A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann Page B

one day be given, that would be written in official registers, books, minutes, and lists, but a secret name. Saying it out loud would bring bad luck, just like buying clothes or equipment before the baby was born, or at any rate before the pregnancy was fully visible.
    In her eighteenth week, Erika learned she was expecting a boy. She was examined by a male doctor who had been a few years ahead of her in medical school. When he had said that the fetus was lying in a position that prevented his seeing whether it was a boy or a girl, Erika grabbed hold of the transducer and managed to get a picture of the child that showed them both it was a boy.
    It was a boy, but was he viable? She checked his head and neck, the length of his legs. Everything looked fine, but Erika left the clinic with a sense of having intruded on her child. It had looked at her from the other side, not wanting to be disturbed, not wanting to be invaded. It was just a glimpse before it dissolved into lines and dots on the screen and a heart beating and beating and beating.
    In week thirty-one, she began to think: I won’t escape this time. Day after day she was helping women through complicated pregnancies and births, calming them, reassuring them, calling it
the most natural thing in the world,
but she herself was afraid. Afraid lest she bleed to death, lest she not be able to breathe. There he lay like a little suicide bomber, waiting to blow himself and Erika to pieces.
    So she asked him if he could manage the journey. Can you handle the choices life is going to thrust at you as soon as the umbilical cord is cut—taking a breath, finding the breast, crying when you need me? Or will you turn inward, into yourself, not have the energy, not cope, not want to? Ane stroked Erika’s blue-white full-moon belly and talked about all the games and songs she would teach him. She stood in the middle of the floor and sang:
    Goosey goosey gander
    Where shall I wander?
    Upstairs and downstairs
    And in my lady’s chamber
    There I met an old man
    Who wouldn’t say his prayers
    So I took him by the left leg
    And threw him down the stairs
    Ane looked at Erika. She asked: “Can he hear us in there?”
    “I don’t know. I think so.”
    “What’s he going to be called when he comes out?”
    “I don’t know.”
     
    And then you’re here. You’re mine and I’m yours and I shall never be myself again. First the fear of being ripped apart, and once the baby is born, the knowledge that I have been ripped apart, though not in the way I thought. Night after night after night without sleep and with you held near to me; the blood, the tears, the milk, the fever, and hard lumps in my breast that are only sometimes eased by warm water, warm skin, or your mouth; the loneliness when everyone else is sleeping, except you and me.
     
    She would lie awake in the night, listening to the sounds he made. She would keep bending over the crib, bringing her face close to the baby’s to check that he was breathing. She would pick him up and take him into her own bed. His body was so warm and heavy. One night she whispered something in his ear, first into the left ear, then into the right. He can’t remember it now, but what she whispered was his name, because she wanted him to be the first to hear it.
    For many weeks after the boy was born, he had no name. There were plenty of suggestions—Kristian, Sebastian, Lukas, Bror, Thorleif—all rejected. But one evening, his parents came to a decision. He was lying between them in the bed, not quite two months old. He had a cold, and a fever. His airways were still so narrow, and Erika said several times that if he got any worse, they’d have to take him to the emergency room. She tried breastfeeding him and dissolved into tears when he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, suckle, his little mouth slack and immobile around her nipple. But as the night wore on, he improved. His breathing grew less labored. He took milk from the breast. He relaxed