Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  Paris, 1899

  I hadn’t, after all, the courage to end you. You were a strong force, and you sensed you might not get your chance in this world. Any thoughts I had of pennyroyal or arsenic or tossing myself down a flight of stairs, and you became a flurry of hiccups and elbows and heels.

  By June, there was no more hiding. My belly swelled outwards from the rest of my body, part of me and also not part of me. Every time I stood, I felt the weight of you pulsing on my thighs and undercarriage. Delicate purple veins laced across my chest and enlarged breasts, and thick blue veins bulged up against the skin of my thighs, twisted like worms. My calf muscles spasmed inexplicably in the middle of the night, so painful I would call out, and I had to urinate all the time. There was no more peace in sleep. Most of the day my stomach was contracted into a dense, tight ball, which made breathing difficult.

  Madame Debord no longer trusted me, and all talk of Nice came to an end. She stayed by my side though, accompanying me outside the flat, walking with her arm linked through mine past the desk of Monsieur Muller, smug in his stiff, high collar. People could get used to (or grow bored of ) anything, and even those who knew us – the office workers and milliners’ girls in the courtyard, the butcher – lost interest soon enough.

  Madame did what she could, even paying for a doctor. And though he pooh-poohed most of her ideas and superstitions pertaining to the confined, he was kind enough. At least, he pretended to believe us when we told him the father of the child had died. I was sure he could sense no man had lived in that apartment for a very long time.

  * * *

  Camille. You were born on the last Tuesday in July, 1899. The twenty-fifth. In the sky, a gibbous moon. Early that morning, I was woken in the dark by a pulsating starburst of pressure in my lower back and anus. The pain subsided as quickly as it had arrived, leaving me with the most urgent need to evacuate my bowels. Which I did, and on my way back to my bed, the pain shot through me again. And perhaps twenty minutes later, again. I had spent my whole life believing that childbirth was a dark and bloody, potentially lethal ordeal, and so I was prepared to die if it came to that. And maybe it was you or maybe it was me, but as soon as the birthing began that morning, in the dark, I wanted only one thing: to bring you safely into the world.

  After a few hours of increasing discomfort, as the sun cast its light across my bedroom floor, the pains became a clenching vice-grip. I called for Madame and she called for Audette and Audette sent her mother for the doctor. I crouched in my bed while Madame and Audette prepared the apartment. Audette built a large fire in the bedroom and also in the salon to keep away any cold, because you and I both would be prone to the flux. She also closed all the windows and shutters and bolted the front door.

  ‘But we have to let the doctor in,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Audette said, stopping at my bed long enough to cup her hand on my forehead. Her cheeks were flushed, excited. She disappeared out of the door to some other task.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ I whined. ‘Can we not open one window?’

  Madame in my room and Audette, down the hall, answered no, in unison.

  ‘It may be the stuff of the old sages-femmes,’ said Madame, laying a stack of clean linen on the chest of drawers, ‘but better to be safe.’

  ‘Safe from what?’

  ‘Witches. Devils. Peoples of the water. If they come at all, they’ll come for your child at the moment of birth.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake.’

  ‘All the clean rags you can find, Audette,’ Madame called through my bedroom door. ‘And start the water boiling.’

  By the time the doctor arrived, I was on all fours over the seat of a chair, my stomach hanging low and my nightdress damp and slick against my body. The doctor compelled me to lie on my back, on a nest of old sheets Audette had prepared for me on the floor. Being on my back felt unnatural, and though he was the doctor, I wanted to tell him he was wrong. He muttered something about stale air and left the room, and then there was some sort of conflict on the other side of my bedroom door, in which I had little interest, until he came back in and flung open the window, letting the outside air blow gently over my skin. For this I was grateful, and willing to take my chances with these peoples of the water.

