Cutting for Stone (48 page)

The wounds were ghastly. One barely conscious man whispered last instructions into the ear of a friend, who hovered over him, writing furiously. Intravenous fluid and blood bottles dangled from hooks embedded in the cave walls. The attendants worked squatting next to the stretchers.

Solomon said hed gone close to the battlefront for this mission. “Usually I stay here. We resuscitate at the battlefield. Intravenous fluid, control bleeding, antibiotics, even some field surgery. We can prevent shock just like the Americans in Vietnam. Only we don't have their heli copters.” He slapped his thighs. “These are our helicopters. We carry our wounded by stretcher.” He scanned the room. “That man over there needs a chest tube,” he said, indicating with his head. “Please do it. Tumsghi will help you. I'll go ahead to the theater. That comrade cannot wait.” He pointed to a pale soldier lying near the curtain with a bloody pad over his abdomen. He was conscious, but barely, breathing rapidly.

The fighter who needed the chest tube whispered “Salaam” when I squatted by him. The bullet had entered his triceps, then his chest, and miraculously missed the great vessels, the heart, and the spine. When I tapped with my bunched fingers above his right nipple it was dull, quite unlike the boxy, resonant note on the left. Blood had collected around the lung in the pleural space, compressing the right lung against the left lung and the heart in the confined cavity of the chest. Working just behind his right armpit, I injected lidocaine and anesthetized the skin, then the edge of the rib and deeper into the pleura, before making an inch-long cut with a scalpel. I pushed a closed hemostat into my incision till I felt it pop through the resistance of the pleura. I put my gloved finger into the hole, sweeping around to ensure space for the chest tube—a rubber hose with openings at side and tip—which I fed into the hole. Tumsghi connected the other end to a drainage bottle with water in it, so that the tube emerged under the water level. This crude underwater seal prevented air going back into the chest. Already dark blood was emerging, and the soldier's breathing improved. He said something in Tigrinya and pulled off his oxygen. Tumsghi said, “He wants you to give his oxygen to someone else.”

I joined Solomon in the operating theater in time to see his patient come off the table. The man's chest didn't move. There was about a five-second silence. One of the women, fighting back tears, knelt and covered his face.

“Some things are beyond us,” Solomon said quietly. “He had a laceration to the liver. I tried mattress sutures. But he also had a tear to the inferior vena cava where it goes behind the liver. It kept oozing. I couldn't stop it unless I clamped the inferior vena cava, which would kill him. You remember Professor Asrat used to say that injuries to the vena cava behind the liver are when the surgeon sees God? He used to say things like that that I didn't understand. I understand now.”

The next patient had a belly wound. Solomon systematically sorted out what to me looked like an impossible and dirty mess. He pulled out the small bowel, identified several perforations which he oversewed. The spleen was ruptured and so this was removed. The sigmoid colon had a ragged tear. He cut out the segment, and then brought the two open ends to the skin in a double-barrel colostomy We irrigated the abdomen vigorously, left drains in place, and did a sponge count. The field looked so neat compared with its condition when we started. Solomon must have read my mind. He held up his hands to show me his stubby fingers and his hammer thumbs: “I wanted to be a psychiatrist.” Over the eight hours, that was the only time I saw him smile behind the mask.

We amputated five limbs. The last two procedures we performed were burr holes in the skulls of two comatose patients. We used a modified carpenter's drill. In the first we were rewarded by blood welling out from just under the dura where it had collected, pressing on the brain. The other patient was agonal, his pupils fixed and dilated. The burr hole produced nothing. The bleeding was deep inside the brain.

Two days later, I took leave of Solomon. There were dark rings under his eyes and he looked ready to fall over. There was no questioning his purpose or dedication. Solomon said, “Go and good luck to you. This isn't your fight. I'd go if I were in your shoes. Tell the world about us.”

This isn't your fight.
I thought about that as I trekked to the border with two escorts. What did Solomon mean? Did he see me as being on the Ethiopian side, on the side of the occupiers? No, I think he saw me as an expatriate, someone without a stake in this war. Despite being born in the same compound as Genet, despite speaking Amharic like a native, and going to medical school with him, to Solomon I was
a ferengi
— a foreigner. Perhaps he was right, even though I was loath to admit it. If I were a patriotic Ethiopian, would I not have gone underground and joined the royalists, or others who were trying to topple Sergeant Men-g istu? If I cared about my country, shouldn't I have been willing to die for it?

