“Are you all right?” he asked. “What’s the matter?” What should I say? How could I tell him? He should stay because he couldn’t tear himself away from me, not because I asked him to.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Go ahead.”
He left, taking the stairs two at a time. I turned back to the big, bright room with a feverish lump in my throat.
Later that night, after the last nursing, Madame Kladaki made her rounds. Under her inspection, Angela washed us and put on the clean binders61 we had all sewed. Then Madame, talking sharply to the nurses, came to see if our wombs were going back into shape properly. Each evening, under her searching hand, we would gasp as we felt the too familiar sensations of labor contractions. She had us pant to dispel the pain. Then she looked at our breasts. Under her touch my swollen breasts ached, my womb was miserable with the end of a contraction, my stitches of stiff catgut pulled and pricked dreadfully, and the lump sat in my throat. I must have looked unhappy, because she asked me, kindly and with a smile, “Madame, is something the matter?” And I almost dissolved.
“Nothing,” I sniffed. “Rien, Madame.”
Katie, waiting for her turn, flipped on her transistor radio to get some music. She fiddled with the dial, then stopped at the sound of a tune. It filtered through my swollen spirit, congested throat. “Hava nagila, hava nagila, hava nagila …”62 I listened, incredulous, to the familiar hora I had danced a hundred times at weddings of relatives and at Antioch on those maddening Ohio spring nights. “In Athens?” I asked myself, and then began to cry quietly, unreservedly, at the first strains of Michael Row the Boat Ashore. All my strings were being played on at once, and it was okay with me.
In the next bed, Maria was having her womb checked, then her breasts. She whined and whimpered and finally sobbed aloud, as though her heart were cracking. “Kyria!” she moaned; it means “Madame,” but to me it sounded like some agonized, ancient cry or prayer. I could see it written in Greek with an exclamation point after it, mysterious and supplicating: “Kyria!” ΚUριϵ!
Even Katie, cheerful Katie, was moping, and when her turn came, she, too, took her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. It was catching, typical—a woman’s ward in any hospital, anywhere. Inevitable. With grateful submission we gave ourselves up to the utter beautiful voluptuousness of a good crying jag. We had all been secretly waiting for it, and this was as close as any of us came to the traditional “baby blues.”63 Then after, we calmly smoked cigarettes, read a bit, and went soundly into a peaceful, comforting sleep.
The next afternoon, all the girls and their mothers gathered in our room. Miss Elleadou was going to give a lecture on baby care. Chairs were brought in; the girls sat in their bathrobes, their smartly dressed mothers all looked pleased and excited at the prospect of the babies coming home. I understood that it was they, the grandmothers and not the new mothers, who would be the true authorities and caretakers.
Miss Elleadou entered, once again wearing her white medical coat. It was wrinkled and too big. She carried her battered slate under her arm, her chalk, her rag. She sat down briskly, smiled her big, toothy smile, and crossed her thick, athletic legs beneath the chair. “Madame,” she said, noticing me in my bed, “I will come over and tell you later about how to take care of baby.” With a businesslike nod she turned away and began to speak to the group.
I lay and watched, picking up a word here and there, catching the drift of a sentence or two. But mostly I was fascinated with Miss Elleadou, for she was not the woman I knew! This Miss Elleadou was warm, had flashes of humor (to judge by the frequent laughter), a gay look to her eyes, and a tone of utter authority. She was entirely another woman in Greek!
Language, says Durrell, creates character.64 Madame Kladaki, too, changed personality with language. She was gentle when she spoke French, but never gentle for a moment in Greek, in which she commanded, if not actually bullied. I was so intrigued that I was sorry when this pleasant, witty, gray-haired woman ended her incomprehensible talk, and brought her chair to my bedside, once again Miss Elleadou, with her slate, her chalk, and her rag.
