Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  He seemed to turn inward. “You Sabras,” he said thoughtfully, “you’re a new kind of Jew in the world.” He looked at her, leaning across the table. “Maybe that’s why you intrigue me so, Raquela.”

  “Your background intrigues me, too, Dr. Brzezinski. I’d like to know more.”

  He patted her hand. “You will. In time.”

  Lunch was over.

  They walked back in the afternoon sun to Mount Scopus. The light was changing. The wind sang through her hair; she felt light-hearted and happy.

  “May I ask your advice, Dr. Brzezinski?” The white hospital and nursing school loomed ahead on the crest of the hill.

  “With pleasure. I have special hours when I become an etza-giver.”

  “What are your hours, Doctor?”

  “Whenever you need me. I have etzas of all sizes for all seasons.”

  She laughed.

  “So now, I’m the rebbe.” He waved his arms expansively. “This is my courtyard. What is your petition, my child?”

  “Mrs. Cantor called me into her office yesterday. She said they’re starting a special course in midwifery. And even though I’m still a student nurse, I was chosen to be in the class. The rest are already graduate nurses. Rebbe, I’d like your advice.”

  He stroked his chin as if he had a long white beard. “As it is written, my daughter, you are a lover of life. And those who love life have a sacred duty to bring new lives into the world. Not only do I think you should take the course and become a midwife. But I will be happy to assist you in your first delivery.”

  “I really don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Brzezinski.”

  “Call me Arik.”

  She stopped walking. “You really want me to—to call you Arik?”

  “Yes, Raquela.”

  SEVEN

  MAY 8, 1945, MORNING

  After a few weeks, Raquela was ready to perform her first delivery.

  She had worked, studied, assisted the nurse-midwife-teacher, until she knew every stage of the delivery, every movement of the hands to ease a baby into the world.

  “Call me,” Arik had told her, “when you take your patient to the delivery room.” He had gone even further. “I’ll arrange it with your supervisor. I’ll do the supervising myself.”

  At seven in the morning, Raquela, flattered and apprehensive, waited behind the desk at the nurses’ station for the first pregnant woman to arrive. Will she be young or old? she wondered. Fat or thin? Inexperienced—with her first baby—or someone who’s had so many children she can give me lessons?

  The hospital corridor was empty and silent. She looked at the calendar on the wall. May 8, 1945. Four days earlier, General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, liberating northern Italy, had joined forces at the Brenner Pass with General Alexander C. Patch’s Seventh Army, sweeping down from Austria. The next day, the remnants of the German army in Italy collapsed. The Nazi parachute division and the Panzer units fighting the Jewish Brigade surrendered.

  She tried to picture Carmi with the victorious army. She could see the trucks, with the blue and white stripes and the star of David. She could see the liberated people tossing flowers, weeping with joy.

  But her image of Carmi himself was wraithlike. Why?

  Was it because Arik was two floors below, probably still asleep in his room? Was seeing him daily at the hospital, drinking coffee with him, letting him help her fold the hospital linen in pleats so they opened like an accordion—was his physical nearness making Carmi’s image grow obscure?

  Or was Carmi’s immaturity the flaw, his jealousy the spoiler?

  Two women approached the nurses’ station, an older woman with a flowered kerchief on her hair leading a younger woman wearing a cotton smock over her pregnant body.

  “Are we in the right place?” The older woman looked questioningly at Raquela’s student uniform and white cowl. “My daughter—she’s going to have a baby.”

  Raquela walked around the nurses’ station. “Yes, this is the maternity wing. Do sit down.” She offered them chairs and returned to the desk. “I’ll need to get some information from you.”

  On a master chart she recorded the young woman’s vital statistics. Name, Batya Ovadiah. Husband’s name, Shimon. Address, Street of the Jews, in the Old City. Age, twenty-one (exactly my age, Raquela thought). Second pregnancy.

  Despite her advanced pregnancy, Batya sat, poised like a dancer, with a braid of black hair, glowing olive skin, and soft, doelike eyes.

  “That’s all the information I need right now.” Raquela took the chart. “Now come with me.”