We crossed the Sudan border by early evening. I took a bus to Port Sudan, and then Sudan Airways to Khartoum. In Khartoum I was able to call a number Adid had provided to let Hema know I was safe. Two days in sweltering Khartoum felt like two years, but at last I flew to Kenya.

IN NAIROBI,
Mr. Eli Harris, whose Houston church had been the pillar of Missing's support for years, had arranged room for me at a mission clinic. Matron and Harris had made these arrangements by cable. I found the work in the small outpatient clinic difficult, as I was certain that many things were getting lost in translation. In my free time, I studied for the exams that I had to take to begin postgraduate training in America.

Nairobi was lush and green like Addis Ababa, the grass pushing up between pavement tiles as if the jungle seethed underneath the city ready to take over. Nairobi's infrastructure and sophistication dwarfed that of Addis. One could thank the years of British rule for that, and, though Kenya was independent, many Brits lived on there. And Indians: in some parts of Nairobi you could imagine you were in Baroda or Ahmedabad with sari emporiums ten to a street,
chat
shops everywhere, the pungent scent of masala in the air, and Gujarati the only language spoken.

At first I spent my evenings in the bars, drowning my sorrows and listening to
benga
music and soukous. The jazzy Congolese and Brazilian rhythms were uplifting, full of optimism, but when I retired to my room, afloat in beer, my melancholia was always worse. Other than the music, Kenyan culture made no impact on me. The fault was mine. I resisted the place. Thomas Stone had come to Nairobi when he fled Ethiopia with his demons chasing him. It was another reason I was disinclined to stay.

I called Hema on a schedule, dialing different friends’ houses every Tuesday night. Things were no better, she said. Were I to come back, I'd still be in danger.

So I stayed in my room and studied every waking minute. I passed the American medical equivalency exams two months later, and immediately presented myself to the American Embassy for my visa. Again, Harris had eased my way.

I was righteous: if my country was willing to torture me on suspicion, if it didn't want my services as a physician, then I disowned my country. But the truth is that by this time I knew that I wouldn't return to Ethiopia, even if things were suddenly rosy again.

I wanted out of Africa.

I began to think that Genet had done me a favor after all.

PART FOUR

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

William Yeats, “The Choice”

CHAPTER 38
Welcome Wagon

C
APTAIN GETACHEW SELASSIE
—no relation to the Emperor— piloted the East African Airways
707
that flew me out of Nai robi. I heard his calm voice twice during the abbreviated night. I had a new respect for his line of work, which brought him closer to God than any cleric. He was the first of three pilots who carried me through nine time zones.

Rome.

London.

New York.

THE RITUAL OF IMMIGRATION
and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining? I passed into marbled hallways, up and then down escalators and into a cavernous receiving area which, even with two planes disgorging passengers, looked half empty. There was no one to herd us from one spot to the next.

Before I knew it, I was out of the sterile, hushed incubator of Customs. The automatic doors swished shut behind me as if to seal out the contamination of the cacophonous crowd outside, held back by a metal barrier.

A Ghanaian woman, whose flowered gown and headcloth had made her look so regal when she boarded in Nairobi, walked out from Customs beside me. We were both exhausted, dazed, unprepared for the sea of faces scrutinizing us. We stood there, manila X-ray folders (a requirement for immigration which no one checked) clutched awkwardly, baggage straps crisscrossing our chests, wide-eyed like animals coming off the Ark.

What struck me first was that the locals were of all colors and shapes, not the sea of white faces I had expected. Their lewd, inquisitive gazes traveled over us. In the cross fire of bewildering new scents, I picked up the Ghanaian woman's fear. She pressed close to me. Men in black suits held up signs on which they had printed names. Their gazes were flat, like overseers taking the measure of the Ghanaian woman's pelvis, noting the gap between her first and second toe which everyone knows is the only reliable gauge of fecundity. I had a vision of the Middle Passage, of blacks shuffling down the gangplank, shackles clinking while a hundred pairs of eyes probed their flanks, their biceps, and studied the exposed flesh for yaws, which was the Old World syphilis. As for me, I was nobody, her eunuch. She dropped her bag, she was so rattled.

