perched above the African continent, and to learn everything they could from the Belgian nun about operating in hostile climates. From there, after correspondence with Amma, the sister-sisters would head south, not to the Congo (which the French and Belgians had covered), not to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, or Nigeria (the Anglicans had their fingers all over those souls and disliked competition), but perhaps to Ghana or Cameroon. Sister Mary Joseph Praise wondered what Saintly Amma might say to Ethiopia.
Saintly Amma's vision now felt like a pipe dream, a vicarious evange lism so ill informed that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was embarrassed to mention it to Thomas Stone. Instead she said in a breaking, hopeless voice, “I have orders to Aden, Doctor. But I thank you. Thank you for all you did for Sister Anjali.” He protested that he'd done nothing.
“You did more than any human being could do,” she said and took his hand in both of hers and held it. She looked into his eyes. “God be with you and bless you.”
He could feel the rosary still entwined in her fingers, and the softness of her skin and the wetness from her tears. He recalled her hands on him, washing his body, dressing him, even holding his head when he retched. He had a memory of her face turned to the heavens, singing, praying for his recovery. His neck grew warm and he knew his color was betraying him a third time. Her eyes showed pain, and a cry escaped her lips, and only then did he know that he was squeezing her hands, grinding the rosary against her knuckles. He let go at once. His lips parted, but he didn't say anything. He abruptly walked away.
Sister Mary Joseph Praise couldn't move. She saw that her hands were red and beginning to throb. The pain felt like a gift, a blessing so palpable that it rose up her forearms and into her chest. What she couldn't bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She'd wanted to cling to him, to cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she'd never known existed.
THE MOMENT she stepped off the
The city was at once dead and yet in continuous motion, like a blanket of maggots animating a rotting corpse. She fled the main street and the stultifying heat for the shade of narrow alleyways. The buildings looked hewn from volcanic rock. Pushcarts loaded impossibly high with bananas, with bricks, with melons, and even one carrying two lepers weaved through the pedestrian traffic. A veiled, stooped old woman walked by with a smoldering charcoal stove on her head. No one glanced at this strange sight, saving their stares instead for the brown-skinned nun walking in their midst. Her uncovered face made her feel stark naked.
After an hour during which she felt her skin puffing up like dough in an oven, after being directed this way and that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise arrived before a tiny door at the end of a slitlike passage. On the rock wall was a pale outline of a signboard recently removed. She offered a silent prayer, took a deep breath, and knocked. A man yelled in a hoarse voice, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise interpreted the sound as invitation to enter.
Seated on the floor next to a shiny balancing scale, she saw a shirtless Arab. All around him, reaching to the ceiling, were great bales of bundled leaves.
The hothouse scent stifled her breathing. It was a new scent for her, this scent of khat: partly cut grass, yet with something spicier behind it.
The Arab's beard was so red with henna she thought hed bled into it. His eyes were lined like a woman's, reminding her of depictions of Salahuddin, who'd kept the Crusaders from taking the Holy Land. His gaze took in the young face imprisoned in the white wimple, and then those hooded eyes fell to the Gladstone bag in her hand. A heave of his body produced a vulgar laugh through gold-trimmed teeth, a laugh which he cut off when he saw the nun was about to collapse. He sat her down, sent for water and tea. Later, in a mixture of sign language and bastardized English, he communicated to her that the Belgian nun who'd lived there had died suddenly. When he said that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise began shivering again, and she felt a deep foreboding, as if she could hear death's footsteps rustling the leaves in that hothouse. She carried a picture of Sister Beatrice in her Bible, and she could see that face in her mind's eye, now metamorphosing into a death mask, and then to Anjali's face. She forced herself to meet the man's gaze, to challenge what he said.
The building was his. Green khat stalks flashed in his mouth as he spoke. The old nun's God had been unable to save her, he said, looking up to the ceiling and pointing, as if He were still crouching there. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyes involuntarily followed his gaze, before she caught herself. Meanwhile, his muddy eyes dropped from the ceiling to her face, to her lips, and to her bosom.
IF I KNOW THIS MUCH about my mother's voyage, it's because it came from her lips to the ears of others and then to mine. But her tale stopped in Aden. It came to an abrupt halt in that hothouse.
What is clear is that she embarked on her journey with faith that God approved of her mission and would provide for and protect her. But in Aden, something happened to her. No one knew what exactly. But it was there that she understood that her God was also a vengeful and harsh God and could be so even to His faithful. The Devil had shown himself in Sister Anjali's purple, contorted death mask, but God had allowed that. She considered Aden an evil city, where God used Satan to show her how fragile and fragmented the world was, how delicate the balance between evil and good, and how naive she was in her faith. Her father used to say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” She felt pity for Saintly Amma, whose dream of enlightenment for Africa was vanity that cost Anjali's life.
For the longest time all I knew was this: after an unknown period of time that could have been months or even a year, my mother, aged nineteen, somehow escaped Yemen, then crossed the Gulf of Aden, then went overland perhaps to the walled and ancient city of Harrar in Ethiopia, or perhaps to Djibouti, then from there by train she entered Ethiopia via Dire Dawa and then on to Addis Ababa.
I know the story once she arrived at Missing Hospital. There were three spaced knocks on the door to Matron's office. “Come in,” Matron said, and with those two words Missing was on a course different than anyone could have imagined. It was at the start of the short rains, when Addis was stunned into wet submission, and when after hours and days of the sound and sight of water, one began hearing and seeing things. Matron wondered if that explained this vision of a beautiful, brown-skinned nun, standing, but just barely, in the doorway.
The young woman's recessed, unblinking brown eyes felt like warm hands on Matron's face. The pupils were dilated, as though, Matron would think later, the horror of the journey was still fresh. Her lower lip was ripe, as if it might burst at the touch. Her wimple, cinched at the chin, imprisoned her features in its oval, but no cloth could restrain the fervor in that face, or conceal the hurt and confusion. Her gray-brown habit must have once been white. But, as Matron's eyes traveled down the figure, she saw a fresh bloodstain where the legs came together.
The apparition was painfully thin, swaying, but resolute, and it seemed a miracle that it was capable of speech, when it said in a voice heavy with fatigue and sadness: “I desire to begin the time of discernment, the time of listening to God as He speaks in and through the Community. I ask for your prayers that I may spend the rest of my life in His Eucharistic Presence and prepare my soul for the great day of union between bride and Bridegroom.”
Matron recognized the litany of a postulant entering the order, words she herself had uttered so many years ago. Matron replied automatically, just as her Mother Superior had done, “Enter into the joy of the Lord.”
It was only when the stranger slumped against the doorpost that Matron came out of her trance, running around her desk to grab her. Hunger? Exhaustion? Menstrual blood loss? What was this? Sister Mary Joseph Praise weighed nothing in Matron's arms. They took the stranger to a bed. Under the veil, the wimple, and habit they found a delicate wicker-basket chest and a scooped out belly. A girl! Not a woman. Yes, a girl whod only just bid good-bye to childhood. A girl with hair that was not cut short like that of most nuns but long and thick. A girl with
