Tongues of Fire (19 page)

He moved to wipe her forehead. She jerked her head away. You've had a baby before, he thought. You knew what it was like. Her mind must have been moving in the same direction. “It wasn't like this the other time.”

The doctor returned. “She says it wasn't like this with her first baby,” Rehv told her, trying to say it in a conversational way.

The doctor ignored him. She probed again with the greasy rubber glove. Paulette yelled. For some reason he had thought she wouldn't do that in front of the doctor. The doctor stripped off the glove and went to the sink to wash her hands. “The baby's in breech,” she said.

Rehv remembered a few paragraphs from his reading at the library. “Does that mean a Caesarean?”

“No,” Paulette said. “No scars.” To Rehv she said: “I've still got to earn my living after this is over.”

The doctor looked at her and parted her lips as if to say something, but whatever it was stayed inside. She was very tired.

“Does it?” Rehv repeated.

“I always avoid it if I can. I'll try to turn the baby around with forceps.”

“No forceps,” Rehv said.

Wearily the doctor turned to him. “What's your name?”

“Isaac Rehv.”

“Listen, Isaac—”

“Mr. Rehv.”

She sighed. “Mr. Rehv. We like having fathers here during delivery. We really do. But you're here to watch, that's all. If you interfere we can send you out of the hospital.”

“But it's too big a risk.”

The colorless, almost lifeless skin of the doctor's forehead wrinkled. “I don't understand.”

“Forceps.”

The doctor managed a thin smile she meant to be reassuring. “Don't worry, Mr. Rehv. I've done hundreds of perfect forceps deliveries. This one won't be any different.”

“But I don't want him marked. Or damaged in any way. His brain.”

“I'm not going to argue,” the doctor said. Her lower lip began to quiver. “I'm not.”

“Oh, Christ.”

They looked at Paulette, lying on the table. Her head was thrown back. The tendons in her neck stood out like flying buttresses under her skin. “And she's having an epidural,” the doctor said. Paulette yelled. The woman nearby yelled. Someone dropped a tray of metal instruments.

“All right,” Rehv said, but the doctor had already gone. He found the damp cloth and pressed it gently on Paulette's forehead.

A nurse entered. She was slight and dark, with large black eyes and straight black hair. She looked like Manolo. She handed Rehv a little pile of white hospital clothing and wheeled Paulette out of the room.

Rehv dressed himself in the clothing: cloth boots that went over his shoes, a starched gown that tied at the back, a cotton headdress that looked like a shower cap, a mask that covered his nose and mouth, gloves. He waited. He paced. He removed the face mask and drank a cup of water. He put it back on. He heard footsteps cracking the air pockets under old linoleum, quarters drop into a vending machine, two men arguing in Spanish, a woman's laugh, a baby's cry. The nurse who reminded him of Manolo opened the door. She had changed into an outfit much like his, except that it was green. She beckoned.

He followed her along a broad corridor and into a large room. Under a harsh white light he saw Paulette lying on another table, shorter than the one in the labor room. There was no more sweat on her brow, no more pain in her eyes. She was partly covered by a coarse green cloth. Her legs were drawn up, her pelvis close to the edge of the table. Two black nurses stood on either side of the table. The doctor was crouching between Paulette's legs. The Filipino nurse pointed to an empty stool drawn up to the end of the table nearer Paulette's head. Rehv sat down.

One of the black nurses glanced at him. “You have to look in the mirror if you want to see anything,” she said. “We used to let the daddies sit at the side but they got in the way there when they fainted.” The nurses laughed under their masks. Rehv raised his head, and in the small round mirror that hung from a horizontal light support at the far end of the table he saw Paulette's gaping vagina, its lips pried wide apart by two steel forceps. He looked at her face, upside down. She looked back. They had nothing to say to each other.

“Push, honey,” said the nurse who liked to see men faint. “Push. Push.” Paulette pushed. The force of her body shook the table. “That's it, honey. That's it. Okay.”

Paulette stopped pushing and waited panting for the next contraction. In the mirror Rehv watched the forceps slide deep inside her body. One moved up, the other down, in a twisting motion. He thought of the baby with its head dented, its face torn open, or its brain bruised where no one could ever see. And what if something was wrong already? A bent spine. Mild retardation. An extra toe. Even an extra toe would mean the end of everything.

