Flotsam (12 page)

SUNDAY EVENING
Kern returned to the hotel. In his room he found Marill in a state of great excitement. “Someone at last!” he shouted. “Damn this roost! Not a living soul in it, today of all days! Everyone gone out! Everyone away! Even the damned proprietor!”

“What’s the matter?” Kern asked.

“Do you know where to find a midwife? Or any kind of woman’s doctor?”

“No.”

“No, of course you don’t!” Marill stared at him. “You’re a sensible fellow. Come along with me. Someone has to stay with the woman. Then I can go out and look for a midwife. Can you do that?”

“Do what?”

“See that she doesn’t thrash around. Reason with her. Do anything.”

He dragged Kern, who had no idea what was happening, along the hall to the floor below and opened the door of a
small room in which there was not much but a bed. On the bed a woman lay groaning.

“The seventh month. Miscarriage or something of the sort. Calm her if you can. I’ll get a doctor.”

He was out of the room before Kern could reply.

The woman on the bed groaned. Kern approached on tiptoe.

“Can I get you anything?” he whispered.

The woman continued to groan. Her faded, blond hair was soaked with sweat and dark patches of freckles stood out on her gray face. Her eyes were rolled up under half-closed lids; only the whites could be seen. Her thin lips were drawn back and her teeth tightly clenched. They gleamed a clear white in the half-darkness.

“Can I get you anything?” Kern repeated.

He looked around. A thin, cheap coat lay tossed over a chair. By the bed stood a pair of worn shoes. The woman lay there, completely dressed, as though she had dropped suddenly on the bed. There was a water bottle on the table and beside the washstand stood a suitcase.

The woman groaned. Kern did not know what to do. The woman began to toss. He remembered what Marill had told him and the little he had learned during his year at the University, and tried to hold down the woman’s shoulders. But it was as if he were trying to hold a snake.

While he was still struggling and she was slipping away from him and pushing him off, she suddenly raised her arms and in an instant had driven her fingers with all her strength, clawlike, into his arm.

He stood as though riveted to the spot. He would never have guessed she had such strength. She twisted her head
slowly as though it were on a pivot and groaned so hideously that it seemed her breath must be coming out of the earth.

Her body jerked and suddenly from beneath the blanket, which she had pushed aside, Kern saw a dark red stain creep, spread out on the sheet and grow larger and larger. He tried to pull himself free, but the woman held him in a grip of iron. As though bewitched he stared at the stain, which became a broad ribbon, reached the edge of the sheet and began, drop by drop, to form a dark pool on the floor.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Kern dared not pull his arm away for fear of jarring her. “Let me go,” he groaned. “Let me go.”

Suddenly the woman’s body grew slack. She released her grip and fell back among the pillows. Kern seized the blanket and lifted it. A wave of blood welled out and splashed on the floor. He leaped up, horrified, and ran instinctively to the room where Ruth Holland lived.

She was there, sitting alone among her open books. “Come!” Kern gasped. “A woman is bleeding to death downstairs.”

They ran down together. The room had become darker. In the window sunset flamed, throwing a dismal light over the floor and table. A reflection, caught in the water bottle, sparkled like a ruby. The woman lay quite still. She seemed to have stopped breathing.

Ruth Holland threw back the blanket. The woman was swimming in blood. “Turn on the light,” the girl called.

Kern rushed to the switch. The light of the weak bulb blended with the red of sunset in a somber glow. Bathed in this reddish-yellow haze lay the woman on the bed. She appeared to be nothing but a formless belly with disheveled, bloody clothes, from which protruded spraddled, white legs, smeared with blood. Her black stockings had worked down and her legs themselves had a strangely twisted and lifeless look.

“Give me the towel! We must stop the bleeding! Perhaps you can find something.”

Kern saw that Ruth had rolled up her sleeves and was loosening the woman’s clothes. He gave her the towel from the washstand. “The doctor must be here soon. Marill has gone for him.”

Searching for bandage material, he hastily emptied out the contents of the suitcase.

“Give me anything you can find!” Ruth called.

On the floor lay a heap of baby clothes—little shirts, belly bands, diapers, and among them a few knitted sweaters of pink and light-blue wool, trimmed with silk bows. One of them was unfinished; a pair of knitting needles was still sticking in it. A ball of soft blue yarn fell and rolled noiselessly across the floor.

“Get me something!” Ruth threw away the blood-soaked towel. Kern gave Ruth the belly bands and diapers. Then he heard steps on the stair and immediately after the door flew open to admit Marill and the doctor.

“Damn it, what’s this?” The doctor took one long stride, pushed Ruth Holland aside and bent over the woman. After a while he turned to Marill. “Call number 2167. Braun is to come at once with everything necessary for anesthesia, Braxton-Hicks operation. Have you got it? In addition, everything for severe hemorrhage.”

“Right.”

The doctor looked around. “You can go,” he said to Kern. “The young lady will remain. Get hot water. Give me my bag.”

Ten minutes later the second doctor came. With the help of Kern and a few people who had arrived in the meantime, the room next to the one where the woman lay was transformed
into an operating room. The beds were pushed aside, tables placed close together, and the instruments laid out. The proprietor brought the strongest bulbs he had and screwed them into the lamps.

“Hurry, hurry!” The first doctor was raging with impatience. He pulled on his white gown and had Ruth Holland button it. “Put one on too.” He threw her a gown. “Perhaps we’ll need you here. Can you stand the sight of blood? Will it make you sick?”

“No,” Ruth said.

“Good girl, fine.”

“Perhaps I can help too,” Kern said. “I’ve had two semesters of medicine.”

“Not just now.” The doctor glanced over his instruments. “Can we begin?”

