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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In the days leading up to Christmas, Dómhildur delivers her 1,922nd baby. Beginnings and endings are her family trade; she comes from a long line of midwives on her mother's side and a long line of undertakers on her father's. She even lives in the apartment that she inherited from her grandaunt, a midwife with a unique reputation for her unconventional methods. As a terrible storm races towards Reykjavik, Dómhildur discovers decades worth of letters and manuscripts hidden amongst her grandaunt's clutter. Fielding calls from her anxious meteorologist sister and visits from her curious new neighbour, Dómhildur escapes into her grandaunt's archive and discovers strange and beautiful reflections on birth, death and human nature. For even in the depths of an Icelandic winter, new life will find a way.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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To those who have gone before.
To those who are here now.
To those who have yet to come.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL WORDS
In 2013, Icelanders voted for the most beautiful word in their language. They chose a nine-lettered one, the job title of a healthcare worker, the Icelandic term for midwife: ljósmóðir. In its reasoning, the jury stated that the word is a composite of the two most beautiful words: móðir (mother) and ljós (light). In Icelandic midwives are also called yfirsetukona, náverukona, jóðmóðir, léttakona, nærkona and ljósa. In Danish a midwife is a jordemor, in Norwegian jordmor, Swedish barnmorska, Finnish kätilö, German Hebamme, Dutch verloskundige, Polish położna, French sage-femme, Italian ostetrica, Spanish comadrona, Portuguese parteira, Estonian ämmaemand, Latvian vecmāte, Lithuanian akušerė, Russian акушерка, Yiddish אַקושערקע, Irish cnáimhseach, Welsh bydwraig, Arabic قابلة, Hebrew מיילדת, Catalan llevadora, Hungarian szülésznő, Albanian mami, Basque emagina, Croatian primalja, Czech porodní asistentka, Chinese 助产士, Romanian moaşă and Greek μαία. The meanings and origins of these words are not always clear, but in most cases they refer to a woman who helps another woman to deliver a baby into the world. The etymology in numerous languages indicates that it refers to an older woman who could be the child’s maternal grandmother.
CONTENTS
I
Mother of Light
“I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest.”
blaise pascal
I receive the baby when it is born, raise it up from the ground and present it to the world
In order to be able to die, a human first has to be born.
It is almost noon when the Arctic night finally begins to dissolve and the ball of fire rises over the horizon, or just about, a pink streak piercing through a slit in the curtains of the delivery room, barely wider than a pocket comb, landing on the suffering woman on the bed. She raises one arm, opens her palm and grabs the light, then lets her arm sink again. She has half a kiwi, laden with seeds, tattooed onto her taut belly, as if the fruit had been sliced in two with a sharp knife, but cracks have appeared in the ink and the inscription under the image has also started to stretch: Yours eternally. When the baby is born, the hairy fruit will shrivel up.
I slip on a mask and put on my protective gown.
The moment has arrived.
A human’s most difficult experience.
To be born.
The crown emerges and shortly after I’m holding a small, slithery body covered in blood.
It’s a boy.
He doesn’t know who he is, or who delivered him into this world, or what this world is.
The father puts down his phone to cut the umbilical cord; with trembling hands he severs the thread between mother and child.
The mother turns her head to the side and watches.
Is he drawing a breath?
The baby draws a breath.
And I think: From now on he will draw a breath twenty-three thousand times a day.
I place the bundle of bawling flesh on the scales. The baby waves its arms about, there are no walls any more, no borders, nothing that delimits the world—it has become an unknown vastness, infinite space, unexplored land mass—it plummets through it in free fall, then calms down, its face is wrinkled, transfigured by anxieties.
The thermometer on the window ledge outside reads minus four degrees and the most vulnerable animal on earth lies in the balance, naked and helpless; it has no feathers or fur to cover itself, no scales, no body hair, only soft down on the crown of its head where the blue fluorescent light shines through.
The baby opens its eyes for the first time.
And sees the light.
It doesn’t know it was being born.
I say, Welcome, mister.
I dry his wet head and wrap him in a towel, then I place him in the arms of his father, who wears a T-shirt inscribed World’s Best Dad.
