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The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

Page 33

by Juliet Butler


  I didn’t know I was having twins. I was in labour for three nights and two days. I just couldn’t seem to give birth. Finally, I managed it. I remember the doctor looking down at my baby and shaking his head in disbelief: he said he’d never seen anything like it. I was frightened and started crying. Then he held the baby up to show me, but I couldn’t see because my eyes were filled with tears.

  They carried the baby out then – I thought I could hear two cries – and after a while, a woman in a white coat came in to see me. I didn’t know if she was a nurse or a doctor but she told me that I’d had urodi. She didn’t tell me why or what they looked like or even if they were still alive. She just said she was very sorry and walked away.

  ‘Very sorry,’ sniffs Masha. ‘I’m pretty sorry we’re mutants too, as it happens.’

  I suppose that was their way of explaining to me that they were taking them away from me.

  ‘Taking them away from her? More like – “Take them away from me!”’

  ‘Will you just listen, Masha. Give her a chance. She’s telling the truth.’ Joolka frowns and Masha looks up at the ceiling sulkily.

  I know she’s telling the truth. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve known enough liars in my time, Masha among them, to recognize honesty when I hear it. But what happened? Did she just let us go and never ask about us?

  I was told they were still alive but weren’t expected to live beyond a few weeks and to forget about them. But I couldn’t, how can you just forget your children when you’ve longed for them so much? From then on I lay with a pillow over my head so no one could hear me weeping. I can’t remember sleeping at all. Misha was called in to look at them straight after the birth. He told the doctors they couldn’t be his and he didn’t want his name on the birth certificate. He refused to see me as well. It was a terrible disgrace for him.

  ‘Turn it off. Turn it off! Masha thumps the bed. ‘I won’t listen to this crap, I won’t. She’s making it all up.’

  ‘Masha,’ says Joolka, pressing the pause button, ‘I know you’ve created your own version of what happened as you’ve been growing up, and that’s understandable. It’s easier to think you were abandoned, and you’ve thought that so long, it’s ingrained. But just listen, Masha, just listen to what she says. You can choose to believe it or not when you’ve heard her speak. It won’t kill you to listen.’

  Masha takes a deep breath, sucks in her lips and goes back to the magazine. Joolka presses the play button and Mother’s sighing voice rolls on.

  So all I had now was my babies, my twins. There was a night cleaner there … one night, in the early hours of the morning when there were no doctors around, and everyone else was asleep, she walked in holding this swaddled bundle with one dark head each end. They were asleep … She put them into my arms and I rocked them and sang to them and kissed the top of their little heads … my own daughters … my dochinki … they were so perfect.’

  ‘So perfect she threw us down the rubbish chute. Or good as.’

  ‘Teekha, Masha,’ says Joolka.

  I never saw them again. It must have been a week or so later when I was better that they asked me to sign the forms rejecting them. I asked what that meant, and they said they’d be looked after by the State. I asked if I could visit them if I signed and they said I couldn’t, so I told them I wouldn’t sign it then and walked out. I thought it would be better if they were looked after by the doctors than coming back to my dormitory with water on the dirt floor and not a stick of firewood for the stove. But I couldn’t reject them – what mother can do that? I went home and I was lying in bed, still weak from the loss of blood, and it was maybe a week after I’d left the hospital when there was a knock at the door and a woman wearing a white doctor’s coat walked in, sat on the edge of the bed and told me she was a physiologist and that she was very sorry but she’d come to break the news that my babies had caught pneumonia and died.

  Died? We both stare at Joolka, who’s paused the tape and is looking up at us.

  ‘Foo!’ spits Masha after a bit. ‘That’s her story, see? Just felt guilty about abandoning us.’

  I went back to the doctors when I was well enough and asked to see the grave, I wanted to put flowers on it, but they told me their bodies had been preserved for science. I even went to the Kunstkamera Museum of Horrors in St Petersburg to see if they had been preserved in a jar there.

