Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

The journey to heaven leads past the place
where the dragons lie.
Cyril of Jerusalem, 315?-386

As it turned out, the decision to make Paris our home base was swiftly overruled by an "impossible" pregnancy.

We'd scoured the newspapers till we found a cheaper apartment. In a single taxi trip we moved our possessions: two suitcases, two typewriters, a cardboard box of books, and another holding dishes, hot plate, and skillet.

The new place was a sixth-floor walk-up just off the rue St. Jacques: two tiny sky-lit rooms beneath a slanting roof on which John regularly bumped his head. The five lower floors were mostly occupied by Arab families. Floor by floor, as we circled up the stairs, we'd breathe in aromas of lamb and spice.

Our own meals we ate most of the time in a state-subsidized students' restaurant in the next block, where the eye of the rooster head might stare balefully from the bottom of the soup bowl. We loved Near Eastern food, though, and would sometimes splurge on dinner at a Moroccan place. Why, then, did the hallway odors in our building make me feel so strange? Queasy... More than once I reached the communal bathroom on the fourth floor barely in time to be sick to my stomach.

By the middle of March, I didn't even have to smell food to feel the waves of nausea begin. Climbing the stairs one afternoon, I had to lean against a wall till the dizziness passed. One of our neighbors, a large, cheerful Algerian woman who always called "Bonjour!" through her open door, came out and led me into her living room. Shooing cats and children off the sofa, she made me lie down.

"It's this way with me, too," she said, "the first few months. Especially when it's a boy. Boys are always more trouble."

The first months? When it's a... Was I --