He’s in turmoil and crying. It’s done. The mother is exhausted and cries as well.
The man bends down with the newborn and places it carefully in the bed beside the woman. The baby turns its head towards the mother and looks at her, his eyes are still full of darkness from the depths of the earth.
He doesn’t know yet that she is his mother.
The mother looks at the child and strokes its cheek with her finger. It opens its mouth. It doesn’t know why it is here any more than anywhere else.
“He’s got red hair like Mom,” I hear the woman say.
It’s their third son.
“They were all born in December,” says the father.
I receive the baby when it is born, raise it up from the ground and present it to the world. I’m the mother of light. I’m the most beautiful word in our language—ljósmóðir.
Three minutes
When I’ve sewn two stitches I leave the parents alone with the baby for a while. If it isn’t too windy to open the door at the end of the corridor, sometimes, between births, I step out onto the small balcony that overlooks the Miklubraut road. There are nine delivery rooms on the ward and I normally deliver one baby a day, although it can sometimes be as many as three in the peak season. They are sometimes born in the cafeteria, in the waiting room, even in the elevator up to the maternity ward. I once ran out to the parking lot and delivered the child of a terrified young couple on the passenger seat of an old Volvo. When I’ve spent a long day handling blood and flesh, I’m grateful for the celestial vault when I step onto the balcony.
I take a deep breath and fill my lungs with cold air. “She’s getting some fresh air,” my colleagues tell each other.
Over the past weeks the weather has fluctuated a great deal.
At the beginning of the month, temperatures were in the double digits, nature had started to reawaken, buds were appearing in the trees. On the fourth of December, nineteen degrees were measured at the northernmost meteorological station in the country, then it rapidly cooled; the temperature dropped by twenty degrees in a single day, and it started to snow heavily. Ploughs struggled with the snowdrifts that have piled up; the sky was heavy with snow and tree branches buckled under its weight. Cars vanished under a thick coat of whiteness and one had to wade, knee-deep, through it to get to the bins. Then it started to rain, causing immense thaws. Dams of slush formed in the rivers, which changed course and gushed over roads and meadows, leaving mud and rocks in their wake. Just a few days ago, there had been a television report about twenty horses in the south that had been trapped in the floods. The accompanying footage revealed patches of farmland like islands in the middle of the water and bedraggled horses, which one farmer said he had reached across the flooded pasture by boat. It remained to be seen what would be in the water when the flooding subsided, whether more animals would be found there.
“Nothing is the way it ought to be any more,” said the farmer to the reporter in the interview.
My sister, the meteorologist, says the same.
“One hopes everything will soon get back to normal again,” said the farmer.
In Ljósvallagata, the drains couldn’t cope with the water from the rainstorms and several storage rooms in the basement were inundated. When I examined the damage in my cellar, I found an artificial Christmas tree and a box full of decorations from my maternal grandaunt’s belongings, which I carried back up to the third floor. Following the floods, there was a severe frost and treacherously slippy black ice, and this week two women gave birth, their arms in plaster casts after stumbling. The only thing that has been constant all month is the wind. And the darkness. When I go to work it’s dark and when I get home from work it’s dark.
When I return inside, the new father is standing by the coffee machine in the corridor. He signals that he wants to talk to me. They’re both electrical engineers, this couple. As a colleague of mine has pointed out, there is a growing tendency now for couples to be members of the same profession: two vets, two sports newscasters, two priests, two police officers, two coaches, two poets. While the engineer chooses his coffee mix, he explains that the little one was actually scheduled to be born on the twelfth of the twelfth, on his paternal grandfather’s birthday, but he delayed his arrival by over a week.
He sips at the coffee and stares down at the lino, and I sense there is something weighing upon him. When he is finished with the cup he turns to the time of birth and asks exactly how it is calculated.
“It’s based on when the baby comes out,” I say.
“Not when the umbilical cord is cut? Or when the baby cries?”
“No,” I say and think to myself not every baby cries. Or draws a breath.
“No, the thing is I was just wondering whether it would be possible to write that he was born twelve minutes after twelve on the birth certificate instead of nine minutes after twelve. It’s a difference of three minutes.”
I study him.
