Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

  I thought of the probationer as I walked up the hill to our quarters. I'd been avoiding her. When her students were with her, she made no sign of recognition. When she saw me with Shiva, she greeted us without comment. The first time I ran into her alone, she stopped me, and said, “Are you Marion?” From her eyes I knew that nothing had changed, and that her door was still open to me. “No,” I had said. “I'm Shiva.” She never asked again.

  I heard the murmur of the radio in Rosina's quarters, but their door was closed and in any case I wasn't looking for company.

  I went to bed alone, went to bed with my thoughts—I felt older than my thirteen years.

  I woke when Shiva came home. I watched him in the mirror. He was taller than I saw myself, and he had the narrow hips and the light tread of a dancer. He slipped off his coat and shirt. His hair was parted and combed to one side when he left the house, but now it was an unruly mass of thick curls. His lips were full, almost womanly, and there was a dreamy, prophetic quality to his face. When he was down to his underwear, he studied himself in the mirror. He held one arm up, and the other out. He was imagining a dance with a woman. He made a graceful turn and dip.

  “You had a good time?” I said.

  It stopped him in his tracks. His arms remained where they were. He looked at me in the mirror, which gave me goose bumps. “A good time was had by one and all,” he said in a hoarse voice that I didn't recognize.

  CHAPTER 33

  A Form of Madness

  THE TAXI DROPPED SHIVA and me across from Missing's gate, in front of the cinder-block buildings, just as the streetlights came on. At sixteen, I was captain, opening batsman, and wicket-keeper for our cricket eleven and Shiva was a middle-order batsman. As opener, my forté was whaling away at the ball and trying to weather the first salvo while demoralizing the bowlers, while Shiva's strength was to doggedly defend his wicket, anchoring the team, even if he scored few runs. After practice it was always dark when we came home.

  I saw a woman framed by the bead curtains and silhouetted against the light of the bar, at the end of the building closest to Ali's souk.

  “Hi! Wait for me,” she called out. Her tight skirt and heels restricted her to mincing steps as she crossed the plank that forded the gutter. She hugged herself against the cold, smiling so that her eyes were reduced to slits.

  “My, you have grown so tall! Do you remember me?” she said, looking uncertainly from me to Shiva. A jasmine scent reached my nostrils.

  After her baby died, I'd seen Tsige many, many times but only at waving distance. She had worn black for a year. That rainy morning when she brought her baby to Missing, Tsige had looked quite plain. Hers was a simple, guileless face, but now with eyeliner, lipstick, hair in waves down to her shoulders, she was striking.

  We touched cheeks like relatives, first one side, then the other, then back to the first side again. “Uh … this is … may I present my brother,” I said.

  “You work here?” Shiva said. Shiva was never tongue-tied around women.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “I own it now. I invite you to please come in.”

  “No … but … thank you,” I stammered. “Our mother is expecting us.”

  “No, she's not,” said Shiva.

  “I hope you won't mind if I come another day,” I said.

  “Whenever you want, you are welcome. Both of you.”

  We stood in awkward silence. She still had my hand.

  “Listen. I know it was a long time ago, but I never thanked you. Every time I see you I want to talk to you, but I don't want to embarrass you, and I felt ashamed … Today, when I saw you this close, I thought I'd do it.”

  “Oh no,” I said, “it's I who worried that you were angry with me— with us. Maybe you blamed Missing for …”

  “No, no, no. I'm to blame.” The light dimmed in her eyes. “That's what happens when you listen to these stupid old women. ‘Give him this,’ ‘Do that,’ they told me. That morning I looked at my poor baby, and I realized all those habesha medicines had hurt him. When your father examined Teferi, I knew he could have helped if I had come days earlier. I'd made a horrible mistake by waiting. But …”

  I remained silent, remembering her sadness and how she had cried on my shoulder.

  “I hope God forgives me. I hope He gives me another chance.” She spoke earnestly, her face reflecting her feelings, hiding nothing. “But listen, what I came to tell you is, may God and the saints watch over you and bless you for all the time you spent with us. Such a good doctor your father is. Are you going to be doctors?”

