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‘He looks like Gagarin in that uniform,’ she says.
He doesn’t look like Gagarin to me. Not at all. I hate him. Why should I crawl? Aunty Nadya stamps her foot angrily and gets back into the car, but Masha jumps out of the other door dragging me with her and round to the front where he’s standing. I go bright red.
‘Please, Uncle Militiaman,’ she says in her little kitten voice, making big eyes at him. ‘We’re sick, see. Really sick.’ He staggers right back when he sees us, like he’s been punched in the face, and almost falls over. Masha takes a few steps towards him. ‘We’ve not got long to live, Uncle Militiaman, and all we want is to see Lenin’s tomb before we die … just like he has … died I mean … please …’ He keeps right on staggering back as Masha keeps walking towards him, his eyes popping out of his head and his mouth open. ‘And it says in all the slogans that Our Militia Protects Us. That’s what it says. I saw one on the way here. I did. I saw it.’ He doesn’t say anything at all, he just swivels his baton crazily at Ivan Borisovich, meaning drive on.
‘Hehe!’ laughs Masha, jumping back in. ‘That showed him.’ Aunty Nadya still looks cross, but Ivan Borisovich is laughing too. Sometimes I think Masha loves being Together.
No one notices us as we get carried down to the tomb, getting darker and colder with each step. It’s silent. All I can hear are footsteps. I’m shivering so much my teeth are chattering. I don’t want to see a dead body, even if it’s Uncle Lenin. I really, really, really don’t. I can’t look, but I do, out of the corner of my eye. He’s lying down, dressed in a dark suit and tie, as if he’s just come out of a meeting. He’s in his own glass box, all lit up. I can see people’s faces all bright and white and ghostly as they shuffle slowly past him. His beard looks like it’s still growing and his eyelids are blue with blood and his hands have veins in them. He would hate to be there. He’d hate to be behind that glass, dead, being stared at by all those eyes. I can’t be sick here. I can’t scream. Can’t, can’t, can’t! Squeeze my eyes shut … hold tight to Aunty Nadya … put my head in her neck … swallow down the sick.
‘Zdorovo! Zdorovo! Can we go again? Can we?’ shouts Masha as we come up the stairs and out of the exit into the sunlight and I can breathe again.
‘Certainly not, Masha. Your sister is scarcely alive with terror.’
‘Mwaah! She spoils everything, she does,’ Masha whines. And pinches me hard under the rug.
June 1964
We’re saved from death by a new friend, and join the Young Pioneers
‘Aaaaaarghh!’ We’re both screaming our heads off because they’ve got us by the ankles and are dangling us over the windowsill, four floors up, just about to drop us.
‘See who’s Boss now, you little fuckers?’ It’s Boris. He’s back to have a new leg fitted and he wants revenge. They came up behind us. We didn’t see a thing. They’ll drop us, I know they will. We got dropped once before, and only survived because of the snow drifts. Now there’s only nettles. I can see them down there, I can, miles away. We’re going to die! My head’s all filling with blood, and I’m scrabbling at the wall, upside down.
‘Help! Help!’
‘Wrong. I’m the Boss. Bring them back up.’ I can hear a girl’s voice, but can’t see anything. Everything stops. ‘That’s if you don’t want your guts spilt on the floor like apple sauce,’ the voice goes on. Then slowly, we get pulled back up into the room and fall to a heap on the floor, all scraped and dazed. There’s a girl on a trolley with a great big knife. Its sharp point is touching Boris’s belly.
‘Crazy fucking witch,’ says Boris in a shaky voice.
‘Get out,’ she says in a low, threatening voice. ‘And don’t come back.’ They move away slowly. There’s four of them. We didn’t hear any of them coming up on us from behind. They grabbed us and threw us over the windowsill before we even knew what was happening. When they’ve gone, she sticks the knife back under her trolley into some sort of secret sheath. ‘So. Want to play draughts then?’ she asks.
‘All right,’ says Masha, getting up and pulling her pyjama top down. I’m just nodding madly and trying to stop my heart jumping out of my chest by pressing on it.
I’ve seen her around. She’s pretty, with the longest, thickest black eyelashes and the biggest brown eyes. Masha always said she looked like a cow, and probably just mooed, which is why she never talked to anyone, and so she hardly noticed her. But I did.
