Cutting for Stone

17. “Tizita”

IREMEMBER THE EARLY MORNINGS, sweeping into the kitchen in Ghosh's arms. He is counting under his breath, “One-two … onetwothree.” We twirl, dip, lunge. For the longest time I will think that dancing is his occupation.

We execute a turn before the stove and arrive at the rear door, where Ghosh works the lock and shoots back the bolt with a flourish.

Almaz and Rosina step in, quickly shutting the door against the cold, and against Koochooloo, who is wagging her tail, awaiting breakfast. Both mamithus are wrapped like mummies, only their eyes showing in a crescent gap. They peel off layers, and the odors of cut grass, and then turned earth, then berbere and coal fires rise from them like steam.

I laugh uncontrollably in anticipation, tuck my chin into my body, because I know Rosina's fingers, which are like icicles, will soon stroke my cheek. The first time she did this, I was startled into laughter instead of tears, a mistake, because it has encouraged this ritual that I dread and anticipate every day.

AFTER BREAKFAST, Hema and Ghosh kiss Shiva and me good-bye. Tears. Despair. Clinging. But they leave anyway, off to the hospital.

Rosina places us in the double pram. Soon, with uplifted hands, I beg to be carried. I want higher ground. I want the adult view. She gives in. Shiva is content wherever he is placed, as long as no one tries to remove his anklet.

Rosina's forehead is a ball of chocolate. Her braided hair marches back in neat rows, then flies out in a fringe that reaches her shoulders. She is a bouncing, rocking, and humming being. Her twirls and turns are faster than Ghosh's. From my dizzy perch, her pleated dress makes gorgeous florets, and her pink plastic shoes flash in and out of sight.

Rosina talks nonstop. We are silent, speechless, but full of thoughts, impressions, all of them unspoken. Rosina's Amharic makes Almaz and Gebrew laugh because her guttural, throat-clearing syllables don't really exist in Amharic. It never dissuades her. Sometimes she breaks into Italian, particularly when she is being forceful, struggling to make a point. Italinya comes easily to her, and strangely its meaning is clear, even though no one else speaks it, such is the nature of that language. When she speaks to herself, or sings, it is in her Eritrean tongue—Tigrinya— and then her voice is unlocked, the words pouring out.

Almaz, who once served Ghosh in his quarters, is now the cook in his and Hema's joint household. She stands rooted like a baobab to her spot in front of the stove, a giantess compared with Rosina, and not given to sound other than deep sonorous sighs, or an occasional “Ewunuth!”— “You don't say!”—to keep Rosina or Gebrew's chatter going, not that either of them needs encouragement. Almaz is fairer than Rosina, and her hair is contained by a gauzy orange shash that forms a Phrygian helmet. While Rosina's teeth shine like headlights, Almaz rarely shows hers.

BY MIDMORNING, when we return from our first Bungalow–to– Casualty–to–Women's Ward–to–Front Gate excursion, with Koochoo -loo as our bodyguard, the kitchen is alive. Steam rises in plumes as Almaz clangs lids on and off the pots. The silver weight on the pressure cooker jiggles and whistles. Almaz's sure hands chop onions, tomatoes, and fresh coriander, making hillocks that dwarf the tiny mounds of ginger and garlic. She keeps a palette of spices nearby: curry leaves, turmeric, dry coriander, cloves, cinnamon, mustard seed, chili powder, all in tiny stainless-steel bowls within a large mother platter. A mad alche mist, she throws a pinch of this, a fistful of that, then wets her fingers and flings that moisture into the mortar. She pounds with the pestle, the wet, crunchy thunk, thunk soon changes to the sound of stone on stone.

Mustard seeds explode in the hot oil. She holds a lid over the pan to fend of the missiles. Rat-a-tat! like hail on a tin roof. She adds the cumin seeds, which sizzle, darken, and crackle. A dry, fragrant smoke chases out the mustard scent. Only then are the onions added, handfuls of them, and now the sound is that of life being spawned in a primordial fire.

ROSINA ABRUPTLY HANDS ME TO Almaz and hurries out the back door, her legs crossing like scissor blades. We don't know this, but Rosina is carrying the seed of revolution. She is pregnant with a baby girl: Genet. The three of us—Shiva, Genet, and me—are together from the start, she in utero while Shiva and I negotiate the world outside. The handoff to Almaz is unexpected.

I whimper on Almaz's shoulder, perilously close to the bubbling cauldrons.

Almaz puts down the stirring ladle and shifts me to her hip. Reaching into her blouse, grunting with effort, she fishes out her breast.

“Here it is,” she says, putting it in my hands for safekeeping.

I am the recipient of many gifts, but this is the first one I remember. Each time it is given to me it is a surprise. When it is taken away, the slate is wiped clean. But here it is, warm and alive, eased out of its cloth bed, bestowed on me like a medal I don't deserve. Almaz, who hardly speaks, resumes stirring, humming a tune. It is as if the breast no more belongs to her than does her ladle.

Shiva in the pram puts down his wooden truck, which his saliva has digested to a soggy pulp. It is, unlike his anklet, separable from him if need be. In the presence of that magnificent one-eyed teat, Shiva lets the truck fall to the floor. Though I have possession of the breast, stroking it, palpating it, I am also his amanuensis.

A rapt Shiva spurs me on and sends silent instructions: Throw it to me. And when I cannot, he says, Open it and see what is inside. That, too, is impossible. I mold it, indent it, and watch it rebound.

Put it to your mouth, Shiva says because this is the first means by which he knows the world. I dismiss this idea as absurd.

The breast is everything Almaz is not: laughing, vibrant, an outgoing member of our household.

When I try to lift it, to examine it, that teat dwarfs my hands and spills out between my fingers. I wish to confirm how all its surfaces sweep up to the summit, the dark pap through which it breathes and sees the world. The breast comes down to my knees. Or perhaps it comes down to Almaz's knees. I can't be sure. It quivers like jelly. Steam condenses on its surface, dulling its sheen. It carries the scent of crushed ginger and cumin powder from Almaz's fingers. Years later, when I first kiss a woman's breast, I become ravenous.

A flash of light and a blast of crisp air announce Rosina's return. I am back in her arms, removed from the breast which vanishes as mysteriously as it has appeared, swallowed by Almaz's blouse.

IN THE LATE MORNING, the chill long gone and the mist burned away, we play on the lawn till our cheeks are red. Rosina feeds us. Hunger and drowsiness blend together perfectly like the rice and curry, yogurt and bananas, in our belly. It is an age of perfection, of simple appetites.

After lunch, Shiva and I fall asleep, arms around each other, breath on each other's face, heads touching. In that fugue state between wake-fulness and dreaming, the song I hear is not Rosina's. It is “Tizita,” which Almaz sang when I held her breast.

I WILL HEAR THAT SONG through all my years in Ethiopia. When I leave Addis Ababa as a young man, I will carry it with me on a cassette that has “Tizita” along with “Aqualung.” Departure or imminent death will force you to define your true tastes. During my years of exile, as the battered cassette wears out, I'll meet Ethiopians abroad. My word of greeting in our shared language is a spark, a link to a community a network: the phone number of Woizero (Mrs.) Menen who, for a modest fee, cooks injera and wot and serves you in her house if you call her the day before; the taxi driver Ato (Mr.) Girma, whose cousin works for Ethio pian Airlines and brings in kibe—Ethiopian butter—because with out butter from cows that live at altitude and graze on high pastures, your wot will taste of Kroger or FoodMart or Land O'Lakes. For Meskel celebrations, if you want a sheep slaughtered in Brooklyn, call Yohannes, and in Boston try the Queen of Sheba's. In my years away from my birth land, living in America, I will see how Ethiopians are invisible to others, yet so visible to me. Through them I will easily find other recordings of “Tizita.”

They are eager to share, to thrust that song in my hands, as if only “Tizita” explains the strange inertia that overcomes them; it explains how they were brilliant at home, the Jackson 5, the Temptations, and “Tizita” on their lips, a perfect Afro on their heads, bell-bottoms swishing above Double-O-Seven boots, and then the first foothold in America—behind the counter of a 7-Eleven, or breathing carbon mon oxide fumes in a Kinney underground parking lot, or behind the counter of an airport newsstand or Marriott gift shop—has turned out to be a cement foot plant, a haven that they are fearful of leaving lest they suffer a fate worse than invisibility namely extinction.

Getachew Kassa's slow version of “Tizita,” a bright but haunting, sober lament on a backdrop of minor-chord arpeggios, is the best known. He has another version, with a fast Latin rhythm. Mahmoud Ahmed, Aster Aweke, Teddy Afro … every Ethiopian artist records a “Tizita.” They record it in Addis Ababa, but also in exile in Khartoum (yes, Khartoum! which proves that even hell has a recording studio) and of course in Rome, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, and New York. “Tizita” is the heart's anthem, the lament of the diaspora, reverberating up and down Eighteenth Street in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C., where it pours out from Fasika's, Addis Ababa, Meskerem, Red Sea, and other Ethiopian eateries, drowning out the salsa or the ragas emanating from El Rincon and Queen of India.

There is a fast “Tizita,” a slow “Tizita,” an instrumental “Tizita” (which the Ashantis made so popular), a short and a long “Tizita” … there are as many versions as there are recording artists.

That first line … I hear it now.

Tizitash zeweter wode ene eye metah.

I can't help thinking about you.

18. Sins of the Father

IN OUR HOUSEHOLD, you had to dive into the din and push to the front if you wanted to be heard. The foghorn voice was Ghosh's, echoing and tailing off into laughter. Hema was the songbird, but when provoked her voice was as sharp as Saladin's scimitar, which, according to my Richard the Lion Hearted and the Crusades, could divide a silk scarf allowed to float down onto the blade's edge. Almaz, our cook, may have been silent on the outside, but her lips moved constantly, whether in prayer or song, no one knew. Rosina took silence as a personal offense, and spoke into empty rooms and chattered into cupboards. Genet, almost six years of age, was showing signs of taking after her mother, telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

Had ShivaMarion been delivered vaginally (impossible, given how our heads were connected), Shiva, presenting skull first, would have been the firstborn, the older twin. But when the Cesarean section reversed the natural birth order, I became the first to breathe—senior by a few seconds. I also became spokesperson for ShivaMarion.

Trailing after Hema and Ghosh in the Piazza, or threading between gharries and lorries into Motilal's Garments in the crowded Merkato of Addis Ababa, I never heard Hema say, “That blue shirt will look so good on Shiva,” or “Those sandals are perfect for Marion.” The arrival of Dr. Ghosh and Dr. Hema meant chairs were dragged out and dusted, and a boy sent running to return with warm Fanta or Coca-Cola and biscuits, despite all protests. Tape measures sized us, our cheeks were pinched by rough hands, and a small crowd gathered to gawk, as if Shiva Marion was a lion in the cages at Sidist Kilo. The upshot of all this would be that Hema and Ghosh purchased two of whatever piece of clothing it was they felt we needed. Ditto for cricket bats, fountain pens, and bicycles. When people saw us and said, “Look! How sweet,” did they really imagine that we had picked the matching outfits ourselves? I'll admit, the one time I tried to dress differently from Shiva, I felt uneasy as we stood before the mirror. It was as if my fly were undone—it just didn't feel right.

We—”The Twins”—were famous not just for dressing alike but for sprinting around at breakneck speed, but always in step, a four-legged being that knew only one way to get from A to B. When ShivaMarion was forced to walk, it was with arms locked around each other's shoulders, not really a walk but a trot, champions of the three-legged race before we knew there was such a thing. Seated, we shared a chair, seeing no sense in occupying two. We even used the loo together, directing a double jet into the porcelain void. Looking back, you could say we had some responsibility for people dealing with us as a collective.

Ask The Twins to come inside for dinner.

Boys, isn't it time for your bath?

ShivaMarion, do you want spaghetti or injera and wot tonight?

“You” or “Your” never meant one of us. When we replied to a question, no one cared which of us had spoken; an answer from one was an answer for The Twins.

Perhaps the adults believed that Shiva, my busy, industrious brother, was naturally parsimonious with his words. If the sound of the anklet which he insisted on wearing counted as speech, then Shiva was a terrible chatterbox, only silent when he muffled the tiny bells under his sock for school. Perhaps the adults believed I never gave Shiva much of a chance to speak (which was true), but no one wanted to tell me to shut up. In any case, in the hullabaloo of our bungalow, where the bridge crowd congregated twice a week, where a 78 rpm spun on the Grundig, and where Ghosh's lumbering tread rattled the dishes as he struggled to learn the rumba and the cha-cha-cha, two years went by before the adults fully registered that Shiva had stopped speaking.

WHEN WE WERE INFANTS, Shiva was considered the more delicate: it was his skull that Stone attempted to crush before Hema saved us. But then Shiva hit all his developmental milestones on time, lifting his head when I did and crawling when it was time to crawl. He said “Amma” and “Ghosh” on cue, and we both decided to walk when we were a month shy of one year of age. Hema and Ghosh were reassured. According to Hema, we forgot how to walk within a few days of taking our first steps, because we had discovered how to run. Shiva spoke as much as he needed to well into his fourth year, but about that time he began to quietly hoard his words.

I hasten to say, Shiva laughed or cried at the appropriate times; he often acted as if he were about to say something just when I piped in; he punctuated my words with exclamations from his anklet and he sang la-la-la lustily with me in the bath. But when it came to actual words— he had no need for them. He read fluently, but refused to do so aloud. He could add and subtract big numbers at a glance, scribbling out the answer while I was still carrying the one over and counting fingers. He was constantly jotting notes to himself, or to others, leaving these around like droppings. He drew beautifully, but in the oddest places, like on cardboard cartons or the back of paper bags. What he loved to draw best at that stage was Veronica. We had an issue of Archie comics in the house—I bought it from Papadakis's bookstore; the three frames on page sixteen had to do with Veronica and Betty. Shiva could reproduce that page, complete with balloons, lettering, and crosshatch shading. It was as if he had a photograph stored in his head and could spill it onto paper whenever he wanted. He left nothing out, not even the page number, or the stain of the fly that had met its death on the margin of the original. I noticed that he always accentuated the curved line under Veronica's breast, particularly when compared with Betty's. I checked the source, and sure enough, the line was there, but Shiva's was thicker, darker. Sometimes he improvised and departed from the original image, rendering the breasts as pointed missiles about to launch, or else as pendulous balloons that hovered over the kneecaps.

Genet and I covered for Shiva's silence. I did it unconsciously; if I was talkative to excess, it was because I saw this as the necessary output for ShivaMarion. Of course, Ihad no problem communicating with Shiva. In the early morning, the shake of his anklet—ching-ding—said, Marion, are you awake? Dish-ching was Time to get up. Rubbing his skull on mine said, Rise and shine, sleepyhead. All one of us had to do was think of an action and the odds were the other would rise to carry it out.

It was Mrs. Garretty at school who made the discovery about Shiva's having given up speech. The Loomis Town & Country School catered to the merchants, diplomats, military advisers, doctors, teachers, representatives of the Economic Commission for Africa, WHO, UNESCO, Red Cross, UNICEF, and especially the newly forming OAU—the Organization of African Unity. The Emperor had offered the gift of Africa Hall, a stunning building, to the fledging OAU, a cunning move that would bring the organization's headquarters to Addis Ababa and already was boosting business for everyone from the bar girls to the Fiat, Peugeot, and Mercedes importers. The OAU kids could have gone to the Lycée Gebremariam, an imposing building that loomed over the steepest part of Churchill Road. But the envoys from the Francophone countries—Mali, Guinea, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritius, and Madagascar— had an eye to the future, and so the cars with the Corps Diplomatiques plates carried les enfants past the lycée to Loomis Town & Country. For completeness, I must mention St. Joseph's, where, according to Matron, the Jesuits, those foot soldiers of Christ, believed in God and the Rod. But St. Joseph's was boys only, which ruled it out for us because of Genet.

Why not the rough-and-tumble of the government schools? If we'd gone there we might have been the only non-native children, and we would have been in a minority of kids with more than one pair of shoes and a home with running water and indoor plumbing. Hema and Ghosh felt their only choice was to send us to Loomis Town & Country, which was run by British expats.

Our teachers at LT&C had their A levels and the odd teaching certificate. It is astonishing how a black crepe robe worn over a coat or a blouse gives a Cockney punter or a Covent Garden flower girl the gravitas of an Oxford don. Accent be damned in Africa, as long as it's foreign and you have the right skin color.

Ritual. That was the balm to soothe the parents’ disquiet about what they were getting for their money at LT&C. Gymkhana, Track and Field Day, the School Carnival, the Christmas Pageant, the School Play, Guy Fawkes Night, Founder's Day, and Graduation—we carried so many mimeographed notices home that they made Hema's head spin. We were assigned to Monday House, or Tuesday House, or Wednesday House, each with its colors, teams, and house masters. On Track and Field Day we competed for the glory of our house and for the Loomis Cup. Every morning in Assembly Hall, Mr. Loomis led us in Assembly Prayer, then a reading from the Revised Standard Version, and then we belted out the hymn from the blue hymnal while one teacher or another banged out the chords on the assembly piano.

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.

Unfortunately, the LT&C students’ pass rates for the General Certificate of Education O levels were terrible when compared with the free government schools. There the Indian teachers were all degree holders whom the Emperor hired from the Christian state of Kerala, the place Sister Mary Joseph Praise hailed from. Ask an Ethiopian abroad if perchance they learned mathematics or physics from a teacher named Kurien, Koshy Thomas, George, Varugese, Ninan, Mathews, Jacob, Judas, Chandy Eapen, Pathros, or Paulos, and the odds are their eyes will light up. These teachers were brought up in the Orthodox ritual which St. Thomas carried to south India. But in their professional roles, the only ritual they cared about was engraving the multiplication and periodic tables as well as Newton's laws into the brains of their Ethio pian pupils, who were uniformly smart and who had a great aptitude for arithmetic.

My class teacher, Mrs. Garretty called Hema and Ghosh at the end of a day when I stayed home from school with a fever. She knew us as the adorable Stone twins, those darling, dark-haired, light-eyed boys who dressed alike, who happily sang, ran, drew, jumped, clapped, and chattered to excess in her class. The day I stayed home, Shiva ran, drew, jumped, and clapped but never uttered a word and, when called on, would not or could not.

Hema went from disbelieving to blaming Mrs. Garretty. Then she blamed herself. She canceled the dancing lessons at Juventus Club, just when Ghosh had mastered the fox-trot and could circumnavigate a room. The turntable got its first rest in years. The bridge regulars shifted to Ghosh's old bungalow, which he had been using as an office and clinic for private patients.

Hema checked out Kipling, Ruskin, C. S. Lewis, Edgar Allan Poe, R. K Narayan, and many others from the British Council and the United States Information Service libraries. In the evenings, the two of them took turns reading to us in the belief that great literature would stimulate and eventually produce speech in Shiva. In those pretelevision days, it was entertaining, except for C. S. Lewis, whose magical cupboards I didn't buy, and Ruskin, who neither Ghosh nor Hema could understand or read for long. But they persisted, hoping that at the very least Shiva might yell for them to stop, the way I did. They kept on even after we'd fallen sleep, because Hema believed one could prime the subconscious. If they had worried over Shiva's survival after birth, now they worried over lingering effects of the antiquated obstetric instruments that had been applied to his head. There was nothing they would not try to bring about speech. Shiva remained silent.

ONE DAY, soon after we turned eight, we got home from school to find Hema had a blackboard installed in the dining room. She stood there, chalk at the ready, copies of Bickham's Penmanship Made Easy (Young Clerks Assistant) at each of our places, and a maniacal gleam in her eyes. On top of each book was a shiny new Pelikan pen, the Pelicano, every schoolkid's dream, along with cartridges—such a novelty.

A time would come when I would be glad to be known as a surgeon with good handwriting. My notes in the chart perhaps gave some intimation of similar skills with a knife (though I will say it is not a rule, and the converse isn't true: chicken-scratch scribbles aren't a sign of poor technique in the theater). One day I would grudgingly thank Hema for making us copy in the round and ornate styles:

Shiva was already fingering his Pelicano. Genet said nothing. Her position in these matters was delicate.

I stood firm. I didn't trust Hema's motivation: guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action. Besides, I had planned a special parade of my Dinky Toys in a weaving path I had carved out on a low embankment next to the house. Her timing was terrible.

“Why can't we go out and play? I don't want to do this,” I said.

Hema's mouth tightened. She seemed to be considering not what I said, but my person, my obstinacy. Subconsciously, at least, she blamed me for Shiva. She saw me and even Genet as having camouflaged his silence in a blanket of chatter.

“Speak for yourself, Marion,” she said.

“I did. Why can't we—I—go play?”

Shiva already had his cartridge loaded.

“Why? I'll tell you why. Because your school is nothing but play I have to see to your real studies. Now, sit down, Marion!”

Genet quietly took her seat.

“No,” I said. “This isn't fair. Besides, it won't help Shiva.”

“Marion, before I twist your ear—”

“He won t speak till he is ready!”I shouted.

With that, I dashed out. I flew around one the corner of the house, gathering speed on the turn. At the second corner, I ran straight into Zemui's broad chest. My first thought was Hema had sent the military to get me.

“Cousin, where is the war?” Zemui said, smiling, peeling me free. His olive uniform was as crisp as ever, the belt, holster, and boots all brown and gleaming. As a reflex, he stomped his right foot and snapped a salute with enough vigor for his fingers to sail off.

Sergeant Zemui was the driver to a man who was now full colonel in the Imperial Bodyguard—Colonel Mebratu. Ghosh had saved his life in surgery years before. Colonel Mebratu was once under suspicion, but now he was in the Emperor's favor. He was both senior commander of the Imperial Bodyguard and liaison to the military attachés from Brit ain, India, Belgium, and America, all of whom had a presence in Ethio pia. The Colonel's job involved frequent diplomatic receptions and parties, not to mention the regular bridge nights at our place. Poor Zemui could only begin his long walk home to his wife and children when his boss's head was on the pillow and the staff car parked in the shed. The Colonel had assigned Zemui a motorcycle to make it easier for him to get back and forth. Since Zemui, who lived near Missing, didn't want to ruin his tires on the crude stone and shingle track that led to his shack, he got Ghosh's permission to park the bike under our carport. There his precious machine was sheltered from the elements and from vandals.

“Just the person I was hoping to see,” Zemui said. “What's the matter, my little master?”

“Nothing,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. My troubles seemed minor when talking to a soldier who'd just done his tour with the UN peacekeeping forces in the civil war in the Congo. “How come you're picking up your motorcycle so late?” I asked.

“The boss was at a party till four in the morning. When I got him home, the sun was coming up. He told me I could come back in the evening. Listen, come, sit down. I want you to read me this letter again.” He parked himself on the edge of the front porch, took the blue-and-red aerogram from his front pocket, and handed it to me. He took off his pith helmet to extract a half-smoked cigarette tucked carefully under one of the straps on the outside. The pith topee, in the manner of white explorers of old, was unique to the Imperial Bodyguard, recognizable at a distance.

“Zemui,” I said, “can I read it later? Hema is after me. I talked back to her. She'll cut off my tongue if she catches me.”

“Oh, that's serious. Of course we can do it later,” Zemui said, springing up. He put the letter away, but I could sense his disappointment. “Do you think Darwin got my letter by now?”

“I am sure his letter is coming. Any day.”

He saluted me and went on to the back of the house.

Darwin was a Canadian soldier who'd been wounded in Katanga; I'd read his letter to Zemui so often I knew it by heart. He said it was cold and snowing in Toronto. At times he was discouraged and he didn't know if he could ever get used to a wooden leg. “Are there women in Eytopia intrusted in a one-leg white man with a scard face? Ha-ha!” He did not have much, but if his pal Zemui ever needed anything, he, Darwin, would do it because he'd never forget how Zemui saved his life. I'd written back in English for Zemui, translating as best I could. I wondered how the two had conversed in the Congo. Zemui showed me a pinwheel gold pendant which he wore around his neck, a St. Bridget's cross. The wounded Darwin had pressed it on Zemui when they parted on the battlefield.

The sight of Rosina, peering back at me as Zemui walked toward her, made me start running again. I felt a vacuum where my brother should have been running next to me.

MY MOTHER'S GRAVE, with its halo of fresh cut apothecary blooms and its inscription of σAFE in APMσ OF JEσUσ held no fascination for me. But in the autoclave room next to Operating Theater 3, I sensed her presence, a scent, a feel so linked to mine. That was where my feet took me. It wasn't the smartest choice as a place to hide.

I never understood Shiva's reluctance to visit this room. Perhaps he saw it as a betrayal of Hema, who had watched over his every breath, who had linked herself by a cord to his anklet. Coming here was one of the few things I did alone.

Seated in my mother's chair, the scent of Cuticura in the cardigan, I spoke to her, or perhaps I spoke to myself. I complained about injustice at home; I confessed my worst fear: that Hema and Ghosh might one day disappear, just as Stone and Sister were no longer in our lives. It was one reason I loitered around Missing's front gate—who was to say Thomas Stone might not come back? My fantasy was that on a sunny morning when the air was so crisp that you could hear it crackle, Gebrew would open Missing's gates, and instead of the stampede of patients, Thomas Stone would be standing there. The fact that I had no idea what he looked like, or what my mother looked like, was inconsequential to this fantasy. His eyes would fall on me. After a few seconds he would smile with pride.

I needed to believe that.

I RETURNED TO OUR BUNGALOW to face the music. There was music, all right, and the sight of Hema leading Genet and Shiva in dance. All three of them wore dance anklets, not Shiva's usual kind, but big leather thongs with four concentric rings of brass bells. They had moved the dining table against the wall. Indian classical music with a snappy tabla beat marked time. Hema had tucked her sari so that one loop ran between her legs, creating what looked like pantaloons. She'd taught Shiva and Genet a complex series of steps and poses in the time I'd been out. Arms in, arms out, arms together, pointing, dipping, drawing a bow, firing an imaginary arrow, the eyes looking this way and that, the feet sliding, a cymbal clash of anklets every time their heels thumped the floor. It hurt me to see this.

Shiva, Genet, and I had entered the world almost in unison. (Genet was a half step behind and a womb across from us, but she'd caught up.) As toddlers, we had freely traded milk bottles and pacifiers, much to Hema's dismay. Shiva's propensity to jump into buckets, puddles, or ditches full of water terrified the adults, who feared he'd drown. To keep him from deeper water, Matron purchased a Jolly Baby wading pool. Here the three of us splashed naked and posed for pictures that would embarrass us one day. Our first circus, our first matinee, our first dead body—we arrived at these milestones together. In our tree house, we'd picked at scabs until we found red, and then we took a blood oath that we Three Missketeers would stand together and admit no other.

Now, we'd arrived at another first: a separation. I stood outside, looking in. Hema beckoned me to join. She was no longer angry. Her forehead glinted with perspiration, strands of hair stuck to her cheeks. If she planned to punish me, perhaps she saw in my expression that it had already happened.

Genet, with an anklet, looked more feminine, more like a girl than the tomboy I knew. I never gave much thought to that sort of thing. In the games we played, she was like any boy. Now, as she danced, she was a step off, struggling; despite that she was graceful, extraordinarily so, as if the anklet had unlocked this quality in her. Even when she missed her cue, or bungled the turn, suddenly she was—and I couldn't help but notice—all girl.

My twin had no miscues. Hed learned the dance in a flash, I could see. He had a way of holding his chin high as if fearful that otherwise the curls he balanced on his head would slide off, and it made him seem taller, more upright than me. That mannerism of his was exaggerated in the dance. When Shiva was excited, his irises turned from brown to blue, and they were that way now as his heels hit the floor in unison with Hema's, and he matched her every dip and flourish. It was as if his anklet moved him, and that in copying the sound of Hema's anklets, the requisite movement of his body came about. I studied this lean, supple creature as if seeing him for the first time.

My brother who could draw anything from memory, who could juggle huge numbers in his head with ease, had now found a new vehicle for locomotion and a new language for his will to express itself, separate from me. I didn't want to join in. I was certain that I would look clumsy. I felt envious, almost as if I were a handicapped child, unable rather than unwilling to participate.

“Traitor,” I said to Shiva, under my breath.

But he heard me; there was nothing wrong with his ears and he'd have known what I said even if I had said it only to myself.

My twin brother, my skull mate, this little dancing god skated away, averting his eyes.

19. Giving Dogs Their Due

THE WEEK BEFORE Shiva gave up his anklet, we were all driving into town when a motorcycle, siren wailing, went tearing by, waving us off the street.

“All right, all right,” Ghosh said, pulling to the side. “His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie the First, Lion of Judah, needs the road.”

We piled out onto Menelik II Avenue. Down the hill was Africa Hall, which looked like a watercolor box standing on its side. Its pastel panels were meant to mimic the colorful hems of the traditional shama. Outside the new headquarters for the Organization for African Unity the flag of every country on the continent had its spot. The building in its short existence had already been graced by the likes of Nasser, Nkrumah, Obote, and Tubman.

The Emperor's Jubilee Palace was on the other side of the avenue. I could see the mounted Imperial Bodyguard sentries, one on each side of the palace gate. The Emperor's residence rose behind the lavish gardens like a pale hallucination of Buckingham Palace. At night, the floodlit building glowed ivory. Since it was that time of year, one of the pines in the compound was strung with lights and became a giant Christmas tree.

Pedestrians, gharries, cars—everything came to a stop. A barefoot man with milky eyes took off his tattered hat to reveal a ring of curly gray hairs. Three women in the black cloth of mourning, umbrellas over their heads, also waited next to us. They were sweating from the effort of walking uphill. One of these ladies sat on the curb. She eased off her plastic shoe. Two young men stood back from the curb, looking displeased at having to interrupt their walk.

The seated woman said, “Maybe His Highness will give us a lift. Tell him we can't afford the bus. My feet are killing me.”

The old man glared, his lips moving as if working up the spittle to chastise her for such blasphemy.

Now a green Volkswagen with a siren and loudspeaker on top sped by. I never thought a Volkswagen could go that fast.

“I bet you His Majesty is in the new Lincoln,” I said to Ghosh.

“The odds are against you.”

It was 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated. According to a schoolmate whose father was a member of Parliament, the Lincoln was President Kennedy's used car, but not the one in which hed been shot. This one was covered and was spectacular, not for its curves but for its impossible length. A joke had circulated in town that for the Emperor to get from the Old Palace on top of the hill, where he conducted his official business, down to the Jubilee Palace, all he had to do was climb into the backseat and come out of the front.

Of the twenty-six cars at His Majesty's disposal, twenty were Rolls-Royces. One was a Christmas present from the Queen of England. I tried to imagine what else was under a monarch's Christmas tree.

A LAND ROVER PASSED BY—Imperial Bodyguard, not police— moving slowly, its tailgate open, men with machine guns across their thighs looking out. We heard a rumble that sounded like war drums; a phalanx of eight motorcycles emerged out of the ether, two abreast, the air shimmering around the engine's fins. The sun glinted off chrome headlights and crash bars. Despite their black uniforms, white helmets, and gloves, the riders reminded me of the wide-eyed, monkey-maned warriors who came out of the hills on horseback on the anniversary of Mussolini's fall, looking mean and hungry to kill again.

The ground shook as the Ducatis slid past, huge reserves of horsepower ready to be unleashed with a turn of the wrist.

His Majesty's green Rolls-Royce was polished to a mirrorlike finish. On a built-up seat, His Majesty looked out of windows specially constructed for monarchs to view and be viewed. In the wake of the motorcycles his car was all but silent save for a faint wheeze from the valves.

Ghosh muttered, “For the price of that, we could feed every child in the empire for a month.”

The old man next to us was on his knees, and then as the Rolls reached us he kissed the asphalt.

I saw the Emperor clear as day, his little dog Lulu on his lap. The Emperor looked directly at us, smiling as we bowed. He brought the palms of his hands together. Then he was past.

“Did you see that?” Hema said, excited. “Did you see the ñamaste?”

“In honor of you,” Ghosh said. “He knows who you are.”

“Don't be silly. It was the sari. Still, how sweet!”

“Is that all it takes to sway you? One ñamaste?”

“Stop it, Ghosh. I don't get involved in politics. I like the old man.”

The Rolls turned toward the palace gate. The motorcyclists and the Land Rover pulled up just beyond the gate. The two guards on horseback, resplendent in their green trousers, white jackets, and white pith helmets, presented arms.

A lone policeman held back the usual cluster of petitioners who waited on one side of the gate. An old woman waving her paper must have caught the Emperor's eye. The Rolls stopped. I could see the little Chihuahua, its paws on the window and its head snapping back and forth: Lulu was barking. The old woman, bowing, thrust her paper to the window with both hands.

She seemed to be speaking. The Emperor was evidently listening. The old woman became more animated, gesturing with her hands, her body rocking, and now we could hear her clearly.

The car moved on, but the old lady wasn't done. She tried to run with the Rolls, fingers on the window. When she couldn't keep up, she yelled, “Leba, leba”—”Thief, thief.” She looked around for a stone, finding none, took off her shoe and bounced it off the trunk before anyone could react.

I saw only the rise of the policeman's club and then she was slumped on the ground, like a sack. The palace gates swung shut. The motorcycle riders ran forward and began clubbing anyone near the gate, ignoring their shrieks. The old woman, motionless, nevertheless got a vicious kick to her ribs. The mounted sentries stared straight ahead, their mounts disciplined and still, only the horses’ skin twitching.

We stood stunned. The two young men behind us snickered, and walked quickly away.

The woman next to us, her hands on her head, said, “How could they do that to a grandmother?” The old man, hat in hand, said nothing, but I could see he was shaken.

As we drove away, I saw the motorcycle riders had turned on the policeman, giving him a good thrashing. His mistake was not clubbing the old woman down before she opened her mouth and embarrassed them all.

THESE MANY YEARS LATER, even though I have witnessed so much violence, that image remains vivid. The unexpected clubbing of the old woman, seconds after the Emperor had greeted us so warmly, felt like a betrayal, and with it came the shock of knowing Hema and Ghosh were powerless to help.

In my mind, that bug-eyed Chihuahua was a party to the cruelty. She was the only creature permitted to walk before His Majesty. She ate and slept better than most of his subjects. From that day forth I had a new perception of the Emperor, and of Lulu. And I definitely didn't like that overweened dog.

IF LULU WAS THE CANINE Empress of Ethiopia, our Koochooloo and the two nameless dogs were the peasantry. A Persian dentist whod worked briefly at Missing christened her “Koochooloo.” To name a dog in Ethiopia is to save it. Missing's two nameless dogs had mangy coats that were so mud-and tar-stained that one could not be sure of the origi nal color. During the long rains, when all other dogs sought shelter, these two stayed out rather than risk a boot to the head. It was quite possible that they were in fact a succession of nameless dogs who happened to visit in twos.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise fed Koochooloo when the Persian dentist disappeared. After her death, Almaz took over.

Koochooloo's eyes were expressive dark pearls. They hinted at a playfulness, a mischievousness, that life's disappointments hadn't quite snuffed out. Dogs aren't supposed to have eyebrows, I know, but I swear she had folds that could move independently. They conveyed apprehension, amusement, and even a befuddled look that reminded me of Stan of Laurel and Hardy fame—we saw their films at Cinema Adowa. There was no question of Koochooloo coming into our house. Cows were sacred; dogs were not.

We didn't know Koochooloo was pregnant until the day after New Year's. We hadn't seen her for two days and then, just before we left for school, we found her behind the woodpile in a crawl space. Our flashlight revealed her utter exhaustion. She could barely lift her head. The fur balls wriggling at her belly explained everything.

We ran to Hema and Ghosh and then to Matron to tell them the exciting news. We thought up names. In retrospect, the adults’ lack of excitement should have warned us.

OUR TAXI DROPPED US at Missing's front gate after school. We had just crested the hill when we saw it, though at first we had no idea what we were seeing. The pups were in a large plastic bag whose mouth was tied with cord to the exhaust pipe of a taxi. We found out later that the driver had seen Gebrew making off with the litter, and he'd proposed a less messy means of getting rid of the pups than drowning them. Gebrew, always in awe of machinery, was too easily convinced.

Under our eyes the cabbie fired his engine, the bag ballooned out, and in a few seconds, the car stalled. Koochooloo, who that morning could hardly walk, tore around the wheels of the car, nipping at the smoke-filled bag. Inside it, her puppies, their snouts overblown when they pressed against the plastic, tumbled over one another looking for an exit. Koochooloo's expression was beyond grief. She was crazed and desperate. Patients and passersby found it entertaining. A small crowd had gathered.

I was numb, disbelieving. Was this some necessary ritual in the raising of puppies which I didn't know about? I took my cues from the adults standing around—that was a mistake. But inside, I felt just like Koochooloo.

Shiva took his cues from no one. He ran to the car and tried to untie the plastic bag from the exhaust pipe, burning his palms in the process. Then he was on his knees, ripping at the thick bag. Gebrew pulled him away, kicking and fighting. Only when Shiva saw that the puppies were quite still, a hillock of fur, only then did he stop.

I glanced at Genet and was shocked by her deadpan expression: it said she was well aware of the undercurrents of the world we lived in and had known well before us. Nothing surprised her.

How Koochooloo could forgive us and live on at Missing, I never understood. She knew nothing of Matron's quotas and edicts for Missing dogs. Just as we didn't know that several times in the past, Gebrew, under orders, had plucked Koochooloo's newborns from her teats and drowned them.

SHIVA HAD SCRAPED HIS KNEES and blistered his hands. Hema, Ghosh, and Matron rushed to meet us in Casualty.

Ghosh put Silvadene on Shiva's burns and dressed his knees. The grown-ups had nothing to say about the pups.

“Why did you let Gebrew do that?” I said. Ghosh didn't look up from the dressings. He was incapable of lying to us, but in this case he'd withheld knowledge of what would happen.

“Don't blame Gebrew,” Matron said. “They were my instructions. I'm sorry. We just can't have packs of dogs roaming around Missing.”

This didn't sound like an apology.

“Koochooloo will forget,” Hema said soothingly. “Animals don't have that kind of memory, my loves.”

“Willjyou forget if someone kills me or Marion?”