The light glistened on his bald spot. The door to the room was taken off its hinges. Four men carried the bed with the softly moaning woman through the corridor and into the room. Her eyes were wide open; her white lips quivered.

“Come on, steady it there!” barked the doctor. “Lift it higher! Careful now, damn it, careful!”

The woman was heavy. Drops of perspiration stood on Kern’s forehead. His eyes met Ruth’s. She was pale but calm and so changed that he hardly recognized her. She belonged now to the bleeding woman.

“There! Everyone out who isn’t needed!” snapped the doctor with the bald spot. He took the woman’s hand. “It won’t hurt. It’s very easy.” His voice had suddenly become like a mother’s.

“My child must live,” whispered the woman.

“Both of you will—both,” the doctor answered softly.

“My child—”

“We’ll just turn it around a little to avoid the shoulder presentation. Then it will come like lightning. Just be calm, quite calm. Anesthesia!”

Kern was standing with Marill and a few others in the room the woman had left. They were waiting for a chance to be useful. From next door came the subdued murmurs of the doctors. Scattered on the floor lay the pink and blue sweaters.

“A birth,” Marill said to Kern. “That’s how it is when someone comes into the world. Blood, blood and screams! Do you understand, Kern?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Marill said. “You don’t and I don’t. A woman, only a woman, can understand. Don’t you feel like a swine?”

“No,” Kern replied.

“You don’t? Well, I do.” Marill polished his eyeglasses and looked at Kern. “Ever slept with a woman? No! Otherwise you’d feel like a swine too. Is there any chance of getting a drink here?”

The waiter appeared from the back of the room. “Bring me a half-bottle of cognac,” Marill said. “Yes, yes, I have money to pay for it. Just go ahead and bring it.”

The waiter disappeared and with him went the proprietor and two other people. Kern and Marill remained alone. “Let’s sit here by the window,” said the latter. He pointed toward the sunset. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

Kern nodded.

“Yes,” Marill said. “All sorts of things side by side. Those are lilacs down there in the garden, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Lilacs and ether. Blood and cognac. Well,
prost!
”

“I brought four glasses, Herr Marill,” said the waiter, placing a tray on the table. “I thought perhaps—” he motioned with his head toward the next room.

“Good.”

Marill filled two glasses. “Do you drink, Kern?”

“Not often.”

“That’s a Jewish sin—abstinence. On the other hand you know more about women. But that’s the last thing women want.
Prost!
”

“
Prost!
”

Kern emptied his glass. It made him feel better. “Is that only a miscarriage,” he asked, “or something else?”

“Yes. Four weeks too soon. Overexertion, that’s the cause. Traveling, changing trains, excitement, hurrying around, and all that sort of thing, see? Just what a woman in her condition ought not to do.”

“And why—”

Marill refilled the glasses. “Why—” he said. “Because she wanted her child to be a Czech. Because she did not want him to be spit at in school and called a stinking Jew.”

“I understand,” Kern said. “Didn’t her husband come with her?”

“Her husband was locked up a couple of weeks ago. Why? Because he was in business and was more enterprising and industrious than his competitor on the next corner. So what do you do if you’re the competitor? You go and denounce the industrious fellow; you accuse him of treasonable speeches, of having cursed the government or of holding communistic theories. Anything at all. Then he gets locked up and you take over his customers. See?”

“I’ve watched it happen,” Kern said.

Marill emptied his glass. “A crude age. Peace is stabilized
with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We’re living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!”

A half-hour later they heard a thin, squalling cry from the next room.

“Damn it,” Marill said, “they’ve done the trick! One more Czech in the world! We’ll have a drink to that! Come on, Kern! To the greatest mystery in the world, birth. You know why it’s a mystery? Because later on one dies.
Prost!
”

The door opened and the second doctor came in. He was spattered with blood and he was sweating. In his hands he held a squalling object as red as a lobster. He was slapping it on the back. “It’s alive,” he growled. “Is there anything here—” He reached for a pile of diapers. “These will have to do—young lady!”

He handed the child and the diapers to Ruth. “Bathe and wrap up—not too tight. The old woman in there, the proprietress, knows how—but keep it away from the ether, leave it in the bathroom—”

Ruth took the child. Her eyes seemed to Kern twice as large as usual. The doctor sat down at the table. “Is that cognac?”

Marill poured him a glass. “How does a doctor feel,” he asked, “when he sees new bombing planes and guns built every day but no new hospitals? After all, the only purpose of the former is to fill the latter.”

The doctor glanced up. “Up shit creek,” he said. “That’s
how! A nice job; you sew them up with the best modern technique so they can be torn to pieces again with the most primitive savagery. Why not kill the children at once? It’s much simpler.”

“My dear fellow,” answered former deputy Marill, “killing children is murder. Killing grown-ups is a prerogative of national honor.”

“In the next war there’ll be plenty of women and children killed too,” the doctor muttered. “We stamp out cholera—and it’s a harmless little ailment compared to a dose of war.”

“Braun!” called the doctor from the next room. “Quick!”

“Coming!”

“Damnation! Things don’t seem to be going right,” Marill said.

After a while Braun came back. He looked worn out. “Tear in the wall of the uterus,” he said. “Nothing to be done. The woman’s bleeding to death.”

“Nothing to be done?”

“Nothing. We’ve tried everything. The hemorrhage won’t stop.”

“Couldn’t you try a transfusion?” asked Ruth, who was standing in the doorway. “You could use my blood.”

The doctor shook his head. “It wouldn’t help, my child. If it doesn’t stop—”

He went back, leaving the door open. The rectangle of bright light had a ghostly look. The three sat in silence. Presently the waiter tiptoed in. “Shall I clear off?”

“No.”

“Will you have something to drink?” Marill asked Ruth.

She shook her head.

“Do. Take some. It will do you good.” He poured her half a glass.