The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep

‘Tak,’ says this other woman in a big voice. ‘What do we have here, hmm?’ She takes my hands off my eyes and my mouth, and looks at me. I try to say I’m Dasha, but my voice is still all swallowed up, so I just nod. She looks at Masha then, but Masha’s got her fingers in her mouth and is all frowny.

‘You do understand plain Russian, don’t you?’ says the grey woman, and I nod again, to be polite. ‘You certainly speak plain Russian, so I’ve heard. Very plain. Hmm.’

She touches the other woman’s arm. ‘Come along with me, Nadya, into the nurses’ room. Let them settle in for a bit, while we wait for Boris Markovich.’

They walk across our big room and open the other door, but it’s not bright white with lots of lights like inside the Laboratory. It’s a small dark place with a desk and two chairs. My heart stops being all tight at that. We’re still up in the corner of our cot with no bars, as we’re afraid we might fall right off the edge. I like bars better. I can see Aunty Nadya through the crack in the half-closed door. I can see her put her head in her hands and start shaking and crying all over the place.

‘She’s crying, Masha,’ I whisper. But Masha just sniffs.

‘Stop this at once, Nadya!’ says the other woman in a crunchy, bad voice. ‘One would think you’d never seen Defective children before. Pull yourself together!’

People think we can’t hear. I don’t know why. Maybe other children can’t hear so well as us? But if we couldn’t hear really, really well, we wouldn’t know anything at all, because we don’t get told anything. I can see Masha’s listening to them too.

‘Ai, ai, ai! It’s the state of them, Lydia Mikhailovna. It’s not that they’re together, it’s not that at all, it’s the state of them. They’re like two frightened wild animals – that’s what they are. What did they do to them in there?’

I make a humming noise. I don’t know why she thinks we’re like wild animals when we’ve never been on the Outside before. I’ve seen wild dogs on the street from the Window; they’re thin and mean.

‘I’m told by Comrade Anokhin that his scientists merely observed their behaviour, Nadya. I have no reason to disbelieve a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and neither should you.’

‘But just look at them,’ she’s sobbing and sniffing now, ‘they flinch as soon as you look at them, they can’t feed themselves, and if they do speak, it’s in the worst common language of the cleaners.’ I squish up my nose. That’s not fair. I don’t swear like Masha does. Mummy told us not to. It’s Masha that swears. I try and stop listening and think of Mummy instead, coming to take us back home. But all I can see of Mummy in my head is her holding on to our cot hard as if she’s going to be blown over, and that makes me want to cry again. Masha feels my crying bubbling up, and pinches me hard so she can keep hearing them.

‘Oh, do stop snivelling, Nadya. You’re a physiotherapist whose job is to treat them, not a simple peasant woman to sit and weep over them. You’ll be praying next! Your task is to rehabilitate them.’

‘But, Lydia Mikhailovna, how am I to do that? Did you see their legs? Completely withered. And their arms, too – the muscles are non-existent. It’s a terrible thing, just skin and bone … ai, ai ai, how am I to work on that, Lydia Mikhailovna? How am I ever to get those little stick legs …’

‘None of that talk. You will get them to walk. You are the best physiotherapist in this hospital. And this is the best Prosthetics Hospital in the USSR. And that means the best in the world. As for Comrade Anokhin, his job was to observe them, in whatever way he desired. As a student of Dr Pavlov, he is pushing back the boundaries of Soviet scientific achievements and that is why his observations will continue while they are in our care. At least for as long as they survive.’

Survive? I look at Masha, just at the same moment she looks at me. Her eyes are open wide. Survive means not being dead. Yet.

She pinches me again to stop me crying, but then the door goes Boom again and a thin old man comes into the room. His face is nearly all nose and big glasses. He’s smiling and his teeth are yellow as old garlic cloves.

When they hear the door, Aunty Nadya and the other woman come quickly out of their room. He nods at them and walks over to us.

‘Nooka! Well now! What’s all this then? So they had enough of you two bedbugs in the Paediatric Institute, did they?’

He lifts his eyebrows and pushes his glasses up his nose with a finger so his eyes grow big and they gawp at us through them. After a bit I stop thinking of crying, and look at his gawpy eyes instead, like great big popping fish eyes.

‘That’s better,’ he says. ‘Right, so we’re going to get you two on your feet, are we?’

