‘Go on, go on!’ Kitty yelled at her, but Mariam just shook her head, holding the tiny, bloody body pressed tight against her.
‘Strap her back down!’ they heard the blonde say through the door. But Kitty crawled off the stretcher and stumbled to the door, without taking her dead child in her arms. Before she could fling it open it was opened from outside, and a Red Army soldier, one of the three from the car, stopped in front of her, lifted her off the ground, brought her back to the stretcher, put her on it, and strapped her down.
‘The placenta hasn’t come yet, you have to let her —’ cried Mariam, horrified. ‘What kind of people are you, what are you!’ Her Russian was clumsy and broken, her voice hoarse and rasping.
Kitty heard nothing more. Total darkness filled her head.
She didn’t watch as Mariam wrapped the dead body in her tunic and carried it out of the room.
*
When Mariam returned and found Kitty unconscious, she started shouting for help, and the blonde returned.
‘She won’t stop bleeding, she’s going to bleed to death. So much blood — Mother of God, Jesus, Holy Child, we have to stop the bleeding, or she’ll die …’
The blonde gazed for a while at Kitty’s blood-drenched lower abdomen with an expression of resignation, then turned to Mariam.
‘You will stop the bleeding. You’ll find everything you need in the basement, in the metal cupboards. You have to operate on her. You have to remove her womb. Otherwise she’ll die a miserable death, and you don’t want that. Otherwise she may get it into her head to bring more traitors into the world. You can operate, can’t you?’
‘What? No, no, no — I can’t do that. I’ve never operated myself, I’m not a doctor, I just helped out in the outpatient department; I only watched, I can do sutures and take them out again, but I can’t do this.’
‘But I was told you were good. That’s why you’re here. So see that you complete the task. I’ll have them bring you morphine. The disinfecting agents are in the basement as well. You can start right away!’
‘I can’t. I can’t!’
Mariam was getting increasingly hysterical.
‘Well, then she’ll just have to bleed to death.’
‘Please, no, no … You can’t do this to me. Call a doctor. Please!’
‘One of my men will assist you. Don’t worry, he won’t pass out. And you know what will happen if you get any ideas.’
‘All right, all right. I’ll do it. I’ll try.’
‘If she survives, you’ll take her with you to the village afterwards, and when she can walk again you’ll send her home. And you’ll be good and keep your mouth shut, won’t you. And tell her: as soon as he makes contact with her, she should go to the nearest commissariat of her own accord, if she doesn’t want … Well, I think now she’ll understand.’
*
Mariam called the Red Army soldier, instructed him to clean his hands with spirit and pass her the necessary tools when she asked for them. She kept talking to Kitty all through the operation.
‘You mustn’t give up. You’re strong. We can do this, but you mustn’t stop fighting. I know it’s hard for you to trust me; it’s hard for you because I’m not a doctor. But I always wanted to be one. I assisted in the outpatient department, they had a very good doctor there, and because we don’t have a proper hospital in the village he would perform operations as well, and he was good. Everyone got well again. And of course there were births, as well; jaundice, gout, TB, I’ve treated everything. We had a miscarriage once, and that woman’s alive and healthy. I can do this. I’m good. Do you believe me? You do believe me, don’t you?’
Mariam was speaking only to Kitty now. Not to God any more. Mariam removed Kitty’s womb, in a classroom that had served as a torture chamber and was now an operating theatre. In a classroom where they had taken down the portrait of the Leader so as not to insult his eyes with the degrading sight of a stillbirth and a blood-drenched woman. Mariam kept her word. She saved Kitty’s life, and her own. She could not save Kitty’s child.