  She turned to the older woman. “You can either wait here or go home and come back later.”

  “I’d better go home. We left Batya’s little girl with a neighbor.”

  She kissed her daughter on the forehead. “I pray to God you will have an easy confinement. Papa must be in shul already, praying you will come home with a son. As for me, I just want you to come home with a live, healthy baby.” She looked at Raquela. “Take good care of my daughter.” She turned and left.

  In the examining room Raquela handed her young patient a hospital gown and instructed her to undress and change. Step by step, detail by detail, Raquela followed the obstetrical procedure she had been taught.

  She prepared Batya for delivery. Weighed her. Took her temperature. Pulse. Blood pressure. Urine. Recorded everything on the master chart. Any abnormality had to be watched like an enemy smoke signal. Urine and blood pressure, especially. A sign of albumen in the urine, or high blood pressure, could mean toxemia. Batya or her baby could die.

  No albumen. Blood pressure normal.

  While Batya lay on a bed, Raquela listened through her stethoscope to the baby’s heartbeat. She nodded. The beat was strong and steady.

  Now she prepped her, carefully shaving the black pubic hair that curled under her belly. An enema, and she was ready to examine Batya internally.

  The bag of water had burst. The cervix had begun to dilate. There was a show of blood.

  A pain convulsed Batya’s body. She bit her lip, stifling a scream.

  “You’re ready for the labor room right now,” Raquela said. She helped her off the bed and took Batya’s arm as she waddled to the next room. There were empty beds; Raquela was grateful they had the room to themselves.

  The pains now came fifteen minutes apart. Raquela timed them on the wall clock. The young woman, her forehead beaded with sweat, tried bravely to suppress her scream.

  “You’re doing fine, really fine, Batya.”

  She had no problem calling Batya by her first name. The intimacy of childbirth gave them a special relationship.

  Between contractions, with Raquela sitting at her side, talking to her quietly, Batya seemed to have full confidence in her young midwife.

  “Try to relax as much as you can between the pains,” Raquela suggested.

  An hour passed. Batya relaxed and began to talk. “I wish my husband were home. It’s hard to have a baby when he’s so far away.”

  “Where is he?”

  “With the Jewish Brigade. I haven’t heard from him for so long, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

  Raquela jumped from her chair. She checked the baby’s heartbeat again. Then Batya’s pulse. Her blood pressure. The pains were coming closer. Ten minutes apart. Eight. Seven.

  She examined her internally again.

  It was still too soon to call Arik.

  Five minutes apart. Four. Three.

  “Just a little while longer,” Raquela assured her.

  Two minutes.

  She examined her again.

  She raced to the nurses’ station and telephoned Arik. She was breathless. “Arik, she’s fully dilated! She’s ready to deliver!”

  “I’ll be up right away. I’ll meet you in the delivery room.”

  She found the orderly; they moved Batya to the large delivery room and slid her onto the delivery table.

  The early-morning sun risi
ng over the Judean wilderness entered through the windows, softening the white walls, the white table, the white cabinets, the white bassinets, the white sheets. Raquela pulled a long white apron over her uniform and white rubber gloves over her scrubbed hands. Then she covered each of Batya’s legs, now firmly flexed in the stirrups, with a tentlike white sheet. The entire area around Batya, the theater in which she was to perform and Raquela to direct, was sterile and white.

  Dr. Brzezinski strode in, serene and confident in his surgeon’s uniform, his hair covered by the surgeon’s cap.

  My rebbe, Raquela thought for a fleeting moment. The best obstetrician in the hospital, taking precious time to be with me. I must not make a single mistake.

  He patted Batya comfortingly on the shoulder. Then he walked to Raquela, who was standing at Batya’s feet. In a low voice that only Raquela could hear, he said, “You’re in command. I’m right here if you need me.”

  She braced herself. “Batya, listen carefully. I will tell you exactly what to do.”

  Batya raised her body a little. “I’ll try.”

  A moment later, a new contraction forced a scream that seemed to come from inside the earth.

