Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘ 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 bored 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’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.