Seven Turns

Simcha, 11 Cheshvan, evening

The bus leaves the central station at six in the morning, and I got there at five, because at my age it's better to sit on a bench than to run after a bus. The windows on that bus are thick and cloudy, riding in it is like sitting inside a jar of water, and the whole way the driver had the soccer game on the radio and swore at the goalkeeper by name. We were on the road maybe twenty minutes, and I got through half the Tehillim, because the women around me were reading the Psalms out loud and I read along.

On that day the line at Rachel's Tomb is so long you can't see where it starts. Young women and old ones, and every one of them has some trouble in her bag. I carried mine in my wallet, in a photograph: Noa at her wedding, in white, twenty-nine years old. Now she's thirty-nine, she's had four rounds of shots, and four times nothing. In Meknes my mother went to the grave of a tzaddik the same way when my older sister had no children, and she took me along. I was six, and all I remember is that it smelled of wax and mint and that my mother didn't say a word the whole way home.

Yocheved sits by the entrance. Everybody knows her. She has been selling string there for thirty years, red, on little cardboard spools, and she winds it around the stone herself, seven times, with a prayer. I asked her for a spool. She looked at me and asked who it was for. I said it was for my granddaughter. Then she put her hand flat over the box and said, "Let her come herself. The string is always for someone, Savta. Nobody wears it for free."

I told her, "For me." She looked at me for a long time, then took twenty shekels from me, though she charges everyone else ten, and walked me to the stone. We wound it together, seven times, she held the spool and I guided the string, and the velvet on the stone was warm, though there was a draft in that hall. On the way back the goalkeeper let another one in, and the driver slammed the wheel so hard that all the women stopped reading. I held the spool in my fist and thought Noa would laugh at me.

Noa

Of course I laughed. Grandma pulled the spool out of her bag right at the table, between the hummus and the salads, and said, "Binti, give me your hand," and I gave it to her, because there has been no point arguing with her since I was five.

She measured the string from my wrist to her elbow and bit it off with her teeth, even though the scissors were lying right there. Then she tied a knot, passing the end through again and again and whispering something in the Arabic I never managed to learn. On the cardboard she had unwound it from, someone had written "Yocheved, strings" in marker, with a phone number, and I put it in the drawer with the batteries, I couldn't tell you why. Eran sat across from us wearing the polite face of an engineer who is being shown a perpetual motion machine.

I'm an archivist. For twelve years I've been sorting through other people's letters, and I know how many strings like this turn up in them, amulets, notes slipped under pillows, and how it all turned out. We had a shelf in the fridge just for the medications, little boxes with names that sounded like planets. In the evenings I injected myself in the stomach in front of the bathroom mirror, and the bruises went around my navel like the marks on a clock face. Four protocols, two transfers, one pregnancy that made it to seven weeks. After the fourth round the doctor said we should take a break, and we were in our third month of taking a break. I never did clear that shelf in the fridge.

I wore the string because taking it off in front of Grandma would have been cruel, and when she wasn't around I forgot it was there. The wool was a little scratchy, and at work it kept catching on the archive folders.

Six weeks later, on the first night of Hanukkah, I bought a test at the pharmacy on our corner so I could throw it away and be done with the whole thing. The two lines showed up before I'd even set it down on the edge of the sink. I sat on the bathroom floor with the red string hanging from my wrist, and I looked at the string longer than I looked at the test.

Eran

I'm a structural engineer and I measure everything, it's an occupational disease: I keep a tape measure in the car and calipers in my desk drawer. On the first Saturday night after that dinner, while Noa was asleep, I measured the string on her wrist. Two hundred thirty-one millimeters, counting the tails of the knot. I put the number in the notes on my phone, I suppose so that in a month I could show her how wool shrinks when it gets wet.

Wool does shrink, and a week later, when I got two hundred twenty-seven, I wasn't surprised. I always measured at the same time, after the neighbors across the way had put out the Havdalah candle in the wine, with the same tape and from the same side of the knot. Every Saturday it came out four millimeters shorter, give or take half a millimeter, and by Hanukkah the string had lost more than two centimeters.

The knot was intact. Nobody had trimmed the ends, the string hadn't worn through anywhere, and in the light the wool was as soft and fuzzy as on the first night, without a single pill. The string was just getting shorter, evenly, on Saturdays.

When Noa showed me the test, I hugged her first, and then I went into the bathroom, opened my notes and stared at the column of numbers until the screen went dark. I didn't write anything down that night.

I never told her. A few times I nearly did, in the evenings, when she fell asleep on the couch with her hand on her belly and the string made a thin red line across her wrist. All those weeks the check engine light was on in my car, and I never took it in, I drove around with it until spring. Someone who had spent four years sticking needles in her own stomach finally had something go right, and I was going to walk up to her with a tape measure.

Irit

I've seen plenty of spontaneous pregnancies in our IVF unit after a couple stops treatment, it's practically a statistic of its own: the body stops waiting, and something in it lets go. I wouldn't even have remembered Noa Almog if it weren't for her bloodwork.

In a normal pregnancy the beta hCG climbs unevenly, it's a living process, with steps and dips. Noa's doubled every forty-eight hours, straight out of the textbook, three times in a row. I showed the printout to the head of the unit, and she joked that with numbers like those we could print brochures.

I also remember her because of a small thing that annoyed me. After four protocols the veins inside her elbows were worn out, so I was drawing from the back of her hand, and Noa wouldn't let me slide the red string off her wrist, even though it sat exactly where I needed to hold the skin. I told her I'd use the other arm. She agreed, and then, out in the hallway, she came back and asked whether it was normal for the string to cut in like that. I took a look. The string was tight, and the skin under it was slightly white, the way it gets under a watch when you buckle the strap one hole tighter.

