It’s the end of a bluish-white February. Marita hears herself scream during the birth. Afterwards all voices are subdued. She’s sewn up. A sheet is drawn around her. The nurse’s hands are kindly. They know each other.

Marita thinks of the birth as a continuation. The child is lying at the bottom of the sea. She doesn’t know if it’s screaming, if it’s getting milk. The boat rolls. The darkness of the sea. Childbed fever rolls her back and forth.

Fritz is there. He can touch her and talk about the snow outside the hospital. The houses. The rime. The Germans.

He reads aloud to her from the daily paper.

Consciousness dissolves like a tablet.

Far away, outside her body, there is terror that the child will die. 113

Each day Fritz arrives with fresh flowers. Crocuses and white anemones. Pilewort. He jingles them like prayer bells. At night she’s alone. The darkness chops and pitches around her.

The child survives. Fritz avoids touching it.

The forceps pinched away a section of its temple. Blood has collected in big, black-and-blue pouches. They’ve got to operate.

It’s over now, the night has passed, and Fritz forces himself into the ward where the child is about to wake up. He looks down into the crib. Its head is swollen like dough around the bandages. Its neck is much too frail.

The child wakes. Its one visible eye is fish-blue. Impersonal. Fritz thinks it’s the eye of an animal, of something inhuman, a dull sheen, a changeling, that the child which nearly killed its mother cannot be his.

It makes no sound. Stares short-sightedly. Its chest rises and falls. A hand opens, the fingers quiver; they fold against the palm. The movement is uncanny. Automatic.

A little machine, thinks Fritz. A shitting machine. Then he wants to shake it. To shake out a noise.

He walks out into the corridor instead.

With Marita rolling in her fever, Fritz walks down the white hospital corridors, carrying his bouquets, moving them here and there. The nurses rest a hand briefly on his back as they sweep past. 114

The child is brought into the same room as Marita. The bandages are removed, the wound allowed to breathe.

The year before, when Marita began to study nursing, Fritz had been proud. Her straight birdlike back in the uniform.

She kept working as a ward maid, taking nightshifts. His nightingale. When she fell pregnant, she wouldn’t hear a word about stopping just because of that.

They had to call her in for a meeting and formally request that she withdraw from her studies. Leave the hospital. It wouldn’t do; they had to spell it out, explaining regretfully that things weren’t the same as where she came from, where, well … where they played fast and loose with the proprieties.

Fritz waited for her outside. He smoked.