Authors: Elena Gorokhova
Twenty-Nine
W
hen my mother first came to visit us, in 1983, Aeroflot planes were not allowed to land in New York. Instead, we bought her a ticket from Leningrad to Montreal, where she changed airports without speaking a word of English, and several hours later came out of the passport control at LaGuardia, smiling.
Now, in 1988, she has taken a direct flight and landed at Kennedy. The word
perestroika
has entered the vocabulary on both sides of the Atlantic, and Mama emerged from a small crowd of dazed Russians who came to visit for the first time since their families had left the Soviet Union twenty years earlier.
On the way home, as our Datsun rolled across Manhattan toward the Lincoln Tunnel, a young woman in skintight shorts approached Andy's open window at a red light on Forty-Second Street, where I started my ESL career. Maybe she couldn't see that there were two passengers in the car, or maybe it didn't matter to her, but what happened next made my mother wince and stiffen. The woman lifted her tank top above her chest, and I immediately knew what flashed through my mother's mind. She had been right all along. America was indeed the mouth of the shark, with all its vices and ills on display, just as
Pravda
had warned her.
I am seven months pregnant, and Mama's eyes are radiating happiness. For years she has been asking probing questions, having given up on the idea that my sister would ever get married or produce a grandchild, realizing that I was her only hope. We know it is going to be a girl. A few months earlier, I sent the results of the amniocentesis to Mama and Marina in Leningradâa picture of paired chromosomes, the photocopied blurry combination of the two Xs that must have surprised them since there is no prenatal testing available in Russia.
Mama and I take a tour of the hospital where the baby is going to be delivered. This is the first American hospital either of us has ever seen, and we walk around gawking at carpeted waiting areas and patient rooms with only one bed, as if we were tourists admiring the landmarks of an unfamiliar civilization. I am happy to know that the health plan my college provides will eliminate at least one anxietyâworrying about medical billsâin the realm of childbirth stresses. But for my mother this tour is more visceral. She realizes, maybe for the first time, that for the seventy-four years of her life in Russia, every Soviet official and every newspaper and every television announcer has lied to her. They have always told her that the West was rotting, along with its hospitals and doctors and its retrograde obstetrics incapable of delivering the new inhabitants of the world's bright future. They have assured her that Soviet medicine was the best in the worldâfree, progressive, and equal to noneâand now, as our nurse guide shows us the baby monitor and the anesthesiologist's station at each delivery bed, my mother realizes that it was never so. I know Mama is happy to see that her granddaughter will be born in what she can only perceive as medical luxury, but there is a slight ambivalence in her face, the shadow of betrayal that dulls the joy in her eyes.
I think of the maternity hospital in Leningrad where I was born, of women leaning out of open windows, shouting details about their delivery to their husbands below, who were not allowed past the reception desk. When I was growing up, it was common knowledge that visitors from the outside presented a sanitary hazard, although in my mind the absence of clean sheets, medicine, and running water had always trumped the possible dangers dragged in by fathers wanting to see their newborns. They arrived in the evening, after work, to stand on the streetcar tracks in front of the hospital and shout questions to their wives who were hanging out of the open windows. The men cupped their hands around their mouths so their voices could reach to the third and fourth floors, shouting questions about the color of their children's eyes and hair as streetcars jingled a warning for them to get off the tracks.
“This is a very good hospital,” says Mama quietly when the tour is over, and I know she is thinking of all the hospitals she has seen in her life, those places she was told were the best in the world. I know she is thinking of her sister, Muza, an obstetrician in the provinces, who will never know about baby monitors or epidurals, who would be bewildered if she found out that an American father-Âto-be can sit by the delivery bed and hold his wife's hand.
When I go into labor, my obstetrician is on vacation and I am assigned to the covering doctor. Andy drives me to the hospital, with my mother in the backseat. As soon as I am hooked up to a baby monitor, regular contractions stop. Then they start, then they fade again. Hours pass as I lie in bed, waiting, wishing I could whip the time as if it were a lazy horse.
I don't know what Mama is doing in the waiting room; she has probably brought one of her Russian books with her, having prepared everything in advance, as usual. I shouldn't think about my mother, anyway; I should concentrate on the breathing I learned in Lamaze class. For six weeks Andy and I drove to a nurse's house where four pregnant women lay on a living room rug and pretended to deliver babies. The nurse, practical and peppy, taught us all kinds of exercises and techniques that made me feel confident and prepared.
An anesthesiologist comes to my bedside and asks if I want an epidural. No, I say emphatically, and shake my head to make sure he understands that I am not a weak American reaching for medication at the slightest twinge of pain. I am sure I can have a natural childbirth, just like my mother, my aunt, and every Russian woman within the borders of the Soviet Union, who are not privy to the medical equipment and care this hospital has to offer. The anesthesiologist leaves, then pops his head inside again to say he will be just outside my door.
More hours pass. I write a note to my mother with an update, and Andy takes it to the waiting room. There isn't much to report except stronger contractions that seem to have become longer and more frequent, just as the enthusiastic Lamaze nurse has taught us. Andy is by my bed with slivers of ice he slides into my mouth, one of many things my obstetrician aunt Muza wouldn't fathom.
