Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

It was a perfect sunny afternoon in Addis, and it made her forget that she was more than two days overdue at Missing. The light at this altitude was so different from Madras, suffusing what it graced rather than glaring off every surface. There was no hint in the breeze of rain, though that could change in an instant. She caught the woody, medicinal odor of eucalyptus, a scent that would never do in a perfume but was invigorating when it was in the air. She smelled frankincense, which every household threw onto the charcoal stove. She was glad to be alive, and glad to be back in Addis, but she didn't know what to make of the wave of nostalgia that overcame her, an unfulfilled longing that she could not define.

With the end of the rains, makeshift stalls had popped up selling red and green chilies, lemons, and roasted maize. A man with a bleating sheep draped around his neck like a cape struggled to see the road in front of him. A woman sold bundles of eucalyptus leaves used as cooking fuel for making injera —the pancakelike food made from a grain, tef. Farther on Hema saw a little girl pour batter on a huge flat griddle which sat on three bricks with a fire underneath. When the Injera was ready, it would be peeled off like a tablecloth, then folded once, twice, and once more, and stored in a basket.

An old woman in the black clothes of mourning stopped to assist a mother sling her baby onto her back in a pouch made out of her shama — the white cotton cloth that men and women alike wrapped around their shoulders.

A man with withered legs that were folded into his chest swung stiff armed along the dirt sidewalk. He had blocks of wood with a handle in each hand, which he planted on the ground, and then he swung his bottom forward. He moved surprisingly well, like the letter M marching down the road. Her brief absence made these sights a novelty again.

A herd of mules overladen with firewood trotted along, their expressions docile and angelic in the face of the whipping they were getting from the barefoot owner who ran with them. The taxi driver leaned on his horn. Despite the high whine of the engine, the taxi managed only to crawl along like another overburdened beast.

A lorry carrying sheep, the poor animals so crowded together they could hardly blink, overtook them. These were the lucky animals being carried to slaughter. Before Meskel, the feast celebrating the finding of Christ's cross, huge herds of sheep would arrive in the capital, the animals wobbly from exhaustion, barely surviving this march to the feast table. Then, in the days after Meskel, one neither heard nor saw any sheep. Instead the skin traders walked the streets and alleys shouting, “Ye beg koda alle!” —”The sheep's hide whoever has!” A household would hail him, and after some haggling, he'd drape another skin over the ones that he was already shouldering and resume his cry.

Suddenly Hemlatha noticed children everywhere as if they'd been invisible all these years. Two boys were racing their crude metal hoops, using a stick to guide and push, weaving this way and that and making motorcar noises. A toddler with railroad tracks of snot connecting nose to lip watched with envy. Its head had been shaved to leave a traffic-island tuft in front; Hema was told when she first came to Ethiopia that this strange haircut was so that if God chose to take that child (and He took so many), the tuft gave Him a handle by which to lift it to heaven.

The child's mother stood outlined by the bead curtain of a buna-bet — coffeehouse—though it was really a bar, offering things more potent than coffee. At night the bar would glow within from the tube lights, painted green, yellow, and red, and the woman, transformed by that hour, would offer drinks and her company. An espresso machine on a zinc bar established the class of an establishment—this was a legacy of the Italian occupation. The woman's flat eyes fell on the cab, then on Hema, and her expression hardened as if she had seen a competitor. She lifted her gaze to the strange container on the taxi's roof, and then she looked nonchalantly away as if to say, I'm not the least bit impressed. She might be an Amhara, Hema thought, with that walnut skin, the high cheekbones. She is so pretty. Probably a friend of Ghosh. A comb was stuck in her hair as if she were taking a break from teasing it into shape. Her legs shone from Nivea. She might even swallow a dab or two of Nivea now and then, in the belief it lightened the complexion. “For all I know, it works,” Hema said, though she shuddered at the thought.

Between the newer cinder-block buildings were huts, the wattle walls unpainted and revealing their sticks, straw, and mud. All it took was a pole stuck in the ground with an empty can inverted over the top to say, This, too, is a buna-bet, and though we don't have an espresso machine, and though we sell homebrewed tej and talla instead of bottled St. George beer, we offer the same services as the other.

The oldest profession in the world raised no eyebrows, even with Hema. Shed learned it was futile to object—it would have been like taking exception to oxygen. But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.

On the main road Hema saw a work crew of grinning, dark-skinned, big-boned Gurages supervised by a laughing Italian overseer. The Gur -age were southerners with a well-deserved reputation for being hardworking and willing to take on what the locals wouldn't. Gebrew, when he needed extra hands at Missing, would simply step out of the front gate and yell “Gurage!” though of late, that could be seen as insulting, so it was safer to shout “Coolie!”

The crew was barefoot but for the overseer and one man who had squeezed into ill-fitting plastic shoes, having cut holes in them for his big toes. By all rights Hema should have been incensed by this sight of black laborers and a white overseer, and she wondered why she wasn't; maybe it was because the Italians who stayed behind in Ethiopia after it was liberated were so easygoing, so ready to mock themselves, that they were hard to resent. Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals. Or maybe that was just the way of being that they found worked best in their circumstance. Hema saw the laborers stand still as soon as the overseer turned away. A snail's pace, but nevertheless, schools, offices, a grand post office, a national bank, were coming up to match the grandeur of Trinity Cathedral, the Parliament Building, and the Jubilee Palace. The Emperor's vision of his European-style African capital was taking shape.

PERHAPS IT WAS BECAUSE the Emperor was still on her mind, and because her taxi was at the intersection where, in place of the string of shops, there once stood a gallows, but suddenly Hema was thinking about a scene that haunted her.

It was at this very spot in 1946 that she and Ghosh, in their first months in Addis, had come upon a crowd blocking the road. Standing on the running board of Ghosh's Volkswagen, Hema had seen a crudely constructed frame and the three dangling nooses. A modified Trenta Quattro with military markings had pulled up. Three handcuffed Ethio pian prisoners on the flatbed were hauled to their feet. The men were coatless, but otherwise, in their shirts, shoes, and pants, they looked as if theyd been interrupted while having dinner.

An Ethiopian officer in Imperial Bodyguard uniform read from a piece of paper and tossed it aside. Hema watched, fascinated, as he put the noose over each head and positioned the knot to one side, behind the ear. The condemned seemed resigned to their fate, which was in itself a form of extreme bravery. The bearing of a tall older man made Hema certain the prisoners were military. This graying but upright prisoner spoke to the Imperial Bodyguard officer who inclined his head to listen. He nodded, and removed the noose. The prisoner then leaned over the truck and held his handcuffed wrists out to a weeping woman. She removed a ring from his finger and kissed his hand. The prisoner stepped back, looked down like an actor searching for his mark onstage, then bowed to this executioner, who returned the gesture and replaced the noose with the delicacy of a husband garlanding his new bride.