by Janet Fitch
Genya lifted me up and carried me back into the compartment. Someone had wiped down the bench, put down a coverlet, scratchy but at least it was dry.
“Tell me what I should do,” my big boy-husband begged, kneeling on the dirty floor, his face on a level with mine, kissing my knuckles as if I were dead already, wetting them with his tears. “I feel so helpless.”
If it was not so ridiculous, I would have laughed. I was on fire, and my lower back ached like it was breaking. I was going to have a baby. What did he have to cry about? “My back,” I managed to say. “Rub my back.” He tried it, but the rubbing wasn’t doing anything, just irritating me. “With your hand, not your fingers. Lower. Yes, there.” He rubbed the base of my back with his big hands. He was strong enough to do what I wanted, but he didn’t understand, kept massaging instead of pressing, his hands too nervous to stay still. “Just press! With your fist!”
Something was wrong. Shouldn’t the pain be in my belly? Or down in my crotch?
“Are you having it now?” he asked. “Is this it?”
“How do I know?” I shouted. “I’ve never done this before.” Useless! And there wasn’t one damn woman on the train who’d been through this herself. The actresses, the Bolsheviks. All their useless faces crowding round the open door, looking at me like I was a two-headed calf. I felt like I should fart some pamphlets for them.
Matvei Grossman stuck his head in from the corridor. “They’ve gone for the midwife.”
Thank God someone had a thimbleful of common sense. “Where are we?” I asked. Somehow it suddenly seemed very important.
“Kambarka,” said Apollonia. She sat on the opposite compartment bench with her legs crossed, staring out the window, as if she could not bear even looking at me. I must be repulsive, my hair plastered to my head. I could see myself in her eyes, like a gargoyle, like a bloated carcass of a cow ripening in the sun, while she looked so pretty and cool. I could tell she was glad I was suffering. I’m sure she hoped I would die. Get your spell off me, devil. All of these people, gaping at me like I was a fish in a tank. My writhing, gasping self, this trembling mountain of flesh.
“It’s a very interesting town. It has an important ironworks,” said Antyushin.
I shivered, and then came another wave of fiery heat. “Get them out of here,” I roared to Genya. “Before I shoot them myself.”
He cleared them out for me. There was a soft knock at the open door. Slava, my friend, my lovely sailor, had brought a pot of tea, a glass, and a towel. “The midwife’ll be here soon, little comrade. Any minute. You’re going to be fine. Just keep on breathing.”
Always good advice. He handed Genya the water, and pressed something in my hand. A lump of sugar. Real sugar. I wondered how long he’d had that in his pocket. I popped it into my mouth and drank the tea, sucking the sweetness. My husband sat on the floor, not to crowd me on the bench, and never let go of my hand as we waited for salvation.
I rested between cramps, dozed and dreamed feverishly of fish, their unblinking eyes and gaping mouths. I knew I’d never be able to look at a fish again as long as I lived. Fish, and wet corridors—Gorokhovaya 2. And my mother with a veil like a coat of slime. But I finally remembered about breathing. I knew how to breathe—that’s all we’d done at Ionia. I breathed through my skin, long skeins of light, keeping a vision of a candle flame in my mind. I breathed and tried to keep the candle steady. I don’t know that it helped, but it kept me from screaming. Had any time passed at all? Where was that midwife?
Sometime later—was there still time?—the sun remained stalled in the white summer sky. It had not moved at all. Suddenly we heard arguing outside the train. Heavy boots, then the compartment door banged open. Genya rose and left me, closing the door behind him. My hands felt empty without his. “Genya?” I wanted to get up and find him, but I didn’t have the strength. I lay there bound up in my dress. How could I go through with this? I had to beg off. I’d been sick ever since Izhevsk. In fact I’d been sick most of this pregnancy, and now I would be expected to do something—not with my mind but with my body alone. The door slid back open and Genya came in, knelt at my bedside. He was biting his lip. There was something he didn’t want to tell me.
The midwife. There was no midwife. Oh God, I would have to give birth on this train with no one who knew anything more than some soldier who’d sewn up his buddy once at the front with the needle and thread he’d just used on his pants. “What?”
