The Midwife's Code | Part I
A Story of Erasure, Resistance, and the Cure They Tried to Bury
Russian Roulette
The song had been playing for a while. Mara didn’t notice at first. The old speaker, battered and unreliable, had started up on its own, clicking and whirring. Then, Jacques Brel’s voice. “Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas…” Don’t quit me.
With an aching throat and tears blurring her eyes, Mara pulls the cotton blanket over the tiny, fragile infant. Don’t quit me. The weight of the fabric is almost nothing. Like the body beneath it. Like the air in her lungs. Like the last shred of belief Mara had clung to. She could keep them alive if only she fought hard enough, if only she worked fast enough. Mara swallows. She should move. She should clean. She should prepare for the next one. But she doesn’t. She sits back on her heels, her head in her hands. The song plays on.
“Moi, je t'offrirai des perles de pluie, venues de pays où il ne pleut pas…”
Rain that never falls. Promises that were never real. Medicine that never came.
Wailing rises from the next room. The mother. A raw, guttural sound, scraping against the walls like something wounded. Mara isn’t even sure she’ll make it through the night. Heartbreak is a cruel medicine when infection is already burning through the body. It hollows you out and leaves nothing for the fight.
Mara had seen it too many times to call it anything else. A waiting game. A gamble. A barrel spinning empty or full. Russian roulette. The words a scientist had once told The New York Times when the then newly appointed administration started slashing health research like it was dead weight. “You don’t know what’s coming.”
Back then, it was a way to describe the gut-wrenching uncertainty of working in a system that was fiercely under attack. But now, it was the reality of the people she had under her care. It was every woman who bled too long after birth, every feverish newborn, every infection that should have been treatable but wasn’t. Before, a shot of antibiotics could have saved them. Now? Now, it was a loaded gun to the temple. Some would live. Some wouldn't.
“Mara, you can’t keep doing this,” a familiar voice cuts through the chaos of the physical space, through the fractured mess of her thoughts. Not enough to pull her back. Just enough to make her want to disappear.
“Please.” She presses her forehead against her knees. "Just let me breathe." But the words dissolve into the wet of her own tears. Maybe it’s because she hasn’t slept in days. Maybe it’s because her stomach is empty. Or maybe it’s because of something worse. The realization that heartbreak isn’t a moment, but a condition. She had become a midwife to bring life into the world, to witness first breaths, not last ones. Instead, she had become something else. A witness to death, a keeper of losses, a failure at keeping them alive.
The person shifts behind her. The footsteps are too restless; fingers are drumming against metal. The sound feels louder than it should. Like a countdown. She doesn’t want to reach zero.
“But Mara… maybe it’s time to ask the right questions.”
The right questions…
Mara had heard the rumors. About something alive. A cure. Witchcraft, she had always told herself. Desperation spun into myth. Positive, but unrealistic. Like a rope thrown into a flood, something to cling to, even when you know the current will take you anyway. Nothing more than an empty promise. She wasn’t the kind to entertain fairytales. Science over fiction. Hard evidence over rumors. Reality over dreams. That was Mara. And yet. Something nagged at her, like a splinter buried too deep to pull out.
Maybe tomorrow, on her rare day off, she’d bike the three-hour stretch over broken asphalt and dirt roads to Paris. Maybe she could ask Baba Yawara over coffee. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. Would it?
Something Alive
The room is loud. Laughter, voices overlapping, the songs - multiple layers of depth and emotion. The food is plentiful, the embraces are unreserved. A toast. “To knowledge that stays alive by moving, never by staying still." Mara lifts her glass with the others, Gaumarjos!. The women’s faces, strangers she already trusts, carry a kind of lightheartedness in a world that should not allow for it. Here, there is joy without hesitation. Resistance is not just in action but in the choice to live fully. It feels like another world. Back in Rambouillet, everything had been grey and silent. Death arrived daily, predictable as the rain. The sky always hung heavy, as if even the clouds carried grief. But here. Here, in Abastumani, the mountains are lush, and the sky feels like freedom. There is a feeling of life Mara hasn’t felt in a while.
She reaches for her glass. The wine is deep red, perhaps even black, staining the sides as she swirls it. Baba Yawara had always said wine held stories.
“If you listen closely, it will tell you where it’s from, who made it, what kind of life it lived.”
