The meaning of a disaster
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sidney Dekker
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Sidney Dekker’s biography and other articles by this writer
'NO rush.'
The obstetrician sounds dead tired through the phone.
Shaving foam is clinging to my cheeks, and I bend the handle away from my face to prevent the white fluff from clogging the speaker holes. Behind me, a wet trail of hasty footsteps leads into the kitchen, to the bathroom, out of the bedroom.
There, one side of our bed lies untouched - my wife is in hospital after a traffic accident yesterday.
‘How are you?' he asks politely.
He doesn't want to know. Around five that morning my anxiety had finally surrendered to a dozing landscape of softness and a depthless sky, and limbs heavy and filled with liquid mud. Now sleep is draining thickly from the bottom of my brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the back of my eyeballs and my upper gums.
My face is getting cold and hard from the aborted shave.
The little sleep has done me no good. The frazzle has settled too deeply even for the pounding of a hot shower. The top of my head gives off a crackling, brittle sensation, like dried paper, something I know can be washed away only by more sleep. Or lots of caffeine. Or by not having picked up the damned phone.
WE HAD ARRIVED in this Scandinavian land a year earlier. It had been summer, then as now. The sun had been shining obscenely, unreservedly. The grass was high, the air thick and golden and filled with light and laughter and mosquitoes. My wife and I had been flown up for job interviews, and mine was conducted in a little restaurant overlooking a canal, a bit out of town. I was told that the canal was dug a century and a half earlier by enlisted men, but overtaken by the railroad a few years after the digging was done. The canal now seemed mainly to keep German tourists afloat. Recreational vessels (always with the man on the wheel, always) of all kinds floated by. It would have made for a fine vacation, judging from the big bellies and lazy movements onboard. The canal slowly meandered past the restaurant and on through a swath of countryside and locks, setting its own pace, so bucolic, so pastoral, so rustic you couldn't keep a heart rate over 30 bpm while sitting next to it.
Another glass of fine red wine was poured, and we looked at blond girls hopping into the canal a few steps down the towpath.
The evening lasted forever; the sun simply would not go away.
I signed the contract there and then.
Later, I learned that this was the finest summer that they'd had in tjugofyra år - twenty-four years.
We got married, packed up in grimy Northern England and, with the last few hundred quid in our pocket, found that we could afford a miserly walled-off portion in the bowels of the ferry across the North Sea. It was a paper-thin excuse for a cabin. A dictionary entry for steerage. It felt lonely and forgotten, and entirely plausible that we would never find our way out again, the way the staircases seemed to disappear up dark holes. The thumping and shaking of the ship's engines reverberated in my chest cavity for three days after we stepped ashore on the other side.
When we arrived in the harbour, where almost a quarter of the country's population had decanted for better shores about a century before, we were greeted by snow. It was wet and thick and blew in all kinds of directions. It was also getting dark.
It was not yet three in the afternoon.
Our first encounter with a Scandinavian winter was grim. And winters would forever stay grim. ‘There is no such thing as bad weather,' soothing Scandinavian voices confided to us. ‘There is only bad clothing.'
They were all wrong.
There is such a thing as bad weather. And it would persist through the next few years. The once-in-24-years summer had relocated to Brazil and taken all the mosquitoes with it. But winters were the worst. They shut people in; they shut them up. Talk to your neighbour in the street and risk saliva freezing against the roof of your mouth.
THE PROMISE OF a new land, new positions, a new future pulled us through, though. And soon enough the promise got brighter still: a baby was moving around in almost grotesque waves and bobbles in my young wife's belly.
And then it was spring, and it was summer, and then one day I got stuck at work and I phoned my wife to ask her to come pick me up.
She hesitated, was working on the baby room. Cleaning out stuff, getting things ready.
But I had no other options, I said.
This, for the record, is patently false. There are always other options. Today, I would pay an infinite sum of money to take a cab. Today, I would walk. Hitchhike. Steal a car. Sleep on the floor and try again the next day. There are always other options.