  “Push!” Raquela commanded. “Push down. As if you’re going to have a bowel movement.”

  Batya pushed.

  “Good. Now relax again.”

  Raquela saw that Batya had used up her breath in the mammoth thrust.

  “Now take another breath. A good one. Fill up your lungs with air!”

  Batya sucked in the air. The next pain came instantly.

  “Push, Batya! Push! Push!”

  With all the strength she could summon, Batya pushed and bore down.

  Raquela forgot Dr. Brzezinski was watching. For suddenly, mysteriously, what had been a small aperture in Batya’s body—the two small pink lips of the vagina’s labia—parted easily. They were to become an exit.

  Now Raquela saw it: the tiny wrinkled skull covered with a soft mat of black hair.

  Like the crust of the earth opening.

  Like the first day of Creation.

  Raquela moved swiftly, almost instinctively, remembering what she had been taught and had observed. With her right hand she held the perineum—the soft pink tissue below the vagina—to prevent it from tearing, to spare Batya the pain of an episiotomy, of cutting and suturing the tissue.

  With her left hand she went inside Batya’s body to help ease out the baby’s head. The head burst forward, face down. Batya no longer needed commands. Nature and Raquela were in control. Raquela cupped the baby’s head in her left hand, still gripping the perineum with her right. Gently she helped rotate the baby’s head to the right until it lay sideways on its face.

  Now she lowered the head and, with a slow, steady pull, drew out the baby’s upper shoulder. Then, continuing the slow and steady pull, she raised the baby’s head, so that the lower shoulder emerged. She drew that one out.

  Now something happened for which no teacher and no textbook had prepared her. The head and shoulders in Batya’s body had acted like a cork. The moment they emerged, the rest of the amniotic fluid, in which the baby had been swimming, gushed forth. A geyser drenched Raquela from head to foot.

  She shook the warm fluid from her body. There was no time to waste. She had never felt so competent, so completely in control.

  With both hands she grasped the baby around its body and continued lifting it out. Wet and purplish red and trailing its white and blue-veined umbilical cord, the baby completed the long hazardous journey out of Batya’s body, entering the strange new world. Crying out.

  Raquela felt a surge of joy. “Batya,” she called out, “you have a beautiful baby girl.”

  Batya lay back on the table and smiled with relief.

  Moving swiftly, with a sterile diaper in her hand, Raquela drew out the shelf under the delivery table and covered it with the diaper and the baby, still attached to Batya through the cord.

  With a tube Raquela sucked the amniotic fluid out of the baby’s mouth. Now she clamped the umbilical cord in two places, and between the clamps she cut the cord.

  Batya lifted her head. “Is everything all right?” she asked anxiously. “Is the baby normal?”

  “Normal? A genius. She has five fingers on her hands,” Raquela sang as she tied a name tag on the baby’s wrist. “Five toes on each foot. You want her IQ, too?”

  “No.” Batya heaved a sigh. “As long as she’s normal; that’s all I want.”

  Raquela heard Dr. Brzezinski laugh. She would have liked to see his face, but she had no time. She was concentrating now on the new life, on the baby. She washed her with a warm sterile cloth, dried her, cleansed her eyes with cotton, and placed a drop of silver nitrate in each eye.

  The baby was pink and healthy. She wrapped her in another cloth and lay her on Batya’s flattened abdomen.

  She had been taught to do that, to place the baby on its mother’s abdomen. The ecstasy on Batya’s face told her it was right. It was right that Batya should first feel the body she had carried inside her body for nine months, before she looked at it. Batya’s eyes were shut, and her hands moved eloquently, caressing the baby that had grown from one single cell to billions of cells, with eyes that would see the world, and ears that would hear music, and a heart and a mind.

  Raquela lifted the baby and placed it in a warm bassinet next to Batya. There was still work to be done. The placenta—the afterbirth that had transferred oxygen and life-giving nourishment from Batya to her baby—was still inside her uterus, and it was not moving.

  Raquela massaged the uterus through the abdomen.

  Ten minutes passed. Batya continued to bleed.

