Her water broke at eight o’clock on Friday evening at their home in Rishon le Zion. The man was so excited as he tried to pack her a bag for a three-day stay in hospital that things kept falling out of his hands. “But you’re only thirty-seven weeks gone,” he said, trying to cover his fears.

She asked him to make her a cup of coffee and calmly packed all the things she’d need for a three-day hospital stay: slippers, underpants, nursing bra, a dressing gown, and pajamas, since she hated those green polka-dot hospital-issue pajamas. She wouldn’t have minded wearing the blue pajamas that male patients received but couldn’t really imagine the hospital maternity ward providing her with men’s pajamas. She was happy as she packed her bag. Happy that she was going to give birth to her baby, and even happier for being spared an additional three and a half weeks of a heavy and cumbersome pregnancy.

She placed all her makeup in the bag, but not before quickly smudging on some black eyeliner to emphasize her green eyes, and coloring her lips in a shade her husband favored. It took him all of ten minutes to make her a cup of muddy black coffee, not the real Turkish coffee her father would have prepared for her, and when he brought it to her in a mug—who for hell’s sake drinks Turkish coffee out of a mug?—his hands were shaking. She felt her first contraction at that very moment. It wasn’t quite as weak she had been led to expect by those experienced in this kind of thing. On the contrary, the contraction was aggressive enough to send her hurling from her seat on the bed next to the packed bag. The coffee spilled, turning her white duvet into a muddy brown sludge. She stood beside the bed, grasping its sides, and the man took the soiled duvet and removed its white cover. A dark stain remained on the white duvet.

This is not a good omen, she thought to herself, and she was scared. It would have been a luckier sign if the cup had at least been broken. But it’s in the nature of a mug not to break easily, and only the muddy coffee spilled out and stained the white duvet her mother had bought her as part of her marriage dowry.

She wailed and laughed at the same time, thinking of the dowry the man had brought to their marriage: the apartment, the car, the furniture, a TV, a washing machine and dryer, dishwasher, kitchen utensils, an assortment of mixers and blenders, and a machine for making coffee; whereas the dowry her mother had given her consisted of the white duvet that she had paid for with the sweat of her brow, cleaning the homes of strangers on Mount Carmel.

They reached the hospital that evening at nine o’clock. In spite of the increasing contractions, she was happy to be giving birth on a Friday, like the Sabbath bride, divinely inspired by God. She was told to walk up and down, up and down, in order to intensify the contractions, but she had no cervical opening. With a two-finger opening you get sent back home.

Over and over she marched the length of the long corridor while her long-legged husband struggled to keep up with her. She was determined to give birth to her baby as dawn broke, and the swift walk was no more strenuous now than her daily routine with her cocker spaniel, Medi.

“Where’s Medi?” she asked the man; she remembered that she hadn’t said a proper good-bye to her beloved dog, in the heat of the spilled coffee and the premature contractions.

“At home,” the man replied.

“What do you mean, at home? I could be held here for twenty-four hours.” It didn’t occur to her that her labor could take even longer.

“So I’ll nip back home to take her down,” the man tried to reassure her.

“And leave me here alone?” She was alarmed. “Where’s my sister when I need her?” she murmured to herself.

“In New York. Would you like me to call your mother?” he asked her, hoping she’d refuse.

“No,” she replied at once. “I don’t need her here to spur me on in Romanian.”

“Voy a dar a la luz”—she said the sentence in Spanish that she had liked when she discovered she was pregnant. To give to the light. What a nice way to describe the act of giving birth. “You only need to add the letter y, and you’ll be giving your baby light as well as air.” She huffed and puffed and took longer steps, her energy at boiling point.

“Where are you running off to?” He chased after her on his long legs. In her design for their wedding invitation, her sister had drawn a pair of long legs and the train of a wedding gown. “Come on, sit down for a moment. You’ve been marching for three hours already. Drink your coffee,” he said, holding out a cup of coffee he’d taken from the vending machine.

“What’s the time?” she asked.

“Five past midnight,” he replied. “Shabbat.”

She gave in and sat down to drink their machine-made Shabbat coffee. She loved that cappuccino they sold in hospital vending machines. It’s the only thing you can put in your mouth in a hospital; everything else is utterly inedible.