“Push, honey.” Paulette pushed. The doctor pulled on the forceps, very hard. “Push. Push. Push.” Paulette grunted. “Okay, honey.” In the mirror Rehv saw, deep inside her body, a narrow pale crescent that had not been there before. He couldn't take his eyes off it.

“Push.” The pale crescent came closer. The doctor did something with a scalpel at the base of Paulette's vagina. Blood spurted. Rehv barely noticed. He watched the crescent coming closer and closer. It was no longer a crescent at all, but a sphere, round and hard and matted with wet dark hair.

“Last time, honey.” Paulette pushed. He heard a baby cry, somewhere far away. The baby cried again, and he knew suddenly that it was his baby, crying inside Paulette. The doctor took the hard sphere gently in her hands and turned it very slightly. Slowly the sphere squeezed through the opening, inch by inch. Then, crying and bloody, his boy slid out into the doctor's hands. She held it up for Paulette to see.

“A perfect baby,” the Filipino nurse said. She laid it, him, on Paulette's heaving breast. He stopped crying. He lay quietly, his head turned toward Rehv. Rehv wanted to touch the side of his face, but he was afraid. The baby opened his eyes. He seemed to look directly at him. His eyes were big and dark and alert. He was looking at him. He was everything Rehv had wanted. But for the first time Rehv understood he was his son as well.

“Here,” the Filipino nurse said. She was handing him a piece of paper tissue. He realized that tears were rolling down his face, and he wiped them away.

“Thank you,” he said. She had gone. They had all gone: the nurses, the doctor. He had wanted to thank her too.

“Are you all right?” he asked Paulette. She nodded. He saw that she was crying. “What's wrong?” But he knew what was wrong.

Paulette held the baby on her breast. Very still, he lay there, watching his father. After a while he turned his head a little and moved his lips against Paulette's breast. She helped him. He suckled.

“He's a beautiful boy,” Paulette said.

“Yes.”

“We could stay together.” It was a question. They both knew the answer. He shook his head.

The door opened. A nurse stood there, one they had not seen before. “Time to go up to the ward.”

Paulette reached out for him, gripped his arm. “I want to give him a name,” she said.

“What name?”

“Paul.”

“All right.” The boy would need an American name, he thought. For now.

The nurse began to wheel them away. The baby felt the movement and stopped suckling. His eyes were still opened wide. He kept them on his father as he disappeared out the door.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Krebs heard a quiet metallic click followed by a very soft thud. The mail. Sliding through the slot. Falling on the carpet in the hall. Yesterday, bills for water and electricity, notice from the credit card company that he had exceeded his maximum. The day before, the phone bill, with an enclosed threat to cut off service if payment was not received by some date or other.

He looked at the clock. The hour hand pointed into the gap between four and five. The minute hand was right behind it, a tiny sliver of white clockface away. Four-twenty-two. But as he watched the sliver did not become tinier, disappear; the minute hand did not gain ground, pass over the hour hand, turn on the speed toward the far turn at six and up the other side, in the daily race to noon and midnight that always ended in a dead heat, the hour hand coming from nowhere to tie. They were not racing today. Time had stopped.

Four-twenty-two. He had probably gone to bed by then, perhaps he had fallen asleep. Or had he still been sitting in front of the television, watching unfamiliar actors relive the Oklahoma land grab in black and white? And eating: three hamburgers with everything—he had forgotten to say, “No pickles”—and two orders of fries. With ketchup.

Krebs pushed back the covers and got out of bed. The curtains, not quite closed, admitted a shaft of late September sunlight that bisected the dark room like a wall of golden glass. He drew them completely together. The wall vanished. He began picking through the shadowy pile of clothing by the foot of the bed. He didn't bother going to the chest of drawers or the closet: They were empty. All his clothing was in the pile, waiting to go to the cleaner's. It had been waiting there for a month or two.

Krebs pulled on a pair of gray flannels. He left the button unfastened and the zipper halfway down because he had to. His flesh bulged over his waistband like a scoop of ice cream too big for the cone. In the bathroom he urinated but neglected to give his penis a shake after he had finished, or perhaps he hadn't quite finished, and when he started down the stairs he felt a warm dribble seep into the flannel and spread across his thigh.

