NINE

MARIA ARBATOVA MY NAME IS WOMAN

Translated by Kathleen Cook.

As a child they used to scare me with stories about the witch Baba-Yaga. As a teenager it was the gynaecologist. All the teachers' warnings and the kids' stories ended up with the most attractive and reckless girls meeting their Armageddon in the gynaecologist's chair.

On the rubbish heap behind the polyclinic, which was closed for repairs, lay an abandoned dentist's chair that the sixth formers used to visit in single-sex groups: the boys to remove the nickel-plated nuts and bolts and the girls to rehearse their future role by sitting in the chair, legs pressed together, chin pointing upwards in agony and arms crossed over their bosom. The belief that this was a gynaecologist's chair was as strong as the conviction that you would get no better treatment here than in its dental counterpart.

There was a tricky and well-developed technique of avoiding medical check-ups in the older classes that was passed down by word of mouth. The minority did not wish to publicise the loss of their virginity, while the majority had been brainwashed by tradition and upbringing to believe that any sign of belonging to the female sex was shameful and regarded a visit to the gynaecologist as prof oundly traumatic.

To cut a long story short, by the time of my first visit to the gynaecologist I was well and truly pregnant.

Avoiding the queue, mother in her white doctor's coat got me into the clinic where she worked, and my eighteen-year-old eyes alighted on the metal structure, the need to mount the likes of which distinguished me from the opposite sex.

«Don't turn the waterworks on for me!» shouted a real battleaxe of a woman doctor, who was washing her rubber-gloved hands, at a pale young blonde with a big belly and dark rings under her eyes. «I won't be responsible for you! What sort of baby do you want to have? A monster? I tell you straight, a monster is what you'll give birth to!» Heaving herself over from the washbasin, she squatted down and poked a rubber-gloved finger into the blonde's ankle. «Swelling! Just look at it! Up to my elbow!»

«I can't go into hospital,» the blonde wept loudly. «There's no one to look after my baby! My parents live too far away and my husband drinks.»

«Her husband drinks!» The doctor turned to my mother. «Whose husband doesn't?..Is this your girl?»

«It's my daughter,» mother said proudly. «Let's hope she's not pregnant,» she added shamefully, in the same tone that doctors say: «Let's hope it's not pneumonia» or «Let's hope it's not a heart attack.»

«How quickly they grow up. I remember her trotting round the clinic in her school uniform! Take your things off!» The battleaxe waved a rubber glove in the direction of the chair.

«Doctor, please, I can't go into hospital. He beats the boy when he gets drunk,» the blonde was wailing.

I started to take off my sweater obediently.

«Your jeans, tights and pants, not your sweater,» mother hissed.

«I'm sick of the lot of you!» the battleaxe howled at the blonde. Then to me: «You look as if you're sitting in the Bolshoi Theatre. Never been in a gynaecologist's chair before?»

«No, never,» I confessed guiltily, like a schoolgirl with poor grades.

«Spread your legs!»

«How?» I said in a panic.

«The way you did for your husband!» the battleaxe shouted, charging at me.

«Who got her in this state?» she asked mother, rummaging around in my genitals.

«A student boyfriend. They're getting married.» Mother tried to make it all sound proper without any great enthusiasm. She would have liked a more up-market young man, of course.

«What is he studying to be?» enquired the battleaxe.

«A singer. An opera singer,» mother added.

«Singers like to have a good time,» the battleaxe summed up her knowledge of the type succinctly. «What about her?»

«She's studying at university,» mother said.

«To be what?»

«A philosopher,» mother confessed guiltily.

The battleaxe froze, her arms inside me up to the elbow, and asked with a mixture of disdain and curiosity:

«What sort of job is that, being a philosopher? Where do they work, philosophers? What sort of family is that, a singer and a philosopher? Never heard of anything like it!»

«That's just what I say,» mother echoed. «She should have done medicine or law.»

«I'll refer her for an abortion,» the doctor concluded.

«An abortion, of course,» mother sang. «They're much too young.»

«You can say that again.» Barely rinsing her hands, the woman immersed herself in the epistolary act.

«Graduate first, then get pregnant,» mother announced solemnly, as if someone had asked her what order to do things in, and as if she had ever taken the trouble to enlighten me on the subject of contraception.

«Their heads are too full of having a good time to know what's what,» the woman sighed.

