«We don't give general anaesthetics here, but since you have listened to me and agreed to think it over, I'll have a word with an anaesthetist in another department.»
I rushed out of the operation room, radiant, followed by heavy, painful glances from the queue. I was not thinking of anything, of course, except that with a general anaesthetic I would not see or hear anything. I was just a moral illiterate who saw the value of the life I was about to destroy solely in terms of my own physical discomfort. But I did this in the company of people who had taught me that this was «right» and I was ready to share the responsibility with them.
«So you decided to come back?» said the Armenian coldly.
«Yes,» I muttered.
«Well, now it's up to you. Yesterday it was on my conscience, but today it's on yours.»
I don't remember anything else, except that later my fianc-came into the ward and we kissed and walked in the rain, without thinking that a chill could be dangerous in my condition. Because the worst was over, and now we could prepare for the wedding, and have fun, and go out for a drink on the money we had been sent as wedding presents. We could love each other and try each other out as partners in what was called married life, but at root it was the adolescent's delight at the freedom from parents. It was as if for the right to get married I'd paid that man in a white coat, called a gynaecologist, who guards the entrance to adulthood.
«Pregnant again?» I was asked sternly a few months later by the same battleaxe in the same clinic, in the same presence of mother in the white coat that gave her the right to get in every doctor's office without queuing. «Toxicosis and rhesus negative. I'll refer her for an abortion.»
«There's no need,» I said quietly, but firmly.
«So what are you planning to do?»
«Have the baby.»
«You what!» The woman was so astonished you would have thought I was a man. «And with you so thin and pale and your low haemoglobin, what sort of baby will you have for me?»
«I'm having it for myself, not for you,» I was about to say, but mother, realizing that I had outgrown my fear of gynaecologists and was about to retaliate for the past, present and future, began ingratiatingly:
«She's decided to have it and that's that. I'd like her to be under you. Our district doctor's just a boy, a student.»
«And he'll die a student too, the duffer. Doesn't know how to get into a woman. Can't think how he gave his wife a child,» she replied. «But regulations are regulations. He's the one she should go to.»
The young gynaecologist looked only slightly older than me. We were embarrassed as two Young Pioneers who had been punished by being made to stand in the corner with no clothes on.
«Becoming a mother is a very responsible step,» he said, flushing deeply and filling in the medical card with his big, childish writing.
«Okay,» I said.
«Has anyone else examined you? In that case I won't.»
«Okay,» I said.
«Here's your referral for tests. Don't you feel well? Here's a sick leave certificate.»
«Okay,» I said.
«I'm giving a talk on Friday for women expecting their first baby. It's nothing special. The only thing is, when the labour pains start you must massage yourself here.» He pulled up his white coat, turned his back to me and began pounding his jeans in the region of the coccyx with his powerful fists.
«But how can you massage yourself there if you're lying on your back?» I asked.
«I don't know. That's what we were taught.»
My pregnancy was not an easy one. Each day I felt sick until noon. I snapped at people like a soldier just back from the war and read the classics to make the baby an intellectual. The classics turned out to be full of horror stories, however, and whatever I started reading someone was sure to die in childbirth after a while. The young gynaecologist got used to me and began to shout at me, copying the behaviour of his seniors.
«You should know better than that, woman. Look how you're putting on weight! You must keep right off salt. Not a gram a day! What have you eaten today?»
«Bananas and a box of tooth powder,» I confessed.
«How do you eat that? Do you mix it with water?» he enquired gravely.
«No, just as it is, with a teaspoon.»
«But that can't taste very nice,» he objected.
«I used to think so too, before I got pregnant.»
«I'm going to put you in hospital. Mortality among pregnant women is very high in this country.»
«But why me?»
«You've got an excess of water in your body, woman. What do you think the baby will be like? There won't be any baby. Your baby's drowning in water!»
After the visits to the clinic I cried my heart out all night, then decided that the less I saw of the doctor, the healthier my baby would be. But the gynaecologist was one of the dedicated kind. With the fervour of a neophyte he sought me out at home, lying in wait in the yard. One day he met me and my husband in the street. We hurriedly crossed to the other side, but he shouted after us across the road:
«You've got oedema and high blood pressure, woman! If you don't go into hospital tomorrow you'll die in childbirth! Mark my words, woman! If anything happens to you, they'll take away my diploma, and there aren't enough gynaecologists as it is.»
That night, after this encounter, I nearly had a miscarriage. The ambulance arrived and an elderly doctor gave me a few injections, took one look at my haggard face with the unnaturally large eyes and at my swollen belly criss-crossed with red and blue veins like a globe of the world and sticking out half a mile from my nineteen-year-old body, and said:
«Tell your husband to give the gynaecologist a good thump next time he appears with his predictions or he'll turn you and a lot of other women into cripples. And use all the pull you have to get tested for twins. I'd say you've got two in there.»
In those days the only place where you could get ultra-sonic tests was the Institute of Gynaecology. Mother found an entr-e. Some bright young lads in white coats rubbed my stomach with a jelly-like substance, then passed a sensor over it and showed me two infants of impressive proportions on the monitor.
