‘Come on now, don’t make a fuss,’ said the angry aunt. ‘You’ve barely begun.’
She let the midwife take back the gown and put her under a sluggish blood-warm shower – and then do something utterly disgusting to her with a length of rubber tube which sent her scurrying crabwise to a toilet – and then lay her on one of the couches and shave her pubic hair. It was peculiar: ordinarily she would have hated every moment, and she still did but again remotely, with the strength of the signal turned way down. To be treated like this felt as if it were of a piece with the way that her body, which had expanded to fill the whole significant portion of the globe, was also turning impersonal on her. It had stopped being hers to direct. It was in the grip of a process in which she had no say. There was something comforting in the thought that it knew what it was doing even if she didn’t. And if the nurses knew what they were doing too, that was good. She was being looked after. The midwife was alsed her down below with an orange disinfectant that stung the newly scraped skin. It looked as if she’d spilled a soft drink in her lap. Then Angry Aunt tossed the hospital gown over the top half of her, and went to fetch a doctor, a woman with a face ironed slack by tiredness. Her eyelids drooped and fluttered as she snapped on rubber gloves, and though she gave Galina an exhausted smile her fingers seemed clumsy and mechanical as she did the pelvic exam.
‘Primipara,’ she said to the Angry Aunt, standing by with a clipboard. ‘Twenty-six years old. Labour not yet urgent. Early rupture of amnion. Longitudinal position of fetus. Left occiput anterior. Normal course; cervix at two centimetres; initial dilatation phase now at – when did you start, dear?’
‘About eleven o’clock this morning,’ said Galina.
‘Three hours, then,’ said the doctor. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said, hoisting the tired smile, ‘everything is going perfectly normally, so don’t worry at all. Inna Olegovna here will take you through to the labour ward, and then it’s just a question of remembering your exercises when the contractions strengthen. Room B3,’ she told the Angry Aunt.
‘I think it’s full.’
‘Is it? G1 then – but she shouldn’t really be climbing stairs, not with waters broken. Is the elevator working?’
‘No.’
‘Oh well. Can’t be helped. Goodbye, my dear.’
‘Wait a minute, please, wait a minute,’ said Galina, but the doctor was almost gone and only turned her head in the doorway. ‘Sorry,’ Galina said, ‘but – what exercises?’
‘You didn’t do the psychoprophylaxis classes?’
‘The what?’
The doctor stifled a yawn with her hand. ‘You should have had a letter,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you get a letter?’
‘Yes – but that was about childcare and things, wasn’t it? I couldn’t go, I didn’t have time.’
‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘You had nine months. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that at this moment I don’t have time either. I was due off shift at six this morning and I have family waiting. Inna Olegovna will explain things to you. Goodbye.’
But the Angry Aunt didn’t say much as they were making their way along more tiled corridors and up a stair where open windows slotted the steamy warmth with shafts of cold. She only muttered about the doctor loading her up with chores. A contraction came when Galina was on the landing, the hardest yet, and Inna Olegovna was resentfully obliged to prop her up. Galina panted, and not just from the squeezing and the clenching inside of her. She had worked out that that sound she could hear, the noise like seagulls in the distance, was actually the rising and falling cacophony of a flock of female voices, crying out. Screaming, in fact, some of them. At the top of the stairs the cries grew louder, with a particular focus, a particular clot of decibels, coming from the far end of the new corridor in front of her.
‘Please,’ Galina made herself say, ‘what is this thing I’m supposed to know about?’
‘You girls,’ said Inna Olegovna with satisfaction. ‘You girls get everything handed to you on a plate.’
‘But how am I supposed –’
‘In here,’ said the Angry Aunt, and showed her through the first doorway on the left, into a white-tiled room with six beds in it, four of them already occcupied. Galina was so relieved not to be sent to the room with the screaming, which she imagined must be a kind of a bedlam judging by the noise, a place of dreadful abandon, that she grasped at the reassuring signs of order here – the big clock that the rows of beds all faced, the stack of clean sheets on the trolley by the door – though there were groans too, and cries, and grunted sounds, as the women in the beds struggled through their internal surges and ebbs, or lay big-eyed and sweating, waiting for the next round.
