Cutting for Stone

11. Bedside Language and Bedroom Language

ON THE MORNING of the twins’ birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.

Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepatitis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the e at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.

THE MORNINGS were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.

At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out, Hema, let's get married. But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.

“Fool!” she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. “How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride for you, I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed.”

Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.

If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo … “Go ahead! What do I care?” he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. “But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?” That led him to picture a bovine penis; he groaned.

This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.

From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. “For the sake of God, be gentle!” he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini—all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the getta? (In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.

He drew the blanket over his head as Almaz stagger-stepped to the bathroom, hefting the steaming cauldron. “Banya skin!” she muttered in Amharic. Amharic was all she ever spoke, though Ghosh suspected she understood more English than she let on. After emptying the cauldron into the bathtub, she finished the thought: “It must be so sickly to require washing every day. What misfortune the getta doesn't have habesha skin. It would stay clean without the need for all this scrubbing.”

No doubt Almaz had been to church this morning. When Ghosh first came to Ethiopia, as he walked down Menelik Street, a woman across the road stopped and bowed to him and he waved back. Only later did he realize that her gesture was aimed at the church across the way. Pedestrians bobbed before a church, kissing the church wall thrice and crossing themselves before going on. If they'd been chaste, they might enter. Otherwise they stayed on the other side of the street.

Almaz was tall with oak-colored skin and a shield-shaped face. Her oval eyes sloped down to the bridge of her nose, giving her a sultry, inviting gaze. Her square chin contradicted that message, and this hint of androgyny brought her admiring looks. She had large but shapely hands, wide hips, and buttocks that formed a broad ledge on which Ghosh believed he could balance a cup and saucer.

She was twenty-six when she came to Missing with labor pains, nine months pregnant, her cheeks flushed with pride because this baby she would carry to term, unlike all the others that had failed to take root in her womb. In the prenatal clinic visits, nursing students had twice recorded FHSH (Fetal Heart Sounds Heard) in the chart. But on the day of her putative labor, Hema heard only silence. Hema's exam revealed that the “baby” was a giant fibroid of the uterus and the FHSH nothing but a rattle in a probationer's brain.

Almaz refused to accept the diagnosis. “Look,” she said, fishing out an engorged breast and squeezing forth a jet of milk. “Could a tit do that if there were no child to feed?” Yes, a tit could do that and more if its owner believed. It took three more months with no true signs of labor and an X-ray that showed no baby's skull, no spine, for Almaz to concede. At the surgery, which she at last agreed to, Hema had to remove both the fibroid and the uterus which it had swallowed. In the town of Sabatha they still waited for Almaz to return with the baby. But Almaz couldn't bear to go back. She stayed on and became one of the Missing People.

He heard Almaz return and the jangle of a cup and saucer. The scent of coffee made him peek from under his tent.

“Is there anything else?” she asked, studying him.

Yes, I need to tell you that I am leaving Missing. Really, I am! I can't let Hema play me like a harmonium. But he didn't say this; instead, he shook his head. He felt Almaz understood intuitively what Hema's absence did to him.

“Yesus Christos, please forgive this sinner, but he was out drinking last night,” she said as she stooped to pick up a beer bottle from under the bed. Alas, Almaz was in a proselytizing mood. Ghosh felt as if he were eavesdropping on her private conversation with God. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

“Blessed St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and all the other saints,” she continued in Amharic, confident he would understand, “for I prayed for master to be a new man, for him to one day give up his dooriye ways, but I was wrong, your venerable holinesses.”

It was the word dooriye that tricked Ghosh into speaking. It meant “lout,” “lecher,” “reprobate”—and it stung him to hear that word.

“What gives you the right to address me this way?” he said, though he didn't really feel the anger his voice carried. He was about to add, Are you my wife?—but choked those words off. To his perpetual shame, he and Almaz had been intimate twice over the years, both times when he was drunk. She'd lain down, lifted, and spread, grumbling even as her hips fell into rhythm with his, but no more than she grumbled about the coffee or hot water. He'd decided that grumbling with Almaz was the language of both pleasure and pain. When they were spent she'd sighed, pulled her skirt down, and asked, “Will there be anything else?” before leaving him to his guilt.

He loved her for never holding those two episodes against him. But it had given her the license to nag him, to raise her grumbling to a steady pitch. That was her prerogative, but the saints help anyone else who addressed him in that tone; she defended him, his belongings, and his reputation with her tongue and with her fists and feet if necessary. Sometimes he felt that she owned him.

“Why do you harass me like this?” he said, the fire gone from his voice. He knew hed never have the courage to break the news of his leaving to her.

“Who said I was talking to you?” Almaz replied.

But when she left he saw the two aspirins in the saucer with his coffee, and his heart melted. My greatest consolation, Ghosh thought, for only the hundredth time since his arrival in Ethiopia, has been the women of this land. The country had completely surprised him. Despite pictures he'd seen in National Geographic, he'd been unprepared for this mountain empire shrouded in mist. The cold, the altitude, the wild roses, the towering trees, reminded him of Coonoor, a hill station in India he'd visited as a boy. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Ethiopia, may have been exceptional in his bearing and dignity, but Ghosh discovered that His Majesty's people shared his physical features. Their sharp, sculpted noses and soulful eyes set them between Persians and Africans, with the kinky hair of the latter, and the lighter skin of the former. Reserved, excessively formal, and often morose, they were quick to anger, quick to imagine insults to their pride. As for theories of conspiracy and the most terrible pessimism, surely they'd cornered the world market on those. But get past all those superficial attributes, and you found people who were supremely intelligent, loving, hospitable, and generous.

“Thank you, Almaz,” he called out. She pretended not to hear.

IN THE BATHROOM Ghosh felt a sharp pain as he peed and was forced to cut off his stream. “Like sliding down the edge of a razor blade using my balls as brakes,” he muttered, his eyes tearing. What did the French call it? Chaude pisse, but that didn't come close to describing his symptoms.

Was this mysterious irritation from lack of use? Or from a kidney stone? Or was there, as he suspected, a mild, endemic inflammation along the passage that carried urine out? Penicillin did nothing for this condition, which waxed and waned. He'd devoted himself to this question of causation, spending hours at the microscope with his urine and with that of others with similar symptoms, studying it like the piss-pot prophets of old.

After his first liaison in Ethiopia (and the only time he'd not used a condom), he had relied on the Allied Army Field Method for “post-exposure prophylaxis,” as it was called in the books: wash with soap and mercuric chloride, then squeeze silver proteinate ointment into the urethra and milk it down the length of his shaft. It felt like a penance invented by the Jesuits. He believed the “prophylaxis” was partly behind the burning sensations that came and went and peaked on some mornings. How many other such time-honored methods out there were just as useless? To think of the millions that the armies of the world had spent on “kits” like this, or to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

There was nothing like a personal experience to tilt a man toward a specialty, and so Ghosh had become the de facto syphilologist, the venereologist, the last word when it came to VD. From the palace to the embassies, every VIP with VD came to consult Ghosh. Perhaps in the county of Cook in America, theyd be interested in this experience.

AFTER HE BATHED and dressed, he drove the two hundred yards to the outpatient building. He sought out Adam, the one-eyed com-pounder, who, under Ghosh's tutelage, had become a natural and gifted diagnostician. But Adam wasn't around, and so he went to W. W. Gonad, a man of many titles—Laboratory Technician, Blood Bank Technician, Junior Administrator—all of which were to be found on a name tag on his oversize white coat. His full name was Wonde Wossen Gonafer, which he'd Westernized to W. W. Gonad. Ghosh and Matron had been quick to point out the meaning of his new moniker, but it turned out that W.W. needed no edification. “The English have names like Mr. Strong? Mr. Wright? Mr. Head? Mr. Carpenter? Mr. Mason? Mrs. Moneypenny? Mr. Rich? I will be Mr. W. W. Gonad!”

He was one of the first Ethiopians Ghosh had come to know well. Outwardly melancholic, W.W. was nevertheless fun-loving and ambitious. Urbanization and education had introduced in W.W. a gravitas, an exaggerated courtliness, the neck and body flexed, primed for the deep bow, and conversation full of the sighs of someone whose heart had been broken. Alcohol could either exaggerate the condition or remove it entirely.

Ghosh asked W.W. to give him a B12 shot; it was worth a try—even placebos had some effect.

As he readied the syringe, W.W. made clucking noises. “You must be sure to always use prophylactics, Dr. Ghosh,” he said and immediately turned sheepish, because W.W. was hardly one to proffer such advice.

“But I do. After that first time I've never had unrubberized intercourse. Don't you believe me? That is why I don't understand this burning some mornings. And you, sir? Why don't you use a condom, W.W.?”

Gonad wore heel lifts that made him walk with an ostrichlike pelvic tilt. He teased his hair into a lofty halo that would one day be called an Afro. Now, he pulled himself to his full five foot one and said haughtily, “If I wanted to make love to a rubber glove I would never have to leave the hospital.”

IF GHOSH HAD BEEN AWARE that at this very moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise was in distress in her quarters, he'd have rushed to help; it might have saved her life. But at that point no one knew. The probationer had yet to deliver her message, and when she did, she failed to tell anyone how sick Sister was.

Ghosh made leisurely rounds with the ward nurse and the probationers. He pointed out a sulfa rash to the newest probationers, removed ascitic fluid from the belly of a man with cirrhosis. The outpatient clinics then took most of the day, except for a formal lecture to the nursing students on tuberculosis. Keeping busy helped him forget about Hema, who should have been back two days ago. He could think of only one explanation for her delay, and it depressed him.

In the late afternoon, Ghosh drove out of Missing. He missed by a few minutes the hue and cry when Thomas Stone carried Sister Mary Joseph Praise out of the nurses’ hostel.

HE PARKED near the towering Lion of Judah, a landmark for the area near the railway station. Carved out of blocks of gray-black stone, with a square crown on its head, that cubist lion resembled a chess piece. The eye slits beneath the low brow stared across the plaza; the sculpture gave this part of town an avant-garde sensibility.

Ghosh stepped into the chromed and lacquered world of Ferraros, where a haircut cost ten times as much as at Jai Hind, the Indian barbershop. But Ferraros, with its frosted-glass window and red-and-white-striped barber's pole, was rejuvenating. The mirrored walls, the necklace of globe lights, the oxblood leather chair with more knobs and chrome levers than Missing's operating table—you could only get this at the Italian establishment.

Ferraro, dazzling in his collarless white smock, was everywhere: behind Ghosh to slip off his coat, alongside him as he led him to the chair, then in front of him to slip on the gown. Ferraro chatted in Italian and it didn't matter that Ghosh knew only a few words; the conversation was offered as background music, not requiring a response. He felt at ease with the older man. “Beware of a young doctor and an old barber” went the saying, but Ghosh thought both he and Ferraro were in good hands.

Ferraro had soldiered in Eritrea before becoming a barber in Addis. Had they shared a common language, there was much that Ghosh would have asked. He'd have loved to hear about the 1940s typhus epidemic during which some brilliant Italian official decided to douse the whole city with DDT, getting rid of lice and the typhus. How had the Italians handled VD in the troops who couldn't possibly have confined themselves to the six Italian ladies in Asmara who were the official garrison puttanas?

He felt an urge to confide in Ferraro, to tell him how his chest ached with jealousy; how he was leaving the country because of a woman who didn't take his love seriously. Ferraro made a soft clucking noise, as if he had intuited the problem and its gender; easing the chair into a reclining position was Ferraro s first step to finding a solution. Neither man could have guessed that at that moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise's heart had stopped beating.

Ferraro gently draped the first hot towel around Ghosh's neck. When the last towel was in place, blotting out all light, Ferraro fell tactfully quiet. Ghosh heard him tiptoe to where he'd parked his cigarette, and then the sound of his exhaling smoke.

If I could have a valet, this would be my man, Ghosh thought. One never doubted for a moment that it was Ferraro s destiny to be a barber; his instincts were perfect; his baldness was inconsequential.

GHOSH EMERGED in a cloud of aftershave. Driving away, he took in the sights as if for the last time: up the steep slope of Churchill Road and past Jai Hind to the traffic light where a balancing act between accelerator and clutch was required before the light turned green. He turned left and went past Vanilal's Spice Shop, Vartanian's Fabrics, and stopped at the post office.

The leper child who staked out this territory where foreigners abounded had blossomed into a teen seemingly overnight. Her perky breasts pushed through her shama while the cartilage of her nose had collapsed to form a saddle nose. He put a one-birr note into her clawed hand.

He turned at the sound of castanets. A listiro, bottle caps threaded onto a nail on his shoe box, looked up at him. Ghosh stood against the post office wall along with a half-dozen other men who were smoking or reading the paper while listiros worked like bees at their feet. The Italians are responsible for this, too, Ghosh thought: people getting their shoes shined more often than they bathe.

It was starting to drizzle, and the listiro's elbows flew like pistons. On the nape of the boy's neck, Ghosh noticed a patch of albino-white skin. Surely not the collar of Venus? So young, and already with scars of healed syphilis? Venereum insontium—”innocently acquired” syphilis— was still in the textbooks, though Ghosh didn't believe in such a thing. Other than congenital syphilis where the mother infected the unborn child, he believed that all syphilis was sexually acquired. He'd seen five-year-olds at play mimicking the act of copulation with each other and doing a good job of it.

A sudden cloudburst sent Ghosh scrambling to his car. The rain washed off a coat of ennui that had enveloped the Piazza. The streetlights came on and reflected off the chrome of passing cars. The Ambassa buses turned a vivid red. On the rooftop of the three-story Olivetti Building (which also housed Pan Am, the Venezia Ristorante, and Motilal Import-Exports) the neon beer mug filled up with yellow lager, foamed over in white suds, then went dark before the cycle started again. That sign had been a source of such wonder when it was first put up. The barefoot men driving their sheep into town for Meskel festival had stopped to watch the show, knotting up traffic as the herd got away from them.

AT ST. GEORGE'S BAR, rain dripped off the Campari umbrellas onto the patio. It was packed inside with foreigners and locals who felt the ambience worth the prices. The glass doors held in a rich scent of can-noli, biscotti, chocolate cassata, ground coffee, and perfume. A gramophone blended into the chatter of voices, the tinkle of cups and saucers, and the sharp sounds of chairs scraping back and glass smacking on Formica-topped tables.

He had just sat down at the bar when he saw Helen's reflection in the mirror—she was seated at a far corner table. She was shortsighted and probably wouldn't see him. Her fair features were striking against her jet-black hair. She was paying no attention to her companion, who was none other than Dr. Bachelli. Ghosh's instinct was to leave at once, but the barman stood waiting, so he asked for a beer.

“My God, Helen, you are beautiful,” Ghosh muttered to himself, studying her reflection. St. George's didn't employ bar girls, but it had no objections to the classier women coming in. Helen's legs were crossed under her skirt, the skin of her thighs white as cream. He remembered those generous glutei that obviated any need for a supporting pillow. A mole on her jawline added to her distinction. But why was it the prettiest half-caste girls—the killis, as they were often called, though the term was derogatory—put on this air of being above it all and bored?

