Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

Hema didn't understand what she was seeing, not then anyway. She half believed it to be a form of theater. The violence of what followed— the truck roaring away, the thrashing forms, the awkward and impossible angle of head on chest, the mad rush of onlookers to tear off the dead men's shoes—was less disturbing than the idea that she was living in a country where such things could take place. Sure, she'd seen brutality cruelty, in Madras, but they took the form of neglect and indifference to suffering, or they took the form of corruption.

The event left Hema sick for days. She contemplated leaving Ethio pia. There'd been nothing about it in the Ethiopian Herald, no comment the government wished to make. The men had been planning revolution, so people said, and this was the Emperor's response. He was keeping a fragile country on course.

Hema had never forgotten the reluctant executioner, a handsome man, his temples forming a sharp angle with his brow so his head was shaped like a hatchet. His nose was flattened at its base as if from an old fracture. She remembered his stately bow to the condemned before he carried out his orders. Shed felt pity and even respect for him. The conflict between his duty and his compassion was revealed by that gesture. Had he refused to follow orders, his neck would have been stretched. Hema was sure he'd acted against his conscience.

Maybe this is what keeps me in Addis all these years, Hema thought, this juxtaposition of culture and brutality, this molding of the new out of the crucible of primeval mud. The city is evolving, and I feel part of that evolution, unlike in Madras, where the city seems to have been completed centuries before I was born. Did anyone but my parents notice that I left? “Why don't you stay in India? There are so many poor women who die needlessly here in Madras,” her father had said halfheartedly on this visit. “You want me to give free service to the poor from this house?” she said. “If not, then get me a job. Let the City Corporation hire me, or the Government Medical Service. If my country needs me, why is it that they don't take me?” They both knew the answer: jobs went to those willing to grease palms. She sighed, causing the taxi driver to look over. She was reliving the pain of saying good-bye to her parents yet again.

The sight of barefoot peasants carrying impossible head loads and horse-drawn gharries plying the roads maintained the aura and mystique of this ancient kingdom that almost justified the fabulous tales of Prester John, who wrote in medieval times of a magical Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim lands. Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here Hema felt she'd tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had traveled back to an earlier epoch. The power filtered down from His Majesty to the Rases, the Dejazmaches, and the lesser nobility and then to the vassals and peons. Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

AT ABOUT TWO in the afternoon, her taxi pulled up to the chukker-brown gates of Missing, a world unto itself.

The rock wall enclosed the hospital grounds and hid the buildings. Eucalyptus towered over the wall, and where there was no eucalyptus there were firs and jacaranda and acacia. Green bottle shards poked up from the mortar at the top of the wall to dissuade intruders—robbery and petty theft were rampant in Addis—though the sight of roses lapping over the wall softened this deterrent. The wrought-iron gate covered with sheet metal was normally kept closed, and pedestrians were admitted through the smaller, hinged door in the gate. But now the big gate was wide open, as was the pedestrian flap.

Inside, Hema saw that Gebrew's sentry hut door and shutter were also open, and when they crested the hill, she could see that every visible window and door in Missing's outpatient building was open, too; in fact, she could see Gebrew, the watchman (who happened to be a priest), in the process of propping open the woodshed door with a rock.

Spotting the taxi, he came running, his army surplus overcoat flapping, his white priest's turban dwarfing his small face, his fly wand, cross, and beads clutched in one hand. He seemed to be trying to shoo the taxi away. Gebrew was a nervous chap given to rapid speech and jerky movements, but he was far more agitated than was his norm. He looked stunned to see her, as if he'd never expected her to come back.

“Praise-God-for-bringing-you-safely, welcome-back-madam, how-are-you-are-you-well? God-answered-our-prayers,” he said in Amharic. She matched him bow for bow as best she could, but he wouldn't stop until she said, “Gebrew!”

She held out a five-birr note. “Take bowl to Sheba Bar and fetch please doro-wot,” she said, naming the delectable red chicken curry cooked in Ethiopian peppers— berbere. Her Amharic was crude, and she could only speak in the present tense, but doro-wot was a term she'd mastered early. And doro-wot had occupied her dreams her last few nights in Madras, after so many days of a pure vegetarian diet. The wot came poured onto the soft crepelike injera and there would be more rolls of injera which Hema would use to scoop up the meat. The curry would have soaked into the injera that lined the bowl by the time Gebrew brought it. Her mouth watered just thinking of the dish.

“Indeed-I-will-madam, Sheba-is-best, blessed-is-their-cook, Sheba-is—”

“Tell me, Gebrew, why be doors and windows open?” Now she noticed his nails and fingers were bloody, and his sleeves had feathers sticking to them, and feathers were caught up in his fly swish.

It was then that Gebrew said, “Oh, madam! This is what I have been trying to tell you. Baby is stuck! The baby. And Sister! And the baby!”

She did not understand. She'd never seen him so worked up. She smiled and waited.

“Madam! Sister is borning! She is not borning well!”

“What? Say again?” Perhaps being away and not hearing Amharic had made her misunderstand.

“Sister, madam,” Gebrew said, alarmed that he didn't seem to be getting through, and thinking volume and pitch might help, though what came out was a squeak.

“Sister” in Missing always referred to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, for the only other nun there was Matron Hirst, who went by Matron, while all the other nurses were addressed as Nurse Almaz or Nurse Esther, and not Sister.

To Hema's astonishment, Gebrew was crying, and his voice turned shrill. “Passage is closed! I tried everything. I opened all the doors and windows. I split open a chicken!”

He clutched his belly and strained in a bizarre imitation of parturition. He tried English. “Baby! Baby? Madam, baby?”

What he tried to convey was clear enough; there was no mistaking it. But it would have been difficult for Hema to believe it in any language.

THE DOORS TO THE OPERATING THEATER burst open. The probationer shrieked. Matron clutched her chest at the sight of the sari-clad woman standing there, hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring.

They froze. How were they to know if this was their very own Hema, or an apparition? It seemed taller and fuller than Hema, and it had the bloodshot eyes of a dragon. Only when it opened its mouth and said, “What bloody nonsense is Gebrew talking? In God's name, what is going on?” did their doubts vanish.

“It's a miracle,” Matron said, referring to the fact of Hema's arrival, but this only further confused Hema. The probationer, her face flushed and her pockmarks shining like sunken nailheads, added, “Amen.”