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‘Yes, yes. She’ll be painlessly put to sleep, ah … killed, that is … after one week of umm … flying …’ she coughs, ‘round and round in space.’ There are no hands up now because it’s a bit sad to think of her being killed up there, all on her own. ‘But she doesn’t know that now, does she? So she’ll be looking out at earth all beautiful and blue, and thinking what a lucky Laika she is.’ Galina Petrovna smiles a big smile at us and we all smile a big smile back.
Age 11
March 1961
We have our weekly bath and meet Lucia
The best day ever in the week is Saturday. It’s bath day in the bannya down in the basement of SNIP. We get a whole tub for just us and one other kid. We’re at the front of the line. We’re always at the front. We’ve been here a million times longer than anyone else, so Masha’s the boss of everyone, even if they’re older than eleven, which is what we are.
‘Yolki palki! Stop shivering,’ says Masha. ‘You make me shiver too.’
‘It’s cold …’
I hug myself to see if I can stop, but it doesn’t help. I keep hugging myself anyway.
Tomorrow’s Sunday, which is Visiting Day, so we all need to be soapy clean for parents. We don’t have any parents, of course, but Aunty Nadya says we need to be soapy clean all the same, in case the other kids’ parents see us. But they wouldn’t ever do that, because we have to stay stuck away in our room all day on Visiting Day so we don’t traumatize the Healthies.
The door to the bannya’s open and we can see the rows and rows of free-standing tubs, all being filled up with steaming hot water from jugs. I’m so excited I almost forget to shiver.
‘Hey, I’m first in, see?’ It’s a girl, loads taller than us. Her head is shaved so she’s from a State Children’s Home, not a family home, and she thinks she can get right to the front where Masha is, because she’s new and doesn’t know Masha.
‘Get lost,’ says Masha.
‘Get lost yourself, midget.’
‘This is my place. Get to the back of the line, shit-face. Don’t want you making my bath stinky.’
‘Who are you calling shit-face?’
I shrink back, away from them. No one messes with my Masha. Last week we were walking down the stairs from Ward C and there was this gang of boys at the bottom, waiting to beat us up, and Masha got her skewer out, the one she’d stolen from the kitchens when I was talking to the cooks on purpose so they wouldn’t notice. She keeps it stuck down our nappy. It’s almost longer than anyone’s chest and she pushed the point into the skin of the neck of the first boy and said ‘Just try it, fucker’ and then walked on right through all of them without looking back or anything. I swear I’d die without Masha.
But she’s got no skewer now. We’re all naked so it’s only her.
‘How long you been here?’ she says to the girl.
‘Week.’
‘Well, I’ve been here five years and this is my hospital and my spot and everyone knows it, don’t they? So get the fuck to the back of the line.’
‘Yeah, you, get lost.’ All three of us turn. It’s Pasha who’s in line behind us. He keeps coming back to have more prosthetic legs that fit as he grows. I haven’t seen him for ages and ages though. He’s got a deep voice now but it’s still him. I can tell easily. I didn’t even know he was back.
‘She’ll come and skewer you to your bed if you don’t,’ he says and laughs. It comes out all deep again but it’s still his Pasha laugh. The girl looks back at Masha and shrugs, but stays where she is.
I didn’t know Pasha was right behind us. Right there, behind us, only half a metre away, but I didn’t know. I hug myself again and wish we’d get called in right now. There are loads and loads of us here, all standing naked, waiting forever, and Pasha is older than us. I wish he wasn’t right there behind us.
‘Yeah? Try it and you’ll get stuck first,’ says the new girl.
‘That’s a laugh. Whatcha gonna stick me with? Babushka’s knitting needle?’
‘OK, children. Come along, come along!’ It’s Aunty Mila the bath attendant calling us in.
‘Oooraaa!’ Masha and me go running in, slipping and sliding on the wet tiles and jump with a swish and a plop into the very first tub. The girl runs in with us and jumps into ours too, squealing like anything.
‘Splash!’ laughs Masha and kicks her foot to splash the girl. ‘What’s your name? Besides Shit-Face?’
‘Lucia,’ she goes. ‘What’s yours? Besides Midget?’
‘Mashdash. I’m Masha and she’s Dasha, but we just get called Mashdash.’
‘All right then, Mashdash. I can hold my breath underwater longer than you. Ready?’ She holds her nose and so does Masha, but I don’t. I like floating, not getting all wet in my mouth and eyes and stuff. It makes me scared that I’ll never come up and get air again. Lucia goes down and blows loads of bubbles but Masha doesn’t, she just waits ’til Lucia starts coming up, then she ducks her head in and comes right back up again.
