«The pre-delivery room?» My legs went all wobbly.
«Don't stand there like a post, woman. Get into the lift.»
I went into the lift on automatic pilot, but the nurse wheeled in a stretcher.
«Get on this.»
«Why?» I whispered.
«Those are the instructions. When your waters break, you must lie down.»
«Then why did you send me right up the corridor to see what time it was?»
«When you've got your baby, you can teach it what to do. But don't start teaching me. On seventy roubles a month I don't have to run around for all of you. At least the foreigners give us presents…»
The pre-delivery section consisted of a room with various pieces of apparatus and beds on which women were emitting bloodcurdling screams.
«How sad to die so young, so beautiful and so talented,» I thought to myself bitterly.
«Come on, woman, lie down properly on your back,» shouted a young man in a white coat.
«I can't. I've got vena cava syndrome. It's on my card.» I reported smartly in military style.
«There's no such thing in the human body. I'm the doctor here, not you. Lie down and let them put the wires on you.»
A young nurse began to attach wires all over me, with a metal plated strap on my forehead connected to a piece of apparatus.
«Here's the switch, woman. Right makes it stronger and left weaker. Understand?»
«No,» I said, understanding only that I would not be left to die in peace.
«When the pain starts turn it right and when it stops turn it left.»
I turned the switch and the electric current started up. My contorted pose, in which I was trying to look as if I was lying on my back, but in fact I wasn't, added an element of grotesque to the proceedings.
The duty doctor was turning over the pages of a detective story with a gory cover. The sight of someone reading a thriller on night duty would probably not have been disturbing in any other department. The assorted screeches and moans merged and multiplied in the high ceiling like the aurora borealis: the thin wails from the small Korean woman, the bass-like groans from the broadshouldered, long-legged blonde, the shrieks from the fat woman with a plait and the heart-rending moans from my neighbour, her forehead scorched from the painkilling electric current.
«You've got a heart of stone. How can your wife bear to live with you?» my neighbour began her dialogue with the doctor.
«Who do you think you are, woman? You're not the first to give birth or the last,» he said, rustling the pages of his book.
«You turd in trousers!» she howled. «What do you know about it? This is my third. If you menstruated once a year, you'd spend nine months preparing for it!»
«That's it,» said the doctor. «I've had enough.» He shut his book and walked out.
«Silly fool,» cried the long-legged blonde. «Why did you make him go? Who's going to deliver my baby now? You?»
«He wouldn't even notice unless you had it on his book!» retorted the other woman.
It was like a ship launched into space with women unable to call for help and incapable of helping themselves. The pain spiralled into a funnel, driving the ship forward to catastrophe. I emerged from a deep howl and a seared forehead, realizing post factum that both events concerned me. Attempting in vain to restrain the next howl, I forced myself not to turn the switch to maximum when the pain came; the lower half of my body separated from me and hovered under the ceiling, flapping the sheets like wings, while the upper half clung on to the bedstead, trying to focus between the agonizing pangs. Time lost all meaning, the room was swallowed up by semi-dusk and noise, and I bade farewell to all that was precious to me in this life.
There was a clatter of heels, and a young lady in glasses with a mask of disdain and fatigue on her plump face, snapped over me:
«Why are you giving birth in silence, woman? We've got to record all the data about your twins. Get on the trolley.»
My behaviour at that moment was anything but silent, yet the concept of discussion remained in the world I had left behind. I crawled onto the trolley like a crab and was barely conscious of the young lady attaching sensors to various parts of me in another room packed with monitors and rushing about amid the screens and notebooks to record the last few moments of my life.
Somehow I ended up on the delivery table by a window bathed in sunlight. The minute hand of the large clock showed nine twenty.
«There's no one around because it's in between shifts,» said the woman on the next delivery table in a gentle voice. It was as quiet as a morgue. You could hear the birds twittering like mad outside.
Two elderly women came into the room, walked up to me and gave a yell that brought all the staff rushing in. With total indifference I heard them say that I should have been delivered an hour ago, that I was torn to pieces, that goodness only knew what I would give birth to now and that they could all get the sack over this.
«Don't worry, everything will be fine? What's your name?» asked an elderly woman, turning me on to my back and almost lying on top of me. Having been called nothing but «woman» for the last few months and because I just hadn't the strength to tell her that I had been categorically forbidden to lie on my back, and because I was sure this was the long-awaited day of judgement, which would put an end to all my misery, I replied with a tongue like cotton wool:
«My name is woman,» and promptly passed out.
I opened my eyes in a cloud of smelling salts to see an incredibly large, black-haired, howling baby.
«Isn't he lovely?» the women gushed.
«Can I touch him?» I asked. They brought him over to me and I touched him timidly. He seemed as hot as a pie fresh from the oven.
«Don't relax. We've got to deliver the other one now. He's very active. He's already gulped too much of your amniotic fluid,» said the elderly woman.
«Can't I have a rest?»
«No, we've only got a few minutes. Quick, give her a drip in her arms and legs!» And a whole battalion of midwives, who had materialized from nowhere, began to insert the drips into my extremities, chattering non-stop as they did so. Another five minutes and I saw the second baby who howled even louder than the first as they slapped him.
