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.
‘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.