Lie Down With Lions (7 page)

She was frightened. She recalled talking to her sister, Pauline, about childbirth. After Pauline’s first, Jane had visited her, taking a bottle of champagne and a little marijuana. When they were both extremely relaxed, Jane had asked what it was really like, and Pauline had replied: “Like shit-ting a melon.” They had giggled for what seemed like hours.

But Pauline had given birth at University College Hospital in the heart of London, not in a mud-brick house in the Five Lions Valley.

Jane thought: What am I going to
do?

I mustn’t panic. I must wash myself with warm water and soap; find a sharp scissors and put it in boiling water for fifteen minutes; get clean sheets to lie on; sip liquids; and relax.

But before she could do anything, another contraction began, and this one
really
hurt. She closed her eyes and tried to take slow, deep, regular breaths, as Jean-Pierre had explained, but it was difficult to be so controlled when all she wanted to do was cry out in fear and pain.

The spasm left her drained. She lay still, recovering. She realized she could not do any of the things she had listed: she could not manage on her own. As soon as she felt strong enough she would get up and go to the nearest house and ask the women to fetch the midwife.

The next contraction came sooner than she had expected, after what seemed like only a minute or two. As the tension reached its peak Jane said aloud: “Why don’t they
tell
you how much it
hurts?
”

As soon as it passed its peak she forced herself to get up. The terror of giving birth all alone gave her strength. She hobbled from the bedroom into the living room. She felt a little stronger with each step. She made it out into the courtyard; then suddenly there was a gush of warm fluid between her thighs, and her trousers were instantly drenched: the waters had broken. “Oh, no,” she groaned. She leaned against the doorpost. She was not sure she could walk even a few yards with her trousers falling down like this. She felt humiliated. “I must,” she said; but a new contraction began, and she sank to the ground, thinking: I’m going to have to do this alone.

Next time she opened her eyes there was a man’s face close to her own. He looked like an Arab sheikh: he had dark brown skin, black eyes and a black mustache, and his features were aristocratic—high cheekbones, a Roman nose, white teeth and a long jaw. It was Mohammed Khan, the father of Mousa.

“Thank God,” Jane muttered thickly.

“I came to thank you for saving the life of my only son,” Mohammed said in Dari. “Are you sick?”

“I’m having a baby.”

“Now?” he said, startled.

“Soon. Help me into the house.”

He hesitated—childbirth, like all things uniquely feminine, was considered unclean—but to his credit the hesitation was only momentary. He lifted her to her feet and supported her as she walked through the living room and into the bedroom. She lay down on the rug again. “Get help,” she told him.

He frowned, unsure what to do, looking very boyish and handsome. “Where is Jean-Pierre?”

“Gone to Khawak. I need Rabia.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll send my wife.”

“Before you go . . .”

“Yes?”

“Please give me some water.”

He looked shocked. It was unheard of for a man to serve a woman, even with a simple drink of water.

Jane added: “From the special jug.” She kept handy a jug of filtered boiled water for drinking: this was the only way to avoid the numerous intestinal parasites from which almost all the local people suffered all their lives.

Mohammed decided to flout convention. “Of course,” he said. He went into the next room and returned a moment later with a cup of water. Jane thanked him and sipped gratefully.

“I’ll send Halima to fetch the midwife,” he said.

Halima was his wife. “Thank you,” said Jane. “Tell her to hurry.”

Mohammed left. Jane was lucky it was he and not one of the other men. The others would have refused to touch a sick woman, but Mohammed was different. He was one of the most important guerrillas, and in practice was the local representative of the rebel leader, Masud. Mohammed was only twenty-four, but in this country that was not too young to be a guerrilla leader or to have a nine-year-old son. He had studied in Kabul, he spoke a little French, and he knew that the customs of the Valley were not the only forms of polite behavior in the world. His main responsibility was to organize the convoys to and from Pakistan with their vital supplies of arms and ammunition for the rebels. It was one such convoy that had brought Jane and Jean-Pierre to the Valley.

