Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

She sighed and pulled back, pushing me upright, then straightening her hair. Her expression was serious, like that of a clinician making a pronouncement after the detailed physical exam.

“Wait, my Marion. You've saved yourself all these years. That is not a small thing. I want you to go home. After you have thought about it, if you want me, I will be here. You can come back here or we can go away, go on a trip together. Or I will come to New York and we will take a beautiful hotel room.” She read the disappointment on my face, the rejection. “Don't be sad. I am doing this out of love for you. When you have something this precious, you must think carefully how you give it away. I'll understand if you don't give it to me. If you choose me, I will be honored, and I will honor you. Now, I'll get a taxi to take you. Go, my sweet man. Go with God. There is no one else like you.”

This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

NOW THAT I HAD the income of an attending surgeon, I bought a duplex at one end of a row of such units in Queens. The roofline above the dormer window on one side was peaked like an eyebrow, and it cast a proprietary gaze over an overgrown wedge of land, thick with maples. In summer, I put my jasmine pots on the little patio and I grew salad staples in a tiny garden. In winter, I brought the jasmine indoors while the empty wire cages outside stood as memorials to the succulent, blood-red tomatoes the earth had given up. I painted walls; I repaired roof shingles; I installed bookshelves. Uprooted from Africa, I was satisfying a nesting impulse. I'd found my version of happiness in America. Six years had gone by, and though I should have visited Ethiopia, somehow I could never quite break free.

One day, when coming out of an ice-cream shop, a tall elegantly dressed black woman, her leather coat dancing above her ankles, brushed past me. I held the door for her, and as she slid past, an intense disquiet came over me. She turned back to look at me, smiling. Another evening, while driving back through Manhattan from a trauma conference in New Jersey, a streetwalker caught my eye as she stepped out from under an awning near the Holland Tunnel. She was ghost lit by car headlamps and reflections off the puddles. She tit-flashed me in the rain. Or I imagined she did. I felt the disquiet again, like the hint of something afire, but one doesn't know where. I circled the block, but she was gone.

At home, I prepared for the next day's work. I could have gone into private practice when I finished my five-year residency, or else I could have gone to some other teaching institution. But I felt a great loyalty to Our Lady. And now, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and Walter Reed in Washington were sending us a few of their senior surgical residents. In peacetime, we provided the closest thing to a war zone, a place where they could hone their skills. I was Our Lady's Head of Trauma; we were blessed with new resources and more personnel. There was no reason for me to be unhappy. But that night, with a fire going in the grate, I felt restless, as if a paralysis would soon set in if I didn't take certain measures.

That weekend, I decided my life needed a dimension that did not involve work. I looked over the Times for events, readings, openings, plays, lectures, and other matters of interest. I forced myself to leave the house on Saturday and again on Sunday.

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I came home after work and deposited my briefcase and the mail in my library. In the kitchen, I lit the candle, set the table, and warmed up the last portion of a chicken casserole that I had cooked the previous Sunday from a Times recipe.

There was a knock on the door.

I panicked.

Had I invited someone over for dinner and forgotten? Other than Deepak coming over once, no one had ever been here. Could it be that Tsige from Boston had decided to take matters into her own hands, since I had failed to call her? I'd picked up the receiver a dozen times, and then lost courage. Or could this be Thomas Stone knocking? I hadn't told him where I lived, but he could have found out easily from Deepak.

I looked through the peephole.

In that convex fish-eye image, I saw eyes, a nose, cheekbones, lips … My brain tried to juggle and rearrange the parts to come up with a face and a name.

It wasn't Stone or Deepak or Tsige.

There was no mistaking who it was.

She turned to leave, went down the two steps.

I could have watched her walk away.

I opened the door. She stood frozen, her body facing the street, her face turned back to the door. She was taller than I recalled, or perhaps it was that she was thinner. She looked to see that it was me, then she dropped her gaze to a spot near my left elbow. This allowed me to study her at will, to decide whether to slam the door on her.

Her hair was straightened, lank, without benefit of ribbons or bows or even a good combing. The cheekbones were intact, more prominent than ever, as if to better buttress those oval, slanting eyes which were her prettiest feature. Even without makeup, hers would always be a stunning face. Although it was summer, she wore a long wool coat tied tight around the waist, and she hugged herself as if she were cold. She stood there motionless, like a small animal caught invading the territory of a predator, paralyzed and unable to move.

I came down my steps. I reached my hand out and tilted her face up. Her eyeballs and lids rolled down just like the eyes of the dolls she used to play with. Her skin was cold to my touch. The vertical scars at the outer edges of her eyes were now seasoned lines, though I recalled the day Rosina's blade gave birth to them, and how they had been raw and choked with dark blood. I jerked her chin farther up. Still she wouldn't meet my gaze. I wanted her to see the scars on my body, one from her betrayal of me with Shiva and another from her becoming more Eritrean than any Eritrean, resulting in the hijacking that drove me out of my country. I wanted her to see my rage through my outer calm. I wanted her to feel the blood surge in my muscles, to see the way my fingers curled and coiled and itched for her windpipe. It was good she didn't look, because if she'd so much as blinked, I would have bit into her jugular, I would have consumed her, bones, teeth, and hair, leaving nothing of her on the street.

I took her by the elbow and led her inside. She came like a woman going to the gallows. In the foyer as I bolted the door, she stood rooted to the mat. I led her to my library—a dining room that I had transformed—and I pushed her down on the ottoman. She perched on its edge. I stared down at her; she didn't move. Then she coughed, a spasm that took fifteen seconds to pass. She brought a crumpled tissue to her lips. I looked at her for a long time. I was about to speak when the cough commenced again.

I went to the kitchen. I boiled water for tea, leaning my head against the refrigerator as I waited. Why was I doing this? One minute homicide, the next minute tea?

She had not changed her position. When she took the cup from me, I saw her unvarnished, chipped fingernails and the wrinkled washerwoman's skin. She pulled one sleeve down, passed the cup over, and repeated the process with the other, so as to hide her hands. Tears streamed down her face, her lips pulled back into a grimace.