishmash.

  And if they don’t know you, they may pity you, but not for long. The mood has changed here and the sheep have turned into wolves. Everyone out for their own. So much for Communism.

  Money. We’ve got more money than we can count. That’s what Masha wrote the book for. But all I wanted from our story is to show Healthy readers that Defectives are people too. Because what I’ve learnt is that if you don’t know one, you can’t really understand one, so I want readers to know us.

  We can give bribes to members of staff to get us vodka now. Bribes big enough to make the risk worth their while. It’s not good, not good at all. We’ve been drinking almost every day. A litre. Sometimes two, if I can get it down quick enough not to pass out. But I know now that the only way to take back control from Masha is to take control of the drinking.

  It was after the Modern Talking concert that we decided to stop. We’d woken up the next morning needing a bottle and I’d said, ‘Listen, Masha. We’re not going down to find someone to get us vodka. We can be happy without it. We can do so many things if we’re not shaking from a hangover or the White Fever. We have our life ahead of us.’

  To my surprise she nodded and said, ‘Let’s try.’

  Everyone wanted to help us. Aunty Nadya, Olessya, Joolka. But it’s like being madly in love – all you can think about every minute of the day is the bottle. It makes your heart race, it beckons you. You need it so badly it sometimes feels like life’s not worthwhile without it. We never knew it would be this hard.

  ‘I’m proud of you.’ We’re sitting in Olessya’s little room, on her armchair. We bought it for her out of our savings. That was Masha’s idea. ‘I’m not crippling myself on that hard wooden chair of yours any more,’ she’d said, with a sniff. ‘I’m used to a bit of comfort, I am.’ But we both knew she wanted an excuse to do something nice for Olessya. Things are changing with Masha, slowly but surely. All we need to do now is to stop drinking.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ Olessya goes on. ‘They say it’s much harder for women alcoholics to give up than men. But you can do it. I know you can. So is this doctor good?’

  We shrug. ‘I don’t know much about her,’ I say. ‘She called up Zlata Igorovna and said she was a n-narcologist’ (the stammer monster fears me) ‘and had a new method of curing alcoholism and that it was one hundred per cent guaranteed and free. She said she wanted to help us.’

  Masha sucks on her teeth and raps her fingers on the arm of the chair. ‘Everyone’s just sooo sweet,’ she says tightly. ‘Like Edouard.’

  She’s remembering the last narcologist who promised to cure us: Edouard. He came all the way from Omsk and sewed ampules into our arms containing a chemical that would react with alcohol in our blood and kill us. Getting ‘sewn up’ is a common enough cure, but it didn’t work on us. Neither did the hypnotist, or the koldoon sorcerer who came to put a magic spell on us. Masha found him. Masha loves reading about all the witches and extrasensories there are now, but I was cynical, even though Joolka says they employ them as members of staff in polyclinics nowadays.

  But the ampules didn’t stop us drinking. We held out for a month of White Fever – throwing up, shaking all over, sweating, seizures, our heads filled with monsters – until even death seemed preferable, so we got a bottle and drank. And we woke up the next morning alive and kicking. And then Edouard wrote an ‘exposé’ in the newspapers all about how we’d fallen off the wagon. About how degraded we were. A hopeless case.

  ‘He seemed so nice …’ I say.

  ‘Your Timur seemed nice too …’ says Masha.

  ‘It was you who told him where we’d hidden the cash.’

  ‘It was you who invited him up for vodka.’

  ‘That was us. Not me, Masha. Us.’

  She sniffs and looks out of the window. ‘Can’t trust anyone in this world. They’re all out to grab money now, in whatever way they can.’ I still miss Timur. I still find it hard to believe he’d do that – steal our thousand dollars we kept hidden in a tea caddy – after he got us dead drunk. And then he quit his job. We never reported it. What’s the point? And of course we never saw him again.