*
After the blonde woman and her entourage had left the village, Mariam took Kitty to an isolated barn and nursed her. She had taken the necessary medicines from the school basement; she found Kitty a clean mattress and fresh bed linen, fetched her milk and warm bread, slaughtered a chicken with her own hands and roasted it over an open fire. She treated Kitty’s inflamed stitches and stroked her head. The fever had to be brought down, Kitty had to be fed; she gave her herbal mixtures to relieve the pain, lay down beside her on the mattress, and stared with her into the nothingness on which Kitty’s eyes were fixed. It was days before Kitty turned and spoke to her for the first time.
‘Where am I?’
‘In my brother’s barn. He’s at the front, somewhere in the northern Caucasus. I didn’t want to take you home with me, to my parents. There would have been unnecessary questions. People in the village are afraid. The NKVD have been here a few times already. They use the old school building for … Well, people are suspicious, anyway; no one wants trouble. We’re safe here.’
‘Why did you take me with you?’
‘What sort of question is that? What else could I have done? You would have died. Rest now. Drink the milk. We have cows, we always have fresh milk. You had a high fever, but that’s normal.’
‘I have to go home. I have to telephone Christine. How long have I been here?’
‘Exactly a week. You can’t get up yet, and you’re not allowed to go, either.’
‘What did you do?’
‘They would have shot us. They took a girl from a neighbouring village, a nurse; she never came back, just because she refused to operate. I had to do it, otherwise they would have shot me — both of us. Last week they brought three men here, shot them, and buried them in the woods.’
Mariam covered her face with her hands. Her body was trembling. Kitty sat up and looked at her, her expression blank. She made no attempt to comfort her. Finally Mariam clasped Kitty in her arms. Kitty didn’t move.
‘I know it can’t ever be put right.’ Mariam groaned and pressed herself against Kitty’s shoulders, buried her face in her neck.
‘What exactly do you mean?’ Kitty insisted.
Mariam stuttered. ‘You … can never have … I … I … your womb …’
In the nights that followed, Mariam stayed with Kitty, lying on a simple blanket beside her mattress and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep only as dawn approached. Eventually, one day, Kitty got up and went out into the warm sunlight with Mariam supporting her. It was quiet; you could hear the crickets. The barn was next to a cornfield, at the end of a narrow path lined with tall cypresses. Green, hunchbacked hills stretched away into the distance. Kitty’s eyes were burning. Her mouth was dry; the sunlight hurt her skin. Nevertheless, she allowed the sun to warm her cold limbs. She stood there, moving her head gently from side to side, slowly raising her arms above her head, wriggling each finger cautiously, one at a time. She moved as if for the first time, as if she first had to learn how to do it: how to walk, to move, to think, to live.
That night, Mariam lit a small campfire and the two of them sat beside it. The night was clear, the sky full of stars, and the moon, white as marble, radiated a greenish light.
‘What exactly did you do?’ asked Mariam, almost inaudibly. She poked the ashes with a stick. ‘You’re so young; what can you possibly have done for them to do something like that to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did your husband do?’
‘He just wanted to go to Vienna … It was a boy, wasn’t it?’ Kitty asked suddenly, concentrating on the glowing coals.
‘Yes.’
‘What was he like? Was he big, small? Did he have lovely little fists? Did he have hair on his head?’
‘He was wonderful. He didn’t suffe
r. He didn’t even feel it. It happened very quickly.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He’s with the angels now.’
‘Stop that nonsense. Where did you take him?’
‘I buried him. In the garden behind the school.’
‘Please don’t start bawling again. Pull yourself together.’
‘Oh God, Kitty … It would have been better if they’d shot us.’
‘That’s enough. Stop it. Don’t cry. Not again. You had no choice. You saved my life.’
‘No, I didn’t. I destroyed everything.’
Kitty got up and started turning slowly round in circles. Head tilted back, looking up at the stars, her lips widening in something like a smile.
‘Careful, you mustn’t move around yet. Please take care — the stitches!’
Kitty took a deep breath and released it again.
‘When all this is over, it doesn’t matter how or when, I will find out who she is, and I will kill her.’
She spoke with great composure. Mariam did not reply, and they went back inside the barn.
