For a long time I heard no more about them. I’d left Paris in August for a small town in the Midi where I worked as a substitute doctor. I returned late, in November, with tens of thousands of francs and the wife of the doctor I’d substituted for, a pathetic, ugly woman. (But that’s another story…) I had of course split up with Mado by that stage; the relationship had in any case dragged on too long. So I was no longer in contact with anyone who could give me news about Mr. and Mrs. Irimia.
But I saw them one Sunday in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the animals. They were holding hands, the way the soldiers and housemaids do in the Cişmigiu Gardens in Bucharest, a sad reminder for me in that Parisian park of our down-at-heel neighborhoods back home. They stopped in the middle of a group of children in front of the elephant pen. From his overcoat pocket, Irimia took out a piece of bread wrapped in paper. He unwrapped it and shared it with the giant beasts.
He cooed to them in Romanian:
—Come on, that’s a nice fellow!
Each time an elephant’s trunk passed between the bars and swayed in the air, then came down toward Irimia, Émilie jumped with fright and tried to pull him away, but he stood there calmly. He was having a good time with the animals and they seemed to accept him. I held back from them, not wishing to disturb this peaceful scene. But I saw them again three months later, in tragic circumstances. I’m used to death and have had occasion to close the eyes of the dead in those white-painted hospital wards where I spent my youth, while thinking of other things besides the bodies decomposing there, in front of me. What do you expect? It’s professional detachment, and leaves no room for the fear of the end. But Émilie’s death shook me badly. It was barbaric.
One day in March, Irimia came looking for me at the hotel, asking me to find a bed in my ward for Émilie, who was pregnant and would soon give birth.
—All right, Irimia. But is that what you really need now? Kids? Why didn’t you take care of it when there was time?
Irimia seemed not to understand. He looked at me, confused, and when he understood that I was talking about an abortion made the sign of the cross automatically. I wasn’t involved with obstetrics at Trousseau, but I told Irimia that I’d make arrangements through the management and try to get the necessary bed. And indeed, it was sorted out within two days. The intern in maternity was a friend of mine and promised to take good care of Émilie. As for myself, when I wasn’t on duty and had a break from my own patients I went across to ward 18, to lend a hand.
I was certain from the moment I brought Émilie in that she would not leave there alive. I had never seen such a pregnancy. It wasn’t abnormal, clinically speaking; her vital signs were fine and she was a good patient. But her entire body was misshapen. An enormous belly, her limbs heavy and projecting stiffly from her body. Her breathing was labored and sometimes her eyes rolled upward in their sockets, like a goose that’s been force-fed. That lumpy body that creaked like an unoiled pulley. That asymmetrical body, without the reflexes required to carry within it another body, a child! It was an absurdity, a physical impossibility. Émilie—for whom picking up a glass of water and setting it down in a different place was a balancing act—now had to give birth to a child! Her rigid body would have had to yield to the infant’s struggling within, to surrender to its blind wormlike writhing.
It was butchery. She lay like an overturned barrel. If she could have twisted about she might have suffered less, and might have made it, possibly. But no, she lay rigid in the bed and looked up at us from there with anxious, beseeching eyes, like a drowning dog. From time to time she screamed and her howls could be heard from afar, through the main wards, just as the lowing of slaughtered cattle must be heard in abattoirs. We considered getting the forceps ready but the head doctor, whom I’d brought to the patient’s bedside, would not permit it. He said she was finished in any case. It went on for three days and nights. Irimia, whom I wanted to send away, remained there by his wife’s bed throughout and stubbornly resisted my entreaties. I’d never seen such determination. He sat still, saying nothing, not even sighing, looking sometimes at me and sometimes at Émilie and waiting.
On the third night, at three a.m., she gave birth to a baby girl. Irimia took her from my hands. He brought her close to a light, gazed at her, then gave her to one of the nurses and went away to get some sleep. When I returned next day to the hospital, he was at Émilie’s bedside. She was in agony. She’d been hemorrhaging badly from early morning and septicemia had set in. She was snoring. Seeing me, Irimia put his finger to his lips to tell me to be quiet.
—She’s on the mend now, he said. She’s made it through.
I didn’t have the courage to reply. Misinterpreting the grave look on my face, he continued:
—That thing she’s doing with her mouth? It’s nothing: it’s just a tic. Then, unable to contain his pride at being a father: “A little girl? What do you say to that? Have you seen what a beauty she is? Come see her.” And he dragged me after him, into a nearby ward.
Émilie died toward evening on the following day. I don’t know who closed her eyes. We buried her one bright, sunny morning at the end of March. It was warm and I went out without my overcoat, smiling in that white spring light. On the way there, flower girls were setting out little bouquets of lilies of the valley for a franc each and I bought them all up in memory of Émilie. Irimia wore his formal black coat, the same one he’d worn nine months earlier at his wedding. Mado was in a corner of the cemetery, as I’d never seen her before, looking distraught and crying like a child, convulsively, and when she spotted me from afar she smiled at me through her tears. She was a nice, sentimental sort of girl.