CHAPTER 6.
My Abyssinia
HEMA FIXED HER EYES on the ground below, watching for the transition of brown scrub and desert into steep escarpment announcing the lush, mountainous plateau of Ethiopia. Yes, she thought. This is my home now. My Abyssinia, which sounded to her so much more romantic than "Ethiopia."
The country was in essence a mountain ma.s.sif that rose from the three deserts of Somaliland, Danakil, and Sudan. Even now Hema felt a bit like a David Livingstone or an Evelyn Waugh exploring this ancient civilization, this stronghold of Christianity which, until Mussolini"s invasion in "35, was the only African nation never to be colonized. Waugh, in his dispatches to the London Times and in his book, referred to His Majesty Haile Sela.s.sie the First as "Highly Salacious," seeing cowardice in the Emperor"s leaving the country in the face of Mussolini"s advance. Hema"s reading of Waugh was that he couldn"t accept the notion of African royalty. He couldn"t accept that the bloodlines of Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie, extending back as they did to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, made the Windsors or the Romanovs look like carpetbaggers. She didn"t think much of Waugh or his book.
The new pa.s.sengers who climbed aboard at Djibouti were Somalis or Djiboutians (and really, she thought, what difference was there between the two, other than a line drawn on a map by some Western cartographer). They chewed khat and smoked 555s and despite their doleful, muddy eyes they were happy. Crammed into the plane, which by now was altogether too familiar to Hema, was khat, great bales of it being hauled back to Addis Ababa. It was all very strange, since khat usually traveled in the opposite direction: grown in Ethiopia, around Harrar, and exported by rail to Djibouti and then by air to Aden. That lucrative khat trade route was responsible for the birth of Ethiopian Airlines. She overheard that some problem with the railway and road transport, as well as the urgent need for large quant.i.ties of khat for a wedding, prompted this reverse export and the unscheduled stop. Khat had to be chewed within a day or so of its harvest, or else it lost its potency Hema pictured the Somali, Yemeni, and Sudanese merchants in the tiny souks that anch.o.r.ed every street and byway, and the owners of the bigger shops of the Merkato in Addis Ababa, eyeing their Tissot watches, snapping at their shop boys as they waited for this shipment. She pictured the wedding guests with mouths too parched to spit, but spitting and cursing all the same, telling one another that the bride was uglier than they remembered, and the big mole on her neck must mean shed also inherited the miserliness of her father.
Hema imagined telling her mother about the pilot business. It made Hema laugh, which made the Somali sitting opposite her, one of the newcomers, smile.
Madras had been hot and humid for the three weeks that Hema was there, but it was heaven compared with Aden. Her parents" three-room house in the neighborhood of Mylapore, very near the temple, had seemed s.p.a.cious to her as a girl, but on this visit if felt claustrophobic. Though she regularly sent her parents bank drafts, shed been dismayed to find no improvements in the house since her last visit. The interior paint had peeled to form abstract patterns while the kitchen, blackened with smoke, resembled a darkroom. The narrow street outside which rarely saw a car was now a noisy thoroughfare, and the compound wall showed no trace of whitewash but instead was the color of the earth on which it stood. Only the garden had benefited from the pa.s.sage of time with the bougainvillea hiding the house from the street. The two mango trees had become huge and heavy with fruit. One was an Alphonso and the other a hybrid with flesh that felt rubbery at first bite but then melted in the mouth like ice cream.
The sole decoration in the living room was, as it had always been, the Glaxo powdered-milk calendar hanging on a nail. The overfed blue-eyed Caucasian baby had never grown up. The caption read "Glaxo Builds Bonny Babies." It was enough to make any breast-feeding mother feel guilty that she was starving her infant. As a child Hema had barely registered the Glaxo baby. Now the calendar drew her eye and her ire. What an insidious presence that brat had been in her life. An interloper with a false message. Hema took down the calendar, but the pale rectangle on the wall called attention to itself in a way the baby never had. No doubt once Hema left, another Glaxo baby would find its way back there.
During her brief vacation, Hema had the house painted and ceiling fans installed. Sathyamurthy, the father of her old childhood nemesis, Velu, peered over the fence as workmen carried in a Western-style commode to be cemented over the footpads of the Indian toilet. He sn.i.g.g.e.red and shook his head. "It"s not for me, you old coot," Hema said in English. "My mother"s hips are bad." And Sathyamurthy answered in the only English phrase he knew, "G.o.dd.a.m.n China, kiss me Eisenhower!" He smiled and waved, and she waved back.
