Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

  IN THE INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURE HALL, I heard snatches of Bengali, Arabic, and Tagalog. A man bound for Lagos protested in screeching pidgin about the unfairness of British Airways, because there was no way he was four pounds over. In this setting, Thomas Stone, without his white coat or scrubs, looked like the newly arrived foreigner.

  “Will you be back, Marion?” he asked when it was time for saying good-bye.

  All I knew was that I wanted to be with Hema when she interred Shiva's ashes between Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise. The grotto by Missing's back wall and in earshot of the little creek was rapidly becoming the family burial plot. I was going back also to see Matron, Almaz, and Gebrew. I knew that my presence would help console them. Beyond that, I hadn't given great thought to my future.

  “Of course I'll be back,” I said. “I still have my house, the car, my job …”

  “Be careful what you eat, drink …,” he said. It was his way of telling me to protect his handiwork.

  I felt better than well. Other transplant patients had to fight to keep their bodies from rejecting the lifesaving organ. The cortisone they took led to cataracts, diabetes, hip fractures, and other side effects. I was blessed not to have to swallow a single pill. I felt no pain if you didn't count the twinges under my ribs, which I considered promising and not painful; they were the sign of Shiva's half liver growing to fully occupy its new home.

  “How about you?” I had yet to find a comfortable way to address my father; it was “Dr. Stone” in the hospital and nothing at times like this. “Will you have a job to go back to?” I teased. He hadn't seen Boston since I fell ill.

  His slow smile only exaggerated the sadness in his face. He took Shiva's death personally, as if fate had never forgotten that he'd once attempted to destroy Shiva, and so when he had operated to save Shiva, his original intent had betrayed him.

  My father made no attempt to shake my hand. Our one hug after Shiva's passing was good for a lifetime. We parted with a nod.

  Hema, however, took Thomas Stone's hand in both of hers. I had missed their reunion at my bedside. Now, I watched like a nosy child.

  “Thomas, stop this at once!” Hema said, chiding him for his melancholic expression. “You did everything you could, do you hear me? You did your best for your sons. No one else in the world could have done what you did. Thomas, if Ghosh were here, he'd say the same thing. He'd have been so proud of you and he'd say, ‘Go on with your work because it is so important.’ “ She released his hand, after patting it one last time, then she turned and walked away.

  Later, as our plane banked over Queens and headed for open water, I thought about Hema's parting words to Stone. Buried in there had been her apology for having fashioned him into a monster in her mind for all these years. In patting his hand and walking away, she was releasing herself.

  Alitalia took us to Rome. Mechanical problems on the connecting flight had the agent projecting a fourteen-hour layover. It gave me an idea. In no time Hema and I were once again in a taxi on a freeway, but this time we were heading to downtown Rome. We were like children playing hooky from school.

  Hema had needed little convincing. We went to a first-class hotel, the Hassler, Rome's best, I was once told. It was a grand building that overlooked the Spanish Steps. From the rooftop at dusk the sky's red hue outlined the dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

  Each morning we set out for the briefest sightseeing. We returned to our hotel for lunch and a long afternoon nap. The evenings we wandered down the streets and alleyways beneath the Spanish Steps. Eventually we'd pick an outdoor café for dinner. “It's so familiar, isn't it?” Hema said. “These menus, typed out and mimeographed, minestrone and pasta fagl-oli, the waiters with white shirts, black pants, white aprons …” I knew what she meant. The Italians had brought it all to Ethiopia, right down to the umbrellas that hung over the little Formica-topped round tables. Hema's face at dinner was as tranquil as Id seen it since I became conscious of her at my bedside at Our Lady. “I wish Ghosh could have been with us. How he would have enjoyed this,” she said, smiling.

  ON THE FOURTH MORNING, we let the concierge talk us into a private tour with a guide from our hotel. What did we want to see? Surprise us, we said. Take us off the cow path. Places where there isn't too much walking or waiting in line.

  He began with the Santa Maria della Vittoria, a ten-minute ride from our hotel. It was a homely church, sitting right on the street, cars passing by, the elaborate façade looking as if it had been slapped on to the front of an unadorned stone box. Our guide said it was built about 1624, first dedicated to St. Paul, and later to the Virgin Mary. The interior was small—tiny when compared with St. Peter's—with a short nave under a low vault. Off to the side, Corinthian pillars flattened into the wall demarcated three “chapels” which were nothing more than recesses, each with a rail for private prayer and a place to light candles. As we came to the end of the nave, our guide turned to the left and pointed. “This is the Cornaro Chapel. It is what I wanted you to see,” he said.

  It took a few seconds for my eyes to relay the sight to my brain, and longer still for my brain to believe. The blue marble sculpture floating before me was Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa. I wanted to silence our guide and say, Stop, I know this sculpture. But in truth what I knew was only a print that found its way onto a calendar which my mother had then thumbtacked to the wall of the autoclave room. It had been up for perhaps thirty years before Ghosh had taken that aging piece of paper and framed it for me, to protect it from further deterioration. The print meant the world to me, yet it had never seemed at ease on my walls in America, where it looked like the cheapest kind of tourist gewgaw. I'd packed it with me on this journey, planning to restore it to the one place where I knew it was at home, the autoclave room.