*
Once Kitty had recovered her strength and could get about without help, she walked to the abandoned school building with the broken windows that looked so normal, anything but menacing, and wandered through the cold corridors and empty rooms. She looked for the room where they had cut her child out of her belly. The portrait of the Generalissimus was back on the wall. She stared for a long while at the man’s moustachioed face; for a very long while, as if seeing him for the first time. Outside again, in the open air, she sat down on the dry earth in the courtyard. A few pigeons were cooing and scratching at the ground in search of something edible. The earth was warm, the sun shining impassively. She heard a tractor drive past in the distance. Her gaze moved across the yard. Somewhere here must be the spot where Mariam had buried her boy. Somewhere here his body must lie. Beneath an oak, almost at the very end of the school grounds, she spotted a little pile of earth: small, so incredibly small. She went over, sank to her knees in front of it, and started digging up the mound with her bare hands. The earth was stubborn and rough, as if trying to thwart Kitty’s intentions. She touched something. Felt it. Felt the nausea well up inside her. Closed her eyes, kept digging. There was a smell of something definitive; she vomited, then screamed, just once, just briefly. The scream sliced the air. Then there was silence again, and the silence felt holy; it was a good day for life to begin, a day of delicate ladybirds and lazy bumblebees flying on the breeze, a day for lying in the shade eating ripe figs and soft persimmons. A day that belonged entirely to life.
She saw with her hands: the nose and the oval of the face, the tiny eyebrows, the lips. She gazed at his face as it arose in her mind’s eye. She recognised him. She would keep him in her memory all her life. His face that she had never seen, never stroked, not even once. That she would never see either crying or laughing, sleeping or awake. She would keep him forever in her dreams, in a parallel universe that existed only behind closed eyelids. She would live there with him, go to sleep and wake with him. She gave him a name. She threw the earth back over him.
Again she retched, but this time didn’t vomit. A flock of birds flew past above her head. The stitches pinched. Gently she stroked the mound of earth with her palm. ‘You can visit me in my dreams; you will, won’t you? I’ll sing you songs, I’ll sing you all the songs in the world, and that will be our sign; you’ll know then that I’m calling you. I’ll take you with me everywhere, no matter where I go. You’ll know I’m there, and I’ll know you’re there. That’ll be enough: it’ll have to be enough for a lifetime.’
She stretched out on the ground, laid her face on the earth, tasted it on her tongue. If she could swallow the bitterness, she would taste the essential thing: this love for her son, fragile, almost painful, physically present yet at the same time soft as butter — this love that eclipsed all other feelings. A love they would never have been able to cut out of her. A love that ripped her apart from inside, that pinched her with every move she made, a thousand times worse than the stitches.
Broken rays of sunlight wandered across the hills, down into the valley, to the village, to the school playground, to stroke Kitty’s ankles, light the colour of a weathered brick. Somewhere a crow was crying. Kitty forced herself to stand. A last, overripe fig fell from the tree beside her. Summer flies buzzed around.
*
At this moment, Kostya was carrying a heavy sack of flour and passing it on to a sailor who hoisted it onto the bed of the truck. Suddenly it was as if there were a heavy scent in his nostrils, a seductive, familiar smell. He wondered where he recognised it from. It was the smell of his grandfather’s chocolate factory. He wiped the sweat from his face, and without knowing why he suddenly thought of his younger sister, from whom he had heard nothing for such a long time. Don’t you miss your brother? Or are you always thinking of your Andro? Where is he now? Was he sent to the northern Caucasus? These thoughts passed through Kostya’s mind, but he preferred not to dwell on them, and seized the next sack of flour. Shots could be heard in the north, but he had learned to ignore them; they were far enough away.