THE SOMALI ACROSS FROM HER wore a shiny blue polyester shirt and a gold watch that swung on his stick wrist. His toes, protruding from sandals, glowed like polished ebony. He looked familiar to Hema. Now, he bowed, grinned, and displayed his fingers as if bidding at an auction as he said, "Three kids, two shots, one night!"
She remembered. His name was Adid. "I say, are you still doing double duty these days?"
His ivory teeth lit up the plane"s dim interior. He said something to his friends. They smiled and nodded sagely. Such strong teeth they have, Hemlatha thought. She admired his blackness, a color so pure that there was a purple tinge to it. The headmistress at her school, Mrs. Hood, had been porcelain white, and the schoolgirls believed that if they touched her, their fingers would come away white; with Adid, she imagined they would come away black. Adid"s regal manner, the slow play of expressions on his face, each thought matched by a lip-eyebrow combo, gave Hema the bizarre idea that she"d like to suck his index finger.
She"d last seen Adid in a headdress and flowing robes in the casualty room at Missing, unflappable, even though his pregnant wife was convulsing. When Hemlatha unwrapped the shrouds of cotton she found a young, pale, anemic girl. Her blood pressure was sky-high. This was eclampsia. While Hemlatha was in Theater 3 delivering this wife of her firstborn by Cesarean section, Adid disappeared and returned with an older wife, also in labor, who proceeded to deliver in the horse-drawn gharry beside the outpatient steps. Hemlatha ran out in time to cut the cord. She pushed on the wife"s belly, but instead of the afterbirth, a twin popped out. Adid"s smile when he saw the second child, the third total, reached from ear to ear. Hema suggested he wear a banner across his chest that said ONE NIGHT, TWO SHOTS, THREE KIDS. Adid had laughed like a man whod never heard the word "worry."
"Yes, yes," he said now, raising his voice to be heard over the drone of the engines. He had the clipped, French-accented diction of a Djibou-tian. "A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world, Doctor?"
Hema, who"d been thinking along similar lines just minutes before, decided she was a pauper by that yardstick. She said, "Amen. You must be a millionaire many times over then."
An impish expression stole across his face, and with waggling brows and using just his eyes he pointed down the bench to a woman veiled and swathed in red-and-orange cotton robes. A very pale, henna-painted foot showed. Hemlatha guessed her to be a Yemeni. Or else a Muslim from Pakistan or India.
"And she is ... ?" Hema said, hoping it would not be impolite to ask about her nationality.
Adid nodded vigorously. "Three more months at least. And one more expecting at home!"
"I tell you what," Hema said, looking pointedly at Adid"s groin, "I"ll ask Dr. Ghosh to give you a special rate on a vasectomy, two for one. It will be cheaper than doing a tubal ligation on all the begums."
The Gujarati couple across from her looked up scowling at Adid"s thigh-slapping laughter.
"Why don"t you bring the wives to the antenatal clinic?" Hema asked. "A smart man like you shouldn"t wait till they get into trouble. You don"t want them to suffer."
"It"s not my choice. You know how these women are. They won"t come until they are unconscious," he said simply.
True enough, Hemlatha thought. Years before, an Arab woman in the Merkato was in labor for days, and the husband, a rich merchant, brought Dr. Bach.e.l.li to see her. But rather than allow a male doctor to see her, she wedged her body behind the bedroom door so that any attempt to open it would crush her. The woman died alone, behind that door, an act much admired by her peers.
Because Hema was hungry, and to annoy the Gujaratis further, she accepted some leaves of khat from Adid and tucked them into her cheek. It was something she"d never have dreamed of doing before, but events of the last few hours had changed things.
The khat was bitter at first, but then the pulpy ma.s.s became almost sweet and not unpleasant. "Wonder of wonders," she said aloud, as her face took on the chipmunk bulge and her jaw fell into the lazy, slewing rhythm of the thousands of khat chewers she had seen in her lifetime. Like a pro, she used her handbag as an elbow bolster and she brought her feet up to the bench, one knee flat, the other under her chin. She leaned toward Adid, who was surprisingly chatty.
