This Stephanie, a mature woman from South Africa whom Michaela had met in the neighborhood choir and had become very friendly with, was the source of some of her new ideas, including the idea of giving birth at home with a midwife, which apparently was fashionable then among young women in North London, who besides relying on their own sturdy health were looking for some kind of meaning in the simpler ways of former generations. I knew that Michaela was searching for something; she wanted to experience the birth on a basic, elemental level, and if half the human race was still giving birth at home without making a fuss about it, there really was no reason for me to be concerned. Her pregnancy had been absolutely normal, and she herself was a strong, healthy young woman. She had also participated in a Lamaze course, and she knew what to expect; in case of an emergency the hospital was just around the corner, and I myself was a doctor after all, as Michaela reminded me in a slightly mocking tone, for it amused her that a doctor, and a young one at that, should be prey to fears that would never even occur to a layman. It was true that I had accumulated plenty of experience over the past few months in the little operating room next to the emergency room, but I had never delivered a baby—let alone this particular one, whom I was already calling Shiva to myself, but with a beth, not with a vav. This was my condition for agreeing to the birth at home, and Michaela was forced to accept it, in spite of her protests. “You’re wrong, Benjy,” she said. “Shiva with a vav is more elegant than Shiva with a beth. And it’s also connected to the word shivayon, equality, or even, if you want, to something religious like Shiviti elohim l’negdi, ‘I have set God always before me.’”
“But you mean a completely different god,” I said immediately. “Why different?” she wondered. “It’s always the same god, Benjy. Why can’t you understand? But never mind, let it be with a beth in the meantime, and when she learns to read and write she can decide for herself how to spell her name. In any case, in English it’s the same, and that’s the important thing,” and this concluded the negotiations between us, with an echo of her refusal to go home to Israel after the year was over.
My parents had already heard this echo too, on the way back from the airport, and they remarked on it to me, but their immediate concern was with Michaela’s plan to give birth at home. In the beginning they tried to pressure Michaela tactfully into changing her mind, as they had tried and succeeded in the matter of the size of the wedding. But this time I wasn’t neutral. I felt obligated to stand up for Michaela and reassure my parents—after all, I was a doctor, wasn’t I? And that should count for something. Fortunately, my father’s niece and her pale, thin, bespectacled husband, the one with the slightly mysterious appearance, called as soon as my parents arrived and invited them to dinner and the theater, distracting them to some extent from their anxieties about the approaching birth, which I intended to tell them about only when it was over. This wouldn’t be easy, for they were staying nearby, and in spite of their discretion and promise not to make a nuisance of themselves, they called several times a day. When I received a phone call at six o’clock in the evening from Michaela, who was already a few days overdue, to tell me that her water had broken, I told her not to say anything to my parents and hurried home from the hospital. There I was met by Stephanie, who liked taking part in these private births and who was chiefly responsible for giving Michaela the confidence to go through with it. Michaela was already lying, pale and smiling, on the mattress on my side of the joined twin beds, for her own mattress, soaked with amniotic fluid, had been put in front of the radiator in the next room to dry. I wondered if amniotic fluid had a smell. The first contraction had not come yet, so while we waited I made coffee and sandwiches for Stephanie and myself, but I forbade Michaela to eat, so that she wouldn’t vomit later. Even though Michaela had assured me that the midwife would bring “everything necessary,” I had prepared myself for the delivery by purchasing some polydine disinfectant, something to stop the bleeding, and three shots of Pitocin to accelerate the contractions, at a pharmacy; the Marcaine injections to anesthetize the pelvic nerves, which proved impossible to obtain at a pharmacy, I secretly “borrowed” from the medicine cabinet in the hospital delivery room, in the hope that we wouldn’t have to use them. Prompted by a premonition that something might go wrong and that I should be prepared for any eventuality, without asking permission I put a few simple but essential instruments in my bag, such as forceps, scalpels, long, curved scissors, and needles, and as soon as I got home I threw them all into a pot of boiling water to sterilize them. How strange, I thought, that I should be sitting here in our little kitchen, full of fear and apprehension, watching the bubbling water, when only a stone’s throw away was a hospital with modern operating rooms to which I had free access. If I really loved Michaela, I wondered, would I have given in to her so easily?