It was while bending down to help her that I saw the sign in the hand of a swarthy brown-eyed man. He held it at waist level, as if he didn't want to be identified with the liveried sign holders. His bush shirt hung out over baggy white pajama pants. Brown sandals on sockless feet completed his outfit. The letters on his sign could have spelled
MARVIN
or
MARMEN
or
MARTIN.
The second word was
STONE.

“Is that supposed to say ‘Marion’?” I asked.

He surveyed me from top to bottom, and then he looked away as if I weren't worth a reply. The Ghanaian woman gave a cry of recognition and rushed away to family.

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the man's line of sight. “I'm Marion Stone. For Our Lady of Perpetual Succour?”

“Marion is girl!” he said, his accent guttural and raw.

“Not this one,” I said. “I'm named after Marion Sims, famous gynecologist?”

There was (according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica)
a statue of Marion Sims in Central Park, at
103
rd Street and Fifth Avenue. For all I knew, it was a landmark for taxis. Though Sims started off in Alabama, his success with fistula surgery brought him to New York City, where he opened the Woman's Hospital and then a cancer hospital, which later was named Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

“Gynecology should be woman!” he rasped, as if I'd broken a fundamental rule.

“Well, Sims wasn't and neither am I.”

“You are not gynecologist?”

“No, I meant I'm not a woman. And yes, I'm not a gynecologist.”

He was confused.
“Kis oomak,”
he said, at last. I knew enough Arabic to understand that he'd just invoked a gynecological term that made reference to my mother.

THE BLACK-SUITED DRIVERS
led their passengers to sleek black cars, but my man led me to a big yellow taxi. In no time we were driving out of Kennedy Airport, heading to the Bronx. We merged at what I thought was dangerous speed onto a freeway and into the slipstream of racing vehicles. “Marion, jet travel has damaged your eardrums,” I said to myself, because the silence was unreal. In Africa, cars ran not on petrol but on the squawk and blare of their horns. Not so here: the cars were near silent, like a school of fish. All I heard was the
whish
of rubber on concrete or asphalt.

Superorganism.
A biologist coined that word for our giant African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration, of the super-organism. It's a sound I believe that only the new immigrant hears, but not for long. By the time I learned to say “Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce,” the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism.

The silhouette of this most famous city—the twin exclamation marks at one end, King Kong's climbing toy in the middle—was familiar. Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, the Empire Theater, and Cinema Adowa had seen to that. My hubris was to think I understood America from such movies. But the real hubris I could see now was America's and it was hubris of scale. I saw it in the steel bridges stretching out over water; I saw it in the freeways looping over one another like tangled tapeworms. Hubris was my taxi's speedometer, wider than the steering wheel, as if Dali had grabbed the round gauge and pulled its ears. Hubris was the needle now showing seventy
miles
per hour, or well over one hundred and ten kilometers per hour, a speed unimaginable in our faithful Volkswagen—even if we'd found a suitable road.

What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing Id ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow.

The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory.
You must remember this.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.

Memory.

I WAS ALONE
in my hemisection of Mr. K. L. Hamid's cab, my luggage next to me, and a scratched Plexiglas partition between us. Two strangers, isolated and distant, in a car so broad that the backseat alone could have held five humans and two sheep.

My muscles were tense because of our speed, worrying about a child drying cow patties on the hot tarmac or the cow or goat that surely would wander into the road. But I saw no animals, no humans except in cars.

Hamid's bullet-shaped head was covered with tight black swirls. On the laminated license next to the meter, the camera had caught his shock and surprise. The whites of his eyes showed. I convinced myself it was a picture taken on the day
he
landed in America, the day he saw and felt what I saw.

Which was why Hamid's discourtesy so wounded me. He wouldn't look my way. Perhaps when one has driven a taxi for a long time, the passenger becomes an object defined by destination and nothing else, just as (if one isn't careful) patients can become the “diabetic foot in bed two” or the “myocardial infarction in bed three.”

Did Hamid think that if he looked I'd want his reassurance? Did he think I'd seek his explanation of every sight along the way so as to assuage my fears? He would have been right.

In that case, I said to myself, Hamid's silence must be instructive! An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship:
You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now.
That was his message. That was the point of his rudeness:
Find your backbone, or be swallowed whole.

