Chapter 16
Coming of an Heir
Waiting for the baby was a great thing, greater than anything that far in our life. Alas, as happy I was for the pregnancy of my wife, I had other things to concentrate on. Most important was my English course. I had to work very hard to be able to sit for my exam in June.
At the same time, I have been very busy with my social work in CYU. It looked easy at the beginning. For a man of 30 with a wife – soon a family –, it was tiring to take part in meetings at least once a week, more often six times monthly.
That time the influence of the party and its youth organization was so strong, that managers had to accept making their decisions together with the "tetragon” of their level. The four corners of the tetragon have been the manager, the party representative, the CYU representative and the trade union secretary. Managers could not deny a CYU activist to leave his or her work for a meeting during working time. But anyhow, going to a meeting meant to do my job in a shorter time.
As for the CYU business, the activists on factory level wanted me to accept their nomination at the next election for a representative of CYU in our office. I did not miss it, but a denial from my part could have had serious effects on my career. At the end I agreed. Fate would organize so that I would be elected in my absence, the assembly for election was held in the first week after my wife’s return from the hospital with the baby, and I was at home with them – on "paternity leave” according to my colleagues. Actually, as the present representative sensed my nomination, he gave in and I had to do his task as an acting representative. In May I have been sent to a training course in a camp at the lake Balaton, to be prepared for my position.
From my boss I have got some special tasks. As the projects of the two floating cranes have been accepted by the Soviet customers, the second step for the design of the water-jet propulsion had to be done. It meant making of a model of the equipment in a 1 to 10 scale, the housing of Plexiglas, the screw of tin alloy, and to simulate all working conditions from completely closed channels through different channel openings to a quite open state, measuring forces, needed performances on the shaft, etc.
First trials with the model have been made in a closed tank in the model workshop for pipelines. After that the complete program has been done in the shipyard’s harbour bay. On the results of this tow-tank measurements, the final properties of the screw have been determined, and the manufacture of the electromotor for the drive of the screw started. Our experiments have been proved in Waageningen by the final tank trials.
Well, I had a busy summer time once more. The weather was hot, and my wife took her duty on herself with patience. Everyone who saw her could tell it would be a boy. From behind it could not be seen she was pregnant. But from the side she looked, as if a melon had been hid under her dress.
The last weeks of her pregnancy have been hard because of immune effects between her and the baby. She had selected a doctor, recommended by colleagues. He wanted to make her duty as easy as possible. Alas, he gave her two kinds of medicine, one against accumulation of fluid in her organism, the other to prevent the spoil of her teeth. It would prove later that both have done more wrong than right.
In a Sunday evening at the end of August, she frequented the toilet regularly. I noticed it and asked, if there were pains. There were none yet, but it was her embryonic fluid, as we learned later. During night I woke up again to hear her go out regularly to toilet.
"What happened, dear?” I asked.
"My dinner might have been too heavy, I had to go out twice.”
I would not sleep and noticed the regular, but shortening intervals between her toilet-going attempts. I said:
"It could be your pains, not the dinner.”
"Do you think so?”
"Let me go out and phone to your doctor.”
"Oh, he is on holiday, but I give you the phone number of his deputy.”
She gave it to me and I hurried to the telephone booth. At 2 a.m. there were none on the streets. The doctor answered my call and said:
"Bring your wife to the hospital. I am starting, too.”
I went back, told her to get ready and took a run to the nearest taxi station one and a half mile away. There was one car there, the driver sleeping.
"What kind of transport?” he asked.
"To the hospital, my wife’s time is coming.”
"Oh, no, again a delivery”, he said, and told me, that there was a case in his car some days ago. The delivery began there, the doctor came running to his car and the mother has been taken on a stretcher up to the delivery room.
When we arrived, my wife’s pains have been five-minute ones.
"I do not understand”, she said, "the fluid has not gone yet.”
She did not noticed that pint of fluid. The medicine caused its vanishing in the final days.
"Do not have fear”, I tried to calm her. Of course, she had, it would be her first delivery.
At the hospital nobody expected her. Someone called the doctor again, and he arrived in an hour. Daylight was coming already. The doctor took her with him, and I was sent away. She was too busy with her own thoughts to deal with me.
"Be careful, dear”, I said.
"Call the ward later”, she answered.
"Doctor, when is it to expect?” I turned to him. He said in about five hours, as it was a first delivery. It was four o’clock.
I went home and, as if it had been an ordinary Monday morning, I shaved and took my breakfast. For a time she had her ration of "baby milk”, a kind of high-fat milk. As she could not consume milk, it was me to drink it for coffee.
I went to work and waited for 9 a.m. to come. Then I called the hospital. Nothing yet. Of course, in a minute all colleagues of mine learned she was in.
"I could not tell by your look that your wife is in the hospital to deliver”, said my old colleague with a good heart and humour.
"I am very anxious.” I did not want to look a husband with no feelings.
"Do not be”, he said with a smile.
"Why, how many children you have?” I asked.
"He? Not one.” One of the draughtswomen was his sister-in-law. It was she who said it.
Anyway, the hours passed and answers to my calls were the same. At last at two o’clock the nurse informed me:
"53 centimeters and 3.2 kilos, a boy.”
When I hung up, all colleagues were standing around me and listening. I repeated what the nurse said. High cheers only, what I remember now. All was in a mist, I sat down. After some time I realized I did not take my lunch. It was too late, the canteen closed down. I asked one of the women with two children, an engineer:
"What shall I take for my wife now?”
"Oh”, she said, "nothing, but an enormous bunch of roses.”
