The Midwife of Venice

by Roberta Rich

  Milk, she thought, as the deck of the ship rose and fell under her feet—she must find more milk for Matteo. Her dwindling supply of goat’s milk would keep him alive for only one more day. He had not cried since they had cast off a short while ago.

  If only Jessica were here, she would know what to do. But Jessica would soon lie in a mass grave on Lazzaretto Vecchio, along with hundreds of others who had succumbed to the plague. Here, on the restless deck of this shifting, pitching three-masted galleon, there was no wet nurse, or even a goat, to provide nourishment to a child.

  Her fellow passengers, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Persians, and Jews, as well as Venetians, clustered at the rail watching as the pillars of San Marco disappeared from sight. Standing next to Hannah was an old man, an Armenian, draped in a flowing caftan and coughing from catarrh. Hannah stepped onto a pile of hemp rope to peer over the high sides of the galleon. Holding on to the rail with one hand, Matteo tucked in her arm, she watched as the Basilica di San Marco receded into the distance.

  Through the cacophony of people chatting, gulls screaming overhead, and ropes thrumming against the sails, the distant bells of the Marangona chimed six o’clock, signalling the beginning of the day. To the east, the fiery ball of the sun began to lift itself from the sea, rising above pinnacles, domes, and towers. Above the tangled finials of San Marco, it paused and winked while the water made clapping sounds. To the west, like the spine of a sea monster, the waves arched and broke over the shores of the Island of Guidecca. The Laguna Veneta, the Venetian lagoon, was choppy. The wind teased the azure water into white wavelets.

  Overhead, the Balbiana‘s three square sails bellied and then fell slack from gusts of wind that began and stopped, came and went, without pattern. The breeze whipped the ends of her red scarf into her mouth. She plucked them out and then, using the advantage of her increased height on the coil of rope, turned to study the crowd.

  Matteo whimpered.

  “I saved you at your birth, and I saved you from your uncles. Now I wonder if I can save you once again.” He was pale, his legs so thin and his arms so flaccid that they flopped lifelessly when Hannah shifted him from one arm to the other. She transferred the shadai from around her neck to his. Had she worked so hard to save him only to lose him to starvation?

  Hannah, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, scrutinized one woman after another, dismissing each one in turn. And then, on the other side of the deck, she noticed a lady, Venetian judging from her velvet dress and blonde hair done up in twin coronets, who bore a small object in her arms. Hannah let go of the rail, climbed down from the rope, and pushed her way toward her. Just as she was about to place a hand on the woman’s arm, she looked more closely at the bundle and realized it was a brown spaniel wrapped in white muslin. She backed away, treading on the feet of another woman, who reached out and grasped Hannah by the shoulder to steady her.

  This woman was dressed in a pelisse, a floor-length gown of silk, as green and iridescent as a hummingbird’s breast. Over her face was a veil that did not permit Hannah to see more than her black eyes.

  When Hannah smiled and apologized, the woman replied, “Maşallah.” After Hannah had regained her footing and greeted her in turn, the veiled woman bent forward to examine Matteo. She tickled him under his chin. When he did not respond, she said, “Your child is ill, hanim effendi. He hardly moves.”

  “I have no milk.”

  “May Allah have pity on him. Where is his wet nurse?”

  “That is a story that does not bear telling. Suffice to say, I have only some goat’s milk growing sour in a bottle. Enough for one more day, no more.”

  “A boy?” When Hannah nodded, the woman said, “Then you have been given a gift.” She gave a slight shrug. “I, to my regret, have produced only girls. Six beautiful but useless girls.”

  “Perhaps next time.” Hannah wondered at the woman’s perfect command of Venetian, which she spoke with only the faintest hint of an Ottoman accent.

  The woman patted her stomach and shrugged. “But how does one escape Allah’s will?” She bowed her head and said, “My name is Tarzi.” A gust of wind blew her gown against her body, and Hannah noticed that she was lush in the plump, sensual way of the Turkish women she had glimpsed in one of the markets in Dorsoduro.

  “I am Hannah.”

  “Forgive me for saying this, Hannah effendi, but do you not think you have been reckless to embark on such a trip without a wet nurse?”

