Klavdia said she couldn’t work this way. With Sulfia shaking so badly, she wouldn’t be able to find the right spot. I had to hold Sulfia down — if she jerked around in the middle of it, Klavdia might stick the needle into her gut. I threw myself across my daughter’s midsection.
“Hold her mouth shut,” said Klavdia. As I smothered Sulfia’s suddenly rising scream, Klavdia pulled a bloody knitting needle from between Sulfia’s legs with a quick motion.
Maybe she is more than a janitor after all, I thought, impressed with Klavdia’s steady hand. Then I released my grip on Sulfia’s clenched jaw. Her head lolled to one side. The frail child had passed out again.
I carried Sulfia to our room on my back. I laid a waterproof pad beneath her pale bum and wrapped her in warm blankets.
She came to again. Her eyes, dark and round like raisins, wandered around the room. She made a soft whining sound.
Her face slowly got whiter. My husband, Kalganow, came home from work.
“What does Sonja have?” he asked.
He didn’t call our daughter by her Tartar name. He called her what the Russians called her because it was beyond their capabilities to remember a Tartar name, much less pronounce one.
My husband was an absolutist. He didn’t believe in God; the only thing he believed was that all people were alike, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was still living in the Middle Ages. My husband didn’t like it when we made distinctions between ourselves and others.
I told him our stupid little Sulfia just had the flu. He went to her bedside and put his hand on her forehead.
“But she’s cold,” he said. “Cold and moist.”
Well, I couldn’t get everything right. Sulfia moaned and tossed and turned.
Twins, so what?
That night I suddenly got worried that Sulfia might die on me. It had been years since I worried about her, and I didn’t like the feeling. I lifted Sulfia’s blanket. Things looked good. I cleaned her up, gathered the bloody stuff, stuck it in a plastic bag, and wrapped the bag in a newspaper. I quietly left our apartment and heard Klavdia turn over in bed as I did. I carried the bloody bundle through the dark, empty streets and stuffed it in a dumpster a few blocks away.
In the morning Sulfia had a fever. She was bleeding like a stuck pig. I pulled a jar of caviar out of the depths of my refrigerator — I’d been saving it for New Year. I smeared it thickly on four slices of bread and fed it to Sulfia. Caviar was known to be good for replenishing blood.
Sulfia’s teeth chattered. She had the chills. Tiny translucent orange balls of caviar stuck to her chin. I poured a drink made out of sea buckthorn berries into her twisted mouth. I had a garden out of town, and I’d picked the berries there in the fall. My hands had bled from being stuck by the thorns; it had ruined the skin on my fingertips. Afterward I pureed the berries with sugar, ten liters’ worth in canning jars. That way the sea buckthorns kept through the winter. Now I mixed spoonfuls of the puree into hot water and gave it to Sulfia to drink so she’d get some vitamins.
She sniffled and groaned, but my labors paid off. After a few days Sulfia stopped bleeding and was able to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom on her own. After a few more days she went back to her nursing school. Klavdia gave us an official note saying that Sulfia had been out with the flu. For the next few months I had an easier time putting up with her, until I noticed her belly starting to get round. At some point it became blatantly obvious. But I noticed it rather late. It had just never occurred to me. Eventually even Kalganow, who normally missed everything, noticed.
“What’s Sonja got in there?” he asked, pointing with his finger. “How did that happen?”
“She’s just a growing girl,” I said hastily. I put my hand on Sulfia’s stomach and froze. The kick I felt against my hand spelled trouble.
God was mocking me. God or Klavdia.
“Must have been twins,” Klavdia said, shrugging her shoulders. “So what?”
She said we’d paid her to take care of only one baby, and she’d done that. Since she knew nothing about a twin, she couldn’t have gotten rid of a second baby. She just stuck the one closest to the exit.
In fact, said Klavdia, the survival of the second twin was evidence of her skill. Others couldn’t even ensure the survival of the mother.
I locked myself in the bathroom and let the tears flow, silently, so no one could hear me and so my eyes wouldn’t get red. Sulfia sat on a kitchen stool and stroked her belly, smiling, eyes wide, munching on slices of bread stacked with cheese and cold cuts, fresh pickles I’d bought at the market, sour pickles I’d canned the past summer, marinated tomatoes, apples, a piece of apple tart, one bowl full of yoghurt, and another filled with cream of wheat and raisins.
Because I knew my husband would never believe the story about being impregnated in a dream, I told him she’d been raped by the neighbor two floors up from us. The neighbor was related to my husband’s most senior supervisor. After that Kalganow didn’t say anything more, not to me, not to Sulfia, and not to the neighbor, and we began to prepare for the arrival of the baby, never losing the faint hope that some calamity — an illness or a botched medical procedure — might still arrive first.
The child
The child, a little girl, seven pounds, twenty inches long, was born one cold December night in 1978 at Birthing Center Number 134. I had a feeling even then that she would become the type of kid who could survive anything without batting an eye. She was an unusual child and screamed very loudly from day one.
My husband and I picked up the baby in a taxi when she was ten days old. Along with our daughter, of course.
The little child nestled in a folded knit blanket piped with pink. It was standard issue at the time. My husband took a picture of us: me with the baby in my arms, next to me Sulfia holding a bouquet of plastic flowers lent to us by the clinic to use in the photos — obviously there was no place to get fresh flowers in winter. The baby’s face was barely visible, a little flash of red between the folds of the blanket. I had completely forgotten that newborns are so tiny and ugly. This one began to scream in the taxi and only let up a year later.
I held the baby in my arms and studied its face. I realized that the fatherless baby looked more like me than like any adult I knew. She was, despite my initial impression, not really ugly. Up close I could see that she was actually a pretty little girl — particularly when she was quiet.
At home we unwrapped her and laid her on the bed. The baby girl had firm little muscles and strong reddish skin. Her tiny arms and legs writhed around and the bed shook beneath her. And she screamed nonstop.
Klavdia’s curious face peered around the doorframe: “Oh, how cute! Already home? Congratulations! Have you fed that baby? The screaming’s unbearable.”
Sulfia sat in a comfy chair and smiled deliriously. My husband leaned down and frowned at his first grandchild. I had the feeling there was something he didn’t like about her. Perhaps he was looking for traces of his supervisor in her little face.
“What’s his name?” asked Klavdia from the doorway.
“It’s a girl!” I cried so loudly that the baby stopped screaming for one brief moment and looked up at me, surprised. “A girl! We have a granddaughter.”
“Okay, okay. What’s its name?” Klavdia asked.
“Aminat,” I said. “Her name is Aminat.”
“What?” said Klavdia, who had always insisted on calling my daughter, whom she’d known since she was a baby, Sonja, and me Rosa, which was at least derived from my actual name, Rosalinda. We had beautiful names that nobody else seemed to be able to deal with.