“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard,” Deshi said. “She’s never actually seen the view from this room.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s drawing something she’s never seen.”
“She isn’t even Chechen.”
“Her greatest shortcoming.”
“She deserves pity rather than scorn.”
“We retired three years ago,” Deshi lamented. “What are we even doing here?”
The unlit cigarette somersaulted from her fingers as she pushed open the door, dashed between her critics, and closed the curtain over the boarded windows. She had felt more humiliated before, but never by people whom she trusted. She grabbed her lighter from the counter and pushed past the nurses, but Maali’s grasp, surprisingly firm on her wrist, held her.
“Let me guess,” Natasha said. “The only way to fix the mural is to amputate the hand that drew it.”
Maali smiled. “It’s not quite so serious.”
“Really?” She felt strangely honored that Maali didn’t want to chop off her hand.
“It’s just that there was never a bus stop at the intersection of Lenin Prospect and City Bureaucrat Street. I know because I stared at that corner for thirty years.”
“We’ll help you,” Deshi added, and under the combined guidance of eyes that had spent some sixty years in front of the maternity ward windows, she erased and redrew, swept up the eraser lint, erased and redrew again. Deshi and Maali argued over every signpost and streetlamp, every tree in City Park, every storefront, kiosk, and traffic light; they had stared from different windows onto different cities, and in trying to bring back both, she created her own. She shaded the buildings with ash and coal, sliced advertisements from unread magazines still stacked in the waiting room and pasted slivers of color across the plywood. The blue waves of a Black Sea resort became sky. Mint gum became linden leaves. Some afternoons the nurses would become lost in the mural, pointing to the distant corners and alleyways like faded pictures in a photo album. The finely detailed ventilation grate that had once suspended a thousand-ruble note in its draft, where Deshi plucked three months’ rent from the air. The aboveground gas pipes from which their mother had hung laundry and their father a hammock. Or the schoolyard blacktop, where Maali’s son had played soldiers years before the war took him. In sixteen years, when glass replaced the plywood boards, Natasha’s murals would find their way to Sonja’s bedroom closet, where they would remain a private treasure for some sixty-three years, until Maali’s great-great-grandson, an art historian, put them on display in the city art museum.
She was studying her city when the nurses arrived on the morning she was to perform her third solo delivery. “It’s going to get busy,” Maali said, with no small amount of glee. With her rain jacket, windbreaker, and overcoat hung on different pegs, the coat stand suggested a fully staffed ward. “We heard land mines on the way in.”
Deshi wagged her head. “You enjoy this job too much, sister. I worry your head has broken.”
“It’s too bad you can’t amputate a head.”
“You can. It’s called a decapitation.”
Maali noted it excitedly on her clipboard.
“We’re all working trauma today,” Deshi said.
“What if there are deliveries?” Natasha asked.
“Then you’ll do them, Natashechka. It doesn’t take much to deliver a child. The mother does most of the work.”
The first casualties arrived a half hour later; red heat radiated from their skin. Natasha disinfected the ropy ends of a calf when Deshi came calling. “We have a delivery. Go.”
The patient lay gowned and supine on the maternity ward bed. Her face throbbed against the white sheets, as flushed and anguished as those four floors below. Two men stood beside her, each holding one hand. She recognized the cleft in the older man’s chin, but now wasn’t the time for pause, for reflection; now was the time to act. She stood between the woman’s pale open legs, trying not to look down.
“The contractions are three minutes apart,” the younger man volunteered. He spoke with the halting formality of an outsider.
It was all she needed in order to remember what to do. “Lasting how long?”
He didn’t know. Sweat grew heavy on the woman’s forehead and trickled toward her temples. After washing her hands to her wrists, rubbing sanitizer to her elbows, she snapped on a fresh pair of gloves. Another contraction came; they all heard it.
“Do you feel like you have to shit?” she whispered into the woman’s ear, afraid of embarrassing her in front of her husband.
The woman nodded.
“What did you ask?” the younger man asked. “Is she okay?”
“The child is in the birth canal, putting pressure on the rectum, that’s all.” These people knew nothing of her, and she drew enough confidence from what they did not know to keep her voice level. They didn’t know that her name was Natasha; that she had performed only two solo deliveries, one and three weeks earlier; that six months earlier, as she detoxed in a Rome psych ward, God had pulled her through a needle’s eye so narrow that this thread in front of them was all that remained.
She told the woman to lift her pale little legs, place her feet in the stirrups, and the woman did. She pulled the woman’s dress into a crumpled hoop around her stomach. They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers.
“My chest hurts,” the woman said.
“You need to breathe.”
“My eyes hurt,” the woman said.
“You need to blink.”
She set two pillows on the floor, beneath the woman’s open legs, just in case. The vise of the woman’s grip crushed the older man’s fingers to squirming scarlet tendrils. “I’ve seen you before,” Natasha said, but was swallowed within the woman’s wail. “Push,” Natasha said. “Push.”
A mat of damp hair ringed by pubic curls began to crown.
“Gently,” she said, extending her hands as the mat of hair became a head. “Take deep breaths. Slow breaths. Imagine you are inflating a balloon. Your breaths are slow and deep. Blow through your mouth at the most painful point of each contraction. Try to whistle.”
She steadied her hands beneath the crowning skull. Instinct told her to palm the back of the child’s head so its first sensation was of warmth and comfort, but she kept a finger’s width between the child’s skin and her own. Maali had warned her never to touch a child’s head before seeing its face; doing so could cause the child to inhale amniotic fluid. But it wasn’t the child who gasped, it was Natasha as she watched the damp forehead emerge. The birth canal sheathed every slip of skin as the mother slid her child into life. Its little eyes didn’t move. Far away, the mother emptied her lungs in an unshaped melody. They all inhaled her whistle.
“The head has come out,” Natasha announced, trying her hardest, for the sake of professional decorum, to stifle the smile widening across her face. The mother pushed and the room hushed, dampened, narrowed by her exertion. The shoulders stuck. With the most tender turn of her gloved hands, Natasha rotated the child’s head so its lids looked into the fleshy pale of the mother’s thigh. The right shoulder slid through. She lifted the child’s head and when the mother’s next whistle pushed out the left shoulder, the rest glided into her hands like an afterthought.
She lifted the umbilical cord over the child’s face, and the warm wet weight of the head pressed to her palm. She angled the child toward the floor. “A girl,” she said. The child opened its eyes and a sharp chill ran through her to know that hers were the first hands to hold the girl.
“She doesn’t look right,” the father said.