Cutting for Stone

the brow, I knew she was going to make it. She was skinny to begin with, and now the illness had consumed her, burned her down to just bones. Her color was returning; the sword that hung over her had lifted away. My shoulders began to unknot.

That afternoon I went to my room in Ghosh's quarters, and I fell into a black sleep. It was only when I woke up that I turned my attention to Shiva. Did he understand how he shattered my dreams? Did he see how he hurt Genet, hurt us all? I wanted to get through to him. The trouble was that I couldn't think of any other way than to pummel him with my fists until he felt the same degree of pain he had caused in me. I hated my brother. No one could stop me.

No one but Genet.

When she told me about her deal with Rosina, how she had agreed to be circumcised if Rosina said nothing to Hema, Genet hadn't finished what she had to say. Later that first night, she struggled to consciousness to ask something of me. She had made me swear to it. “Marion,” she said, “punish me, but not Shiva. Attack me and cast me away, but leave Shiva alone.”

“Why? I can't do that. Why spare him? “

“Marion, I made Shiva do what he did with me that night. I asked him.” Her words were like kidney punches. “You know how Shiva is different … how he thinks in another way? Believe me, if I hadn't asked him, he would have read his book and I wouldn't be here.”

Reluctantly, on that first night, I had given Genet my word that I wouldn't confront Shiva. I did so mainly because that night had looked as if it might well have been her last.

I never told Hema what had really happened, leaving her to imagine whatever it was she thought I had done.

Why, you might ask, did I keep my word? Why did I not change my mind when I saw that Genet would survive? Why didn't I tell Hema the truth? You see, I'd learned something about myself and about Genet during her battle to stay alive. I'd come so close to losing her, and it helped me understand that despite everything, I didn't want her to die. I might never forgive her. But I still loved her.

WHEN SHE WAS DISCHARGED from the hospital, I carried Genet from the car to the house. No one objected, and if they had I would have stood my ground. My unceasing vigil at Genet's bedside had earned a grudging acknowledgment from Hema; she didn't dare deny me.

As I carried her daughter into our house through the kitchen, Rosina watched from her doorway. Genet never looked in that direction. It was as if her mother and the room in which she had lived her life no longer existed. Rosina stood there, beseeching with her eyes, pleading for forgiveness. But a child's ability for reprisal is infinite, and can last a lifetime.

I carried Genet to our old room, Shiva's room, which would now be hers.

The plan was that Shiva and I would sleep in Ghosh's old quarters, but separately, he in the living room.

Half an hour later, when I went to get Genet's clothes from Rosina's quarters, she had locked herself in and wouldn't answer despite my knocking. I pushed on the wood in anger, and I could tell from the resistance that she'd barricaded the door or else she was leaning against it. A peculiar silence blanketed the atmosphere. I went to the window. The shutters were bolted, but now, with Almaz helping, I pulled on the flimsy slats till they snapped off. The wardrobe had been used to block the window. I scrambled onto the ledge and tried to shove the wardrobe aside with my hands, but I couldn't. I craned my neck to peer above it. What I saw made me set my back to the window frame, put both feet on the wardrobe, and topple it without a thought to its contents. It hit the ground with a terrific crash, the wood splintering, the mirror shattering, plates smashing. It brought everyone running.

I could see clearly now. We all could see. Hema, Ghosh, Shiva were behind me, and even Genet, hearing the commotion, had dragged herself there.

There is a mathematical precision to that scene as I remember it, but there are no angles in Carr's Geometry or any other text that quite describe the slant of that neck. And no pill in the pharmacopoeia that might erase the memory. Hanging from a rafter, her head tilted on her spine, her mouth open and the tongue looking as if it had been yanked out of her throat, was Rosina.

35. One Fever from Another

THE MOSSY STONE WALLS and the massive gate of Empress Menen School gave it the look of an ancient fortress. In her white socks, light blue blouse, dark blue skirt, and with no headbands, clips, or earrings, Genet was just one of the girls, blending in. Her only adornment was the St. Bridget's cross hanging from her neck. She didn't want to stand out. Her old vivacious self had died along with the corpse we took down from the rafter and buried in Gulele Cemetery.

My new ritual was to come on Saturday evenings to see Genet. She was just up the hill from the palace where General Mebratu (with Zemui at his side) took hostages and tried to bring about a new order.

Genet could have come home on weekends, but she said Missing evoked painful memories. She insisted she was happy at Empress Menen. The Indian teachers were strict but very good. Sheltered from society and from us, she worked very hard.

We entered university together for our premedical course, and the following year we entered medical school. Now out of uniform and in regular clothes, her dress and manner remained reserved and subdued. Each time I went to visit Genet in the Mekane Yesus Hostel opposite the university, I'd pray that this would be the day when the locked door to her heart opened and I might see traces of the old Genet. She was appreciative for the tiffin carrier of food Almaz and Hema sent for her, but the barrier she put up around herself remained.

I still loved her.

I wished I didn't.

We entered the Haile Selassie the First School of Medicine in 1974— only the third class to be admitted. Genet and I were paired as dissection partners on a cadaver, which was fortunate for her. Anyone else would have taken offense at her frequent absences and her failing to carry her load. I didn't think she was lazy. There was no good reason for this; something was brewing, and for once I had no clue.

OUR BASIC SCIENCE TEACHERS were very good, a mix of British and Swiss professors and a few Ethiopian physicians who graduated from the American University of Beirut and then took postgraduate training in England or America. There was one Indian: our own Ghosh. Ghosh had a title: not Assistant Professor, or Associate Professor, or Clinical Associate Professor (implying an honorary, unpaid designation), but Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Surgery.

I don't think any of us, not even Hema, realized the extent of Ghosh's scholarship during his twenty-eight years in Ethiopia. But Sir Ian Hill, dean of the new medical school, certainly did. Ghosh had forty-one published papers and a textbook chapter to his name. An initial interest in sexually transmitted illness had given way to major scholarship on relapsing fever, for which he was the world's expert, because the louse-borne variety of this disease was endemic to Ethiopia, and because no living person had observed the disease as closely.

I learned about relapsing fever as a schoolboy when Ali of the souk opposite Missing brought his brother, Saleem, to the hospital and asked me to intercede. Saleem burned with fever and was delirious. Ghosh said later that Saleem's story was typical: He'd arrived in Addis Ababa from his village with his life's belongings in a cloth strung over his shoulder. Ali found his brother a toehold in the seething, swarming docks of the Merkato, where, monsoon or not, he hauled sacks off the trucks and into the godowns. At night he slept cheek by jowl with ten others in a flophouse. In the rainy season, there was little opportunity to wash clothes because they would take days to dry. Saleem's living conditions were unfit for humans, but ideal for lice. While scratching his skin he must have crushed a louse, its blood entering his body through the scratch. Coming from the village, he had no immunity to this urban disease.

In Casualty, Saleem lay on the ground too weak to sit or stand, semiconscious. Adam, our one-eyed