The mail lay fanned on the floor. He bent down to pick it up: a letter from the bank, no doubt to remind him that his mortgage payment was overdue, something from a record club, something else from a skiing magazine, a letter from France that should have been delivered next door, and a bill from a florist in Raleigh, North Carolina, addressed to Alice. He would write on it, “Not at this address,” and leave it in the slot for the postman, as he always did. Nothing but bills ever came for her.

Krebs stood up, thinking about Raleigh, North Carolina. He was aware of movement outside, and glanced through the small round window in the top of the door. Bunting was walking up the path. A long black car was parked at the curb. Quickly Krebs stepped to the side, away from the door.

The doorbell rang. It rang again. Knuckles knocked against the glass. Then something scraped inside the lock, and Krebs knew Bunting was coming in whether he opened the door or not. He opened it and, conscious of his unshaven face, his new fat, and his stained trousers, said: “What do you want?”

Bunting responded to his words, not his tone. “No time to explain now,” he said, brushing past Krebs and into the hall. “I'll tell you in the car. Throw some clothes on. You've got two minutes.”

“I don't have to take orders from you anymore.”

“Of course you do, Krebs. You're back on the team. Unless you've found some better work, that is.”

A daydream was coming true, like finding a sack of money on the sidewalk or a beautiful girl in your bed. Krebs knew that daydreams didn't come true in life, not in his life. “Why?”

“Don't be so suspicious, Krebs,” Bunting replied. “You were right. We were wrong.”

“I was right?”

“Yes. About Isaac Rehv.”

Bunting waited in the living room. Bunting in his hand-tailored charcoal gray suit, with his pink skin, his prematurely gray hair, and reading glasses hung around his neck, waited in a little clearing in the refuse: fast-food cartons, moldy spareribs, beer cans, empty bottles, comic boks—Porky Pig, Archie, Superman. Upstairs Krebs splashed cold water on his face and wished he had time to shave. He noticed a hair growing out of his nostril—so long, how could he have missed it?—and yanked it out on his way to the bedroom. He put on a shirt and jacket less wrinkled than the rest, and hurried down the stairs, breathing hard.

“You look like hell, Krebs,” Bunting said as they went out the door.

Krebs and Bunting sat in the back seat. “The city,” Bunting told the driver, who started down Willow Crescent at a speed that made a small boy look up as he pedaled his tricycle along the sidewalk.

Bunting reached down to the floor and picked up a small reel-to-reel tape recorder. He pressed a button, listened to himself say, “That's not dill,” and pressed the fast forward. “I won't bore you with the whole thing,” he told Krebs. Bunting found the part of the tape he wanted, and sat back, the recorder on his knee.

A man said: “Believe me, I'd like to help you.” He had a soft Israeli accent and sounded tired and old.

Bunting said: “Then tell us about the Haganah.”

The old man laughed, but he didn't put much into it: “There is no secret about that. I was with the Haganah in the forties. I know nothing of this new Haganah, if it exists at all.”

Bunting said: “Okay, Dennis.”

The old man screamed in pain.

“Hell,” Bunting said, stopping the tape. “That's not it.” He ran it forward. Krebs found a striped necktie in one of the pockets of his jacket and put it on. “Maybe here,” Bunting said. He pressed the play button and turned to Krebs, a worried look in his eyes. “Checks and stripes, Krebs?”

The old man was crying. He made a high nasal sound, but with plenty of volume, Krebs noticed, like a small child.

Bunting said: “Take this away.” There was a rattling sound Krebs could not identify. Bunting said: “I can't eat cafeteria swill one more day. From now on we'll order from that deli across the street.”

Someone said: “The Belly Deli?”

Bunting said: “Right.”

The other man said: “I think they close early.”

Bunting said: “Find out.” Footsteps. A door opened and closed.

The old man cried.

Bunting said: “Have you got a cigarette, Dennis?” A match was struck. The sound was very good: Krebs could hear it scrape against the sandpaper strip. He glanced at Bunting and saw him dipping into his pocket for cigarettes. He lit one with a gold lighter and began filling the car with blue smoke.