«Is that one mine too?» I gasped like an idiot.
«Of course it is,» the nurse replied, unwinding the drip. «And thank your lucky stars that Professor Sidelnikova happened to come in, or you wouldn't have seen either of them.»
Then followed a tatty, unheated corridor, where my neighbour and I lay on trolleys for two hours with our bellies like deflated balloons as we studied the ornate moulding on the ceiling.
«Is anyone looking after them, do you think? Or have they been left like we have?» I asked.
«They'll never tell us,» my neighbour said gloomily.
«Mind you don't go to sleep, women!» everyone shouted at us as they passed by.
«Why don't they take us into the ward?» we asked them weakly.
«You must stay awake for two hours, so you catch internal bleeding if there is one. The bedside nurses here are only for foreigners.»
«But it's cold out here!»
«That's so you don't go to sleep.»
Two hours later I was on the operating table.
«Are you allergic to anaesthetic? It will take me an hour to sew this up, you're all in tatters,» said a cheerful young man in a green coat.
«I can stand it,» I replied and finally passed out under the mask.
«Tell your husband he owes me a bottle of wine. I did a good job on you. You're just as good as new now. Only why did he bring you here so late to have your twins? You won't be able to sit down for six months after this,» he said an hour later.
«He brought me here a month ago…»
«All right. We're only human too. What's your job?»
«I'm a student.»
«What of?»
«Philosophy.»
He was about to say that phil
osophers were only human as well, but thought better of it and said instead:
«Well, take it philosophically then.»
That must have been the last straw, because all my pent-up emotions burst out in a fit of sobbing.
«Calm down, calm down…» said the doctor anxiously, pinning me to the table and glancing into the other room where there should have been a nurse on duty. «If you cry like that all your stitches will come out and I'll have to spend another hour sewing you up again! And everything's fine. You've got two lovely boys! So what are you crying about, sweetheart?» He put a couple of shots into the syringe one after the other and shouted into the corridor. «Lena, Lida, where the blazes are you?» then started plunging syringes into my arm, which already felt like a pincushion. Then everything around me began to swim: the blinding light bulbs, the nurses who had turned up at last, and the green walls. And in the dizzy haze of this medical cocktail I saw myself running naked along the unheated corridor of the Institute of Gynaecology past lines of doctors who were spitting and throwing earth at me towards an open lighted door, while I tried to cover my big belly with my hands…
All this happened seventeen years ago for the sole reason that I am a woman. And as long as there are people who do not regard this as a suitable subject for discussion it will happen each day to other women, because being a woman in this world is not something worthy of respect, even when you are doing the only thing that men cannot do.
NINA GORLANOVA
HOW LAKE JOLLY CAME ABOUT
Translated by Jane Chamberlain.
Phew, this place smelled like the barracks.
«Let's go on over to the third ward, Golubova,» the midwife called in a peremptory bass. «Your blood pressure's up. You need to sleep, and the windows in the even wards open on the highway.»
Catching up her abdomen in her arms, Masha left the reception area and made her way toward the first floor. There the midwife disappeared into parts unknown. Now, aside from the smell of the barracks, essences of bleach and urine were vying for dominance. Suddenly from nowhere came a waft of watermelon. Masha decided this was her blood pressure playing tricks (objects abruptly shifting position, specks before her eyes, and various other manifestations). Have to lie down. She found the third ward and opened the door. Four pregnant cows looked up at her gloomily. To be on the safe side she asked, «May I come in?»
«Wish you would,» replied one of the women.
«We have forty-five mosquitoes on the ceiling,» another explained, «and with you here that makes fewer per capita.»
Masha raised her eyes: plaster hung in shreds from the ceiling, swaying back and forth (again that mobility of objects, specks and all). Masha counted the beds and divided forty-five by five. It came out to nine drifters apiece. Before that, it had been eleven-point-something.
A woman whose face was all covered with red blotches fastidiously caught a mosquito in flight with her thumb and index finger. She squashed it and grabbed another. It's like a circus, Masha marveled and sat down on the unoccupied bed by the window. The man-eaters began to circle her face in a cloud, looking for something to bite. «I should swat a few,» she decided, but her efforts brought no success. The mosquitoes slowly but invariably flew away and hid in the scales of the peeling whitewash on the wall.
«Don't jump around, you'll have premature birth,» warned the woman with the blotches and caught another mosquito with her two fingers. It seemed to Masha that there was something superhuman in such adroitness. Are all these oddities because of my blood pressure? she wondered and quickly lay down.
«Alena,» someone called from the street.
«I won't go to him.» She waved a greeting through the window glass. «When my face is a blight, I keep out of sight.»
«Is the skin problem because of your pregnancy?» Masha asked.
«No, it's the mosquitoes.»
At that moment the door cracked open and a teapot appeared.
«Nobody here wants milk,» commanded the bass voice of the midwife.
«Oh, yes, we do,» the women chorused.
«But you'd better watch out: it's cold, you'll take a chill, you'll get sick,» the midwife warned loudly, coming onto the ward.
«Nonsense… who cares?» The women held out their glasses and the youngest, barely more than a girl, explained to Masha: «This is what they give us for afternoon tea.»
Masha also took a glass from the bedside table and held it out to the midwife. The latter poured far less than a glassful for each, repeating, «I had a little taste — boy, is it cold!» From under her smock peeped a printed cotton dress on which a triple repetition of the Ministry of Health logo erupted in black among green leaves.
«After an intensive struggle, milk was nevertheless received,» Alena said as she began sipping it, but suddenly she bellowed, holding her abdomen. «They come visiting, but after that the contractions start up — ooowff — again!»
«How long between?» asked Masha.
«Not for two weeks yet. They say such things happen at this stage. False labor.»
«But what's the interval between your contractions?»
Alena picked up her watch, grumbled that it was always stopping, and began to shake it ruthlessly as one might shake a thermometer. Masha was unable to sit calmly by and witness such abuse relating to her own area of expertise. She asked Alena for the watch and moved it rhythmically several times from left to right. The watch had stopped.
«Time to clean it with some alcohol.»
«See, all your watch wants is a drinkie-poo,» said one of the women, who had gulped her milk and was obviously warming to a favorite topic.
But Alena turned to Masha. «Do you work at the watch factory? In which section?»
«On the assembly line.»
«My husband's an engineer in the third section,» Alena began, but she was interrupted by another contraction.
Outside the window an earth-moving machine let out a roar: Drrra-bub-bub-bub.
«Our friend has returned a teensy bit late from his lunch break, hmmm?» remarked a woman with a braid whom Masha had privately christened Schoolmarm.
«Golubova!» The head of the maternity division energetically entered the ward and tried to outshout the noise of the earth-mover: «You're new here, so I'd better explain something. We haven't any water in the lavatory. Well, that's how it is. Some women have written to complain, but you see, we won't be in this building much longer — any day now we'll be moving into the new one.»
To confirm her words, the earth-mover began vigorously devouring the rocky earth to prepare it for the foundation of the new hospital.
«Strictly speaking, this building hasn't existed on paper for five years now. But one of the women wrote Moscow to complain. The commission is going to check on it one of these days,» the head doctor spread her hands helplessly. The lapel of her lab coat also bore the Ministry of Health logo. «Well, getting back to the present, ladies, how did we pass the night?» she asked.
«Just like the Kremlin Congress: applause swelling to ovation,» said Alena and clapped her hands, trying to dispatch some mosquitoes.
Drrra-bub-bub-bub, the earth-mover roared.
The head doctor seemed not to hear Alena, but she also made reference to the mosquitoes. «We sprayed the basement yesterday.»
«Do more good if they stretched some cheesecloth over the window,» Alena said.
«Anna Lvovna, still no sign of my test results, hmm?» asked the Schoolmarm with exaggerated pique.
«I got back results from two Nichiporenko tests, even though they only did one general,» the Girl-woman chimed in.
Masha stepped into the conversation, egged on by Alena's determination. «Your test results probably went to the new hospital, since this one no longer exists on paper.»
Drrra-bub-bub-bub.
The head doctor pranced out of the ward.
«But the new hospital doesn't exist either,» Alena said.
«Why didn't you tell her about your contracti
ons? Maybe it's time for you to go into labor.»
«I really don't want to right now — haven't used up all my maternity leave yet. I could party for another two weeks. Why should I give this money to somebody else? Or maybe I should just go ahead and deliver?» She turned to Masha. «Yesterday I took a urine test to the lab, but then a piece of plaster fell all over me — they had to pour out all eight jars.»
«What can you expect from a building that hasn't existed for five years?»
«Alena, you were going to try and find out about my antibiotics, whether it might hurt the baby because I lied about those two weeks?» the Girl-woman asked hurriedly. «You will call, won't you?»
«It's only yourself you deceived. You fudged the two weeks so they'd give you antibiotics, so now go ahead and poison the child,» Alena answered.
«It won't be me that…»
«From six months on taking antibiotics is okay, and that's exactly where you are.»
«That's if you count the fudged time, but it's really only five-and-a-half. You will call your friend, won't you?»
«Come on, Golubova, let's take your blood pressure.»
Masha went out into the corridor and walked toward the voice. As she walked, she thought: This is me walking in a corridor that no longer exists. For some reason she couldn't stop wondering about the building's being extinct and about that commission from Moscow, although she herself didn't know why this was so important.
In the dining room the elderly midwife was taking the blood pressure of some newly arrived patients, who were covering their nostrils from the stench. On the wall hung a colorful advisory: PERMISSION OF MIDWIFE REQUIRED BEFORE TURNING ON TELEVISION. Masha glanced about in search of a TV set but found none. Quick-witted Masha, who had grown up in a crowded hostel, suddenly felt uncomfortable and confused. She looked around uncertainly. The pressure dial showed one-sixty over one hundred. Of course, it's just my blood pressure, she said to herself. If I could just lie down and get some sleep.
But sleep was impossible. Although Alena did not wish to give birth, nature had gone to work — implacable as a clock — and the birth process was accelerating. Alena kept moaning and repeating, «So many people on earth, did they all start like this? So many people on earth…»
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