Her name’s Olessya. She was lent the draughts board by Galina Petrovna, the teacher.
‘You two can be the same turn,’ she says, once we’re back in the ward. ‘First you, then next time Dasha.’
‘Dasha doesn’t want to play,’ Masha says, leaning over the board and not looking up.
‘Well, I want her to,’ says Olessya simply. ‘OK?’ Masha glances up in surprise, then shrugs.
Khaa! I’m going to play! I’ve always just watched before. I hope Masha doesn’t make a wrong move that I’ve got to make up for!
‘You a Reject then?’ asks Masha, moving a black piece without really thinking.
‘Yeah. Actually, I’m a twin, like you two.’ She moves her orange counter. ‘My sister Marina’s blonde and blue-eyed. My dad said if we hadn’t been twins, he’d have killed the MosGas man, cos him and my mum are both dark-haired!’ We laugh.
I look and look at the board, and then take a deep breath and make a move. I hate that Masha’s got to make the next one for us.
‘We were born Healthy,’ says Olessya, looking at the board, ‘but Dad gave us his cold when we were five and we got polio. We had fevers for a week, but when we got better our legs had stopped working. Crippled, and that was that.’
She tips her head on one side, thinking, and then moves another counter.
‘Polio’s a bitch,’ says Masha. ‘SNIP’s filled with Polios.’ She looks back at the board. ‘You both get rejected then?’
‘Yeah. Never saw my parents again. We had a baby brother who was healthy so they had him to raise. I’ve got one eye that strays, so I got sent to an Uneducable place out of town and Marina stayed in Moscow in an Educable orphanage.’
‘Shit,’ says Masha. ‘Separated. That sucks.’
I carefully move my piece and look up at Olessya.
‘Are you g-getting schooling here, though?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Been here five weeks and I can read and write and do maths now. Healthy! I’d stay here forever. You’re lucky. Good rations and nice staff.’
‘I know. We’re grateful. But we don’t get schooling because we’ve had our f-four years. They don’t do secondary here. It would be n-nice to have more lessons.’
‘Shame,’ says Olessya. ‘I’ve heard there’s a good boarding school for Defectives in the south of Russia somewhere. Galina Petrovna told me. She says I should get myself transferred there. Why don’t you go there?’
We both look at her like she’s crazy.
‘Go to live in a school?’ says Masha, lifting a counter from the board. ‘Oh yeah, why not? Might as well fly to the moon with Gagarin on his next trip while we’re at it!’ We both laugh. But Olessya doesn’t.
‘Everything’s possible,’ she says. ‘Everything. You just need to try.’
Olessya won at draughts because Masha kept making the wrong moves. I knew she would. I was so cross I actually felt like crying, but now we’re standing in the Room of Relaxation for the Young Pioneers ceremony, and it’s so exciting I’ve forgotten all about that and I’m nervous as anything. I wish we had the whole uniform and not just the red scarf to wear with our pyjamas. We’ve been wearing nothing but pyjamas indoors for eight years now and only get dressed if we’re being filmed by the Science Academy or go outside. But never mind that now, I’m going to be part of the Young Pioneers, and then the Young Communist organization – and then a Party member like Doctor Lydia Mikhailovna, Professor Boris Markovich and Doctor Anokhin … You have to be a member of the Party if you want to be a doctor, like I do. Aunty Nadya’s a physiotherapist. I wonder if you have to be a Party member for that? I don’t think so.
We’re a bit behind with joining up because you normally become a Pioneer when you’re ten, but never mind that either. We’ll catch up.
‘Attention!’ We all straighten up as Lydia Mikhailovna walks in to inspect us. She marches up and down the line like we’re proper soldiers on parade. There’s a great big mural all across the wall at the far end, showing Uncle Lenin patting a Young Pioneer on the shoulder. He’s a Healthy Pioneer (there aren’t any Defectives in the posters) and there are mountains, and ships in the sea, and peasants in fields of corn, and new factories with chimneys. There’s everything you could ever want to see out there in our beautiful Russia, and it’s always sunny. Aunty Nadya brought in a conch shell once and held it to my ear so I could hear the waves crashing as if they were right there, caught in the shell. I could really hear them.
‘One, two, three, march!’ Most of the kids are on trollies and can’t march, but we all get ourselves over to the Red Corner to where the big bust of Lenin is, and line up again.