‘I won!’ she shouts. I laugh because Lucia doesn’t know she cheated. Masha’s funny.
Aunty Mila comes to scrub us with a brush and soap and Masha goes miaow like a cat and tells her not to bother with me, as she wants double time. But Aunty Mila does me too and then she does Lucia and pulls Masha’s ear before she goes to the next bath to scrub them. I’m floating in the water like a fish in the sea or green seaweed, and I’m melting away until I’m nothing at all except water too. It’s like being all single in the water, like it’s just me floating away. I’ll be sucked down the plughole and swooshed right out to sea and then get washed up on a warm shore. And there’ll only be Pasha there but that won’t matter because there’ll be coconuts to live off and we’ll learn to climb the coconut trees and swim …
Ding Ding! The bell goes to say our ten minutes is up, clanging like the fire alarm, and we have to get out, quick as anything, and run for our sheets to get dried with, while the next three jump into the bath.
‘What ward you in, Mashdash?’ asks Lucia.
‘None of them. We got an Isolated room,’ says Masha, because Lucia wasn’t talking to me.
‘Fuck you. Why? You infectious?’
‘Nah. We’re special. Not like you.’
‘Fuck you. I’m in Ward D. You a State kid or Family kid?’
‘State.’
‘Good. Family kids suck.’
‘Yeah. They suck. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, I want marmalade and oranges …’
‘Yeah, makes you sick. I’ll come see you tomorrow then.’ She’s dried herself in two seconds flat. Quicker even than us.
‘OK. Ask for Mashdash.’
‘See ya then.’
‘See ya.’ She hops really fast, back to the changing room, and then I see she’s got only one and a half legs.
We make four wishes because we’re bored
‘She was all right,’ Masha says, stuffing a chunk of black bread into her mouth all at once when we’re back in our room. She stole it off the plate of a little kid in the canteen and hid it down our nappy for later. We get all our bread and food weighed out on scales by the gramme. I lie back on my pillow with my leg hanging over the bed and think a bit about what we’re going to do all day, now we don’t go to school any more. It only goes up to primary school in SNIP, so now we’re eleven, it’s stopped. Aunty Nadya has other kids to work on because we can walk, and run, and climb, and if we haven’t leaked in our nappy for more than an hour, we’re allowed to ride our red tricycle round the Physio hall as a treat. It’s Masha that leaks anyway, not me. She can’t be bothered to try not to. But I do. I squeeze down there like mad. Uncle Vasya bought us the red tricycle. Apart from Marusya, it’s the best present in the world.
I try not to look at the chunk of spongy black bread because I’m starving. I know we get Fully Provided For, and I’m grateful, but I still always seem to be starving. There’s only a bit left now and Masha’s chewing away at it, looking out of the window. She never shares.
I make a steeple with my fingers and press it against my nose. I miss not learning. It’s like I’ve only just started knowing things. It’s like opening a bag of all different sweets and trying a few, then having it taken away. It’s like when we were taken away from the Window.
Galina Petrovna said I had Amazing Potential, and almost cried sort of, when we had our last day of schooling with her. I think she did cry, almost, although Masha said she didn’t. It’s nyelzya to borrow school books, but Aunty Nadya sometimes brings us picture books filled with coloured photos of sharp mountains like in the Altai, and blue lakes in Siberia, which are the deepest in the world, and of snow in Murmansk where it’s almost always night time even in the day time. I wish she’d leave the books for us when she’s gone, but she can’t, or they’d get taken, like Marusya was. You don’t get to keep your own things in an Institution.
‘D’you think Lucia will come tomorrow?’ I ask. I don’t usually make any of my own friends because Masha doesn’t like the sort of girls I like. I don’t care though, because they keep going away, so you have to keep saying goodbye as soon as you really get to like them. While we keep on just staying and staying.
‘Course she will.’
‘Mash …’ I lift myself up on my elbow because she’s lain down the other end of the bed now and is sucking her fingers. ‘We won’t get sent away will we? Like the Uneducables. To an orphanage? Now that we can’t study any more?’
We’ve heard all about the orphanages for Uneducables from some of the other kids. You don’t even have to be that Defective to be classed as one, just a bit Defective like having a squint in one eye. They say you get tied to a cot all day, and not fed until sometimes you starve to death. I think that can’t be true because the grown-ups say Defectives are all cared for. But you never quite know …
‘Nyetooshki. We’re not morons, are we?’ She doesn’t lift her head from her pillow. I shake my head. There are three classes of Uneducables. There’s the Morons, the Cretins and then the Imbeciles, but I can’t tell the difference when they’re brought here for treatment, I really can’t. They all seem nice enough to me.