Bachelli, his silk kerchief flowing out of his cream coat and matching his tie, appeared much older on this night than his fifty or so years. His carefully sculpted pencil mustache and his expression of equanimity cigarette in hand, bothered Ghosh because he saw in it his own inertia, the thing that had kept him in Africa so long. Ghosh was fond of Ba ch elli; the man was not a great physician, but he knew his limits in medicine, though he didn't always know his limit in alcohol.

Just a week ago, Ghosh had been shocked to see Bachelli drunk and singing the “Giovinezza,” goose-stepping down the middle of the road in the heart of the Piazza. It was near midnight, and Ghosh had stopped his car then and tried to get him off the street. Bachelli became loud and boisterous, screaming about Adowa, which was enough to get him beaten up if he persisted. Bachelli was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in 1934; he was a young officer again in the 230th Legion of the National Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in 1896. At Adowa, ten thousand Italian soldiers, with as many of their Eritrean askaris, poured down from their colony to invade and take Ethiopia. They were defeated by Emperor Menelik's barefoot Ethiopian fighters armed with spears and Remingtons (sold to them by none other than Rimbaud). No European army had ever been so thoroughly thrashed in Africa. It stuck in the Italian craw, so that even men who weren't born at the time of Adowa, like Bachelli, grew up wanting vengeance.

Ghosh didn't understand any of this till he came to Africa. He hadn't realized that Menelik's victory had inspired Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, and that it had awakened Pan-African consciousness in Kenya, the Sudan, and the Congo. For such insights, one had to live in Africa.

The Italians never forgot their humiliation, and so on the next try, some forty years later, Mussolini took no chances; his motto was Qualsi-asi mezzo!—win by any means. The monkey-maned Ethiopian horsemen with leather shields and spears and single-shot rifles found the enemy was a cloud of phosgene gas that choked them to death, Geneva protocol be damned. Bachelli had been part of that. And looking at Bachelli's face, so flushed with liquor and pride, as he did his victory march in the Piazza, Ghosh had realized it must have been Bachelli's proudest moment.

Ghosh sat trying to be inconspicuous at the bar, but watching the couple in the mirror. When Ghosh first met Helen, he'd fallen madly in love with her—for a few days. Every time Helen saw him she'd say, “Give me money, please.” When he asked for what, she'd blink and then pout as if the question were unreasonable. She'd say, “My mother died,” or “I need abortion”—whatever came into her head. Most bar girls had hearts of gold and eventually married well, but Helen's heart was of baser metal.

Poor Bachelli was smitten by Helen and had been for years, even though he had a common-law Eritrean wife. He gave Helen money. He expected and accepted her selfishness. He called her his donna delin-quente, offering the mole on her cheek as proof. Ghosh meant to ask Bachelli if he actually believed anything in Lombroso's abominable book, La Donna Delinquente. Lombroso's “studies” of prostitutes and criminal women uncovered “characteristics of degeneration”—such things as “primitive” pubic hair distribution, an “atavistic” facial appearance, and an excess of moles. It was pseudoscience, utter rubbish.

Ghosh slipped out abruptly without finishing his beer, because suddenly the idea of making small talk with either of them that evening was intolerable.

THE AVAKIANS WERE LOCKING UP their bottled-gas store, and beyond their shop the lights of the Piazza, the transitory illusion of Roma, came to an end. Now it was all darkness, and the road ran past the long, gloomy, fortresslike stone wall that held up the hillside. A gash in the moss-covered stones was Säba Dereja—Seventy Steps—a pedestrian shortcut to the roundabout at Sidist Kilo, though the steps were so worn down that it was more a ramp than stairs, treacherous when it rained. He drove past the Armenian church, then around the obelisk at Arat Kilo— another war monument at a roundabout—past the Gothic spires and domes of the Trinity Cathedral and then the Parliament Building, which took its inspiration from the one on the banks of the Thames. At the Old Palace, because he was not quite ready to head home, he turned down to Casa INCES, a neighborhood of pretty villas.

He wasn't in the mood for the Ibis or one of the big bars in the Piazza that employed thirty hostesses. He saw a simple cinder-block building up ahead. It appeared to be partitioned into four bars. There were hundreds of such places all over Addis. A soft neon glow showed from two doorways. A plank forded the open gutter. He chose the door on the right, pushing through the bead curtain. It was, as he had suspected given the size, a one-woman operation. The tube light had been painted orange, creating a womblike interior, exaggerated by the frankincense smoking on the charcoal brazier. Two padded bar stools fronted a short wooden counter. The bottles on the shelf on the back wall were impressive—Pinch, Johnny Walker, Bombay gin—even if they were filled with home-brewed tej. His Majesty Haile Selassie the First, in Imperial Bodyguard uniform, gazed down from a poster on one wall. A leggy woman in a swimsuit smiled back at His Majesty from a Michelin calendar.

What little floor space remained held a table and two chairs. Here the barmaid sat with a customer who held her hand; the man seemed intent on keeping her attention. Just when Ghosh decided there was no point in staying, she wrenched her hand free, scraped her chair back, stood, and bowed. High heels to show off her calves. Dark polish on her toenails. Very pretty, he thought. The smile seemed genuine and suggested a better disposition than Helen's. The other man pushed sullenly past Ghosh and left without a word.

The land of milk and honey, Ghosh thought. Milk and honey, and love for money.

Now she and Ghosh traded how-are-yous and I-am-wells, bowing, the deep excursions diminishing till the last few were mere inclinations of the head. Ghosh eased onto the bar stool as she circled behind the counter. She was perhaps twenty, but with big bones, and the fullness of her blouse suggested she had mothered at least one child.

“Min the tetalehf she asked, thrusting her finger at her mouth, in case he didn't understand Amharic.

“I deeply regret that I drove your admirer away. Had I known he was here, or how much he cared for you, I could never have intruded on such a tryst.”

She gasped with surprise.

“Him! He wanted to keep that one beer going till daylight without buying me one. He is from Tigre. Your Amharic is better than his,” she said, gushing, relieved that it would not be a night of sign language.

Her gauzy white cotton skirt ended just below her knees. The colorful border was repeated on the piping of the blouse, and again in the frill of the shama over her shoulders. Her hair was straightened and permed, a Western do. A collar of tattoos in the form of closely spaced wavy lines made her neck look longer. Pretty eyes, Ghosh thought.

Her name was Turunesh, but he decided to call her what he was in the habit of calling all women in Addis: Konjit, which meant “beautiful.”

“I'll have blessed St. George's. And please serve one for yourself. We must celebrate.”

She bowed her thanks. “Is it your birthday, then?”

“No, Konjit, even better.” He was about to say, It is the day that I have freed myself from the chains of a woman who has deviled me for over a decade. The day I have decided my sojourn in Africa ends and America awaits.

“It is the day I have set eyes on the most beautiful woman in Addis Ababa.”

Her teeth were strong and even. A rim of upper gum showed when she laughed. She was self-conscious about this because she brought her hand to her mouth.

Something inside him melted at the sound of her happy laughter, and for the first time since waking that morning, he felt almost normal.

When he first arrived in Addis Ababa he'd sunk into a deep depression. He considered leaving at once because he'd found that he'd completely misunderstood Hema's intentions in sending for him. What he thought was the triumphant conclusion of a courtship that began when they were interns in India turned out to be in his head alone. Hema thought she was just doing Ghosh (and Missing) a favor. Ghosh hid his embarrassment and humiliation. It was the time of the long rains and that alone was enough to make a man kill himself. The Ibis in the Piazza saved him. He'd been looking for a drink and was attracted by an entrance with an arch of ivy that was festooned with Christmas lights. He could hear music from within and the sounds of womanly laughter. Inside, he thought hed died and returned as Nebuchadnezzar. In those Ibis women—Lulu, Marta, Sara, Tsahai, Meskel, Sheba, Mebrat— and in the sprawling bar and restaurant that occupied two floors and three enclosed verandas, he found a family. The girls welcomed him like a long-lost friend, restoring his good humor, encouraging the joker in him, always happy to sit with him. Feminine good looks were as abundant as the rain outside; skin tones ranged from café au lait to coal. The few half-caste women at Ibis had white or olive-toned skin and blue-brown, or even green, eyes. The coming together of races generally produced the most exotic and beautiful fruit, however the core was unpredictable and often sour.

But of all the qualities of the women he met in Addis, the most important was their acquiescence, their availability. For months after his arrival in Addis, well after his discovery of the Ibis and so many other bars like it, Ghosh was celibate. The irony of that period was that the one woman he wanted rejected his advances, while all around him were women who never said no. He was twenty-four and not totally inexperienced when he arrived in Ethiopia. The only intimacy hed ever had in India was with a young probationer by the name of Virgin Magdalene Kumar. Shortly after their three-month affair ended, she left her order and married a chap he knew (and presumably changed her name to Magdalene Kumar).

“Hema, I am only human,” he murmured now as he did every time he thought he was being unfaithful to her.

He reached across and felt the flesh under Konjit's ribs, pinching up a skin fold.

“Ah my dear, should we send for dinner? We need to put flesh on you. And sustenance for what we are about to do tonight. It is, I will confess to you, my very, very first time.”

Had she been an older woman (and many one-woman bars were run by older women who had saved money for their own place after working somewhere grand like the Ibis), he would have used a different tone, one that was less direct, more courtly—a gentler form of flattery. But with her, he had settled on the naughty schoolboy approach.

When she reached to feel his hair, rub his scalp, Ghosh purred with contentment. On the radio the muffled twang of a krar repeated a six-note riff from a pentatonic scale that seemed common to all Ethiopian music, fast or slow. Ghosh recognized the song, a very popular one. It was called “Tizita;” there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.

“Your skin is beautiful. What are you? Banya?” she asked.

“Yes, my lovely, I am indeed Indian. And since nothing about me other than my skin is beautiful, you are gracious to say so.”

“No, no, why do you say that? I swear on the saints I wish I had your hair. I can't get over your Amharic. Are you sure your mother is not habesha?”

“You flatter me,” he said. Hed learned a little Amharic in the hospital, but it was only through tête-à-têtes like this that he became fluent. He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath … The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. “Really, I only know the Amharic of love. If you sent me outside to buy a pencil, I wouldn't be able to do it, for I lack those words.”

She laughed and again tried to cover her lips. Ghosh held her hands, and so she drew her lower lip up as if to hide her teeth, a gesture he found nubile and touching.

“But why hide your smile? … There. How beautiful!”

Much, much later, they retired to the back room; he closed his eyes and pretended, as he always did, that she was Hema. A most willing Hema.

THE MIST WAS inches off the ground when he emerged, and it had brought with it a funereal silence and bone-chilling cold. He took a leak by the roadside. A hyena laughed, whether at his action or his equipment he couldn't be sure. He spun around and saw lupine retinas shining from the trees beyond the first set of houses. He ran while trying to zip up, unlocked his car, and jumped in. He quickly started the engine and moved off. A peeing man had to worry about more than hyenas. Shiftas, lebas, madjiratmachi, and all sorts of villains were a threat after midnight, even in the heart of the city and near paved roads. Just the previous month, two men had robbed, raped, and then cut off an Englishwoman's tongue, thinking its absence would prevent her from tattling. Another victim of a robbery had his balls cut off—a common enough practice— in the belief that he would have no courage left to extract revenge. They were the lucky ones. The rest were simply murdered.

THE GATES OF MISSING were wide open when he got back, which was strange. He pulled up to his cottage, slid the car into the open-sided shed. As his lights shone on the rock wall, he slammed the brakes, terrified by what he saw: a ghostly white figure rose from a squat to stand before his headlights, the eyes reflecting back a shimmering red, just like the hyena's eyes. But this was no hyena, but a weeping, bereft Almaz who had clearly been waiting for him.

“Hema, Hema, what have you done,” he muttered to himself, convinced that the worst had happened and Hema had returned married. Why else would Almaz stay so late except to tell him this? She and the whole world knew how he felt about Hema. The only person who didn't know was Hema.

The ghostly figure ran over to the passenger side, opened the door, and climbed in. Bowing her head and in the most formal tone and without meeting his eyes, she said, “I am sorry to bring you bad news.”

“It's Hema, isn't it?”

“Hema? No. It is Sister Mary Joseph Praise.”

“Sister? What happened to Sister?”

“She is with the Lord, may He bless her soul.”

“What?”

“Lord help us all, but she is dead.” Almaz was sobbing now. “She died giving birth to twins. Dr. Hema arrived but could not save her. Dr. Hema saved the twins.”

Ghosh stopped hearing after her first mention of Sister and death. He had to have her repeat what she said, and then repeat again everything that she knew, but each time it came down to Sister being dead. And something about twins.

“And now we can't find Dr. Stone,” she said at last. “He is gone. We must find him. Matron says we must.”

“Why?” Ghosh managed to ask when he found his tongue, but even as he said that he knew why. He shared with Stone the bond of being the only male physicians at Missing. Ghosh knew Stone as well as anyone could know Stone, except, perhaps, Sister Mary Joseph Praise.

“Why? Because he is suffering the most,” Almaz said. “That is what Matron says. We must find him before he does something stupid.”

It's a bit too late for that, Ghosh thought.

12. Land's End

THE MORNING AFTER the births and the death, Matron Hirst came to her office very early as if it were any other day Shed slept but a few hours. She and Ghosh had driven around, hunting for Thomas Stone late into the night. Stone's maid, Rosina, had kept a vigil in his quarters, but there had been no sign of him.

Matron pushed away the papers stacked on her desk. Through her window she could see patients lined up in the outpatient department, or rather she could see their colorful umbrellas. People believed the sun exacerbated all illnesses, so there were as many umbrellas as there were patients. She picked up the phone. “Adam?” she said, when the compounder came on the line. “Please send word to Gebrew to close the gate. Send patients to the Russian hospital.” Her Amharic, though accented, was exceedingly good. “And Adam, please deal with the patients who are already in the outpatient department as best you can. I'll be asking the nurses to make rounds on their wards and to manage. Let the probationers know that all nursing classes are canceled.”

Thank God for Adam, Matron thought. His education had stopped at the third grade, which was a shame, because Adam could have easily been a doctor. Not only was he adept at preparing the fifteen stock mixtures, ointments, and compounds which Missing provided to outpatients, he also had uncanny clinical sense. With his one good eye (the other milky white from a childhood infection) he could spot the seriously ill among the many who came clutching the teal-blue graduated Missing medicine bottles, ready to have them refilled. It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn … libehn … hodehn,” literally, “My head … my heart … and my stomach,” with the patient's hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (jasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia— somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and bella donna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor's mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill.

THE PHONE RANG, and for once Matron was grateful. Normally she hated the sound because it always felt like a rude interruption. The small Missing switchboard was still a novelty. Matron had declined an extension in her quarters, but she thought it was important to have phones in the doctor's quarters and the casualty room. Even this phone in her office she considered a luxury, but now she grabbed the receiver, hoping for good news, news about Stone.

“Please hold for His Excellency, the Minister of the Pen,” a female voice said. Matron heard faint clicks, and imagined a little dog walking on the wooden floors of the palace. She stared at the stacks of Bibles against the far wall. There were so many they looked like a barricade of shiny, cobbled rexine.

The minister came on, asked about Matron's health, and then said, “His Majesty is saddened by your loss. Please, accept his deepest condolences.” Matron pictured the minister standing, bowing as he spoke into the phone. “His Majesty personally asked me to call.”

“It is most kind, most kind, of His Majesty to think of us … at this time,” Matron said. It was part of the Emperor's mystique and a key to his power that he knew everything that went on in his empire. She wondered how word had reached the palace so soon. Dr. Thomas Stone with Sister Mary Joseph Praise assisting had removed a pair of royal appendices, and Hema had performed an emergency Cesarean section on a granddaughter who didn't make it to Switzerland. Since then a few others in the royal family came to Hema for their confinement.

Matron only had to ask, the minister said, if there was something the palace could do. The minister didn't touch on the manner of Sister's death, or the fate of the two babies.

“By the way, Matron …,” he said, and she was alert because she sensed this was the real reason for the call. “If by any chance a military … a senior officer comes to Missing for treatment, for surgery in the next day or so, the Emperor would like to be informed. You can call me personally.” He gave her a number.

“What sort of officer?”

She took the silence to mean the minister was giving thought to his answer.

“An Imperial Bodyguard officer. An officer who has—shall we say— no need to be at Missing.”

“Surgery, you say? Oh, no. We've closed the hospital. We have no surgeon, Minister. You see Dr. Thomas Stone … is indisposed. They were a team, you see …”

“Thank you, Matron. Please let us know.”

She mulled over the call after she hung up. Emperor Haile Selassie had built up a strong, modern military, consisting of army, navy, air force, and the Imperial Bodyguard. The Bodyguard was a force as large as the others, the equivalent of the Queen's Guard in England who stood outside Buckingham Palace. But just like the Queen's Guard, the Imperial Bodyguard wasn't merely a ceremonial unit; its professional soldiers and its units were no different than the rest of the armed forces, and trained for battle. Up-and-coming cadets from all the services went to Sandhurst or West Point or Poona. But those sojourns had a way of expanding one's social conscience. The Emperor feared a coup by these young officers. Having the second-or third-largest standing armed force on the continent was a matter of pride, but it was also potentially dangerous to his reign. The Emperor deliberately kept the four services in competition with one another, kept their headquarters far apart, and he transferred generals who were getting too powerful. Matron sensed some such intrigue—why else would the Minister of the Pen call personally?

The minister had no idea what it meant for Missing not to have a surgeon, Matron thought. Before Thomas Stone's arrival, Missing could handle most internal medicine and pediatric patients, thanks to Ghosh, and it tackled complicated obstetric and gynecologic conditions, thanks to Hema. Over the years a number of other doctors had come and gone, some of them capable of surgery. But Missing never had a fully trained and competent surgeon till Stone. A surgeon allowed Missing to fix complex fractures, remove goiters and other tumors, perform skin grafts for burns, repair strangulated hernias, take out enlarged prostates or cancerous breasts, or drill a hole in the skull to let out a blood clot pressing against the brain. Stone's presence (with an assistant like Sister Mary Joseph Praise) took Missing to a new level. His absence changed everything.

THE PHONE RANG again a few minutes later, and this time the sound was ominous. Matron brought the instrument gingerly to her ear. Please God, let Stone be alive.

“Hello? This is Eli Harris. Of the Baptist congregation of Houston … Hello?”

For a call from America, the connection was crystal clear. Matron was so surprised that she said nothing.

“Hello?” the voice said again.

“Yes?” Matron said gruffly.

“I'm speaking from the Ghion Hotel in Addis Ababa. Could I speak to Matron Hirst?”

She held the receiver away, covering the mouthpiece. She felt panicked. And confused. What on earth was Harris doing here? She was accustomed to dealing with donors and charitable organizations by mail. She needed to think quickly, but her mind refused to cooperate. At last, she took her hand away and brought the phone up. “I'll pass the message on, Mr. Harris. She will call you back—”

“May I know who is speaking—”

“You see, we have had a death of one of our staff. It might be a couple of days before she calls you.” He started to say something, but Matron hung up abruptly. Then she took the receiver off the hook, glaring at it, daring it to ring.

The Baptists of Houston were of late Missing's best and most consistent funders. Matron sent out handwritten letters every week to congregations in America and Europe. She asked that her letter be forwarded to others if they were unable to help. If a reply came expressing any interest, she immediately mailed them Thomas Stone's textbook, The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Medicine. Though expensive to mail, it was better than any prospectus. Donors, she found, always had a prurient interest in what could go wrong with the human body, and the photographs and illustrations (by Sister Mary Joseph Praise) in the book satisfied that desire. A picture of a strange creature with the face of a pig, the furriness of a dog, and with small, myopic eyes accompanied the chapter on appendicitis, and Matron always put her letter there as a bookmark. The legend read “The wombat is a burrowing, nocturnal marsupial found only in Australia, and the only reason to mention it is the dubious distinction it has in joining man and apes in ownership of an appendix.” The book, more than any exchange of letters, had won the Houston Baptists’ support.

Ghosh arrived half an hour later, shaking his head. “I went to the British Embassy. I drove around the city. I went to his house again. Rosina's there and she hasn't seen him. I walked all over Missing's grounds—”

“Let's take a ride,” Matron said.

As they drove down to Missing's gate, they saw a taxi coming up the hill carrying a white man. “That must be Eli Harris,” Matron said, sliding down in the passenger seat with an alacrity that surprised Ghosh. She told him about Harris's call. “If I remember correctly, I got Harris to fund a project that was your idea: a citywide campaign against gonorrhea and syphilis. Harris has come to see how we are doing.”

Ghosh almost steered them off the road. “But we have no such project, Matron!”

“Of course not.” Matron sighed.

Ghosh never looked his best in the morning, even after a bath and shave. He hadn't had time for either of these. Dark stubble swept up from his throat, detoured around his lips, and reached almost to his bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“To Gulele. We need to make funeral arrangements.”

They rode in silence.

THE GULELE CEMETERY was on the outskirts of town. The road cut through a forest where the dense overhanging canopy of trees made it feel like dusk. Suddenly the forbidding wrought-iron gates loomed before them, standing out against the limestone walls. Inside, a gravel road led up to a plateau thick with eucalyptus and pine. There were no taller trees in Addis than in Gulele.

They trudged between the graves, their feet crunching and crackling on the carpet of leaves and twigs. No urban sounds or voices were to be heard here; only the stillness of a forest and the quiet of death. A fine drizzle wet the leaves and branches, then gathered into big drops that plopped on their heads and arms. Matron felt like a trespasser. She stopped at a grave no larger than an altar Bible. “An infant, Ghosh,” she said, wanting to hear a living voice, even if it was only hers. “Armenian, judging by the name. Lord, she died just last year.” The flowers by the headstone were fresh. Matron began a Hail Mary under her breath.

Farther down were the graves of young Italian soldiers: NATO à ROMA, or NATO à NAPOLI, but no matter where they were born they were DECEDUTO AD ADDIS ABABA. Matron's vision turned misty as she thought of them having died so very far from home.

John Melly's face appeared to her, and she could hear “Bunyan's Hymn.” It was the hymn they had played at his funeral. At times the tune found her; the words came to her lips unbidden.

She turned to Ghosh, “You know I was in love once?”

Ghosh who already looked troubled, froze where he stood.

“You mean … with a man?” he said at last, when he could speak.

“Of course with a man!” She sniffed.

Ghosh was silent for a long time, then he said, “We imagine we know everything there is to know about our colleagues, but really how little we know.”

“I don't think I knew I loved Melly until he was dying. I was so young. Easiest thing in the world is to love a dying man.”

“Did he love you?”

“He must have. You see he died trying to save me.” Her eyes welled up. “It was in 1935. I'd just arrived in the country, and I couldn't have picked a worse time. The Emperor fled the city as the Italians were about to march in. The looters went to town, pillaging, raping. John Melly commandeered a truck from the British Legation to come and get me. You see, I was volunteering at what is now Missing. He stopped to help a wounded person on the street, and a looter shot him. For absolutely no reason.” She shuddered. “I nursed him for ten days, and then he died. One day I'll tell you all about it.” Then, uncontrollably, she had to sit down, her head in her hands, weeping. “I'm all right, Ghosh. Just give me a minute.”

She was mourning not Melly as much as the passage of the years. She'd come to Addis Ababa from England after getting restless teaching in a convent school and running the student infirmary; she'd accepted a post with Sudan Interior Mission to work in Harrar, Ethiopia. In Addis, she found her orders were canceled because the Italians had attacked, and so she had simply attached herself to a small hospital all but abandoned by the American Protestants. During that first year she'd watched as soldiers—some of the young men buried here—as well as Italian civilians poured in to populate the new colony: carpenters, masons, technicians. The peasant Florino became Don Florino when he crossed the Suez. The ambulance driver reinvented himself as a physician. She had carried on, just as the Indian shopkeepers, the Armenian merchants, the Greek hoteliers, the Levantine traders had carried on during the occu pation. Matron was still there in 1941, when the Axis's fortunes turned in North Africa and in Europe. From the Hotel Bella Napoli's balcony, Matron watched Wingate and his British troops parade into town, escorting Emperor Haile Selassie, who was returning after six years of exile. Matron had never set eyes on the diminutive Emperor. The little man seemed astonished by the transformation of his capital, his head swiveling this way and that to take in the cinemas, hotels, shops, neon lights, multistory apartment buildings, paved avenues lined with trees … Matron said to the Reuters correspondent standing beside her that perhaps the Emperor wished he'd stayed in exile a little longer. To her chagrin, she was quoted verbatim (but fortunately as an “anonymous observer”) in every foreign paper. She smiled at that memory.

She rose, brushed away her tears. The two of them trudged on.

They walked down the path between one row of graves, then back up another.

“No,” Matron said abruptly. “This'll never do. I can't imagine leaving our cherished daughter in this place.”

Only when they broke out into the sunlight did Matron feel she could breathe.

“Ghosh, if you bury me in Gulele, I'll never forgive you,” she said. Ghosh decided silence was the best strategy. “We Christians believe that in the Lord's Second Coming the dead will be raised from the grave.”

Ghosh was raised a Christian, a fact that Matron never seemed to remember.

“Matron, do you sometimes doubt?”

She noticed that his voice was hoarse. His eyelids sagged. She was reminded again that this was not her grief alone.

“Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. Our beloved Sister believed … I worry that in a place as damp and disconsolate as Gulele, even Sister will find it hard to rise when the time comes.”

“What then? Cremation?”

One of the Indian barbers doubled as a pujari and arranged cremations for Hindus who died in Addis Ababa.

“Of course not!” She wondered if Ghosh was being willfully dense. “Burial. I think I might know just the place,” Matron said.

THEY PARKED AT Ghosh's bungalow and walked to the rear of Missing, where the bottlebrush was so laden with flowers that it looked as if it had caught fire. The property edge was marked by the acacias, their flat tops forming a jagged line against the sky. Missing's far west corner was a promontory looking over a vast valley. That acreage as far as the eye could see belonged to a ras—a duke—who was a relative of His Majesty Haile Selassie.

A brook, hidden by boulders, burbled; sheep grazed under the eye of a boy who sat polishing his teeth with a twig, his staff near by. He squinted at Matron and Ghosh and then waved. Just as in the days of David, he carried a slingshot. It was a goatherd like him, centuries before, who had noticed how frisky his animals became after chewing a particular red berry. From that serendipitous discovery, the coffee habit and trade spread to Yemen, Amsterdam, the Caribbean, South America, and the world, but it had all begun in Ethiopia, in a field like this.

An unused bore well occupied this corner of Missing. Five years before, one of the Missing dogs had fallen into the well. Koochooloo's desperate yelps brought Gebrew. He fished her out by dangling a noose around her, almost lynching her in the process. The well needed to be sealed over. In supervising that task, Matron found used prophylactics and cigarette butts around the rock wall; she'd decided the area was in need of redemption. Coolies cleared the brush and planted native grass seedlings. In two months a beautiful green carpet surrounded the well. Gebrew tended to this lawn, squatting, crab walking, grabbing a fistful of grass with his left hand and sweeping under it with the sickle in his right hand.

It was Sister Mary Joseph Praise who identified the wild coffee bush by the well. But for Gebrew's regularly nipping the top buds, it would have grown out of reach. With a few old outpatient benches brought to this lawn it became a place where even Thomas Stone temporarily abandoned his cares. Cigarette in hand, mind adrift, hed smoke and watch while Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Matron fussed with their plants. But before too long he would grind his cigarette into the grass (a practice which Matron thought vulgar) and march off as if to some urgent summons.

Matron prayed silently. Dear God, only You know what will become of Missing now. Two of ours are gone. A child is a miracle, and we have two of those. But for Mr. Harris and his people, it wont be that. For them it would be shameful, scandalous, a reason to pull out. Missing had no income to speak of from patients. It relied on donations. Its modest expansion of the last few years came because of Harris and a few other donors. Matron had no rainy-day fund. It was against her conscience to hold back money when money allowed her to cure trachoma and to prevent blindness, or give penicillin and cure syphilis—the list was endless. What was she to do?

Matron studied the view in every direction. She wasn't registering what she saw because her thoughts were turned inward. But gradually, the valley, the scent of laurel, the vivid green colors, the gentle breeze, the way light fell on the far slope, the gash left by the stream, and above all this the sweep of sky with clouds pushed to one side—it had its effect on her. For the first time since Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death, Matron felt a sense of peace, a sense of certainty where there had been none. She was certain that this was the spot—this was where the long voyage of Sister Mary Joseph Praise would end. She remembered, too, how in her first days in Addis, when things had looked so bleak, so terrifying, so tragic with Melly's death—it was at those moments that God's grace came, and that God's plan was revealed, though it was revealed in His time. “I can't see it Lord, but I know You can,” she said.

13. Praise in the Arms of Jesus

THE BAREFOOT COOLIES were jovial men. Told by Ghosh what their task would be, they made clucking sounds of condolence. The big fellow with the prognathic jaw shed his fraying coat; his shorter companion pulled off his tattered sweater. They spat on their palms, hefted the pickaxes, and set to it; happened-had-happened and be-will-be as far as they were concerned, and though it was a grave they were digging, it guaranteed the night's bottle of tej or talla and perhaps a bed and a willing woman. Sweat oiled their shoulders and foreheads and dampened their patchwork shirts.

The sky had started off bluffing, convoys of gray clouds scurrying across like sheep to market. But by afternoon a perfect blue canopy stretched from horizon to horizon.

GHOSH, SUMMONED to the casualty room by Matron, spotted a lean and very pale white man waiting by a pillar. Ghosh kept his head down, certain this was Eli Harris, and thankful that the man's back was to him.