  “I had little choice in the matter.”

  “In his condition, a slight fever or grippe could take him.”

  Hannah felt like replying, Do you think me so simple as not to have thought of this? Instead she said, “I was giving him suck until a few days ago and then my milk dried up. By then it was too late to find a suitable nurse to accompany us.” The lie came easily to her. In truth, she had had no time to plan anything other than how to get Matteo onto the Balbiana before the Prosecuti’s soldiers returned to Jessica’s house and seized both of them.

  Tarzi said, “You were nursing him yourself?” She sounded astonished by the thought.

  Jessica would have known how to handle a woman such as this one. A mere tap of Jessica’s fan on the woman’s solid arm and Tarzi would have become less haughty.

  “I was brought to bed a month ago with my last daughter, Gülbahar.”

  “So you have a wet nurse?”

  “Of course,” said Tarzi. “Hatice is an ikbal, a Circassian slave from the mountains. Slender, but tough as a mountain cat.” Tarzi tied the ends of her veil behind her head to keep them from being whipped about by the wind. Above them, the sails gave a thump as the wind filled them.

  “My husband gave me Hatice when my eldest daughter was born.”

  “You are fortunate,” said Hannah. No one in the ghetto could afford slaves; no one in the ghetto wore jewels of the size and perfection that Tarzi wore.

  “You have no time to waste.” Tarzi gazed around at the crowd at the rail. She gestured to a portly man of about fifty years standing a few feet away, talking to an old Armenian man who was coughing phlegm into a piece of cloth. “The Sultan has appointed my husband to be Governor of the province of Üsküdar. I had no choice but to accompany him on this voyage and bring my daughters with me.”

  Hannah could not help noticing that Tarzi had shaped her dark eyebrows into crescents and had outlined her eyelids with kohl. The effect was fetching.

  “I desperately need a woman to give suck to my son. Perhaps your wet nurse would be available?”

  Tarzi said, “I am sympathetic, do not misunderstand, but my Gülbahar has a ferocious appetite. If Hatice had to give suck to two babies, both of them would be in jeopardy.”

  What inducement could Hannah offer this Pasha’s wife in her silk gown, wearing around her neck a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg? Just then the ship broached and Hannah fell against her. Tarzi put her arms around her to steady her. Hannah feared that at any moment she would burst into tears. She had no choice. She pleaded with the woman in front of her.

  “Please! I beg you. I cannot stand by and watch my son starve to death.”

  “There is nothing to be done for this baby. You will bear other children. Every time my Ahmet and I lie together, as if by magic, a child arrives a few months later.” She patted Hannah’s arm. “That is Allah’s way. For my part, I would prefer it to be different.”

  “Different in what way?” Hannah asked.

  She bent closer to Hannah’s ear and lowered her voice. “I am hoping not to grow big again. My confinements are difficult. Vomiting for months, fatigue, and insomnia. Then the pain of the travail and flooding, which, with the next confinement, my midwife fears she will not be able to staunch. And then who will watch over my girls? Who will see they make suitable marriages if I am gone?”

  Hannah looked down at Matteo and fussed with his blanket. Perhaps she had something to offer this woman after all, she reflected. In the ghetto, coitus interruptus was called a
mong the women “winnowing within and threshing without.” It was a poor technique. A specially contrived golden ball inserted in the female passage to seal off the entrance to the womb? Impossible to obtain on the Balbiana. Douching with an infusion of guaiac tea? Hardly practical on this pitching galleon. Then there was abstinence. She glanced at Tarzi’s husband, who still stood several paces away chatting with the old Armenian. No man wishes to be denied the joys of the marriage bed, especially not one such as this, with his fleshy bottom lip and the thick hillock where his legs joined.

  A wave as high as one of the pillars of San Marco threw the ship to one side. A spray of salty water hit Hannah in the face. She staggered, falling to her knees and nearly dropping Matteo. Mopping her face on her sleeve, she decided she would risk offering this woman forbidden knowledge.

  “I am a midwife. I know many ways of encouraging conception—from infusions of fenugreek to the ground seeds of wild rue.” And have tried most of them myself, she could have added, but instead said, “But I also know ways to prevent conception.”