In English once more, Miss Elleadou’s lecture was as long and odd as any of those she had given to me before, and as with them, I came away with very little. I did understand, however, that the Greeks say the first forty days are the hardest, and I was to expect the next six weeks to be difficult. After that, it would all get better. She told me how to flip the baby back and forth if he choked on milk, and told me to make him something called hamomile (which I recognized to be camomile tea), and give it to him in a bottle if he seemed uncomfortable. It would soothe him, she said, and be good for his stomach. If he was restless or had pain, I should heat a towel on the stove and hold it against his stomach. He should not be allowed to cry much, because it would give him a hernia. The nurses, she said, would show us tomorrow how to give a bath. Then she stood up, smiled a little absently, and left.
The girls remained in a knot, discussing something. Feeling left out, I asked Katie what was going on.
“Oh, we are supposed to write a report on how we had our babies, if we had pain, and everything we felt. Didn’t Miss Elleadou ask you to write one too?”
“No,” I said, “Maybe because I can’t write Greek.”
“Well, we could translate for you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, but I felt a little hurt and puzzled. Of course, I hadn’t had the usual course, but still, as Katie indignantly said, and I could have hugged her, “why should there be no interest in what you have to say?” Was it because I was American?
I remembered the feeling I had had when the baby was first born and I was still in the delivery room, the feeling that something was wrong. I wondered now if Miss Elleadou’s harshness with me, her grade of “only six, you did not do so well” was because I, a foreigner, and an American at that, who had had only a week instead of six months of instruction, had done about as well as the girls she worked with for so long.
We had all discussed our experiences in the delivery room. I found that the birth, or rather The Birth, had become a block of time into which I would go, reliving it the way one has to relive an accident or any great, traumatic event. (This continued for a few days until the sense memory, the body’s memory, began to fade and the experience was absorbed and accepted.) Except for the beautiful Rosa, everyone had had pain, some fear, a great deal of discomfort; everyone felt she had “not done the breathing too well,” had cried out, moaned, burst into tears. Each girl felt that she had not come through as she had hoped and had been led to believe she would. Each girl felt some sense of failure, and some irritation with Miss Elleadou (whom they all liked), for telling her, insisting rather, that there would be absolutely no pain at all. The girls had expected some and whenever they would say “labor pain” or imply some anticipated discomfort Miss Elleadou would scold them, so they had come to believe that it would be very easy for them if they just breathed properly. She never told us—certainly she never told me—that the whole basis of this natural childbirth method was a kind of conditioned reflex psychology. (In the old days, women who expected much pain often got it, and we were never to even mention it, as if to say it were to invoke it.) As we compared notes, we found that Miss Elleadou had told each girl, as she had told me, that she had not done awfully well—as though there were a perfect birth.
During the next few hours, as I read and wrote letters, the girls wrote their reports and read them to each other. When Frieda and Katie translated them for me, I was amazed. Without exception, each of the girls wrote exactly what Miss Elleadou would have wanted her to write! According to the reports, no one had suffered any pain, discomfort, anxiety, or fear.
“Why didn’t you tell her what you told me?” I asked Frieda.
“Oh, well, it wasn’t so bad,” she said.
“But Miss Elleadou specifically said she wanted your exact experience.”
Frieda shrugged and looked a little embarrassed. I had already become quite
aware that the girls all minimized their discomfort to their families. I knew that they all had to fight their relatives to come to Madame Kladaki’s clinic and they had fought hard. True, we hadn’t suffered unbearably at all; true, we were all glad—or would be when the sense memory abated a little—to have had the experience. But the girls were making a fairy story of their childbirth now, protecting both themselves and Madame Kladaki and Miss Elleadou, giving them not the human, but the perfect birth. I wondered if they would eventually come to believe it themselves. With sour grapes in my soul, I told myself Miss Elleadou knew she could count on the Greek girls to fill her files with correct responses—maybe she wasn’t so sure of me.
That night, Liesel came to see me. She came with Arno and the two of them sat on my bed. She opened a bag and took out a small blue sweater and a rubber toy.
