Cutting for Stone (46 page)

“You're avoiding me, Marion,” he said. “We must start. We can't finish unless we start, right?”

I would never have predicted what he'd say next.

“I don't want you to feel responsible for the entire family. Hema is very capable. Matron, even though she is getting old, is tough and resourceful. I am saying this to you because I want you to take your medi cal career to great heights. Don't feel bound by duty to Shiva or Hema or Matron to stay here. Or to Genet,” he added, frowning slightly as he mentioned her name. He leaned forward to grab my hand, to make sure I understood how serious he was. “I wanted to go to America so badly. All these years I've read
Harrisons
and the other textbooks … and the things they do, the tests they order … it's like reading fiction, you know? Money's no object. A menu without prices. But if you get there, it won't be fiction. It'll be true.” His eyes turned dreamy as he imagined what it was like.

“We
stopped you from going, didn't we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?”

“Don't be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?” he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he'd made out of a bungalow. “I've been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn't make me happy. Or maybe that's my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly
could
have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I won't have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

“Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the Book of Job, Job says to God, ‘You should've taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why
life,
if it was just to suffer?’ Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering.” He laughed as if he liked what he just said. His fingers automatically went up to his pajama pocket, then to the back of his ear searching for a pen, because the old Ghosh would have jotted that down. But there was no pen and no more need to write anything down.

“I haven't suffered. Well, maybe briefly. Only when my darling Hema made me pursue her for years. That was suffering!” The smile said it was a kind of suffering he wouldn't have traded for fame or fortune.

“Shiva will thrive with Hema. Hema needs him to keep her occupied. Hema's instinct will be to retreat to India. She'll make a lot of noise about that. It won't happen. Shiva will refuse. So she'll stay here in Addis. What I am saying is that it's not your worry. You understand?”

I nodded, without much conviction.

“I do have one small regret,” Ghosh said. “But it's something you can help me with. It has to do with your father.”

“You're the only father I've ever had,” I said quickly. “I wish Thomas Stone had this leukemia instead of you. I wouldn't care one bit if he died!”

He waited before answering, swallowing hard. “Marion, it means everything to me that you consider me your father. I couldn't be prouder of you, of who you've become. But I bring up Thomas Stone for selfish reasons. As I said, it's one of
my
regrets.

“You see, I was as close a friend to your father as he was capable of having. You have to picture how it was then, Marion. He was the only other male physician here at Missing. We were so different, nothing in common, or so I thought, when I met him. But I found that he loved medicine in the same sort of way that I love medicine. He was dedicated. His passion for medicine … it was as if he came from another planet,
my
planet. We had a special bond.”

His eyes drifted off to the window, perhaps recalling those times. I waited. Eventually he turned to me and squeezed my hand.

“Marion, your father was deeply wounded by something, God knows what. His parents died when he was a child. We never talked about things like that. But here, working alongside Sister Mary Joseph Praise, all of us working together, he was sheltered. He was as happy as such a man can be. I felt protective of him. He knew surgery well, but he had
no
understanding of life.”

“You mean he was like Shiva?”

He paused to consider this. “No. Very different. Shiva's content! Look at him. Shiva has no need for friendship or social support or approval—Shiva lives in this moment. Thomas Stone wasn't like that; he had all the needs the rest of us have. But he was scared. He denied himself his needs, and he denied himself his past.”

“Scared of what?” I found all this hard to swallow. “Matron told me once that he threw instruments when he got upset. She said he had a temper, that he was fearless.”

“Oh, fearless in surgery, I suppose. But even that might not be true. A good surgeon
must
be fearful and he was a good surgeon, the best, never foolhardy, and appropriately fearful. Well … a few lapses of judgment, but then he was human. But when it came to relationships he was … terrified. He was frightened that if he got close to anyone they'd hurt him. Or perhaps he'd hurt them.”

I was resisting this construction of Stone that was so different from what I'd made up all these years. Finally, I asked, “What do you want from me?”

“Now that my time is coming, Marion … I want to let Thomas Stone know that whatever happened I always considered myself his friend.”

“Why don't you write to him?”