The Komsorg, who’s come in from the local Young Communist Youth Organization, is looking sick and yellow. Aunty Nadya says it’s frightening for the Healthies from the Outside to see us kids when they’re not used to it. The Komsorg keeps looking at her watch as she goes through our oaths. There’s this loud patriotic music coming from the State Radio speaker on the wall, which reminds me of the time that engineer came in to mend our speaker on the wall in G Ward. He kept looking round at us from the top of his ladder, and was trembling so much that in the end he ran out, saying he couldn’t be expected to work under those conditions. I try to understand people, I really do, but I’ve never seen us so I can’t see what they can. I can only see Masha. And she’s pretty.
‘… duty to uphold the great morals of Socialism …’ The Komsorg’s still talking. Now she starts going on about Equality and Justice and Doing No Wrong. It’s a bit awkward, as we’re standing next to the little kid Masha tried to stuff down the rubbish chute the other day. He would’ve gone right down too if he hadn’t held on really hard to the frame. And on the other side is the girl she fed with marbles that we found in the skip (they must have been confiscated from one of the Family kids – we were so excited, but we couldn’t keep them as all our hiding places have been found out). Masha told her they were magic balls, which could make her invisible. She really tried to swallow them too, but they were too big and she coughed them up, but she almost died choking. Masha had to hold her upside down while I slapped her back to pop them out.
‘Young Pioneer!’ I jump. It’s my turn. ‘Are you prepared to fight for the cause of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?’
‘Always P-p-prepared!’ Chort! I keep stuttering now. It started after I went Outside that time, to play hide and seek, and realized I was a monster. I just can’t get words out any more, unless I’m alone with Masha.
‘I, D-Daria Krivoshlyapova, joining the r-ranks of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, in the presence of my Comrades, do solemnly p-promise to love and cherish my Motherland p-passionately …’ Masha looks up at the ceiling, like she’s got nothing to do with me. She hates me stuttering. She says it’s pathetic.
There’s a big poster of the Young Pioneer, Pavel Morozov, on the wall. Masha said she’d denounce her father in a second, if she had one, like Pavel did, and have him sent off to be shot too, for anti-Soviet activity. Then she’d be famous like he is. She keeps on trying to find ways to denounce the Administrator. In summer, when all the staff went, she got into the Administrator’s room and went through all her files to see if she’d forged documents to help bandits, like Pavel’s father did, or was an American spy, or is involved in anti-Soviet agitation, but there was nothing. I was scared to death, but it was healthy fun. I felt like a proper Activist.
‘And now you have been sworn in, we shall sing the USSR Hymn,’ says the Komsorg, and we all go at it, at the top of our voices because we’re all so happy and proud. Actually, I’m so proud to be in the Best of All Possible Worlds I could really burst or something. Defectives are killed at birth in Amerika. Everyone says so. But we’re cared for. Well, maybe the Uneducables aren’t so much … but we are. I almost feel like crying, I’m so proud. Masha’s singing louder than anyone. She’s shouting out, We were raised by Stalin to be true to the People, Inspired by him to heroic deeds of labour!
As we’re filing out, Lydia Mikhailovna taps me on the shoulder at the door. ‘Don’t forget. Delegation tomorrow with Doctor Anokhin.’ Masha sniffs so hard her nose goes all sideways. As if we could forget … ‘And that’s quite enough of that sneer, Masha! You are very lucky to be playing a small part in Soviet Scientific Progress. You should know that, now more than ever. Get a sound sleep.’
A sound sleep is the last thing we’ll get …
July 1964
We perform for Anokhin’s delegation but Popov steps in
‘Not going in.’
‘We’ve g-got to, Mashinka.’
‘Why? They can’t make us.’
‘They can. We’ll be sent away if we don’t, to an orphanage. We must.’
We’re sitting on our bed waiting to be called into the Conference Hall at 11 a.m. The black Volgas full of delegates from all over the USSR, and this time from all over the world, have been driving up all morning outside the window. We watched. Loads of them. Like cockroaches swarming up to rotting food.
‘What’s so bad then?’ Olessya’s sitting with us. ‘About the Delegation?’
Masha’s twiddling the button on our pyjamas and both of us are jiggling our legs up and down like mad things. I wish those marbles really could make you invisible. I’d swallow them all, however big they were, and disappear right now.
‘Dunno,’ says Masha.
