Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

I thought of the probationer as I walked up the hill to our quarters. I'd been avoiding her. When her students were with her, she made no sign of recognition. When she saw me with Shiva, she greeted us without comment. The first time I ran into her alone, she stopped me, and said, “Are you Marion?” From her eyes I knew that nothing had changed, and that her door was still open to me. “No,” I had said. “I'm Shiva.” She never asked again.

I heard the murmur of the radio in Rosina's quarters, but their door was closed and in any case I wasn't looking for company.

I went to bed alone, went to bed with my thoughts—I felt older than my thirteen years.

I woke when Shiva came home. I watched him in the mirror. He was taller than I saw myself, and he had the narrow hips and the light tread of a dancer. He slipped off his coat and shirt. His hair was parted and combed to one side when he left the house, but now it was an unruly mass of thick curls. His lips were full, almost womanly, and there was a dreamy, prophetic quality to his face. When he was down to his underwear, he studied himself in the mirror. He held one arm up, and the other out. He was imagining a dance with a woman. He made a graceful turn and dip.

“You had a good time?” I said.

It stopped him in his tracks. His arms remained where they were. He looked at me in the mirror, which gave me goose bumps. “A good time was had by one and all,” he said in a hoarse voice that I didn't recognize.

THE TAXI DROPPED SHIVA and me across from Missing's gate, in front of the cinder-block buildings, just as the streetlights came on. At sixteen, I was captain, opening batsman, and wicket-keeper for our cricket eleven and Shiva was a middle-order batsman. As opener, my forté was whaling away at the ball and trying to weather the first salvo while demoralizing the bowlers, while Shiva's strength was to doggedly defend his wicket, anchoring the team, even if he scored few runs. After practice it was always dark when we came home.

I saw a woman framed by the bead curtains and silhouetted against the light of the bar, at the end of the building closest to Ali's souk.

“Hi! Wait for me,” she called out. Her tight skirt and heels restricted her to mincing steps as she crossed the plank that forded the gutter. She hugged herself against the cold, smiling so that her eyes were reduced to slits.

“My, you have grown so tall! Do you remember me?” she said, looking uncertainly from me to Shiva. A jasmine scent reached my nostrils.

After her baby died, I'd seen Tsige many, many times but only at waving distance. She had worn black for a year. That rainy morning when she brought her baby to Missing, Tsige had looked quite plain. Hers was a simple, guileless face, but now with eyeliner, lipstick, hair in waves down to her shoulders, she was striking.

We touched cheeks like relatives, first one side, then the other, then back to the first side again. “Uh … this is … may I present my brother,” I said.

“You work here?” Shiva said. Shiva was never tongue-tied around women.

“Not anymore,” she said. “I own it now. I invite you to please come in.”

“No … but … thank you,” I stammered. “Our mother is expecting us.”

“No, she's not,” said Shiva.

“I hope you won't mind if I come another day,” I said.

“Whenever you want, you are welcome. Both of you.”

We stood in awkward silence. She still had my hand.

“Listen. I know it was a long time ago, but I never thanked you. Every time I see you I want to talk to you, but I don't want to embarrass you, and I felt ashamed … Today, when I saw you this close, I thought I'd do it.”

“Oh no,” I said, “it's I who worried that you were angry with me— with us. Maybe you blamed Missing for …”

“No, no, no. I'm to blame.” The light dimmed in her eyes. “That's what happens when you listen to these stupid old women. ‘Give him this,’ ‘Do that,’ they told me. That morning I looked at my poor baby, and I realized all those habesha medicines had hurt him. When your father examined Teferi, I knew he could have helped if I had come days earlier. I'd made a horrible mistake by waiting. But …”

I remained silent, remembering her sadness and how she had cried on my shoulder.

“I hope God forgives me. I hope He gives me another chance.” She spoke earnestly, her face reflecting her feelings, hiding nothing. “But listen, what I came to tell you is, may God and the saints watch over you and bless you for all the time you spent with us. Such a good doctor your father is. Are you going to be doctors?”

“Yes,” Shiva and I said easily, speaking in unison. It was about the only thing I could say with confidence these days, and it was about the only thing Shiva and I seemed to agree on.

The light came back to her face.

AS WE WALKED to our bungalow, Shiva said, “Why didn't we go inside? She probably lives at the back. She would have let you sleep with her.”

“What makes you think I have to sleep with every woman I see?” I'd turned on him with more venom than was needed. “I don't want to sleep with her. Besides, she's not that kind of woman,” I said.

“Maybe not anymore. But she knows how.”

“I've had my chances, you know. It's a choice.” I told him about the probationer, as if to prove my point.

Shiva had nothing to say to that, and we walked in silence. He was getting under my skin. I didn't want to think about Tsige in that way; I didn't want to picture her sweet face and how she had to make her living. It was painful to imagine, and so I chose not to. But Shiva had no such qualms.

Shiva said, “One day we'll have sex with women. I think today is as good as any other day.” He looked up as if to ascertain that the arrangement of the stars was auspicious.

I stopped him and grabbed his shirt. I tried to find reasons for my objection. What came out was lame.

“Are you forgetting Hema and Ghosh? You think it's something that will make them happy? People look up to them. We mustn't do anything to embarrass them.”

“I think it's inevitable,” Shiva said. “They do it, too. I'm sure they—”

“Stop!” I said. What a disturbing thought. But not so for Shiva.

THE VERY MONTH we turned sixteen, my voice cracked when I didn't want it to. I had blackheads pushing out as if I had swallowed a sack of mustard seeds. The clothes Hema bought me grew tight or short in three or four months. Hair appeared in strange places. Thoughts of the opposite sex, mainly of Genet, made it difficult for me to concentrate. It reassured me to see these physical changes mirrored in Shiva, but after our conversation about Tsige, I couldn't talk with him about the desire I was feeling or the restraint that had to come with it. Shiva felt no such need for restraint.

“Prison,” I'd heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, “is the best thing for a marriage. If you can't send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.” Now that I knew what they were up to, I was deeply embarrassed, even shocked.

Despite our knowledge of the human body in the context of disease, Shiva and I were naïve for the longest time about sexual matters—or perhaps it was just me. Little did I know that our Ethiopian peers both at our school and at the government schools had long ago gone through their sexual initiation with a bar girl or a housemaid. They never suffered my years of foggy confusion, trying to imagine what was unimaginable.

I remember a story my classmate Gaby told me when I was twelve or thirteen, a story which he'd heard from a cousin who had emigrated to America, a story which we all believed for the longest time. “When you land in New York,” the cousin had said, “a beautiful blond woman will engage you in conversation at the airport. Her perfume will drive you mad. Big breasts, miniskirt. She will introduce you to her brother. They'll offer you a ride into town in their convertible, and, of course, not to be rude, you accept. As you are driving, the man will say, ‘Let's just drop by my house in Malibu and have a martini before we get you to Manhattan.’ You pull in to their mansion. A house like you've never seen. As soon as you are inside, the man will pull out a gun and point it at you, and say ‘Screw my sister or you will die.’ “