In labour

A short story of new beginnings

“In labour” illustrated by Güzin Ayan

Already bored. It must have been the second day of my family visit back home. It was around noon. Coming from Tuesday market, my auntie Ayse showed up with her shopping trolley she was pulling around like a jaded dwarf mimicking the arch on her spine. More than tired, she was furious. “Potatoes! Onions! There isn’t a single thing that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg,” she complained, fanning her neck with her hand. “Seriously, it is a daylight robbery.” She might have sworn a bit but I have no fancy for committing those words to paper. Busy in the kitchen, and still wearing her apron, the ugly one she bought as a souvenir from Cappadocia, my mother was a bit late to welcome her at the dark entrance door so she caught up with us a bit later when Ayse had already made her way to the sitting room, ready to take a seat. My mother knew where Ayse was coming from so, she could guess what the whole fuss was about. The galloping inflation had been a regular confab.

With my usual grumpy intonation, I told my mother to take off her apron and sit down with Ayse, whose thundering grouch seemed to run on forever. I would make them some coffee, which she didn’t turn down, she would never, indeed. In the kitchen next door, I could still overhear what they were talking about. Their voices were drowning out one another, a tendency they could never shake off since the passing of their parents, who lived out the last years of their lives profoundly deaf upon which both my mother and Ayse had grown overly fixated on the idea of being heard, and now shouting was their ordinary way of exchange. In the foreseeable future, it was unlikely to see them turning around or going back to normal.

“Güzinnnnnn,” yelled Ayse. “Bring me a glass of water, please. I’m begging you.”

“Sure,” I replied, and immediately appeared with a tray back in the room.

“Thank you my dear,” she said. “Have you lost weight, darling?”

“Don’t think so. At least, not that I know of.”

“I was like you, you know. When I was your age. Ask your mom.”

“Who wasn’t?” said my mother, visibly not very keen on throwing a compliment for anybody, least of all her own sister.

“Past is past,” she muttered.

“Is everybody ok?” I asked. What about your granddaughter? How is she doing?”

“She started kindergarten, you know. What a relief, I’m free. God bless all the kids, but it’s no longer something for me. I’ve definitely passed my prime. You know what happened today. A man at the market, probably my age, collapsed right before my eyes.”

“Don’t start it,” said my mother. “I can no longer put up with stories like this. People are born, people die, so what?”

“Let me bring your coffees,” I said trying not to get involved in any argument of theirs.

“I don’t understand you,” said Ayse, “you never let me speak. You don’t let me speak at all.”

“Why should I? You always tell me the same things over and over again. I don’t want to get bogged down with things in which I have no say.”

“Mom!” I said. “Let her speak.”

But Ayse lost interest in what she was saying.

“Is that new?” she asked, gaping at the new painting hung on the wall. “What happened to the framed puzzle there, the old one?”

“Nothing, it sits somewhere in the wardrobe, doesn’t it, mom?”

“Well, I can take it if you don’t mind,” she asked. “I mean, if you are done with it.”

I was sent to the bedroom to take it. It was thrown at one of the dark corners where mothballs were hidden here and there inside folded old garments. A precarious place. The puzzle put together an impressionist painting of a tired mother in black attending to a cradle with wonder, calm and ennui. It’d been on the wall since middle school, the time when everybody in the family went with the trend and got into doing puzzles.

“It’s all yours now,” I said with a ghostly sense of relief.

“When will you have a child?” asked Ayse.

I was off guard but I managed to put a smile and take it lightly.

“Maybe in another world,” I said.

My own birthday was soon. In two days, on an ugly Wednesday.

“Mom,” I said “do you remember how I was born?”

Something I didn’t need to ask. Where I came from was marked out. I left scars. Large visible stitches. I knew. She told me before. C-section was something new and experimental. Or to put it another way, it was avant-garde. And the doctors sewed her belly with sutures more like one would see on a blanket -large, sloppy, and vulgar. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that I was born as a threat.

“It was a Saturday in spring,” she said.

She told me that she was thirty-four years old with a petite body of about 45 kilograms. Doctors were worried. I could have caused serious bleeding. Dark. Darkness. This was what anaesthesia meant. Through darkness, I was left in the hands of strangers. The vision of my mother was completely gone, it was taken away. She felt nothing. She had no recollection of the actual labour. Nor labour pangs. I listened to my story of birth as if it belonged to a stranger, it were someone else’s. Certain things were resistant to recollection. Among them was birthing. How nice. How amazing. Memory itself deleted things that she had no control of. How I wished the same thing had existed for death. If that could be true, then, it meant that, two years ago, that night, in that sick bed, when he kept gulping for air, when he cried for help, when his eyes flickered like a fledgling bird learning to fly, when his tiny body was too small to carry his lungs, when, when they were too small to keep breathing, too weak to utter one last word, my father-in-law hadn’t been there, he had already gone, vanished, disappeared somewhere with a clear memory. Life was pain and he was completely unaware of it. Numb.

Written and illustrated by Güzin Ayan