Sophie started reading to her baby in the fifth month of her pregnancy, so by the time she was born, my adorable baby niece was wonderfully well-read. She was familiar with Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats –Sophie had a thing about anything Irish –and Anna Karenina, of course, which although it wasn’t Irish was Sophie’s all-time favourite book.
The Baby (because that was what we called the foetus) was very appreciative. She kicked and danced about, and Sophie’s otherwise perfect oval of a belly was always being pushed out of shape by a foot, an elbow, or possibly a head or a backside, as the baby rearranged her position. (We were always sure she would be a girl. We were also certain that she would have a lively and original character.)
Sophie was often too weary to read. She’d moan, ‘Read to us, Kate.’ I could never get my head around James Joyce, so I read to Sophie and her unborn baby the poems of Yeats. One in particular, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, I read time and again. I especially love the last verse for its rhythm, and its longing.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Sophie’s baby was born in early spring, not long before I finished school. A message was brought to the classroom when Sophie went into labour, and I tore off to the hospital on my bicycle straight away. I was one of two official birth helpers, so they allowed me into the labour room, but when I got there all I could do was stand and gawp.
Lil was the other helper. She was feeding Sophie bits of ice, and when the pain got really bad, she cried to the nurses, ‘Oh Gawd, can’t you give the poor child something for this?’
‘No!’ cried Sophie. ‘No drugs!’
But she was in such pain. I couldn’t bear to see her like that; I thought she might split open, like an egg. Earlier on she had been reading The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde between contractions to cheer herself up, and I took hold of the book and held onto it, hard. Later, I noticed that my fingernails had dug little half-moon impressions into the cover.
The Baby certainly took her time to be born. I walked Sophie up and down the hospital corridors for what seemed like hours, stopping whenever she felt a contraction coming on. When she implored me to rub her lower back, I rubbed it, until suddenly that wasn’t what she wanted at all, and she snapped at me to stop. Finally, well into the early hours of next morning, the Baby decided it was her time to come into the world, though she wasn’t so much born as shot out, red and angry, her limbs flailing with unexpected, terrifying freedom.
It must have been awful for her, to come so quickly from a confined, dark place to brilliant light and endless space. She wailed fit to wake the dead, until she was swaddled tightly by the comforting restraint of cloth. She had been covered with a gleaming, bloody, cheesy substance, which the nurse partially wiped away before wrapping her. Then she was placed at Sophie’s breast. Lil stroked the top of the baby’s head. ‘What a perfect little darlin’,’ she said.
The baby looked like one of those Russian dolls, a bundle of cloth with a rather stoic little face emerging from it, dominated by bright, dark, knowing eyes. I imagined her clicking open to reveal, magically, a set of identical dolls in descending order of size. She was the beginning of us, our first descendant, the only other person we knew on this earth to be properly related to us. I thought that her life should be recorded in words and pictures and perhaps even song.
Sophie named her Anastasia.
It was almost dawn by the time the initial excitement died down. Lil had kissed everyone she could get her hands on, reaching up to grasp the sides of their faces with her old hands and puckering up her creased red mouth far too early for the actual kiss. The doctor looked very surprised to be rewarded by a kiss from Lil. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed and pleased by becoming an aunt, I’d have died of embarrassment.
When there seemed to be nothing else to do, the nurses said that we should allow Sophie to rest. ‘Kate, bring me back something new to read!’ Sophie cried as I made a lingering exit from the room, reluctant to drag myself away from the baby. ‘Bring me something interesting!’
An inkling of light had appeared in the sky. I waited with Lil on the footpath for the taxi. ‘Anastasia!’ said Lil in a tone of disbelief. ‘It’s a big name for a baby.’
I stood awkwardly, straddling my bicycle. I can’t think of words to express what I was feeling –fear and wonder and awe and exhilaration might be a start. I wanted to get away from Lil to savour my feelings privately. ‘I’m going to tell Marjorie,’ I said, and pedalled away down the silent laneways that surrounded the hospital, my headlight making a wavering beam in the darkness. When I arrived at Marjorie’s place I had to sit beneath a tree for a few moments to gather myself together, though where it was all the parts of me had gone, I couldn’t say. I sat there in the near dark, and dew came down on me, and finally, when I felt I could be with people again, I went to Marjorie’s window, and threw pebbles at the glass to wake her (I’ve read of this in books and had always wanted to do it).
Marjorie had been my best friend for a long time; I knew that she would wake at once. She is one of those rare people who open their eyes and jump out of bed looking as fresh as . . . a daisy. I’ve seen her do this when I stay overnight, and it’s a bit scary. I don’t know if she ever needs sleep, really, or if she goes into a kind of suspended animation. And her pyjamas are never creased or wrinkled or even worn-looking.
