After nine agonizing hours of contractions, I’m hauled into the delivery room. My pubes get shaved with a rusty razor. An enema is forced in my anus. The doctor, a brusque woman with coarse canine features, declares that I’m unable to dilate. Bluish light reflects in the lines of her face, her silhouette stark against the tiled walls.

“Five centimeters,” she says, and wags her head. “You’re not trying hard enough.”

The baby’s head is ripping me. The pain is unbearable. Wet with sweat, feverish and frantic, I scream.

“What are you yelling for?” The doctor rounds on me. “Who asked you to get pregnant? It didn’t hurt screwing, did it? But now you cry like it hurts? Shut your mouth and push!” Her harsh face twists with resentment.

“What would you know about screwing?” I say. “When was the last time you got laid, you sadistic bitch? Who’d want to fuck you? You’re nothing but a yapping mutt—” Pain cuts me off.

“Push, dura, push!”

I grunt and pant and squeeze.

“Bad mother! You’ll suffocate the baby! Push!”

Two nurses throw themselves on my stomach and press down. 

I can’t draw air.

“Give me the scalpel. I’m cutting her open.” The doctor leans in and hot fire splits my groin. 

I holler in agony.

“I got the head! Push!”

I push and feel something huge slide out of me. My belly collapses on itself like a deflated balloon.

“It’s a boy!” the nurse says.

“Pavlik.” I can’t see through my tears. “Pavlik!”

I hear a cry, feeble at first. With each breath it grows stronger. Then I see him. A reddish squirmy baby boy held in gloved hands. The nurse ties a tag with a number to his foot and an identical one to my wrist.

“Give him to me.” My voice is hoarse from screaming.

The nurse wipes him, swaddles him, and carries him out.

“Where is she taking him? I want my baby! Give me my baby!”

My abdomen contracts and something else plops out. I’m so weak, I can barely move. The nurse cleans me roughly and begins stitching me up, sticking the needle right into my flesh.

And I lose it.

. . .

I wake up in a dark room. My head spins. My breasts ache, engorged with milk. There is no baby at my side. I throw off the blanket and shift my legs and stifle a cry. My crotch ripples with pain. I grip the headboard, struggle to standing, and listen.

Soft snores. Measured breathing. Bodies around me on beds. Gray light seeps in from the gap in the drapes and I glimpse a sliver of the sky hung with clouds.

“That’s where the golden city is,” I whisper, “above the clouds. The place where eagles live.”

I step into the slippers, creep to the door, and crack it open. The hinges screech. I freeze. Someone rolls over with a sigh. I wait until the bed springs settle and slip out, shuffling toward the babies’ cries. I can hear them coming from the corridor ahead. I pass by the nurses’ station where a nurse sleeps with her head on the desk, turn to the right, and come upon a line of square windows.

The nursery. 

I press my face to the glass. 

Weak light illuminates two rows of insect-like trolleys on casters. Atop each of them is a plastic tray with a newborn, about twenty total, swaddled head to toe, tags with numbers tied around their bottom ends. Most of them are asleep, a few are crying. Their tiny scrunched up faces gape with toothless holes.

“Pavlik.” My breath fogs up the glass. 

I try the door. It’s unlocked. I step in.

“Pavlik?” 

The voice that comes from the corner of the room, from the trolley by the plastic baby scales, stops crying. I walk up to it and lean over.

A face looks at me, round and stubborn, like mine. Eyebrows in a frown. Eyes dark, unblinking. Beads of tears on the eyelashes. 

I check the tag. “Baboch Pavel Pavlovich, boy, labor: March twentieth, three twenty a.m. Weight three kilograms, height fifty centimeters.” My hands shake so hard, it takes me several attempts to lift him out and to free my breast.

He latches on at once. 

My nipples buzz. Milk drips from my other breast in a warm trickle and soaks the robe. I stroke his cheek, his forehead, his nose. I feel my tears dampen his blanket. “Pavlik, it’s Mama. How are you?”  

He breathes quietly, working. His nostrils flare.

“It’s me, remember? Is it okay if I call you Pavlik?”

Footsteps echo from the corridor.

My heart skips a beat. 

Pavlik spits the nipple out and hiccups. A thin line of saliva trails from his puckered lips.

“I won’t let them take you away.” I slip the robe over my breast and hasten out of the room.

The footsteps round the corner and the militant triumphantly points at me. “There she is!” 

Next to him walks the delivery doctor.

“You can't take him away from me, he’s mine!” 

I run to the end of the hallway, to the large window. It’s cracked open. I grab on to the frame and step on the hot radiator, hoisting myself up on the windowsill.

A door opposite the nursery opens and a woman’s head sticks out. She looks for the source of the noise.

“Where the hell are you going?” says the militant.

“Somewhere where I don’t have to see your ugly mug.”

A couple patients gather up by the doctor and engage in fervent whispers.

“That’s enough!” The militant strides to the window, a hand on his holster. “Get down, or—”

I push the windowpane open.

There is a collective intake of air and the militant stops, uncertain.

“Or what? You will shoot me? Go ahead. Is that all you can do?” I pass my eyes over the assembly. More post-labor women have gathered in the corridor in the meantime. They all stare at me, scared and curious. “Look at yourselves. You’re animals caged by fear.” 

I grip Pavlik firmer.

“Do you want to hear me confess? Is that what you want?” I raise my voice. “Well, you won’t get it because I’m not sorry! I would’ve killed him over and over! You want to accuse me of manslaughter, of committing a crime? But who are you to decide what’s unlawful? What do you do, day in and day out? You lie and pretend and cheat and hide and you’re afraid to speak your minds!”

The militant takes a step.

“Don’t move!”

He halts.

I peer outside.

Moscow is waking. Seven or so stories below, cars bustle along the street; above it spreads out thick drab grayness. I look at Pavlik. “You still want to come with me?”

He studies me with dark trusting eyes and then he blinks once, as if he agrees.

“Okay.” 

I face them. “You think it’s my end? You’re wrong. It’s my beginning.”

The sky calls to me. My fingers lengthen into feathers. My robe falls off and gives way to a black shiny mantle with the white crown of a predator and—

. . .

The eagle perches on the edge of the sill. It waits for the eaglet, a ball of silver fuzz with tiny talons, to climb onto its back and grip its nape. The vobla flings itself at the birds. The eagle snatches it out of the air and tears at it with its beak and consumes it and screeches at the barking dog and the herd of cows, sending them to stampede away.

It turns around, clumsily, moving first one leg, and then the other.

The clouds are gone, burned away by the sun. It shines bright against the blue of the sky and the eagle thinks it looks like a golden city. The little eaglet trembles in fright, squeaks, sinks its talons deeper. 

The eagle spreads its wings and takes off.

The ground below slants, falls back. Buildings blur in the bluish haze. Wind washes over the eagle’s body and whistles in its ears and carries it upward. Exhilarated by the flight, it screams and dives and swoops down and passes so closely to the road, it startles a flock of ravens pecking at something in the ditch. They croak and scatter, abandoning their meal. 

A dead jackal.

The eagle and the eaglet fly on.