not the time yet and then sent me to the window of the prenatal ward on the other side of the building. Eera raised herself to the windowsill and from under her half-dropped eyelids, she incredulously looked to see that I was still there. She told me to leave because the childbirth would be at nine.
Of course, she did not know that I was protecting her from this world with its KAMAZ-dragons and merciless paramedics. "Kerdun on the shift?"
"No."
I returned to the gazebo… There I sat squeezing in the cupped hands the quiver in my shoulders to ward off the chill of night…
In the murky predawn twilight, the circle of the gazebo floor was suddenly crossed by a strange dark ball pushing a white cylinder before itself. Only when it disappeared into the grass, I guessed that it was a hedgehog whose muzzle got stuck in an ice-cream paper cone.
The rays of invisible sun touched the white clouds high above; soon it wouldn't be so awfully cold. From the center in the gazebo roof, a fine thread of web plumbed down precipitated by the weight of a big spider on its end. No sooner he touched the floor than the air space of the gazebo was cut thru by a sparrow flying in the direction marked by the muzzle-covered hedgehog. The spider followed them.
(…I can see signs, but—what a pity!—I cannot read them.
Spider, bird, hedgehog… The three Magi?..)
In the delivery room, someone started screaming again. When the screams died down, two women called me from behind the sheer veil of the mosquito net to come up. One of them held the baby in her uplifted hands; something was dangling between the tiny legs.
"Son!" I had time to think.
"Congratulations to your daughter!"
"Navel cord," corrected I myself…
The mother-in-law met me with a smile and congratulations, she had already called the maternity hospital on the phone.
Borrowing money from Tonya, I ran to the Bazaar. It was a serious banknote of 25 rubles, she hadn't smaller ones by her at the moment. I flounced about the Bazaar, buying up bouquets of roses; roses, I wanted only roses, nothing but roses. Until the blank click in the run out clip of 25 rubles.
Then I hurried back to the hospital embracing that bale of bouquets. The one-legged cripple, on his crutches by the five-story block of the mother-in-law, smiled at me happily – he knew where I was hurrying to.
The nurse at the maternity hospital had to call two more of her colleagues to help her to take the flowers from the waiting room to the inner corridor. Later, Eera told me that she was still lying then in that corridor on the gurney and they heaped the roses over the bedsheet covering her but not for too long because they had to take her to the wardroom where flowers were not allowed… Then nurses and midwives shared those bouquets to take them home; one bouquet went to the paramedic Kerdun who came on her shift in the morning. Who cares? The most important thing that you were born.
"…a million, a million, a million of scarlet roses…"
~ ~ ~
(…Egyptologists are still arguing why the beautiful female faces of sphinxes are endowed with those hanging beards…)
The explanation was demonstrated by Eera. Though, at first, she demonstrated you, from behind the windowpane. The white fabric tightly wrapped all around you except for the circle of the face with your eyes in an obstinate squint. The same fabric covered Eera's hair, and half of her face was hidden with a bandanna-wide mask, like by the bank robbers, only white. She took you away somewhere, and then returned to the window and said thru the glass, that your eyes were the bluest blue but that you were already asleep after feeding.
To say this, she untied the upper strings of the mask, leaving the lower ones in place and the released cloth hung under her chin.
(…a beautiful face and an odd beard under it! The sphinxes have just fed their cubs!
That's what the ancient Egyptians wanted to bring over…)
When back at the apartment on Red Partisans, I was struck by the horrific look of the door to our narrow bedroom. How could I not see earlier all that dirt and mud splashes, and that long single hair hanging from a mud clump stuck to the door at a half-meter up from the floor? I heated some water and washed the door on both sides and then the window frame too, from inside. When Tonya gave me the carriage of her children, so that you would have where to sleep, I washed it as well taking into the yard under the bedroom window. And there I realized that it was the right thing to do when from out the folds in the collapsible top I picked out a piece of dried baby’s cack. No, I did not say anything to anyone, no one had anything to do with it, that was a part of sorting it out between me and the world in our single combat…
At the institute, Eera still had one more final examination. If it were missed, she would have to wait one whole year so as to take it together with the following graduating course. However, you were born very conveniently – right after the previous exam and there followed a week set aside for reading up between the examinations plus three more days, because there were four groups at a course, and they were not examined on the same day but one after another which amounted to 10 days allowed for your stay in the hospital.
On the sixth day of your life, Eera came to the waiting room and said that you were already all right, and the danger of jaundice, because of the different Rh factor in your parents, was over, and you were ready to be taken home any moment they say so. I kicked up tempestuous activity running to the Head of the maternity hospital