Abraham Verghese: Cutting for Stone

After an hour during which she felt her skin puffing up like dough in an oven, after being directed this way and that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise arrived before a tiny door at the end of a slitlike passage. On the rock wall was a pale outline of a signboard recently removed. She offered a silent prayer, took a deep breath, and knocked. A man yelled in a hoarse voice, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise interpreted the sound as invitation to enter.

Seated on the floor next to a shiny balancing scale, she saw a shirtless Arab. All around him, reaching to the ceiling, were great bales of bundled leaves.

The hothouse scent stifled her breathing. It was a new scent for her, this scent of khat: partly cut grass, yet with something spicier behind it.

The Arab's beard was so red with henna she thought hed bled into it. His eyes were lined like a woman's, reminding her of depictions of Salahuddin, who'd kept the Crusaders from taking the Holy Land. His gaze took in the young face imprisoned in the white wimple, and then those hooded eyes fell to the Gladstone bag in her hand. A heave of his body produced a vulgar laugh through gold-trimmed teeth, a laugh which he cut off when he saw the nun was about to collapse. He sat her down, sent for water and tea. Later, in a mixture of sign language and bastardized English, he communicated to her that the Belgian nun who'd lived there had died suddenly. When he said that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise began shivering again, and she felt a deep foreboding, as if she could hear death's footsteps rustling the leaves in that hothouse. She carried a picture of Sister Beatrice in her Bible, and she could see that face in her mind's eye, now metamorphosing into a death mask, and then to Anjali's face. She forced herself to meet the man's gaze, to challenge what he said. Of what? Who asks “of what” in Aden? One day you are well, your debts are paid, your wives are happy, praise Allah, and the next day the fever gets you, and if it opens your skin up to the heat which your skin has fought off all these years, you die. Of what? Of what doesn't matter. Of bad skin! Of pestilence! Of bad luck, if you like. Of good luck, even.

The building was his. Green khat stalks flashed in his mouth as he spoke. The old nun's God had been unable to save her, he said, looking up to the ceiling and pointing, as if He were still crouching there. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyes involuntarily followed his gaze, before she caught herself. Meanwhile, his muddy eyes dropped from the ceiling to her face, to her lips, and to her bosom.

IF I KNOW THIS MUCH about my mother's voyage, it's because it came from her lips to the ears of others and then to mine. But her tale stopped in Aden. It came to an abrupt halt in that hothouse.

What is clear is that she embarked on her journey with faith that God approved of her mission and would provide for and protect her. But in Aden, something happened to her. No one knew what exactly. But it was there that she understood that her God was also a vengeful and harsh God and could be so even to His faithful. The Devil had shown himself in Sister Anjali's purple, contorted death mask, but God had allowed that. She considered Aden an evil city, where God used Satan to show her how fragile and fragmented the world was, how delicate the balance between evil and good, and how naïve she was in her faith. Her father used to say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” She felt pity for Saintly Amma, whose dream of enlightenment for Africa was vanity that cost Anjali's life.

For the longest time all I knew was this: after an unknown period of time that could have been months or even a year, my mother, aged nineteen, somehow escaped Yemen, then crossed the Gulf of Aden, then went overland perhaps to the walled and ancient city of Harrar in Ethiopia, or perhaps to Djibouti, then from there by train she entered Ethiopia via Dire Dawa and then on to Addis Ababa.

I know the story once she arrived at Missing Hospital. There were three spaced knocks on the door to Matron's office. “Come in,” Matron said, and with those two words Missing was on a course different than anyone could have imagined. It was at the start of the short rains, when Addis was stunned into wet submission, and when after hours and days of the sound and sight of water, one began hearing and seeing things. Matron wondered if that explained this vision of a beautiful, brown-skinned nun, standing, but just barely, in the doorway.

The young woman's recessed, unblinking brown eyes felt like warm hands on Matron's face. The pupils were dilated, as though, Matron would think later, the horror of the journey was still fresh. Her lower lip was ripe, as if it might burst at the touch. Her wimple, cinched at the chin, imprisoned her features in its oval, but no cloth could restrain the fervor in that face, or conceal the hurt and confusion. Her gray-brown habit must have once been white. But, as Matron's eyes traveled down the figure, she saw a fresh bloodstain where the legs came together.

The apparition was painfully thin, swaying, but resolute, and it seemed a miracle that it was capable of speech, when it said in a voice heavy with fatigue and sadness: “I desire to begin the time of discernment, the time of listening to God as He speaks in and through the Community. I ask for your prayers that I may spend the rest of my life in His Eucharistic Presence and prepare my soul for the great day of union between bride and Bridegroom.”

Matron recognized the litany of a postulant entering the order, words she herself had uttered so many years ago. Matron replied automatically, just as her Mother Superior had done, “Enter into the joy of the Lord.”

It was only when the stranger slumped against the doorpost that Matron came out of her trance, running around her desk to grab her. Hunger? Exhaustion? Menstrual blood loss? What was this? Sister Mary Joseph Praise weighed nothing in Matron's arms. They took the stranger to a bed. Under the veil, the wimple, and habit they found a delicate wicker-basket chest and a scooped out belly. A girl! Not a woman. Yes, a girl whod only just bid good-bye to childhood. A girl with hair that was not cut short like that of most nuns but long and thick. A girl with (and how could they not notice?) a precocious bosom.

Every maternal instinct in Matron came alive, and she kept vigil. She was there when the young nun woke up in the night, terrified, delirious, clinging to Matron once she knew she was in a safe place. “Child, child, what happened to you? It is all right. You are safe now.” With such soothing words, Matron comforted her, but it was a week before the young nun slept alone and another week before the color returned to her face.

When the short rains ended, and when the sun turned its face to the city as if to kiss and make up and say it was after all its favorite city for which it had reserved its most blessed, cloud-free light, Matron led Sister Mary Joseph Praise outdoors. She was to introduce her to the Missing People. The two of them entered Operating Theater 3 for the first time, and an astonished Matron watched as the stern and serious expression of her new surgeon, Thomas Stone, crumbled into something akin to happiness at the sight of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He was blushing, taking her hand in his and crushing it till tears came to the young nun's eyes.

My mother must have known then that she would stay in Addis Ababa forever, stay in Missing Hospital and in the presence of this surgeon. To work for him, for his patients, to be his skilled assistant, was sufficient ambition, and it was an ambition without hubris, and God willing, it was something she could reasonably do. A return journey to India through Aden was too difficult to contemplate.