‘Hello,’ said Galina. Nobody answered. She sat on the edge of an empty bed and levered herself round and back onto the pillows. There was a big light-fitting directly above her head, a wide white bowl strangely pock-marked with black. The Angry Aunt twitched a thin grey bedspread over her legs.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘Pay attention. When the contractions come, breathe deeply. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. If you need extra help, rub the skin of your belly in circles. Use the clock to time the contractions. You’ll know you’re reaching the next stage when they come a minute or less apart. How much it hurts depends on how well you conduct yourself.’
‘Is that really all you can tell me?’ said Galina.
‘Huh. Better than nothing,’ said the Angry Aunt.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said the woman on the right of Galina, when she’d gone; a thin woman in her thirties with curls stuck to her forehead. She kept her eyes on the second hand of the clock as she spoke. ‘You didn’t miss much.’
‘You went to the classes?’
‘Yes, but it was only stuff about taking lots of walks, you know, and how to prepare baby food, and then there were five minutes at the end about labour pain being an illusion promoted by capitalist doctors, and how it was really only messages from the subcortex of the brain which you could turn off by stimulating the cortex. Or maybe the other way around.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Galina.
‘Neither do I,’ said the woman.
‘I do,’ said her neighbour on the other side, a sturdy-looking teenager. ‘It means they’re not going to give us any painkillers.’ And she started to laugh, but her next contraction arrived. ‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘Here we go again. Oh you bastard, how did I let you talk me into this? Oh you cocksucker. Oh. You. Motherfucker.’
‘Must you talk like that?’ said Galina. ‘It’s very vulgar.’
‘You stuck-up bitch,’ said the girl, through clenched teeth. ‘Just you wait.’
*
The girl was right. Galina did wait, faithfully counting the interval between contractions, five minutes, four minutes, and trying rather self-consciously to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, while her new muscles worked, and perhaps it did help, sort of; but after a while, a long while or a short while, the feelings changed, in quantity of discomfort and therefore in quality to until they began to stab holes in her deep breaths, and to leave her gasping, with the breath forced up into a tiny bouncing flutter in her throat, and everything further down surging along out of control. It was not squeezing that she felt, any more: it was a crushing, a pulping. It was not stretching now, but tearing. It put her in mind of what she’d seen butchers doing in the big meat lockers, twisting apart joints against the angle of the bones, the cartilage popping, the fibres of the meat pulling out in red strings. And the Angry Aunt did nothing to help. The first time she came back, Galina watched her hungrily, expecting that there would be a pill to swallow or an injection to take, but she had only brought a bowl of water, and briskly wiped all the foreheads in the room with it, like a person scrubbing tabletops.
Galina had never in her adult life experienced anything that really hurt, a physical sensation that would be up there in intensity of unpleasantness with sorrow or humiliati
on, and the discovery was astonishing. When each contraction reached its peak, she found that she would gladly have re-endured any awful emotion she had ever known, if it had just meant that she didn’t have to experience the next instant of this. She would rather be back in the conversation she had had with Volodya when she came home from Sokolniki Park. She would rather be lying in the dark with one hand over her eye and the pillow wet and the TV braying through the wall. No contest. But no one was interested in making the swap. The next instant came, and then another one, and another, though the pain that filled each one up made it impossible to imagine that she would be able to endure any continuation whatsoever of this sharpness, this blade slicing in the tissue, this lightning-fork running through the nerves, until she did, and she had, and she was facing the impossibility of an instant further on. She didn’t want to stroke her belly or her back. She didn’t want to touch anywhere down there, where her body was not her own any more, and some kind of terrible misunderstanding had arisen about sizes and volumes and the feasibility of getting an object as big as a city bus out through narrow flesh. She wanted to watch from the other side of the glass. But that was the other discovery. It had been a ridiculous illusion to suppose that some detached bit of her would be able to watch her body getting on with it. The contractions sucked her down into flesh and bone. While they lasted, her body was all there was. Only her body existed. She was all body.
