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 . . .
10
FOR A WHILE THE PROFESSOR DISPLAYED A CERTAIN acquiescence and stopped battering Skinhead with questions. He tried talking with Newling: she just looked at him wide-eyed and benevolent, incapable of giving an intelligible answer to any of his questions. He deliberated at length how best to approach Skinhead so as not to lose face yet achieve some degree of clarity. This strange journey was dragging on, yet at the same time—the Professor sensed—his desire to find an explanation for it all was waning: an inkling had crept into his head, but he kept driving it away. What was more, a strange apathy had overcome him. The campfire had a twofold effect on him: it calmed him, but also dulled his mind . . .
One time the Professor sat down next to Skinhead at the campfire and addressed him with respectful courtesy.
“Could you tell me, please, whether you have any means of contacting my family, my wife, that is? I am certain that she is very worried . . .”
“In principle, I do. What exactly would you like me to communicate to her?”
“Well, first of all, that I’m alive and well. You see, we’ve been married almost forty-two years and have never been separated for any length of time. If for some reason I cannot be returned to my former position,” here the Professor inserted a pregnant pause so that Skinhead would appreciate the full extent of his, the Professor’s, discretion, “might she be sent to join me?”
Skinhead scratched behind his ear with his thick finger. “Hmm . . . Could you tell me whether or not your wife believes in God?”
The Professor was indignant: “Excuse me! Well, we’re atheists, of course. I am a philosopher, a Marxist, and I teach Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. My wife is a party member . . .”
“I see, I see,” Skinhead interjected. “Are there any people of faith in your family at all?”
“No, of course not. My mother-in-law was an ignorant village woman, but she died—rest her soul—in 1951 . . .”
“Well that’s of no significance whatsoever.” Skinhead seemed to want to calm him.
“I’m sorry. What’s of no significance?”
“That she’s dead . . . In principle, we can get in touch with her. Only, you know, I would advise you to limit yourself to a brief message, on the order of, say, ‘Everything is all right. Don’t worry . . .’ How can you invite her here if you yourself don’t have a very good idea of where it is you are?”