The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep. Juliet Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

      ‘Yeah, yeah – and the vibrations go all up your body to your head,’ says another kid, all excited to be making Masha cross, ‘and you can see them mopping up all the blood with towels, there’s loads and loads of blood, everything’s red. The whole room goes red, they just can’t get enough towels in there to mop it all up.’

      I put my hands over my ears to stop listening, but I can still hear them all.

      ‘There’s a shortage of anaesthetic, you might not even get any …’

      ‘… Uncle Styopa in our village got caught up in a crop mower and they just gave him a bottle of vodka. He passed out during the operation, but they didn’t know if it was the vodka or the pain!’ They’re laughing.

      ‘You can smell the blood above even the antiseptic,’ says one little kid.

      ‘Fuck off!’ shouts Masha, getting up. ‘Fuck off, the lot of you!’

      We get up to go.

      ‘Aunty Nadya said we’d have anaesthetic,’ I say as we go back inside.

      ‘Yeah, but she didn’t say it was only local. I’m not doing it if it’s only local. Fuck. I like my leg. It’s mine. Well … half of it is.’

      ‘I like it too. It balances us when we climb. How are we going to climb without it? Aunty Nadya says it’s like our tail.’

      Masha shrugs.

      ‘But they gave us general anaesthetic to have our appendix out, Mash, Remember?’

      ‘Yeah … in the end. But they weren’t going to give us anything to start off with – just tie us down.’

      I shiver. That was awful. I had a terrible pain in my stomach, which kept making Masha throw up. But she didn’t want to go to a hospital to be looked at because, whenever we do that, we end up with loads of doctors crawling all over us, poking every bit of us. Like maggots in meat, as Masha says. But we had such a high temperature that our SNIP night-duty doctor diagnosed appendicitis and Lydia Mikhailovna was called back in from her flat to take us to the Botkin Hospital. The pain was so bad it was making everything dizzy and black, but the doctors wouldn’t operate as they didn’t know how much novocaine to give us and thought they’d kill us by mistake. They wanted a signed form from Professor Popov, or Anokhin, that if we died, it wouldn’t be their fault. But Anokhin was in Amerika and Popov was at his country dacha so in the end they said the best thing to do was operate without any novocaine and just tie us down. We screamed and screamed then, at the very thought, like we were being tortured. Well, actually, it would have been torture – and Lydia Mikhailovna СКАЧАТЬ