"... and we spend most of the rainy season away from Addis, in Aweyde, which is near Harrar."
"I know all about Aweyde," Hema said, which wasn"t true. Shed driven there years before on a holiday to see the old walled city of Harrar. What she remembered about Aweyde was that the entire town seemed nothing more than a khat market. The houses were hopelessly plain, not a trace of whitewash. "I know all about Aweyde," she said again, and the khat made her feel that she actually did. "The people there are rich enough to each drive a Mercedes, but they won"t spend a cent to paint their front door. Am I right?"
"Doctor, how could you know these things?" Adid said, astonished.
Hema smiled, as if to say, Very little escapes me, my dear man. And then she was thinking of the Frenchman"s b.a.l.l.s, of rugaeform folds, of the median raphe that separated one b.o.l.l.o.c.k from the other, of the dartos muscle, the cells of Sertoli. Her mind was racing, hyperaware.
The cabin was no longer hot, and it felt good to be heading home. She wanted to say to Adid: When I was a medical student, we had to do this test on patients to check for visceral pain. Visceral pain is different from when you b.u.mp your knee, for example. Visceral pain comes from the inside, from the body"s organs. It"s a pain that is tough to characterize, poorly localized, but painful all the same. Anyway, as students we had to squeeze the testes to check for intact visceral pain, because diseases like syphilis can cause the loss of visceral pain sensations. One day, at the bedside of a patient with syphilis, the professor picked on me to demonstrate visceral pain. The men in our group were snickering. I was bold then-I didn"t hesitate. I exposed the b.a.l.l.s- the testes, excuse me. The patient had advanced syphilis. When I squeezed, the man just smiled at me. Nothing. No pain. No reaction. So I squeezed harder-really hard. Still nothing. But one of my male cla.s.smates fainted!
Adid grinned, as if she had told him this story.
THE PLANE DESCENDED, slipping into and out of the scattered clouds over Addis Ababa. The dense forests of eucalyptus trees at first concealed the city. Emperor Menelik had imported eucalyptus years before from Madagascar, not for its oil, but as firewood, the lack of which had almost made him abandon his capital city. Eucalyptus had thrived in the Ethiopian soil, and it grew rapidly-twelve meters in five years, and twenty meters in twelve years. Menelik had planted it by the hectare. It was indestructible, always returning in strength wherever it was cut down, and proving ideal for framing houses.
The trees revealed clearings with circular, thatch-roofed tukuls and a thorn enclosure to keep the animals penned in. Then, at the edge of the city, she saw corrugated-tin-roofed houses, abundant and closer to gether. A church with a short spire came into view, and then the city proper. There was Churchill Road starting at the railway station and making a steep rise to the Piazza, with a handful of cars and buses plying its slope. This glimpse of the city center, which looked so modern, made her think of Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie. Hed brought about more change in his reign than the country had undergone in three centuries. Down at street level, his portrait-the hook nose, the thin lips, the high brow- would be in every house. Hema"s father was the Emperor"s biggest fan because just before World War II, as Mussolini stood ready to invade, Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie warned the world of the price of standing by and allowing Italy to invade a sovereign country like Ethiopia; such inaction, he said, would fuel the territorial ambitions of not just Italy but Germany. "G.o.d and history will remember your judgment," he said famously before the League of Nations, and they did. It made him the symbol of the little guy whod stood up to the bully (and lost).
"You see Missing Hospital, madam?" This from Adid who peered over her shoulder.
"Missing is missing," she said.
Near the airport an entire hillside had turned to a flaming orange from the blooming of the meskel flower which told her that the rainy season must have ended. Another hillside was covered with lean-tos and shacks of corrugated tin, the colors rust brown or a darker corrosive hue. Each shack shared a wall with its neighbor, so that collectively they looked like long irregular railway carriages that snaked across the hill, sending buds and offshoots in all directions.
THE FRENCHMAN BUZZED low over the strip so that the customs agent could get on his bicycle and shoo stray cows from the runway He circled and landed.
