David Bezmozgis - The Free World

At the doctor’s office, the anteroom was occupied mostly by Italians. The office was a regular medical practice, though the doctor had an arrangement with the Canadian embassy. Polina and Alec were the only Russians there with the exception of one other couple and their eleven-year-old son. They didn’t need to speak a word of Russian to identify one another. In a doctor’s office, where everyone is wary and secretive, they were more wary and secretive. Still, it didn’t take long for Alec to strike up a conversation. The husband was a metallurgist. He was acquainted with Canada primarily on a subterranean level. Alec asked their son if he was eager to go to Canada. The boy shrugged his shoulders and started to blink spasmodically. “Calm yourself, Vova,” his mother said to him. Polina saw the husband set his jaw bitterly at his wife. “He’s a good boy,” the mother said, defending herself as much as her son, “it just happens to him when he gets nervous.” Under the weight of his parents’ scrutiny, the boy lowered his head, gripped his chair, and blinked harder.

The metallurgist and his son were called first. They reappeared half an hour later, the boy blinking as vigorously as before, the metallurgist smoldering.

— He made him hop on one foot and touch his nose, like in a circus show, the metallurgist said.

— Did he do it? the mother asked with sincere, desperate concern.

— Of course he did it, the metallurgist barked. Why not? There’s nothing wrong with him.

After the metallurgist’s wife returned from her examination, Alec was called in by one doctor and another doctor materialized and beckoned Polina. She and Alec walked down the same short hallway which branched off in two directions. Polina’s doctor turned right. He opened a door to an examining room and motioned for Polina to take a seat on a padded table. The doctor was very well groomed — clean-shaven, but for a tightly clipped mustache. He looked not so much professional as prim, even prudish. He removed his gold wristwatch and deposited it on a metal dolly beside the door, about as far from Polina as possible given the dimensions of the room. He then indicated that Polina should unbutton her blouse, and once she had, he commenced the examination, touching her gingerly with dry hands, tapping her here and there, applying the stethoscope, and performing all this in such a way as to make Polina feel ashamed of her body.

After he had completed this first stage of the examination, the doctor turned his back and made notations on a form, at the top of which Polina discerned the emblem of the Canadian flag. When he turned in her direction again he gestured for Polina to put her legs up. With a quick movement he reached under the table and snapped two stirrups into position. All of this, from the very first, he conducted without uttering a single word. Without, Polina realized, even so much as a sound. It was this antiseptic silence combined with the physical humiliation of being touched with such disdain that made Polina feel as if she were once again back in the green-walled hospital clinic.

The doctor there had been a woman. She’d walked into the surgery and parted Polina’s knees without quite looking at her. She’d offered no explanation of what she intended to do or when she intended to do it. She said nothing at all until a nurse walked in and then she berated her for not having already prepared and sterilized the patient.

Like a magician’s assistant, Polina had felt as if she had been split in two. The doctor and the nurse pretended her top half didn’t exist and dealt only with her bottom half. Polina relinquished it to them. She concentrated on her top half. She tried to retain this focus in spite of the pain, refusing to cry out, as though what was happening below was incidental and remote. She imagined that the pain was coming at her from a vast distance, as from the unseen bottom of a gorge.

When they were finished, the nurse transferred her onto a gurney. She was rolled out into the hallway and left there, once again, without explanation. Polina thought that she could still feel blood seeping. The loss of blood, the pain, and the cold metal of the gurney chilled her and she started to shiver. She was exhausted and drained, too weak to call out, and yet the tremors became so violent that her gurney creaked from side to side on its rubber wheels. Time and again people rushed by and ignored her. When she saw her doctor hurrying past, she reached out and caught her by the arm. Through chattering teeth, she told her she was cold, that she wanted a sheet for her gurney.

— How old are you? the doctor asked.

— Twenty-one, Polina said.

— You’re not a child. Pull yourself together, the doctor said.

— Please, is there a sheet? Polina asked.

— Who are you to make demands? You don’t like it here? Don’t fuck so much next time.

When they released her that evening, Maxim was waiting for her outside. She wasn’t really in any condition to take the bus by herself, so, in a way, she was grateful to have someone help her. She only wished that it were someone else. Who exactly she couldn’t have said, even a stranger, anyone but Maxim. She saw him through the square wire-reinforced windows of the hospital doors. He was at the bottom of the stone steps, bent slightly at the waist, listening to another young man who smoked and talked. When Polina opened the doors, Maxim looked up and mounted the steps as if to help her with it. But when he reached the top, the door was already swinging shut behind her. He looked lost for a moment. Polina expected that having missed the door, he would offer her his arm. She looked forward to refusing him, only he didn’t offer his arm. He also didn’t do or say any of the unwelcome things she expected him to do or say, which, curiously, irritated her even more. She looked at him and saw penitence and relief vying for dominion in his face.

— Did you happen to see a kind of chubby girl in a blue cloud-pattern dress in there? a young man asked when Polina and Maxim reached the bottom of the steps.

— I don’t think so, Polina said.

— Raisa is her name. She has shortish brown hair and sort of a dimple in her chin.

— I really don’t know, Polina said.

— Her girlfriend brought her in this morning. That’s a long time. Let me ask you, and please be honest: What do you think, should I keep waiting?

Polina allowed Maxim to escort her home on the bus. From the bus stop they walked the two blocks to her building without speaking. It was only when he had to say goodbye that Maxim delivered his line.

— It’s better for our future, Maxim said.

The following day Maxim brought her carnations and inquired after her well-being. Several days later, he brought carnations again. In a week’s time he returned with more carnations, now on account of the fact that he had, before the abortion, established the habit of bringing her flowers once a week. He presented these to Polina in such a way as to communicate that he believed things had returned to normal. Though she had an indefinable urge to protest, she admitted that things had indeed returned to normal. She couldn’t justify her lingering resentment. Her experience at the clinic had been horrid, but she’d had no reason to suppose that it would be otherwise. Almost everyone she knew had had at least one abortion. Some had gone to hospitals; others, hoping to conceal the pregnancy from their parents, had had their boyfriends pay twenty-five rubles and submitted to the procedure at the apartment of a nurse or a doctor. Not a few of them ended up in the hospital anyway with infections and complications. Compared to these, her ordeal hardly ranked.

In their own way, Polina and Maxim had kept the abortion to themselves. Maxim had given a tin of caviar to the doctor at the regional polyclinic who had referred Polina to the hospital. It was understood that the doctor wouldn’t say anything to her parents. Polina also didn’t share the information with her sister. Which was why, since they did not know otherwise, her mother and her sister each made a point of commenting on Maxim’s extraordinary romantic display.