  Silently, Raquela weighed her options. To wait? Turn to Arik for help? Continue massaging Batya’s uterus, causing it to contract and expel the placenta? Squeeze the uterus in the cup of her hand and push the placenta down? Or ask that Batya be given anesthesia, then go into the uterus, seize the placenta, and draw it out?

  She waited. More minutes ticked by. She continued massaging. The baby slept peacefully in the bassinet. Its ordeal was over. But not Batya’s. Raquela looked across the room at Arik.

  In a low, calm voice, she asked, “Still time, Doctor?”

  Arik nodded. “A little.”

  Fifteen minutes.

  Twenty minutes.

  At last. The placenta was moving!

  Raquela drew it out, rushed it to a table at her side and spread the huge sack on a towel. She examined it minutely, inch by inch, making sure no small pieces had broken off and remained inside Batya.

  Now Raquela shouted joyfully, “Mazal tov!” Congratulations.

  This too was hospital practice. To have congratulated her before the afterbirth was out and whole might bring bad luck.

  Raquela lifted the baby and now for the first time placed her in Batya’s arms.

  The baby’s eyes opened as though she wanted to see the face of this stranger in whose body she had swum and slept, and taken nourishment and warmth and shelter, and survived.

  For Raquela this was the moment of poignancy, watching the mother and child.

  Batya, lost in rapture, as if she were trying to fathom the mystery, stroked her baby’s cheeks. She counted the fingers on each hand; then she freed the pink feet from the cloth and counted the toes, then back to the face, tracing the tiny nose, the rose-petal mouth.

  Finally she whispered, “She is beautiful. Dear God, let Shimon come home alive and see his little daughter.”

  Arik walked to Batya; he put his hand on her arm as it encircled her baby.

  “You were very good,” he said. Then he looked down the delivery table to Raquela. “To say nothing of how skilled and brilliant your midwife was; you were so good that you can come back next year.”

  Arik’s approval seemed to cement the circle around the two young women; they would never be strangers again.

  Raquela was still working; she washed the remaining blood from the young mothers bod
y and draped her in a clean white sheet.

  “You rest here on the table for a while,” she said, “and maybe sleep a little. I’ll take your baby downstairs to the nursery. I’ll bring her to you as soon as you’re in your room.”

  She took the baby in her arms. Arik came and ran his hand over the baby’s forehead and the satin-soft skull. His gentleness and his genuine pleasure in touching the baby sent tremors through Raquela’s skin.

  They walked out of the room to the nursery. “I’m proud of you, Raquela. It was a perfect delivery.” He stopped in the hallway, looked at her, and chuckled. “Even to the baptism.”

  She held the baby tighter and smiled. “Next time I’ll wear a raincoat and boots.”

  EIGHT

  MAY 8, 1945, 6 P.M.

  “The evildoers now lie prostrate before us.”

  Winston Churchill’s voice on the BBC rose and on the the hushed assemblage. The student nurses and teachers stood at attention in the lounge, breathing, drinking, inhaling Churchill’s words: the war in the West was over.

  From the House of Commons they heard the opening of “God Save the King.” Proudly they joined in the singing. Then, as the BBC ended the broadcast, they sang their own anthem, Hatikvah—“Song of Hope.”

  Raquela saw tears rolling down Judith’s cheeks. She put her arms around her.

  “Maybe you’ll hear something now, Judith. Maybe you’ll get some word about your family in Czechoslovakia.”

  Judith wiped her eyes. “If only—if only they’re alive. It’s six years since I saw them. And not one word.”

  Raquela looked around the lounge. Each woman was alone with her thoughts. For each of them the victory had a special private meaning. She knew which ones were waiting for their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, to come home. For her the end of the war meant Carmi. Now, in the mixture of joy and anxiety that filled the room, Carmi’s face seemed clearer, closer to her, than it had for months. She saw the jaunty cap. The movie-star smile. How soon would he hold her in his arms?

  Mrs. Cantor was calling for attention. “We’ve just had a phone call. We’ve all been invited to a victory celebration in Augusta Victoria.”