Cutting for Stone (29 page)

Rosina called Genet's name from somewhere in the house.

I picked up the belt. How we could both be so serene, I'll never know.

I touched Genet on her shoulders, gently, carefully. The other moment of touch was long gone. Her eyes turned to me with what could be love or its opposite.

“I will always find you,” I whispered.

“Maybe,” she said, bringing her lips close to my ear. “But I might get better at hiding.”

Rosina walked in and stopped, frozen at the sight of us.

“What are you two doing?” she said, in Amharic. She smiled out of habit, but her brows conveyed her puzzlement. “I've been looking all over for you. Where are your clothes? What is this?”

“A game,” I said waving the blindfold and belt as if it answered her questions, but my throat was so dry I don't think any noise came out.

Genet brushed past me, heading back to the living room. Rosina grabbed her hand. “Where are your clothes, daughter?”

“Let go my hand.”

“But why are you naked?”

Genet said nothing, her face defiant.

Rosina jerked her by the arm. “Why did you take them off?”

When Genet replied, her voice was cutting, spoiling for a fight. “Why do
you
take your clothes off for Zemui? When you send me out, is it not for you to get naked?”

Rosina's mouth froze in the open position. When she could speak, she said, “He is your father. He's my husband.”

Genet's face showed no surprise. She laughed, a cruel, mocking sound, as if she'd heard these words before. I cringed for my nanny as Genet spoke. “Your
husband?
My
father?
You lie. My father would stay the night. My father would have us live with him in a real house.” She was angry, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Your husband wouldn't have another wife and three children. Your husband wouldn't come home and send me out to play so he can play with you.” She pulled her arm free and went to get her clothes.

ROSINA HAD FORGOTTEN
I was there.

Innocence, the carefree days, hung over a chasm. She finally turned to me.

We studied each other as if we were looking at strangers. I'd gone into the pantry sightless. Now the blindfold was off.
Zemui was Genet's father.
Was I the only one not to know this? How stupid was I? Why had I never thought to ask? Did Shiva know? All the long hours the Colonel spent with us playing bridge … It made sense that Zemui was also around all that time. True, in a matrilineal society, one accepted these things and didn't ask about a father when none was present. But I
should
have asked. I saw it now. The signs were there. I was blind, and naïve and dumb. All the letters I had written for Zemui to Darwin inquiring about his family and conveying best wishes from his pal had given no clue that Genet was his child. All those written words, spoken words, were just the shimmering surface of a deep and swift river; to think of the nights I lay in bed, hearing that motorcycle, feeling sorry for Zemui trudging home in the rain, in the dark. Clearly, I wasn't the only one to feel compassion for him.

Rosina knew me so well, she could read the progression of my every thought. I hung my head: I'd slipped in the esteem of my beloved nanny. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that now her head was down, too, as if she'd failed me, as if she had never wanted me to know this side of her. I wanted to say,
About what you saw, it was a game …

I said nothing.

Genet returned, clothed in the flannel pajamas. She left without a backward glance, and Rosina followed.

Shiva was in the dining room, just beyond the door to the kitchen.

I stayed in the pantry after shutting the door, and I stood facing the shelves. A scent lingered, an ozone generated by me and Genet, by our two wills.

I heard footsteps draw near and stop, and I knew that Shiva was on the other side of the door, just as he knew I was on this side. ShivaMar-ion couldn't hide much from Shiva or Marion. But I squeezed my eyes shut and turned invisible and carried myself to a place where I was completely alone and no one could share my thoughts.

CHAPTER 21
Knowing What You Will Hear

I
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED,
when Rosina ran her fingers through my curls, or insisted she iron my shirt before we went out, it was as if nothing had happened. But I saw these acts of hers differently They were familiar, but also designed to have a hand on me at all times, and thereby put her body between me and her daughter.

Something
had
transpired that night in the pantry, just as Rosina feared. Id leaned on a hidden panel, and much like in the comics, Id plunged through. The falling was unintentional, but now that I was on the other side I wanted to stay. I wanted to be around Genet more than ever, and Rosina knew it.

I saw a new dimension to Rosina—call it cunning. The same cunning was in me as well, because I no longer felt safe telling her what I was thinking. But my feelings were tough to hide. When I was with Genet, I felt the blood rushing to my face. I had forgotten how to
be.

For the rest of the holidays, Genet gravitated to Shiva. His presence generated no awkwardness, while mine clearly did. I watched them put on their practice record, clear the dining room, strap on their anklets, and run through their complex routines in Bharatnatyam. I wasn't jealous. Shiva was my proxy, just as I had been his when Almaz had given me her breast. If I could not be with Genet, wasn't Shiva's being with her the next-best thing?