  Each time I tried to return to my earlier position, on my knees, the doctor reprimanded me. Lying down, all the weight of you settled into my spine. After hours of this, I lost much of my will and had only the energy to do what I was told. I was offered a mask to wear, which, ignorant of its purpose, I accepted, and allowed it to be placed over my nose and mouth. The doctor administered a liquid by dripping it from a glass pipette into a wad of cotton folded into the mask, which I then inhaled. The liquid smelled sweet but made me feel as if my head were going to detach from my body and float out of the window. I pulled the mask from my face and vomited on to the floor, and no one asked me to wear it again.

  More hours passed and I was permitted to walk around the apartment, to ease your progress. Audette kept the fires raging and Madame stayed as close to me as a shadow. I wanted this to end and it felt like it never would. I was imprisoned and I was possessed by pain. Each surge was like. Each one was like. All the bones of the lower back and pelvis and thighs contracting in size and density to that of a bullet. Not once though, not once did I wish you dead. And in these agonizing hours, and after all the years of having believed what Tante Huguette had told me, in these hours I learned that my own mother would never have wanted me to die.

  And then. You came. With a warm gush of swampy water and hot blood, you came. I felt you, your head, the hard, solid skull of you pushing eagerly towards this brand-new life. I felt your slick and sticky warmth when you were placed on my chest, you with movements that were slow, like cloth billowing underwater, as if you hadn’t yet realized this great transition. As if you thought you were still in the womb. The doctor tied two ligatures around the cord that united us, and with blunt-ended scissors it was cut. And you were cast adrift. He ignored Audette’s cries that the cord must be severed at a certain distance from your small body – something having to do with the potential of your singing voice, she claimed – and he tied off the end with a clean strip of cloth. Madame covered your head with a sweet little cap and then you were taken from me. The white paste that greased your skin was removed with linens doused in water that had been warmed to the same temperature in which you had lived for those nine months before. Madame even cleaned your little ears, and all your orifices, with linen twisted into small tents, and, in spite of this intrusion, you made no complaint. Cocooned tightly in white, you were finally returned to me with your red, pinched face, asleep. Audette fed me a brew of some horrid mixture to prevent haemorrhage and, after the doctor left (because he wouldn’t have approved), we gave you a spoonful of warm red wine doused with treacle to cut through the birth-phlegm in your throat; to comfort your stomach and cleanse it of any filth you might have ingested during your journey; to strengthen your brain against madness. On these points, Madame Debord was emphatic.

  I, it must be said, was lovingly washed from head to foot by Madame Debord and Audette. They placed a warm cloth between my legs to absorb the flow of blood, and bandaged my abdomen tightly with a towel.

  You. Had a shock of black hair that grew in a cowlick from the left side of your head to the right. Your toes were extraordinarily long and your legs bent up either side of your belly like a frog. Your gums were rigid against my breast when you fed, which was all you did for the first week of your life. You were attached to me, and I was attached to the bed with the blood of the lochia and with fatigue.

  You weren’t the only newborn in the apartment. Madame. She was enraptured, empowered. She went outside alone, to do the shopping, for the first time in fifteen years. She fed me stewed partridge as it was easy to digest, but denied me fruit against the risk of flatulence. I was given plenty of white wine and bran
dy.

  ‘Food that will stick to the ribs,’ Madame said, watching me eat a bowl of thick bread soup with vegetables and chicken fat. ‘Fill the hole that’s been left inside you.’

  And I. You came with the gift of respite and, for a short time, I believed that I, we, had a chance at happiness. I was inebriated, high. Which made it all the worse when, two weeks after you arrived, I fell.

  I couldn’t, for some reason, settle you on to the breast, even though we’d had no trouble at first. Coaxing you to feed put both of us in such an anxious state that I had visions of slamming either my head, or worse, your good body, into the wall. It was the pitch of your scream. Your braying sent me into a frenzy. You screamed yourself purple and you hadn’t any tears and I didn’t know how to make it stop.

  All I wanted to do was sleep, but when I slept, I dreamt of pushing your head underwater, or of losing you in a pit of suckling mud. When I was awake, my thoughts were darker still.

  And the whole affair with Axelle. Compared to this? Vaudeville. I was ashamed to have ever felt anything for her at all.