‘You two get delegations in to see you all the time, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, but they’re usually in a little room, for doctors from our Soviet republics,’ says Masha. ‘They lay you out naked as a baby on a slab and get all these pip-eyed medical students in from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and Fuckistan to poke at you, and pick at you like a piece of meat, with all their medical jargon. But the ones with Anokhin are different. That’s like being up on the yobinny Bolshoi Ballet stage.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘the small ones aren’t f-fun but they’re OK. One of the K-Kazakh students asked our doctor, “Can theys tork?” And Masha sits right up and says, “Hey, we can speak Russian better than you’ll be able to in five lifetimes, you illiterate camel!” and he looked like he’d been shot through the heart, d-didn’t he, Mash? D-didn’t he?’ But Masha doesn’t even smile. She just keeps jiggling her leg, making the floor thump.
Olessya’s sitting on my side. Everyone sits on Masha’s side normally, except Olessya.
‘That’s what keeps you in here, isn’t it? The delegations … the research …’ she says slowly.
‘Yeah, well, right now I don’t want to be here,’ says Masha.
‘Girls!’ It’s Lydia Mikhailovna, come to get us. My tummy turns right over in a somersault. ‘Come along. Everyone is gathered in the Conference Hall.’
We get up slowly and follow her. Down the corridor, on and on, round one corner and then another and another.
‘Come along, stop dawdling.’
We go round the back of the Conference Hall to where the stage is. It’s dark as anything. There are wooden stairs going up to the stage, which is all covered off by a heavy red curtain with a gold sickle and hammer on it so we can’t see them all sitting in rows and rows of black suits.
‘Right. You know the routine. Get undressed.’ Lydia Mikhailovna’s standing over us. I can hear them all buzzing in the hall behind the curtain. Like wasps waiting to sting. We undo our buttons, take off our pyjamas and untie our nappy. Masha’s sick then, and Lydia Mikhailovna’s all cross, saying she should have asked for a bucket if she felt nauseous, not thrown up on the floor.
‘Fucking kefir for breakfast,’ mutters Masha, wiping her mouth. ‘Knew it was off.’
We’re naked now and shivering like anything. Waiting. We can hear Doctor Anokhin on the stage. Very rare example of ischiopagus tripus twins … under our care, quite remarkable that they have survived into their teens … under our care … remarkable … survived … There’s a circle drawn in chalk on the stage that we have to stand in, behind the curtain. I want to swallow marbles. We walk up slowly and step into it. We wait. I won’t fall down, I won’t. Soviet Progress. Grateful. Grateful. Grateful. Best of. I squeeze my eyes shut and dig my fingers into Masha’s neck where I’m holding her. She digs hers into mine. The curtains slowly open. I can’t see anything because the spotlight is on us, bright as anything and blinding me, but I can hear the gasp go up. They always gasp.
Anokhin comes up on to the stage with a pointer. Two hearts, two brains, two kidneys, two nervous systems, two upper intestines, one blood system, one liver, one lower intestine, one leg each and a shared leg at the back. Turn!
He taps my forehead with his pointer and we turn. The spotlights come from everywhere.
I’m glad I’m blinded and can’t see them. I won’t cry. We’ve been told to keep our eyes open and look straight ahead but the light’s so bright my eyes are watering.
‘Turn!’ He taps the back of my head. I turn to face them again, blinded by the spotlights, I take my hand off Masha’s neck to wipe my cheek because my eyes are watering. I hope they don’t think I’m crying or anything stupid like that because I’m not crying. I’m not.
Crash! There’s a noise like a chair falling over and then the door to the hall bangs. I look at Masha. Did we do something wrong?
‘Stand on one leg,’ says Anokhin. Masha lifts hers up because I’m stronger. ‘Run to the edge of the stage and back,’ he says. We run to the edge of the stage and back. ‘Hop,’ he says. We hop.
He talks and talks and talks while we stand in the spotlight, in the chalk circle, doing what he tells us to with his pointer for ever and ever until he runs out of talk and dismisses us. There’s a round of applause as we walk off. Lydia Mikhailovna is waiting for us backstage. We get dressed slowly in our nappy and then our pyjamas and go down the wooden stairs. She stops us at the door and we can see Boris Markovich standing in the corridor with his hands in his pockets. Doctor Anokhin walks up to him and holds out his hand.