  So when Zlata Igorovna walked in yesterday to tell us she was sending the narcologist to us this afternoon because she was fed up with her Home being notorious for harbouring the world’s only conjoined drunks, we agreed.

  ‘So tell us what’s happening out there, Olessinka,’ asks Masha, waving at the window, ‘in the land of the living.’ Olessya picks up her pile of newspapers and opens it at an article she’s been reading. She reads newspapers every day and listens to the news programmes on her radio, but we just let it all pass us by. We can’t change anything out there.

  ‘How’s our glorious drunken President then?’ asks Masha. ‘What a great example he is to us all. Has he fallen off any more bridges lately?’

  ‘Pozor! Russia’s a great country, troubled but great. The greatest country in the world and yet, after Lenin, we had that tyrant Stalin, then the peasant Khrushchev who everyone laughed at after the shoe-throwing incident, then that old stuffed goose Brezhnev, another laughing stock, then a series of Party faithfuls on their deathbeds, and then Gorbachev, who was so weak he let the Soviet Union slip through his fingers like mushy peas. And now we have Yeltsin, a drunken buffoon.’

  ‘Ei, calm down!’ Masha laughs. ‘Stalin was The Man. All we need is another Stalin.’

  ‘You were tortured under Stalin,’ says Olessya coldly.

  ‘And look how well
we turned out! Cheer up. I only asked what’s happening. Gospodi!’

  ‘Well, OK, in a nutshell,’ she rustles the newspapers again, ‘since you ask, all Russia’s gas and oil and wealth has been sold off for kopecks to the New Russian gangster businessmen for paltry bribes to the government. In fact, everything’s being sold off: factories, airlines, steel plants, land. It’s not very different to the Red Army looting the palaces after the revolution. We’ve gone from so-called altruistic Socialism with the distant goal of Communism, to dog eats dog. The country is being torn apart and the chunkiest, meatiest bits go to the most savage.’ She pauses for breath and we stare at her in surprise.

  ‘Um … Altruism?’ asks Masha, not really understanding much Olessya’s said. I’m not sure I do either. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It means selfless concern for the wellbeing of others. Communism. That was what it was all supposed to be about, wasn’t it? But it got corrupted. That’s why Sunny Nina, Little Lyuda and Big Boris died. That’s why I’m in here with my one hundred per cent diploma doing nothing except sitting by the gates looking at the world go by. That’s why Dasha with her one hundred per cent diploma is drinking herself to death. That’s why you, Masha, with your energy and drive and spirit, are sitting in a room all day playing war games. It’s because we’re arrogant, we Russians are. We’re a great people, a cultured people, I truly believe we’re the best people in the world, but we’re fatally flawed by our own pride and arrogance. Do you know what arrogance is? It’s fear of thinking others are better than you. It’s vulnerability. We wanted to be the best, we wanted our country to be the best of all possible worlds, so we desperately hid our flaws. Like us. The Defectives!’

  ‘Wow, calm down, Olessinka,’ says Masha, waving her arms. We know Olessya gets political, but she seems particularly fired up this morning.

  ‘I won’t calm down! It’s such a waste. Such a waste of a great people. We should be led by a woman, not by men with all their screwed-up patriarchal weaknesses. Why did Gorbachev never tell us about Chernobyl and let everyone get irradiated? All those children splashing in puddles under the invisible radioactive cloud? Everyone in the world knew, except us. Why didn’t we know about the Novocherkassk riots either? We were living there, for God’s sake. Now it’s in the history books. The biggest riot in Soviet history, and did we know anything about it? No. And Chikatilo, the mass murderer who killed fifty-two children, children, down in the Novocherksassk region. He was happily killing away for fifteen years, while we were there. And the reason he could keep on murdering then was because no one was told. No one. Those mothers let their children wander around alone because they weren’t told, because having a mass murderer in your midst would have been a flaw, and Russia. Does. Not. Like. Flaws.’ She emphasizes each word with a thump on the side of her wheelchair, and then balls her fists up and looks down at her legs.