Mara had laughed when he said that. Back in Paris, over bitter coffee and a chipped ceramic cup. She had been too tired, too skeptical, too certain she was wasting her time. The café had been small and dark, the kind of place where no one asked questions. The espresso machine hissed. A woman near the window smoked uninterestedly, the end of her cigarette pulsing in the dim light. Baba Yawara had stirred his coffee once, twice, then looked up at her.
“You don’t believe me,” he had said. Not a question.
Baba Yawara had always reminded Mara of Bramwell Brown of Old Bear, the books she’d read so many times as a little girl, it’s pages thin and brittle, corners worn off. Since the first time she had seen him at the Tribunal’s knowledge circle in Paris. As if he had been snatched from a forgotten place, carried forward by those who refused to let him disappear. His eyes held a shimmer of insecurity, the quiet understanding that he was there to guide, not to lead. And there was warmth. The kind that wrapped around her like a childhood memory, the same quiet comfort her teddy bear had given her at six years old when the monsters had been living under her bed. And then there were the stories. Baba Yawara never told them in a straight line. His words moved like rivers, branching off, doubling back, rushing forward just when she thought she had lost the thread. He let silences settle like punctuation, daring the listener to fill the gaps. Sometimes his stories were lessons wrapped in riddles. Other times, they were just fragments. Half-finished sentences, stories without endings, spoken as if he trusted time to finish them.
Baba Yawara had stirred his coffee again, slow, deliberate. He did not look at Mara as he spoke. “There is a story,” he said. "A long time ago, no, maybe not so long, there were two two healers. One worked with what the world called new, the other with what the world called old."
His fingers drummed against the table, keeping a rhythm only he could hear.
“The first healer had shelves filled with bottles. White tablets, blue capsules, needles and vials that worked quickly, cleanly. Their patients came in sick, left cured. Simple. The second healer - they had nothing you could see. Their cure was too small for the eye, too wild for the bottle, too alive to be owned.”
A pause. A slow sip of coffee.
“Then the sickness came.”
He lifted one hand, as if presenting something unseen.
“The bottles of the first healer ran dry. Their medicines stopped working. The sickness did not listen to them anymore. The second healer, though, thyy whistled, and his cure came running. Tiny things, hunters, older than history itself. They moved through the body like ghosts, slipping past what should have killed them, fighting what the world had forgotten how to fight.”
Baba Yawara finally looked at her, his gaze steady, waiting.
Silence. A Griot’s silence. One that demanded an answer, even if none was given.
“Phages”, she had said, skeptical.
Baba Yawara only shrugged. “Your body does not care what your textbooks forgot.”
He broke off a piece of bread, rolling it between his fingers as if considering his next words. Then, as if it were the same thought, he said, “A story is like a traveler. It only stays where it is welcome. If you hold too tightly, it will slip through your fingers. If you ignore it, it will pass you by.” She had frowned at him, waiting for more. “What does that mean?” she had asked.
“You tell me.”
It’s that line that brings her back to the Supra in Abastumani. To the women lifting their glasses, to the stories being passed like bread between hands. To the quiet realization that she is inside a story now, too. One that, like all the others, will only stay where it is welcome. To land of Phages.
The Lab
Perched on a glowing mountain, the old Abastumani observatory feels oddly out of place. Even in the height of summer, the dense canopy of spruce and fir keeps the ground cool, casting long, shifting shadows. Over a century old, the structure feels like a contradiction of past and present, of science abandoned but knowledge still alive. Mara takes it all in as she approaches the lab. The forest feels open but serene, with fallen needles creating a soft, silent carpet underfoot.
Before she had left for Georgia, Baba Yawara had told her another story. About a woman who had refused to let the light go out here.
“Once, there was a mountain that held the stars,” he had said. “When war came, the stars dimmed, the watchers left. But one stayed. An astronomer. A guardian.” He had paused, watching Mara carefully, the way he always did when he wanted her to put the pieces together herself. She hadn't understood it then. Not fully. But now, as she climbed the path toward the old observatory, she wondered if the woman was still here. If she had always known that the Meepebi would come, searching for something unseen, not in the sky, but in the body.
The night before - after the supra had made her stomach full of warm cheese, beans, ember-dark wine, and an unexpected warmth, one without hesitation, by women who had only just learned her name - three elder Meepebi had led her to another, smaller, quieter room.