The adults looked at me. But I hadn't spoken. Moreover, I was a good eight feet away from where Shiva was getting bandaged. His irises had gone from brown to a steely blue, his pupils down to pinpoints, his chin thrust higher than ever, exposing his neck so that he was sighting down his nose at a world populated by people for whom he seemed to have the greatest disdain.

Will you forget if someone kills me or Marion?

Those words were formed in the voice box, shaped by the lips and tongue, of my heretofore silent brother. For his first spoken words in years, he'd crafted a sentence none of us would forget.

The adults looked at Shiva and then at me. I shook my head and pointed to Shiva.

Finally, Hema whispered, “Shiva … what did you say?”

“Will you forget about us tomorrow if someone kills us today?”

Hema reached for Shiva, wanting to hug him, tears of joy in her eyes. But Shiva drew back from her, drew back from all of them, as if they were murderers. He bent down, rolled down his sock, and snapped off the anklet, placing it on the table. That anklet had never come off except to be repaired, enlarged, and three or four times replaced by a new one. It was as if he'd cut off a finger and laid it on the table.

“Shiva,” Matron said at last, “if we let Koochooloo have her litters, we'd have about sixty dogs around Missing by now.”

“What happened to the other puppies?” Shiva asked, before I could.

Matron mumbled something about Gebrew having disposed of them humanely and that the car exhaust was ill-advised and not sanctioned, and Gebrew should have done it well before we came back from school. I was in step with him now.

Shiva touched my shoulder, and whispered in my ear.

“What did he say?” Hema asked.

“He said, when you all are so cruel, why should he speak? He says he doesn't think Sister Mary Joseph Praise or Thomas Stone would have done something like this. Maybe if they were here this would never have happened.”

Hema sighed, as if shed been waiting for one of us to bring their names up in just this way. “Darling,” she said, in a voice like gravel, “you have no idea what they might do.”

Shiva walked out. Ghosh and Matron had the stunned expression of people who had seen a ghost. Now they were the ones who were mute. How, I wondered, could these adults who cared so much whether my brother spoke or not, who cared for the poor, the sick, the motherless, who were as bothered as we were by the cruelty to the old woman outside the palace, be so indifferent to the cruelty we had witnessed?

I asked Matron later if she thought that the death of her pups left scars on Koochooloo's insides. Matron said she didn't know, but she did know that Missing couldn't afford to breed dogs, and three was the limit. And no, she didn't think there was a separate dog heaven, and frankly she did not know God's opinion on what was the right number of dogs for Missing, but He had given her some discretion on this matter and that was not something she wanted to debate with me.

AFTER THE KILLINGS, I saw in Koochooloo's eyes her disappointment in us as a race. She sought out places where she could curl up and not run into humans. We left food out for her, and if she ate, it was not when we were around.

For weeks, there was only one person for whom she would attempt to wag her tail, and that was Shiva.

When Shiva learned to dance Bharatnatyam (and became Hema's sishya and she was already talking about his arangetram—his debut), I first began to see him as separate from me. Now that he would talk and could express himself, ShivaMarion didn't always move or speak as one. In earlier years, our differences had complemented each other. But in the days after the death of the pups, I felt our identities slowly separating. My brother, my identical twin, was tuned to the distress of animals. As for the affairs of humans, for now at least, he was to leave that to me.

20. Blind Man's Buff

MR. LOOMIS, headmaster of Loomis Town & Country, saw to it that our long holidays coincided with the long rains. That way, he could be in England in July and August, relaxing, spending our school fees, while we were stuck in Addis Ababa. Old hands in Addis referred to the monsoon months as “winter,” which hopelessly confused new arrivals for whom July could only be summer.

It rained so much that it even rained in my dreams. I awoke happy that there was no school, but that incessant murmur on the tin roof immediately dampened the euphoria. This was the winter of my eleventh year, and when I went to bed at night, I prayed that the skies should open up on Mr. Loomis wherever he was, be it Brighton or Bournemouth. I hoped that a personal thundercloud trailed him every minute of that day.

SHIVA WAS UNAFFECTED BY COLD, fog, mist, or wetness, while I became morose and pessimistic. Outside our window, there was now a brown lake dotted with atolls of red mud. I lost faith that a lawn and flower bed could ever reappear out of that.

On Wednesdays Hema took us to the British Council and USIS libraries, where we returned books, checked out a new pile, loaded them in the car, then she dropped us off at the Empire Theater or Cinema Adowa for the matinee. We were free to read whatever we wanted, but Hema required of us a half-page journal entry to record new words we learned and the number of pages we had read. We were also to copy out a memorable idea or sentence to share at dinner.

I resented this winter curriculum, but it did bring Captain Horatio Hornblower sailing into my life. Matron, whose ability to read my soul I did not yet fully appreciate, asked me to borrow A Ship of the Line for her. I opened it out of curiosity and found I had sailed into a world more damp and wretched than my own, and strangely, I was happy to be there. Thanks to C. S. Forester, I was on a creaking ship on the other side of the world and in the head of Horatio Hornblower, a man who was like Ghosh and Hema—heroic in his professional role. But he was also like me—”unhappy and lonely.” Of course, I wasn't really unhappy or lonely, but in the monsoon season it seemed necessary to think of myself that way. The unfairness of the Admiralty in London, the irony of Hornblower's seasickness, the tragedy of his returning from a long voyage to find his children mortally ill with smallpox … I had my equivalents, trivial as they were, for all these perils.

After hours of reading, I itched to be outdoors; I know Genet did, too. Shiva sketched and scribbled. Hema's calligraphy exercises catalyzed an unstoppable ink flow in Shiva's pen, but his medium was still paper bags, napkins, and end pages of books. He loved to sketch Zemui's BMW and had done so in every season. Veronica, if he drew her, now straddled a motorcycle.

On a Friday, after Ghosh and Hema left for work, the rain came down harder and there was now thunder and hail. The noise on the roof was deafening. I peeked out of the kitchen door and was met by the scent of sopping hide, and the sight of three donkeys sheltering under the roof overhang along with their overseer. If the wood the donkeys delivered was anywhere as wet as they were, it did not bode well for our stove. The animals stood still, resigned to their fate, half asleep, their skin twitching involuntarily.

When I went back to the living room, Genet yelled above the racket, “Let's play blind man's buff!”

“Sissy game,” I said. “Stupid girls’ game.” But she was already hunting for a blindfold.

I never understood why blind man's buff was so popular at school, particularly in Genet's class. I'd seen the mob dancing just out of reach of “it,” pushing or “buffing” the blind man till he (or she) captured a tormentor. The blind man had to name the captive or set the person free.

We modified the game for indoors: no buffing of the blind man. Instead, you hid by standing silent (though with the din on the roof you could be whistling and it wouldn't matter). You could hide anywhere but the kitchen, and not under or behind a barrier. Time was the object of the game: how fast could the blind man find the other two.

THAT MORNING, Genet went first. It took her fifteen minutes to find Shiva, and ten more to get me.

You would think after twenty-five minutes of standing there I would be bored. I wasn't. I was intrigued.

It took discipline to stand stock-still. I felt like the Invisible Man, one of my favorite comic book characters. The Invisible Man stood as the world moved around him, as his archenemy tried to find him.

Blindfolded, wearing white tights, her arms reaching in front of her, putting one foot out, then the other, Genet looked helpless, as if she were walking the plank on a pirate ship. She had the upright carriage and the balance of one who could do cartwheels with an arm tucked to her side, and who could walk on her hands with more grace than Ghosh on two feet. Barrettes made of yellow and silver beads were snug around her hair, which was parted in the middle and pulled up into two stalks. Genet wasn't vain about her dress. But when it came to headbands, combs, pins, and banana clamps, she was most particular. Of course, this trait might have been more Hema's or Rosina's or Almaz's doing: they were forever brushing her hair or braiding it into ponytails or rows. Hema sometimes put kohl inside Genet's lower lid. That black line highlighted her eyes, made them catch fire and flash like mirrors.

Girls matured faster than boys, so they said, and I believed it, because Genet acted older than ten. She distrusted the world and was more argumentative and always ready for combat; if I was too willing to defer to adults and assume they knew what they were doing, she was just the opposite, quite willing to think of them as fallible. But now, blindfolded, she had a vulnerability I'd never been aware of before; all her defenses seemed to reside in the high heat of her gaze.

Twice, Genet almost walked into me–as–Invisible Man, veering off at the last second. The third time, she was millimeters away, and the Invisible Man snorted to suppress a laugh. Her hands, sweeping like windmills, found me and nearly took my eyes out.

Then things turned strange.

When I wore the blindfold, I found Genet in thirty seconds, and Shiva in half that time. How? I followed my nose. I had no inkling such a thing was possible. I was “seeing” through olfaction. I heeded an instinct that only made itself known when my sight was gone.

Shiva, when it was his turn, found us just as quickly. Suddenly, we forgot about the rain.

When I blindfolded Genet again, it took her even longer than the first time. Her nose was no help. For half an hour, I watched her shuffle this way and that.

Frustrated, she whipped off the blindfold and accused us of moving and of being in collusion. On both counts we were innocent.

When Ghosh came home for lunch, Genet and I rushed to tell him about our game. “Wait! Stop!” he said. “I can't hear you when you speak over each other. Genet, you first. ‘Begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end: then stop.’ Who said that?”

“You did,” Genet said.

“The King in Alice in Wonderland,” Shiva said, “page ninety-three. Chapter twelve. And you missed four words and two commas.”

“I certainly did not!” Ghosh said, acting offended, but unable to conceal his surprise.

“You missed ‘The King said, comma, very gravely, comma.’ “

“Right you are …,” Ghosh said. “Now, tell me what happened, Genet.”

She did and then begged him to referee. Ghosh stationed Genet here and there, and each time, blindfolded and sightless, I went straight to her. We blindfolded Ghosh at his request, but he was no better than Genet. We would have further “explored the phenomenon,” as Ghosh put it, but he had to return to the hospital.

GENET'S FOREHEAD STAYED FURROWED all afternoon, her eyebrows meeting in a V. I felt the venom of her gaze on my face.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“Is it against the law to look?”

“Yes.”

I stuck my tongue out. She flew out of her chair and came at me. I expected that. We tumbled to the floor. I soon pinned her flat on her back, her arms above her head, straddling her, but it was far from an easy task.

“Get off me.”

“Why? So you can have another shot?”

“Get off, I said.”

“I will. But if you start again, I will do this.” I dug my knee under her armpit and into her ribs. Her anger dissolved into screams and hysterical laughter. She begged me to stop. Knowing her and how quickly the fire could flare when you thought you had put it out, I gave her another dose to make sure. When I stepped off, I did not turn my back on her.

Genet could sprint faster than Shiva but could not quite beat me over a short distance. Her gait was so effortless, her feet barely touching the ground, that she could run all day. I wouldn't race her over anything longer than fifty yards. Climbing trees, playing soccer, wrestling, or sword fighting—in all these she was just about our equal.

But blind man's buff had found a difference.

DURING DINNER with Hema and Ghosh, Genet was quiet. The yellow and silver barrettes had given way to a vicious claw clamp and a knitting needle going across. When Hema asked, she reported on her Secret Seven book. She sat next to me and Shiva, fending off Almaz and Rosina, who bustled around, trying to add to our plates. The two of them always ate later in the kitchen.

After dinner, Genet said her good nights and retreated to Rosina's quarters behind our bungalow. I found Ghosh hunting through Alice in Wonderland. I looked over his shoulder as he found page ninety-three. Shiva was right, down to the two commas.

The rain stopped when we got into bed, precisely when it was too late to take advantage of the lull. The silence was both a relief and nerve-racking, because at any moment it would start back up.

Hema read to us in our bedroom, a nightly ritual that she had never interrupted once she began it in response to Shiva's silence. R. K. Nara -yan's Man-eater of Malgudi was our text the last few days. Ghosh sat on the other side of our bed, head bowed, listening. The book had started slowly and it had yet to pick up any pace. But perhaps that was the point. As we adjusted to the slow, the “boring” world of village India, it revealed itself to be interesting and even funny. Malgudi was populated by characters that resembled people we knew, imprisoned by habit, by profession, and by a most foolish and unreasonable belief that enslaved them; only they couldn't see it.

The sound of the phone ringing was foreign to Malgudi and it broke the thread of the story. Ghosh picked up the receiver. “Right away,” he said, gazing at Hema. When he hung up he said, “Princess Turunesh is in labor. Six centimeters. Pains five minutes apart. Matron is with her in the private room.”

“What does that mean, ‘six centimeters’?” I asked.

Ghosh was about to answer, but Hema, already at the dresser, brushing her hair, said quickly, “Nothing, sweetie. The princess will have a baby soon. I have to go.”

“I'll come with you,” Ghosh said. He could assist if Hema opted for a Cesarean section.

I NEVER LIKED IT when they left at night. My dread wasn't intruders, but an anxiety about Hema and Ghosh, a fear that despite their best intentions, they might not come back. I never felt that way in the daytime. But at night, when they went dancing at Juventus or played bridge at Mrs. Reddy and Evangeline's house, I'd wait up for them, imagining the worst.

After they left, I padded into the living room in bare feet and pajamas. I worked the short-wave band on the Grundig.

Above the static, I heard the motorcycle. Halfway up our driveway, Sergeant Zemui would always cut the engine so as not to disturb us. Then in silence, save for the squeak of springs and the rattle of mudguards, he'd coast into the carport. The coda was the metallic whump of cycle rolling back onto its center stand.

I loved that ungainly BMW and the way its udderlike engine bulged out on either side of the frame. Shiva loved it, too. All machines have genders, and that BMW was a royal “she.” For as long as I can recall I'd been hearing her low throb, a lub-dub sound in the early morning and at bedtime, as Zemui left for and returned from work. Whenever I heard the tramp of his heavy boots receding, I felt sorry for him. I pictured his lonely hike home, particularly during this season of mud and rain. Despite the long raincoat and a plastic hood for his pith helmet, it was impossible not to get soaked.

FIVE MINUTES LATER, I heard the kitchen door open. Genet came in wearing my hand-me-down pajamas.

Her anger from earlier wasn't there. In its place was something I rarely saw: sadness. Her hair was held back by a blue headband. She was listless, withdrawn, as if years, not minutes, had passed since I last saw her.

“Where's Shiva?” she asked, sitting across from me.

“In our room. Why?”

“Just asked. No reason.”

“Hema and Ghosh had to go to the hospital,” I said.

“I know. I heard them tell my mother.”

“Are you all right?”

She shrugged. Her eyes looked through the glowing dial of the Grundig, to some planet beyond. There was a little fleck in the right iris, a puff of smoke around it, where a spark had penetrated. We were much younger, exploding cap-gun strips on the pavement, striking them with a heavy rock, when that happened. You could only see the blemish close up, and at certain angles. From a distance, the hint of asymmetry made her gaze seem dreamy.

A crackly Chinese station faded in and out, a woman's voice with sounds no throat should be able to produce. I thought it was funny, but Genet didn't smile.

“Marion? Will you play blind man's buff with me?” She asked in a sweet, gentle way. “Just one more time?”

I groaned.

“Please?”

The urgency in her voice surprised me. As if her future depended on this.

“Did you come back just for that reason? Shiva's already in bed.”

She was silent, considering this, and then she said, “How about just you and me. Please, Marion?”

I was never good at saying no to Genet. I didn't think she would have any better luck finding me this time around than before. It would only make her more depressed. But if that was what she wanted …

OUTSIDE, the rain had scrubbed the sky free of stars; the black night leaked through the shutters into the house and under my blindfold.

“I've changed my mind,” I said into the void.

She ignored me, tying a second knot to secure the blindfold. For good measure, she put an empty rice-flour sack over my head, rolling up the edges to leave my mouth uncovered.

“Did you hear me?” I said. “I don't want to do this, I never agreed to this.”

“You cheated? You admit it?” The voice did not even sound like hers.

“I won't admit what is not true,” I said.

A gust of wind rattled the windows. It was the bungalow's way of clearing its throat, warning us to cinch up for more rain.

She disappeared again, and when she returned I felt my hands being strapped against my sides with a piece of leather—Ghosh's belt. “That's so you won't remove the blindfold.”

Now she grabbed me by my shoulders. She spun me around. Her hands were paddles, slapping my chest, my shoulders, turning me like a top. When I yelled for her to stop she added a few more turns.

“Count to twenty. And don't peek.”

I was still turning in that inner darkness, wondering why nausea had to be such a firm companion of vertigo. I crashed into something. A hard edge. The sofa. It caught me in the ribs, but it did keep me from falling. This wasn't fair, tying my hands, messing with my balance … She'd tricked me. If she wanted to disorient me, it had worked. “Cheater!” I yelled. “If you want to win so bad, just say you won, okay?”

A sharp sound on the tin roof made me jump. An acorn? I waited, but it didn't rattle down the slope. A thief checking to see if anyone was home? With my hands bound, I was doubly helpless. I sneezed. I waited for the second sneeze—they always came in twos. But not tonight. I cursed the musty sack.

“Screw your courage to the sticking place!” I shouted. I had no idea what that meant, but Ghosh said it a lot. It sounded vulgar and defiant, a good thing to repeat when you needed courage. My heart hammered in my chest. I needed courage.

The scent I had to follow wasn't as distinct as it had been in the morning. Not being able to reach in front of me and being saddled with a sack on my head were huge handicaps. “I'll find you,” I yelled, “but then never again.”

In the dining room, using my foot, I traced the sideboard, saying “Screw your courage to the sticking place” as my mantra. From there I went on down the corridor leading to the bedrooms.

I knew the spots where the narrow floorboards squeaked. There were many nights I'd stood outside Ghosh and Hema's room, listening, particularly when they seemed to be arguing. With them what you thought was a squabble could be just the opposite. I once heard Hema speak of me as “His father's son. Stubborn to a fault,” and then she laughed. I was shocked. I didn't think of myself as stubborn, and I had no idea that I might be anything like the man I sometimes fantasized might come through the front gate. Hema never mentioned his name, and her tone of voice when she compared me to him suggested faint praise. Another night I overheard Hema say, “Where? Exactly where? Under what circumstance? Don't you think we could have looked at Sister's face, or his face, and known? How did we not know?They should have told us. Say something, Ghosh.” I didn't get it. Ghosh was strangely silent.

Now, with the blindfold on, I could recall every word of theirs. Covering my eyes had opened up new channels in my memory, just as it had fired up my sense of smell. I felt I needed to ask Hema and Ghosh about this conversation. What were they talking about? But how could I? I couldn't tell them Id been eavesdropping.

MY NOSE LED ME TO our bedroom. I turned in. I inched forward. I came to where the scent peaked. I was up against the dresser. Bending forward, my face touched flannel. Her pajamas. Shed piled them on top of my dresser. Like a tracker dog, I buried my nose in the cloth, shook my face in flannel and scattered the pajamas, sharpening my instrument.

“Very clever,” I said. I knew Shiva was on his bed. He must have strapped on his big dancing anklet, because it sounded now, a noise that was his equivalent of a noncommittal grunt.

I retraced my steps. The kitchen was supposed to be off-limits, but that is where the trail led. But here, the scents of ginger, onions, cardamom, and cloves were like curtains that I had to claw through.

On an impulse, I knelt and put my nose to the tiles. What chance did bipedal man have, nose high up in the air, against a four-legged tracker whose nose was to the ground? Yes, there she was. The trail veered to the right.

Inching to the pantry, I knew that this game, born out of monsoon tedium, was no longer that. No rules now. Nothing would be the same after this. I knew. I may have been just eleven, but my consciousness felt as ripe as it would ever be. My body might grow and age and I would soon have more knowledge and experience, but all that was me, all that was Marion, the part that saw and registered the world and chronicled it in an inner ledger for posterity, was well seated inside my body and never more so than at that moment, robbed of eyes and hands.

I stood up as I entered the pantry. “I know you're there,” I said. The echo gave me a fix on that long narrow room; I knew just where she was and I went to her.

Genet was in front of me. If my hands were free, I would ‘ve reached for her, tickled or pinched her. I heard a muffled sound. It could have been laughter, but I didn't think so. She was crying.

I wanted to console her. The urge to do so grew. It was a feral instinct, much like the one that led me to her.

I drew forward.

She pushed me away, but halfheartedly. The push was a plea for me not to leave.

I'd always assumed that Genet was content with her life. She ate at our table, went to school with us, and was part of the family. She didn't have a father, and we didn't have our real parents, and I assumed that, just like us, she felt lucky to have Hema and Ghosh. I saw us as equals, but in doing so, perhaps I glossed over the things she could not overlook. Our bedroom was bigger than her narrow and drafty one-room quarters. At night, if she wanted to visit the privy, Genet had to step out into the elements, passing the open shed where we stacked firewood. While Ghosh and Hema tucked us into bed, transported us to the magi cal world of Malgudi, then turned off the lights, Genet read to herself under the single naked bulb, trying to tune out the radio which Rosina played late into the night. There was one bed, and mother and daughter slept in it, but Genet would probably have relished her own bed. A charcoal brazier provided warmth. The smoke and incense that permeated her clothes embarrassed her. If we found her quarters cozy, she was ashamed of where she lived. In earlier years, we were as often in that room as we were in our house. But of late, though Rosina welcomed us, Genet didn't encourage us to come in.

Blindfolded, I suddenly saw all this so clearly. I understood her fierce competitiveness in a way I'd never appreciated.

One more step forward. I waited. The push or punch did not come. I inclined my head, used it as a probe to find her. Her ear and then her cheek brushed against mine. Wet. Her jerky breathing was hot against my neck. Slowly she settled her chin there.

The feral self stood dutiful and protective. Watch and learn, it said to me. Defend and comfort. I felt heroic.

My feet were close together. I had tilted forward to counter her weight. When she readjusted, I fell against her, sandwiching her against the pantry shelf. Our bodies were touching at the thighs, hips, and at the chest, our cheeks still together. I waited for her to push me back to the vertical, but she didn't.

How well we knew each other's bodies from wrestling, from pulling each other up to the tree house, and from earlier years, wading in our splash pool together. In the big packing cases stuffed with straw in which glassware was shipped to Missing, we played house and doctor. We were never self-conscious about our anatomical differences. But now, blindfolded, her face invisible to me and mine obscured by cloth, it was all new and unknown. I wasn't the Invisible Man. I was the blind man who could see, who is forgiven his clumsiness by the other qualities the blindness brings out.

Though my arms were pinned to my side, I could swivel my hands forward. I touched her hips. Her skin was cold. She didn't flinch. She needed my touch, my warmth. I pulled her to me.

She trembled.

She was naked.

I don't know how many minutes I stood there. It was precisely the comfort she seemed to need this night. If only she had known to ask, or I to give, we could've done away with the blindfold … Thank God for the blindfold.

She worked her hands into the gap between my arms and my trunk. She hugged me. It was an awkward, painful pose for me. Yet I didn't dare say a word for fear she'd let go.

The rain murmured gently on the tin roof.

After an eternity, she withdrew her arms. She took the rice bag off my face.

She undid my restraint, freeing my hands, and I heard the belt buckle clatter to the floor. But she left the blindfold on. If I'd wanted to, I could have taken it off.

I missed her embrace. I wanted to feel it again, now that my arms were free. I reached for her. Naked, she felt smaller, more delicate.

Something soft, fleshy touched my lips. I had never been kissed before. At the movies, Genet and I groaned and laughed when we saw the actors kiss. There was always one Italian movie in the triple feature, particularly at Cinema Adowa. It was either dubbed or had subtitles. It typically came before the short comic feature—the Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy—and it always had lots of kissing. Shiva studied those onscreen smooches with great seriousness, cocking his head. Genet and I didn't. Kissing was silly. Adults had no idea how stupid they looked.

Our lips were dry. A big nothing, just as I thought. Perhaps the kissing had the same purpose as the embrace. To give and get comfort. I tilted my head to one side, movie style, wondering if the sensation would get any better. I caught her lower lip between my lips. This was a new discovery, that the mouth could be this delicate tactile instrument, particularly in the absence of sight. Her tongue touched my lips and I wanted to snap my head back. I thought of the twenty-five-cent, one-hour sucker on which the three of us took turns. Now, slowly, our two mouths shared the candy without the candy. Not really pleasurable. Not disgusting either.

Genet's hands were on my face. They did that in the movies. I slid my right hand to her shoulders, then down her chest. I felt the hillocks on which her nipples sat, no different than mine. Her fingers slid down to touch my chest, where it should have been ticklish, but it was not. My hand swept over her belly, and then down farther, between her legs, running over a soft fissure, the absence, the empty space, more intriguing than what might have been present. Her hand, tentative like mine, slipped past my waistband, prospecting. When she held me, it felt so different than when I touched myself.

THE DOOR FROM THE OUTSIDE to the kitchen opened.

It had to be Rosina. Or perhaps it was Ghosh and Hema. The footsteps went on into the living room.

I stepped back. I pulled off the blindfold, blinking in the dark pantry, an alien landing on earth.

In the reflected light of the kitchen, Genet's eyes were moist, her face puffy and her lips swollen. She didn't want to meet my gaze. She preferred me blind. Her eyes were slanted, her nose rising to a quick point. Her forehead planed back, not at all like Rosina's rounded one. She looked like the bust of Queen Nefertiti in my Dawn of History book.

My blindfold was off but I still possessed a hyperacuity of the senses. I could see the future. Genet's face in that pantry was the face that most revealed her. It carried intimations of the woman she would grow up to be. I could see how those eyes would stay serene, beautiful, concealing the kind of restlessness and recklessness so evident tonight. Her cheekbones would push out, expressing the sheer force of her will, making her nose even sharper, further elongating her lovely eyes. The lower lip would outgrow the upper, the buds on her chest turn into fruit, and her legs would grow like tall vines. In a land of beautiful people, she would be most beautiful and exotic. Men—I knew this before I should have known—would perceive her disdain and would want her. Iwould want her most of all. She'd put up obstacles. I might never be as strong for her or as close to her as I was this night. Despite this knowledge, I'd keep trying.

I knew all this. I felt it, saw it. It entered my consciousness in a flash, but the proof was yet to come.

Rosina called Genet's name from somewhere in the house.

I picked up the belt. How we could both be so serene, I'll never know.

I touched Genet on her shoulders, gently, carefully. The other moment of touch was long gone. Her eyes turned to me with what could be love or its opposite.

“I will always find you,” I whispered.

“Maybe,” she said, bringing her lips close to my ear. “But I might get better at hiding.”

Rosina walked in and stopped, frozen at the sight of us.

“What are you two doing?” she said, in Amharic. She smiled out of habit, but her brows conveyed her puzzlement. “I've been looking all over for you. Where are your clothes? What is this?”

“A game,” I said waving the blindfold and belt as if it answered her questions, but my throat was so dry I don't think any noise came out.

Genet brushed past me, heading back to the living room. Rosina grabbed her hand. “Where are your clothes, daughter?”

“Let go my hand.”

“But why are you naked?”

Genet said nothing, her face defiant.

Rosina jerked her by the arm. “Why did you take them off?”

When Genet replied, her voice was cutting, spoiling for a fight. “Why do you take your clothes off for Zemui? When you send me out, is it not for you to get naked?”

Rosina's mouth froze in the open position. When she could speak, she said, “He is your father. He's my husband.”

Genet's face showed no surprise. She laughed, a cruel, mocking sound, as if she'd heard these words before. I cringed for my nanny as Genet spoke. “Your husband? My father? You lie. My father would stay the night. My father would have us live with him in a real house.” She was angry, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Your husband wouldn't have another wife and three children. Your husband wouldn't come home and send me out to play so he can play with you.” She pulled her arm free and went to get her clothes.

ROSINA HAD FORGOTTEN I was there.

Innocence, the carefree days, hung over a chasm. She finally turned to me.

We studied each other as if we were looking at strangers. I'd gone into the pantry sightless. Now the blindfold was off. Zemui was Genet's father. Was I the only one not to know this? How stupid was I? Why had I never thought to ask? Did Shiva know? All the long hours the Colonel spent with us playing bridge … It made sense that Zemui was also around all that time. True, in a matrilineal society, one accepted these things and didn't ask about a father when none was present. But I should have asked. I saw it now. The signs were there. I was blind, and naïve and dumb. All the letters I had written for Zemui to Darwin inquiring about his family and conveying best wishes from his pal had given no clue that Genet was his child. All those written words, spoken words, were just the shimmering surface of a deep and swift river; to think of the nights I lay in bed, hearing that motorcycle, feeling sorry for Zemui trudging home in the rain, in the dark. Clearly, I wasn't the only one to feel compassion for him.

Rosina knew me so well, she could read the progression of my every thought. I hung my head: I'd slipped in the esteem of my beloved nanny. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that now her head was down, too, as if she'd failed me, as if she had never wanted me to know this side of her. I wanted to say, About what you saw, it was a game …

I said nothing.

Genet returned, clothed in the flannel pajamas. She left without a backward glance, and Rosina followed.

Shiva was in the dining room, just beyond the door to the kitchen.

I stayed in the pantry after shutting the door, and I stood facing the shelves. A scent lingered, an ozone generated by me and Genet, by our two wills.

I heard footsteps draw near and stop, and I knew that Shiva was on the other side of the door, just as he knew I was on this side. ShivaMar-ion couldn't hide much from Shiva or Marion. But I squeezed my eyes shut and turned invisible and carried myself to a place where I was completely alone and no one could share my thoughts.

21. Knowing What You Will Hear

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, when Rosina ran her fingers through my curls, or insisted she iron my shirt before we went out, it was as if nothing had happened. But I saw these acts of hers differently They were familiar, but also designed to have a hand on me at all times, and thereby put her body between me and her daughter.

Something had transpired that night in the pantry, just as Rosina feared. Id leaned on a hidden panel, and much like in the comics, Id plunged through. The falling was unintentional, but now that I was on the other side I wanted to stay. I wanted to be around Genet more than ever, and Rosina knew it.

I saw a new dimension to Rosina—call it cunning. The same cunning was in me as well, because I no longer felt safe telling her what I was thinking. But my feelings were tough to hide. When I was with Genet, I felt the blood rushing to my face. I had forgotten how to be.

For the rest of the holidays, Genet gravitated to Shiva. His presence generated no awkwardness, while mine clearly did. I watched them put on their practice record, clear the dining room, strap on their anklets, and run through their complex routines in Bharatnatyam. I wasn't jealous. Shiva was my proxy, just as I had been his when Almaz had given me her breast. If I could not be with Genet, wasn't Shiva's being with her the next-best thing?

Perhaps my bloodhound instinct, my ability to find Genet by scent, was no more than a party trick. But perhaps not. We never played blind man's buff again. The very idea was disquieting.

I AVOIDED ZEMUI when he came to pick up or drop off his motorcycle, or when Colonel Mebratu came to play bridge. The Colonel enjoyed driving his Peugeot, or his jeep, or his staff Mercedes, and the last time Zemui spotted me, hed been riding shotgun and he waved and grinned. When I finally did encounter Zemui, I wanted to be annoyed with him; he had something in common with Thomas Stone, though Zemui at least saw his daughter every day. But when Zemui shook my hand and excitedly pulled out a new Darwin letter, I found myself sitting down with him on the kitchen steps. I was tempted to say, Why don t you ask your daughter to do this? But I didn't because I understood something I had missed before—that Genet surely didn't make things easy for her father. I was reading and writing letters for Zemui because his daughter had refused.

ON A FRIDAY EVENING, the Colonel breezed into Missing and into Ghosh's old quarters bringing energy with him, as if not one man but a regiment in full colors had arrived, along with the marching band. Half an hour later, there were two tables going. The players—Hema, Ghosh, Adid, Babu, Evangeline, Mrs. Reddy, and a newcomer they brought— seemed to inhabit their bridge hands, becoming Pass and Three-No-Trumps, their faces flushed with concentration. Adid, the khat merchant and old friend of Hema's, owned a shop in the Merkato right next to Babu's and had brought him into the group. A burst of conversation like a collective sigh signaled the end of a round. I loved to observe them play.

The Colonel, just back from London, had a rare bottle of Glenfid-dich for Ghosh, chocolates for us, and Chanel No. 5 perfume for Hema. The cigarettes in the ashtrays were Dunhill and 555—his contribution again. Though he wore a blazer and open shirt, his tucked-in chin and the shoulders drawn back made it seem he was still in uniform. If he left the party, I imagined the rest of them would slump over like toys whose spring had unwound.

Evangeline, an Anglo-Indian, a bridge regular, turned to Colonel Mebratu: “A little bird told me that we might soon be calling you Brigadier General. Is that true?”

Colonel Mebratu frowned. “Such vicious rumors. Such an incestuous community. And I fear, Evangeline, you are at the center of it. But in this case I must correct you, my dear. I am not soon to be called Brigadier General. As of yesterday, I am Brigadier General.”

Well, there was no stopping them after that. Zemui and Gebrew made two runs for food from the Ras Hotel.

Much later that night, Mebratu and Ghosh palavered over cognac and cigars. “In Korea in ‘52 we were one of fifteen countries in the UN forces. I wasn't long out of command training when I went there. The other countries underestimated us. You see, they knew nothing about Ethiopian courage or the battle of Adowa or any of that. By God, we proved ourselves in Korea. By the time we got to the Congo, they knew what to expect. We had an Irish commander, then a Swedish commander, and in the third year, they made our own General Guebre commander of allthe UN forces. You know, Ghosh, as a career military man that was my proudest moment. Even more than this promotion I got yesterday.”

I'LL NEVER KNOW HOW, but Ghosh understood what I was going through after the pantry episode; perhaps he recognized that I was quarantined from Genet and that Shiva didn't share in that experience; perhaps he saw my confusion when Zemui was around. Maybe it was written on my face that I'd become aware of human complexity—that's a kinder word than “deceit.” I was trying to decide where to peg my own truth, how much to reveal about myself—it helped to have such a steadfast father in Ghosh, never fickle, never prying, but knowing when I needed him. Had Hema learned what went on in the pantry, I'd hear about it two seconds later. But Ghosh, if he knew, was capable of keeping his peace, biding his time, hearing me out; he'd have even kept it secret from Hema if he didn't think it served any purpose to tell her.

One wet afternoon, when Genet and Shiva were having their dance lesson with Hema, Ghosh telephoned and asked me to meet him in Casualty. “I want you to feel a most unusual pulse.” Ghosh was primarily a surgeon now, operating electively three days a week and doing the emergency cases as needed. But, as he often said at dinner, he was still an internist at heart and couldn't resist coming down to Casualty to see certain patients who presented a diagnostic puzzle, one that neither Adam nor Bachelli could crack.

I was grateful for Ghosh's call. I never had any interest in dancing, but it bothered me to see Genet enjoying something in which I had no part. I put on my gutta-percha boots and raincoat and dashed out with my umbrella.

Demisse was in his twenties, sitting on the examining stool in front of Ghosh, wearing only torn jodhpurs. I noticed at once the bobbing of his head, as if an eccentric flywheel turned within him. It was my first formal visit with a patient, and I was embarrassed. What would this barefoot farmhand think of a young boy entering the exam room? But he was thrilled to see me. Later I realized that patients felt privileged to be singled out in this fashion. Not only had they made it past Adam, not only had they seen the tilik doctor, the same big doctor whom the royalty came to see, but now they got a bonus—me.

Ghosh guided my fingers to Demisse's pulse at the wrist. It was easy to feel, unavoidable, a surging, slapping, powerful wave under my fingertips. Now I could see that his head bobbing happened in time with the pulse.

“Now feel mine,” Ghosh said, holding out his wrist. It was harder to find, subtle.

He had me go back to Demisse's pulse.

“Describe it,” Ghosh said.

“Big … strong. Like something alive under the skin, slapping,” I said.

“Exactly! That is a classic collapsing or water hammer pulse. Its full name is the Corrigan's water hammer pulse.”

He handed me a foot-long thin glass tube that Id seen lying across his table. “Hold it up. Now turn it over.” The tube was sealed at both ends and had a little water in it. When I flipped it, the water raced down to the bottom of the tube with an unexpected smacking sound and a shock. “There's a vacuum inside, you see,” he said. “It's a toy that kids played with in Ireland. It's a water hammer. Dr. Corrigan was reminded of the toy when he first felt a pulse like Demisse's.”

Ghosh had made the water hammer for me. He had sealed one end of a glass tube with a Bunsen flame. Then he put a few drops of water inside the tube through the open end. He heated the length of the tube above the liquid to drive the air out and quickly sealed the open end under the flame.

“Demisse's heart shoots blood out into the aorta. That's the big highway leading out of the heart,” he said, making a sketch for me on paper. “A valve right here at the exit from the heart is supposed to close after the heart contracts, to keep the blood from falling back into the heart. His doesn't close well. So his heart squeezes blood out just fine, but half of that ejected blood falls right back into the heart between squeezes. That's what gives it the collapsing quality.” How exciting to be able to touch a human being with one's fingertips and know all these things about them. I said as much to Ghosh, and from his expression you would think Id said something profound.

He sent for me often during those holidays. Shiva came at times, but not if it interfered with his dance lesson or if he was in the middle of a drawing. I learned to recognize the slow, heaving, plateaulike pulse of a narrowed aortic valve. It was the opposite of a collapsing pulse. The small valve opening made that pulse both weak and prolonged. Pulsus parvus et tardus, Ghosh called it.

I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease. When I tried to explain this to Ghosh, he was excited.

“Yes! A treasure trove of words! That's what you find in medicine. Take the food metaphors we use to describe disease: the nutmeg liver, the sago spleen, the anchovy sauce sputum, or currant jelly stools. Why, if you consider just fruits alone you have the strawberry tongue of scarlet fever, which the next day becomes the raspberry tongue. Or how about the strawberry angioma, the watermelon stomach, the apple core lesion of cancer, the peau d'orange appearance of breast cancer … and that's just fruits! Don't get me started on the nonvegetarian stuff!”

One day I showed Ghosh the notebook in which I kept a written cata log of everything he had told me, and every pulse I had seen. Like a birder, I listed the ones I sought: pulsus par-adoxus, pulsus alternans, pulsus bisferiens … and simple drawings of what they might look like. He wrote in the fly leaf: Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est! “That means ‘Knowledge is power!’ Oh, I do believe that, Marion.”

We didn't stop at pulses. I went to Ghosh as often as I could. Fingernails, tongues, faces—soon my notebook was chock-full of drawings and new words. I found use at last for my penmanship: each figure was carefully labeled.