  ‘That’s nice, isn’t it? Wanted to see her twinlets pickled in a jar.’ Masha’s still leafing through the magazine, but she’s listening as intently as I am. ‘That’s just the kind of mummy we all need …’

  And then, all those years later, when I found they were still alive – I felt so sorry to have not looked more for them, so sorry that I formed them like that in my womb, and then all I could do when I did meet them was cry. I couldn’t understand why the doctors had lied to me. Why did they lie?

  There’s a pause, and then we hear Joolka’s voice saying ‘I really have no idea.’

  Well, and then when that cleaner called me up from the Twentieth, and I met them, I thought they would have been told about me. About how I was lied to. About how much I loved them. Now I think they weren’t.

  ‘No.’ It’s Joolka’s voice again. ‘I’m afraid they weren’t told anything about you by anyone.’

  I can’t understand it, I can’t understand why the scientists deprived two children of a mother and let them live and grow up without me. I would have done anything for them when they were growing up, anything. And then, when they found me again, it was the same, I would have done anything to make up for lost time, to make up for having formed them like that, but it wasn’t to be. It was too late. They found me and then they rejected me … I lost them twice. Perhaps I deserved it.’

  The tape recorder clicks off and Masha sniffs, then picks up the remote and turns the TV back on.

  ‘You’re not putting any of that in my book,’ she says.

  We go on a family picnic

  ‘I’ve got a round swimming pool in my kindergarten,’ says Sasha, picking her nose while she sits next to me on the grass. ‘It’s got penguins painted on the sides. It’s down in the cellar and you have to climb up a ladder to get in. I’m the best swimmer in my class. I can even swim underwater.’

  ‘Sasha,’ says Joolka, ‘you’re supposed to be helping Daddy find sticks for the camp fire.’

  Kolya, Joolka’s husband, is here with us. He drove us all here in their red Niva. It was a bit of a squash, but Anya sat on our lap and we just hoped we wouldn’t get stopped by a GAI traffic policeman. Even though Kolya’s a professional photographer, he doesn’t takes photos of us and we both like him for that. We’re just friends out on a picnic. Kolya’s got a fire going and is cooking skewers of fatty pork. It smells delicious.

  ‘I am, see? I’m finding them.’ Sasha leans back and rakes her fingers through the pine needles, looking sneakily at Joolka as she does. ‘I’m just quickly telling Aunty Dasha about our swimming pool.’ Joolka shakes her head and jiggles fat baby Bobik in her arms. We’re all having a barbeque in the countryside outside Moscow. It reminds me of the camp on the River Don, except there are no fences keeping us in, so we can stop and light a fire wherever we like. We’re sitting by a little river on a grass verge with a village just round the bend. It’s getting on towards the evening but it’s still warm and swarms of gnats are buzzing round our heads.

  It’s been a week since she told us about our mother. Masha won’t talk about the interview, but I think it’s a shame that she wanted us and we wanted her and we were kept from each other. It’s upsetting. But I’m glad I know, because it means that I was loved and not rejected. I asked Masha if we could go and see Mother again, now that we know what happened, but of course she said no. One thing I can’t understand is why Mother was told by the scientists we’d died. Why? She could have come in and held us. Joolka’s sitting on a log now holding little Anya on her knee and Bobik suckling on her breast. All we wanted was to be picked up by some
one other than the porter. Mummy – Anna Petrovna – didn’t cradle us like that; she kissed us over the bars of our cot. And sang to us. Our own mother, though, our real mummy, could have picked us right up and held us to her.

  Sasha pokes me. ‘Aunty Dasha, I’ve got a swing at the dacha, it’s so high I can’t see the top of it because our dyedushka climbed right up to the highest branch of a pine tree to make it, and it swings so far it’s like flying.’

  ‘That sounds fun, Sashinka. You’re so lucky,’ I say. I don’t stutter with the children. It’s odd.

  Masha’s tapping her leg to the sound of Modern Talking playing on the car radio and has a twig with a marshmallow on it, which she’s poking in the fire. She’s not interested in the children any more because the novelty’s worn off. It’s like with Marusya, my doll. She played with her for a bit and then got bored and gave her to me. It’s her fifth marshmallow but the twigs keep burning and the marshmallows drop into the flames and burn. She’s irritated because she wants vodka. What’s the point of a picnic without vodka? I can hear her saying it in her head. To be honest, I want vodka too. I feel all jittery without it.