«It's funny she didn't try to persuade me to have it,» I said when we got outside.

«She's had fifteen abortions herself,» mother informed me.

The idea that a pregnant girl of eighteen about to marry the man she loved should actually have the child had never entered my head. The heights of philosophical thought were more tempting than the kitchen sink scenario associated with motherhood as a student. Just as thoughts of continuing the family tree never occurred to my boyfriend or my mother. My boyfriend felt guilty, depressed and confused, of course; but professional ambitions combined with the infantilism nourished by our over-protective mothers united us into a couple unsuitable for reproduction.

Next day I plaited my hair and took my place in the queue, wearing a baggy hospital dressing gown. The subdued women waiting for their turn to go into the operating theatre, the shouts of the current victim inside, who was then led out, with the concomitant mise-en-scene… She staggering and the nurses trying to prop her up against the wall, shouting:

«Hurry up, you're not the only one, woman! There's a whole queue of them waiting. Get into the ward and put the pad under you properly. You're bleeding and there's no one to wipe it up! You don't fancy working here as a cleaner, do you?»

The usual production line: the waiting women, glancing at their watches to work out what household chores they would have time for today apart from an abortion; the tired, bitchy nurses; the screams from behind the closed door. The facial expressions suggested that everything was following its due course, the adults were doing their usual adult jobs, and only I, an infantile idiot, viewed the whole thing in a tragic light.

«Do they give you an anaesthetic?» I asked a fat, middle-aged woman, doing my best to make my voice sound natural.

«You must be joking,» she replied with a loud yawn.

«Why not?» I asked in a panic.

«Think yourself lucky if you get a novocaine injection.» The woman stared at me, saw everything about me, and turned away in disgust. «Just out of nappies and she turns up here!»

«But why are they screaming if they've been given an injection?» I turned to a young woman in dangling earrings.

«Because novocaine doesn't work on everyone,» she smiled. «Stop analyzing and just count elephants.»

«What elephants?» I asked desperately, sensing my total ignorance and unworthiness to be sitting in the same queue as these older, experienced women.

«Well, you know when you're trying to get to sleep you count elephants: one elephant plus another elephant makes two, two elephants plus another elephant makes three, and so on. When you get up to a thousand elephants, the abortion will be over, unless there are complications, of course.»

At the twenty-seventh elephant I heard my name called out.

«How old are you, lassy?» The question came from an elderly Armenian in a short-sleeved white coat, his powerful arms crossed on a hairy chest in the operation room.

«Eighteen.»

«This your first abortion?»

«Yes.»

«Doesn't he want to get married?»

«Yes, he does, but having children doesn't go with a career,» I babbled, trying to gain time.

«Do you have a mother?»

«Yes.»

«What does she do?»

«She's a doctor.»

«……!» He cursed for a long time in Armenian. «I won't give you a scrape today. First abortions often end in infertility. You've got the night to think it over. I want you to think hard.»

I gave him a look of doglike gratitude and said:

«Alright, I'll think it over. And I'm allergic to novocaine.» This was a clever lie, which mother had taught me, instead of telling me about contraception. «I can only have a general anaesthetic.»

«We don't give general anaesthetics here, but since you have listened to me and agreed to think it over, I'll have a word with an anaesthetist in another department.»

I rushed out of the operation room, radiant, followed by heavy, painful glances from the queue. I was not thinking of anything, of course, except that with a general anaesthetic I would not see or hear anything. I was just a moral illiterate who saw the value of the life I was about to destroy solely in terms of my own physical discomfort. But I did this in the company of people who had taught me that this was «right» and I was ready to share the responsibility with them.

«So you decided to come back?» said the Armenian coldly.

«Yes,» I muttered.

«Well, now it's up to you. Yesterday it was on my conscience, but today it's on yours.»

I don't remember anything else, except that later my fianc-came into the ward and we kissed and walked in the rain, without thinking that a chill could be dangerous in my condition. Because the worst was over, and now we could prepare for the wedding, and have fun, and go out for a drink on the money we had been sent as wedding presents. We could love each other and try each other out as partners in what was called married life, but at root it was the adolescent's delight at the freedom from parents. It was as if for the right to get married I'd paid that man in a white coat, called a gynaecologist, who guards the entrance to adulthood.

