it wasn’t the child who gasped, it was Natasha as she watched the damp forehead emerge. The birth canal sheathed every slip of skin as the mother slid her child into life. Its little eyes didn’t move. Far away, the mother emptied her lungs in an unshaped melody. They all inhaled her whistle.
“The head has come out,” Natasha announced, trying her hardest, for the sake of professional decorum, to stifle the smile widening across her face. The mother pushed and the room hushed, dampened, narrowed by her exertion. The shoulders stuck. With the most tender turn of her gloved hands, Natasha rotated the child’s head so its lids looked into the fleshy pale of the mother’s thigh. The right shoulder slid through. She lifted the child’s head and when the mother’s next whistle pushed out the left shoulder, the rest glided into her hands like an afterthought.
She lifted the umbilical cord over the child’s face, and the warm wet weight of the head pressed to her palm. She angled the child toward the floor. “A girl,” she said. The child opened its eyes and a sharp chill ran through her to know that hers were the first hands to hold the girl.
“She doesn’t look right,” the father said.
Natasha rubbed the girl’s back through a towel, then tilted her head to open the airway. She stroked the girl’s nose, dried the girl’s mouth, suctioned residue through a plastic syringe, tickled her feet, but still the girl hadn’t cried. Should she run downstairs for help? Could she perform CPR on a newborn? She pushed her fingers into the child’s soft, soggy soles, and begged them to kick back. At the ends of her feet the protruding toes seemed in error, so curled and delicate they might sink back into the doughy flesh. These are the feet of a human being you brought into the world. She will not die.
She didn’t. Lips drawn to the pink edges of her toothless gums. A sharp gulp.
“She’s breathing.”
“I can hear,” the father said. The girl wailed. “She breathes like her mother.”
She placed the girl on the mother’s bare skin. The mother stared through a frame of damp hair and recognized her daughter; they were both breathing. Pink liquid trickled from the girl’s mouth, striping the incline of her mother’s still swollen stomach. With a fresh towel Natasha wrapped the two together.
“You should start nursing as soon as you feel able,” Natasha said. She didn’t need to borrow their confidence. It was hers. “It will help the placenta come out and stop the bleeding.”
The mother nodded weakly, happily. Her voice was unfamiliar when she spoke. Natasha had only heard it in screams. “This is my daughter?”
“Yes,” Natasha said, finally allowing herself a smile. “She’s yours.”
The older man approached as she washed her hands under the sputtering tap. There was much yet to clean, but first, her hands. He thanked her.
“The mother did most of the work,” she said. In his wrinkles she recognized his face as she might a photograph crumpled and flattened. “I’ve seen you before.”
“Have you been to Eldár?”
In a truck, with five other women. “In passing.”
“What about the city university? I taught there. Or the Café Standard? I enjoyed their bebop nights. Do you like bebop?”
“I don’t like trumpets.”
“But what if a trumpet is playing the music you like?”
She thought of loose screws trembling on the Nightclub dance floor.
“The music I like can’t be played on a trumpet,” she said.
“If it can’t be played on a trumpet, it’s not music.”
“My name is Natasha,” she said, smiling.
“Khassan Geshilov.”
Repeating the name aloud, she saw the black-and-white dust jacket photo. “I’ve read your book.”
He gave a bashful laugh. “You’re the one?”
“It ended before the Russians arrived. A stupid decision, if you ask me.”
“If only you had been my editor! Origins of Chechen Civilization,” he said fondly, as if he had also forgotten the title. He turned to the boarded windows. “This is the whole city, isn’t it?”
“As much as can be seen from the window.”
He strolled the ash-shaded streets and verdant leaves, reading the city so he might later remember. He lingered at an intersection between City Park and the university library, hesitated, then pressed his finger into the street. “The love of my life was nearly killed by a bus here. She had been following me, and I only found out then, with the screech of bus tires.”
“You have stalkers? No wonder you didn’t have time to write about the Russians.”
“That’s a story for another day.”