Marius came back from Izgrev with a container of curry and rice, some chocolate, and a case of bottled water. He’d filled a suitcase with extra clothes, some books and a blanket. He handed me his favorite novel, The Master and Margherita by Bulgokov, which I put on my nightstand.
“I’m having strong contractions,” I said, explaining to him about the toilet.
“Let me get the nurse,” Marius replied and walked out.
Ten minutes later, he’d tracked someone down. The nurse stood over my bed and put her cold hands on the tight basketball of my stomach, said something to Marius, and left again.
“She’s getting you an IV drip,” he said. “There’s a muscle relaxant you need. Once you get that, they think the contractions will stop. You’ll just have to lie still and relax.”
“For how long?” I asked, meeting Marius’s eye. “How long do I have to stay like this?”
“Until the baby is born.”
My days in Maichin Dom were long and dreary. For the first few days, my roommate—a chubby woman from Mladost—talked to me in Bulgarian all day, telling me (I imagined) intimate details about her life and her hopes for her baby and about her husband—who did not come to visit even one time.
She didn’t seem to mind the fact that I couldn’t understand her. She offered me cigarettes, which I didn’t accept, showed me pictures on her cell phone of her pre-pregnancy body, and introduced me to Bulgarian soap operas. After a week, she gave birth to a baby girl and left the hospital, leaving the room to me, and my endless hours of lying on my back, looking out the window or looking at the ceiling. I spent hours reading, but the muscle relaxant made me drowsy, and so I would drift in and out of sleep many times each day. I carried a roll of toilet paper with me to the bathroom and learned to balance my uneven weight so that I didn’t fall over every time. There was no hot water, and so I hosed myself down with ice-cold water, squatting on my heels. Marius came by every day with food, sometimes bringing Adam with him. Yana had cut his hair, and his long blonde curls were gone. He looked older, more serious, when he at the side of my bed. “You’ll get better now, okay, mama? You’re better okay?” I would hug him and tell him that I would be better soon. I could feel his tight muscles relax when I held him, and I knew that he must be worried and frightened.
After what seemed like an endless amount of time, Marius and I persuaded my doctor to release me. If I had to lie in bed for four months, we argued, it would be much better to do it at home, where I could take a hot shower and eat well. The doctor approved my discharge, but only if we hired a private nurse to come to the apartment in Izgrev to give me shots of the muscle relaxant. I would still be in bed, and I would still be so relaxed I could hardly think, but at least I would be in my own bed.
Before I left, I was wheeled to an examination room, where I climbed up on the table and was relieved to find an English-speaking doctor, a woman who had studied in the States. “We’ll just take a look in there,” she said, her voice tinged with a southern accent. “To make sure everything is A-OK.” Marius sat with me during the exam, holding my hand as the doctor squirted jelly on my stomach and rolled the wand over the skin. “I hear you’ve had some difficulties,” she said, squinting at the monitor. “Well, everything looks good in there. You’re little girl seems very healthy.”
“Little girl?” I said, looking from the doctor to Marius. “Did you say girl?”
“You don’t know the sex?” she asked. “I’m sorry. You wanted it to be a surprise?”
“I had an ultrasound at twelve weeks and our doctor said it was a boy.”
“Ah, well, he was mistaken. Look here,” she said, turning the wand onto the baby. “Ovaries. This is very clearly a baby girl.”
Somehow, without even knowing it, we had walked under a rainbow.
*
Back at the apartment in Izgrev, Marius helped me up the five flights of stairs to the apartment, where Adam was waiting with Yana and Ivan. My son ran to me at top speed, throwing himself around my legs. In Maichin Dom, I had little way of knowing how he was doing. He’d visited a few times, and Marius told me he was fine, but I hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with Adam in nearly a month and I felt unbalanced by the separation. It was the first time in his life that he had been away from me for so long, and I could see that he’d missed me, too. I never wanted to be away from him for so long again, but he would be staying with Yana and Ivan until the baby’s birth. I simply couldn’t take care of Adam during the pregnancy. I had to stay in bed.