When I had seen her for the first time, a couple of weeks before, she had looked plainer. I had only seen her for ten minutes that awful day at the layette shop. Now she looked young, chic, and pretty, reminding me a little of a sister-in-law I was fond of. Liesel was born of a German mother and a Greek father, and her looks were more Germanic than Greek. She had beautiful, large green eyes, a clean-lined face, and was very well dressed in a green suit with some unusual modern jewelry. She seemed a little nervous as she folded the bag from which she had taken the gifts. My eyes teared a little with gratitude. Now she was asking in her very slight, unplaceable accent if we had baby furniture.
“No,” I said. “Arno is going to get a large basket, the kind you use for laundry—we can line it and …” She cut me off with a gesture. She would not hear of it, she said. When her firstborn daughter, as she was always to call her, was born in America, all the people they had known at Purdue University had been so generous and kind that she had frequently hoped she could repay American warmth. If Arno would come, she said, she would get a man with a truck to send a crib and blankets and sheets left from her second daughter.
After she had gone, the babies were brought in for nursing. Arno stayed on a while longer, and we talked a little and examined the baby together. But the pane of glass that I had felt was between us on the way to the hospital was still there, and he again left early. But this time I did not cry. I shrugged and made a face and told myself everything would straighten out when I got home.
And I would be going home soon. This was Friday night. Sunday afternoon I would leave Madame Kladaki’s. The visitors were shooed out, and we wiped our sore and tender breasts with our not-so-sterile water, and raised our babies to be fed.
Almost the first thing the American sees when he reaches the center of Athens is the Sponge Man. He stands directly outside of the American Express, in elegant Constitution Square, surrounded by the cafés and fancy tourist shops which sell to American women the popular woven Greek bags that no Athenian woman would touch. There are Diners Club signs in restaurant windows, and the many kiosks are loaded down with American magazines, dirty books, English classics in paperback, worry beads, American cigarettes at one dollar a pack, and Greek ones at about eleven cents. The Sponge Man is the only exotic object in sight; the big, yellow-orange sponges, pulled from the Aegean, are hung about his hat brim, dangle in huge clusters from his hands, are tied to his waist—he resembles a human Christmas tree. As I never saw him sell a sponge to anyone, I do not know whether he was for the tourists or the Athenians, but I suspect for the tourists. I myself have always believed that sponges are blue and pink and are yanked from the deeper levels of A&P shelves, and I’ve always had a certain distaste for an animal which allows itself to be used for menial tasks. But now I shall think kindly of the Greek sponge. For when I entered the delivery room late on Friday afternoon with Frieda and Katie, I saw my infant son plucked from his crib, stripped and briskly washed all over by Marina with a large, well-used sponge. “So that’s what they’re for,” I thought. He turned scarlet and screamed. When he was entirely covered with soapsuds, Angela picked up a large pitcher and while Marina held him, she poured the water out over him, being careful to avoid his eyes. His shrieks gave me a new protective feeling, but I wondered uneasily how I would manage the bath alone at home.
I watched him being dressed: the diaper, the tight swaddling sheets holding down his arms. When he cried, I took him out of the crib, but Angela and Marina were obviously affronted by my claiming him. He was still theirs, and only on loan to me for nursing, which they could not do.
Katie was going home and her husband would see his son for the first time. It had been Katie, for the most part, who made my stay in the clinic pleasant, actually even workable at all. I realized how ill-thought-out my planning was, how lucky I was to have come to a place where two out of six girls spoke English. Without Katie’s help I would never have been able to communicate my simplest needs to the nurses. I liked Katie’s warmth, her directness. I would feel a little lost without her during the next two days, I thought.
She pulled down a beautiful blue baby’s basket full of blue satin pillows with a little engraved plate that said “Agori,” or Boy, and a great blue bow to pin on the outside.
“Mila is apples,” I said, “tyri is cheese.” I was reading quickly from my notebook as she packed up her nightgown and Jane Austen and the baby’s diapers. “Kimas is ground beef. Stafili is grapes. Right?” I wrote slowly in my notebook: ΣTαϕύλi.
“This is correct, Frances. And I will telephone you in a day or two and see how you are doing. I will try to help you get a maid. I will come to see you.”
