Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

  “Leave it open, Marion,” Hema said. “And turn on the light.”

  A razor blade, a spirit lamp, and a bloody cloth were by Genet's bed.

  Genet sat demure, her hands pressed to both sides of her face, her elbows resting on her knees. The posture of a thinker, but for the rags in each hand.

  Hema pulled Genet's fingers away to reveal two deep vertical cuts, like the number 11, just past the outer end of each eyebrow. A total of four cuts. The blood that welled up looked as dark as tar.

  “Who did this?” Hema said, covering the wound and applying pressure.

  The two occupants were silent. Rosina's eyes were locked on the far wall, a smirk on her face.

  “I said, who did this?” Hema's voice was sharper than the razor that made the cuts.

  Genet replied in English. “I wanted her to do it, Ma.”

  Rosina said something sharp to Genet in Tigrinya. I knew that short guttural phrase meant Shut your mouth.

  Genet ignored her. “This is the sign of my people,” she went on, “my father's tribe. If my father were alive he would have been so proud.”

  Hema opened her mouth as if considering what to say. Her face softened a bit. “Your father isn't alive, child. By the grace of God, you are.”

  Rosina frowned, not liking this much of an exchange in English.

  “Come with me. Let me take care of that,” Hema said more gently.

  I knelt beside Genet. “Come with us, please?”

  Genet glanced nervously at her mother, then hissed, “You'll only make it harder for me. I wanted these marks as much as she did. Please, please go.”

  GHOSH COUNSELED PATIENCE. “She isn't our daughter.”

  “You're wrong, Ghosh. She ate at our table. We send her to school at our expense. When something bad is happening to her, we can't say, ‘She isn't our daughter.’”

  I was stunned to hear what Hema said. It was noble. But if Hema saw Genet as my sister, this introduced complications as far as my feelings for Genet …

  Ghosh said soothingly, “It's just to keep away the buda, the evil eye. Like the pottu on the forehead in India, darling.”

  “My pottu comes off, darling. No blood is shed.”

  A WEEK LATER, when Hema and Ghosh came home from work, they heard Rosina's wailing soliloquy, loud as ever, no different than when theyd left for work that morning. She bemoaned fate, God, the Emperor, and chastised Zemui for leaving her.

  “That's it,” Hema said. “The poor child will go mad. Are we going to stand by while that happens?”

  Hema gathered Almaz, Gebrew, W.W., Ghosh, Shiva, and me. En masse we went to Rosina's door and pushed it open. Hema grabbed Genet by the arm and brought her into our house, leaving the rest of us to pacify Rosina who screamed to the world that her daughter was being abducted.

  BEHIND THE CLOSED DOOR of Hema's bedroom, we could hear the sounds of Genet in the tub. Hema came out to get milk and asked Almaz to slice up papaya and pour lemon and sugar over it. Soon Almaz disappeared into the bedroom and stayed there.

  An hour later, Hema and Genet emerged arm in arm. Genet was in a sequined yellow blouse and a glittering green skirt—parts of Hema's Bharatnatyam dance outfit. Her hair was pulled back off her forehead, and Hema had darkened her eyes with a kohl pencil. Genet stood regal, happy, her head high, her carriage that of a queen who'd been unshackled and restored to her throne. She was my queen, the one I wanted by my side. I was so proud, so drawn to her. How could she ever be my sister when she was already something else to me? Hema's glittering green sari matched Genet's colors. We almost missed the sight of Almaz, ducking away to the kitchen, her eyes darkened, her lips red, blush on her cheeks, and huge dangling earrings framing that strong face.

  The five of us piled into the car, Genet in the backseat between me and Shiva. At the Merkato Hema got a new set of clothes for Genet. It was Christmas and Diwali and Meskel all rolled into one.

  We finished up at Enrico's. Genet sat across from me, smiling at me as she licked her ice cream. Hesitantly at first, but then gathering speed, she chattered away. If she'd been brainwashed as Hema said, her brain was drying out.

  I picked my moment, having scouted the obstacles under the table. I loved her so much, but I hadn't forgotten the indignity of her visit to my bed not two weeks before, and the wet present she left me. I loved the image of her hovering over me, a moment of such rare beauty. But I wanted to erase the wet part.

