*
Béla is out of town when I feel the ĕrst contractions early one
September morning. ey cinch and cinch, strong enough to snap me.
I call Klara. By the time she arrives two hours later, the doctor still isn’t
there. I labor in the same room that Béla was born in, the same bed.
When I buckle against the pain, I feel a connection to his mother, a
woman I never had the chance to meet. is baby I’m working to get
into the world will have no grandparents. e doctor still hasn’t come.
Klara hovers near me, offering me water, wiping my face. “Get away!”
I yell at her. “I can’t stand your smell.” I can’t be the baby and birth a
baby. I have to inhabit myself and she is distracting me. Out of the
razor-sharp haziness of labor comes the memory of the pregnant
woman in Auschwitz who labored in agony with her tied-together
legs. I can’t stop her face, her voice from coming into the room with
me now. She haunts me. She inspires me. Every impulse in her body,
her heart, pointing to life, while she and her baby were both consigned
to an unspeakably cruel death. e sorrow breaks across me. I am a
landslide. I will break myself open on the sharp edge of her torment. I
will accept this pain because she didn’t have a choice. I will accept my
pain so that it might erase hers, might erase every memory, because if
this pain doesn’t destroy me, memory might. e doctor ĕnally comes.
My waters burst and I feel the baby shoot out of me. “It’s a little girl!”
Klara yells. For a moment I feel complete. I am here. My baby girl is
here. All is well and right.
* * *I want to name her Anna-Marie, a romantic name, a French-sounding
name, but the Communists keep a roster of the permissible names,
and Anna-Marie isn’t allowed. So we choose the inversion: Marianne,
a tribute to Béla’s cousin Marianna, the one who still calls me a dumb