The contractions started too soon. I was walking up the stairs of the apartment in Izgrev, Adam’s hand in mine, and the wall of muscles in my abdomen locked up, hard and tight, as if a belt were cinched. I stopped, to catch my breath, letting go of Adam’s hand and grasping the railing. Marius rushed to me and helped me sit down.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Contraction,” I said.
“Isn’t it too soon for that?”
I tried to remember if I’d had contractions like that before, when I was pregnant with Adam. But of course I did have contractions like that, at the very end, when Adam was being born. “About four months too soon.” I said, pulling myself up.
Alarmed, Marius called the obstetrician and made an emergency appointment. The doctor examined me, asked how often the contractions were happening. When I told him that I’d felt them for a few days, but they were so gentle that I’d ignored them, he looked concerned. He folded his arms over his chest and spoke to Marius Bulgarian, a language I found thick as honey, filled with gulps and slurs and swallows. The doctor shrugged as he spoke, as if there was nothing he could do.
“What’s happening?” I asked, trying to stay calm.
“You’re having regular contractions,” Marius said
“I know,” I replied. “I can feel that. Does he know why?”
“No,” Marius said. “You’re dilated, which means that there’s a chance the baby could be born early.”
“How many weeks am I now?”
“Eighteen,” Marius said.
“Is that enough for the baby to…”
Marius shook his head. “If he’s born now, they won’t be able to do much for him. At twenty-two weeks, there is more they can do. He wants you to admit you to Maichin Dom.”
Maichin Dom was the Maternity Hospital of Sofia, a huge concrete soviet cube with darkened windows, old leather furniture, industrial art, and lightless hallways. Sofia’s primary public facility for pregnant women, it had once been the only place in the city where babies were born. Marius had been born there, and his daughter Rada had been born there. Now, the hospital was severely underfunded and understaffed, with whole floors closed down, hallways without light bulbs in the fixtures, cracked windows, and insufficient medical equipment. There were private clinics popping up in Sofia, Marius told me, and these clinics might have nicer facilities, but they were unregulated. The best doctors in Bulgaria were still at Maichin Dom.
Marius checked me in, and a nurse led me to a room on the fifth floor. As we stepped out of the elevator and walked to my room, a cluster of pregnant women stood together near an open window, smoking and drinking beer. The women were laughing and talking, making the most of whatever illness had brought them to Maichin Dom. There was a man standing with them and, as we passed by, I realized—from the stethoscope around his neck—that he was a doctor. A doctor having a smoke with his pregnant patients? I gave Marius a look of surprise and he shrugged. “Smoking is really common in Bulgaria.”
A particular smell filled the hallways, a mixture of ammonia, dirty socks, and stale smoke that would stay with me long after I left a month later. The smell would lodge itself into the recesses of my memory, and once in awhile—years later, in a grocery in Chinatown, for example, or in our moldy basement in Providence—I would find myself back in Maichin Dom, surrounded by the memory of the dark hallways and the strange pack of smoking woman.
I had a room with a twin bed, bleached sheets, and one thin pillow. There was another bed, the occupant absent but signs of her remaining on her bedside table: a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume, and a cell phone.
“I’ll go home and get some things,” Marius said, seeing the state of the room. “What do you want?”
“Books. A notebook. My fountain pen. And some of those Lindt hazelnut chocolate bars. And it’s a little cold in here. Maybe a heavier blanket?”
“Okay,” he said, sighing heavily, clearly pained to be leaving me there. “I’ll be bringing you food every day. If you need something else, I can bring it then.”
“There isn’t food served here?” I asked.
“There is,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But you won’t want to eat it. It will be nettle soup and black bread every day.”
“Can you bring Adam to visit?” I said. He was staying with Yana and Ivan in Bankya. “I want him to know everything is fine.”
“I’ll see,” Marius said. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for him to see this place. We don’t want to scare him.”
I changed into my nightgown and tried to find the bathroom. It was down the hall, just past the smoking window, a two-stalled lavatory with an exposed bulb swinging from the ceiling. There was a concrete shower area at the far end of the room with a few rubber hoses poking from the walls. The toilets themselves had no seats—I couldn’t tell if they had been broken and were never replaced or if there were never seats to begin with—and so I had to somehow balance my pregnant self over the toilet, holding my maternity dress with one hand and the wall with the other, to pee. The first time I tried this acrobatic endeavor, I tipped sideways, sprinkling urine all over my legs. There was no toilet paper to be found—you needed to bring your own apparently—and so I used my dress.
But more problematic than my inability to balance my belly-heavy self was the fact that squatting over a seatless toilet brought on contractions, and by the time I’d finished peeing, and went back to my room, I’d had two strong ones in a row. I didn’t know how to tell the nurse that this was happening. There was no call button in my room, and even if there were, she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Bulgarian. And so I slipped into my bed, pulled the hard starched sheets over my tight stomach, and tried to relax until Marius came back.
The reality of what was happening—that I was stuck in an understaffed, drafty, broken-toileted hospital, in which I could not communicate with the doctors or nurses, was starting to hit me. How had I arrived here, at this strange place, sick, alone, my clothes full of pee? Only a few months before, I was in a comfortable rented house in the Midwest, Adam’s wooden train track set up near the fireplace, jazz on the stereo, with a regular income and a toilet with a seat. I felt, suddenly, profoundly disconnected from my own life. The past seemed to pool around me, thick and oily, separate from the present, unmixable. I looked out the window at the hazy fall night, all the lights of Sofia’s apartment buildings blinking on in the distance, trying to imagine what would happen next.
I lay in bed. I ran my hand over my stomach. I was five months pregnant and the baby moved slowly, like a big fish, sending shivers through my body. Never had I felt so vulnerable. All the mechanisms I’d used in the past to save me—my humor and my education and my beauty—were useless now. I was far from home, sick, alone. As I felt the baby swimming in me, I made a promise to God or Fate or whatever force ruled my life: Get me out of this one, and I will be good forever. I will be a good wife and mother. I will be loyal and strong. No more complaints, no more requests: If you help me get out of this Bulgarian hospital with my baby alive, I won’t ask for help again.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original logo and art by Max Winter.