*
Kitty prepared for her departure. The trains were running irregularly; there were reports of bands of robbers in the stations. It would be safer, Mariam suggested, for her to ask a farmer to take her to the city. The post office in the village had closed some time ago. There was no way of sending a telegram to Christine. Kitty was uncomfortable about taking the roubles she needed for the journey from Mariam, but she had no choice.
‘What will you do?’ Kitty asked her friend — her friend, despite everything — as they said goodbye.
‘I’ll go home, to my parents, and see whether I can be of any assistance to the doctor in the next village. They closed our outpatient clinic a few months ago.’
‘Come to Tbilisi.’
‘Is that a joke? What would I do in the city?’
‘There’s a shortage of doctors everywhere. I worked in a hospital, too.’
‘But I’m not a doctor, Kitty.’
‘You’re the best doctor I know.’
Kitty hugged her saint tightly. Mariam brushed back a lock of hair from her forehead.
‘Please forgive me, if you can,’ she whispered in her ear as they parted.
*
Christine’s hand flew to her mouth when she opened the door and saw Kitty standing before her at last. Kitty — without her belly. The farmer had set her down at the main market and she had walked the steep streets all the way up the hill to Vera. Christine knelt down in front of her and started kissing her hands. Kitty had never seen her aunt so beside herself. Christine stroked her face, hands, shoulders, kept running her hands through her hair; she kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. She had spent days on the phone to the administrative authorities, had been to every commissariat in the city, had interrogated all her old acquaintances, to no avail. No one had been able to tell her where Kitty was.
‘What did they do, what did they do to you …?’ asked Christine, again and again.
Kitty allowed herself to be kissed and stroked, but her eyes remained glazed, and she didn’t want to talk, either.
‘I’m hungry, I’m so hungry, I’m so tired, I have to eat something and then sleep, just sleep.’
Christine quickly started opening the kitchen cupboards and putting everything she found on the table. She put a saucepan on the gas and heated the frying pan.
‘I nearly died of worry, I didn’t know what to do … What on earth happened, Kitty?’
As she sliced the bread, Christine cut her forefinger and froze at the sight of the blood running from it. She continued to stare at the red liquid in fascination. Kitty got to her feet, led Christine to the sink, and ran water over the fingertip.
‘It’s all right, it’s not that bad,’ s
he said, looking at her aunt. Christine’s expression was one of horror.
That night, Christine sat beside Kitty with the beautiful half of her face turned towards her, and clung to her hand. Kitty wanted to be left alone, but Christine seemed so frightened that she didn’t dare send her aunt away.
‘Where’s the baby?’
The room lay in darkness. Kitty could see Christine’s silhouette, her flawless profile, and felt an inexplicable urge to touch her face. But it wasn’t the flawless side she wanted to touch; it was the side with the scars, the burned left side she had revealed to her not all that long ago, to tell her that together they would make it, that they would get through this, whatever happened. But they hadn’t made it.
‘What are you doing?’ Christine shrank away slightly as Kitty’s hand moved across her cheek, across her nose, towards the left side, which was hidden beneath a blue veil.
‘Let me, please,’ said Kitty, gently touching the shrivelled skin that felt so hard compared to the intact half of Christine’s face. As if she were stroking a prehistoric animal, the last survivor of an extinct species. Her instinct was to withdraw her hand, but she overcame it and went on exploring Christine’s face with her fingers. Kitty began to speak. Calmly and in detail she told Christine about the hours in the school building, about the blonde woman, about the straps that had bound her, about the syringe, about Mariam, about the questions, those questions they kept asking her again and again, to which she had had no answers. She told her about the contractions, about the stillbirth, about the operation, about the days in the barn where Mariam had nursed her. And all the while she ran her hand over Christine’s scars, felt her way across the bumps and hollows in the hope that by studying Christine’s map she would be able to create her own. A map of her own that would show her how to go on living. A survival map. One that would help her to get out of the classroom with the white rectangle on the wall and cross her own desert, where there was nothing but burning sun and a little mound beneath a tree.
The Eighth Life Page 28