Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

The minister had no idea what it meant for Missing not to have a surgeon, Matron thought. Before Thomas Stone's arrival, Missing could handle most internal medicine and pediatric patients, thanks to Ghosh, and it tackled complicated obstetric and gynecologic conditions, thanks to Hema. Over the years a number of other doctors had come and gone, some of them capable of surgery. But Missing never had a fully trained and competent surgeon till Stone. A surgeon allowed Missing to fix complex fractures, remove goiters and other tumors, perform skin grafts for burns, repair strangulated hernias, take out enlarged prostates or cancerous breasts, or drill a hole in the skull to let out a blood clot pressing against the brain. Stone's presence (with an assistant like Sister Mary Joseph Praise) took Missing to a new level. His absence changed everything.

THE PHONE RANG again a few minutes later, and this time the sound was ominous. Matron brought the instrument gingerly to her ear. Please God, let Stone be alive.

“Hello? This is Eli Harris. Of the Baptist congregation of Houston … Hello?”

For a call from America, the connection was crystal clear. Matron was so surprised that she said nothing.

“Hello?” the voice said again.

“Yes?” Matron said gruffly.

“I'm speaking from the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa. Could I speak to Matron Hirst?”

She held the receiver away, covering the mouthpiece. She felt panicked. And confused. What on earth was Harris doing here? She was accustomed to dealing with donors and charitable organizations by mail. She needed to think quickly, but her mind refused to cooperate. At last, she took her hand away and brought the phone up. “I'll pass the message on, Mr. Harris. She will call you back—”

“May I know who is speaking—”

“You see, we have had a death of one of our staff. It might be a couple of days before she calls you.” He started to say something, but Matron hung up abruptly. Then she took the receiver off the hook, glaring at it, daring it to ring.

The Baptists of Houston were of late Missing's best and most consistent funders. Matron sent out handwritten letters every week to congregations in America and Europe. She asked that her letter be forwarded to others if they were unable to help. If a reply came expressing any interest, she immediately mailed them Thomas Stone's textbook, The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Medicine. Though expensive to mail, it was better than any prospectus. Donors, she found, always had a prurient interest in what could go wrong with the human body, and the photographs and illustrations (by Sister Mary Joseph Praise) in the book satisfied that desire. A picture of a strange creature with the face of a pig, the furriness of a dog, and with small, myopic eyes accompanied the chapter on appendicitis, and Matron always put her letter there as a bookmark. The legend read “The wombat is a burrowing, nocturnal marsupial found only in Australia, and the only reason to mention it is the dubious distinction it has in joining man and apes in ownership of an appendix.” The book, more than any exchange of letters, had won the Houston Baptists’ support.

Ghosh arrived half an hour later, shaking his head. “I went to the British Embassy. I drove around the city. I went to his house again. Rosina's there and she hasn't seen him. I walked all over Missing's grounds—”

“Let's take a ride,” Matron said.

As they drove down to Missing's gate, they saw a taxi coming up the hill carrying a white man. “That must be Eli Harris,” Matron said, sliding down in the passenger seat with an alacrity that surprised Ghosh. She told him about Harris's call. “If I remember correctly, I got Harris to fund a project that was your idea: a citywide campaign against gonorrhea and syphilis. Harris has come to see how we are doing.”

Ghosh almost steered them off the road. “But we have no such project, Matron!”

“Of course not.” Matron sighed.

Ghosh never looked his best in the morning, even after a bath and shave. He hadn't had time for either of these. Dark stubble swept up from his throat, detoured around his lips, and reached almost to his bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“To Gulele. We need to make funeral arrangements.”

They rode in silence.

THE GULELE CEMETERY was on the outskirts of town. The road cut through a forest where the dense overhanging canopy of trees made it feel like dusk. Suddenly the forbidding wrought-iron gates loomed before them, standing out against the limestone walls. Inside, a gravel road led up to a plateau thick with eucalyptus and pine. There were no taller trees in Addis than in Gulele.

They trudged between the graves, their feet crunching and crackling on the carpet of leaves and twigs. No urban sounds or voices were to be heard here; only the stillness of a forest and the quiet of death. A fine drizzle wet the leaves and branches, then gathered into big drops that plopped on their heads and arms. Matron felt like a trespasser. She stopped at a grave no larger than an altar Bible. “An infant, Ghosh,” she said, wanting to hear a living voice, even if it was only hers. “Armenian, judging by the name. Lord, she died just last year.” The flowers by the headstone were fresh. Matron began a Hail Mary under her breath.

Farther down were the graves of young Italian soldiers: NATO à ROMA, or NATO à NAPOLI, but no matter where they were born they were DECEDUTO AD ADDIS ABABA. Matron's vision turned misty as she thought of them having died so very far from home.

John Melly's face appeared to her, and she could hear “Bunyan's Hymn.” It was the hymn they had played at his funeral. At times the tune found her; the words came to her lips unbidden.

She turned to Ghosh, “You know I was in love once?”

Ghosh who already looked troubled, froze where he stood.

“You mean … with a man?” he said at last, when he could speak.

“Of course with a man!” She sniffed.

Ghosh was silent for a long time, then he said, “We imagine we know everything there is to know about our colleagues, but really how little we know.”

“I don't think I knew I loved Melly until he was dying. I was so young. Easiest thing in the world is to love a dying man.”

“Did he love you?”

“He must have. You see he died trying to save me.” Her eyes welled up. “It was in 1935. I'd just arrived in the country, and I couldn't have picked a worse time. The Emperor fled the city as the Italians were about to march in. The looters went to town, pillaging, raping. John Melly commandeered a truck from the British Legation to come and get me. You see, I was volunteering at what is now Missing. He stopped to help a wounded person on the street, and a looter shot him. For absolutely no reason.” She shuddered. “I nursed him for ten days, and then he died. One day I'll tell you all about it.” Then, uncontrollably, she had to sit down, her head in her hands, weeping. “I'm all right, Ghosh. Just give me a minute.”

She was mourning not Melly as much as the passage of the years. She'd come to Addis Ababa from England after getting restless teaching in a convent school and running the student infirmary; she'd accepted a post with Sudan Interior Mission to work in Harrar, Ethiopia. In Addis, she found her orders were canceled because the Italians had attacked, and so she had simply attached herself to a small hospital all but abandoned by the American Protestants. During that first year she'd watched as soldiers—some of the young men buried here—as well as Italian civilians poured in to populate the new colony: carpenters, masons, technicians. The peasant Florino became Don Florino when he crossed the Suez. The ambulance driver reinvented himself as a physician. She had carried on, just as the Indian shopkeepers, the Armenian merchants, the Greek hoteliers, the Levantine traders had carried on during the occu pation. Matron was still there in 1941, when the Axis's fortunes turned in North Africa and in Europe. From the Hotel Bella Napoli's balcony, Matron watched Wingate and his British troops parade into town, escorting Emperor Haile Selassie, who was returning after six years of exile. Matron had never set eyes on the diminutive Emperor. The little man seemed astonished by the transformation of his capital, his head swiveling this way and that to take in the cinemas, hotels, shops, neon lights, multistory apartment buildings, paved avenues lined with trees … Matron said to the Reuters correspondent standing beside her that perhaps the Emperor wished he'd stayed in exile a little longer. To her chagrin, she was quoted verbatim (but fortunately as an “anonymous observer”) in every foreign paper. She smiled at that memory.