  “Yes,” Shiva and I said easily, speaking in unison. It was about the only thing I could say with confidence these days, and it was about the only thing Shiva and I seemed to agree on.

  The light came back to her face.

  AS WE WALKED to our bungalow, Shiva said, “Why didn't we go inside? She probably lives at the back. She would have let you sleep with her.”

  “What makes you think I have to sleep with every woman I see?” I'd turned on him with more venom than was needed. “I don't want to sleep with her. Besides, she's not that kind of woman,” I said.

  “Maybe not anymore. But she knows how.”

  “I've had my chances, you know. It's a choice.” I told him about the probationer, as if to prove my point.

  Shiva had nothing to say to that, and we walked in silence. He was getting under my skin. I didn't want to think about Tsige in that way; I didn't want to picture her sweet face and how she had to make her living. It was painful to imagine, and so I chose not to. But Shiva had no such qualms.

  Shiva said, “One day we'll have sex with women. I think today is as good as any other day.” He looked up as if to ascertain that the arrangement of the stars was auspicious.

  I stopped him and grabbed his shirt. I tried to find reasons for my objection. What came out was lame.

  “Are you forgetting Hema and Ghosh? You think it's something that will make them happy? People look up to them. We mustn't do anything to embarrass them.”

  “I think it's inevitable,” Shiva said. “They do it, too. I'm sure they—”

  “Stop!” I said. What a disturbing thought. But not so for Shiva.

  THE VERY MONTH we turned sixteen, my voice cracked when I didn't want it to. I had blackheads pushing out as if I had swallowed a sack of mustard seeds. The clothes Hema bought me grew tight or short in three or four months. Hair appeared in strange places. Thoughts of the opposite sex, mainly of Genet, made it difficult for me to concentrate. It reassured me to see these physical changes mirrored in Shiva, but after our conversation about Tsige, I couldn't talk with him about the desire I was feeling or the restraint that had to come with it. Shiva felt no such need for restraint.

  “Prison,” I'd heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, “is the best thing for a marriage. If you can't send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.” Now that I knew what they were up to, I was deeply embarrassed, even shocked.

  Despite our knowledge of the human body in the context of disease, Shiva and I were naïve for the longest time about sexual matters—or perhaps it was just me. Little did I know that our Ethiopian peers both at our school and at the government schools had long ago gone through their sexual initiation with a bar girl or a housemaid. They never suffered my years of foggy confusion, trying to imagine what was unimaginable.

  I remember a story my classmate Gaby told me when I was twelve or thirteen, a story which he'd heard from a cousin who had emigrated to America, a story which we all believed for the longest time. “When you land in New York,” the cousin had said, “a beautiful blond woman will engage you in conversation at the airport. Her perfume will drive you mad. Big breasts, miniskirt. She will introduce you to her brother. They'll offer you a ride into town in their convertible, and, of course, not to be rude, you accept. As you are driving, the man will say, ‘Let's just drop by my house in Malibu and have a martini before we get you to Manhattan.’ You pull in to their mansion. A
house like you've never seen. As soon as you are inside, the man will pull out a gun and point it at you, and say ‘Screw my sister or you will die.’ “

  So many nights I lay awake dreaming of this horrible, twisted, beautiful fate, wishing I could go to America only for this reason. Brother, put away the gun, I will screw your sister for free, became a line Gaby and I and our little gang said to one another, our secret phrase that signaled our fellowship in adolescent horniness, our simmering sexual heat. Even after we realized the story was absurd, a fairy tale, it still delighted us, and we loved to repeat that refrain.

  A few weeks after Shiva and I had seen Tsige outside her bar, I encountered the Staff Probationer walking down to Missing's gate. There was no escaping her. Seeing her always provoked anxiety.

  She was with her brood of probationers. She usually ignored me in that situation. But on this day she smiled and blood rushed to her face. I smiled back so as not be rude. She winked and came to me as her students walked on. “Thank you for last night. I hope the blood didn't scare you. Did that surprise you? I waited for you all these years. It was worth it.” She brushed against me. “When are you coming next? I'll be counting the days.”

