Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

At dinner, a month after Id learned of Ghosh's blood disorder, Hema shared with us that she and Shiva had operated on fifteen successive fistula patients with not one recurrence. “I owe this to Shiva,” she said. “He convinced me to take more time preparing the women for surgery. So now, we admit the patients and feed them eggs, meat, milk, and vitamins for two weeks. We treat with antibiotics till the urine is clear and use zinc oxide paste on their thighs and vulva. It was Shiva's idea to deworm them and correct iron deficiency anemia before surgery. We work on strengthening their legs, getting them moving.” She looked at Shiva with pride. “I am embarrassed to say, he's seen and understood their needs better than I have after all these years. Like the idea of physical therapy—”

“Can't get them to walk after surgery if they won't walk before,” Shiva said.

On four of their patients the hole into the bladder was so large, so scarred down and shrunk back, that it was impossible to pull the edges together. In these patients, Hema and Shiva had learned to expose a narrow but thick “steak” of flesh under the labia and, while keeping it connected at one end to its blood supply, tunnel its free end up and pull it into the vagina and use it as a live patch in the fistula.

“Matron has a donor who wants to support nothing but fistula surgery,” Shiva said. “We're getting one thousand American dollars every month.” I found it difficult to look at him, let alone congratulate him.

I STOPPED FRETTING over Genet. When she failed two of the four courses the first year and had to repeat both semesters, I was too distracted by Ghosh's illness to care. She wasn't having a good time and living it up. Instead she'd lost her desire, lost sight of her target if she'd ever had one. All it took was one week of not studying, missing class, to get impossibly behind, so hectic was the pace of the first year of medical school.

Halfway through my second year, I learned that Genet had again missed a few anatomy lab sessions. I felt obliged to check on her.

At Mekane Yesus Hostel, the door to her room was open. Her visitor's back was to me; neither of them saw me at first. Genet shared the room with another girl who wasn't there. The tiny room which had once been so neat was now cluttered and messy. The room held a bunk bed and a small table for two. When he was alive, Genet acted as if Zemui annoyed her. Her brave and loyal father had died in a hail of bullets, and now she had his picture on the ceiling, inches from her face when she lay on the top bunk.

Her visitor's coarse features and his gruff manner made him stand out. I knew him as a student firebrand, organizing others for curricular reform, or collecting signatures to oust an unpopular warden. But he was Eritrean first, just like Genet. The liberation of Eritrea was almost certainly his most important cause, but it was the one he'd have to keep secret. He was speaking to Genet in Tigrinya, but I heard a few English words: “hegemony” and “proletariat.” He stopped in midsentence when he sensed me in the doorway. His bovine eyes gave me a look that said, You will never be one of us.

I deliberately spoke to Genet in Amharic, so her guest would see that I spoke it better than he did. He muttered something to her in Tigrinya and stalked off.

“Who are these radical friends of yours, Genet?”

“What radicals? I'm just hanging around with Eritreans.”

“The secret police have informers on this floor,” I said. “They'll link you with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.”

She shrugged. “Do you know the EPLF is making great gains, Marion? You can't know that. It's not in the Ethiopian Herald. But I doubt you're here to discuss politics?”

In the past I might have been wounded by her manner. “Hema says hello. And Ghosh says he wants to see you for dinner one of these evenings … Genet, I'm worried about your dissections. There is no one to do your labs for you this year. If you don't show, you'll fail, no matter what. Come on, Genet.”

Her face, so interested and animated when the other man was there, had now become sullen.

“Thank you,” she said icily.

I wanted badly to tell her that Ghosh was ill, to shake her out of her self-absorption. And yet I sat there feeling the witchcraft of her presence. It kept me coming after her and it made me tell myself I still loved her, no matter how she acted, even when our lives were so clearly drifting apart.

IN MY FINAL YEAR of medical school, during my surgery rotations, Ghosh's volcano erupted. I came home to a look on Hema's face that told me she knew. I steeled myself for her tirade. She hugged me instead.

Ghosh had thrown up blood, and also developed a major nosebleed. He'd tried to conceal it but failed. He was resting comfortably in the bedroom. I peeked in on him, then came out and sat with Hema at the dining table. Almaz, red-eyed, brought me tea.

“I suppose I'm glad he didn't tell me,” Hema said. I could see from her swollen eyelids that she'd spent the afternoon crying. “Particularly when there's nothing to do for it. I've been able to enjoy the best of him. Such perfect days, without knowing any of this.” She fingered the diamond ring on her finger, a present that he'd given her the last time they renewed their yearly vows. “Had I known … maybe we could have taken a trip to America. I asked him about that. He said he preferred to be here. The first sight of me every morning is all he wants! Ayoh, he is such a romantic chap, even now. It's funny, but a few months ago, I actually felt that things were so good that something bad had to happen. The signs were all in front of me. But I wasn't paying attention.”

“Me, too,” I said.

I found Almaz weeping in the kitchen, and Gebrew, tears in his eyes, his tiny Bible in his hand, rocking and reciting verses to console her. When they saw me, Gebrew said, “We shall fast for him. Our prayers have been lacking.”

Almaz nodded, and though she let me hug her and try to reassure her, she was agitated. “We have not been prayerful,” she said. “That is why such a thing comes on us.”

I ASKED GEBREW if hed seen Shiva, and he said Shiva had been gone all day, but if he was back, he might be in his workshop. Gebrew walked down with me to the toolshed.

“Are you still wearing your scroll?” Gebrew asked, referring to the thin strip of sheep's hide on which he'd drawn an eye, an eight-pointed star, a ring, and a queen and copied a verse in fine script. He had rolled the scroll tight and eased it into an empty bullet casing. On the metal he scratched out a cross and my name.

“Yes, it's always with me,” I said, which was sort of true because I carried this phylactery in my briefcase.

“I should have made one for Dr. Ghosh and perhaps this would not happen.”

I marveled at my faithful friend. To become a priest in Ethiopia, it was enough for the archbishop in Addis Ababa to blow his breath into a cloth bag which was then carried to the provinces and opened in a church yard, allowing for the mass ordination of hundreds. The more priests the merrier, from the standpoint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

But having thousands and thousands of priests had its problems for God-fearing people like Almaz. A small number of these men were drunkards and cadgers for whom priesthood was a means of avoiding starvation while satisfying their other appetites. The worst reprobate priest who held out his cross obliged Almaz to stop and kiss its four points. I met her one day looking distressed, her clothes in disarray. She told me she'd beaten off a priest's advances with her umbrella, and others had come to her assistance and pummeled the man. “Marion, when I'm dying, go to the Merkato and get me two priests,” she said to me then. “That way, just like Christ, I can die with a thief on either side of me.”