Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

WHEN GEBREW MET US at the gate and said men had come and snatched Ghosh from Missing, my childhood ended.

I was twelve years old, too old to cry, but I cried for the second time that day because it was all I knew to do.

I was not yet man enough to sweep into the house of whoever had taken Ghosh away and rescue him. The only skill I had was to keep going.

Shiva was ashen, silent. For a brief moment I felt immensely sad for him, my handsome brother who had the reached the height of a teenager without shedding the rounded shoulders of boyhood. His eyes reflected my pain, and for that instant we were one organism, with no separation of flesh or consciousness. And we ran as one being, The Twins, up the hill, frantic to get home.

WE FOUND HEMAon the sofa, pale, sweaty, wet strands of hair sticking to her forehead. Almaz, her cheeks tear-stained, and looking nothing like the stoic Almaz we knew, was by Hema's side, holding a bucket.

“She drank the water,” Almaz said before we could ask. “Don't drink the water.”

“I'm all right,” Hema said, but her words were hollow.

It wasn't all right. How could she say it was? My worst nightmare had come true: Ghosh gone, and now Hema mortally ill.

I buried my face in the darkness of her sari, my nostrils filled with her scent. I felt responsible for it all. The General's ill-fated rebellion, Zemui's death, the arrest of a man who was more father to me than any man can be, and, yes, even the poison in the water …

Just then the front door flew open, and Matron and Dr. Bachelli ran in. Bachelli carried his well-worn leather bag, his chest heaving. Matron, also gasping for breath, said, “Hema! There's nothing wrong with the water. It was just a rumor. It's all right.”

Hema looked confused. “But … I've had cramps, nausea. I threw up.”

“I drank it myself,” Bachelli said. “There's nothing wrong with it. You will feel better in a few minutes.”

Shiva looked at me.

A glimmer of hope.

Hema rose then, testing her limbs, her head. Later we found out that similar scenes were playing out all over the city. It was an early lesson in medicine. Sometimes, if you think you're sick, you will be.

If there was a God, he had just given us a huge reprieve. I wanted another. “Ma, what about Ghosh? Why did they take him? Will they hang him? What did he do? Is he hurt? Where did they take him?”

Matron sat us down on the sofa. Her bright handkerchief came out. “There, there, little loves. We'll sort this out. We all need to be strong, for Ghosh's sake. Panic does not serve us.”

Almaz, silent till then, watching with her hands on her hips, interrupted to say in Amharic, “What are we waiting for? We have to go at once to Kerchele Prison. Let me get the food ready. And we need blankets. Clothes. Soap. Come on!”

THE VOLKSWAGEN FELT like a strange machine with Hema driving. Bachelli sat up front, and Almaz and Matron were in the backseat with us on their laps. We made our jerky way through the city.

I saw Addis Ababa anew. I had always thought it a beautiful city with broad avenues in its heart, and many squares with monuments and fenced gardens around which traffic had to circle: Mexico Square, Patriot's Square, Menelik Square … Foreigners, whose only image of Ethiopia was that of starving people sitting in blinding dust, were disbelieving when they landed in the mist and chill of Addis Ababa at night and saw the boulevards and the tram-track lights of Churchill Road. They wondered if the plane had turned around in the night and they were in Brussels or Amsterdam.

But in the aftermath of the coup, in the light of Ghosh's arrest, the city looked different to me. The squares which commemorated the bloodshed of Adowa and the liberation from the Italians were now fitting places for a mob to conduct a lynching. As for the villas I had once admired—pink, mauve, tan, and hidden by bougainvillea—it was in these houses that men like the General or his counterparts in the army and police plotted the revolution and its betrayal. There was treachery in the streets, treachery in the villas. I could smell it. Perhaps it had always been there.

SOON WE WERE AT the green gates of the prison everyone called Kerchele, a corruption of the Italian word carcere, or incarcerate. Others called it the Alem Bekagne, an Amharic expression that meant “Goodbye, cruel world.” The entrance was past a railway crossing on a busy trunk road. There was no pavement here, no shoulder, just asphalt falling abruptly off into dirt, dirt now stirred by the feet of hundreds of anxious relatives, who became our kin in suffering. They stood rooted in their helplessness, but they let us pass between them till we reached the sentry office.

Before Matron could ask, the man said without looking up, “I don't know if he or she is here, I don't know when I will know if he or she is here or not here, if you leave food or blankets or whatever, if he or she is here, they might get it, if not somebody else gets it. Write his name on a paper with whatever you are dropping off, and I will not answer any questions.”

People leaned against the wall, and women stood under umbrellas unfurled out of habit even though the sun was behind clouds. Almaz found a spot to squat where she could observe the comings and goings, and then she did not budge.

An hour passed. My feet ached, but still we waited. We were the only foreigners there, and the crowd was sympathetic. One man, a lecturer at the university, said his father had been in this jail many years ago. “As a boy I would run the three miles from my house, once a day, to bring food. He was so thin, but each time he would feed me first and make me take back more than half the food. He knew that for him to eat, we had to starve. One day, when my older brother and mother came with food, they heard the dreaded words ‘No need to bring food anymore.’ That's how we knew my father was dead. And you know why they arrested my brother today? For no reason. He is a hardworking businessman. But he is the child of one of their old enemies. We are the first suspects. The old enemies and the children of enemies. God knows why they spared me. I was in the demonstration by the university students. But they took my brother instead. Because he is the oldest.”

Bachelli took a taxi to the Juventus Club to see if he could get the Italian consul involved, and then he had to return to Missing. With one doctor arrested, and his wife waiting outside the jail, it all rested on the shoulders of the third doctor, namely Bachelli. He could keep things going, oversee the nurses and Adam, the compounder.

Shiva, Hema, Matron, and I returned to the car to rest our feet, to get warm, to huddle. After fifteen minutes we returned to stare at the gates. Back and forth we went, reluctant to leave, even though we were accomplishing nothing.

WHEN IT WAS QUITE DARK, a man with a shama covering his head, mouth, and upper torso walked by, just as we emerged from the car. But for his shiny boots and the fact that hed come from the narrow lane on the side of the prison, he might have passed for just another man heading home. In his hand he swung a cloth showing the outline of a covered pot—his lunch or dinner. He stared at Matron. He paused behind the car, his back to the road as if he were taking a leak.

“Don't turn this way!” he said harshly, in Amharic. “The doctor is here.”

“Is he all right?” Matron whispered.

He hesitated. “A little bruised. Yes, but he is fine.”

“Please, I beg you,” Hema broke in. I had never heard her beg anyone in my life. “He's my husband. What is going to happen next? Will they let him go? He had nothing to do with all this—”

The man hissed. A large family walked by. When they passed, he said, “Talking to you is enough for someone to accuse me. If I want to be safe, I must accuse someone. Like animals eating our young. It's a bad time. I'm talking to you because you saved my wife's life.”