“I suppose we can assume the army and air force decided
Genet's lips were quivering. I could only imagine how worried she was: I felt a cold flutter in my belly whenever I thought about Rosina, gone for more than twenty-four hours now. I reached out, and Genet clutched my hand.
By dusk, the firing intensified, and it turned bitterly cold. Matron, fearless, went back and forth to the hospital, despite our pleas that she stay. When I had to go to the bathroom I crawled. I saw through the window the bright tracers crisscrossing the sky.
Gebrew locked and chained the main gate and withdrew from his sentry hut to the main hospital complex. The nurses and nursing students were bedded down in the nurses’ dining room with W. W. Gonad as well as Adam, the hospital compounder, watching over them.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, there was a knock at our back door, and when Ghosh opened it, there stood Rosina! Genet, Shiva, and I swarmed all over her, hugging her. Through hot tears Genet screamed at her mother in Tigrinya for leaving her and making her worry.
Matron stood grinning just behind Rosina; some instinct had made Matron and Gebrew go down to the locked gate to check one last time. Huddled against it they found Rosina, sheltering from the wind.
As she gobbled down food, Rosina told us that things were much worse than she'd imagined. “I wanted to reach the upper part of town, but there was an army roadblock. I had to take a big detour, first this way, then that.” A firefight around a villa forced her to take cover, and then army tanks and armored vehicles prevented her return. She spent the night on the porch of a shop at the Merkato, where others trapped by darkness had taken shelter. In the morning, she'd been unable to move from the Merkato because of roaming army platoons who ordered everyone off the street. It had taken her till nightfall to cover a distance of three miles. She confirmed our worst fears: the Imperial Bodyguard was under attack by the army, air force, and police. Pitched battles were being fought all over, but the army was steadily concentrating its efforts on General Mebratu's position.
Rosina snuck off to her quarters to wash and change clothes, and she returned with her mattress, and also with
Matron sank down on the mattress and stretched out her feet. She reached under her sweater and pulled out a revolver, tucking it between mattress and wall.
“Matron!” Hema said.
“I know, Hema … I
“That's not what I was thinking at all,” Hema said, looking at the gun as if it might explode.
“I promise you, this was a gift. I keep it in a place where no soul could find it. But you see, looters—that's what we need to worry about,” Matron said. “This might stop them. I did buy two other guns. I've passed them out to W. W. Gonad and Adam.”
Almaz carried in a basket of
Shiva sat cross-legged. He carefully folded a sheet of paper, then tore it in half and then repeated the process again and again till he had a bunch of tiny squares. I knew he was just as shaken as I was by the turn of events. Watching his hands moving methodically, I felt as if I was keeping my mind and my hands busy. Now he put one paper square by itself, then counted and stacked three squares next to it, then seven, then eleven. I had to ask.
“Prime numbers,” he said as if that explained anything. He rocked back and forth, his lips moving. I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.
But Shiva's escape was incomplete tonight; I knew, because in watching him, I felt no relief.
“Don't try,” I said to Shiva. “Let's go to sleep.”
He put his papers away at once.
Rosina and Genet were already fast asleep, both exhausted. Rosina's return was a great reprieve, but my greatest relief that night came when my head touched Shiva's, a sense of safety and completion, a home at the end of the world. Thank God that whatever happened wed always have ShivaMarion to fall back on, I thought. Surely, we could always summon ShivaMarion when we needed to, though I guiltily remembered that we hadn't done so in a while. I nudged his ribs and he nudged back, and I could feel him smile without opening his eyes. I took reassurance from that, because earlier that day hed been a stranger sitting on the Version Clinic steps, but now he was Shiva again. Together we had an unfair advantage on the rest of the world.
I awoke at some point to find everyone but Matron and Ghosh asleep. The gunfire came in intense bursts, but with unpredictable moments of quiet, so that I could hear Matron clearly as she spoke to Ghosh: “When the Emperor fled Addis in ‘36, just before the Italians marched in, it was chaos … I should have gone to the British Legation. One look at the Sikh infantrymen at the gate, with their turbans and beards and bayonets, and no looter was going to get near. Biggest mistake I made was not to go there.”
“Why didn't you?
“Embarrassment. I'd dined once with the ambassador and his wife. I felt so out of place. Thank God for John Melly He was a young missionary doctor. He sat next to me. He talked about his faith, and his hopes to build a medical school here …” Her voice trailed off.
“You told me about him once,” Ghosh said. “You loved him. You said one day you'd tell me all about it.”
There was a long silence. I was tempted to open my eyes, but I knew that would break the spell.
Matron's voice sounded thick. “By staying here, I was responsible for John Melly's death. It wasn't Missing Hospital then. Surely, a hospital will be spared is what I thought anyway. But our own ward boy led a mob here. They snatched a young nursing assistant and raped her. I fled to the other end of the infirmary, where I found Dr. Sorkis. You never met him. A Hungarian. A terrible surgeon, a morose fellow. He operated like a technician. Disinterested. We'd had such a parade of short-time doctors till you and Hema and Stone arrived …” She sighed again. “On that night, though, Sorkis made all the difference in the world. He had a shotgun and a pistol. When the mob reached the infirmary, I pleaded through the closed door with Tesfaye—that was the ward boy's name— ‘Don't be part of this evil, for the sake of God.’ Oh, but he mocked me. ‘There is no God, Matron,’ he said. Said many other vile things.
“When they broke down a panel on the door, Dr. Sorkis fired first one barrel at eye level, and the second barrel at groin level. The sound deafened me. When my hearing came back, I heard men screaming in pain. Sorkis reloaded and went outside, firing the shotgun at knee level.
“I confess I felt pleasure to see them hobble away. Instead of fear, I felt anger. Tesfaye came charging again … I think he thought the rabble was still with him. Sorkis raised his pistol—this very one here—and he squeezed the trigger. Even before I heard the sound, I saw Tesfaye s teeth spray out and the back of his head pop. The fight went out of the rest.
“When the Italians marched into town the next morning, call me a traitor, Ghosh, but I for one welcomed them because the looting stopped. That's when I discovered that John Melly had tried to get me to safety. He stopped his truck to help a wounded man, and when he did, a drunken looter came right up to him and fired a pistol into Melly s chest. For no reason at all!
“I hurried to the legation when I heard. I nursed him round the clock. He suffered for two weeks, but his faith never wavered. It is one reason I never left Ethiopia. I felt I owed it to him. Hed ask me to sing ‘Bunyan's Hymn’ to him while I held his hand. I must have sung it a thousand times before he died.