Perhaps my bloodhound instinct, my ability to find Genet by scent, was no more than a party trick. But perhaps not. We never played blind man's buff again. The very idea was disquieting.

I AVOIDED ZEMUI
when he came to pick up or drop off his motorcycle, or when Colonel Mebratu came to play bridge. The Colonel enjoyed driving his Peugeot, or his jeep, or his staff Mercedes, and the last time Zemui spotted me, hed been riding shotgun and he waved and grinned. When I finally did encounter Zemui, I wanted to be annoyed with him; he had something in common with Thomas Stone, though Zemui at least saw his daughter every day. But when Zemui shook my hand and excitedly pulled out a new Darwin letter, I found myself sitting down with him on the kitchen steps. I was tempted to say,
Why don t you ask your daughter to do this?
But I didn't because I understood something I had missed before—that Genet surely didn't make things easy for her father. I was reading and writing letters for Zemui because his daughter had refused.

ON A FRIDAY EVENING,
the Colonel breezed into Missing and into Ghosh's old quarters bringing energy with him, as if not one man but a regiment in full colors had arrived, along with the marching band. Half an hour later, there were two tables going. The players—Hema, Ghosh, Adid, Babu, Evangeline, Mrs. Reddy, and a newcomer they brought— seemed to inhabit their bridge hands, becoming Pass and Three-No-Trumps, their faces flushed with concentration. Adid, the khat merchant and old friend of Hema's, owned a shop in the Merkato right next to Babu's and had brought him into the group. A burst of conversation like a collective sigh signaled the end of a round. I loved to observe them play.

The Colonel, just back from London, had a rare bottle of Glenfid-dich for Ghosh, chocolates for us, and Chanel No.
5
perfume for Hema. The cigarettes in the ashtrays were Dunhill and
555
—his contribution again. Though he wore a blazer and open shirt, his tucked-in chin and the shoulders drawn back made it seem he was still in uniform. If he left the party, I imagined the rest of them would slump over like toys whose spring had unwound.

Evangeline, an Anglo-Indian, a bridge regular, turned to Colonel Mebratu: “A little bird told me that we might soon be calling you Brigadier General. Is that true?”

Colonel Mebratu frowned. “Such vicious rumors. Such an incestuous community. And I fear, Evangeline, you are at the center of it. But in this case I must correct you, my dear. I am not
soon
to be called Brigadier General. As of yesterday, I
am
Brigadier General.”

Well, there was no stopping them after that. Zemui and Gebrew made two runs for food from the Ras Hotel.

Much later that night, Mebratu and Ghosh palavered over cognac and cigars. “In Korea in ‘
52
we were one of fifteen countries in the UN forces. I wasn't long out of command training when I went there. The other countries underestimated us. You see, they knew nothing about Ethiopian courage or the battle of Adowa or any of that. By God, we proved ourselves in Korea. By the time we got to the Congo, they knew what to expect. We had an Irish commander, then a Swedish commander, and in the third year, they made our own General Guebre commander of
all
the UN forces. You know, Ghosh, as a career military man that was my proudest moment. Even more than this promotion I got yesterday.”

I'LL NEVER KNOW HOW,
but Ghosh understood what I was going through after the pantry episode; perhaps he recognized that I was quarantined from Genet and that Shiva didn't share in that experience; perhaps he saw my confusion when Zemui was around. Maybe it was written on my face that I'd become aware of human complexity—that's a kinder word than “deceit.” I was trying to decide where to peg my own truth, how much to reveal about myself—it helped to have such a steadfast father in Ghosh, never fickle, never prying, but knowing when I needed him. Had Hema learned what went on in the pantry, I'd hear about it two seconds later. But Ghosh, if he knew, was capable of keeping his peace, biding his time, hearing me out; he'd have even kept it secret from Hema if he didn't think it served any purpose to tell her.

One wet afternoon, when Genet and Shiva were having their dance lesson with Hema, Ghosh telephoned and asked me to meet him in Casualty. “I want you to feel a most unusual pulse.” Ghosh was primarily a surgeon now, operating electively three days a week and doing the emergency cases as needed. But, as he often said at dinner, he was still an internist at heart and couldn't resist coming down to Casualty to see certain patients who presented a diagnostic puzzle, one that neither Adam nor Bachelli could crack.

I was grateful for Ghosh's call. I never had any interest in dancing, but it bothered me to see Genet enjoying something in which I had no part. I put on my gutta-percha boots and raincoat and dashed out with my umbrella.

