Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

He pulled out a short length of pale, white, wormlike tissue. “I put a mosquito clip here and here … and then I cut between the clips. I remove a two-centimeter segment. Ideally you'd send it to pathology. That way if his wife gets pregnant a year from now, you can show the patient the pathology report and he'll know it's not because you didn't do your job but because a third party did his job better. I don't send it to pathology for the simple reason that we don't have a pathologist. But for a while, there was a pathologist at the American Embassy clinic in Beirut. I'd do the vasectomies for the American staff and send him these little pieces I cut out. The man did the pathology for all the American embassies in East and West Africa. He kept sending back reports that my specimens were inadequate: though he thought he saw some uroepi -thelial tissue, he couldn't be certain it was the vas. ‘It's the vas,’ I wrote to him each time. ‘What other uroepithelial tissue could I have cut out? Call it the vas.’ But he kept complaining: ‘Cannot be certain. Not enough tissue.’ It was starting to annoy me, you know? So finally, I sent him a pair of sheep's balls. I put them in formalin and sent them off in the same diplomatic pouch. With a note: ‘Is this enough tissue?’ Never had a problem with him after that.”

Cooper hee-hawed, his mask sucking in and out.

“Now, I tie off the cut ends with catgut. And then I tell the patient, ‘No communication with wife allowed for the next ninety days.’ “

Ghosh turned to face the patient, and repeated the sentence. The patient nodded. “Okay, you can communicate, say ‘Good morning, darling,’ and all that, but no sex for three months.” The patient grinned. “Okay, you can have sex, but you must wear a condom.”

“I use interruptus,” the patient said, speaking for the first time in a heavy East European accent.

“You use what? Interruptus? Pull and pray? Good God, man! No wonder you have five kids! It's noble of you to try to get off the train at an earlier station, but it's unreliable. No sir. Interrupt the interruptus, man, unless you want to reach your half dozen this year.” The patient looked embarrassed. “You know what we call young men who use coitus interruptus?” Ghosh said.

The population expert shook his head.

“We call them Father! Daddy. Pater. Pappa. Père. No sir, I have done the interrupting for you. Give me three months and you can tell your missus that she is not to worry because you will be shooting blanks, and there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.”

WITH GENET AND ROSINA AWAY, our quarters felt empty. I missed Genet terribly. Hema and I both worried that wed never see her again. She'd promised to call, and write, but three weeks had gone by and wed yet to hear from her. That year, 1968, we had torrential rains; the Blue Nile and Awash had spilled their banks, causing flooding. The babbling brook behind Missing looked like a river. In Addis, the populace was bottled up indoors so that a lull in the rain released the scent of stifled humanity, dung fires, and clothes that refused to dry. The ivy raced up the drainpipes and found chinks in walls, while the tadpoles hurried into croaking frogs before their limbs were fully formed. No child I knew was ever tempted to turn its face to the sky and catch raindrops on the tongue, not when you lived and breathed water.

Now that Shiva and I were teenagers, looking ahead to our fourteenth birthday, I kept expecting something to feel different. I tried to stay busy, but all I could think about was Genet and what she might be up to in Asmara. I hoped she was homebound, miserable, and missing me. Without Genet as a witness, nothing I did was meaningful.

LATE ON A TUESDAY EVENING, I watched Ghosh in Operating Theater 3 as he removed a gallbladder. When he was done, we swung by the surgical ward to see Etien, a diplomat from Ivory Coast, a man we knew socially, who'd suddenly developed a bowel obstruction. In surgery, Ghosh had found an obstructing rectal cancer which he was forced to resect. It was a big and challenging operation, and I knew Ghosh was hopeful for a cure. But he was forced to create a colostomy on the belly wall. “Etien's very depressed,” Ghosh said. “Not about the cancer, but over his colostomy. He can't accept the idea of waste coming out from an opening in his abdomen.”

Etien had the sheet over his head. When Ghosh examined him, and then said the colostomy looked beautiful, tears welled up in Etien's big eyes. He wouldn't look down there. All he said was “Who will marry me now?”

Ghosh was surprisingly firm. “Etien, that's not the part of your body I cut off, the marrying part. You'll find a woman who loves you, and you'll explain it to her. If she loves you for yourself, you'll both be glad that you are alive.” Ghosh's facial expression brooked no argument, but then he softened. “Etien, imagine if all humans were born with their anus on the belly and that's where everyone's waste emerged. Then imagine if someone said they were going to operate on you and reroute your bowel so it opened behind you, between your buttock cheeks, somewhere where you couldn't see it except in a mirror, and where you could hardly reach it or easily keep it clean …” It took a few seconds, but then Etien smiled. He dabbed his eyes. He ventured a glance down at his colostomy. It was a small step in the right direction.

Ghosh had one more patient to see. He told me to go on home so I wouldn't be late for dinner.

The rain began to come down hard and I had no umbrella. I walked under the sheltered walkways connecting the theater to Casualty and Casualty to the male ward. Where the walkway ended, I dashed across a short gap, leaping over a puddle to arrive at the nurses’ quarters. I rarely explored this female warren. It looked deserted. If I went up the long outer balcony and down the stairs at the other end … well, I'd still get soaked, but I'd be fifty yards closer to home before I had to dash out into the rain. I hoped Adam's wife, the keeper of the virgins, with that big cross around her neck, didn't see me, because she would chase me out.

Upstairs, the doors of the individual nurses’ rooms opened onto the shared veranda. They must have all been in the dining room, otherwise they would have been lined up against the veranda railing, teasing out their hair, painting their nails, sewing, and chatting.

I heard music from the corner room that had once been my mother's. I'd been up here a few times, but just like her grave, this wasn't a place where I felt her presence. The strangeness of the music, the beat, were what pulled me closer. Guitars and drums in a driving rhythm repeated a musical refrain first in one register, then another. Of late some Ethiopian music adopted a Western sound, with horns, snare drums, and a repeating electric guitar riff that took the place of the muffled strings of the krar and the hand clapping. But this wasn't Ethiopian music, and not just because the words were English (albeit an English I couldn't quite understand). This was radically different, like a new color in the rainbow.

The door was open a crack.

She stood barefoot in the center of the room, her back to me. A white slip exposed her shoulders and ended at the back of her knees. Her head went from side to side, and her long, straight hair, conked with chemicals, followed as if welded to her skull. Her hips were driven by the bass line, while her upraised right hand kept the melody. Her left hand must have been pressed to her belly, because the elbow jutted out like the handle of a teacup. The music had entered her; it lubricated her joints, softened her bones and flesh to produce this gyrating, fluid, and sensual movement.