Cutting for Stone (39 page)

He pulled out a short length of pale, white, wormlike tissue. “I put a mosquito clip here and here … and then I cut between the clips. I remove a two-centimeter segment. Ideally you'd send it to pathology. That way if his wife gets pregnant a year from now, you can show the patient the pathology report and he'll know it's not because you didn't do your job but because a third party did his job better. I don't send it to pathology for the simple reason that we don't have a pathologist. But for a while, there was a pathologist at the American Embassy clinic in Beirut. I'd do the vasectomies for the American staff and send him these little pieces I cut out. The man did the pathology for all the American embassies in East and West Africa. He kept sending back reports that my specimens were inadequate: though he
thought
he saw some uroepi -thelial tissue, he couldn't be certain it was the vas. ‘It's the vas,’ I wrote to him each time. ‘What other uroepithelial tissue could I have cut out? Call it the vas.’ But he kept complaining: ‘Cannot be certain. Not enough tissue.’ It was starting to annoy me, you know? So finally, I sent him a pair of sheep's balls. I put them in formalin and sent them off in the same diplomatic pouch. With a note: ‘Is this enough tissue?’ Never had a problem with him after that.”

Cooper hee-hawed, his mask sucking in and out.

“Now, I tie off the cut ends with catgut. And then I tell the patient, ‘No communication with wife allowed for the next ninety days.’ “

Ghosh turned to face the patient, and repeated the sentence. The patient nodded. “Okay, you can communicate, say ‘Good morning, darling,’ and all that, but no sex for three months.” The patient grinned. “Okay, you can have sex, but you must wear a condom.”

“I use interruptus,” the patient said, speaking for the first time in a heavy East European accent.

“You use what?
Interruptus?
Pull and pray? Good God, man! No wonder you have five kids! It's noble of you to try to get off the train at an earlier station, but it's unreliable. No sir. Interrupt the interruptus, man, unless you want to reach your half dozen this year.” The patient looked embarrassed. “You know what we call young men who use coitus interruptus?” Ghosh said.

The population expert shook his head.

“We call them Father! Daddy. Pater. Pappa. Père. No sir, I have done the interrupting for you. Give me three months and you can tell your missus that she is not to worry because you will be shooting blanks, and there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.”

CHAPTER 31
The Dominion of the Flesh

W
ITH GENET AND ROSINA AWAY,
our quarters felt empty. I missed Genet terribly. Hema and I both worried that wed never see her again. She'd promised to call, and write, but three weeks had gone by and wed yet to hear from her. That year,
1968
, we had torrential rains; the Blue Nile and Awash had spilled their banks, causing flooding. The babbling brook behind Missing looked like a river. In Addis, the populace was bottled up indoors so that a lull in the rain released the scent of stifled humanity, dung fires, and clothes that refused to dry. The ivy raced up the drainpipes and found chinks in walls, while the tadpoles hurried into croaking frogs before their limbs were fully formed. No child I knew was ever tempted to turn its face to the sky and catch raindrops on the tongue, not when you lived and breathed water.

Now that Shiva and I were teenagers, looking ahead to our fourteenth birthday, I kept expecting something to feel different. I tried to stay busy, but all I could think about was Genet and what she might be up to in Asmara. I hoped she was homebound, miserable, and missing me. Without Genet as a witness, nothing I did was meaningful.

LATE ON A TUESDAY EVENING,
I watched Ghosh in Operating Theater
3
as he removed a gallbladder. When he was done, we swung by the surgical ward to see Etien, a diplomat from Ivory Coast, a man we knew socially, who'd suddenly developed a bowel obstruction. In surgery, Ghosh had found an obstructing rectal cancer which he was forced to resect. It was a big and challenging operation, and I knew Ghosh was hopeful for a cure. But he was forced to create a colostomy on the belly wall. “Etien's very depressed,” Ghosh said. “Not about the cancer, but over his colostomy. He can't accept the idea of waste coming out from an opening in his abdomen.”

Etien had the sheet over his head. When Ghosh examined him, and then said the colostomy looked beautiful, tears welled up in Etien's big eyes. He wouldn't look down there. All he said was “Who will marry me now?”

Ghosh was surprisingly firm. “Etien, that's not the part of your body I cut off, the marrying part. You'll find a woman who loves you, and you'll explain it to her. If she loves you for yourself, you'll both be glad that you are alive.” Ghosh's facial expression brooked no argument, but then he softened. “Etien, imagine if all humans were born with their anus on the belly and that's where
everyone's
waste emerged. Then imagine if someone said they were going to operate on you and reroute your bowel so it opened behind you, between your buttock cheeks, somewhere where you couldn't see it except in a mirror, and where you could hardly reach it or easily keep it clean …” It took a few seconds, but then Etien smiled. He dabbed his eyes. He ventured a glance down at his colostomy. It was a small step in the right direction.

