11.(55-59) Closer and Closer

Slim Novel 11 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage


55. Closer and Closer

Kimi lies in bed in room or wanders hall or strolls in Hospital, her abdomen hanging heavy. She sleeps poorly, waking often to Baby’s kick now more than before and with movements as its body shifts. And she is starting to feel birthing contraction, signaled by abdomen hardening, starting as discomfort deep in back then coming around flank in a tightening that makes abdomen into hard wood board. Sanya says it is preparation for birth.

   The contractions come more at night in bed. She times the intervals almost automatically repeating over and over “one little baby”, “two little baby,” … . Like counting sheep and it puts her in and out of fitful sleep. As long as the timing between beginnings of successive belly tightening differs from the last, the true birthing labor has not yet started and this knowledge makes her feel as if she has control and soothes her.

   During first week of March, air raid warnings wail day and night, and Kimi is in bunker more than in room. She wants to help carry the few remaining old patients out during raids but Sanya harshly forbids. “I was foolish enough to allow you to stay but I shall not allow you to be burned alive. At first sound of whistle, you are to go to bunker staying close to exit and if fire bomb falls on Hospital you are to leave bunker and get yourself to Tokyo Bay. And do not look back lest you become another Lot's wife.” So Kimi spends most nights huddled by the bunker’s exit watching fireworks as bombs explode all around except on Hospital.

8 March, perfectly clear, mirror blue sky and not even a little white cloud; it is memorable because the B-29s make an unusual morning raid that Kimi watches from start to stop. Whistles start blowing at 8 AM and by 8:30 the few remaining patients are stowed in bunker and Kimi crouches beside Sanya at exit peering east. At ten minutes to 9, she sees them, black dots like swarm of wasps moving to honey – Tokyo.  In the lead are the spotters – she is expert on their bombing technique now. They pinpoint a target by dropping colored smoke bombs about it. After them, the air squadrons come 4 bombers each. This is standard pattern for bombing a military target and when she sees it she has feeling of relief for it tells that the B-29s are headed for the war factories on outskirts.

   Sanya glances back at the few frail oldsters. She shrugs and takes a long look at Kimi, “Promise me that on the day we get bombed you will escape to Tokyo Bay. Consider. You do not end with yourself; you hold a part of Future in you.”

   Kimi is quiet, gazing towards the western horizon where a plume of black smoke rises and faint explosions tremble the clear morning air now heavy with the late winter sweet-daphne flower-blossom fragrance. A tremor from 1,000-pound bomb exploding 2 miles away causes the oldsters to whimper in fright.

56. The Burning-Alive People

8 March, evening, peaceful oasis in desert of war. First time in weeks no whistle echoes in Hospital and city siren is silent. Kimi wanders hall with awful premonition.

   From elderly patient, a rumor spreads that the American President Roosevelt has died and the Yankee Monkees are in mourning so no raids should be expected for a week. Almost everyone has a different explanation for the silence. Sanya is nowhere seen.

March 9th will be Kimi’s date for starting pregnancy real labor pains. This morning, Sanya said the pains may start any time and if not by tomorrow she will “strip the membranes,” meaning she will use her gloved hand deep in Kimi's birth canal and insert forefinger inside opening of womb, and, with a sweep of the finger, strip away the attachment of the bag of water as she had taught Kimi to do on pregnants who go late. It usually induces labor within hours.

Night falls and Kimi lies quiet in the low bunk. She shivers and pulls the quilt comforter over her face. Baby keeps poking her insides more insistently now sometimes in several bumpy jerks like a chick struggling to burst its shell.

   “Oh! Oh! Oh!” she gasps as Baby seems to jab elbow into her left side and a uterus tightening contraction follows. “Ooh, a strong one!” Her fingers touch the abdomen. It is rigid like a board. She times the contraction, saying “1 little baby, 2 little baby, 3 little baby, … .” At 30 it is softer and by 40, gone. Then another tightening comes four minutes later then another at ten minutes.
   She dozes – confused sleep with dreams and awakenings: In one she is a nymph chased by a satyr in shoulder-high grass and when he catches and whirls her around he is Jun, her Village boyfriend, and he lays her splendidly on the sod and she climaxes with searing sensation rippling through loins but the man in her arms goes limp and she moves her head and recognizes her father still and gray covered with dripping seaweed.