On a Friday evening, our last weekend before school started, I rode with Ghosh to see Farinachi, the toolmaker. Ghosh handed Farinachi two old stethoscopes and a drawing of his idea for a teaching stethoscope. Farinachi, a dour, stooped Sicilian, wore a vest under his leather apron. He studied the drawing carefully through a haze of cigar smoke, tracing the outline with a large forefinger. He had fashioned several contraptions for Ghosh, including the Ghosh Retractor, and the Ghosh Scalp Clip. Farinachi shrugged, as if to say if that was what Ghosh wanted, he would do it.

As we were driving back, Ghosh pulled out a present hed wrapped for me. It was my very own brand-new stethoscope. “You don't have to wait for Farinachi. Now that you know your pulses, we're going to start listening to heart sounds.” I was moved. It was the first gift I'd ever received that wasn't one of a pair. This was mine alone.

Looking back, I realize Ghosh saved me when he called me to feel Demisse's pulse. My mother was dead, and my father a ghost; increasingly I felt disconnected from Shiva and Hema, and guilty for feeling that way. Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It's okay. He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive.

22. The School of Suffering

ONE MORNING toward the end of Michaelmas term, as Shiva, Genet, and I walked to Missing's gate, school satchels in hand, I saw a couple racing up the hill toward us, a child flopping lifeless in the man's arms. They were ready to drop, yet still trying to run up that incline when they had no breath to walk. But as long as they ran with the child in their arms, it was still alive to them, and there was hope.

Without a moment's hesitation, ShivaMarion raced to meet them. The parents’ distress triggered this, gave us no time to debate our response, as a higher brain emerged, doing the deciding for us and guiding us to move as one organism if we knew what was best. I remember thinking, in the midst of that panic, how much I missed that state and how exhilarating it was to be ShivaMarion. Even as I grabbed the infant boy from the father (whose gait by now had become a weary shuffle) and raced away, Shiva's steady hand on my low back was my afterburner, and he matched my stride perfectly, ready to take over when I tired. I was conscious of the baby's skin, the way it chilled my hand, sucking the heat out of it as I ran—I knew I'd never again take being “warm-blooded” for granted, having now felt the alternative.

We handed the child over in Casualty and we waited outside, panting. When the parents caught up, we held the doors open for them. Minutes later we heard a scream, then loud protests, and ultimately the wailing that means the same in any language. It was all too familiar a sound.

There was another Missing sound that made my adrenaline flow: it was the shrieking, grating sound of Gebrew dragging the big gate open as fast as it would go. It always signaled a dire emergency.

A childhood at Missing imparted lessons about resilience, about fortitude, and about the fragility of life. I knew better than most children how little separated the world of health from that of disease, living flesh from the icy touch of the dead, the solid ground from treacherous bog.

Id learned things about suffering that weren't taught to me by Ghosh: First, that white was the uniform of suffering, and cotton its fabric. Whether it was thin (a shama or nettald) or heavy as a blanket (in which case it was a gabby), it must keep the head warm and the mouth covered—no sun or wind should hit because these elements carried the mitch, the birrd, and other evil miasmas. Even the minister with the waistcoat and fob watch would, when he was ill, throw a nettala over his coat, cram eucalyptus leaf up his nose, take an extra dose of kosso for tapeworm, and then hurry over to be seen.

Day after day a white-robed mass flowed up our hill, gravity the current against which they swam. Those whose breath ran short as well as the crippled and the lame stopped at the halfway point to look up, to gaze past the tops of the flanking eucalyptus to where the African hawks soared against the blue sky.

Once they crested the hill, patients went to the registration desk to get their card. From there it was on to Adam, the man whom Ghosh called the World's Greatest One-Eyed Clinician. “Short of breath, are you?” Adam might say to a patient. “But still you managed to run up the hill and get the fourth card of the day?” In Adam's book, a number under ten on the outpatient card identified a hypochondriac more accurately than any test Ghosh might do.

From my spot observing the daily influx, I once saw a proud Eritrean woman carrying a heavy basket; inside was something large, sprouting, with a surface that was red, raw, and weeping. It was her breast. It had become so huge from cancer that this was the only way for her and her breast to come to Missing.

I drew such sights in my notebook. My sketches were nothing like Shiva's, but they served me well. A glance at them allowed me to recall the memory, even if it was not Shiva's photographic kind.

On page thirty-four I drew a child in profile, chubby-cheeked, healthy. But from the other side, his profile showed a chunk of his cheek, one nostril, and the eye missing, so that his glistening teeth and pink gum and the recess of the orbit were visible. I learned from Ghosh to call this ghastly sight cancrum oris. It came about from a trivial gum or tooth infection which spread because of malnutrition and neglect, often during an episode of measles or chicken pox. Once ignited, it progressed rapidly, usually causing death before the child could be brought to Missing. Sometimes, the disease simply ran out of steam, or the body's defenses were finally able to contain the march, but at the expense of half the face. Death was perhaps a better fate than to live with the disfigurement. I watched Ghosh operate on this child. It was terrifying, and then I was in awe at what this man who sat down to dinner with us each night was capable of doing: rotate a flap of skin to cover the cheek, and another the hole in the nose. Further flaps and reconstruction he planned for a later surgery. Even so there was no restoring to normal the face, much less the soul, of a child so scarred. After the surgery, what Ghosh said to me was, “Don't be too impressed. I'm an accidental surgeon, son. I do all I can do. But your father … what he could have done to that face would have been as good as the best plastic surgeon alive. You see, your father was a real surgeon. I don't think I've seen anyone better.” What made someone a real surgeon, I asked. Ghosh didn't hesitate: “Passion for his craft … and skill, dexterity. His hands were always ‘quiet.’ I mean he had no wasted movements, no dramatic gestures. It looked slow, routine, but when you looked at the clock you realized how fast it must have been. But even more important is the confidence once you make the first cut, the belief in yourself, which allows you to do more and get better results. I'm thankful I can do the simple things, the bread-and-butter operations. But I'm scared to death half the time.”

He was being modest. But it was true that Ghosh was a different being in the outpatient department where he saw “consultations”—the patients Bachelli and Adam kept for him to render an opinion. Ghosh's real skill emerged with those who looked “normal” to my gaze. Hidden from us unschooled observers, a disease had left its traces. A woman who wove baskets said, “On St. Stefano's Day I passed urine on a barbed-wire fence …” Or this from a sad, distraught coolie: “The morning after the Wednesday fast, I accidentally stepped over the cast-off water from a prostitute's morning wash …” Ghosh listened, his eyes taking in the blister marks on the sternum which said the native healer had been consulted; he noted the thick speech and guessed that the uvula had probably been recently amputated on a second visit to the same charlatan. But Ghosh had an ear for what lay beneath those surface words, and a pointed question uncovered a story which matched with one in his repertoire of tales. Then it was time to look for the flesh signs, the bookmarks of the disease, and to palpate and percuss and listen with his stethoscope for clues left behind. He knew how that story ended; the patient only knew the beginning.

THERE IS ONE LAST SIGHTING at Missing—which had nothing to do with Ghosh—that I must describe because it happened during that period: it explained Shiva's life course, and why it veered away from my mine.

Late one morning as Shiva and I sat on the culvert by the side of Missing's hill, a frail, barefoot girl, no older than twelve, came stiff-legged up the hill. Prematurely stooped like an old woman, she leaned heavily on her giant of a father. His muddy, patched jodhpurs ballooned above bare feet and horned toenails. He could have taken the hill in twenty strides. Instead he took small steps to accommodate hers. They crept forward like snails, while other visitors sped up when they neared these two, as if father and daughter created an animating field. When she reached us, I understood why. An unspeakable scent of decay, putrefaction, and something else for which the words remain to be invented reached our nostrils. I saw no point in holding my breath or pinching my nose because the foulness invaded instantly, coloring our insides like a drop of India ink in a cup of water.

In the way that children understand their own, we knew her to be innocent of her terrible, overpowering odor. It was of her, but it wasn't hers. Worse than the odor (since she must have lived with it for more than a few days) was to see in her face the knowledge of how it repulsed and revolted others. No wonder she had fallen out of the habit of looking at human faces; the world was lost to her, and she to it.

When she paused to catch her breath, a slow puddle formed at her bare feet. Looking down the road, I could see the trail she left behind. I'll never forget her father's face. Under that peasant straw hat he burned with love for his daughter, and rage against the world that shunned her. His bloodshot eyes met every stare and even sought out those who tried not to look. He cursed their mothers, and cursed the gods they worshipped. He was deranged by a scent he could have escaped.

Did I say she met no one's gaze? No one's but Shiva's. A moment passed between them, a barely discernible easing of her features, as if Shiva had caressed her, reached out to comfort her. His lifted chin dipped for her, his eyes shaded to blue and his lips set firmly together. Her lids suddenly sparkled with liquid. The father who had blasphemed his way up the hill fell silent.

My brother, who once spoke with anklets and whose dance could be as complex as a honeybee's, didn't know he would dedicate his life to just such women, the outcasts of society; he would seek them at the Autobus Terra as they arrived from the provinces. He would pay touts to go to the furthermost villages and find them where they were hidden away, shunned by their husbands and families. He would have pamphlets distributed wherever the Coca-Cola truck went, which is to say wherever there were paved roads, asking for these women—girls, really—to come out of hiding, to come to him, so that he might cure them. He would become the world's expert …

But I am ahead of my story. Shiva's understanding of the medical condition behind that odor came later. That afternoon, one of many that I spent wondering about my future, Shiva had already sprung into action. With his eyes on her, he walked to them and led father and daughter to Hema. I look back now and I realize that in that act his career was already predetermined, and it was destined to differ vastly from mine.

23. The Afterbird and Other Animals

THE RAINS HAD ENDED and we had been back in class fewer than two weeks when Hema woke us with what I took to be good news. “No school. We're keeping you home today,” she said. Something about trouble in the city. Taxis wouldn't be running. I stopped listening after “no school.”

It was a perfect day to be home. Meskel celebrations were to start, and already Missing's fields were carpeted with yellow. We'd lose the soccer ball in the daisies, we'd climb into the tree house … Then I remembered: with Genet under Rosina's watchful eye, it wouldn't be the same.

I pushed out the wooden shutters of my bedroom window and climbed onto the ledge. Sunshine flooded the room. By noon the temperature would reach seventy–five degrees, but for the moment I shivered in my bare feet. From my perch, I could see beyond Missing's east wall onto a quiet meandering road which descended and then disappeared, the hills rising just beyond, as if the road had gone underground before it emerged in the distance as a mere thread. It wasn't a road we traveled or even one that I knew how to get to, and yet it was a view I felt I owned. On the left side a fortresslike wall flanked the road, receding with it, struggling to stay vertical. Giant clusters of purple bougainvillea spilled over, brushing the white shamas of the few pedestrians. There was a quality to this pellucid first light and the vivid colors that made it impossible to imagine trouble.

In the dining room, I noticed the strained, preoccupied expression on Ghosh's face. He had his shirt, tie, and coat on. He'd been awake for hours, it seemed. Hema in her dressing gown was huddled next to him, twisting and untwisting a lock of her hair. I was surprised to see Genet there; her head jerked up when I came in, as if she didn't know I lived in the house. Rosina, who usually orchestrated our mornings, was nowhere to be seen. In the kitchen I found Almaz frozen by the stove; only when the egg began to smoke did she scoop it off the pan and onto my plate. I noticed the tears in her eyes.

“The Emperor,” she said, when I pressed her. “How dare they do this to His Majesty? What thankless people! Don't they remember he saved us from the Italians? That he's God's chosen?”

She told me what she knew: While the Emperor was on a state visit to Liberia, a group of Imperial Bodyguard officers seized power during the night. They were led by our own Brigadier General Mebratu.

“And Zemui?”

“He is with them, of course!” she said, whispering, shaking her head in disappointment.

“Where is Rosina?”

She pointed with her chin in the direction of the servant's quarters.

Genet came into the kitchen, on her way to the back door. She looked frightened. I stopped her, and held her hand.

“Are you all right?” I noticed the gold chain and strange cross around her neck.

She nodded, then went out the back door. Almaz didn't look at her.

“It's true,” Ghosh said, back in the dining room. He glanced at Hema, as if the two of them were trying to decide how much to divulge to us. What they couldn't hide was their anxiety.

The previous evening General Mebratu went to the Crown Prince's residence to tell him that others were plotting a coup against his father. At the General's urging, the Crown Prince summoned ministers loyal to the Emperor. When they came, General Mebratu arrested them all.

It was a brilliant ploy, but it unsettled me. I couldn't imagine Ethiopia without Haile Selassie at the helm—nobody could. The country and the man seemed to go together. General Mebratu was our hero, a dashing figure who could do no wrong. The Emperor had lost some of his glow for us. But I never expected this of the General—was this a betrayal, a dark side of his that had emerged? Or was he doing the right thing?

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

One of the prisoners, an old and frail minister, had had an asthma attack, and so Ghosh had been summoned to the Crown Prince's residence in the early morning. “The General doesn't want anyone dying if he can help it. He wants it to be peaceful.”

“Does he want to be Emperor?” I asked.

Ghosh shook his head. “No, I don't think that's it at all. What he wants is for the poor to have food, to have land. That means taking it from the royals and from the Church.”

“So is this a good thing he is doing, or a bad thing?” Shiva asked, looking up from the book he had brought to the table. That was Shiva: he hated ambiguity, and he wanted things cut and dried. Often when Shiva asked such a question, it was because he didn't see what was obvious to me. But in this case, it was a good question, one that I wanted to ask, too. “Isn't the Imperial Bodyguard supposed to defend the Emperor?” Shiva added.

Ghosh winced, as if Shiva's query hurt.

“This isn't my country, so who am I to judge? Mebratu has a good life. He didn't have to do this. I do think he's doing this for the people. Long ago he was under great suspicion, then he was the favorite son, and recently he was under suspicion again, and he felt he might be arrested very soon anyway.”

Ghosh said that, as he left the Crown Prince's palace, Zemui had walked Ghosh to his car and given Ghosh something to give to Genet. It was the gold pendant Darwin Easton had taken off his own neck and given to Zemui—the St. Bridget's cross. He'd asked Ghosh to convey his love to her and to Rosina.

After Hema dressed, she and Ghosh left for the hospital. “Stay close to home, boys. You hear?” We were not to leave Missing property, no matter what.

I went to the gate. I met just three patients coming up the hill. No car or bus passed by Missing. I stood with Gebrew, staring out. The silence was eerie, not even the clip-clop of horseshoes or the jingle of harness bells to break the stillness. “When the four-legged taxis stay in their stables, you know things are serious,” Gebrew said.

There were bars, a tailor's shop, and a radio repair shop in the two cinder-block buildings across from us; but there was no sign of life. Ignoring Hema and Ghosh's warnings, and over Gebrew's protests, I crossed the road to the tiny Arab souk, a plywood structure painted canary yellow that sat between the larger buildings. The window through which the souk usually conducted business was shuttered, but a child emerged through the door, which was barely cracked open, carrying a cone-shaped package made out of newspaper and wrapped in twine. Probably ten cents’ worth of sugar for the morning tea. I slipped in. The air inside was thick with incense. If I leaned over the counter I could touch the back wall. The Arab souks all over Addis were like this, as if theyd come from the same womb. Dangling down from the ceiling, on clothespins attached to a string, were single-use packets of Tide, Bayer aspirin, Chiclets, and paracetamol. They twirled like party decorations. A meat hook hanging from the rafters held squares of newspaper, ready to use as wrapping. A roll of twine hung on another hook. Loose cigarettes sat in a jar on top of the counter, unopened cigarette packs stacked next to them. The shelves were stuffed with matchboxes, bottled sodas, Bic pens, pencil sharpeners, Vicks, Nivea Creme, notebooks, erasers, ink, candles, batteries, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Pepsi, sugar, tea, rice, bread, cooking oil, and much more. Mason jars full of caramela and cookies flanked the counter, leaving an opening in the middle over which I leaned. I saw Ali Osman, lace cap glued to his head, seated on the mat along with his wife, infant daughter, and two men. The floor space was hardly big enough for Ali and his family to sleep spooned against one another, knees bent, and now he had visitors. They sat around a pile of khat.

Ali was worried. “Marion, times like this are when foreigners like us can suffer,” he said. It was strange to hear him use the word ferengi to describe himself, or me, because we were both born in this land.

I crossed back over to Gebrew and shared with him some stick candy I had bought.

Suddenly Rosina walked right past us. “Look after Genet,” she called over her shoulder. I didn't know whether she meant me or Gebrew.

“Wait!” Gebrew said, but she didn't.

I ran after her and grabbed her hand. “Wait, Rosina. Where are you going? Please.”

She spun on me as if to tell me off, but then her face softened. She was pale, and her eyes were puffy from crying. The skin was tight over her jaw, whether in fear or determination I couldn't tell.

“The boy is right. Don't go,” Gebrew said.

“What would you have me do, priest? I haven't seen Zemui in a week. He's a simple fellow. I'm worried for him. He'll listen to me. I'll tell him he must be loyal to God, and the Emperor, before anything else.” I was suddenly scared. I clung to Rosina. She pulled herself free, but gently. Out of habit, she pinched me on the cheek and ran her hand through my hair. She kissed me on the top of my head.

“Be reasonable,” Gebrew said. “The Imperial Bodyguard headquarters is too far away. If he's with the General, then he's in the palace. You'll be walking right past the army headquarters and the Sixth Police Station. It will take you too long.”

With a wave she was gone. Gebrew, whose eyes were perpetually weepy from trachoma, looked as if he might bawl. He perceived a danger far greater than anything I could imagine.

Ten minutes later, a jeep with a mounted machine gun appeared, followed by an armored car. They were Imperial Bodyguard soldiers, wearing grim expressions and also combat helmets in place of their usual pith helmets. Camouflage fatigues and ammo belts had replaced the regular olive-green drill. A voice came over a loudspeaker mounted on the armored truck: “People. Remain calm. His Majesty Crown Prince Asfa Wossen has taken over the government. He will be making an announcement at noon today. Listen to Radio Addis Ababa at noon. Radio Addis at noon. People. Remain calm …”

I wandered away from the gate and drifted over to the hospital. W. W. Gonad was sitting in the breezeway outside the blood bank, a transistor radio in his lap, and nurses and probationers sitting close to him. He looked excited, happy.

At noon in our bungalow we gathered around the Grundig and Rosina's transistor radio, one tuned to the BBC and the second to Radio Addis Ababa. Almaz stood to one side; Genet shared a chair with me. Hema took the clock down from the mantelpiece and wound it; the unguarded expression on her face showed the depth of her anxiety. Matron seemed the least concerned, blowing on a cup of dark coffee, smiling at me. A faceless, stentorian English voice said, “This is the BBC World Service.”

At last, the announcer moved from a coal strike in Britain to what interested us. “Reports from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, indicate that a bloodless coup has taken place while Emperor Haile Selassie was away on a state visit to Liberia. The Emperor has cut short his visit and abandoned his plans for a state visit to Brazil.”

“Coup” was a new word for me. It implied something ancient and elegant, and yet the adjective “bloodless” implied that there had to be a “bloody” variety.

I confess that at that moment I was thrilled to hear our city and even the Imperial Bodyguard, mentioned by the BBC. The British knew nothing of Missing, or the view of the road from my window. But now, we'd made them look in our direction. Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment theyd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.

But how was it that the BBC could look out from London and see what was happening to us? When we looked over the walls of Missing we saw nothing.

Well after noon, and long after the BBC broadcast, the martial music on Radio Addis Ababa ceased and, with a rustle of papers, a stuttering Crown Prince Asfa Wossen came on the air. What little I had seen of the portly, pale eldest son in the newspaper and in the flesh suggested a man who might scream at the sight of a mouse; he lacked the Emperor's charisma and bearing. The Crown Prince read a statement—and it was clear he was reading—in the high Amharic of officialdom, difficult for anyone but Almaz and Gebrew to understand. When he was done, Almaz left the dining room, upset. Minutes later—how did they do this?—the BBC aired a translation.

“The people of Ethiopia have waited for the day when poverty and backwardness would cease to be, but nothing has been achieved …”

The Crown Prince said his father had failed the country. It was time for new leadership. A new day was dawning. Long live Ethiopia.

“Those are General Mebratu's words,” Ghosh said.

“More like his brother's,” Hema said.

“They must have a gun to the Crown Prince's head,” Matron said. “I don't hear any conviction in his voice.”

“Well, then he should've refused to read it,” I said. Everyone turned to look at me. Even Shiva lifted his head up from the book he was reading. “He should say, ‘No, I won't read it. I would rather die than betray my father.’ “

“Marion's right,” Matron said, at last. “It doesn't say much about the Crown Prince's character.”

“It's just a ploy, using the Crown Prince,” Ghosh said. “They don't want to dump the monarchy right away. They want the public to get used to the idea of a change. Did you see how upset Almaz is at the idea of someone deposing the Emperor?”

“Why do they care about the public? They have the guns. The power,” Hema said.

“They care about a civil war,” Ghosh said. “The peasants worship the Emperor. Don't forget the Territorial Army, all those aging fighters who battled the Italians. Those irregulars are neither army nor Bodyguard, but they far outnumber them. They can come pouring into town.”

“They might anyway,” Matron said.

“Mebratu couldn't get the army, police, or air force's support ahead of time,” Ghosh said. “I suppose the more people he involved before the coup, the more likely he'd have been betrayed. The General and his brother, Eskinder, were arguing when I got there this morning. Eskinder had wanted to trap all the army generals the previous night, using the same ruse that had trapped the other loyalists. But the General vetoed that.”

“You saw the General when you went there?” I asked.

“I wish he hadn't,” Hema said. “He has no business getting in the middle of this,” she said looking cross.

Ghosh sighed. “I went as a physician, Hema, I told you. When I got there, Tsigue Debou, the head of the police, had thrown in his lot with Mebratu. He and Eskinder were pressing the General to attack the army headquarters before the army can get organized. But he refused. He was … emotional. These were his friends, his peers. He was sure that good men in the other services would throw their lot in with him. You know he took the time to see me to the door, he thanked me. He told me he was determined to avoid bloodshed.”

THE REST OF THE DAY went by with the streets eerily silent. Very few patients came to Missing, and patients who could leave fled for home. We sat glued to the radio.

Genet stayed in her quarters alone. In the late afternoon, Hema sent me to fetch her. I led her back by the hand. She put on a brave front, but I knew she was worried and scared. That night, she slept on our sofa: there was no sign of Rosina.

The next day, the city was so quiet, and the only thing circulating was rumors. Only the bravest of shopkeepers opened his doors. Word was that the army was still wavering, undecided about whether to support the coup leaders or remain loyal to the Emperor.

At noon, Gebrew came to tell us that we should go to the gate. We got there in time to see a huge procession of university students carrying Ethiopian flags, their faces glowing with sweat and excitement. They were grouped under banners: COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING … Marshals with armbands kept order. To my amazement, there was W. W. Gonad marching under the banner of the School of Business. He gave us a sheepish grin, adjusted his tie, and marched on, trying to look like a member of the faculty. There must have been several thousand students and staff, and they chanted in one voice in Amharic:

My countrymen awake—history calls you

No more slavery, let freedom reign anew

Banners in English read: FOR EVERYONE, A BLOODLESS REVOLUTION and LET US STAND PEACEFULLY WITH THE NEW GOVERNMENT

OF THE PEOPLE.

The street was lined with wary onlookers who, like us, had been indoors much too long. Stray dogs gathered, barking at the marchers and adding to the noise. A pretty student in jeans put leaflets in our hands. Almaz pushed the paper away as if it were contaminated. “Hey, miss! Is this why they sent you to university?” Almaz called after her.

An old man with a beard waved his flyswatter as if he were trying to smack the students. “If you were studying, you shouldn't have time for this,” he shouted. “Don't forget who built your university, who taught you to read!”

We learned later from W. W. Gonad that in the Merkato the Muslims and Eritrean shopkeepers received the students with cheers. But elsewhere in Addis, their reception by the public was cold, and when the procession turned to reach the army headquarters, where they had intended to convince the army to join the revolt, they were met at an intersection by an army platoon in combat gear. The young commander told the crowd that they had exactly one minute to disperse or he would give his soldiers orders to fire. The students tried to argue, but the sounds of rifle bolts pulling back convinced the marchers to retreat. That was when W. W. Gonad left the rally.

I was still pleased to be out of school, but the anxiety on the faces of the adults had rubbed off. Ghosh and Matron returned to the hospital to prepare for casualties. Hema had her Version Clinic that afternoon. Shiva, who till then had little interest in what was going on, was uneasy, as if he sensed something no one else did. Unusual for Shiva, he asked Hema if she would stay home and not to go to work.

“I don't want to leave, my love,” she said, agonizing over what to do, “but I have Version Clinic.”

“Take us with you,” Shiva said. Then he added, “We practiced Bick-ham. See my paper? Just as you told us.” His calligraphy was better than the examples of the ornate and round style in the book. “So please?”

“I really can't …,” Hema said. “I have to go to the labor room first before clinic.”

“We'll go with you,” Shiva said.

“No. I won't have you in the labor room.” She could see the disappointment in Shiva's face. “I tell you what, you boys go to the Version Clinic and wait for me. Whatever you do, stay together.”

This was the rarest of invitations. Unlike Ghosh, if Hema carried a stethoscope, she didn't bring it home. The white coat we glimpsed her wearing in the hospital stayed there. I rarely thought of Hema as a doctor because at home she was all mother. Ghosh constantly talked medicine, but Hema never did. We knew she went to Labor and Delivery and that she operated on Mondays and Wednesdays. From what we overheard, she was very good and in great demand, but the specifics were not mentionable to us. She wanted us to always know that her eyes were on us, and no doctoring would distract her from that vigilance. The Version Clinic was a good example. We'd heard of it for years, but we hadn't the least idea what went on there. According to the dictionary, one meaning of “version” was from the Latin, versus—”to turn.”

Hema's departures in the night came with cryptic phrases, words stranger than “version” tossed over her shoulder: “eclampsia” or “post-partum hemorrhage” or, that most chilling term of all, the “Delayed Afterbird.” That one wasn't even in the medical dictionary. And you never heard of the Afterbird except when it was Delayed. It was feared, and yet its arrival was necessary. Shiva and I looked for that Delayed Afterbird on the trees of Missing, or high up in the sky.

Shiva drew the Afterbird, and in his many renderings it was like a flying wing, an elongated triangle, sightless, legless, but beautiful, sleek, aerodynamic, and utterly mysterious. Could our mother's death be linked to the Delayed Afterbird? It would have been so easy to ask Hema. But the topic was off-limits. At least that was how Hema made it feel.

THE WOMEN'S CLINIC behind the main hospital building deviated from the whitewashed decor of Missing, because it had lime-green paint on the outer walls and blue banisters. A hygenia tree dropped orange blossoms on the steps. The soil underneath the tree was aflame with blue lobelia and pink clover. We found a gaggle of pregnant patients seated on the steps, their hair covered by shashes. While waiting, theyd tucked fresh blossoms behind their ears and stretched their legs out in front of them. Their white shamas glowed in the sun, and with bellies swollen, clutching their pink outpatient cards, they resembled a flock of lively geese. Some were barefoot, and those who weren't had eased off their plastic shoes. It was tense in the city, but looking at these woman, and hearing their laughter, their complaints about swollen ankles, husbands, or heartburn, you would never have known.

When they spotted us, they called us over to shake our hands, ask our names, our age, fuss with our hair, and remark on our similarity. They insisted that we sit with them, and I would have declined, except Shiva happily said yes. I sat there embarrassed, like a chick squished between hens. Shiva seemed to be in heaven.

So often we never truly see our own family and it is for others to tell us that they've grown taller or older. I confess, I mostly took Shiva's appearance for granted—he was my twin after all. But at that moment, I was seeing my brother anew: the large rounded forehead, the curls that piled up on his head, threatening to fall forward and obscure his sight, the equanimity around the brow and eyes, and his mannerism of putting his finger alongside his cheek just like the Nehru portrait on our wall at home. What was completely new was this smile which transformed my wombmate into a blue-eyed stranger, rendering a lightness to his being, so that were it not for the sturdy female arms draped over his shoulders, caresssing his hair, he would have floated off those steps.

A woman read a pink pamphlet that had been dropped over the Piazza and Merkato by an air force plane. She was the lone woman who could read, albeit slowly: “Message from His Holiness, Patriarch of the Church, Abuna Basilios,” she said, and heads at once bowed, and hands made the sign of the cross, as if His Holiness were on the steps with them. “To my children, the Christians of Ethiopia and to the entire Ethiopian people. Yesterday, at about ten in the evening, the Imperial Bodyguard soldiers who were entrusted with the safety and welfare of the royal family committed crimes of treachery against their country …”

Seated in their midst, sweating in the sun, I shivered. I could see that the patriarch's words rang true for these ladies. He was speaking for God. This did not bode well for the man we so admired, General Mebratu.

The women turned naughty after that, mocking the Bodyguard and then men in general, laughing and carrying on as if they were at a wedding. Shiva was in rapture, grinning from ear to ear. His earlier apprehension had vanished. It was as if hed found his ideal spot, surrounded by pregnant women. There was much about my brother I did not understand.

When Hema appeared, the women struggled to their feet, despite Hema's protests. A mother's pride showed in Hema's eyes to see us adopted by her patients.

THREE AT A TIME, the women mounted the examining tables. They pushed their skirts down just below their bellies and pulled their chemises up to expose their watermelon swellings. When one of the patients on the table waved to Shiva to come close and hold her hand, he stepped in, and I followed. Hema bit her tongue.

“All late third trimester,” Hema said, after a while, without explaining what that meant. She used both hands to confirm that the baby's position was “something other than head down. A baby can't come out easily unless its head is pointing down to the mother's feet. That is why the Prenatal Clinic sent them here to Version Clinic,” she said, mentioning another clinic which we knew she attended in this very room but on a different day.

She pulled out a strange, stunted version of a stethoscope—a feto-scope. The bell of the stethoscope had a U-shaped metal bracket on which she could rest her forehead, and then use the weight of her head to press the bell into the skin, leaving her hands free to stabilize the belly. She held up a finger like a conductor signaling for quiet. Conversation stopped, and the patients on the stretchers and the throng around the door held their breaths, till Hema raised up and said, “Galloping like a stallion!” A score of voices added, “Praise the saints!” Hema didn't offer to let us listen.

She got down to business. “With this hand I cup the baby's head. My other hand I put here where the baby's bottom is—how do I know?” She looked at Shiva as if his question was impertinent. Then she laughed. “Do you know how many thousands of babies I've felt this way, my son? I don't have to think. The head is this coconutlike hardness. The bottom is softer, not as distinct. My hands give me a picture,” she said, outlining a shape in the air above the exposed belly. “The baby's back is to me. Now watch.” She set her feet, then using firm and steady pressure of her cupped hands, she pushed the head one way, the butt the other way, while also pushing her hands toward each other as if to keep the baby curled up. Something in the way her thumbs were aligned with the rest of her fingers, all held close together, reminded me of her Bharatnatyam dance gestures. “There! You see? An initial resistance, a stickiness, then it gives, and the baby tumbles over.” I saw nothing. “Well, of course you didn't see. The baby's floating in water. Once I start the turn, the baby finishes the last quarter turn by itself. Now it's not a breech baby. It's a head presentation. Normal.” She listened to the fetal heart again to be sure it was still strong.

In no time, Hema, possessed of the same bustling energy with which she dealt cards or drilled us on our spelling, was done. Only one baby refused to somersault.

“For all I know, this clinic could be the biggest waste of time. Ghosh wants me to do a study to see how many babies float back to where they were after version. You know how he talks. ‘The unexamined practice is not worth practicing.’ “ She snorted, remembering something else. “I had a friend when I was a child, a neighbor boy by the name of Velu. He kept chickens. Now and then a hen would cluck in a peculiar way, and Velu knew, don't ask me how, that it meant an egg was stuck in a transverse position. He would reach in and turn it to vertical. The chicken stopped clucking, and the egg would pop out. Velu was obnoxious at your age. But I remember his trick with the chicken now, and I wonder if I underestimated him.”

I didn't say a word for fear of breaking the spell. It was so rare to hear her think aloud like this.

“Between you and me, boys, I have no desire to publish a paper that might put me out of this business. I enjoy Version Clinic.”

“Me, too,” Shiva said.

“Whether it is India or here, the ladies are all the same,” Hema said, gazing at the women milling around. No one had left. They waited for the tea, bread, and vitamin pill that would follow the clinic. They grinned back at Hema with sisterly affection—no, with adoration. “Look at them! All happy and radiant. In a few weeks, when labor starts, they'll be yelling, screaming, cursing their husbands. They'll turn into she-devils. You won't recognize them. But now they're like angels.” She sighed. “A woman is never more a woman than in this state.”

The problems of the city and the country had disappeared, at least for me and Shiva. How fortunate we were to have Hema and Ghosh as parents. What was there to fear?

“Ma,” Shiva said, “Ghosh says pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease.”

“He says it knowing you will repeat it to me. That rascal. He shouldn't be telling you such things.”

“Can you show us where the baby comes out?” Shiva said. I knew he was utterly serious, and I also knew that with those words hed broken the spell. I was furious with him. Kids need a certain cunning when it comes to dealing with adults, and somehow Shiva had none. In the same mysterious fashion with which permanent teeth arrived, so also self-consciousness and embarrassment came to camouflage my guilt, while shame took root in my body as a price for curiosity.

“Okay. That's enough. Time for you chaps to go home,” Hema said.

“Ma, what does the word ‘sexual’ mean?” Shiva said, as she pushed us out. I studied my twin. For once I was unsure of his intent: Was he teasing her, or was this just his unconventional way of thinking? Hema's response only added to my confusion: “I have to go to the wards for a short time. You boys don't leave the house.” She shooed us off. Her tone was annoyed, and yet if I was not mistaken, she was trying very hard to hide a smile.

24. Loving the Dying

IN A COUNTRY where you cannot describe the beauty of the land I without using the word “sky,” the sight of three jets streaking up in a JL steep climb was breathtaking.

I happened to be outside on the front lawn. The shock wave traveled through the earth to my feet and ran up my spine before I heard the explosion. I stood rooted there. Smoke rose in the distance. The stunned silence that followed was shattered by the screech of hundreds of birds, which took to the sky, and by the barking of every dog in the city.

I still wanted to believe that this—the jets, the bombs—was all part of some grand plan, the expected course of events, and that Hema and Ghosh understood what was going on, even if I didn't. Whatever this was, they could turn it around.

When Ghosh emerged from the house, running as fast as he could, and when he grabbed me, fear and concern in his eyes, the last of my illusions vanished. The adults weren't in charge. There were clues to that earlier, I suppose, but even when I had seen the old woman pummeled by the Emperor's guards, it suited me to believe that Hema and Ghosh still controlled the universe.

But fixing this was beyond their ability.

GHOSH, HEMA, AND ALMAZ dragged mattresses into the corridor. Our whitewashed chikka walls—packed mud and straw—offered little protection. In the corridor, the bullets would at least have to pass through two or three chikka walls. Bullets whined overhead, sounding close, while the pops and thuds sounded distant. Glass tinkled in the kitchen, and later we found a bullet had shattered a pane. I lay on the mattress, frozen, my body incapable of movement. I waited for someone to say, This is a colossal error that will soon be corrected, and you can go out and play again.

“I suppose we can assume the army and air force decided not to join the coup,” Ghosh said, looking to see if this understatement got a response from Hema. It did.

Genet's lips were quivering. I could only imagine how worried she was: I felt a cold flutter in my belly whenever I thought about Rosina, gone for more than twenty-four hours now. I reached out, and Genet clutched my hand.

By dusk, the firing intensified, and it turned bitterly cold. Matron, fearless, went back and forth to the hospital, despite our pleas that she stay. When I had to go to the bathroom I crawled. I saw through the window the bright tracers crisscrossing the sky.

Gebrew locked and chained the main gate and withdrew from his sentry hut to the main hospital complex. The nurses and nursing students were bedded down in the nurses’ dining room with W. W. Gonad as well as Adam, the hospital compounder, watching over them.

NEAR MIDNIGHT, there was a knock at our back door, and when Ghosh opened it, there stood Rosina! Genet, Shiva, and I swarmed all over her, hugging her. Through hot tears Genet screamed at her mother in Tigrinya for leaving her and making her worry.

Matron stood grinning just behind Rosina; some instinct had made Matron and Gebrew go down to the locked gate to check one last time. Huddled against it they found Rosina, sheltering from the wind.

As she gobbled down food, Rosina told us that things were much worse than she'd imagined. “I wanted to reach the upper part of town, but there was an army roadblock. I had to take a big detour, first this way, then that.” A firefight around a villa forced her to take cover, and then army tanks and armored vehicles prevented her return. She spent the night on the porch of a shop at the Merkato, where others trapped by darkness had taken shelter. In the morning, she'd been unable to move from the Merkato because of roaming army platoons who ordered everyone off the street. It had taken her till nightfall to cover a distance of three miles. She confirmed our worst fears: the Imperial Bodyguard was under attack by the army, air force, and police. Pitched battles were being fought all over, but the army was steadily concentrating its efforts on General Mebratu's position.

Rosina snuck off to her quarters to wash and change clothes, and she returned with her mattress, and also with caramela for us. Genet still hadn't forgiven her, but she clung to her.

Matron sank down on the mattress and stretched out her feet. She reached under her sweater and pulled out a revolver, tucking it between mattress and wall.

“Matron!” Hema said.

“I know, Hema … I didn't buy this with the Baptist money, if that is what you are thinking.”

“That's not what I was thinking at all,” Hema said, looking at the gun as if it might explode.

“I promise you, this was a gift. I keep it in a place where no soul could find it. But you see, looters—that's what we need to worry about,” Matron said. “This might stop them. I did buy two other guns. I've passed them out to W. W. Gonad and Adam.”

Almaz carried in a basket of injera and lamb curry. We ate with our fingers from this communal dish. Then it was back to waiting, listening to the crackles and pops in the distance. I was too tense to read or do anything but lie there.

