‘But they’re all men in top hats. With cigars.’
‘She’s still a capitalist, clearly, and we’ll get her. Then we’ll be Heroes of the Soviet Union. You just wait.’
Masha always thinks everything is going to work out for the best if you just try hard enough.
Aunty Nadya told us that when Anokhin went to Amerika he met two boy twins our age, who are just like us except they’re being exploited by their imperialist parents and put on show for money in cheap circuses and given no education. Not even any education at all. I don’t know why they weren’t killed, like all the other Defectives in Amerika. I suppose it’s because they were money makers. They can’t even read or write, he says, they just have to stand on stages for people who pay a green dollar. Aunty Nadya said Anokhin thought they should be rescued and brought to the Soviet Union and that we ought to marry them and see what sort of children we had together. Masha says she’s not marrying freaks, thank you very much. Just because Anokhin wants more baby freaks to put under his microscope.
‘When’s our next mission then?’ I ask, looking out of the window. ‘In denouncing her?’
‘Tomorrow, 1400 hours. Lydia Mikhailovna’s office. She’s meeting with the Administrator. She might give something away, we’ve got to be alert.’
It’s summer, so SNIP is almost empty for three months. A lot of the staff are at their dachas, including Lydia Mikhailovna’s secretary, so we sneak in at 13:30 and hide behind her solid desk in the anteroom. We can hear everything from there, even if they close the door to Lydia Mikhailovna’s office.
‘Got the notepad?’
She knows I have.
‘Yes. Got the notepad.’
We’re just starting to get cramp when Lydia Mikhailovna walks in, but she’s with Aunty Nadya, not the Administrator.
‘I confess I have no idea what all this is about, Nadya,’ she’s saying as they tap past us. I can see their shoes. ‘It’s all rather unconventional, to say the least. And with Boris Markovich away it seems very odd that he should be addressing us, behind his back as it were.’
‘Comrades! Comrades!’ I shrink right back into the wall like a snail going into its shell. It’s him! Doctor Anokhin. Masha looks at me all pop-eyed and puts her fist in her mouth. They’ll kill us if they find us here. But if they shut the door to the office we can sneak out. Please, please shut the door …
‘No, no, Pyotr Kuzmich, don’t shut the door, there’s no air in Moscow in summer,’ says Lydia Mikhailovna.
Fuck! mouths Masha.
‘So, thank you so much, Lydia Mikhailovna, for taking the time to see me,’ he says, ‘and yes, you too, Nadya.’ We can hear scraping chairs but can’t see anything.
‘Not at all, Pyotr Kuzmich. An honour as always.’ That’s Mikhailovna.
‘So really I just wanted to discuss our girls, our two little berries – very fond of them I am too, as you know. If you’re an aunty to them, Nadya, then I feel like their uncle. Yes, indeed, an uncle and aunty. Family.’
Masha looks at me and sticks her finger down her throat. She hates him. I don’t like him much either. I get cold every time he comes near us with his chocolatey smell.
‘As you know, the girls are a complete mystery to scientists around the world in that they have identical genes and identical upbringings, but frankly speaking have two totally disparate characters.’ He coughs but no one says anything. I’m hardly breathing at all. My foot itches but I can’t move a centimetre. They’ll hear. I don’t know what disparate means. Desperate? ‘And this is not an, um, conscious decision of theirs as I have observed them from birth and this dissimilarity in character, believe me, was clear from within hours of birth. Hours.’
I frown. He was there at our birth? He’s not actually our uncle, is he? Or did he really create us? I don’t understand a thing. I wish I was back in bed.
‘So yes, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this new research, fascinating really, into the left and right hemispheres of the brain? It centres on how the dominant hemisphere might actually contribute to differing behavioural patterns. This, ah, theory, is beginning to gain ground in the West and is not, in the strictest Marxist-Leninist sense, acceptable in the Soviet Union since, as we all know, one’s character is formed purely by environment and not by genes. Nurture not nature.’
‘Of course!’ It’s Lydia Mikhailovna.