‘And anyway,’ says Masha, all muffled, ‘Anokhin needs us. You heard Aunty Nadya.’
‘Is she telling a lie though? Maybe she’s tricking us?’
Grown-ups tell lies to make us feel better. Maybe Uneducables are tied up and starved to death …
‘He keeps coming back, doesn’t he? With his yobinny delegations to show us off.’ She yawns and then pretends like she’s catching bubbles in the air with her hands. Plyop, plyop plyop. She swallows them for wishes. I do the same. One wish for being adopted by Aunty Nadya and taken to live with her family. Second wish for getting Marusya back. Third wish for being a beautiful Lyuba non-leech with perfect spun gold hair and perfect cornflower-blue eyes and perfect rose-red lips just like all the strong peasant women in the posters everywhere, standing in fields of wheat. And the fourth wish is to be all on my own in the field of wheat. And for Masha being all on her own too but next to me so she can stay close by if she likes.
Lucia comes on Visiting Day
The next day – Horrible Visiting Day – is all warm and sunny. It’s spring time again and we’re looking out of the window at the other kids from SNIP playing in the grounds. Family kids aren’t congenital like us, because congenitals get taken away by the State when they’re babies and their parents sign rejection forms. We’re the Otkazniks – Rejects. Most of the family kids in here were born normal and have had an accident, like they’ve been run over by trains or cars. Tasha got blown up by a German hand grenade in a disused church. Petya climbed a telegraph pole and got electrocuted. They were here about two years ago. Or maybe three. Or even four. The years all get muddled now. I liked Tasha lots. She said she’d write but she didn’t. They never do … I don’t like it when people call us Otkazniks because no one knows for sure we were actually rejected.
‘I want to go out.’ Masha’s sticking her nose and her forehead and her flat hands up against the window, like they’re glued there. I can see her breath puffing shapes on the window, and I puff some too, then I quickly draw a smiley face in it, winking at me, before it disappears.
I want to go out too, but we’re still a Secret so we can’t.
‘Let’s play Kamoo-Kak – Who’s-What?’ I say. We play that all the time. It’s when you have to think of a person and the questions are all different sorts:
What sort of flower are they like? What sort of colour are they like? What sort of transport are they like? What sort of fruit are they like? What sort of animal are they like?
I go first, and mine is daisy, yellow, bicycle, strawberry and bird, which Masha guesses as Galina Petrovna first off. I think I’ve done her before.
We go back to pushing our noses against the window again. I can hear all the laughs and shouts from the corridor as the mummies come in and I stick my fingers in my ears. I hate Sundays. I look out of the window at the block opposite, and imagine that I’m the girl who lives there. I’ve called her Anya, and she’s got curly blonde hair and wears a white pinafore to school. She walks past the five shops called Bread, Vegetables, Meat, Wine and Clothes, with her school bag swinging on her shoulder, every morning, and then jumps on a tram to go to school. But not on Sunday. Aunty Nadya says there are playgrounds in all the back yards with slides and swings, so I imagine I’m Anya now, being given buckwheat porridge by her mummy this Sunday morning and then going out and whizzing down the slide over and over again with Pasha until neither of us can breathe so we sit in the sandpit and eat loads of chocolate instead.
‘Hey, Mashdash! Get a life!’
We jump and come unstuck from the window. It’s Lucia. She’s found us! She’s got freckles and green eyes like Pippi Longstocking. She goes over to our bed, drops her crutches and starts bouncing on it.
‘The Administrator here’s a right bitch. Confiscates everything but your heart. I had a grass-snake skin, all curled up small, and she found it and tore it in half right before my eyes.’
‘She’d tear your heart out too and stamp it with Property of SNIP like everything else in here if she could,’ says Masha, going back over to the bed. ‘She’d have a thousand hearts in a five-litre jar in the freezer in the kitchens. And eat one a night.’
We laugh at that. But I think I might, maybe, hold on to my chest at night now, in case she comes in with a knife. Masha says the strangest things, it gives me nightmares sometimes. And our Administrator really is the meanest person in the world. She hates us more than she hates anyone else. Sometimes I think it’s her who took Marusya, not the night nurse. Masha thinks so too. She says she’ll get revenge for me.
‘I reckon she’s an American agent,’ says Masha. ‘I’m watching her so I can denounce her.’
‘Yes! And if she is one and we denounce her, we might get a medal!’ I say excitedly, and they both look at me like I’ve said something stupid, then look away.
Lucia lies back and does a bicycle with her leg in the air and then tips herself over so it’s resting up on the wall, and she’s all upside down.