  I stopped being a part of the world. You and Madame Debord were somewhere over there, safe on the other side of a plate of glass that separated us. I could see you both but couldn’t touch you. Through my half-closed bedroom door I could hear Madame singing and clapping and making a fuss. I would stutter-sleep until your lamb-cry, and then you would be placed in my arms and my nightdress pulled down to expose a nipple, dark and sore and split, and we would look at each other and then fight and fight until you latched on, for at least a moment. The prickle would come and the let-down of milk and a brief, brief moment of relief as I heard the sounds of your quiet swallowing, but then your body would tense, your legs curl up, and you, still tightly latched, would abruptly turn your head away, tearing my skin with your strong gums.

  We called for the doctor. He informed me that my troubles were a result of my traumatized womb, a sort of shock, and that all would be well in time. He presented us with a feeding bottle. The rubber teat smelled like something burning, and I didn’t think you would take to it, nor to the pap, the clouded mixture of flour and water we put in the bottle. And you didn’t. You refused it with vehemence and the misery continued.

  The first time I left the apartment with you, you were five weeks old. It was the end of August, the same season as, a year before, I had met Axelle. The smell of the streets, the sultry hang of the leaves on the trees, and the way the light fell through those leaves on to the pavement, reminded me of her. I was overdressed with petticoats and thick stockings and felt as heavy and uncoordinated as a barge. Just to breathe evenly was a task. You started crying and I envisioned letting go of the pram, like casting a boat off the end of a pier, and watching it sail into the middle of the road to be smashed by an omnibus. The feeling was akin to looking down from the edge of a great height, wanting and not wanting to jump. I went home, trembling, and left the apartment only once more in my life.

  * * *

  It was simple, Camille. This world had become intolerable and there was a chance I could hurt you, so I made a decision, and this decision unburdened my heart. Early October, a Saturday evening. I went to bed as soon as Madame was asleep. I didn’t undress, but lit a candle and lay beside you, you asleep and fidgeting in your berceau. You sighed and sucked your lips with the memory of my breast, and your breathing was a messy gargle of stops and starts. I curled on to my side and watched the flicker of candlelight on the wall. I lay there, awake, until the candle burned to nothing, and then for quite a while longer. Twice you woke, and both times I fed you until you slept again. I was your mother still, this last night. When I was ready, I got out of bed and put on my boots and coat. I kissed you, very quickly, on your soft mouth. As I passed Madame’s bedroom, I stood at her door, partially open, and listened to the rhythms of her sleep.

  A letter. Left on the dining table. Madame had to believe I was never coming back, and that I could not be found. I wrote what was true, that I was not made of the mothering stuff but that she was, and that you deserved at least that much. And I wrote what was not true, that I was going to try and make a life somewhere else. I signed the letter with all my love and gratitude.

  Paris. Deepest, coldest night. I consumed the air like wine, and walked at a brisk pace towards the river. All my senses buzzed. Extinguished gas lamps glowed with the ghosts of remembered light. I thought I could hear laughter and music and the rumble of the underground train tunnel that was being constructed for the World’s Fair. Empty hooks in the butcher’s window. Horseless carriages lined up in courtyards. The locksmith locked up tight. All the things of life but not the lives to animate them. This. Time of night. Was a clandestine peek into a world known only to rats and bakers and bargemen. Cut-throats and prostitutes. I half expected to be confronted, and anticipated a murderer’s hands at my throat, but also felt queerly untouchable. Here was a new day. And it was unspoiled, still wrapped in smooth brown paper. What a freedom it was, to know you were about to die.

  My toes and fingers were numb by the time I reached the Pont Alexandre III. The river at the bank here was shallow, and I would have to climb a good way into the bridge to reach deep water. It was a job untying my bootlaces with dull fingers. In the end I had to prise my feet loose, but then placed my boots neatly, toes pointed to the river, and upon them lay my coat that I had folded as prudently as an apology. All this time, there was the call of the stone woman perched on the Pont des Invalides, warped and distorted by the wind.

