‘Bastards! Blyadi! Pumping radioactive shit into us, then measuring our organs with Geiger counters and X-rays – they might as well have slit our throats, but then they’d have been sawing off the branch they were sitting on, wouldn’t they? Spitting in their own well …’
‘It doesn’t sound, from what Golubeva was saying, that they thought you’d live long. They studied two conjoined twins very much like you fifteen years earlier, and they died as babies.’
‘Not fucking surprised.’
‘So I suppose they thought they could do whatever they wanted while they had time …’
It’s a hot afternoon and even though the balcony door is wide open and the net curtains are fluttering in the breeze, my T-shirt is sticking to my back. But I feel icy cold.
She reads on: ‘Their reaction to pain (usually introduced by a scalpel, a needle or an electric shock) …’
There’s a rushing noise in my head now and the words start running into each other … I feel dizzy. It’s coming back to me in short flashes – waiting for the electric shocks – the ticking noise – it was the waiting that was the worst, knowing they’d come and then crying out in pain when they did, and what was even worse – hearing Masha screaming … trying to stop them, holding out my hands and trying to stop them …
‘They put a metronome on before they administered the electric shock, and then found the metronome alone caused the same reaction as the shock itself. They prevented one of you from sleeping for long periods, continually shaking you awake … they starved one of you for nine hours at a time whilst feeding the other every few hours …’
‘Fuck! Yobinny Fascists! Nazis! And we rant on about Mengele, claiming our lot were all as pure as the driven snow …’
‘And you were hooked up during all the experiments to electrocardiograms to measure your heartbeats, pneumograms to measure your breathing, and electroencephalograms to measure brain activity. And your gastric juices were analysed constantly through tubes fed into your stomachs. You must have been a wired-up nightmare to look at, it’s just … hideous, too macabre to even imagine …’ she falters, shaking her head. ‘And seeing the photos you showed me of when you were six, in SNIP, so adorable … how could they do that? I’m so, so sorry …’ She shuffles the papers with the tips of her fingers as if they’re soiled, looking from one of us to the other with disbelief.
‘Go on,’ says Masha tightly. ‘Go on, what else?’
‘They … they packed one of you in ice until your temperature dropped to twenty-six degrees – one degree lower and you’d have died of hypothermia. One degree … It says that whenever Alexeyeva came into the room you’d start crying, so they had to carry out the experiments on pain when you were asleep or unawares.’
Beyond the rushing in my ears I can hear children playing by the lake. Laughing and splashing in the sunshine.
Joolka turns a page and keeps reading on and on. And on … both twins react identically to the heart/eye reflex where the heart is slowed down (and can be stopped altogether) by applying pressure to the eyeball … I close my eyes and I can see Doctor Alexeyeva walking in with the porter to take us to the laboratory. I can see her as if she’s standing there, right in front of me, I can hear Masha screaming at the electric shocks, I can hear her in that laboratory, screaming and screaming …
‘… they burnt one of you and then the other, to monitor your different reactions …’ but Masha’s not screaming now, no, she’s swearing angrily and thumping the bed. My poor Mashinka, I hated them hurting her, I won’t think about it, I won’t. I’ll just black it all out, black it out like I did when we were little. I need her to stop reading this now. I feel sick.
I need vodka.
We see a film documentary of us as children in the Ped
‘I’m not sure I want to see it, Masha. Why would you want to see their documentary? It’ll be like a horror film.’
We’re outside, pacing up and down the path at the end of the garden. We can’t sit still, Masha’s consumed with this white-hot anger and outrage. But as for me, I just think what’s done is done. We did survive, despite all the odds. We’re still here. We’re zhivoochi. Joolka said there were two doctors in charge of us – Alexeyeva and Kryuchkova – women. Both of them women. She said Kryuchkova was probably the one doing the monitoring behind the machines in the Laboratory, that’s why neither of us remember her. I wonder if they were mothers themselves? Did either of them ever feel any twinge of pity or even guilt?
‘Ei, girls, come and do some weeding! Make yourselves useful …’ Timur’s standing in the middle of one of the flowerbeds with a garden fork, waving at us. Masha gives him the finger and he laughs and goes back to his digging. He’s planted roses, red and white roses, just like the fairy tale about Rose Red and Snow White.