  Tarzi looked at her and said in a quiet voice, “If you have a remedy, I will pay you whatever you like.” She placed a hand on her ruby necklace. “Take this if you like.”

  In Hannah’s linen bag were herbs for bringing on pangs of birth, for easing the pain, for stopping the prodigious bleeding that sometimes followed birth. She even carried balm of Fatima, an Anatolian cream known to heal the striations of the belly left after a confinement. But she did not have with her any herbs to prevent the formation of a child.

  Hannah considered Tarzi’s dilemma. She remembered a Bedouin practice from the Negev Desert. “I can assist. But it will be painful.” Hannah looked at Matteo, his eyelids laced with blue veins and his mouth drooping. “Your ruby does not interest me. My price is your wet nurse. She must give suck to Matteo.”

  “But what of my own baby?”

  “I will give your wet nurse some herbs to make her milk flow.”

  “As freely as the Sweet Waters of Asia?” Tarzi asked.

  Hannah nodded.

  Lowering her head to Hannah’s ear, Tarzi said, “I will come to you early tonight. I know my Ahmet and in what manner he will want to celebrate the first night at sea.”

  While Hannah was changing Matteo’s swaddling bands that evening, in the meagre sleeping area she had carved out for them amidst all the other passengers, she noticed his skin was growing wrinkled and dry from lack of milk. His eyes looked dull; his limbs hung limply. She fed him some boiled water and the last of the goat’s milk, even though it had turned sour. A trickle of the milk escaped his mouth. He began to cry. Hannah wiped it off with a corner of the blanket and put Matteo to her own breast hoping that she might provide some comfort, though no nourishment. He gave a few obliging tugs and then fell back in her arms, relaxed, enjoying the security of her embrace.

  “Do not give up, son. Help is at hand. Soon you will be drinking the finest mother’s milk.”

  As the ship pitched and rolled, Hannah found it safer to crawl on her hands and knees around her small space at the base of a ladder than to stand upright and be thrown to her knees when the ship hit a wave. Her stomach rebelled at the movement and she kept a basin nearby in case she became sick. The pitching was as bad on deck, but the air was fresher.

  At the appointed hour, Tarzi climbed down the ladder, arriving at Hannah’s sleeping pallet as she was enfolding Matteo in his coverlet. As Hannah had quickly learned, there was no privacy on the ship. Passengers, even the wealthy ones, performed their ablutions in full view of others. Men and women trod past Hannah’s tiny sleeping area, under the steps joining the upper and lower decks. Hannah had draped a wool blanket over the rope on which she had strung up Matteo’s cloths to dry, forming a makeshift triangle of privacy. The hem of it pooled on the deck, growing sticky with pine pitch oozing from between the planks.

  “Goodness, this is a mouse hole. And the air!” Tarzi waved a hand in front of her face.

  “Little of that precious stuff reaches me down here,” Hannah said.

  Tarzi looked apprehensive. “So what is your plan to prevent all these babies of mine coming unbidden into the world? Let me have your remedy quickly, then I want to bathe and perfume myself for Ahmet.” She gave a sigh and muttered, “The sooner started, the sooner finished. I have a feeling this will not be agreeable.”

  Hannah described what she intended to do. Tarzi looked frightened, but Hannah laid a hand on her arm. “Do not worry. I have gentle hands. I will not harm you.”

  “In my way, I am as desperate as you,” Tarzi said. “Let us get this unpleasantness over with.”

  “Lie over there.” Hannah gestured to her straw pallet. “And remove your lower garments.”

  After shrugging off her billowy pair of drawers and pulling up her chemise, Tarzi positioned herself on the pallet, which served as a bed, her legs crossed in front of her. She used Hannah’s valise as a pillow.

  “When I am through we will go directly to your wet nurse with Matteo. There is no time to waste.”

  Hannah placed Matteo into a hammock made from a shawl that she had strung from an overhead beam. His body felt as slack in her arms as an empty pillowcase. Then she squatted on her heels next to Tarzi and stroked her cheek to relax her. “You will be brave.” But Hannah suspected that Tarzi would not be brave, would moan and writhe and make this unfamiliar procedure all the more difficult. Hannah washed her hands in a bucket of fresh soapy water. Finding a pebble smooth and small had been easy. She had only to look on the deck to find any number of them jammed between the planks. The stone, about the size of a dried pea, felt smooth between her fingers as she scrubbed it in the water. “Open up your knees like the petals of a flower.” Hannah spoke with confidence to ease Tarzi’s worry.