   Waking sweaty and shivering, with Baby kicking madly within her, and quilt kicked to floor, she buries her head in the pillow.

  This time she dreams of Grandma and herself together on beach. Grandma reaches out but now the scene shifts and Kimi as a child is in a chair and O-To is stuffing rice into her mouth and Kimi's belly is swelling so big it is like a thin balloon and she floats on a limitless sea. Then, a fire bursts out, sheets of flame and she struggles to escape but is caught in a current moving her toward the sheets of flame, so close she can feel the heat and hear the burning-alive people.

57. Commencement

Sleeper wakes in the gray light filtering through old cloth curtain over old window before dawn. Soaked with sweat but feeling strong and well, she undresses and wraps a dry blanket around her cold, moist body except head then sits in upper bunk gazing toward the sign of dawn. Her body feels the seasonal spring morning – a touch of the sweet-daphne flower-blossom fragrance in the air –, her body warmth is now pleasantly confined by the wrap; and all of these sensations work to seemingly slow time's passing, as it is slowed during a moment of great pleasure. All these sensations sum within to transmit contentment.

   Baby inside is waking too; it extends arm then leg and turns suddenly and knocks and kicks. Having spent hours counting fetal movements within herself she knows Baby's sleep-wake cycle is close to 90 minutes. A uterus contraction starts in small of back like a fist slowly tightening at base of spine. A pain? Yes, it must be, she guesses, because Baby's kicks always seem to evoke the tightening now. “Kick! Start!” where had she heard that? It builds for fifteen seconds and now she can feel front abdomen hard as board beneath her navel. “Strong one!” She breathes slow and deep as taught. It lasts a minute and lets up and she senses something moist between thighs. Unwrapping her comforter she sees mucous blood. “It must be starting?”

   She dresses quickly and hurries to Sanya. The Direktor sits at desk next to charcoal stove eating rice and sipping bean soup. “What is it, my dear?”
   Kimi holds up the bloody mucous wrapped loosely in paper.

   “The bloody show, alright! Pull down your pants and lie there!” She points to cot.

   “Well, well!” Sanya's gloved finger explores deep inside Kimi. “Cervix already thinned and admits a finger, back waters intact and Baby's head is in pelvis. Well, well, my soon mother-to-be! I pronounce you in labor. Congratulations.”

   Sanya spoons out a heap of rice and cup of bean soup, bringing it to low table by Kimi. “Eat! You will need fuel.”

   Kimi feels quiet joy. “It is coming.”

   Outside is turning into a warm spring day and so far no sirens wailing. Sanya, a believer that birthing labor is best experienced on one's feet, suggests a stroll outside.

58. In the Park with Sanya

They walk arm in arm. It is breezy but from the south and warm. They reach the park, which the municipal government constructed several years ago after Sanya’s repeated insistence that kids in this poor place need a place to play other than a local trash heap. A 10-meter square bordered by inward facing park benches and with children's fun things: sliding pan, monkey bars and 4 green-painted wood plank swings suspended from iron piping.

   After weeks of siren wailing and with today's weather warm, the local kids are out and running. Here a 4-year-old boy with bare-shaved head clambers over the monkey bars; there two curly black-hair 5-year-old girls slide one after the other down the sliding pan and next to them two older girls in monpe knickers and peasant jackets go back and forth on the swings as the older bro of one of the girls pushes each alternately while the mothers watch. All of them bow to Sanya with “Good morning, Lady Professor.” One bench is empty and they sit. Sanya takes a deep breath mouth closed. “Ah, sweet-daphne! My juice always gets moving once it gets into my system.”

   Kimi sits contented, hands on belly bulge. Sanya says “How I envy you now!”

   Kimi looks up in surprise. “Envy me? You? Envy me? You traveled the world, became a doctor, built a hospital and even this park comes from you. You studied everything under the sun and beyond the moon. Why envy me? All I've known are men. How I wish I were born a man to get a chance to do things.”