And what about the kind nannies – Mummy, Aunty Dusya and Aunty Shura, and the nurses? Did they all know what was being done to us in the Laboratory? No, I’m sure they didn’t. Only vetted medical staff would have been allowed in there. Like Pavlov’s Tower of Silence. Locked and soundproof.
‘It won’t be like a horror movie,’ says Masha. ‘You heard what Joolka said, they cut it. They prettied it up for the foreigners. She says we’re as sweet as two chocolate drops in it.’
Yes, apparently they showed the original documentary in London, to a gathering of English doctors and they were so ‘disturbed’ that the Academy decided to edit it right back and sanitize it. I remember all their cameras following us about in SNIP when we were learning to walk. But I don’t remember cameras in the Ped.
There’s an old woman teetering along the path towards us. She’s new and hasn’t seen us before. She stops and puts her hand over her mouth and then crosses herself as we walk towards her. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Masha and Dasha,’ she says as we approach. ‘The Together Twins.’ We go to walk past, but she puts her hand on Masha’s arm to stop her. ‘How will you die?’ she asks. ‘What happens when one of you dies?’
Masha shakes her hand off and snaps, ‘One goes to Heaven and the other goes to Hell – why don’t you just pack yourself off there too!’
We leave her standing there with her mouth open and make our way back to the entrance. Joolka’s coming soon with the video to play on our TV.
She slots the tape into the video player and presses play.
There we are, two plump little babies with dark spiky hair. The crackly commentary is like the voice of Mayak State Radio, deep and reassuring, explaining about our separate nervous systems and shared blood system and how they injected one of us with radioactive iodine. A nurse picks up my foot and cuts my sole with a scalpel. I start wailing – silently – because there’s no sound on the film. ‘Foo!’ Masha spits. ‘Nazis! We’re helpless and they just want to see how loud we can scream.’ It rolls on, showing another pair of conjoined twins, Ira and Galya, joined higher up their body, who were born fifteen years before us and were also studied by Anokhin. They died when they were a year old. ‘Not fucking surprised,’ mutters Masha.
We sit there on the bed, me and Masha, watching ourselves as babies growing into small children. We look identically angelic, happy, laughing and loving life. There’s a great big cot that I don’t remember – ours was small – and a vase of flowers. There are stacks of dolls on the table and we’re in flowery smocks. I don’t remember any of those either.
I glance across at her. She’s frowning and fiddling with the button on our trousers. There are two buttons, one for me and one for her, but hers is all worked loose. ‘The difference in character was evident soon after the birth,’ says the chocolatey voice-over. ‘Masha is more passive … it is Dasha who first sits up, Dasha who first starts crawling … Dasha who moved their third leg.’ Then they show me struggling to put a sock on my own foot and Masha being told to do the same but taking it from the nurse and pushing it over the edge of the bed. Khaa! Good old Masha! Joolka laughs and we look at each other and smile. The film moves to a scene where we’re looking bore
d with thick tubes down our throats to measure our gastric juices. There’s a doctor I don’t recognize sitting behind the machine. That must be Kryuchkova. She looks … kindly. But as we get older, our eyes, staring unsmilingly up at the camera, have this haunting black emptiness about them. It makes me shiver. They don’t show Alexeyeva at all. We’d probably just start crying if they had her in the same room.
Then we move to SNIP where we’re all happy and laughing, learning to walk with two big bows on each of our heads. We look so young and … sweet. Both of us. And there’s us laughing excitedly again as we lie on the floor naked, pulling ourselves up the metal pole to practise getting close enough to each other to walk. That was the time Anokhin first came in to see us.
When it’s finished, we stare at the whirring blank screen.
I thought it would be terrible to watch but it’s not, it’s actually quite interesting to see ourselves when we were little. It’s like a home movie, except it isn’t, is it? It’s a medical documentary to be shown to scientists around the world. But we’ve never seen ourselves as children before. Masha’s calmed down. She’s thinking the same thing as I am. She gets up to have a cigarette and we walk on to the balcony while Joolka packs up the video.
