Cilka's Journey(32)
Cilka grabs Elena, pulling her from the pack. She sees now that the groaning woman is Natalya, her blond hair stuck with sweat and soot to her forehead.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
Antonina has followed them in. As they place Natalya on her bed they step away and let the brigadier see her.
“How far gone?” Antonina asks.
Natalya shakes her head in pain and fear. “I don’t know.” Her scarf is still bundled around her neck. Her gloved hands clutch at it.
“Weeks or months?”
“Months, five or six, I don’t know! Help me, please help me.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Cilka asks Elena again.
“She’s bleeding and she is pregnant. We think she is having the baby.”
Antonina looks up and sees Cilka standing back.
“Come here,” she says. “You work in the hospital—take charge. The rest of you, get ready to go to dinner.”
Cilka opens her mouth to object, changes her mind. She has no idea how to deliver a baby, but she wants to be there for Natalya.
“Excuse me, Antonina Karpovna, can I have Josie and Elena stay and help me? I have a note here for you from the doctor, Yelena Georgiyevna.”
Cilka unfolds it and puts the note in Antonina’s gloved hands. Antonina reads it and looks around to find Josie, says in a monotone, “Well, another one of you wins a prize, congratulations.” She looks back at Cilka. “The two of them can stay with you. I’ll have some towels and sheets sent over. The rest of you, get out.” She wraps her scarf back over her mouth, only her eyes showing.
Before the women leave for the mess, Cilka says, “Can I ask if anyone here has had a baby or attended anyone giving birth?”
The brigadier looks around at the women, pushes her scarf down again. “Well?”
“I’ve helped birth plenty of cows but no humans,” says Margarethe, matter-of-factly.
“You can stay also.”
Natalya’s screams from the bed refocus the attention. Sweet, beautiful Natalya, Cilka thinks. Josie kneels down beside her, pushes the damp blond hair off her face.
“How bad is the bleeding?” Cilka asks.
“There was a lot of it when I went to the latrine on the worksite. Help me, please, Cilka, save my baby.”
She wants the baby, Cilka notes. There is something within Cilka that understands, if this happened to her, she might cling to that idea of life, too. But it won’t happen to Cilka. She doesn’t think her body is able to get pregnant.
Josie looks pleadingly at Cilka. “You know what to do?”
Cilka keeps her face blank, serious. “We will do all we can, Natalya. We need to take your clothes off so we can see how you are, all right?”
Fifteen women gather at the door, wrapped up, eager to get away, keen not to bear witness to tragedy. Cilka, Josie, Elena and Margarethe tend to Natalya as best they can.
A guard delivers two towels and two sheets. Greeted by the screams of Natalya, he throws them into the hut without a word.
While the rest of the hut is having dinner, Natalya gives birth to a baby boy. He makes no sound; he gives no movement. Taking one of the towels, Cilka wraps his little body in it and places him in Natalya’s arms. The four women stand over her as she cries herself to sleep, clutching her son to her chest for what will be their one and only night together. Josie stays by her bedside all night.
The next morning Antonina tells Elena and Margarethe to stay with Natalya. Cilka and Josie are to take the baby and report to the hospital for work. Josie looks pained.
“We’ll look after Natalya, Josie,” Elena says.
Taking the dead baby from his mother’s arms is one of the hardest things Cilka has done in her twenty years.
* * *
In the hospital, Josie is slow to catch on. Cilka finds herself spending more time teaching and doing the job herself at the expense of nursing. She perseveres, and Yelena looks the other way as slowly Josie learns the art of determining what information from a doctor needs to be in a patient file, what was only comment and not for recording. She can speak Russian well now but she struggles greatly with the Cyrillic, with the names and spellings of drugs. She is shy toward the medical and nursing staff, preferring to interrupt Cilka for help than ask for instructions to be repeated.
Cilka, however, excels at every task. She is now expert at drawing blood; her suturing, while not to the standard of Olga and the others in the embroidery class, is admired by her more experienced colleagues. She effortlessly combines caring for the emotional needs of her patients with their practical ones.
Josie is grateful and warmer to Cilka now, whispering to her in the hut as they lie side by side on the nights Boris and Vadim haven’t visited. She is anxious, and overwhelmed. “How will I learn? How will I keep up?”
Cilka sometimes does not have the energy to reassure her, though she wants to be good to her. She just knows it’s possible things will get even harder, that they have to take each moment as it comes.
One day, they return from work and Natalya is gone. Antonina Karpovna refuses to give them answers, which Cilka knows is not good. Usually, they know when a woman has gone to the hole, because it is a warning to the rest of them. Cilka cannot stop the images of women leaping onto electric fences in that other place, preferring a quick death to the hell on earth that was the camp, or the gas chamber they knew awaited them all. The blankness is coming over Cilka, cold and flat as snow on the ground, and she just wants to lie down. But she knows what Natalya meant to Josie. She sits by her and silently offers a hand for her to hold until she falls asleep.