I told her wool shrinks when it gets wet and she should loosen it. She said the knot couldn't be untied, and pulled her sleeve down over her fingers. I wrote "moderate anxiety" in her chart and offered her the psychologist, the way I offer everyone. Women who get pregnant after IVF often hold on to some object, a ring, or the pajamas they wore for the transfer. I've had a chipped mug at my station for nine years now, from a patient who had twins, and I won't throw it away, even though nobody can drink out of it anymore. That day there was a box of sufganiyot on the counter from some sponsor company, and Noa took one and carried it off without a bite.

Dmitry

Twelve weeks, nuchal translucency, routine screening, twenty minutes for the whole thing. I've been doing ultrasound for thirty-two years, five of them in Kharkiv, and I can do these scans with my eyes shut. The patient lies still with her left arm under her head, and the husband stands by the wall holding his phone face down.

Nuchal translucency normal, nasal bone visible, heart rate one sixty-two. I run the probe along the spine and see the cord. It goes around the fetus in a loop, and another loop, and another. I angle the probe and switch on the Doppler to see the flow, and the loops light up red and blue, and there are seven of them. Seven turns around a body six centimeters long. There isn't that much cord at twelve weeks. It wouldn't stretch to three turns.

At twelve weeks a wrapped cord means nothing, the fetus swims around in there with all the room in the world and it all comes undone ten times a day. I know this, and I'm about to say so. I open my mouth, and on the screen the lowest loop pulls tight. Slowly, a centimeter a second, the way you pull a shoelace tight. Then the second one. A pause, and the third. That's how you wind thread on a spool, tugging it snug after every turn.

The patient says a quiet "oh" and takes her left arm out from under her head. There's a red string on her wrist, the skin under it has gone completely white, and a thin dark line is rising along the edge.

I hit freeze. On the frozen screen four loops are pulled tight and three are loose. I hit print, the printer pushes out the image, and I tear it off and put it in her hand, though we only give out the images at the end, in an envelope, with the report. The husband says, "Take it off, Noa, this is crazy, take it off right now." I start the probe again. The loops lie quietly, all seven, heart rate one sixty. I type into the report, "Umbilical cord entanglement, follow-up recommended in one week," and I can't remember the Hebrew word for umbilical cord, though I write it every day.

Noa

We drove home from the clinic without talking. A February rain was coming down, fine and cold, the kind Jerusalem gets for three days straight, and at the lights in Talpiot Eran looked at my hand and I looked at the printout. It was still warm from the printer, and on it, gray on black, lay my child, wound around seven times. I put it in my bag face down, then took it out and put it back face up, because face down was worse.

Eran asked me to take the string off in the hallway and again in the car, and that evening he brought the scissors from the kitchen. I said I would leave him if he touched it, and I was surprised to hear that I meant it. He set the scissors down on the table and went out to the car, and from the window I watched him sitting there with the engine off.

The cardboard was in the drawer with the batteries. Yocheved picked up on the sixth ring, sleepy and cross, and asked who had given me this number. I told her I'd been wearing the string since last Cheshvan, that it was shrinking and cutting in, and that today on the scan the cord was wrapped around seven times. She didn't say anything for a long while, and then she asked, "Who was it wound for?" I told her my grandmother had said, "For me." Yocheved said, "Then call your grandmother," and hung up.

It was almost midnight, but Grandma answered right away, she hadn't been sleeping. I told her about the loops on the screen and that the skin under the string had turned white. She listened without a word. Then she asked whether I'd eaten anything today. She told me that Yocheved had charged her twenty shekels and everyone else ten, and that the driver had sworn at the goalkeeper the whole way, and she had already told me all of it at dinner, word for word. Only after that did she say, "Don't take it off. I've arranged it." I didn't ask with whom, or what she had arranged.

For a week I slept on my back with my left hand on top of the blanket, so nothing would press on it. The string sat so tight that by evening my fingers were swollen, and I had to move my wedding ring onto a chain.

On Wednesday, just before dawn, I woke up because my hand felt light. The string was lying on the sheet, whole, with the knot still tied, a closed ring that had no way of slipping off my hand. There was a dark mark on my wrist, like the mark a bracelet leaves. It was twenty to five. At six my mother called and said Grandma had died in her sleep during the night, and that nobody could say exactly when, because the aide had looked in on her at four and then again at five.

A different doctor did the follow-up, a young woman. There was no entanglement. She played the recording back three times and said that last week had most likely been an artifact, with Doppler the loops sometimes overlap. I nodded. The image was in my bag, and I didn't show it to her.

The women from the chevra kadisha who washed Grandma's body gave my mother a little bag with the things that had been on her. Inside were her brooch and a red wool string with no knot, curled into a ring. My mother didn't know where it had come from, and she gave it to me.

Noa, 11 Cheshvan, a year later

My daughter is two months old. Her name is Rachel, my mother suggested it, and I couldn't find it in me to argue. She has Grandma's eyebrows and a habit of clenching her fist in her sleep.

This morning at six the bus with the thick windows left the central station again. I didn't go. I found Eran's notes back in the spring, when I was looking through his phone for the plumber's number: the column of millimeters, Saturday after Saturday, and under it a single line, written the night after the scan. I read the first two words and closed the note.

In the evening Rachel fell asleep in my arms with her fist against her cheek, and I opened her fingers to wipe her palm. On her wrist, where babies have that little crease, there was a thin white line, perfectly even, the kind a strap leaves when someone buckles it one hole tighter.

I put Rachel down, opened the dresser drawer where the printout and both strings lie in separate envelopes under Grandma's brooch, and took out Eran's tape measure.