Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  It was all Erika could do to stop Karl escorting her to the makeshift hospital at Bernried Castle, but when she pointed out to him how Martha needed him more than she did right now, how the best thing he could do for all of them was find them a new home as soon as possible, and how it really was a very short journey before she would be surrounded by health professionals whose nerves would be a lot less ‘frayed’ by the presence of a woman due to go into labour at any time, he eventually capitulated.

  ‘But this is a hospital for wounded soldiers, Frau Portner, not a maternity ward,’ said the hairless and rather wrinkly doctor in charge with an apologetic brow that only added to his striking resemblance to a sphinx cat in a white coat.

  ‘I don’t mind, Dr…?’

  ‘Löwe.’

  ‘I really don’t mind, Dr Löwe,’ Erika smiled. ‘You see, my midwife fled when all the looting took place recently and so this really would be the best place for me to be.’

  Dr Löwe wrung his hands. ‘But I’m afraid we really don’t have the equipment for helping someone through a birth. I mean, if there were complications.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Erika said as cheerfully as she could, ‘I’m a doctor too and I’ve even brought my own medical books and instruments specifically for birthing.’ She pointed to the box at her feet on the steps to the castle.

  The doctor’s bright blue eyes became watery, as if he might burst into tears at any second. ‘Well, the truth is, Frau Portner, erm, Dr Portner,’ he attempted to lessen his own agitation by laughing at his little faux pas, ‘we… no one here, me in particular, well, how can I put this… I’ve never delivered a baby before.’

  The admission finally took such a great weight off the doctor’s depilated shoulders that all his wrinkles were instantly, though momentarily, ironed out so that his head resembled a bar billiards ball. How such an “experienced” doctor could have gone through his career without ever delivering a baby, Erika could only wonder at, unless he was unusually late in coming to the profession. But this speculation had to wait, as Erika realised she needed now to pour all her resources into a display of coquettish femininity at a time when she felt much more slob than siren.

  ‘Really?’ she said with fluttering eyelashes. ‘That does surprise me, a physician of such obvious experience and skill as yourself. But still, there is something about you that tells me no matter what situations present themselves you will always rise to the challenge and excel yourself.’ She thought she might have gone a little too far having put such a ridiculous emphasis on the word rise, which had Erika desperately trying to blink images of the doctor’s glabrescent wrinkly appendage from her mind under the disguise of more flirtatious eyelashing.

  ‘Well…’ Dr Löwe meowed, still unconvinced.

  ‘And besides, the thing is,’ Erika said suddenly clutching at her hips with genuine discomfort. I think this baby might be coming.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the doctor blanched.

  ‘I think it might be coming now!’

  Max requested that Edgar or Horst go back to town instead of him on the next visit. Partly because he was terrified that he would bump into Utkin again and be subjected to another drinking marathon with all the nauseous, head splitting symptoms that proceeded from it, but also he wanted his friends to feel some of the austere luxury that came with donning the fur coat and getting away from the prison and the hospital for a while, albeit via a six kilometre hike to a village of maudlin and ailing Russians. But his captors were having none of it.

  So he found himself trudging into town with Christoph again the following week. The monk was limping most of the way and his cheek was black with bruising.

  ‘Come and see me in the barracks tonight,’ Max whispered to him as they walked. ‘Let me tend to your injuries.’

  The monk cocked his head and attempted to hang a smile across his broken face, but Max wasn’t sure if that meant he would come.

  Thankfully Max’s guard led him straight past the Utkin residence this time and on to a small apartment block, which might have afforded the tenants on the top floor some wonderful views in the summer, if the summer ever came. But everyone here was still groping their way through the Cimmerian winter. A winter which froze all the water in the officers’ toilets, rendering them unusable, hence the stench and the obstacle course of turds Max had to negotiate in the street as he entered the block.

  He knocked on the door of apartment number three. He had to knock a few times, each time harder than the last to be heard over the clamour inside. Eventually a child answered and stood staring up at Max for a moment. He beamed at the girl as he might have done at a long lost friend, after all it had been so long since Max had seen a child, the limpidity and guilelessness inherent therein so far from the world he had inhabited for the last few years. However, this little girl did not return his smile, nor did she appear to embody those ingenuous traits Max was yearning to see. After glaring at the alien for a protracted second she scurried back into the pandemonium of the apartment leaving the door wide open and apparently neglecting to announce his arrival to her parents.

  ‘Hello?’ Max called out edging his way inside and knocking hard on the open door as he went.

  The girl and her three siblings were the main cause of the racket. That and the adults’ harassed reaction to them. The kids played like any other kids would play, but cooped up in this pokey apartment, instead of out in the sun-drenched fields of a life their parents had to leave far away, the sound was amplified to distorting levels. The man and woman shouting the most at the kids Max assumed were the parents, but there were three other couples in the flat, the men in various states of undress so that it was difficult for Max to ascertain their rank, and the women in various states of pregnancy so that it was easy for Max to ascertain why he had been ordered to come here.

  Eventually, as Max continued to shuffle politely further inside, one of the women sat at the table in the centre of the room, one of the few pieces of furniture there, noticed him despite her heavy eyelids.

