Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

He nodded. “I'm sure. You were lucky. Usually apnea is fatal before anyone recognizes it.”

“Don't say that. Oh God. What can we do, Ghosh?”

He was about to tell her that there was nothing one could do. Nothing at all. If the child was lucky, it might outgrow the apnea in a few weeks. The only choice was to put these preemies on machines that breathed for them till their lungs matured. Even in England and America this was rarely done. At Missing it was out of the question.

She waited for his pronouncement. She had suspended her own breathing.

“Here is what we do,” he said, and she sighed. He was making this up. He didn't know if his plan would work. But he knew he did not have the heart to say there was nothing to be done.

“Get me a chair. One of those from the living room. Also give me some of your anklets and a pair of pliers. And some thread or twine. A clipboard or a notebook if you have one. And tell Almaz to make coffee. The strongest she can make and as much of it as she can make and tell her to fill up the thermos flask.”

This new Hema, the adoptive mother of the twins, rose at once to do his bidding, never asking why or how. He watched her dance away.

“If I knew you were that agreeable Id have asked for a cognac and a foot massage as well,” he muttered to himself. “And if this doesn't work … at least I'll have my bags packed.”

GHOSH SAT IN THE CHAIR, sipping coffee, a string wrapped around his finger, and the house silent around him. It was two in the morning. The other end of the string connected to one of Hema's anklets which he'd cut in half and looped around Shiva's foot. The tiny silver bells dangling from the anklet made a pleasant cymbal-like sound when the foot moved.

He had strapped his wristwatch to the arm of his chair. On the first page of an exercise book, he made vertical columns labeled with date and time. Shiva stirred in his sleep; the anklet sounding reassuringly. Earlier, they had fed the twins, adding one drop of coffee to Shiva's bottle. It was Ghosh's hope that caffeine, a nervous-system stimulant and irritant, would keep the respiratory center ticking. It had clearly made the infant more restless than his identical twin.

Hema slept on the sofa in the far corner of the living room, which was just beyond this bedroom. A floor lamp with a shade that they moved to Hema's room gave him light to see the page.

Ghosh studied the walls. A little girl in pigtails and a half sari stood between two adults. A framed picture of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, handsome and pensive, one finger on his cheek, hung opposite Ghosh's chair. He'd imagined Hema's bedroom would be neat, everything in its place. Instead, there were clothes spilling off the bed rail, a suitcase open on the floor, more clothes piled in the corner, and books and papers stacked on a chair. And just inside the bedroom door he noticed for the first time was a crate the size of a sideboard. She did it, he thought, as he leaned closer to read the writing on the outside. A Grundig, no less. The best money can buy. His own gramophone and radio had conked out a few months before.

Periodically he would glance at the child, make sure the little chest was moving. After what felt like half an hour, he yawned, looked at his watch, and was astonished to find that only seven minutes had passed. My God, this is going to be difficult, he thought. He finished his cup of coffee and poured a second.

He stood and circled the room. On one shelf was a bound set of books. GREAT WORLD CLASSICS SERIES was stamped in a gold imprint. He picked one volume and sat down. The book was beautifully bound, in a leathery cover, and had gold-trimmed pages that looked as if they had never been opened.

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, he went to wake Hema. In sleep she looked like a little girl, both hands together and tucked under one cheek. He gently shook her, and she opened her eyes, saw him, and smiled. He held out the cup of coffee.

“My turn?” He nodded. She sat up. “Did he stop breathing?”

“Twice. There was no doubt about it.”

“God. Oh God. I wasn't imagining it, was I? We're so lucky I saw that first one.”

“Drink this, then wash your face and come to the bedroom.”

When she returned he gave her the thread running to the anklet, the notebook with the pen clipped to it. “Whatever you do, don't lie on the bed. Stay in this chair. It's the only way to stay awake. I've been reading, which really helps. I look up at the end of every page. If I hear the anklet move, then I don't look up and I keep reading. When he stopped breathing, I tugged at the anklet and he started right back up. Little fellow just forgets to breathe.”

“Why should he have to remember? Poor baby.”

HEMA HAD HARDLY SETTLED in the chair when she heard a strange noise. It took her a second to realize that it was the sound of Ghosh snoring. She tiptoed to where he was on the sofa, dead to the world, looking like a big teddy bear. She covered him with the blanket which had slipped to the floor, and she returned to her vigil. The snoring reassured her. It told her she was not alone. She picked up the book Ghosh had been reading.

She'd bought the set of twelve books from a staffer at the British Embassy who was returning home. She was ashamed not to have read even one. Ghosh had put a bookmark on page ninety-two. Had he really come that far? Why did he pick this book? She turned to the first page:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

She read that opening sentence three times before she understood what it might be about. She looked at the title of the book. Middlemarch. Why couldn't the writer be clear? She read on, only because Ghosh had managed to keep reading. Little by little, she found herself immersed in the story.

THE NEXT MORNING, as Ghosh made rounds, he wondered if the Colonel made it back to his garrison in Gondar without incident. If the Colonel had been arrested, or hanged, would news ever reach Missing? The Ethiopian Herald never wrote about treason, as if it were treasonable to report treason.

After looking in on his patients, Ghosh unearthed an incubator from one of the storage sheds behind Matron's bungalow. Ghosh was Missing's de facto pediatrician. In the early years he'd fashioned an incubator for premature babies. After the Swedish government opened a pediatric hospital in Addis Ababa, Missing sent all the very premature babies there and put the incubator away.

Despite its delicate construction with glass on four sides and a tin base, the incubator was still intact. He had Gebrew hose it off, dust it for fleas, put it in the sunlight for a few hours, then rinse it again with hot water. Ghosh wiped it down with alcohol before setting it up in Hema's bedroom. No sooner had he stepped back to admire it than Almaz walked around it three times making thew-thew sounds, stopping short of actually spitting. “To ward off the evil eye,” she explained in Amharic, wiping her lip with the back of her forearm.

“Remind me never to invite you into the operating theater,” Ghosh said in English. “Hema?” he said, hoping she would weigh in. “Antisepsis? Lister? Pasteur? Are you no longer a believer?”

“You forget I am postpartum, man,” she said. “Warding off spirits is much more important.”

The twins lay swaddled next to each other like larvae, sharing the incubator, their skulls covered with monkey caps and only their wizened, newborn faces showing. No matter how far apart Hema put them, when she came to them again, they would be in a V, their heads touching, facing each other, just as they had been in the womb.