Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

  Sister Mary Joseph Praise lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose. Matron had pulled down Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyelids, but they would not stay closed. The half-mast eyelids, the unseeing gaze, hammered in the reality of her death.

  Stone took one last look. He wanted to remember her not as Sister, not as his assistant, but as the woman he should have declared his love for, the woman he should have cared for, the woman he should have wed. He wanted the ghoulish image of her corpse burned into his brain. He had negotiated his way through life by work, and work, and more work. It was the only arena in which he felt complete and the only thing he had to give Sister Mary Joseph Praise. But at this moment work had failed him.

  The sight of her wounds shamed him. Thered be no healing, no scars to form, harden, and fade on her body. He would bear the scar, he would carry it from the room. Hed known only one way of being, and it cost him. But he would have been willing to change for her had she only asked. He would have. If only she could have known. What did it matter now?

  He turned to leave again, glancing around as if to seal in his memory this place in which hed polished and elevated his art, this place that hed furnished to suit his needs and that he thought was his real home. He took it all in because he knew hed never ever return. He was surprised to find Hema still standing behind him, and again the sight of the bundles she carried made him recoil.

  “Stone, think about this,” Hema said. “Turn your back on me if you want, because I'll have no use for you. But don't turn your back on these children. I won't ask you again.”

  Hema held her living burden and waited on Stone. He was on the verge of speaking to her honestly, of telling her all. In his eyes she saw pain and puzzlement. What she didn't see was any recognition of the infants as being connected to him. He spoke like a man who'd just been hit on the head. “Hema, I don't understand who … why they are here … why Mary is dead.”

  She waited. He was circling around a truth that might emerge if she waited. She wanted to grab his ears and shake it out of him.

  At last he met her gaze, refusing to look down at the infants, and what he said wasn't what she wanted to hear. “Hema, I don't want to set eyes on them, ever.”

  The last of Hema's restraint fell away. She was livid for the children, furious that he seemed to think this was just his loss.

  “What did you say, Thomas?”

  He must have known a battle line had just been drawn.

  “They killed her,” he said. “I don't want to set eyes on them.”

  So this is how it will be, Hema thought, this is how we shall pass from each other's lives. The twins mewled in her arms.

  “Whose are they, then? Aren't they yours? So didn't you kill her, too?”

  His mouth opened in pain. He had no answer, so he turned to leave.

  “You heard me, Stone, you killed her,” Hema said, raising her voice so that she drowned out every other sound. He flinched as the words lashed into him. It pleased her. She felt no pity. Not for a man who wouldn't claim his children. He pushed the swinging door so hard it shrieked in protest.

  “Stone, you killed her,” she shouted after him. “These are your children.”

  THE PROBATIONER BROKE the ensuing silence. She was trying to anticipate, so she opened a circumcision tray and pulled on gloves. The one thing Matron allowed her to do without supervision was to use the foreskin guillotine.

  But instead of praising her, Hema pounced on her. “My goodness, girl, don't you think these children have had quite enough? They're preemies! They are not out of danger. Want them to be chip-cock-Charlies on top of all this? … And you? What have you been doing all the time, eh? You should've been worrying about their swallowing ends, not their watering cans.”

  HEMA ROCKED THE TWINS, thrilled by their breathing selves, by their peaceful smiles, the opposite of the usual anxious, panicked face of a newborn. Their mother lay dead in the same room, their father had run, but they knew nothing of that.

  Matron, Gebrew, the nurse anesthetist, and others who had gathered were weeping around Sister's body. Word had spread to the maids and housekeepers. Now a funeral wail, a piercing lululululululu ripped through the heart of Missing. The ululations would continue for the next few hours.

  Even the probationer began to show the first inkling of Sound Nursing Sense. Instead of struggling to appear to be something she was not, she wept for Sister, who was the only nurse who really understood her. For the first time the probationer saw the children not as “fetuses” or “neonates” but instead as motherless children, like herself, children to be pitied. Her tears poured out. Her body slumped as if the starch had vanished not just from her clothes but from her bones. To her amazement, Matron came and put an arm around her. She saw not just sadness but fear in Matron's face. How could Missing go on without Sister? Or without Stone? For surely he was never coming back, that she could see.

