Cutting for Stone

Gebrew was a nervous chap given to rapid speech and jerky movements, but he was far more agitated than was his norm. He looked stunned to see her, as if he'd never expected her to come back.

“Praise-God-for-bringing-you-safely, welcome-back-madam, how-are-you-are-you-well? God-answered-our- prayers,” he said in Amharic. She matched him bow for bow as best she could, but he wouldn't stop until she said, “Gebrew!”

She held out a five-birr note. “Take bowl to Sheba Bar and fetch please doro-wot,” she said, naming the delectable red chicken curry cooked in Ethiopian peppers—berbere. Her Amharic was crude, and she could only speak in the present tense, but doro-wot was a term she'd mastered early. And doro-wot had occupied her dreams her last few nights in Madras, after so many days of a pure vegetarian diet. The wot came poured onto the soft crepelike injera and there would be more rolls of injera which Hema would use to scoop up the meat. The curry would have soaked into the injera that lined the bowl by the time Gebrew brought it. Her mouth watered just thinking of the dish.

“Indeed-I-will-madam, Sheba-is-best, blessed-is-their-cook, Sheba-is—”

“Tell me, Gebrew, why be doors and windows open?” Now she noticed his nails and fingers were bloody, and his sleeves had feathers sticking to them, and feathers were caught up in his fly swish.

It was then that Gebrew said, “Oh, madam! This is what I have been trying to tell you. Baby is stuck! The baby. And Sister! And the baby!”

She did not understand. She'd never seen him so worked up. She smiled and waited.

“Madam! Sister is borning! She is not borning well!”

“What? Say again?” Perhaps being away and not hearing Amharic had made her misunderstand.

“Sister, madam,” Gebrew said, alarmed that he didn't seem to be getting through, and thinking volume and pitch might help, though what came out was a squeak.

“Sister” in Missing always referred to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, for the only other nun there was Matron Hirst, who went by Matron, while all the other nurses were addressed as Nurse Almaz or Nurse Esther, and not Sister.

To Hema's astonishment, Gebrew was crying, and his voice turned shrill. “Passage is closed! I tried everything. I opened all the doors and windows. I split open a chicken!”

He clutched his belly and strained in a bizarre imitation of parturition. He tried English. “Baby! Baby? Madam, baby?”

What he tried to convey was clear enough; there was no mistaking it. But it would have been difficult for Hema to believe it in any language.

7. Fetor Terribilis

THE DOORS TO THE OPERATING THEATER burst open. The probationer shrieked. Matron clutched her chest at the sight of the sari-clad woman standing there, hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring.

They froze. How were they to know if this was their very own Hema, or an apparition? It seemed taller and fuller than Hema, and it had the bloodshot eyes of a dragon. Only when it opened its mouth and said, “What bloody nonsense is Gebrew talking? In God's name, what is going on?” did their doubts vanish.

“It's a miracle,” Matron said, referring to the fact of Hema's arrival, but this only further confused Hema. The probationer, her face flushed and her pockmarks shining like sunken nailheads, added, “Amen.”

Stone stood and unfurrowed his brows at the sight of Hema. Though he didn't say a word, his expression was that of a man who, having fallen into a crevasse, spotted the bowline lowered from the heavens.

Hema, recalling this event many years later, said to me, “My saliva turned to cement, son. A sweat broke out over my face and neck, even though it was freezing in there. You see, even before I digested the medi cal facts, I'd already registered that smell.”

“What smell?”

“You won't find it any textbooks, Marion, so don't bother looking. But it's etched here,” she said, tapping her head. “If I chose to write a textbook, not that I have any interest in that kind of thing, I'd have a chapter on nothing but obstetric odors.” The smell was both astringent and saccharine, these two contrary characteristics coming together in what she'd come to think of as fetor terribilis. “It always means a labor room catastrophe. Dead mothers, or dead babies, or homicidal husbands. Or all the above.”

She couldn't believe the amount of blood on the floor. The sight of instruments lying helter-skelter— on the patient, next to the patient, on the operating table—assaulted her senses. But most of all—and shed been resisting this—she couldn't accept the fact that Sister Mary Joseph Praise, sweet Sister, who should have been standing, gowned, masked, and scrubbed, a beacon of calm in this calamity instead lay all but lifeless on the table, her skin porcelain white and her lips drained of all color.

Hema's thoughts became dissociated, as if they were no longer hers but instead were elegant copperplate scrolling before her in a dream. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's left hand lying supine on the table drew Hema's eye. The fingers were curled, the index finger less so, as if she'd been pointing, when sleep or coma overcame her. It was a posture of repose that one rarely associated with Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Hema's eyes would be drawn to that hand repeatedly as the hour unfolded.

The sight of Thomas Stone brought her back to her senses and galvanized her. Seeing Stone in the hallowed place between a woman's legs that was reserved for the obstetrician rankled Hema. That was her spot, her domain. She shouldered him aside, and in his haste he knocked the stool over. He tried to explain what had happened: finding Sister, their discovery of her pregnancy and then her obstructed labor, the shock, the bleeding that never stopped—

“Ayoh, what is this?” she said, cutting him off, her eyes round with alarm, brows shooting up and her mouth a perfect O. She pointed at the bloody trephine and the open textbook resting by Sister Mary Joseph Praise's belly. “Books and whatnots?” She swiped them aside, and they clattered to the floor, the sound reverberating off the walls.

The probationer's heart hammered against her breast like a moth in a lamp. Not knowing where to put her hands, she stuffed them in her pockets. She reassured herself that she had no part in the books and whatnots. Her failure (and she was beginning to see this) was a failure of Sound Nursing Sense; she'd missed the gravity of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's condition when she delivered Stone's message. She'd assumed that others would look in on Sister Mary Joseph Praise. No one had been aware that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was that ill, and no one had told Matron.

SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE moved her head, and Matron believed that she was at least transiently aware that Matron held her hand. But so relentless was her pain that Sister couldn't acknowledge Matron's kindness.

In his hands I saw a large golden spear and at its iron tip there seemed to be a point of fire.

Matron's guess from the fragments she could understand was that Sister Mary Joseph Praise's mumbled words were perhaps the words of St. Teresa that they both knew so well.

I felt as if he plunged it into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails. When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out, and left me inflamed with a great love for God. The pain was so severe, it made me moan several times. The sweetness of this intense pain is so extreme, there is no wanting it to end, and the soul is not satisfied with anything less than God.

But unlike St. Teresa of Avila, Sister Mary Joseph Praise surely did want the pain to end, and just then, Matron said, the pain seemed to loosen its grip on her belly, and Sister sighed and clearly said, “I marvel, Lord, at your mercy. It is not something I deserve.”

A brief period of lucidity with roving eye movements followed, along with more attempts at speech, but it was unintelligible. Light splashed into the room, and Matron said it was as if a shroud that had formed in front of her face melted away. In that moment, as Sister Mary Joseph Praise looked around OT3—her operating theater for