«Pregnant again?» I was asked sternly a few months later by the same battleaxe in the same clinic, in the same presence of mother in the white coat that gave her the right to get in every doctor's office without queuing. «Toxicosis and rhesus negative. I'll refer her for an abortion.»

«There's no need,» I said quietly, but firmly.

«So what are you planning to do?»

«Have the baby.»

«You what!» The woman was so astonished you would have thought I was a man. «And with you so thin and pale and your low haemoglobin, what sort of baby will you have for me?»

«I'm having it for myself, not for you,» I was about to say, but mother, realizing that I had outgrown my fear of gynaecologists and was about to retaliate for the past, present and future, began ingratiatingly:

«She's decided to have it and that's that. I'd like her to be under you. Our district doctor's just a boy, a student.»

«And he'll die a student too, the duffer. Doesn't know how to get into a woman. Can't think how he gave his wife a child,» she replied. «But regulations are regulations. He's the one she should go to.»

The young gynaecologist looked only slightly older than me. We were embarrassed as two Young Pioneers who had been punished by being made to stand in the corner with no clothes on.

«Becoming a mother is a very responsible step,» he said, flushing deeply and filling in the medical card with his big, childish writing.

«Okay,» I said.

«Has anyone else examined you? In that case I won't.»

«Okay,» I said.

«Here's your referral for tests. Don't you feel well? Here's a sick leave certificate.»

«Okay,» I said.

«I'm giving a talk on Friday for women expecting their first baby. It's nothing special. The only thing is, when the labour pains start you must massage yourself here.» He pulled up his white coat, turned his back to me and began pounding his jeans in the region of the coccyx with his powerful fists.

«But how can you massage yourself there if you're lying on your back?» I asked.

«I don't know. That's what we were taught.»

My pregnancy was not an easy one. Each day I felt sick until noon. I snapped at people like a soldier just back from the war and read the classics to make the baby an intellectual. The classics turned out to be full of horror stories, however, and whatever I started reading someone was sure to die in childbirth after a while. The young gynaecologist got used to me and began to shout at me, copying the behaviour of his seniors.

«You should know better than that, woman. Look how you're putting on weight! You must keep right off salt. Not a gram a day! What have you eaten today?»

«Bananas and a box of tooth powder,» I confessed.

«How do you eat that? Do you mix it with water?» he enquired gravely.

«No, just as it is, with a teaspoon.»

«But that can't taste very nice,» he objected.

«I used to think so too, before I got pregnant.»

«I'm going to put you in hospital. Mortality among pregnant women is very high in this country.»

«But why me?»

«You've got an excess of water in your body, woman. What do you think the baby will be like? There won't be any baby. Your baby's drowning in water!»

After the visits to the clinic I cried my heart out all night, then decided that the less I saw of the doctor, the healthier my baby would be. But the gynaecologist was one of the dedicated kind. With the fervour of a neophyte he sought me out at home, lying in wait in the yard. One day he met me and my husband in the street. We hurriedly crossed to the other side, but he shouted after us across the road:

«You've got oedema and high blood pressure, woman! If you don't go into hospital tomorrow you'll die in childbirth! Mark my words, woman! If anything happens to you, they'll take away my diploma, and there aren't enough gynaecologists as it is.»

That night, after this encounter, I nearly had a miscarriage. The ambulance arrived and an elderly doctor gave me a few injections, took one look at my haggard face with the unnaturally large eyes and at my swollen belly criss-crossed with red and blue veins like a globe of the world and sticking out half a mile from my nineteen-year-old body, and said:

«Tell your husband to give the gynaecologist a good thump next time he appears with his predictions or he'll turn you and a lot of other women into cripples. And use all the pull you have to get tested for twins. I'd say you've got two in there.»

In those days the only place where you could get ultra-sonic tests was the Institute of Gynaecology. Mother found an entr-e. Some bright young lads in white coats rubbed my stomach with a jelly-like substance, then passed a sensor over it and showed me two infants of impressive proportions on the monitor.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. Up till then all my logical attempts to feel the living creature inside me had failed. I understood that I was pregnant, that this would result in the appearance of a small creature and that I would be its mother, but only as separate facts. My mind was not capable of organizing these facts into cause and effect. My country's culture had not prepared me for this. «You're a girl and one day you'll be a mother, so you mustn't…» and then followed a whole string of unfair restrictions. «One wrong step and that will be the end of you.» I had heard that ever since I could remember, as often and with the same degree of disbelief as the statement that military service was the noble duty of each and every citizen. «I'm your mother,» mother used to shout, using this to justify all sorts of unfair punishments. The whole country was full of iron-willed, stony-faced mothers, their prototypes brawled in queues, complained about their drunkard husbands, gladly abandoned their children to the mercy of nurseries, hospitals, summer camps and schools, and I had no desire to swell their ranks.