“We will share with you now the foundation of what you need to know,” one of the women had said as they settled in a circle. The eldest of them, her hair fully silver, sat with the weight of someone who had spent a lifetime being listened to. Not asking, not waiting, just knowing her words would carry. The lines on her face mapped stories of loss and defiance, of knowledge kept safe in the quiet corners of history. Beside her, the woman with hair black as ink carried herself differently. There was sharpness in the way she sat, softened only by the passage of time. But the streaks of grey at her temples were not her own, it felt as an attempt to erase, to control, to keep something of herself from slipping away. The artificial ash did not hide the truth. It only revealed her resistance to letting go. And then, the third. She was lighter not just in presence but in the soft gold of her hair, now streaked with white. She looked like someone who had spent a lifetime in between worlds, between histories, between holding on and setting free. The great-granddaughter of Eliava carried his name like a quiet weight, neither boastful nor burdened but with the surety that she had been tasked with remembering. They did not introduce themselves. They did not need to. The stories would come first.
Mara had held herself steady, pretending certainty, but her eyes betrayed her. A flicker of doubt. Skepiticism. A longing for an answer, but the quiet gnawing question whether this could be it.
“The history of phages is a history of power,” the silver-haired woman began. But before she could continue, the one with ink-black hair cut in, her voice sharper. “And of forgetting. Of erasing.” The blonde woman sighed, shaking her head. “Not erased. Not here.”
A pause. A flicker of tension.
Mara shifted in unease. “Phages,” she had said, yet again skeptical. The ink-haired woman watched her. Too closely. As if she saw something Mara was trying to hide.
“You are afraid to believe.”
Mara tensed. “I just…” She exhaled, shaking her head. “I have seen people die. I have seen hope kill just as quickly as sickness.”
The grey-haired woman let out a quiet laugh. Not cruel. Not kind. “And you think fear will save them?”
A pause. A flicker of heat in Mara’s chest.
“No,” she admitted.
“Then listen. Those who build walls around knowledge, who kill knowledge, who erase knowledge, do so not to protect, but to claim control.”
Mara felt the meaning of the words more than anyone. The slow suffocation of knowledge was a pattern, not an exception. She had seen it in hospitals running dry of medicine, in doctors afraid to speak the truth, and in midwives forced to work without tools that could have saved lives. It was never about science. It was never about safety. It was about control.
The soft woman. She told Mara it was Félix d’Hérelle who named phages in 1917, but that is was her great-grandfather Giorgi Eliava who dreamed of giving them to the world. He had trained with d’Hérelle in Paris, and when he returned to Georgia, he had done something unthinkable: he had built an institution dedicated to phages. The Eliava Institute. A home for research, a place where phages were not just studied but applied. A cure for infections that nothing else could stop.
“But in our world, knowledge is dangerous when it cannot be controlled. Stalin did not trust him. In 1937, he was executed as an enemy of the people.”
Mara’s stomach tightened. Death as control. How easy it was to look back and see each act of erasure as an isolated moment, a cruelty of the past. But history had never been buried. It had only changed shape. Knowledge had always been something to be stolen, silenced, hoarded, or destroyed. For a little while, the world had believed the shackles of history were broken. That the era of controlling who gets to live and who is left to die had ended. But they had been proven wrong. Over and over again. Mara tried to hold herself steady, pretending certainty, but her body betrayed her. The slightest lean backward. The twitch of her fingers in her lap, pressing into her palm, as if grounding herself in something tangible.
The third woman noticed.
“The Eliava Institute never stopped,” she quickly intercepted. “Not even when the West turned its back. Not even when antibiotics drowned out every other cure. When civil war started. When the beginning of the end of the world started. Maia gave us a home here in Abustomani. The research continued. The work continued. We did not stop.”
We did not stop.
The thought had woken up Mara that next day. A jolt, a tiny sliver of optimism flowed through her veins. The same she had felt after taking Baba Yawara’s advice to follow the story. It’s the thought that had crept up again as she enters the large wooden door into the observatory-turned-resistance lab. But before her eyes fully adjusted to the darkness of the not yet light space, she noticed an eerie atmosphere, there was something wrong. She’d never set foot in the lab before, but even she could tell the space was out of order, items in places where they shouldn’t be, as if someone had taken apart a puzzle and forced the pieces back together in the wrong places. Familiar, but fundamentally wrong.
And then, voices behind her. Worried murmurs. And eyes that no longer met hers with trust, but with suspicion. As if, in the space of a night, she had become the enemy…
This was a really interesting first chapter, I am interested in this untapped world of the midwives and the brutal truth of Mara's work. Great work :)