Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

Hema, who'd been thinking along similar lines just minutes before, decided she was a pauper by that yardstick. She said, “Amen. You must be a millionaire many times over then.”

An impish expression stole across his face, and with waggling brows and using just his eyes he pointed down the bench to a woman veiled and swathed in red-and-orange cotton robes. A very pale, henna-painted foot showed. Hemlatha guessed her to be a Yemeni. Or else a Muslim from Pakistan or India.

“And she is … ?” Hema said, hoping it would not be impolite to ask about her nationality.

Adid nodded vigorously. “Three more months at least. And one more expecting at home!”

“I tell you what,” Hema said, looking pointedly at Adid's groin, “I'll ask Dr. Ghosh to give you a special rate on a vasectomy, two for one. It will be cheaper than doing a tubal ligation on all the begums.”

The Gujarati couple across from her looked up scowling at Adid's thigh-slapping laughter.

“Why don't you bring the wives to the antenatal clinic?” Hema asked. “A smart man like you shouldn't wait till they get into trouble. You don't want them to suffer.”

“It's not my choice. You know how these women are. They won't come until they are unconscious,” he said simply.

True enough, Hemlatha thought. Years before, an Arab woman in the Merkato was in labor for days, and the husband, a rich merchant, brought Dr. Bachelli to see her. But rather than allow a male doctor to see her, she wedged her body behind the bedroom door so that any attempt to open it would crush her. The woman died alone, behind that door, an act much admired by her peers.

Because Hema was hungry, and to annoy the Gujaratis further, she accepted some leaves of khat from Adid and tucked them into her cheek. It was something she'd never have dreamed of doing before, but events of the last few hours had changed things.

The khat was bitter at first, but then the pulpy mass became almost sweet and not unpleasant. “Wonder of wonders,” she said aloud, as her face took on the chipmunk bulge and her jaw fell into the lazy, slewing rhythm of the thousands of khat chewers she had seen in her lifetime. Like a pro, she used her handbag as an elbow bolster and she brought her feet up to the bench, one knee flat, the other under her chin. She leaned toward Adid, who was surprisingly chatty.

“… and we spend most of the rainy season away from Addis, in Aweyde, which is near Harrar.”

“I know all about Aweyde,” Hema said, which wasn't true. Shed driven there years before on a holiday to see the old walled city of Harrar. What she remembered about Aweyde was that the entire town seemed nothing more than a khat market. The houses were hopelessly plain, not a trace of whitewash. “I know all about Aweyde,” she said again, and the khat made her feel that she actually did. “The people there are rich enough to each drive a Mercedes, but they won't spend a cent to paint their front door. Am I right?”

“Doctor, how could you know these things?” Adid said, astonished.

Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of the Frenchman's balls, of rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one bollock from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli. Her mind was racing, hyperaware.

The cabin was no longer hot, and it felt good to be heading home. She wanted to say to Adid: When I was a medical student, we had to do this test on patients to check for visceral pain. Visceral pain is different from when you bump your knee, for example. Visceral pain comes from the inside, from the body's organs. It's a pain that is tough to characterize, poorly localized, but painful all the same. Anyway, as students we had to squeeze the testes to check for intact visceral pain, because diseases like syphilis can cause the loss of visceral pain sensations. One day, at the bedside of a patient with syphilis, the professor picked on me to demonstrate visceral pain. The men in our group were snickering. I was bold then—I didn't hesitate. I exposed the balls— the testes, excuse me. The patient had advanced syphilis. When I squeezed, the man just smiled at me. Nothing. No pain. No reaction. So I squeezed harder—really hard. Still nothing. But one of my male classmates fainted!

Adid grinned, as if she had told him this story.

THE PLANE DESCENDED, slipping into and out of the scattered clouds over Addis Ababa. The dense forests of eucalyptus trees at first concealed the city. Emperor Menelik had imported eucalyptus years before from Madagascar, not for its oil, but as firewood, the lack of which had almost made him abandon his capital city. Eucalyptus had thrived in the Ethiopian soil, and it grew rapidly—twelve meters in five years, and twenty meters in twelve years. Menelik had planted it by the hectare. It was indestructible, always returning in strength wherever it was cut down, and proving ideal for framing houses.

The trees revealed clearings with circular, thatch-roofed tukuls and a thorn enclosure to keep the animals penned in. Then, at the edge of the city, she saw corrugated-tin-roofed houses, abundant and closer to gether. A church with a short spire came into view, and then the city proper. There was Churchill Road starting at the railway station and making a steep rise to the Piazza, with a handful of cars and buses plying its slope. This glimpse of the city center, which looked so modern, made her think of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hed brought about more change in his reign than the country had undergone in three centuries. Down at street level, his portrait—the hook nose, the thin lips, the high brow— would be in every house. Hema's father was the Emperor's biggest fan because just before World War II, as Mussolini stood ready to invade, Emperor Haile Selassie warned the world of the price of standing by and allowing Italy to invade a sovereign country like Ethiopia; such inaction, he said, would fuel the territorial ambitions of not just Italy but Germany. “God and history will remember your judgment,” he said famously before the League of Nations, and they did. It made him the symbol of the little guy whod stood up to the bully (and lost).

“You see Missing Hospital, madam?” This from Adid who peered over her shoulder.

“Missing is missing,” she said.

Near the airport an entire hillside had turned to a flaming orange from the blooming of the meskel flower which told her that the rainy season must have ended. Another hillside was covered with lean-tos and shacks of corrugated tin, the colors rust brown or a darker corrosive hue. Each shack shared a wall with its neighbor, so that collectively they looked like long irregular railway carriages that snaked across the hill, sending buds and offshoots in all directions.

THE FRENCHMAN BUZZED low over the strip so that the customs agent could get on his bicycle and shoo stray cows from the runway He circled and landed.

Cars and vans in the bile-green colors of the Ethiopian police raced up to the plane, along with every functionary of the Ethiopian Airlines staff. The cargo door was yanked open, and frantic hands rushed to unload the khat. They tossed the bundles into a VW Kombi, then into a three-wheeler van, and when those were full, they stuffed the police cars, and they all raced off, sirens sounding. Only then were the passengers allowed to disembark.

The engine of the blue-and-white Fiat Seicento whined as the six-hundred milliliter engine, which gave it its name, strained to carry Hemlatha and her Grundig. Shed personally supervised the loading of the big crate onto the roof rack.