Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘Lucky Olessya. She escaped,’ says Masha and chews the end of the postcard. I want to hold it, but Masha won’t let me. I sort of think I’d get the smell of peaches and milk from it.

‘Bloody blue stamps,’ goes on Masha miserably. ‘Property of SNIP. Sheets, towels, curtains, pyjamas, socks, tin cups, plates, soles of our shoes. Can’t believe they don’t just stamp it on our foreheads.’

‘Are we really Property of SNIP, though? Are we going to stay here forever, Mashinka?’

‘No fucking way. Once we denounce the Administrator, we’ll be recognized, and then we’ll be let out to work for the Communist cause.’

‘But we keep trying to denounce her and don’t find anything. Are you sure she’s an American agent?’

‘Course she is, idiot. She looks like all the capitalists in the posters with their mean narrow eyes and low foreheads and long noses. Course she is.’

‘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.’