‘However, it cannot be denied that here we have two identical sisters, who are biological mirror images of each other, duplicates in every possible way. Except for character. What we believe is, since the egg that produced these twins divided so late, it seems possible that the left and right hemispheres of the one brain split off into two heads contained in the same body. You might be aware of Wolcott-Sperry’s experimental split-brain surgery – the severing of the corpus callosum?’
Masha’s frowning and I know she’s as lost as I am. What on earth’s he on about? What egg? We’re not chickens. What corpus? And what split head?
‘Science fiction, you might say,’ he says, ‘but this definitive lateralization of the brain function proves that a right-handed person – like Dasha – uses the left-hand side of the brain, which tends to be analytical and logical, making her more serious and thoughtful. Being left-handed, Masha uses the right-hand side of her brain, making her impulsive and emotional. A person who lives for the moment. Left-handers are also historically more prone to violence, and we all know about the beatings she gives Dasha. Now then. We know that the right side of Masha’s brain is larger than her left and vice versa in Dasha. We know that Masha’s heart has abnormal cardiac rotation to the right, while Dasha’s has correct alignment on the left, presenting us with reversal in heart situs. Yes? Yes? When first taught to write, Masha wrote in a back-to-front mirror-image script with her left hand, until forced to use her right. So it almost seems that the two hemispheres of the one brain have actually divided out within a single body – each hemisphere controlling half that body!’
There’s a longish pause.
‘Are you suggesting that Masha and Dasha are in fact one person? One brain somehow split into two?’ says Lydia Mikhailovna.
‘Yes, yes! Exactly. Now, just picture the conflict!’
‘I don’t need to picture it, Pyotr Kuzmich,’ she goes on. I can hear a chair scraping and my heart nearly stops. Is she getting up and coming out? I squeeze into the wall. ‘I have it staring me in the face every day. I don’t know about all these hemisphere theories, all I know is that it’s hideous to even think about what it must be like for Dasha to live with Masha. Truly hideous. Masha, who is domineering, selfish, childish, abusive and frankly of far inferior intelligence.’
I bite my lip. I can feel Masha tensing all through me. She still has her fist in her mouth.
‘Just imagine,’ Lydia Mikhailovna goes on, and I’m thinking: Please stop! Stop! It’s not true, you don’t know us, Masha’s strong and brave. I need her! ‘Just imagine … what it would be like to be joined forever, for every minute and second of your life, to someone who cannot and will not empathize with you, or indeed anyone else. Someone who genuinely sees you as a spineless, weak attachment whose only use is to do your bidding night and day. You and I, Pyotr Kuzmich, choose the ones we wish to spend our lives with, and if we are irritated by them, we go into another room to get away. How that poor child stays sane is something I will never fathom. Every moment of her life she must repress her own feelings, suppress her every desire, subjugate herself constantly to an egotistical, self-seeking psychopath!’
I bite my lip so hard I can taste blood. Masha’s burning up. If she jumps up and starts yelling, we’re done.
‘Well now, yes, Lydia Mikhailovna, I can see, from a human point of view, a psychological point of view, Dasha is the one who suffers most. As the logical one she understands their relationship is symbiotic. Certainly, Masha is headstrong and impetuous, so Dasha must be compliant and submissive. But what interests me, as you may have seen from the dissertation, what interests me most, is
pain sensitivity.’
‘Pain sensitivity?’
‘Yes, yes, pain sensitivity. It appears that when an organism suffers constant levels of pain and trauma throughout its early years, then the pain threshold is considerably raised in later years and that organism becomes almost inured to pain. In addition, yes, in addition, the memory of that trauma can in fact be completely wiped out – as we have seen with the twins. Quite remarkable that their recollections of their time in the Paediatric Institute are so very selective – indeed, they seem to have no recall at all of the daily um … procedures.’
‘I’m afraid we have no knowledge of your experiments either. Having not been informed of them – which I must say, I view as an omission,’ says Lydia Mikhailovna coldly. Masha’s still furious. She’s taken her fist out of her mouth and now both of them are balled up stiffly at her sides like hand grenades about to go off. ‘And we have not had access to the dissertation, as I believe it is kept at Red Level in the Academy of Medical Sciences. I did make enquiries.’
