Chapter 27
In the darkness I perceive a rhythmic pulse, steady and reassuring, to which the beat of my own heart conforms. I have not felt so whole and protected as I do now since I can remember.
I hear mother’s voice. I recognize it, although it resounds in a peculiar way, as if I were listening to it from inside a soft shell.
“Will she be able to carry this burden?” she asks.
“She is strong, she can do it,” a second voice says.
It’s Arthur’s voice. It too sounds muffled, distant.
“She cannot protect her brother alone, you will have to help her, Arthur. Promise,” mother commands.
“I promise,” Arthur says.
“There will come a day when she will have to discover the secret she carries, and that day you will have to be by her side,” mother continues.
“I will,” Arthur vows.
I sense something stir beside me, and I realize that I am not alone.
“When Iris will be outside my womb she will be exposed to a world where I will be able to offer only limited guidance,” mother says, her voice sad.
Outside my womb: the words reverberate within me. I am in my mother’s womb.
“Don’t worry,” Arthur says, and from the vibrations I receive I sense that he must have touched her. Perhaps he is holding her hand now.
I perceive the edge in mother’s tension dissolve.
“Lie down now,” he tells her.
The presence beside me stirs again, and this time it touches me. I feel love for this presence, it is part of me. I move, and as we come in contact for the third time I realize that I am beside my brother.
Mother lies down, and I sense the shift in her body, the change of direction in my own posture.
“Hand me the potion,” she tells Arthur.
There is a long silence.
“Hold my hand now,” she asks him.
I hear a gurgle, a flow of fluids, the potion seeping inside mother’s body.
Then a sudden wave of heat gushes around me, and it is so intense it almost burns me. Mother screams, but it is not pain she is feeling, rather heartbreaking sadness for what will come next.
The heat burns hotter and hotter, and then, at once, I sense myself swell, almost to the point of bursting, and my cry resonates within me with shattering force.
Then the heat subsides, and my swollen self adjusts, with painful slowness, to its new self. I hear three heartbeats beat in unison, one inside the other, like those of a human matryoshka: my brother’s heartbeat inside me, my own heartbeat inside mother, and the strongest heartbeat - mother’s.
In the darkness of this womb, for this one moment in time, I feel immense clarity. I know who I am: I am sister, daughter and mother.
Then something breaks, and mother begins to scream. The softness around me turns into painful spasms, it twists and contracts as if it suddenly refused my presence within it.
Why? I need to know. Why is it rejecting me?
“Push, Kathrine, push!,” Arthur encourages mother.
Mother’s labour has started.