Our working time soon came to an end, and I went to buy the roses and to go to the hospital. I had to wait for her to come. At last she came, as she had been sleeping or rather, as if I had been a stranger to her. She hardly recognized me. I talked to her and gave her the flowers, but she told me to give them to the nurse, she would arrange them. We sat on the bench, and I tied to ask her, but she hardly answered. Then a nurse took a baby to us, and I was astonished to see the face of my mother in a miniature copy with dense black hair. It was my son.
When our son was taken away, she talked at last, and then I realized the reason of her sleepy condition. She told me in a slow way that she had not been able to deliver, the child had been taken from her by Caesarean section. She talked and talked, but I could not understand everything and would not disturb her by questions.
Much later, when she would be at home, could the picture only come together. When I left her at 4 a.m. that morning, her doctor left the hospital, too. He probably gave instructions to call him when necessary. Around her, only a lot of medical students remained. Her pains became quicker, but later almost stopped. If that unscrupulous doctor had been there, he would have known that it was an emergency. But the students only waited and let her remain in danger of life. When the doctor returned at half past one, he saw it at once, that delivery was impossible. Of course, remember, the other one on holiday had given her something to spare her teeth. And what about the child? The ossification tablets fixed her pelvis and, although her outer body measurements had been proper, she was unable to deliver the baby. Poor little creature did as nature instructed him, but the exit remained closed.
My wife told me, when he saw her, he shouted to the students and nurses to take her up, as either the mother or a child was in a real danger – actually both were. The lift was occupied, they took her up by the stairs, she was almost thrown off the stretcher. And once in the delivery room, she was narcotized. When I came, she did not know where she was. The operation happened at two, and at five I stood there, coming from nowhere by her judgement.
I could hardly accept such unscrupulous behaviour. The next day all my colleagues wanted to know everything. As I mentioned, at that time I have not been very well informed, I told them only my impressions. As I took my breakfast of pancakes with sweet cheese, the old colleague asked:
"Where did you get that?
"I made it yesterday evening. I always fry pancakes”, I answered and realized, that for a stranger it could not be an ordinary thing.
I tried to do my work and prepared to go on holiday, as soon as my wife was out of the hospital. The election day for my CYU representative post was near, and I feared, it could disturb my holiday. It would, but, anyway, I would be elected in my absence.
Afternoon came also in the next day and I went to see my family. My wife was waiting already and she said nervously:
"The baby has been taken to the paediatric clinic.”
"Is he ill?” I became nervous, too.
"He fell into a coma. The doctor says, he has a concentration of fluid in his brain from the unsuccessful delivery”, she began to cry.
It was a bad situation. There were no doctors around, and we could not get any information. I asked her:
"What did they say about nursing?”
"Oh, he would be taken to me for every nursing time.”
My anxiety left me. In that case the baby has not been in danger, only he was under observation. I tried to becalm her, too.
My guess was right. From the next day she would go to nurse him every 4 hours, and after two days in the clinic, the necessary records made, he was taken back to the hospital. Anyway, she remained there 10 days with the baby and, when we took him home with us, the permission of the paediatric clinic has also been necessary. We would have to take him back for a new examination in three months.
The coma has been repeated only once at his age of 2 years. The girls in the nursery did not pay a proper attention to his temperature, and it went up. Gradually I would manage to lose all my confidence in nurses, doctors, etc. The doctor in the clinic, where he would be taken, would lie to us about a pneumonia – made up only in his mind – for an excuse, why he would not give him out to us to take him home. My wife would have the courage to take him home on her own responsibility, as it was visible that his stay in the clinic would make a trauma in that little boy.
On the day, when my wife was released from the hospital with our ten-day-old baby, we took a taxi – it was accidentally an archaic Pobeda – and took him home. That was the afternoon of my election. I did not go there, we had to learn baby-sitting from the start.
I spent a week at home – to the fun of all our relatives, who found it ridiculous – and at the end of it my wife was an experienced feeder, bather, dresser and everything about babies. She had bought the book of dr. Spock some months before and she studied it diligently.
We decided to avoid the mistake made by her sister, and we slept in our room, while the baby in his. By proper feeding and with care about her diet not to make problems for the baby, as well as by a good routine, he became a calm, good humoured little creature.
There was another point to avoid misconceptions, feeding during the night. My wife tried to go over, as soon as possible, to a timetable, when he got his last meal at 10 p.m. and nothing before 6 a. m. This way my wife has been spared of sleepless nights and the baby of undigested food in his stomach. He always spent the night fine, and in the morning he took his proper quantity.
After the initial weight loss he took on weight soon. It was a big risk to weigh him, as he would make every kind of movements, thus causing the scales to show false results. At last we found a good way: we put his empty plastic bathtub on the scales and lay him within.
He soon recognized our voices, even our images. He was only six weeks old, when I bought a proper chandelier for his room instead of the original single bulb. He followed with his sight all I did.
Of course, I made as many shots about him as possible. That time I stopped photographing on black-and-white negative, I used only colour slides. Soon I would take the habit of developing them myself. My flashlight from the last GDR trip has done a very good job.
My wife soon had to take all the care about him on herself, as I took the line of English lessons once more. If it were possible, the job has become even harder than in the previous year. Lexica has remained with our group-master, but instead of Grammar, we studied the subject "Knowledge about English Speaking Countries”. Mainly we learned about England, but some chapters of our text-book dealt with the U.S.A. and Australia. Our lecturer in this subject has been the elderly lady, who saved me from the self-indicted trap on the entrance exam. She would sympathise with me, she might have spotted the interest in me.
Her lessons have been a pleasure. She did not check our knowledge in an elementary-school way, instead she generated a debate and then nobody cared for his or her shyness. She had a good talent to do it properly.
The girl who sat near me became pregnant. The bench soon became too near to her belly.