Cutting for Stone

I remained silent, remembering her sadness and how she had cried on my shoulder.

“I hope God forgives me. I hope He gives me another chance.” She spoke earnestly, her face reflecting her feelings, hiding nothing. “But listen, what I came to tell you is, may God and the saints watch over you and bless you for all the time you spent with us. Such a good doctor your father is. Are you going to be doctors?”

“Yes,” Shiva and I said easily, speaking in unison. It was about the only thing I could say with confidence these days, and it was about the only thing Shiva and I seemed to agree on.

The light came back to her face.

AS WE WALKED to our bungalow, Shiva said, “Why didn't we go inside? She probably lives at the back. She would have let you sleep with her.”

“What makes you think I have to sleep with every woman I see?” I'd turned on him with more venom than was needed. “I don't want to sleep with her. Besides, she's not that kind of woman,” I said.

“Maybe not anymore. But she knows how.”

“I've had my chances, you know. It's a choice.” I told him about the probationer, as if to prove my point.

Shiva had nothing to say to that, and we walked in silence. He was getting under my skin. I didn't want to think about Tsige in that way; I didn't want to picture her sweet face and how she had to make her living. It was painful to imagine, and so I chose not to. But Shiva had no such qualms.

Shiva said, “One day we'll have sex with women. I think today is as good as any other day.” He looked up as if to ascertain that the arrangement of the stars was auspicious.

I stopped him and grabbed his shirt. I tried to find reasons for my objection. What came out was lame.

“Are you forgetting Hema and Ghosh? You think it's something that will make them happy? People look up to them. We mustn't do anything to embarrass them.”

“I think it's inevitable,” Shiva said. “They do it, too. I'm sure they—”

“Stop!” I said. What a disturbing thought. But not so for Shiva.

THE VERY MONTH we turned sixteen, my voice cracked when I didn't want it to. I had blackheads pushing out as if I had swallowed a sack of mustard seeds. The clothes Hema bought me grew tight or short in three or four months. Hair appeared in strange places. Thoughts of the opposite sex, mainly of Genet, made it difficult for me to concentrate. It reassured me to see these physical changes mirrored in Shiva, but after our conversation about Tsige, I couldn't talk with him about the desire I was feeling or the restraint that had to come with it. Shiva felt no such need for restraint.

“Prison,” I'd heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, “is the best thing for a marriage. If you can't send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.” Now that I knew what they were up to, I was deeply embarrassed, even shocked.

Despite our knowledge of the human body in the context of disease, Shiva and I were naive for the longest time about sexual matters—or perhaps it was just me. Little did I know that our Ethiopian peers both at our school and at the government schools had long ago gone through their sexual initiation with a bar girl or a housemaid. They never suffered my years of foggy confusion, trying to imagine what was unimaginable.

I remember a story my classmate Gaby told me when I was twelve or thirteen, a story which he'd heard from a cousin who had emigrated to America, a story which we all believed for the longest time. “When you land in New York,” the cousin had said, “a beautiful blond woman will engage you in conversation at the airport. Her perfume will drive you mad. Big breasts, miniskirt. She will introduce you to her brother. They'll offer you a ride into town in their convertible, and, of course, not to be rude, you accept. As you are driving, the man will say, ‘Let's just drop by my house in Malibu and have a martini before we get you to Manhattan.’ You pull in to their mansion. A house like you've never seen. As soon as you are inside, the man will pull out a gun and point it at you, and say ‘Screw my sister or you will die.’ “

So many nights I lay awake dreaming of this horrible, twisted, beautiful fate, wishing I could go to America only for this reason. Brother, put away the gun, I will screw your sister for free, became a line Gaby and I and our little gang said to one another, our secret phrase that signaled our fellowship in adolescent horniness, our simmering sexual heat. Even after we realized the story was absurd, a fairy tale, it still delighted us, and we loved to repeat that refrain.

A few weeks after Shiva and I had seen Tsige outside her bar, I encountered the Staff Probationer walking down to Missing's gate. There was no escaping her. Seeing her always provoked anxiety.

She was with her brood of probationers. She usually ignored me in that situation. But on this day she smiled and blood rushed to her face. I smiled back so as not be rude. She winked and came to me as her students walked on. “Thank you for last night. I hope the blood didn't scare you. Did that surprise you? I waited for you all these years. It was worth it.” She brushed against me. “When are you coming next? I'll be counting the days.”

She swung every bit of flesh that would swing as she shimmied after her students, as if Chuck Berry were strutting behind her, playing his guitar. She called over her shoulder, loud enough for the whole world to hear, “Next time please don't run off afterward like that, okay?”

I raced home. Of late, particularly on weekends, Shiva went off on his own and I hadn't given it much thought. I never imagined this is what he'd been up to.

Shiva, Genet, and Hema were at the dinner table, Rosina serving. Ghosh had gone to wash up. I hauled Shiva off to our room.

“She thinks it was me!” I wished I'd never told him about my dancing with the probationer. “Why didn't you ask me? I would have forbidden you to go. I did forbid you to go. What did you tell her? Did you pretend to be me?”

Shiva was puzzled by my anger. “No. I was me. I just knocked on her door. I said nothing. She did all the rest.”

“My God! Just like that? You broke your virginity and hers?”

“It was my first time with her. And what makes you so sure about her, eh, older brother?” His words were like a punch in my gut. I'd never heard Shiva speak sarcastically to me, and it felt cutting, ugly. He went on as I stood speechless. “It's not my first time, anyway. I've been going to the Piazza every Sunday.”

“What? How many times have you gone?”

“Twenty-one times.”

I couldn't speak. I was stunned, embarrassed, disgusted, and terribly envious.

“The same woman?”

“No, twenty-one different women. Twenty-two if you count the probationer.” He was standing there, chin pointing at me, one arm languidly set against the wall.

When I found a voice I said, “Well would you mind not going back to the Staff Probationer?”

“Why? Will you visit her?”

I no longer felt I had any authority over him, no credible experience with which to advise him. I felt very tired. “Never mind. But do me a favor; tell her who you are if you go back. And stay around and hold her and whisper sweet things in her ear when you are done. Tell her she's beautiful.”

“Whisper what? Why?”

“Forget it.”

“Marion, all women are beautiful,” Shiva said. I looked up and realized that he spoke with conviction and not a trace of sarcasm. He wasn't embarrassed, or angry that I hauled him off, or the least bit upset. My conceit was that I thought I knew my brother. Yet all I really knew were his rituals. He loved his Grays Anatomy and carried it around so much, it had pale indentations on the cover from his fingers. When Ghosh got Shiva a new edition of Grays, my brother was insulted, as if Ghosh had brought him a stray puppy to replace his beloved Koochooloo, who was on her last legs. I knew Shiva's rituals, but not the logic behind them. Shiva did find women beautiful—I'd seen that from the first time we visited the Version Clinic. He never missed a clinic and ultimately wore Hema down until she taught him how to turn babies. There was nothing prurient about his interest in the Version Clinic or in obstetrics and gynecology. If the clinic day happened to fall on a holiday, or Hema decided to not have it for some reason, Shiva would still be there,