  Hemlatha shut out the sobbing around her as she rocked the babies, and then she began to croon, her anklets jingling faintly like castanets as she shifted weight from one foot to the other. She felt the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise as acutely as anyone, and yet she felt guided— perhaps this was Sister's doing—to give her all at this moment to the two infants. The twins were breathing quietly; their fingers fanned over their cheeks. They belonged in her arms. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. Sister Mary, bride of Christ, now gone from the world into which she just brought two children.

  Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life in this her thirtieth year was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, to mimic the rigid masking smile of Shiva, to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune, a tabla beat. Thim-thaga-thaga, thim-thaga-thim, thim-thaga … Hema moved gently, knees flexing, tapping her heels, then her forefoot in time to the music in her head.

  The bit players in Theater 3 regarded her as if she were mad, but she danced on even as they tidied the corpse, she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

  Ridiculous, the thoughts that came to her as she danced: her new Grundig, Adid's lips and his long fingers, the thump of Matron falling over, the revolting feel of the Frenchman's balls but the satisfaction in seeing the color flee his face, Gebrew with chicken feathers stuck to him. What a journey … what a day … what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance …

  She was surprisingly graceful and light on her feet, the neck and head and shoulder gestures of Bharatnatyam automatic for her, eyebrows shooting up and down, eyeballs flitting to the edges of their sockets, feet moving, a rigid smile on her face, and all this while holding the babies in her arms.

  Outside the hospital, as the light faded, the lions in the cages near the Sidist Kilo Monument, anticipating the slabs of meat the keeper would fling through the bars, roared with hunger and impatience; in the foothills of Entoto, the hyenas heard and paused as they neared the edge of the city three steps forward and one back, cowardly and opportunistic; the Emperor in his palace made plans for a state visit to Bulgaria and perhaps to Jamaica, where he had followers—Rastas—who took their name from his precoronation name of Ras Teferi and who thought he was God (an idea he didn't mind his own people believing, but when it came from so far away and for reasons that he didn't understand, made him wary).

  THE LAST FORTY-EIGHT hours had irrevocably altered Hema's life. She had two infants squinting up at her from time to time as if to confirm their arrival, their good fortune.

  Hema felt light-headed, giddy. I won the lottery without buying a ticket, she thought. These two babies plugged a hole in my heart that I didn't know I had until now.

  But there was danger in the analogy: shed heard of
a railway porter at Madras Central Station who won lakhs and lakhs of rupees, only to have his life fall apart so that he soon returned to the platform. When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart—she was thinking of Stone.

  Stone had prayed for a miracle. The silly man didn't see that these newborns were miracles. They were obstetric miracles for surviving his assault. Hema decided to name the first twin to breathe Marion. Marion Sims, she would tell me later, was a simple practitioner in Alabama, USA, who had revolutionized women's surgery. He was considered the father of obstetrics and gynecology, the patron saint; in naming me for him, she was both honoring him and giving thanks.

  “And Shiva, for Shiva,” she said, naming the child with the circular hole in his scalp, the last to breathe, the child she had labored over, a child all but dead until she had invoked Lord Shiva's name, at which point he took his first gasp.

  “Yes, Marion and Shiva.”

  She tacked on “Praise” to both names, after their mother.

  And finally, reluctantly, almost as an afterthought, but because you cannot escape your destiny, and so that he wouldn't walk away scot-free, she added our surname, the name of the man who had left the room: Stone.

  PART TWO

  When a pole goes into a hole

  it creates another soul

  which is either a pole

  or a hole

  Newton's Fourth Law of Motion (as taught by the Mighty Se nior Sirs of Madras Christian College during the initiation/ ragging of A. Ghosh, Junior Pisser Kataan, Batch of 1938, St. Thomas Hall, D Block, Tambaram, Madras)

  CHAPTER 11

  Bedside Language and Bedroom Language

  ON THE MORNING of the twins’ birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.

  Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepatitis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the e at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.

