They send for a doctor right away (Ignatov doesn’t want to wait until morning), rousting him out of bed and driving him to the station. Groaning, he climbs into the train car, clumsily hoisting up his stout legs; he’s still young, only a little older than Ignatov. Zuleikha has fully come to and he examines her in the light of a kerosene lamp, wearily chewing at his sagging lower lip and tugging at a long lock of sparse hair that’s been combed over early baldness.
“Heart’s fine,” he says indifferently. “Lungs, too. Skin healthy.”
“And so…?” Ignatov is standing right there, in the railroad car, leaning his back against the closed door and smoking.
Ten pairs of eyes – the ten exiles remaining after the escape – are looking down at him from their bunks; nobody else has yet been assigned to car number eight because other things have been happening.
“You can calm down, comrade,” the doctor yawns sleepily and he places his rudimentary instruments in his gaunt doctor’s bag. “It’s not typhus. Not scabies. Not dysentery. We’re not going to put the whole train in quarantine.”
Ignatov nods with relief and flings his cigarette butt into the cold stove. They’d stopped issuing coal for heating at the end of April after deciding it was enough; this isn’t a sanatorium, and it’s warm anyway.
“The cause of fainting could be anything at all,” the doctor drones on, as if he’s talking to himself while he heads toward the door. “Oxygen starvation, malnutrition – among other things. Or simply bad blood vessels.”
“Or pregnancy,” rings out loudly and distinctly from the depths of the bunks.
The puzzled doctor turns around and raises the kerosene lamp a little. Several gloomy faces overgrown with dirty beards are gazing at him, the whites of their eyes gleaming. So many of them have passed through his hands in recent months, they’ve all blended into one tired, dark image. One of the faces in the car, though, seems to remind him of someone or even be vaguely familiar. So familiar that the doctor raises the lamp to it. Closer, even closer. The nose is a sharp beak, the teasing eyes are like pieces of ice, there’s a steep arc of a massive, high forehead with a tangled coil of glistening silver hair around it. No, it can’t be. What is this?
“Professor!” says the doctor, exhaling. “Is that you?”
“She won’t allow you to check the tension of the mammary glands and the Montgomery tubercles,” Leibe utters in the clear, authoritative voice of a lecturer in a large auditorium. “Be so good as to at least investigate the condition of the salivary glands and facial pigmentation.”
The doctor is staring at the professor; he just can’t look away.
“Professor Leibe! How did you…?”
“Try a deep palpation of the abdomen, too,” continues Leibe. “My diagnosis would be eighteen weeks.”
When he’s done speaking, Leibe bores a long, unblinking gaze into the doctor, who wipes his damp upper lip and sits back down on the bunk next to the frightened Zuleikha. He feels her lower jaw.
“Exhale,” he quietly orders.
She shakes her head, breathing loudly and rapidly, without stopping.
“Zuleikha, my dear,” says Izabella, sitting down alongside Zuleikha and taking her hand. “The doctor’s asking.”
“I said exhale,” the doctor repeats angrily.
Zuleikha exhales and holds her breath. The doctor swallows and lays his palms on her belly. He looks significantly at the professor.
“I’m palpating an enlargement of the uterus.”
Leibe laughs loudly and triumphantly, his teeth flashing in the darkness:
“I’ll grade you unsatisfactory, Chernov. And I did warn you in the first year that you would not be a good diagnostician!”
Zuleikha mumbles, uncomprehending, not knowing what she’s supposed to do now.
“Tell the patient to breathe,” says Leibe. Content and still chuckling, he reclines on the bunk.
Zuleikha inhales convulsively.
“Professor, how did you…?” In an attempt to find Leibe’s face, the doctor thrusts the lamp into the dark bunk, where Leibe is hiding.
“You may receive your grade book at the dean’s office, Chernov,” answers Leibe, wrapping himself up cocoon-like in someone’s sheepskin jacket and rolling closer and closer to the wall. “I have no time for consultations right now.”
“Volf Karlovich,” insists the doctor, sweeping the lamp’s light around the bunk, “after all, we’ve… After all you did for–”
“I don’t have time, Chernov.” The voice only just carries from the depths. “I don’t have time.”
The doctor’s lamp illuminates a rustling mountain of rags by the far wall. The mountain soon stops moving.
Zuleikha whimpers quietly, like a dog, biting the edge of her headscarf and gazing upward, staring. Izabella sits next to her and strokes Zuleikha’s hands, which are clasped in fists and lying lengthways alongside her body.
Chernov shakes his head slightly as if he’s shedding a hallucination, clasps his doctor’s bag to his chest, and leaves the railroad car. He jumps down to the ground, leaning against Ignatov’s proffered arm, and notices Ignatov’s eyes are stern and tense.
“I assure you again, comrade commandant, this is nothing bad,” utters the slightly annoyed doctor. What tender commandants there are now! “What do we have here?”
He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes Ignatov’s cheek. On it are four long, dark streaks that look like marks made by a small hand.
Pregnant? Yes, she wanted to eat all the time but of course they weren’t fed. Yes, her belly had gotten a little heavier recently but she’d thought it was from aging. And the red days had stopped coming, though she thought that was from worry. But that she was pregnant? Oh, that Murtaza, he’s cheated death. He’s been in the grave a long time but his seed is alive, growing in her belly. It’s already halfway grown.
Another girl? Of course, what else could it be? What was it the Vampire Hag said? You only bring girls into the world. No, that’s not what she said. You only bring girls into the world and they don’t survive.
And will this one really die, too?… Well, of course. This one will leave her as well, after having barely been born. Her bright infant’s redness won’t even have a chance to leave her tender skin, her tiny little eyes won’t have a chance to fill with meaning, and her mouth won’t have a chance to smile for the first time.
Zuleikha looks at the black ceiling. Thoughts flow as the wheels knock. A warm May night is rushing past on the other side of the plank wall. The light, half-empty railroad car rocks wildly, like a cradle. Everybody’s already asleep, including the kind Izabella, who’d stroked her hand half the night, and the eccentric professor, whose bright, joyful eyes had looked at her for so long. If only she could fall asleep, too.
Was it permissible for her to request Allah to allow her child to at least stand on its own two feet? That the child at least take its first steps before leaving this world? Or was that too great an impudence? There’s nobody with her to ask for advice: not Murtaza, not the mullah. Almighty, give me some hints yourself: am I allowed to ask this of You? I won’t ask for anything else, I wouldn’t dare. Only this.
And there’s this thought, out of nowhere: What if the All-powerful hears and permits your child to take its first step? What would it be to lose the child then? Might it be better for it to be right away, before getting used to the child and taking a liking to it? She remembers how she grieved over her first daughter, who was granted one whole month of life. And then less for the second, who departed after a couple of weeks. And even less for the third, who didn’t survive seven days. The fourth, who departed right away, at birth, was seen off with dry eyes.