Cars and vans in the bile-green colors of the Ethiopian police raced up to the plane, along with every functionary of the Ethiopian Airlines staff. The cargo door was yanked open, and frantic hands rushed to unload the khat. They tossed the bundles into a VW Kombi, then into a three-wheeler van, and when those were full, they stuffed the police cars, and they all raced off, sirens sounding. Only then were the pa.s.sengers allowed to disembark.
The engine of the blue-and-white Fiat Seicento whined as the six-hundred milliliter engine, which gave it its name, strained to carry Hem-latha and her Grundig. Shed personally supervised the loading of the big crate onto the roof rack.
It was a perfect sunny afternoon in Addis, and it made her forget that she was more than two days overdue at Missing. The light at this alt.i.tude was so different from Madras, suffusing what it graced rather than glaring off every surface. There was no hint in the breeze of rain, though that could change in an instant. She caught the woody, medicinal odor of eucalyptus, a scent that would never do in a perfume but was invigorating when it was in the air. She smelled frankincense, which every household threw onto the charcoal stove. She was glad to be alive, and glad to be back in Addis, but she didn"t know what to make of the wave of nostalgia that overcame her, an unfulfilled longing that she could not define.
With the end of the rains, makeshift stalls had popped up selling red and green chilies, lemons, and roasted maize. A man with a bleating sheep draped around his neck like a cape struggled to see the road in front of him. A woman sold bundles of eucalyptus leaves used as cooking fuel for making injera-the pancakelike food made from a grain, tef. Farther on Hema saw a little girl pour batter on a huge flat griddle which sat on three bricks with a fire underneath. When the Injera was ready, it would be peeled off like a tablecloth, then folded once, twice, and once more, and stored in a basket.
An old woman in the black clothes of mourning stopped to a.s.sist a mother sling her baby onto her back in a pouch made out of her shama- the white cotton cloth that men and women alike wrapped around their shoulders.
A man with withered legs that were folded into his chest swung stiff armed along the dirt sidewalk. He had blocks of wood with a handle in each hand, which he planted on the ground, and then he swung his bottom forward. He moved surprisingly well, like the letter M marching down the road. Her brief absence made these sights a novelty again.
A herd of mules overladen with firewood trotted along, their expressions docile and angelic in the face of the whipping they were getting from the barefoot owner who ran with them. The taxi driver leaned on his horn. Despite the high whine of the engine, the taxi managed only to crawl along like another overburdened beast.
A lorry carrying sheep, the poor animals so crowded together they could hardly blink, overtook them. These were the lucky animals being carried to slaughter. Before Meskel, the feast celebrating the finding of Christ"s cross, huge herds of sheep would arrive in the capital, the animals wobbly from exhaustion, barely surviving this march to the feast table. Then, in the days after Meskel, one neither heard nor saw any sheep. Instead the skin traders walked the streets and alleys shouting, "Ye beg koda alle!"-"The sheep"s hide whoever has!" A household would hail him, and after some haggling, he"d drape another skin over the ones that he was already shouldering and resume his cry.
Suddenly Hemlatha noticed children everywhere as if they"d been invisible all these years. Two boys were racing their crude metal hoops, using a stick to guide and push, weaving this way and that and making motorcar noises. A toddler with railroad tracks of snot connecting nose to lip watched with envy. Its head had been shaved to leave a traffic-island tuft in front; Hema was told when she first came to Ethiopia that this strange haircut was so that if G.o.d chose to take that child (and He took so many), the tuft gave Him a handle by which to lift it to heaven.
The child"s mother stood outlined by the bead curtain of a buna-bet- coffeehouse-though it was really a bar, offering things more potent than coffee. At night the bar would glow within from the tube lights, painted green, yellow, and red, and the woman, transformed by that hour, would offer drinks and her company. An espresso machine on a zinc bar established the cla.s.s of an establishment-this was a legacy of the Italian occupation. The woman"s flat eyes fell on the cab, then on Hema, and her expression hardened as if she had seen a compet.i.tor. She lifted her gaze to the strange container on the taxi"s roof, and then she looked nonchalantly away as if to say, I"m not the least bit impressed. She might be an Amhara, Hema thought, with that walnut skin, the high cheekbones. She is so pretty. Probably a friend of Ghosh. A comb was stuck in her hair as if she were taking a break from teasing it into shape. Her legs shone from Nivea. She might even swallow a dab or two of Nivea now and then, in the belief it lightened the complexion. "For all I know, it works," Hema said, though she shuddered at the thought.