Shiva sat cross-legged. He carefully folded a sheet of paper, then tore it in half and then repeated the process again and again till he had a bunch of tiny squares. I knew he was just as shaken as I was by the turn of events. Watching his hands moving methodically, I felt as if I was keeping my mind and my hands busy. Now he put one paper square by itself, then counted and stacked three squares next to it, then seven, then eleven. I had to ask.

“Prime numbers,” he said as if that explained anything. He rocked back and forth, his lips moving. I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.

But Shiva's escape was incomplete tonight; I knew, because in watching him, I felt no relief.

“Don't try,” I said to Shiva. “Let's go to sleep.”

He put his papers away at once.

Rosina and Genet were already fast asleep, both exhausted. Rosina's return was a great reprieve, but my greatest relief that night came when my head touched Shiva's, a sense of safety and completion, a home at the end of the world. Thank God that whatever happened wed always have ShivaMarion to fall back on, I thought. Surely, we could always summon ShivaMarion when we needed to, though I guiltily remembered that we hadn't done so in a while. I nudged his ribs and he nudged back, and I could feel him smile without opening his eyes. I took reassurance from that, because earlier that day hed been a stranger sitting on the Version Clinic steps, but now he was Shiva again. Together we had an unfair advantage on the rest of the world.

I awoke at some point to find everyone but Matron and Ghosh asleep. The gunfire came in intense bursts, but with unpredictable moments of quiet, so that I could hear Matron clearly as she spoke to Ghosh: “When the Emperor fled Addis in ‘36, just before the Italians marched in, it was chaos … I should have gone to the British Legation. One look at the Sikh infantrymen at the gate, with their turbans and beards and bayonets, and no looter was going to get near. Biggest mistake I made was not to go there.”

“Why didn't you?

“Embarrassment. I'd dined once with the ambassador and his wife. I felt so out of place. Thank God for John Melly He was a young missionary doctor. He sat next to me. He talked about his faith, and his hopes to build a medical school here …” Her voice trailed off.

“You told me about him once,” Ghosh said. “You loved him. You said one day you'd tell me all about it.”

There was a long silence. I was tempted to open my eyes, but I knew that would break the spell.

Matron's voice sounded thick. “By staying here, I was responsible for John Melly's death. It wasn't Missing Hospital then. Surely, a hospital will be spared is what I thought anyway. But our own ward boy led a mob here. They snatched a young nursing assistant and raped her. I fled to the other end of the infirmary, where I found Dr. Sorkis. You never met him. A Hungarian. A terrible surgeon, a morose fellow. He operated like a technician. Disinterested. We'd had such a parade of short-time doctors till you and Hema and Stone arrived …” She sighed again. “On that night, though, Sorkis made all the difference in the world. He had a shotgun and a pistol. When the mob reached the infirmary, I pleaded through the closed door with Tesfaye—that was the ward boy's name— ‘Don't be part of this evil, for the sake of God.’ Oh, but he mocked me. ‘There is no God, Matron,’ he said. Said many other vile things.

“When they broke down a panel on the door, Dr. Sorkis fired first one barrel at eye level, and the second barrel at groin level. The sound deafened me. When my hearing came back, I heard men screaming in pain. Sorkis reloaded and went outside, firing the shotgun at knee level.

“I confess I felt pleasure to see them hobble away. Instead of fear, I felt anger. Tesfaye came charging again … I think he thought the rabble was still with him. Sorkis raised his pistol—this very one here—and he squeezed the trigger. Even before I heard the sound, I saw Tesfaye s teeth spray out and the back of his head pop. The fight went out of the rest.

“When the Italians marched into town the next morning, call me a traitor, Ghosh, but I for one welcomed them because the looting stopped. That's when I discovered that John Melly had tried to get me to safety. He stopped his truck to help a wounded man, and when he did, a drunken looter came right up to him and fired a pistol into Melly s chest. For no reason at all!

“I hurried to the legation when I heard. I nursed him round the clock. He suffered for two weeks, but his faith never wavered. It is one reason I never left Ethiopia. I felt I owed it to him. Hed ask me to sing ‘Bunyan's Hymn’ to him while I held his hand. I must have sung it a thousand times before he died.

“He who would valiant be

‘Gainst all disaster

Let him in constancy

Follow the Master.

There's no discouragement

Shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent

To be a Pilgrim.”

What incredible discoveries one could make with one's eyes closed: I'd never heard Matron talk (let alone sing) about her past; in my mind it was as if she'd arrived into the world fully formed, in nun's garb, always running Missing. Her whispered tale, her confession of her fear, of love, of a killing, were more frightening than the gunfire in the distance. In that dark corridor, lit only by the intermittent glow of flares and artillery tracers which made dancing shadows on the wall, I pressed hard against Shiva's skull. What else did I not know? I wanted to sleep, but Matron's hymn, her quavering voice, still echoed in my ears.

25. Anger as a Form of Love

BY THE NEXT EVENING, it was all over—the coup had failed. In three days, hundreds of Imperial Bodyguard soldiers had been killed, and many more had surrendered. I saw one man being dragged out of the cinder-block building across from Missing; hed tried to get rid of his distinctive uniform, but the fact that he was wearing just a vest and boxers identified him as a rebel.

As the army tanks and armored cars closed in, General Mebratu and a small contingent of his men fled from the back of the Old Palace, heading north into the mountains under cover of darkness.

The morning after that, Emperor Haile Selassie the First, Conquering Lion of Judah, King of Kings, Descendant of Solomon, returned to Addis Ababa by plane. Word of his arrival spread like wildfire, and a dancing, ululating crowd lined the road as his motorcade went by. Throngs took to the street, arms linked, hopping in unison, springs in their feet, chanting his name long after he passed. Among them were Gebrew, W. W. Gonad, and Almaz; she reported that His Majesty's face had been full of love for his people, appreciation for their loyalty. “I saw him as clearly as I see you standing there,” she said. “I swear he had tears in his eyes, God strike me down if I am lying.” The university students who had marched through the streets a few days before were nowhere to be seen.

The mood in the city was celebratory. Shops were open. Taxis of both the horse-drawn and petrol variety were out with a vengeance. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day in Addis Ababa.

In our bungalow, the mood was somber. Id always thought of General Mebratu and Zemui as the “good guys,” my heroes. The Emperor was far from a “bad guy,” and the attempts of the coup leaders to make him one weren't convincing. Still, I wanted the General to succeed in what hed started. The tide had turned, and the worst possible thing had happened: my heroes had become the “bad guys,” and one didn't dare say otherwise.

Rosina and Genet suffered agonies, waiting for news, knowing that whatever it was, it wouldn't be good.

It sunk in for me that Zemui would probably never pick up his motorcycle again. Darwin would get no more letters from his friend. The bridge evenings with General Mebratu as the life of the party were almost certainly over.

The Emperor offered a huge reward for the capture of General Mebratu and his brother. The night after the Emperor's return there were gun battles in different neighborhoods as the last of the “rebels” were hunted down. I felt so sorry for the rank-and-file Imperial Bodyguard men like the one I saw dragged away: his crime was to belong to the losing side, or perhaps even the wrong side. But all he'd done was follow orders; General Mebratu had determined his fate.

I didn't know what to think about our General anymore; the man we knew and admired seemed unrelated to the notorious and now hunted rebel who led the failed coup. Every time I heard small arms fire, I wondered if that was his and Zemui's last stand.

I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING to loud wails from Rosina's quarters. I ran into Ghosh and Hema in the corridor, and we went rushing out in our pajamas.

Gebrew and two somber men stood outside Rosina's door. Her hysterical wailing was in Tigrinya, but its meaning would have been clear in any language.

We learned that General Mebratu's small group had escaped up into the Entoto Mountains and then circled back into the lowlands near the town of Nazareth. They were headed to Mount Zuquala, a dormant volcano, where they hoped to shelter on land belonging to the Mojo family.

In the end, it was peasants who betrayed the General with loud cries of lulululu when they stumbled on his group.

A police force soon surrounded General Mebratu. In that last fire-fight, running out of ammunition, the General disarmed a wounded policeman, then crawled to another wounded policeman to get his weapon. He called to Eskinder, his brother, to help, but instead Eskinder shot our beloved General in the face before putting the gun in his own mouth. I wondered if they had made a suicide pact. Or had Eskinder made a decision for the two of them? As for Zemui, father of Genet, friend of Darwin, he refused to surrender or to take his own life. He charged the forces that had him surrounded, and they gunned him down.

Eskinder's bullet had hit the General's cheek and ripped out his right eye, leaving it dangling, before lodging under the left eye. By some miracle the bullet did not enter the skull. The General was unconscious but alive. He was rushed to the military hospital in Addis Ababa, a distance of about one hundred kilometers.

WE SAT AROUND the dining table, the four of us, trying to block out the wailing from Rosina's. I could hear Genet's sobs from time to time. Though Hema had gone in and come out of Rosina's quarters, I couldn't bring myself to do so. Shiva had his hands over his ears, and his eyes were moist.

While we were still huddled at the table Mr. Loomis's office called. “Business as usual,” Ghosh said, putting down the phone. Loomis Town & Country was open, and if we were Tuesday House, we had to remember to bring our sports gear.

Despite our misgivings, Ghosh convinced us that school would be better than listening to Rosina's wailing all day. He drove us there, Shiva and I sharing the front seat.

Near the National Bank a crowd spilled off the sidewalk, into the street, charged with a strange energy, heading toward us. We inched forward. Suddenly I saw directly in front of us, as clearly as if they were on a stage, three bodies strung up on makeshift gallows. Ghosh told us to look away, but it was too late. In their immobility the corpses appeared to have been dangling there for centuries. Their heads were angled awkwardly, and their hands lashed behind their backs.

The crowd swarmed around our car. The festivities were apparently just over. One young man walking with two others slapped the hood of our car, the sound making me jump. He grinned, and whatever it was he said, it wasn't nice. Someone else slammed the roof above our heads, and then we felt our car rock back and forth.

I was sure the mob would string us up by our necks, too. I clutched the dashboard, a scream in my throat. Ghosh said, “Keep calm, boys! Smile, wave, show your teeth! Nod your head … make it look as if we came for the show.” I don't know if I smiled, but I do know that I stifled that scream. Shiva and I grinned like monkeys and pretended we weren't frightened. We waved. Perhaps it was the sight of identical twins, or the sense that we were just as crazy inside the car as they were on the outside, but we heard laughter, and the thumps on the car were now more good-natured, less violent.

Ghosh kept nodding his head, a big smile on his face, waving, keeping up an agitated chatter, “I know, I know, you unkempt rascal, good morning to you, too, yes indeed, I have come to delight in this heathen spectacle … Let's hang you, by Jove, it certainly is most civilized of you to do this, thank you, thank you,” and inching forward. I'd never seen him this way before, expressing such dangerous contempt and anger under a smiling and false exterior. At last we were through, the car moving freely. Looking back, I could see hands tugging at the leather shoes of the corpses.

Shiva and I had arms around each other in our ancient pose. We were badly shaken. In the school parking lot, Ghosh turned off the engine and held us to him. I wept for Zemui, for General Mebratu, shot in the eye, for Genet and Rosina, and at last for myself. To be in Ghosh's arms and against his chest was to find the safest haven in the world. He cleaned my face with one end of his kerchief and then used the other end on Shiva. “That was the bravest thing you might ever do in your lives. You kept your head. You screwed your courage to the sticking place. I'm proud of you. I tell you what—we'll go out of town this weekend. To the hot springs in Sodere, or Woliso. We'll swim and forget all about this.”

He gave us each a final hug. “If I find Mekonnen, then he'll be here with his taxi the usual time. If I don't find him, I'll be here myself at four.” When I was about to enter my classroom, I turned back to look. Ghosh was still standing there, waving.

Loomis Town & Country was abuzz. I heard boasts of what the other kids had seen and done. I felt no desire to contribute or listen.

THAT DAY, while we were in school, four men in a jeep came to visit Ghosh. They took him away as if he were a common criminal, his hands jacked up behind his back. They slapped him when he tried to protest. Hema learned this from W. W. Gonad, who told the men they were surely mistaken in taking away Missing's surgeon. For his impertinence W.W. got a boot in his stomach.

Hema refused to believe Ghosh was gone. She ran home, certain that she'd find him sunk into his armchair, his sockless feet up on the stool, reading a book. In anticipation of seeing him, in the certainty that he would be there, she was already furious with him.

She burst through the front door of our bungalow. “Do you see how dangerous it is for us to associate with the General? What have I been telling you? You could get us all killed!” Whenever she came at him like that, all her cylinders firing, it was Ghosh's habit to flourish an imaginary cape like a matador facing a charging bull. We found it funny, even if Hema never did.

But the house was quiet. No matador. She went from room to room, the jingle of her anklets echoing in the hallways. She imagined Ghosh with his arm twisted behind his back, being punched in the face, kicked in the genitals … She ran to the commode as her lunch came up. Later she lit incense, rang the bell, and vowed that she'd make pilgrimages to the shrines at Tirupati and Velankani if they released Ghosh alive.

Hema picked up the phone to tell Matron. But the line was dead. The phones had stopped working when the bombs fell, and ever since, they had only worked sporadically. She stood looking out of the kitchen window.

Ghosh's car was at the hospital. But even if she got in the car, where was she supposed to go? Where had they taken him? And if she went and they arrested her as well, then her sons would be left alone … It took a monumental effort of will for her to decide to wait for us.

Hema could hear a sobbing monologue from the servant's quarters— the voice was Rosina's, though it was hoarse and sounded nothing like her. It was addressed to Zemui, or to God, or to the men who killed her husband. It had begun that morning, and it had not reached its zenith.

Hema saw Genet emerge, red-eyed but composed, leading a wobbly Rosina. They were heading for the outhouse. They had no one to mourn with them other than Almaz and Gebrew, who at that moment were elsewhere. Hema felt that Genet had aged suddenly, that a hardness had crept into the little girl's face, and the sugar and spice and everything nice had died.

Hema splashed water on her cheeks. She took a deep breath. It was crucial that she stay calm for our sakes, she told herself.

She drank a glass of water that had passed through the purifier. She had just put the glass down when Almaz came running in. “Madam, don't drink the water. They are saying the rebels poisoned the water supply.”

But it was too late because Hema felt her face burning and then came the worst belly cramps of her life.

26. The Face of Suffering

WHEN GEBREW MET US at the gate and said men had come and snatched Ghosh from Missing, my childhood ended.

I was twelve years old, too old to cry, but I cried for the second time that day because it was all I knew to do.

I was not yet man enough to sweep into the house of whoever had taken Ghosh away and rescue him. The only skill I had was to keep going.

Shiva was ashen, silent. For a brief moment I felt immensely sad for him, my handsome brother who had the reached the height of a teenager without shedding the rounded shoulders of boyhood. His eyes reflected my pain, and for that instant we were one organism, with no separation of flesh or consciousness. And we ran as one being, The Twins, up the hill, frantic to get home.

WE FOUND HEMAon the sofa, pale, sweaty, wet strands of hair sticking to her forehead. Almaz, her cheeks tear-stained, and looking nothing like the stoic Almaz we knew, was by Hema's side, holding a bucket.

“She drank the water,” Almaz said before we could ask. “Don't drink the water.”

“I'm all right,” Hema said, but her words were hollow.

It wasn't all right. How could she say it was? My worst nightmare had come true: Ghosh gone, and now Hema mortally ill.

I buried my face in the darkness of her sari, my nostrils filled with her scent. I felt responsible for it all. The General's ill-fated rebellion, Zemui's death, the arrest of a man who was more father to me than any man can be, and, yes, even the poison in the water …

Just then the front door flew open, and Matron and Dr. Bachelli ran in. Bachelli carried his well-worn leather bag, his chest heaving. Matron, also gasping for breath, said, “Hema! There's nothing wrong with the water. It was just a rumor. It's all right.”

Hema looked confused. “But … I've had cramps, nausea. I threw up.”

“I drank it myself,” Bachelli said. “There's nothing wrong with it. You will feel better in a few minutes.”

Shiva looked at me.

A glimmer of hope.

Hema rose then, testing her limbs, her head. Later we found out that similar scenes were playing out all over the city. It was an early lesson in medicine. Sometimes, if you think you're sick, you will be.

If there was a God, he had just given us a huge reprieve. I wanted another. “Ma, what about Ghosh? Why did they take him? Will they hang him? What did he do? Is he hurt? Where did they take him?”

Matron sat us down on the sofa. Her bright handkerchief came out. “There, there, little loves. We'll sort this out. We all need to be strong, for Ghosh's sake. Panic does not serve us.”

Almaz, silent till then, watching with her hands on her hips, interrupted to say in Amharic, “What are we waiting for? We have to go at once to Kerchele Prison. Let me get the food ready. And we need blankets. Clothes. Soap. Come on!”

THE VOLKSWAGEN FELT like a strange machine with Hema driving. Bachelli sat up front, and Almaz and Matron were in the backseat with us on their laps. We made our jerky way through the city.

I saw Addis Ababa anew. I had always thought it a beautiful city with broad avenues in its heart, and many squares with monuments and fenced gardens around which traffic had to circle: Mexico Square, Patriot's Square, Menelik Square … Foreigners, whose only image of Ethiopia was that of starving people sitting in blinding dust, were disbelieving when they landed in the mist and chill of Addis Ababa at night and saw the boulevards and the tram-track lights of Churchill Road. They wondered if the plane had turned around in the night and they were in Brussels or Amsterdam.

But in the aftermath of the coup, in the light of Ghosh's arrest, the city looked different to me. The squares which commemorated the bloodshed of Adowa and the liberation from the Italians were now fitting places for a mob to conduct a lynching. As for the villas I had once admired—pink, mauve, tan, and hidden by bougainvillea—it was in these houses that men like the General or his counterparts in the army and police plotted the revolution and its betrayal. There was treachery in the streets, treachery in the villas. I could smell it. Perhaps it had always been there.

SOON WE WERE AT the green gates of the prison everyone called Kerchele, a corruption of the Italian word carcere, or incarcerate. Others called it the Alem Bekagne, an Amharic expression that meant “Goodbye, cruel world.” The entrance was past a railway crossing on a busy trunk road. There was no pavement here, no shoulder, just asphalt falling abruptly off into dirt, dirt now stirred by the feet of hundreds of anxious relatives, who became our kin in suffering. They stood rooted in their helplessness, but they let us pass between them till we reached the sentry office.

Before Matron could ask, the man said without looking up, “I don't know if he or she is here, I don't know when I will know if he or she is here or not here, if you leave food or blankets or whatever, if he or she is here, they might get it, if not somebody else gets it. Write his name on a paper with whatever you are dropping off, and I will not answer any questions.”

People leaned against the wall, and women stood under umbrellas unfurled out of habit even though the sun was behind clouds. Almaz found a spot to squat where she could observe the comings and goings, and then she did not budge.

An hour passed. My feet ached, but still we waited. We were the only foreigners there, and the crowd was sympathetic. One man, a lecturer at the university, said his father had been in this jail many years ago. “As a boy I would run the three miles from my house, once a day, to bring food. He was so thin, but each time he would feed me first and make me take back more than half the food. He knew that for him to eat, we had to starve. One day, when my older brother and mother came with food, they heard the dreaded words ‘No need to bring food anymore.’ That's how we knew my father was dead. And you know why they arrested my brother today? For no reason. He is a hardworking businessman. But he is the child of one of their old enemies. We are the first suspects. The old enemies and the children of enemies. God knows why they spared me. I was in the demonstration by the university students. But they took my brother instead. Because he is the oldest.”

Bachelli took a taxi to the Juventus Club to see if he could get the Italian consul involved, and then he had to return to Missing. With one doctor arrested, and his wife waiting outside the jail, it all rested on the shoulders of the third doctor, namely Bachelli. He could keep things going, oversee the nurses and Adam, the compounder.

Shiva, Hema, Matron, and I returned to the car to rest our feet, to get warm, to huddle. After fifteen minutes we returned to stare at the gates. Back and forth we went, reluctant to leave, even though we were accomplishing nothing.

WHEN IT WAS QUITE DARK, a man with a shama covering his head, mouth, and upper torso walked by, just as we emerged from the car. But for his shiny boots and the fact that hed come from the narrow lane on the side of the prison, he might have passed for just another man heading home. In his hand he swung a cloth showing the outline of a covered pot—his lunch or dinner. He stared at Matron. He paused behind the car, his back to the road as if he were taking a leak.

“Don't turn this way!” he said harshly, in Amharic. “The doctor is here.”

“Is he all right?” Matron whispered.

He hesitated. “A little bruised. Yes, but he is fine.”

“Please, I beg you,” Hema broke in. I had never heard her beg anyone in my life. “He's my husband. What is going to happen next? Will they let him go? He had nothing to do with all this—”

The man hissed. A large family walked by. When they passed, he said, “Talking to you is enough for someone to accuse me. If I want to be safe, I must accuse someone. Like animals eating our young. It's a bad time. I'm talking to you because you saved my wife's life.”

“Thank you. Is there anything we can do for you? For him—”

“Not tonight. In the morning at ten o'clock, be in this spot. No, be farther away. See that post with the streetlight? Be there and bring a blanket, money, and a dish just like this. The money is for him. Go home now.”

I ran over to fetch Almaz, who had not left her spot, her voluminous skirts ringed around her like a circus tent, her white gabby wrapped around her head and shoulders, only her eyes showing. She wouldn't hear of leaving. She was going to stay the night. Nothing would persuade her. Reluctantly we left her, but only after we forced Almaz to put on Hema's sweater and then wrap herself with the gabby.

At home, mercifully the phones were working. Matron got the British and Indian embassies to promise to send their envoys in the morning. None of the royals would talk to Matron; if the Emperor's own son was under suspicion, so were his nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. We heard that there were rumblings of discontent among the junior army officers who felt their generals erred in not joining the coup; there must have been some truth to that, because that day the Emperor authorized a pay raise for all army officers. The word was that only the intense rivalry and jealousy between the senior army and Imperial Bodyguard officers had saved His Majesty.

THAT NIGHT SHIVA and I slept with Hema in her bed. Ghosh's Bryl-creem scent was on the pillow. His books were piled on the nightstand with a pen wedged in French's Index of Differential Diagnosis to mark a page, and his reading glasses balanced precariously on the cover. His bedtime rituals of inspecting his profile and sucking his belly in and out ten times, of lying across the mattress for a few minutes so his head hung back over the edge—”antigravity” maneuvers, as he called them—were unexciting, but in his absence, their importance was revealed. “Another day in paradise” was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift. The three of us lay there and waited as if he'd just gone to the kitchen and would fill the doorway any second. Hema sobbed. She voiced our thoughts when she said, “Lord, I promise never to take that man for granted again.”

Matron, who'd decided to sleep in our house, in the bed that belonged to me and Shiva, called out, “Hema, go to sleep now. Boys, say your prayers. Don't worry.”

I prayed to all the deities in the room, from Muruga to the Bleeding Heart of Jesus.

IN THE EARLY MORNING Almaz was back. There'd been no news. “But I stood up whenever a car came and went. If the doctor was in the car, I wanted him to see me.”

Hema and Matron planned to go to the arranged spot at ten o'clock, carrying food, blankets, and money. Then they'd make the rounds of the embassies and the royals. Hema convinced us to stay at home. “What if Ghosh calls home? Someone needs to be here to take the message.” Rosina and Genet were there, so we weren't completely alone. Almaz, after rejuvenating herself with bread and hot tea, insisted on going back to Kerchele with Hema and Matron.

By noon, they were still not back. Shiva, Genet, and I fixed sandwiches while Rosina looked on, distracted. She was red-eyed and hoarse. “Don't worry,” she said, “Ghosh will be all right.” Somehow her words weren't reassuring. Genet, pale and strangely listless, squeezed my hand.

KOOCHOOLOO WAS THE KIND OF MUTT who rarely made any noise. At Missing, barking at strangers would have been a never-ending proposition. So when I heard Koochooloo bark, I paid attention. Looking out of the living room window I saw a scruffy man in a green army jacket stroll up the driveway and disappear behind our house. Koochooloo turned rabid, unleashing a volley of deafening yelps. Her message was A very dangerous man is at our doorstep.

I ran to the kitchen where Rosina, Genet, and Shiva were already at the window. Koochooloo was just below us, loud as I had ever heard her. She moved forward, her neck disappearing in a collar of raised fur, her teeth bared. The man pulled open his heavy jacket and drew a revolver which was tucked in his pants. He had no belt, no holster, and no shirt, just a white vest. At the sight of the gun, Koochooloo fled. She was brave but not stupid.

“I know him,” Rosina whispered. “Zemui gave him a ride a few times. He is army. He used to stand just outside the gate, hoping Zemui would come by. He was always flattering Zemui. ‘Envy is behind flattery’ I told Zemui. Zemui would pretend not to see him, or he'd tell him he was going in another direction.”

The army man tucked the gun back into his pants, then he walked over to the BMW and caressed the seat.

“See! What did I tell you?” Rosina said.

“Come out, please,” he called, looking our way. “I know you're in there.”

“Stay here,” Rosina said, drawing a deep breath. “No. Don't stay. You all go by way of the front door and run to the hospital. Wait with W.W. Wait till I come for you.” She threw the bolt back. “Lock the door behind me,” she said, as she stepped out.

I cannot tell you why the three of us, instead of obeying her, simply opened the door again and followed her. It wasn't bravery. Perhaps the notion of running away felt more dangerous than staying with the one adult we could count on.

The intruder's eyes were bloodshot, and he looked as if he'd slept in his clothes, but his manner was jocular. The bulky camouflage jacket was big enough to swallow him, and yet his arms stuck out of the sleeves. He was missing his beret. He had a dark vertical furrow in the middle of his forehead, like a seam where the two halves of his face met. Despite the scraggly mustache, he looked too young for his uniform.

“This,” he said, almost purring as he stroked the motorcycle tank, “belongs to … to the army now.”

Rosina pulled her black shama over her hair, the gesture of a woman entering a church. She stood silent and obedient before him.

“Did you hear me, woman? This belongs to the army.”

“I suppose it is true,” she said, eyes downcast. “Perhaps the army will come and get it.” Her tone was deferential, which was why her words took a few seconds to sink in. I wondered later why she chose to provoke him and put us at risk.

The soldier blinked. Then he exclaimed in a high-pitched voice, “ Iam the army!”

He grabbed her hand and yanked her to him.

“ Iam the army.”

“Yes. This is the doctor's house. If you are taking anything, you should let him know.”

“The doctor?” He laughed. “The doctor is in jail. I'll let him know when I see him again. I'll ask him why he hires an impertinent whore like you. We should hang you for sleeping with that traitor.”

Rosina stared at the ground.

“Are you deaf, woman?”

“No, sir.”

“Go on. Tell me one good thing about Zemui. Tell me!”

“He was the father of my child,” Rosina said softly, refusing to look him in the face.

“A tragedy for that bastard child. Just tell me something more. Go on!”

“He did what he was told. He tried to be a good soldier, like you, sir.”

“A good soldier, huh? Like me?” He turned to us, as if asking us to witness her impudence.

Then, so quickly that none of us saw it coming, he backhanded her. It was a tremendous blow, sending her reeling, and yet somehow she didn't fall. She held her shama to her face. I could see the blood. She brought her feet together and stood upright. Shiva and I instinctively clasped hands.

I felt something wet running down my shin. I wondered if hed notice, but he was preoccupied with a nasty gash on the knuckle of his middle finger. I could see a flash of white, either sinew or tendon or a tooth fragment.

“The devil! You cut me, you gap-toothed bitch.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Genet moving. I knew that look on her face so well. She flew at him. He raised his foot, caught her in the chest, and pushed her off before she could get near him. He pulled out his gun again, cocked it, pointed it at Rosina. “Do it again, bastard child, and I'll kill your mother. Do you understand? Do you want to be an orphan? And you two,” he said, addressing us, “stay out of my way. I could kill the lot of you right now and I'd get a medal.”

We all recognized the plastic key chain that he pulled from his pocket. It was in the shape of the Congo. There was only one like it in our world, and it belonged to Zemui.

In getting the motorcycle off its stand, he almost fell over. After straddling the bike, he looked around for the lever and, finding it, he tried to kick-start the engine, but the bike was in gear, and so it lurched forward, almost toppling him again. When he got his balance, he looked to see if we'd noticed.

He tromped on the pedal, trying to find neutral. It was such a contrast to Zemui, who merely toed the lever and who handled the BMW as if it were featherlight. Zemui would prime the cylinders with a slow-motion stroke, followed by a brisk kick, and the motor would chug into life. Thinking of Zemui, who'd fought to the death rather than surrender, I felt ashamed. It made me want to act in a manner befitting the bike's true owner. I squeezed Shiva's hand. ShivaMarion was on the same page, I could tell, because he squeezed back.

The soldier flailed at the kick-start lever, as if he were stomping an enemy, his face getting flushed, sweat pouring off his brow. I smelled gas. He'd flooded the carburetor.

It was a cool day, the sun filtering through a few clouds and glinting off the chrome of the motorcycle. He paused to get his breath, then took off his jacket, slung it on the seat behind him. He shook out the hand with the bloody knuckle. He was a scrawny, thin fellow, I saw. Annoyed and humiliated by the engine resisting him, his lips drew back in a snarl. His frustration was dangerous.

“Let us push it for you. You flooded the engine and that's the only way to start it now.” This from Shiva.

“When you get to the bottom of the hill, just put it in first gear,” I said. “It'll start right away.”

He looked over, surprised, as if he didn't know we were capable of speech, let alone in his mother tongue.

“Is that how he started it?”

He never ever flooded it, I wanted to say.

“Every time,” I said. “Especially if he hadn't started it for a while.”

He frowned. “Okay, you two help me push the motorcycle.” He shoved his gun deeper into his waistband, behind his belt buckle. He tucked the jacket that he had thrown over the seat under his buttocks.

From the top of our driveway, the gravel road leading down to Casualty started off flat and then descended and seemed to disappear over a ledge, beyond which one could see the lower branches of trees that were just within the perimeter wall. Only when you were halfway down did you see how the road turned sharply, well before the ledge, and then went on to the roundabout near Casualty.

“Push!” he said. “Push, you bastards.”

We did, and he helped by leaning forward and walking the machine. Soon he was rolling, licking his lips, happy. The bike weaved and the handlebars made wide excursions.

“Steady!” I called. ShivaMarion was pushing in unison, a three-legged trot that soon became a four-legged sprint.

“No problem,” he shouted, putting his feet on the pedals. “Push!”

We gathered speed on the down slope now.

“Open the gas cock! Open the valve,” Shiva called out.

“What? Oh, yes,” he said and he took his right hand off the handlebars to feel for the petcock under the tank, precious seconds ticking away.

“It's on the other side!” I shouted.

He switched hands. He'd never find it and it didn't matter because there was enough fuel in the carburetor to take him at least a mile.

The bike was traveling at speed now, springs squeaking and mudguards rattling, its weight accelerating it down the hill, aided by our efforts. He'd taken his eyes off the road to find the petcock. By the time he looked up, ShivaMarion was running as fast as it could, adding every ounce of thrust possible to his progress. I saw his white-knuckled grip on the throttle, while his left hand was undecided whether to continue its search or return to the handlebars.

“Put it in gear, quick,” I shouted, giving the bike a last desperate push.

“Full gas!” Shiva yelled.

He was slow in responding, first twisting the throttle all the way, then glancing down to stamp on the gear lever. For a heart-stopping moment when it slipped into first, the bike seized, the back wheel locking, we had failed …

And just when I thought that, the engine sputtered and roared to life, revving to its red line with a vengeance, as if it were saying, I'll take it from here, boys. It surged forward, the back tire spitting gravel at us, nearly throwing the rider off, which only made him cling harder, squeezing the throttle in a death grip instead of letting go.

A howl emerged as he saw what was ahead. He had only a few feet and a few seconds to negotiate the turn before the ledge. It is an axiom of motorcycling that you must always look in the direction you want to go and never at what you are trying to avoid. His gaze, I was sure, was fixed on the approaching precipice. The BMW roared ahead, still accelerating. I raced after him.

The front wheel hit the concrete curb at the ledge and stopped. The back wheel flew up in the air; but for the weight of that big engine, the motorcycle would have somersaulted over. Instead it was the rider who sailed past the handlebars, his howl now a scream. He flew in an arc, shooting over the ledge and then falling until his motion was arrested by a tree trunk. I heard a whump, an involuntary grunt as the air in his lungs was evicted. His momentum snapped his neck forward and smashed his face into the tree. He tumbled down and rolled another ten feet.

The BMW, after standing on its nose, fell back to the ground and onto its side; the engine stalled but the back wheel kept spinning. I had never heard such silence.

I CLAMBERED DOWN. I got to him first. Id wanted this to happen, but now I felt terrible that it had. Amazingly, he was conscious, flat on his back, blinking, stunned, as blood trickled into his eyes and poured out of his nostrils and lips. There was no more army in him. His expression was that of a child whose reach had exceeded its grasp with disastrous results.

His foot lay twisted under him in a fashion that made me want to throw up. He moaned, clutching at his upper belly. His face was a bloody mess. It was a grotesque sight.

Neither his face nor his foot seemed to concern him as much as his belly. “Please,” he said. His breath was short and he clawed at his belt.

His eyes found me.

“Please. Get it out.”

For a moment Id forgotten what he had done to Zemui or Rosina and Genet, or what he'd done to Ghosh. All I could see was his suffering, and I felt pity.

I looked up to see Rosina, her lip swollen and split, a front tooth missing.

“Please …,” he said again, clutching at his chest. “Get this out. For the love of St. Gabriel, get this out.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

He kept rooting ineffectively, desperately, at his belly, and now I could see why. The pistol butt was digging into him—it had just about disappeared under his ribs on the left side.

“Watch out!” Rosina yelled. “He's trying to get his gun.”

“No,” I tried to say, “the gun handle has smashed in his lower ribs.” I did hear myself say to him, “Hold on. I'll get it out!” I wrapped my hands around the handle of that gun and pulled with all my strength. He screamed. It would not budge. I changed my grip.

I felt a mule kick in my hand before I heard the shot.

Then the gun came sliding free in my hand, as if it had never been wedged there but had simply been sitting on his belly button.

I smelled burned clothing and cordite. I saw a red pit in his belly. I saw life slip out of his eyes as easily as a dew drop rolls off a rose petal.

I felt his pulse. It was a variety Ghosh had never shown me: the absent pulse.

ROSINA SENT GENET to fetch Gebrew.

He came running. He hadn't heard the shot. The bungalow was far enough removed and the gun so muffled by the man's belly that the sound had not carried.

“Hurry. Someone might come for him,” Rosina said. “But first we must move the motorcycle.” With all five of us heaving, we righted the BMW and managed to get it to the toolshed, just past the curve at the bottom of our driveway. Other than a ding on the tank, the bike looked no worse for wear. In the toolshed we rearranged the cords of firewood, the stacks of Bibles, the sawhorse, incubator, and other junk kept there, so that the bike was hidden from sight.

Returning to the body, we had little to say to one another. Gebrew and Shiva fetched the wheelbarrow, and with Rosina and Genet's help, they fed the body into its rusty cavity. I leaned against a tree, looking on. He lay in the wheelbarrow in the kind of unnatural posture only the dead achieve. Now with Rosina leading us, we pushed him through the trees on the perimeter trail, just inside of Missing's wall, until we reached the Drowning Soil. The hospital's old septic tank was located here, deep underground, and for years it had overflowed before it was taken out of use. USAID concrete, Rockefeller funds, and a Greek contractor named Achilles had built a new one. But the old tank's effluent had digested the land. A downy growth of moss served to deceive the eye; anything heavier than a pebble would sink. The odor, present at all times, kept trespassers away. Matron had barbed wire strung around it, and the sign in Amharic said DROWNING SOIL, which was the closest translation for “quicksand.”

The smell was powerful. Pushing down the fence post so that the barbed wire was flat on the ground, Rosina and Gebrew got the wheelbarrow as far forward as they dared. I glared at Shiva. He was impasive, looking on. He could have been watching shoeshine boys at work—it was the opposite of what I felt. They were about to pitch the body forward when I said, “No!” I grabbed Rosina's hand, forcing her to set the wheelbarrow down. I was shaking, crying. “We can't do this. It is wrong. Rosina … Oh my God, what have I done—”

Rosina slapped me hard. Shiva put his hand on my shoulder, more to restrain me perhaps than to offer support. Rosina and Gebrew took the handles again, and they tipped the dead man out.

The mossy ground sagged like a mattress. The face on that body no longer belonged to the man who had terrorized us; it was a pathetic face, a human face, not that of a monster.

When the body finally disappeared, Rosina spat in its direction. She turned to me, the anger and bloodlust contorting her face. “What's wrong with you? Don't you know he would have killed us all for the fun of it? The only reason he didn't is he was even hungrier to steal Zemui's motorcycle. Don't feel anything but pride for what you did.”

WE WALKED BACK in silence. When we were home, inside the kitchen, Rosina turned to us, her hands on her hips. “No one but us knows what happened,” she said. “No one can know. Not Hema. Not Ghosh. Not Matron. No one at all. Shiva, you understand? Genet? Gebrew?”

She turned to me. “And you? Marion?”

I looked at my nanny, her face bloodied and the missing tooth making her look like a stranger. I steeled myself for more harsh words from her. Instead, she came over and held me in her arms. It was the hug a woman gives either her son or her hero. I held her tight. Her breath was hot in my ear as she said, “You are so brave.” This was my consolation: all was well between me and Rosina. Genet came over and put her arms around me.

If this was what brave felt like—numb, dumb, with eyes that could see no farther than my bloody fingers, and a heart that raced and pined for the girl who hugged me—then I suppose I was brave.

27. Answering Medicine

HANGING SEEMED TO BE THE FATE of anyone who'd been close to General Mebratu. What spared Ghosh thus far was that he was a citizen of India. That and the prayers of his family and his legions of friends. His imprisonment did more than suspend everything in my world; it took away any meaning life once had for me.

It was then, as we despaired, that I thought of Thomas Stone. Before the coup, Id go for months without thinking of him. Having no picture of him, and no knowledge that he had authored a famous textbook (Hema, I learned later, had given away or removed every extant copy of A Short Practice at Missing), Thomas Stone seemed unreal to me, a ghost, an idea. It didn't seem possible that I might have been fathered by someone as white-skinned as Matron. An Indian mother was easier to imagine.