‘Ah, of course, of course, our red, secret classification … well, well, never mind. Suffice to say that they both have a remarkably high pain threshold. The appendicitis incident, where Dasha scarcely complained despite the appendix having burst … And the helmets, yes, in fact one of my students tried out the neuro-helmets and almost flew through the roof, yet the girls are very tolerant of them. Very tolerant indeed.’
‘I believe it’s more the anticipation of pain, Pyotr Kuzmich, which causes Dasha’s suffering.’ It’s Aunty Nadya. ‘Rather than the suffering itself.’
‘Well yes, Nadya, yes, she’s a sensitive soul in that way, our Dashinka. However, let’s get down to business. The reason I’m here is because my team would like to conduct a few more, aaah, procedures to test their pain sensitivity now they are young adults.’
I gulp and look at Masha. She’s biting her thumb. What procedures? What does he mean?
‘It would only take a few weeks, perhaps just a week, a matter of a scratch with a scalpel here and there, electric shocks, burning and freezing – you know, very similar to what we did to them back in the Paediatric Institute – and then we could monitor their … aah … levels of discomfort as teens. Hmm? As compared to early childhood?’
Lydia Mikhailovna puts on her quiet, icy voice.
‘Am I to understand that these electric shocks and freezing and … and burning, were the norm for them in the Paediatric Institute?’
There’s a slight pause.
‘Well, not norm, of course,’ he says eventually. ‘But that was certainly part of the research that we would like to follow on with now. For comparison, you understand.’
Masha and me look at each other.
‘We would have to consult with Professor Popov,’ says Lydia Mikhailovna.
‘Aaakh, Popov! The man is not a true scientist, Lydia Mikhailovna! Forgive me, but we Soviets have just stepped in to prevent a Third World War. Great times demand great feats. We cannot afford to give way to bourgeois sentimentality and fallibility. No, we must not be accused of—’
‘But, Pyotr Kuzmich!’ Aunty Nadya speaks up, sounding a bit scared, but also upset. ‘Could you not conduct these experiments on your dogs?’
‘Dogs, Nadya, are rarely born conjoined, and cannot rate pain on a scale of 1 to 5. We require a pain-threshold experiment with human conjoined twins. These are the only living pair in the Soviet Union.’
I frown. Conjoined? What’s conjoined mean? I’ve never heard that word before.
‘But these are children, Pyotr Kuzmich … little girls,’ goes on Aunty Nadya.
‘Not exactly children, are they, Nadya? Not real children? And I fear your love for them is clouding your reason and the aims of Soviet science—’
‘You’re wrong. I don’t love them,’ she says, clear as anything. ‘They’re not my own children, are they? Not my own flesh and blood. I pity them. I just feel pity for them. As I do to all my patients. Even scientists should feel pity, Pyotr Kuzmich.’
We stay sitting there for a bit after they’ve all gone and after we’ve heard their feet tapping off down the corridor. We just sit there, not talking.
‘See,’ says Masha, after a bit. ‘Told you she didn’t love us. You and your stupid mummies and aunties.’
‘Yes, Masha.’
‘If she doesn’t need us, we don’t need her.’
‘No, Masha.’
‘Psychopath, am I?’
‘No, no, Masha. That’s just Lydia Mikhailovna being crazy. She doesn’t understand.’
‘Inferior intelligence, am I?’
‘No, Masha, no, no, you’re the boss. They don’t understand. I need you. Being tough is better than knowing your times-tables, right?’
She gets up then, and puts her arm round my neck for balance. I put mine round hers for balance too. And we walk right out and back to the ward.
Olessya writes again and Aunty Nadya adopts someone who isn’t us
It’s so healthy here. They’re taking us on holiday by a river to stay in a camp in the woods for three months. We fish and cook our own food on fires and play all the time. You should come for the next school year. Can you?
We’re sitting on our bed playing cat’s cradle with our shoelaces, looking at Olessya’s postcard for the millionth time. All the kids are hiding under their beds again because Masha told them we had magic powers to split their heads in half, like us, and make them all become our together-twin slaves, with right and left parts of their brains. She has a stick, which she says is a wand, and if she strikes them with it, they’ll divide into two, with a lightning bolt – like we were. So it’s quiet as anything. It’s so odd, to think we we’re actually one person divided into two parts of our brain, but I’ll try not to think of that. I’ll think of the postcard instead.