Now she too watched the clock, pushing at the second hand with her eyes, as if the thin red wand creeping round the dial directly controlled what she was feeling. It was the last thing in the room that made sense. The seconds tugged and dragged at it as it passed – they were viscous gulfs, they were treacly hectares of wasteland, they were wet mouths – but it went on moving. It pushed on. Nothing else helped. The time the hour and minute hands measured went away. People went away. Fyodor seemed as remote as the stars; the baby was unimaginable. The woman in the right-hand bed disappeared, then the teenager, wheeled away up the hall in a kind of thrashing paroxysm. It didn’t matter. Nothing was real except her and the second hand. Because if she clung to it for two whole revolutions, every black division round the face a separate passage through an experience worse than sorrow or humiliation, it would arrive, in the end, at the second that ended the contraction, and make the pain drain abruptly down like water in a holed mug, and she would be briefly her recognisable self again, panting and trembling, with luxurious seconds of respite ahead of her. Gradually the respites ended sooner and sooner: three circuits of the second hand, two, one and a half. But it was all there was to hold onto, and it gave her just enough strength to bite her teeth together and stop herelf making those dreadful groaning noises coming from the other beds. She could just, just manage it. Her and the second hand.
And then the second hand let her down. Two minutes of pain, and she waited for the end, she waited and waited, while the red needle crept onwards, up and over the top of the dial, and round the bottom again, and through two more whole turns before she understood that the respite wasn’t coming, this time; wasn’t coming any more. And the pain of the contraction changed shape too. It had come, before, in gathering waves, rocking in and rising higher and higher, all surging so to speak in one direction, all stretching and tightening – all tearing and crushing – towards the one goal, the one object. She’d been being opened. She couldn’t help knowing that. But now there seemed to be no object, no pattern. If the pain was a sea, it was a choppy mess of froth now, churned by waves running every which way and slapping into each other. The butchers’ hands forgot what they were doing and ripped at her at random. Things had gone mad inside her. And the seconds were just as hard to get through, and now they were going to come at her forever and ever, without stopping, with no order or logic or justification at all. This can’t be right, she thought. I can’t do this.
‘Nurse,’ she called, her voice a squeak. And again. And again. In the end Inna Olegovna came, wiping red hands on a towel.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I think something is wrong,’ Galina whispered.
The Angry Aunt sighed and rummaged in the parts of Galina for which she had never found a name she was comfortable saying out loud.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s just the second stage. Perfectly normal. A couple more hours, maybe.’
Two hours maybe. A hundred and twenty minutes maybe. Seven thousand two hundred seconds maybe. Forever and ever.
‘Please,’ said Galina, ‘please. Can’t you give me something? This is torture. I can’t bear it.’
‘We don’t have anything like that,’ said the Angry Aunt. ‘It’s against policy. You aren’t ill, you know.’
‘But I can’t bear it,’ Galina said, and helplessly began to cry, not in sobs, but in weak streams from the outside corners of her eyes. Down in the salt water dripped the awful liquor of everything: her body’s betrayals, her ruined plans, her utter loneliness. ‘I can’t,’ she wept. ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’
‘Well, you have to,’ said Inna Olegovna. ‘You have no choice. You’re not helping yourself with this kind of attitude, you know. It’s all in how you think about it. So pull yourself together and breathe right, or you’ll kill the baby.’
Oh, she knew this game. All her life it had been the cure-all. Pretend the world better. If you weep, pretend you’re smiling. If you’re puzzled, pretend you’re certain. If you’re hungry, pretend you’re full. If you see chaos, pretend there’s a plan. If today stinks, pretend it’s tomorrow. If it hurts – psychoprophylaxis. The butchers’ hands worked without cease. Behind Inna Olegovna’s head the black splotches on the light shade swam into focus. Stalactites of black mucus with little legs and wings in them: they were all mashed flies, swad and left to fester. But why should I pretend this doesn’t hurt? she thought, and was all of a sudden angrier than she could ever remember being before.
The Angry Aunt was going.
‘Nurse!’ shouted Galina, and found she could throw the pain into her voice if she stopped trying to make it hurt less. Into the shout, the whole thing, the whole experience of being scraped out alive into a bloody tunnel. ‘Nurse!’
