The midwife knocked on my door on one evening of damp earth. She looked like a farmer with her big boots and her bucket full of water. She put the bucket down in my living room, waited until her breath would be calm and said then: "So. Here I am to get the baby."
"What baby?" I wondered and stared at the midwife. "But I am not pregnant at all! How will you get a baby? I haven't even slept with a man!"
"That is none of my business", replied the midwife. "I was sent here to deliver you. Lay down on the sofa."
I obeyed, protesting already somewhat weaker: "There is nothing to deliver."
"There is always something to deliver!" said the midwife firmly. "Normally babies, but you won't believe me what strange things I have already pulled out of women!"
I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I didn't want to see the instruments, which reminded me the teeth-puller I feared as much as normal people fear dogs.
"Do you think dogs have group souls or individual souls?" I asked the midwife, suddenly convinced that she might know the answer, because she knew things about me not even I did know.
The woman did not answer, but put her hands on my head and my chest and my belly. I did not even wonder that she had three hands. I just wondered whether she would deliver a puppy or a book.
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