The kitchen-sink image of motherhood had not taken root in my brain. The conversion from a bohemian university student to the mother of twins seemed beyond my capabilities. Actually, I could not concentrate on it, because the frontline for physical survival lay in gynaecological consulting rooms.

They got me into hospital in the end. The pathological pregnancy department was in a building on the verge of collapse. There was no hot water and only one toilet for the whole floor, with a long line of pale-faced women queuing outside it, clutching their bellies. The ward had some thirty beds. To save space there was only one locker for two beds. The atmosphere was certainly not conducive to the birth of healthy progeny. If one pathologically pregnant woman could create an aura of hysteria around her, just multiply that by thirty. The civil wars over whether or not to open the window in a heat wave ended with the advent of a nurse to inject all the participants with tranquillisers. And the «Thousand and One Nights» were more like the horror stories after «lights out» at summer camp about maniacs, vampires and walking corpses. The role of ghouls here, however, was played by ignorant gynaecologists, drunken husbands, mean bosses and heartless mothers-in-law. Nourished on the culture of the university set, I was trying to become my own adult woman here while imbibing all sorts of nonsense useful for psychologists and historians, but fatal for a young mother-to-be.

«Planned caesarian,» grunted a heavy-shouldered woman doctor, poking me with her finger as she did the rounds, one of the uncouth breed that are in charge of greengrocers or gynaecology departments, and walked on.

«Why a caesarian?» I shouted, running after her, because she happened to be in charge of the gynaecology department.

«Surely you know why, woman!» She looked surprised, but went on walking. «Measure your hips and think about it. No child could get through such a narrow pelvis, woman. They need more room than that. You'd give them a terrible time and kill yourself into the bargain. I'm going to write 'caesarian' on your card in big red letters, so they can't miss it. You may not come to me for the birth.»

«You bet I won't.»

«And what's so bad about my department,» she said huffily.

«Yesterday a woman went into labour and the nurse told her to wait because there were only two tables and they were both occupied.»

«So what?» the doctor said. «What difference did it make? She yelled a bit in the ward. My mother gave birth to me in a hay field. She was mowing and had me on the spot.»

«I'd prefer a bit more comfort than that.»

«Then send a telegram to Brezhnev saying you're someone special. Maybe he'll let you give birth on his nice big office desk. I do too much as it is for my miserable wage.»

An all-ward discussion decided that a caesarian was much better than the usual method, firstly, because you felt no pain and, secondly, because the doctor was there all the time, whereas if it wasn't a caesarian you might have to hunt high and low for one. We were entertained by the whole repertoire of stories from twenty-nine fevered minds about death or other horrors from a caesarian. And when everyone finally calmed down and began snuffling and snoring, I lay in the darkness, weeping into my pillow with my head twisting the Rubik cube of what awaited me. I was very attracted by the idea of a general anaesthetic, of course, and waking up to find two lovely babies wrapped round with silk ribbons. But being a bookworm I had studied a pile of books on the subject and discovered, inter alia, that the vegeto-vascular system of children born by a caesarian was not so adaptable to changes in pressure.

It had been drummed into my head by all and sundry that in the sphere of childbirth I was totally incompetent, and that all Soviet women with broad hips gave birth cheerfully to a single child on the hay, in bed, in a lift, at the workbench or at the steel furnace, and only I, a degenerate bohemian, was not only pregnant with two at once, but also had a rhesus problem, oedema, a narrow pelvis and quite unfounded claims.

Somehow I managed to survive the hospital with the icy washes in the morning in a packed washroom full of big jars of urine tests; meals the very smell of which was enough to give you a miscarriage; the dusty windows facing the hospital morgue, and various other accessories that accompanied the emergence of a new life into the twenty-first century.

From the hospital I was sent to the Central Institute of Gynaecology, where the wives of diplomats and cosmonauts gave birth and also the string-pullers and pathological cases. I belonged to the third and fourth categories. Mother's friend who worked there warned me:

«Our place is better that an ordinary maternity home, of course, but if you feel it starting and don't call me, I can't answer for anything.»

