“Well, it seems to me that if the Italian doctors could do it, and the Turkish doctors, surely the Soviet doctors could figure out how to get this baby out of her without ripping her open.”

Apparently, he’s too old to care about this challenge to his national pride. He sets his jaw at me. “Is big baby.”

“Well, I won’t let you do it. I just won’t.” I march over to Iris. She looks up at me, glassy-eyed. “They want you to have a cesarean, but I swear to you, they’ll do it over my dead—”

“Goddamn it, Ruth! Give me the goddamn cesarean!” she shouts.

THEY WHEEL HER INTO the operating theater and shut the doors in front of my face. I trudge back toward the waiting room, head inside the tiny, appalling restroom, and throw up yellow bile into the Soviet toilet. When I emerge, Fox is waiting for me with another cup of coffee.

“She’ll be all right,” he tells me.

“You keep saying that.”

“Because she will.”

I look down at the coffee. “I don’t think I can drink this.”

“You need something to eat.”

“What if they need me?”

“They won’t.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s safer this way, you know.”

I lift my gaze to meet his. We haven’t really looked at each other, not eye to eye like this, not since last night when he spooned caviar into my mouth, and I cradled his face in my hands and smoothed down the spikes of his eyebrows with my thumbs. For some reason I imagine I’ll see his old eyes, pale and inscrutable, but I’m wrong. His face is compassionate and his eyes are soft. It’s too much. I start to turn away, but he catches me. We stand there in the white, bright corridor for a minute or two, just resting against each other. His heart beats in sound, slow, mighty thuds against my ear.

“What are we going to do?” I whisper. “This wasn’t the plan.”

“It is now,” he says.

TWO AND A HALF hours later, the nurse appears through the swinging white doors with the round portholes. I’m half asleep on a pair of chairs. My head rests on Fox’s lap. I sit up as she marches toward us.

“Is boy. Four and half kilos.”

“Holy moly,” says Fox.

“What’s a kilo?” I ask.

“Two point two pounds,” Fox tells me. “He’s a bruiser, all right.”

“I want to see my sister. How’s my sister?”

The nurse shrugs. She’s memorized the English words for boy and four and half, and that’s all. I look around helplessly. Where’s Kedrov when we need him?