Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

  The land of milk and honey, Ghosh thought. Milk and honey, and love for money.

  Now she and Ghosh traded how-are-yous and I-am-wells, bowing, the deep excursions diminishing till the last few were mere inclinations of the head. Ghosh eased onto the bar stool as she circled behind the counter. She was perhaps twenty, but with big bones, and the fullness of her blouse suggested she had mothered at least one child.

  “Min the tetalehf she asked, thrusting her finger at her mouth, in case he didn't understand Amharic.

  “I deeply regret that I drove your admirer away. Had I known he was here, or how much he cared for you, I could never have intruded on such a tryst.”

  She gasped with surprise.

  “Him! He wanted to keep that one beer going till daylight without buying me one. He is from Tigre. Your Amharic is better than his,” she said, gushing, relieved that it would not be a night of sign language.

  Her gauzy white cotton skirt ended just below her knees. The colorful border was repeated on the piping of the blouse, and again in the frill of the shama over her shoulders. Her hair was straightened and permed, a Western do. A collar of tattoos in the form of closely spaced wavy lines made her neck look longer. Pretty eyes, Ghosh thought.

  Her name was Turunesh, but he decided to call her what he was in the habit of calling all women in Addis: Konjit, which meant “beautiful.”

  “I'll have blessed St. George's. And please serve one for yourself. We must celebrate.”

  She bowed her thanks. “Is it your birthday, then?”

  “No, Konjit, even better.” He was about to say, It is the day that I have freed myself from the chains of a woman who has deviled me for over a decade. The day I have decided my sojourn in Africa ends and America awaits.

  “It is the day I have set eyes on the most beautiful woman in Addis Ababa.”

  Her teeth were strong and even. A rim of upper gum showed when she laughed. She was self-conscious about this because she brought her hand to her mouth.

  Something inside him melted at the sound of her happy laughter, and for the first time since waking that morning, he felt almost normal.

  When he first arrived in Addis Ababa he'd sunk into a deep depression. He considered leaving at once because he'd found that he'd completely misunderstood Hema's intentions in sending for him. What he thought was the triumphant conclusion of a courtship that began when they were interns in India turned out to be in his head alone. Hema thought she was just doing Ghosh (and Missing) a favor. Ghosh hid his embarrassment and humiliation. It was the time of the long rains and that alone was enough to make a man kill himself. The Ibis in the Piazza saved him. He'd been looking for a drink and was attracted by an entrance with an arch of ivy that was festooned with Christmas lights. He could hear music from within and the sounds of womanly laughter. Inside, he thought hed died and returned as Nebuchadnezzar. In those Ibis women—Lulu, Marta, Sara, Tsahai, Meskel, Sheba, Mebrat— and in the sprawling bar and restaurant that occupied two floors and three enclosed verandas, he found a family. The girls welcomed him like a long-lost friend, restoring his good humor, encouraging the joker in him, always happy to sit with him. Feminine good looks were as abundant as the rain outside; skin tones ranged from café au lait to coal. The few half-caste women at Ibis had white or olive-toned skin and blue-brown, or even green, eyes. The coming together of races generally produced the most exotic and beautiful fruit, however the core was unpredictable and often sour.

  But of all the qualities of the women he met in Addis, the most important was their acquiescence, their availability. For months after his arrival in Addis, well after his discovery of the Ibis and so many other bars like it, Ghosh was celibate. The irony of that period was that the one woman he wanted rejected his advances, while all around him were women who never said no. He was twenty-four and not totally inexperienced when he arrived in Ethiopia. The only intimacy hed ever had in India was with a young probationer by the name of Virgin Magdalene Kumar. Shortly after their three-month affair ended, she left her order and married a chap he knew (and presumably changed her name to Magdalene Kumar).

  “Hema, I am only human,” he murmured now as he did every time he thought he was being unfaithful to her.

  He reached across and felt the flesh under Konjit's ribs, pinching up a skin fold.

  “Ah my dear, should we send for dinner? We need to put flesh on you. And sustenance for what we are about to do tonight. It is, I will confess to you, my very, very first time.”

  Had she been an older woman (and many one-woman bars were run by older women who had saved money for their own place after working somewhere grand like the Ibis), he would have used a different tone, one that was less direct, more courtly—a gentler form of flattery. But with her, he had settled on the naughty schoolboy approach.

  When she reached to feel his hair, rub his scalp, Ghosh purred with contentment. On the radio the muffled twang of a krar repeated a six-note riff from a pentatonic scale that seemed common to all Ethiopian music, fast or slow. Ghosh recognized the song, a very popular one. It was called “Tizita;” there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.

  “Your skin is beautiful. What are you? Banya?” she asked.

  “Yes, my lovely, I am indeed Indian. And since nothing about me other than my skin is beautiful, you are gracious to say so.”

