State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [94]
“Aaaahhh!” the crowd said, and laughed. Marina, breathless, looked over the edge where the water from the roof churned into a pit of mud and vines like it was pouring off Niagara Falls. She dipped an arm beneath the child’s midsection and carried him back to the center of the room again. The baby was laughing too. What was the joke, exactly? That she really thought he was going to go over the same way she had thought that Easter would not break the surface of the water again? That this was how they ensured an intelligent race, by letting the careless babies fall like ripe fruit from the trees? She held the child beneath his arms to face her. He was no doubt thinner than the average American model but very healthy, kicking and gurgling with pleasure. The toddler stopped her running for a minute to pick up the unemployed knife and began to knock it against the floor behind the older woman. The baby then urinated on Marina, a long exuberant stream against the front of her already soaking shirt. The men laughed harder now and the women laughed more sedately, shaking their heads at all the silly foreigners in the world who don’t know enough to hold a baby in the right direction. The toddler’s knife got stuck in the floorboards and after a momentary wail she pulled it out and plunged it back again, missing the old woman’s back by six inches. “Could you pick up that knife?” Marina said to Dr. Nkomo.
Dr. Swenson would no doubt have argued for respecting the natural order in which babies sailed off the edge of a flat earth and toddlers played with the knives they would one day need to understand in order to feed themselves. These children had escaped without major injury before Marina arrived and chances were no doubt good that they would continue to exist after the company departed, but still, Dr. Nkomo was willing to pry the knife from the unwilling hands of the little girl, and when he had handed it to one of the men she put her face down on the floor and wept. The woman weaving shingles stood up and said something to Dr. Nkomo, pointing at Marina, pointing at him. The teenage girl came and took the baby away.
“Have I done something already?” Marina asked.
“It is something about your clothes,” he said. “Clothes is the only word I recognized, and maybe I am not sure of that.”
The older woman now got up stiffly from the floor and began to unbutton Marina’s shirt. Marina caught the woman’s fingers and shook her head but the woman simply waited until Marina let her hands go and then she started again. Her touch was both patient and persistent. It made no difference to Marina that there was urine on her filthy, soaking clothes but there was no way to explain that. When Marina stepped away the woman followed her. She was considerably shorter than Marina, they all were, and so Marina was left to look at the part in her gray hair, the long braid that went down her back. Her dress pulled against her belly and her belly pressed against Marina’s groin. The woman’s belly was high and hard and suddenly Marina saw the woman’s arms were thin, her face and legs were thin. Only her stomach protruded. Marina considered this as she stepped away from her again and again until it seemed possible that they might both go over the edge. Marina stopped, considering the ways to extricate herself while the woman resumed the work with the buttons, her stomach pressed against her, and then she felt the baby kick.
“My God,” Marina said.
“I think she wants to wash your shirt,” Dr. Nkomo said, seeming deeply embarrassed. “Once they are on to an idea it is very difficult to dissuade them.”
“She’s pregnant. I felt the baby kick,” Marina said. “It kicked me.”
The baby kicked again as if grateful for the recognition and the woman lifted her face and shook her head at Marina as if to say, Kids, what can you do? Her forehead was deeply creased and her neck was wattled. There was a dark, flat mole of an irregular shape on the side of her nose near the eye that could