The midwife came back, looking surprised.
‘Now what?’ she said.
‘My husband’, croaked Galina, baring her teeth, ‘is the Komsomol secretary at Elektrozavodskaya.’
‘All the more reason you should set a good example,’ said the Angry Aunt, but she was cautious now.
‘He has friends everywhere. Good friends. At the City Soviet, at the Party Control Commission. Some of them supervise the hospitals,’ she said, and the word hospitals came out with a hiss.‘They would be very upset if he were upset. Do you understand me?’
‘It’s policy to –’
‘Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘So go and get me something for the pain. This is a hospital.’ Hiss. ‘You’ll have some morphine on a shelf somewhere. Go and get it.’
‘But –’
‘But nothing. Do what you’re told!’
Inna Olegovna scurried.
*
Well, they did have a little injection of something tucked away on a shelf, and it just about lasted her until the last stage began, and they moved her down the corridor to the bedlam of the delivery room, not caring at that point about the shouts and screams because she was adding to them herself as she started to push. The teenager was in the next bed, all done, white and quiet and stunned, baby already papoosed up and whisked away; but she laughed when she heard the words that Galina was shouting. I am going to get his mother out of that flat if it’s the last thing I do, thought Galina, and prepared to meet her future.
Notes – V.3 Psychoprophylaxis, 1966
1 He was registered with the All-Union Legal Correspondence Institute: founded in 1932, with more than forty thousand graduates by 1968. Added together, students attending evening classes (652,000 in 1967–8) and studying by correspondence (1.77 million
in 1967–8) earned almost half of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the USSR, and for law degrees the proportion was even higher, 43,000 out of 65,000 in 1967–8. A law degree was a tool of working-class social mobility, as in the United States, appealing to those on the rise, like Fyodor, rather than to those with established family traditions of education. Figures from Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia.
2 The thousand skirmishes of communalka life: see Fitzpatrick, Everyday linism, pp. 47–9; and for the special political claustrophobia of communal flats in times of purge and denunciation, see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007), which includes floor plans of the extraordinarily crammed places his witnesses inhabited. For the surreal spectacle of Stalin himself picking his way through a communalka, and looking with touristic interest at the writing on the wall around the telephone, see Grossman, Life and Fate.
3 Orange or lime-green orlon: orlon being the Soviet brand-name equivalent to Western nylon.
4 The deputy director of a pig farm’s on trial: a famous case from 1969, hoicked back in time for the usual unscrupulous reasons of dramatic foreshortening. For the trial coverage, as presented for the outrage of liberal-minded intellectuals, see Literaturnaya Gazeta (1969) no. 27, p. 10.
5 One of the three Moscow maternity homes that specialised in Rh-neg patients: I get my details of hospital conditions for this chapter from Katherine Bliss Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union (Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), pp. 185–7, and Peter Osnos, ‘Childbirth, Soviet Style: A Labor in Keeping With the Party Line’, Washington Post, 28 November 1976, pp. G13–G14. Some details of Soviet medical procedure for childbirth come from Elizabeth Lee, ‘Health Care in the Soviet Union. Two. Childbirth – Soviet Style’, Nursing Times (1984), 1–7 February; 80 (5):44–5, which is a view of a system by a British midwife, focused mainly on differences in goals and intentions. All of these apply to periods ten to twenty years after the date at which Galina is giving birth, so some of what happens here is inevitably conjectural. But the system does not appear to have changed fundamentally, and any allowance made for decaying facilities and increasing cynicism as the Brezhnev years went on can be balanced against the truth that the special Rhesus-negative maternity hospitals were the sought-after best of the system. A different kind of allowance needs to be made for my other major source on procedure. I. Velvovsky, K. Platonov, V. Ploticher and E. Shugom, Painless Childbirth Through Psychoprophylaxis: Lectures for Obstetricians, translated by David A. Myshne (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1960) is a manual for export, offering an idealised version of psychoprophylactic childbirth as it would have been if implemented in every Soviet hospital with the care it was given in the one hospital where it was invented. What Galina experiences is my best guess at psychoprophylaxis as actually practised.
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