“I can't. I never could. Hema hasn't forgiven him for leaving. She was happy he left—she wanted you two from the moment you were born. But still, she wouldn't forgive him for leaving. And then, once he left, she was terrified—always—that he might come back and claim you. I had to promise her, swear to her, that I wouldn't write him or communicate with him in any form.” He looked at me, and said with quiet pride, “I kept my word, Marion.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

I'd harbored such curiosity about Thomas Stone when I was younger. I had fantasized about his return. Now I resisted Ghosh, and I wasn't quite sure why.

Ghosh went on, “But I fully expected Stone to contact me. I was disappointed as the years went on that he didn't. Marion, he is filled with shame and he assumes that I have no desire to see him. That I hate him.”

“How do you know?”

“I've no way of knowing this for sure. I suspect that to this day he sees himself as an albatross. Call it clinical intuition if you like. The truth is that you were better off with us than with him. Try as he might, I don't know that he could have created what we have here, a family. So I don't want you to hate that man. The cross he carries is huge.”

“Why tell me this now?” I said. “I stopped thinking about him after you came out from jail. He was never there when we needed him. Why should I waste my time thinking about him?”

“For my sake. I told you, this is for
me.
My one regret. It's not about you. But only you can help me.”

I said nothing.

“Let me see if I can explain …” He looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds. “Marion, there'll be something incomplete about my life if I don't let him know that I still consider him a brother.” His eyes became wet. “And that whatever his reasons are for being silent all these years, I still … love him.
I
can't see him, I can't tell him this. But you can. I won't live to see it, but that's what I want. Do it without hurting Hema's feelings. Do it for me. Complete what is incomplete.”

“Are you going to tell Shiva this?”

“If I tell Shiva that it's my dying wish, he'd do it. But Shiva may not know
how
to do it, how to … heal him. It requires more than delivering a message.” He hesitated. “Speaking of Shiva: what I also need to tell you about Shiva is that whatever he did to you, please forgive him.”

He stunned me there. Had he planned to say that? Was it an afterthought? I didn't think Ghosh knew the depths of my hurt, my bitterness toward Shiva, but I'd underestimated him. Still, what happened between me and Shiva wasn't a subject I wanted to bring up with Ghosh; it was too painful, too personal.

“I'll do my best about Thomas Stone. For you. But I can't believe this is what you want. You're forgetting this is the man who caused my mother's death … A nun's death. A nun he got pregnant. And then he abandoned his children. And to this day no one seems to know how any of it happened.”

As my voice rose and quavered, Ghosh said nothing, but looked at me steadily till my shoulders collapsed and I gave in. Id do what he asked.

WHEN THE END CAME
a week later he was still in that chair, all of us with him, me and Shiva holding his left hand, Matron holding his right. Almaz, who had become so lean from rigorous fasting, squatted behind his chair with her hand on his shoulder; Hema sat on the arm of the chair, so Ghosh's head could rest against her body. Genet was not to be found. She wasn't in her hostel when Gebrew was sent in a cab to bring her to Missing. Gebrew stood next to Almaz, praying.

Ghosh's breathing was labored, but Hema gave him morphine—he'd taught her that, she said. Morphine “disconnects the head from the brain,” so although the breathlessness was unchanging, the anxiety would be gone.

He opened his eyes once, startled. He looked at Hema, then at us. He smiled and closed his eyes. I like to think in that last gaze he saw a tableau of his family, his real flesh and blood, because our blood was now in his veins. I like to think in seeing us he felt his highest purpose was served.

And that is how he passed from this life to the next, without fanfare, with characteristic simplicity, fearless, opening his eyes that last time to make sure we were fine before he went on.

When his chest stopped moving, my sorrow was mixed with relief: I'd been matching every breath of his with mine for days. I know Hema felt the same way as she laid her head on his and wept, her arms still cradling him.

WITH GHOSH'S DEATH
came a new understanding of the word “loss.” I'd lost my birth mother and father, lost the General, lost Zemui, lost Rosina. But I only knew real loss when I lost Ghosh. The hand that patted me and put me to sleep, the lips that trumpeted bedtime songs, the fingers that guided mine to percuss a chest, to feel an enlarged liver or spleen, the heart that coaxed my ears to understand the hearts of others, was now stilled.