  I looked over to Hema. Her face was aglow. She understood. What providence had brought us to this spot? Surely this was Ghosh announcing his presence, because Ghosh was the sort of man who could be counted on to know that Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa was minutes from our hotel, even if he'd never been to Rome before. Ghosh had brought us here, led us to this spot, not to see St. Teresa in marble, but to see Sister Mary Joseph Praise in the flesh, for that is what the figure was to me. I have come, Mother.

  WE LIT CANDLES. Hema fell to her knees, the flame throwing a flickering light on her face. Her lips moved. She believed in every kind of deity and in reincarnation and resurrection—she knew no contradictions in these areas. How I admired her faith, her lack of self-consciousness—a Hindu lighting candles to a Carmelite nun in a Catholic church.

  I knelt, too. I addressed God and Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Shiva and Ghosh—all the beings I carried with me in the flesh and in spirit. Thank you for letting me be alive, letting me see this marble dream. I felt a great peace, a sense that coming to this spot had completed the circuit, and now a blocked current would flow and I could rest. If “ecstasy” meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

  My mother had spoken.

  What I didn't know then was that she had more to say.

  CHAPTER 54

  Homefires

  IT WAS DUSK when we landed. I had been away from Addis for seven years. The white buildings of Missing looked rounded at the edges, worn down, as if theyd been excavated in an archaeological dig but not restored.

  When the taxi reached Shiva's toolshed I had the driver let me out. I told Hema to go on because I wanted to walk the rest of the way.

  I stood listening once the car pulled away; the dry rustle of the leaves was like a child's hand sifting through a box of coins. The sound had lost all its menace for me. I found that dented and bent curb, which had stopped a motorcycle but not its rider. I looked down into the trees and the shadows where he fell. The spot no longer generated any dread for me. All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear. I looked out over trees to th
e city. The sky was a mad painter's canvas, as if halfway through the artist had decided against azure and had instead splashed ochre and crimson and black on the palette. The city was alight, glowing, but here and there it was obscured by great puffs of mist which smudged my view, like the smoke of many small battles.

  I walked up the hill to the house, a thousand memories now of Shiva and me doing our three-legged race to be in time for dinner, or the two of us and Genet walking back with our school books, of Zemui coming up with his motorcycle and then coasting the last hundred yards. Up ahead I could see the figures huddled around our taxi and around Hema. Then Matron, Gebrew, and Almaz separated from the vehicle, silhouetted against the last embers of the sky, and they waited for me.

  I'D BEEN BACK just three days when Matron summoned me to Casualty. A young girl with a bull-gore wound to the abdomen was exsanguinating before our eyes. The child would have died if wed tried to send her elsewhere. I took her to Operating Theater 3 at once, and found the bleeder. What followed next—cutting out damaged bowel, washing out the peritoneal cavity, fashioning a colostomy, was routine, but its effect on me was anything but. I felt I was on consecrated soil, standing on the same spot where Thomas Stone, Ghosh, and Shiva had stood, each with scalpel in hand. At the end of the surgery, when I turned to leave, weaving around the bucket and wires on the floor, I looked up and saw Shiva in the new glass that separated Theater 3 from its spanking-new mate, Theater 4. The sight took my breath away. I remembered Shiva's first words when the killing of Koochooloo's puppies prompted him to break years of silence: Will you forget if someone kills me or Marion?

  No, Shiva, we'll never forget you, I said to my reflection. In saying that I think I decided my future.

  AMONG SHIVA'S BELONGINGS in his room, I found a key on a key-holder shaped like the Congo. In Shiva's toolshed was a strange-looking motorcycle, with bright red, stubby fenders, a teardrop-shaped red fuel tank, handlebars that would have been called ape hangers in America, and lovely chrome wheels. Hema said that Shiva had bought the bike secondhand a few years back and that he kept tinkering with it. She said he had only ridden it late at night when there was no traffic. The udderlike engine looked very familiar, and its low rumble when I kick-started it gave away its true identity.

  I operated three days a week, and when my return ticket to New York was about to expire, I did nothing.

  Shiva's liver functioned beautifully in me year after year. The shots of hepatitis B immunoglobulin helped. The virus became so dormant that my blood tests showed I wasn't a carrier, and that I couldn't infect anyone. Matron insisted it was a miracle, and I had to agree.

  In 1991, five years after my return, I stood by the gates of Missing just as I had when I was a child, and I watched the forces of the Tigre People's Liberation Front and other freedom fighters make their way into the city. They were dressed in the same functional shirts, shorts, and sandals of the guerrillas I had seen in Eritrea, bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, rifles in their hands. They didn't march in formation, yet their faces showed the discipline and confidence of men who believed in their cause. There was no looting, no mayhem. The only looting was by the Comrade President-for-Life, who emptied the Treasury and flew with his loot to Zimbabwe, where his fellow looter, Mugabe, gave him refuge. Mengistu was a despised figure, a blight on the nation, a man about whom to this day no one can find a good word to say Almaz said that the souls of all those he murdered were assembled in a stadium, waiting to give him a reception on his way to hell.