I was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. Up till then all my logical attempts to feel the living creature inside me had failed. I understood that I was pregnant, that this would result in the appearance of a small creature and that I would be its mother, but only as separate facts. My mind was not capable of organizing these facts into cause and effect. My country's culture had not prepared me for this. «You're a girl and one day you'll be a mother, so you mustn't…» and then followed a whole string of unfair restrictions. «One wrong step and that will be the end of you.» I had heard that ever since I could remember, as often and with the same degree of disbelief as the statement that military service was the noble duty of each and every citizen. «I'm your mother,» mother used to shout, using this to justify all sorts of unfair punishments. The whole country was full of iron-willed, stony-faced mothers, their prototypes brawled in queues, complained about their drunkard husbands, gladly abandoned their children to the mercy of nurseries, hospitals, summer camps and schools, and I had no desire to swell their ranks.
The kitchen-sink image of motherhood had not taken root in my brain. The conversion from a bohemian university student to the mother of twins seemed beyond my capabilities. Actually, I could not concentrate on it, because the frontline for physical survival lay in gynaecological consulting rooms.
They got me into hospital in the end. The pathological pregnancy department was in a building on the verge of collapse. There was no hot water and only one toilet for the whole floor, with a long line of pale-faced women queuing outside it, clutching their bellies. The ward had some thirty beds. To save space there was only one locker for two beds. The atmosphere was certainly not conducive to the birth of healthy progeny. If one pathologically pregnant woman could create an aura of hysteria around her, just multiply that by thirty. The civi
l wars over whether or not to open the window in a heat wave ended with the advent of a nurse to inject all the participants with tranquillisers. And the «Thousand and One Nights» were more like the horror stories after «lights out» at summer camp about maniacs, vampires and walking corpses. The role of ghouls here, however, was played by ignorant gynaecologists, drunken husbands, mean bosses and heartless mothers-in-law. Nourished on the culture of the university set, I was trying to become my own adult woman here while imbibing all sorts of nonsense useful for psychologists and historians, but fatal for a young mother-to-be.
«Planned caesarian,» grunted a heavy-shouldered woman doctor, poking me with her finger as she did the rounds, one of the uncouth breed that are in charge of greengrocers or gynaecology departments, and walked on.
«Why a caesarian?» I shouted, running after her, because she happened to be in charge of the gynaecology department.
«Surely you know why, woman!» She looked surprised, but went on walking. «Measure your hips and think about it. No child could get through such a narrow pelvis, woman. They need more room than that. You'd give them a terrible time and kill yourself into the bargain. I'm going to write 'caesarian' on your card in big red letters, so they can't miss it. You may not come to me for the birth.»
«You bet I won't.»
«And what's so bad about my department,» she said huffily.
«Yesterday a woman went into labour and the nurse told her to wait because there were only two tables and they were both occupied.»
«So what?» the doctor said. «What difference did it make? She yelled a bit in the ward. My mother gave birth to me in a hay field. She was mowing and had me on the spot.»
«I'd prefer a bit more comfort than that.»
«Then send a telegram to Brezhnev saying you're someone special. Maybe he'll let you give birth on his nice big office desk. I do too much as it is for my miserable wage.»
An all-ward discussion decided that a caesarian was much better than the usual method, firstly, because you felt no pain and, secondly, because the doctor was there all the time, whereas if it wasn't a caesarian you might have to hunt high and low for one. We were entertained by the whole repertoire of stories from twenty-nine fevered minds about death or other horrors from a caesarian. And when everyone finally calmed down and began snuffling and snoring, I lay in the darkness, weeping into my pillow with my head twisting the Rubik cube of what awaited me. I was very attracted by the idea of a general anaesthetic, of course, and waking up to find two lovely babies wrapped round with silk ribbons. But being a bookworm I had studied a pile of books on the subject and discovered, inter alia, that the vegeto-vascular system of children born by a caesarian was not so adaptable to changes in pressure.
It had been drummed into my head by all and sundry that in the sphere of childbirth I was totally incompetent, and that all Soviet women with broad hips gave birth cheerfully to a single child on the hay, in bed, in a lift, at the workbench or at the steel furnace, and only I, a degenerate bohemian, was not only pregnant with two at once, but also had a rhesus problem, oedema, a narrow pelvis and quite unfounded claims.
Somehow I managed to survive the hospital with the icy washes in the morning in a packed washroom full of big jars of urine tests; meals the very smell of which was enough to give you a miscarriage; the dusty windows facing the hospital morgue, and various other accessories that accompanied the emergence of a new life into the twenty-first century.
From the hospital I was sent to the Central Institute of Gynaecology, where the wives of diplomats and cosmonauts gave birth and also the string-pullers and pathological cases. I belonged to the third and fourth categories. Mother's friend who worked there warned me:
«Our place is better that an ordinary maternity home, of course, but if you feel it starting and don't call me, I can't answer for anything.»
