Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Her eyes were shut; I think they remained shut throughout the whole ensuing procedure. But mine opened, wider and wider, at what perhaps no Krepski had seen, or at least viewed with such privileged and terrified intentness. The mother — for this is what she was now indubitably becoming — arched her spine, heaved her monstrous belly, seemed to offer her whole body to be cleaved from between the legs upwards, and those expanding eyes of mine saw a glistening, wet, purple-mottled object, like some wrinkled marble pebble, appear where the split began. This pebble grew — and grew — growing impossibly large for the narrow opening in which it seemed intent on jamming itself. For a whole minute, indeed, it stuck there, as if this were its final resting place, while the mother screamed. And then suddenly it ceased to be a pebble. It was a lump of clenched, unformed flesh, suffused with blood, aware that its position was critical. The mother gasped; it became a head, a gnarled, battered, Punch-and-Judy head. The mother gasped again, this time with an audible relief and exultation; and it was no longer a head, but a whole creature , with arms and legs and little groping hands; and it was no longer caught in that awesome constriction but suddenly spilling out with slippery ease, like something poured from a pickle jar, a slithery brine accompanying it. But this was not all. As if it were not remarkable enough that so large a thing should emerge from so small a hole, there followed it, rapidly, an indescribable mass of multicoloured effluents, the texture and hue of liquid coral, gelatine, stewed blackberries …

From what a ragout is a human life concocted.

What was I doing throughout this spectacular performance? My eyes were popping, my knees were giving. I was clutching the Great Watch, fit to crush it, in my right hand. But now, with the little being writhing in slow motion on the gory sheets and the mother’s moans of relief beginning to mingle with a new anguish, I knew that I had my own unavoidable part to play in this drama. Once, on Grandfather’s television at Highgate, I had watched (disgusted but fascinated) a programme about child-delivery. I knew that much pertained to the fleshy tube which even now snaked and coiled between mother and baby. The mother understood it too; for with her last reserves of energy she was gesturing to a chest of drawers on the fair side of the room. In one of the drawers I found a pair of kitchen scissors …

With the instant of birth begins the possibility of manslaughter. My untutored hands did what they could while my stomach fought down surging tides — not just of nausea but of strange, welling fear. Like the TV surgeon, I held up the slippery creature and, with an irresolute hand, slapped it. It grimaced feebly and made the sound — a sound of choking pain — which they say means life has taken hold. But it looked wretched and sick to me. I put it down on the mattress close to the mother’s side, as if some maternal fluence could do the trick I could not. We looked at each other, she and I, with the imploring looks of actual lovers, actual cogenitors who have pooled their flesh in a single hope.

Deborah … with your playground whistle.

I had heard the expression “life hangs in the balance.” I knew that it applied to tense moments in operating theatres and in condemned cells when a reprieve may still come, but I never knew — used to life as an ambling affair that might span centuries — what it meant. And only now do I know what enormous concentrations of time, what huge counter-forces of piled-up years, decades, centuries, go into those moments when the balance might swing, one way or the other.

We looked at the pitiful child. Its blind face was creased; its fingers worked. Its breaths were clearly numbered. The mother began to blubber, adding yet more drops to her other, nameless outpourings; and I felt my ticking, clockmaker’s heart swell inside me. A silent, involuntary prayer escaped me.

And suddenly they were there again. Stanislaw and Feliks and Stefan; winging towards me by some uncanny process, bringing with them the mysterious essence of the elements that had received them and decomposed them. Great-grandfather from his Highgate grave, Grandfather from his urn, Father (was he the first to arrive?) from the grey depths where the fishes had nibbled him and the currents long since corroded and dispersed him. Earth, fire, water. They flocked out of the bowels of Nature. And with them came Stanislaw senior, Kasimierz, Tadeusz; and all the others whose names I forget; and even the mythical Krepfs of Nuremberg and Prague.

My hand was on the magic, genie-summoning Watch. In that moment I knew that Time is not something that exists, like territory to be annexed, outside us. What are we all but the distillation of all time? What is each one of us but the sum of all the time before him?

The little baby chest was trembling feebly; the hands still groped; the wrinkled face was turning blue. I held out the Great Watch of Stanislaw. I let it swing gently on its gold chain over the miniscule fingers of this new-born child. They say the first instinct a baby has is to grasp. It touched the ticking masterpiece fashioned in Lublin in the days of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. A tiny forefinger and thumb clasped with the force of feathers the delicately chased gold casing and the thick, yellowed glass. A second — an eternity passed. And then — the almost motionless chest began to heave vigorously. The face knotted itself up to emit a harsh, stuttering wail, in the timbre of which there seemed the rudiments of a chuckle. The mother’s tearful eyes brightened. At the same time I felt inside me a renewed flutter of fear. No, not of fear exactly: a draining away of something; a stripping away of some imposture, as if I had no right to be where I was.

The diminutive fingers still gripped the Watch. Through the gold chain I felt the faintest hint of a baby tug. And a miraculous thing — as miraculous as this infant’s resurgence of life — happened. I set it down now as a fact worthy to be engraved in record. At six-thirty P.M. on a July day scarcely a week ago, the hand of a baby (what titanic power must have been in those fingers, what pent-up equivalent of years and years of accumulated time?) stopped my great-grandfather’s Watch, which had ticked, without requiring the hand of man to wind it, since September, 1809.

The fear — the sensation of being assailed from within — clutched me more intently. This room, in the house of my great-grandfather — in which my ancestors themselves had invisibly mustered (had they fled already, exorcised ghosts?) — was no longer my sanctuary but the centre of a desert. Weighing upon me with a force to equal that which had kept this child alive, was the desolation of my future, growing older and older, but never old enough, and growing every day, more puny, more shrivelled, more insectile.

I released my grip on the chain. I pressed the Great Watch into the hands of an infant. I got up from my position squatting by the mattress. I looked at the mother. How could I have explained, even if I had her language? The baby was breathing; it would live. The mother would pull through. I knew this better than any doctor. I turned to the door and made my exit. Things grew indistinct around me. I stumbled down the flight of stairs to the street door.

Outside, I found a phone-box and, giving the barest particulars, called an ambulance to the mother and child. Then I blundered on. No, not if you are thinking this, in the direction of Deborah. Nor in the direction of the Thames, to hurl, not the Watch, but myself into the murky stream and join my sea-changed father.

Not in any direction. No direction was necessary. For in the historic streets of Whitechapel, minutes later, I was struck, not by an omnibus, not by an arrow of lighting, nor by a shell from one of the Kaiser’s iron-clads, but by an internal blow, mysterious and devasting, a blow by which not physical trees but family trees are toppled and torn up by their roots.