— She’s just like you. And then she handed me the bundle, as if to confirm that the child definitely wasn’t from her side of the family and that her contribution had been first and foremost to nourish my daughter with the right vitamins and then go through the inevitable process of bringing her into the world. It was two o’clock in the morning and I was wondering when might be the right time to take my leave. I could well understand that Anna was tired, but the baby’s gaze was fixed on me and I longed to hold her a little bit longer. I wanted to tell the child’s mother that she could have a rest now and fall asleep even and that I would just sit there a bit longer, alone with the baby, that’s if that was all right with her.
As I was practicing holding the child, her mother seemed to be sizing me up. She looked as if she either wanted to cry or just vanish from the scene, leaving me alone with the child. I was the one who started crying in the end, not the mother. She looked at me in puzzlement, as did the midwife and medical student.
— People are often overwhelmed by feelings when they have a baby, particularly their first one, the midwife explained. That’s how she put it, overwhelmed by feelings.
— I cried, I say unflinchingly in the car. The drama student looks at me with interest. I give myself some extra points for not falling into the temptation of glorifying myself in the girl’s eyes.
Even though we were, strictly speaking, two virtual strangers having a child together, the midwife strongly recommended that I stay with the mother and child in the hospital that night.
The room was equipped for fathers, too, their needs were also taken into account; there was an extra sofa bed. The baby slept in a Plexiglas cradle beside her mother’s bed. The child’s mother didn’t raise any objections, but stared at me, as if she were trying to place me in her life, as if her body remembered something her mind couldn’t quite recall. Because there was so little hair on my daughter’s head, it was recommended that she wear a bonnet, the midwife explained to me.
— The body mainly cools down from the head, she said, and I thought I detected an apologetic tone as she was placing the pink bonnet on my daughter. Before clocking off her shift, she gave each of us booklets on family insurance and parental leave.
My child’s mother dozed off as soon as her head hit the pillow, which was understandable, since she’d just brought a whole child into the world. She was both exhausted and aching. I would have been perfectly willing to say something beautiful to her, but she was too tired to listen. I imagined it must be strange to wake up on a Friday morning and go up to the hospital to give birth to a baby. I also would have liked to have been kind to her somehow, but just didn’t know how to go about it. I felt it was almost an act of sacrilege for me, a fully grown man, to fall asleep in a bed in a maternity ward. I’d never slept in the same room as the mother of my child before, and had only spent enough time with her to conceive a child. It would have been out of the question for me to wander around the maternity ward in my underpants, or even my blue striped pajamas, garments the mother of my child had never seen me in. This wasn’t a hotel room and we weren’t lovers. An adult male who went to the toilet and then forgot to put the seat down had no place in this silk-soft world of breast-suckers and mothers, in this smooth downy nest.
Once the midwife was gone and Anna had fallen asleep for the night, I wheeled the cradle over to the sofa bed and bent over it to stare at the baby. I was alone with the child. She was awake and staring right back at me; my moment of carelessness made flesh was staring at me.
— The baby was awake and staring at me, I say to my fellow passenger in the car. We’re finally out of the woods, which are supplanted by fields of golden sunflowers that stretch for as far as the eye can see, giant yellow flower heads. It has started to rain.
I bent over so that my daughter could make out the outlines of my face and see her father. She was an incredibly beautiful child — of course, I didn’t have much to compare her to, even though I’d caught fleeting glimpses of a few other startled newborns in the ward. They looked like old people, with their red-violet flesh, all wrinkled with apprehension and burdened by the new life that had just begun. My child — our child — was different. She seemed to neither resemble me nor her mother; she was unique somehow, a new issue — not that I’d had any preconceptions of what the baby would look like; on the contrary, I’d practically pushed any speculations of that kind out of my mind. I scrutinized the baby, drank her with my eyes.
Then I lifted the quilt, and my daughter stretched her legs and twinkled her toes as I examined her incredibly tiny foot. There was a lot of light around the child; I wondered whether it might have been coming from some material in the quilt cover.
— Welcome, I whispered gently, sticking my little finger into the baby’s palm. I didn’t undress but stayed up all night staring at the child, partly also because I didn’t know when I would see her again. My daughter’s mother and I weren’t a couple, and I wasn’t even sure I would meet my child’s mother that often, although I would undoubtedly be welcome to visit the child we had together.
Anna was exhausted and slept all night, with her mouth slightly ajar, the sleep of the just. I kind of checked on her several times, though I refrained from exploiting my position and staring at her at length. But I adjusted her quilt, spreading it over her a bit better, and then rearranged our daughter’s dwarf covers as well. That rounded off my tasks for the night. Mom also used to adjust my quilt when she was clearing up at night. It was the last thing I remembered before I fell asleep in the dark, Mom pulling the quilt over me; then she tidied up in the kitchen, closed the windows, turned off the lights, and called it a day. It was then that I realized I knew nothing about the family of my child’s mother and that I hadn’t even asked her about my child’s granddad and granny. I couldn’t very well walk up to the bed where she was sleeping, pale with her rosy cheeks and moist lips, bend over her, shake her shoulder, and ask:
— Who are your parents, Anna?
The drama student is all ears, wriggles in her seat, and sits up, waiting with bated breath to see if I can form another seven-word sentence:
— A newborn baby was staring at me, I repeat to her.
Then I bent all the way down to the baby and gently picked her up, as light as a feather, in her white frotté bodysuit, and carefully lay down on the pillow on the sofa bed with the baby in my arms, adjusting her as carefully as I could on my tummy and pulling the quilt over her. Her legs were in the fetal position, but I delicately pulled on one heel and then the other, and my daughter stretched out one leg herself and I felt it pressing against my belly button. Although I tried to breathe as lightly as I could, the baby rose and sank, like a baggy airbed; then I stroked her gently on the back until she fell asleep. I was very careful not to fall asleep myself.