Aunty Nadya shakes her head. ‘It’ll take an eternity, Boris Markovich, to get those bony little legs to support them – completely atrophied, they are. I’ve seen a lot of children in my time, but this, this … Aaakh nyet, an eternity …’

‘We don’t have an eternity, Nadya, as you know. We have Plans. Five-Year Plans, new Targets, new Thoughts. So there’ll be no going back for them, thank God, only forwards. And I’ll wager, if anyone can get those two trotting along these corridors of ours, it’s you. We both know that …’

Aunty Nadya sucks her spongy lips in. The gawpy-eyed man leans towards us. ‘I’m the Director of this …’ he waves round the room ‘… um, hospital. SNIP. That’s easy, isn’t it? It stands for the Scientific National Institute of Prosthetics – Snip for short. This is your home now.’

‘Snip!’ says Masha. ‘Snip!’

It’s the first thing we’ve said to them and everyone laughs as if it’s a big joke, so she says it again, louder. Masha likes making people laugh.

‘Snip!!’

‘That’s right!’ The man’s smiling even more, crinkling his face into lots of lines, and Masha’s smiling too. ‘Easy, isn’t it? So, is there anything we can get you now? A jigsaw, perhaps? Picture books? Mmm?’

We don’t know what they are, so we don’t say anything.

He lifts his eyebrows up again. ‘Well, would you like to meet some of the other children then? Eh? Don’t suppose you’ve met many children before, have you? Come along, what would you like? I can tell by those bright little eyes of yours, you can understand me.’

I know what I’d like more than anything in the world.

‘I’d like to go back home,’ I say. ‘To Mummy.’

His eyebrows go right up, and he looks back at the two women, but their eyebrows go right up too, so they’re all standing there with their eyebrows right up as if they’re not hearing me, and I remember to tell them what everyone else calls Mummy in the Ped.

‘I want to go back to Anna Petrovna. We want to go home to her.’

He laughs and pats my head. ‘No, no, no. Snip is your home now, not the Paediatric Institute, and you have Aunty Nadya to look after you instead of Anna Petrovna. Anna Petrovna must stay in her own hospital.’ I start crying again in silly sobs that won’t stop, so he pats my head again. ‘Now don’t you worry, you’ll have lots of fun with us – Aunty Nadya will show you how to do a jigsaw.’ He smiles again, then bangs the palm of his hand on the bedstead as if he’s angry about something, and makes the bed jump. ‘Come along, comrades.’ He turns to go. But when they’re all at the door, he stops.

‘Nadya?’ She looks at him. ‘Clean them up properly and then let the other children in to play with them, will you?’

The stupid children are let in to play with us

They’re all talking at the same time and bouncing and tumbling and saying stuff I can’t hear because it’s all being said at the same time. ‘Dima … your name … stand on my head … three months here … upside downs … Mummy …’ and jumping and laughing, ’til my head’s buzzing like nasty shiny equipment that won’t turn off.

‘Go away!’ shouts Masha. We’re in the corner of our bed, but they’re on that too, all different sizes and colours and making such a shouting they can’t even hear us.

‘Here!’ It’s a boy who’s tall as a proper grown-up. ‘Piggyback!’

He moves to pick us up and put us on his back.

‘Hold on to me!’ he shouts. I hold on like mad because I’m scared he’ll drop us with a bang on the floor. The other children run round after us, whooping. Masha’s holding on too, and we’re thumping up and down on his back. She’s grabbing his hair, which isn’t razored, and he yells in pain and dumps us back on the bed, but it’s covered with children and we squish some of them so they yell too. We’ve never seen real children before and we never, ever get touched normally, except to have our Procedures, so Masha hates other people’s skin on hers. She starts hitting and scratching and yelling at them to go away and the children start squealing, and one howls with a big open mouth, like a hole, making so much noise, like there’s a monster coming out of it or something, that I put my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes closed.

‘Tak! All right, you lot, all right, that’s enough!’ It’s Aunty Nadya who’s come into the room. She claps her hands and they all go quiet as quiet. ‘Shoo, off you go, back to your ward. That will do for one day.’ Then the door goes Boom as Aunty Nadya closes it after them. We lie on the bed breathing in and out loudly and I can feel Masha’s heart banging. Aunty Nadya goes out too then, tut-tutting, leaving us alone.

‘Stupid children,’ Masha says after a bit.

‘Stupid children,’ I say.

