Sydney, Australia
March, 1978
I have handed in my Ph.D. thesis. I am about to leave Australia to work in
Philadelphia. My plans are grand: stay with on Malibu Beach,
travel across America giving seminars at four University Departments.
My flat-mate and I are chattering
happily as we prepare Saturday evening dinner for our friend and
ourselves. I chop carrots and the radio is playing reggae music. A
news flash. We are told that a bomb has exploded outside the Sydney
hotel where a conference for Commonwealth premiers is in progress.
Two bystanders are killed: the target is unarmed. Nature is again
allowed to take its course with the Prime Minister of India.
Our friend arrives. We eat dinner
soberly, subdued. We had planned to watch a movie. My flat-mate and
our friend want to drive to the cinema, I need to run there. I wait
for them when I arrive, smug in the triumph of a fleet foot over the
availability of parking spaces. We go in together and pleasantly pass
the next few hours watching the adaptation of John Fowles’ book,
“The Magus.”
Budapest, Hungary
July 1980
I am in Budapest for a Physiology
Congress.
I walk from Pest to Buda; over the
bridge across the Danube towards the monument to freedom the locals
call the Fishlady. I turn back to look at Pest and I see both a
red-starred jeep filled with Russian soldiers and the square where
other Russian soldiers had opened fire on infant, child and adult
Hungarians in 1956. Soldiers and tanks in this beautiful city of
mazurkas and Bartok.
I shower in one of a non-sexually
segregated series of shower stalls in the student hostel when I first
understand that I really am pregnant. The body I wash is unfamiliar,
how could my body change in this manner? When I dress I see that a
blouse that fit loosely two weeks ago is tight. Dressed, outside, I
find that my eyes will not stay open in the summer Sunday sun. I
stand close to a brown brick wall and remove my contact lenses.
Instant relief.
My nausea backs up long enough for me to buy salami,
sauerkraut and bread from a nearby small goods shop. I cross the rode
and climb onto a very clean tram, no one checks my ticket. Over the
river and in a busier part of town, I descend towards the center of
the earth by many steps and then escalator into a very clean train
platform and onto a very clean train. One very clean bus later and I
am at the Congress headquarters.
I sit through lectures all morning and
greet colleagues during the breaks and in the afternoon nausea
overcomes me. I discreetly remove myself from the lecture room to
search for the first aid room.
“Can you please help me find a
doctor? A gynecologist.”
“Eh?”
“I’m pregnant.” The first person
I tell. The first human on earth to learn about my son’s existence.
“Preg-a-nant? Show me,” The
white-coated young man gives me a Hungarian-English dictionary. He
lounges over the desk while he and his two companions look at me
expectantly.
“Oh. Preg-nant. Preg-nant. Hmm.
Pregnant. Yes! Pregnant!” He suggests a doctor I can visit at the
local hospital.
I instantly decide to wait three
weeks until I return to Philadelphia. I smile, I hope enigmatically
like the Mona Lisa, and walk away.
Four days later, I have survived my own
talk, several poster sessions, many lectures, the congress banquet,
the congress boat ride on the Danube and the amorous advances of a
Dutch physiologist and an Indian physician. I stand two hours in a
closely packed line, waiting to buy a railway ticket to Thessalonika
at the station. Cigarette smoke in my face, nausea, nausea. My
feeling of ill being is intensified when the ticket-seller demands
American dollars and refuses to accept Hungarian florints or
travelers’ checks.
The following day I return with a detective
novel and American dollars and the wait is neither unpleasant or in
vain. Although it could have been – I am one dollar short. Suddenly
a man materializes from the crowd and gives the needed dollar to the
ticket collector, and then disappears before I have time to thank
him.
That evening my colleague Eileen, and I, board the train to Thessalonika.