The pre-delivery section consisted of a room with various pieces of apparatus and beds on which women were emitting bloodcurdling screams.
«How sad to die so young, so beautiful and so talented,» I thought to myself bitterly.
«Come on, woman, lie down properly on your back,» shouted a young man in a white coat.
«I can't. I've got vena cava syndrome. It's on my card.» I reported smartly in military style.
«There's no such thing in the human body. I'm the doctor here, not you. Lie down and let them put the wires on you.»
A young nurse began to attach wires all over me, with a metal plated strap on my forehead connected to a piece of apparatus.
«Here's the switch, woman. Right makes it stronger and left weaker. Understand?»
«No,» I said, understanding only that I would not be left to die in peace.
«When the pain starts turn it right and when it stops turn it left.»
I turned the switch and the electric current started up. My contorted pose, in which I was trying to look as if I was lying on my back, but in fact I wasn't, added an element of grotesque to the proceedings.
The duty doctor was turning over the pages of a detective story with a gory cover. The sight of someone reading a thriller on night duty would probably not have been disturbing in any other department. The assorted screeches and moans merged and multiplied in the high ceiling like the aurora borealis: the thin wails from the small Korean woman, the bass-like groans from the broadshouldered, long-legged blonde, the shrieks from the fat woman with a plait and the heart-rending moans from my neighbour, her forehead scorched from the painkilling electric current.
«You've got a heart of stone. How can your wife bear to live with you?» my neighbour began her dialogue with the doctor.
«Who do you think you are, woman? You're not the first to give birth or the last,» he said, rustling the pages of his book.
«You turd in trousers!» she howled. «What do you know about it? This is my third. If you menstruated once a year, you'd spend nine months preparing for it!»
«That's it,» said the doctor. «I've had enough.» He shut his book and walked out.
«Silly fool,» cried the long-legged blonde. «Why did you make him go? Who's going to deliver my baby now? You?»
«He wouldn't even notice unless you had it on his book!» retorted the other woman.
It was like a ship launched into space with women unable to call for help and incapable of helping themselves. The pain spiralled into a funnel, driving the ship forward to catastrophe. I emerged from a deep howl and a seared forehead, realizing post factum that both events concerned me. Attempting in vain to restrain the next howl, I forced myself not to turn the switch to maximum when the pain came; the lower half of my body separated from me and hovered under the ceiling, flapping the sheets like wings, while the upper half clung on to the bedstead, trying to focus between the agonizing pangs. Time lost all meaning, the room was swallowed up by semi-dusk and noise, and I bade farewell to all that was precious to me in this life.
There was a clatter of heels, and a young lady in glasses with a mask of disdain and fatigue on her plump face, snapped over me:
«Why are you giving birth in silence, woman? We've got to record all the data about your twins. Get on the trolley.»
My behaviour at that moment was anything but silent, yet the concept of discussion remained in the world I had left behind. I crawled onto the trolley like a crab and was barely conscious of the young lady attaching sensors to various parts of me in another room packed with monitors and rushing about amid the screens and notebooks to record the last few moments of my life.
Somehow I ended up on the delivery table by a window bathed in sunlight. The minute hand of the large clock showed nine twenty.
«There's no one around because it's in between shifts,» said the woman on the next delivery table in a gentle voice. It was as quiet as a morgue. You could hear the birds twittering like mad outside.
Two elderly women came into the room, walked up to me and gave a yell that brought all the staff rushing in. With total indifference I heard them say that I should have been delivered an hour ago, that I was torn to pieces, that goodness only knew what I would give birth to now and that they could all get the sack over this.
«Don't worry, everything will be fine? What's your name?» asked an elderly woman, turning me on to my back and almost lying on top of me. Having been called nothing but «woman» for the last few months and because I just hadn't the strength to tell her that I had been categorically forbidden to lie on my back, and because I was sure this was the long-awaited day of judgement, which would put an end to all my misery, I replied with a tongue like cotton wooclass="underline"
«My name is woman,» and promptly passed out.
I opened my eyes in a cloud of smelling salts to see an incredibly large, black-haired, howling baby.
«Isn't he lovely?» the women gushed.
«Can I touch him?» I asked. They brought him over to me and I touched him timidly. He seemed as hot as a pie fresh from the oven.
«Don't relax. We've got to deliver the other one now. He's very active. He's already gulped too much of your amniotic fluid,» said the elderly woman.
«Can't I have a rest?»
«No, we've only got a few minutes. Quick, give her a drip in her arms and legs!» And a whole battalion of midwives, who had materialized from nowhere, began to insert the drips into my extremities, chattering non-stop as they did so. Another five minutes and I saw the second baby who howled even louder than the first as they slapped him.
«Is that one mine too?» I gasped like an idiot.
«Of course it is,» the nurse replied, unwinding the drip. «And thank your lucky stars that Professor Sidelnikova happened to come in, or you wouldn't have seen either of them.»
Then followed a tatty, unheated corridor, where my neighbour and I lay on trolleys for two hours with our bellies like deflated balloons as we studied the ornate moulding on the ceiling.
«Is anyone looking after them, do you think? Or have they been left like we have?» I asked.
«They'll never tell us,» my neighbour said gloomily.
«Mind you don't go to sleep, women!» everyone shouted at us as they passed by.
«Why don't they take us into the ward?» we asked them weakly.
«You must stay awake for two hours, so you catch internal bleeding if there is one. The bedside nurses here are only for foreigners.»
«But it's cold out here!»
«That's so you don't go to sleep.»
Two hours later I was on the operating table.
«Are you allergic to anaesthetic? It will take me an hour to sew this up, you're all in tatters,» said a cheerful young man in a green coat.
«I can stand it,» I replied and finally passed out under the mask.
«Tell your husband he owes me a bottle of wine. I did a good job on you. You're just as good as new now. Only why did he bring you here so late to have your twins? You won't be able to sit down for six months after this,» he said an hour later.
«He brought me here a month ago…»
«All right. We're only human too. What's your job?»
«I'm a student.»
«What of?»
«Philosophy.»
He was about to say that philosophers were only human as well, but thought better of it and said instead:
«Well, take it philosophically then.»
That must have been the last straw, because all my pent-up emotions burst out in a fit of sobbing.
«Calm down, calm down…» said the doctor anxiously, pinning me to the table and glancing into the other room where there should have been a nurse on duty. «If you cry like that all your stitches will come out and I'll have to spend another hour sewing you up again! And everything's fine. You've got two lovely boys! So what are you crying about, sweetheart?» He put a couple of shots into the syringe one after the other and shouted into the corridor. «Lena, Lida, where the blazes are you?» then started plunging syringes into my arm, which already felt like a pincushion. Then everything around me began to swim: the blinding light bulbs, the nurses who had turned up at last, and the green walls. And in the dizzy haze of this medical cocktail I saw myself running naked along the unheated corridor of the Institute of Gynaecology past lines of doctors who were spitting and throwing earth at me towards an open lighted door, while I tried to cover my big belly with my hands…