April 1956

We get leech therapy and a fairy tale for being sick

I hurt all over, like I do when Masha’s been kicking me, but it’s not just the bits she kicks this time. It’s everywhere. And I’m so hot I tremble all the time. Masha’s the same but worse. She’s gone all floppy and hardly talks at all.

‘Well, well and how’s the fever today?’ Aunty Nadya comes in with her trolley. She’s been looking after us since we got sick from the children’s germs. That was weeks and weeks ago. I knew we’d get germs, but I can’t always be holding my breath. Mummy told us about how germs are our enemies, but I wish she’d told them here in SNIP too. No one listens to us.

‘Well, you’re over the worst. Nearly lost you, we did!’

‘Where?’ I say. ‘Where did you nearly lost us?’

She just laughs and says, ‘You’ll be glad to hear we’ll have no mustard plasters today.’

‘Ooraaa!’ I clap my hands. Mustard plasters are hot as hot.

Masha lifts her head up. We get a pillow here, which is for your head to rest on. We didn’t back home. One each.

‘No banki?’ she asks.

‘No banki,’ says Aunty Nadya. I look at the trolley, just to make sure, because grown-ups trick you like mad. Banki are little glass cups, which she lights a fire in, so it can suck up our skin in lots of round, pink lumps. It doesn’t really hurt, not like proper hurting, but when she plips them off they leave these bumps all over, like soft jellyfish. I can count to ten now, because she’s taught us all the way up to ten, and I always count the ten red lumps on our backs. It’s easy-peasy. I bet I could count to a hundred, but there’s only ten cups.

‘No cupping. We’ve got the little leeches today.’

‘Fooo!’ Masha hates leeches more than anything. I look hard at the trolley and I can see them now, all squelchy and squishy and black, in a nasty big jar of muddy water.

‘Won’t!’ says Masha. But she’s too floppy to be too cross. I see them sticking on the glass and want to cry. Every time they take that first bite I feel sick, and won’t look at them or think of them, slimy-slithery on my tummy.

‘Teesha, teesha … hush now. You know they suck out all the fever and badness. They’re good little worms with magic healing juice for you. You’re two funny little fish, you are – you don’t so much as blink at the sight of our biggest needles, but show you a leech and you’re all over the place. You’re squeamish, that’s all. I’ll put them on your backs today so you won’t have to see them.’

‘Nyet …’ moans Masha and wriggles and wiggles. ‘Nyet …’

‘Da. Just lie still.’

‘Tell us the fairy story then,’ I say and pull at her sleeve. ‘About Lyuba. Loud as loud can be, so we can’t hear them eating our blood.’

‘Well, what nonsense, you can’t hear leeches … But very well. Once upon a time …’ I hear her pop open the jar and splash inside for a leech. I can smell them. They smell like the porter who took us away. Like dirty mops. I grit my teeth together and listen as hard as I can to get everything else out of my head. ‘… in a faraway land, there lived an old couple, who thought they could never have children. But one fine morning they found a baby girl who’d been left on their doorstep, and brought her up as their own.’ I go all tight and put my fist in my mouth, waiting for the leech, but she puts it on Masha first.

‘Aiiii!’ she squeals, but I know it’s not the hurt, it’s the thought of its slimmery slimy body. That’s the worst thing.

‘She grew up to be perfectly beautiful. Lips like rosebuds, eyes as blue as the summer sky and hair like spun gold. They adored her and gave her everything she wanted and called her Lyuba – which means Love.’

I think hard as anything of Perfect Lyuba as Aunty Nadya puts the leech on me and holds it ’til its teeth dig inside me. ‘By the time she was sixteen, her parents had been forced to sell their house and their land to buy dresses for her perfect figure and rings for her perfect fingers and fine food for her perfect little mouth. But she still wanted more.’

‘Ai, ai, ai, ai!’ cries Masha.

‘Teekha, Masha! Listen! And then they said: “Lyuba, my love, we must find a husband for you who will love you as much as we do and give you everything you desire.” So word went out over the land that Lyuba was looking to be wed. Handsome princes came from far and wide, and to every one, she gave a task. The first had to bring her pink river-pearls, the second golden sea-pearls and the third a necklace of black diamonds.’

She only puts three each on us, so I’ve got two to go. If I was Lyuba, I’d want to stay with my mummy forever, not marry a prince and get pearls and things.

‘Then a young peasant boy came to her, and said he would give her the greatest gift of all, his True Love.’

Masha groans. She thinks love’s stupid. She likes the next bit best.