Inside, Adam pointed to a curtain. Ghosh heard regular grunting, coming with each breath and in the rhythm of a locomotive. He found four Ethiopian men standing there, three in sports coats and one in a burly jacket. They were gathered around the stretcher, as if in prayer. All four had spit-shined brown shoes. As they squeezed out to make room for Ghosh, he glimpsed a burgundy holster under a coat.

“Doctor,” the man lying on the table said, offering his hand and trying to rise, but wincing with the effort. “Mebratu is my name. Thank you for seeing me.” He was in his thirties, his English excellent. A thin mustache arched over a strong mouth. Pain had given him a peaked expression, but it was nevertheless an extraordinary, handsome face, the broken nose adding to its character. He looked familiar, but Ghosh couldn't place him. Unlike his companions, he seemed stoic, not fearful, even though he was the one in pain.

“I tell you, I have never hurt like this.” He grinned from ear to ear as if to say, A man is going along when out of the blue comes a banana peel, a cosmic joke that leaves you upended and clutching your belly. A wave of pain made him wince.

I can't possibly see you today. Beloved Sister has died and any minute I expect someone to tell me they have found Dr. Thomas Stone's body. For God's sake go to the military hospital. That was what Ghosh wanted to say, but in the face of such suffering he waited.

Ghosh took the proffered hand and while supporting it he felt for the radial artery. The pulse was bounding at one hundred and twelve per minute. Ghosh's equivalent of perfect pitch was to be able to tell the heart rate without a watch.

“When did this start?” he heard himself say, taking in the swollen abdomen that was so incongruent on this lean, muscled man. “Begin at the beginning …”

“Yesterday morning. I was trying to … move my bowels.” The patient looked embarrassed. “And suddenly I had pain here.” He pointed to his lower abdomen.

“While you were still sitting on the toilet?”

“Squatting, yes. Within seconds I could feel swelling … and tightening. It came on like a bolt of lightning.”

The assonance caught Ghosh's ear. In his mind's eye he could see Sir Zachary Cope's little book, The Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen in Rhyme. He'd found that treasure on the dusty shelf of a secondhand bookstore in Madras. The book was a revelation. Who knew that a medical text could be full of cartoon illustrations, be so playful, and yet provide serious instruction? Cope's lines regarding sudden blockage of the normal passage through the intestine came to him:

… rapid onset of distention

Will certainly attract your keen attention.

He asked the next question, even though he knew the answer. There were times like this when the diagnosis was written on the patient's forehead. Or else they gave it away in their first sentence. Or it was announced by an odor before one even saw the patient.

“Yesterday morning,” Mebratu replied. “Just before the pain began. Since then no stool, no gas, no nothing.”

Sometimes a bowel-coil gets out of place

By twisting round upon a narrow base …

“And how many enemas did you try?”

Mebratu let out a short sharp laugh. “You knew, huh? Two. But they did nothing.”

He wasn't just constipated but obstipated—not even gas could pass. The bowel was completely obstructed.

Outside the cubicle the men seemed to be arguing.

Mebratu's tongue was dry, brown, and furred. He was dehydrated, but not anemic. Ghosh exposed the grotesquely distended abdomen. The belly didn't push out when Mebratu took a breath. In fact it moved hardly at all. This is my work, Ghosh thought to himself as he pulled out his stethoscope. This is my grave-digging equivalent. Day in and day out. Bellies, chests, flesh.

In place of the normal gurgling bowel sounds, what he heard with his stethoscope was a cascade of high-pitched notes, like water dripping onto a zinc plate. In the background he heard the steady drum of the heartbeat. Astonishing how well fluid-filled loops of bowel transmitted heart sounds. It was an observation he'd never seen in a textbook.

“You have a volvulus,” Ghosh said, pulling his stethoscope off his ears. His voice came from a distance, and it didn't sound like it belonged to him. “A loop of the large bowel, the colon, twists on itself like this—” He used the tubing of his stethoscope to demonstrate first the formation of a loop, then the twist forming at the base. “It's common here. Ethiopians have long and mobile colons. That and something about the diet predisposes to volvulus, we think.”

Mebratu tried to reconcile his symptoms with Ghosh's explanation. His mouth turned up; he was laughing.

“You knew what I had as soon as I told you, right, Doctor? Before you did all these … other things.”

“I suppose I did.”

“So … will this twist untwist by itself?”

“No. It has to be untwisted. Surgically.”

“It's common, you say. My countrymen who get this … what happens to them?”

At that moment, Ghosh connected the face with a scene he wished he could forget.

“Without surgery? They die. You see, the blood supply at the base of the loop of bowel is also twisted off. It's doubly dangerous. There's no blood going in or out. The bowel will turn gangrenous.”

“Look, Doctor. This is a terrible time for this to happen.”

“Yes, it is a terrible time,” Ghosh burst out, startling Mebratu. “Why here, if I may ask? Why Missing? Why not the military hospital?”

“What else have you understood about me?”

“I know you're an officer.”

“Those clowns,” he said, nodding his chin in the direction of his friends outside. “We don't do a good job of dressing as civilians,” Mebratu said, wryly. “If their shoes aren't spit polished they feel naked.”

“It's more than that, actually. Years ago, shortly after I arrived here, I saw you conduct an execution. I'll never forget that.”

“Eight years and two months ago. July the fifth. I remember it, too. You were there?”

“Not intentionally.” A simple drive into the city had turned into something else when a large crowd on the road had forced him and Hema into being spectators.

“Please understand, it was the most painful order I ever carried out,” Mebratu said. “Those were my friends.”

“I sensed that,” Ghosh said, recalling the strange dignity of both the executioner and the condemned.

Another wave of pain traveled over Mebratu's face and they both waited till it passed. “This is a different kind of pain,” he said, trying to smile.

“You should know,” Ghosh said, “that earlier today the palace called. They asked Matron to inform them if a military person came here for treatment.”

“What?” Mebratu swore and tried to sit up, but the movement made him yell in pain. His companions rushed in. “Did Matron tell the palace?” he managed to ask.

“No. Matron told me she wouldn't turn you away knowing that you had nowhere else to go.”

The patient relaxed now. His friends had a quick discussion, and then they remained in the room.

“Thank you. Thank Matron for me. I am Colonel Mebratu, of the Imperial Bodyguard. You see we had plans, a few of us, to meet on this date in Addis. I came from Gondar. When I got here I found the meeting had to be called off. We feared we were … compromised. But I didn't get the message till I was already here. Before I left Gondar, yesterday, my pain began. I saw a physician there. Like you, he must have known what I had, but he told me nothing. He told me to come back and see him in the morning and that he wanted to check me again. He must have told the palace, or else why would they call the hospitals in Addis? Hanging will also be my fate if I am discovered in Addis. You must treat me. I can't be seen at the military hospital today.”

“There is another problem,” Ghosh said. “Our surgeon has … he has left.”

“We heard about your … loss. I am sorry. If Dr. Stone can't do it, then you have to.”

“But I can't—”

“Doctor, I have no other options. If you don't do it, I die.”

One of the men stepped forward. With his light beard, he looked more like an academic than a military man. “What if your life depended on it? Could you do it?”

Colonel Mebratu put his hand on Ghosh's sleeve. “Forgive my brother,” he said, then smiled at Ghosh as if to say, You see what I have to do to keep peace? Out loud he said: “If something should happen, you can say in good faith that you knew nothing about me, Dr. Ghosh. It's true. All you know about me are all the things you guessed.”

GHOSH DIALED Hema's quarters. It occurred to him that Colonel Mebratu and his men must have been plotting some kind of a coup. What else could the secret meeting in Addis have been about? Ghosh was faced with a conundrum: How did one treat a soldier, an executioner, who now was engaged in treason against the Emperor? But of course, as a physician, his obligation was to the patient. He felt no dislike for the Colonel, though he could do without the brother. It was difficult to dislike a man who bravely suffered physical pain and managed to retain his manners.

Over the hum of the receiver, Ghosh could hear the blood rushing into his ear with every heartbeat.

Hema's brusque “Hello” told him she was scowling. “It's me,” he said. “Do you know who I have here tonight?” He told her the story. She interrupted before he could finish: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Hema, did you hear what I just said? We have to operate. It's our duty.”

She wasn't impressed.

He added, “They're desperate. They have nowhere else to go. They have guns.”

“If they are so desperate, they can open the belly themselves. I am an obstetrician-gynecologist. Tell them I just had twins and I'm in no condition to operate.”

“Hema!” He was so mad that words would not come out. At least in the business of patient care, she was supposed to be on his side.

“Are you minimizing what I have on my hands?” she said. “What I've gone through just yesterday? You weren't there, Ghosh. So now these children's every breath is my responsibility.”

“Hema, I'm not saying …”

“You operate, man. You've assisted him with volvulus, haven't you? I've never operated on volvulus.” By “him” she meant Stone.

The silence was punctuated only by the sound of her breathing. Does she not care if I get shot? Why take this attitude with me? As if I'm the enemy. As if I caused the disaster she walked into when she returned. Did I invite the Colonel here?

“What if I have to resect and anastomose large bowel, Hema? Or do a colostomy? …”

“I'm postpartum. Indisposed. Out of station. Not here today!”

“Hema, we have an obligation, to the patient … the Hippocratic oath—”

She laughed, a bitter, cutting sound. “The Hippocratic oath is if you are sitting in London and drinking tea. No such oaths here in the jungle. I know my obligations. The patient is lucky to have you, that's all I can say. It's better than nothing.” She hung up.

GHOSH WAS an internal medicine specialist through and through. Heart failure, pneumonia, bizarre neurological illness, strange fevers, rashes, unexplained symptoms—those were his métier. He could diagnose common surgical conditions, but he wasn't trained to fix them in the operating theater.

In Missing's better days, whenever Ghosh popped his head into the theater, Stone would have him scrub and assist. It allowed Sister Mary Joseph Praise to relax, and for Ghosh, being the first assistant to Stone was a fun change from his routine. Ghosh's presence transformed the cathedral hush of Theater 3 to a carnival racket, and somehow Stone didn't seem to mind. Ghosh asked questions left and right, cajoling Stone into talking, instructing, even reminiscing. At night, Ghosh sometimes assisted Hema when she did an emergency C-section. Rarely, Hema sent for him when she performed an extensive resection for an ovarian or uterine cancer.

But now he found himself alone, standing in Stone's place, on the patient's right, scalpel in hand. It was a spot he hadn't occupied for many years. The last time he stood on the right was during his internship when, as a reward for good service, they let him operate on a hydrocele while the staff surgeon stood across and took him through each step.

On his instruction the circulating nurse passed a rectal tube into the anus, guiding it up as high as it would go.

“We better start,” he said to the probationer who was scrubbed, gowned, and gloved on the other side of the table, ready to assist him. Her faint pockmarks were hidden by cap and gown. Even though her lids were puffy, she had beautiful eyes. “We can't finish if we don't start so we better start if we're to finish, yes?”

A very large incision should be made

—of small ones in such cases be afraid—

The coil brought out, untwisted by a turn

—a clockwise turn as you will quite soon learn—

And then a rectal tube is upward passed—

Thereon there issues forth a gaseous blast …

With the colon swollen to Hindenburg proportions it would be all too easy to nick the bowel and spill feces into the abdominal cavity. He made a midline incision, then deepened it carefully, like a sapper defusing a bomb. Just when panic was setting in because he felt he was going nowhere, the glistening surface of the peritoneum—that delicate membrane that lined the abdominal cavity—came into view. When he opened the peritoneum, straw-colored fluid came out. Inserting his finger into the hole and using it as a backstop, he cut the peritoneum along the length of the incision.

At once, the colon bullied its way out like a zeppelin escaping its hangar. He covered the sides of the wound with wet packs, inserted a large Balfour retractor to hold the edges open, and delivered the twisted loop completely out of the wound onto the packs. It was as wide across as the inner tube of a car tire, boggy, dark, and tense with fluid, quite unlike the flaccid pink coils of the rest of the bowel. He could see the spot where the twist had occurred, deep in the belly. Gently manipulating the two limbs of the loop, he untwisted, clockwise, just as Cope said. He heard a gurgle and at once the blue color began to wash out of the ballooned segment. It pinked up at the edges.

He felt through the bowel wall for the rectal tube that Nurse Asqual had inserted. He fed it up like a curtain rod in a loop. When the tube reached the distended bowel, they were rewarded with a loud sigh and the rattle of fluid and gas hitting the bucket below. “And down the coil contracts and you will see, the parts arranged more as they ought to be,” Ghosh said, and the probationer, who had no idea what he was talking about, said, “Yes, Dr. Ghosh.”

Ghosh flexed his gloved fingers. They looked competent and powerful—a surgeon's hands. You can't feel this way, he thought, unless you have the ultimate responsibility.

AFTER HE CLOSED, as he was stripping off his gloves, he saw Hema's face in the glass of the swinging doors. It disappeared. He charged after her. She ran, but he soon caught up with her in the walkway. She stood panting against the pillar. “So?” she said when she could speak. “It went well?”

They were both grinning. “Yes … I just untwisted the loop.” He couldn't hide the pride and excitement in his voice.

“It could twist again.”

“Well, his choice was either me or nothing, since the other doctor here would not help.”

“True. Good for you. I've got to go. Almaz and Rosina are watching the babies.”

“Hema?”

“What?”

“You would have helped if I got into trouble?”

“No, I was just stretching my legs …” Despite herself, a twinkle showed in her eyes. “Silly. What did you think?”

With Hema, even sarcasm felt like a gift. He fought the instinct to jump forward, the eager puppy too ready to forget the cuffing it had received minutes before.

“Just yesterday,” Hema said, “I drove past the spot where we saw that first hanging, and I thought about it …” She seemed to study him meditatively “Have you eaten anything today?”

That was when he noticed: His beloved, his Madras-returned, unmarried beauty, was more magnified than ever. There were succulent rolls visible between sari and blouse. The skin under her chin was gently swollen like a second mons.

“I've not eaten since you left for India,” he said, which was almost true.

“You've lost weight. It doesn't look good. Come by and eat. There's food, tons of it. Everybody keeps bringing food.”

She walked off. He studied the way the flesh on her buttocks swung this way, and that, about to sail off her hips. She'd brought back from India more of herself to love. It was the worst time for this, but he was aroused.

He dressed and found himself thinking about the operation again. Should I have tacked the sigmoid colon to the abdominal wall to prevent it twisting again? Didn't I see Stone do this? Colopexy I think he called it. Had Stone spoken to me about the danger of a colopexy and warned against it, or had he recommended it? I hope we took out all the sponges. Should have counted once more. I should've taken one more look. Checked for bleeders while I was at it. He recalled Stone saying, When the abdomen is open you control it. But once you close it, it controls you. “I understand just what you mean, Thomas,” Ghosh said, as he walked out of the theater.

