Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

I felt a mule kick in my hand before I heard the shot.

Then the gun came sliding free in my hand, as if it had never been wedged there but had simply been sitting on his belly button.

I smelled burned clothing and cordite. I saw a red pit in his belly. I saw life slip out of his eyes as easily as a dew drop rolls off a rose petal.

I felt his pulse. It was a variety Ghosh had never shown me: the absent pulse.

ROSINA SENT GENET to fetch Gebrew.

He came running. He hadn't heard the shot. The bungalow was far enough removed and the gun so muffled by the man's belly that the sound had not carried.

“Hurry. Someone might come for him,” Rosina said. “But first we must move the motorcycle.” With all five of us heaving, we righted the BMW and managed to get it to the toolshed, just past the curve at the bottom of our driveway. Other than a ding on the tank, the bike looked no worse for wear. In the toolshed we rearranged the cords of firewood, the stacks of Bibles, the sawhorse, incubator, and other junk kept there, so that the bike was hidden from sight.

Returning to the body, we had little to say to one another. Gebrew and Shiva fetched the wheelbarrow, and with Rosina and Genet's help, they fed the body into its rusty cavity. I leaned against a tree, looking on. He lay in the wheelbarrow in the kind of unnatural posture only the dead achieve. Now with Rosina leading us, we pushed him through the trees on the perimeter trail, just inside of Missing's wall, until we reached the Drowning Soil. The hospital's old septic tank was located here, deep underground, and for years it had overflowed before it was taken out of use. USAID concrete, Rockefeller funds, and a Greek contractor named Achilles had built a new one. But the old tank's effluent had digested the land. A downy growth of moss served to deceive the eye; anything heavier than a pebble would sink. The odor, present at all times, kept trespassers away. Matron had barbed wire strung around it, and the sign in Amharic said DROWNING SOIL, which was the closest translation for “quicksand.”

The smell was powerful. Pushing down the fence post so that the barbed wire was flat on the ground, Rosina and Gebrew got the wheelbarrow as far forward as they dared. I glared at Shiva. He was impasive, looking on. He could have been watching shoeshine boys at work—it was the opposite of what I felt. They were about to pitch the body forward when I said, “No!” I grabbed Rosina's hand, forcing her to set the wheelbarrow down. I was shaking, crying. “We can't do this. It is wrong. Rosina … Oh my God, what have I done—”

Rosina slapped me hard. Shiva put his hand on my shoulder, more to restrain me perhaps than to offer support. Rosina and Gebrew took the handles again, and they tipped the dead man out.

The mossy ground sagged like a mattress. The face on that body no longer belonged to the man who had terrorized us; it was a pathetic face, a human face, not that of a monster.

When the body finally disappeared, Rosina spat in its direction. She turned to me, the anger and bloodlust contorting her face. “What's wrong with you? Don't you know he would have killed us all for the fun of it? The only reason he didn't is he was even hungrier to steal Zemui's motorcycle. Don't feel anything but pride for what you did.”

WE WALKED BACK in silence. When we were home, inside the kitchen, Rosina turned to us, her hands on her hips. “No one but us knows what happened,” she said. “No one can know. Not Hema. Not Ghosh. Not Matron. No one at all. Shiva, you understand? Genet? Gebrew?”

She turned to me. “And you? Marion?”

I looked at my nanny, her face bloodied and the missing tooth making her look like a stranger. I steeled myself for more harsh words from her. Instead, she came over and held me in her arms. It was the hug a woman gives either her son or her hero. I held her tight. Her breath was hot in my ear as she said, “You are so brave.” This was my consolation: all was well between me and Rosina. Genet came over and put her arms around me.

If this was what brave felt like—numb, dumb, with eyes that could see no farther than my bloody fingers, and a heart that raced and pined for the girl who hugged me—then I suppose I was brave.

HANGING SEEMED TO BE THE FATE of anyone who'd been close to General Mebratu. What spared Ghosh thus far was that he was a citizen of India. That and the prayers of his family and his legions of friends. His imprisonment did more than suspend everything in my world; it took away any meaning life once had for me.

It was then, as we despaired, that I thought of Thomas Stone. Before the coup, Id go for months without thinking of him. Having no picture of him, and no knowledge that he had authored a famous textbook (Hema, I learned later, had given away or removed every extant copy of A Short Practice at Missing), Thomas Stone seemed unreal to me, a ghost, an idea. It didn't seem possible that I might have been fathered by someone as white-skinned as Matron. An Indian mother was easier to imagine.

But now, as time stood still, this man whose face I couldn't picture was on my mind. I was his son. This was my moment of greatest need. When the army man came to steal the motorcycle and could have killed us, where was Stone? When I murdered the intruder—that was still how I saw it—where was Stone? When that death mask loomed in front of my eyelids at night, or when cold hands clutched at me from the shadows, where was Stone? Above all, when I needed to free the only father I ever had, where was Stone?

In those awful days which soon stretched out to two weeks, as we went back and forth from house to jail, to Indian Embassy, to Foreign Ministry, I was convinced that had I been a better son to Ghosh, if I'd been worthy of him, I might have spared him his present torture.

Perhaps it wasn't too late.

I could change. But what form should this change take?

I waited for a sign.

It came on a blustery morning when word of fresh hangings in the Merkato reached us. I set out hurriedly for the gate for no particular reason: wherever I was, I was ready to be somewhere else. On my way there, a mysterious sweet, fruity odor reached my nostrils. Simultaneously, a green Citroën, floating on its shocks, its back tires hidden by skirtlike fenders, wheezed into the portico of Casualty. A portly man slumped in the backseat was carried out by two younger men, and at once the scent got stronger. He had the café-au-lait skin and jowly features of the royal family, as if hed been raised on clotted cream and scones in place of injera and wot. To me he looked asleep. His breathing was deep, loud, and sighing, like an overworked locomotive. With every exhalation he gave off that sweet emanation—it even had a color: red.

I knew I'd encountered this odor before. Where? How? I stood thinking outside Casualty as they carried him in, trying to solve this puzzle. I realized I was engaged in the kind of reflection, the kind of study of the world, which I so admired in Ghosh. I remembered how he'd conducted that experiment with blind man's buff—literally a blinded experiment—to validate my ability to find Genet by her scent.

Later Dr. Bachelli told me the man had diabetic coma—the fruity odor was characteristic. I went to Ghosh's office—his old bungalow— and read from his textbooks about the ketones that built up in the blood and caused that scent. Which led me to read about insulin. Then about the pancreas, diabetes … One thing led to another. It was perhaps the only time in the two weeks since Ghosh had gone to prison that I'd been able to think of anything else. I expected Ghosh's big books to be unreadable. But I found that the bricks and mortar of medicine (unlike, say, engineering) were words. You needed only words strung together to describe a structure, to explain how it worked, and to explain what went wrong. The words were unfamiliar, but I could look them up in the medi cal dictionary, write them down for future use.