«What sort of job is that, being a philosopher? Where do they work, philosophers? What sort of family is that, a singer and a philosopher? Never heard of anything like it!»
«That's just what I say,» mother echoed. «She should have done medicine or law.»
«I'll refer her for an abortion,» the doctor concluded.
«An abortion, of course,» mother sang. «They're much too young.»
«You can say that again.» Barely rinsing her hands, the woman immersed herself in the epistolary act.
«Graduate first, then get pregnant,» mother announced solemnly, as if someone had asked her what order to do things in, and as if she had ever taken the trouble to enlighten me on the subject of contraception.
«Their heads are too full of having a good time to know what's what,» the woman sighed.
«It's funny she didn't try to persuade me to have it,» I said when we got outside.
«She's had fifteen abortions herself,» mother informed me.
The idea that a pregnant girl of eighteen about to marry the man she loved should actually have the child had never entered my head. The heights of philosophical thought were more tempting than the kitchen sink scenario associated with motherhood as a student. Just as thoughts of continuing the family tree never occurred to my boyfriend or my mother. My boyfriend felt guilty, depressed and confused, of course; but professional ambitions combined with the infantilism nourished by our over-protective mothers united us into a couple unsuitable for reproduction.
Next day I plaited my hair and took my place in the queue, wearing a baggy hospital dressing gown. The subdued women waiting for their turn to go into the operating theatre, the shouts of the current victim inside, who was then led out, with the concomitant mise-en-scene… She staggering and the nurses trying to prop her up against the wall, shouting:
«Hurry up, you're not the only one, woman! There's a whole queue of them waiting. Get into the ward and put the pad under you properly. You're bleeding and there's no one to wipe it up! You don't fancy working here as a cleaner, do you?»
The usual production line: the waiting women, glancing at their watches to work out what household chores they would have time for today apart from an abortion; the tired, bitchy nurses; the screams from behind the closed door. The facial expressions suggested that everything was following its due course, the adults were doing their usual adult jobs, and only I, an infantile idiot, viewed the whole thing in a tragic light.
«Do they give you an anaesthetic?» I asked a fat, middle-aged woman, doing my best to make my voice sound natural.
«You must be joking,» she replied with a loud yawn.
«Why not?» I asked in a panic.
«Think yourself lucky if you get a novocaine injection.» The woman stared at me, saw everything about me, and turned away in disgust. «Just out of nappies and she turns up here!»
«But why are they screaming if they've been given an injection?» I turned to a young woman in dangling earrings.
«Because novocaine doesn't work on everyone,» she smiled. «Stop analyzing and just count elephants.»
«What elephants?» I asked desperately, sensing my total ignorance and unworthiness to be sitting in the same queue as these older, experienced women.
«Well, you know when you're trying to get to sleep you count elephants: one elephant plus another elephant makes two, two elephants plus another elephant makes three, and so on. When you get up to a thousand elephants, the abortion will be over, unless there are complications, of course.»
At the twenty-seventh elephant I heard my name called out.
«How old are you, lassy?» The question came from an elderly Armenian in a short-sleeved white coat, his powerful arms crossed on a hairy chest in the operation room.
«Eighteen.»
«This your first abortion?»
«Yes.»
«Doesn't he want to get married?»
«Yes, he does, but having children doesn't go with a career,» I babbled, trying to gain time.
«Do you have a mother?»
«Yes.»
«What does she do?»
«She's a doctor.»
«……!» He cursed for a long time in Armenian. «I won't give you a scrape today. First abortions often end in infertility. You've got the night to think it over. I want you to think hard.»
I gave him a look of doglike gratitude and said:
«Alright, I'll think it over. And I'm allergic to novocaine.» This was a clever lie, which mother had taught me, instead of telling me about contraception. «I can only have a general anaesthetic.»
«We don't give general anaesthetics here, but since you have listened to me and agreed to think it over, I'll have a word with an anaesthetist in another department.»
I rushed out of the operation room, radiant, followed by heavy, painful glances from the queue. I was not thinking of anything, of course, except that with a general anaesthetic I would not see or hear anything. I was just a moral illiterate who saw the value of the life I was about to destroy solely in terms of my own physical discomfort. But I did this in the company of people who had taught me that this was «right» and I was ready to share the responsibility with them.
«So you decided to come back?» said the Armenian coldly.
«Yes,» I muttered.
«Well, now it's up to you. Yesterday it was on my conscience, but today it's on yours.»
I don't remember anything else, except that later my fianc-came into the ward and we kissed and walked in the rain, without thinking that a chill could be dangerous in my condition. Because the worst was over, and now we could prepare for the wedding, and have fun, and go out for a drink on the money we had been sent as wedding presents. We could love each other and try each other out as partners in what was called married life, but at root it was the adolescent's delight at the freedom from parents. It was as if for the right to get married I'd paid that man in a white coat, called a gynaecologist, who guards the entrance to adulthood.
«Pregnant again?» I was asked sternly a few months later by the same battleaxe in the same clinic, in the same presence of mother in the white coat that gave her the right to get in every doctor's office without queuing. «Toxicosis and rhesus negative. I'll refer her for an abortion.»
«There's no need,» I said quietly, but firmly.
«So what are you planning to do?»
«Have the baby.»
«You what!» The woman was so astonished you would have thought I was a man. «And with you so thin and pale and your low haemoglobin, what sort of baby will you have for me?»
«I'm having it for myself, not for you,» I was about to say, but mother, realizing that I had outgrown my fear of gynaecologists and was about to retaliate for the past, present and future, began ingratiatingly:
«She's decided to have it and that's that. I'd like her to be under you. Our district doctor's just a boy, a student.»
«And he'll die a student too, the duffer. Doesn't know how to get into a woman. Can't think how he gave his wife a child,» she replied. «But regulations are regulations. He's the one she should go to.»
The young gynaecologist looked only slightly older than me. We were embarrassed as two Young Pioneers who had been punished by being made to stand in the corner with no clothes on.
«Becoming a mother is a very responsible step,» he said, flushing deeply and filling in the medical card with his big, childish writing.
«Okay,» I said.
«Has anyone else examined you? In that case I won't.»
«Okay,» I said.
«Here's your referral for tests. Don't you feel well? Here's a sick leave certificate.»
«Okay,» I said.
«I'm giving a talk on Friday for women expecting their first baby. It's nothing special. The only thing is, when the labour pains start you must massage yourself here.» He pulled up his white coat, turned his back to me and began pounding his jeans in the region of the coccyx with his powerful fists.