They had arrived at the maternity ward last night and he hasn’t slept much.
“It would compensate for the twelfth of the twelfth,” he adds, crushing the paper cup.
I give this some thought.
The man is suggesting the child was unborn for the first three minutes of its life.
“I would really appreciate it,” he ends up saying.
“I might have looked at the clock wrong,” I say.
He throws the cup into the bin and together we walk back towards the room where the mother and son are waiting.
He halts in front of the door.
“I know Gerður wanted a daughter, even though she never let on. Women want daughters.” He hesitates and then says that they had read an article about how it was possible to control the sex of the child but it was too late by then.
“It went the way it went,” he says, holding out his hand and thanking me for the help. “When you think about it,” the statistics buff adds, “twenty million people share the same birthday as my son.”
Few things under the sun can surprise a woman with my work experience.
Except perhaps the being himself.
It is not uncommon for the profession of midwife to run in families, from woman to woman, and I myself descend from four generations of midwives. My great-grandmother was a midwife in the north of the country in the first half of the twentieth century and my maternal grandaunt worked in the maternity ward for almost half a century. Then I have a maternal aunt who is a midwife in a small village in Jutland. According to sources, a forefather of ours, Gísli Raymond Guðrúnarson, also worked as a male midwife and delivered two hundred children. It is said that Gísli, known as Nonni, not only had good hands, but was also a highly skilled blacksmith and made his own forceps and various other useful tools.
My grandaunt’s spirit still hovered in the air when I started working at the maternity ward sixteen years ago. The oldest midwives remembered her well, although the number of those who worked with her is dwindling. There are still stories about her, even among those who never met her. She was known for dropping various remarks such as Any idiot can have a baby. More as if she were talking to herself, it was said. One of her colleagues claimed she hadn’t used such harsh words, quoting her instead as having said it’s not everyone who can be a parent. Or even that she’d said it’s not everyone who has the mettle to become a parent. Another person alleged that she’d worded it differently and said that a difficult individual doesn’t stop being a difficult individual just because they’ve had a baby. Another said that she hadn’t spoken about a difficult individual but a flawed one and that she regarded self-pity as the worst fault of all. I’m told she looked for signs of it in the future parents and said that self-pity can be visible or hidden, but it’s deeply rooted in a person’s nature.
It was also said that she predicted the future of relationships, sat down with half a coffee cup in the air and a sugar cube clenched between her teeth, and swirled the hand that held the cup so that ripples formed in the liquid and said:
“They’ll have another child and then divorce.”
Sometimes the message was more cryptic such as It’s a weird web what they call a family. Her fellow midwives claimed that she had little faith in relationships and none at all in marriage. One of them went even further and said that she had no faith in man. “Those were her exact words,” the colleague claimed, “I don’t think she had much faith in man except when he was fifty centimetres long, helpless and speechless.”
If a problem arose it was said that my grandaunt’s refrain was:
Few things under the sun can surprise a woman with my work experience. Except perhaps the being himself.
Those were the words she used.
It was no secret that she had a hard time accepting the radical changes in the work of midwives, as she put it, when she was middle-aged and fathers started to attend the births of their children. It must be considered quite remarkable given that it seemed natural and normal to her that men had worked as midwives in the past.
Decades of work experience tell me otherwise was her way of protesting against the organizational changes in the maternity ward. One of her colleagues told me that she had said it was an extra burden to handle the men in the room. In the period in which my grandaunt worked on the ward, women’s partners would only be men and the men of her generation often came straight from their offices in their suits and ties, not knowing where to hang up their coats or put down their hats, instead handing them to the midwife. Others came directly from their workshops with their hands still smeared in oil. There were complaints that she left the fathers to their own devices and preferred to concentrate on the future mothers. It was also said that a certain obstetrician had been protective of her. When I asked former colleagues of hers why my grandaunt had needed protection, I got no clear answers. I later heard rumours that she’d had an affair with this same obstetrician for decades, but I’ve never been able to get this confirmed.
In my experience partners often find it difficult to witness the suffering of childbirth and feel useless watching.
They stroke the woman’s arm and occasionally say:
“You’re doing great.”
The woman in labour says the same to her partner:
“You’re doing great.”
