Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

Matron let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you think they were all fire worshippers? Tree worshippers? Mr. Harris, they are Christians. They are no more in need of redemption than you are in need of a hair straightening cream.”

“But I feel it's not true Christianity. It's a pagan sort of …,” he said, and patted his forehead.

“Pagan! Mr. Harris, when our pagan ancestors back in Yorkshire and Saxony were using their enemies’ skulls as a plate to serve food, these Christians here were singing the psalms. They believe they have the Ark of the Covenant locked up in a church in Axum. Not a saint's finger or a pope's toe, but the Ark! Ethiopian believers put on the shirts of men who had just died of the plague. They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life, of finding salvation. That,” she said, tapping the table, “is how much they thirsted for the next life.” She couldn't help what she said next. “Tell me, in Dallas, do your parishioners hunger like that for salvation?”

Harris had turned red. He looked around as if for a place to hide. But he wasn't completely done. Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.

“It's actually Houston, not Dallas,” he said softly. “But, Matron, the priesthood here is almost illiterate—Gebrew, your watchman, doesn't understand the litany that he recites because it is in Geez, which no one speaks. If he holds to the Monophysite doctrine that Christ had only a divine nature, not a human one, then—”

“Stop! Mr. Harris, do stop,” Matron said, covering her ears. “Oh, how you vex me.” She came around the table, and Harris drew back as if he worried that she might box his ears. But Matron walked to the window.

“When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?”

Matron leaned her head on the windowpane.

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—”by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

The sight of that plain, weathered face pressed against the glass, the wet cheeks, the interlocking fingers … it was for Harris more powerful than anything she had said. Here was a woman who could give up the restrictions of her order when it stood in the way. From her lips had come the kind of fundamental truth which, because of its simplicity, was unspoken in a church like Harris's where internecine squabbling seemed to be the purpose for the committee's existence, as well as a manifestation of faith. It was a small blessing that an ocean separated the doers like Matron from their patrons, because if they rubbed shoulders they'd make each other very uncomfortable.

Harris stared at the stack of Bibles by the wall. He hadn't seen them when he first walked in.

“We have more English Bibles than there are English speaking people in the entire country.” Matron had turned from the window and followed his gaze. “Polish Bibles, Czech Bibles, Italian Bibles, French Bibles, Swedish Bibles. I think some are from your Sunday-school children. We need medicine and food. But we get Bibles.” Matron smiled. “I always wondered if the good people who send us Bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.”

“I am embarrassed,” Harris said.

“No, no, no. Please! People here love these Bibles. They're the most valuable thing a family can possess. Do you know what Emperor Mene-lik, who ruled before Haile Selassie, did when he fell ill? He ate pages of the Bible. I don't think it helped. This is a land where paper— worketu — is much valued. Did you know that among the poor, marriage consists simply of writing two names on a piece of paper? And to divorce, why you just tear up the paper. Priests will give out pieces of paper with verses on them. The paper is folded over again and again until it is a tiny square and then these are wrapped in leather and worn around the neck.

“I was happy to give away Bibles. But the Interior Minister saw it as proselytizing. ‘How can it be proselytizing when no one can read? Besides it is the same faith as yours,’ I said. But the minister disagreed. So now the Bibles pile up, Mr. Harris. They breed in the toolshed like rabbits. They spill over into our storerooms and into my office. We use them as support for bookshelves. Or to paper the walls of the chikka huts. Anything at all, really!”

She walked over to the door and beckoned him to join her outside. “Let's take a walk,” she said. “Look,” Matron said when they were in the hallway, pointing to a sign above a door: OPERATING THEATER 1. The room was a closet, jammed full of Bibles. Wordlessly she pointed to another room across the way which Harris could see was a storeroom for mops and buckets. The sign above it read OPERATING THEATER 2. “We have only one theater. We call it Operating Theater 3. Judge me harshly, if you will, Mr. Harris, but I take what I am given in God's name to serve these people. And if my donors insist on giving me another operating theater for the famous Thomas Stone, when what I need are catheters, syringes, penicillin, and money for oxygen tanks so I can keep the single theater going, then I give them their operating theater in name.”

At the steps of the Missing outpatient department the bougainvillea was in full bloom, concealing the pillars of the carport so that the roof appeared to be cantilevered.

A man hurried by, bundled in a heavy white wrap over a ragged military overcoat. His white turban and the monkey-mane fly-swish in his hand made him stand out.

“That's the very Gebrew we were talking about,” Matron said as Gebrew spotted them and stopped and bowed. “Servant of God. And watchman. And … one of our bereaved.”

Harris was surprised at Gebrew's relative youth. In one of her letters, Matron wrote of a Harrari girl of twelve or thirteen who had been brought in, moribund, a cut umbilical cord trailing out from between her legs. She had given birth a few days before, but there had been no afterbirth; the placenta wouldn't budge. The family had traveled by mule and bus for two days to get to Missing. And as Gebrew, in his compassion, lifted the poor girl out of the gharry, she screamed. Gebrew, instrument of God, had inadvertently stepped on the trailing umbilical cord, causing the placenta to break free. The little girl was cured even before she crossed the threshold of the casualty room.

Harris shivered in a sleeveless cotton shirt, his eyeballs oscillating, his fingers tugging at his collar, then adjusting a pith helmet which Matron didn't realize he had with him.

Matron walked him through the children's ward, which was no more than a room painted bright lavender with infants on high beds with metal rails. The mothers camped out on the floor beside the beds. They jumped up at the sight of Matron and bowed. “That child has tetanus and will die. This one has meningitis, and if he lives he might well be deaf or blind. And its mother”—she said, affectionately putting her arm around a waiflike woman—”by staying at Missing night and day is neglecting her three other children. Lord, we've had a child back home fall into a well, get gored by a bull, and even kidnapped while the mother was here. The humane thing is to tell her to go home, to take the child home.”

“Then why is she here?”

“Look at how anemic she is! We are feeding her. We give her the child's portions, which the child can't eat, as well as her portion, and I've asked them to give her an egg every day, and she is getting an iron injection and medicine for hookworm. In a few days we'll find her bus fare and then send her home with this child if he is alive. But at least she'll be healthier, better able to look after the other children … Now this child is awaiting surgery …”