Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

So many nights I lay awake dreaming of this horrible, twisted, beautiful fate, wishing I could go to America only for this reason. Brother, put away the gun, I will screw your sister for free, became a line Gaby and I and our little gang said to one another, our secret phrase that signaled our fellowship in adolescent horniness, our simmering sexual heat. Even after we realized the story was absurd, a fairy tale, it still delighted us, and we loved to repeat that refrain.

A few weeks after Shiva and I had seen Tsige outside her bar, I encountered the Staff Probationer walking down to Missing's gate. There was no escaping her. Seeing her always provoked anxiety.

She was with her brood of probationers. She usually ignored me in that situation. But on this day she smiled and blood rushed to her face. I smiled back so as not be rude. She winked and came to me as her students walked on. “Thank you for last night. I hope the blood didn't scare you. Did that surprise you? I waited for you all these years. It was worth it.” She brushed against me. “When are you coming next? I'll be counting the days.”

She swung every bit of flesh that would swing as she shimmied after her students, as if Chuck Berry were strutting behind her, playing his guitar. She called over her shoulder, loud enough for the whole world to hear, “Next time please don't run off afterward like that, okay?”

I raced home. Of late, particularly on weekends, Shiva went off on his own and I hadn't given it much thought. I never imagined this is what he'd been up to.

Shiva, Genet, and Hema were at the dinner table, Rosina serving. Ghosh had gone to wash up. I hauled Shiva off to our room.

“She thinks it was me!” I wished I'd never told him about my dancing with the probationer. “Why didn't you ask me? I would have forbidden you to go. I did forbid you to go. What did you tell her? Did you pretend to be me?”

Shiva was puzzled by my anger. “No. I was me. I just knocked on her door. I said nothing. She did all the rest.”

“My God! Just like that? You broke your virginity and hers?”

“It was my first time with her. And what makes you so sure about her, eh, older brother?” His words were like a punch in my gut. I'd never heard Shiva speak sarcastically to me, and it felt cutting, ugly. He went on as I stood speechless. “It's not my first time, anyway. I've been going to the Piazza every Sunday.”

“What? How many times have you gone?”

“Twenty-one times.”

I couldn't speak. I was stunned, embarrassed, disgusted, and terribly envious.

“The same woman?”

“No, twenty-one different women. Twenty-two if you count the probationer.” He was standing there, chin pointing at me, one arm languidly set against the wall.

When I found a voice I said, “Well would you mind not going back to the Staff Probationer?”

“Why? Will you visit her?”

I no longer felt I had any authority over him, no credible experience with which to advise him. I felt very tired. “Never mind. But do me a favor; tell her who you are if you go back. And stay around and hold her and whisper sweet things in her ear when you are done. Tell her she's beautiful.”

“Whisper what? Why?”

“Forget it.”

“Marion, all women are beautiful,” Shiva said. I looked up and realized that he spoke with conviction and not a trace of sarcasm. He wasn't embarrassed, or angry that I hauled him off, or the least bit upset. My conceit was that I thought I knew my brother. Yet all I really knew were his rituals. He loved his Grays Anatomy and carried it around so much, it had pale indentations on the cover from his fingers. When Ghosh got Shiva a new edition of Grays, my brother was insulted, as if Ghosh had brought him a stray puppy to replace his beloved Koochooloo, who was on her last legs. I knew Shiva's rituals, but not the logic behind them. Shiva did find women beautiful—I'd seen that from the first time we visited the Version Clinic. He never missed a clinic and ultimately wore Hema down until she taught him how to turn babies. There was nothing prurient about his interest in the Version Clinic or in obstetrics and gynecology. If the clinic day happened to fall on a holiday, or Hema decided to not have it for some reason, Shiva would still be there, seated on the steps of the locked building. Here I was telling him to be nice to the probationer, but he could argue that hed given the probationer just what she'd wanted while I'd been anything but nice to her. Meanwhile, I was saving myself for one woman. My abstinence felt noble because it was so very difficult. I burned with my celibacy and I wanted it to impress Genet. How could it not?

It had been clear to me ever since that sunny Saturday three years before when Genet returned from her holiday in Asmara that puberty for her was all but complete. Her growth spurt that winter made everything longer: legs, fingers, even lashes. Her eyelids turned sleepy looking, and her eyes seemed even more widely spaced. After her return from Asmara, she'd begun to drive the household mad. According to Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, breast buds and pubic hair were the first signs of puberty in girls. How strange that Nelson overlooked the first sign I noted, namely, a heady, mature scent that beckoned like a Siren. When she wore perfume, the two scents would mingle, and what emerged made me dizzy. All I could imagine was tearing off her clothes and drinking from the source.

Genet's changes galvanized Rosina—I could see that clearly. Hema and Rosina were allies, united by their desire to protect Genet from the predators, the boys. But the two mothers were never protective enough for my tastes, and they sabotaged their own efforts by buying her the kinds of clothes and accessories that made her more attractive to the opposite sex. The hounds—judging by how I felt—couldn't help sniffing at our doorstep, and what's more, Genet, by her own admission, was in heat.

THAT TERM, on a Thursday, Genet sent word that she wouldn't be riding back to school in our taxi. She said she'd come home on her own. As Shiva and I walked the last fifty yards up our driveway, a sleek black Mercedes-Benz dropped Genet off.

Shiva went on into the house, but I waited.

“I don't like you coming back with Rudy,” I said to her. It was such an understatement—that luxurious car made me feel so inadequate and it made my blood boil. Rudy's father had the porcelain and bathroom fixture monopoly in Addis. There were perhaps two other kids in the school who drove their own cars. What rankled most was that Rudy had once been one of my best friends.

“You sound like my mother,” Genet said, oblivious to my distress.

“Rudy is the crown prince of the toilets. He just wants to sleep with you.”

“Don't you?” she said looking at me coyly, tilting her head.

“Yes. But I want to sleep only with you. And I love you. So it's different.”

For all my shyness around women, I didn't have a problem telling Genet how I felt. Perhaps it was a mistake to show my hand so easily. It gave a shallow woman great power over you, but my faith insisted she couldn't be shallow, that such love, such commitment from me, would empower her, free her.

“Will you do it with me?” she asked.

“Of course I will. I dream of it every night. We only have to wait three more years, Genet, and we can get married. And then we will lose our virginity in this place,” I said pulling out a much-folded picture I had torn out of National Geographic. It showed the Lake Palace in Udaipur, a gleaming white hotel in the middle of a pristine blue lake. “I want to marry in India,” I said. I had visions of me, the groom, riding in on an elephant, a symbol of the desire and the frustration I had repressed— only an elephant (or a jumbo jet) would do. And beautiful Genet, bejew-eled and dressed in a gold sari, jasmine all around … I could see every detail. I even had the perfume picked out for her—Motiya Bela made from jasmine flowers. “And this is the honeymoon suite.” The flip side showed a room with a giant four-poster bed, with huge French doors beyond that opened out onto the lake. “Notice the bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a bidet.” The crown prince of toilets could never top that.