Cutting for Stone

THE GULELE CEMETERY was on the outskirts of town. The road cut through a forest where the dense overhanging canopy of trees made it feel like dusk. Suddenly the forbidding wrought-iron gates loomed before them, standing out against the limestone walls. Inside, a gravel road led up to a plateau thick with eucalyptus and pine. There were no taller trees in Addis than in Gulele.

They trudged between the graves, their feet crunching and crackling on the carpet of leaves and twigs. No urban sounds or voices were to be heard here; only the stillness of a forest and the quiet of death. A fine drizzle wet the leaves and branches, then gathered into big drops that plopped on their heads and arms. Matron felt like a trespasser. She stopped at a grave no larger than an altar Bible. “An infant, Ghosh,” she said, wanting to hear a living voice, even if it was only hers. “Armenian, judging by the name. Lord, she died just last year.” The flowers by the headstone were fresh. Matron began a Hail Mary under her breath.

Farther down were the graves of young Italian soldiers: NATO a ROMA, or NATO a NAPOLI, but no matter where they were born they were DECEDUTO AD ADDIS ABABA. Matron's vision turned misty as she thought of them having died so very far from home.

John Melly's face appeared to her, and she could hear “Bunyan's Hymn.” It was the hymn they had played at his funeral. At times the tune found her; the words came to her lips unbidden.

She turned to Ghosh, “You know I was in love once?”

Ghosh who already looked troubled, froze where he stood.

“You mean … with a man?” he said at last, when he could speak.

“Of course with a man!” She sniffed.

Ghosh was silent for a long time, then he said, “We imagine we know everything there is to know about our colleagues, but really how little we know.”

“I don't think I knew I loved Melly until he was dying. I was so young. Easiest thing in the world is to love a dying man.”

“Did he love you?”

“He must have. You see he died trying to save me.” Her eyes welled up. “It was in 1935. I'd just arrived in the country, and I couldn't have picked a worse time. The Emperor fled the city as the Italians were about to march in. The looters went to town, pillaging, raping. John Melly commandeered a truck from the British Legation to come and get me. You see, I was volunteering at what is now Missing. He stopped to help a wounded person on the street, and a looter shot him. For absolutely no reason.” She shuddered. “I nursed him for ten days, and then he died. One day I'll tell you all about it.” Then, uncontrollably, she had to sit down, her head in her hands, weeping. “I'm all right, Ghosh. Just give me a minute.”

She was mourning not Melly as much as the passage of the years. She'd come to Addis Ababa from England after getting restless teaching in a convent school and running the student infirmary; she'd accepted a post with Sudan Interior Mission to work in Harrar, Ethiopia. In Addis, she found her orders were canceled because the Italians had attacked, and so she had simply attached herself to a small hospital all but abandoned by the American Protestants. During that first year she'd watched as soldiers—some of the young men buried here—as well as Italian civilians poured in to populate the new colony: carpenters, masons, technicians. The peasant Florino became Don Florino when he crossed the Suez. The ambulance driver reinvented himself as a physician. She had carried on, just as the Indian shopkeepers, the Armenian merchants, the Greek hoteliers, the Levantine traders had carried on during the occu pation. Matron was still there in 1941, when the Axis's fortunes turned in North Africa and in Europe. From the Hotel Bella Napoli's balcony, Matron watched Wingate and his British troops parade into town, escorting Emperor Haile Selassie, who was returning after six years of exile. Matron had never set eyes on the diminutive Emperor. The little man seemed astonished by the transformation of his capital, his head swiveling this way and that to take in the cinemas, hotels, shops, neon lights, multistory apartment buildings, paved avenues lined with trees … Matron said to the Reuters correspondent standing beside her that perhaps the Emperor wished he'd stayed in exile a little longer. To her chagrin, she was quoted verbatim (but fortunately as an “anonymous observer”) in every foreign paper. She smiled at that memory.

She rose, brushed away her tears. The two of them trudged on.

They walked down the path between one row of graves, then back up another.

“No,” Matron said abruptly. “This'll never do. I can't imagine leaving our cherished daughter in this place.”

Only when they broke out into the sunlight did Matron feel she could breathe.

“Ghosh, if you bury me in Gulele, I'll never forgive you,” she said. Ghosh decided silence was the best strategy. “We Christians believe that in the Lord's Second Coming the dead will be raised from the grave.”

Ghosh was raised a Christian, a fact that Matron never seemed to remember.

“Matron, do you sometimes doubt?”

She noticed that his voice was hoarse. His eyelids sagged. She was reminded again that this was not her grief alone.

“Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. Our beloved Sister believed … I worry that in a place as damp and disconsolate as Gulele, even Sister will find it hard to rise when the time comes.”

“What then? Cremation?”

One of the Indian barbers doubled as a pujari and arranged cremations for Hindus who died in Addis Ababa.

“Of course not!” She wondered if Ghosh was being willfully dense. “Burial. I think I might know just the place,” Matron said.

THEY PARKED AT Ghosh's bungalow and walked to the rear of Missing, where the bottlebrush was so laden with flowers that it looked as if it had caught fire. The property edge was marked by the acacias, their flat tops forming a jagged line against the sky. Missing's far west corner was a promontory looking over a vast valley. That acreage as far as the eye could see belonged to a ras—a duke—who was a relative of His Majesty Haile Selassie.

A brook, hidden by boulders, burbled; sheep grazed under the eye of a boy who sat polishing his teeth with a twig, his staff near by. He squinted at Matron and Ghosh and then waved. Just as in the days of David, he carried a slingshot. It was a goatherd like him, centuries before, who had noticed how frisky his animals became after chewing a particular red berry. From that serendipitous discovery, the coffee habit and trade spread to Yemen, Amsterdam, the Caribbean, South America, and the world, but it had all begun in Ethiopia, in a field like this.

An unused bore well occupied this corner of Missing. Five years before, one of the Missing dogs had fallen into the well. Koochooloo's desperate yelps brought Gebrew. He fished her out by dangling a noose around her, almost lynching her in the process. The well needed to be sealed over. In supervising that task, Matron found used prophylactics and cigarette butts around the rock wall; she'd decided the area was in need of redemption. Coolies cleared the brush and planted native grass seedlings. In two months a beautiful green carpet surrounded the well. Gebrew tended to this lawn, squatting, crab walking, grabbing a fistful of grass with his left hand and sweeping under it with the sickle in his right hand.

It was Sister Mary Joseph Praise who identified the wild coffee bush by the well. But for Gebrew's regularly nipping the top buds, it would have grown out of reach. With a few old outpatient benches brought to this lawn it became a place where even Thomas Stone temporarily abandoned his cares. Cigarette in hand, mind adrift, hed smoke and watch while Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Matron fussed with their plants. But before too long he would grind his cigarette into the grass (a practice which Matron thought vulgar) and march off as if to some urgent summons.

Matron prayed silently. Dear God, only You know what will become of Missing now. Two of ours are gone. A child is a miracle, and we have two of those. But for Mr. Harris and his people, it wont be that. For them it would be shameful, scandalous, a reason to pull out. Missing had no income to speak of from patients. It relied on donations. Its modest expansion of the last few years came because of Harris and a few other donors. Matron had no rainy-day fund. It was against her conscience to hold back money when money allowed her to cure trachoma and to prevent blindness, or give penicillin and cure syphilis—the list was endless. What was she to do?

Matron studied the view in every direction. She wasn't registering what she saw because her thoughts were