Sohrab turned to his father and said:
Mansour is very good in impregnating women! Look at his wife!"
It was obvious that his new wife, Mitra, was pregnant. How funny, how productive this man, who had ruined Neda's life was!
In the delivery room, all Neda could understand was that something was wrong. However, her mother's desperate love for her diverted her mind somewhat. Mehri was cleaning the sweat from Neda's face, holding her hand and did not mind that her daughter was pushing her nails into the palm of her hand. She had no strength left to push as the doctor and the nurse kept asking her to do. The doctor was wearing a white jacket and he had a white mask covering his mouth and nose. The nurse's uniform was light blue and she also had a white mask on.
"Push, just a little more!" Neda was not sure who was the one saying that; was her mom, the doctor, or the nurse; or all of them at the same time. She was just too tired, too weak, to listen, to help, to even cry. This all had started in the middle of the night. She took a glimpse of the clock in the room. It was twelve noon. They injected some drug into her IV. The doctor said:
"I am inducing you. I can't hear the baby's pulse. If this doesn't work, we have to do an immediate cesarean."
She could hear all these, but she could not comprehend them. She heard her mother saying:
"Why don't you do the cesarean now?"
She did not hear the answer the doctor gave her mother, or maybe he did not answer at all. She heard that they were talking about her water being broken many hours ago, but she did not hear the rest. Her mother was still next to her, holding her hand, kissing her forehead, touching her hair, talking gently to her, encouraging her to help the doctor. She did not know what that meant.
But suddenly there was this egregious push that was coming from her waist down, the greatest pain, something beyond her wildest imagination, something beyond any human endurance. The nurse with the blue uniform was pushing her stomach. She was almost at the top of her. She was pushing so hard that Neda began screaming as hard as her voice would let her. Her family outside, along with anyone else heard this last screaming. Sohrab began crying.
"Push a little more. It is coming, it's coming!" The nurse stopped pushing her stomach and got down the delivery bed and went and stood next to the doctor. Suddenly there was a silent; even Neda, herself, stopped screaming. Something was coming out of her.
Concurrently, at the foot of the delivery bed, in the nurse's able hands sparkled the life of a baby, like the small vacillating flare of light on a night stand, who had not breathed a moment ago, but who with same privilege and significance as the rest of human race would live and produce others in its own shape and image. In the quiescence, there came a conspicuous answer to Neda's questioning eyes, a cry so dissimilar to mellow voices that had been speaking in the room; a bold, demanding, aggressive cry of the new being, who had so unfathomably arrived from some mysterious dimension.
Neda saw the blue and bloody baby. The doctor took it from the nurse's hands. He held the baby by its feet and slapped it in its back. Neda did not know why! But when she saw some nasty stuff came out of its mouth, then she knew. The pain, all of it was gone, as if it never was. Neda only contemplated on the baby. The nurse ran out of the room. The doctor stuck something inside the baby's nose. Her mother was crying. She had already heard the baby's cry, yet she still did not know what her baby was. Before she could gather her strength to ask the doctor, he, himself, said:
"It's a girl!"
Was it not custom to put the baby on her stomach? She finally asked for it. It was her mother who answered:
"No, sweet heart! We better not!"
She, who had been hot and sweaty only a few minutes ago, now felt so cold that she felt she would freeze to death. The nurse returned to the room with couple of blankets as though she knew that the mother would be cold after the child birth. The blankets were soft and warm; but she could not stop trembling. She looked at the crying baby and her heart sank. She began a silent cry. Her mother and the nurse joined her in crying. Her mother was loud, the nurse was quiet. The doctor looked at Neda and thought about the very difficult delivery she had had. He said in his speaking mind: "Hell with the law..." He placed the baby on Neda's chest. Sohrab and Sima were now inside; and against the regulation of the hospital, Sohrab took some pictures. Neda used her very last energy before fainting to smell her baby, to listen to her heartbeat, and try to remember them for the rest of her life. Then she said in a voice barely audible:
"Can we call her Arianna?"
To Be Continued
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