‘The ideal Soviet childhood then,’ she says, slowly puffing out a ring of smoke. ‘Lucky old us.’
I shake my head. ‘Lying to everyone about what really happened to us in there is almost more horrific than showing it.’
Masha looks down at the back of her hand. ‘I wonder if we’re still radioactive. It’s almost like they wanted to kill us, with all the starving and freezing and zapping us. Surprised we didn’t have a double heart attack.’
‘They must have expected us to die too – like the first ones did.’ Masha stubs out her cigarette and puts the butt in a plastic bag she hides behind the pot plant. I sigh. ‘But we kept on living.’
And here we are, over forty years later. Totally indestructible, despite all the odds, despite Masha smoking like a steam train and me drinking like a cobbler – a litre of vodka a day, if I can get it. Zhivoochi. But death and how it will happen is that nagging question that sits at the back of our minds all the time, like a black dog snapping at our heels, a question which, unlike everyone else who meets us, we’re afraid to ask. Shall I ask Joolka now? Before she goes? Quick, yes, do it! Just ask what will happen. How long will it take for the other one to die? Hours? Days? Weeks? Will they be able to operate to separate us? Do I want to be separated? Would Masha? And if they can’t, what happens when one of our hearts stops beating? Will it be painful? Will we …
‘Bye then, girls,’ says Joolka, standing at the door. ‘I’m going to be interviewing Anna Yefimovna, one of your nurses in the Paediatric Institute, next. And Doctor Golubeva, and Lydia Mikhailovna too. I’ll be interested to get her viewpoint.’
‘That old carrot,’ mutters Masha. ‘I know what her viewpoint will be. Darling Dashinka … Malicious Masha …’
Joolka casts a brief glance back at us, shakes her head, and then she’s gone.
We go boating on the lake with Timur
We’re lying under the birch trees, looking up through the fluttering silver leaves to the sky, while Lyuba and Marat paddle in the cool river. I have my head in the crook of Slava’s arm and can feel his chest rising and falling with his breathing. I can breathe his smell, his unique, sour milky smell. The most wonderful smell in the world.
His fingers are running up and down my bare arm.
‘Mama, I’m hungry,’ calls Marat from the sandy bank. I lift my head and see him walking out of the water, dripping wet. He looks just like his father.
I smile. ‘Well get Lyuba out of the river and I’ll put the picnic out,’ I call back. ‘Run around a bit in the sun to get dry first.’
I sit up and spread out a newspaper to put the hard-boiled eggs, dried fish, juicy Borodinsky bread and lard and zefir meringues out on. I’ve got home-made compote too, made with the strawberries from our little plot. And a thermos of milk, fresh from our cows.
‘Hey, don’t go away, sexy,’ Slava growls and bites my shoulder, trying to pull me back down.
‘I have to feed your offspring. Your son and heir is always starving – like his dad … Besides, I thought you were going to build a little fire …’
‘Here’s my fire,’ he says, and pulling my face to his, he kisses me hard on the lips.
‘Ei! Timka! Get a grip – we’re going round in circles here!’
‘If you’re so clever, why don’t you give it a go!’ says Timur, puffing, while he pulls on the oars.
‘All right, I will. Move over and let Mashinka take control of the situation!’
We all laugh as she pushes him backwards off his seat on the little rowing boat and takes his place, almost tipping us both over the side. We pick up an oar each. I can see this is going to be a disaster! Timur’s wearing a blue shirt buttoned right up to the collar and a flat cap. He’s got nice broad hands and a face all brown and wrinkled by years in the sun. He buys vodka for us and comes up to our room sometimes to share it. He keeps promising to take us out to the lake for a boat ride and today he’s finally done it.
‘Right,’ says Masha. ‘One, two, pull! We’ll get out to the middle of the lake and just float.’
Just float. That sounds good to me. Then I laugh again as I get splashed by water from Masha’s flailing oar. Timur reaches over and wipes the water off my face with his sleeve. Yes, this reminds me of that boat trip with Slava on the Don … the kiss … It’s nice to spend time with a man. To be looked after. Masha says he’s only after our money, but that’s Masha. She doesn’t trust anyone. Except me.