The wards were either for six ordinary pregnant women or one diplomat-cosmonaut-general's wife. An orderly brought round a dirty trolley with some cadaver-coloured kasha for the ordinary patients and morsels of haute cuisine for the dip-cosm-gens. They were allowed to have visitors in the ward, while we had to make do with scribbled notes and hurried shouts down the phone or through the window. With his usual artistic flair my husband used to put on a white coat and make his way to the third floor, where I was waiting for him, hiding in the dark corridor. We embraced like conspiratorial revolutionaries, because towards the end of my pregnancy I became obsessed with the sense of being «insulted and humiliated», and together with the management I believed that meeting my own husband when I was about to give birth to his child was a flagrant infringement of the rules. And that if caught I deserved to be punished by immediate eviction and childbirth in an even less congenial place. So defenceless and insecure are pregnant women that they almost turn into zombies.

Tired of Russian food the black women fried bananas in sunflower oil on their little electric stoves, while the Koreans braised herring in milk. These mouth-watering smells, multiplied by a somewhat fevered imagination, produced racist moods. The only compensation was the folklore growing up in connection with the regular visits to a long-legged black woman by the three other wives of her diplomat husband.

The institute also differed from other establishments of its kind in the presence of a large number of black- and yellow-skinned students. I could be eating, sleeping or even dying when a crowd of them would burst into the ward and an energetic teacher with a bunch of case histories fished one of the latter out, waved her pointer in my direction and rattled:

«Interesting case, girl of nineteen, twins, rhesus-negative,» and twenty students felt my belly in turn, each trying to look like a hardbitten professional.

«What would happen if I gave birth in the middle of one of these demonstrations?» I asked.

«Don't worry, we're going to use you for our end-of-term practicals,» she replied.

One day lying on my back I passed out. The desk with smelling salts was at the other end of the corridor about half a bus stop away, so they revived me by slapping my pretty, as I thought, face. Coming to, I lay down on my back again and again lost consciousness. The assembled doctors cogitated for some time, before shrugging their shoulders and dispersing. I had to get through the night and was scared stiff of assuming a horizontal position again. So I just sat up until morning, clasping a pillow forlornly, and in the morning collapsed, went to sleep and lost consciousness again. This was the state in which an energetic professor brought there by a crowd of baffled doctors found me. Cursing like a trooper, she slapped me smartly on the face, sat me up in bed and addressed the assembled company:

«I can't think how you got through the institute? Who gave you your diplomas? Just take a look at her. Typical twins. Two heavy foetuses pressing on the vena cava. That's not pathology, it's the norm for anyone who calls themselves a specialist.» The doctors looked at the floor.

«And you, woman, just remember not to give birth on your back. That's not for you!»

«Then what should I give birth on?» A chill ran down my spine.

«On your side. French women always give birth on their side, and Koreans squatting on their heels.»

«But it says on my card in big red letters that I'm having a caesarian,» I said, beseechingly. «How can I have one on my side or squatting on my heels?»

«Give me your card,» the professor demanded. «Look here, woman. I'm crossing out caesarian and writing vena cava syndrome instead.»

«But the baby will never get throughmy narrow pelvis,» Iyelled.

«Who told you such rubbish? You've got a great pelvis. An ideal pelvis for twins. No caesarian! There's a fashion for them these days. Only if you're in labour for three days do you get your caesarian!» And out she went, fanning herself with my case history and clacking on her high heels. I was so confused by now that all I could do was weep and pray to the Almighty.

I would go up to the mirror and examine my heavy, naked stomach, which was moving and changing shape like Solaris, with the vague outlines of heads, knees and elbows. I could hardly grasp that these were my babies and thought of it all as a kind of abstract, intelligent mass that I talked to, complained about life to, and begged not to kick my innards when they were having their tussels. It must be said that even then my requests were not ignored. An animal instinct told me that I was no longer alone within the confines of my own skin, but intellectually I could only grasp that the responsibility for the survival of all three of us in the cogwheels of this medical machine was exclusively mine. And this made me shiver like an aspen leaf as the happy day approached, which I had been taught to regard as the day of judgement.