“Do you know the Hebrew word for a machine that’s become obsolete?” her man asked her, trying to distract her from another contraction that was so powerful as to almost draw the very life out of her body.

“Contraction after contraction and no opening,” she said, disappointed. “The whore, she swallows,” she added quickly.

“Who swallows?” He was focusing on the contraction.

“The machine. You asked for a word to describe a machine that’s become obsolete. I hope I won’t become obsolete after giving birth to this baby.” She was suddenly gripped by an obscure fear, remembering the mug of black coffee spilling all over the white duvet her mother had given her as a marriage dowry.

A religious couple came and sat next to them, and the religious woman told them that this was her fourth baby but the first time she was giving birth on a Shabbat; she was happy as she said this.

At two in the morning they took her into the delivery room. The religious woman had been taken in half an hour before. She would no doubt give birth first, as she had plenty of experience and knew how to do it.

In the delivery room they could see the religious woman’s husband in the cubicle next to theirs. She could hear the woman screaming at him, “What have you done to me, you bastard?” and was surprised to hear such language from an observant Jew. Where the hell did she learn to use such words? Her husband was embarrassed for her and told the man who was about to become a first-time father that he was used to his wife pouring out her anger on him with every contraction. She uses such profanities only when she’s giving birth to a baby, he said, defending his wife.

In sorrow you shall bring forth children; and yet your fury shall be on your husband, she thought to herself as she competed with the other woman over which of them could shout the louder.

“I should be pregnant all my life, if that’s the only chance I get to curse the whole world and its wife,” she said to the two men standing nearby. “But on second thought, with pains such these I don’t wish myself more than one more birth. It’s far too painful,” she said, trying to amuse herself and her baby’s father.

He held her hand, blew on her tormented face, wiped the sweat from her brow, and caressed her.

“Would you like me to massage your feet?” he asked, and she said no, her feet didn’t hurt.

A good man, she thought to herself. I’d marry him, if we weren’t already married.

Noa was born at five in the morning. Five minutes later, the religious woman also gave birth to a baby girl. It was as if the two women were in competition, and her Noa had beaten the religious woman’s baby, to be born on the holy Sabbath.

“It’s a girl,” her man said to her, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Why are you crying?” she asked him. “Are you disappointed?”

“If you’d seen the scissors that doctor used to cut you up like a chicken, you’d be crying, too,” he replied.

“Ay, ay, what does the pain matter now? The baby’s out, isn’t she?” She looked at the man suspiciously; maybe she wasn’t out?

“It’s the placenta. Push down hard,” the doctor ordered, his face in front of her wide-open legs.

She pushed hard and screamed like a banshee.

“The placenta’s out. I’m cutting. Don’t move,” said the doctor. “I’m starting to sew you up.”

“Will it hurt?” she asked, exhausted.

“Even if it does, you won’t feel a thing,” the doctor said as he was stitching her up.

“My mother would never do any sewing on the Sabbath,” she whispered to her man, who was holding her hand, burrowing into her, at one with her agony.

“He’s stitching you up exactly as you do with your rice-stuffed chicken dish,” he said.

“With pine nuts and raisins,” she added.

“Best in the world, the way you do your stuffed chicken.” He had learned her idiosyncratic, ungrammatical way of speaking, and sometimes spoke Hebrew the way she did.

“You like my stuffed chicken,” she stated.

“It’s you I love,” he said and gave her a long kiss on her lips.

When he let go of her lips she told him that stuffed chicken would be the first thing she would teach Noa to cook when she took her first steps in life. “I have a Romanian recipe that is passed down from one generation to another,” she explained, and he placed his long fingers on her mouth. “Don’t talk now; just rest,” he said to the woman who had just given birth to his baby daughter.

“Is he still sewing me up?” she asked, feeling nothing except his fingers on her lips.

“I’m almost done,” said the doctor, “you can close your eyes and fall asleep.”

“How does she look, my baby girl?” she remembered to ask her husband, with her eyes closed.

“Perfect. Beautiful, just like you,” he replied.

She drifted into blissful sleep.