  “You will not hurt me?”

  “I will try not to. You must stay calm and breathe through your mouth.”

  “And that is what you intend to use?” Tarzi pointed to the pebble. “I do not understand.”

  “Last year, a Sephardic Jew, a trader in cochineal, returned from the Levant. He told my husband the story of Bedouin nomads. They insert a pebble into the matrix of their she-camels to keep them unfruitful during long journeys across the desert.” When Isaac repeated the story to her, Hannah could not fathom why such a thing would work. Now, on reflection, she thought perhaps the pebble in the womb destroyed the male seed by crushing its fragile protective shell in the same way a pestle grinds a peppercorn. Hannah had discussed the Bedouin story with other midwives. None of them had heard of such a technique ever being attempted on a woman.

  “But I am not a she-camel,” said Tarzi, starting to pull on her trousers and rise.

  “And I am not a Bedouin,” said Hannah, pouring a drop of almond oil into her hands and massaging it into her fingers and onto the pebble. “Look.” She held the pebble up so Tarzi could see. “You have pearls bigger than this. Do not fret. This is safe.” Hannah tried to take courage from her own words, but in truth, the insertion of an object where it did not belong, like a cinder in the eye, could cause pain and purulence.

  Moreover, since Tarzi had recently given birth, Hannah must be careful that the pebble did not disturb the healing of the womb and result in fresh and copious bleeding. It would have been dangerous to attempt such a procedure on dry land, never mind on this galleon that never ceased plunging up and down. It was as though God himself, pretending to be a clumsy conjuror, were tossing their little ship from hand to hand in a game of exuberant juggling.

  Tarzi parted her knees. Hannah slipped two fingers into the woman’s passage, feeling for the opening of her womb. Soon she realized that she could not insert the pebble by manipulation alone. She needed to view the passage, see if such a procedure was even possible or if the mouth of the womb was now clamped shut against intrusion. Perhaps the birthing spoons would help. She reached for her linen bag and took them out. She had not even thought to clean them in all that had happened to her sinc
e she had retrieved them from Jacopo. The dried fluids from Matteo’s birth still adhered to the spoons. She turned her back on Tarzi and swished them clean in the bucket of water, carefully drying them on a clean cloth. She draped a towel across Tarzi’s bent knees so the woman would not see the procedure.

  After rubbing the spoons with oil, she inserted them into Tarzi’s passage and very gently squeezed them open. She could now see the that womb’s mouth, a small thing to be grateful for, was still pliable from the birth of Gülbahar.

  Footsteps drew close. Tarzi gave a groan. She heard what sounded like a pair of heavy boots hesitate and then climb quickly up the steps. Jessica had been right: men had no interest in the affairs of women. At the thought of Jessica, Hannah felt herself grow teary. It was too much to expect after all these years that she would bear a child, but if someday God smiled and gave her a daughter, she would name her Jessica.

  Hannah placed her other hand on Tarzi’s belly, trying to gauge the position and size of the fundus of the matrix.

  “You have tender hands, Hannah, but still it hurts. Perhaps this is not a wise idea.”

  “Try to stay still and remember to breathe.” Hannah was glad she was not trying to stand upright because she could not have kept to her feet on the pitching ship. A sudden heaving of the galleon threw her into the corner, nearly hitting her head on Matteo’s hanging hammock. Tarzi gave a yelp of pain. The sudden movement had wrenched Hannah’s fingers from the birthing spoons.

  It could not be right to thwart God’s will by preventing conception. Was this His way of telling her so?

  Hannah regained her position, kneeling on one side of Tarzi’s upraised knees, her hand between her legs. With the birthing spoons in place, she pinched the pebble between her index and middle fingers and pushed it up the passage, nudging it past the mouth of the matrix and into the womb. Then she eased the birthing spoons out of Tarzi’s passage. In less time than it takes to recite the Shabbat prayers, the task was finished.