Waiting for the next contraction, Jane recalled that awful journey. She had thought of herself as a healthy, active and strong person, easily capable of walking all day; but she had not anticipated the shortage of food, the steep climbs, the rough stony paths and the incapacitating diarrhea. For parts of the trip they had moved only at night, for fear of Russian helicopters. They had also had to contend with hostile villagers in places: fearing that the convoy would attract a Russian attack, the locals would refuse to sell food to the guerrillas, or hide behind barred doors, or direct the convoy to a meadow or orchard a few miles away, a perfect camping spot which turned out not to exist.

Because of the Russian attacks, Mohammed changed his routes constantly. Jean-Pierre had got hold of American maps of Afghanistan in Paris, and they were better than anything the rebels had, so Mohammed often came to the house to look at them before sending off a new convoy.

In fact Mohammed came oftener than was really necessary. He also addressed Jane more than Afghan men usually did, and made eye contact with her a little too much, and stole too many glances at her body. She thought he was in love with her, or at least he had been until her pregnancy became visible.

She in turn had been drawn to him at the time when she was miserable about Jean-Pierre. Mohammed was lean and brown and strong and powerful, and for the first time in her life, Jane had been attracted to a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist pig.

She could have had an affair with him. He was a devout Muslim, as were all the guerrillas, but she doubted whether that would have made any difference. She believed what her father used to say: “Religious conviction may thwart a timid desire but nothing can stand against genuine lust.” That particular line had enraged Mummy. No, there was as much adultery in this puritan peasant community as anywhere else, as Jane had realized listening to the riverside gossip among the women while they fetched water or bathed. Jane knew how it was managed, too. Mohammed had told her. “You can see the fish jump at dusk under the waterfall beyond the last water mill,” he had said one day. “I go there some nights to catch them.” At dusk the women were all cooking, and the men were sitting in the courtyard of the mosque, talking and smoking: lovers would not be discovered so far from the village, and neither Jane nor Mohammed would have been missed.

The idea of making love by a waterfall with this handsome, primitive tribesman tempted Jane; but then she had got pregnant, and Jean-Pierre had confessed how frightened he was of losing her, and she had decided to devote all her energies to making her marriage work, come what may; and so she never went to the waterfall, and after her pregnancy began to show, Mohammed did not look at her body.

Perhaps it was their latent intimacy that had emboldened Mohammed to come in and to help her, when other men would have refused and might even have turned away at the door. Or perhaps it was Mousa. Mohammed had only one son—and three daughters—and he probably now felt unbearably indebted to Jane. I made a friend and an enemy today, she thought: Mohammed and Abdullah.

The pain began again, and she realized she had enjoyed a longer-than-usual respite. Were the contractions becoming irregular? Why? Jean-Pierre had said nothing about that. But he had forgotten much of the gynecology he had studied three or four years ago.

This one was the worst so far, and it left her feeling shivery and nauseated. What had happened to the midwife? Mohammed
must
have sent his wife to fetch her—he would not forget, or change his mind. But would she obey her husband? Of course—Afghan women always did. But she might walk slowly, gossiping on the way, or even stop off at some other house to drink tea. If there was adultery in the Five Lions Valley there would be jealousy, too, and Halima was sure to know or at least guess at her husband’s feelings for Jane—wives always did. She might resent being asked to rush to the aid of her rival, the exotic white-skinned educated foreigner who so fascinated her husband. Suddenly Jane felt very angry with Mohammed and with Halima, too. I’ve done nothing wrong, she thought. Why have they all deserted me? Why isn’t my husband here?

When another contraction began, she burst into tears. It was just too much. “I can’t go on,” she said aloud. She was shaking uncontrollably. She wanted to die before the pain could get worse. “Mummy, help me, Mummy,” she sobbed.

Suddenly there was a strong arm around her shoulders and a woman’s voice in her ear, murmuring something incomprehensible but soothing in Dari. Without opening her eyes, she held on to the other woman, weeping and crying out as the contraction grew more intense; until at length it began to fade, too slowly, but with a feeling of finality, as if it might be the last, or perhaps the last bad one.

She looked up and saw the serene brown eyes and nutshell cheeks of old Rabia, the midwife.

“May God be with you, Jane Debout.”

Jane felt relief like the lifting of a crushing burden. “And with you, Rabia Gul,” she whispered gratefully.

“Are the pains coming fast?”

“Every minute or two.”

