Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

She half expected Sister Mary Joseph Praise to sit up in protest.

Instead she heard the thud of a body falling and turned in time to see Matron crumpled on the floor.

CUSTODY OF THE BODY” was the first thing out of Matron's mouth when she revived. She'd passed out for probably fewer than five seconds; everyone was in the same position, but now staring down at her. The probationer ran over to help. Despite Hema's protests, Matron clawed and kneed her way onto the anesthetist's stool, shouting, “I'm not leaving!” They were too busy to argue.

She sat near the board that tethered Sister Mary Joseph Praise's arm, blood finally running from a bottle into a vein. Matron reached for that hand, bending over it, studying Sister Mary Joseph Praise's fingers. She didn't want to look at what the doctors were doing, their red gloves reaching in Sister's belly. Matron still felt light-headed.

As she massaged Sister's fingers to still the shaking in her own, the words came to Matron unbidden: “Instruments of God.” Sister Mary Joseph Praise had beautiful fingers, slender and soft, each a delicate sculpture. Even at rest they spoke of fine motor skills. Matron's by contrast were doughy white, the knuckles large and red as if someone had taken a ruler to them; the knobby excrescencies on the fingers spoke of nothing but age and toil and the caustic soaps and scrubbings which were the first tools of her profession; the fire burst of wrinkles on her palms spoke of her love for the Ethiopian soil and her willingness to plant and weed and dig alongside Gebrew. He was guard, gardener, odd-job man, and priest, and he believed Matron had no business dirtying her hands.

Matron felt her body shaking. Lord, you can take me, she thought. But wait till they're done because I don't want to distract them again. How she longed for a cup of coffee made from their own plant grown on Missing soil. She loved the gritty feel of the stone-ground bean against her teeth, and the way it rolled down the throat like lead shot. The Italians had left behind their passion for macchiato and espresso so that every café in Addis served these beverages. Matron had no use for any of that. Missing coffee, brewed traditionally, that's what sustained her through the day, and what she needed right now.

Tears tracked down into the crevices at the angles of her mouth. One of my Cherished Own, she thought; the daughter I can never have, now with child … So many times at Missing, Matron had become privy to an unspeakable secret revealed by catastrophic illness. Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling. But Lord, she cried out silently, You could have spared us this. Spared her!

As she stroked the younger woman's skin, Matron thought of the impulse that had made Sister Mary Joseph Praise choose to hide her body under a nun's habit or under scrub suit and mask. It hadn't worked; her covering exaggerated what little flesh was exposed. When a face was so lovely, lips so full, even a veil couldn't block its sensuality.

A few years after Sister Mary Joseph Praise's arrival, Matron thought that the two of them should give up the white habit. The Ethiopian government had closed down an American mission school in Debre Zeit for proselytizing. Matron was in the business of running a hospital, not converting souls; she decided it might be politically smart to forgo nun's habit. But when she'd seen Sister Mary Joseph Praise leaving Operating Theater 3 in a skirt and blouse, Matron wanted to run out and cover her with a sheet. W. W. Gonafer, Missing's laboratory technician, standing next to Matron, had also seen Sister Mary Joseph Praise walk by in mufti. He'd frozen like a setter pointing to quail, a flush creeping from his collar to the roots of his hair, as if lust were a companion fluid to blood. Matron had decided then that nuns at Missing should remain in habit.

A sudden exclamation that could have been from Hema or from Thomas Stone startled Matron, brought her back to the present. She jerked her head up, and before she could stop herself, she looked … What she saw made her shudder and feel as if she'd keel over again. She dropped her head down between her shoulders, closed her eyes, and forced her mind to find another focus …

Matron had no saint whom she modeled herself after, someone to call on at these times. To think of St. Catherine of Siena drinking the pus of invalids—oh! how that disgusted her. Matron thought of such displays as a particular Continental weakness, and she was impatient with celestial billing and cooing, bleeding palms and stigmata. And as for St. Teresa of Avila … why, she didn't have anything against Teresa. She didn't grudge Sister Mary Joseph Praise her adulation of Teresa. But secretly she agreed with Dr. Ghosh, the internal medicine physician at Missing, that St. Teresa's famous visions and ecstasies were probably nothing but forms of hysteria. Ghosh had shown Matron photographs that Charcot, the famous French neurologist, had taken of his patients with hysteria at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Charcot believed that these delusions sprung from a woman's uterus— hystera in Greek. His patients, who were all women, stood in smiling poses—provocative poses, Matron thought—that Charcot had labeled “Crucifixion” and “Beatitude.” How could anyone smile in the face of paralysis or blindness? La belle indifférence was what Charcot called this phenomenon.

If Sister Mary Joseph Praise had visions, she wasn't one to speak about them. Some mornings, Sister Mary Joseph Praise had looked sleepless, her bright cheeks, her floating carriage, suggesting her feet strained to remain earthbound. Perhaps that explained her equanimity while working shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Stone, a man who for all his talents gave little encouragement to those who labored with him.

Matron's faith was more pragmatic. She'd found in herself a calling to help. Who needed help more than the sick and the suffering, more so here than in Yorkshire? That was why she came to Ethiopia a lifetime ago. The few photographs, mementos, books, and certificates Matron brought with her had over the years been pilfered or mislaid. She never worried over this—one Bible, after all, would do just as well as the next. The essentials were also easily replaceable: her sewing kit, her water-colors, her clothes.

But she'd come to value the intangibles: the position she had grown to in the city where she was “Matron” to everyone, even to herself; the resourcefulness she'd discovered that allowed her to make a cozy hospital—an East African Eden, as she thought of it—grow out of a disorganized jumble of rudimentary buildings; and the core group of doctors whom she'd recruited and who by long association had evolved into her Cherished Own. The umbilical cord that had connected her to the Society of Holy Child Order, to the Sudan Interior Mission, had shriveled and fallen off. They were all now self-exiled prisoners at Missing— she and her Cherished Own.

Missing Hospital wasn't its name, of course, and now and then Matron tried to correct people, teach them to say “Mi-shun” instead of “Missing.” But in truth that year it wasn't even Missing; it was either Basel Memorial or Baden Memorial—she had to consult the paper taped to her desk to be sure—named after a generous church in either Switzerland or Germany. The Baptists of Houston were big donors, but they weren't at all concerned about naming the hospital. Dr. Ghosh liked to say that the hospital had as many forms as a Hindu god. “On any given day, only Matron knows which hospital we work in, and if we are walking into the Tennessee Baptist outpatient clinic, or the Texas Methodist outpatient clinic, so how can you blame me for being late— I have to get out of bed and go find my place of work. Oh, Matron, there you are!” Prisoners they all were, Matron thought, smiling despite herself; Missing People who could hardly choose their cell mates. But even for Ghosh, who was without doubt one of the strangest of God's creations, Matron felt a maternal affection. And the parallel anxiety that comes with such an impish child.