Demisse was in his twenties, sitting on the examining stool in front of Ghosh, wearing only torn jodhpurs. I noticed at once the bobbing of his head, as if an eccentric flywheel turned within him. It was my first formal visit with a patient, and I was embarrassed. What would this barefoot farmhand think of a young boy entering the exam room? But he was thrilled to see me. Later I realized that patients felt privileged to be singled out in this fashion. Not only had they made it past Adam, not only had they seen the
tilik
doctor, the same big doctor whom the royalty came to see, but now they got a bonus—me.

Ghosh guided my fingers to Demisse's pulse at the wrist. It was easy to feel, unavoidable, a surging, slapping, powerful wave under my fingertips. Now I could see that his head bobbing happened in time with the pulse.

“Now feel mine,” Ghosh said, holding out his wrist. It was harder to find, subtle.

He had me go back to Demisse's pulse.

“Describe it,” Ghosh said.

“Big … strong. Like something alive under the skin, slapping,” I said.

“Exactly! That is a classic
collapsing
or water hammer pulse. Its full name is the Corrigan's water hammer pulse.”

He handed me a foot-long thin glass tube that Id seen lying across his table. “Hold it up. Now turn it over.” The tube was sealed at both ends and had a little water in it. When I flipped it, the water raced down to the bottom of the tube with an unexpected smacking sound and a shock. “There's a vacuum inside, you see,” he said. “It's a toy that kids played with in Ireland. It's a water hammer. Dr. Corrigan was reminded of the toy when he first felt a pulse like Demisse's.”

Ghosh had made the water hammer for me. He had sealed one end of a glass tube with a Bunsen flame. Then he put a few drops of water inside the tube through the open end. He heated the length of the tube above the liquid to drive the air out and quickly sealed the open end under the flame.

“Demisse's heart shoots blood out into the aorta. That's the big highway leading out of the heart,” he said, making a sketch for me on paper. “A valve right here at the exit from the heart is supposed to close after the heart contracts, to keep the blood from falling back into the heart. His doesn't close well. So his heart squeezes blood out just fine, but half of that ejected blood falls right back into the heart between squeezes.
That's
what gives it the collapsing quality.” How exciting to be able to touch a human being with one's fingertips and know all these things about them. I said as much to Ghosh, and from his expression you would think Id said something profound.

He sent for me often during those holidays. Shiva came at times, but not if it interfered with his dance lesson or if he was in the middle of a drawing. I learned to recognize the slow, heaving, plateaulike pulse of a narrowed aortic valve. It was the opposite of a collapsing pulse. The small valve opening made that pulse both weak
and
prolonged.
Pulsus parvus et tardus,
Ghosh called it.

I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease. When I tried to explain this to Ghosh, he was excited.

“Yes! A treasure trove of words! That's what you find in medicine. Take the food metaphors we use to describe disease: the nutmeg liver, the sago spleen, the anchovy sauce sputum, or currant jelly stools. Why, if you consider
just fruits
alone you have the strawberry tongue of scarlet fever, which the next day becomes the raspberry tongue. Or how about the strawberry angioma, the watermelon stomach, the apple core lesion of cancer, the
peau d'orange
appearance of breast cancer … and that's just fruits! Don't get me started on the nonvegetarian stuff!”

One day I showed Ghosh the notebook in which I kept a written cata log of everything he had told me, and every pulse I had seen. Like a birder, I listed the ones I sought:
pulsus par-adoxus, pulsus alternans, pulsus bisferiens …
and simple drawings of what they might look like. He wrote in the fly leaf:
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est!
“That means ‘Knowledge is power!’ Oh, I do believe that, Marion.”

We didn't stop at pulses. I went to Ghosh as often as I could. Fingernails, tongues, faces—soon my notebook was chock-full of drawings and new words. I found use at last for my penmanship: each figure was carefully labeled.

On a Friday evening, our last weekend before school started, I rode with Ghosh to see Farinachi, the toolmaker. Ghosh handed Farinachi two old stethoscopes and a drawing of his idea for a teaching stethoscope. Farinachi, a dour, stooped Sicilian, wore a vest under his leather apron. He studied the drawing carefully through a haze of cigar smoke, tracing the outline with a large forefinger. He had fashioned several contraptions for Ghosh, including the Ghosh Retractor, and the Ghosh Scalp Clip. Farinachi shrugged, as if to say if that was what Ghosh wanted, he would do it.

As we were driving back, Ghosh pulled out a present hed wrapped for me. It was my very own brand-new stethoscope. “You don't have to wait for Farinachi. Now that you know your pulses, we're going to start listening to heart sounds.” I was moved. It was the first gift I'd ever received that wasn't one of a pair. This was mine alone.

Looking back, I realize Ghosh saved me when he called me to feel Demisse's pulse. My mother was dead, and my father a ghost; increasingly I felt disconnected from Shiva and Hema, and guilty for feeling that way. Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It's okay. He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also
how
to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive.