Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

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… ’

‘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.

‘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?