At the moment he died I felt the mantle of responsibility pass from him to me. He'd anticipated that. I remembered his advice to wear that mantle lightly. He'd handed me the professional baton, wanted me to be the kind of doctor who would surpass him, and then pass on that same knowledge to my children and to their children, a chain. “I shall not break the chain,” I said, hoping Ghosh could hear me.

Freud, I knew, wrote that one only became a man the day one's father died.

When Ghosh died, I stopped being a son.

I was a man.

CHAPTER 37
Exodus

W
HEN I LEFT ETHIOPIA
two years after Ghosh died, it had nothing to do with Ghosh's deathbed wishes. It wasn't about finding Thomas Stone and healing his pain. It wasn't because the Emperor had been deposed by a creeping military rebellion, or that the armed forces “committee” that took power had been reduced by infighting and murder to one mad dictator, an army sergeant, a man named Mengistu, who'd eventually make Stalin look like an angel.

Rather, I left on Wednesday, January
10
,
1979
, the day news spread through the city like influenza that four Eritrean guerrillas posing as passengers had commandeered an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing
707
and forced it to fly to Khartoum, Sudan. One of the four was Genet. That morning she'd been a medical student, albeit one who had fallen three years behind. By evening, she was a liberation fighter.

I was a doctor at long last, an intern finishing up my last rotation. I'd done three months each in internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology and now all that remained was a month of pediatrics.

Hema tracked me down by telephone in the early evening. She'd heard the news about Genet.

“Marion, come home at once.”

The tone of her voice made the air around me go still.

“Ma, are you okay? We can't help her. They may come to talk to us. You are her guardian.”

Since Ghosh's death, without the buffer of his presence, I'd become closer to Hema. She sought my advice, and I looked for time to spend with her. I felt Ghosh's hand in that.

“Marion, my love, it's not about Genet … Adid just called. The secret police are searching for a co-conspirator named Marion Praise Stone. They may be on their way there.”

Thank God for Adid's source, a Muslim in Security with a soft spot for Missing. Genet's roommate, a tiny waif of a girl who I am sure had no knowledge of the plot, spit out my name within an hour of the hijack. People will say anything when their fingernails are being ripped out.

Visions of Ghosh, his head shaved, in the Kerchele Prison yard, flashed through my mind. But the old Kerchele was a country club compared with what it was now: an overcrowded torture college, a butcher shop where enemies of the state came to their ends. Bodies and body parts were carried out in trucks every night and posed throughout the city a macabre public arts program that served to educate and edify.
Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man. Headless Woman Pointing Out Orion. Traitor Holding Head in His Hands. Dead Man with Penis in His Mouth.
The unifying message was clear:
You're Dead If You Think of Crossing Us.

The Sergeant-President, an uncouth, barbaric man, had only one thing in common with the Emperor: hed never let Eritrea secede. He launched a full-scale military offensive, bombing Eritrean villages where rebels mingled with civilians, putting the Eritrean homeland under siege. But of course, this only served to give new energy to the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

Meanwhile, the Oromo tribes were pressing for freedom. The Tigres (who spoke a language similar to that of the Eritreans) had formed their own liberation front. The royalists around Addis Ababa, who believed in the Emperor and the monarchy, had set off bombs in government offices in the capital. The university students, once great fans of the military “committee,” were now split into those pushing for democracy and those who felt nothing short of an Albanian-style Marxism would do. Neighboring Somalia decided this was the time to press its claims on disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert that even the vultures did not want. Who said being a dictator is easy? The Sergeant-President had his hands full.

WITHOUT A WORD TO ANYONE,
I slipped out of the back of the Ethio-Swedish Pediatric Hospital, leaving my car parked in its spot. I took a taxi home. I couldn't believe this was happening. What had Genet accomplished? Hijacking an Ethiopian Airlines plane was all about publicity. Yes, BBC would pay attention. It would further embarrass the Sergeant-President, but he was doing a fine job of that without any outside help. Even if Genet's act hadn't put me in danger, I'd have resented the hijack. Ethiopian Airlines was a symbol of our national pride. Foreigners raved about EA's wonderful service, its skilled pilots. Jet flights from Rome, London, Frankfurt, Nairobi, Cairo, and Bombay to Addis made it easy for tourists to visit. Then EA's regional service of DC-
3
s flew a daily looping, hopscotch route so that you could leave the Hilton Addis Ababa in the morning, see the castles in Gondar, the ancient obelisks in Axum, the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and be back in the Hilton lounge in Addis just when the good-time girls were drifting in trailing perfume, and the Velvet Ashantis were playing their theme song, a version of “Walk—Don't Run” by the Ventures.

