Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

“Ma,” Shiva said, “Ghosh says pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease.”

“He says it knowing you will repeat it to me. That rascal. He shouldn't be telling you such things.”

“Can you show us where the baby comes out?” Shiva said. I knew he was utterly serious, and I also knew that with those words hed broken the spell. I was furious with him. Kids need a certain cunning when it comes to dealing with adults, and somehow Shiva had none. In the same mysterious fashion with which permanent teeth arrived, so also self-consciousness and embarrassment came to camouflage my guilt, while shame took root in my body as a price for curiosity.

“Okay. That's enough. Time for you chaps to go home,” Hema said.

“Ma, what does the word ‘sexual’ mean?” Shiva said, as she pushed us out. I studied my twin. For once I was unsure of his intent: Was he teasing her, or was this just his unconventional way of thinking? Hema's response only added to my confusion: “I have to go to the wards for a short time. You boys don't leave the house.” She shooed us off. Her tone was annoyed, and yet if I was not mistaken, she was trying very hard to hide a smile.

IN A COUNTRY where you cannot describe the beauty of the land Iwithout using the word “sky,” the sight of three jets streaking up in a JLsteep climb was breathtaking.

I happened to be outside on the front lawn. The shock wave traveled through the earth to my feet and ran up my spine before I heard the explosion. I stood rooted there. Smoke rose in the distance. The stunned silence that followed was shattered by the screech of hundreds of birds, which took to the sky, and by the barking of every dog in the city.

I still wanted to believe that this—the jets, the bombs—was all part of some grand plan, the expected course of events, and that Hema and Ghosh understood what was going on, even if I didn't. Whatever this was, they could turn it around.

When Ghosh emerged from the house, running as fast as he could, and when he grabbed me, fear and concern in his eyes, the last of my illusions vanished. The adults weren't in charge. There were clues to that earlier, I suppose, but even when I had seen the old woman pummeled by the Emperor's guards, it suited me to believe that Hema and Ghosh still controlled the universe.

But fixing this was beyond their ability.

GHOSH, HEMA, AND ALMAZ dragged mattresses into the corridor. Our whitewashed chikka walls—packed mud and straw—offered little protection. In the corridor, the bullets would at least have to pass through two or three chikka walls. Bullets whined overhead, sounding close, while the pops and thuds sounded distant. Glass tinkled in the kitchen, and later we found a bullet had shattered a pane. I lay on the mattress, frozen, my body incapable of movement. I waited for someone to say, This is a colossal error that will soon be corrected, and you can go out and play again.

“I suppose we can assume the army and air force decided not to join the coup,” Ghosh said, looking to see if this understatement got a response from Hema. It did.

Genet's lips were quivering. I could only imagine how worried she was: I felt a cold flutter in my belly whenever I thought about Rosina, gone for more than twenty-four hours now. I reached out, and Genet clutched my hand.

By dusk, the firing intensified, and it turned bitterly cold. Matron, fearless, went back and forth to the hospital, despite our pleas that she stay. When I had to go to the bathroom I crawled. I saw through the window the bright tracers crisscrossing the sky.

Gebrew locked and chained the main gate and withdrew from his sentry hut to the main hospital complex. The nurses and nursing students were bedded down in the nurses’ dining room with W. W. Gonad as well as Adam, the hospital compounder, watching over them.

NEAR MIDNIGHT, there was a knock at our back door, and when Ghosh opened it, there stood Rosina! Genet, Shiva, and I swarmed all over her, hugging her. Through hot tears Genet screamed at her mother in Tigrinya for leaving her and making her worry.

Matron stood grinning just behind Rosina; some instinct had made Matron and Gebrew go down to the locked gate to check one last time. Huddled against it they found Rosina, sheltering from the wind.

As she gobbled down food, Rosina told us that things were much worse than she'd imagined. “I wanted to reach the upper part of town, but there was an army roadblock. I had to take a big detour, first this way, then that.” A firefight around a villa forced her to take cover, and then army tanks and armored vehicles prevented her return. She spent the night on the porch of a shop at the Merkato, where others trapped by darkness had taken shelter. In the morning, she'd been unable to move from the Merkato because of roaming army platoons who ordered everyone off the street. It had taken her till nightfall to cover a distance of three miles. She confirmed our worst fears: the Imperial Bodyguard was under attack by the army, air force, and police. Pitched battles were being fought all over, but the army was steadily concentrating its efforts on General Mebratu's position.

Rosina snuck off to her quarters to wash and change clothes, and she returned with her mattress, and also with caramela for us. Genet still hadn't forgiven her, but she clung to her.

Matron sank down on the mattress and stretched out her feet. She reached under her sweater and pulled out a revolver, tucking it between mattress and wall.

“Matron!” Hema said.

“I know, Hema … I didn't buy this with the Baptist money, if that is what you are thinking.”

“That's not what I was thinking at all,” Hema said, looking at the gun as if it might explode.

“I promise you, this was a gift. I keep it in a place where no soul could find it. But you see, looters—that's what we need to worry about,” Matron said. “This might stop them. I did buy two other guns. I've passed them out to W. W. Gonad and Adam.”

Almaz carried in a basket of injera and lamb curry. We ate with our fingers from this communal dish. Then it was back to waiting, listening to the crackles and pops in the distance. I was too tense to read or do anything but lie there.

Shiva sat cross-legged. He carefully folded a sheet of paper, then tore it in half and then repeated the process again and again till he had a bunch of tiny squares. I knew he was just as shaken as I was by the turn of events. Watching his hands moving methodically, I felt as if I was keeping my mind and my hands busy. Now he put one paper square by itself, then counted and stacked three squares next to it, then seven, then eleven. I had to ask.

“Prime numbers,” he said as if that explained anything. He rocked back and forth, his lips moving. I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.

But Shiva's escape was incomplete tonight; I knew, because in watching him, I felt no relief.

“Don't try,” I said to Shiva. “Let's go to sleep.”

He put his papers away at once.

Rosina and Genet were already fast asleep, both exhausted. Rosina's return was a great reprieve, but my greatest relief that night came when my head touched Shiva's, a sense of safety and completion, a home at the end of the world. Thank God that whatever happened wed always have ShivaMarion to fall back on, I thought. Surely, we could always summon ShivaMarion when we needed to, though I guiltily remembered that we hadn't done so in a while. I nudged his ribs and he nudged back, and I could feel him smile without opening his eyes. I took reassurance from that, because earlier that day hed been a stranger sitting on the Version Clinic steps, but now he was Shiva again. Together we had an unfair advantage on the rest of the world.