  In so many words, she was telling me to get on with it.

  Which is what I did. I climbed, as I had done before, and once I reached the right spot, I spent very little time there. I waited for a sign but, as I already told you, none came. There was nothing sensational in this act; from the outside, very little drama. I stood, leaned forward, expelled the last of my breath and let myself fall.

  The black water. Accommodating. Closed over my head.

  36

  Anouk

  Ottawa River, 1996

  Anouk was eighteen years old and driving Red’s truck with the windows down, and feeling pretty good because in the empty seat next to her, a copy of the local newspaper. And in those pages, her first printed feature article. A revisiting of the story of a tornado that had hit a nearby town ten years before, and the efforts of the local Mennonite community to help in the aftermath. Her pitch. Her work. First summer out of high school, first money she had ever earned, in the bank.

  She stopped at a roadside farm stall to buy six ears of peaches ’n’ cream corn. The stall also carried pints of blueberries and cherries, plastic jugs of apple cider and pies. A black goat cleaved at the gravel at the side of the road where it was tethered to a stake, and the farmer gave Anouk a couple of cherries to feed to the goat.

  ‘Watch what he does with the pits,’ he said, and then, as if he were duty bound: ‘The cherries aren’t local, they come up from Niagara.’

  Anouk offered the cherries to the goat and indeed, it worked each one with its long, bearded muzzle, and eventually a bone-clean pit was ejected out of the side of its mouth by a tongue that was as grey and shiny as steel.

  Back in the car, the milky smell of corn husk. The clouds were fast moving and passed over the sun so quickly that the road ahead snapped from light to dark and back to light again, shadows from rock or tree at once sharp as the edge of a piece of paper, then faded, then gone. Today, everything was beautiful.

  She got home just as the sun was beginning to set. Great wedges of deep-orange light branded the side of the house, the lawn, the west faces of the trees. Red wasn’t around, so she left the newspaper and the corn on the kitchen counter and went straight to the river, swam out to the island and climbed on to a slab of rock and lay there, stomach-down, and picked at a splat of dry, mint-green moss that was spread over the surface of the rock like scales. This rock. She pressed her cheek close into it. This rock
striated fluidly with layers of black and purple and orange, and flecks of gold and silver. She wasn’t supposed to be out here, just now. This hour of the day, she should have been back at the house taking her pills. Nebulizer. Physio. Repeat.

  But today, everything was beautiful.

  * * *

  Early in the morning, the rev and cough and dying sputter of a chainsaw. Anouk pulled herself out of bed and went to her window and there was Red, standing by the house in a hover of bluish fumes. He pressed the body of the saw against his side and wrenched the cord. The motor started again, cutting savagely into the soft morning. It was a little after 7 a.m. She turned from the window just as Red lifted the saw to a lower bough of the biggest tree in their yard.

  In the kitchen, she swallowed her pills and inhaled her steroids. While she waited for the steroids to work, she tidied the kitchen, her days like a jigsaw puzzle, slotting life into meticulous curves and divots between treatments. Her dad must have cooked for himself late at night because there was a sauce-crusted pot on the stove and a bowl full of pasta in the sink, a half-mown ear of corn. Greasy residue on the cutting board, and the newspaper she’d left out and opened to the page that carried her piece, untouched. There was a dirty cup and plate of orange peels on the table, and she cleared this up too while her coffee brewed.

  A firefly of worry there. A recognition that lately, over the last few months, there was a carelessness to the way her father did things.

  She took her cup outside and walked around the house to where Red now stood in a dune of golden sawdust, the air thick with the rich smell of freshly cut wood. The saw whined to a crescendo as another bough fell from the tree. He didn’t seem to know she was there and so she waited a while, watched him brace under the weight of the saw, the upper bones in his back jabbing at his thin plaid shirt. Without her noticing he had become smaller, and she wondered how this could happen. He switched off the saw and put it on the ground and shook out his arms, lifted a pair of plastic goggles from his face and settled them on the top of his head. His face was marked red with the impression of the shape of the goggles.