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Anastasia was born in Budapest on the second of February 1949. She died on the eighteenth of February 1949.
She was just sixteen days old. Poor thing, she never stood a chance. Born eleven weeks early, she never left the hospital. Josef never had chance to hold her. Nor did I, not properly, never had the chance to feed her. Everything inside her tiny little body was underdeveloped – her kidneys, the lungs, the liver, her heart. Nothing worked as it should; the odds were against her from the first. I spent sixteen days and nights just staring at her, secretly praying that God would help her build up the strength to live, to survive. I cursed my womb for not providing for her.
Sick day and night for the first three months of the pregnancy, I became thin and lethargic, barely able to move, unable to nourish myself, least of all the baby inside me. After the period of sickness, came the pain, the muscular pain which seemed to permeate into the bone. A sudden movement and it would traverse through me. For weeks on end, I was unable to move. Josef ate at work, bringing me home small scraps of dinner, which I would heat up and stare at, unable to face swallowing such tasteless and uninspired offerings. It was a life of misery, compounded by the thought that the baby was suffering as much as myself. The birth itself, eleven weeks too early, was relatively easy; Anastasia slipped quietly into the world without a murmur. How I wished to hear her cry, to see evidence of lungs full of air. It was never to be; she fell silently into a coma and never woke up. She was conscious long enough to see me and her father briefly before her eyelids closed, never to open again.
I slept at the hospital. The hospital staff provided me with blankets which I would spread out on the chair to make myself as comfortable as possible, wrapping myself against the cold draft. I didn’t dare grumble, the hospital was a hospital only in name. It lacked virtually all essential supplies, and medicines were precious, used only in cases where the patient was important enough or ill enough to warrant it, but not sick enough to make recovery unlikely. My body seemed thankful to be rid of the torment that it had to endure all those months. I spent hours watching her, burdened by guilt, apologising for the inadequacies of my womb. I would make up little tunes, slow tunes in time to her laboured breath as I watched her delicate chest move up and down. My mind would repeat again and again the words plastered up on the wall of the delivery unit – To give birth is a girl’s glory and a wife’s duty. How those words mocked me.
One night I dreamt of horses, grey horses galloping riderless through dark forests, zigzagging past trees, jumping over fallen branches and exposed roots, their manes and tails blowing dramatically in the wind. When I awoke, Anastasia had died. It was the final betrayal. Just as my body had failed her during gestation, my consciousness had deserted her at the point of death. I never saw her slip away, never held her match-like fingers to comfort her as she drifted from this miserable world into the next. I’d barely had the chance to say hello and now I’d missed the opportunity to say my farewell. I prayed that God would accept her and give her the love and security I’d failed to provide. Once, believing myself to be a good communist, I had tried to deny my God, pretended that I didn’t need religion. Sometimes I believed I had renounced it for the illusion that the Party said it was. But if I didn’t need it, Anastasia certainly did. I couldn’t bear the thought of her going from one darkness to another in such a short space of time. I needed her to have an afterlife to make up for the miserable sixteen days spent in a cold bleak hospital in Budapest. I’d expected to cry and yes, I mourned for her, but the tears did not come. Whatever grief I had was tempered by the relief that her troubles were over.
The staff removed her from the cot where she had spent her short existence, and carefully placed her in a small wooden box, lined with a faded shawl. They were about to take her away into the depths of the hospital but I insisted on taking her home with me. I wanted to save her from the indignity of the hospital’s incinerator. Josef hired a car from work and came to pick me up and drove me home, disgusted that I should want to bring Anastasia back. I remembered how delighted he was when I first became pregnant, thankful that at last I was doing my patriotic duty. But he soon lost interest when it became obvious that things were not as they should have been. He spent longer at work, unable and unwilling to face his miserable wife at home. After the birth, he came to see me three, maybe four times and would pace up and down asking if I was ever likely to give birth to a normal child, a future communist. I was a disappointment to him, and I don’t think he ever looked at Anastasia; she was too much an embarrassment, lying there oblivious to the distress she caused him. I was always relieved when he left and found myself apologising to her for his abruptness. My only other visitor was Agnes – she came every other day, bearing fruit and a sympathetic word.