‘Lyuba laughed scornfully and struck him over the head with her gem-encrusted cane, intending to kill him, but instead she was at once turned into an ugly leech squirming in the mud. “There!” said the peasant boy. “You have what you deserve. You are a spoilt, blood-sucking leech. But now you have the power to do good, and heal the sick. When you have healed a hundred thousand humans, you will be returned to your original form.”’

‘What’s a hundred thousand?’ I ask through my pillow.

‘It’s more tens than you could ever count. So Lyuba sadly swam through many ponds and rivers and streams until one day she was picked up in the Moscow River and put into a big jar in a city pharmacy. The jar was sent to a big hospital where she was used for her magic juice to save a hundred thousand sick citizens. The hundred thousandth one was the peasant boy who was dying of pneumonia, and she saved his life too.’

‘Are these leeches saving our lives?’ I always ask this.

‘No, you’re zhivoochi. They’re just helping you get better faster.’ We get called zhivoochi lots. Even back in the Box. It means you’re a survivor, which means you keep not being dead even when you should be. ‘So do you know what happened then?’ Aunty Nadya asks and looks at us. We do, but shake our heads. ‘She changed back into a beautiful girl. But now that she wasn’t spoilt, she had a beautiful soul too.’

‘So the peasant boy fell in love with her …’ I say, quick as quick.

‘And she fell in love with him …’ says Masha, quick as quick too.

‘And they lived happily ever after!’ we say together, and then we all laugh because we always finish the fairy tale like that. Together.

She takes the leeches off with a shlyop shlyop and plops them back in the jar. I don’t want to look, but I can see they’re all fat as her fingers now, and happy. I wonder if one of them is a mean prince who will turn back into him and marry me.

‘So, girls,’ she says, leaning over us and rubbing stinky spirits on the bites. ‘Tomorrow Uncle Vasya will come and visit, and he’ll have a present for you to keep.’

‘What? What? A jellyfish?!’ asks Masha, getting herself up on her elbow.

‘It’s a secret.’

‘One present each?’ I ask. Because I know, if it’s only one, Masha will keep it.

‘You’ll see,’ says Aunty Nadya.

We like Uncle Vasya more than anything. He was in SNIP too, after he got both his legs blown off in the Great Patriotic War, and she was his physiotherapist, just like she’s our physiotherapist. And because she loved him, and he loved her, she took him home when he was all better. And they married and live happily ever after.

‘Masha,’ I say, when Aunty Nadya has gone and it’s all quiet, ‘do you think she’ll take us home when we’re better too?’

‘No. She doesn’t love us.’

‘Yes, but what if she did love us?’

‘Mummy loved us and she didn’t take us back to her home.’

‘Mummy still might come and get us. She might be just waiting until we get better here.’

Masha looks up at the ceiling for a bit.

‘I don’t think I love Mummy any more.’

‘Why not?’ I ask.

‘Because she made us go away.’

‘But she made us go away to get better.’

‘We were better anyway,’ Masha says.

‘Well … she said she’d visit.’

‘And she hasn’t. So I don’t think Mummy loves us any more. Why should I love her, if she doesn’t love me?’ She sniffs so much then that her nose goes all sideways.

Well, I don’t care what Masha says, I still love Mummy. But I won’t tell her that. It’s my secret.

Uncle Vasya gives me a dolly called Marusya

‘She’s called Marusya,’ I tell Masha.

‘I know, idiot. You’ve told me a thousand times.’

I’ve got a dolly. All of my own. Uncle Vasya gave her to us yesterday. She’s all soft and rubbery and when I hug her inside my pyjama top she’s just as warm as me, and I can feel her little heart, like I can feel Masha’s, but Marusya’s goes faster, plip, plop, plip because she’s so small.

‘Anyway, how do you know she’s called Marusya?’ asks Masha. ‘Uncle Vasya just called her Kooklinka – plain Dolly.’

‘She told me.’

Masha shrugs.

Uncle Vasya told me she got lost from her last little girl and has been very sad waiting for another one. That’s me. She fell out of a car, he said and almost got run over and was very frightened at being alone but she walked and walked and hid in a train until he found her all dirty and tired, hiding in a cardboard box in his street. So he told her he knew just the little girl for her. Marusya’s Defective like us, he says, but I can’t see why, except that she’s got only one ear, which is the one I whisper into, so not even Masha can hear what we say.