Between the newer cinder-block buildings were huts, the wattle walls unpainted and revealing their sticks, straw, and mud. All it took was a pole stuck in the ground with an empty can inverted over the top to say, This, too, is a buna-bet, and though we don"t have an espresso machine, and though we sell homebrewed tej and talla instead of bottled St. George beer, we offer the same services as the other.
The oldest profession in the world raised no eyebrows, even with Hema. Shed learned it was futile to object-it would have been like taking exception to oxygen. But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.
On the main road Hema saw a work crew of grinning, dark-skinned, big-boned Gurages supervised by a laughing Italian overseer. The Gur -age were southerners with a well-deserved reputation for being hardworking and willing to take on what the locals wouldn"t. Gebrew, when he needed extra hands at Missing, would simply step out of the front gate and yell "Gurage!" though of late, that could be seen as insulting, so it was safer to shout "Coolie!"
The crew was barefoot but for the overseer and one man who had squeezed into ill-fitting plastic shoes, having cut holes in them for his big toes. By all rights Hema should have been incensed by this sight of black laborers and a white overseer, and she wondered why she wasn"t; maybe it was because the Italians who stayed behind in Ethiopia after it was liberated were so easygoing, so ready to mock themselves, that they were hard to resent. Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals. Or maybe that was just the way of being that they found worked best in their circ.u.mstance. Hema saw the laborers stand still as soon as the overseer turned away. A snail"s pace, but nevertheless, schools, offices, a grand post office, a national bank, were coming up to match the grandeur of Trinity Cathedral, the Parliament Building, and the Jubilee Palace. The Emperor"s vision of his European-style African capital was taking shape.
PERHAPS IT WAS BECAUSE the Emperor was still on her mind, and because her taxi was at the intersection where, in place of the string of shops, there once stood a gallows, but suddenly Hema was thinking about a scene that haunted her.
It was at this very spot in 1946 that she and Ghosh, in their first months in Addis, had come upon a crowd blocking the road. Standing on the running board of Ghosh"s Volkswagen, Hema had seen a crudely constructed frame and the three dangling nooses. A modified Trenta Quattro with military markings had pulled up. Three handcuffed Ethio pian prisoners on the flatbed were hauled to their feet. The men were coatless, but otherwise, in their shirts, shoes, and pants, they looked as if theyd been interrupted while having dinner.
An Ethiopian officer in Imperial Bodyguard uniform read from a piece of paper and tossed it aside. Hema watched, fascinated, as he put the noose over each head and positioned the knot to one side, behind the ear. The condemned seemed resigned to their fate, which was in itself a form of extreme bravery. The bearing of a tall older man made Hema certain the prisoners were military. This graying but upright prisoner spoke to the Imperial Bodyguard officer who inclined his head to listen. He nodded, and removed the noose. The prisoner then leaned over the truck and held his handcuffed wrists out to a weeping woman. She removed a ring from his finger and kissed his hand. The prisoner stepped back, looked down like an actor searching for his mark onstage, then bowed to this executioner, who returned the gesture and replaced the noose with the delicacy of a husband garlanding his new bride.
Hema didn"t understand what she was seeing, not then anyway. She half believed it to be a form of theater. The violence of what followed- the truck roaring away, the thrashing forms, the awkward and impossible angle of head on chest, the mad rush of onlookers to tear off the dead men"s shoes-was less disturbing than the idea that she was living in a country where such things could take place. Sure, she"d seen brutality cruelty, in Madras, but they took the form of neglect and indifference to suffering, or they took the form of corruption.
The event left Hema sick for days. She contemplated leaving Ethio pia. There"d been nothing about it in the Ethiopian Herald, no comment the government wished to make. The men had been planning revolution, so people said, and this was the Emperor"s response. He was keeping a fragile country on course.
Hema had never forgotten the reluctant executioner, a handsome man, his temples forming a sharp angle with his brow so his head was shaped like a hatchet. His nose was flattened at its base as if from an old fracture. She remembered his stately bow to the condemned before he carried out his orders. Shed felt pity and even respect for him. The conflict between his duty and his compa.s.sion was revealed by that gesture. Had he refused to follow orders, his neck would have been stretched. Hema was sure he"d acted against his conscience.
