Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SIXTY THREE – THE DAUGHTER
When the time came for the birth, Lilya went to the capital to her parents for the best medicine, and I planned to come before the birth and achieve first-class care in the maternity hospital in the usual Georgian way of gifts and money. But my father-in-law was terribly afraid of this and frightened me,
“Don’t you dare! In the maternity hospital they will immediately understand that the divorce is fictitious, they will inform the police, and I’ll have troubles with the apartment and terrible shame! I ask you not to appear there, but come straight to us as soon as Lilya and the child return home.”
I was offended and did as hi asked. To hell with you, inhumane laws, and strange people! But on the second day after discharge, I flew to… my girls.
It’s interesting that we prepared two names: Ana and Alex for any occasion, but, apparently, we talked more often about the boy, in any case, they said “he” about the child, and, gradually, the image of the boy was deposited in Lilya’s mind.
When the midwife told her, “Congratulations, you have a girl!”
Lilya blurted out in surprise, “How is the girl? Are you sure?”
The nurse was very surprised, but she didn’t confuse anything. The girl was ours, Lilya immediately noticed the characteristic curl of her ear, like mine…
“Show me my daughter,” I asked my wife, and she unwrapped the diapers and took out a naked baby.
I took my daughter in my arms and felt the little body trembling. She felt cold and uncomfortable. And I immediately put the child in my bosom under my T-shirt. It was easier to hold the little one this way, and the beating of my heart calmed the newborn… The child snuggled up to me, breathed more calmly, and we fell in love with each other. Another dear creature immediately and forever entered my life, who was now smacking her lips, unsuccessfully trying to feed herself a little from her father’s breast.
The next morning I saw my daughter’s birth certificate. It said – Ana Nikolaevna Malinik. Damn it! Whose last name does a woman get when she gets married? Just like everywhere else, either her father or her husband, as she pleases. My wife left her maiden name after marriage – Malinik. But was a child in the USSR usually given his mother’s surname? Of course not!
The divorce had nothing to do with it, of course. The father-in-law simply did not feel at ease, presenting documents of his granddaughter with a Jewish surname Neiman that was terrible for the capital’s ear and consciousness. But this was not the only “error” in the birth certificate. The second mistake was the place of birth. Ana was born in Moscow, because the maternity hospital where Lilya gave birth was in Moscow. But the bureaucrats did their best to reduce the chances of registration in the capital, and at the first clue they changed everything they could. Oh, is your mother registered in the Moscow region? This means that we’ll write down your daughter’s place of birth not as Moscow, but as the Moscow region! That’s it – just go born, and the tubs of… s… Soviet life are instantly poured out on you. I remembered the little fluffy duckling that I almost plunged into the village toilet, but I thought better of it in time and saved it. It was time to come to your senses as an adult, especially having your own “duckling”…
Ana grew up strong and brave like a boy. She is still like this. At first she was small and thin, but quickly gained weight. Lilya stayed with her parents, and I returned to create our apartment.
Every two months, coming to Moscow, I photographed my girls, and at home I was homesick, looking at their photographs. In winter, when Ana was already six months old, I was pushing her in a sled in the snow and tripped. I didn’t break anything, but I severely sprained my ankle, so I returned from Moscow on crutches, and then walked for a long time with a cane. Oddly enough, many years later, my daughter, studying at a medical school, will repeat my pirouette, but she will have to have surgery on her leg.
I remember how six-month-old Ana showed her sense of humor for the first time. I put three plastic Mickey Mousses in a row on the sofa, hit it with my fist, and all the Mickeys fell down, as if on command. Ana burst out laughing. Again – more laughing, again – even more. Each time she laughed more and more, as if getting a taste for the trick. I realized that she is (as all of us were) all right with the humor!
Well, we weren’t okay with allergies. Lilya said, “Ana has allergy to life.”
The child got covered with rash from any food. Usually, if one has an allergy, you feed him or her potatoes. Ana had rash from the mashed potatoes; we had to soak the potatoes in cold water for a long time for her.
But my daughter started walking and talking very early. At one year old, she herself wandered in the meadows near Moscow and sniffed wild flowers with pleasure.
In the summer, Lilya and I tried to go on a short vacation to Leningrad and Tallinn. She wanted to see a school friend, and I wanted to see Kalle. Alas, a couple of days in Leningrad and a couple of days in Tallinn – that’s all we got. The child fell ill, and we were called upon to fulfill our parental duties. I just managed to buy my own (lucky!) IGWH (independent gas water heater) in Tallinn. We couldn’t get such stuff (or pay exorbitant prices!) at home. Even on vacation, I constantly thought about building an apartment. Although, in reality, the improvement of housing proceeded slowly.