Another woman’s voice said: “The baby is coming early.”

Jane turned her head and saw Zahara Gul, Rabia’s daughter-in-law, a voluptuous girl of Jane’s age with wavy near-black hair and a wide, laughing mouth. Of all the women in the village, Zahara was the one to whom Jane felt close. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

Rabia said: “The birth has been brought on by carrying Mousa up the hillside.”

“Is that all?” said Jane.

“It is plenty.”

So they don’t know about the fight with Abdullah, Jane thought. He has decided to keep it to himself.

Rabia said: “Shall I make everything ready for the baby?”

“Yes, please.” Goodness knows what kind of primitive gynecology I’m letting myself in for, Jane thought; but I can’t do this alone—I just can’t.

“Would you like Zahara to make some tea?” Rabia asked.

“Yes, please.” There was nothing superstitious about that, at least.

The two women got busy. Just having them there made Jane feel better. It was nice, she thought, that Rabia had asked permission to help—a Western doctor would have walked in and taken charge as if he owned the place. Rabia washed her hands ritually, calling on the prophets to make her red-faced—which meant successful—and then washed them again, thoroughly, with soap and lots of water. Zahara brought in a jar of wild rue, and Rabia lit a handful of the small dark seeds with some charcoal. Jane recalled that evil spirits were said to be frightened off by the smell of burning rue. She consoled herself with the thought that the acrid smoke would serve to keep flies out of the room.

Rabia was a little more than a midwife. Delivering babies was her main work, but she also had herbal and magical treatments to increase the fertility of women who were having difficulty getting pregnant. She had methods of preventing conception and bringing on abortion, too, but there was much less demand for these: Afghan women generally wanted lots of children. Rabia would also be consulted about any “feminine” illness. And she was usually asked to wash the dead—a task which, like delivering babies, was considered unclean.

Jane watched her move around the room. She was probably the oldest woman in the village, being somewhere around sixty. She was short—not much more than five feet tall—and very thin, like most of the people here. Her wrinkled brown face was surrounded by white hair. She moved quietly, her bony old hands precise and efficient.

Jane’s relationship with her had begun in mistrust and hostility. When Jane had asked whom Rabia called upon in case of difficult deliveries, Rabia had snapped: “May the devil be deaf, I’ve never had a difficult birth and I’ve never lost a mother or a child.” But later, when village women came to Jane with minor menstrual problems or routine pregnancies, Jane would send them to Rabia instead of prescribing placebos; and this was the beginning of a working relationship. Rabia had consulted Jane about a recently delivered mother who had a vaginal infection. Jane had given Rabia a supply of penicillin and had explained how to prescribe it. Rabia’s prestige had rocketed when it became known that she had been entrusted with Western medicine; and Jane had been able to tell her, without giving offense, that Rabia herself had probably caused the infection by her practice of manually lubricating the birth canal during delivery.

From then on Rabia began to turn up at the clinic once or twice a week to talk to Jane and watch her work. Jane took these opportunities to explain, rather casually, such things as why she washed her hands so often, why she put all her instruments in boiling water after using them, and why she gave lots of fluids to infants with diarrhea.

In turn, Rabia told Jane some of her secrets. Jane was interested to learn what was in the potions Rabia made, and she could guess now some of them might work: medicines to promote pregnancy contained rabbit brains or cat spleen, which might provide hormones missing from the patient’s metabolism; and the mint and catnip in many preparations probably helped to clear up infections which hindered conception. Rabia also had a physic for wives to give to impotent husbands, and there was no doubt about how that worked: it contained opium.

Mistrust had given way to wary mutual respect, but Jane had not consulted Rabia about her own pregnancy. It was one thing to allow that Rabia’s mixture of folklore and witchcraft might work on Afghan women, and quite another to subject herself to it. Besides, Jane had expected Jean-Pierre to deliver her baby. So, when Rabia had asked about the position of the baby, and had prescribed a vegetable diet for a girl, Jane had made it clear that this pregnancy was going to be a Western one. Rabia had looked hurt, but had accepted the ruling with dignity. And now Jean-Pierre was in Khawak and Rabia was right here, and Jane was glad to have the help of an old woman who had delivered hundreds of babies and had herself given birth to eleven.