The midwife had not yet arrived, even though she had said that she was on her way some time ago. Michaela showed no signs of anxiety; she was well prepared and confident that everything would go smoothly. Stephanie and I watched as she greeted the first contraction with the special breathing exercises she had learned, without uttering a sound. In the meantime my parents phoned, and guessed by the tone of my voice that something was happening. I made them swear not to come until I called them, and they promised to wait for my permission—but half an hour later I saw them through the window, walking up and down the street as if they wanted, in spite of the bitter cold, to be close to the scene of the event. They were wearing heavy coats, and from time to time they raised their eyes to our lighted windows. Then they disappeared, into a nearby pub as it turned out, from which they phoned to say that they were close by and if I needed them they could be there in a minute. The midwife, presumably stuck in the busy evening traffic, had still not arrived, and I started to become really worried about what I would do if, God forbid, she didn’t come at all and it proved impossible to transfer Michaela to the hospital against her will. The rate of the contractions increased slightly, but there was still no sign of an opening. Michaela was quiet, she didn’t let out a single moan, and it was a wonder to me that she, who screamed and moaned wildly when we made love, was so restrained in the face of pains so severe that her face went white and she closed her eyes for long stretches at a time. For a moment I felt angry at myself for leaving all the arrangements for the midwife and the delivery to her. But before I took more drastic steps, such as going around to the hospital to fetch someone qualified to help, I decided to bring my parents up to the apartment, not only in order to leave someone more reliable than Stephanie with Michaela, although she seemed quite calm and collected, but also to get encouragement from their presence, and maybe even to get some practical advice from my mother, who had also given birth, even though it had been only once, and thirty years ago at that.
I ran down to the pub to call them. At first I couldn’t find them in the crush, because instead of sitting in a corner, as I expected, they were standing at the bar like veteran customers, drinking beer and holding an animated conversation with a group of Englishmen. When they saw me pushing my way toward them, looking agitated, my father had been having such a pleasant time that he thought it was already over and I had come to give them the news. He hurried to introduce me to his new acquaintances, and the friendliness of their nods led me to understand that here too I had been one of the subjects of his conversation. When we left the pub he complained again, as he had done since his arrival, of my poor English vocabulary and the mistakes I kept making, and offered once more to speak to me in English in order to improve my command of the language. But my mother, who sensed my deep excitement, cut him short: “Not now. Let’s wait for Shiva to be born first.” There was something very agreeable and reassuring in the way she pronounced for the first time the name of the baby who had not yet been born—who was apparently in no hurry to be born, either, judging by the lack of change in Michaela’s dilation. My father, of course, did not go into the bedroom and only looked in politely from the door,
but my mother sat down next to the bed and began talking intensely with Michaela and Stephanie, who were becoming increasingly concerned at the failure of the midwife to arrive. Three hours had passed since she had been summoned, and there was no sign of her; and they had both been relying on her, not only medically but spiritually.
And then I understood that I would have to delivery my baby by myself, and taking into account the fact that my hospital was only a stone’s throw away, the situation into which I had been manipulated seemed to me nothing short of scandalous. Michaela sensed my rage and smiled apologetically. Her face was very pale; there were already black rings under her eyes, and I knew that she was in great pain but that she didn’t want to complain, especially after the Lamaze course that she had so faithfully and enthusiastically attended, under the supervision of the very midwife who still hadn’t arrived and whose whereabouts were unknown to the people who answered the phone at her house. I brought the instruments and drugs I had prepared into the bedroom, placed two pillows under her legs to raise them, and without hesitation gave her a shot of Pitocin to speed up the contractions. I had never injected anyone with Pitocin before, but since I had studied the formula in advance and read up on its action I had no qualms about administering it, especially since it was simply a weak solution of a substance I recognized as a muscle contractant. My mother watched me respectfully and nodded encouragingly, confident of the skill and lightness of my hand. Even though she was violently opposed to the idea of having the baby at home, she possessed a marvelous capacity for displaying optimism in the hour of need and putting old disagreements behind her. In order to keep Michaela occupied until the next contraction, she tried to remember details of her own delivery, to which Michaela paid scant attention, for now, under the influence of the injection, the contractions were coming more frequently, but still without any signs of the cervix’s dilating. The baby’s hard skull, too, which I succeeded in palpating in order to ascertain that her head would appear first, was still high up, as if she knew there was no point in approaching the cervix, which was still completely closed. I didn’t want to give Michaela the Marcaine yet, in case it caused a relaxation that would delay the birth. I realized that my anxiety was exaggerated and tried to tell myself that it was no big deal; every ambulance driver delivered a baby at least once or twice during the course of his career, and Michaela was showing impressive powers of endurance. She still had not asked me to give her anything to relieve the pain, and she did whatever I told her to without complaining, as if she were ready to press her guts out and tear herself into pieces as long as I left her in our bedroom and didn’t take her to the hospital.
