Skinhead petted the humanoid rodent and placed it back on the branch he had just removed it from.
“My Lord, who is that?” asked Newling in horror.
“The thirsty seeking to be filled,” Skinhead said derisively, then hesitated immediately: What am I doing? Why am I teasing her again? What inveterate madness . . .
Some wall cracked or curtain tore, and a huge piece of former knowledge surfaced in her memory: her parents, her grandmother, their house in Trekhprudny Lane, the commune in Troparevo . . . Lev Tolstoy and the Gospel, not the Gospel of Tolstoy, but the original one that she had received from her grandmother . . . Immediately she choked on his derisive tone: she recognized the words from the Gospels that he had obviously and deliberately distorted: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled . . .”
“No, no, I am not making a mockery. I’m sorry. That’s just my way . . . I only wanted to say that that is their truth . . . All passion ultimately dies, does it not?” he continued, but her heart beat painfully from his words. “Just not everyone manages to find peace in the time allotted.”
He bent over and picked up off the ground a startled creature that had just fallen off a tree trunk. Now it was not a human rodent, but resembled more a human worm. The creature was motionless, its teeth had disappeared, and its mouth had acquired a size proportional to its head, while its tiny face seemed completely childlike.
“That’s it. It’s been filled. Now it most resembles a five-month-old human embryo.”
The Professor glanced over the Newling’s shoulder. Something terrifying came into his head, and he asked hoarsely: “Is it dead?”
“What are you saying! There is no death, Professor. And this one, I think, is considerably closer to the beginning than to the end,” Skinhead answered mysteriously.
At this point the Professor exploded: “I hate riddles! I demand a clear and concise answer to the question of what is going on here. If you consider it obligatory to show me all these so-called miracles, then could you at least explain your parables and allegories so that they make some sense . . . ?”
“What parables!” Skinhead laughed sincerely. “You and I haven’t even got to the alphabet yet!”
“Mind you, I’m going to complain! I have important connections in the most serious of organizations too!” the Professor chirred, and Skinhead seemed to retreat at his shouting and started to reason with him.
“Do pardon me. I in no way wanted to offend you or anything like that . . . You and I can discuss all this, just not right now. A little bit later. Now’s not the time. It’s not appropriate . . .”
The Professor calmed down: that it was not appropriate was something he could understand; it sounded convincing. And it was also pleasing that at the mention of his connections Skinhead had changed his tone of voice . . .
The beautiful woman stood alongside, tears flowing down her cheeks. It was apparent to the Professor that Skinhead had his eyes set on her.
“The poor, poor things,” she whispered. And unexpectedly quickly she asked Skinhead: “Is the tree bitter?”
He looked at her and responded very quietly, but the Professor heard it all down to the last word.
“Bitter? Of course, it’s bitter . . .” He motioned with his hand that it was all right to keep going in the indicated direction.
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 . . .”