It was winter, when Esther was feeling the pangs of birth. She remembered herself sitting at the window, looking at the heavy black clouds accumulating-gathering in the sky, with a promise of first snow. She was feeling her body’s trembling. It was the time to practice what she had learned in the medical school, so she told herself. She had not accomplished her studies there, due to Aaron’s the pressure.of her husband, Rabbi Aaron. Then he agreed that she would work a couple of months – and be partially employed in the obsterics department. But when her pregnancy advanced – he became scared and said: ‘Don’t risk to be with many people. You may be pushed unwillingly by someone- or infected.’ She knew his pedancy, and followed his order – so that it would not make him sore. She had led her last months of pregnancy in idleness. . .
It was afternoon. Rabbi Aaron had been at home - when Esther told him her feeling: ‘my time has come.’ He ran to his childhood friend, Bearl, the synagogue beadle- who had still owned the his wagon drawn by a horse. He came very soon with Rabbi Aaron to his hut and took Esther to the hospital. Some of her woman friends there- were still in their positions at that evening. They were delighted to check her body, saying that birth would not take place so soon, maybe only on the next day. Rabbi Aaron left her, believing that the birth would be delayed.
But suddenly Esther was feeling pains. Esther’s friend- the nurse Mina - cheered her up, but an hour later, at midnight, the chief obsterician woman was called to her. Esther’s birth did not take long, and she was glad it had been over.
She heard the midwife calling: “A male!” All seemed to be quiet, except the baby’s shriek and whimping. But suddenly the baby was snatched by the nurse. Esther tried to glance around and saw no one. Her perspiring and painful body trembled, and in her vague consciousness she understood: something had gone wrong. Her birth seemed to be regular, but…
The woman physician and the nurse did not answer her repeated call for them. They also disappeared from her eyes. After a short time - the woman-doctor arrived back to the room. Esther saw also the nurse already standing beside her, severe faced, holding a parcel, in which the born infant had been wrapped. His bald head was peeping out as a turtle’s head out of its shield.
Esther was filled with dread. Her consciousness was lost for a moment. She saw like a strike of babbled lightning. She began to sob, reflecting: ‘if the infant is alive, why hadn’t they shown him to me immediately? Had they washed him already? . . Why are they here- looking so strangely at me?”
She felt very thirsty and asked some water. She had just heard the physician ordering the nurse: “Let me have him”, and the wrapped baby had been given to her. Esther requested water once again, and her friend, nurse Mina - again disregarded that. She approached Esther, holding her by two hands, indicating her to look toward the woman physician holding her baby:
“The baby is alive,” she told Esther, who heard like thunders rolling around her, “but his hands…”
”Let me have him,” Esther yelled. She repeated saying that, but the woman physician turned to her, she had a metalic voice, that banged on Esther: “He was born without hands, Esther Hittin. We are sorry.”
“Be quiet, Esther…please,” murmured Mina – the nursing midwife standing by her, “You should not be excited. You may hurt yourslf, and him.”
A black curtian was hovering over Esther. She shrieked: ‘Oh, God,’– but then took control of herself, and demanded again to see him.
The doctor opened the sheet and showed her the horrible sight of a bare creature - head and legs and chest with shoulders, but without hands. ‘Just a cut out tree,’ she thought, ‘just a cut out tree. This is what God had wanted me to bear?’
Her friend, nurse Mina, touched the cushion under her head and caressed her hair.
“Your husband will come soon, and we will tell him,” she said.
“You should be used to see his sight,” said the woman doctor in a commanding voice. To Esther it seemed sadistic. “He is a living human being.”
The physician left the room with the baby. Her friend - Mina, still remained with her.
Esther was crying in terror. She hardly glanced at anything. Another nurse came in, and helped Mina to carry Esther on a stretcher to the large hall, where many women were lying after giving birth.
‘It would have been better’, she thought for a second, ‘if they had taken the monster from me forever. Or not shown him to me at all. Better I would have died- and never seen him. But he should live. . .Why?… He has lost his simple human form still in my womb. Why, God? Why has he come out of my flesh and blood ?’
Then she became asleep from birth fatigue, or just swooned from the shock…
After almost a week in hospital, Esther carried her wrapped baby to go out. But before leaving- she was suddenly called to the hospital’s main office. She found there a midwife and a male doctor. They had been her instructors in the obsterics courses, and she saw that her husband had been already seated nearby.
“We apologize for this Questionaire,” the midwife told Esther, “But we have an ordinary routine of inqiry – in a case like yours.”
“We must do it,” said the physician, “for medical analysis and scientific research. Maybe your inheritance or surrounding or both - will reveal us something.”
“You want to fumble in my terrible wound; it is still paining.”
“We would not bother you a lot.”
They inquired hher if there had been such a case in her family. No, she said, and they asked Aaron the same question, which he also replied negatively.
“Now think before you answer,” said the man, “ try to recall if while studying or working in our Institution, you touched or tried a certain pill or drank a liquid, that you had thought to be plain pure water. Or a medicine, or whatever.”
“You try to condemn me!” she was screaming, “ I don’t have a suicidical tendency, doc! I wanted this.baby…so much!”
She began crying, moving the small creature in her bosom, and Aaron tried to relieve her, and grabbed the baby together with her.
“We have remained with enigma and uncertainty,” said the physician. He indicated both to rise and go out.
In the following evening - the circumcision ceremony of the baby took place. The Circumcizer Reb Yudel arrived with Rabbi Haneles to Aron;s hut. Though the beadle Bearl and the warden Shmaryeh had warned the Chief Rabbi, that it might be a very poor ceremony. They could have found, they said, other two people to make the praying ‘Minien’ (team of ten men)- but he wanted to be present.
“I am not a Jewish Hosid,” Rabbi Haneles told the couple, “I don’t believe in a demon’s interference in daily life. If my participation contributes even one sixtieth of a cheer up, it would be beneficial.”
The circumcizer Reb Yudel concentrated in cutting off the upper skin, that covered the end of the baby’s penis. It seemed like he had not noticed the infant’s missing hands. The baby was wrapped by a cloth, and nobody told Yudel about his defficiency, and he was in a hurry to another ceremony. All the other people present in the ceremony, including a woman neighbor - gazed askew at the baby and glanced at each other in a awe. As if they were signing to each other: ‘I know what you know’.
The little baby screamed like every normally shaped Jewish baby. Soon his mother took him away, mumbling to herself: ‘It had been better if the man with the knife would have cut my son’s throat. Abraham, our forefather, had refrained from doing that to his son Isaac. God pitied him - at the last minute.. .God had not pitied my son. . .’
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CHAPTER 4