Cutting for Stone

“Hema, I am only human,” he murmured now as he did every time he thought he was being unfaithful to her.

He reached across and felt the flesh under Konjit's ribs, pinching up a skin fold.

“Ah my dear, should we send for dinner? We need to put flesh on you. And sustenance for what we are about to do tonight. It is, I will confess to you, my very, very first time.”

Had she been an older woman (and many one-woman bars were run by older women who had saved money for their own place after working somewhere grand like the Ibis), he would have used a different tone, one that was less direct, more courtly—a gentler form of flattery. But with her, he had settled on the naughty schoolboy approach.

When she reached to feel his hair, rub his scalp, Ghosh purred with contentment. On the radio the muffled twang of a krar repeated a six-note riff from a pentatonic scale that seemed common to all Ethiopian music, fast or slow. Ghosh recognized the song, a very popular one. It was called “Tizita;” there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.

“Your skin is beautiful. What are you? Banya?” she asked.

“Yes, my lovely, I am indeed Indian. And since nothing about me other than my skin is beautiful, you are gracious to say so.”

“No, no, why do you say that? I swear on the saints I wish I had your hair. I can't get over your Amharic. Are you sure your mother is not habesha?”

“You flatter me,” he said. Hed learned a little Amharic in the hospital, but it was only through tete-a-tetes like this that he became fluent. He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath … The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. “Really, I only know the Amharic of love. If you sent me outside to buy a pencil, I wouldn't be able to do it, for I lack those words.”

She laughed and again tried to cover her lips. Ghosh held her hands, and so she drew her lower lip up as if to hide her teeth, a gesture he found nubile and touching.

“But why hide your smile? … There. How beautiful!”

Much, much later, they retired to the back room; he closed his eyes and pretended, as he always did, that she was Hema. A most willing Hema.

THE MIST WAS inches off the ground when he emerged, and it had brought with it a funereal silence and bone-chilling cold. He took a leak by the roadside. A hyena laughed, whether at his action or his equipment he couldn't be sure. He spun around and saw lupine retinas shining from the trees beyond the first set of houses. He ran while trying to zip up, unlocked his car, and jumped in. He quickly started the engine and moved off. A peeing man had to worry about more than hyenas. Shiftas, lebas, madjiratmachi, and all sorts of villains were a threat after midnight, even in the heart of the city and near paved roads. Just the previous month, two men had robbed, raped, and then cut off an Englishwoman's tongue, thinking its absence would prevent her from tattling. Another victim of a robbery had his balls cut off—a common enough practice— in the belief that he would have no courage left to extract revenge. They were the lucky ones. The rest were simply murdered.

THE GATES OF MISSING were wide open when he got back, which was strange. He pulled up to his cottage, slid the car into the open-sided shed. As his lights shone on the rock wall, he slammed the brakes, terrified by what he saw: a ghostly white figure rose from a squat to stand before his headlights, the eyes reflecting back a shimmering red, just like the hyena's eyes. But this was no hyena, but a weeping, bereft Almaz who had clearly been waiting for him.

“Hema, Hema, what have you done,” he muttered to himself, convinced that the worst had happened and Hema had returned married. Why else would Almaz stay so late except to tell him this? She and the whole world knew how he felt about Hema. The only person who didn't know was Hema.

The ghostly figure ran over to the passenger side, opened the door, and climbed in. Bowing her head and in the most formal tone and without meeting his eyes, she said, “I am sorry to bring you bad news.”

“It's Hema, isn't it?”

“Hema? No. It is Sister Mary Joseph Praise.”

“Sister? What happened to Sister?”

“She is with the Lord, may He bless her soul.”

“What?”

“Lord help us all, but she is dead.” Almaz was sobbing now. “She died giving birth to twins. Dr. Hema arrived but could not save her. Dr. Hema saved the twins.”

Ghosh stopped hearing after her first mention of Sister and death. He had to have her repeat what she said, and then repeat again everything that she knew, but each time it came down to Sister being dead. And something about twins.

“And now we can't find Dr. Stone,” she said at last. “He is gone. We must find him. Matron says we must.”

“Why?” Ghosh managed to ask when he found his tongue, but even as he said that he knew why. He shared with Stone the bond of being the only male physicians at Missing. Ghosh knew Stone as well as anyone could know Stone, except, perhaps, Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

“Why? Because he is suffering the most,” Almaz said. “That is what Matron says. We must find him before he does something stupid.”

It's a bit too late for that, Ghosh thought.

12. Land's End

THE MORNING AFTER the births and the death, Matron Hirst came to her office very early as if it were any other day Shed slept but a few hours. She and Ghosh had driven around, hunting for Thomas Stone late into the night. Stone's maid, Rosina, had kept a vigil in his quarters, but there had been no sign of him.

Matron pushed away the papers stacked on her desk. Through her window she could see patients lined up in the outpatient department, or rather she could see their colorful umbrellas. People believed the sun exacerbated all illnesses, so there were as many umbrellas as there were patients. She picked up the phone. “Adam?” she said, when the compounder came on the line. “Please send word to Gebrew to close the gate. Send patients to the Russian hospital.” Her Amharic, though accented, was exceedingly good. “And Adam, please deal with the patients who are already in the outpatient department as best you can. I'll be asking the nurses to make rounds on their wards and to manage. Let the probationers know that all nursing classes are canceled.”

Thank God for Adam, Matron thought. His education had stopped at the third grade, which was a shame, because Adam could have easily been a doctor. Not only was he adept at preparing the fifteen stock mixtures, ointments, and compounds which Missing provided to outpatients, he also had uncanny clinical sense. With his one good eye (the other milky white from a childhood infection) he could spot the seriously ill among the many who came clutching the teal-blue graduated Missing medicine bottles, ready to have them refilled. It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn … libehn … hodehn,” literally, “My head … my heart … and my stomach,” with the patient's hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (jasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia— somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress