Cutting for Stone (21 page)

With the colon swollen to
Hindenburg
proportions it would be all too easy to nick the bowel and spill feces into the abdominal cavity. He made a midline incision, then deepened it carefully, like a sapper defusing a bomb. Just when panic was setting in because he felt he was going nowhere, the glistening surface of the peritoneum—that delicate membrane that lined the abdominal cavity—came into view. When he opened the peritoneum, straw-colored fluid came out. Inserting his finger into the hole and using it as a backstop, he cut the peritoneum along the length of the incision.

At once, the colon bullied its way out like a zeppelin escaping its hangar. He covered the sides of the wound with wet packs, inserted a large Balfour retractor to hold the edges open, and delivered the twisted loop completely out of the wound onto the packs. It was as wide across as the inner tube of a car tire, boggy, dark, and tense with fluid, quite unlike the flaccid pink coils of the rest of the bowel. He could see the spot where the twist had occurred, deep in the belly. Gently manipulating the two limbs of the loop, he untwisted, clockwise, just as Cope said. He heard a gurgle and at once the blue color began to wash out of the ballooned segment. It pinked up at the edges.

He felt through the bowel wall for the rectal tube that Nurse Asqual had inserted. He fed it up like a curtain rod in a loop. When the tube reached the distended bowel, they were rewarded with a loud sigh and the rattle of fluid and gas hitting the bucket below. “And down the coil contracts and you will see, the parts arranged more as they ought to be,” Ghosh said, and the probationer, who had no idea what he was talking about, said, “Yes, Dr. Ghosh.”

Ghosh flexed his gloved fingers. They looked competent and powerful—a surgeon's hands. You can't feel this way, he thought, unless you have the ultimate responsibility.

AFTER HE CLOSED,
as he was stripping off his gloves, he saw Hema's face in the glass of the swinging doors. It disappeared. He charged after her. She ran, but he soon caught up with her in the walkway. She stood panting against the pillar. “So?” she said when she could speak. “It went well?”

They were both grinning. “Yes … I just untwisted the loop.” He couldn't hide the pride and excitement in his voice.

“It could twist again.”

“Well, his choice was either me or nothing, since the other doctor here would not help.”

“True. Good for you. I've got to go. Almaz and Rosina are watching the babies.”

“Hema?”

“What?”

“You would have helped if I got into trouble?”

“No, I was just stretching my legs …” Despite herself, a twinkle showed in her eyes. “Silly. What did you think?”

With Hema, even sarcasm felt like a gift. He fought the instinct to jump forward, the eager puppy too ready to forget the cuffing it had received minutes before.

“Just yesterday,” Hema said, “I drove past the spot where we saw that first hanging, and I thought about it …” She seemed to study him meditatively “Have you eaten anything today?”

That was when he noticed: His beloved, his Madras-returned, unmarried beauty, was more
magnified
than ever. There were succulent rolls visible between sari and blouse. The skin under her chin was gently swollen like a second mons.

“I've not eaten since you left for India,” he said, which was almost true.

“You've lost weight. It doesn't look good. Come by and eat. There's food, tons of it. Everybody keeps bringing food.”

She walked off. He studied the way the flesh on her buttocks swung this way, and that, about to sail off her hips. She'd brought back from India more of herself to love. It was the worst time for this, but he was aroused.

He dressed and found himself thinking about the operation again. Should I have tacked the sigmoid colon to the abdominal wall to prevent it twisting again? Didn't I see Stone do this? Colopexy I think he called it. Had Stone spoken to me about the danger of a colopexy and warned against it, or had he recommended it? I hope we took out all the sponges. Should have counted once more. I should've taken one more look. Checked for bleeders while I was at it. He recalled Stone saying,
When the abdomen is open you control it. But once you close it, it controls you.
“I understand just what you mean, Thomas,” Ghosh said, as he walked out of the theater.

IT WAS LATE EVENING
before the hospital staff gathered by the gaping cavity in the earth, now shored up with timber. There was no time to waste, because by Ethiopian tradition, no one eats till the body is interred. That meant the nurses and probationers were starving. The casket arrived on the shoulders of orderlies treading the same path down which Sister Mary Joseph Praise would come to sit in this grove. Hema trailed behind the pallbearers, walking with Stone's maid, Rosina, and with Ghosh's maid, Almaz, the three of them taking turns carrying the two infants who where bundled up in blankets.

They laid the casket down by the edge of the grave, and removed the lid. There were sobs and strangled cries as those who had yet to see the body pressed closer.

The nurses had dressed Sister Mary Joseph Praise in the clothes the young nun first donned when she pledged body and soul to Christ—her “bridal” dress. The arching, hooded veil was to show that her mind was not on earthly things but on the kingdom of heaven; it was the symbol of her being dead to the world, but in the gathering mist it was no longer a symbol. The starched guimpe around her neck hung down like a bib. Her habit was white, interrupted by a plaited white cord. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's hands emerged from the sleeves and met in the middle, the fingers resting on her Bible and a rosary. Discalced Carmelites originally shunned footwear—hence the term “discalced.” Sister Mary Joseph Praise's order had been practical enough to wear sandals. Matron had left her feet bare.

Matron chose not to call Father de la Rosa of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, because he was a man who had a disapproving manner even when there was nothing to disapprove, and there was plenty here. She almost called Andy McGuire from the Anglican church; he would have been a comfort and most willing. But in the end Matron felt that Sister Mary Joseph Praise would have wanted no one but her Missing family to see her off. The same instinct led Matron to ask Gebrew earlier that day to prepare to say a short prayer. Sister was always respectful of Gebrew, even though his being a priest was incidental to his duties as watchman and gardener; she would have appreciated how much it honored and consoled Gebrew to be called on in this fashion.

In the cool and very still air, Matron held up her hand. “Sister Mary Joseph Praise would have said, ‘Don't grieve for me. Christ is my salvation.’ That must be our consolation as well.” Matron lost her train of thought. What else was there? She nodded at Gebrew who was immaculately dressed in a white tunic extending to his knees, trousers underneath, and tightly coiled turban on his head. These were the ceremonial clothes he wore only on Timkat, the day of the Epiphany. Gebrew s liturgy was in ancient Biblical Geez, the official language of the Ethio pian Orthodox Church. With great effort, he kept his singsong recitation short. Then the nurses and probationers sang Sister Mary Joseph Praise's favorite hymn, one she had taught them and which they favored in morning chapel in the nurses’ hostel.

Jesus lives! Thy terrors now
Can no longer, death, appall us;
Jesus lives! By this we know
Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us.
Alleluia!

They all pushed forward, straining for a last look before the lid was nailed in place. Gebrew would say later that Sister Mary Joseph Praise's face glowed, her expression was peaceful, knowing her ordeal on earth was over. Almaz insisted that a lilac scent emerged as the lid went down.

Ghosh felt a message being conveyed to him. Sister seemed to be saying,
Make good use of your time. Don't waste more years pursuing love that might never be reciprocated. Leave this land for my sake.

Hema, standing close, vowed silently to Sister Mary Joseph Praise that shed look after us as if we were her own.

With ropes under the casket, the coolies lowered Sister into her grave. The heavy stones required by Ethiopian tradition were handed down to the taller coolie whose feet were perched on either side of the coffin. The stones were to keep hyenas out.

At last the two men pushed the earth back to fill in the grave, the service all but over. All but the ululations.

Shiva and I, so new to life, were startled by that unearthly sound. We opened our eyes to contemplate a world in which so much was already amiss.

CHAPTER 14
Knowledge of the Redeemer

T
HE DAY AFTER THE FUNERAL,
Ghosh rose early. For a change his waking thoughts were not about Hema but about Stone. As soon as he was dressed, he went straight to Stone's quarters, but he found no sign that the occupant had returned. Deflated, he went to Matron's office. She looked up expectantly. He shook his head.

He was eager to see his postoperative patient and check his handiwork. He'd been a reluctant surgeon, but now the anticipation he felt was a revelation to him. It must have been a feeling Stone had regularly enjoyed. “This could be addictive,” he said to no one in particular.

He found Colonel Mebratu sitting on the edge of the bed, his brother helping him dress. “Dr. Ghosh!” Mebratu said, smiling like a man without a care in the world, though he was clearly in pain. “My status report: I passed gas last night, stool today. Tomorrow I will pass gold!” He was a man used to charming others, and even in his weakened state, his charisma was undiminished. For someone fewer than twenty-four hours out of surgery, he looked great. Ghosh examined the wound, and it was clean and intact.

“Doctor,” the Colonel said, “I must return to my regiment in Gondar today. I can't be gone for much longer. I know it's too soon, but I don't have a choice. If I don't show my face I will be under even deeper suspicion. You don't want to save my life only for me to be hanged. I can arrange for intravenous fluids at home, whatever you say.”

Ghosh had opened his mouth to protest, but he realized he could not insist.

“All right. But listen, there is a real hazard of the wound bursting if you strain. I'll give you morphine. You must travel lying flat. We'll arrange intravenous fluids, and tomorrow you can sip water and then clear liquids the next. I will write it all down. You will need the stitches removed in about ten days.” The Colonel nodded.

The bearded brother clasped Ghosh's hand and bowed low, muttering his thanks.

“Will you travel with him?” Ghosh said.

“Yes, of course. We have a van coming. Once he is settled, I'll go to my new posting in Siberia.” Ghosh looked puzzled. “I am being banished.”

“Are you also in the military?” Ghosh said.

“No, as of this moment, I am nothing, Doctor. I am nobody.”

Colonel Mebratu put his hand on his brother's shoulder. “My brother is modest. Do you know he has a master's degree in sociology from Columbia? Yes, he was sent to America by His Imperial Majesty. The Old Man wasn't happy when my brother was attracted by the Marcus Garvey Movement. He didn't let him pursue a Ph.D. He summoned him back to be a provincial administrator. He should have let him finish.”

“No, no, I came willingly,” the brother said. “I wanted to help my people. But for that I am off to Siberia.” Ghosh waited, expecting more.

“Tell him why,” the Colonel said. “It's a health matter, after all.”

The brother sighed. “The Health Ministry built a public health clinic in our former province. His Imperial Majesty came to cut the ribbon. Half my budget for the district was consumed to make everything look good along His Majesty's route. Paint, fences, even a bulldozer to tear down huts. As soon as he left, the clinic closed.”

“Why?”

“The budget for the clinic was spent!”

“Did you not protest?”

“Of course! But no replies to my messages. The Health Minister intercepted them. So, I reopened the health center myself. It took about ten thousand birr. I got a missionary doctor in a town fifty miles away to come once a week. I had a retired army nurse doing dressings, and I found a midwife to move there. I got supplies. The local bootlegger gave me a generator. The people loved me. The Health Minister wanted to kill me. The Emperor summoned me to Addis.”

“How did you get the money?” Ghosh asked.

“Bribes! People would bring over a big
injera
basket, with more money in it than
Injera.
When I used the bribes for a good purpose, they gave me more bribes because they were worried that I would expose them.”

“You told this to His Majesty?”

“Ah! But that is complicated. Everyone is whispering in his ear. ‘Your Majesty,’ I said, when I got my audience. ‘The health center needs a budget to keep going.’ He acted surprised.”

“He knew,” the Colonel interjected.

“He heard me out. Those eyes give away nothing. When I was done, His Majesty whispers to Abba Hanna, the Minister of the Purse. Abba Hanna scribbles in the record. And the other ministers, have you seen them? They are in a state of constant terror. They never know if they are in their master's favor or not.

“His Majesty thanks me for my service to that province, et cetera, et cetera, and then I bow and bow and walk backward. I meet the Minister of the Purse at the rear of the room, and he gives me three hundred birr! I need thirty thousand, or even three hundred thousand, I could use. For all I know the Emperor said one hundred thousand and Abba Hanna decided it was worth only three hundred. Or was three hundred the Emperor's idea? And who do you ask? By then, the next petitioner is telling his story, and the Minister of the Purse is running back to take his position near the Emperor.

“I tried to shout from the back of the room, Your Majesty, did the minister make a mistake?’ My friends dragged me away—”

“Otherwise you wouldn't be around to tell us this story,” the Colonel said. “My foolhardy brother.”

The Colonel turned serious, his eyes on Ghosh as he took Ghosh's hand in both of his. “Dr. Ghosh. You're a better surgeon than Stone. A surgeon in hand is worth two who are gone.”

“No, I was lucky. Stone is the best.”

“I thank you for something else. You see, I was in terrible pain all the way from Gondar to here. The journey going back is going to be easy by comparison. The pain was … I knew whatever this was would get worse, would kill me. But I had options. I came to you. When you told me that for my fellow countrymen, if they have to suffer this, they simply die …” The Colonel's face turned hard, and Ghosh could not be sure if it was anger or if he was holding back tears. He cleared his throat. “It was a crime to close my brother's health center. When I came to Addis Ababa for this meeting with my … colleagues, I was prepared to listen. But I wasn't sure. You could say my motives were suspect. If I wanted to be part of a change, was it for the best of reasons, or just to grab power? I'm telling you things you can never repeat, Doctor, do you understand?”

Ghosh nodded.

“My journey, my pain, my operation …,” the Colonel went on, “God was showing me the suffering of my people. It was a message. How we treat the least of our brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus,
that's
the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks, or how big the Emperor's palace happens to be. I think God put you in my path.”

Later, when they had left, Ghosh realized how he'd been so predisposed to dislike Colonel Mebratu, but the opposite had happened. Conversely, as an expatriate, it was easy to project benevolent qualities on to His Majesty. Now he was less sure.

MR. ELIHU HARRIS
was dressed all wrong. That was the first thing Matron noticed when he closed the door behind him and stepped up to her desk and introduced himself. He had every right to be annoyed, having visited Missing on the two previous days without meeting Matron. Instead, he seemed grateful to see her, worried about intruding on her time.

“I had no idea you were coming, Mr. Harris,” Matron said presently. “Under any other circumstance, it would have been a pleasure. But you see, yesterday, we buried Sister Mary Joseph Praise.”

“You mean …” Harris swallowed hard. His mouth opened and closed. He saw such sorrow in Matron's eyes, and he was embarrassed to have overlooked it. “You mean … the young nun from India? … Thomas Stone's assistant?”

“The very same. As for Thomas Stone, he has left. Vanished. I am very worried about him. He is a distraught man.”

Harris had a pleasant face, but his overdeveloped upper lip and uneven front teeth left him just short of handsome. He fidgeted in his chair. He was doubtless yearning to ask how all this had happened, but he didn't. Matron understood he was the sort of man who, even when he had the upper hand, didn't know how to press for his rights. As he stood before her, his soft brown eyes reluctant to engage, her heart softened to him.

So Matron told Harris everything, a rush of simple sentences that were weighed down by what they conveyed. When she was finished, she said, “Your visit comes when we are at our worst.” She blew her nose. “So much of what we did at Missing revolved around Thomas Stone. He was the best surgeon in the city. He never knew that it was because of the people he operated on in the royal family, in the government, that we were allowed to go on. The government makes us pay a hefty annual fee for the privilege of serving here, can you imagine? They could if they want simply close us down. Mr. Harris, even your giving us money was because of his book … This might be the end of Missing.”

As Matron talked, Harris sank farther back in the chair, as if someone had a foot on his chest. He had a nervous habit of patting his cowlick, even though it was not in danger of falling.

There are people in the world who were cursed by bad timing, Matron thought. People whose cars break down on the way to their wedding, or whose Brighton holiday is invariably ruined by rain, or whose crowning day of private glory is overshadowed by and forever remembered as the day King George VI died. Such people vexed the spirit, and yet one was moved to pity because they were helpless. It wasn't Harris's fault that Sister had died or Stone had disappeared. Yet there he was.

If Harris wanted an accounting of money, she had nothing to show him. Matron submitted progress reports under duress, and since what donors wanted to spend on had no link to the reality of Missing's needs, her reports were a form of fiction. She'd always known a day like this would come.

Harris choked, then coughed. When he recovered, with much throat clearing and fumbling with his handkerchief, he came indirectly to his business with Matron. But it wasn't what Matron imagined it would be.

“You were right about our plan to fund a mission for the Oromo, Matron,” Harris said. Matron faintly recalled a mention of this in a letter. “The doctor in Wollo sent me a telegram. The police have occupied the building. The district governor will do nothing to evict them. The supplies are being sold. The local church has been preaching against us, saying we are the devils! I had to come to straighten things out.”

“Pardon me for being blunt, Mr. Harris, but how could you have funded it sight unseen?” She felt a pang of guilt as she said this, since Harris hadn't seen Missing till now. “If I recall, I wrote to say that it was unwise.”

“It's my fault,” Harris said, wringing his hands.
“I
prevailed on my church steering committee … I haven't told them yet,” Harris said, almost in a whisper. Clearing his throat and finding his voice he added, “My intentions …, I hope the committee will understand, were good. We … I hoped to bring knowledge of the Redeemer to those who do not have it.”

Matron let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you think they were all fire worshippers? Tree worshippers? Mr. Harris, they
are
Christians. They are no more in need of redemption than you are in need of a hair straightening cream.”

“But I feel it's not true Christianity. It's a pagan sort of …,” he said, and patted his forehead.

“Pagan! Mr. Harris, when
our
pagan ancestors back in Yorkshire and Saxony were using their enemies’ skulls as a plate to serve food, these Christians here were singing the psalms. They believe they have the Ark of the Covenant locked up in a church in Axum. Not a saint's finger or a pope's toe, but the Ark! Ethiopian believers put on the shirts of men who had just died of the plague.
They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life, of finding salvation.
That,” she said, tapping the table, “is how much they thirsted for the next life.” She couldn't help what she said next. “Tell me, in Dallas, do your parishioners hunger like that for salvation?”

Harris had turned red. He looked around as if for a place to hide. But he wasn't completely done. Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.

“It's actually Houston, not Dallas,” he said softly. “But, Matron, the priesthood here is almost illiterate—Gebrew, your watchman, doesn't understand the litany that he recites because it is in Geez, which no one speaks. If he holds to the Monophysite doctrine that Christ had only a divine nature, not a human one, then—”

“Stop! Mr. Harris, do stop,” Matron said, covering her ears. “Oh, how you vex me.” She came around the table, and Harris drew back as if he worried that she might box his ears. But Matron walked to the window.

“When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?”

Matron leaned her head on the windowpane.

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—”by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

The sight of that plain, weathered face pressed against the glass, the wet cheeks, the interlocking fingers … it was for Harris more powerful than anything she had said. Here was a woman who could give up the restrictions of her order when it stood in the way. From her lips had come the kind of fundamental truth which, because of its simplicity, was unspoken in a church like Harris's where internecine squabbling seemed to be the purpose for the committee's existence, as well as a manifestation of faith. It was a small blessing that an ocean separated the doers like Matron from their patrons, because if they rubbed shoulders they'd make each other very uncomfortable.

Harris stared at the stack of Bibles by the wall. He hadn't seen them when he first walked in.