Maybe this is what keeps me in Addis all these years, Hema thought, this juxtaposition of culture and brutality, this molding of the new out of the crucible of primeval mud. The city is evolving, and I feel part of that evolution, unlike in Madras, where the city seems to have been completed centuries before I was born. Did anyone but my parents notice that I left? "Why don"t you stay in India? There are so many poor women who die needlessly here in Madras," her father had said halfheartedly on this visit. "You want me to give free service to the poor from this house?" she said. "If not, then get me a job. Let the City Corporation hire me, or the Government Medical Service. If my country needs me, why is it that they don"t take me?" They both knew the answer: jobs went to those willing to grease palms. She sighed, causing the taxi driver to look over. She was reliving the pain of saying good-bye to her parents yet again.
The sight of barefoot peasants carrying impossible head loads and horse-drawn gharries plying the roads maintained the aura and mystique of this ancient kingdom that almost justified the fabulous tales of Prester John, who wrote in medieval times of a magical Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim lands. Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here Hema felt she"d tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had traveled back to an earlier epoch. The power filtered down from His Majesty to the Rases, the Dejazmaches, and the lesser n.o.bility and then to the va.s.sals and peons. Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn"t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?
AT ABOUT TWO in the afternoon, her taxi pulled up to the chukker-brown gates of Missing, a world unto itself.
The rock wall enclosed the hospital grounds and hid the buildings. Eucalyptus towered over the wall, and where there was no eucalyptus there were firs and jacaranda and acacia. Green bottle shards poked up from the mortar at the top of the wall to dissuade intruders-robbery and petty theft were rampant in Addis-though the sight of roses lapping over the wall softened this deterrent. The wrought-iron gate covered with sheet metal was normally kept closed, and pedestrians were admitted through the smaller, hinged door in the gate. But now the big gate was wide open, as was the pedestrian flap.
Inside, Hema saw that Gebrew"s sentry hut door and shutter were also open, and when they crested the hill, she could see that every visible window and door in Missing"s outpatient building was open, too; in fact, she could see Gebrew, the watchman (who happened to be a priest), in the process of propping open the woodshed door with a rock.
Spotting the taxi, he came running, his army surplus overcoat flapping, his white priest"s turban dwarfing his small face, his fly wand, cross, and beads clutched in one hand. He seemed to be trying to shoo the taxi away. Gebrew was a nervous chap given to rapid speech and jerky movements, but he was far more agitated than was his norm. He looked stunned to see her, as if he"d never expected her to come back.
"Praise-G.o.d-for-bringing-you-safely, welcome-back-madam, how-are-you-are-you-well? G.o.d-answered-our-prayers," he said in Amharic. She matched him bow for bow as best she could, but he wouldn"t stop until she said, "Gebrew!"
She held out a five-birr note. "Take bowl to Sheba Bar and fetch please doro-wot," she said, naming the delectable red chicken curry cooked in Ethiopian peppers-berbere. Her Amharic was crude, and she could only speak in the present tense, but doro-wot was a term she"d mastered early. And doro-wot had occupied her dreams her last few nights in Madras, after so many days of a pure vegetarian diet. The wot came poured onto the soft crepelike injera and there would be more rolls of injera which Hema would use to scoop up the meat. The curry would have soaked into the injera that lined the bowl by the time Gebrew brought it. Her mouth watered just thinking of the dish.
"Indeed-I-will-madam, Sheba-is-best, blessed-is-their-cook, Sheba-is-"
"Tell me, Gebrew, why be doors and windows open?" Now she noticed his nails and fingers were b.l.o.o.d.y, and his sleeves had feathers sticking to them, and feathers were caught up in his fly swish.
It was then that Gebrew said, "Oh, madam! This is what I have been trying to tell you. Baby is stuck! The baby. And Sister! And the baby!"
She did not understand. She"d never seen him so worked up. She smiled and waited.
"Madam! Sister is borning! She is not borning well!"
"What? Say again?" Perhaps being away and not hearing Amharic had made her misunderstand.
"Sister, madam," Gebrew said, alarmed that he didn"t seem to be getting through, and thinking volume and pitch might help, though what came out was a squeak.
"Sister" in Missing always referred to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, for the only other nun there was Matron Hirst, who went by Matron, while all the other nurses were addressed as Nurse Almaz or Nurse Esther, and not Sister.