IT WAS LATE EVENING before the hospital staff gathered by the gaping cavity in the earth, now shored up with timber. There was no time to waste, because by Ethiopian tradition, no one eats till the body is interred. That meant the nurses and probationers were starving. The casket arrived on the shoulders of orderlies treading the same path down which Sister Mary Joseph Praise would come to sit in this grove. Hema trailed behind the pallbearers, walking with Stone's maid, Rosina, and with Ghosh's maid, Almaz, the three of them taking turns carrying the two infants who where bundled up in blankets.

They laid the casket down by the edge of the grave, and removed the lid. There were sobs and strangled cries as those who had yet to see the body pressed closer.

The nurses had dressed Sister Mary Joseph Praise in the clothes the young nun first donned when she pledged body and soul to Christ—her “bridal” dress. The arching, hooded veil was to show that her mind was not on earthly things but on the kingdom of heaven; it was the symbol of her being dead to the world, but in the gathering mist it was no longer a symbol. The starched guimpe around her neck hung down like a bib. Her habit was white, interrupted by a plaited white cord. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's hands emerged from the sleeves and met in the middle, the fingers resting on her Bible and a rosary. Discalced Carmelites originally shunned footwear—hence the term “discalced.” Sister Mary Joseph Praise's order had been practical enough to wear sandals. Matron had left her feet bare.

Matron chose not to call Father de la Rosa of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, because he was a man who had a disapproving manner even when there was nothing to disapprove, and there was plenty here. She almost called Andy McGuire from the Anglican church; he would have been a comfort and most willing. But in the end Matron felt that Sister Mary Joseph Praise would have wanted no one but her Missing family to see her off. The same instinct led Matron to ask Gebrew earlier that day to prepare to say a short prayer. Sister was always respectful of Gebrew, even though his being a priest was incidental to his duties as watchman and gardener; she would have appreciated how much it honored and consoled Gebrew to be called on in this fashion.

In the cool and very still air, Matron held up her hand. “Sister Mary Joseph Praise would have said, ‘Don't grieve for me. Christ is my salvation.’ That must be our consolation as well.” Matron lost her train of thought. What else was there? She nodded at Gebrew who was immaculately dressed in a white tunic extending to his knees, trousers underneath, and tightly coiled turban on his head. These were the ceremonial clothes he wore only on Timkat, the day of the Epiphany. Gebrew s liturgy was in ancient Biblical Geez, the official language of the Ethio pian Orthodox Church. With great effort, he kept his singsong recitation short. Then the nurses and probationers sang Sister Mary Joseph Praise's favorite hymn, one she had taught them and which they favored in morning chapel in the nurses’ hostel.

Jesus lives! Thy terrors now

Can no longer, death, appall us;

Jesus lives! By this we know

Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us.

Alleluia!

They all pushed forward, straining for a last look before the lid was nailed in place. Gebrew would say later that Sister Mary Joseph Praise's face glowed, her expression was peaceful, knowing her ordeal on earth was over. Almaz insisted that a lilac scent emerged as the lid went down.

Ghosh felt a message being conveyed to him. Sister seemed to be saying, Make good use of your time. Don't waste more years pursuing love that might never be reciprocated. Leave this land for my sake.

Hema, standing close, vowed silently to Sister Mary Joseph Praise that shed look after us as if we were her own.

With ropes under the casket, the coolies lowered Sister into her grave. The heavy stones required by Ethiopian tradition were handed down to the taller coolie whose feet were perched on either side of the coffin. The stones were to keep hyenas out.

At last the two men pushed the earth back to fill in the grave, the service all but over. All but the ululations.

Shiva and I, so new to life, were startled by that unearthly sound. We opened our eyes to contemplate a world in which so much was already amiss.

14. Knowledge of the Redeemer

THE DAY AFTER THE FUNERAL, Ghosh rose early. For a change his waking thoughts were not about Hema but about Stone. As soon as he was dressed, he went straight to Stone's quarters, but he found no sign that the occupant had returned. Deflated, he went to Matron's office. She looked up expectantly. He shook his head.

He was eager to see his postoperative patient and check his handiwork. He'd been a reluctant surgeon, but now the anticipation he felt was a revelation to him. It must have been a feeling Stone had regularly enjoyed. “This could be addictive,” he said to no one in particular.

He found Colonel Mebratu sitting on the edge of the bed, his brother helping him dress. “Dr. Ghosh!” Mebratu said, smiling like a man without a care in the world, though he was clearly in pain. “My status report: I passed gas last night, stool today. Tomorrow I will pass gold!” He was a man used to charming others, and even in his weakened state, his charisma was undiminished. For someone fewer than twenty-four hours out of surgery, he looked great. Ghosh examined the wound, and it was clean and intact.

“Doctor,” the Colonel said, “I must return to my regiment in Gondar today. I can't be gone for much longer. I know it's too soon, but I don't have a choice. If I don't show my face I will be under even deeper suspicion. You don't want to save my life only for me to be hanged. I can arrange for intravenous fluids at home, whatever you say.”

Ghosh had opened his mouth to protest, but he realized he could not insist.

“All right. But listen, there is a real hazard of the wound bursting if you strain. I'll give you morphine. You must travel lying flat. We'll arrange intravenous fluids, and tomorrow you can sip water and then clear liquids the next. I will write it all down. You will need the stitches removed in about ten days.” The Colonel nodded.

The bearded brother clasped Ghosh's hand and bowed low, muttering his thanks.

“Will you travel with him?” Ghosh said.

“Yes, of course. We have a van coming. Once he is settled, I'll go to my new posting in Siberia.” Ghosh looked puzzled. “I am being banished.”

“Are you also in the military?” Ghosh said.

“No, as of this moment, I am nothing, Doctor. I am nobody.”

Colonel Mebratu put his hand on his brother's shoulder. “My brother is modest. Do you know he has a master's degree in sociology from Columbia? Yes, he was sent to America by His Imperial Majesty. The Old Man wasn't happy when my brother was attracted by the Marcus Garvey Movement. He didn't let him pursue a Ph.D. He summoned him back to be a provincial administrator. He should have let him finish.”

“No, no, I came willingly,” the brother said. “I wanted to help my people. But for that I am off to Siberia.” Ghosh waited, expecting more.

“Tell him why,” the Colonel said. “It's a health matter, after all.”

The brother sighed. “The Health Ministry built a public health clinic in our former province. His Imperial Majesty came to cut the ribbon. Half my budget for the district was consumed to make everything look good along His Majesty's route. Paint, fences, even a bulldozer to tear down huts. As soon as he left, the clinic closed.”

“Why?”

“The budget for the clinic was spent!”

“Did you not protest?”

“Of course! But no replies to my messages. The Health Minister intercepted them. So, I reopened the health center myself. It took about ten thousand birr. I got a missionary doctor in a town fifty miles away to come once a week. I had a retired army nurse doing dressings, and I found a midwife to move there. I got supplies. The local bootlegger gave me a generator. The people loved me. The Health Minister wanted to kill me. The Emperor summoned me to Addis.”

“How did you get the money?” Ghosh asked.

“Bribes! People would bring over a big injera basket, with more money in it than Injera. When I used the bribes for a good purpose, they gave me more bribes because they were worried that I would expose them.”

“You told this to His Majesty?”

“Ah! But that is complicated. Everyone is whispering in his ear. ‘Your Majesty,’ I said, when I got my audience. ‘The health center needs a budget to keep going.’ He acted surprised.”

“He knew,” the Colonel interjected.

“He heard me out. Those eyes give away nothing. When I was done, His Majesty whispers to Abba Hanna, the Minister of the Purse. Abba Hanna scribbles in the record. And the other ministers, have you seen them? They are in a state of constant terror. They never know if they are in their master's favor or not.

“His Majesty thanks me for my service to that province, et cetera, et cetera, and then I bow and bow and walk backward. I meet the Minister of the Purse at the rear of the room, and he gives me three hundred birr! I need thirty thousand, or even three hundred thousand, I could use. For all I know the Emperor said one hundred thousand and Abba Hanna decided it was worth only three hundred. Or was three hundred the Emperor's idea? And who do you ask? By then, the next petitioner is telling his story, and the Minister of the Purse is running back to take his position near the Emperor.

“I tried to shout from the back of the room, Your Majesty, did the minister make a mistake?’ My friends dragged me away—”

“Otherwise you wouldn't be around to tell us this story,” the Colonel said. “My foolhardy brother.”

The Colonel turned serious, his eyes on Ghosh as he took Ghosh's hand in both of his. “Dr. Ghosh. You're a better surgeon than Stone. A surgeon in hand is worth two who are gone.”

“No, I was lucky. Stone is the best.”

“I thank you for something else. You see, I was in terrible pain all the way from Gondar to here. The journey going back is going to be easy by comparison. The pain was … I knew whatever this was would get worse, would kill me. But I had options. I came to you. When you told me that for my fellow countrymen, if they have to suffer this, they simply die …” The Colonel's face turned hard, and Ghosh could not be sure if it was anger or if he was holding back tears. He cleared his throat. “It was a crime to close my brother's health center. When I came to Addis Ababa for this meeting with my … colleagues, I was prepared to listen. But I wasn't sure. You could say my motives were suspect. If I wanted to be part of a change, was it for the best of reasons, or just to grab power? I'm telling you things you can never repeat, Doctor, do you understand?”

Ghosh nodded.

“My journey, my pain, my operation …,” the Colonel went on, “God was showing me the suffering of my people. It was a message. How we treat the least of our brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus, that's the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks, or how big the Emperor's palace happens to be. I think God put you in my path.”

Later, when they had left, Ghosh realized how he'd been so predisposed to dislike Colonel Mebratu, but the opposite had happened. Conversely, as an expatriate, it was easy to project benevolent qualities on to His Majesty. Now he was less sure.

MR. ELIHU HARRIS was dressed all wrong. That was the first thing Matron noticed when he closed the door behind him and stepped up to her desk and introduced himself. He had every right to be annoyed, having visited Missing on the two previous days without meeting Matron. Instead, he seemed grateful to see her, worried about intruding on her time.

“I had no idea you were coming, Mr. Harris,” Matron said presently. “Under any other circumstance, it would have been a pleasure. But you see, yesterday, we buried Sister Mary Joseph Praise.”

“You mean …” Harris swallowed hard. His mouth opened and closed. He saw such sorrow in Matron's eyes, and he was embarrassed to have overlooked it. “You mean … the young nun from India? … Thomas Stone's assistant?”

“The very same. As for Thomas Stone, he has left. Vanished. I am very worried about him. He is a distraught man.”

Harris had a pleasant face, but his overdeveloped upper lip and uneven front teeth left him just short of handsome. He fidgeted in his chair. He was doubtless yearning to ask how all this had happened, but he didn't. Matron understood he was the sort of man who, even when he had the upper hand, didn't know how to press for his rights. As he stood before her, his soft brown eyes reluctant to engage, her heart softened to him.

So Matron told Harris everything, a rush of simple sentences that were weighed down by what they conveyed. When she was finished, she said, “Your visit comes when we are at our worst.” She blew her nose. “So much of what we did at Missing revolved around Thomas Stone. He was the best surgeon in the city. He never knew that it was because of the people he operated on in the royal family, in the government, that we were allowed to go on. The government makes us pay a hefty annual fee for the privilege of serving here, can you imagine? They could if they want simply close us down. Mr. Harris, even your giving us money was because of his book … This might be the end of Missing.”

As Matron talked, Harris sank farther back in the chair, as if someone had a foot on his chest. He had a nervous habit of patting his cowlick, even though it was not in danger of falling.

There are people in the world who were cursed by bad timing, Matron thought. People whose cars break down on the way to their wedding, or whose Brighton holiday is invariably ruined by rain, or whose crowning day of private glory is overshadowed by and forever remembered as the day King George VI died. Such people vexed the spirit, and yet one was moved to pity because they were helpless. It wasn't Harris's fault that Sister had died or Stone had disappeared. Yet there he was.

If Harris wanted an accounting of money, she had nothing to show him. Matron submitted progress reports under duress, and since what donors wanted to spend on had no link to the reality of Missing's needs, her reports were a form of fiction. She'd always known a day like this would come.

Harris choked, then coughed. When he recovered, with much throat clearing and fumbling with his handkerchief, he came indirectly to his business with Matron. But it wasn't what Matron imagined it would be.

“You were right about our plan to fund a mission for the Oromo, Matron,” Harris said. Matron faintly recalled a mention of this in a letter. “The doctor in Wollo sent me a telegram. The police have occupied the building. The district governor will do nothing to evict them. The supplies are being sold. The local church has been preaching against us, saying we are the devils! I had to come to straighten things out.”

“Pardon me for being blunt, Mr. Harris, but how could you have funded it sight unseen?” She felt a pang of guilt as she said this, since Harris hadn't seen Missing till now. “If I recall, I wrote to say that it was unwise.”

“It's my fault,” Harris said, wringing his hands. “I prevailed on my church steering committee … I haven't told them yet,” Harris said, almost in a whisper. Clearing his throat and finding his voice he added, “My intentions …, I hope the committee will understand, were good. We … I hoped to bring knowledge of the Redeemer to those who do not have it.”

Matron let out an exasperated sigh. “Did you think they were all fire worshippers? Tree worshippers? Mr. Harris, they are Christians. They are no more in need of redemption than you are in need of a hair straightening cream.”

“But I feel it's not true Christianity. It's a pagan sort of …,” he said, and patted his forehead.

“Pagan! Mr. Harris, when our pagan ancestors back in Yorkshire and Saxony were using their enemies’ skulls as a plate to serve food, these Christians here were singing the psalms. They believe they have the Ark of the Covenant locked up in a church in Axum. Not a saint's finger or a pope's toe, but the Ark! Ethiopian believers put on the shirts of men who had just died of the plague. They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life, of finding salvation. That,” she said, tapping the table, “is how much they thirsted for the next life.” She couldn't help what she said next. “Tell me, in Dallas, do your parishioners hunger like that for salvation?”

Harris had turned red. He looked around as if for a place to hide. But he wasn't completely done. Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.

“It's actually Houston, not Dallas,” he said softly. “But, Matron, the priesthood here is almost illiterate—Gebrew, your watchman, doesn't understand the litany that he recites because it is in Geez, which no one speaks. If he holds to the Monophysite doctrine that Christ had only a divine nature, not a human one, then—”

“Stop! Mr. Harris, do stop,” Matron said, covering her ears. “Oh, how you vex me.” She came around the table, and Harris drew back as if he worried that she might box his ears. But Matron walked to the window.

“When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?”

Matron leaned her head on the windowpane.

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—”by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

The sight of that plain, weathered face pressed against the glass, the wet cheeks, the interlocking fingers … it was for Harris more powerful than anything she had said. Here was a woman who could give up the restrictions of her order when it stood in the way. From her lips had come the kind of fundamental truth which, because of its simplicity, was unspoken in a church like Harris's where internecine squabbling seemed to be the purpose for the committee's existence, as well as a manifestation of faith. It was a small blessing that an ocean separated the doers like Matron from their patrons, because if they rubbed shoulders they'd make each other very uncomfortable.