   “Kimi, child, all I did was handed me on gold spoon, I never struggled and the best anyone can say of me is I made the most of opportunity. But you, my ---.” Sanya verbally stumbles over the word, color rising, “---my very dear young friend, you never had chances I had. You did what you must and you have not just survived you are with fruit.”

   Kimi’s face tightens and she breathes slowly by the numbers as taught. After half a minute her face relaxes.

   Sanya continues: “I do not mean only becoming a mother. Any woman can do that. I mean how you did it: a conscious aware act in the face of our nation's calamity. It tells me who you are: One of the superiori, the New People, the comers whose offspring will take over and put things aright in the next hundred years. I do not mean genetic superiority or being above the law, I mean superiority from cultural heritage and having nodal people in your life ---.”

   “You most of all!” Kimi interrupts.

   Sanya looks away as Kimi reaches out and claps Sanya's hand to her own breast. “You! You are the one I love most!” Kimi is trying hard to keep her voice low. “Please! Please, Sanya! Let me stay with you! Don't send me away, ever!”

   Sanya for once is mute. She faces Kimi and does not try to withdraw hand. Instead she reaches out and brings Kimi's head against her own left shoulder. Kimi sobs quietly.

   “My dear, dear Kimi. In another time or place we could be life companions, I not quite mother, you not quite daughter. We are of the same people, the New People to come. Now my time is ending as you are just about to bloom and I see my life as a preparation for you. And I am satisfied I have experienced your love and you have got a peek at my knowledge and through it wisdom will grow. Now I may die happy and you may live content because of what I gave you which you shall hand on to your daughter and she in turn.

   “Then Baby will be girl!” Kimi almost shouts. “But how do you know?”

   “The fetal movements, my dear, which you have been so carefully recording for research! Your baby has been averaging eighty per hour this last month. Only 1% of male fetuses move with such a frequency so 99% chance it will be a girl.”

   Kimi claps for joy. “A girl is my dream.” Suddenly her words are stopped. Another pain forcing her to press the sides of her bulge and breathe slow and deep.

   “Well,” says Sanya, after a glance at overhead sun, “we shall get back and I'll check what is going on below.”

59. To Push or Not

Sanya finds Kimi’s womb-opening admits 2 fingers.  She says, "At five fingers, the baby will start moving down." She checks the baby's heartbeat listening on the abdomen over the uterus bulge with her straight wood stethoscope pressed in deeply: “12 beats in 5 seconds; that is 144 a minute. Good. Now, my dear, rest on the cot here to strengthen body and mind for labor.” She draws curtain. “I'll be in my room.”

   Kimi lies on left side with hands clasped over downward sloping bulge, breathing slow and deep as uterus contraction peaks and recedes. Labor is like the incoming tide, each succeeding wave pushing further up the beach. She cannot feel Baby's moves as much now; which is usual once labor starts. The labor contraction seems like a driven wedge irresistibly advancing under the uterus contractions. She wonders if Sanya is really right about Baby's being a girl? 
   Kimi never experienced real love before. Now she knows Love: it is not sex desire, not wanting to do the other person’s wish, neither is it desiring to possess the other; it is Kimi’s quiet joy every time Sanya appears in mind or place.  
   She dozes. Only a few minutes, it seems, but now the daylight through the curtains is gone and Sanya sits beside the cot, pressing stethoscope into Kimi's abdomen.  And deep in the birth canal an insistent sharp stretching pain tells her the Moment is closer.

   “Heart rate good.” Sanya reports, pulling glove on over right hand. “Put up your legs”

   “Oh, I have to pee!”

   “In a minute.” Sanya thrusts fingers deep inside. “Almost fully dilated, head in good position, waters intact. Another few hours and we'll see the newborn.”

   Contractions are now every 3 minutes and she feels pressure on her bottom, like a constipation but knows from her Obstetric ward work that it is too soon to push. Her energy must be conserved for the Moment of birth. She sits on edge of the cot breathing slow and deep and holding her bulging abdomen with both hands to direct Baby's head downward into the birth canal.

   Sanya puts a bowl of rice in front of her. Kimi says, “I don’t feel like it.”

   “Eat. You will need the energy.” She glances to her left up at the clock. “Ah, ten o'clock. Let us check the news.”
   For next, click 11/(60-63) Mighty Smokey Over Tokyo