Cutting for Stone

He appeared not to hear. After a pause, she repeated the question.

Stone thrust his chin at her, as if to say she could name them whatever she wanted. “Please get them out of my sight,” he said very softly.

He kept his back turned on the infants to gaze once more at Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Which was why he missed the way his words fell on Hema like hot oil; he didn't see the flames of anger shooting out of her eyes. Hema would misread his intentions, and he hers.

Stone wanted to run away, but not from the children or from responsibility. It was the mystery, the impossibility of their existence that made him turn his back on the infants. He could only think of Sister Mary Joseph Praise. He could only think of how she'd concealed this pregnancy, waiting, who knows for what. In response to Hema's question, it would have been a simple thing for Stone to say, Why ask me? I know no more than you do about this. Except for the certainty that sat like a spike in his gut that it was somehow his doing, even though he had no recollection how or where or when.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise lay lifeless and unburdened of the two lives she had carried, as if that had been her sole earthly purpose. Matron had pulled down Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyelids, but they would not stay closed. The half-mast eyelids, the unseeing gaze, hammered in the reality of her death.

Stone took one last look. He wanted to remember her not as Sister, not as his assistant, but as the woman he should have declared his love for, the woman he should have cared for, the woman he should have wed. He wanted the ghoulish image of her corpse burned into his brain. He had negotiated his way through life by work, and work, and more work. It was the only arena in which he felt complete and the only thing he had to give Sister Mary Joseph Praise. But at this moment work had failed him.

The sight of her wounds shamed him. Thered be no healing, no scars to form, harden, and fade on her body. He would bear the scar, he would carry it from the room. Hed known only one way of being, and it cost him. But he would have been willing to change for her had she only asked. He would have. If only she could have known. What did it matter now?

He turned to leave again, glancing around as if to seal in his memory this place in which hed polished and elevated his art, this place that hed furnished to suit his needs and that he thought was his real home. He took it all in because he knew hed never ever return. He was surprised to find Hema still standing behind him, and again the sight of the bundles she carried made him recoil.

“Stone, think about this,” Hema said. “Turn your back on me if you want, because I'll have no use for you. But don't turn your back on these children. I won't ask you again.”

Hema held her living burden and waited on Stone. He was on the verge of speaking to her honestly, of telling her all. In his eyes she saw pain and puzzlement. What she didn't see was any recognition of the infants as being connected to him. He spoke like a man who'd just been hit on the head. “Hema, I don't understand who … why they are here … why Mary is dead.”

She waited. He was circling around a truth that might emerge if she waited. She wanted to grab his ears and shake it out of him.

At last he met her gaze, refusing to look down at the infants, and what he said wasn't what she wanted to hear. “Hema, I don't want to set eyes on them, ever.”

The last of Hema's restraint fell away. She was livid for the children, furious that he seemed to think this was just his loss.

“What did you say, Thomas?”

He must have known a battle line had just been drawn.

“They killed her,” he said. “I don't want to set eyes on them.”

So this is how it will be, Hema thought, this is how we shall pass from each other's lives. The twins mewled in her arms.

“Whose are they, then? Aren't they yours? So didn't you kill her, too?”

His mouth opened in pain. He had no answer, so he turned to leave.

“You heard me, Stone, you killed her,” Hema said, raising her voice so that she drowned out every other sound. He flinched as the words lashed into him. It pleased her. She felt no pity. Not for a man who wouldn't claim his children. He pushed the swinging door so hard it shrieked in protest.

“Stone, you killed her,” she shouted after him. “These are your children.”

THE PROBATIONER BROKE the ensuing silence. She was trying to anticipate, so she opened a circumcision tray and pulled on gloves. The one thing Matron allowed her to do without supervision was to use the foreskin guillotine.

But instead of praising her, Hema pounced on her. “My goodness, girl, don't you think these children have had quite enough? They're preemies! They are not out of danger. Want them to be chip-cock-Charlies on top of all this? … And you? What have you been doing all the time, eh? You should've been worrying about their swallowing ends, not their watering cans.”

HEMA ROCKED THE TWINS, thrilled by their breathing selves, by their peaceful smiles, the opposite of the usual anxious, panicked face of a newborn. Their mother lay dead in the same room, their father had run, but they knew nothing of that.

Matron, Gebrew, the nurse anesthetist, and others who had gathered were weeping around Sister's body. Word had spread to the maids and housekeepers. Now a funeral wail, a piercing lululululululu ripped through the heart of Missing. The ululations would continue for the next few hours.

Even the probationer began to show the first inkling of Sound Nursing Sense. Instead of struggling to appear to be something she was not, she wept for Sister, who was the only nurse who really understood her. For the first time the probationer saw the children not as “fetuses” or “neonates” but instead as motherless children, like herself, children to be pitied. Her tears poured out. Her body slumped as if the starch had vanished not just from her clothes but from her bones. To her amazement, Matron came and put an arm around her. She saw not just sadness but fear in Matron's face. How could Missing go on without Sister? Or without Stone? For surely he was never coming back, that she could see.

Hemlatha shut out the sobbing around her as she rocked the babies, and then she began to croon, her anklets jingling faintly like castanets as she shifted weight from one foot to the other. She felt the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise as acutely as anyone, and yet she felt guided— perhaps this was Sister's doing—to give her all at this moment to the two infants. The twins were breathing quietly; their fingers fanned over their cheeks. They belonged in her arms. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. Sister Mary, bride of Christ, now gone from the world into which she just brought two children.

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life in this her thirtieth year was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, to mimic the rigid masking smile of Shiva, to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune, a tabla beat. Thim-thaga-thaga, thim-thaga-thim, thim-thaga … Hema moved gently, knees flexing, tapping her heels, then her forefoot in time to the music in her head.

The bit players in Theater 3 regarded her as if she were mad, but she danced on even as they tidied the corpse, she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Ridiculous, the thoughts that came to her as she danced: her new Grundig, Adid's lips and his long fingers, the thump of Matron falling over, the revolting feel of the Frenchman's balls but the satisfaction in seeing the color flee his face, Gebrew with chicken feathers stuck to him. What a journey … what a day … what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance …

She was surprisingly graceful and light on her feet, the neck and head and shoulder gestures of Bharatnatyam automatic for her, eyebrows shooting up and down, eyeballs flitting to the edges of their sockets, feet moving, a rigid smile on her face, and all this while holding the babies in her arms.

Outside the hospital, as the light faded, the lions in the cages near the Sidist Kilo Monument, anticipating the slabs of meat the keeper would fling through the bars, roared with hunger and impatience; in the foothills of Entoto,