  I kicked her shin savagely with my toe cap. She managed not to make a sound, but the pain showed in her face and in the tears that sprung to her eyes. “What's the matter?” Ghosh said.

  She managed to say, “I ate my ice cream too fast.”

  “Ah! Ice-cream headache. Strange phenomenon. You know, that is something we ought to study, don't you think, Hema? Is it a migraine equivalent? Is everyone susceptible? What is its average duration? Are there complications?”

  “Darling,” Hema said, kissing him on the cheek, such a rare display of affection in a public place, “of all the things you've wanted to study, you've finally found one I'd love to study with you. I'm assuming it will involve lots of ice cream?”

  In the car, Genet showed me the big welt on her shin. “Are you done?” she said, quietly.

  “No, that was just a warm-up. I have to repay you in kind.”

  “You'll ruin my new clothes,” she said coyly, leaning against me. The scars at the ends of both eyebrows were still angry at the edges. Hema saw them as barbaric, but I thought they looked beautiful. I put my arm around Genet. Shiva looked on, curious as to what I would do next. Those slashes next to her eyes made her look preternaturally wise, because they were at the spot where people developed wrinkles when they aged. She grinned, and the number 11s were exaggerated. I felt my heart racing, powerless. Who was this beauty? Not my little sister. Not even my best friend. Sometimes my opponent. But always the love of my life.

  “So,” she said again, “seriously, are you done with your revenge?”

  I sighed. “Yes, I'm done.”

  “Good,” she said. She took my little finger and bent it back and would have snapped it if I didn't snatch it away.

  GENET SLEPT IN A BED made up for her in our living room. The next morning, before we went to school, Hema sent for Rosina. Shiva, Genet, and I snuck into the corridor to listen. I peeked, and I saw Rosina standing before Hema the way she'd stood before the army man.

  “I expect to see you back in the kitchen, helping Almaz. And from now on, in the daytime, the door and window to your quarters stay open. Let some light and air in there.”

  If Rosina was going to make claims on her daughter, this was the moment.

  We held our breath.

  She didn't say a word. She made a curt bow, and left.

  WE FELL BACK into our school routine: loads of homework, then Hemawork, which included penmanship, current affairs discussions, vocabulary, and book reports. Cricket for me and Shiva, and dance for Shiva and Genet. Many an evening Gosh bowled to us on a makeshift pitch on our front lawn. For a large man he had a delicate touch with the bat and taught us how to sweep, to drive, and to square-cut.

  Shiva was, as of that year, exempt from school assignments, the result of Hema and Ghosh negotiating with his teachers at Loomis Town & Country. Both sides were relieved. Shiva didn't have to write an essay on the battle of Hastings if he saw no point to it. Loomis Town & Country would collect Shiva's fees and let him attend class, since he wasn't disruptive. Shiva didn't mind the ritual of school. The teachers knew us and they understood Shiva as well as one could understand Shiva. But just like Mr. Bailey, newly arrived from Bristol, some teachers had to discover Shiva for themselves. Bailey was the only teacher in LT&C's history to have a degree, and therefore he felt obliged to set a very high standard. Two-thirds of us failed the first math test. “One of you scored a perfect one hundred. But he or she didn't write a name on the paper. The rest of you were miserable. Sixty-six percent of you failed,” he exclaimed. “What do you th
ink about that number? Sixty-six!”

  For Shiva, rhetorical questions were a trap. He never asked a question to which he knew the answer. Shiva raised his hand. I cringed in my seat. Mr. Bailey's eyebrow went up, as if a chair in the corner which he'd managed to ignore for a few months had suddenly developed delusions that it was alive.

  “You have something to say?”

  “Sixty-six is my second-favorite number,” Shiva said.

  “Pray, why is it your second favorite?” said Bailey.

  “Because if you take the numbers you can divide into sixty-six, including sixty-six, and add them up, what you have is a square.”

  Mr. Bailey couldn't resist. He wrote down 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 22, 33, and 66—all the numbers that went into 66—and then he totaled. What he got was 144, at which point both he and Shiva said, “Twelve squared!”

  “That's what makes sixty-six special,” Shiva said. “It's also true of three, twenty-two, sixty-six, seventy—their divisors add up to a square.”