Harris stared at the stack of Bibles by the wall. He hadn't seen them when he first walked in.

“We have more English Bibles than there are English speaking people in the entire country.” Matron had turned from the window and followed his gaze. “Polish Bibles, Czech Bibles, Italian Bibles, French Bibles, Swedish Bibles. I think some are from your Sunday-school children. We need medicine and food. But we get Bibles.” Matron smiled. “I always wondered if the good people who send us Bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.”

“I am embarrassed,” Harris said.

“No, no, no. Please! People here love these Bibles. They're the most valuable thing a family can possess. Do you know what Emperor Mene-lik, who ruled before Haile Selassie, did when he fell ill? He ate pages of the Bible. I don't think it helped. This is a land where paper—worketu— is much valued. Did you know that among the poor, marriage consists simply of writing two names on a piece of paper? And to divorce, why you just tear up the paper. Priests will give out pieces of paper with verses on them. The paper is folded over again and again until it is a tiny square and then these are wrapped in leather and worn around the neck.

“I was happy to give away Bibles. But the Interior Minister saw it as proselytizing. ‘How can it be proselytizing when no one can read? Besides it is the same faith as yours,’ I said. But the minister disagreed. So now the Bibles pile up, Mr. Harris. They breed in the toolshed like rabbits. They spill over into our storerooms and into my office. We use them as support for bookshelves. Or to paper the walls of the chikka huts. Anything at all, really!”

She walked over to the door and beckoned him to join her outside. “Let's take a walk,” she said. “Look,” Matron said when they were in the hallway, pointing to a sign above a door: OPERATING THEATER 1. The room was a closet, jammed full of Bibles. Wordlessly she pointed to another room across the way which Harris could see was a storeroom for mops and buckets. The sign above it read OPERATING THEATER 2. “We have only one theater. We call it Operating Theater 3. Judge me harshly, if you will, Mr. Harris, but I take what I am given in God's name to serve these people. And if my donors insist on giving me another operating theater for the famous Thomas Stone, when what I need are catheters, syringes, penicillin, and money for oxygen tanks so I can keep the single theater going, then I give them their operating theater in name.”

At the steps of the Missing outpatient department the bougainvillea was in full bloom, concealing the pillars of the carport so that the roof appeared to be cantilevered.

A man hurried by, bundled in a heavy white wrap over a ragged military overcoat. His white turban and the monkey-mane fly-swish in his hand made him stand out.

“That's the very Gebrew we were talking about,” Matron said as Gebrew spotted them and stopped and bowed. “Servant of God. And watchman. And … one of our bereaved.”

Harris was surprised at Gebrew's relative youth. In one of her letters, Matron wrote of a Harrari girl of twelve or thirteen who had been brought in, moribund, a cut umbilical cord trailing out from between her legs. She had given birth a few days before, but there had been no afterbirth; the placenta wouldn't budge. The family had traveled by mule and bus for two days to get to Missing. And as Gebrew, in his compassion, lifted the poor girl out of the gharry, she screamed. Gebrew, instrument of God, had inadvertently stepped on the trailing umbilical cord, causing the placenta to break free. The little girl was cured even before she crossed the threshold of the casualty room.

Harris shivered in a sleeveless cotton shirt, his eyeballs oscillating, his fingers tugging at his collar, then adjusting a pith helmet which Matron didn't realize he had with him.

Matron walked him through the children's ward, which was no more than a room painted bright lavender with infants on high beds with metal rails. The mothers camped out on the floor beside the beds. They jumped up at the sight of Matron and bowed. “That child has tetanus and will die. This one has meningitis, and if he lives he might well be deaf or blind. And its mother”—she said, affectionately putting her arm around a waiflike woman—”by staying at Missing night and day is neglecting her three other children. Lord, we've had a child back home fall into a well, get gored by a bull, and even kidnapped while the mother was here. The humane thing is to tell her to go home, to take the child home.”

“Then why is she here?”

“Look at how anemic she is! We are feeding her. We give her the child's portions, which the child can't eat, as well as her portion, and I've asked them to give her an egg every day, and she is getting an iron injection and medicine for hookworm. In a few days we'll find her bus fare and then send her home with this child if he is alive. But at least she'll be healthier, better able to look after the other children … Now this child is awaiting surgery …”

In the male ward, which was long and narrow and held forty people, she kept up her recitation. The patients who could tried to sit up to greet them. One man was comatose, his mouth open, his eyes unseeing. Another sat leaning forward on a special pillow, struggling mightily to breathe. Two men, side by side, had bellies swollen to the size of ripe pregnancy.

“Rheumatic heart valve damage, nothing we can do … and these two fellows have cirrhosis,” Matron explained.

Harris was struck by how little it took to nurture and sustain life. A huge chunk of bread in a chipped basin and a giant battered tin cup of sweetened tea—that was breakfast and lunch. Very often, as he could see, this feast was being shared with the family members squatting by the bed.

When they emerged from the ward, Matron stopped to catch her breath. “Do you know that at this moment we have funds for three days, that's all? Some nights I go to sleep with no idea of how we can open in the morning.”

“What will you do?” Harris asked, but then he realized he knew the answer.

Matron smiled, her eyes almost disappearing as her cheeks pushed up, giving her a childlike quality. “That's right, Mr. Harris. I pray. Then I take it out of the building fund or whatever fund has money. The Lord knows my predicament, or so I tell myself. He must approve the transfer. What we are fighting isn't godlessness—this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. It's poverty. Money for food, medicines … that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.”

Harris's anxiety about the steering committee had all but gone.

“I'll confess, Mr. Harris, that as I get older, my prayers aren't about forgiveness. My prayers are for money to do His work.” She reached out for his hand and held it in both of hers, patting it. “Do you know, dear man, that in my darkest moments, you have so often been the answer to my prayers?”

Matron felt she had said enough. It was a gamble. She had nothing to put on the table but the truth.

15. Crookedness of the Serpent

THE NEWBORNS SEEMED UNREAL to Ghosh, all noses and wrinkles, as if they'd been planted in Hema's house, a lab experiment gone awry. Ghosh tried to make appropriate noises and act interested, but he found himself resenting the attention they were getting.

It was five days since Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death. He had stopped by Hema's house in the early evening before setting out to look for Stone. He'd found his Almaz there, very much at home, immersed in the task of caring for the babies, barely registering his presence. The last few days, he had been forced to make his own coffee and heat his own bathwater. Matron, Sister Asqual, Rosina, and several nursing students were there, too, fussing over the newborns. Rosina, with nothing to occupy her now that Thomas Stone was gone, had also moved over to Hema's. No one noticed when he left Hema's bungalow.

He drove first to the Ghion and the Ras hotels, then to the police headquarters where he sought out a sergeant he knew. The man had no news for him. He drove through the Piazza from one end to the other, and then, after a beer at St. George's, decided it was time to go home. His plans to leave had solidified. He had an airline ticket to Rome, then on to Chicago, leaving in four weeks. By that time, perhaps things at Missing would have settled. He couldn't see himself staying on, not now, not with Stone gone and Sister dead. But he had yet to find the courage to tell Matron or Almaz—or Hema.

It was dark when he pulled into his carport. He saw Almaz squatting by the back wall, wrapped against the cold so only her eyes showed. She was waiting for him just as she had the night Sister Mary Joseph Praise had died.

“Oh God. What now?”

She came to the passenger door, yanked it open, and climbed in. “Is it Stone?” he said. “What happened?”

“Where have you been? No, it's not Stone. One of the babies stopped breathing. Let's go to Dr. Hema's bungalow.”

THE BLUE NIGHT-LIGHT made Hema's bedroom seem surreal, like a set for a movie. Hema was in a nightdress, her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders. He found it difficult to look away.

The two newborns were on the bed, their chests rising and falling evenly, eyes closed, and their faces peaceful.

Turning back to Hema, he saw she was trembling, her lips quivering. He put his hands out, palms up, asking what had happened. By way of an answer, she flew into his arms.

He held her.

In the years he had known her, he'd seen her happy, angry, sad, and even depressed but, underneath, always feisty. He had never seen her fearful; it was as if she'd become some other person.

He tried to lead her outside of the room, his arm still around her shoulder, but she resisted. “No,” she whispered. “We can't leave.”

“What's going on?”

“I happened to be looking at them just after I put them to bed. I saw Marion breathing evenly. But Shiva …” She sobbed now, as she pointed to the child with the dressing on his scalp. “I saw his stomach rise, then it went down as he exhaled … and then nothing. I watched as long as I could. ‘Hema, you are imagining things,’ I said. But I could see him turning blue, even in this light, especially when I compared his color with Marion's. I touched him, and his arms shot out as if he was falling, and he took a deep breath. His fingers curled around my finger. He was saying, Don't leave me. He was breathing again. Oh, my Shiva. If I hadn't been standing there … he'd be gone by now.”

She sobbed into her hands, which rested on his chest. Ghosh held her, her tears making his shirt damp. He didn't know what to say. He hoped she didn't smell beer. In a moment, she pulled away, and they stood arm in arm, Almaz just behind them, gazing at Shiva.

Why had Hema taken on the naming of the babies? It felt premature. He couldn't get his lips around the names. Were the names negotiable? What if Thomas Stone showed up? And why name the child of a nun and an Englishman after a Hindu god? And for the other twin, also a boy, why Marion? Surely it was temporary, until Stone came to his senses, or the British Embassy or someone made arrangements. Hema was acting as if the kids were hers.

“Did it happen more than once?” he asked.

“Yes! Once more. About thirty minutes later. Just when I was about to turn away. He exhaled … and stopped. I made myself wait. Surely he has to breathe. I held back until I couldn't stand it any longer. When I touched him he started breathing as if hed been waiting for that little push, as if he forgot. I've been here for the last three hours, too scared to even go to the loo. I didn't trust anyone else to watch, and besides I could not quite explain it to them … Thank God Almaz decided to stay to help me with the night feeds. I sent her to get you,” Hema said.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I'll watch them.”

She was back in no time. “What do you think?” she said, leaning against his arm as she dabbed her eyes with a hankie. “Shouldn't you listen to his lungs? He wasn't coughing or struggling.”

Ghosh, finger to chin, his eyes narrowing, studied the child quietly. After a long while he said, “I'll examine him thoroughly when he is awake. But I think I know what it is.”

The way she looked at him made his heart swell. This wasn't the Hema who reacted to everything he said with skepticism. “In fact, I'm sure. Apnea of the premature. It's well described. You see, his brain is still immature, and the respiratory center, which triggers each breath, isn't fully developed. He ‘forgets’ to breathe every now and then.”

“Are you sure it isn't something else?” She wasn't challenging him; like any mother, she wanted certainty from the doctor.

He nodded. “I'm sure. You were lucky. Usually apnea is fatal before anyone recognizes it.”

“Don't say that. Oh God. What can we do, Ghosh?”

He was about to tell her that there was nothing one could do. Nothing at all. If the child was lucky, it might outgrow the apnea in a few weeks. The only choice was to put these preemies on machines that breathed for them till their lungs matured. Even in England and America this was rarely done. At Missing it was out of the question.

She waited for his pronouncement. She had suspended her own breathing.

“Here is what we do,” he said, and she sighed. He was making this up. He didn't know if his plan would work. But he knew he did not have the heart to say there was nothing to be done.

“Get me a chair. One of those from the living room. Also give me some of your anklets and a pair of pliers. And some thread or twine. A clipboard or a notebook if you have one. And tell Almaz to make coffee. The strongest she can make and as much of it as she can make and tell her to fill up the thermos flask.”

This new Hema, the adoptive mother of the twins, rose at once to do his bidding, never asking why or how. He watched her dance away.

“If I knew you were that agreeable Id have asked for a cognac and a foot massage as well,” he muttered to himself. “And if this doesn't work … at least I'll have my bags packed.”

GHOSH SAT IN THE CHAIR, sipping coffee, a string wrapped around his finger, and the house silent around him. It was two in the morning. The other end of the string connected to one of Hema's anklets which he'd cut in half and looped around Shiva's foot. The tiny silver bells dangling from the anklet made a pleasant cymbal-like sound when the foot moved.

He had strapped his wristwatch to the arm of his chair. On the first page of an exercise book, he made vertical columns labeled with date and time. Shiva stirred in his sleep; the anklet sounding reassuringly. Earlier, they had fed the twins, adding one drop of coffee to Shiva's bottle. It was Ghosh's hope that caffeine, a nervous-system stimulant and irritant, would keep the respiratory center ticking. It had clearly made the infant more restless than his identical twin.

Hema slept on the sofa in the far corner of the living room, which was just beyond this bedroom. A floor lamp with a shade that they moved to Hema's room gave him light to see the page.

Ghosh studied the walls. A little girl in pigtails and a half sari stood between two adults. A framed picture of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, handsome and pensive, one finger on his cheek, hung opposite Ghosh's chair. He'd imagined Hema's bedroom would be neat, everything in its place. Instead, there were clothes spilling off the bed rail, a suitcase open on the floor, more clothes piled in the corner, and books and papers stacked on a chair. And just inside the bedroom door he noticed for the first time was a crate the size of a sideboard. She did it, he thought, as he leaned closer to read the writing on the outside. A Grundig, no less. The best money can buy. His own gramophone and radio had conked out a few months before.

Periodically he would glance at the child, make sure the little chest was moving. After what felt like half an hour, he yawned, looked at his watch, and was astonished to find that only seven minutes had passed. My God, this is going to be difficult, he thought. He finished his cup of coffee and poured a second.

He stood and circled the room. On one shelf was a bound set of books. GREAT WORLD CLASSICS SERIES was stamped in a gold imprint. He picked one volume and sat down. The book was beautifully bound, in a leathery cover, and had gold-trimmed pages that looked as if they had never been opened.

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, he went to wake Hema. In sleep she looked like a little girl, both hands together and tucked under one cheek. He gently shook her, and she opened her eyes, saw him, and smiled. He held out the cup of coffee.

“My turn?” He nodded. She sat up. “Did he stop breathing?”

“Twice. There was no doubt about it.”

“God. Oh God. I wasn't imagining it, was I? We're so lucky I saw that first one.”

“Drink this, then wash your face and come to the bedroom.”

When she returned he gave her the thread running to the anklet, the notebook with the pen clipped to it. “Whatever you do, don't lie on the bed. Stay in this chair. It's the only way to stay awake. I've been reading, which really helps. I look up at the end of every page. If I hear the anklet move, then I don't look up and I keep reading. When he stopped breathing, I tugged at the anklet and he started right back up. Little fellow just forgets to breathe.”

“Why should he have to remember? Poor baby.”

HEMA HAD HARDLY SETTLED in the chair when she heard a strange noise. It took her a second to realize that it was the sound of Ghosh snoring. She tiptoed to where he was on the sofa, dead to the world, looking like a big teddy bear. She covered him with the blanket which had slipped to the floor, and she returned to her vigil. The snoring reassured her. It told her she was not alone. She picked up the book Ghosh had been reading.