“There’s a problem,” Genya said, his forest eyes welling. The skin of his nostrils seemed very thin whenever he was upset. “He said the midwife wants you to come to the village. She won’t do it here. Thinks we’re devils. Typical religious morons. I say the hell with it. You can have the baby with us just as well as with her.”
“No!” I cried out. Oh please, could someone please help me, someone who knew his ass from a hole in the ground?
“She’s in the wagon outside,” said Genya’s girlfriend, Apollonia. She couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
“I can make her come in,” said Slava, lounging at the door. “It wouldn’t take much.”
Force some little old lady to attend me, with a gun to her head? “And if she refuses? You’d shoot her?”
“Why not?” He shrugged. “You can’t fight Soviet power.”
And leave a village without its midwife? Shoot her right there from the agit-train? Well, that would certainly change people’s minds about the Red cause. Another contraction drove my back into barbed wire. I didn’t want to give birth on this train. Better some old lady’s izba. “Take me to her.” I sat up, tried to rise, but my legs refused to hold me. I sank back down to the bench, but still upright, clutching Genya, shivering in the heat, sicker than I’d ever been in my life. “Take me.”
“The hell with these ignorant peasants,” Genya said, his jaw dangerously flexed. I knew that face, that mulish expression. He was getting his back up. “You know what it’ll be like—priests and icons, holy water. Who knows what they’ll do to you to punish you for being with us.”
I was willing to take my chances. “Genya, sometimes other people know something too. Now help me!”
Reluctantly, he helped me stand, then lifted me in his arms. The sailor led the way. Matvei and a sparsely bearded little muzhik waited by a bony horse attached to a cart. In the cart, a woman in a white kerchief sat stiffly next to one of our Red soldiers, a rifle casually at his side. She sat firm in her seat. If she was frightened, she gave no indication. She was a big woman, square shouldered, in a blue apron, her face pockmarked, wide boned, a rock of defiance. You could have ironed a shirt on her back, it was so broad and straight. She could have been fifty, she could have been ninety.
Genya sighed. “You’d really go with her?”
“Help me up.”
With one last baleful look, he lifted me up to the soldier, who settled me into the seat next to the midwife. Genya started to climb in after me.
“Nyet,” said the old woman, gesturing no with one wagging finger. “Not you.”
“I’m not letting her out of my sight,” he said.
“Not you,” she said again.
“This is my husband,” I tried to explain. I began to tremble again. I hadn’t been upright this long since Izhevsk. The blood surged in my head.
She put her hand on my forehead, a strong hand, cool and steady. I wanted her to leave it there forever. “You’re ill. A fever. How long?”
Just the sound of her calm, sure voice brought tears to my eyes, that hand, just like Avdokia’s. “A week, I think.”
“Has the water come?” I nodded. “How long ago?”
It was hard to say if it was five hours or fifteen. “Maybe noon.”
“And the suzheniya?” Contractions. “How far apart?” She was very abrupt, but I could see her knowledge struggling with her loathing of us, her deep-seated purpose to bring life into the world getting the upper hand.
“Twenty minutes, thirty. It’s my back.” I started
to cry.
She was nodding coolly. She’d seen all of this before. I loved her already. “And when was your last confession?”
Suddenly Genya was there, grabbing the old lady’s blouse like he was going to punch her, yelling in her face with his mighty lungs, “What difference does that make? You old fool! Who cares? No—we’re not doing this. It’s insane. Marina—”
“A long time,” I told her.
“We should get started,” the old lady said.
“No. I forbid it. Marina, you can’t let her—”
The midwife raised her voice, it was clear, and hard. “Your wife is ill, she’s fevered, she’s already in danger. She’s been sick for a week. You call me insane? You people aren’t human, you’re animals.”
Grigory from Krasnaya Gazeta ran out of the train car. “Kuriakin, it’s good news. The 3rd Army has just taken Perm. The track’s open.”
I heard Marfa Yermilova’s voice, sharp. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
Other voices. Clamoring, all at once, like seagulls.
“Can you just give me a minute!” Genya roared, and knit his fingers atop his head, as if things were falling on it. “Just a minute!” He turned back to the old lady. “Anything happens to her, I swear, I’ll kill you.”