She let me in the back door. Her excitement (‘A girl!’ she kept saying, as if she couldn’t believe it, ‘A girl!’, though I’d been telling her for months that was what the baby would be) . . . her excitement finally allowed the whole amazing thing to sink into me, and we jumped up and down on the spot for a little while, though this was something neither of us would normally do.
We made hot chocolate. Marjorie was in her mauve chenille dressing-gown, and her knobbly sleeve kept brushing against my arm as she moved about the kitchen. Despite the jumping up and down I was still in a daze, and Marjorie took hold of me and sat me down in a chair. Marjorie’s parents came out in their dressing-gowns. ‘It’s a girl,’ I told them. ‘We’re calling her Anastasia.’
‘Ah, the legendary survivor of the Romanovs,’ said Marjorie’s father, raising both eyebrows and stirring his chocolate with a slow, even movement. He was a doctor, a general surgeon, tall and thin, with humorous, watchful eyes and hairy wrists.
I sat at the table and savoured the warm, full feeling that welled up inside me. It was a feeling that was absolutely new to me, and I sat and talked to Marjorie and her family and basked in it until Marjorie’s mother stood up to make toast.
It was then I remembered that Lil would be wanting help with the breakfasts at Samarkand, so I tore myself away and pedalled like a mad thing through the streets that were already crawling with leisurely cars.
Samarkand was still shrouded in mist, and it rose up like an apparition, enormous, ramshackle and old. It sat on a bend in the river, like a monument to earlier times, and had a view up an uninhabited stretch of water fringed by trees. Standing on top of high timber stumps (the underneath was a barren area regularly swept through by floods), it was two-storeyed, weatherboard, with deep verandahs, and a staircase zig-zagging up the front, punctuated by landings. The galvanised iron roof was almost entirely red with rust.
I dumped my bike at the bottom of the steps and bounded up them, two at a time. SAMARKAND, said a nameplate fixed to the wall near the front door, in mirrored letters on oiled wood. If I peered into the worn, silvered surface, I could make out the tops of trees, and the sky, and bits of my own face –an eye, a scrap of red hair, a freckled forehead.
I used to pause and gaze from the verandah, across the square grassed area directly in front, not quite a park, with a line of palm trees down one side. In front of that was a road, then the river. My secret childhood cubby was down there –an enormous fig tree which looked almost human, but which I also imagined was a rambling, spacious house, full of long corridors and secluded rooms.
But I didn’t have the luxury of daydreaming now, with breakfasts to be served. Lil was in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl with one hand and throwing the shells onto a plate, where they landed with a brittle sound. She had bandy legs and hunched shoulders; she seemed to be shrinking inside her skin each day. The sun streamed in through the windows onto the worn green walls. The coloured panels at the top of each window –gold, purple, green –threw jewelled squares of light into the room. It was an ugly room, but this morning it looked beautiful.
I made piles of toast (I love toast, and think one should eat as much of it as possible), took it out to the dining room and went back to fetch the scrambled eggs. At the largest table that morning was a young man with a mournful face and long matted hair and bare feet, and a woman who kept crumbling her toast into bits and pushed away her plate of eggs without appetite. They were not together, but it appeared to me that they matched. At a small table next to them, a shabby businessman bent anxiously over a sheaf of papers, sipping coffee.
‘I’m sorry, we’re a bit at sixes and sevens this morning,’ said Lil, bustling into the room, ‘but Sophie had her baby in the early hours. Imagine! A girl! Anastasia, her name is. She’s beautiful –I’m over the moon, I can tell you!’ She beamed at all the guests in turn and twirled around and danced back into the kitchen.
The guests had no idea who Sophie was, but Lil’s joy infected them, and they smiled shyly at each other with wary eyes. Their bodies softened and relaxed; they swayed gently like tentacled creatures in a rockpool stirred by a passing current. The thin woman pulled her plate towards her and began to eat, after all. The mournful young man leaned across and asked the businessman whether he minded if he looked at his newspaper.
I could see through to the kitchen where Lil was dancing to music from the radio. She moved easily and gracefully, her arms above her head and her feet making intricate patterns on the floor like a Greek dancer. Lil often danced alone this way. She sashayed into the dining room and threw her tea-towel and apron onto the back of a chair. ‘I’m done in,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the dishes in the sink for once; I’m going to get some sleep.’
I hoed into my breakfast, my head full of the baby. This girl, whom Sophie had named Anastasia. Neither of these words seemed to do her justice. I remembered her private little face as she lay sleeping against Sophie’s breast. She seemed to me to be not so much a child as a flower bud, or a newly-emerged butterfly, damp, enfolded, and full of promise.