‘Comrade Popov. You left the auditorium?’ he says with his eyebrows raised. Boris Markovich takes a step back and doesn’t take his hand out of his pocket.
‘Yes, I left. I could watch no more. They are not one of your dogs, Pyotr Kuzmich.’ He says that all quiet, but somehow really loud. ‘We no longer live in Stalin’s Soviet Union. We live in the country that Lenin intended. These are normal, intelligent, fourteen-year-old teenagers, not a dumb animal. They should never be forced to witness the spectacle of a room full of men, analysing their naked anatomy.’
Anokhin gives a little smile and tips his head on one side.
‘Then next time blindfold them,’ he says. And walks off.
We go to amputate our leg, but I mess it up – as usual
‘I got a plane, got a plane!’ shouts Masha, pulling a wooden plank out of the skip. She’s half in the skip and I’m half out. I won’t go all in because it stinks of blood and dead dogs. They incinerate the experimental ones but throw the strays, which hang around the grounds, in here to rot when they die.
‘I’m the Soviet fighter pilot and you’re the Fascists!’ she says, jumping back down, and we start racing around with the plank on our back, bombing the little kids playing with us. They run away screaming like we’re really bombing them. Masha whacks one with the plank and he goes flying into a tree trunk and just lies there, so I think he’s actually dead. Then he gets up and goes right back to being a Fascist. There’s all sorts of stuff in the skips. We go out there every day now, and find bits of metal for swords to play Whites and Reds with, or nails to play surgeons and patients with.
I’d rather be inside, sitting with Olessya, but she’s in the schoolroom, learning. They give all kids an elementary education here, whatever their age. She’s just taught herself up to now with books the kind nannies in her orphanage gave her.
After a bit, we all sit down to get our breath and sort through what we’ve got; like, who’s got the bloodiest surgical gloves, or sharpest bit of metal. One piece is like a mirror, but I won’t look in that.
They don’t have mirrors in SNIP to protect us from seeing ourselves, but me and Masha went off one Sunday to the Old Wing where the Party Conferences are held, and went right into the Party Hall where no one has ever been, because it’s strictly off limits. It used to be a ballroom for decadent people before the Great October Revolution, and it had a wooden jigsaw puzzle floor and lights like worlds of falling diamonds. And a massive mirror with a golden twirly frame. I didn’t understand what it was when I first saw our reflection as we walked up to it. I thought it was just a door leading to somewhere. Then we saw this lumbering, ugly thing with bits sticking out everywhere rocking towards us … like nothing we’d ever seen before. It was me and Masha. It was how everyone else sees us. I won’t even think about it now, it makes me sick. It makes me want to cry every time I think of it. Even Masha was so shocked she couldn’t talk for ages. It’s like we’d never really seen what other people see, with our great big stupid third leg waving above us like some scorpion or something. But now we’ve seen we’re all mashed up together and not like anything else on earth, I can’t forget. We hid in bed under the sheet for days and days after that. Aunty Nadya said, over and over, that we were beautiful, but she’s lying. It’s another of their Lies. The Healthies outside by the gate are right. That Nastya, the cleaner in the Pediatriya was right. The driver who took us there was right. We’re urodi. No one in the whole wide world looks as ugly as us. Olessya said some stuff about what matters is what’s on the inside, not the outside, but if we look like this on the outside, no one’s going to bother about what’s on the inside. They’ll just run right away screaming.
In the end, Aunty Nadya said if it would make us feel any better we could have our third leg amputated as we don’t need it.
So now the amputation’s all set for next week.
Masha’s drawing a Nazi swastika in the ground with a metal shard. She shouldn’t. That’s treason or something. She’s crazy, Masha is. The others are laughing at one of the kids, who’s pulled a surgical glove on his head like a cockerel.
‘So, Mashdash,’ the kid says, taking it off with a snap, ‘you doing the amputation next week?’
‘Maybe,’ says Masha. Like there’s a choice now.
‘Well, you can hear them sawing through the bone,’ he says. ‘Karr, karr …’ and he goes like he’s sawing at his good leg with the shard of metal.
‘Fuck off, piss-face. They’ll give us anaesthetic. Knock us out.’
‘No they don’t! They don’t! Honest they don’t! It’s only local, right? So you’re in there with all the lights and the surgeons and you can see the saw and its sharp teeth and everything. All the time.’