I smiled now, relaxing, letting the scenery rush by. It was exhilarating to have arrived at this insight. I slapped the seat. I voiced my thoughts.

“Yes, Hamid. Screw your courage to the sticking place,” I said aloud, invoking Ghosh, who never got to see what I was seeing, never heard the superorganism. How joyfully he would have embraced this experience.

Hamid jerked back at the sound of my voice. He glanced at me in the mirror, then away, then back again. Eye contact for the first time! Only now did he seem to acknowledge he was carrying something other than a sack of potatoes.

“Thank you, Hamid!” I said.

“What? What you say?”

“I said, ‘thank you.’ “

“No, before that!”

“Oh, that. It's Macbeth,” I said, leaning forward to the Plexiglas, overeager for conversation.
“Lady
Macbeth, actually. My father used to say that to us all the time. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place.’ “

He was silent, his gaze flitting from road to rearview mirror. Finally he burst out.

“You insult me?”

“Beg your pardon? No. No! I was merely talking to myself. It is as—”

“Screw me?
Screw you!” he said.

My mouth fell open. Was it possible to be so completely misunderstood? His face in the mirror said indeed it was. I sank my neck back and shook my head in resignation. I had to laugh. To think that Ghosh—or Lady Macbeth—would be so misinterpreted.

Hamid still glared at me. I winked at him.

I saw him reach into the glove compartment. He pulled out a gun. He brandished it, showing me its different aspects through the dirty Plexiglas, as if he were trying to hawk it to me, or prove to me that it was in fact a gun, not a cheap plastic toy, which is what it looked like.

“You think I joke?” he said, a wicked energy taking over his face, as if the object in his hand made him not a joker but a philosopher.

I didn't mean to add fuel to the fire. I don't see myself as foolhardy or brave. But I found this little revolver pathetic and I simply didn't believe, indeed I was certain, he couldn't possibly use it. It was hilarious. I
knew
guns. I'd made a crater in a man's belly with one twice that size. I had buried gun and owner in a swamp (from which he still threatened to rise every night). Just four months ago, I had operated on rebels felled by guns.
This
popgun of his on this day, in the context of America, where cars stayed in lanes, where Customs never opened your bags, seemed like a prop, a cosmic joke. Could I not have had a proper
American
driver? Failing that, at least a gun that Dirty Harry wouldn't have been embarrassed to hold? Why escape Addis, flee Asmara, get out of Khartoum, and abandon Nairobi, only to face this?

Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say,
Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview.
Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing. I'd reached that point with Hamid. My body was shaking with laughter. Fatigue, jet lag, and disorientation contributed to my finding this so funny.

Hamid's use of the verb “screw” was quite different from screwing one's courage to the sticking place. His saying that word made me think of that story which had circulated when I had more pimples than common sense, more curiosity than sound sexual knowledge. It was the myth of the beautiful blonde and her brother whom one might meet at the airport when landing in America. They offered you a ride, took you home for a drink, at which point the brother brandished a weapon and said, “Screw my sister or you will die!” Long after I knew the story to be ridiculous, it retained its charm as a comic fantasy.
Screw my sister or you will die!
Here I was, well after the tale had slipped my mind, newly landed in America, and, sure enough, a man brandished a gun. I wished I could have shared the moment with Gaby, the schoolmate who first reported the story to me. A perverse impulse in me made me now repeat the phrase we schoolboys loved to say to each other, a challenge, a veiled threat, even though I was laughing hard: “Brother, put away the gun, I'll screw your sister for free.” I don't know if he picked up the change in my tone and mood, or even if he heard me. Perhaps he just decided that my kind of lunacy wasn't to be toyed with. In any case, he had a change of heart.

THE WROUGHT-IRON GATES
of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour were wide open. Dr. Abramovitz, the chief of surgery, was supposed to interview me at
10:00
a.m. My plan was to finish my interview, take another taxi to Queens, and
then
look for a hotel in which to get over my jet lag. I had interviews lined up in the next few days in Queens, Jersey City, Newark, and Coney Island.

A man with
LOUIS
embroidered on his blue overalls approached just as Hamid's taxi pulled out of the gate.

“Lou Pomeranz, Chief Caretaker of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,” he said, gripping my hand. A soft pack of Salems showed in his breast pocket. He was barrel-chested and top-heavy. “Do you play cricket?”