«But how can you massage yourself there if you're lying on your back?» I asked.
«I don't know. That's what we were taught.»
My pregnancy was not an easy one. Each day I felt sick until noon. I snapped at people like a soldier just back from the war and read the classics to make the baby an intellectual. The classics turned out to be full of horror stories, however, and whatever I started reading someone was sure to die in childbirth after a while. The young gynaecologist got used to me and began to shout at me, copying the behaviour of his seniors.
«You should know better than that, woman. Look how you're putting on weight! You must keep right off salt. Not a gram a day! What have you eaten today?»
«Bananas and a box of tooth powder,» I confessed.
«How do you eat that? Do you mix it with water?» he enquired gravely.
«No, just as it is, with a teaspoon.»
«But that can't taste very nice,» he objected.
«I used to think so too, before I got pregnant.»
«I'm going to put you in hospital. Mortality among pregnant women is very high in this country.»
«But why me?»
«You've got an excess of water in your body, woman. What do you think the baby will be like? There won't be any baby. Your baby's drowning in water!»
After the visits to the clinic I cried my heart out all night, then decided that the less I saw of the doctor, the healthier my baby would be. But the gynaecologist was one of the dedicated kind. With the fervour of a neophyte he sought me out at home, lying in wait in the yard. One day he met me and my husband in the street. We hurriedly crossed to the other side, but he shouted after us across the road:
«You've got oedema and high blood pressure, woman! If you don't go into hospital tomorrow you'll die in childbirth! Mark my words, woman! If anything happens to you, they'll take away my diploma, and there aren't enough gynaecologists as it is.»
That night, after this encounter, I nearly had a miscarriage. The ambulance arrived and an elderly doctor gave me a few injections, took one look at my haggard face with the unnaturally large eyes and at my swollen belly criss-crossed with red and blue veins like a globe of the world and sticking out half a mile from my nineteen-year-old body, and said:
«Tell your husband to give the gynaecologist a good thump next time he appears with his predictions or he'll turn you and a lot of other women into cripples. And use all the pull you have to get tested for twins. I'd say you've got two in there.»
In those days the only place where you could get ultra-sonic tests was the Institute of Gynaecology. Mother found an entr-e. Some bright young lads in white coats rubbed my stomach with a jelly-like substance, then passed a sensor over it and showed me two infants of impressive proportions on the monitor.
I was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. Up till then all my logical attempts to feel the living creature inside me had failed. I understood that I was pregnant, that this would result in the appearance of a small creature and that I would be its mother, but only as separate facts. My mind was not capable of organizing these facts into cause and effect. My country's culture had not prepared me for this. «You're a girl and one day you'll be a mother, so you mustn't…» and then followed a whole string of unfair restrictions. «One wrong step and that will be the end of you.» I had heard that ever since I could remember, as often and with the same degree of disbelief as the statement that military service was the noble duty of each and every citizen. «I'm your mother,» mother used to shout, using this to justify all sorts of unfair punishments. The whole country was full of iron-willed, stony-faced mothers, their prototypes brawled in queues, complained about their drunkard husbands, gladly abandoned their children to the mercy of nurseries, hospitals, summer camps and schools, and I had no desire to swell their ranks.
The kitchen-sink image of motherhood had not taken root in my brain. The conversion from a bohemian university student to the mother of twins seemed beyond my capabilities. Actually, I could not concentrate on it, because the frontline for physical survival lay in gynaecological consulting rooms.
They got me into hospital in the end. The pathological pregnancy department was in a building on the verge of collapse. There was no hot water and only one toilet for the whole floor, with a long line of pale-faced women queuing outside it, clutching their bellies. The ward had some thirty beds. To save space there was only one locker for two beds. The atmosphere was certainly not conducive to the birth of healthy progeny. If one pathologically pregnant woman could create an aura of hysteria around her, just multiply that by thirty. The civil wars over whether or not to open the window in a heat wave ended with the advent of a nurse to inject all the participants with tranquillisers. And the «Thousand and One Nights» were more like the horror stories after «lights out» at summer camp about maniacs, vampires and walking corpses. The role of ghouls here, however, was played by ignorant gynaecologists, drunken husbands, mean bosses and heartless mothers-in-law. Nourished on the culture of the university set, I was trying to become my own adult woman here while imbibing all sorts of nonsense useful for psychologists and historians, but fatal for a young mother-to-be.
«Planned caesarian,» grunted a heavy-shouldered woman doctor, poking me with her finger as she did the rounds, one of the uncouth breed that are in charge of greengrocers or gynaecology departments, and walked on.
«Why a caesarian?» I shouted, running after her, because she happened to be in charge of the gynaecology department.
«Surely you know why, woman!» She looked surprised, but went on walking. «Measure your hips and think about it. No child could get through such a narrow pelvis, woman. They need more room than that. You'd give them a terrible time and kill yourself into the bargain. I'm going to write 'caesarian' on your card in big red letters, so they can't miss it. You may not come to me for the birth.»
«You bet I won't.»
«And what's so bad about my department,» she said huffily.
«Yesterday a woman went into labour and the nurse told her to wait because there were only two tables and they were both occupied.»
«So what?» the doctor said. «What difference did it make? She yelled a bit in the ward. My mother gave birth to me in a hay field. She was mowing and had me on the spot.»
«I'd prefer a bit more comfort than that.»
«Then send a telegram to Brezhnev saying you're someone special. Maybe he'll let you give birth on his nice big office desk. I do too much as it is for my miserable wage.»
An all-ward discussion decided that a caesarian was much better than the usual method, firstly, because you felt no pain and, secondly, because the doctor was there all the time, whereas if it wasn't a caesarian you might have to hunt high and low for one. We were entertained by the whole repertoire of stories from twenty-nine fevered minds about death or other horrors from a caesarian. And when everyone finally calmed down and began snuffling and snoring, I lay in the darkness, weeping into my pillow with my head twisting the Rubik cube of what awaited me. I was very attracted by the idea of a general anaesthetic, of course, and waking up to find two lovely babies wrapped round with silk ribbons. But being a bookworm I had studied a pile of books on the subject and discovered, inter alia, that the vegeto-vascular system of children born by a caesarian was not so adaptable to changes in pressure.
It had been drummed into my head by all and sundry that in the sphere of childbirth I was totally incompetent, and that all Soviet women with broad hips gave birth cheerfully to a single child on the hay, in bed, in a lift, at the workbench or at the steel furnace, and only I, a degenerate bohemian, was not only pregnant with two at once, but also had a rhesus problem, oedema, a narrow pelvis and quite unfounded claims.