Cutting for Stone

I came to my feet, still puzzled.

“I pray for you every day,” she said in Amharic. “Don't tell me that I have changed that much?”

I towered over her. I was tongue-tied. She had been a mother and I a boy when I first met her.

“Tsige?” I said at last.

She lunged toward me, kissed my cheeks, held me at arm's length to better examine me, then pulled me to her to bump cheeks again and again. “My God, Blessed Mary and all the saints, how are you? Is it you? Endemenneh? Dehna ne woy? How are you? Can this be you? Praise God that you are here …”

After six years in America, it was only at that moment, standing in that yellow house, in her arms, cut grass under my feet, that I felt at ease in this land, felt my guard come down and the muscles in my belly and neck relax. Here was someone from my past, from my very street, someone whom I liked and with whom I had always felt a bond. I kissed her cheeks as vigorously as she kissed mine: Who would stop first? Not I.

Tayitu peered in from the kitchen. Two other women looked over the upstairs rail. Our fellow diners stopped to watch. They were displaced people, just like us, and they understood all too well these kinds of reunions, these moments when a piece of your old house comes floating by in the river.

“What are you doing here?” Tsige said. “You mean you didn't come to see me?”

“I came to eat. I had no idea! I've been living in New York for six years. I'm here just for the day. I'm a doctor now. A surgeon.”

“A surgeon!” She gasped, falling back, clasping her hands to her heart. Then she kissed the back of my wrists, first one, then the other. “A surgeon. You brave, brave child.” She turned to our audience and in the tones of a cantor she continued, still in Amharic, “Listen, all you unbelievers, when he was a little boy, and when my baby was dying, who took me to the right place in the hospital? It was he. Who called the doctor, who was his father, to see my child? He did. Then who was it who stayed with me as my baby fought for life? No one but him. He was the only one by my side when my little baby died. No one else was there for me, if only you knew …” The tears streamed down her face, and in an instant the mood in the room went from the joy of reunion to profound sadness, as if those two emotions were invariably linked. I heard sympathetic clucks and tsks from the men, and Tayitu blew her nose and dabbed at her good eye, while the other two women wept freely. Tsige was unable to speak, head bowed—she was overcome for a moment. At last she straightened her shoulders, raised her head, the lips parted to smile bravely, and she declared, “I never ever forgot his kindness. Even today, when I go to sleep, I pray for my baby's soul, then I pray for this boy. I lived across the street. I watched him grow up, become a man, go to medical school. Now he is a surgeon. Tayitu, give everyone their money back, for today is a feast day. Our brother has come home. Tell me, ye of little faith, does any one of you need some other proof that there is a God?” Her eyes glittered like diamonds; her hands, palms up, reached for the ceiling.

For the next few minutes I solemnly shook the hand of every person in the house.

LATER I SAT WITH TSIGE on a sofa in a living room upstairs. She had kicked off her heels and tucked her feet up under her. Still holding my hand, she touched my cheek often to exclaim how happy she was to see me.

I had plans to return to New York that afternoon, but Tsige insisted on sending Mesfin away. “You can take a later flight,” she said.

“Are you sure I can find a taxi here?” I said, pretending to be serious.

After a beat, she threw her head back and laughed. “See, you have changed! You used to be so shy.”

Through the window I saw six or seven baby goats in a large wire enclosure. Behind that was a chicken coop. A dreamy-looking boy with a long narrow head sat stroking one of the goats. “He's my cousin,” Tsige said. “You can see the forceps marks on his forehead. He has some problems. But he loves to take care of the animals. You should come here when we celebrate Meskel on Meskerem Day. We slaughter the goats and cook outdoors. You will see not just taxis, but police cars. They come from the Roxbury and South End stations to eat.”

Tsige said she left Addis a few months after me. A patron of the bar, a corporal in the army, had wanted to marry her. “He was nobody. But in the revolution, even the privates became powerful.” When she declined his advances, she was falsely accused of imperialist activities and imprisoned. “I bought my way out after two weeks. In the time I was in Kerchele, they confiscated my house. He came to see me, pretending he had nothing to do with my arrest. If I married him, he said, everything would come back to us. The country was being run by dogs like him. I had money hidden away. I never looked back. I left.

“In Khartoum, I waited a month for asylum from the American Embassy. I worked as a servant for the Hankins, a British family. They were nice. I learned English by taking care of their children. That was the only good thing that came out of Khartoum. I don't mind the cold in Boston because every cold day reminds me how good it is to be out of Khartoum.

“I worked hard here, Marion. Quick-Mart—often I did two shifts. Then five nights I worked at a parking garage. I saved and saved. I became the first Ethiopian woman to drive a taxi in Boston. I learned the city. I found work for Ethiopians. Stock boy, parking attendant, taxi driver, or counter girl at the hotel gift shop. I lent money on interest to Ethiopians. Tayitu used to work for me in the bar, so when she came, I rented this house. She cooked. Then I bought the house. Now, my God, there is much to be done: grind tef, make injera, clean chicken, make wot, sweep the house. It takes three or four people. Ethiopians arrive at my door like newborn lambs, everything they have tied up in bedsheets, their X-rays still in their hands. I try to help them.”

“You really are the Queen of Sheba.”

There was an impish grin on her face. She switched to English, a language I had never heard her speak. “Marion, you know what I had to do to feed my baby in Addis. Then in Sudan, I was even lower than that— I was no better than a bariya,” she said, using the slang word for “slave.” “In America they said you can be anything. I believed it. I worked hard. So when they say, ‘Queen of Sheba,’ I think to myself, Yes, from bariya to queen.”

I told Tsige about seeing her on the day I left Addis so hastily, seeing her getting out of her Fiat 850. “Today, what do I see before I see your face? Your beautiful leg getting out of a car. The last glimpse of you in Addis was also your beautiful leg coming out of a car. I wanted to say good-bye to you then. But I couldn't.”

She laughed, and self-consciously pulled her skirt down. “I knew you disappeared right after Genet,” Tsige said. “No one knew if you were part of the hijacking.”

“Really? People thought I was an Eritrean guerrilla?”

She shrugged. “I didn't think you had anything to do with it. But when I saw Genet, she never said anything one way or the other.”

I was puzzled. “How could you have seen Genet? She left the same day I left. That's why I had to go—did you see her in Khartoum?”

“No, Marion. I saw her here.”

“You saw Genet in America?”

“I saw her here. In this house … Oh my God. You didn't know?”

I felt the air leave my lungs. A sinkhole opened up under me. “Genet? Isn't she still fighting with the Eritreans?”

“No, no, no. That girl came here as a refugee, just like the rest of us. Someone brought her here. She had her baby in her arms. She acted as if she didn't recognize me at first. I had to remind her.” Tsige s face turned hard. “You know, Marion, once we come here, we are all the same. Eritrean, Amhara, Oromo, big shot, bariya, whatever status you had in Addis it means nothing. In America you begin at zero. The ones who do the best here are those who were zero there. But Genet came here thinking she was special, not like the rest of us—”

“When was this?”

“Two, maybe three years ago. She said she'd lost touch with you. She didn't know where you went. She acted as if she didn't know you had escaped from Addis.”

“What? She was lying,” I said. “It was the Eritreans who helped me escape. She was their star … their big heroine. She must have known.”

“Maybe she didn't trust me, Marion. I never knew her the way I knew you, never exchanged two words with her. People change, you know. When you leave your country, you are like a plant taken out of soil. Some people turn