  Anya and Sasha are a bit afraid of Masha, they can see her chortik.

  ‘We’ve got hens, too, loads of them.’ Sasha’s still chattering away to me. Even the dogs on the street snarl and bark at us because we’re Together, but Joolka’s children just see us as Aunty Masha and Aunty Dasha. Three-year-old Anya looks at you like she’s looking into you. She’s white-skinned and has blue eyes like my Lyuba, and Sasha’s dark and dusky like my Marat. No one would believe they were sisters. As different as God’s gift and an omelette, they are. And even though me and Masha are supposedly identical, we’re just as different as them.

  Vodka. I want vodka but Joolka won’t let us drink with the children around. She’s right.

  Sasha pokes me again to get my attention. ‘The hens go running after Bobik when he’s having an outside air bath. Babushka says that’s because they think his pipiska’s a worm. When Babushka wants to make us soup, she takes them on to the back step and chops off their heads with an axe. The blood goes everywhere, all into her face and hair too. She goes to the back step so I can’t see her, but I’ve seen her do it. I hide, and see her. And she leaves their heads and claws in the soup to make it taste nice, so you have to not spoon them out. We’ve got pigs too, they’re called Obyed and Oozhin, Lunch and Supper. I wish you could come to our dacha.’ She stops talking then and blows her breath out, making both cheeks puff. She reminds me of Masha when she was young. ‘But my babushka says over her dead body. I don’t know why she says that, she’s not even met you. She likes dead bodies. I asked her what she’d wish if she had one wish and she said she’d like to find the dead body of a gangster out on the path outside the dacha, one who’d been gunned down, with wads and wads of dollars in his pockets so she could steal them. My one wish is to find dinosaur bones. What’s your one wish, Aunty Dasha?’

  I smile at her and raise my eyebrows.

  My one wish is to have a child like her.

  Instead I say, ‘I’d like to be invisible.’

  ‘Me toooo!’ she says excitedly.

  ‘Time for shashlik then,’ says Kolya loudly, waving a skewer of pork meat around. ‘Any helpers, Sashkip?’

  She pulls a face but goes over to her father. I asked Joolka once, if Sasha and Anya had been born Together, would she have kept them? ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Just as your mother would, if she’d been able.’

  Masha’s marshmallow falls into the fire again and she swears and throws the stick in angrily. Vodka makes the world soft and sweet.

  Joolka’s finished feeding Bobik and she lies him face down along her leg and pats his back, then bends down and kisses the top of his head.

  ‘They’re like gypsies, these foreigners,’ Masha says under her breath. ‘I know they’ve got vodka in the car.’ She glances across at it. ‘That baby looks like a poached egg, don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

  ‘Would you like to hold him?’ Joolka stands up and passes Bobik to me, just like that.

  ‘So,’ she says, sitting down in front of us, cross-legged. Anya leans on Joolka’s back and wraps her arms around her neck. ‘Now we’re all settled, here’s the latest. I talked to your Doctor Golubeva on the phone, just briefly – I’ll interview her properly later – and she said that you were kept in the Paediatric Institute to be studied by scientists. She worked in the Brain Institute with Anokhin and he brought her over sometimes to do that helmet thing on you. She said there were two women doctors who were in charge of you, and one wrote a dissertation about you.’

  Bobik starts wriggling in my clumsy arms and then he begins squalling and goes bright red in the face. He wants his mummy. She smiles apologetically, takes him back and tucks him in the makeshift sling she’s wearing. Anya’s still hanging around her shoulders. He calms down straight away and goes to sleep like a light turning off. It’s instinctive to want your own mother. Mothers are like magnets.