Her mother and aunt came for her. Her baby, Alexander, was brought in. It was time to go. She was still heavy and wide-bellied in her binder; unlike Rosa, who had left the day before, her clothes did not hang right. She was plain and round-eyed. We went to shake hands. Suddenly, unexpectedly, we threw our arms around each other, kissing on both cheeks. When we pulled away I saw she had tears in her eyes, and I could have kissed her again. The nurses lined up for goodbyes, and tips, and we waved her out and down the stairs into that distant world of street, and home, and being alone once more inside one’s skin.
I turned back to the room and Maria; the place was beginning to seem empty. It was like being the last to leave the dormitory at summer vacation, and the three of us who were left rattled around the clinic. Fortunately, Frieda remained. I would have to depend on her for company and to be my translator and interpreter. We sat in her room together. She grimaced and we smiled. Frieda was the only one of us who could not nurse. There was much too much milk, and she was too uncomfortable. Her daughter, Stella, drank her mother’s milk from the bottle, and the rest of our milk too—for every day we used our breast pumps (actually a small, plastic cup-like container unlike the American version) and kept them tied on with a tight binder at night. Most of us wore these a good part of the time, because we were in pain from the excess milk and they relieved some of the pressure. The cups containing the excess milk sat on our night tables for hours. Finally, before bedtime, Marina came and collected them. And at the 2:00 A.M. feeding, the babies were given this milk from bottles. I could not imagine that it was boiled. (I knew that Frieda would make a formula for her baby at home and take the water directly from the tap: nobody thought of bacteria or germs, but drafts and cold terrified them. I remembered visiting Shirl’s infant in a Philadelphia hospital and having to wear a gown and sterilize my hands in order to look at the baby behind a glass pane.) I liked the Greek way better for the most part, but I was too American not to want to boil the water he would drink, and I felt uneasy about our milk, which sat for hours on our tables, while the most delicate cream rose to the top. Still, the babies did appear to be thriving.
We could see the milk in the clear plastic breast cups. Maria’s milk was heavy and yellow, mine seemed light in comparison and very white veering toward blue, like skim milk. Katie’s was somewhere in between. I was fascinated that it came in many tiny jets making half a dozen or more delicate little streams. I tasted it and found to my surprise that it was sweet l
ike skim milk in fact, with a fair amount of sugar. I felt a little uneasy about tasting my own milk and then wondered why I should feel as though I were violating a taboo. Perhaps it was getting too close to my own infancy and my mother’s breast and milk.
I was sorry that Frieda couldn’t nurse her baby, but fortunately she was pleased that, as the milk dried up, she was less uncomfortable.
We sat in her room and talked. “My family will come in an hour,” she said. “They are so excited about the baby they can hardly talk about anything else.”
“Your mother and father certainly come often, but I don’t know who your husband is. You have so much company all the time….”
“Oh, this is not my mother and father, you see. They are my husband’s parents. I live with them and his grandparents. My husband is away studying engineering in Austria. I have not heard from him yet, but I should get a letter soon.” She sighed, “He won’t see Stella until Christmas. It is a long time. You see, we were married only a few months when I got pregnant and we decided I should come back to be taken care of at home.” (How dare I feel bad about Arno’s short visits?)
“Where did you learn to speak English so well?”
“I was an airline stewardess for Ethiopian Air Lines.” She smiled. Her face, olive-toned and smooth, was soft and had a lovely richness; she was something of a beauty. Like some marvelously overdone chicken thigh, she gave, in her plumpness, a sense of rare succulence. Frieda had humor and spoke and understood English much better, I learned, than Katie. She lacked entirely Katie’s schoolmarmishness and was more frivolous, more spontaneous, more fun to be with. Once, I asked her if she could use her free (courtesy) air fare to come to the United States for a visit. “Oh, I would love to go to America, but I do not think it is possible. You see,” she said, “Ethiopian Air Lines does not fly to the States, and I could never trust any other airline but Ethiopian. I would be much too nervous.” I was so touched by her faith that I could say nothing.
A Room in Athens Page 11