Juliet Butler - The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep

‘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 us 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…

That’s when Masha blew up. ‘Turn it off!’ Joolka shook her head in frustration, but she did. Everyone does what Masha tells them to. I was glad. They don’t realize, none of them, that she’s right, Masha is. She’s strong and I’m weak. Where would I be without her?

So that wasn’t going in her book either.

I hear an ambulance siren wailing from the highway. There are so many cars now that there are traffic jams and accidents all the time. The newspapers are full of stories of corruption and the new Russian mafia. And we get all these soap operas from Mexico about love and deception. It’s all happened so fast. Aunty Nadya says there’s more food in the shops now than you can shake a stick at, but most of it’s imported from the West and much too expensive to buy. ‘We’ve prostituted ourselves to them,’ Aunty Nadya always says gruffly. ‘Gorbachev’s fault for letting the Soviet Union fall apart.’

Some crows fly overhead, cawing sadly, and I yawn. None of that really concerns us. We get fed three meals a day by the State, and Joolka, Aunty Nadya and Baba Iskra keep bringing us supplies. Nothing’s too expensive for us to buy. I’d like to buy firmenni food for Aunty Nadya and Baba Iskra too, but Masha says they wouldn’t accept it. She’s probably right. Masha’s usually right.