One night I woke up in a pool of water, the meaning of which had not been explained to me. All my experienced companions were fast asleep, and I was too embarrassed to wake them with my stupid questions. So I hobbled slowly towards the night desk. The nurse there was also fast asleep, after consuming her fair share of diluted spirit that evening. The water was still running down my legs.

«Please,» I shook her shoulder. «I need help.»

«Why can't you just settle down, woman, and go to sleep. It's night time,» the duty nurse grunted.

«I've got water running down me and I don't know what it means,» I said hesitantly.

«Always the same old thing… What time is it?»

«I don't know. I haven't got a watch.»

«Well, go and see then. It's for you, isn't it, not for me?»

Like an idiot, I hobbled to the clock at the other end of the corridor, worried about the water dripping onto the lino and about not letting the nurse get her sleep.

«Five o'clock,» I announced, when I got back.

«All right, let's go,» said the nurse, standing up lazily and setting off down the corridor.

«Where are we going?»

«To cloud cuckoo land… We're going to the pre-delivery room, woman, that's where.»

«The pre-delivery room?» My legs went all wobbly.

«Don't stand there like a post, woman. Get into the lift.»

I went into the lift on automatic pilot, but the nurse wheeled in a stretcher.

«Get on this.»

«Why?» I whispered.

«Those are the instructions. When your waters break, you must lie down.»

«Then why did you send me right up the corridor to see what time it was?»

«When you've got your baby, you can teach it what to do. But don't start teaching me. On seventy roubles a month I don't have to run around for all of you. At least the foreigners give us presents…»

The pre-delivery section consisted of a room with various pieces of apparatus and beds on which women were emitting bloodcurdling screams.

«How sad to die so young, so beautiful and so talented,» I thought to myself bitterly.

«Come on, woman, lie down properly on your back,» shouted a young man in a white coat.

«I can't. I've got vena cava syndrome. It's on my card.» I reported smartly in military style.

«There's no such thing in the human body. I'm the doctor here, not you. Lie down and let them put the wires on you.»

A young nurse began to attach wires all over me, with a metal plated strap on my forehead connected to a piece of apparatus.

«Here's the switch, woman. Right makes it stronger and left weaker. Understand?»

«No,» I said, understanding only that I would not be left to die in peace.

«When the pain starts turn it right and when it stops turn it left.»

I turned the switch and the electric current started up. My contorted pose, in which I was trying to look as if I was lying on my back, but in fact I wasn't, added an element of grotesque to the proceedings.

The duty doctor was turning over the pages of a detective story with a gory cover. The sight of someone reading a thriller on night duty would probably not have been disturbing in any other department. The assorted screeches and moans merged and multiplied in the high ceiling like the aurora borealis: the thin wails from the small Korean woman, the bass-like groans from the broadshouldered, long-legged blonde, the shrieks from the fat woman with a plait and the heart-rending moans from my neighbour, her forehead scorched from the painkilling electric current.

«You've got a heart of stone. How can your wife bear to live with you?» my neighbour began her dialogue with the doctor.

«Who do you think you are, woman? You're not the first to give birth or the last,» he said, rustling the pages of his book.

«You turd in trousers!» she howled. «What do you know about it? This is my third. If you menstruated once a year, you'd spend nine months preparing for it!»

«That's it,» said the doctor. «I've had enough.» He shut his book and walked out.

«Silly fool,» cried the long-legged blonde. «Why did you make him go? Who's going to deliver my baby now? You?»

«He wouldn't even notice unless you had it on his book!» retorted the other woman.

It was like a ship launched into space with women unable to call for help and incapable of helping themselves. The pain spiralled into a funnel, driving the ship forward to catastrophe. I emerged from a deep howl and a seared forehead, realizing post factum that both events concerned me. Attempting in vain to restrain the next howl, I forced myself not to turn the switch to maximum when the pain came; the lower half of my body separated from me and hovered under the ceiling, flapping the sheets like wings, while the upper half clung on to the bedstead, trying to focus between the agonizing pangs. Time lost all meaning, the room was swallowed up by semi-dusk and noise, and I bade farewell to all that was precious to me in this life.

There was a clatter of heels, and a young lady in glasses with a mask of disdain and fatigue on her plump face, snapped over me:

«Why are you giving birth in silence, woman? We've got to record all the data about your twins. Get on the trolley.»

My behaviour at that moment was anything but silent, yet the concept of discussion remained in the world I had left behind. I crawled onto the trolley like a crab and was barely conscious of the young lady attaching sensors to various parts of me in another room packed with monitors and rushing about amid the screens and notebooks to record the last few moments of my life.