But now, as time stood still, this man whose face I couldn't picture was on my mind. I was his son. This was my moment of greatest need. When the army man came to steal the motorcycle and could have killed us, where was Stone? When I murdered the intruder—that was still how I saw it—where was Stone? When that death mask loomed in front of my eyelids at night, or when cold hands clutched at me from the shadows, where was Stone? Above all, when I needed to free the only father I ever had, where was Stone?

In those awful days which soon stretched out to two weeks, as we went back and forth from house to jail, to Indian Embassy, to Foreign Ministry, I was convinced that had I been a better son to Ghosh, if I'd been worthy of him, I might have spared him his present torture.

Perhaps it wasn't too late.

I could change. But what form should this change take?

I waited for a sign.

It came on a blustery morning when word of fresh hangings in the Merkato reached us. I set out hurriedly for the gate for no particular reason: wherever I was, I was ready to be somewhere else. On my way there, a mysterious sweet, fruity odor reached my nostrils. Simultaneously, a green Citroën, floating on its shocks, its back tires hidden by skirtlike fenders, wheezed into the portico of Casualty. A portly man slumped in the backseat was carried out by two younger men, and at once the scent got stronger. He had the café-au-lait skin and jowly features of the royal family, as if hed been raised on clotted cream and scones in place of injera and wot. To me he looked asleep. His breathing was deep, loud, and sighing, like an overworked locomotive. With every exhalation he gave off that sweet emanation—it even had a color: red.

I knew I'd encountered this odor before. Where? How? I stood thinking outside Casualty as they carried him in, trying to solve this puzzle. I realized I was engaged in the kind of reflection, the kind of study of the world, which I so admired in Ghosh. I remembered how he'd conducted that experiment with blind man's buff—literally a blinded experiment—to validate my ability to find Genet by her scent.

Later Dr. Bachelli told me the man had diabetic coma—the fruity odor was characteristic. I went to Ghosh's office—his old bungalow— and read from his textbooks about the ketones that built up in the blood and caused that scent. Which led me to read about insulin. Then about the pancreas, diabetes … One thing led to another. It was perhaps the only time in the two weeks since Ghosh had gone to prison that I'd been able to think of anything else. I expected Ghosh's big books to be unreadable. But I found that the bricks and mortar of medicine (unlike, say, engineering) were words. You needed only words strung together to describe a structure, to explain how it worked, and to explain what went wrong. The words were unfamiliar, but I could look them up in the medi cal dictionary, write them down for future use.

Hardly two days later, I encountered the scent again at Missing's gate. This time an old woman stretched out on the bench of a gharry, propped there by her relatives, was the source. She had the same sighing, breathing, and not even the horse's strong scent could conceal the fruity odor. “Diabetic acidosis,” I said to Adam, and he said it was possible. The blood and urine tests confirmed that I was right.

Somehow, life went on at Missing. Whether we had one doctor or four, the patients kept coming. The simple things—treating dehydration in infants, treating fevers, conducting normal deliveries—were routinely managed. But anything surgical had to be turned away I hung around Casualty with Adam, or else I hid in Ghosh's old bungalow browsing through his textbooks. Time didn't speed up, nor did my fear for Ghosh diminish one bit, but at last I felt I had found something that was the equivalent of Shiva's drawing or his dancing, a passion that would keep disturbing thoughts at bay. What I was doing felt more serious than Shiva's pursuits; mine felt like an ancient alchemy that could cause the prison gates in Kerchele to spring open.

During that awful period with Ghosh in jail, Almaz holding vigil outside prison, and the Emperor so distrustful of everyone that Lulu had to sniff every morsel of His Majesty's food, my olfactory brain, the feral intelligence, came awake. It had always known odors, the variety of them, but now it was finding labels for the things it registered. The musty ammoniacal reek of liver failure came with yellow eyes and in the rainy season; the freshly baked bread scent of typhoid fever was year-round and then the eyes were anxious, porcelain white. The sewer breath of lung abscess, the grapelike odor of a Pseudomonas-infected burn, the stale urine scent of kidney failure, the old beer smell of scrofula—the list was huge.

One night after supper, Matron dozed on the sofa while Shiva drew intently at the dining table. Hema, who was pacing the room, stopped by my armchair. This was Ghosh's spot. I had my feet up and books piled next to me. I think she understood that I was preserving his space. Over my shoulder she saw the thick gynecology textbook of hers that I'd opened, purely by chance, to a picture of a woman's vulva distorted by a giant Bartholin's cyst. I made no attempt to hide what I was doing. I sensed Hema struggle to find an appropriate response. She put her hand on my hair and then the hand slipped down to my ear, and I thought she was going to twist my pinna (that's what I learned the fleshy part of the ear was called). I felt her indecision. She caressed my pinna and stroked my shoulder.

When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you.

I'm sure Hema believed that a prurient interest in a woman's anatomy took me to that page in the textbook. And perhaps it did, but that wasn't all there was to it. Would she believe me if I said that those musty old books with their pen-and-ink drawings, their grainy photographs of people parts contorted and rendered grotesque by disease, held out a special promise? Kelly's Obstetrics and Jeffcoate's Gynecology, and French's Index of Differential Diagnosis (at least in my childish way of thinking), were maps of Missing, guides to the territory into which we were born. Where but in such books, where but in medicine, might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained? Where else could I understand the urge in me (was it homicidal? Id lie awake at night wondering) that did away with the army man, and then the simultaneous urge to keep it concealed and to confess? Maybe there were answers in great literature. But I discovered in Ghosh's absence, in the depths of my sorrow, that the answer, allanswers, the explanation for good and evil, lay in medicine. I believed that. I was sure that only if I believed would Ghosh be freed.

ON THE THIRD WEEK of Ghosh's abduction, I walked to the front gate in the morning, just as St. Gabriel's sounded the hour, which was Gebrew's command to allow entrance. The narrow pedestrian opening permitted just one person at a time to come through. What prevented chaos and a stampede was the sight of Gebrew in his priest's garb.

Two men jostled each other, high stepping over the frame of the gate like hurdlers. “Behave yourselves, for God's sake,” Gebrew admonished. Next came a woman who stepped over gingerly, as if getting out of a boat and onto the dock. As the patients took turns to peck like hens around the four points of Gebrew's handheld cross—once for the crucified Christ, then for Mary, then once for all the archangels and the saints, and then for the four living creatures of the Book of Revelation—and waited for Gebrew to touch it to their forehead, order was imposed. These visitors to Missing feared illness and death, but their fear of damnation was greater.

I studied the faces, each one an enigma, no two alike. I hoped that the next face would be Ghosh's.

I imagined the day my “real” father—Thomas Stone—would step through the gate. I imagined myself standing here. I'd be a doctor by then, and I might be in my green scrubs, taking a break between surgeries, or in my white coat with a shirt and tie beneath. Even though I had no photograph or memory of Stone to go by, Id know it was him right away

I knew what I'd say to him: You're much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.

28. The Good Doctor

IAWOKE WHILE IT WAS NOT YET DAYBREAK. I ran as fast as I could in the dark to the autoclave room. This was the thought that woke me up: What if Sister Mary Joseph Praise could intercede and free Ghosh? My “father” would never come, but what if my birth mother was just waiting to be asked? I hoped she wouldn't hold my long absence from her desk chair against me.

Seated, staring up at that print of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, seeing only faint outlines as I hadn't put on the light, I felt as if I were in a confessional, but with no desire to confess. I was silent for ten minutes or so.

“You know for the longest time I assumed that all babies came in twos,” I said. I was making conversation. I didn't want to get to Ghosh or the favor I sought right away. “Koochooloo's pups came in fours and sixes. At Mulu Farm we saw a sow with twice that number.

“We are identical twins, but the truth is we aren't exactly identical. No, not the way a one-birr note is identical with another birr note in all but the serial number. Shiva is actually my mirror image.

“I'm right-handed, and Shiva's left-handed. The swirl on the back of my head is on my left. Shiva's is on the right.”

My hand went to my nose, again something I wasn't telling her. A month before the coup, I had a confrontation with Walid, who'd been teasing me over my name (such an easy target). I found myself flattened by a head butt—a testa—and the fight went out of me. Testa—Italian for “head”—some claim is an ancient Ethiopian martial art, but if so, there are no dojos, no belts, just lots of broken noses. The only defense against the “big knuckle” is to lower your head. Walid used his testa when I wasn't expecting it.

To my surprise, Shiva helped me up. Shiva was so tuned to the distress of animals and pregnant women, yet he could be blissfully unaware of the pain of other humans, especially if he was the cause. I watched in astonishment as Shiva confronted Walid. Walid's answer was another testa. Their frontal bones met with a sickening clash. When I could bear to look, I saw Shiva standing as if nothing had happened. The junior boys came running like vultures around carrion, because the fall of a bully makes big news. Walid was supine on the ground. He came to his feet and tried it again. The dull thud of their heads left me in mortal fear for Shiva. But Shiva hardly blinked while Walid was out cold with a big gash on his skull. When he eventually returned to school, he was a subdued figure.

That night Shiva allowed me to explore his head. Unlike me, he had a gentle peak at the vertex, and his frontal bones were very thick and as hard as steel. My topography was different. I had asked Ghosh why this might be, and he postulated that the instruments used on Shiva at birth might have caused the bones of his head to heal in this “exuberant” manner. Or else it might have had to do with the fact that we were conjoined. I was too proud to ask what exactly that meant.

A folio-size book in the British Council Library had pictures of Chang and Eng of Siam, the most famous Siamese twins. A few pages later was a portrait of the Indian Laloo, who toured the world as a circus freak. Laloo had a “parasitic twin emerging from his chest.” Laloo stood in a loincloth, and from his bare chest sprouted two buttocks and a pair of legs. To me it looked as if the parasitic twin wasn't “emerging” from Laloo, but climbing back into him.

When I could unglue my eyes from the pictures, every word in that text was a revelation to me. I learned that when two embryos just happened to grow in the mother at the same time, the result was fraternal twins—they didn't look alike and they could be boy and girl. But if a single embryo in a mother happened to split very early on in its growth into two separate halves, the result was identical twins like me and Shiva. Conjoined twins, then, were identical twins where the early split of the fertilized egg into two halves was incomplete, so the two halves remained stuck to each other. The result could be like Chang and Eng, two individuals connected at the belly or some other spot. It could also result in unequal parts, like Laloo and his parasitic twin.

“Did you know that Shiva and I were craniophagus? Connected at the head?” I said to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. “They cut that connection at birth—they had to. It was bleeding.”

I was silent for a long while, and I hoped she understood that I was being respectful. It was selfish for me to talk about our births when they coincided with her death. We had another long and awkward silence.

“Can you please get Ghosh out of jail?”

There, I said it.

I waited for a reply. In the ensuing quiet, I felt guilt and shame wash over me. I hadn't told her that Id ripped out the page on Laloo and left the library with it; Id said nothing about killing the army man and how I feared a terrible retribution some day.

There was something else Id held back, something I understood only after seeing the pictures of Chang and Eng, and of Laloo: the fleshy tube between Shiva and me had been cut and it was long gone … but it wasn't gone—it still connected us. That picture of Laloo captured how I felt, as if pieces of me were still stuck to Shiva and parts of him were inside me. I was connected to Shiva for better or worse. The tube was still there.

What would it have been like if ShivaMarion walked around with heads fused, or—imagine this—sharing one trunk with two necks? Would I have wanted to make my way—our way—through the world in that fashion? Or would I have wanted doctors to try and separate us at all costs?

But no one had given us that choice. Theyd separated us, sliced through the stalk that made us one. Who's to say that Shiva's being so different, his circumscribed, self-contained inner world that asked nothing of others, didn't come from that separation, or that my restlessness, my sense of being incomplete, didn't originate at that moment? And in the end, we were still one, bound to each other whether we liked it or not.

I left the autoclave room abruptly, without even a good-bye. How could I expect Sister to help me when I was holding back so much?

I didn't deserve her intercession.

So I was astonished when, an hour later, it came.

It took the form of a cryptic note on a Russian hospital prescription pad. It came to Gebrew from Teshome, his counterpart at the Russian hospital gates. Teshome said it was from a Russian doctor who had made Teshome swear to keep his identity a secret. On one side the doctor had scribbled: “Ghosh is fine. Absolutely no danger.” On the back Ghosh had scrawled: “Boys, SCREW YOUR COURAGE TO THE STICKING PLACE! Thank Almaz and no need to wait. Matron please call in all favors. Hope lovely bride renews yearly contract. XXX G.”

I went back to the autoclave room. I stood behind the chair like a penitent and I thanked Sister Mary Joseph Praise. I told her all. I held back nothing. I asked for her forgiveness—and for her to continue to help us free Ghosh.

I SAW ALMAZ ANEW, saw her quiet strength and determination in the nightly vigil she had held outside Kerchele Prison. Whatever she lacked in education she made up for in character and in loyalty.

But Id lost all respect for the Emperor. Even Almaz, always a staunch royalist, had a crisis of faith.

No one really believed that Ghosh was a party to the coup. The problem was—and it was the same for hundreds of others whod been rounded up—His Majesty Haile Selassie made all the decisions. His Majesty wouldn't delegate and His Majesty felt no haste.

Every afternoon we went to Kerchele to deliver the one meal we were allowed to bring, and to pick up the container bearing the previous day's meal. The relatives outside the prison were our family now. It was also the most fertile place to gather new information and plausible rumors. We heard that the Emperor took a morning walk in the palace garden, during which the Minister of Security, the Minister of State, and the Minister of the Pen came out to him one by one. They walked three paces behind him and reported on rumors and real events of the previous twenty-four hours. Each man worried whether the one who went before him had set a trap by mentioning something which he then failed to mention. Lulu, a royal diviner, peed on certain people's shoes, and the rumor mills were undecided if that was an indication that you were to be trusted or you were under suspicion—this was the sort of thing one learned by visiting Kerchele.

The next day, just twenty-four hours after my visit to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, we were allowed to see Ghosh.

The prison yard with its lawn and giant shade trees looked like a picnic spot. Under that green canopy, the prisoners stood like leafless saplings.

I spotted Ghosh at once. Shiva and I flung ourselves into his arms. It didn't register till we were in his embrace that his head had been shaved or that his face had become gaunt. What did register was that my chest stopped aching for the first time in over a month. The scent on his clothes, on his person, was a coarse, communal odor that made me sad, because it spoke of his degradation. We stood aside to allow Hema and Matron to get near him, but I kept a hand on him, frightened that he might vanish. Some men are improved by losing weight, but Ghosh, without his plump cheeks and jowls, looked diminished.

Almaz stood back, her face all but hidden by the tail of her shama, waiting. Ghosh freed himself from Hema and Matron, and he walked over to her. She bowed deeply, then bent as if to touch his feet, but Ghosh grabbed her arms before she could, and he pulled her up and kissed her hands. He embraced her. He said hed been so happy to see her standing and waving when they would take him back and forth in the covered jeeps, even though he knew she didn't see him. Almaz, whose teeth Id never noticed before, grinned from ear to ear, while tears ran down her face.

“The only suffering for me was worrying about all of you. You see, I didn't know if they'd arrested Hema as well. Or maybe even Matron. When I saw Almaz standing in the prison yard, holding that picture of the family in her hands in that frame, I understood she was saying you were all right. Almaz, you put my heart at ease.”

None of us knew till then that Almaz's vigil had included the family picture, and that whenever a car came or left the prison, she'd stand up and hold that picture up and smile.

The minutes were ticking by and we pressed Ghosh to tell us all. I don't think he wanted to alarm us, but he couldn't lie. “The first night was the worst. I was put in that cage,” he said, pointing to a grubby, low-slung shack that looked like a storeroom. “It's a tiny space. You can't stand up. That's where they put common criminals, murderers, along with vagrant boys, pickpockets. The air is terrible, and at night, they lock the door and then there's no air at all. This one fellow, a brute, rules the place, and he decides who sleeps where. The only place where you can get a little air is by the door, and in return for my wristwatch, he let me sleep there. If I spent another night there I thought I'd have died. No sheets, no blankets, sleeping on the cold ground. When the sun rose, I was scratching from lice.

“A major came directly from the palace with instructions to take me to the military hospital and give me everything I needed to care for General Mebratu. The Emperor didn't have much faith in the doctors who were caring for him. When this major saw where I'd spent the night, and saw that my face was swollen, and that I was limping, he was furious. He took me to the military hospital where I could shower, get deloused, and get a fresh set of clothes.

“At the military hospital, they showed me the General's X-rays, then took me to him. Who do I see there but Slava—Dr. Yaroslav from the Russian hospital. Slava was shaking badly and not looking good. As for Mebratu, he was in deep sleep, or else he was unconscious. Slava said the Ethiopian doctors wouldn't go near the General. They were terrified that if he died they'd suffer, and if they saved him they'd be suspected of being sympathizers. ‘Slava,’ I said, ‘tell me he is sedated, and wasn't this way before you saw him.’ Slava said the General had been wide awake, speaking, no weakness in hands and legs when he came in. ‘I was against sedation,’ Slava said. All this time, there was another Russian doctor with Slava, a youngish woman—Dr. Yekaterina. She said, ‘Sedation is very good. He has head injury. We have to operate.’ I said, ‘Head injuries are only important because the head contains the brain. That bullet is not near the brain.’ ‘What you call this,’ she says pointing to his eye. ‘Comrade,’ I said to her, ‘I call it his orbit.’ She didn't think much of me, and I didn't like the way she was disrespectful of Slava. Slava may be an alcoholic, but he was a pioneer in orthopedics before they banished him to Ethiopia. Slava mouths to me from behind her, ‘KGB!’ I called in the major. ‘What are your instructions as far as my authority?’ He said, ‘Whatever you need. You are in charge. Those are my direct orders from His Majesty.’ ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Take this doctor back to Balcha Hospital. Don't let her come back. I need medicinal brandy, some smelling salts, and let's put two beds in this room for me and Slava.’ I dosed General Mebratu with every antibiotic there was, and gave Slava the brandy and he stopped shaking. Then Slava and I debrided the General's eye, right at the bedside, cut away what was hanging without trying to do too much more. The General never stirred. I had no plans to take the bullet out.

“For the next two nights, I had Slava for company, and I slept in a regular bed. It was three days before that Communist sedation wore off. ‘Slava, was that dose of sedative for a horse, by any chance?’ I asked. ‘No, but it was given by a nag named Yekaterina!’ Slava said.

“When General Mebratu woke up, other than a slight headache and a nasal voice, he was in good shape. They wouldn't let me stay there anymore, and they sent Slava off. That's when I scribbled the note. When I came back here they put me in one of the proper cells with some decent chaps. They brought me back and forth once or twice a day, to dress the wound, but I wasn't allowed more than a few words with the General.”

I'd already spotted two giant rats emerging in broad daylight from a gutter between two buildings. Ghosh was hiding things from us, but then we were hiding something from him.

From that day on, we were allowed twice-weekly visits. Now the only question was when he would be released.

First one, then another of Ghosh's VIP patients came by the house to pick up some comfort from home that Ghosh sought—a particular pen, more books, a paper in a certain stack. Theyd bring with them a Lati-nate script in Ghosh's handwriting, a prescription for a compound mixture, and I'd lead them to Adam, the compounder.

In Ghosh's absence I understood what kind of doctor he was. These royals, or ministers or diplomats, weren't seriously ill, not to my eyes anyway. They didn't have the power to get him out of jail, but they had the power to get into prison to see Ghosh. He, by pulling down the lower eyelid and looking at the color of the conjunctivae, by asking them to protrude the tongue, and all the while with his finger on the pulse, managed to diagnose and reassure them. The modern designation “family practitioner” doesn't quite cover all the things he was.

THREE WEEKS AFTER we first saw Ghosh, General Mebratu was put on trial, a show for international observers. An underground newspaper carried reports of the trial, as did a few foreign papers. General Mebratu, proud and far from penitent, wouldn't renounce what he'd done. His bearing made a great impression on people who were allowed to attend. From the witness box he preached his message: land reform, political reform, and the end of entitlements that reduced peasants to slaves. Those who had fought to put down Mebratu s coup now wondered why they had opposed him. We heard that a core of junior officers plotted to spring the General from prison, but Mebratu vetoed this. The death of his troops weighed on him. The court sentenced him to hang. His last words in the courtroom were “I go to tell others the seed we planted has taken root.”

ON THE EVENING of the forty-ninth day of Ghosh's captivity, a taxi drove up our driveway and swung around the back. I heard Almaz yell, and I tried to imagine what new calamity we were facing.

Getting out of the taxi, surveying our quarters as if he'd never seen them before, was our Ghosh. Gebrew, who'd ridden on the running board of the taxi from the gate, jumped off, clapping with glee, hopping in place. Genet and Rosina came out from their quarters. We danced around Ghosh. The air was filled with shrieks and with lululululu—the sound of Almaz's joy. Koochooloo was there, barking, wagging her tail, and howling, the two nameless dogs standing at a distance following her cue.

It was midnight when we went to bed, Shiva and me crowded in with Ghosh and Hema. It was far from comfortable, and yet I never slept better. I woke once and heard the sound of Ghosh's heavy snoring: it was the most reassuring sound on earth.

WE AWOKE EARLY the next morning, our mood still celebratory. Unbeknownst to us, at that moment General Mebratu, veteran of Korea and the Congo, graduate of Sandhurst and Fort Leavenworth, was taken to his execution.

They hung him in a clearing in the Merkato, perhaps because it was in the Merkato that the student procession and the idea of the coup had found its most vocal support. The executioner, we later learned, was the Emperor's aide-de-camp, a man General Mebratu had known for years. “If you ever loved a soldier, put that knot carefully,” General Mebratu was reported to have said. When the noose was in position, and just as the truck was about to pull away, the General took a running jump off the back of the truck, sailing off into martyrdom.

We heard about it by late morning. That night in the stone villas, the barracks, and in chikka houses, junior officers who graduated from the Holeta Military Academy, or the Harar Military Academy, or the Air Force Academy in Debre Zeit, went to bed plotting to finish what General Mebratu had started.

With every passing day, General Mebratu s stature grew until he was unofficially canonized. His likeness appeared in anonymous leaflets, drawn in the cartoon style of the ancient Ethiopic icon painters, with an abundance of yellow, green, and red; they depicted a black Christ flanked by a black John the Baptist, and our own General Mebratu. All three had yellow halos around their heads and the River Jordan running over their feet. The text read, For this is He that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying: The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.

29. Abu Kassem's Slippers

TWO DAYS AFTER the General's execution, the hospital staff, led by Adam and W. W. Gonad, had a welcome-back party for Ghosh. They bought a cow, hired a tent and a cook.

Adam slit the beast's throat. An overeager orderly with a yearning for gored-gored—raw beef—cut a thin and still quivering steak from the flank while the animal stood on glass legs. They strung the cow from a tree, made their cuts, and carried the meat to an outdoor table to be processed.

When I saw an army jeep come up our driveway, my blood turned cold. The cooks stood still as we watched a uniformed officer go into our bungalow. I sleepwalked toward the house. I was at the front door when the officer stepped out, Ghosh and Hema with him. Shiva was by my side.

“Boys,” Ghosh said. “The motorcycle. Do you know who came to take it?” Ghosh was calm, unaware of any reason to be alarmed.

My first response was relief—they hadn't come for Ghosh! Then, when it sunk in why the man was here, came panic. The five of us had worked out the story: A soldier came with the key. He drove the motorcycle away. We had no words with him. We'd repeated the story to Hema the day the soldier went missing. As preoccupied as she was with Ghosh's arrest, she'd shrugged it off.

I was about to speak when I got a good look at the officer's face.

It was the intruder, the army man, the one who came to take the motorcycle.

It was his face. The same forehead and teeth, but a body that was not as lean and gangly. The spotless, pressed uniform, the beret tucked under his shoulder lapel, gave him the manner of a professional soldier, something which the intruder had lacked. I felt my face turning colors.

Rosina and Genet came walking rapidly around the corner of the house. Word had gotten out. There was a crowd around us.

“A soldier came with a key and he drove it away,” Shiva said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

The officer smiled. He leaned forward to me and said politely, in English, “Is there anything else you remember? Something you aren't telling me?”

Ghosh interrupted, saying, “Ah, here's Rosina.” In Amharic, Ghosh said, “Rosina, this officer wants to know about Zemui's motorcycle.”

Rosina made a deep bow. I was reminded of her politeness to the thief, and how her choice of words then had been inflammatory. I hoped she'd be prudent.

“Yes, sir. I was with the boys when he came—” She stopped and brought the edge of her shama to her mouth, her eyes popping. “Excuse me, sir. The man … he looked very much like you. When I saw your face … forgive me,” and she made a little bow again. “He wasn't … he wasn't as polite as you. Dressed … not like you.”

“We have the same mother,” the officer said, with a wry smile. “It's true, he looks like me. What was he wearing?”

“Just the army jacket. No shirt. A white singlet underneath. Boots, trousers,” Rosina said.

“Did he look all right to you?”

“He had his gun tucked here,” she said, pointing to her midriff, “instead of in his …”

“Holster?” the brother offered.

“Yes. And he looked … his eyes red. He looked as if he might be …”

“Drunk?” the brother said softly. “Did you ask him why he wanted the motorcycle?”

“Please, sir. He had that gun,” she said. “He seemed very angry. He had the key.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He … said many things. He said he's taking the motorcycle. I said nothing.” She'd departed from the script we had rehearsed, but it seemed to be working.

“Why? What has happened? What happened to the motorcycle?” Shiva said in English, his deadpan expression revealing nothing. I was astonished at Shiva's nerve.

“Well, that's what I don't know,” the officer said. His English was excellent and his manner softened. “He wasn't supposed to take the motorcycle. The army wouldn't have let him keep it, anyway” He paused as if considering whether to say more. When he continued, it was to Ghosh and Hema that he directed his remarks. “He hasn't been seen since he came here. I'm posted in Dire Dawa, and I only found out he was AWOL two weeks ago. He told a woman he kept that he was going to pick up a motorcycle.” He turned to me and Shiva. “So you saw him drive away?”

“I heard the sound,” I said.

He nodded. “Doctor, do you mind if I take a quick look around …”

“By all means,” Ghosh said.

I felt the sky pressing down on me as the officer and his driver went to the back of the house, and then walked down the gravel driveway. Had we come this far, with Ghosh free, only to have the army man send us back to hell? Genet glared at me, while Rosina squatted, applying a eucalyptus stick to her teeth. The two men walked to the ledge, then turned in the direction of the roundabout and disappeared from view. If on their return they went to the toolshed, we were doomed. The motorcycle was well hidden, but not to one who was intent on finding it.

After an eternity they returned.

“Thank you, Doctor,” the officer said, extending his hand to Ghosh. “I fear the worst. The day the Emperor returned, some of our soldiers got their hands on a lot of money. My brother had something to do with that. It's perhaps a good thing he disappeared.”

Once the jeep was out of sight, Ghosh studied us for a moment. He sensed something amiss, but he didn't ask any questions. When Hema and Ghosh stepped back inside, I went to the corner of the house and I threw up. Genet and Shiva followed me. I waved them off. The gastrointestinal system has its own brain, its own conscience.

Inside the tent the folding chairs wobbled on the soft grass. Soon the tables sagged with beakers of tej and plates of food. The kitfo—coarsely ground raw meat mixed with kibe (a spiced and clarified butter)—was my favorite dish. We never served this at home, but from the time I was a baby, I'd eaten kitfo in Rosina's quarters, or in Gebrew's shack. On this day I had no appetite. The injera was stacked on the table like napkins. The gored-gored was the dish everyone went after: cubes of raw meat, which you dipped in a fiery red pepper sauce. The dishes kept coming: meatballs, meat curry, lentil curry, tongue, and kidney. What had been grazing under a tree that morning had, in short order, reached the table.

Ghosh sat on a dais in an armchair. One by one the nurses, nursing students, and the other Missing employees came to shake his hand and to praise the saints for allowing him to survive his ordeal.

Rosina didn't come out, but I found Genet in a corner of the tent. I sat by her. Dressed in black, pushing food around on her plate, she looked like a dour and distant cousin of the Genet I knew—shed hardly left the house since Zemui's death. When an orderly came and greeted her, kissed her on her cheeks, she barely acknowledged him.

“When will you go back to school?” I said. “When will you start eating with us again?”

“They killed my father. Did you forget? I don't care about school.” Then she hissed at me, “Tell the truth. You told Ghosh, didn't you?”

“I did not!”

“But you were thinking of telling him, weren't you? Tell the truth!”

She had me there. When I felt Ghosh's arms around me for the first time in that prison yard, a confession jumped to my lips. I had to suck it back and swallow.

“Since when did thinking become a crime? … Don't look at me that way,” I said.

She took her plate and sat far away from me. Even if I didn't have great faith in myself, I wanted her to have more faith in me. It hurt that she no longer saw me as the hero who shot the intruder.

BY THE LATE AFTERNOON the tent came down, and now visitors from outside Missing arrived as word spread that Ghosh was free. For Evangeline and Mrs. Reddy the moment was bittersweet because, though Ghosh was back, General Mebratu was gone forever. Evangeline kept saying, “So young. So young to be no more,” dabbing at her eyes, while Mrs. Reddy comforted her, pulling Evangeline's head into her considerable bosom. The two brought a giant pot of chicken biriyani and the fiery mango pickle that was Ghosh's favorite. “It's your second honey moon, sweetie,” Evangeline said to Ghosh. She winked at Hema. Adid, their old friend, came carrying three live chickens roped together by their feet, handing them over to Almaz. He brushed feathers off his spotless white polyester shirt, which he wore over a flowing, plaid ma'awis that extended to his sandals. Behind him came Babu, who was General Mebratu's usual bridge partner, bearing a bottle of Pinch, the General's favorite. By nightfall, there was talk of pulling out the cards for old time's sake. At any moment I expected Zemui to drive up with General Mebratu.

The house got stuffy. I opened windows back and front. At one point Ghosh retreated to the bedroom to shed his sweater and Hema went with him. I followed and stood in the doorway. He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. It was as if he couldn't get over the novelty of running water. Hema stood outside the bathroom looking at his reflection in the vanity.

“I've been thinking …,” I heard Ghosh say. “We've had a good innings. Maybe we should leave … before the next coup.”

“What? Back to India?” Hema said.

“No … then the boys would have to learn Hindi or Tamil as a compulsory second language. It's too late for that. Don't forget why we left in the first place.”

They didn't know I was listening.

“Lots of Indian teachers have gone from here to Zambia,” Hema said.

“Or America? To the county of Cook?” he said and laughed.

“Persia? They say there are huge needs, just like this place. But they have tons of money to spend.”

Zambia? Persia? Were they joking? This was my country they were talking about, the land of my birth. True, its potential for violence and mayhem had been proved. But it was still home. How much worse would it be to be tortured in a land that wasn't your own?

We've had a good innings.

Ghosh's words felt like a kick to my solar plexus: this was my country, but I realized it wasn't Hema's or Ghosh's. They weren't born here. Was this for them a job only good for as long as it lasted? I slipped away.

I stepped out to the lawn. I remember the air that night, and how it was so brisk that it could revive the dead. The fragrance of eucalyptus stoking a home fire, the smell of wet grass, of dung fuel, of tobacco, of swamp air, and the perfume of hundreds of roses—this was the scent of Missing. No, it was the scent of a continent.

Call me unwanted, call my birth a disaster, call me the bastard child of a disgraced nun and a disappeared father, call me a cold-blooded killer who lies to the brother of the man I killed, but that loamy soil that nurtured Matron's roses was in my flesh. I said Ethyo-pya, like a native. Let those born in other lands speak of Eee-theee-op-eee-ya, as if it were a compound name like Sharm el Sheikh, or Dar es Salaam or Rio de Janeiro. The Entoto Mountains disappearing in darkness framed my horizon; if I left, those mountains would sink back to the ground, descend into nothingness; the mountains needed me to gaze at their tree-filled slopes, just as I needed them to be certain I was alive. The canopy of stars at night; that, too, was my birthright. A celestial gardener sowed meskel seeds so that when the rainy season ended, the daisies bloomed in welcome. Even the Drowning Soil, the foul-smelling quicksand behind Missing, which had swallowed a horse, a dog, a man, and God knows what else—I claimed that as well.

Light and dark.

The General and the Emperor.

Good and evil.

All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?

BY ELEVEN O'CLOCK, Ghosh excused himself from the company in the living room and came back with us to our room. Hema followed.

Shiva said, “We haven't slept in this bed since you left.”

Ghosh was touched. He lay in the center, and we huddled on either side. Hema sat at the foot of our bed.

“In prison, lights were out by eight o'clock. We'd each tell a story. That was our entertainment. I told stories from the books we read to you in this room. One of my cell mates, a merchant, Tawfiq—he would tell the Abu Kassem story.”

It was a tale well known to children all over Africa: Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision. At last, even he couldn't stomach the sight of them. But his every attempt to get rid of his slippers ended in disaster: when he tossed them out of his window they landed on the head of a pregnant woman who miscarried, and Abu Kassem was thrown in jail; when he dropped them in the canal, the slippers choked off the main drain and caused flooding, and off Abu Kassem went to jail …

“One night when Tawfiq finished, another prisoner, a quiet, dignified old man, said, Abu Kassem might as well build a special room for his slippers. Why try to lose them? He'll never escape.’ The old man laughed, and he seemed happy when he said that. That night the old man died in his sleep.

“The next night, out of respect for the old man, we lay in silence. No story. I could hear men crying in the dark. This was always the low point for me. Ah, boys … Id pretend you both were against me, just like this, and I would imagine Hema's face before me.

“The following night, we couldn't wait to talk about Abu Kassem. We all saw it the same way. The old man was right. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or don't sow, becomes part of your destiny … I met Hema in the septic ward at Government General Hospital in India, in Madras, and that brought me to this continent. Because of that, I got the biggest gift of my life—to be a father to you two. Because of that, I operated on General Mebratu, who became my friend. Because he was my friend, I went to prison. Because I was a doctor, I helped to save him, and they let me out. Because I saved him, they could hang him … You see what I am saying?”

I didn't, but he spoke with such passion I wasn't about to stop him.

“I never knew my father, and so I thought he was irrelevant to me. My sister felt his absence so strongly that it made her sour, and so no matter what she has, or will ever have, it won't be enough.” He sighed. “I made up for his absence by hoarding knowledge, skills, seeking praise. What I finally understood in Kerchele is that neither my sister nor I realized that my father's absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.”

All these years and I hadn't known this about Ghosh, about his father dying when he was young. He was like us, fatherless, but at least we had him. Perhaps he'd been worse off than we were.

Ghosh sighed. “I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny“

AFTER GHOSH LEFT, I wondered if the army man was my pair of slippers. If so, they'd come back once already in the form of his brother. What form would they take next?

Just when my thoughts were coming in illogical sequences, a prelude to sleep, I felt someone lifting up the mosquito net. In the instant that I saw her, she was already sitting on my chest, pinning my arms down.

I could have thrown her off. But I didn't. I liked her body on mine and I liked the faint scent of charcoal and the frankincense that permeated her clothes. Maybe shed come to make up to me for being so rude before. She could ‘ve climbed in through one of the open windows.

In the light from the hallway, I could see the fixed smile on her face.

“So, Marion? Did you tell Ghosh about the thief?”

“If you were hiding here, you already know.”

Shiva, awake now, looked at the two of us, then rolled over, and closed his eyes.

“You almost told that officer, his brother.”

“I didn't. I was just surprised …,” I said.

“We think you told Ghosh and Hema.”

“Of course not. I wouldn't.”

“Why wouldn't you?”

“You know why. If it gets out, they'll hang me.”

“No, they will hang me and my mother for sure. You'll be to blame.”

“I dream about his face.”

“I do, too. And I kill him every night. I wish I'd shot him.”

“It was an accident.”

“If I'd killed him, I wouldn't call it an accident. If I'd killed him, we'd have no worries.”

“Easy for you to say because you didn't kill him.”

“My mother thinks you'll tell. We're worried about you.”

“What? Well, you tell Rosina not to worry.”

“It'll slip out one day and get us all killed.”

“Okay, stop. If you know I'll tell, why talk to me? Get off me now.”

She slid down so that her body was spread-eagled over mine. Her face hovered over me, and for one second I thought she was going to kiss me, which would have been very strange in the context of our exchange. I studied her eyes so close to mine, the blemish in the right iris, her breath on my face, sweet, pleasant. I could see the dangerous beauty she was going to turn into. I thought of the last time we were this close. In the pantry.

Her pupils dilated, her eyelids sagged down over the irises.

I felt something warm where her thighs were on top of mine, a spreading heat.

I felt fluid soak my pajamas. The air under the mosquito net filled with the scent of fresh urine. Now her eyes rolled up, showing only the whites, and she threw her head back. She shivered. Her neck was arched, the strap muscles taut. She looked down one last time. “That's so you don't ever forget your promise.” She jumped off and was gone before I could think of reacting. I reared up now, ready to chase after her, to tear her to pieces.

Shiva held me back, whether from his desire to be a peacemaker or to protect her, I couldn't say. His eyes were downcast and they managed not to look at me. I stood shaking with anger as Shiva stripped the bed. My pajama bottom was soaked; Shiva had been spared. In the bathroom Shiva ran the tub and I got in. Shiva sat on the commode, quiet but keeping me company. We did not exhange a word. Back in the bedroom I was putting on fresh pajamas when Ghosh came in.

“I saw your light. What happened?”

“An accident,” I said.

Shiva said nothing. The scent was unmistakable. I was ashamed. I could've told on Genet, but I didn't. I opened the window for a few minutes and then closed it.

Ghosh wiped down the mattress. He helped us flip it over. He brought fresh sheets, made the bed for us. I could tell that he was distressed.

“Go back to the guests,” I said. “We're all right. Really.”

“My boys, my boys,” he said, sitting on the edge of the mattress. I know he thought I had wet the bed. “I can't imagine what you have been through.”

That was true. He couldn't imagine. And we probably wouldn't know what he'd been through either.

He sighed. “I'll never leave you again.”

I felt a twinge in my chest at those words, a desire to make him take them back. He'd spoken as if it were all in his hands to decide. As if he had forgotten about fate and slippers.