The wards were either for six ordinary pregnant women or one diplomat-cosmonaut-general's wife. An orderly brought round a dirty trolley with some cadaver-coloured kasha for the ordinary patients and morsels of haute cuisine for the dip-cosm-gens. They were allowed to have visitors in the ward, while we had to make do with scribbled notes and hurried shouts down the phone or through the window. With his usual artistic flair my husband used to put on a white coat and make his way to the third floor, where I was waiting for him, hiding in the dark corridor. We embraced like conspiratorial revolutionaries, because towards the end of my pregnancy I became obsessed with the sense of being «insulted and humiliated», and together with the management I believed that meeting my own husband when I was about to give birth to his child was a flagrant infringement of the rules. And that if caught I deserved to be punished by immediate eviction and childbirth in an even less congenial place. So defenceless and insecure are pregnant women that they almost turn into zombies.
Tired of Russian food the black women fried bananas in sunflower oil on their little electric stoves, while the Koreans braised herring in milk. These mouth-watering smells, multiplied by a somewhat fevered imagination, produced racist moods. The only compensation was the folklore growing up in connection with the regular visits to a long-legged black woman by the three other wives of her diplomat husband.
The institute also differed from other establishments of its kind in the presence of a large number of black- and yellow-skinned students. I could be eating, sleeping or even dying when a crowd of them would burst into the ward and an energetic teacher with a bunch of case histories fished one of the latter out, waved her pointer in my direction and rattled:
«Interesting case, girl of nineteen, twins, rhesus-negative,» and twenty students felt my belly in turn, each trying to look like a hardbitten professional.
«What would happen if I gave birth in the middle of one of these demonstrations?» I asked.
«Don't worry, we're going to use you for our end-of-term practicals,» she replied.
One day lying on my back I passed out. The desk with smelling salts was at the other end of the corridor about half a bus stop away, so they revived me by slapping my pretty, as I thought, face. Coming to, I lay down on my back again and again lost consciousness. The assembled doctors cogitated for some time, before shrugging their shoulders and dispersing. I had to get through the night and was scared stiff of assuming a horizontal position again. So I just sat up until morning, clasping a pillow forlornly, and in the morning collapsed, went to sleep and lost consciousness again. This was the state in which an energetic professor brought there by a crowd of baffled doctors found me. Cursing like a trooper, she slapped me smartly on the face, sat me up in bed and addressed the assembled company:
«I can't think how you got through the institute? Who gave you your diplomas? Just take a look at her. Typical twins. Two heavy foetuses pressing on the vena cava. That's not pathology, it's the norm for anyone who calls themselves a specialist.» The doctors looked at the floor.
«And you, woman, just remember not to give birth on your back. That's not for you!»
«Then what should I give birth on?» A chill ran down my spine.
«On your side. French women always give birth on their side, and Koreans squatting on their heels.»
«But it says on my card in big red letters that I'm having a caesarian,» I said, beseechingly. «How can I have one on my side or squatting on my heels?»
«Give me your card,» the professor demanded. «Look here, woman. I'm crossing out caesarian and writing vena cava syndrome instead.»
«But the baby will never get throughmy narrow pelvis,» Iyelled.
«Who told you such rubbish? You've got a great pelvis. An ideal pelvis for twins. No caesarian! There's a fashion for them these days. Only if you're in labour for three days do you get your caesarian!» And out she went, fanning herself with my case history and clacking on her high heels. I was so confused by now that all I could do was weep and pray to the Almighty.
I would go up to the mirror and examine my heavy, naked stomach, which was moving and changin
g shape like Solaris, with the vague outlines of heads, knees and elbows. I could hardly grasp that these were my babies and thought of it all as a kind of abstract, intelligent mass that I talked to, complained about life to, and begged not to kick my innards when they were having their tussels. It must be said that even then my requests were not ignored. An animal instinct told me that I was no longer alone within the confines of my own skin, but intellectually I could only grasp that the responsibility for the survival of all three of us in the cogwheels of this medical machine was exclusively mine. And this made me shiver like an aspen leaf as the happy day approached, which I had been taught to regard as the day of judgement.
One night I woke up in a pool of water, the meaning of which had not been explained to me. All my experienced companions were fast asleep, and I was too embarrassed to wake them with my stupid questions. So I hobbled slowly towards the night desk. The nurse there was also fast asleep, after consuming her fair share of diluted spirit that evening. The water was still running down my legs.
«Please,» I shook her shoulder. «I need help.»
«Why can't you just settle down, woman, and go to sleep. It's night time,» the duty nurse grunted.
«I've got water running down me and I don't know what it means,» I said hesitantly.
«Always the same old thing… What time is it?»
«I don't know. I haven't got a watch.»
«Well, go and see then. It's for you, isn't it, not for me?»
Like an idiot, I hobbled to the clock at the other end of the corridor, worried about the water dripping onto the lino and about not letting the nurse get her sleep.
«Five o'clock,» I announced, when I got back.
«All right, let's go,» said the nurse, standing up lazily and setting off down the corridor.
«Where are we going?»
«To cloud cuckoo land… We're going to the pre-delivery room, woman, that's where.»
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