  “Pray, tell us what's your favorite number,” Bailey said, no sarcasm in his voice anymore, “since sixty-six is your second favorite?”

  Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote: 10,213,223.

  Bailey studied this for a long while, turning a bit red. Then he threw up his hands in a gesture that struck me as very ladylike. “And pray, why would this number interest us?”

  “The first four numbers are your license plate.” From Mr. Bailey's expression, I didn't think he was aware of this. “That's a coincidence,” Shiva went on. “This number,” Shiva said, tapping on the board with the chalk, getting as excited as Shiva allowed himself to get, “is the only number that describes itself when you read it. ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, and two threes!” Then my brother laughed in delight, a sound so rare that our class was stunned. He brushed chalk off his hands, sat down, and he was done.

  It was the only bit of mathematics that stayed with me from that year. As for the student who scored one hundred percent?—whoever it was had drawn a picture of Veronica on the test paper in lieu of a name.

  I mulled over our fates, especially the good fortune that let him skip homework. I suppose I understood. Since Shiva couldn't do or wouldn't do what was required of him, he was no longer required to do it. Since I could, I had to.

  Shiva went to Version Clinic whenever our school schedule allowed. He'd managed to make his way into one of Hema's surgeries, a Cesarean section, and now he was hooked. Gray's Anatomy became his Bible, and he drew at a frenetic pace, pages of his drawings littering our room. His subject was no longer just BMW parts or Veronica but sketches showing the vulva and uterus and uterine blood vessels. To control the proliferation of paper, Hema insisted he draw in exercise books, which he did, filling page after page. You rarely saw Shiva without his Gray's in his hand.

  Perhaps as a reaction to Shiva, I'd seek out Ghosh after school. I knew his haunts: Operating Theater 3, Casualty, the post-op ward. My clinical education was gathering speed. Sometimes I assisted him with the vasectomies which he did in his old bungalow.

  GENET AND I SAT DOWN one evening, practicing our penmanship by copying out a page of aphorisms from Bickham's before beginning our homework. I looked up and was startled to see hot tears in her eyes. “If ‘Virtue is its own reward,’ “ she said suddenly, “then my father should be alive, no? And if ‘Truth needs no disguise,’ why do we have to pretend that His Majesty isn't short or that his affection for his ugly dog is normal? You know he has a servant whose only job is to carry around thirty pillows of different sizes to place at His Majesty's feet, so that whatever throne he sits on his feet don't dangle in the air?”

  “Come on, Genet. Don't talk that way,” I said. “Unless you want to have your neck stretched.” Even before the coup, it was heresy to speak against His Majesty. People went to the gallows for less. After the coup, you had to be ten times more careful.

  “I don't care. I hate him. You can tell anyone you want.” She stormed off.

  WHEN THE SCHOOL TERM drew to a close, Rosina dropped a bombshell. She asked for leave to return to the north of the country, to Asmara, the heart of Eritrea. She wanted to take Genet with her to meet her family and to meet Zemui's parents. Hema feared she wouldn't return, and so she recruited Almaz and Gebrew to try to talk Rosina out of it, or have her go alone, but Rosina was adamant. In the end, Genet solved the problem. “No matter what,” she told Hema, “I'll be back. But I do want to see my relatives.”

  When their taxi to the bus depot pulled away, Genet waved happily; she'd been so excited about the three-day journey, and she could talk of nothing else. But for me (and for Hema) it was heartbreaking. That very night, the wind picked up, the leaves were swishing and rustling, and by morning a squall arrived, heralding the long rains.

  NOW THAT I WAS about to turn thirteen, I was aware that for Matron, Bachelli, and Ghosh, and for Missing Hospital, the rainy season meant the croup, diphtheria, and measles season. There was no letup in the work.

  One morning, as I went down to the gate, umbrella in hand, I saw a woman coming up the hill to Missing, rivulets of water pouring off her umbrella. She looked frightened. I recognized her; she worked in one of the bars in the cinder-block buildings opposite Missing. Some mornings I saw her looking much as she did now, a plain and pleasant face, wearing a homely cotton skirt and top. Id also seen her at night, her hair teased out, wearing heels, jewelry, elegant clothes, and looking glamorous.