Ghosh had one more patient to see. He told me to go on home so I wouldn't be late for dinner.

The rain began to come down hard and I had no umbrella. I walked under the sheltered walkways connecting the theater to Casualty and Casualty to the male ward. Where the walkway ended, I dashed across a short gap, leaping over a puddle to arrive at the nurses’ quarters. I rarely explored this female warren. It looked deserted. If I went up the long outer balcony and down the stairs at the other end … well, I'd still get soaked, but I'd be fifty yards closer to home before I had to dash out into the rain. I hoped Adam's wife, the keeper of the virgins, with that big cross around her neck, didn't see me, because she would chase me out.

Upstairs, the doors of the individual nurses’ rooms opened onto the shared veranda. They must have all been in the dining room, otherwise they would have been lined up against the veranda railing, teasing out their hair, painting their nails, sewing, and chatting.

I heard music from the corner room that had once been my mother's. I'd been up here a few times, but just like her grave, this wasn't a place where I felt her presence. The strangeness of the music, the beat, were what pulled me closer. Guitars and drums in a driving rhythm repeated a musical refrain first in one register, then another. Of late some Ethiopian music adopted a Western sound, with horns, snare drums, and a repeating electric guitar riff that took the place of the muffled strings of the
krar
and the hand clapping. But this wasn't Ethiopian music, and not just because the words were English (albeit an English I couldn't quite understand). This was radically different, like a new color in the rainbow.

The door was open a crack.

She stood barefoot in the center of the room, her back to me. A white slip exposed her shoulders and ended at the back of her knees. Her head went from side to side, and her long, straight hair, conked with chemicals, followed as if welded to her skull. Her hips were driven by the bass line, while her upraised right hand kept the melody. Her left hand must have been pressed to her belly, because the elbow jutted out like the handle of a teacup. The music had entered her; it lubricated her joints, softened her bones and flesh to produce this gyrating, fluid, and sensual movement.

She turned. Her eyes were closed and her face was tilted up. The lower lip was twisted, as if it had been split and had healed out of alignment.

I knew that lip, that faintly pockmarked face, though now the pocks textured the skin and exaggerated her cheekbones. It was the body I didn't recognize. She'd been a student probationer forever, until Matron, taking pity on her, gave her a new title, Staff Probationer, which transformed her. From being on the long-term plan, a perpetual student, she became an instructor for incoming probationers. In the classroom, with textbooks that she knew by heart, she could both drive facts into the probationers’ heads and demonstrate that it was possible to keep them there, by the manner in which she regurgitated her material, never looking at the text.

Normally she wore her hair pulled off her forehead and neck and gathered into a top bun so tight that it arched her eyebrows. When she crowned this with the winged nurse's cap, it looked as if she'd inverted an ice-cream cone on her head.

Other than her precarious hairdo, I'd always thought of the Staff Probationer as plain. At school, I knew girls who were neither ugly nor beautiful but who saw themselves one way or the other, and that conviction made it come true. Heidi Enqvist was gorgeous, but alas not in her own eyes, and so she lacked the mystery and allure of Rita Vartanian, who despite her overbite and prominent nose managed to make Heidi envious.

The probationer was of the Heidi mold. I think that's why she made herself a willing prisoner of a stiff, starched uniform and adopted an unsmiling expression to go with it. The only identity she had was that of being in the nursing profession; in her own eyes, and in the light of the world, she thought she was nobody. Id always felt the probationer's discomfort around us. But then she was shy around everybody.

But I could see now that there was more to her than nursing. The uniform concealed a body full of curves, like the figures Shiva used to draw, and the body moved in ways that would have made a harem dancer jealous.

Her eyes were closed. Were she to see me she'd be startled, embarrassed, and probably furious. I was about to step back when, to my surprise, she stepped forward and pulled me in by my hand, as if a phrase in the song was my cue. She kicked the door shut. The music was louder and more intense inside the room.

She had me taking little steps in time to the beat, moving my body this way and that. I was embarrassed at first. I wanted to laugh or say something clever, the way an adult would. But her expression and the throbbing beat made me feel anything but dancing would have been like talking in church. My steps became effortless. I imitated her, my shoulders moving in the opposite direction from my hips. My hands drew figures in the air. The trick was not to think. My body felt segmented, and each segment answered the call of a particular instrument. The pattern of our steps felt inevitable.

Just when I mastered that, she pulled me to her, my cheek against her neck, my chest against her breasts, separated from them by the thinnest of materials. I'd never danced before, certainly not like this. I breathed in her perfume and her sweat. She squeezed, taking my breath away, as if to make our two bodies one. She guided my arm so that it was around her, my hand over her sacrum, and I held her close. We never stopped moving. She led.