I bent over to hug my son and Adam lunged into my arms, trying to crawl up over my stomach, deft and quick as a monkey. He was heavy, and the strain of holding him had an immediate effect: The contractions started again.
Seeing my distress, Marius pulled Adam out of my arms and set him on the floor. “You’re mom can’t carry you, sweetie,” he said.
“But why?” Adam asked, looking confused and hurt. I understood his confusion. It didn’t make sense that I couldn’t pick him up and carry him. I had done so his whole life. It was unnatural and unjust.
“I can’t pick up heavy things until your baby sister is born,” I added, savoring the sound of sister. “It could hurt her. She could be born too soon.”
“Am I a heavy thing?” he asked, looking at my stomach with consternation.
“Very heavy,” I said. “I need you to help me for the next few months. You need to be a very good boy for Yana and Ivan while I get better.”
Adam looked up at me, then wrapped himself gently around my legs, careful not to hurt me. “Okay mama,” he said. “I will.”
Later that night, Marius sat at the edge of my bed. Taking my hand in his, he told me that he’d made a big decision: He was going to work exclusively in English from that point forward. While I’d been in Maichin Dom, he had begun writing his next book—his fourth—in English. He was switching languages.
As someone who found it difficult writing in her first language, the idea of writing in a second one seemed brave and ambitious to me. It was a wonderful idea, I told him. It was his chance to reach a bigger audience. His books were bestselling, but bestselling in Bulgaria, which is a little like saying you have a #1 hit song in Samoa. He’d made around 1000 leva ($500) from the sales of his last book. His audience was small and very few Bulgarian writers were ever translated into English. I believed that Marius deserved to have readers outside of Bulgaria. Writing a book in English was an inevitable step in sharing his vision. If he wrote his books in English, he would reach people. Soon, everyone would know what I knew already: That my husband was a genius.
Every day, as I lay on my back in bed oozing with hormones and muscle relaxants, Marius went to his office at the back of the apartment and wrote his new book. The office had a view of Vitosha mountain, and when I waddled back there, usually around lunch to see if Marius wanted to eat with me, the scene was picturesque: A desk stacked with papers and books, a coffee cup next to an English-Bulgarian dictionary, the snow-capped Vitosha mountain stretching grandly beyond. Stacks of his Buddhist rosaries were piled next to his computer, so that he could run his fingers over the beads while he thought. To me, Marius was like Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, who had left Russia after the Revolution. Nabokov had written in Russian and then in English, settling into the language like a butterfly into a flower. My husband was equally gifted. Sometimes I would bring him coffee and kiss the top of his head, simply proud to see him at work.
I was not allowed to drink coffee—caffeine caused contractions—but Marius drank pots of it to fuel his days of writing, those pages and pages of brilliant words he was writing in English, while I was too overwhelmed by flesh and estrogen to put a single interesting sentence on paper. I was uneasy with my incapacitation, but I couldn’t articulate how frustrated I felt. I didn’t understand how to translate that mixture of pride in his genius and jealousy that I wasn’t writing too. I couldn’t say that it seemed unfair, to have worked so hard only to find myself pregnant and bedridden. I couldn’t actually admit, even to myself, that I felt resentful that my writing—my art and my vocation—was on hold while Marius was free to write a new book. I felt slighted, cheated somehow, but by whom? I’d chosen to have a baby. It was my uterus causing the trouble. There was no one to blame but me.
Nonetheless, the feeling that I was being cheated existed in the back of my mind, bubbling and boiling and hot. I had spent the past years working on a book, and now I was going nowhere. I was falling behind. When I’d left Iowa City, some of my classmates already had book contracts. Some had been published by New York publishers. Some had been reviewed in the New York Times. And there I was, incapacitated by pregnancy, big as a whale, head full of fuzzy thoughts, the TV turned to Bulgarian soap operas, unable to work.
***
To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original logo and art by Max Winter.