  She swung every bit of flesh that would swing as she shimmied after her students, as if Chuck Berry were strutting behind her, playing his guitar. She called over her shoulder, loud enough for the whole world to hear, “Next time please don't run off afterward like that, okay?”

  I raced home. Of late, particularly on weekends, Shiva went off on his own and I hadn't given it much thought. I never imagined this is what he'd been up to.

  Shiva, Genet, and Hema were at the dinner table, Rosina serving. Ghosh had gone to wash up. I hauled Shiva off to our room.

  “She thinks it was me!” I wished I'd never told him about my dancing with the probationer. “Why didn't you ask me? I would have forbidden you to go. I did forbid you to go. What did you tell her? Did you pretend to be me?”

  Shiva was puzzled by my anger. “No. I was me. I just knocked on her door. I said nothing. She did all the rest.”

  “My God! Just like that? You broke your virginity and hers?”

  “It was my first time with her. And what makes you so sure about her, eh, older brother?” His words were like a punch in my gut. I'd never heard Shiva speak sarcastically to me, and it felt cutting, ugly. He went on as I stood speechless. “It's not my first time, anyway. I've been going to the Piazza every Sunday.”

  “What? How many times have you gone?”

  “Twenty-one times.”

  I couldn't speak. I was stunned, embarrassed, disgusted, and terribly envious.

  “The same woman?”

  “No, twenty-one different women. Twenty-two if you count the probationer.” He was standing there, chin pointing at me, one arm languidly set against the wall.

  When I found a voice I said, “Well would you mind not going back to the Staff Probationer?”

  “Why? Will you visit her?”

  I no longer felt I had any authority over him, no credible experience with which to advise him. I felt very tired. “Never mind. But do me a favor; tell her who you are if you go back. And stay around and hold her and whisper sweet things in her ear when you are done. Tell her she's beautiful.”

  “Whisper what? Why?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Marion, all women are beautiful,” Shiva said. I looked up and realized that he spoke with conviction and not a trace of sarcasm. He wasn't embarrassed, or angry that I hauled him off, or the least bit upset. My conceit was that I thought I knew my brother. Yet all I really knew were his rituals. He loved his Grays Anatomy and carried it around so much, it had pale indentations on the cover from his fingers. When Ghosh got Shiva a new edition of Grays, my brother was insulted, as if Ghosh had brought him a stray puppy to replace his beloved Koochooloo, who was on her last legs. I knew Shiva's rituals, but not the logic behind them. Shiva did find women beautiful—I'd seen that from the first time we visited the Version Clinic. He never missed a clinic and ultimately wore Hema down until she taught him how to turn babies. There was nothing prurient about his interest in the Version Clinic or in obstetrics and gynecology. If the clinic day happened to fall on a holiday, or Hema decided to not have it for some reason, Shiva would still be there, seated on the steps of the locked building. Here I was telling him to be nice to the probationer, but he could argue that hed given the probationer just what she'd wanted while I'd been anything but nice to her. Meanwhile, I was saving myself for one woman. My abstinence felt noble because it was so very difficult. I burned with my celibacy and I wanted it to impress Genet. How could it not?

  It had been clear to me ever since that sunny Saturday three years before when Genet returned from her holiday in Asmara that puberty for her was all but complete. Her growth spurt that winter made everything longer: legs, fingers, even lashes. Her eyelids turned sleepy looking, and her eyes seemed even more widely spaced. After her return from Asmara, she'd begun to drive the household mad. According to Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, breast buds and pubic hair were the first signs of puberty in girls. How strange that Nelson overlooked the first sign I noted, namely, a heady, mature scent that beckoned like a Siren. When she wore perfume, the two scents would mingle, and what emerged made me dizzy. All I could imagine was tearing off her clothes and drinking from the source.

  Genet's changes galvanized Rosina—I could see that clearly. Hema and Rosina were allies, united by their desire to protect Genet from the predators, the boys. But the two mothers were never protective enough for my tastes, and they sabotaged their own efforts by buying her the kinds of clothes and accessories that made her more attractive to the opposite sex. The hounds—judging by how I felt—couldn't help sniffing at our doorstep, and what's more, Genet, by her own admission, was in heat.