I anticipated her every step, clueless as to where that knowledge came from. We spun, then surged this way, then that, like one organism. I thought of Genet. Emboldened, I led and she followed. I pressed against the soft flesh where her legs came together only because she pressed, too, grinding her hips into me. Blood surged to my face, to my arms, into my stomach, my groin. The world had fallen away. I was in an elaborate dialogue with her.

The music wouldn't stop, and I never wanted it to stop, and just when I thought that, it faded. The American announcer's lazy drawl was so unlike the crisp formal tones of the BBC. “Well, well,” he said. “My, my. Umm, hmmm,” as if hed seen us carrying on. “Have you ever heard anything quite like that? This is the Rock of East Africa. East Africa's Big
14
. Armed Forces Radio Service, Asmara.” It wasn't a station that I knew existed. I knew of a huge American military presence, a listening post, I'd heard it called, just outside of Asmara in Kagnew. Who knew they had something
we
could listen to?

We were still pressed together, holding the world at bay. She gazed into my eyes, I didn't know if she was about to cry or laugh. All I knew was that I'd have cried with her, or laughed or got down on all fours and pretended to be Koochooloo if she asked.

“You're so beautiful,” I said, surprising myself.

She gasped. My words seem to ripple through her. Had I said the wrong thing? Her lips quivered; her eyes shone. She was expressing joy. I'd said the right thing.

She lowered her face, brought that lip with the puckered scar and the bulges on either side close to mine. Her mouth overlapped mine, forming a seal. The silliest image entered my mind, and it was that of connecting one garden hose to another. What flowed across wasn't water, but her tongue. This time, unlike in the pantry with Genet, I received her tongue eagerly. It was so very exciting. I put my hand behind her head. I pressed my body to her, feeling every atom in me come to a point.

I pulled away once to look at her and say, “You're so beautiful,” because it was a magical phrase, one I knew I should use often, but only if I believed it to be true. I don't know how long we were coupled by our mouths, but it came most naturally, as if I were satisfying a hunger. I didn't realize this potential existed in me. It carried me forward. Whatever was next, I didn't know, but my body knew. I trusted my body. I was ready.

Suddenly, she stepped away. She held me at arm's length. She sat on the edge of the bed. She was crying. Something had happened about which my body had failed to inform me. Or perhaps there was a rule, an etiquette, that I'd failed to observe. I eyed the door, measuring my escape.

“Can you ever forgive me?” she said. “Your mother shouldn't have died. Maybe if I told someone she was sick, they could've helped her.”

This was astonishing. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. I'd entirely forgotten this was my mother's room. I couldn't picture Sister Mary Joseph Praise in here, certainly not with a poster of Venice on the wall, and on another wall a black-and-white poster of a white singer, his pelvis thrust forward at the microphone stand which hed pulled toward him, his face contorted with the effort of singing. I looked back to the Staff Probationer.

“I didn't know how sick she was.” She hiccuped through her tears, just like a baby.

“It's all right,” I said, feeling as if someone else gave me those words.

“Say you forgive me.”

“I will if you stop crying. Please.”

“Say it.”

“I forgive you.”

She only cried louder. Someone would hear. I didn't think I was supposed to be in this room. And I certainly wasn't supposed to make her cry.

“I said it! I said I forgive you. Why are you still crying?”

“But I almost let you and your brother die. I was supposed to help you breathe when you came out. I was supposed to resuscitate you. But I forgot.”

WHEN I FIRST CAME
to this room, I was adrift, feeling as if a part of me was missing, all because Genet was away. Then I'd forgotten all that and found happiness, no, ecstasy, in the dance, a hint of what I wanted with Genet. And now I was adrift again, and confused. Paradise had seemed so close, and now I was clawing through fog. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, to the bed.

“You can do anything you want to me. Anytime,” she said, tilting her head back, looking up at me as I stood over her.

What did she mean?

“Do what?” I said.

Anything.

She let me go and she fell back on her bed. She was spread-eagled. She was ready. For whatever I might want to do.

Yes, there was something I wanted to do. If I were given free rein, dominion over her body, I knew I'd discover it by instinct. I had a general idea. I was nearly fourteen after all.

She was giving me license and still I waited.

She rolled over onto her belly, showing me her buttocks and peering at me over her shoulder. Her eyelids were puffy, her expression dreamy and faraway She spun one hundred eighty degrees so her head faced me. She propped herself up on her elbows. Her breasts hung down, the nipples barely concealed. She followed my gaze to her cleavage.

I heard voices and footsteps outside. The other nurses and probationers were back from dinner.

I didn't want to leave. But the world had intruded. My hesitation doomed me. That and her uninvited confession.

“I want to dance with you again,” I said, in a whisper.

“You can …,” she whispered, but as if that were the wrong answer.

“I do want to do … anything with you.”