Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone

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.

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 the 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?