‘I can’t hear her talking. How can you hear her talking?’ says Masha after I’ve been whispering a bit to Marusya.

‘She only talks to me. Uncle Vasya said she didn’t talk to him hardly at all, except to say she was sad at being lost, and that she came from East Germany.’

‘Where’s East Germany?’

‘Outside Moscow. A long long way away.’

‘How did she get to Moscow?’

‘Wait. I’ll ask her.’

‘I don’t want her to talk to me anyway,’ says Masha, sniffing. ‘I wanted a tractor. Like in the picture book.’ I’m really glad about that. Masha took Marusya for herself to start with, but just bounced her off my head for a bit and then got bored. So I get to keep her to myself now. ‘I know!’ she says, all laughing suddenly. ‘Let’s do roll-overs!’

‘All right.’ I put Marusya under my pillow. I’ll ask her later.

‘I’m a hedgehog!’ shouts Masha and we roll over and over on our bed to one end, and then upside down on our heads, to the other end, laughing like mad as the room goes round and round. And Masha keeps trying to get us to fall off and I keep trying to get us to stay on.

‘I’m a hedgehog too!’ I shout.

‘You can’t be one too, I was one first!’

‘All right, I’ll be a … a … curly caterpillar!’

Boom! Aunty Nadya comes in with her white cap and popping eyes.

‘Tak, tak, tak. What’s all this? I told you to do your leg exercises, not break your necks!’

‘We was, we was! Look!’ says Masha, and kicks her leg in the air, so I do too, laughing like anything. Aunty Nadya does her special frowning, which is a smile really, and slaps our legs.

‘Were, not was. We were. Right. Time for another massage to get those muscles working. Sit up straight.’

‘Can Marusya have her legs massaged too?’

‘Yes, Dasha, you can do her, and I’ll do you. Now then, we must work extra hard because I have some very exciting news.’ Her eyes pop at us like she’s trying to keep them in, but the exciting news is pushing them both out of her head.

‘What? What?!’ We shout together.

‘We are going to be visited in a month’s time by a Very Important Guest. He wants to see what progress you’ve made since you left his care in the Paediatric Institute, so you must make me proud of you. It’s the great Doctor Anokhin himself! Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin!’ Her eyes are all bright and sparkly.

We don’t know who he is and where his care was, but she’s so happy about him coming that we’re all happy too. I want to make her proud of us lots. Perhaps she’ll love us then. And take us home with her. That’s if Mummy doesn’t come for us first.

Age 7

September 1957

The great Doctor Anokhin comes to see us with his lesser doctors

‘They’re here! The cavalcade has arrived. They’re here!’ Aunty Nadya is standing by the window. She’s been standing by the window for hours. ‘Now then, just do as you’re told and try your very hardest.’

‘How Very Important is he again?’ asks Masha, bouncing up and down.

‘Well, he’s the successor to the Great Doctor Pavlov …’

‘So more important than a Professor and a Hospital Director, like Boris Markovich …’ I say.

‘Or even a Tsar …’ laughs Masha, still bouncing.

‘Well, I don’t know about a Tsar, I’m sure,’ Aunty Nadya laughs back. ‘But he’s not quite as important as our First Secretary. Nearly, though! He’s very famous. And he’s bringing people to film you for a documentary for the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. That’s why we’ve got flowers and this nice rug in your room, and pink ribbons in your hair.’

I pat my own pink ribbon on top of my head, which must be the same as Masha’s, and feel it all puffy like a butterfly. They don’t shave our heads any more so we have two little plaits each. Aunty Nadya said Anna Petrovna (Mummy, that is) worked with Doctor Anokhin and that she might come to see us too. That’s what I’m more excited about than anything in the world: seeing Mummy again. Because I miss her all the time, every minute and second. And most of all at night. Even after all these months.

Marusya got stolen from me. One of the nannies here said it was the night nurse who took her from my folded arms when I was sleeping because there’s a shortage of East German dollies like her, and they can’t be bought for love nor money, the nanny said. I cried for days and days, because I hadn’t even said goodbye or told her she’d been taken away and that I’d never, ever have given her away. Not ever. And now I don’t know where she is, and she’s probably crying too and thinking I don’t love her. And all I want in the world is for her to know I didn’t give her away, but that she was stolen from me.

But I won’t think of that now.

Boom! My heart jumps like a frog, but it’s only Lydia Mikhailovna opening the door, looking cross as she whooshes into the room.