  She asked me for directions. Her name was Tsige, I learned later. I heard the muted, glottic, honking cough coming from the infant slung to her back in a shama, papoose fashion. It was a sound like the cry of a gander, and for that reason, I bypassed Casualty and took Tsige directly to the croup room. The croup room was at other times the diarrhea/ dehydration room. A lab bench ran along the four walls, its surface covered with red rubber sheets. A curtain rod at head height circled the room and intravenous bottles were suspended from this. In a pinch, Missing could resuscitate up to sixteen or even twenty infants packed side by side on that bench.

  The baby's eyes were screwed shut, the fingers curled, the tiny translucent nails leaving marks in the palm. The rise and fall of the little chest seemed too fast for a four-month-old. The nurse found a scalp vein and hooked up an intravenous drip. Ghosh arrived and quickly examined the little fellow. He let me listen with his stethoscope: it seemed impossible for such a tiny chest to be so full of squeaks, whistles, wheezes, and rattles. Over the left side, the heartbeat was so rapid I couldn't imagine how such a pace could be sustained. “You see these bowed legs, the lumpy bossing of the forehead?” Ghosh said. “And the hot-cross-bun pattern on the top of the skull? These are the stigmata of rickets.”

  “Stigmata” in my religion class at LT&C meant the nail wounds, the cuts from the crown of thorns, the gash made by the spear of Longinus in Christ's flesh. But Ghosh used the word to mean the flesh signs of a disease. In the Piazza he had once pointed out the stigmata of congenital syphilis in a listless boy who was squatting on the sidewalk: “Saddle nose, cloudy eyes, peg-shaped incisor teeth …” I read about the other stigmata of syphilis: mulberry molars, saber-shinned tibias, and deafness.

  All the infants in the croup room appeared related because they all had the stigmata of rickets to a greater or lesser degree. They were wizened, bug-eyed, with big foreheads.

  Ghosh put the child in the crude oxygen tent fashioned out of a plastic sheet. “The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets,” he said to me under his breath. “It's the cascade of catastrophes.”

  Ghosh took Tsige aside, his Amharic surprisingly fluent as he explained what was going on. He cautioned her to keep breast-feeding “no matter what you hear from anyone else.” When Tsige said the child was hardly sucking, he said, “Still, it will comfort him because he will know you are there. You're a good mother. This is hard.” Tsige tried to kiss Ghosh's hand when he left, but he'd have none of it.

  “I'll try to check o
n this baby later,” Ghosh said on his way out. “We have a vasectomy tonight. Dr. Cooper from the American Embassy is coming to learn. Would you bring over a sterilized vasectomy pack from the operating theater? And plug in the sterilizer in my quarters?”

  I stayed in the croup room with Tsige, because I sensed that she had no one else. Her infant looked no better. I thought of the shops on Churchill Road and how I'd seen tourists stop there, thinking it was a flower shop or flower market, only to find that the “flowers” were wreaths. Then they noticed the shoe-box-size coffins, just for infants.

  Tears streamed down Tsige's face—she could see her baby was the sickest one there. The other mothers withdrew as if she were bad luck. At one point I held her hand. I searched for words of comfort but realized I didn't need any. When her baby began grunting with each breath, Tsige cried on my shoulder. I wished Genet were with me—whatever she was doing in Asmara surely couldn't be as meaningful as this. Genet said she wanted to be a doctor—for a smart kid growing up at Missing, perhaps it seemed inevitable. And yet Genet had an aversion to the hospital and had no interest in following Ghosh or Hema around. Even if she were in Addis, I couldn't see her sitting here with Tsige.

  AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Tsige's child died. It had been like watching a slow drowning. The effort of breathing ultimately proved too much for that tiny chest.

  At once the staff nurse ran out in the rain to the main hospital, just as she'd been instructed to do. She gestured for me to follow, but I stayed put. A parent's grief needed a scapegoat, and parents were occasionally moved to violence, to exacting retribution on those who'd tried to help. I knew I had nothing to fear from Tsige.

  Half an hour later, Tsige held the shrouded body in her arms, ready for his voyage home. Belatedly, the other mothers gathered around Tsige. They raised their mouths to the heavens, the veins on their necks forming cords. Lulululululu, they cried, hoping their lament might weave some protection around their infants.