“If God wills it, so it shall be.”
He howled as if it were he, not I, who was experiencing the deep pain of labor. He grabbed his head like it was on fire. “That’s it,” he shouted at her, scrambling up into the wagon. “You go to your good Christian hell, all right? And take your piousness with you.” He was lifting me up. “I’m not leaving my wife with you.”
“Stop it, Genya!” I fought him like an animal, wrenching myself from his grip. “I need her. I can’t do this alone! Put me down!” I didn’t know where I got the energy, but I arched and twisted like a cat. He had to put me down or drop me.
He clutched his head like it was filling with demons. “What are you talking about? You’re not alone. Look! You have me, you have all of us!” And he waved his hand toward the comrades of our train, Matvei and Antyushin, Grigory, Dutkov the printer, Slava, Apollonia, Aksakov, Marfa Yermilova, Kostya from Pravda, an entire audience smoking, watching our drama. All his spacemen, his propagandists and theoreticians, actors. I’d give all of them for one old baba who could safely deliver my child. I didn’t care how many icons I’d have to kiss. Maybe I’d want to kiss them. I had stopped knowing who I was or what I wanted. I just wanted to get out of the sight of all these people staring at me and suffer my pain in peace and get this baby out.
“Your wife is very ill,” the midwife said to my panicked Genya, speaking slowly and clearly as if he were deaf, as if he would have to read the words on her lips. “She could die. I don’t think she will, but it’s in the hands of God. I can do more for her than you can, of that I’m sure.”
I could die. I don’t think I really believed it until she said it, right out loud. I was sick, but I didn’t realize how sick, and now the baby was coming. My terror rose into my throat like vomit. It coiled up my spine.
“I’ll kill you myself if you let her die,” he said, pointing at her, right at her upturned nose, as if he would stab her with the spear of his finger. “I swear to you. I’ll come back and burn your whole village.”
I went into a spasm of labor, and laid my head in her lap, clutching her apron. “Let’s go.”
The old lady held me, held me hard, pressing my back with her fist, right where it was breaking, splitting in two. I groaned loud enough for everyone on that train to hear. “Pray,” said the midwife. “Pray to Theotokos. Save me, Holy Mother of God.” After all my life with Avdokia, I knew that prayer like a song. I whispered it along with her: “O my All-Gracious Queen Theotokos, my hope who befriends orphans and intercedes for strangers, joy of those who sorrow, protectress of those offended…” And the words rushed over me like a stream. They soothed me. If I couldn’t have Avdokia here with me now, I had this solid peasant woman, and the prayer gave me some human sounds to utter. “Look upon my troubles and see my sorrow. Help me for I am weak. Guide me for I am wandering. For you know my offense. Resolve it as you will, for I have no other help than you, no other intercessor nor good comforter, only you. O Mother of God, may you keep and protect me, unto the ages of ages, Amen.”
“Amen,” I choked out. She held me and started over again, submerging me in the steady flow of those old words, like an ancient poem, firm in the center, prayed until the cramping left me. “Where’s Genya?” I gasped.
“He’s right there, by the train.”
I sat up and, yes, there he was, with the others, half listening to Marfa Yermilova, half turned from the cart, crushing his cap in his fist, trying not to look at me. Lot’s husband. Poor Genya couldn’t bear to see anyone suffer. I recalled the night we spent with the thief, in the little room on Grivtsova Alley.
But that boy had died.
The midwife took my hand. “Devushka, say goodbye now. As if it is your last day on earth.”
The shock, the fear of it, the reality, sank in the rest of the way. Death in childbirth. “You really think I’m going to die?” I whispered. My mouth was so dry.
“You have to submit, to whatever comes. Any holding back will make the birth harder. It is important, this farewell. It is the first of the unfastenings.”
Yes, I understood. For once, I had to submit, utterly. This was bigger than me, the war I was moving into, bigger than the train, bigger than the sun, it would blot out the sky. I struggled to sit upright, she propped me up. I took a deep breath. “Goodbye!” They all looked up. “Goodbye, Genya. Don’t forget me.”