  “No, no, why do you say that? I swear on the saints I wish I had your hair. I can't get over your Amharic. Are you sure your mother is not habesha?”

  “You flatter me,” he said. Hed learned a little Amharic in the hospital, but it was only through tête-à-têtes like this that he became fluent. He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath … The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. “Really, I only know the Amharic of love. If you sent me outside to buy a pencil, I wouldn't be able to do it, for I lack those words.”

  She laughed and again tried to cover her lips. Ghosh held her hands, and so she drew her lower lip up as if to hide her teeth, a gesture he found nubile and touching.

  “But why hide your smile? … There. How beautiful!”

  Much, much later, they retired to the back room; he closed his eyes and pretended, as he always did, that she was Hema. A most willing Hema.

  THE MIST WAS inches off the ground when he emerged, and it had brought with it a funereal silence and bone-chilling cold. He took a leak by the roadside. A hyena laughed, whether at his action or his equipment he couldn't be sure. He spun around and saw lupine retinas shining from the trees beyond the first set of houses. He ran while trying to zip up, unlocked his car, and jumped in. He quickly started the engine and moved off. A peeing man had to worry about more than hyenas. Shiftas, lebas, madjiratmachi, and all sorts of villains were a threat after midnight, even in the heart of the city and near paved roads. Just the previous month, two men had robbed, raped, and then cut off an Englishwoman's tongue, thinking its absence would prevent her from tattling. Another victim of a robbery had his balls cut off—a common enough practice— in the belief that he would have no courage left to extract revenge. They were the lucky ones. The rest were simply murdered.

  THE GATES OF MISSING were wide open when he got back, which was strange. He pulled up to his cottage, slid the car into the open-sided shed. As his lights shone on the rock wall, he slammed the brakes, terrified by what he saw: a ghostly white figure rose from a squat to stand before his headlights, the eyes reflecting back a shimmering red, just like the hyena's eyes. But this was no hyena, but a weeping, bereft Almaz who had clearly been waiting for him.

  “Hema, Hema, what have you done,” he muttered to himself, convinced that the worst had happened and Hema had returned married. Why else would Almaz stay so late except to tell him this? She and the whole world knew how he felt about Hema. The only person who didn't know was
Hema.

  The ghostly figure ran over to the passenger side, opened the door, and climbed in. Bowing her head and in the most formal tone and without meeting his eyes, she said, “I am sorry to bring you bad news.”

  “It's Hema, isn't it?”

  “Hema? No. It is Sister Mary Joseph Praise.”

  “Sister? What happened to Sister?”

  “She is with the Lord, may He bless her soul.”

  “What?”

  “Lord help us all, but she is dead.” Almaz was sobbing now. “She died giving birth to twins. Dr. Hema arrived but could not save her. Dr. Hema saved the twins.”

  Ghosh stopped hearing after her first mention of Sister and death. He had to have her repeat what she said, and then repeat again everything that she knew, but each time it came down to Sister being dead. And something about twins.

  “And now we can't find Dr. Stone,” she said at last. “He is gone. We must find him. Matron says we must.”

  “Why?” Ghosh managed to ask when he found his tongue, but even as he said that he knew why. He shared with Stone the bond of being the only male physicians at Missing. Ghosh knew Stone as well as anyone could know Stone, except, perhaps, Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

  “Why? Because he is suffering the most,” Almaz said. “That is what Matron says. We must find him before he does something stupid.”

  It's a bit too late for that, Ghosh thought.

  CHAPTER 12

  Land's End

  THE MORNING AFTER the births and the death, Matron Hirst came to her office very early as if it were any other day Shed slept but a few hours. She and Ghosh had driven around, hunting for Thomas Stone late into the night. Stone's maid, Rosina, had kept a vigil in his quarters, but there had been no sign of him.

  Matron pushed away the papers stacked on her desk. Through her window she could see patients lined up in the outpatient department, or rather she could see their colorful umbrellas. People believed the sun exacerbated all illnesses, so there were as many umbrellas as there were patients. She picked up the phone. “Adam?” she said, when the compounder came on the line. “Please send word to Gebrew to close the gate. Send patients to the Russian hospital.” Her Amharic, though accented, was exceedingly good. “And Adam, please deal with the patients who are already in the outpatient department as best you can. I'll be asking the nurses to make rounds on their wards and to manage. Let the probationers know that all nursing classes are canceled.”

  Thank God for Adam, Matron thought. His education had stopped at the third grade, which was a shame, because Adam could have easily been a doctor. Not only was he adept at preparing the fifteen stock mixtures, ointments, and compounds which Missing provided to outpatients, he also had uncanny clinical sense. With his one good eye (the other milky white from a childhood infection) he could spot the seriously ill among the many who came clutching the teal-blue graduated Missing medicine bottles, ready to have them refilled. It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn … libehn … hodehn,” literally, “My head … my heart … and my stomach,” with the patient's hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (jasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia— somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and bella donna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor's mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill.

