Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

Suddenly the pain returned, and I was falling. They grabbed me beneath my arms and hauled me to the bench, where I shivered and whined through a contraction like a sick dog, I was so tired, shaking. How could it be this cold in July? “My coat,” I whispered through my cracked lips. The blue daughter covered me with the sheepskin. Her kindness made me cry. For Mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face… The hard bench was good to press my back upon. The midwife and the red daughter continued their prayers as the blue one pulled off her kerchief and took down her braid, and then her sister’s, and her mother’s. She unbuttoned my dress, checked me all over, chanting, “Untie, unloose the knots and chains, take your golden keys, O Theotokos, take your keys and unlock the fleshy gates, may the child come easily.” She took a rope with knots in it and held it over me, untied them one by one.

My own high-pitched moans appalled me, but I couldn’t hold them back. I’d always thought of myself as a bold girl, but I’d just been naive. Another lost child in need of salvation. Now the two daughters pulled me up, the blue and the red, and walked me around the stool like a man in a prison yard, like a horse on a water wheel. I couldn’t imagine hurting this much. Not even Chekists could have invented such a torture. And women lived through this every day. Holy Theotokos, make it stop! I wanted to lie down so badly, just for a little while, but they wouldn’t let me. The midwife left me with these twin dolls, her younger selves. “Please don’t go,” I sobbed.

“I’ll be back for the birth.” She laughed and the door opened… Ah, light! Then it closed again, sealing me into the dark like the lid of a coffin.

Time slipped its track. The hut was a portal into the deep past. All my ideas, all my cleverness, my so-called personality made no difference here. The thing I was, a woman, a body, no more profound than a cow, a mare in foal, a bitch whelping under a porch. Whimpering, shivering. No thoughts, no mind. What good was all our revolutionary dumb show, pamphlets, agitki like so many children’s skits performed for parents and doting relatives? No manifesto was going to help me now. Holy Mother of God, surely the baby was coming soon, surely this couldn’t go on… “When is this going to stop?”

“What, you thought it just pops out like a pea from a pod?” My pretty keeper laughed. “You haven’t even started.”

I wept, sagged in their arms. I couldn’t go through with this. It was a mistake. I should have gone back to Petrograd, to the modern mothers’ home on Kamenny Island. I remembered how clean it was, the nurses, the revolutionary babies… “I can’t do this.”

“Well, who’s going to? We can’t do it for you,” said the woman in blue. Were they twins? Twin sorceresses in their sarafany and loosened hair and secret smiles? “You have to work if you want the baby to come.”

“I can’t. I’m too weak…”

“City girl,” the red one said. “You should have thought of that.”

“She’s sick. Mama’s gone to get you something,” said Mercy in blue.

“I have to lie down.” I saw flames shooting up over their heads. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face… Unlock, untie… They couldn’t hold me up forever, and finally laid me back on the wide, splintery bench. Hot and dark. I needed air. The scent of herbs was overwhelming—I’d smell it until my dying day, which could be soon… “I can’t breathe. Please, open the door.”

“It’s not done,” said the blue sister. Her cheeks were pink. Sweat dripped from her skin. “It’s not safe.”

“Just for a bit?” I begged. “I’ll walk, I promise.”

They opened the door. Blue sky! Cornflower blue, and a little breeze nodding the boughs. The trees peered in like shy children. The sisters took up handfuls of herbs from the floor and made vigorous crosses in the doorway, protecting me from some sort of devil, while I drank in fresh air in huge gulps. In a moment the red one slammed the door shut again, as if there were wild beasts that would smell my labor and come marauding. Was that it?

The only light came from the icon lamp and the candles and stray beams from between chinks in the log walls. But true to my word, I walked and walked, like some blind donkey. “Where’s the old woman?” Suddenly it was of vital importance that old woman was back in the room. “Where did she go?”

“She has other things to do,” the red daughter snapped, while her sister wiped my face. “She’ll be back. Don’t you trust us?” She cackled. Oh, she was a devil!

“Don’t scare her,” said the blue one. “She’s getting you some milk. For strength. So you can push.”

I tried to remember when I last ate. I’d been sick since Izhevsk… those cabbage pies… Though I recalled Genya trying to feed me. Bread, a bit of fish. Nothing stayed down. The next grip of pain doubled me over. One sister held me while the other put a knee in my back. They certainly knew their business, these storybook women.

After a year or two, the midwife returned in a flash of light and a gulp of blessed air before plunging us back into the thick, fuggy dark. She held a bowl to my lips, milk still warm from the cow… Were there still cows? I took a sip but it turned my stomach.

“Drink,” she urged me. “You heard him, that devil. Said he’d burn down the village.”

“He wouldn’t really,” I said between sips. Yes, I could feel strength passing into my body.

“Oh, you don’t think so?” the old woman said.

But maybe he would. I thought of how he had once crushed the poor Virgin of Tikhvin. He wouldn’t understand anything about this hut in the woods, the spells, the knots, the witch and her daughters blue and red. Outside, the sun must still be shining, the birds warbling their summer songs… for all the good it did me. Why wasn’t it night already? If I could just hang on until nightfall, I’d have made it through this terrible day and the baby would come. Theotokos, look upon my troubles…

The old woman shook me, holding the bowl. “More. You have to try.”

I drank a few more swallows before she let me sink onto the bench.

I dozed between pains. A terrible rustling came from the rafters. Angels, hundreds of them, hung from the ceiling above my head, upside down, with wings like leather. I could hear them rustling, trying to get closer. They stared down with big squidlike eyes, blinking, dumb, neither male nor female. No physical bodies, no sex, no idea what we humans suffered. All they could do was gape, trying to get a good view of my misery. I got on my hands and knees, forehead cradled on my arms, my tightening belly resting on my thighs, and endured like a cow. No mind, no self, my name was Woman, my name was Pain. The red daughter pressed my spine with her giant hands.

“I don’t want it anymore,” I whispered.

“Too late,” said the red sister.

It won’t live, my mother had said.

If the child was doomed, why even try? It would die and so would I, and we’d be buried in a field in Udmurtia and no one would ever find me. I doubted Genya would even return to the village, let alone burn it. I crouched there, on hands and knees, weeping. Couldn’t I just die? Did they have to make me live through it all the way?

“That’s enough,” said the midwife. “Get her up.”

They lifted me to my feet, tried to make me walk. “She can’t, Mama,” said the blue daughter, blue-eyed, with arms like a blacksmith’s. “It’s the fever. She’s burning up. She can’t stand.”

The old woman came to me, grabbed my chin. “You’re not getting away from me,” she said. Her eyes were very blue. Her upper lip was long, her nose was short, her gray hair fell like a waterfall. “Hear me?” She slapped me. “Wake up!” Her eyes burned into me. “You’re going to have this baby, Bolshevik. Now walk!” They hauled me and shoved me, shouted, praised, threatened. The old woman muttered prayers, incantations, made signs and symbols in the air. However much I begged them to leave me to die, they held me and pressed me, sponged me, and walked me round and round the birthing stool. “Take me outside. Just let me breathe. I can’t breathe!”