And when the birth finally came, between six and seven in the morning, after an additional shot slowly but surely encouraged the cervix to begin to open, like a big red rose—and when in the warm intimacy of our bedroom, where at Michaela’s request the lights had been dimmed, the head of our baby, covered with wildly untidy hair, emerged together with the first signs of a gray London dawn—I began to understand, if not to endorse, Michaela’s stubborn insistence on giving birth at home. Especially since the birth was so smooth and easy. The baby perhaps identifying with Michaela, who had not uttered a single groan of pain all night long, only cried very briefly, and stopped as soon as I cut the umbilical cord and gave her to my mother, who wrapped her in a big towel, her hands trembling with an emotion I had not imagined this logical, unsentimental woman capable of. Afterward, when we recalled these moments, I learned that the emotion which made my mother tremble so much that she almost dropped the baby was due not only to the birth of this baby, with its startlingly hairy, almost devilish head, but also to the distant but vivid memory of the loneliness she herself had felt when I was born, a birth she had not known would be her last. I too was strangely moved by the hairy black head emerging from the bleeding womb, precisely because it was the opposite of the shorn head that had misled me into taking Michaela for a boy when I first met her in the Lazars’ living room. As if by some mysterious process a little of my beloved’s long, abundant hair had grown on my baby’s head, which was now resting dark and shining on my pillow while I waited for the placenta to come out so that I could coolly suture the bleeding tears in the vagina with the needles I had brought from the hospital. I stress the word “coolly” here because even Michaela, who was radiant with joy, could guess how much it had affected me to function as a physician at the birth of my own child. But she had no idea of the price I was soon to extract for having been forced to deal so surgically and directly with her blood, womb, and placenta. And when Stephanie, who had been enthralled by my performance throughout the long night, finally invited my father into the bedroom to see his granddaughter, I didn’t wait to observe the reactions of this good man, who had been sitting quietly, wide awake, in the living room all night long, but hurried to the bathroom to wash off what I felt had besmirched the little love I had for my wife.
So profound and intense was the weariness that had accumulated between the four sides of my personality, that had been active during the long night—physician, husband, father, and son—that I dozed off in the warm, scented bathwater and failed to register the belated arrival of the midwife, who turned out to be a tall dark woman, perhaps of oriental extraction, with a haughty air and white hair. It seemed that there was a prosaic explanation for her mysterious absence. As soon as she received our summons she had set out, but a car had run into her as she was crossing the street and injured her ankle, with the result that she had to spend several hours in the police station and the emergency room. Since she didn’t have our telephone number and we weren’t listed in the phone book, she had no way of contacting us. But her conscience wouldn’t let her go straight home from the hospital, and just as she was, limping painfully on a crutch, she came to keep her promise, accompanied by her young daughter, and to see if she was still needed. Although the birth was already over, Michaela and Stephanie were happy to see her and made her sit down on the armchair in the bedroom—first of all, to tell her in detail about how the birth had gone and how the correct breathing she taught had helped overcome the pain, and second, to ask her to examine the baby and express her opinion. They woke the baby up and laid her naked on the lap of the midwife, who examined her thoroughly and also anointed her with a special oil she had brought with her, after which Stephanie put her back in our bed, next to Michaela. The baby still didn’t have a crib of her own. Although Michaela had purchased all the necessary equipment, she had left it all in the department store, in order not to arouse the jealousy of mysterious evil forces until the birth had been safely accomplished. “I don’t believe it,” said my father to Michaela in genuine astonishment. “A rational, liberated woman like you, believing in mysterious evil forces?”
“Of course I don’t want to believe in mysterious forces,” replied Michaela jokingly, “but what can I do if they believe in me?” Stephanie and Michaela praised me to the skies to the midwife, who examined the cervix, praised my stitches, but could not hide her disapproval of the injections I had given Michaela to induce the birth. Why was I in such a hurry? she wanted to know. Nature had a rhythm of its own. If I had not induced the birth, perhaps she would have arrived in time to deliver the baby herself. Who knows whether she was thinking of the fee she had lost or her professional enjoyment, or perhaps of both.
But none of this mattered now. My father’s face was crumpled with fatigue, and my mother asked me to call a taxi for them, because she didn’t want to put me out. But I insisted on driving them home myself, and I went to get the car from its parking place behind the chapel, trying to engrave on my memory the details of the foggy London street, which looked like a set from an old English movie, so that I could tell Shiva when she grew up about the morning of her birth. Outside the garden gate of the pretty house where my parents were staying, my mother, who was still wide awake, suddenly suggested that she would go back to be with Michaela while I snatched a few hours’ sleep on her bed, next to my father.
I don’t know if it was the somber expression on my face that worried her, or if she was already missing the new baby, but I refused. Although I could have done with a few hours’ sleep in their pleasant room, surrounded by the bourgeois quiet of the English house, I didn’t know how Michaela would react to my desertion only a few hours after the birth of the baby, and I said good-bye to my parents, who embraced me warmly. I knew that they were very happy now, and the dense fog surrounding us, which reminded them of their childhood, only increased their happiness. They were bursting with pride in my successful delivery of the baby, after all their fears. I too was pleased with myself, and on the way home, as I glided slowly and carefully between the little milk vans, I wondered what to say in the monthly report I sent to Lazar’s secretary about my work in the London hospital. Should I mention the fact that I had delivered the baby by myself at home, which might be interpreted by a certain person as excessive intimacy in my relations with Michaela, or should I simply announce the fact of Shiva’s birth, so that she, the distant and impossible beloved, would know that the way was open for her to renew our sweet and secret relations, now that she was doubly protected against me?
Open Heart Page 37