We’re in the middle of the lake now and we sit at the back of the boat again and lean back, looking up at the blue sky while Timur takes back the oars and sculls gently around.
Masha seems to have forgotten all about the dissertation and documentary film. She ranted for a bit, but then she just turned her attention back to the real horror films she watches on our video player and we don’t talk about it now. Joolka managed to bribe her way into getting the whole dissertation though. I’ve read it now, and I’ve given it to Olessya to look at. Perhaps if she sees what happened to us, she’ll forgive Masha and be friends again. I miss Olessya. I feel lonely without her.
Joolka interviewed Anna Yefimovna, who was a young doctor in the Ped with access to us. She still works there as head of a department. She talked of us as specimens, not children. She said Anokhin was courageous and had been exiled under Stalin for daring to believe that nature as well as nurture might affect personalities. Ours. She also said that telling our parents we’d died was an act of compassion, because we were considered ‘non-viable for life’ and that no one should be expected to bear the cross of having mutant infants. She insisted the experiments were what she called ‘humane trials’ and ended her interview by saying she pitied us ‘as only a Russian woman can’. Masha was spitting mad the whole way through the taped interview.
‘Timka, ei, Timik, catch me a fish,’ says Masha sleepily. ‘Catch me a fish and we’ll build a fire and fry it up.’
‘Only thing you’ll catch in here is an old boot,’ he says, peering over the side.
‘Well, we’ll fry that up then,’ says Masha. ‘It’ll be tastier than the stuff they give us from the kitchens …’
I dip my hand into the water and it ripples gently over my fingers as we float in slow circles.
Joolka asked Anna Yefimovna if she remembered the nanny who sat with us all the time, called Anna Petrovna, but she didn’t. It’s like she didn’t exist. Perhaps we wanted a mummy so much we imagined her? No. No. She was real. She’s probably dead now … I would have liked to have met her again …
Joolka talked to Doctor Golubeva next, who worked in the Brain Department of Anokhin’s Institute of Experimental Medicine. It turns out that she was the one who was sent to tell our mother we’d died. Golubeva was the one who broke the news. And yet she didn’t tell u
s anything, not when she came with her helmets to SNIP, not even when she visited us for all those years in the Twentieth with her sour cream buns. Perhaps the buns were an atonement … And they kept track of them, the doctors did, kept track of our parents and our brothers, to see if they’d go on and have more Together twins. They all knew.
I can hear her gravelly old voice now, in my head, as we listened to the tape recorder. Was it wrong to tell their mother they’d died? And not to tell the girls about their parents? No. They were a perfect living laboratory, an experiment just waiting to happen. We saw them as a miracle created by nature, a dream come true for us! You see, Soviet scientists were under terrible pressure to make pioneering discoveries ahead of Western scientists, so it was a very tense period, but also exciting for us. We were making constant breakthroughs but we were always being pushed to do more and more.
I sigh. The Soviet Union and its dream of Communism is long gone; now we have capitalism and imperialism, all those things we were brought up to hate. But these women, these doctors, they still believe it was right to do what they did. Joolka didn’t come and see us yesterday because Anya had her booster jab and was crying and clingy. We had vials of blood taken from us three times a day, every day, for six years.
Masha wouldn’t let Joolka play much of the next interview – the one with Lydia Mikhailovna. It started off with her saying: Masha’s childish, spiteful and mean but sets herself up as some icon of morality who protects and loves this so-called degraded sister of hers despite everything, and she’s delighted when everyone believes her version – that she’s the good sister and Dasha’s the bad sister – but nothing could be further from the truth. I could feel Masha’s chortik rising up inside her as she listened to that. I held my breath. On the one hand I wanted to hear more – no one apart from Aunty Nadya and Slava have ever said what they think to our faces – but on the other hand I wanted her to stop. It’s Dasha who is good and kind and forgiving, Dasha who is intelligent. You’d think they’d been brought up by different families – Masha by peasants and Dasha by professors. You’d think the clever, intuitive one would lead the other, wouldn’t you? But no, it’s Masha who bullies, abuses and controls …
The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep Page 34