Electric Acorn 15 : Fiction : Kathrin Roloff

Electric Acorn 15: Short Stories:

Kathrin Roloff

A One-Day Mother

A mother was crying. This was not unusual in a place like this, where day after day up to a dozen women gave birth. Crying was common here. Not-yet mothers gave vent to a pain which every single one of them believed nobody had ever suffered before. New mothers cried out of relief when this pain was over. Or they cried because they had just realized that the things they would now have to go through would be even worse that what they had just endured, either because there was no father or because the bundle laid in their arms was somehow incomplete. The nurses were used to coping with these everyday troubles. This mother however, had none of these troubles; she was not even what was termed by the nurses a not-yet or a new mother. In the routine of a hospital where women were usually kept no longer than three days after the delivery, this mother was already old: She was to leave the next day. She was well past the earliest stages in motherhood when the nurses still tolerated crying. But then she obviously did not care at all whether her crying would be tolerated or regarded as a nuisance. Like an infant she was completely unaware of her surroundings, and like an infant's, her crying was full of accusing hunger, different only in that it was not easily silenced by a nipple put into her mouth. Indeed it could not be silenced at all. Her wailing filled the otherwise so carefully air-conditioned air of the ward until everybody had to breathe in her pain. The other mothers were turning in their beds and trying to hide their faces from the unknown evil that had befallen one of them, the nurses were hurrying to and fro in a desperate attempt to prove they had been mistaken. The doctors were left entirely out of it because everybody was so used to their omniscience that it did not even occur to anyone they might need to be put in the picture. But gradually it penetrated to them all. The impossible had indeed happened. Urgent phone calls crawled through the lines, out of the hospital, into and out of the city.

She had worked as a charwoman for the hospital for years, so they knew her there. This choice of job had been a deliberate one. She always knew she would be born there, at this very hospital, her dear baby girl. So far, circumstance had prevented her only dream from coming true. But she wanted to have her baby at an early age; she wanted to understand her better than her own mother had understood her. But then it probably was not the number of years in-between but the liking a mother took to her child when she first set eyes on her - she felt certain her mother had never really liked her. Her sister had fared better, but her sister was also prettier. Which was not difficult, she decided with a furtive glance at the nurse's little hand-mirror. The only mirror she had at home decapitated her reflection, it was hung so low. To look at her body to check whether her clothes matched and fitted, this she could bear, but not her face. She had been born with the mark but had never really learned to accept herself as a person with such a face, just as nobody else ever accepted her. She was a very lonely person, had always been so. Children, otherwise so innocently impolite, never stared at her but shrank from her sight. Even the grown-ups seemed tempted to hide their faces in somebody else's skirts. Consequently, few people ever talked to her. She would not even blame them for it; at some point in her childhood she had come to understand, painfully, the difference between beauty and ugliness. She herself could not suppress humanity's craving for the perfect and abhorrence of the disfigured in her own mind. She would blame no one, but she gave up trying to make friends - she had never had friends anyway. Even her own sister, when she was old enough to understand the way Darwin works in modern human life, turned her back on her in a merciless act of survival of the prettiest. But even if her own mother and sister had deserted her, her daughter would not. Her daughter would learn to love her for the love she would give her before she ever grew up to judge her outward appearance. She would not abandon one so full of kindness, so loving, so caring only because somebody told her her mother was hideous. For once, she would have a person who would not withdraw from her or reject her, one who worried about her feelings and who would stand by her. And she would not do so because she was ugly herself and therefore shared in her misery. To the contrary, her daughter would be one of the most perfect creatures ever seen, one the nurses said was beautiful even in the absence of the person who had borne her. A sweet little thing, and she would know nothing her mother had gone through, and would have everything her mother had never had. Everybody would love her, respect her, seek her friendship. She would grow up to be a much desired beauty with lots of potential fathers for the children she might want to have. Unlike her mother, even though she had been most eager to reproduce since her first period. She knew all about the act of conception, but no one had ever lowered himself to acting it out with her. It would not be easy to have her girl, but now was the time. She would be born on the same day as her mother, a quarter of a century later. She would be the perfect version. She would be her mother corrected, live her mother's life as it would have been without her face. Again she looked at her reflection, contemplated the happy smile that had crept on her face and even increased the ugliness; then she held the mirror at arms length and once more checked her outfit. It was fine; it would fit into the hospital atmosphere. She was ready to have her baby. This was their birthday.

The calls that had been sent out from the hospital had done their duty, had tracked her down, had circled her in, had finally broken into her house. She had been sitting opposite the child for a few hours. At first she had cradled her, held her to her bosom, felt her soft heartbeat, breathed in the air the girl breathed out, which smelled sweeter than anything she had ever known. She had contemplated the tiny face with the fair hair and the sleeping eyes which she knew to be blue, the tiny hands clenched into even tinier fists, the happy, gurgling smile. She had been just as happy herself. After a few hours the baby had opened her eyes and burst into a heart-rending wailing that was echoed at the hospital. No powdered milk would shut her up, no fresh nappy dry her tears. After a while, the charwoman simply put her down opposite herself and waited, despairing. She had done everything she could, and yet that thing would not be quiet. Could it be that even at such an early age….? She could not bring herself to believe this. It would rob her of the only goal she had ever had in life, would deprive her even of the little purpose she had given herself. There would be no one to love her, no corrected version of her life. The tears started to run down her own cheeks now. Three people were crying.

She was almost happy when those busy calls heard the wailing and broke into her flat to collect the baby and return her to the person who had borne her. The woman no longer felt like the mother herself; the child had deserted her at first sight. They collected her, too, and all the way to prison she wondered how she could possibly end her meaningless life as soon as possible.

All the outside world ever knew of this little tragedy was broadcasted in the evening. A two-day old infant had been abducted from the hospital by a woman pretending to be a nurse. That woman had already been caught and the baby been found with her, unharmed. All the lucky mothers experienced a pleasant thrill at this news, and at least one of those who were not lucky enough to be mothers felt luckier at this moment, even though she was in custody on her own birthday: All she heard was "two-day old". She had made a mistake. Her baby had simply been too old.

Biography

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