She'd bought the set of twelve books from a staffer at the British Embassy who was returning home. She was ashamed not to have read even one. Ghosh had put a bookmark on page ninety-two. Had he really come that far? Why did he pick this book? She turned to the first page:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

She read that opening sentence three times before she understood what it might be about. She looked at the title of the book. Middlemarch. Why couldn't the writer be clear? She read on, only because Ghosh had managed to keep reading. Little by little, she found herself immersed in the story.

THE NEXT MORNING, as Ghosh made rounds, he wondered if the Colonel made it back to his garrison in Gondar without incident. If the Colonel had been arrested, or hanged, would news ever reach Missing? The Ethiopian Herald never wrote about treason, as if it were treasonable to report treason.

After looking in on his patients, Ghosh unearthed an incubator from one of the storage sheds behind Matron's bungalow. Ghosh was Missing's de facto pediatrician. In the early years he'd fashioned an incubator for premature babies. After the Swedish government opened a pediatric hospital in Addis Ababa, Missing sent all the very premature babies there and put the incubator away.

Despite its delicate construction with glass on four sides and a tin base, the incubator was still intact. He had Gebrew hose it off, dust it for fleas, put it in the sunlight for a few hours, then rinse it again with hot water. Ghosh wiped it down with alcohol before setting it up in Hema's bedroom. No sooner had he stepped back to admire it than Almaz walked around it three times making thew-thew sounds, stopping short of actually spitting. “To ward off the evil eye,” she explained in Amharic, wiping her lip with the back of her forearm.

“Remind me never to invite you into the operating theater,” Ghosh said in English. “Hema?” he said, hoping she would weigh in. “Antisepsis? Lister? Pasteur? Are you no longer a believer?”

“You forget I am postpartum, man,” she said. “Warding off spirits is much more important.”

The twins lay swaddled next to each other like larvae, sharing the incubator, their skulls covered with monkey caps and only their wizened, newborn faces showing. No matter how far apart Hema put them, when she came to them again, they would be in a V, their heads touching, facing each other, just as they had been in the womb.

SOME NIGHTS as he took his shift by the sleeping infant, exhausted, fighting sleep, he talked to himself. “Why are you here? Would she do this for you?” The old resentments made his jaw tighten. “You silly bugger, you allowed yourself to succumb to her spell again?” Why did he lack the willpower to say what must be said?

He told himself that once the infant, this Shiva, was over its breathing problem, he would leave. Knowing Hema, when she no longer had to rely on him, things would be back to where they had always been. Since Harris's visit, it was unclear if the Houston Baptists would continue their support. Matron wouldn't give her opinion.

For two weeks he and Hema kept a vigil over Shiva, getting help in the daytime, but reserving the night for themselves. They had finished Middlemarch in a week and it had given them plenty to discuss. He picked Zola's Three Cities Trilogy: Paris next, and that they both found absorbing. Shiva's episodes of apnea decreased from more than twenty a day to two a day and then ceased. They extended their vigil into a third week, just to be on the safe side.

Hema's sofa was too small for a man of Ghosh's proportions, and seeing him scrunched up there, she felt grateful to him and conscious of his sacrifice. It would have surprised her to know how much he relished occupying the space that she'd just vacated, and covering himself with a blanket still scented with her dreams. The jingling of Shiva's ankle bracelet filtered into his sleep, and one night he dreamed that Hema was dancing for him. Naked. It was so vivid, so real, that the next morning, he hurried to Cook's Travel, waited till they opened, and canceled his ticket to America. He did it before he had any coffee—or a chance to second-guess himself.

MATRON WAS INCREASINGLY STOOPED, her face more weathered in the aftermath of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death. She spent her evenings at Hema's—everybody did—but she didn't protest when Ghosh and Hema sent her back to her quarters by eight, accompanied by Koochooloo. That dog had become protective of Matron, and since the other two nameless dogs often followed Koochooloo, Matron had an entourage with her.

Two weeks after they buried Sister, Gebrew saw a barefoot coolie walk by with his right arm in a long cast, the elbow straight at his side. Worse still, the man was so sleepy he staggered and was in danger of breaking his head, not to mention his other arm. Gebrew felt terrible because it was he who had directed the coolie to the Russian hospital when he showed up at Missing with a fracture. The Russian doctors loved injecting barbiturates no matter what ailed you, and since their patients loved the needle, no one left the Russian hospital unsedated. Gebrew knew from his years at Missing that a broken forearm had to be cast in a neutral and functional position, with the elbow flexed to ninety degrees, the forearm midway between pronation and supination, even though he knew none of those terms. He escorted the unsteady coolie to the casualty room where, after Ghosh looked at the X-ray, the orderlies reapplied the cast. At that moment, though none of them quite realized it, Missing officially reopened for business.

Hema refused to leave the infants. She claimed she was no longer a doctor, but a mother. She was the kind of mother who was fearful for her children, who loved being with them and was unwilling to part from them. The two mamithus—Stone's Rosina and Ghosh's Almaz—took turns sleeping on a mattress in her kitchen, and were ready to help.

With Stone gone or dead, and Hema a full-time mother, once the gates opened, the burden on Ghosh was huge. Matron hired Bachelli to run the morning outpatient clinics where the great majority of Missing's patients were seen. This allowed Ghosh the freedom to operate when he could, and to concentrate on the patients admitted to the hospital.

SIX WEEKS AFTER Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death, the gravestone arrived, hauled up by donkey cart. Hema and Ghosh went to see it levered into place. The mason had carved a Coptic cross on the stone. Below it he had etched letters he copied from the paper Matron had given him:

Matron arrived, short of breath and agitated. The three of them stood there, studying the strange lettering. The mason looked on, hoping for a commendation. Matron let out a sigh of exasperation.

“I don't suppose he can do much about that now,” Matron said, and gave the man a nod. He gathered his crowbars and gunnysacks and led his animal away.

“I was thinking,” Hema said, her voice hoarse. “That inscription should read, ‘Died at the hands of a surgeon. Now safe in the arms of Jesus.’ “

“Hema!” Matron protested. “Custody of the tongue.”

“No, really,” Hema said. “A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.”

“Sister Mary Joseph Praise is covered in the soil of the land she came to love,” Matron said, hoping to put a stop to this kind of talk.

“Put there by a surgeon,” said Hema who had to have the last word.

“Who has now left the country,” Matron said.

They turned to look at her, mouths open.

Matron said, apologetically, “I got a call from the British Consulate. That's why I was late. From what I can piece together, Stone went to the Kenyan border, then to Nairobi, don't ask me how. He's in bad shape. Drink, I presume. The man was crazed.”

“He's not hurt or anything?” Ghosh said.

“As best as I can tell he's in one piece. I made a trunk call to Mr. Elihu Harris just now. Yes, I got Harris involved. They have a big mission in Kenya. If he sobers up, Harris thinks Stone could work there. Or if he doesn't want that, Eli can arrange for him to go to America.”

“But what about his books, and his things?” Ghosh said. “Should we send them on to him?”

“I imagine he'll write for his books and specimens once he is settled,” Matron said.

The news both annoyed and pleased Hema. It meant Stone had abandoned the children, and that he'd given up any claims on them. She wished he'd signed a paper to that effect. She still felt uneasy. A man who made his name at Missing, whose lover was buried at Missing, and whose children were being raised at Missing, might not be able to cut the Missing cord that easily. “The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole,” Hema said.

“He's no serpent,” Ghosh said sharply, contradicting Hema. She was too astonished to reply. “He is my friend,” Ghosh continued in a tone that dared anyone to disagree. “Let's not forget what a valuable colleague he was all these years, the great service he gave to Missing, the lives he saved. He's no serpent.” He spun on his heels and walked off.

Ghosh's words pricked Hema's conscience. She couldn't assume that he was to feel everything she felt. Not if she cared for him. Ghosh was his own man, had been all along.

She gazed at Ghosh's receding back and was frightened. She'd never worried particularly about Ghosh's feelings, but now, at the graveside, she felt like a young girl who, while drawing water at the well, meets a handsome stranger—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—but she ruins it by saying the wrong thing.

16. Bride for a Year

THE MILK COW WAS HEMA'S FOLLY, but once the first cream-rich mouthful slid down her throat there was no going back, even if Ghosh had taken away the reason for a cow.

“Are you joking, Hema? You can't give cow's milk to newborn babies!”

“Who says so?” she said, but without conviction.

“ I do,” he said. “Besides, they've been thriving on formula for weeks. They are staying on formula.”

After his sharp words at Sister's graveside, she'd felt a terrible premonition that he would leave Missing, but in the ensuing days he had proved true to her, returning to sleep on the sofa. The calm, methodical way he'd approached Shiva's problem was a side of him she hadn't appreciated. On the wall by the door he'd taped a paper that graphed the waning and disappearance of those terrifying episodes of apnea. Hema would never have had the confidence to say what he said one evening— that the night watch was over.

He'd been sleeping on the sofa since the day she summoned him, and now she didn't want him to leave—his snoring was a sound she'd come to depend on. But she couldn't resist arguing with him now and then; it was an old reflex. She thought of it as her way of being affectionate.

They didn't take the anklet off Shiva's foot, even though it was no longer needed. The sound had become part of Shiva, and to remove it felt akin to taking away his voice.

In the early morning a stone bell heralded the procession of cow, calf, and Asrat, the milkman, up the driveway. The cowbell was tonally related to the chime of Shiva's anklet. Asrat charged more for bringing the milk factory to the house, but by milking under Rosina's or Almaz's watchful eye, there was no question of the milk being watered down.

By the time Hema rose, the house was suffused with the scent of boiling milk. She took to adding more and more milk to her morning coffee. Soon when Hema heard the cowbell, her mouth watered, just as if she were one of Professor Pavlov's mutts. Her morning “coffee” grew to two tumblers, and she had another two glasses during the day, more milk than coffee, loving the way the buttery flavor lingered on her tongue. Unlike the buffalo milk of her childhood, this milk was made so very tasty by the highland grass on which the cow fed.

When Asrat, whose bovine equanimity Hema believed came from having his cows sleep inside his hut at night, said one morning, “If only madam would buy corn feed, the milk would be so thick a spoon would stand up in it,” she didn't hesitate. Soon a coolie arrived with ten sacks on a handcart stamped ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION and NOT FOR RESALE. “The best investment I've ever made,” Hema said a few days later, smacking her lips like a schoolgirl. “Corn makes all the difference.”

“Hardly a controlled experiment, given the bias you introduced by paying for the corn,” Ghosh said.

Asrat tethered the animals behind the kitchen, the calf just out of reach of its mother's udders, while he delivered what milk remained to other homes. The cow and calf called to each other with such soothing and auspicious sounds. Hema remembered her mother saying, “A cow carries the universe in its body, Brahma in the horns, Agni in the brow, Indra in the head …”

The calf's call for its mother was nothing like the cry of her twins, but the emotion was identical. In her years as an obstetrician, Hema had never thought too much about a newborn's cry, never paused to consider the frequency that made a baby's tongue and lips quiver like a reed. It was such a helpless, urgent sound, but hitherto its importance lay in what it signaled: a successful labor, a live birth. Only when it was absent was it noteworthy. But now, when her newborns, her Shiva and Marion, cried, it was like no other earthly sound. It summoned her from sleep's catacombs and brought shushing noises to her throat as she rushed to the incubator. It was a personal call—her babies wanted her!

She remembered a phenomenon she'd experienced for years when she was about to fall asleep: a sense that someone was calling her name. Now she told herself it had been her unborn twins telling her they were coming.

There were other noises she became attuned to in her new-mother state. The thwack of wet cloth on the washing stone. The clothesline sagging with diapers (banners to fecundity) and raising a flapping alarm before a rain squall, sending Almaz and Rosina racing outside. The glass-harp notes of feeding bottles clinking together in the boiling water. Rosina's singing, her constant chatter. Almaz clanging pots and pans … these sounds were the chorale of Hema's contentment.

A Maharashtrian astrologer, on a tour of East Africa, came to the house over Ghosh's objections. Hema paid for him to read the children's fortunes. With his spectacles and fountain pens in his shirt pocket, he looked like a young railway clerk. After recording the exact time of the twins’ births, he wanted the parents’ birth dates. Hema gave hers and then volunteered Ghosh's, throwing Ghosh a warning look. The astrol oger consulted his tables and his calculations filled one side of a foolscap paper. At last he said, “Impossible.” He looked nervously at Hema, but avoided Ghosh's eyes. He capped his pen, put away his papers, and while an astonished Hema looked on, he made for the door. “Whatever is their destiny,” he said, “you can be sure it's linked to the father.”

Ghosh caught up with him at the gate. He declined Ghosh's offer of money. With a mournful expression he intoned, “Doctor saab, I'm afraid you cannot be the father.” Ghosh pretended to be deeply troubled by this news. Ghosh reported back to Hema, but she wasn't half as amused as he was. It left her fearful, as if the man had somehow predicted Thomas Stone's return.

The next day Ghosh found Hema squatting, cupping rice flour in her fist and drawing a rangoli—an elaborate decorative pattern—on the wooden floor just outside her bedroom, taking pains that the lines were uninterrupted, so the evil spirits could not pass. Above the door frame to the bedroom, Hema hung a mask of a bearded devil with bloodshot eyes, his tongue sticking out—a further deflection of the evil eye. It became part of her morning ritual along with the playing of “Suprabhatam” on the Grundig, a version sung by M. S. Subbulakshmi. The chant's hiccuping syncopation evoked for Ghosh the sound of women sweeping the front yard around the banyan tree in the early mornings in Madras and the dhobi ringing his bicycle bell. “Suprabhatam” was what radio stations used to begin their daily broadcast, and as a student, Ghosh had heard the words of “Suprabhatam” on the lips of dying patients. It amused him that he had to come to Ethiopia to learn exactly what it was: an invocation and a wake-up call for Lord Venkateswara.

Ghosh noticed that Hema's bedroom closet was now a shrine dominated by the symbol of Shiva: a tall lingam. In addition to the little brass statues of Ganesh, Lakshmi, and Muruga, now came a sinister-looking ebony carving of the indecipherable Lord Venkateswara, as well as a ceramic Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary and a ceramic crucified Christ, blood welling out of the nail holes. Ghosh held his tongue.

Without fanfare and quite unexpectedly, Ghosh had become Missing's surgeon. Though he was no Thomas Stone, he had now handled several acute abdomens (his stomach fluttering just like the first time) and dealt with stab wounds and major fractures and even put in a chest tube for trauma. A woman in the labor and delivery room had suddenly developed airway obstruction. Ghosh ran in and cut high in the neck, opening the cricothyroid membrane; the aspirate sound of air rushing in was its own reward, as was the sight of the patient's lips turning from deep blue to pink. Later that day, under better lighting in the operating theater, he did his first thyroidectomy Operating Theater 3 was now a familiar place, but still fraught with danger. Nothing was routine for him.