  ‘It was Red Level, back then,’ she goes on, ‘so no one could access it, but now, what with all this democracy and the papers full of scandalous stories about what really happened under Stalin, it’s a huge can of worms that’s been opened. It’s momentous. I mean, all the archives are wide open now, so I shouldn’t have any problem getting it. She said it was published in 1959 and was written by Doctor Alexeyeva. It’ll be interesting, won’t it? To see what it says. But you can’t remember anything? No? Just your “Mummy” and some of the other nannies?’

  We both shake our heads. Ground rice and butter is what we remember, and Jellyfish, our toy. We had him for one day. Mummy gave him to us. Sasha has swimming pools and swings … I don’t care that we didn’t have that though. We had Mummy, at least we had her. I do care that we could have had our own birth mother too – if they hadn’t told her we’d died.

  We find out why the scientists took us from our parents

  ‘I got it, I finally got it,’ said Joolka, bursting into our room two days later. She puts her rucksack down with a bang and fishes some crumpled papers out of it. ‘Here it is. I went to the library of the Academy of Medical Sciences and asked to see it. I had the title and the reference number, but they said it wasn’t accessible. But you know how it is, I got one of the librarians on her own and said that I’d be “very grateful” and she said, “Well, it might be possible to just let you look at it, but not make a copy.” So I quietly slipped her a hundred-dollar bill and all of a sudden it was possible. She brought it out and I was on my own at the table, taking notes. I tell you, I just couldn’t believe what was in there. Literally, couldn’t believe it. Every page I turned over was more horrific than the one before. No wonder they told your mother you’d died. No mother would have allowed anything like that to happen to her babies. Not in a million years …’

  Neither of us says anything. I look at the papers in her hands. Do I want to know? Wouldn’t I sleep sounder if I didn’t?

  ‘You were a dream come true for Anokhin. It says it all here in the first paragraph, they just saw you as two guinea pigs, or, or … I don’t know, microbes in a petri dish. Unseparated twins are objects of great scientific interest. A most remarkable human experiment created by nature.’

  ‘Human experiment?’ Masha’s interested now. She definitely wants to hear what they did to us. She wants to hate them, I can already feel her balling up inside, spoiling for a fight. ‘Go on then, Maht,’ she says. ‘What did the svolochi do?’

  ‘So,’ says Joolka, sitting on the rug, ‘it starts off saying: for six years, P. K. Anokhin and his colleagues carried out experiments on a pair of unseparated twins, Masha–Dasha (ischiopagus tripus, born 1950) in the Institute of Experimental Medicine to establish the separate roles of the nervous system and the blood system on the body’s ability to adjust to conditions such as prolonged sleep deprivation, extreme hunger and extreme temperature change.’

  She looks up and bites her bottom lip.
That doesn’t sound good to me … not good at all.

  She looks back down. ‘It says that a few days after birth you were kept in laboratory conditions, so you must have been taken straight off to Anokhin’s Institute of Experimental Medicine – probably soon after you were brought in to your mother by that cleaner. And this is interesting: It was noted that, despite living in an identical environment, developmental characteristics such as speech, movement and nervous processes were markedly different from birth.’

  ‘What’s so interesting about that?’ snaps Masha. ‘We’re as different as your Sashinka and Anik. We’re different people. We just got fused together somehow.’

  ‘Well … no, Masha, what actually happened is that one zygote – one embryo – was dividing into identical twins but started splitting too late, so didn’t complete the division. That’s what conjoined twins are, but that means the two of you have identical inherited genes. So if you—’

  ‘That’s crap, we’re as identical as a wolf and a goat!’ says Masha shortly. ‘So come on, Maht, come on, what did they do to us?’

  ‘Well, it’s all written down in this very formal medical-speak, which makes it even more chilling, but it starts off saying: To study the speed with which the blood travelled from one twin to the other we introduced various substances into the blood of one child, such as radioactive iodine, barium, glucose and sodium methane sulphonate. For example, 2500 units of radioactive iodine were introduced into Masha in her bottle of milk, after which, the levels of radioactivity in the thyroid of both twins were measured with a Geiger counter. The kidneys were observed when sodium methane sulphonate was introduced into the ulnar vein of one child. In thirty minutes a distinct change in the contours of the kidneys of both children were observed on X-rays …’

 

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