  ‘Are you the doctor?’ she said her hand reaching weakly out for the man slumped next to her as if to rouse him to protect her just in case he was not the medic at all but an intruder.

  ‘I am. How can I help?’

  ‘A one way ticket to Moscow would help,’ another woman sat on the floor piped up as she sewed a shirt as if she was trying to stab it to death.

  Max snorted quietly and politely at her little joke and waited for a sensible answer from someone.

  ‘My wife is in here,’ the officer who had been leaning on the window sill since Max entered propelled himself forwards into an afterthought of a room attached to the main one, in which was barely enough space for a single bed, the only bed in the entire flat, Max noted.

  On the bed lay a heavily pregnant woman with a white sheet under her blotted with blood.

  ‘Hello, Mrs…?’

  ‘Lagunov,’ the woman sighed. In the dim light provided by a lamp from the other room this young woman’s skin had the colour and texture of old paper. ‘Am I losing the baby?’ she asked without agitation, as if this was a regular occurrence in her life.

  ‘Let me take a look,’ Max said glancing at the officer for some kind of unspoken permission to delve between his wife’s legs. ‘When do you think are you due?’

  ‘Not for another month or so yet,’ Mrs Lagunov gasped the last word, her head and shoulders catapulting from the bed, one hand reaching out to clasp her abdomen, which felt as if it was about to split open.

  ‘No, you’re not losing the baby,’ Max said, his own heart beginning to race to match the speed of his patient’s.

  ‘Then what’s wrong with her?’ her husband shouted over her cries.

  ‘Nothing, it’s just that she’s having the baby. Now.’

  As well as for its hairless wrinkly skin, the sphinx cat is also recognisable by its bright blue eyes, saucer-like on its little face. In this respect Dr Löwe resembled the cat even more as he urgent
ly found a room in the castle for his newest patient recently gone into labour.

  Where she sat on her bed unpacking her box of books and equipment, Erika could see out of the window over the acres of immaculate parkland that surrounded this early twelfth-century Augustine monastery. It was hard to imagine she was still in the same congested, crumbling country she had travelled through with Karl, the same devastated, incinerated country Benjamin had told her so much about as they rattled about in that windswept carriage full of displaced people. It was hard to believe she was even on the same continent with these ancient trees reaching up unencumbered, their cuckoo-sprinkled canopy out of sight. She opened the window and the simple room was suddenly adorned with the gentle croak of frogs, and perfumed with jasmine.

  For a moment she felt guilty that her in-laws were combing the streets looking for a new home when she could quite happily have lived here forever, until a contraction yanked her back to her own precarious reality – giving birth in a hospital for wounded soldiers with no expertise in midwifery around her. And no husband.

  She hadn’t heard from Max now in eight months, since just after their wedding when he was ordered out to Breslau. She hadn’t heard from her own father, who was commanding a regiment somewhere, for the same length of time too. She hadn’t even had any contact with her mother in Neurode since she had left with Karl. If Max could not be here for the birth of his child she would have wished for no one else but her mother. She needed those zaftig arms around her now, her reassuringly commanding tone, her experience. Because Erika knew, she could read all the books she wanted to, pass all the medical exams she had, call herself a doctor, but her mama had one qualification Erika couldn’t possibly have achieved yet – she had given birth successfully to two children.

  There was a gentle pawing at the door and Dr Löwe’s startled eyes entered the room before the rest of him. ‘Shall I take your instruments for sterilisation?’

  ‘Oh thank you, yes,’ Erika handed them over. ‘Contractions are coming a little more frequently now,’ she informed him.

  Consequently there was little room left on his face for those eyes.

  ‘Is there a nurse that can come and assist?’ Erika asked.

  ‘All of our nurses are nuns,’ Löwe said in one of his eternally compunctious cadences, ‘so they are not allowed to be present at the birth, I’m afraid’.

  ‘Praise be!’ Erika muttered sarcastically.

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But anyway I have asked Dr Becker to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Erika brightened at the news. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘An orthopaedic surgeon.’

  ‘Great,’ she deflated again.

  ‘Lots of passion for his vocation, Dr Becker. I’m sure you’ll like him.’

  Erika read between the lines here quickly as if the facts were spelt out by the furrows on Löwe’s pale skin. ‘So when did he qualify?’

  ‘Oh, I, erm, don’t know, one… or two years ago.’

  Erika lay back on the clean sheets and began leafing through her Stöckel with even more focus than she had the night before her exam when, crammed in that musty armchair with Max, they had tested each other till the early hours.

  The room suddenly got even darker as the doorway filled with nearly every other member of the household who had heard Max’s announcement.

  ‘Can you bring the light in here, heat up a bowl of water and bring as many sheets or towels as you have?’ Max ordered the rabble at the door hoping that might disperse them a bit. But no one budged.

  ‘Nearly all the sheets and towels we have are here on the bed already,’ the husband said.

  ‘Where are the other beds? Where does everyone else sleep?’ Max asked curtly.

  ‘This is the only bed we have. We usually take it in turns to have an hour in it through the night, but last night with Klara in this state we had to leave her there.’

