It was so unusual to see my mother at the school. For others it was a customary occurrence because parents still came to get their children – because of the dark road and the graveyard, which frightened us. I pictured how it would be if she was waiting for me, for her daughter. It was a good feeling. My mother is different. But she is my mother and she’s waiting for me after school. The teacher was saying something about monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, but out there by the flower-beds my mother stood waiting for me.
The bell rang. A happy stream of students flowed out of school, ready to fall into their parents’ embraces and go home to warm dinners. My mother and I didn’t know how to behave. I went up to her, put my arms around her, the way the others did, and for a brief while we stood like that. Then I took her by the hand and led her inside. The corridors were empty, the cafeteria tidied but still saturated with the smell of milk. The teacher’s office was past the cafeteria. She asked my mother to come in and told me to wait outside. I might as well have gone in too, because the acoustics in the empty spaces carried almost every word the teacher said to my ears.
‘Have you noticed her dislike of milk?’
‘We don’t have milk at home.’
‘But it’s necessary for a growing child’s organism. In school she manages to pour out her daily glass of milk, or give it to a classmate or gulp it down then run to the toilet. Does that seem normal to you?’
‘Maybe she has an allergy to milk.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. You’re a doctor. Is there such a thing as an allergy to milk, the healthiest and most noble of foods? Do you not, as a mother, fear that without milk she might not develop fully?’
‘Maybe it’s because she never received her mother’s milk.’
‘Why is that? Did you have some sort of illness?’
‘Yes. I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t want her to have milk from a mother who didn’t want to live.’
The clock ticked in the empty lunch room. It ticked so loudly that I felt compelled to count the ticks. Beyond the windows pigeons were flapping in the puddles. The milk smell had permeated the lunch-room tables, chairs and walls. And the silence was unbearable. I waited for the teacher to throw my mother out of her office.
‘I won’t tell anyone what you’ve just told me. The consequences could be unpredictable. Please talk to your daughter about the milk. We don’t want to torture the child.’
The door opened and the teacher’s face showed an expressive grimace: you poor, poor child. My mother and I politely said our goodbyes.
Outside, spring was in the air. Immediately my mother lit a cigarette. How greedily she inhaled and exhaled the smoke into the fresh air! We walked in silence but my heart was skipping joyfully. I was walking home from school with my mother. I wanted this road to go on for ever. If it went on for ever, we could walk in silence and we could talk. Both would be good.
‘Let’s take a detour,’ my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.
We turned off onto the old road that led towards the river. There, to the left of the avenue, stretched a field with an old wooden house at its far edge. Everyone knew that its owner was not quite sane and therefore kept a safe distance from the house. But my mother grasped my hand firmly and led me directly into that fearful zone. There was no one in the house. We could hear cows mooing in the barn. We followed the sound, despite my terrible misgivings. Sitting in there, her eyes like two black dots behind thick glasses, was the old lady, milking her cows. The warm milk was trickling into a pail. I started to feel nauseous and tried to pull away from my mother’s hand, but she held me firmly. The owner of the house poured what she had just milked from the pail into a jar and placed a cup beside it.
‘Drink, child,’ she said, like the youngest of all the witches in my fairy tales.
‘Drink, child,’ my mother repeated. ‘Drink,’ she said again, sensing my increasing resistance.
‘Well, then. When I die, then you’ll see!’ Crying and almost gagging, I drank the warm milk. My tears added salt to the milk. I gulped it down so that the battle would be over.
In the evening my mother gave me a signed letter addressed to my teacher, requesting that they not force me to drink milk. My fury melted into gratitude.
The next morning, the familiar nausea had disappeared. Visions of milk no longer obsessed me instead of continents, stamens, catheti and hypotenuses. At lunch, no one put a glass in front of me. But I tasted a little of my neighbour’s milk. It was the same milk that I couldn’t stand, but I could drink it or not. I had gained a little freedom.
Often my patients had not made a choice to have a child or not to have one. Whether for lovers who refused to accept a pregnancy or husbands who didn’t want the burden of more children, the exhausted women capitulated. They were ready to endure inhuman abortion pains without anaesthesia. And opposite them in the corridor sat another endless line desperate for children – but a child wouldn’t come no matter how hard they tried.
In the long hours of waiting outside my consultation room the women sometimes managed to bare their hearts to one another. It was all the fault of men, asking women to give up their child, or not allowing them to get pregnant. Yet men themselves were indifferent. They considered this part of women’s world. And Soviet medicine would take care of them.
I sat in my country ambulatory centre in the narrow room with its dilapidated wood stove, its ancient gynaecological chair and suspect examination instruments. This was Soviet medicine.
I often thought of Serafima, now no more than a vague image from a world whose door was unconditionally closed to me. Once she came to me in a dream and said that she had lost her child after all. She had the same lovely face but her eyes were closed. She spoke with her eyes closed. I woke in a cold sweat. And I tried to comfort myself that maybe it meant exactly the opposite, as quite often happens with dreams. White is black and black is white. Life is death, death is life. The narrow corridor of the small ambulatory centre, where my women sit day after day in a never-ending queue, is proof of that.
It was an ordinary late afternoon. Countless incomplete patients’ record cards lay on my chaotic desk, along with a half-drunk cup of coffee, an ashtray and a number of microscope slides with smears which were to be packed up and sent to the nearest city lab. A lamp with its quivering light, a pile of firewood by the stove, an oilcloth screen and a narrow leatherette couch. The familiar, annoying sound of a knock at the door.
I knew what I would see when I opened the door. They would continue to sit and wait. Patiently, eternally, with no end in sight.
After a short pause I opened the door. There it was – the long line of waiting women, and at the end of the line, her knees carefully squeezed together, with her school bag on her shoulders, sat my daughter. She had come to meet me.
Thus she sat there, not realizing what this queue was for. Nor that sooner or later she too would have reason to join the others. Nor that no one, including me, knew how she would fare in the queue or if she would choose it for herself. She had braided her hair herself and clumsily tied blue ribbons in it.
Patiently she awaited the end of my working day. We locked up the ambulatory centre and went home. ‘It will be cold at home,’ said my daughter. ‘The dog will definitely be sleeping in my bed.’ It had iced over and the snow crunched under our feet. ‘Let’s go to that hill where we can see the sky over the river,’ she said suddenly. I lit a cigarette. All around was silent and dark. Somewhere a dog began to bark. We walked through the old graveyard. ‘Now it’s safe,’ she said. Among the grey and black tombstones glimmered white grave mounds. The moonlight shone at a slant and the shadows thrown by the cedars lay across the blanket of snow. ‘Now it’s safe,’ my daughter said again, and took my mitten-clad hand.