The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

9

IT WAS A LONG, LOW MOAN THAT DESCENDED INTO A uterine growl. Skinhead searched with his eyes for Manikin, but the latter kept stomping along on its sluggish feet. The source of the groan turned out to be Fat Lady, who was dropping to the ground. With a professional’s hand Skinhead caught her up from behind. He helped her fall into a more comfortable pose. Fat Lady lay there, her legs bent at the knees as she attempted to clasp her enormous stomach. A puddle spread underneath her back . . .

“Is she giving birth?” Skinhead was astonished. “How strange that someone can give birth in this place . . . On the other hand, why not?”

The woman wore a flannel robe with large terry-cloth flowers, and a few of the buttons had managed to detach themselves under the pressure of her writhing body. With skilled fingers he undid the rest. He pulled the hem of her nightshirt back toward her enormous floppy breasts, and what he saw took his breath away. At first it seemed to him that her body was bound with a multitude of thick pink and lilac-crimson plaits with large sea mollusks, similar to those of the genus Tonicella or Neopilina, growing on them, each of them the size of a tea saucer. He touched one of the shells: it was not separable from her body, but some sort of parasitical growth. All these plaits and shells were attached with cords that had sprouted in her stomach. There was even a sort of monstrously attractive artistry to this living network.

Never in his long years of medical practice had Skinhead seen anything like this. He had no instruments with him, only the silver spoon he stuck between Manikin’s clenching jaws whenever its seizures began. Nothing but his bare hands . . .

He began to examine her, at least visually, and attempted to shift one of the shell-like growths and to palpate her stomach. On first palpation he thought he felt the fetus’s hand. High, very high up, right under her diaphragm.

“A breach presentation,” he uttered, dismayed, anticipating additional complications with the turn of the legs. He wanted to continue his manual examination, but something monstrous occurred: the little fist he had just felt punched through the taut wall of the belly and came through to the surface. Fat Lady howled.

“Hold on, hold on, my dear,” he calmed the woman.

What is this? Perforation of the uterus wall, the wall of the abdominal prelum, and the surface of the skin? That’s unimaginable! How macerated must the tissues be for them to perforate under pressure from a fetus’s hand? He pressed her stomach once again: it was hard and dense.

Just then his intravision clicked on, and an image appeared. The woman’s entire womb was packed solid with infants, like a fish with caviar. The little fist he held in his hand belonged to a completely formed nine-month-old fetus, as apparent from the dense little nails on its fingers—a significant indicator of maturation . . .

With two fingers he expanded the opening from which the little hand had emerged. The woman moaned.

“Hold on just a bit, just a bit: you’re giving birth to a little champion,” he bolstered the woman with his automatically vigorous tone of voice.

The opening gave way easily, and, taking the child’s hand into his own, his arm disappeared into the hole almost to the elbow: he was hoping to turn the child by the head. It turned very easily, but face-first, not neck-first. The doctor made it dive downward and placed his hand under the back of its head.

The woman moaned, but she was no longer shouting, and Skinhead continued mumbling his usual, calming somethings, without giving it a second thought.

“That’s good, Mommy. Your first child? Second? You know what you’re doing then . . . Breathe deeper, deeper . . . And not so fast, count to ten . . .”

Everything went quite quickly, quite wonderfully, and the little boy popped out. A normal, live infant lay in the doctor’s hand covered in thick vernix caseosa . . . With no umbilical cord. A child could be born without arms, without legs, and without a head. But without an umbilical cord? The umbilical depression was deep, and clean, completely healed . . .

Despite his surprise, Skinhead did what needed to be done at that moment: he cleaned out the nose and the oral cavity, and, turning the infant upside down, smacked it on its moist buttocks. It emitted a deep insulted cry: “wah-wah . . .”

How long had it been since Skinhead had last heard this plaintive sound of new life? . . . The pathetic music, the hoarse song of lungs just opened, the first attempt at musical articulation from the cartilaginous flute of the vocal cords that frightens the performer himself . . . The infant cries out of fright at the new sound.

