Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

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.

‘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.