Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [31]
A few moments later Rabia said: “Now the other shoulder.”
Jane squeezed again, and then there was an enormous relief of tension, and she knew that the baby was born. She looked down and saw its tiny form cradled on Rabia’s arm. Its skin was wrinkled and wet, and its head was covered with damp dark hair. The umbilical cord looked weird, a thick blue rope pulsing like a vein.
“Is it all right?” Jane asked.
Rabia did not reply. She pursed her lips and blew on the baby’s squashed, immobile face.
Oh, God, it’s dead, thought Jane.
“Is it all right?” she repeated.
Rabia blew again, and the baby opened its tiny mouth and cried.
Jane said: “Oh, thank God—it’s alive.”
Rabia picked up a clean cotton rag and wiped the baby’s face.
“Is it normal?” asked Jane.
At last Rabia spoke. She looked into Jane’s eyes, smiled and said: “Yes. She is normal.”
She’s normal, Jane thought. She. I made a little girl. A girl.
Suddenly she felt utterly drained. She could not remain upright a moment longer. “I want to lie down,” she said.
Zahara helped her step back to the mattress and put cushions behind her so that she was sitting up, while Rabia held the baby, still attached to Jane by the cord. When Jane was settled, Rabia began to pat the baby dry with cotton rags.
Jane saw the cord stop pulsing, shrivel and turn white. “You can cut the cord,” she said to Rabia.
“We always wait for the afterbirth,” Rabia said.
“Do it now, please.”
Rabia looked dubious, but complied. She took a piece of white string from her table and tied it around the cord a few inches from the baby’s navel. It should have been closer, Jane thought; but it doesn’t matter.
Rabia unwrapped the new razor blade. “In the name of Allah,” she said, and cut the cord.
“Give her to me,” said Jane.
Rabia handed the baby to her, saying: “Don’t let her suckle.”
Jane knew Rabia was wrong about this. “It helps the afterbirth,” she said.
Rabia shrugged.
Jane put the baby’s face to her breast. Her nipples were enlarged and felt deliciously sensitive, like when Jean-Pierre kissed them. As her nipple touched the baby’s cheek, the child turned her head reflexively and opened her little mouth. As soon as the nipple went in, she began to suck. Jane was astonished to find that it felt sexy. For a moment she was shocked and embarrassed; then she thought: What the hell.
She sensed further movements in her abdomen. She obeyed an urge to push, and then felt the placenta come out, a slippery small birth. Rabia wrapped it carefully in a rag.
The baby stopped sucking and seemed to fall asleep.
Zahara handed Jane a cup of water. She drank it in one gulp. It tasted wonderful. She asked for more.
She was sore, exhausted and blissfully happy. She looked down at the little girl sleeping peacefully at her breast. She felt ready to sleep herself.
Rabia said: “We should wrap the little one.”
Jane lifted the baby—she was as light as a doll—and handed her to the old woman. “Chantal,” she said as Rabia took her. “Her name is Chantal.” Then she closed her eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ellis Thaler took the Eastern Airlines shuttle from Washington to New York. At La Guardia Airport he got a cab to the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The cab dropped him at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the hotel. Ellis went inside. In the lobby he turned left and went to the 58th Street elevators. A man in a business suit and a woman carrying a Saks shopping bag got in with him. The man got out on the seventh floor. Ellis got out at the eighth. The woman went on up. Ellis walked along the cavernous hotel corridor, all alone, until he came to the 59th Street elevators. He went down to the ground floor and left the hotel by the 59th Street entrance.
Satisfied that no one was following him, he hailed a cab on Central Park South, went to Penn Station and took the train to Douglaston, Queens.
Some lines from Auden’s “Lullaby” were repeating in his head as he rode the train:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral.
It was