I could see him struggling with himself, his shock as great as mine. I knew him. He could show his anger in front of his comrades, but not his tears. He knew that everything he did now would be remembered eternally. He had to act as heroic as the worker painted above him on the side of the train. Perhaps the train was the devil, after all. Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife? He was trembling like a horse, his eyes pleading. I forgive you.
“Now your parents,” the old woman told me. “Wherever they are. Your brothers and sisters, your friends.”
Was I dreaming this? “Goodbye, everyone.” Tears streamed down my face. “Goodbye…” Mama, Papa.
“Forgive them,” she commanded.
Mama? It won’t live. And Papa, with Arkady that night, playing right into his hands. “I can’t, I don’t know how.”
“Pray for guidance. Ask the Holy Mother to show you. Go on.”
Please, Holy Mother, help me to forgive them. Unbind me. I tried to remember when I had loved them most. Mama in her morning dress, arranging roses. Come help me, Marina. Brushing my hair with her soft ivory brush, rubbing my cheeks with a rose petal to make them rosy. Papa, letting me lace the links into his starched cuffs, teaching me to play chess on Sunday afternoons. Bringing the box home from the printers, my blue books, their gleaming gold leaf. Just the first of many, he’d said.
“I forgive you,” I whispered.
The comrades gathered around Genya, the politicals, the actors, side-glancing guiltily at him as he stood among them with his arms folded, his cap in his grip, under the rising sun of the Red October. His bright-painted train, his revolution. I forgave him. All of them. Kolya, Seryozha. Papa. Varvara, Genya. I could see the tears dripping down his sweet face.
Here was Slava, tucking my sheepskin roll next to me in the wagon, my boots and bast shoes, as if tucking my things into my grave. The sky was puffy with clouds. Goodbye, Genya. Goodbye.
The peasant slapped the reins and the sky began to move.
10 Angels and Devils
The dry rutted road stretched from horizon to horizon, my own Vladimirka. Though I sweated and shivered, dry mouthed, cramping, nauseated, I was grateful to be off the train and in the care of this straight-backed old woman. I lay across her knees as she rubbed my back. She wasn’t Avdokia, but far closer than a crowd of dumbfounded
actors and slogan-spouting Bolsheviks, not one of whom was acquainted with the bare facts of life. Maybe I’d have this baby right here in the wagon. I just was glad to be moving, grateful for the rocking of the cart, the slight breeze, the silent peasant, the grunting wheeze of the horse. I felt safe, safer than on the bright train of the Future, which, disappearing, already seemed unreal.
The pains came and went, and the midwife murmured prayers and pressed my back, resting her broad hand on my belly. I slept when I could. I dreamed of my mother. She was wrapped in a blue veil, with Ukashin at her side. What appears to be a straight line is only part of the larger form. Yes. I’d forgotten. I was in this wagon feeling its rhythmic jolts, but also in the nursery with Avdokia, getting ready for bed. And still under the snow halfway to Alekhovshchina. And watching flakes falling into the Catherine Canal from a white bed, where Kolya smoked a cigar. I was the old woman at my side, and also the child struggling to emerge from my feverish body. Perhaps I was also standing on the Finland shore, breathing the briny air, looking out over a swamp, and saying, This is where I will build my city.
Sometime later—an hour? A year?—we entered a village, trees passing overhead, the cries of chickens and children. The cart stopped. The midwife spoke to someone. Would we get out here? I peered over the side. A little hard-baked village, a red cow, women at the well. She told the peasant to drive on.
I groaned. “This isn’t it?” We’d been driving so long.
“A little farther. Almost there.” She patted my back.
We creaked over the deep ruts out the other end of the village, back into the buzzing green, the jammy scent of hot pine, branches intertwined above us, insects whirring, until we finally pulled up before an izba nestled deep in the trees like a witch’s hut. This tumbledown izba, half choked in vines. What was next, hen’s legs? Baba Yaga? Hut, turn and face me. A young woman waited for us there. She wore the same face as the midwife, and a blue sarafan and white embroidered blouse. She helped steady me as I climbed from the cart. So this was where I would have my child, wherever this was…Zhili-buili, once upon a time…I’d been transported back to when tsars won their kingdoms through valor, and horses had wings and firebirds made promises.