  THE PHONE RANG, and for once Matron was grateful. Normally she hated the sound because it always felt like a rude interruption. The small Missing switchboard was still a novelty. Matron had declined an extension in her quarters, but she thought it was important to have phones in the doctor's quarters and the casualty room. Even this phone in her office she considered a luxury, but now she grabbed the receiver, hoping for good news, news about Stone.

  “Please hold for His Excellency, the Minister of the Pen,” a female voice said. Matron heard faint clicks, and imagined a little dog walking on the wooden floors of the palace. She stared at the stacks of Bibles against the far wall. There were so many they looked like a barricade of shiny, cobbled rexine.

  The minister came on, asked about Matron's health, and then said, “His Majesty is saddened by your loss. Please, accept his deepest condolences.” Matron pictured the minister standing, bowing as he spoke into the phone. “His Majesty personally asked me to call.”

  “It is most kind, most kind, of His Majesty to think of us … at this time,” Matron said. It was part of the Emperor's mystique and a key to his power that he knew everything that went on in his empire. She wondered how word had reached the palace so soon. Dr. Thomas Stone with Sister Mary Joseph Praise assisting had removed a pair of royal appendices, and Hema had performed an emergency Cesarean section on a granddaughter who didn't make it to Switzerland. Since then a few others in the royal family came to Hema for their confinement.

  Matron only had to ask, the minister said, if there was something the palace could do. The minister didn't touch on the manner of Sister's death, or the fate of the two babies.

  “By the way, Matron …,” he said, and she was alert because she sensed this was the real reason for the call. “If by any chance a military … a senior officer comes to Missing for treatment, for surgery in the next day or so, the Emperor would like to be informed. You can call me personally.” He gave her a number.

  “What sort of officer?”

  She took the silence to mean the minister was giving thought to his answer.

  “An Imperial Bodyguard officer. An officer who has—shall we say— no need to be at Missing.”

  “Surgery, you say? Oh, no. We've closed the hospital. We have no surgeon, Minister. You see Dr. Thomas Stone … is indisposed. They were a team, you see …”

  “Thank you, Matron. Please let us know.”

  She mulled over the call after she hung up. Emperor Haile Selassie had built up a strong, modern military, consisting of army, navy, air force, and the Imperial Bodyguard. The Bodyguard was a force as large as the others, the equivalent of the Queen's Guard in England who stood outside Buckingham Palace. But just like the Queen's Guard, the Imperial Bodyguard wasn't merely a ceremonial unit; its professional soldiers and its units were no different than the rest of the armed forces, and trained for battle. Up-and-coming cadets from all the services went to Sandhurst or West Point or Poona. But those sojourns had a way of expanding one's social conscience. The Emperor feared a coup by these young officers. Having the second- or third-largest standing armed force on the continent was a matter of pride, but it was also potentially dangerous to his reign. The Emperor deliberately kept the four services in competition with one another, kept their headquarters far apart, and he transferred generals who were getting too powerful. Matron sensed some such intrigue—why else would the Minister of the Pen call pers
onally?

  The minister had no idea what it meant for Missing not to have a surgeon, Matron thought. Before Thomas Stone's arrival, Missing could handle most internal medicine and pediatric patients, thanks to Ghosh, and it tackled complicated obstetric and gynecologic conditions, thanks to Hema. Over the years a number of other doctors had come and gone, some of them capable of surgery. But Missing never had a fully trained and competent surgeon till Stone. A surgeon allowed Missing to fix complex fractures, remove goiters and other tumors, perform skin grafts for burns, repair strangulated hernias, take out enlarged prostates or cancerous breasts, or drill a hole in the skull to let out a blood clot pressing against the brain. Stone's presence (with an assistant like Sister Mary Joseph Praise) took Missing to a new level. His absence changed everything.

  THE PHONE RANG again a few minutes later, and this time the sound was ominous. Matron brought the instrument gingerly to her ear. Please God, let Stone be alive.

  “Hello? This is Eli Harris. Of the Baptist congregation of Houston … Hello?”

  For a call from America, the connection was crystal clear. Matron was so surprised that she said nothing.

  “Hello?” the voice said again.

  “Yes?” Matron said gruffly.

  “I'm speaking from the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa. Could I speak to Matron Hirst?”

  She held the receiver away, covering the mouthpiece. She felt panicked. And confused. What on earth was Harris doing here? She was accustomed to dealing with donors and charitable organizations by mail. She needed to think quickly, but her mind refused to cooperate. At last, she took her hand away and brought the phone up. “I'll pass the message on, Mr. Harris. She will call you back—”