The baby?
Could the Lulikov family doctor have been wrong? But if so, what could she have lost in all that blood, clotty as kasha?
Nelly, who confides that she is hoping to fall pregnant herself, says that they should ask the village midwife. Tonya’s sure that Mama once said pregnancy makes you smell things stronger than normal, and the burnt-leaf scent of Nelly’s candles does make her want to retch. Sometimes she can even smell the unharvested orchards of Otrada, fervent and filthy, the stink from the estate hanging over the village. It reminds her of Dmitry’s cologne. As if he has followed her here.
The midwife touches Tonya’s belly, says, Oh, look, I think your baby is awake, and Tonya pitches forward, trying to capture the movement within. The midwife says, Have you never felt a baby, and don’t you know that they swim like that, but Mama’s babies never moved like this. The midwife isn’t certain of the source of the bleeding a month before, but she says she’s seen it happen. The bursting of some sac in the early to middle weeks, but the baby is fine.
‘Wonderful news,’ exclaims Nelly. ‘Imagine if we could have little ones close in age, Tonya!’
Tonya keeps her hands spread like fins across her midsection.
‘Before you go, Shura,’ says Nelly, addressing the midwife, ‘tell us. You would know – you speak with everyone. Has anyone been by Otrada recently, or seen the state it’s in?’
The midwife nods. ‘Some kids said they saw a curl of smoke from the chimney.’
‘A squatter? A malingerer?’
Tonya listens only vaguely, her thoughts fluttering like the baby, her heart pounding. If she is still pregnant, should she write to Valentin? Should she let him know? But how could she say it? How could she not say it?
‘Kids telling tales, is all. They said they saw someone in front of the house, by the willows. A woman holding a pair of infant mittens, half stitched. No baby in sight.’ The midwife’s tone is resentful. It is terrible luck to prepare gifts for a baby before the birth, and nobody would know it better than a midwife. ‘The woman had curling hair pinned up with flowers, they said. Wore a flax dress with trimmings. They’re telling people it’s a ghost.’
The midwife says it like she doesn’t believe in ghosts, but they are all raised to believe in ghosts, around here. In witches, wood-goblins, talking animals, water-spirits, house-spirits. In magic.
Tonya moves her hand over her belly again, which feels tighter, tauter than before, and she feels the baby’s flurry of kicks, as if in reply. She grew up here too, but she never believed in any magic. Not until now, at least. Not until today.
The summer passes slow and hot. Valentin doesn’t reply to any of her letters, but the pregnancy has put Tonya into a kind of trance. Under its spell, she is unaware of feelings other than the baby’s kicks, her hunger, the throb in her arms and legs as she works the harvest fields for the first time in her life. She will think about Valentin later, after the spell breaks.
It happens, abruptly, on a pale evening in September. As Tonya stands from the rocking chair, there is a soaring, gripping pain across her body. Nelly looks up from spinning. The room is spinning too. The baby has been unusually still all day, and a band of fear tightens around Tonya’s chest. Maybe she worked too long today. But peasant women all work until they give birth; some even try to work through labour. Mama never worked, barely even left the bedroom while she was pregnant, sometimes not even the bed.
That is the other thought Tonya has not fully allowed herself, all these months, alongside the thought of Valentin.
Mama’s babies.
The pain again, sharper now, like fingernails scraped across a wound, and Tonya gasps. Kirill is not home. The midwife could be anywhere from here to Kalasy.
Nelly’s eyes turn to beads. ‘Is it coming?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tonya says, in a pant.
‘I’ll go for the midwife,’ says Nelly. ‘Lie down, dearest. I’ll be back right away.’
Breathlessly Tonya does as she is told. It cannot be the baby, but of course it is, it’s time, even if Valentin has answered none of her letters, even if she hasn’t yet chosen a name, even if she’s only a child herself, not quite nineteen. But these doubts are soon blasted away by another wave of agony, and she groans. A moment’s relief, and then again, and then again.
No, not yet, not yet—
It only gets worse. The pain, and the terror. Tonya has no idea how to have a baby, at least a live one. She saw all those dead ones come out of Mama, of course, too many, and they are all she can see right now, the way they were bluish, furry, with their cords thick and grey and hung round their necks. The midwife would tie off these flaccid ropes with flax and blow on the tiny faces, on the hands, the feet, while Mama would flop over like a fish, like she was the one who could not get any air.
No, no, no—
‘Let me help,’ says a voice. A male voice.
Tonya squeezes one eye open.
‘I was passing by outside, and heard your cries,’ says the stranger. ‘It’s easier if you sit up and brace yourself against me.’
She has no presence of mind, no time to wonder who he is. She lets out a sob, swipes at the sweat on her face.
‘Breathe,’ the voice continues. ‘Tishe edesh’, dal’she budesh’. No?’
Tonya looks blindly at him, trying to absorb the meaning of this old village phrase, The slower you ride, the further you go, trying to express that every baby she ever saw was dead, but instead what emerges is a roar, a primordial sound. He looks as if he understands. She has the unclear sense that she knows him from somewhere but before she can think of where, it is happening again, she is ripping open.
She screams loud enough to unseal the windows.
‘Here’s the head. It won’t be long.’
Something breaks, surges. Tonya falls back against the bed, feeling her tongue roll out of her mouth and back in again. Is it alive? she tries to ask, but the stranger is smiling.
‘Baby girl,’ he says. ‘There is still the afterbirth.’
‘Afterbirth?’
He is already wrapping the baby in cloth, and it begins to wail. Tonya reaches out for her daughter, and then Nelly is there, suddenly, and the midwife too, and soon Tonya doesn’t know who is crying any more and who isn’t. She feels clumsy and careless as she looks down at her own child for the first time. She never knew newborns could be like this, red-faced and furious, but also milky and warm, with hummingbird-breaths.
‘Oh, Tonya,’ says Nelly, brushing a finger over the baby’s slippery head. ‘Oh, I must have one too, I must.’
‘Who helped me?’ Tonya says hoarsely. ‘I want to thank him.’
Nelly looks away. ‘No one I know,’ she says. ‘Must have been a good Samaritan just passing through.’
Tonya decides to call the baby Lena. In slumber Lena looks ethereal, like a fairy, but awake she never stops crying. Nelly is able to calm her much better than Tonya, clucking and cooing, whispering how soon she will have a baby too, hopefully, a friend that Lena can play with.
In winter the world is swept white. The trees wear the snowfall like queens. New papers finally make their way into Popovka, and Kirill reads aloud in a sombre voice: There is no more Provisional Government, no more Imperial ministers, no more links to the reign of the Tsar. There has been another revolution. Another coup.
The Winter Palace itself has been taken.
Petrograd belongs to the Bolsheviks.
Soon after the spring thaws, a brigade of Chekists arrives in the village. The Cheka are said to be the new Bolshevik secret police, but nobody knows what this will mean. The brigade sets up camp in the village and Tonya sees them in the lane sometimes, in their matching leather greatcoats, a washed-out quality to their faces, like a piece of laundry gone over one time too many.