As Josef drove me home, I sat silently in the back with the wooden box on my lap. I stared out of the window, watching the huddled figures going about their business, the long pointless queues, the shop fronts with nothing to sell, the blocks of flats, bleak and grey. Everything seemed so damn grey. And so I brought my baby home, back to our tiny apartment. It wasn’t, of course, quite how I imagined it to be.
*
‘A Christian burial, eh? That’s a rarity these days,’ said Father Aczel, looking at me through his spectacles perched precariously at the end of his nose. ‘You’re very lucky I haven’t renounced the cloth, I’m a dying breed you know. Literally.’ I felt sorry for him – the Party ridiculed the church, depicting the clergy as sexual perverts or money-grabbing thieves.
I had rung Father Aczel the day after coming home from the hospital. I waited until Josef had gone to work before phoning him. Before leaving, Josef declared he wanted to see that “grisly box” gone by the time he got home from work. I had no intention of doing otherwise. I opened the lid and peered at her and stroked the strands of bronze-coloured hair – she would have been a redhead, like me. It was the first time since her birth that I’d looked at her without cursing God and begging His intervention at the same time. Now, I just cursed Him. But if I had been unable to provide her with life, at least I could oblige her with a proper send-off.
And so I rang Father Aczel and told him about Anastasia and my desire to grant her a proper Christian burial. I feared it was short notice but, as he said, he was in little demand and was glad to accommodate me. I then rang Agnes and asked whether she would accompany me. Together, in her husband’s car, we drove the five or so kilometres towards the east of Pest and a small church beyond the City Park. The three of us stood beside the church alter, the small box resting in a nearby pew. At the back of the church kneeled an elderly woman dressed in black crossing herself ceaselessly, otherwise the church remained deserted. ‘You sure it won’t compromise you, Father?’
‘Just being here is compromising enough, Eva. There’s fewer of us by the day.’
‘But you’re still here, Father,’ said Agnes. ‘Your church is still standing.’
‘Yes, and for every day it survives, I thank the Lord, but sometimes I wonder how long I can go on. It’s only a matter of time until they come for me. Shall we go? I’ve arranged for a grave to be dug and I’ve got a small wooden cross. Well, Eva, what did you say the infant’s name was?’
As Father Aczel wrote out Anastasia’s name on the cross, I smiled at Agnes – she’d tied her hair back into a bun, accentuating the roundness of her face. I wanted to thank her for coming but I knew I couldn’t express how grateful I was that she was there. How pathetically grateful.
Outside, the dark clouds swept across the sky and the wind whistled in the trees. We stood beside the grave that had been dug next to the churchyard wall, the spade still standing in the mound of fresh earth. Father Aczel clutched his bible, his robes blowing in the breeze, his honeyed voice washing over me. ‘We pray, o Lord, that Anastasia may be taken into the Kingdom of His Almighty God and that there she may find peace in the company of angels. We pray that God in His mercy may take her into His realm and deliver her the peace she was so cruelly denied in this mortal world...’
As Father Aczel lowered Anastasia into the ground, Agnes took my hand and squeezed it. And finally, I was able to cry for my precious little daughter, the daughter who had only caught sight of her mother for a few brief moments before resigning herself to the darkness; whose passing existence I shall always remember. I cried for her blighted life, her sixteen days on this earth, her frailty, her helplessness. She never heard me call her name, never tasted her mother’s milk, was never held by her father. I cried for myself, as a mother denied the opportunity of seeing her daughter as a proper being, denied the sound of hearing her baby cry, denied even the tactile presence of her lips against my breast. My baby, my poor little baby. May we meet again, my darling.