Somehow I ended up on the delivery table by a window bathed in sunlight. The minute hand of the large clock showed nine twenty.

«There's no one around because it's in between shifts,» said the woman on the next delivery table in a gentle voice. It was as quiet as a morgue. You could hear the birds twittering like mad outside.

Two elderly women came into the room, walked up to me and gave a yell that brought all the staff rushing in. With total indifference I heard them say that I should have been delivered an hour ago, that I was torn to pieces, that goodness only knew what I would give birth to now and that they could all get the sack over this.

«Don't worry, everything will be fine? What's your name?» asked an elderly woman, turning me on to my back and almost lying on top of me. Having been called nothing but «woman» for the last few months and because I just hadn't the strength to tell her that I had been categorically forbidden to lie on my back, and because I was sure this was the long-awaited day of judgement, which would put an end to all my misery, I replied with a tongue like cotton wool:

«My name is woman,» and promptly passed out.

I opened my eyes in a cloud of smelling salts to see an incredibly large, black-haired, howling baby.

«Isn't he lovely?» the women gushed.

«Can I touch him?» I asked. They brought him over to me and I touched him timidly. He seemed as hot as a pie fresh from the oven.

«Don't relax. We've got to deliver the other one now. He's very active. He's already gulped too much of your amniotic fluid,» said the elderly woman.

«Can't I have a rest?»

«No, we've only got a few minutes. Quick, give her a drip in her arms and legs!» And a whole battalion of midwives, who had materialized from nowhere, began to insert the drips into my extremities, chattering non-stop as they did so. Another five minutes and I saw the second baby who howled even louder than the first as they slapped him.

«Is that one mine too?» I gasped like an idiot.

«Of course it is,» the nurse replied, unwinding the drip. «And thank your lucky stars that Professor Sidelnikova happened to come in, or you wouldn't have seen either of them.»

Then followed a tatty, unheated corridor, where my neighbour and I lay on trolleys for two hours with our bellies like deflated balloons as we studied the ornate moulding on the ceiling.

«Is anyone looking after them, do you think? Or have they been left like we have?» I asked.

«They'll never tell us,» my neighbour said gloomily.

«Mind you don't go to sleep, women!» everyone shouted at us as they passed by.

«Why don't they take us into the ward?» we asked them weakly.

«You must stay awake for two hours, so you catch internal bleeding if there is one. The bedside nurses here are only for foreigners.»

«But it's cold out here!»

«That's so you don't go to sleep.»

Two hours later I was on the operating table.

«Are you allergic to anaesthetic? It will take me an hour to sew this up, you're all in tatters,» said a cheerful young man in a green coat.

«I can stand it,» I replied and finally passed out under the mask.

«Tell your husband he owes me a bottle of wine. I did a good job on you. You're just as good as new now. Only why did he bring you here so late to have your twins? You won't be able to sit down for six months after this,» he said an hour later.

«He brought me here a month ago…»

«All right. We're only human too. What's your job?»

«I'm a student.»

«What of?»

«Philosophy.»

He was about to say that philosophers were only human as well, but thought better of it and said instead:

«Well, take it philosophically then.»

That must have been the last straw, because all my pent-up emotions burst out in a fit of sobbing.

«Calm down, calm down…» said the doctor anxiously, pinning me to the table and glancing into the other room where there should have been a nurse on duty. «If you cry like that all your stitches will come out and I'll have to spend another hour sewing you up again! And everything's fine. You've got two lovely boys! So what are you crying about, sweetheart?» He put a couple of shots into the syringe one after the other and shouted into the corridor. «Lena, Lida, where the blazes are you?» then started plunging syringes into my arm, which already felt like a pincushion. Then everything around me began to swim: the blinding light bulbs, the nurses who had turned up at last, and the green walls. And in the dizzy haze of this medical cocktail I saw myself running naked along the unheated corridor of the Institute of Gynaecology past lines of doctors who were spitting and throwing earth at me towards an open lighted door, while I tried to cover my big belly with my hands…

All this happened seventeen years ago for the sole reason that I am a woman. And as long as there are people who do not regard this as a suitable subject for discussion it will happen each day to other women, because being a woman in this world is not something worthy of respect, even when you are doing the only thing that men cannot do.