One way or another, by the beginning of classes we moved to our Tbilisi, still poorly equipped apartment and lived there. No one could have foreseen that a return to Moscow would soon follow…
In the warm autumn, we wandered through the city parks and pushed little Ana in a folding stroller. We inherited it from Eli’s relatives. One of his many cousins and second cousins married the daughter of a mountaineer-colonel, Uncle Simon Malkin, who helped friends with vouchers to military resorts. His eldest son was already practicing dentistry in Germany, and now his daughter and her husband have emigrated to the States. By the way, these were not the only friends who left USSR. Eli’s other cousin, Grisha, who graduated from the physics department with us, the one with whom Denis and I caught crayfish on Lake Bazaleti, also recently moved to the States. Sasha, who was already working at IBM, was helping him with his settlement and a job.
And we still enjoyed the soft golden autumn and the friendly city here. Little Ana saw a tiny lame dog in the park, the sight of which struck her. Impressed by the picture, she said her first complex phrase, “Litya Bow-wow leg bubu,” which meant – “The little dog has a sore leg.” I was so proud of my daughter’s oratory success! I remember the first time we went to the Zoo. Ana looked and looked at the animals, and then she got tired and fell asleep in her stroller. She woke up in front of a cage with… a ram, called him “Bow-wow” and fell asleep again. It would seem that what trifles are sometimes remembered! I tried to analyze why I remember this insignificant “Bow-wow”. Maybe because I myself always wanted a dog in my childhood, but never had it?
My daughter also became a “dog lover.” She adored her toy dogs, and we even operated on her beloved Dachshund together when her tail came off. Ana had no doubt that when she grew up, she would become a doctor, and she would have her own living dog.
In the meantime, I was telling my daughter stories about the neighbor’s cat, Besik. It was a big and fluffy cat of our neighbor, Aunt Eva, a classmate of my Uncle Abel. I often went to her to call using her home phone, in the absence of one of my own. Ana liked the big, kind cat, about whom I knew many stories: how he ate all the cutlets from the table, got into a fight with a wild cat, which bit him badly, and how he walked his kittens on the roof.
The stories were true, and I always presented them colorfully, and now I regret that I did not write them down then. Aunt Eva’s stories were generally interesting. Her father, a Russian imperial officer, was from a wealthy family; they owned forests in Borjomi. My only memory of Aunt Eva’s dad, whom I never knew or saw, was a huge cupboard made of carved wood up to the ceiling with figures of Atlantes on both sides, which dad brought from Paris. In memory of her mother, there was a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, as simple as a bar of laundry soap, from the times of Menshevik Georgia (Abt.1920), which still smelled fragrant sixty years later. In the evenings, people came and went, drank tea at the table and continuously talked some stories.
I remember well how Eva, without any embarrassment, told how her sister, a gynecologist, performed an abortion on her on the same tea table and instead of iodine, she smeared everything inside and outside with cupboard polishing varnish. “It was very burning, and everything stuck together to hell!” Eva laughed cheerfully, “But there were no infection, as the varnish was alcohol-based!”
And another, sad story was about her and Abel’s classmate from a German school, Hegele, who fled to the Baltic States to escape deportation to Kazakhstan. There he joined the Wehrmacht and became a Luftwaffe pilot. In German radio reports, which were forbidden to listen to, he was mentioned as a hero. But hearing how your classmate and former friend bombed your homeland and shot down planes with other classmates was terrible and surreal.
But I will return to my daughter. At home, Ana was registered at the children’s clinic. Here her Moscow card was inscribed in Georgian – Ana Neiman and she was vaccinated against measles. It was a new vaccine and was said to be safe. But they didn’t do allergy tests, they administered the entire dose, and here we learned for the first time from our own child what an anaphylactic shock is. The worst thing is that after this Ana developed severe asthma. “Unlucky” is not the right word!
And after a while, Maya celebrated her birthday. Her group mates came, returning from military training, where hepatitis was rampant. This intestinal disease was considered infectious, contagious, and patients in the USSR were hospitalized for two to four weeks. Both Maya and Lilya felt unwell in a couple of weeks after the party. Like a good student, I brought test tubes home and began testing their urine daily. A weak solution of iodine was poured onto the surface of the test tube. If a bluish-green ring forms – it’s hepatitis!
After two or three days, the tests became obvious, and I took both girls to the infectious diseases hospital. In the emergency room they looked at me like I was crazy when I said that two healthy-looking, well-dressed and made-up women posed a threat to the population.
“I’m a medical student!” I convinced.
“Ah, I understand,” said the doctor, “You’ve read a lot!” but she took pity and took a blood tests on them.
After some time, with her eyes wide open in surprise, she confirmed my diagnosis (high transaminases!), and isolated both of them.
I had to take the child back to Moscow, where Ana could stay in a warm apartment during the day under the supervision of her great-grandmother Tanya.
All these moves, repairs, and work hit me too. I was terribly tired and did not study well.
“Look, they’ll kick you out!” I remembered my late grandmother Sofa. The summer session really could have ended badly, and without passing the exams, I took academic leave. The next semester I didn’t have to go to college, and starting in the new year I could repeat the spring semester.
I just couldn’t sit like that. I went to practice in a clinic, in a surgical office in the Moscow region. And starting in the fall, I began working in the intensive care unit as a paramedic to gain experience in treating seriously ill patients. I will talk more about this in another chapter on medical training. In the meantime, story will go to housing.
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