That same week as Enright's letter my mother acquired the inheritance, having disposed of the dacha and English Plus’s liquid assets. Two-thirds she kept and wired me the remainder. Upon receipt I made a speculative call to the Victorian Taxi Directorate – my visa permitted full-time work in holiday periods. The funds would cover the start-up costs, chiefly registration, insurance and testing my street knowledge. I spent four solid days poring over Melbourne’s byways – akin to memorising capillaries – but the effort paid off. The examiner whistled admiration. ‘Ninety-eight out of a hundred, that’s got to be a first, and I mean locals too.’
Launched onto the street, the Camry divines my every impulse, symbiotic anticipation. Nocturnal Melbourne, neon loops and striations, winks alive over its drab daytime skin. I pass St Vincent’s Hospital, its entrance white lozenges backlit orange, missing steps to a missing monument. Delivering babies as my wife and unborn son sleep at home.
We went to the obstetrics department last week for Anna’s ultrasound. Soporific mid-morning hung over the waiting room. A television mounted on the wall beamed silent chat show conversation. Anna perused women’s magazine covers with headlines like PRINCESS DI TELLS: OUR OBSESSION WITH HER IMAGE. IS SHE A BITCH OR JUST PREMENSTRUAL? Posters of chuckling babies banished death and suffering to other wards. Five other women sat in bucket seats. One let loose a rippling, bubbling, purring fart with a loud climax, then theatrically embarrassed, wagged her finger as if at the miscreant. All suppressed giggles. Female bonding – the simplest formula there is, I mused. Put two or more pregnant women in a room, wait ten seconds. Works best when males are absent or at least inconspicuous.
Crisp reassuring sounds came from the adjoining room – brisk pats and prolonged handwashing. The sonographer appeared. ‘I’m Sue.’ Short silvering hair mussed under her sterile cap, she led us through. While Anna undressed behind a plastic curtain I took a chair beneath a giant steel tube that herniated the ceiling. In patient smock and undergarments, Anna heaved her paunch onto the examination table and assumed a recumbent birth posture before a large screen.
Sue smeared clear gel over Anna’s abdomen from the silver nozzle of a tube, keeping up a jokey patter while instructing Anna to turn this way and that, asking questions which Anna answered in mostly competent English.
Two broken lines ran from centre screen to each lower corner; white filled the space within. ‘Amniota,’ said Sue. ‘We’re getting warm… see the head?’ She gestured to a white globe. ‘Pointing down. A good sign. Now look directly above.’ A waving appendage, gushing grey. ‘Sorry Mum. Couldn’t hold on. One healthy fellow on the way. I must warn that ultrasounds aren’t one hundred per cent reliable. Sometimes the boys get stage fright and turn their backs, next thing you know Mum and Dad go painting the bedroom pink – but if that’s not a willy call me Pete. Training for Sydney 2000 if you don’t mind.’
Sue’s sleeve slid up her arm, revealing a wristwatch. While she re-buttoned it I scrawled notes on my pad, ending with 3.15 PM НИКОЛАЙ ЖИВ! When she glanced around I wrote the English, held it up: NIKOLAI IS ALIVE! She gave me a double thumbs-up.
Nikolai tadpole-kicked sideways, out of focus. Sue fiddled with the controls – again that obscene sugar-ant cranium. Legs hard against chest, finger or fingers or hand jammed in mouth, he executed a slow forward roll. My heart clutched.
‘I hope he will be a ballet dancer one day. But of course, ballet is not an Olympic event.’
I doubted Sue caught Anna’s wistful inflection, which her plodding phrasing all but neutralized.
‘Do you have any names picked out?’
‘Nadia for girl,” Anna replied. ‘Word for hope.’
‘Much hoped for, I’m sure. Keep it up your sleeve. Like I said I’ve been caught out before. Nadia as in Comaneci? Moscow 1980, yeah? I was glued to the telly for a week, me and ten million others. Wasn’t she something? What couldn’t she do?’
‘Yes!’ Anna beamed. ‘Our greatest…’
‘Gymnast,’ I prompted.
‘And for a boy?
‘Nikolai.’ Anna’s voice dropped half an octave.
‘Lovely. Does it have a particular meaning?’
‘It means…’ Again she faltered, turned to me.
‘In the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikolai is the patron saint of miracles, and Russia’s national saviour. Also the name of two of our dead Tsars – kings as you would say – including our last one murdered by the communists. Nikolai has for us Russians many significances,’ I added, redundantly perhaps, and squeezed Anna’s hand. She mustered a sideways smile.
Nikolai hovered on the edge of the screen.
‘Hey parents! He heard the curtain call. Born performer this bloke. You could ramp up your excitement a bit.’ She led a round of applause.
Nikolai disappeared altogether.
‘Time’s nearly up. Seen enough for today?’ Taking silence for assent, Sue turned off the monitor. ‘We’ll book an encore in a couple of months.’
My preview of fatherhood ended, solipsistic as a home movie. A passing unmourned – Nikolai the Perfect to flesh and blood Nikolai.
‘So everything is normal?’ Anna asked.
Sue screwed up the left side of her face – a quintessentially Australian, that is to say optimist’s gesture, gathering up all foreboding then expelling it in winks and nods. ‘Far as I can tell. We can’t screen for everything but all the vitals – heart rate, foetal size and shape, limb development – are around the mark.’
I plant my foot in remembered elation, shoot through amber lights at Swanston Street intersection. Forgiving as ever, the Camry absorbs the thrust. Anna’s discontent, that grit in my sole, will work itself loose. We don’t so much solve our problems as dislodge them. Doesn’t every successful marriage endure a stage of pure power struggle? To not join the battle is to fail us both.
Her two-thirds-full wine glass a fisted weapon as we face off across the dinner table, candlelight and pristine white tablecloth faux intimacy. One glass a fortnight – that I know about – is hardly bacchanalian. The point I labour is that with our (her) history, moderation is excess.
‘I’m allowed some pleasures, aren’t I?’ she snarled when I first broached the subject at the start of her fifth month.
‘Pleasure! That’s rich. Who’s missing out here? Who kicked who onto the divan?’ Fuel to the fire. I held my tongue.
All week I sifted each word I want to say…
‘You know, Anna’ – perfect opening gambit, brooking no demur – ‘back when Australia was a smudge on the atlas, during our toughest times I often imagined us thrown together in a strange country, no language, not even a roadmap. And here we are, only better equipped – guess what? Hello again stranger. Orbiting satellites beaming missives back and forth. Doesn’t it make you wish for the bad old days?’
…but I didn’t.
The usual funk, reproachful glance to her midriff – ah, Nikolai you old standby, salt and balm to our marital wounds. Disarmed, she lowers the glass to the table, pushes it my way. Sanctimony aside, we’re quits.
Pregnancy is supposed to enlarge body and spirit. Hers resembles a metamorphosis in reverse. Involuntary celibacy within marriage surely comes with a warranty clause. Withholding sex, once her guerrilla strike, over four months becomes a weapon of attrition. And she wonders why I am never home except to sleep.
Yes, taxi driving suits me (or I suit the job, a murkier proposition). My happy mix of several forgotten or unsuspected minor talents: photographic memory for maps, innate compass (Anna snidely informs me that a nascent technology, Global Positioning Systems or GPS, will within a decade render this obsolete), prodigious concentration once I’m committed to the task. Knowing how far to push my luck as the master ingredient. Taxi driving is a scavenging profession (is profession too dignifying a word?). One has to be where the scraps fall. Let others jockey for pole place at Flinders Street Station. I forage lower down the food chain – if there is hierarchy in this most democratic of occupations.