On the day the twins turned two months old, Ghosh was in mid-surgery when the probationer poked her head in to say that Hema urgently needed him. Ghosh was removing a foot so destroyed by chronic infection that it had become a weeping, oozing stump. The boy had traveled alone from his village near Axum, a voyage of several days, to beg Ghosh to cut off the offending part. “It has stuck to my body for three years,” he said, pointing to the foot that was four times the size of his other foot and shapeless, with toes barely visible.

Madura foot was found wherever people habitually walked barefoot, but the town of Madurai, not far from Madras, had the dubious honor of lending its name to this disease. No place ever came off well when a disease was named after it: Delhi belly, Baghdad blues, Turkey trots. Madura foot began when a field-worker stepped on a large thorn or nail. Their livelihood gave them no choice but to keep walking, and slowly a fungus overran the foot, invaded bone, tendon, and muscle. Nothing short of amputation would help.

Encouraged by the old surgical saw “Any idiot can amputate a leg,” Ghosh had decided to proceed. If he hesitated, it was because the rest of the saying went “but it takes a skilled surgeon to save one.” Still there was no saving this foot.

The boy was the first patient Ghosh had ever seen who sang and clapped his way into the theater, overjoyed at having surgery. Ghosh cut through skin above the ankle, leaving a flap at the back to cover the stump. He tied off the blood vessels and sawed through the bone and heard the thump of the foot landing in the bucket. It was at this point that the probationer delivered her summons.

Ghosh covered the wound with a damp sterile towel, and he ran home, tearing off his mask and cap, imagining the worst.

He burst into Hema's bedroom, breathless. “What is it?”

Hema, in a silk sari, had spread rice out on the floor. In Sanskrit letters, shed spelled out the boys’ names in the grains. Shiva was in her arms, and Rosina held Marion. Hema had assembled a few Indian women, who were glaring at him in disapproval.

“The post came,” Hema said. “We forgot to do the nama-karanum, Ghosh. Naming ceremony. Should be on the eleventh day, but you can also do it on the sixteenth day. We have not done it on either of those two days, but in my mother's letter she says as long as I do it as soon as I get her aerogram we are all right.”

“You made me leave an operation for this?” He was furious. It was on his lips to say, How can you subscribe to all this witchcraft?

“Look,” Hema hissed, embarrassed by his behavior, “the father is supposed to whisper the child's name into its ear. If you don't want to do it, I'll call someone else.”

That word—”father”—changed everything. He felt a thrill. He quickly whispered “Marion” and then “Shiva” into each tiny ear, kissed each child, then kissed Hema on the cheek before she could pull away, saying “Bye, Mama,” scandalizing Hema's guests before he raced back to the theater to fashion the flap over the stump.

THE TWINS WEREN'T EASY to tell apart but for the anklet which Hema had kept on Shiva as a talisman. While Shiva was peaceful, quiet, Marion tended to furrow his eyebrows in concentration when Ghosh carried him, as if trying to reconcile the strange man with the curious sounds he made. Shiva was slightly smaller, and his skull still bore the marks of Stone's attempts at extraction; he fussed only when he heard Marion crying, as if to show solidarity.

By twelve weeks, the twins had gained weight, their cries were lusty their movements vigorous. They clenched their fists against their chests, and now and then they stretched out their arms and focused on their hands with cross-eyed wonder.

If they didn't show awareness of each other, Hema believed it was because they thought they were one. When they were bottle-fed, one in Rosina's arms, the other in Hema's or Ghosh's, it helped greatly for them to be within earshot, heads or limbs touching; if they took one twin to another room, they both became fussy

At five months, the boys had a riot of black curly hair. They had Stone's close-set eyes, which made them appear hypervigilant, examining their surroundings like clinicians. Their irises, depending on the light, were a very light brown or a dark blue. The forehead, round and generous, and the perfect Cupid's bow of the lip was all Sister Mary Joseph Praise. They were, Hema thought, much more beautiful than Glaxo babies, and there were two of them. And they were hers.

To his delight, Ghosh had the magic touch when it came to putting them to sleep. He supported one child on each forearm, their cheeks against his shoulder while their feet rested on the shelf of his belly. He would circumnavigate Hema's living room, bobbing and swaying. For lack of lullabies, he reached into his repertoire of bawdy verse. One night Matron took Ghosh aside and said: “Your limericks are usurping my prayers.” Ghosh pictured Matron on her knees reciting:

There was a man from Madras

Whose balls were made out of brass

In stormy weather

They clanged together

And sparks came out of his arse.

“I'm sorry, Matron.”

“It can hardly be good for them to hear these things at such a tender age.”

GHOSH COULD BARELY REMEMBER what his life was like before the twins arrived. When they snuggled in his arms, smiled, or pressed their wet chins against him he felt his heart would burst with pride. Marion and Shiva; now he could not imagine any better names. Of late his shoulders ached and his hands were numb when the mamithus lifted the sleeping boys from his arms.

Since he started sleeping on Hema's sofa, he'd not had a twinge of discomfort when he peed.

Hema regained some of her old manner. At times he missed their sparring. Had he pursued her all these years precisely because she was so unattainable? What if she had agreed to marry him as soon as he arrived in Ethiopia? Would his passion have survived? Everyone needed an obsession, and in the last eight years, shed given him his, and for that perhaps he should be grateful.

Many a night, after putting the boys to bed, he had to return to finish up at the hospital. Not one drop of beer had touched his lips since his first night on Hema's sofa. On Hema's narrow couch he slept peacefully and woke refreshed.

Living under the same roof, Ghosh discovered that Hema chewed khat. It began during the night vigils with Shiva and it had helped her through her shift. Her bookmark was soon ahead of his in Middlemarch, and she was on Zola before he was done. She tried to hide the khat from him, and when he mentioned it, he found it touching how flustered she became. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

So he didn't bring it up again, though he knew when he saw her knitting late into the night, or when she waited up for him and was chattier than Rosina, that she had probably had a little chew before he arrived. Adid, the always smiling merchant she had seen on the plane coming back from Aden and whose company they both enjoyed, brought her the leaves.

As for Ghosh, proximity to Hema was his drug. He brushed against her when he lowered the sleeping babies into the crib that replaced the incubator. He was encouraged when she didn't turn around and snap at him. He gazed at her while sipping his morning coffee as she wrote out shopping lists for him, or consulted with Almaz about the plans for the day. One day she saw him looking.

“What? I look horrible first thing in the morning. Is that it?”

“No. You look the opposite of horrible.”

She blushed. “Shaddap,” she said, but the glow in her face did not fade.

One evening at dinner, he said, more to himself than to her, “I wonder what has become of Thomas Stone.”

Hema pushed her chair back and stood up. “Please. I don't want you to ever mention that man's name in this house.”

There were tears in her eyes. And fear. He went to her. He could bear her anger, he could suffer it, but he couldn't bear to see her in distress. He grabbed her hands, pulled her toward him; she fought but finally gave in, as he murmured, “It is all right. I didn't mean to upset you. It's all right.” I'd sell my best friend down the river to be able to hold you like this.

“What if he comes and claims them? You heard the astrologer.” She was trembling. “Have you thought about that?”

“He won't,” Ghosh said, but she heard the uncertainty in his voice. She marched to her bedroom. “Well, if he tries, it will be over my dead body, do you hear me? Over my dead body!”

ONE VERY COLD NIGHT when the twins were nine months old, and while the mamithus slept in their quarters, and when Matron had returned to hers, everything changed. There was no longer a reason for Ghosh to sleep on the couch, but neither of them had brought up the idea of his leaving.

Ghosh came in just before midnight, and he found Hema sitting at the dining table. He came up close to her so she could inspect his eyes and see if there was liquor on his breath—it was what he always did to tease her when he returned at this hour. She pushed him away.

He went in to look at the twins. When he came out he said, “I smell incense.” Hed scolded her before for letting the twins breathe in any smoke.

“It's a hallucination. Maybe the gods are trying to reach you.” She pretended to be absorbed in the task of putting his dinner on the table.

“Macaroni that Rosina prepared,” she said, uncovering a bowl. “And Almaz left chicken curry for you. They are competing to feed you. God knows why.”

Ghosh tucked his napkin into his shirt. “You call me godless? If you read your Vedas or your Gita, you'll remember a man went to the sage, Ramakrishna, saying, ‘O Master, I don't know how to love God.’ “ Hema frowned. “And the sage asked him if there was anything he loved. He said, ‘I love my little son.’ And Ramakrishna said, ‘There is your love and service to God. In your love and service to that child.’ “

“So where were you at this hour, Mr. Godly Man?”

“Doing a Cesarean section. I was in and out in fifteen minutes,” Ghosh said. Hema did three Cesarean sections in the weeks after the birth of the twins: once to teach Ghosh, once to assist him as he did it, and the third time to stand by and watch. No woman would die at Missing or be sent elsewhere for want of a C-section. “The baby had the cord wrapped around its neck. Baby is fine. The mother is already asking for her boiled egg.”

Watching Ghosh eat had become Hema's nightly pastime. His appetites engaged him; he lived in the center of a flurry of ideas and projects that made piles around her sofa.

Her mind had been drifting, so she had to ask him to repeat what he said.

“I said I would be in the middle of my internship at Cook County Hospital now, had I gone. I was ready to leave Ethiopia, you know.”

“Why? Because Stone left?”

“No, woman. Before that. Before the babies were born or Sister died. You see, I was convinced that you would come back from India a married woman.”

To Hema this was so absurd, so unexpected, a reminder of an innocent time from so long ago, that she burst out laughing. Ghosh's consternation made it even funnier, and the safety pin that held the top of her blouse together flew into the air and landed in his plate. That was too much for her, and she clutched her breast and rose from her chair, doubled over.

Since her return from India and the tragedy of Sister's death, there had been few occasions for side-splitting humor. When she caught her breath she said, “That's what I like about you, Ghosh. I'd forgotten. You can make me laugh like no one else on earth.” She sat back in her chair.

Ghosh had stopped eating. He pushed the plate away. He was clearly upset and she didn't know why. He wiped his lips with the napkin, his movements precise and deliberate. There was a quaver in his voice.

“What joke?” he said again. “My wanting to marry you all these years was a joke?”

She found it difficult to meet his gaze. She'd never told him what had gone through her mind when she thought her plane was crashing, and how her last earthly thought was about him. The smile on her face felt false and she couldn't sustain it. She looked away, but her eye caught the menacing mask nailed up over the bedroom door.

Ghosh dropped his head into his hands. His mood had turned from ebullient to despairing; she had pushed him past a breaking point. And all because she had laughed? Once again she felt uncertain around him, as she had that day at Sister Mary Joseph Praise's grave.

“It's time I moved back to my quarters,” he said.

“No!” Hema said, so forcefully that they were both startled.

She pulled her chair closer to his. She peeled his hands from his head and held them. She studied the strange profile of her colleague, her unhandsome but beautiful friend of so many years who had allowed his fate to become so inextricably tangled with hers. He seemed intent on leaving. He wasn't looking to her for guidance.

She kissed his hand. He resisted. She moved even closer. She pulled his head to her bosom, which, without the safety pin, was more exposed than it had ever been in front of a man. She held him the way he had held her when he came running the night Shiva stopped breathing.

After a while she turned his face to hers. And before she could think about what she was doing, or why, and how this had happened, she kissed him, finding pleasure in the way his lips felt on hers. She saw now and was ashamed to see how selfishly she had dealt with him, made use of him all these years. Shed not done it consciously. Nevertheless, shed treated him as if he existed for her pleasure.

It was her turn to sigh, and she led the stunned Ghosh to the second bedroom, which was used to iron clothes and as storage, a bedroom she should have given him long ago instead of leaving him on the sofa. They undressed in the dark, cleared the bed of the mountain of diapers, towels, saris, and other garments. They resumed their embrace under the covers. “Hema, what if you get pregnant?” he asked. “Ah, you don't understand,” she said. “I'm thirty. I may have left it too late already.”

To his shame, now that those magnificent orbs he had fantasized about were unfettered and in his hands, now that she was his from the fleshy chin pad to the dimples above her buttocks, the transformation of his member from floppy flesh to stiff bamboo did not happen. When Hema realized what was amiss, she said nothing. Her silence only increased his distress. Ghosh didn't know that Hema blamed herself, that she thought she had been overeager and that she had misread the signs and misunderstood the man. A hyena's coughing in the distance seemed to mock them both.

She stayed perfectly still, as if lying on a land mine. At some point she fell asleep. She awoke to a sensation of rising from underwater to be resurrected and reclaimed. And it was because Ghosh's mouth was around her left breast, trying to swallow it. He directed her movements, pushing her this way and that, and it made her think that even when he had been at his most passive, he had really been in charge.

The sight of his great block of a head and his lips resting where no man had been before brought forth a rush of blood to her cheeks, her chest, and deep in her pelvis. One of his hands held her other breast, shock waves surging through her, while his other hand caressed her inner thighs. She found her hands responding in kind, pulling his head to her, reaching for his broad back, wanting him to swallow her whole. And now she felt something unmistakable and promising against her thighs. In that moment, witnessing his animal eagerness, she understood that shed forever lost him as a plaything, as a companion. He was no longer the Ghosh she toyed with, the Ghosh who existed only as a reaction to her own existence. She felt ashamed for not having seen him this way before, ashamed for presuming to know the nature of this pleasure and thereby denying herself and denying him all these years. She pulled him in, welcomed him—colleague, fellow physician, stranger, friend, and lover. She gasped in regret for all the evenings they'd sat across from each other, baiting each other and throwing barbs (though, now that she thought about it, she did most of the baiting and throwing) when they could have been engaged in this astonishing congress.

IN THE EARLY MORNING she awoke, fed and changed the children, and when they went back to sleep, she returned to Ghosh. They began again, and it was as if it were the first time, the sensations unique and unimaginable, the headboard slapping against the wall advertising their passion to Almaz and Rosina who were just arriving in the kitchen, but she didn't care. They slept, and only when they heard the cowbell and the calf cry did they rise.

Ghosh stopped Hema as she was about to leave the room.

“Is marrying me still a laughing matter?”

“What are you saying?”

“Hema, will you marry me?”

He was unprepared for her response, and later he wondered how she could have been so ready with an answer, one that would never have occurred to him.

“Yes, but only for a year.”

“What?”

“Face it. This situation with the children threw us together. I don't want you to feel obliged. I will marry you for a year. And then we are done.”

“But that is absurd,” Ghosh sputtered.

“We have the option to renew for another year. Or not.”

“I know what I want, Hema. I want this forever. I have always wanted it forever and ever. I know that at the end of the year I will want to renew.”

“Well you may know, my sweet man. But what if I don't? Now you have surgery scheduled this morning, no? Well, you can tell Matron that I'll start doing hysterectomies and other elective surgery again. And it's time you learned some gynecologic surgery, something other than just C-sections.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder as she departed, and the coyness in her smile and the mischief in her eyes and her arched eyebrows, and the steep tilt of her neck, were those of a dancer sending a signal without words. Her message silenced him. Instead of a year or a lifetime, suddenly he could only think of nightfall, and though it was only twelve hours away, it felt like an eternity.