Tunes for Dancing Bears: Extract
CHAPTER 1
The obstetrician seemed menacing. He looked like a shark: small eyes and stretched lips, and too many teeth when he opened his mouth to speak. He had given up trying to breathe life into her baby and was now leaning over her under the blinding lights. For a moment, nothing came out of his mouth but a puff of stale breath. And when at last he told her, muttering a word she did not understand, Lydia’s own lips went stiff, as if numbed by novocaine. She became aware of silence, abrupt and furtive, and a sudden scuttling through the haze surrounding the birthing table.
A young nurse stopped by and, her mouth twitching, asked whether she wished to hold her baby. Lydia was still grappling for coherence. Only a short while earlier, gazing at herself in the overhead mirror, she’d had the feeling of participating in some sort of theatrical production: elaborate costumes and scenery, herself at centre stage, supine, obedient to the director, while a part of her struggled to wrest itself free of her possessive flesh.
She had been good, had been wonderful. They had all said so, urging her to push, push, push. And she wanted to go on being good; dreaded being abandoned in this vast, antiseptic chamber. At last, she accepted the stillborn child and held him stiffly in her arms, looking into his face with dream-like detachment. Mine? The room spun around. The child bore a remarkable resemblance to her husband.
But where was her husband? Someone had tried to call him after she’d been admitted but John, a surgeon at another hospital, was on call during that long holiday weekend and not immediately reachable. She had forgotten all about him until just this moment. Dr. Minnaar had left by then, closely followed by his assistants. Except for the young nurse, the room was empty, like a deserted theatre following a bomb threat. Had they forgotten her? Lydia felt paralyzed, overcome by a nightmarish terror of urgently needing to say something but finding her tongue frozen, her eloquent Greek hands dead. Her fingertips on the child’s head registered no sensation.
“Your husband’s on his way, Mrs. Gabriel,” the nurse said. Gently. Then something else, something about the baby. Anoxia.
“What?”
Lydia’s heart was a wild bird trapped inside a chimney. She held the inert child for another moment then thrust him back at the young nurse, who looked doomed, having failed to escape along with her colleagues.
“Do something!” Lydia heard herself shout, her body shuddering, as though subjected to electric shock. “Do something, please!”
“You’re still young, Mrs. Gabriel, you—”
She was thirty-three going on thirty-four but did not argue. All she said was, “No!” The word reverberated in the empty room while her head rolled on the pillow. “No!” Nothing else, just the one word uttered over and over, like an amplifier of her shrivelling heart. “No!”
A few minutes passed. Another nurse came in, checked her pulse, took her blood pressure. Then, murmuring words of comfort, administered a sedative.
All this took place in early September; that short fickle period between seasons. By the time her husband arrived, Lydia Gabriel had been moved out of the birthing area and onto the bustling maternity ward, where she slept for several merciful hours. Every now and then, though, she muttered in her sleep, speaking in her mother tongue.
“Panagía mou! Panagía, voíthisé me!”