30. Word for Words

SIXTY DAYS HAD PASSED since Zemui's death, and Genet was still confined to the house. Rosina, sinister with her missing tooth, was unsmiling and prickly like an Abyssinian boar.

“Enough,” Gebrew told her on the Feast of St. Gabriel. “I'll melt a cross to get you a silver tooth. It's time to smile and to find white in your clothing. God wishes it. You are making His world gloomy. Even Zemui's legal wife has given up mourning.”

“You call that harlot his wife?” she screamed at Gebrew. “That woman's legs swing open when a breeze comes through the door. Don't talk to me about her.” The next day Rosina boiled up a big basin of black dye and into this she tossed all her remaining clothes as well as a good many of Genet's school clothes.

When Hema tried to get Genet to go back to LT&C, Rosina rebuffed her. “She's still in mourning.”

Two days later, on a Saturday, I heard a lululu of celebration from Rosina's quarters as I was coming into the kitchen. I knocked. Rosina opened it just a crack, peering out at me with a hunter's eye, a blade in her hand.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine, thank you,” she said and closed the door, but not before I saw Genet, a towel pressed to her face, and bloody rags on the floor.

I couldn't keep this knowledge to myself. I told Hema and now she knocked on their door.

Rosina hesitated. “Come in if you must,” she said, her manner surly. “We're all done.”

The room was redolent of cloistered women. And frankincense and something else—the scent of fresh blood. It was difficult to breathe. The naked bulb hanging from the ceiling was off. “Close the door,” Rosina snapped at me.

“Leave it open, Marion,” Hema said. “And turn on the light.”

A razor blade, a spirit lamp, and a bloody cloth were by Genet's bed.

Genet sat demure, her hands pressed to both sides of her face, her elbows resting on her knees. The posture of a thinker, but for the rags in each hand.

Hema pulled Genet's fingers away to reveal two deep vertical cuts, like the number 11, just past the outer end of each eyebrow. A total of four cuts. The blood that welled up looked as dark as tar.

“Who did this?” Hema said, covering the wound and applying pressure.

The two occupants were silent. Rosina's eyes were locked on the far wall, a smirk on her face.

“I said, who did this?” Hema's voice was sharper than the razor that made the cuts.

Genet replied in English. “I wanted her to do it, Ma.”

Rosina said something sharp to Genet in Tigrinya. I knew that short guttural phrase meant Shut your mouth.

Genet ignored her. “This is the sign of my people,” she went on, “my father's tribe. If my father were alive he would have been so proud.”

Hema opened her mouth as if considering what to say. Her face softened a bit. “Your father isn't alive, child. By the grace of God, you are.”

Rosina frowned, not liking this much of an exchange in English.

“Come with me. Let me take care of that,” Hema said more gently.

I knelt beside Genet. “Come with us, please?”

Genet glanced nervously at her mother, then hissed, “You'll only make it harder for me. I wanted these marks as much as she did. Please, please go.”

GHOSH COUNSELED PATIENCE. “She isn't our daughter.”

“You're wrong, Ghosh. She ate at our table. We send her to school at our expense. When something bad is happening to her, we can't say, ‘She isn't our daughter.’”

I was stunned to hear what Hema said. It was noble. But if Hema saw Genet as my sister, this introduced complications as far as my feelings for Genet …

Ghosh said soothingly, “It's just to keep away the buda, the evil eye. Like the pottu on the forehead in India, darling.”

“My pottu comes off, darling. No blood is shed.”

A WEEK LATER, when Hema and Ghosh came home from work, they heard Rosina's wailing soliloquy, loud as ever, no different than when theyd left for work that morning. She bemoaned fate, God, the Emperor, and chastised Zemui for leaving her.

“That's it,” Hema said. “The poor child will go mad. Are we going to stand by while that happens?”

Hema gathered Almaz, Gebrew, W.W., Ghosh, Shiva, and me. En masse we went to Rosina's door and pushed it open. Hema grabbed Genet by the arm and brought her into our house, leaving the rest of us to pacify Rosina who screamed to the world that her daughter was being abducted.

BEHIND THE CLOSED DOOR of Hema's bedroom, we could hear the sounds of Genet in the tub. Hema came out to get milk and asked Almaz to slice up papaya and pour lemon and sugar over it. Soon Almaz disappeared into the bedroom and stayed there.

An hour later, Hema and Genet emerged arm in arm. Genet was in a sequined yellow blouse and a glittering green skirt—parts of Hema's Bharatnatyam dance outfit. Her hair was pulled back off her forehead, and Hema had darkened her eyes with a kohl pencil. Genet stood regal, happy, her head high, her carriage that of a queen who'd been unshackled and restored to her throne. She was my queen, the one I wanted by my side. I was so proud, so drawn to her. How could she ever be my sister when she was already something else to me? Hema's glittering green sari matched Genet's colors. We almost missed the sight of Almaz, ducking away to the kitchen, her eyes darkened, her lips red, blush on her cheeks, and huge dangling earrings framing that strong face.

The five of us piled into the car, Genet in the backseat between me and Shiva. At the Merkato Hema got a new set of clothes for Genet. It was Christmas and Diwali and Meskel all rolled into one.

We finished up at Enrico's. Genet sat across from me, smiling at me as she licked her ice cream. Hesitantly at first, but then gathering speed, she chattered away. If she'd been brainwashed as Hema said, her brain was drying out.

I picked my moment, having scouted the obstacles under the table. I loved her so much, but I hadn't forgotten the indignity of her visit to my bed not two weeks before, and the wet present she left me. I loved the image of her hovering over me, a moment of such rare beauty. But I wanted to erase the wet part.

I kicked her shin savagely with my toe cap. She managed not to make a sound, but the pain showed in her face and in the tears that sprung to her eyes. “What's the matter?” Ghosh said.

She managed to say, “I ate my ice cream too fast.”

“Ah! Ice-cream headache. Strange phenomenon. You know, that is something we ought to study, don't you think, Hema? Is it a migraine equivalent? Is everyone susceptible? What is its average duration? Are there complications?”

“Darling,” Hema said, kissing him on the cheek, such a rare display of affection in a public place, “of all the things you've wanted to study, you've finally found one I'd love to study with you. I'm assuming it will involve lots of ice cream?”

In the car, Genet showed me the big welt on her shin. “Are you done?” she said, quietly.

“No, that was just a warm-up. I have to repay you in kind.”

“You'll ruin my new clothes,” she said coyly, leaning against me. The scars at the ends of both eyebrows were still angry at the edges. Hema saw them as barbaric, but I thought they looked beautiful. I put my arm around Genet. Shiva looked on, curious as to what I would do next. Those slashes next to her eyes made her look preternaturally wise, because they were at the spot where people developed wrinkles when they aged. She grinned, and the number 11s were exaggerated. I felt my heart racing, powerless. Who was this beauty? Not my little sister. Not even my best friend. Sometimes my opponent. But always the love of my life.

“So,” she said again, “seriously, are you done with your revenge?”

I sighed. “Yes, I'm done.”

“Good,” she said. She took my little finger and bent it back and would have snapped it if I didn't snatch it away.

GENET SLEPT IN A BED made up for her in our living room. The next morning, before we went to school, Hema sent for Rosina. Shiva, Genet, and I snuck into the corridor to listen. I peeked, and I saw Rosina standing before Hema the way she'd stood before the army man.

“I expect to see you back in the kitchen, helping Almaz. And from now on, in the daytime, the door and window to your quarters stay open. Let some light and air in there.”

If Rosina was going to make claims on her daughter, this was the moment.

We held our breath.

She didn't say a word. She made a curt bow, and left.

WE FELL BACK into our school routine: loads of homework, then Hemawork, which included penmanship, current affairs discussions, vocabulary, and book reports. Cricket for me and Shiva, and dance for Shiva and Genet. Many an evening Gosh bowled to us on a makeshift pitch on our front lawn. For a large man he had a delicate touch with the bat and taught us how to sweep, to drive, and to square-cut.

Shiva was, as of that year, exempt from school assignments, the result of Hema and Ghosh negotiating with his teachers at Loomis Town & Country. Both sides were relieved. Shiva didn't have to write an essay on the battle of Hastings if he saw no point to it. Loomis Town & Country would collect Shiva's fees and let him attend class, since he wasn't disruptive. Shiva didn't mind the ritual of school. The teachers knew us and they understood Shiva as well as one could understand Shiva. But just like Mr. Bailey, newly arrived from Bristol, some teachers had to discover Shiva for themselves. Bailey was the only teacher in LT&C's history to have a degree, and therefore he felt obliged to set a very high standard. Two-thirds of us failed the first math test. “One of you scored a perfect one hundred. But he or she didn't write a name on the paper. The rest of you were miserable. Sixty-six percent of you failed,” he exclaimed. “What do you think about that number? Sixty-six!”

For Shiva, rhetorical questions were a trap. He never asked a question to which he knew the answer. Shiva raised his hand. I cringed in my seat. Mr. Bailey's eyebrow went up, as if a chair in the corner which he'd managed to ignore for a few months had suddenly developed delusions that it was alive.

“You have something to say?”

“Sixty-six is my second-favorite number,” Shiva said.

“Pray, why is it your second favorite?” said Bailey.

“Because if you take the numbers you can divide into sixty-six, including sixty-six, and add them up, what you have is a square.”

Mr. Bailey couldn't resist. He wrote down 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 22, 33, and 66—all the numbers that went into 66—and then he totaled. What he got was 144, at which point both he and Shiva said, “Twelve squared!”

“That's what makes sixty-six special,” Shiva said. “It's also true of three, twenty-two, sixty-six, seventy—their divisors add up to a square.”

“Pray, tell us what's your favorite number,” Bailey said, no sarcasm in his voice anymore, “since sixty-six is your second favorite?”

Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote: 10,213,223.

Bailey studied this for a long while, turning a bit red. Then he threw up his hands in a gesture that struck me as very ladylike. “And pray, why would this number interest us?”

“The first four numbers are your license plate.” From Mr. Bailey's expression, I didn't think he was aware of this. “That's a coincidence,” Shiva went on. “This number,” Shiva said, tapping on the board with the chalk, getting as excited as Shiva allowed himself to get, “is the only number that describes itself when you read it. ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, and two threes!” Then my brother laughed in delight, a sound so rare that our class was stunned. He brushed chalk off his hands, sat down, and he was done.

It was the only bit of mathematics that stayed with me from that year. As for the student who scored one hundred percent?—whoever it was had drawn a picture of Veronica on the test paper in lieu of a name.

I mulled over our fates, especially the good fortune that let him skip homework. I suppose I understood. Since Shiva couldn't do or wouldn't do what was required of him, he was no longer required to do it. Since I could, I had to.

Shiva went to Version Clinic whenever our school schedule allowed. He'd managed to make his way into one of Hema's surgeries, a Cesarean section, and now he was hooked. Gray's Anatomy became his Bible, and he drew at a frenetic pace, pages of his drawings littering our room. His subject was no longer just BMW parts or Veronica but sketches showing the vulva and uterus and uterine blood vessels. To control the proliferation of paper, Hema insisted he draw in exercise books, which he did, filling page after page. You rarely saw Shiva without his Gray's in his hand.

Perhaps as a reaction to Shiva, I'd seek out Ghosh after school. I knew his haunts: Operating Theater 3, Casualty, the post-op ward. My clinical education was gathering speed. Sometimes I assisted him with the vasectomies which he did in his old bungalow.

GENET AND I SAT DOWN one evening, practicing our penmanship by copying out a page of aphorisms from Bickham's before beginning our homework. I looked up and was startled to see hot tears in her eyes. “If ‘Virtue is its own reward,’ “ she said suddenly, “then my father should be alive, no? And if ‘Truth needs no disguise,’ why do we have to pretend that His Majesty isn't short or that his affection for his ugly dog is normal? You know he has a servant whose only job is to carry around thirty pillows of different sizes to place at His Majesty's feet, so that whatever throne he sits on his feet don't dangle in the air?”

“Come on, Genet. Don't talk that way,” I said. “Unless you want to have your neck stretched.” Even before the coup, it was heresy to speak against His Majesty. People went to the gallows for less. After the coup, you had to be ten times more careful.

“I don't care. I hate him. You can tell anyone you want.” She stormed off.

WHEN THE SCHOOL TERM drew to a close, Rosina dropped a bombshell. She asked for leave to return to the north of the country, to Asmara, the heart of Eritrea. She wanted to take Genet with her to meet her family and to meet Zemui's parents. Hema feared she wouldn't return, and so she recruited Almaz and Gebrew to try to talk Rosina out of it, or have her go alone, but Rosina was adamant. In the end, Genet solved the problem. “No matter what,” she told Hema, “I'll be back. But I do want to see my relatives.”

When their taxi to the bus depot pulled away, Genet waved happily; she'd been so excited about the three-day journey, and she could talk of nothing else. But for me (and for Hema) it was heartbreaking. That very night, the wind picked up, the leaves were swishing and rustling, and by morning a squall arrived, heralding the long rains.

NOW THAT I WAS about to turn thirteen, I was aware that for Matron, Bachelli, and Ghosh, and for Missing Hospital, the rainy season meant the croup, diphtheria, and measles season. There was no letup in the work.

One morning, as I went down to the gate, umbrella in hand, I saw a woman coming up the hill to Missing, rivulets of water pouring off her umbrella. She looked frightened. I recognized her; she worked in one of the bars in the cinder-block buildings opposite Missing. Some mornings I saw her looking much as she did now, a plain and pleasant face, wearing a homely cotton skirt and top. Id also seen her at night, her hair teased out, wearing heels, jewelry, elegant clothes, and looking glamorous.

She asked me for directions. Her name was Tsige, I learned later. I heard the muted, glottic, honking cough coming from the infant slung to her back in a shama, papoose fashion. It was a sound like the cry of a gander, and for that reason, I bypassed Casualty and took Tsige directly to the croup room. The croup room was at other times the diarrhea/ dehydration room. A lab bench ran along the four walls, its surface covered with red rubber sheets. A curtain rod at head height circled the room and intravenous bottles were suspended from this. In a pinch, Missing could resuscitate up to sixteen or even twenty infants packed side by side on that bench.

The baby's eyes were screwed shut, the fingers curled, the tiny translucent nails leaving marks in the palm. The rise and fall of the little chest seemed too fast for a four-month-old. The nurse found a scalp vein and hooked up an intravenous drip. Ghosh arrived and quickly examined the little fellow. He let me listen with his stethoscope: it seemed impossible for such a tiny chest to be so full of squeaks, whistles, wheezes, and rattles. Over the left side, the heartbeat was so rapid I couldn't imagine how such a pace could be sustained. “You see these bowed legs, the lumpy bossing of the forehead?” Ghosh said. “And the hot-cross-bun pattern on the top of the skull? These are the stigmata of rickets.”

“Stigmata” in my religion class at LT&C meant the nail wounds, the cuts from the crown of thorns, the gash made by the spear of Longinus in Christ's flesh. But Ghosh used the word to mean the flesh signs of a disease. In the Piazza he had once pointed out the stigmata of congenital syphilis in a listless boy who was squatting on the sidewalk: “Saddle nose, cloudy eyes, peg-shaped incisor teeth …” I read about the other stigmata of syphilis: mulberry molars, saber-shinned tibias, and deafness.

All the infants in the croup room appeared related because they all had the stigmata of rickets to a greater or lesser degree. They were wizened, bug-eyed, with big foreheads.

Ghosh put the child in the crude oxygen tent fashioned out of a plastic sheet. “The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets,” he said to me under his breath. “It's the cascade of catastrophes.”

Ghosh took Tsige aside, his Amharic surprisingly fluent as he explained what was going on. He cautioned her to keep breast-feeding “no matter what you hear from anyone else.” When Tsige said the child was hardly sucking, he said, “Still, it will comfort him because he will know you are there. You're a good mother. This is hard.” Tsige tried to kiss Ghosh's hand when he left, but he'd have none of it.

“I'll try to check on this baby later,” Ghosh said on his way out. “We have a vasectomy tonight. Dr. Cooper from the American Embassy is coming to learn. Would you bring over a sterilized vasectomy pack from the operating theater? And plug in the sterilizer in my quarters?”

I stayed in the croup room with Tsige, because I sensed that she had no one else. Her infant looked no better. I thought of the shops on Churchill Road and how I'd seen tourists stop there, thinking it was a flower shop or flower market, only to find that the “flowers” were wreaths. Then they noticed the shoe-box-size coffins, just for infants.

Tears streamed down Tsige's face—she could see her baby was the sickest one there. The other mothers withdrew as if she were bad luck. At one point I held her hand. I searched for words of comfort but realized I didn't need any. When her baby began grunting with each breath, Tsige cried on my shoulder. I wished Genet were with me—whatever she was doing in Asmara surely couldn't be as meaningful as this. Genet said she wanted to be a doctor—for a smart kid growing up at Missing, perhaps it seemed inevitable. And yet Genet had an aversion to the hospital and had no interest in following Ghosh or Hema around. Even if she were in Addis, I couldn't see her sitting here with Tsige.

AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Tsige's child died. It had been like watching a slow drowning. The effort of breathing ultimately proved too much for that tiny chest.

At once the staff nurse ran out in the rain to the main hospital, just as she'd been instructed to do. She gestured for me to follow, but I stayed put. A parent's grief needed a scapegoat, and parents were occasionally moved to violence, to exacting retribution on those who'd tried to help. I knew I had nothing to fear from Tsige.

Half an hour later, Tsige held the shrouded body in her arms, ready for his voyage home. Belatedly, the other mothers gathered around Tsige. They raised their mouths to the heavens, the veins on their necks forming cords. Lulululululu, they cried, hoping their lament might weave some protection around their infants.

I walked with Tsige to the gate. There she turned to me, her eyes full of pain. We held each other's gaze for what seemed like a long time. She bowed, then carried her bundle away. I felt so sad for her. Her baby's suffering had ended, but hers had just begun.

DR. COOPER ARRIVED promptly at eight that evening in an embassy staff car, just as the patient, a Polish gentlemen, pulled up in his Kombi.

Ghosh had learned the technique of vasectomy as an intern, and he'd learned directly from Jhaver in India, whom he spoke of as “the maestro of male nut clipping who is personally responsible for millions of people not being here.” The operation was a novelty in Ethiopia, and now expatriate men, particularly Catholics, came to Ghosh in increasing numbers for an operation that was uncommon or unavailable in their countries.

“I have a proposition for you Dr. Cooper. I shall teach you the vasectomy, and once you are proficient, you can pay me back by doing a vasectomy on a VIP patient.”

“Do I know him?” Cooper asked.

“You are talking to him,” Ghosh said. “So you see I have a vested interest in seeing you are superbly trained. My assistant, Marion, will help me judge your skills. Marion, not a word to Hema—you either, Cooper—about my plans, please.”

Cooper had a stiff brush cut and overlapping square teeth that looked like Chiclets. His American accent was sharp, jarring to the ear, but offset by the way he drawled out his words, by his relaxed, affable manner, as if he'd never had an unpleasant moment in his life and did not expect to.

“See one, do one, teach one. Raaaiyt, old buddy?” Cooper said.

“Indeed, yes,” Ghosh said. “It is easy to do, but harder than it looks. Some preliminaries, Dr. Cooper. I tell the patient to use an enema the night before, because nothing makes them more tense than being constipated. Warm milk and honey mixed together and put into an enema bag held shoulder high is what I recommend.”

“Does it work?”

“Does it work? Let me put it this way: if the patient happens to be drinking a whiskey and soda, it'll suck the glass right out of his hand.”

“Gotcha,” said Cooper.

“I also ask the patient to take a warm bath beforehand. It relaxes him.” He added sotto voce, “And it improves my olfactory experience, you know?”

The patient hadn't said a word thus far. He was, Ghosh had told me, a consultant to the Economic Commission for Africa, an expert on population control who happened to be the father of five girls. He didn't mind all the attention.

“We can't finish if we don't start, so we better start, yes? Marion, the heater please?” I'd already turned on the electric heater under the table. “Here is the first caveat. If you don't want the scrotum to shrivel up, and the balls to retract to the armpit, the room has to be really warm. Now, the second caveat is relaxation. Very important. A barbiturate or narcotic might help. I recommend an ounce of Johnny Walker Red or Black. I'm not particular. A wonderful relaxant. And yes, you might give one to the patient, too.”

Cooper's laugh rolled leisurely out of his mouth, like the great banks of clouds that spilled over the Entoto Mountains.

I hoped Cooper was paying attention. I'd seen it before: when the patient's private parts were first exposed, even when the room was warm, the scrotal skin—the dartos muscle—would wrinkle and shrink, and the cremaster muscle would tug the testis up. Then, after a good swallow of whiskey (by the patient), which was served only at this point and not before, the sac unfurled.

Both surgeons were gloved, and Ghosh cleaned the area thoroughly and then draped sterile towels to frame the field. “Another tip, Dr. Cooper. Even though it's a simple operation, mustn't allow any bleeding. Do you know what a brinjal looks like, Dr. Cooper?”

“I don't believe I do, no sir,” Cooper said.

“Aubergine? … Melanzana?…Eggplant?”

Cooper recognized the last word.

“Well, if you don't meticulously control bleeding, you'll have an eggplant. Or two. And you know what we call that complication, Cooper. We call it the bloody-brinjal-and-bugger-all. Which is also what they fed us for five years in my medical-school hostel.”

I served the patient his Johnny Walker, which he downed in one gulp.

I loved assisting Ghosh. Ever since he treated me as if I were old enough to learn and understand, I took my role very seriously. I was thrilled to have Cooper there watching.

Ghosh, on the patient's right, rooted with his thumb and index finger at the top right of the scrotum, just where it joined the body. “You feel all the wiry things—lymph vessels, arteries, nerves, and whatnot? Well, the vas deferens is in that lot, and with practice you can tell it apart from all the other wires. It has the largest wall-to-lumen ratio of any tubular structure in the body, believe it or not. Here it is. A whiplike structure. Put your finger behind mine.”

Cooper rooted around, and said, “Got it. The vas. Yup.”

“Now, push the vas forward from the back with the tip of your index finger, fix it like this against the pulp of your finger so that it doesn't slip away.”

Ghosh's instructions to Cooper were similar to what he said to me when I assisted him. He loved to teach, and in Cooper, he had the kind of student he deserved. If he dazzled Cooper with his polished delivery, it was because he'd practiced it on me. Practicing medicine and teaching medicine were completely connected for Ghosh. When there was no one to instruct, he suffered. But that was rare. He would happily teach a probationer, or even a family member—whoever happened to be around.

“I use Adrenalin with my local anesthetic to keep the bleeding minimal. And don't be stingy.” He emptied a five-cc syringe of local into the tissue that his index finger pushed forward. “Any less than that and he'll have pain and the balls will go to the armpit. You'll have to call a chest surgeon to bring them down. Now … see how my index finger still has the vas stretched over it? I make a tiny cut in the scrotal skin. I keep pushing on the vas, pushing it forward … and … there! When I can see it in the wound, I use an Allis to grab the vas.”

He pulled out a short length of pale, white, wormlike tissue. “I put a mosquito clip here and here … and then I cut between the clips. I remove a two-centimeter segment. Ideally you'd send it to pathology. That way if his wife gets pregnant a year from now, you can show the patient the pathology report and he'll know it's not because you didn't do your job but because a third party did his job better. I don't send it to pathology for the simple reason that we don't have a pathologist. But for a while, there was a pathologist at the American Embassy clinic in Beirut. I'd do the vasectomies for the American staff and send him these little pieces I cut out. The man did the pathology for all the American embassies in East and West Africa. He kept sending back reports that my specimens were inadequate: though he thought he saw some uroepi -thelial tissue, he couldn't be certain it was the vas. ‘It's the vas,’ I wrote to him each time. ‘What other uroepithelial tissue could I have cut out? Call it the vas.’ But he kept complaining: ‘Cannot be certain. Not enough tissue.’ It was starting to annoy me, you know? So finally, I sent him a pair of sheep's balls. I put them in formalin and sent them off in the same diplomatic pouch. With a note: ‘Is this enough tissue?’ Never had a problem with him after that.”

Cooper hee-hawed, his mask sucking in and out.

“Now, I tie off the cut ends with catgut. And then I tell the patient, ‘No communication with wife allowed for the next ninety days.’ “

Ghosh turned to face the patient, and repeated the sentence. The patient nodded. “Okay, you can communicate, say ‘Good morning, darling,’ and all that, but no sex for three months.” The patient grinned. “Okay, you can have sex, but you must wear a condom.”

“I use interruptus,” the patient said, speaking for the first time in a heavy East European accent.

“You use what? Interruptus? Pull and pray? Good God, man! No wonder you have five kids! It's noble of you to try to get off the train at an earlier station, but it's unreliable. No sir. Interrupt the interruptus, man, unless you want to reach your half dozen this year.” The patient looked embarrassed. “You know what we call young men who use coitus interruptus?” Ghosh said.

The population expert shook his head.

“We call them Father! Daddy. Pater. Pappa. Père. No sir, I have done the interrupting for you. Give me three months and you can tell your missus that she is not to worry because you will be shooting blanks, and there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.”

31. The Dominion of the Flesh

WITH GENET AND ROSINA AWAY, our quarters felt empty. I missed Genet terribly. Hema and I both worried that wed never see her again. She'd promised to call, and write, but three weeks had gone by and wed yet to hear from her. That year, 1968, we had torrential rains; the Blue Nile and Awash had spilled their banks, causing flooding. The babbling brook behind Missing looked like a river. In Addis, the populace was bottled up indoors so that a lull in the rain released the scent of stifled humanity, dung fires, and clothes that refused to dry. The ivy raced up the drainpipes and found chinks in walls, while the tadpoles hurried into croaking frogs before their limbs were fully formed. No child I knew was ever tempted to turn its face to the sky and catch raindrops on the tongue, not when you lived and breathed water.

Now that Shiva and I were teenagers, looking ahead to our fourteenth birthday, I kept expecting something to feel different. I tried to stay busy, but all I could think about was Genet and what she might be up to in Asmara. I hoped she was homebound, miserable, and missing me. Without Genet as a witness, nothing I did was meaningful.

LATE ON A TUESDAY EVENING, I watched Ghosh in Operating Theater 3 as he removed a gallbladder. When he was done, we swung by the surgical ward to see Etien, a diplomat from Ivory Coast, a man we knew socially, who'd suddenly developed a bowel obstruction. In surgery, Ghosh had found an obstructing rectal cancer which he was forced to resect. It was a big and challenging operation, and I knew Ghosh was hopeful for a cure. But he was forced to create a colostomy on the belly wall. “Etien's very depressed,” Ghosh said. “Not about the cancer, but over his colostomy. He can't accept the idea of waste coming out from an opening in his abdomen.”

Etien had the sheet over his head. When Ghosh examined him, and then said the colostomy looked beautiful, tears welled up in Etien's big eyes. He wouldn't look down there. All he said was “Who will marry me now?”

Ghosh was surprisingly firm. “Etien, that's not the part of your body I cut off, the marrying part. You'll find a woman who loves you, and you'll explain it to her. If she loves you for yourself, you'll both be glad that you are alive.” Ghosh's facial expression brooked no argument, but then he softened. “Etien, imagine if all humans were born with their anus on the belly and that's where everyone's waste emerged. Then imagine if someone said they were going to operate on you and reroute your bowel so it opened behind you, between your buttock cheeks, somewhere where you couldn't see it except in a mirror, and where you could hardly reach it or easily keep it clean …” It took a few seconds, but then Etien smiled. He dabbed his eyes. He ventured a glance down at his colostomy. It was a small step in the right direction.

Ghosh had one more patient to see. He told me to go on home so I wouldn't be late for dinner.

The rain began to come down hard and I had no umbrella. I walked under the sheltered walkways connecting the theater to Casualty and Casualty to the male ward. Where the walkway ended, I dashed across a short gap, leaping over a puddle to arrive at the nurses’ quarters. I rarely explored this female warren. It looked deserted. If I went up the long outer balcony and down the stairs at the other end … well, I'd still get soaked, but I'd be fifty yards closer to home before I had to dash out into the rain. I hoped Adam's wife, the keeper of the virgins, with that big cross around her neck, didn't see me, because she would chase me out.

Upstairs, the doors of the individual nurses’ rooms opened onto the shared veranda. They must have all been in the dining room, otherwise they would have been lined up against the veranda railing, teasing out their hair, painting their nails, sewing, and chatting.

I heard music from the corner room that had once been my mother's. I'd been up here a few times, but just like her grave, this wasn't a place where I felt her presence. The strangeness of the music, the beat, were what pulled me closer. Guitars and drums in a driving rhythm repeated a musical refrain first in one register, then another. Of late some Ethiopian music adopted a Western sound, with horns, snare drums, and a repeating electric guitar riff that took the place of the muffled strings of the krar and the hand clapping. But this wasn't Ethiopian music, and not just because the words were English (albeit an English I couldn't quite understand). This was radically different, like a new color in the rainbow.

The door was open a crack.

She stood barefoot in the center of the room, her back to me. A white slip exposed her shoulders and ended at the back of her knees. Her head went from side to side, and her long, straight hair, conked with chemicals, followed as if welded to her skull. Her hips were driven by the bass line, while her upraised right hand kept the melody. Her left hand must have been pressed to her belly, because the elbow jutted out like the handle of a teacup. The music had entered her; it lubricated her joints, softened her bones and flesh to produce this gyrating, fluid, and sensual movement.

She turned. Her eyes were closed and her face was tilted up. The lower lip was twisted, as if it had been split and had healed out of alignment.

I knew that lip, that faintly pockmarked face, though now the pocks textured the skin and exaggerated her cheekbones. It was the body I didn't recognize. She'd been a student probationer forever, until Matron, taking pity on her, gave her a new title, Staff Probationer, which transformed her. From being on the long-term plan, a perpetual student, she became an instructor for incoming probationers. In the classroom, with textbooks that she knew by heart, she could both drive facts into the probationers’ heads and demonstrate that it was possible to keep them there, by the manner in which she regurgitated her material, never looking at the text.

Normally she wore her hair pulled off her forehead and neck and gathered into a top bun so tight that it arched her eyebrows. When she crowned this with the winged nurse's cap, it looked as if she'd inverted an ice-cream cone on her head.

Other than her precarious hairdo, I'd always thought of the Staff Probationer as plain. At school, I knew girls who were neither ugly nor beautiful but who saw themselves one way or the other, and that conviction made it come true. Heidi Enqvist was gorgeous, but alas not in her own eyes, and so she lacked the mystery and allure of Rita Vartanian, who despite her overbite and prominent nose managed to make Heidi envious.

The probationer was of the Heidi mold. I think that's why she made herself a willing prisoner of a stiff, starched uniform and adopted an unsmiling expression to go with it. The only identity she had was that of being in the nursing profession; in her own eyes, and in the light of the world, she thought she was nobody. Id always felt the probationer's discomfort around us. But then she was shy around everybody.

But I could see now that there was more to her than nursing. The uniform concealed a body full of curves, like the figures Shiva used to draw, and the body moved in ways that would have made a harem dancer jealous.

Her eyes were closed. Were she to see me she'd be startled, embarrassed, and probably furious. I was about to step back when, to my surprise, she stepped forward and pulled me in by my hand, as if a phrase in the song was my cue. She kicked the door shut. The music was louder and more intense inside the room.

She had me taking little steps in time to the beat, moving my body this way and that. I was embarrassed at first. I wanted to laugh or say something clever, the way an adult would. But her expression and the throbbing beat made me feel anything but dancing would have been like talking in church. My steps became effortless. I imitated her, my shoulders moving in the opposite direction from my hips. My hands drew figures in the air. The trick was not to think. My body felt segmented, and each segment answered the call of a particular instrument. The pattern of our steps felt inevitable.

Just when I mastered that, she pulled me to her, my cheek against her neck, my chest against her breasts, separated from them by the thinnest of materials. I'd never danced before, certainly not like this. I breathed in her perfume and her sweat. She squeezed, taking my breath away, as if to make our two bodies one. She guided my arm so that it was around her, my hand over her sacrum, and I held her close. We never stopped moving. She led.

I anticipated her every step, clueless as to where that knowledge came from. We spun, then surged this way, then that, like one organism. I thought of Genet. Emboldened, I led and she followed. I pressed against the soft flesh where her legs came together only because she pressed, too, grinding her hips into me. Blood surged to my face, to my arms, into my stomach, my groin. The world had fallen away. I was in an elaborate dialogue with her.

The music wouldn't stop, and I never wanted it to stop, and just when I thought that, it faded. The American announcer's lazy drawl was so unlike the crisp formal tones of the BBC. “Well, well,” he said. “My, my. Umm, hmmm,” as if hed seen us carrying on. “Have you ever heard anything quite like that? This is the Rock of East Africa. East Africa's Big 14. Armed Forces Radio Service, Asmara.” It wasn't a station that I knew existed. I knew of a huge American military presence, a listening post, I'd heard it called, just outside of Asmara in Kagnew. Who knew they had something we could listen to?

We were still pressed together, holding the world at bay. She gazed into my eyes, I didn't know if she was about to cry or laugh. All I knew was that I'd have cried with her, or laughed or got down on all fours and pretended to be Koochooloo if she asked.

“You're so beautiful,” I said, surprising myself.

She gasped. My words seem to ripple through her. Had I said the wrong thing? Her lips quivered; her eyes shone. She was expressing joy. I'd said the right thing.

She lowered her face, brought that lip with the puckered scar and the bulges on either side close to mine. Her mouth overlapped mine, forming a seal. The silliest image entered my mind, and it was that of connecting one garden hose to another. What flowed across wasn't water, but her tongue. This time, unlike in the pantry with Genet, I received her tongue eagerly. It was so very exciting. I put my hand behind her head. I pressed my body to her, feeling every atom in me come to a point.

I pulled away once to look at her and say, “You're so beautiful,” because it was a magical phrase, one I knew I should use often, but only if I believed it to be true. I don't know how long we were coupled by our mouths, but it came most naturally, as if I were satisfying a hunger. I didn't realize this potential existed in me. It carried me forward. Whatever was next, I didn't know, but my body knew. I trusted my body. I was ready.

Suddenly, she stepped away. She held me at arm's length. She sat on the edge of the bed. She was crying. Something had happened about which my body had failed to inform me. Or perhaps there was a rule, an etiquette, that I'd failed to observe. I eyed the door, measuring my escape.

“Can you ever forgive me?” she said. “Your mother shouldn't have died. Maybe if I told someone she was sick, they could've helped her.”

This was astonishing. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. I'd entirely forgotten this was my mother's room. I couldn't picture Sister Mary Joseph Praise in here, certainly not with a poster of Venice on the wall, and on another wall a black-and-white poster of a white singer, his pelvis thrust forward at the microphone stand which hed pulled toward him, his face contorted with the effort of singing. I looked back to the Staff Probationer.

“I didn't know how sick she was.” She hiccuped through her tears, just like a baby.

“It's all right,” I said, feeling as if someone else gave me those words.

“Say you forgive me.”

“I will if you stop crying. Please.”

“Say it.”

“I forgive you.”

She only cried louder. Someone would hear. I didn't think I was supposed to be in this room. And I certainly wasn't supposed to make her cry.

“I said it! I said I forgive you. Why are you still crying?”

“But I almost let you and your brother die. I was supposed to help you breathe when you came out. I was supposed to resuscitate you. But I forgot.”

WHEN I FIRST CAME to this room, I was adrift, feeling as if a part of me was missing, all because Genet was away. Then I'd forgotten all that and found happiness, no, ecstasy, in the dance, a hint of what I wanted with Genet. And now I was adrift again, and confused. Paradise had seemed so close, and now I was clawing through fog. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, to the bed.

“You can do anything you want to me. Anytime,” she said, tilting her head back, looking up at me as I stood over her.

What did she mean?

“Do what?” I said.

Anything.

She let me go and she fell back on her bed. She was spread-eagled. She was ready. For whatever I might want to do.

Yes, there was something I wanted to do. If I were given free rein, dominion over her body, I knew I'd discover it by instinct. I had a general idea. I was nearly fourteen after all.

She was giving me license and still I waited.

She rolled over onto her belly, showing me her buttocks and peering at me over her shoulder. Her eyelids were puffy, her expression dreamy and faraway She spun one hundred eighty degrees so her head faced me. She propped herself up on her elbows. Her breasts hung down, the nipples barely concealed. She followed my gaze to her cleavage.

I heard voices and footsteps outside. The other nurses and probationers were back from dinner.

I didn't want to leave. But the world had intruded. My hesitation doomed me. That and her uninvited confession.

“I want to dance with you again,” I said, in a whisper.

“You can …,” she whispered, but as if that were the wrong answer.

“I do want to do … anything with you.”

“Yes! That's what I want, too.” She was kneeling on the bed now, brightening, smiling through her tears. “Come,” she said, arms extended, beckoning.

“But nothing right now. I'll be back another day.” I put my hand on the doorknob.

“But … how about anything now?” she said, loud enough for the world to hear.

I slipped out quickly, hoping that if anyone saw me, they'd think it perfectly normal for me to visit.

The rain hadn't let up. I let it beat on my head. I didn't mind. Rain was familiar. But this balancing on the edge of feelings so powerful they seemed capable of making me fly, this was a revelation. By the time I reached our quarters I was soaked. When I saw the door to Rosina and Genet's room, I longed for the padlock not to be there. I stood staring at that closed door.

It was at that moment, with raindrops smacking me on the fontanel, that I came to the decision that I must marry Genet. Yes, that was my destiny. What I felt with the probationer, I never wanted to feel with anyone but Genet. There were too many temptations out there, great forces ready to shake me free of my avowed intent. I wanted to succumb to temptation. But with just one woman, and that was Genet.

If I married her, I'd solve everything. It would keep Rosina from pulling away, it would make Hema, Ghosh, and Rosina happy, and they'd have both of us as their children. I could see us having kids of our own. We'd tear down the servant's quarters and build the twin to the main house, with a linking corridor, so we could all be under the same roof; we'd have a room, or maybe a suite, for Shiva. He'd be happy to have Genet as a sister-in-law. Since Shiva wasn't one to look back, to celebrate the past, it was all the more important for me to preserve the family, keep us as one.