  THAT TERM, on a Thursday, Genet sent word that she wouldn't be riding back to school in our taxi. She said she'd come home on her own. As Shiva and I walked the last fifty yards up our driveway, a sleek black Mercedes-Benz dropped Genet off.

  Shiva went on into the house, but I waited.

  “I don't like you coming back with Rudy,” I said to her. It was such an understatement—that luxurious car made me feel so inadequate and it made my blood boil. Rudy's father had the porcelain and bathroom fixture monopoly in Addis. There were perhaps two other kids in the school who drove their own cars. What rankled most was that Rudy had once been one of my best friends.

  “You sound like my mother,” Genet said, oblivious to my distress.

  “Rudy is the crown prince of the toilets. He just wants to sleep with you.”

  “Don't you?” she said looking at me coyly, tilting her head.

  “Yes. But I want to sleep only with you. And I love you. So it's different.”

  For all my shyness around women, I didn't have a problem telling Genet how I felt. Perhaps it was a mistake to show my hand so easily. It gave a shallow woman great power over you, but my faith insisted she couldn't be shallow, that such love, such commitment from me, would empower her, free her.

  “Will you do it with me?” she asked.

  “Of course I will. I dream of it every night. We only have to wait three more years, Genet, and we can get married. And then we will lose our virginity in this place,” I said pulling out a much-folded picture I had torn out of National Geographic. It showed the Lake Palace in Udaipur, a gleaming white hotel in the middle of a pristine blue lake. “I want to marry in India,” I said. I had visions of me, the groom, riding in on an elephant, a symbol of the desire and the frustration I had repressed— only an elephant (or a jumbo jet) would do. And beautiful Genet, bejew-eled and dressed in a gold sari, jasmine all around … I could see every detail. I even had the perfume picked out for her—Motiya Bela made from jasmine flowers. “And this is the honeymoon suite.” The flip side showed a room with a giant four-poster bed, with huge French doors beyond that opened out onto the lake. “Notice the bathroom with a claw-foot tu
b and a bidet.” The crown prince of toilets could never top that.

  Genet was surprised and touched by the photographs and the fact that I would be carrying that page in my wallet. My tigress fixed her gaze on me with new interest.

  “Marion, you've really thought about this, haven't you?”

  I described the white silk sheets on the bed, how the sheer cotton curtains would enclose it in the daytime, but at night, they'd be open, as would the doors to the veranda. “I'll cover the bed with rose petals, and when I undress you, I'm going to lick and kiss every inch of your body, starting with your toes …”

  She moaned. She put a finger on my lips, her eyeballs rolling back in her head, showing me her throat. “My God, you better stop before I go crazy.” She sighed. “But listen, Marion, what if I tell you that I don't want to get married? I don't want to wait. I want to be deflowered. Now. Not in three years.”

  “But what about Hema? Or your mother?”

  “I don't want them to deflower me. I want you.”

  “That's not—”

  A peal of laughter, for which I forgave her because it lifted my spirits. “I know what you mean, silly. What if I don't have your strength to resist? Some days I just want to do it. Don't you? Just to get it over with! Just to know.” She sighed. “If you won't do it, maybe I should ask Shiva? Or Rudy?”

  “Not that toilet prince. And Shiva … well, Shiva is no longer a virgin. He's done it already. Besides, I thought you loved me.”

  “What?” She clapped her hands in delight, and looked around for Shiva. “Shiva?” She was almost jumping for joy. She'd sidestepped the question of her love for me. She was too shy to profess it, I told myself. “Oh, Shiva, Shiva! We must get all the details from him. Shiva, no longer a virgin, you say? What are you and I waiting for, then?”

  “I'm waiting for you and—”

  “Oh, stop. You sound like a stupid romance novel. You sound like a girl, for God's sake! If you want first shot you better move fast, Marion.” She seemed serious, no trace of humor in her face. She scared me when she spoke that way. “Otherwise, I have some others in mind. Your friend Gaby, or even the toilet prince, though his breath stinks of cheese.” She burst out laughing again, enjoying my distress but also showing me that she was just joking, thank God.