  THE MORNINGS were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.

  At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out, Hema, let's get married. But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.

  “Fool!” she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. “How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride for you, I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed.”

  Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.

  If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo … “Go ahead! What do I care?” he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. “But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?” That led him to picture a bovine penis; he groaned.

  This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.

  From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. “For the sake of God, be gentle!” he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini—all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the getta? (In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.

  He drew the blanket over his head as Almaz stagger-stepped to the bathroom, hefting the steaming cauldron. “Banya skin!” she muttered in Amharic. Amharic was all she ever spoke, though Ghosh suspected she understood more English than she let on. After emptying the cauldron into the bathtub, she finished the thought: “It must be so sickly to require washing every day. What misfortune the getta doesn't have habe-sha skin. It would stay clean without the need for all this scrubbing.”

  No doubt Almaz had been to church this morning. When Ghosh first came to Ethiopia, as he walked down Menelik Street, a woman across the road stopped and bowed to him and he waved back. Only later did he realize that her gesture was aimed at the church across the way. Pedestrians bobbed before a church, kissing the church wall thrice and crossing themselves before going on. If they'd been chaste, they might enter. Otherwise they stayed on the other side of the street.

  Almaz was tall with oak-colored skin and a shield-shaped face. Her oval eyes sloped down to the bridge of her nose, giving her a sultry, inviting gaze. Her square chin contradicted that message, and this hint of androgyny brought her admiring looks. She had large but shapely hands, wide hips, and buttocks that formed a broad ledge on which Ghosh believed he could balance a cup and saucer.

  She was twenty-six when she came to Missing with labor pains, nine months pregnant, her cheeks flushed with pride because this baby she would carry to term, unlike all the others that had failed to take root in her womb. In the prenatal clinic visits, nursing students had twice recorded FHSH (Fetal Heart Sounds Heard) in the chart. But on the day of her putative labor, Hema heard only silence. Hema's exam revealed that the “baby” was a giant fibroid of the uterus and the FHSH nothing but a rattle in a probationer's brain.

  Almaz refused to accept the diagnosis. “Look,” she said, fishing out an engorged breast and squeezing forth a jet of milk. “Could a tit do that if there were no child to feed?” Yes, a tit could do that and more if its owner believed. It took three more months with no true signs of labor and an X-ray that showed no baby's skull, no spine, for Almaz to concede. At the surgery, which she at last
agreed to, Hema had to remove both the fibroid and the uterus which it had swallowed. In the town of Sabatha they still waited for Almaz to return with the baby. But Almaz couldn't bear to go back. She stayed on and became one of the Missing People.

  He heard Almaz return and the jangle of a cup and saucer. The scent of coffee made him peek from under his tent.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked, studying him.

  Yes, I need to tell you that I am leaving Missing. Really, I am! I can't let Hema play me like a harmonium. But he didn't say this; instead, he shook his head. He felt Almaz understood intuitively what Hema's absence did to him.

  “Yesus Christos, please forgive this sinner, but he was out drinking last night,” she said as she stooped to pick up a beer bottle from under the bed. Alas, Almaz was in a proselytizing mood. Ghosh felt as if he were eavesdropping on her private conversation with God. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

  “Blessed St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and all the other saints,” she continued in Amharic, confident he would understand, “for I prayed for master to be a new man, for him to one day give up his dooriye ways, but I was wrong, your venerable holinesses.”

  It was the word dooriye that tricked Ghosh into speaking. It meant “lout,” “lecher,” “reprobate”—and it stung him to hear that word.

  “What gives you the right to address me this way?” he said, though he didn't really feel the anger his voice carried. He was about to add, Are you my wife?—but choked those words off. To his perpetual shame, he and Almaz had been intimate twice over the years, both times when he was drunk. She'd lain down, lifted, and spread, grumbling even as her hips fell into rhythm with his, but no more than she grumbled about the coffee or hot water. He'd decided that grumbling with Almaz was the language of both pleasure and pain. When they were spent she'd sighed, pulled her skirt down, and asked, “Will there be anything else?” before leaving him to his guilt.