‘What’re you in here for?’ asks Masha.
‘New leg. I was in an orphanage. I wasn’t a congenital, I was healthy as anything, my stupid mum just didn’t like me. But I ran away from there and got my leg all chewed off by a mad dog. So after that I got sent to an orphanage for Defectives. That sucked even more. It’s much better here in SNIP. You get fed and the staff treat you like people.’
‘Did it chew your leg right off?’ I can’t stop myself from asking. ‘The mad dog?’
‘Stupid question,’ says Masha. ‘She’s still got half left.’
‘Well, it didn’t exactly chew it off. It got hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I got found five days later by the militia, all delirious with fever. They sent me back to the orphanage, but by then my leg had got all stinky and had to be cut off.’
Her voice is all squashed upside-downy as she reaches higher and higher with her leg and then falls off the bed sideways and we all laugh.
‘How come you’ve got to stay here for so long?’ she asks, picking herself up. ‘Most of the kids here have legs and arms missing, but you’ve still got all yours.’
‘We’re some sort of Big Secret, so we can’t ever leave here,’ says Masha.
Lucia sits up and hugs her leg up to her chin looking all interested. ‘A Secret? No shit. Why?’
‘Because, we’re Together.’
‘What’s so secret about that?’
‘Dunno.’ Masha shrugs. ‘Maybe we’re a secret experiment. Maybe the scientists joined us together. I haven’t seen anyone else Together, not ever. Have you seen anyone else Together?’
‘Nope. But then you haven’t seen anyone with a leg bitten off by a dog either, have you? Doesn’t make me a Secret. Don’t they tell you why?’
‘No. They don’t tell us anything.’
‘S’pose they know best. Better not to know,’ she says, and balls one fist into her eye, rubbing it. ‘Does your head in, knowing does. Anyway, you’re lucky. It’s healthy here. You get two hundred grammes of bread a day – and butter and meat. We get shit-all, and they pump us full of injected crap to keep us quiet.’
‘Do they tie you to the bed too?’ I ask, thinking of the Uneducables.
‘Yeah, sometimes. Or tie you up in a sheet so you can’t move. It sucks. Wish I was a Secret like you two and could live here.’
She unthreads a shoelace from my boot, which is tucked under the bed, puts the middle bit between her teeth and gives me both ends behind her head. ‘I’m a pony. Click click.’ I laugh and pull the reins. She throws her head up and down and whinnies and we all laugh some more as she rears up and paws in the air. Then after a bit she looks round the empty room. ‘Don’t you have any toys or books or stuff? If you really live here, don’t you get your own stuff?’
‘Nyetooshki,’ says Masha. ‘It’d get nicked. If it’s not screwed down or stamped with an SNIP stamp, it gets nicked.’
‘Same with us in the orphanage. My mum brings me stupid books, when she should bring lard or cooked potatoes. Books get nicked by the staff as soon as you look at them, to sell on.’
‘At least your mummy visits,’ I say.
Masha rolls her eyes. ‘Ignore my moron here. She’s obsessed with mums, right?’ I bite my bottom lip. I kept waiting for Mummy after she didn’t come that tomorrow time and so in the end, Aunty Nadya told us that she wasn’t our real mummy at all. She said she was only one of the staff. She says our real mummy is in Moscow, because we were born here and that she probably couldn’t cope with the two of us as she was too busy working. So now I write letters to my real mummy every week telling her what we’re doing and how we’re getting along. Because everyone wants a mummy, don’t they? Whoever she is … Aunty Nadya says she doesn’t know if Mummy actually properly rejected us, so she takes them and posts them for me. I always put a return address in big capital letters at the top, but she hasn’t written back yet. I’ve been writing for years and years. Masha says Aunty Nadya just pretends to post them, because she can’t tell us anything at all about our mummy, however much I ask. Lydia Mikhailovna says to Banish her from my Mind. One of the nannies says she went mad, and another one says she died having us. But I believe Aunty Nadya when she says that Mummy is just really busy.
‘Yeah,’ says Lucia, rolling on to her stomach, ‘my mum didn’t sign the rejection form when she gave me away.’ She gives a big yawn and stretches like a starfish. ‘Silly bitch. I could’ve been adopted if she’d like proper rejected me. If she’d signed the forms and stuff. Then I wouldn’t have had to run away and get my leg bitten off almost. She comes in every month and brings me shit-all, when all I want is black bread because I’m always fucking starving. Just my luck to be born to someone like her. She’s retarded.’
‘Why did she give you up if you were Healthy?’ I ask.