But this time everything was different, contrary to all rules, habits, and expectations. The infant easily detached itself from the doctor’s palm—just as a bubble of air rises from an underwater plant to the surface, and still articulating the same two notes, it floated smoothly upward about three feet, then disappeared, leaving behind the sound of a burst rubber ball and a swift whirlpool in the air . . .

Skinhead barely managed to follow it with his eyes, when the woman in labor let out another howl, and he dropped down to his knees alongside her. Among the rainbow network of growths there were two gaping tears: out of one stuck a little foot, and from the other a gray little head was pushing its way outward. The place from which the first infant had just been extracted had closed into a folded navel, so there was no need to suture it. Skinhead attempted to feel with his hand whether the head and the foot belonged to one child or two.

The woman screamed. Skinhead, while pushing the leg back inside, pressed on the woman’s stomach so that it was easier for the head to come through. A shell-like growth impeded the opening from widening, and Skinhead pulled the growth back with the silver spoon, using the fingers of his left hand to open up a path. The second boy was also without an umbilical cord, but Skinhead now thought only about how not to let this child float off into the sky. However, the phenomenon repeated itself exactly as before: the infant began to scream and to move its little hands, and although Skinhead held on to it tightly this time, covering it with his second hand, the infant slipped out from under his hand and, like a soap bubble, with the very same smacking sound, floated off, leaving one more quickly dissipating vortex.

With the third infant Skinhead struggled a lot longer because it came feet first—to turn it over had proved impossible—and to make matters worse, it pulled a section of the cord that had grown into the woman’s stomach in its tightly clenched fist. This time, though, Skinhead was already not surprised when the back of the light, hairless little girl detached itself from his moist palm and floated into the air.

The difficulty with the set of twins lay in that they turned out to be in a single amniotic sack and could not emerge from the opening, so that Skinhead was forced to bite through not the umbilical cord, as do animals and women giving birth without help, but the elastic dark-blue rope around the woman’s stomach, which, although it had emptied considerably, continued to be enormous.

The next child surprised Skinhead by emerging the most natural way, through the birth canal, but it also did not gladden him with an umbilical cord. That was the sixth. The seventh was born right after, also the old-fashioned way, but it was very premature and floated off the doctor’s hand so reluctantly that Skinhead even regretted slightly that he had not attempted to restrain it. Strictly speaking, the last two were hetero-ovular twins, but developmentally one lagged behind the other by about seven weeks. That just doesn’t happen . . . True, with twins it frequently happens that one overwhelms the other in prenatal development . . . But there was no time to intellectualize, because out of the woman’s stomach poked the little hand of the next client waiting to emerge . . .

When the multiple births finally ended, the woman asked where her children were. Skinhead stroked her face: it was she, his primary patient, the one for whose sake he had waged his battle with medical bureaucrats, with his colleagues, with his friends, and even with his family . . . She was exhausted by work beyond her strength, hunger, birthing, loneliness, responsibility, and lack of money, and he explained as best he could that her children must be in heaven. She sobbed bitterly.

“But what about me, not a single little child for me, not one?”

She lay there as he kneeled before her. The tangle of growths and cords had slackened and now hung around her hips, which were covered with stretch marks and abrasions. He pulled at one of the shells, and it remained in his hand. Dense and alive as worms just moments ago, the cords crumbled in his hands, and the entire confused network fell from her body like a dry hull. Some sort of leathery membrane that reminded him of a shed snakeskin fell from the woman’s hips. Her body recovered its human dignity. And her eyes, ringed by dark circles of suffering, looked at the doctor with gratitude. He knew well that exhausted, somewhat vacant look of a woman who had just given birth . . .

“Can you walk?” Skinhead asked.

“I’ll stay here,” she answered.

Skinhead then buried the remainder of the monstrous growths in the sand, gathered several dry plants off the ground, and lit a fire.

“You rest, my child, just rest. Everything will be all right . . .”

She began to move, and rose up on one arm. “What do you mean—all right . . . ?”

Skinhead looked back: they were waiting for him. For the first time in their entire journey, he did not put out the fire as he left.

They set off further in their usual fashion, in single or double file, and Skinhead, looking back, could still see the bluish flame in the distance. Then he heard a hollow smacking sound, and when he turned around for the last time he saw nothing except the sand hills and his own tracks quickly swept over by light drifts of sand . . .