Okay, she said. She would come over.
Then, not much later, she called me. Her voice trembled. She had been on her way to pick me up, but there'd been an accident. She was all right, but the baby, she was worried about the baby.
Eight months pregnant.
So worried about the baby.
The tremor of her anxiety played all the way through the phone line, setting off in me a fear and uncertainty that rode my spine like a cold finger. I tried to shake it off, hold it at bay, appear stable and strong while still on the phone. I told her there was nothing to worry about. I mean, if she was walking and talking and all, what could possibly be wrong with our child inside of her? I told her things would be fine, we'd check it out, but she'd see - there would be no problem.
I rushed out on foot to find her, and when I had I commandeered a colleague's car to take her to the hospital. Where she had to stay for observation.
Deep into the night I'd finally left to get some sleep. Indications about what might be wrong with the baby, if anything, had been vague and uncertain, but also stable. There had been little to no change throughout the evening.
‘There's nothing to be afraid of,' I'd said.
But of course there was.
THE WINDOW BLINDS in our apartment kitchen are open, and I cower from the hard slices of morning sun coming through them.
What the doctor says to me on the phone hits me like the blast of a jet engine.
‘We've had to get the baby.'
The way he tells it, my wife is fine. Well, she hasn't woken up yet after the emergency C-section, so he doesn't really know, but all indications are good. The accident pretty much spared her: a haematoma on the abdomen is all. What happened inside is a different story. Hard to say. He's been on shift all day yesterday and all night. He's done the operation and is going home now, but before he does, he just, you know, wants to put in a little courtesy call...
‘You know, before going home. Tell you how things have developed.'
They've had to get the baby.
There's no rush, he tells me again. Things are stable now. Under control.
They've had to get the baby.
My heart climbs higher.
‘Hur mår barnet?' I ask in a tender rendition of a language that is new for me. My voice feels feeble and squashed. How is the child?
The line is silent for a little while, the hiss of its static merging with the throbbing in my ears, the frazzle in my head.
‘Inte så bra.' Not so good. The words come out in a whisper, an apology, a wish that things were different.
A cold fear closes around my throat. A terrible sense of prickling, tingling foreboding crawls all over my skin, from my toes up through my legs and torso and neck, and all the way up over my scalp from back to front. The skin in my face goes hot, then cold.
My chin juts up involuntarily and I find myself looking up at the ceiling, biting my lower lip. My eyes sting, then fill rapidly. A layer of normalcy, of fairness, of predictability crumbles away from the world I know. I stand there, the blue plastic handle of the cheap phone clutched and sweaty in my hand, in the kitchen of a new flat, a new town, a new country.
They've had to get the baby.
This is not how I imagined my induction into fatherhood. Over the phone, with a baby that hadn't been due just yet, who was not doing so good, and with my wife anaesthetised, out cold in the hospital. I'm not ready: don't they recognise that? My wife isn't here - how can we even finalise our deliberations on the name?
‘Vad blev det?' I say quietly.
‘En flicka.' A girl.
A block of ice settles at the core of my gut.
Then my legs give way. I slump, slide down past the slivers of sunlight that are stacked against the cupboards, and sit on the cold floor, breathing hard into the phone.
A girl.
A baby girl.
Can pain travel by phone?
The obstetrician seems to get it. There is little more to say. Or perhaps he knows, from years of bringing bad news and good news, that platitudes create distance, that real sympathy nestles in the silences in between.
‘I'm going home now,' he says softly. ‘Come when you can. Ingen bråska. No rush.'
I scramble up from the floor and dress as quickly as I can. Not much later I'm running through hospital corridors and up the zigzag of stairs and through wide doors that open too slowly. The dash through the neon world feels endless, my legs like never before, limp, mushy, scarcely gliding under me, reaching for a future I desperately want to avert.