We’re still sitting looking at it when Aunty Nadya comes in.
‘I have something to tell you, girls,’ she says, looking around at the empty ward with all the little feet sticking out from under the beds. She shakes her head wearily and sits down. ‘It’s about Vasya – you know, Uncle Vasya’s little nephew. I’ve brought him in a few times, to play.’
‘Prick,’ says Masha, but makes it sound like she’s hiccupping and Aunty Nadya doesn’t even notice.
‘Well, his parents are alcoholics and they’ve just been deprived of their parental rights by the militia, which is the same, of course, as Rejection. So he could be sent to an orphanage.’
Masha sits up, interested.
‘But we can’t let that happen, of course, so we’ve decided …’ she gets up then and goes over to the window and looks out, then looks back at us, all red in the face ‘… we’ve decided to adopt him. Our little Vasinka.’
When she says that, I go all hot and then all cold and then hot again, I can feel it. I’ve hoped every day for eight years that she’d take us home, like she took Uncle Vasya home. I’d hoped she’d adopt us. All we State kids want, every minute of every day, is to be adopted into a family. But she’s not adopting us. She’s adopting a Healthy boy. And he’s not even her own flesh and blood, either. He’s Uncle Vasya’s flesh and blood. She’s adopting someone else. I feel that stupid hard ball of sadness, which is what makes me cry, pushing up from my chest to my throat. I won’t cry.
‘Prick,’ says Masha again, louder. And this time Aunty Nadya hears, but doesn’t say anything.
‘I know that you always wanted me to adopt you, girls.’ She comes back to the bed, sits down again and goes to pat my hand, all apologetic and still flushed in the face, but I take it away and rub my nose. I take a deep breath to force the ball back down. ‘I couldn’t, you see. It’s difficult to explain, but with all the red tape and bureaucracy and you being so unusual, and Anokhin and his research, you know … You need to be hidden away, not live in a normal flat to go wherever you please …’
‘Blood is thicker than water,’ says Masha, looking up at the ceiling and sniffing.
‘Now that’s
not true. You know I never had children of my own …’
‘We know that, all right.’ Masha takes the shoelaces we were playing with and wraps them tight round her fingers like she’s strangling them.
‘It’s just … Little Vasya would be helpless without us … he hasn’t got a patron like Doctor Anokhin. So I’ll bring him in to visit then, shall I? You’ll be like his sisters now.’
Masha pulls the laces even tighter, and knots them viciously.
‘Yes,’ she hisses. ‘Bring him in. You just bring him on in to his big sisters.’
So that’s that.
When she’s gone and I’ve finished crying, we go outside to sit on the tail end of a lorry in the back yard.
‘Right. Fuck it. We’re out of here,’ says Masha.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’ll go and ask Professor Popov to let us go to Olessya’s school in Novocherkassk.’
‘He’ll never let us.’
‘How do you know? You can’t eat honey ’til you’ve smoked out the bees.’
‘But we’ve already tried asking people, haven’t we? We’ve tried. Galina Petrovna just cried. And Aunty Nadya said over her dead body, and Lydia Mikhailovna told us never to speak of it again. We can’t go to Professor Popov … can we, Masha?’
‘Course we can. Haven’t smoked the last of the little buggers out yet, have we?’
‘Lydia Mikhailovna will kill us. So will Aunty Nadya.’
‘Fuck them. Let’s think about us. I’m not sitting around waiting for our yobinny pain-threshold week, even if you are. And how many more years of cabbage soup on Monday, fish soup on Tuesday and living life in pyjamas can we stick?’
‘Yes.’ I swing my leg, thinking about it, and she does too. So we sit there swinging our legs. ‘And if we don’t get a diploma,’ I say, after a bit, ‘I can’t be a doctor.’
The lorry driver walks up.
‘Want a lift to the meat factory, Mashdash?’
‘Nyetooshki! You’d bring us back as sausages, Ivan Ivanovich!’ laughs Masha.
‘Don’t worry, no one would eat them – too tough!’ He laughs too and climbs into the cab.
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 11