  Max looked incredulously at the officer, a lieutenant as he soon discovered. Officers of similar rank, pregnant women and children living in conditions in many ways worse than their own prisoners’. His very own bunk in the draughty heights of the mouldy barracks suddenly seemed bizarrely desirable. The wooden seat over the hole in the ground they had in Gegesha also seemed to him almost decadent compared to crapping in the streets as the Russians did, despite the rats, sitting atop the pyramid of shit which grew out of the hole, waiting to nip at the buttocks and scrotums of the prisoners trying to relieve themselves there.

  ‘Well then, how about newspaper? Bring as much newspaper as you can. And soap. Well, give her some room to breathe!’ Max said as firmly as he dared to the audience crammed in the doorway. ‘And let’s have that light in here! Please.’

  The lieutenant dispersed the sorry crowd as he crashed through it on his way to bring the items the doctor had requested whilst Max dumped his coat in the corner of the little room, rolled up his sleeves and said delicately to his patient, ‘That was a contraction. Now when the next one comes make sure you breathe through it. Do not push. You are not ready to push just yet, OK?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Klara said through tightly clamped lips, anticipating more pain.

  Max pulled out his pocket watch, laid it on the windowsill and kept an eye on it until the next contraction came. The lieutenant soon returned with soap and water and a rather emaciated pile of paper.

  ‘It’s all we have,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘It’s OK. Just lay it under the sheets. If you can try and shift a little, Mrs Lagunov?’

  Whilst the lieutenant and his wife performed the awkward dance necessary to remake the bed as instructed with her still on it, Max washed his hands thoroughly. More thoroughly even than he needed to perhaps, as it gave him time to think, to recall the procedure and work out how he was going to do it with such limited resources.

  ‘OK,’ he said shaking his hands dry when he saw the state of the towels on offer, ‘I need to, er, check, erm, inside, to, er…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Klara saved him. ‘Whatever you need to do.’

  He pulled his stethoscope from his bag and looked around for her husband who was hovering just outside the door now, looking half desirous to be with his wife again, but glad of the duty of keeping the rabble away as his excuse for staying sentry by the door. Max inserted two fingers into the woman’s vagina.

  ‘That’s what you need to do!’ Erika bellowed at Dr Becker as the contractions came harder and faster. ‘Two fingers in and check for the position of the baby’s head, the presentation, the dilation.’

  Dr Becker, who looked but a few years older than a baby himself did as he was told.

  ‘What do you find?’ Erika said in a tone that reminded her of her own teacher Dr Stöhr when the class were up to their elbows in the innards of a cadaver.

  ‘Head well down,’ Max told himself, but made sure it was loud enough for Klara to hear too since the news was good, ‘Anterior presentation, only a thin rim of cervix remaining. Have your waters not broken yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t expect to be having the baby yet.’

  ‘That’s OK. In fact that’s good,’ he said listening with his stethoscope to the baby’s heart. ‘A hundred and thirty beats per minute. That’s good. Strong and steady.’

  His own heartrate wasn’t far behind the baby’s now and the trauma of the next few minutes was only going to increase it and everyone else’s in the room. Max had assisted on a number of births during his training but never had he led, let alone been the only medic present.

  Another contraction tore through Klara and Max checked the watch. Contractions every three minutes.

  ‘My waters have broken now. At least I hope that’s what just happened,’ Klara visibly blushed despite already being red with exertion.

  Max checked and confirmed her suspicion. ‘Let me pull out that wet sheet,’ he said as Klara hauled her hips about. ‘I can see the baby’s head now, Mrs Lagunov,
so when that next contraction comes you can push. But not too hard, do you understand?’

  As he delved in his bag for more tools – the pliers that he used to cut Paul’s frostbitten fingers off, the clamps made by the ex-engineer from Heidelberg from wire stolen from the perimeter fences – he wondered whether to elaborate for his patient that if she pushed too hard and split her perineum he didn’t really have the appropriate tools to sew her up again.

  ‘Check the heartrate,’ Erika ordered Becker, blinking the sweat from her eyes.

  She felt his hands shaking as he held the stethoscope to her flesh.

  ‘About a hundred and forty beats per minute,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Just pant through it, pant through it, it’s not time to push yet,’ Erika instructed herself although she could have sworn Becker began panting too as she said that.

  Another contraction ripped through her. She roared. She reached out for someone to grasp. Her mother. Max. All she got was a fistful of wet sheets. She tried not to imagine the worst, about the baby or Max. She refused to give birth to this child unless its father would be there for it as it grew. But the baby didn’t seem to be waiting for permission. Then as the pains rent her body she started hoping for the worst. Well, death was the only excuse that bastard could have for not being here with her holding her hand right now, wasn’t it? How could he leave her at a time like this? Have his way with her and then flounce off to the front and play doctor with all those nurses swooning over him and all those whores telling him to forget the wife, live for now, after all you might not be alive tomorrow so what was the point of waiting faithfully?

  ‘Just pant through it, you know, in and out,’ was all the information he chose to offer Klara as Max took hold of the baby’s crown to try and stop it shooting out if she didn’t follow his instructions. ‘On the next contraction the head will be born.’