Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [103]
There he found a woman lying, unattended, in the kitchen with her legs apart, about to give birth to a baby. He could see the baby’s head starting to come. He had no idea what to do. Birth was women’s business—that was the way people thought in those days, especially a Jewish male raised in the old country, as my grandfather was.
Next door a neighbor was hanging out her clothes, and he hurriedly sought her help. Then he ran to the other end of the village where the doctor lived. It was a hot day. He remembered the heat and dust for the rest of his life. By the time they got back to the house the woman was dying. And it was my grandfather, Abram Skutari, the old Jew, who received her final glance—a roomful of people had gathered, but he was the one she fixed her eye upon. He swore afterwards that he watched her face fill up with his own fright; she drank it in, and then she died.
The child was still alive and breathing. It took my grandfather a minute to understand this. There was much noise and confusion in the room, and it was hot, and everyone was hovering around the dead woman. But there on the kitchen table was a baby wrapped in a sheet. Its lips were moving, trembling, which was how he knew it was alive. No one was paying any attention to it. It was as though it wasn’t there. As though it was a lump of dough left by mistake.
He reached out and touched its cheek, and felt a deep, sudden longing to give it something, a blessing of some kind. He could never understand where that longing came from, but he once confessed to my father, who was fond of retelling the story, that he felt perfectly the infant’s loneliness; it was loneliness of an extreme and incurable variety, the sort of loneliness he himself had suffered since leaving home at eighteen.
In his pocket was an ancient coin from the old country. He placed that coin on the baby’s forehead and held it there, watching as the breath rose and fell under the sheeting. "Be happy," he said in Albanian or Turkish or Yiddish, or possibly English. Then he said it again, be happy, but he felt as though he were blessing a stone, that nothing good could come out of his mouth. He felt weak, he felt like a man made of paper and straw, he felt as though he wasn’t a man at all, that he might as well be dead.
He didn’t realize he was weeping until he felt the weight of an arm on his shoulder. It was the doctor, who was also weeping. They stood together like that. Their tears mingled.
Mingled—that’s the word my grandfather used when he told this story, our tears mingled. The other man’s arm on his shoulder felt like a brother’s arm and the touch of it made him wail even louder.
After that they all signed the death certificate and then the birth certificate, even my grandfather. Everyone was astonished he could write his name. He set it down: Abram Gozhdë Skutari, and as he wrote he felt a surge of strength come into his body. He felt the strumming of his own heart. He felt he would be able to do anything, even walk into the Royal Bank at the corner of Portage and Main and ask for a loan.
But that child’s sadness never left him. He swore he’d never seen a creature so alone in the world. He lived a long life and made a million dollars and loved his wife and was a decent father to his sons. But he grieved about that baby all his days, the curse that hung over it, its terrible anguish.
Mrs. Flett’s Theory
Surely no one would expect Mrs. Flett to come up with a theory about her own suffering—the poor thing’s so emptied out and lost in her mind she can’t summon sufficient energy to brush her hair, let alone organize a theory. Theorizing is done inside a neat calm head, and Mrs. Flett’s head is crammed with rage and disappointment. She’s given way. She’s a mess, a nut case. In the morning light her hurt seems temporary and manageable, but at night she hears voices, which may just be the sound of her own soul thrashing. It sings along the seams of other hurts, especially the old unmediated terror of abandonment. Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside