The brusque Igor Olegovich probed the surface of her belly, then put on a glove and poked his iron finger into her soft, fleshy depths. He told Liza to come back when the labor pains were so intense that she wanted to “tear the radiator from the wall.” Besides, according to the calendar, she wasn’t due until the 9th, and disturbing doctors without good reason was bad manners.
Liza meekly submitted to his orders. Her pregnancy had so softened her that she held her tongue, and didn’t respond with the kind of reply the doctor deserved. To be honest, the labor pains had stopped of their own accord. Tired out by the expectations and the results of the false alarm, the couple slowly wended their way along the banks of the Moscow River. They were both thinking only about the upcoming events, but they talked about everything else except that.
“It’s nice when a city has a lot of water. The windows of my favorite apartment in New York faced the East River. There were three of us renting it, and each of us had our own little room. But I was the only one with a view of the river. And I liked Staten Island a lot, too. There’s so little water in Moscow. In New York, I always tried to live close to the water.”
“Tell me about it,” Liza said.
“Ask Nora. She loves telling people how she came to see me in about ’94 or ’95. I don’t remember exactly. I was living in my first apartment. Not alone—with a whole group of people. There was a black guy who played sax; an English girl, the granddaughter of some famous writer, either Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark, I don’t remember. The place was so trashed that it took Nora two days just to clean the kitchen. And after that she threw out four garbage bags of rubbish from my room alone. She never said a word. Well, she asked only one question: ‘Yurik, how did you end up with two left shoes, both of them worn out?’”
“Yes, Nora’s amazing, of course. I would have raised such a stink if I had been in her place!”
“No, that’s not her style.”
“Were you already hooked by then?”
“No. Just a bit. But not like later. I mean, I didn’t realize I was already hooked yet. I thought I was just experimenting. Nora was staying at her friend’s house in Manhattan, a wonderful lady. I borrowed money from her the first year. I tried to pay it back, but I didn’t always manage. Her nickname was Chipa. I forget her real name. She had a window that overlooked the water, too—a view of the Hudson. I tried so hard to throw away that piece of my life that it seems I’ve even forgotten what I never intended to forget.”
A taxi approached, and Yurik pulled Liza into the back seat. They went home and started waiting until January 9, which they referred to as “Day X.” On the morning of the 9th, Liza called the doctor and asked whether it was now time to give birth. The doctor casually told her to wait another week.
“Doctor,” Liza said, “I’ve had labor pains for a whole week. I mean, they’re not evenly spaced, true; they come and go, sometimes often, sometimes less so. But they’re absolutely real. Shouldn’t we do an ultrasound, at least, to see what the little one is up to in there?”
“Fine. Go pay to have an ultrasound, if you so desire,” the brusque doctor said.
They traveled to the outskirts of the city for the ultrasound, and sat waiting their turn for an hour. A woman with greasy hair examined the sonogram and diagnosed a double nuchal cord. Liza’s spirits sank; she felt she had run out of strength. The children whined all evening, squabbled, and howled before bed in two-part harmony. Yurik picked up his guitar to play, but even this tried-and-true calmative was ineffectual.
In the evening, Pasha, Liza’s former lover, called and asked whether they needed his help. They certainly did. Their angel-nanny Victoria had come down with the flu and gone away to stay with her relatives for several days to convalesce. Pasha came over an hour later. The children clambered all over him. Yurik, with whom they had long been on the best of terms, asked Pasha to put them to bed for him, and he sat with Liza. She just wanted everything to be over as soon as possible, and she drank some sedative—to keep from crying, and to keep from thinking about anything. The sedative had very little effect on the labor pains, and she simply couldn’t sleep. Toward six in the morning, Liza made the decision that it was time to give birth. Immediately. Yurik tried to joke: “Are you thinking about the radiator?”
But the labor pains, which were not evenly spaced but coming as nature deemed fit, now turned into one long corridor of pain. Pasha was sleeping in the nursery, on a cot. At a quarter to seven, Liza and Yurik closed the door quietly behind them and got into a taxi. Two traffic lights later, Liza realized that the baby was on the way. At just after seven, they arrived at the maternity hospital. The entrance gate was closed. The guard’s booth looked deserted. There was no time to see whether the guard was inside. It was easier to go on foot to the reception desk.
Liza climbed out of the taxi and stepped right into an icy puddle. But she was unable to walk. Not a single step. Everything was like in a bad movie, the only difference being that it was impossible to slow it down or stop it. Standing nearly up to her knees in the icy puddle, Liza gripped the handle of the taxi door tightly; the taxi driver shouted that it was time for him to leave and that they needed to pay up immediately. Uncoupling herself from the door with difficulty, Liza gave Yurik precise instructions about what to do next: “Run to the reception desk and tell them that you need a doctor and a gurney—your wife is having a baby. Tell them I’ve gone into labor!”
Yurik hadn’t experienced such fear, and such a complete break with reality, since his dangerous narcotic trips. Nevertheless, he behaved very reasonably. Nearby, a small, frightened Tajik streetcleaner was trying to break up the ice on the frozen sidewalk with a crowbar. Yurik grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and said to him sternly, “Hold her up.” And he ran off to the reception desk.
The Tajik knew only two words in Russian that might be appropriate in this situation: “girl,” and “fuuuuuck…”
“Girl, fuuuuuuck,” he said to Liza, stroking her back.
Liza leaned against the crowbar, which in some unknown way had ended up in her hands. The pain, which had already been powerful, now overmastered her, so that nothing was left of her but pain. At that moment, she seemed to turn into an animal, operating only on instinct. And her instinct told her: lie down and give birth.
Liza threw her coat off onto the snow and said firmly to the Tajik, “Right now!” And she got down on all fours.
“Girl … fuuuuuck…” the Tajik whispered. Crouching down beside her on his haunches, he began praying, quietly and rapidly. Then Yurik came back.
“Liza! Liza, wait—they’re on their way. Stand up—what are you doing?” he cried in horror.
This was the most terrifying scene he had ever witnessed in his life. He bent over to help his wife up, but when he saw her up close, her teeth bared, he started reeling. At that moment, a blonde woman in a faded green lab coat ran up to them.
“Stand up. Come on, try to stand up,” she said.
Liza answered her with a sound that resembled “RRRuunnhhh.”
“Come on, now, stand up,” the midwife commanded, and tried to lift Liza up by her shoulders.
“I won’t make it,” Liza insisted.
The midwife let her go, and thrust her hand into Liza’s trousers, where she fished around, and, simultaneously with the Tajik, said, “Fuuuuck…” Then she added: “Totally fucked.”
Then, for some reason, they all got distracted and looked over at the guard’s booth. Meanwhile, the baby made one last sprint for the finish.