I STEPPED INTO THE HOUSE, dripping water on the floor. In the bathroom I stripped naked and studied myself in the mirror, looking to see what the probationer saw. I was tall for my age, nearly six feet, and my skin was fair. I could perhaps have passed for someone of Mediterranean ancestry; my irises were brown—I never saw the hint of blue I could see in Shiva's. My expression seemed unduly earnest, particularly when my hair was damp. Once it dried, the curls would return and would have a life of their own, refusing to be corralled. This is what it means to arrive at manhood, I thought, hands on my hips, turning to admire my flanks, my buttocks.

I dressed and returned to the kitchen, breathing in the scents steaming out of the pots and snatching a piece of meat before Almaz could slap my hand away. She scolded me, but it was a sweet sound, as was the music from the living room with the heavy beat of a tabla, and the thump and thud of Hema and Shiva dancing, of Hema calling out instructions. I heard the rattle of the loose bumper on the Volkswagen as Ghosh came up the driveway. I felt ecstatic, as if I was at the epicenter of our family, missing only Genet and Rosina who surely would come back, and then our family would be whole.

I pushed out of my mind what the probationer said about what shed done—or hadn't done—for my mother. There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold such pleasure. And as for my father? No, he wouldn't ever walk through those gates; I now knew that. Whatever Thomas Stone had, wherever he was at this moment, he had no idea what he'd given up in the exchange.

32. A Time to Sow

GENET AND ROSINA RETURNED two days before school began; they arrived with the clamor and excitement of the Indian circus coming to the Merkato. Their taxi from the bus station sagged on its springs, the roof carrier and trunk so laden with goods.

The first thing I noticed was Rosina's gold tooth and the grin that went with it. Genet, too, was transformed, radiant, wearing a traditional cotton skirt and tight bodice, with a matching shama around her shoulders. She shrieked with happiness as she leaped out to hug Hema, almost knocking her over. Then she rushed to Ghosh, then Shiva, then Almaz and me, and then back into Hema's arms. When Rosina hugged me, it was loving and affectionate; but her lengthy embrace of Shiva made me feel a stab of envy. Her absence allowed me to now see clearly what I'd overlooked before—that she favored Shiva. Was this a result of her seeing me in the pantry with her naked daughter? Or had she always had a soft spot for Shiva? And was I the only one to notice?

They were all talking over one another now. Rosina, one arm still around Shiva, allowed Gebrew to admire her gold tooth.

“Genet, darling, your hair!” Hema said, because it was braided into tight cornrows, like her mother's, each braid springing free at the back of her head where it was tied around a shiny disk. “You cut it?”

“I know! Don't you love it? And see my hands,” she said. Her palms were orange with henna.

“But it's so … short. And you pierced your ears, darling!” Hema said. Blue hoops hung down from her lobes. “My God, girl,” she said, holding Genet by the shoulders, “Look at you! You've grown taller and … fuller.”

“Your tits are bigger,” Shiva said.

“Shiva!” Hema and Ghosh said at the same time.

“Sorry,” he said, surprised by their reaction. “I meant her breasts are bigger,” he said.

“Shiva! That isn't the sort of thing you say to a woman,” Hema said.

“I can't say it to a man,” Shiva said, looking impatient.

“It's all right, Ma,” Genet said. “And it's true. I'm a B, or maybe even a C!” she said looking down proudly at her breasts, which pointed up like stargazers.

Rosina could tell what was being discussed. “Stai zitto!” she said to Genet, her finger on her lips, which made Genet laugh.

“Madam,” Rosina said to Hema in Amharic, “I've had my hands full with this girl. All the boys are chasing her. Does she have the sense to discourage them? No. And look how she dresses!” I was distressed to hear a trace of pride in her complaint.

Genet said, “I just love the clothes in Asmara. Oh! I brought postcards. Dov’è la mia borsetta, Mama? I want to show you. Oh, it's in the taxi … Hold on.” She went headfirst through the open window of the taxi, treating us to a view of her panties. Rosina screamed at her in Tigrinya, to no avail.

Genet thrust postcards at us. “Oh, Asmara, you can't imagine what a beautiful city the Italians built so long ago. See?” It wasn't something to brag about: being colonized for so long before Ethiopia. The strange, colorful buildings were all angles, like something out of a geometry set.

HEMA AND GHOSH soon drifted back into the house. The taxi driver helped Gebrew unload wooden stools and a new bed into Rosina's quarters. The bed was made of hand-carved dark wood, a gift from Rosina's brother in Asmara, we learned.

I sat on the new bed, gazing at Genet. It felt as if she'd been away for years. I was tongue-tied. “So how was your winter, Marion?” If I was unsure of myself in front of her, she didn't know the meaning of shy.

I'd saved up things to tell her. I even had a script. But this tall beautiful girl—this woman, I should say—sitting next to me, so Eritrean and so enamored of things Italian, messed up my speech. The patients I'd seen, the books I'd read … none of this could compete with Asmara.

“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “You know how it is here in the long rains.”

“That's it? Nothing? No movies, no adventures? And … girlfriends?”

I was still smarting from Rosina's description of the boys chasing Genet in Asmara. It was a betrayal. Surely Genet had a role in that: What boy would bother you if you told him to get lost?

“Well,” I said, “I don't know about girlfriends, but …”

Reluctantly at first, I told her about my visit to my mother's old room, but I recast my time with the probationer as something casual, portraying myself as the indifferent participant. However, the further I got into the story, the less I was able to sustain that tone.

Genet's eyes became as round as the hoops on her ears.

“So you did it with her?” she said.

“No!” I said.

She seemed disappointed, when I would have expected her to be jealous.

“For God's sake, Marion, why not?”

I shook my head. “I didn't because …”

“Because what? Spit it out,” she said, poking my side, as if to help the words come out. “Who are you waiting for? The Queen of England? She's married you know.”

“I didn't do it, because … I knew it would be wonderful, more than wonderful. I knew it would be fantastic—”

“What kind of explanation is that?” she said, rolling her eyes in frustration.

“But … I knew I wanted my first time to be with you.”

There, I said it.

Genet looked at me for the longest time, her mouth open. I felt vulnerable. I held my breath hoping what came out of her mouth next wouldn't be mockery or amusement. Ridicule would destroy me.

She leaned over, her eyes soft, her expression loving and tender, and she took my chin in both her hands and shook it side to side as if I were a little baby.

“Ma che minchia?” Rosina asked, her hands on her hips, rudely interrupting us. I hadn't noticed her come back into the room.

Genet burst out laughing. Rosina didn't find it amusing, but Genet was losing her breath, keeling over. Rosina glared at her, then gave up, muttering to herself. This hysterical laughter of Genet's was something new.

When she could speak, Genet explained. “ Ma che minchia?’ means ‘What the fuck?’ which I kept saying in Asmara. I learned it from my cousins. My mother threatened to slap me every time I said it. And now she says it, can you believe it? … So, Marion—che minchia, eh?”

WE HAD DINNER together in the bungalow, Genet seated with us, while Rosina and Almaz ate in the kitchen.

It had become my practice to take over the Grundig once wed eaten. Often I listened to the Rock of Africa till midnight when it went off the air. The music spoke to what I was feeling; in the tight structure of a twelve-bar blues or in Dylan's haunting ballads, order was imposed. Shiva sat with me most evenings. The music spoke to him, too.

Now the DJ came on, “Rock of East Africa, AFRS Asmara, where everyone is a mile and a half high. This is a Boone's Farm Saturday here at the base. The first shipment of Boone's Farm wine came in last night, and folks, if you missed it, I hate to tell you, but it's all gone, and so are some people here. Now let's listen to Bobby Vinton, ‘My Heart Belongs Only to You.’ “

I was pleased to find Genet knew nothing of this radio station. The cousins in Asmara couldn't be that cool if they never tuned in to this show.

The next song began without any introduction. I jumped up. “This is it!” I said to Genet. “This is the tune I was telling you about.”

In all the evenings of listening to the radio, here for the first time was the song that I'd heard in the probationer's room.

I was shimmying and twisting to the music, blind to Hema's shocked expression and the stares of Ghosh and Genet. I cranked the volume up; Rosina and Almaz came out of the kitchen. They must have thought I was mad. This was out of character for me, but I couldn't stop myself, or I chose not to, and something told me this was the day for it.

Now Shiva stood up and joined me, and his dancing was smooth, silky, and so polished, as if all his lessons with Hema had been a way of biding time till he heard this song. That was all it took for Genet to jump in. I pulled Hema up from her chair, and soon she moved in time to the music. Ghosh needed no urging. I tried to pull Rosina in, but she and Almaz fled to the kitchen. The five of us in that living room danced till the very last note had sounded.

Chuck Berry.

That was the name of the artist. The song was “Sweet Little Sixteen”—so the announcer said.

When it was time for bed, Genet said she was going back to Rosina's quarters. Hema looked hurt. “I'll keep my mother company,” Genet said. “I have my own bed now. There were six of us on the floor in Asmara. Having a bed for myself will be a real luxury.”

The next day in the Piazza, I found the Chuck Berry 45 in a record shop. I realized from the dust jacket that “Sweet Little Sixteen” was a number one hit—but in 1958! I was crushed. The rest of the world had heard this song more than a decade before I knew it existed. When I thought of how I had danced to it the previous night, it felt like the dance of an ignoramus, like the awe of a peasant seeing the neon beer mug on top of the Olivetti Building.

ON THE EVE of the new school year, Hema and Ghosh took us with them to the Greek club for the annual gala to celebrate the end of “winter.” Genet surprised me by saying shed stay back and get her school clothes ready; she, Rosina, Gebrew, and Almaz planned a cozy dinner in Rosina's quarters.

The big band was made up of moonlighting musicians from the army, air force, and Imperial Bodyguard orchestras. They could play “Stardust,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “Tuxedo Junction” in their sleep. Chuck Berry wasn't in their repertoire.

The expatriate community back from vacations, was out in force, looking tanned. I saw Mr. and Mrs. G——, who weren't really married, and the word was they'd abandoned their spouses and children in Portugal to be with each other; Mr. J——, a dashing Goan bachelor who was jailed briefly for a financial shenanigan, was in full form. The newly arriving expats would quickly learn their roles; they'd find that their for-eignness trumped their training or talent—it was their most important asset. Soon they'd be regulars, smiling and dancing at this annual event.

I'd always thought the expatriates represented the best of culture and style of the “civilized” world. But I could see now that they were so far from Broadway or the West End or La Scala, that they probably were a decade behind the times, just as I'd been with Chuck Berry. I watched the ruddy, sweaty faces on the dance floor, the childlike brightness in their eyes; it made me sad and impatient.

Shiva danced first with Hema, then with women he knew from Hema and Ghosh's bridge circle, and then with anyone who looked keen to dance. Suddenly I didn't want to be there any longer; I left early, telling Hema and Ghosh I'd take a taxi home.

I thought of the probationer as I walked up the hill to our quarters. I'd been avoiding her. When her students were with her, she made no sign of recognition. When she saw me with Shiva, she greeted us without comment. The first time I ran into her alone, she stopped me, and said, “Are you Marion?” From her eyes I knew that nothing had changed, and that her door was still open to me. “No,” I had said. “I'm Shiva.” She never asked again.

I heard the murmur of the radio in Rosina's quarters, but their door was closed and in any case I wasn't looking for company.

I went to bed alone, went to bed with my thoughts—I felt older than my thirteen years.

I woke when Shiva came home. I watched him in the mirror. He was taller than I saw myself, and he had the narrow hips and the light tread of a dancer. He slipped off his coat and shirt. His hair was parted and combed to one side when he left the house, but now it was an unruly mass of thick curls. His lips were full, almost womanly, and there was a dreamy, prophetic quality to his face. When he was down to his underwear, he studied himself in the mirror. He held one arm up, and the other out. He was imagining a dance with a woman. He made a graceful turn and dip.

“You had a good time?” I said.

It stopped him in his tracks. His arms remained where they were. He looked at me in the mirror, which gave me goose bumps. “A good time was had by one and all,” he said in a hoarse voice that I didn't recognize.

33. A Form of Madness

THE TAXI DROPPED SHIVA and me across from Missing's gate, in front of the cinder-block buildings, just as the streetlights came on. At sixteen, I was captain, opening batsman, and wicket-keeper for our cricket eleven and Shiva was a middle-order batsman. As opener, my forté was whaling away at the ball and trying to weather the first salvo while demoralizing the bowlers, while Shiva's strength was to doggedly defend his wicket, anchoring the team, even if he scored few runs. After practice it was always dark when we came home.

I saw a woman framed by the bead curtains and silhouetted against the light of the bar, at the end of the building closest to Ali's souk.

“Hi! Wait for me,” she called out. Her tight skirt and heels restricted her to mincing steps as she crossed the plank that forded the gutter. She hugged herself against the cold, smiling so that her eyes were reduced to slits.

“My, you have grown so tall! Do you remember me?” she said, looking uncertainly from me to Shiva. A jasmine scent reached my nostrils.

After her baby died, I'd seen Tsige many, many times but only at waving distance. She had worn black for a year. That rainy morning when she brought her baby to Missing, Tsige had looked quite plain. Hers was a simple, guileless face, but now with eyeliner, lipstick, hair in waves down to her shoulders, she was striking.

We touched cheeks like relatives, first one side, then the other, then back to the first side again. “Uh … this is … may I present my brother,” I said.

“You work here?” Shiva said. Shiva was never tongue-tied around women.

“Not anymore,” she said. “I own it now. I invite you to please come in.”

“No … but … thank you,” I stammered. “Our mother is expecting us.”

“No, she's not,” said Shiva.

“I hope you won't mind if I come another day,” I said.

“Whenever you want, you are welcome. Both of you.”

We stood in awkward silence. She still had my hand.

“Listen. I know it was a long time ago, but I never thanked you. Every time I see you I want to talk to you, but I don't want to embarrass you, and I felt ashamed … Today, when I saw you this close, I thought I'd do it.”

“Oh no,” I said, “it's I who worried that you were angry with me— with us. Maybe you blamed Missing for …”

“No, no, no. I'm to blame.” The light dimmed in her eyes. “That's what happens when you listen to these stupid old women. ‘Give him this,’ ‘Do that,’ they told me. That morning I looked at my poor baby, and I realized all those habesha medicines had hurt him. When your father examined Teferi, I knew he could have helped if I had come days earlier. I'd made a horrible mistake by waiting. But …”

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

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

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

The light came back to her face.

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

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

“Maybe not anymore. But she knows how.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What? How many times have you gone?”

“Twenty-one times.”

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

“The same woman?”

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

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

“Why? Will you visit her?”

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

“Whisper what? Why?”

“Forget it.”

“Marion, all women are beautiful,” Shiva said. I looked up and realized that he spoke with conviction and not a trace of sarcasm. He wasn't embarrassed, or angry that I hauled him off, or the least bit upset. My conceit was that I thought I knew my brother. Yet all I really knew were his rituals. He loved his Grays Anatomy and carried it around so much, it had pale indentations on the cover from his fingers. When Ghosh got Shiva a new edition of Grays, my brother was insulted, as if Ghosh had brought him a stray puppy to replace his beloved Koochooloo, who was on her last legs. I knew Shiva's rituals, but not the logic behind them. Shiva did find women beautiful—I'd seen that from the first time we visited the Version Clinic. He never missed a clinic and ultimately wore Hema down until she taught him how to turn babies. There was nothing prurient about his interest in the Version Clinic or in obstetrics and gynecology. If the clinic day happened to fall on a holiday, or Hema decided to not have it for some reason, Shiva would still be there, seated on the steps of the locked building. Here I was telling him to be nice to the probationer, but he could argue that hed given the probationer just what she'd wanted while I'd been anything but nice to her. Meanwhile, I was saving myself for one woman. My abstinence felt noble because it was so very difficult. I burned with my celibacy and I wanted it to impress Genet. How could it not?

It had been clear to me ever since that sunny Saturday three years before when Genet returned from her holiday in Asmara that puberty for her was all but complete. Her growth spurt that winter made everything longer: legs, fingers, even lashes. Her eyelids turned sleepy looking, and her eyes seemed even more widely spaced. After her return from Asmara, she'd begun to drive the household mad. According to Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics, breast buds and pubic hair were the first signs of puberty in girls. How strange that Nelson overlooked the first sign I noted, namely, a heady, mature scent that beckoned like a Siren. When she wore perfume, the two scents would mingle, and what emerged made me dizzy. All I could imagine was tearing off her clothes and drinking from the source.

Genet's changes galvanized Rosina—I could see that clearly. Hema and Rosina were allies, united by their desire to protect Genet from the predators, the boys. But the two mothers were never protective enough for my tastes, and they sabotaged their own efforts by buying her the kinds of clothes and accessories that made her more attractive to the opposite sex. The hounds—judging by how I felt—couldn't help sniffing at our doorstep, and what's more, Genet, by her own admission, was in heat.

THAT TERM, on a Thursday, Genet sent word that she wouldn't be riding back to school in our taxi. She said she'd come home on her own. As Shiva and I walked the last fifty yards up our driveway, a sleek black Mercedes-Benz dropped Genet off.

Shiva went on into the house, but I waited.

“I don't like you coming back with Rudy,” I said to her. It was such an understatement—that luxurious car made me feel so inadequate and it made my blood boil. Rudy's father had the porcelain and bathroom fixture monopoly in Addis. There were perhaps two other kids in the school who drove their own cars. What rankled most was that Rudy had once been one of my best friends.

“You sound like my mother,” Genet said, oblivious to my distress.

“Rudy is the crown prince of the toilets. He just wants to sleep with you.”

“Don't you?” she said looking at me coyly, tilting her head.

“Yes. But I want to sleep only with you. And I love you. So it's different.”

For all my shyness around women, I didn't have a problem telling Genet how I felt. Perhaps it was a mistake to show my hand so easily. It gave a shallow woman great power over you, but my faith insisted she couldn't be shallow, that such love, such commitment from me, would empower her, free her.

“Will you do it with me?” she asked.

“Of course I will. I dream of it every night. We only have to wait three more years, Genet, and we can get married. And then we will lose our virginity in this place,” I said pulling out a much-folded picture I had torn out of National Geographic. It showed the Lake Palace in Udaipur, a gleaming white hotel in the middle of a pristine blue lake. “I want to marry in India,” I said. I had visions of me, the groom, riding in on an elephant, a symbol of the desire and the frustration I had repressed— only an elephant (or a jumbo jet) would do. And beautiful Genet, bejew-eled and dressed in a gold sari, jasmine all around … I could see every detail. I even had the perfume picked out for her—Motiya Bela made from jasmine flowers. “And this is the honeymoon suite.” The flip side showed a room with a giant four-poster bed, with huge French doors beyond that opened out onto the lake. “Notice the bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a bidet.” The crown prince of toilets could never top that.

Genet was surprised and touched by the photographs and the fact that I would be carrying that page in my wallet. My tigress fixed her gaze on me with new interest.

“Marion, you've really thought about this, haven't you?”

I described the white silk sheets on the bed, how the sheer cotton curtains would enclose it in the daytime, but at night, they'd be open, as would the doors to the veranda. “I'll cover the bed with rose petals, and when I undress you, I'm going to lick and kiss every inch of your body, starting with your toes …”

She moaned. She put a finger on my lips, her eyeballs rolling back in her head, showing me her throat. “My God, you better stop before I go crazy.” She sighed. “But listen, Marion, what if I tell you that I don't want to get married? I don't want to wait. I want to be deflowered. Now. Not in three years.”

“But what about Hema? Or your mother?”

“I don't want them to deflower me. I want you.”

“That's not—”

A peal of laughter, for which I forgave her because it lifted my spirits. “I know what you mean, silly. What if I don't have your strength to resist? Some days I just want to do it. Don't you? Just to get it over with! Just to know.” She sighed. “If you won't do it, maybe I should ask Shiva? Or Rudy?”

“Not that toilet prince. And Shiva … well, Shiva is no longer a virgin. He's done it already. Besides, I thought you loved me.”

“What?” She clapped her hands in delight, and looked around for Shiva. “Shiva?” She was almost jumping for joy. She'd sidestepped the question of her love for me. She was too shy to profess it, I told myself. “Oh, Shiva, Shiva! We must get all the details from him. Shiva, no longer a virgin, you say? What are you and I waiting for, then?”

“I'm waiting for you and—”

“Oh, stop. You sound like a stupid romance novel. You sound like a girl, for God's sake! If you want first shot you better move fast, Marion.” She seemed serious, no trace of humor in her face. She scared me when she spoke that way. “Otherwise, I have some others in mind. Your friend Gaby, or even the toilet prince, though his breath stinks of cheese.” She burst out laughing again, enjoying my distress but also showing me that she was just joking, thank God.

I couldn't take much more teasing; it was hard to hear her mention the names of other suitors. I spied the stack of women's fashion magazines in her hands. “What's happened to you?” I demanded. I was angry now. I remembered the girl who had mastered Bickham's Penmanship, and who, after Zemui's death, had read books voraciously, anything that Hema fed her. “You used to be … serious,” I said. Now her best friends were two beautiful Armenian sisters. The three of them went shopping together in the afternoons or to the movies where they observed actors whose dress and behavior they held to be the gold standard. They kept all the boys guessing. Genet's grades had once been so good that she skipped a grade and joined our class. But of late she rarely studied, and her grades were average. “What's going on, Genet? Don't you want to be a doctor?”

“Yes, Doctor, I want to be a doctor,” she said coming very close to me. “Doctor, I want you to give me a checkup.” She held her arms apart, the book bag in one hand, the fashion magazines in her other hand. She brought her body close to mine and thrust her hips into me. “I hurt down here, Doctor.”

Rosina jumped out of the front door of our quarters like a jack-in-the-box. Her sudden appearance was startling, and I admit it was comical, but I didn't think that the way Genet burst out laughing would please Rosina.

In a torrent of Tigrinya, with italinya thrown in, Rosina screamed at Genet and descended on us. Genet danced around me to stay out of Rosina's reach, finding even more humor in her mother chasing her. I understood Rosina's words here and there and guessed what she was saying: Where are your brains and what do you think you were doing just now? Who is that boy with the car and do you know he only wants one thing? Why are you pressing against Marion as if you are a bar girl? Each question provoked fresh laughter from Genet.

Rosina glared at me, as if I should answer for her daughter. This was the second time she'd caught Genet and me in a compromising position. She switched to Amharic as she grilled me. “You! Why didn't she come back with you and Shiva? And what were you two doing just now?”

“We're going to be doctors, don't you know, Mother?” Genet shouted in Amharic, tears in her eyes, barely able to speak. “I was teaching him how to examine a woman!”

Rosina's shocked face was Genet's reward, and she found this so hysterical that she dropped her magazines and her book bag, clutched at her stomach, and staggered away in the direction of their quarters. The two of us watched her sashay away, holding her sides. Rosina turned to me, hiding her dark confusion by putting on the stern look she'd use when Shiva or I had been naughty. But it felt artificial, more so now because, at six feet and one inch, I towered over my nanny. “What do you have to say for yourself, Marion?”

I hung my head, took two shuffling steps toward her. “I want to say …,” I said, and then I grabbed Rosina, lifted her up in the air, whirled her about while she beat on my shoulders. “I want to say that I am so happy to see you. And I want to marry your daughter!”

“Put me down. Put me down!”

I put her down, and she tried to slap me, but I jumped away.

“You're crazy, you know that?” Rosina said, trying to adjust her blouse, smoothing out her skirt, determined not to smile at all costs. “The evil spirits have gotten into all you children.” She picked up the book bag and the magazines and retreated after Genet, shouting for her and me to hear, “You two just wait, I'm going to get a stick and line you evil children up and beat that devil out of you.”

“Rosina, why talk to your future son-in-law that way?” I called after her.

She made to turn back and come after me, but I dodged away.

“Madness! Lunacy!” she said and stalked off, talking to herself.

I looked up to see Shiva standing in the big picture window, looking out. The wind in the eucalyptus trees stirred up the kind of dry rustling sound that could fool you into thinking it was a rain squall. But the sky was cloudless. Through the glass I could see Shiva studying me, his face flushed. Our eyes met, and his expression suggested he'd been laughing, that he probably saw and heard everything. I admired his pose, one hand in his pocket, knees locked, his weight on one leg—my brother was elegant even in the act of standing in place; it was a quality he shared with Genet. He rarely smiled, and there was, in the tautness of his upper lip, the hint of a leer. I grinned, holding nothing back. I felt good, pleased with myself. My brother could read my mind. My brother loved me, he loved Genet, and I loved them both. Yes, Rosina was right, madness all around at Missing, but only a madman would want to be anywhere else.

34. A Time to Reap

THE MADNESS OF THAT EVENING came at a most inopportune time. It was my last year at LT&C and I was hell-bent on doing well in the school finals. My motivation was simple: a magnificent, ivory-colored hospital, five times as large as Missing, had been built on a rise looking down at Churchill Road and the post office and the Lycée Français. It was to be the teaching hospital of a new medi cal school to be staffed with the help of the British Council, Swiss aid, and USAID. The teachers were distinguished physicians from these countries who had recently retired from long academic careers and ac cepted short assignments to Addis.

So while Rosina went after Genet, hauling the magazines and textbooks Genet had dropped, and certain to continue her fight, I wasted no time. I went inside, washed up, and then spread my books out on the dining table. Hema and Ghosh were playing bridge with a few others at Ghosh's old bungalow.

I ate as I studied. Every minute counted, as far as I was concerned. Id mapped out how many days and hours and minutes remained before the school-leaving exam. If I wanted to sleep, play cricket, and get into medical school, I had no time to waste.

Genet arrived an hour later to study with me. I tried not to look up. Soon, Shiva joined us. Hed brought Jeffcoates Principles of Gynaecology to the table, and it bristled with bookmarks. Shiva didn't read books as much as he disassembled and digested them, made them appendages of his body.

For Genet and me to get into medical school we had to get top grades in the school finals. Genet professed to be just as enamored with medicine as I was, but she was often late joining me at the study table, and she packed it in earlier than I did. Sometimes she didn't come at all. On two weeknights I took a taxi to Mr. Mammen's house, for tuition in math and organic chemistry. Genet came once, bristled at Mammen's ironclad discipline, and wouldn't go back, while I found his help to be priceless. On weekends I retreated to Ghosh's old quarters to study, leaving Ghosh and Hema free to turn the radio on or entertain without worrying about disturbing me. Genet could have joined me at Ghosh's quarters, but she rarely did.

Shiva didn't have any of our worries. He'd been lobbying to drop out of school altogether. He wanted to function as Hema's assistant— degrees and diplomas did not matter to him. Hema was blunt: if he wanted to work with her, he'd have to finish his final year, even if he didn't take the exams. Meanwhile, on his own he was learning everything he could about obstetrics and gynecology. I overheard Hema tell Ghosh that Shiva knew more than the average final-year medical student when it came to obstetrics and gynecology.

Shiva had appropriated the toolshed where we'd hidden the motorcycle. He'd learned to weld from Farinachi, and he kept his torch and equipment in there. A month or so earlier, I'd stuck my head in the toolshed and was surprised to see the back wall was visible, with no sign of the motorcycle, or the wood stacks, gunnysacks, and Bibles we'd used to conceal it.

“I took it apart,” Shiva had said, when I asked. He pointed to the base of his heavy worktable—the square wooden plywood support concealed the engine block. The bike's frame he'd wrapped in oilcloth and tarp and buried under the table. The rest of the bike was stored in containers which ranged from matchboxes to stacked crates, neatly arranged on metal shelves he'd welded together.

“TELL ME ABOUT IT, Shiva,” Genet whispered from behind her book, Chemistry by Concept. She'd lasted just ten minutes before breaking the silence and my concentration.

“Tell you about what?” Shiva said, not bothering to lower his voice.

“About your first time! What else? Why didn't you tell me before? I just heard from Marion that you're not a virgin.”

Shiva's story, which I'd been too embarrassed and envious to ask about myself, was stunning in its simplicity.

“I went to the Piazza. Down the side street next to the Massawa Bakery, you know, where you see the rooms, one after the other? A woman in each doorway, different-colored lights?”

“How did you pick?”

“I didn't. I went to the first door. That was it,” he said, smiling, and turning back to his work.

“No, it isn't it!” She snatched his book away. “What happened next?”

I pretended to be annoyed, but every cell in my brain was attentive. I was glad that Genet was doing the questioning.

“I asked how much. She said thirty. I said I had only ten. She said okay. She took off her clothes and lay on the bed—”

“ All her clothes?” I blurted out. Shiva looked at me, surprised.

“All but her blouse, which she pulled up.”

“A bra? What was she wearing?” Genet wanted to know.

“A little sweater, I think. A half-sleeve thing. And a miniskirt. Bare legs and high heels. No underwear. No bra. She stepped out of her heels, dropped her skirt, lifted her blouse, and lay down.”

“Oh, God! Go on,” said Genet.

“I took all my clothes off. I was ready. I told her it was my first time. She said, ‘God help us.’ I said I didn't think we needed God. I got on top of her, she helped me start—”

“Did it hurt her? Were you …”

“Erect. Yes. No, I don't think it hurt her. You know the vagina has walls that are expansible, they can accommodate a baby's head—”

“Okay, okay,” Genet said. “Then what?”

“She started to move, showing me how till I understood. I did that till I experienced the ejaculatory response.”

“What?” Genet said.

“The contraction of the vas and the seminal vesicles mixing with pro-static secretions—”

“He came,” I explained. I'd learned the word from a scruffy little pamphlet authored by a T N. Raman, a writer of purple prose. My classmate Satish brought these pamphlets back from his holiday in Bombay. T N. Raman was responsible for most everything Indian schoolboys learned (or misunderstood) about sex.

“Oh … and after that?” Genet said.

“Well, I got up, got dressed, and left.”

“Did it hurt you?” I asked.

“No pain.” From his unsmiling expression, he could have been talking about getting an ice cream at Enrico's.

“That's it?” Genet asked. “Then you paid her?”

“No, I paid her first.”

“What did she say when you were leaving?”

Shiva thought about that. “She said she liked my body, and she liked my skin. That next time she would give it to me … doggy style!”

“What did she mean, ‘doggy style’?”

“I didn't know. I said, ‘Why wait till next time? Show me now.’ “

“You had money?”

“That's what she asked. ‘You have money?’ But I didn't. She let me do it anyway. From the back was what she called doggy style. This time I think she had her own … explosion.”

“God,” Genet said, groaning and sliding down in her chair, her face suffused with blood. “What's the matter with you, Marion? Where are you going?”

I had risen from my chair. The scent coming from Genet was overpowering, the air shimmering pink with it.

“What's the matter with me?” I was not as annoyed as I acted. “How am I supposed to study here, tell me? I can't believe you asked me that.”

The matter with me was that I was terribly aroused, hearing Shiva's story, and now seeing the sultry look in Genet's eyes, her body in touching distance, smelling her in heat, and knowing she was willing. If I didn't leave, I was going to have my own explosion in my pants. I had to leave. I shoved my biology notes into my jacket.

I found Rosina standing too close to the kitchen door and now pretending some special interest in the stove. Even if she wasn't eavesdropping or lacked any sense of smell, she surely saw the pink cloud wafting out of the dining room. She avoided my eyes. Mother and daughter couldn't seem to escape each other, with Genet determined to act outrageously, and Rosina just as determined to respond, and it was difficult to say who initiated their battles. Rosina was my ally in one sense, because she kept Genet safe for me. But it annoyed me to see her hovering in this way.

“I'm going to the souk,” I said gruffly.

“But you just sat down to study, Marion.”

I glared at her, daring her to stop me.

I TOOK MY TIME walking down to the front gate. I bought a Coke but then gave it to Gebrew. I sat in his sentry hut. I didn't want to go home until my mind and my body were back to baseline. Gebrew's long story about a troublesome nephew helped the cause.

Eventually, I bid Gebrew good night, and I headed back. When I turned up from the roundabout to the road leading to our bungalow, I saw that there was a light on in the toolshed. Shiva worked late there many nights.

Whenever I came this way in the dark, I felt dread as I neared the spot where the army man went airborne. There was a crack in the concrete of the curb that commemorated that moment when the BMW's front wheel had been arrested.

The tree trunks creaked and groaned. The rustling of the leaves sounded ominous, like a hand sifting through coins. I fully expected to see the army man rise out of the darkness. After years of imagining him, I would find it almost a relief when he appeared. Shiva had no such qualms because he stayed in the toolshed late into the night. The passing years hadn't taken away from me the weight of what had happened at this spot; but the fear had become familiar. I understood what made people confess to murder years after the fact; they believed that it was the only way to cease tormenting themselves. I hurried past that turn in the road.

I heard music from Shiva's radio in the toolshed.

I was just past the toolshed, almost to our house, when I saw a figure come purposefully down the hill. It was pitch-dark, and now I heard a muttering sound—it was talking to itself. My heart was in my mouth, but what kept me from panic was that it sounded like a woman. Only when the figure was almost on me did I see that it was Rosina. Where could she be headed at this hour? She came up very close to me, studying my face the way she often did to be sure I was not Shiva. Then, before I registered her anger, she slapped me. She was all over me, cuffing me and pulling me down by my hair with her left hand while she slapped me with her right.

“I warned you!” she screamed.

“Rosina! What are you talking about?” I said, cowering.

This only infuriated her. I suppose I could easily have stopped her, or run, but I was too shocked to react. She slapped me again.

“Five minutes I leave you alone, and this is what happens! So clever, you pretending to go to the souk, and she to the bathroom.”

When I asked her to explain, she swung at me, and this time I turned so her blow found the back of my head.

“I waited,” she said. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Then I went looking for you. I saw her coming up the hill. You sent her out first, didn't you? If she gets pregnant, what happens?” Rosina hissed in my ear. “It means she'll be a maid like me. All that English and studying books won't make any difference in her life.”

“But, Rosina, I didn't—”

“Don't lie to me, my child. You were never good at lying. I saw you two looking at each other. I should have kept her home right then.”

I stood silent, staring at her.

“You want proof? Is that it?” she yelled. “She reached to her waist and drew something out and flung it at me. A pair of women's panties. “Her blood … and your seed.” I picked the garment off my face. In the dark I could see nothing. But I could smell blood, the scent of Genet … and I could smell semen. It was mine. I recognized my starchy scent. No one else shared that odor.

No one but my twin brother.

I HAD NO HEART, no energy, to do anything but to crawl into bed. I felt battered. I felt alone. Shiva came to bed much later. I waited to see if he would say anything. At some point he fell asleep while I lay there awake. In Ethiopia there was a method of divining guilt called lebashai: a little boy was drugged and taken to the scene of the crime and asked to point out the guilty party. Unfortunately, a hallucinating youngster's pointing finger too often stopped in front of an innocent who was then stoned to death or drowned. Lebashai was banned in the empire, but it still went on in the villages. That was how I felt: falsely accused by the pointing finger, but unable to defend myself.

What I could do was extract revenge. The guilty party slept next to me. I could have killed Shiva that night. I thought about it. I decided it would solve nothing. My world was already destroyed. My arms were dead. My brain was numb. My love had been turned into a mockery of love, into shit. I had no reason, no desire, to do anything anymore.

GENET DIDN'T GO to school the next day. Shiva left with Hema's reluctant permission to go with Mr. Farinachi to Akaki, to the textile factory where one of the giant dye machines had seized. Farinachi had been asked to manufacture a part, and he wanted Shiva to come and see the giant looms.

I stayed in bed. When Hema came to see why, I said I didn't feel well and wouldn't go to school. She took my pulse, looked at my throat. She was puzzled. When she tried to quiz me, I said, “Never mind, I'm going.” That was easier than facing an interrogation.

I don't remember anything about that day in school. Ghosh and Hema had no idea what had transpired, but they knew something had happened. The door and window to Rosina's quarters were closed, and they could hear Rosina carrying on in there in a loud voice.

That evening Hema said there were three of Rosina's relatives— a woman and two men—visiting her. Hema pressed me as to what was going on. I couldn't believe that she didn't know or that Rosina didn't tell her. It appeared that no one was talking about what happened the previous night. I was sure Rosina would go to Hema and accuse me and I couldn't understand why so far she had not. Had Hema talked to Shiva, I suspect she would have found out everything. But no one thought to ask him.

Shiva returned just as we were finishing dinner, pleased with his excursion to Akaki. Neither Genet nor Rosina was at the table. Almaz said that mother and daughter were having a big fight and that Rosina's relatives had come to mediate.

Hema rose to go see what was happening, but Ghosh held her back. “Whatever it is, if you get in the middle it's only going to get more complicated.” Shiva said nothing, eating his food.

I wasn't being noble by keeping quiet. I didn't think anyone would believe my side of the story. It was up to my brother or Genet to save me if they wanted to. I studied Shiva's face at the dining table. There was no sign that he was aware of the calamity he'd caused. No indication at all.

That night I told Shiva I was moving to a room in Ghosh's old quarters. I was going to sleep and study there. I wanted to be alone there, I announced, not looking at him.

He said nothing. It would be the first time in our lives that we did not occupy the same bed. If there were filaments and cords of yolk or flesh that kept our divided egg sticking together, I was taking a scalpel to them.

Saturday morning, when I came over for breakfast, it seemed to me that Shiva hadn't slept any better than I had. After breakfast, he left for Farinachi's.

I was about to go back to my room to study when Almaz burst into the dining room. “I think you better come, madam,” she said, addressing Hema.

She led the charge to the servant's quarters; Hema, Ghosh, and I followed.

Rosina sat in a corner of the darkened room, looking sullen, defensive yet anxious. Genet lay on her bed, her face pale, sweat beading on her forehead, her eyes open, but unfocused and dull. The room held a raw, sour odor of fever.

“What happened here?” Hema asked, but Rosina wouldn't answer or meet Hema's gaze. Almaz turned on the light, and she moved to block my view, then lifted the blanket to show Hema.

Ghosh said, “Open the window, Marion,” and he moved closer to look.

“My God,” Hema said. Genet moaned in pain. Hema grabbed Rosina's shoulders. “Did you? Did you just … this poor girl?” Choking with fury, Hema shook her. But Rosina wouldn't look up. “You stupid woman!” Hema said. “Oh, God, God. Why?” Hema's eyes were those of a madwoman, uncomprehending, dangerous. I thought she might strangle Rosina. Instead, she pushed her away. “You've probably killed her, Rosina, do you know that?” There were tears coming down Rosina's chin, but her expression remained surly.