  EVERY EVENING I checked on Matron before I went to bed. She was so tremulous and bent over with age, but her joy in life was unchanged. We would have a cup of cocoa together. Her only LP—Bach—played in the background on the small gramophone I had bought for her. She never tired of the “Gloria,” which I will always associate with her. As Id sit with her, she would look over and smile as if she always knew Id come back to the land I had once disowned. It had been Matron's wish that God might call her either during her prayers or her sleep, and He obliged. It was 1991, a few months after the President-for-Life fled; I found her in her chair, the record still spinning on her gramophone. Just the previous morning she had been supervising the planting of a new cultivar, the Rosa rubiginosa Shiva, which she had officialy registered with the Royal Society. To me it looked as if the whole city, rich and poor, turned out for her funeral. Almaz said that the streets to heaven were lined by the souls of those who were grateful to Matron, and that her throne was next to Mary's.

  Almaz and Gebrew were retired and ensconced in new, comfortable quarters built for them at Missing, free to spend their time in any way they chose. I suppose it should not have surprised me that they would spend it in fasting and prayer.

  The Shiva Stone Institute for Fistula Surgery with Hema as its titular head grew, as did its funding. Hema worked every day, and zealous young gynecologists from within the country, but also from other African nations, came to train and take up the cause. The Staff Probationer, whose room I had visited so many years ago, had become a skilled assistant under Shiva's tutelage, and now, with Hema's encouragement, she was a confident surgeon on her own, well suited to the painstaking task of training the young doctors who came to learn how to treat this one condition. I insisted on learning her real name, and reluctantly she told me it was Naeema. But it was not a name she ever used; she had become the Staff Probationer even to herself.

  In going through Matron's papers, I discovered that the anonymous donor who had modestly funded Shiva's work for so many years was none other than Thomas Stone. Now he worked to direct other donors and foundations to support Missing.

  I HAD TO WAIT till 2004 for Sister Mary Joseph Praise's message to reach me. It happened just after New Year's on the Western calendar, a time when the mimosa trees that surrounded the outpatient building had sprung their violet and yellow blooms and Missing was enveloped in the scent of vanilla.

  I'd gone into the autoclave room between patients. The framed print of Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa looked slightly askew. In straightening it, I found the hook was loose. When I took the frame down to tighten the hook, I noticed the thick paper backing had come unglued at one edge. The room stayed humid because of the autoclave, and it appeared to have weakened the glue. On trying to get the backing to stick again, I spied a gossamer-thin letter paper folded and ensconced behind that backing, the lines of blue writing showing through.

  I fished it out.

  I slumped back into my chair. My hands never tremble, but for some reason that delicate slip of paper shook.

  The letter looked discolored by age, almost transparent, in danger of crumbling into dust. Like Ghosh, I had a moment to decide whether to read a private letter that was meant for another. I was certain that this was the letter my mother had penned just before I was born. Then it was in Ghosh's possession. When I was twenty-five years old, the letter came to me. I had carried it to America, then I had brought it back. For twenty-five years I was unaware that I had it. Until today. “When are you coming, Mama?” I used to ask when I was a small boy gazing up at the picture. She had come at last.

  CHAPTER 55

  The Afterbird

  September 19 Dear Thomas,

  Last night, God told me I must confess to you what I have never confessed, even to God. Years ago, in Aden, I turned from God as He turned from me. Something happened to me there that should not happen to any woman. I could not forgive the man who harmed me. I could not forgive God. Death would have been better than what I endured. But I came here, to Missing. I came in the dress of a nun to hide my bitterness and shame from the world.

  In Jeremiah 17 it is written, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, and who can understand it?” I came to Ethiopia in deceit.

  But our work changed me. I would have been your assistant till my last breath. Now, things have changed again.

  A few months ago, you were like a man possessed, and I tried to comfort you. Now I am with child. Do not blame yoursel
f.

  It was difficult to hide my body from Matron and the others. Many times I thought of telling you. I could never find a way. But now I am frightened. My time is short. Last night the movements became strong. It made me think, What if Thomas wishes me to stay? I should not leave in the way I came to Missing and to you, hiding and in deceit. That is why I write.

  I must flee Missing to spare it my shame just as I once fled to it to hide my shame. If you come to me when you get this letter, I will know that you wish me to be with you. But whatever you do, my love will always be the same.

  Mary

  It took such concentration to finish my last surgical case—a routine vagotomy and gastrojejunostomy for a duodenal ulcer—and not let my mind wander. At last, with that letter in hand, I walked back to my quarters, feeling as if I had never come up this path before.

  She loved him. She loved him so much she ran to him from Aden. The bloodstains with which she came to Missing told me what she could not. She made her way to the doctor—the man—she had met on that ship out of India. And then, years later, she loved him so much she was ready to leave him. At the eleventh hour she decided to write and tell him. Then she waited for him to come, or not.