Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone

When the supplies came, Stone went first to Sister Anjali. Making do with the crudest of antisepsis, with one scalpel stroke he exposed the greater saphenous vein where it ran just inside Sister Anjali's ankle. He threaded a needle into the collapsed vessel that should have been the width of a pencil. He secured the needle in place with ligatures, his hands a blur as he pushed one knot down over another. Despite the intravenous drip of Ringer's lactate and the sulfa, Anjali didn't make a drop of urine or show any signs of reviving. Later that evening, she died in a final dreadful paroxysm, as did two others, an old man and old woman, all within a few hours of one another. For Sister Mary Joseph Praise the deaths were stunning, and unforeseen. The euphoria she felt when Thomas Stone had risen and come to see Anjali had blinded her. She shivered uncontrollably.

At twilight, Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Thomas Stone slipped the shrouded bodies over the rail, with no help from the superstitious crew who wouldn't even look their way.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise was inconsolable, the brave front she'd put up shattering as her friend's body splashed into the water. Stone stood beside her, unsure of himself. His face was dark with anger and shame because he had not been able to save Sister Anjali.

“How I envy her,” Sister Mary Joseph Praise said at last through tears, her fatigue and sleeplessness combining to release custody of her tongue. “She's with our Lord. Surely that is a better place than this.”

Stone bit off a laugh. To him such a sentiment was a symptom of impending delirium. He took her by the arm and led her back to his room, lay her down on his bunk, and told her she was to rest, doctor's orders. He sat on the hammock and watched as life's only sure blessing—sleep—came to her, and then he hurried off to reexamine the crew and all passengers. Dr. Thomas Stone, surgeon, did not need sleep.

TWO DAYS LATER, with no more new cases of fever, they were finally allowed off the Calangute. Thomas Stone sought out Sister Mary Joseph Praise before disembarking. He found her red-eyed in the cabin she'd shared with Sister Anjali. Her face and the rosary she clutched were wet. With a start he registered what he had failed to before: that she was extraordinarily beautiful, her eyes big and soulful and more expressive than eyes had a right to be. His face grew warm and his tongue wouldn't unstick itself from the floor of his mouth. He shifted his gaze to the floor, to her travel bag. When he finally spoke it was to say, “Typhus.” He'd looked in his books and given the matter a great deal of thought. Seeing her puzzlement, he said, “Indubitably typhus.” He had expected the word, the diagnosis, would make her feel better, but instead it seemed to fill her eyes with fresh tears. “Most likely typhus—of course a serum test could have confirmed it,” he stammered.

He shuffled his feet, crossed and uncrossed his hands. “I don't know where you're going, Sister, but I'm heading to Addis Ababa … it's in Ethiopia,” he said, mumbling into his chin. “To a hospital … that would value your services if you were to come.” He looked at her and blushed again, because the fact was he knew nothing about the hospital he was going to or whether it could use her services, and because he felt those moist dark eyes could read his every thought.

But it was her own thoughts that kept Sister Mary Joseph Praise silent. She remembered how shed prayed for him and for Anjali, and how God had answered just one of her prayers. Stone, risen like Lazarus, then brought his entire being into understanding the fever. Hed barged into the crew's quarters, run roughshod over the captain, and bullied and threatened. Doing the wrong thing, as Sister Mary Joseph Praise saw it, but in pursuit of the right thing. His fierce passion had been a revelation to her. At the medical college hospital in Madras where she trained as a nurse, the civil surgeons (who at the time were mostly Englishmen) had floated around serene and removed from the patients, with the assistant civil surgeons and junior and senior house surgeons (who were all Indian) trailing behind like ducklings. At times it seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were incidental to their work. Thomas Stone was different.

She felt his invitation to join him in Ethiopia hadn't been rehearsed. The words had slipped out before he'd been able to stop them. What was she to do? Saintly Amma had identified a Belgian nun who had broken away from her order, and who had made a most tenuous foothold in Yemen, in Aden, a foothold that was in jeopardy because of the nun's ill health. Saintly Amma's plan was for Sister Anjali and Sister Mary Joseph Praise to start there, perched above the African continent, and to learn everything they could from the Belgian nun about operating in hostile climates. From there, after correspondence with Amma, the sister-sisters would head south, not to the Congo (which the French and Belgians had covered), not to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, or Nigeria (the Anglicans had their fingers all over those souls and disliked competition), but perhaps to Ghana or Cameroon. Sister Mary Joseph Praise wondered what Saintly Amma might say to Ethiopia.

Saintly Amma's vision now felt like a pipe dream, a vicarious evange lism so ill informed that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was embarrassed to mention it to Thomas Stone. Instead she said in a breaking, hopeless voice, “I have orders to Aden, Doctor. But I thank you. Thank you for all you did for Sister Anjali.” He protested that he'd done nothing.

“You did more than any human being could do,” she said and took his hand in both of hers and held it. She looked into his eyes. “God be with you and bless you.”

He could feel the rosary still entwined in her fingers, and the softness of her skin and the wetness from her tears. He recalled her hands on him, washing his body, dressing him, even holding his head when he retched. He had a memory of her face turned to the heavens, singing, praying for his recovery. His neck grew warm and he knew his color was betraying him a third time. Her eyes showed pain, and a cry escaped her lips, and only then did he know that he was squeezing her hands, grinding the rosary against her knuckles. He let go at once. His lips parted, but he didn't say anything. He abruptly walked away.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise couldn't move. She saw that her hands were red and beginning to throb. The pain felt like a gift, a blessing so palpable that it rose up her forearms and into her chest. What she couldn't bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She'd wanted to cling to him, to cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she'd never known existed.

THE MOMENT she stepped off the Calangute onto the soil of Yemen, Sister Mary Joseph Praise wished she'd never disembarked. How absurd it had been for her to have pined to come ashore all those days they'd been quarantined. Aden, Aden, Aden—she'd known nothing about it before this voyage, and even now it was no more than an exotic name. But from the sailors on the Calangute, she gathered that one could hardly go anywhere in the world without stopping in Aden. The port's strategic location had served the British military. Now its duty-free status made it the place to both shop and find one's next ship. Aden was gateway to Africa; from Africa it was gateway to Europe. To Sister Mary Joseph Praise it looked like the gateway to hell.

The city was at once dead and yet in continuous motion, like a blanket of maggots animating a rotting corpse. She fled the main street and the stultifying heat for the shade of narrow alleyways. The buildings looked hewn from volcanic rock. Pushcarts loaded impossibly high with bananas, with bricks, with melons, and even one carrying two lepers weaved through the pedestrian traffic. A veiled, stooped old woman walked by with a smoldering charcoal stove on her head. No one glanced at this strange sight, saving their stares instead for the brown-skinned nun walking in their midst. Her uncovered face made her feel stark naked.