6
Of course, there was a large clock in the delivery room, as conspicuous as at a train station: the time of birth had to be established unequivocally and on the spot. It was seven-thirty in the morning. Miriam lay in great pain on a bed, the midwife on her left side and a maternity nurse to her right. Normally not prone to being superstitious, that day I found myself wondering if being at the wrong hospital would bring bad luck.
They each held one of Miriam’s hands while spurring her on. ‘Breathe, honey! Breathe through the contractions!’
‘Hey, don’t bite!’ shouted the delivery nurse when Miriam, reacting to a particularly strong contraction, sank her teeth into the nearest available limb. ‘Pant! Don’t bite!’
I looked on helplessly from a distance. My delicate little Minchen was not cut out for childbirth. I should never have saddled her with this.
When the contractions subsided for a moment, the redheaded maternity nurse who had met us at the lift went to fetch coffee. When she returned, she pressed a paper cup into my hand and whispered: ‘I think your wife could use your help right now.’
So coffee in hand, I sat down on the stool next to Miriam’s bed. I took a sip and bent over to whisper something encouraging, but before I could get a word out she cried: ‘No, please! Not with that coffee breath! Ugh, it stinks … I’m so nauseous … I can’t stand it …’
Never before had she looked at me (or through me) like that. Not only as though I were a complete stranger, but a hostile one at that. I noticed that even now, in the throes of labour, she emphasised the word can’t — as a child she adopted this one quirk of her father’s accent. ‘I can’t stand it.’
Her reaction made me recoil and nearly knock over the stool. So this was how ill giving birth could make you. I fled to the corridor, set the still-full coffee cup on a window sill on the way to the WC, rinsing my mouth a good five or six times, gargling with water until my throat went raw.
When the contractions resumed in full force, the women laid Miriam on the floor.
‘Don’t be alarmed, honey. You can push better this way.’
They put a pillow under her head, and there she lay, on the scuffed linoleum, with three women kneeling around her. The maternity nurse wiped up small amounts of faeces that came out with each push. The midwife put a stethoscope to Miriam’s belly, offering the mother-to-be a listen, but Miriam shook her head vehemently as a sign that the hooks be removed from her ears: by now, everything was an intrusion. The midwife signalled me to come listen. I’d have rather not, but I didn’t want to come across as an indifferent father. I knelt down next to Miriam, and with the stethoscope attached, I tried to hold my breath (it was the combination of Surinamese sausage and coffee on an empty stomach, of course, that had produced such a birthing-unfriendly stench). I listened to my imminent fatherhood. Eyes closed, I saw in my mind’s eye a snippet of a documentary of a coral reef. The panicked gurgle of escaping gas bubbles. Blurp, blurp. An improbably fast, watery heartbeat. Acoustically, already a miscarriage.
I nodded and handed the stethoscope back to the obstetrician. I returned to my stool near the door. The women conferred quietly as to whether it wasn’t time to break the membranes. A few moments later, I heard the metallic sound of fluids dripping, then gushing, then dripping again.
7
‘Look, honey, this is the amniotic fluid.’ The Fiat-midwife held the kidney-shaped bedpan up for Miriam to see. ‘That red’s just a bit of blood.’
It was one of those wards where nothing was done without the patient being informed. The heavily sagging body of my sweetheart rested on hands and knees on the floor like a pregnant animal ready to drag itself off to its den to deliver its cubs. The women crouched behind her continued their cries of encouragement. I thought the birthing process had begun. But no. Their exclamations were for the mother-to-be’s excrement. ‘Go on, girl, there’s still more in there. Breathe through the contractions, give us a little push.’
Before unleashing a wonder, a woman first has to prove she is capable of abandoning all dignity.
Back when Miriam was still on the bed, the women whispered among themselves about the dilation, which with a crinkling rubber glove was established to be eight centimetres. ‘At ten, we start pushing.’
Now, even more soft-spokenly, they measured eight-and-a-half, which apparently was enough to give the green light for pushing. There must be a reason for their haste. Miriam once again was lying on her back on the floor, her legs spread wide.
‘You’re going great, honey. We can already see a bit of its scalp … and some hair …’
I didn’t like the looks of it. The women, Miriam excepted, carried on a continual consultation in a way that was meant to be inconspicuous but was betrayed by worried glances and hurried whispering. The only words I understood were: ‘the other bed’.
8
‘Don’t be alarmed if a few people come in,’ the obstetrician said to Miriam. ‘Obstetrics interns. We’ll be sure they keep to themselves.’
That took us by surprise. Of course I was too weak-kneed to protest. The room filled up with a few young women dressed in white nylon who couldn’t have kept less to themselves. They crowded around Miriam. The doctor got up and instructed two of the obstetricians-in-training to wheel the bed out into the passage. Then a different, better-equipped one was brought in.
Maybe because the group of trainees had thinned out for the time being, I suddenly caught sight of a young man in a white coat, his back to me, sitting at a shelf unit attached to the wall. Judging from his posture, he was writing furiously. Miriam was lifted onto the new bed by six pairs of arms at once, and was commanded to resume pushing with redoubled pressure. From time to time, the white-coated man twirled around on his swivel stool to observe the birthing arena and continued penning his notes on the clipboard supported on his knee.
Perhaps it was lack of sleep that weakened (or obscured) my attention. The room was in the grip of the kind of panic that did not paralyse those present, but rather drove them to serious and purposeful action.
‘Yea-a-a-ah …!’ emerged from several throats simultaneously. All these years later, I harbour the tenacious recollection of how the unwashed infant was lobbed into my lap by the flick of a blood-covered wrist. I shall never forget the gooey splash with which the baby landed on my thigh. It was more like it had been flung, because the child appeared so lifeless and blue.
Nobody cried out that it was a boy. I had to determine this myself. The consternation continued. There were so many women crowded around the bed that I lost sight of Miriam.
The following observations are taken directly from my diary entry on 15 June 1988, because this is as close as I can come to Tonio’s birth:
‘With all those swollen, passively dangling limbs, the little sprog made me think of a bunch of carrots, or rather a string of pale blue sausages you saw hanging at the butcher’s. For half a second, there was the panic: stillborn. But as she turned around, the midwife jabbed the little nipper in his side — a routine, almost malicious whap that got our son bawling. The piercing cries also brought on my own tears — finally. I prodded an index finger against the miniature fist. The fingers wound themselves viscidly around it. It was the little boy’s very first grip on life.’
The baby was taken from me to be washed. I was finally allowed to give Miriam a kiss and to compliment her on the most beautiful delivery of all time. The interns now at a respectful distance, the doctor offered her apologies for the chaotic scene. Now she dared to confess that the last time she had listened with the stethoscope she could hardly pick up a heartbeat, so despite only partial dilation they had decided to get Miriam to start pushing. Since induced birth could not be ruled out, she had had the special bed brought in.