Another contraction rumbles in like a train, and, when it ends, I notice that my fingernails have left little purple crescents in the flesh of my palms. A silly memory comes to mind, Nina's description of when her son, Mitya, was born. It felt like someone stuck an umbrella in, she said, and then opened it up inside you. It makes me wonder, as I lick my lips and swallow sweat, where this helpful image was hiding when the anesthesiologist was here.
In the interval between contractions I think of my co-worker Zoe, who teaches yoga in addition to ESL, of the description of her daughter's birth a year earlier, obviously a more enlightened and refined experience than I already know mine is going to be. Zoe had a doula in the hospital room, who instructed her to deliver her baby in a squatting position in order to achieve what she called an orgasmic birth.
The next contraction wipes the word
orgasmic
out of my mind, and I know Zoe and her doula would be very disappointed if they could see me. When I catch my breath, I yell for the anesthesiologist. By now, the Lamaze class is a distant memory, and it is obvious that I am a failure. “Where is the anesthesiologist?” I shout, as the next freight train detonates inside me. “He said he was right there!” I shriek. He lulled me into believing he was just outside the door, and now he's vanished, that bastard.
The epidural is in, a few hours of respite. How did my grandmother give birth to six and my aunt Muza to three without epidurals? Why was my mother so desperate to have another baby after she gave birth to Marina during the war, undoubtedly not under the most desirable conditions? And what about my friends Nina, Nadia, and Tania, a younger generation who chose to risk the same birthing indignities in the hands of indifferent staff and inferior hospitals?
The epidural bliss is wearing off now; no more anesthesia is allowed. It is time to start pushing, says the doctor. I push. Harder, he says. I push harder. I don't know how to push, let alone push harder, but I do what I'm told. It all feels unreal, as if I am onstage, acting in a play. The nurse is my director, orchestrating the visceral performance where we are all pressing forward to bring on the final scene. Push, push, she chants. Harder, harder, she sings. I claw at Andy's hand, belching nonhuman grunts. But no matter how hard everyone tries, we get stuck somewhere in the middle of act three.
“It's a breech,” says the doctor. “I'll try to turn the baby, but we may need to do a C-section.”
The C-word makes me think of a vertical scar from chest to crotch Aunt Muza talked about on one of her summer visits to our dacha when she described a surgery she had performed. From here to here, she said, enclosing a foot of her round stomach between her palms. I don't remember how old I was when I heard this, but the image has stayed with me ever since: an entire belly open, skin pulled apart with clamps, then sewn up with wide stitches of my aunt's resolute hand. I imagine myself on the operating table, my insides exposed, like one of those papier-mâché torsos in Mama's anatomy museum with coils of intestines and chunks of major organs I used to stare at when I was in elementary school.
“Ask him how big the scar will be,” I say to Andy. I am not sure this is the right thing to worry about right now, but for some reason, this is the only thing that surfaces in my mind.
I write a note to my mother with the news about the breech, and Andy takes it to the waiting room. Ten minutes later, a page with her squared handwriting comes back, describing a maneuver she performed once before the war when she was the chief and only physician of a provincial hospital near a peat mine that mostly employed women. She was twenty-four, just out of medical school, and had never delivered a baby before, but there was a woman in the last stage of labor right there in front of her, already nine centimeters dilated, and what Mama saw was not the baby's crown but its butt. Although she didn't know what to do, my mother didn't panic. She raced to her office and returned with a textbook she had wisely brought from Ivanovo, where she went to medical school. She was orderly and practical, even at that age, and she calmly ran her finger down the contents pages. The chapter on childbirth included two paragraphs on how to treat a breech. She propped the book open on a chair and followed the instructions she still remembers half a century later.
I translate the note for the doctor. He says he has never heard of this but will give it a try. I feel some churning, some major rearrangement in my gut. It doesn't work.
I can no longer see the nurse because she is behind me, wheeling my bed out of delivery and into the operating room. Andy and the doctor are already there, wearing gowns and caps the color of newborn chicks, but I can see only their heads from behind a screen the nurse installs around my waist. The screen cuts me in two: one half of me is conscious, with a working mind, a beating heart, and moving arms, and the other half is numb, no longer mine. It now belongs to the operating nurses, whose capped heads bob above the screen, and to the doctor, whom I can't see now because he is bending down. I think of his scalpel slicing me open from the rib cage to the bottom of my belly, of the strange reality in which I am able to understand what he is doing but not feel it. I think of the diagram of blood vessels Mama asked me to copy from a textbook when I was twelve, a tangle of red arteries and blue veins running from the heart to the lungs and down to the liver, uterus, and kidneysâeverything in primary colorsâwhat the doctor is probably now staring at as the old image bobs to the surface of my memory.
I see Andy crossing from the numb side of me to the working side, cradling an infant in his arms, holding it clumsily, away from his body, as if it were made of glass. He sits down on the side of the bed for me to see her, plump and pink, wrapped in a baby blanket, with a cap over her head. There is not a single blotch or blemish on her skin: she didn't have to struggle to get out. She was simply lifted out of my open belly and into her father's waiting arms.