Ethiopian Airlines had for years been a target for the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. But even in the Emperor's time, crack security men on board disguised as passengers ensured a near-perfect safety record until Genet's flight. On one occasion, seven Eritrean hijackers stood up and announced their intentions. The two security men picked off five of the hijackers as easily as if they were shooting tin cans off a fence at ten paces. They overpowered the sixth. The seventh locked herself up in the bathroom and exploded a grenade. The pilot landed the crippled, rudderless plane despite a gaping hole in the tail section. On another occasion, the security force overpowered a hijacker and strapped him into a first-class seat. Instead of shooting him, they bibbed him with towels and slit his throat.

That January afternoon, Genet and her pals seized the plane without a fight. Word was they had help on the inside. The security men may have turned.

As my taxi drove through the Merkato, I took in the familiar sights. Could this be the last time I passed this way, the last time I smelled the hops from the St. George's brewery on this road? A woman with her hair in cornrows, Eritrean style, flagged my taxi down. “Lideta, please,” she said, naming her destination.

“Lideta, is it?” the driver said. “Why don't you take a plane, sweetheart?” Her face fell, then turned hard. She didn't bother to argue. She just turned away.

“Those bastards better lay low tonight,” the driver said to me, since I clearly wasn't one of them. “Look,” he said, waving his hand at the pedestrians on both sides. “They're everywhere.” There were thousands of Eritreans in Addis Ababa—people like the Staff Probationer, like Genet. They were administrators, teachers, university faculty, students, government workers, and officers in the armed forces, executives in telecommunications, waterworks, and public health, and legions of others who were just common folk. “They drink our milk and eat our bread. But in their homes tonight, you know they're butchering a sheep.”

Since the military took power, many Eritreans I knew, including some physicians and medical students, had gone underground to join the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

The news in the capital was that the situation in the north of Ethio pia around Asmara had turned against the Sergeant-President. The Eritrean guerrillas ambushed military convoys at night and disappeared in daylight. I'd seen grainy photos of these fighters. Dressed in their trademark sandals, khaki shorts and shirts, they had the daring, the conviction, and the passion of patriots fighting their occupiers. The conscripted Ethiopian soldiers in their jeeps and tanks, weighted down with helmets, combat boots, jackets, and weaponry, were confined to the main roads. How could they find an enemy they couldn't see, in a countryside where they didn't speak the language and couldn't tell civilians and sympathizers from guerrillas?

As my taxi approached Missing's gates, I saw Tsige stepping out of her Fiat
850
in front of her bar. She'd prospered these last few years, buying out the business next door, adding a kitchen, a full restaurant, and hiring more bar girls to serve customers. Upgrades to the furniture, two foosball machines, and a new television set made her bar the equal of the best in the Piazza. Tsige owned one taxi, and when we last spoke she'd told me she was looking for a second. She never failed to encourage me, to tell me how proud she was of me and that she prayed for me every day. Now, as I saw her lovely stockinged leg emerge from the car, I had a great urge to stop and say good-bye, but I couldn't. This was her land, too, and I hoped that unlike me she'd never have a need to flee.

MISSING'S MAIN GATE
was wide open. This was Hema's prearranged signal that the coast was clear for me to come home.

When you have just minutes to leave the house in which you've spent all your twenty-five years, what do you take with you?

Hema had my diplomas, certificates, passport, a few clothes, money, bread, cheese, and water packed in a roomy Air India shoulder bag. I wore sneakers and layers of clothes against the cold. I threw in a cassette which I knew had both the slow and fast “Tizita” on it, but left the cassette player behind. I contemplated taking
Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine,
or
Schwartz's Principles of Surgery,
but with each book weighing about five pounds, I didn't.

