Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

She turned. Her eyes were closed and her face was tilted up. The lower lip was twisted, as if it had been split and had healed out of alignment.

I knew that lip, that faintly pockmarked face, though now the pocks textured the skin and exaggerated her cheekbones. It was the body I didn't recognize. She'd been a student probationer forever, until Matron, taking pity on her, gave her a new title, Staff Probationer, which transformed her. From being on the long-term plan, a perpetual student, she became an instructor for incoming probationers. In the classroom, with textbooks that she knew by heart, she could both drive facts into the probationers’ heads and demonstrate that it was possible to keep them there, by the manner in which she regurgitated her material, never looking at the text.

Normally she wore her hair pulled off her forehead and neck and gathered into a top bun so tight that it arched her eyebrows. When she crowned this with the winged nurse's cap, it looked as if she'd inverted an ice-cream cone on her head.

Other than her precarious hairdo, I'd always thought of the Staff Probationer as plain. At school, I knew girls who were neither ugly nor beautiful but who saw themselves one way or the other, and that conviction made it come true. Heidi Enqvist was gorgeous, but alas not in her own eyes, and so she lacked the mystery and allure of Rita Vartanian, who despite her overbite and prominent nose managed to make Heidi envious.

The probationer was of the Heidi mold. I think that's why she made herself a willing prisoner of a stiff, starched uniform and adopted an unsmiling expression to go with it. The only identity she had was that of being in the nursing profession; in her own eyes, and in the light of the world, she thought she was nobody. Id always felt the probationer's discomfort around us. But then she was shy around everybody.

But I could see now that there was more to her than nursing. The uniform concealed a body full of curves, like the figures Shiva used to draw, and the body moved in ways that would have made a harem dancer jealous.

Her eyes were closed. Were she to see me she'd be startled, embarrassed, and probably furious. I was about to step back when, to my surprise, she stepped forward and pulled me in by my hand, as if a phrase in the song was my cue. She kicked the door shut. The music was louder and more intense inside the room.

She had me taking little steps in time to the beat, moving my body this way and that. I was embarrassed at first. I wanted to laugh or say something clever, the way an adult would. But her expression and the throbbing beat made me feel anything but dancing would have been like talking in church. My steps became effortless. I imitated her, my shoulders moving in the opposite direction from my hips. My hands drew figures in the air. The trick was not to think. My body felt segmented, and each segment answered the call of a particular instrument. The pattern of our steps felt inevitable.

Just when I mastered that, she pulled me to her, my cheek against her neck, my chest against her breasts, separated from them by the thinnest of materials. I'd never danced before, certainly not like this. I breathed in her perfume and her sweat. She squeezed, taking my breath away, as if to make our two bodies one. She guided my arm so that it was around her, my hand over her sacrum, and I held her close. We never stopped moving. She led.

I anticipated her every step, clueless as to where that knowledge came from. We spun, then surged this way, then that, like one organism. I thought of Genet. Emboldened, I led and she followed. I pressed against the soft flesh where her legs came together only because she pressed, too, grinding her hips into me. Blood surged to my face, to my arms, into my stomach, my groin. The world had fallen away. I was in an elaborate dialogue with her.

The music wouldn't stop, and I never wanted it to stop, and just when I thought that, it faded. The American announcer's lazy drawl was so unlike the crisp formal tones of the BBC. “Well, well,” he said. “My, my. Umm, hmmm,” as if hed seen us carrying on. “Have you ever heard anything quite like that? This is the Rock of East Africa. East Africa's Big 14. Armed Forces Radio Service, Asmara.” It wasn't a station that I knew existed. I knew of a huge American military presence, a listening post, I'd heard it called, just outside of Asmara in Kagnew. Who knew they had something we could listen to?

We were still pressed together, holding the world at bay. She gazed into my eyes, I didn't know if she was about to cry or laugh. All I knew was that I'd have cried with her, or laughed or got down on all fours and pretended to be Koochooloo if she asked.

“You're so beautiful,” I said, surprising myself.

She gasped. My words seem to ripple through her. Had I said the wrong thing? Her lips quivered; her eyes shone. She was expressing joy. I'd said the right thing.

She lowered her face, brought that lip with the puckered scar and the bulges on either side close to mine. Her mouth overlapped mine, forming a seal. The silliest image entered my mind, and it was that of connecting one garden hose to another. What flowed across wasn't water, but her tongue. This time, unlike in the pantry with Genet, I received her tongue eagerly. It was so very exciting. I put my hand behind her head. I pressed my body to her, feeling every atom in me come to a point.

I pulled away once to look at her and say, “You're so beautiful,” because it was a magical phrase, one I knew I should use often, but only if I believed it to be true. I don't know how long we were coupled by our mouths, but it came most naturally, as if I were satisfying a hunger. I didn't realize this potential existed in me. It carried me forward. Whatever was next, I didn't know, but my body knew. I trusted my body. I was ready.

Suddenly, she stepped away. She held me at arm's length. She sat on the edge of the bed. She was crying. Something had happened about which my body had failed to inform me. Or perhaps there was a rule, an etiquette, that I'd failed to observe. I eyed the door, measuring my escape.

“Can you ever forgive me?” she said. “Your mother shouldn't have died. Maybe if I told someone she was sick, they could've helped her.”

This was astonishing. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. I'd entirely forgotten this was my mother's room. I couldn't picture Sister Mary Joseph Praise in here, certainly not with a poster of Venice on the wall, and on another wall a black-and-white poster of a white singer, his pelvis thrust forward at the microphone stand which hed pulled toward him, his face contorted with the effort of singing. I looked back to the Staff Probationer.

“I didn't know how sick she was.” She hiccuped through her tears, just like a baby.

“It's all right,” I said, feeling as if someone else gave me those words.

“Say you forgive me.”

“I will if you stop crying. Please.”

“Say it.”

“I forgive you.”

She only cried louder. Someone would hear. I didn't think I was supposed to be in this room. And I certainly wasn't supposed to make her cry.

“I said it! I said I forgive you. Why are you still crying?”

“But I almost let you and your brother die. I was supposed to help you breathe when you came out. I was supposed to resuscitate you. But I forgot.”

WHEN I FIRST CAME to this room, I was adrift, feeling as if a part of me was missing, all because Genet was away. Then I'd forgotten all that and found happiness, no, ecstasy, in the dance, a hint of what I wanted with Genet. And now I was adrift again, and confused. Paradise had seemed so close, and now I was clawing through fog. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, to the bed.

“You can do anything you want to me. Anytime,” she said, tilting her head back, looking up at me as I stood over her.