I gaze up at the satellite saucers perched on rooftops, all week beaming footage of Germans hacking the Berlin Wall to rubble – one year on. Snow stings my nose. We approach Paveletskaya Metro Station, a dim illuminated M mounted on the low entrance. A crowd mills around the swinging doors. We hold hands to avoid separation as it heaves us towards the escalators. Lamps light a descent otherwise black and bottomless as a coal shaft. The escalators flatten out, discharging us onto the platform.
Boarding the train to a scratchy loudspeaker announcement – Watch out for the closing doors. Next station is Avtozavodskaya – we wedge in a corner of the carriage. The train roars out of the tunnel and hurtles towards the bridge over the Moscow River. Floes drift towards the shallows, grey sediment churning in their wake. Our carriage sways then slows. Avtozavodskaya. Dear passengers, when alighting please do not forget your things.
We disembark and ride the up-escalators. People surge by on our left as the red-faced woman in the supervision booth screams ‘Keep right’ into a failing microphone.
Outside, in a small park trodden to sludge is a foodstuffs market. Swarthy refugees from the Caucasus squat beside polished scales, tomatoes arrayed in plump pyramids, pails of cucumbers trucked in from Voskresensky. A hubbub of passersby comes to cluck at the outrageous prices and chide them as spekulanty. One woman stands on tiptoe and waves both arms in the air, miming runaway inflation. The young stallholder gives a wan smile, grimy palms turned out in a gesture of resignation. Corduroy jacket crumpled, trouser cuffs flapping in the breeze, he looks anything but a sleek profiteer. Any day the city police will arrive to smash his stall, haul him off to the watch house, and deport him back to Chechnya at his own expense. High prices are a kind of down payment, pre-emptive strike.
The entrance to State Women’s Polyclinic No. 13 is two steps below street level, doorway grill hosed clean. Slimy boot marks, like a breakout of eels, squiggle across the parquetry. Astringent hospital smells, zealous applications of ammonia or carbolic acid or both, drift from intersecting corridors. Orderlies wheeling trolleys pursue medicos with wooden clipboards. Anna sees a different doctor each month but they all wear stained gowns and an air of twitchy fatigue. She approaches the receptionist who glances up from her typewriter, tears our appointment slip in two and points us towards some unoccupied wooden chairs.
Despite the buttock-chilling seats, Anna’s forehead is shiny with sweat. Edging closer I take off her glove and begin massaging her palm. Her brittle jauntiness is at once an attempt to ward off despair and her signal for me to swallow my hurt. Even at her lowest ebb she does not need my solace. Now is no time to blunder into the trespassers-will-be-prosecuted realm of our marriage.
A doctor, younger than the others, auburn ringlets straying from a bun, pauses at the front desk. The ECG chart under her arm shows violent oscillations trailing away to a flat red line. After a brief heads-together conversation with the receptionist she turns towards us.
‘Anna Anatolyevna Kurguzikova?’
I barely have time to squeeze Anna’s hand for luck before she stands and follows the doctor to a curtained cubicle.
I count heads inside the waiting room. I’m on nodding terms with most of the regular patients whose husbands and boyfriends have dropped away over the months. Four head-scarved veterans of obstetrics wards wait to escort daughters home. The usual twenty or so teenage victims of state-issue condoms that burst and split like figs, sitting with legs crossed in penitence, hoping peritonitis will not be the price this time. One shot Anna a glare for jumping the queue. The clinic accords higher priority to terminating misbegotten lives than helping infertile couples to conceive. Not by much – with each visit it is getting harder to say which is the bigger epidemic.
But today is definitive. A prognosis will ensue. Last month’s specialist gave us a longer than usual corridor explanation during which she mentioned the dreaded word endometriosis three times. Over three years I have become conversant with the most common gynaecological disorders and the admission that endometriosis is only now being seriously investigated doesn’t bear contemplation. I don’t – can’t – remember what today’s examination entails. For all the specialists’ skill and gentleness, the procedures are too close to rape; state-sponsored rape at that. Once again I wish my sperm count is anything other than healthy and undiminished.
Needing distraction, my gaze settles on the poster above the receptionist’s desk. It has hung there since we began attending the clinic, but some patriotic element within the hospital administration recently ordered it reframed in brass. Acquiring lustre as the parquetry fades and mildew creeps up the walls, a woman, blonde curls peeping out from a cap, wearing twilled blue serge cut broad across the shoulders, stands before a relief map of the USSR, its rivers and floodplains aqua wrinkles on pink. She carries a bundle the size and shape of a baby. Neither flesh nor features are visible. What disturbs me most, even more than the Order of Lenin adorning her breast – red ribbon with gold trim, medallion, hammer, sickle, wheat panicles and red star framing the leader’s face – is the absence of self-absorbed radiance I associate with young mothers. Instead, staring straight ahead she holds the child at arms’ length, in propitiation.
A wall heater throbs into life. Dusk shadows fall across the room. With winter encroaching I can tell the time by their crisp edges. Every now and again the receptionist draws herself upright, and – with the élan of a conservatory soloist – punches out a sentence, manual carriage squealing back into lock. The curtain creaks open and the auburn-haired doctor emerges. Her bun will surely unravel by shift end.
‘Vassili Sergeyevich?’
I already prefer her to the others. She looks less defeated or crushed under absurd case loads. The respectful patronymic settles the matter. To older staff I am a snarled Kurguzikov. If, that is, they deign to address a male interloper.
With a toss of her head she motions me inside the cubicle. Anna, naked except for a wraparound gown, lies over a rubber sheet, both knees protruding over the side of the trolley. When I bend over the pillow she opens her eyes and glares at me with such hostility I recoil. Propping herself on one elbow, she turns to the doctor. ‘Could you please give us a minute?’ She swallows as though the sedative has dried out her mouth.
I slide the curtain around, prop on the edge of the bed, reach across. She clamps hands to cheeks, rolls into foetal position. ‘Milaya, why so hopeless? So your cycle’s out of rhythm. Doesn’t every woman get that at some point? Didn’t the specialist two months ago tell us it is a self-correcting fluctuation common at your age? Next month it’ll be something else. It doesn’t have to mean infertility.’
‘This time it’s different,’ she wails. ‘Something’s not right – I know my own body.’
‘I understand.’ I have ready the usual bromides. That it is only natural to fear the worst, still we should guard against self-fulfilling despair. Given Moscow’s ravaged ecology it isn’t unusual for couples to wait twelve months or longer to conceive, it doesn’t have to mean early menopause… but she doesn’t let me finish.