We left on foot, a small convoy heading to the side wall of Missing, but first I insisted we go by the grove where Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise were buried. I walked with my arm around Hema. Shiva assisted Matron. Almaz and Gebrew had gone ahead. I felt Hema's body trembling.

At Ghosh's grave, I took leave of him. I imagined how he would have tried to cheer me up, make me look at the bright side—
You always wanted to travel! Here's your chance. Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
I kissed the marble headstone and turned away. I didn't dwell at my birth mother's grave. If I wanted to say good-bye to her, this wasn't the place. I hadn't visited the autoclave room for more than two years. I felt a pang of guilt, but it was too late to go there now.

At the wall, Hema held me. She laid her head on my chest, and the tears were flowing freely, in a way that I'd only seen at Ghosh's death. She couldn't speak.

Matron, a rock of faith in moments of crisis, kissed me on the forehead and said simply, “Go with God.” Almaz and Gebrew prayed over me. Almaz handed me a kerchief tied around a couple of boiled eggs. Gebrew gave me a tiny scroll that I was to swallow for protection— I popped it into my mouth.

If my eyes were dry, it was because I couldn't believe this was happening. As I looked at my send-off party I felt such hatred for Genet. Perhaps Eritreans in Addis were slaughtering sheep and toasting her tonight, but I wished she could see this snapshot of our family as it was torn apart, all because of her.

It was time to say good-bye to Shiva. I'd forgotten what it felt like to hold him, what a perfect fit his body was to mine, two halves of a single being. Ever since Genet's mutilation, we'd slept separately except for a brief period around Ghosh's death. Once Ghosh died, I returned to his old quarters, leaving Shiva in our childhood room. Only now did I recognize the severity of the penance I'd enforced by sleeping apart. Our arms were like magnets, refusing to disengage.

I pulled my head back and studied his face. I saw disbelief and a bottomless sadness. I was strangely pleased, flattered to get such a reaction from him. I'd seen this only twice before: on the day of Ghosh's arrest and on the day of Ghosh's death. Our parting at Missing's wall was a kind of death, his expression said. And if it was so for him, it was for me, too. Or should have been.

There was a time, ages ago, it seemed, when we could read each other's thoughts. I wondered if he could read mine. I'd postponed this moment, this reckoning with him. It was the deal I'd made with Genet, but I felt no need to honor that now. Now, my mind expressed itself.

Shiva, do you see how deflowering Genet, a biological act as far as you were concerned, led to all this? It led Rosina to kill herself, led Genet to stray from us? It led to this moment where I hate the woman I hoped to marry? Even now Hema thinks that I set all this in motion, that I did something to Genet.

Do you see how you betrayed me?

This good-bye is like cutting off my body.

I love you as I love myself—that is inevitable.

But I can't forgive you. Perhaps in time, and only because that's what Ghosh wanted. In time, Shiva, but not now.

We stood at the foot of the ladder which Gebrew had placed against Missing's east wall.

Shiva handed me a cloth bag. In the darkness it was impossible to see, but I thought I recognized the shape and the color of his dog-eared copy of
Gray's Anatomy
and below that a pristine copy of some other heavy book. I was about to remonstrate. I bit my tongue. In giving me his
Gray's,
Shiva sacrificed a piece of himself, the most valuable thing he owned that was removable and portable.

“Thank you, Shiva,” I said, hoping it didn't sound sarcastic. I now had two bags instead of one.

Gebrew slung burlap sacks on top of the bottle shards that crested the wall. I climbed over. On the other side was the road that I'd always seen from my bedroom window but never explored. It was a view that I thought of as pastoral, idyllic, a road disappearing into the mist and mountains to a land of no worries. Tonight it looked sinister.

“Good-bye,” I called one last time, touching my hand to that moist wall, the living, breathing exoskeleton of Missing. Inside, a chorus of voices so dear to me, they who were the beating heart of Missing, called out, wished me Godspeed.

A hundred yards away, a truck sat idling. It carried stacks of re treaded tires. The driver helped me climb onto the bed, where a tarp had been strung over and under tires to make a small cave. Adid had water, biscuits, and a pile of blankets placed there. He had arranged my escape but under the aegis of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. The EPLF had become the common path to leave Ethiopia, particularly if you planned to do it from the north and if you were willing to pay.