To Hema"s astonishment, Gebrew was crying, and his voice turned shrill. "Pa.s.sage is closed! I tried everything. I opened all the doors and windows. I split open a chicken!"
He clutched his belly and strained in a bizarre imitation of parturition. He tried English. "Baby! Baby? Madam, baby?"
What he tried to convey was clear enough; there was no mistaking it. But it would have been difficult for Hema to believe it in any language.
CHAPTER 7.
Fetor Terribilis
THE DOORS TO THE OPERATING THEATER burst open. The probationer shrieked. Matron clutched her chest at the sight of the sari-clad woman standing there, hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring.
They froze. How were they to know if this was their very own Hema, or an apparition? It seemed taller and fuller than Hema, and it had the bloodshot eyes of a dragon. Only when it opened its mouth and said, "What b.l.o.o.d.y nonsense is Gebrew talking? In G.o.d"s name, what is going on?" did their doubts vanish.
"It"s a miracle," Matron said, referring to the fact of Hema"s arrival, but this only further confused Hema. The probationer, her face flushed and her pockmarks shining like sunken nailheads, added, "Amen."
Stone stood and unfurrowed his brows at the sight of Hema. Though he didn"t say a word, his expression was that of a man who, having fallen into a creva.s.se, spotted the bowline lowered from the heavens.
Hema, recalling this event many years later, said to me, "My saliva turned to cement, son. A sweat broke out over my face and neck, even though it was freezing in there. You see, even before I digested the medi cal facts, I"d already registered that smell."
"What smell?"
"You won"t find it any textbooks, Marion, so don"t bother looking. But it"s etched here," she said, tapping her head. "If I chose to write a textbook, not that I have any interest in that kind of thing, I"d have a chapter on nothing but obstetric odors." The smell was both astringent and saccharine, these two contrary characteristics coming together in what she"d come to think of as fetor terribilis. "It always means a labor room catastrophe. Dead mothers, or dead babies, or homicidal husbands. Or all the above."
She couldn"t believe the amount of blood on the floor. The sight of instruments lying helter-skelter-on the patient, next to the patient, on the operating table-a.s.saulted her senses. But most of all-and shed been resisting this-she couldn"t accept the fact that Sister Mary Joseph Praise, sweet Sister, who should have been standing, gowned, masked, and scrubbed, a beacon of calm in this calamity instead lay all but lifeless on the table, her skin porcelain white and her lips drained of all color.
Hema"s thoughts became dissociated, as if they were no longer hers but instead were elegant copperplate scrolling before her in a dream. Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s left hand lying supine on the table drew Hema"s eye. The fingers were curled, the index finger less so, as if she"d been pointing, when sleep or coma overcame her. It was a posture of repose that one rarely a.s.sociated with Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Hema"s eyes would be drawn to that hand repeatedly as the hour unfolded.
The sight of Thomas Stone brought her back to her senses and galvanized her. Seeing Stone in the hallowed place between a woman"s legs that was reserved for the obstetrician rankled Hema. That was her spot, her domain. She shouldered him aside, and in his haste he knocked the stool over. He tried to explain what had happened: finding Sister, their discovery of her pregnancy and then her obstructed labor, the shock, the bleeding that never stopped- "Ayoh, what is this?" she said, cutting him off, her eyes round with alarm, brows shooting up and her mouth a perfect O. She pointed at the b.l.o.o.d.y trephine and the open textbook resting by Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s belly. "Books and whatnots?" She swiped them aside, and they clattered to the floor, the sound reverberating off the walls.
The probationer"s heart hammered against her breast like a moth in a lamp. Not knowing where to put her hands, she stuffed them in her pockets. She rea.s.sured herself that she had no part in the books and whatnots. Her failure (and she was beginning to see this) was a failure of Sound Nursing Sense; she"d missed the gravity of Sister Mary Joseph Praise"s condition when she delivered Stone"s message. She"d a.s.sumed that others would look in on Sister Mary Joseph Praise. No one had been aware that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was that ill, and no one had told Matron.
SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE moved her head, and Matron believed that she was at least transiently aware that Matron held her hand. But so relentless was her pain that Sister couldn"t acknowledge Matron"s kindness.