Ghosh scooped Genet in his arms, and she let out an unearthly moan as he lifted her off the bed. “The car,” Ghosh said, and Almaz ran ahead to get the door. Hema followed. I lingered for a second in the doorway on the threshold of Genet's home. My nanny sat just the way she had when we came in. I thought of the day she'd taken a razor to scarify Genet's face and how her expression had been defiant, proud. But now, I saw shame and fear.

As I ran to join them in the car, Hema spun on her heel and thrust her face in mine. “I think you had something to do with this, Marion. I'm not a fool!”

She got in the car and slammed the door. They pulled away with Almaz cradling Genet in the back, Ghosh driving. I ran down our drive, cut behind the toolshed and across the field, and caught up with them as they took her into Casualty.

They poured fluids and antibiotics into Genet's veins. Then Hema took her to Operating Theater 3 for a more careful examination. When Hema came out, she was shaken but more composed, and quietly furious. She didn't seem to care if I heard her report to Ghosh and Matron. “Can you imagine Rosina paid to slice off the child's clitoris? Not just clitoris but also the labia minora and then sew the edges together with sewing thread! Good God, can you imagine the pain? I cut the sutures out. It is hugely infected. Now it's up to God.”

Genet was wheeled to the single room reserved for VIPs. I remembered Ghosh telling me it was the room that General Mebratu had occupied after emergency surgery, shortly after we were born.

I sat on a chair by her bed. At one point, Genet squeezed my hand, whether consciously or reflexively I couldn't be sure. I held it.

Hema sat across from me in an armchair, her elbows on her knees, head in her hands. We had nothing to say to each other. I was as angry with Hema as she was with me.

At one point, Hema lifted her head up and said, “The people who did this should all go to jail.” It wasn't the first time she'd had to rescue a woman in Genet's situation. She was probably one of the world's experts in treating botched and infected female circumcisions. But now her face was clamped down in a bitterness I'd never seen before.

It was evening when Genet opened her eyes. She saw me, and she tried to say something. I asked her if she wanted water, and she nodded. I guided a straw to her mouth. She looked around to see if there was anyone else in the room.

“I'm sorry, Marion,” she whispered, her eyes swimming with tears.

“Don't talk,” I said. “It's all right.” It wasn't, but that's what came to my mouth.

“I … should have waited,” she said.

Why didn't you, I wanted to say. I didn't get any of the pleasure, the honor of being your first lover, but I'm getting all the blame.

She moaned when she tried to move, licking her lips. I gave her more water.

“My mother thinks it was you.” Her voice was weak.

I nodded, but said nothing.

“When I told her it was Shiva,” Genet said, “she slapped me. She kicked me and called me a liar. She didn't believe me. She thinks Shiva is a virgin.” She tried to laugh, but grimaced and then coughed. When she could speak, she said, “Listen, I made my mother promise not to tell Hema.”

I couldn't resist a sarcastic snicker. “Well, don't worry. She will tell Hema. She's probably telling her right now.”

“No. She won't,” Genet said. “That was our deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“I agreed to let her do this to me, if she wouldn't … say anything. She's to keep quiet. Not a word to Hema. Not one word. And no more shouting at you.”

I slumped back on hearing this. Genet allowed a strange woman to cut her privates with an unsterilized blade, and it was all to protect me? So now I was to blame for the circumcision? It was so absurd that I wanted to laugh, but I found I couldn't: the guilt had settled on me as if it knew that was its home and it would be welcome.

Shiva came in the evening, his face pale and drawn. “Here, sit here,” I said before he could open his mouth. I didn't trust myself near him and I needed a break. “Stay with her till I come back. Hold her hand. She gets restless when I let go.” There was nothing else I could say to him, now. I was beyond anger, and he was beyond sorrow.

GENET'S FEVER RAGED for three days. I sat by her bed day and night. Hema, Ghosh, and Matron were in and out all the time.

On the third day, Genet stopped making any urine. Ghosh was very worried, drawing blood himself, then Shiva or I would run to the lab, help W.W. line up our reagents and tubes and measure the blood urea nitrogen level: high, and getting higher.

Genet was never completely unconscious, just sleepy, confused at times, often moaning, and at one point horribly thirsty. She called for her mother once, but Rosina wasn't there. Almaz told me Rosina wouldn't leave her room, which was probably a good thing. The atmo sphere in the hospital room was tense enough without the prospect of Hema attacking Rosina.

On the sixth day, Genet's kidneys began to produce urine, and then they produced it in huge amounts, filling up the catheter bag. Ghosh doubled and tripled her intravenous fluid rates, and encouraged her to drink to keep up with the loss. “Hopefully this means her kidneys are recovering,” Ghosh said. “They just aren't able to concentrate the urine too well.”

One morning, when I woke up in the chair and saw her face, the texture of the skin, the relaxation around the brow, I knew she was going to make it. She was skinny to begin with, and now the illness had consumed her, burned her down to just bones. Her color was returning; the sword that hung over her had lifted away. My shoulders began to unknot.

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

No one but Genet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35. One Fever from Another

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

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

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

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

I still loved her.

I wished I didn't.

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

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

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

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

In Casualty, Saleem lay on the ground too weak to sit or stand, semiconscious. Adam, our one-eyed compounder, bent over the patient, and with one swift move made the diagnosis.

Years later Ghosh showed me the correspondence he had with the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who was about to publish Ghosh's seminal series of cases of relapsing fever. The editor felt “Adam's sign” was pretentious. Ghosh defended the honor of his uneducated compounder at the risk of not being published in that prestigious journal.

Dear Dr. Giles,

… in Ethiopia we classify hernias as “below the knee” and “above the knee,” not “direct” or “indirect.” It's another order of magnitude, sir. Our casualty room often has as many as five patients prostrate on the floor with fever. The clinician asks: Is this malaria? Is it typhoid? Or is it relapsing fever? There is no rash to help sort this out (the “rose spots” of typhoid are invisible in our population), though I will grant you that typhoid causes a bronchitis and a slow pulse, and people with malaria often have giant spleens. I would be remiss in publishing a paper on relapsing fever without providing the clinician a practical way to make the diagnosis, particularly in settings where blood and serum tests are hard to come by. The clinician has only to grab the patient's thigh, squeeze the quadriceps muscle, squeeze it hard: Patients with relapsing fever will jump up because of the otherwise silent muscle inflammation and tenderness that is part of this disease. Not only is this a good diagnostic sign, but it can raise Lazarus. This sign was first noted by Adam, and is deserving of the eponym “Adam's sign.”

I could testify to Adam's sign—Saleem yelled and leaped to his feet when Adam mashed. The editor wrote back. He was pleased with all the other revisions but Adam's sign remained a sticking point. Ghosh held his ground.

Dear Dr. Giles,

… there is a Chvostek's sign, a Boas's sign, a Courvoisier's sign, a Quincke's sign—no limit it seems to white men naming things after themselves. Surely, the world is ready for an eponym honoring a humble compounder who has seen more relapsing fever with one eye than you or I will ever see with two.

Ghosh, working in an obscure African hospital, far from the academic mainstream, had his way. The paper was published in the prestigious journal, and no doubt led to his being invited to write a chapter in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, the bible of senior medical students. Now, here he was, a professor. Hema bought our new professor two beautiful pin-striped suits, one black and the other blue. Also a tweed coat with leather elbow patches, as if to put “Professor” in quotes. The bow tie was his idea. In all things, especially when it cost little and did no harm to others, Ghosh was his own man. The bow tie told the world how pleased he was to be alive and how much he celebrated his profession, which he called “my romantic and passionate pursuit.” The way Ghosh practiced his profession, the way he lived his life, it was all that.

36. Prognostic Signs

LIFE IS FULL OF SIGNS. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

Pus somewhere and Pus nowhere means Pus in the belly.

Low platelets in a woman is lupus until proven otherwise.

Beware of a man with a glass eye and a big liver …

Across the outpatient department, Ghosh would spot a breathless young woman, her cheeks flushed, contradicting her general pallor. Hed suspect narrowing of the mitral valve of the heart, though he'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly why. It would make him listen carefully for the soft, rumbling murmur of mitral stenosis, a devilish murmur which, as he said, “you'll only hear if you know it's there,” and then it was only audible with the bell of the stethoscope lightly applied over the apex of the heart after exercise.

I'd developed my own heuristics, my mix of reason, intuition, facial appearance, and scent. These were things not in any book. The army soldier who'd tried to steal the motorcycle had an odor at the moment of his demise, and so, too, had Rosina, and the two odors were identical—they spoke of sudden death.

But I didn't trust my nose when I should have, when it picked up signals from Ghosh that put my nerves on edge. I wrote it off as being a function of his new job as a professor, a side effect of his new suits and new environment. When I was around him it was easy to be reassured. He'd always been upbeat, a happy soul. But now he was even more jovial. He'd found his best self. For a man who prided himself on “the three Ls: Loving, Learning, and Legacy,” he'd excelled in all three.

On the anniversary of Hema and Ghosh's marriage, I woke myself at 4:00 a.m. to study. Two hours later, I walked over from Ghosh's old bungalow to the main house. Shiva had moved back to our boyhood room. It was still dark outside. I planned to creep into Shiva's room to see if a shirt I was missing had been laundered and hung in his closet. I came in as Almaz arrived. I hugged her and then waited as she made the sign of the cross on my forehead and murmured a prayer.

Hema was still sleeping. The hallway bathroom door stood open, steam coming out. Ghosh stood in front of the washbasin, a towel around his waist, leaning heavily on the sink. It was early for him. I wondered why he was using this bathroom. So as not to wake Hema? I could hear his labored breathing before I saw him and, certainly, before he saw me. The effort of bathing had winded him. In his reflection in the mirror, I saw his unguarded self. I saw terrible fatigue; I saw sadness and apprehension. Then he saw me. By the time he'd turned around, the mask of joviality which had fallen into the sink had been slapped back on, not a seam showing.

“What's wrong?” I asked. I felt my stomach flutter. The scent was there. It had to be connected to what I just saw.

“Not a thing. Scary, isn't it?” He paused to take a breath. “My beautiful wife is sleeping like an angel. My sons make me so proud … Tonight I'm going to take my wife dancing and I'll ask her to extend our marriage contract for another year. The only thing wrong is that a sinner like me doesn't deserve such blessings.”

Hema came out to the hallway, shaking sleep from her hair. Ghosh flashed me an anxious look.

He turned back to the mirror, whistling as he slapped on cologne. His eyes pleaded with me not to alarm Hema. The effort of holding his arms up made his “Saints Come Marching In” full of staccato notes and pauses. I got my shirt and left.

I had an early morning class, an important one. But I followed my instinct, my intuition—my nose. I dressed and then hid myself behind Shiva's toolshed. Soon, the Volkswagen appeared out of the mist, with just Ghosh in it. I followed on foot.

I got to Casualty in time to see him enter Matron's office. Not only was Matron there at this early hour, she was waiting. I stood there considering what this meant, when Adam appeared carrying a bottle of blood. Matron's door opened for him. Adam emerged moments later empty-handed. He was startled to see me, and he tried to close the door behind him, but I had a foot there.

Ghosh was on a lounge chair, his feet up, a pillow behind his head, smiling. Bach's “Gloria” chorus sounded on Matron's ancient phonograph. Matron bent over his arm, taping the needle that carried blood into his vein in place. They looked up, thinking perhaps it was Adam returning for something.

Ghosh's lips moved.

“Son, you know I—”

“Don't bother to lie to me,” I said.

He looked to Matron, as if for a cue. She sighed. “This is fate, Ghosh. I always thought Marion should know.”

I'll never forget the stillness, the hesitation, and a trace of something I'd never before seen on Ghosh's face: cunning. Then it gave in to resignation and a faraway look. For a moment I saw the world through his eyes, his intellect, his sweeping vision that took in Hippocrates, Pavlov, Freud, and Marie Curie, the discovery of streptomycin and penicillin, Landsteiner's blood groups; a vision that recalled the septic ward where he wooed Hema, and Theater 3 where he was the reluctant surgeon; a vision that recapitulated our birth and looked to the future, looked past his life to the end of mine and beyond. And then and only then did it settle, gather, and focus, on the now, on a moment when the love was so palpable between father and son that the thought that it might end, and this memory be its only legacy, was unacceptable.

“All right, Marion, you budding clinician. What do you think it might be?” He loved the Socratic Method. Only this time, he was the patient, and it was my heuristic I would invoke.

I'd noticed his pallor before, but I'd refused to let it register. Now I remembered that I'd seen bruises on his arms and legs for the past few months—bruises for which he always had explanations. Was it just a week ago he had the paper cut on his finger? It happened in front of my eyes, and it bled for a while; when I saw him a few hours later, the wound was still oozing. How had I managed to dismiss that? I remembered, too, his hours exposed to radiation from the Old Koot, the ancient X-ray machine which, despite everyone's protests, he'd continued to use until Missing finally got a new machine. The Koot was broken apart with hammers and the pieces hauled to the Drowning Soil. There it would keep the army man company, while making his bones glow.

“A blood cancer? A leukemia?” I said, hating the sound of those ugly words on my lips. Ghosh's disease was only born, it only came to life, the moment I named it, and now it couldn't go away.

He beamed, turned to Matron, raising his eyebrows. “Can you believe this, Matron? My son, the clinician.”

Then his voice lost its ebullience; he spoke in a manner in which pretense had fallen off like leaves after a frost.

“Whatever happens, Marion, you mustn't let Hema know. I had my slides sent off about two years ago through Eli Harris to Dr. Maxwell Wintrobe in Salt Lake City Utah, USA. He's a fabulous hematolo-gist. I love his textbook. He personally wrote me back. What I have is like an active volcano, rumbling and spitting. Not quite a leukemia, but brewing into one; it's called ‘myeloid metaplasia,’ “ he said, pronouncing it carefully as if it were something delicate and exquisitely wrought. “Remember the term, Marion. It's an interesting disease. I still have many years left, I'm sure. The only troublesome symptom I have now is anemia. These blood transfusions are my oil changes. I'm going dancing tonight with Hema. It's our big day, you know. I wanted more gumption.”

“Why won't you let Ma know? Why didn't you let me know?”

Ghosh shook his head. “Hema will go crazy … She'll, she shouldn't, she can't … Don't look at me that way, my son, I'm not being noble, I promise you.”

“Then I don't understand.”

“You didn't know about my diagnosis these last two years, did you? If you had known, it would've changed your relationship with me. Don't you think?” He grinned, and he ruffled my hair. “You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife.” He stopped there, silent for a long time as he thought of Hema. “I want my days to be that way. I don't want everyone to stop being normal. You know what I mean? To have all that ruined.” He smiled. “When things get more severe, if it ever comes to that, I'll tell your ma. I promise.”

He looked at me intently. “You'll keep this a secret? Please? It's what you can do for me. A gift, if you like. Give me as many normal days as I can possibly have. And you mustn't tell your brother either. That might be hardest for you. I know you two have had a … rift. But you understand Shiva better than anyone. I know you care enough for him to protect him from this news getting to him prematurely.”

I gave him my word.

ABOUT THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, I remember very little, except that Ghosh's wisdom was revealed. It had been a blessing not to know for the last two years. Now that I knew, there was no turning back time or erasing that knowledge; it was as if he were back in jail again and, in a way, so was I. I read everything I could about myeloid metaplasia (how I hated that term which he loved). His bone marrow was quiet when I first learned of his diagnosis. But then the disease became more active, the volcano started rumbling, oozing lava, spitting telltale traces of sulfurous gas when the wind was right.

I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, “Seize the day! What matters is this moment!” Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.

Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

SHIVA AND HEMA went about their days ignorant of Ghosh's condition. They were caught up in their own excitement. Shiva had coaxed Hema into a major commitment to treating women with vesiculovaginal fistula, or “fistula” for short. It wasn't a condition that Hema (or any gynecologic surgeon) relished seeing because it was difficult to cure.

Now I can explain why that little girl whom we'd seen when we were young children—the one who came walking up the hill with her father, her head bowed with shame, dribbling urine at every step, carrying about her an unspeakable odor—had such a profound influence on Shiva's life.

Unbeknownst to Shiva and me, Hema had operated on her three times. The repair broke down the first two times; the last one held. We never got to see her leave Missing, but we had Hema's word that she was cured and had left happy. The mental scars, though, would never heal. We understood little at the time of what ailed her; it wasn't a subject Hema would speak about to us. But now, Shiva and I knew. In all likelihood, perhaps before she was a teen, the girl was married off to a man who could have been as old as her father. The painful consummation of her marriage (more traumatic if circumcision had left scar tissue at the entrance to the vagina for the husband to batter down) would have terrifed her. She may even have been too young to connect this act with becoming pregnant, but soon she was swollen with child. When labor began, the baby's head jammed against her pelvic bones, the pelvic inlet already narrowed by rickets. In a developed country or a big city she might have had a Cesarean section as soon as her contractions started. But in a remote village, without the help of anyone but her mother-in-law, she would suffer for days, her uterus trying to do the impossible, but succeeding only in ramming the baby's head against the bladder and the cervix, crushing those tissues against the unyielding bony pelvis. The baby soon died inside the womb and the mother's death would follow shortly, most often due to a ruptured uterus or infection and septicemia. It was the rare family who managed to transport the mother to a health center. There the lifeless fetus could be removed piecemeal, by first crushing the skull and then pulling the rest out.

During her convalescence from that dreadful labor, the dead and gangrenous tissues inside her birth passage eventually sloughed off, leaving her with a jagged hole between bladder and vagina. Instead of urine passing from bladder to urethra to emerge just under the clitoris (and only when she chose to void), the bladder now constantly leaked its contents directly into the vagina and down her legs. She was never dry, her clothes always soaked, and she dribbled all day. The bladder and its urine quickly became infected and foul-smelling. In no time her labia, her thighs, became wet and macerated and oozed pus. This must have been when her husband cast her off, and her father came to the rescue.

Fistulas have been described since antiquity. But it wasn't till 1849 in Montgomery, Alabama, that Dr. Marion Sims, my namesake, first succeeded in repairing a vaginal fistula. His first patients were Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, three slave women who had been cast out by their families and their owners because of this condition. Sims operated on them—willing subjects we are told—in an attempt to cure the fistula. Ether had just been discovered but wasn't in widespread use, so his patients were wide awake. Sims closed the gaping hole between bladder and vagina with silk and thought he had cured them. But a week later, he found pinhole openings along the line of his repair through which urine was leaking. He kept trying. He operated on Anarcha some thirty times. He learned from each failure, modified his technique until he ultimately got it right.

When Hema operated on the girl wed seen, she used the principles of repair established by Marion Sims. She first put a catheter through the urethra into the bladder to divert the urine away from the fistula to allow the wet, macerated tissues to dry and heal. A week later, Hema operated vaginally using the bent pewter spoon the Alabama surgeon had fashioned—the Sims speculum, we now call it—which allowed for good exposure and made vaginal surgery possible. She had to carefully dissect out the edges of the fistula, trying to find what had once been discrete layers of bladder lining, bladder wall, then vaginal wall and vaginal lining. Once she had trimmed the edges, she made her repair, layer by layer. Sims, after many failures, had a jeweler fashion a thin silver wire which he used to close the surgical wound. Silver elicited the least inflammatory reaction from the tissues, inflammation being the reason a repair would break down. Hema used chromic catgut.

At dinner, a month after Id learned of Ghosh's blood disorder, Hema shared with us that she and Shiva had operated on fifteen successive fistula patients with not one recurrence. “I owe this to Shiva,” she said. “He convinced me to take more time preparing the women for surgery. So now, we admit the patients and feed them eggs, meat, milk, and vitamins for two weeks. We treat with antibiotics till the urine is clear and use zinc oxide paste on their thighs and vulva. It was Shiva's idea to deworm them and correct iron deficiency anemia before surgery. We work on strengthening their legs, getting them moving.” She looked at Shiva with pride. “I am embarrassed to say, he's seen and understood their needs better than I have after all these years. Like the idea of physical therapy—”

“Can't get them to walk after surgery if they won't walk before,” Shiva said.

On four of their patients the hole into the bladder was so large, so scarred down and shrunk back, that it was impossible to pull the edges together. In these patients, Hema and Shiva had learned to expose a narrow but thick “steak” of flesh under the labia and, while keeping it connected at one end to its blood supply, tunnel its free end up and pull it into the vagina and use it as a live patch in the fistula.

“Matron has a donor who wants to support nothing but fistula surgery,” Shiva said. “We're getting one thousand American dollars every month.” I found it difficult to look at him, let alone congratulate him.

I STOPPED FRETTING over Genet. When she failed two of the four courses the first year and had to repeat both semesters, I was too distracted by Ghosh's illness to care. She wasn't having a good time and living it up. Instead she'd lost her desire, lost sight of her target if she'd ever had one. All it took was one week of not studying, missing class, to get impossibly behind, so hectic was the pace of the first year of medical school.

Halfway through my second year, I learned that Genet had again missed a few anatomy lab sessions. I felt obliged to check on her.

At Mekane Yesus Hostel, the door to her room was open. Her visitor's back was to me; neither of them saw me at first. Genet shared the room with another girl who wasn't there. The tiny room which had once been so neat was now cluttered and messy. The room held a bunk bed and a small table for two. When he was alive, Genet acted as if Zemui annoyed her. Her brave and loyal father had died in a hail of bullets, and now she had his picture on the ceiling, inches from her face when she lay on the top bunk.

Her visitor's coarse features and his gruff manner made him stand out. I knew him as a student firebrand, organizing others for curricular reform, or collecting signatures to oust an unpopular warden. But he was Eritrean first, just like Genet. The liberation of Eritrea was almost certainly his most important cause, but it was the one he'd have to keep secret. He was speaking to Genet in Tigrinya, but I heard a few English words: “hegemony” and “proletariat.” He stopped in midsentence when he sensed me in the doorway. His bovine eyes gave me a look that said, You will never be one of us.

I deliberately spoke to Genet in Amharic, so her guest would see that I spoke it better than he did. He muttered something to her in Tigrinya and stalked off.

“Who are these radical friends of yours, Genet?”

“What radicals? I'm just hanging around with Eritreans.”

“The secret police have informers on this floor,” I said. “They'll link you with the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.”

She shrugged. “Do you know the EPLF is making great gains, Marion? You can't know that. It's not in the Ethiopian Herald. But I doubt you're here to discuss politics?”

In the past I might have been wounded by her manner. “Hema says hello. And Ghosh says he wants to see you for dinner one of these evenings … Genet, I'm worried about your dissections. There is no one to do your labs for you this year. If you don't show, you'll fail, no matter what. Come on, Genet.”

Her face, so interested and animated when the other man was there, had now become sullen.

“Thank you,” she said icily.

I wanted badly to tell her that Ghosh was ill, to shake her out of her self-absorption. And yet I sat there feeling the witchcraft of her presence. It kept me coming after her and it made me tell myself I still loved her, no matter how she acted, even when our lives were so clearly drifting apart.

IN MY FINAL YEAR of medical school, during my surgery rotations, Ghosh's volcano erupted. I came home to a look on Hema's face that told me she knew. I steeled myself for her tirade. She hugged me instead.

Ghosh had thrown up blood, and also developed a major nosebleed. He'd tried to conceal it but failed. He was resting comfortably in the bedroom. I peeked in on him, then came out and sat with Hema at the dining table. Almaz, red-eyed, brought me tea.

“I suppose I'm glad he didn't tell me,” Hema said. I could see from her swollen eyelids that she'd spent the afternoon crying. “Particularly when there's nothing to do for it. I've been able to enjoy the best of him. Such perfect days, without knowing any of this.” She fingered the diamond ring on her finger, a present that he'd given her the last time they renewed their yearly vows. “Had I known … maybe we could have taken a trip to America. I asked him about that. He said he preferred to be here. The first sight of me every morning is all he wants! Ayoh, he is such a romantic chap, even now. It's funny, but a few months ago, I actually felt that things were so good that something bad had to happen. The signs were all in front of me. But I wasn't paying attention.”

“Me, too,” I said.

I found Almaz weeping in the kitchen, and Gebrew, tears in his eyes, his tiny Bible in his hand, rocking and reciting verses to console her. When they saw me, Gebrew said, “We shall fast for him. Our prayers have been lacking.”

Almaz nodded, and though she let me hug her and try to reassure her, she was agitated. “We have not been prayerful,” she said. “That is why such a thing comes on us.”

I ASKED GEBREW if hed seen Shiva, and he said Shiva had been gone all day, but if he was back, he might be in his workshop. Gebrew walked down with me to the toolshed.

“Are you still wearing your scroll?” Gebrew asked, referring to the thin strip of sheep's hide on which he'd drawn an eye, an eight-pointed star, a ring, and a queen and copied a verse in fine script. He had rolled the scroll tight and eased it into an empty bullet casing. On the metal he scratched out a cross and my name.

“Yes, it's always with me,” I said, which was sort of true because I carried this phylactery in my briefcase.

“I should have made one for Dr. Ghosh and perhaps this would not happen.”

I marveled at my faithful friend. To become a priest in Ethiopia, it was enough for the archbishop in Addis Ababa to blow his breath into a cloth bag which was then carried to the provinces and opened in a church yard, allowing for the mass ordination of hundreds. The more priests the merrier, from the standpoint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

But having thousands and thousands of priests had its problems for God-fearing people like Almaz. A small number of these men were drunkards and cadgers for whom priesthood was a means of avoiding starvation while satisfying their other appetites. The worst reprobate priest who held out his cross obliged Almaz to stop and kiss its four points. I met her one day looking distressed, her clothes in disarray. She told me she'd beaten off a priest's advances with her umbrella, and others had come to her assistance and pummeled the man. “Marion, when I'm dying, go to the Merkato and get me two priests,” she said to me then. “That way, just like Christ, I can die with a thief on either side of me.”

But Gebrew was different. Almaz was sure God approved of Gebrew. He spent hours with his nose buried in his prayer books, leaning on his makaturia—his praying stick—beads clicking through his fingers. Even when he shed his priest garb to cut the grass, to run errands, to be Missing's watchman and gatekeeper, his turban stayed on and his lips never stopped moving. “Please make Ghosh a scroll,” I said to Gebrew. “Have faith. Maybe it is not too late.”

SHIVA HAD JUST COME BACK. I hadn't been in that toolshed for ages, and I was unprepared for the extreme clutter. Parts of engines and electrical boxes covered the floor. The narrowest of paths led to where his tank and welding equipment stood along with scraps of metal. Shiva had shored up the walls and ceiling of the shed with a welded metal scaffold, and from this his tools hung on wire holsters. He was hidden at his desk behind a mountain of books and papers. I made my way there. He was sketching a design for a frame of some kind, an apparatus he said would allow better exposure during fistula surgery. He put his pencil down and waited. Hed known nothing about what had transpired in the bungalow earlier. I told him the truth about Ghosh.

He listened but said nothing. Though he turned a little pale, his face otherwise gave away very little. He closed his eyes. He had climbed into his tree house and pulled up the ladder. He had no questions. I waited. Not even this news could break down the walls between us, I saw.

I needed him. I had carried Ghosh's secret alone, and now I was ready to spread the burden. I needed his strength for the days that were to come, but I didn't want to admit it. What was Shiva thinking? Did he feel anything at all? I left after a while, disgusted that those eyes would not open, convinced I couldn't count on him.

But Shiva surprised me. That night and for two more nights Shiva slept in the corridor outside Ghosh and Hema's bedroom with just a blanket wrapped under and over him. It was his way of expressing his love for Ghosh, of staying close. Ghosh was moved to tears seeing Shiva curled up there the next morning. I felt something around my heart break down and shatter when Hema told me. On the fourth night, as Ghosh's condition worsened, I decided to leave Ghosh's old bungalow and return to the bed I used to share with Shiva. I convinced Shiva not to sleep on the floor in the corridor. We slept awkwardly, on the edges of the mattress, getting up several times in the night to check on Ghosh. By morning, our heads were touching.

SHIVA AND I HAD the same blood group as Ghosh. With Adam's help, I'd been stockpiling my blood for this moment. Now, Shiva gave his. But blood was no longer sufficient, and it had caused a dangerous iron overload. Ghosh's platelets weren't working; he was oozing from his gums as well as losing blood in his bowel. He became progressively weaker.

Ghosh didn't want to move to the hospital. Soon the anemia left him short of breath, and he could no longer lie flat. We moved him from his marital bed of more than twenty years to his favorite armchair in the living room, his legs up on the footstool.

Quietly, systematically, he sought time with everyone he loved. He sent for Babu, Adid, Evangeline, and Mrs. Reddy and the other bridge players; I heard them laughing and reminiscing, though it wasn't all laughter. His cricket team surprised him when they arrived dressed in their whites to honor their captain. They regaled him with exaggerated stories of his past exploits.

Then it reached the point that he was breathing oxygen through a face mask that sat loosely over his chin. It was my turn to have the conversation with Ghosh. I'd been dreading the moment, resisting its implication.

“You're avoiding me, Marion,” he said. “We must start. We can't finish unless we start, right?”

I would never have predicted what he'd say next.

“I don't want you to feel responsible for the entire family. Hema is very capable. Matron, even though she is getting old, is tough and resourceful. I am saying this to you because I want you to take your medi cal career to great heights. Don't feel bound by duty to Shiva or Hema or Matron to stay here. Or to Genet,” he added, frowning slightly as he mentioned her name. He leaned forward to grab my hand, to make sure I understood how serious he was. “I wanted to go to America so badly. All these years I've read Harrisons and the other textbooks … and the things they do, the tests they order … it's like reading fiction, you know? Money's no object. A menu without prices. But if you get there, it won't be fiction. It'll be true.” His eyes turned dreamy as he imagined what it was like.

“We stopped you from going, didn't we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?”

“Don't be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?” he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he'd made out of a bungalow. “I've been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn't make me happy. Or maybe that's my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I won't have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

“Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the Book of Job, Job says to God, ‘You should've taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer?’ Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering.” He laughed as if he liked what he just said. His fingers automatically went up to his pajama pocket, then to the back of his ear searching for a pen, because the old Ghosh would have jotted that down. But there was no pen and no more need to write anything down.

“I haven't suffered. Well, maybe briefly. Only when my darling Hema made me pursue her for years. That was suffering!” The smile said it was a kind of suffering he wouldn't have traded for fame or fortune.

“Shiva will thrive with Hema. Hema needs him to keep her occupied. Hema's instinct will be to retreat to India. She'll make a lot of noise about that. It won't happen. Shiva will refuse. So she'll stay here in Addis. What I am saying is that it's not your worry. You understand?”

I nodded, without much conviction.

“I do have one small regret,” Ghosh said. “But it's something you can help me with. It has to do with your father.”

“You're the only father I've ever had,” I said quickly. “I wish Thomas Stone had this leukemia instead of you. I wouldn't care one bit if he died!”

He waited before answering, swallowing hard. “Marion, it means everything to me that you consider me your father. I couldn't be prouder of you, of who you've become. But I bring up Thomas Stone for selfish reasons. As I said, it's one of my regrets.

“You see, I was as close a friend to your father as he was capable of having. You have to picture how it was then, Marion. He was the only other male physician here at Missing. We were so different, nothing in common, or so I thought, when I met him. But I found that he loved medicine in the same sort of way that I love medicine. He was dedicated. His passion for medicine … it was as if he came from another planet, my planet. We had a special bond.”

His eyes drifted off to the window, perhaps recalling those times. I waited. Eventually he turned to me and squeezed my hand.

“Marion, your father was deeply wounded by something, God knows what. His parents died when he was a child. We never talked about things like that. But here, working alongside Sister Mary Joseph Praise, all of us working together, he was sheltered. He was as happy as such a man can be. I felt protective of him. He knew surgery well, but he had no understanding of life.”

“You mean he was like Shiva?”

He paused to consider this. “No. Very different. Shiva's content! Look at him. Shiva has no need for friendship or social support or approval—Shiva lives in this moment. Thomas Stone wasn't like that; he had all the needs the rest of us have. But he was scared. He denied himself his needs, and he denied himself his past.”

“Scared of what?” I found all this hard to swallow. “Matron told me once that he threw instruments when he got upset. She said he had a temper, that he was fearless.”

“Oh, fearless in surgery, I suppose. But even that might not be true. A good surgeon must be fearful and he was a good surgeon, the best, never foolhardy, and appropriately fearful. Well … a few lapses of judgment, but then he was human. But when it came to relationships he was … terrified. He was frightened that if he got close to anyone they'd hurt him. Or perhaps he'd hurt them.”

I was resisting this construction of Stone that was so different from what I'd made up all these years. Finally, I asked, “What do you want from me?”

“Now that my time is coming, Marion … I want to let Thomas Stone know that whatever happened I always considered myself his friend.”

“Why don't you write to him?”

“I can't. I never could. Hema hasn't forgiven him for leaving. She was happy he left—she wanted you two from the moment you were born. But still, she wouldn't forgive him for leaving. And then, once he left, she was terrified—always—that he might come back and claim you. I had to promise her, swear to her, that I wouldn't write him or communicate with him in any form.” He looked at me, and said with quiet pride, “I kept my word, Marion.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

I'd harbored such curiosity about Thomas Stone when I was younger. I had fantasized about his return. Now I resisted Ghosh, and I wasn't quite sure why.

Ghosh went on, “But I fully expected Stone to contact me. I was disappointed as the years went on that he didn't. Marion, he is filled with shame and he assumes that I have no desire to see him. That I hate him.”

“How do you know?”

“I've no way of knowing this for sure. I suspect that to this day he sees himself as an albatross. Call it clinical intuition if you like. The truth is that you were better off with us than with him. Try as he might, I don't know that he could have created what we have here, a family. So I don't want you to hate that man. The cross he carries is huge.”

“Why tell me this now?” I said. “I stopped thinking about him after you came out from jail. He was never there when we needed him. Why should I waste my time thinking about him?”

“For my sake. I told you, this is for me. My one regret. It's not about you. But only you can help me.”

I said nothing.

“Let me see if I can explain …” He looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds. “Marion, there'll be something incomplete about my life if I don't let him know that I still consider him a brother.” His eyes became wet. “And that whatever his reasons are for being silent all these years, I still … love him. I can't see him, I can't tell him this. But you can. I won't live to see it, but that's what I want. Do it without hurting Hema's feelings. Do it for me. Complete what is incomplete.”

“Are you going to tell Shiva this?”

“If I tell Shiva that it's my dying wish, he'd do it. But Shiva may not know how to do it, how to … heal him. It requires more than delivering a message.” He hesitated. “Speaking of Shiva: what I also need to tell you about Shiva is that whatever he did to you, please forgive him.”

He stunned me there. Had he planned to say that? Was it an afterthought? I didn't think Ghosh knew the depths of my hurt, my bitterness toward Shiva, but I'd underestimated him. Still, what happened between me and Shiva wasn't a subject I wanted to bring up with Ghosh; it was too painful, too personal.

“I'll do my best about Thomas Stone. For you. But I can't believe this is what you want. You're forgetting this is the man who caused my mother's death … A nun's death. A nun he got pregnant. And then he abandoned his children. And to this day no one seems to know how any of it happened.”

As my voice rose and quavered, Ghosh said nothing, but looked at me steadily till my shoulders collapsed and I gave in. Id do what he asked.

WHEN THE END CAME a week later he was still in that chair, all of us with him, me and Shiva holding his left hand, Matron holding his right. Almaz, who had become so lean from rigorous fasting, squatted behind his chair with her hand on his shoulder; Hema sat on the arm of the chair, so Ghosh's head could rest against her body. Genet was not to be found. She wasn't in her hostel when Gebrew was sent in a cab to bring her to Missing. Gebrew stood next to Almaz, praying.

Ghosh's breathing was labored, but Hema gave him morphine—he'd taught her that, she said. Morphine “disconnects the head from the brain,” so although the breathlessness was unchanging, the anxiety would be gone.

He opened his eyes once, startled. He looked at Hema, then at us. He smiled and closed his eyes. I like to think in that last gaze he saw a tableau of his family, his real flesh and blood, because our blood was now in his veins. I like to think in seeing us he felt his highest purpose was served.

And that is how he passed from this life to the next, without fanfare, with characteristic simplicity, fearless, opening his eyes that last time to make sure we were fine before he went on.

When his chest stopped moving, my sorrow was mixed with relief: I'd been matching every breath of his with mine for days. I know Hema felt the same way as she laid her head on his and wept, her arms still cradling him.

WITH GHOSH'S DEATH came a new understanding of the word “loss.” I'd lost my birth mother and father, lost the General, lost Zemui, lost Rosina. But I only knew real loss when I lost Ghosh. The hand that patted me and put me to sleep, the lips that trumpeted bedtime songs, the fingers that guided mine to percuss a chest, to feel an enlarged liver or spleen, the heart that coaxed my ears to understand the hearts of others, was now stilled.

At the moment he died I felt the mantle of responsibility pass from him to me. He'd anticipated that. I remembered his advice to wear that mantle lightly. He'd handed me the professional baton, wanted me to be the kind of doctor who would surpass him, and then pass on that same knowledge to my children and to their children, a chain. “I shall not break the chain,” I said, hoping Ghosh could hear me.

Freud, I knew, wrote that one only became a man the day one's father died.

When Ghosh died, I stopped being a son.

I was a man.

37. Exodus

WHEN I LEFT ETHIOPIA two years after Ghosh died, it had nothing to do with Ghosh's deathbed wishes. It wasn't about finding Thomas Stone and healing his pain. It wasn't because the Emperor had been deposed by a creeping military rebellion, or that the armed forces “committee” that took power had been reduced by infighting and murder to one mad dictator, an army sergeant, a man named Mengistu, who'd eventually make Stalin look like an angel.

Rather, I left on Wednesday, January 10, 1979, the day news spread through the city like influenza that four Eritrean guerrillas posing as passengers had commandeered an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 707 and forced it to fly to Khartoum, Sudan. One of the four was Genet. That morning she'd been a medical student, albeit one who had fallen three years behind. By evening, she was a liberation fighter.

I was a doctor at long last, an intern finishing up my last rotation. I'd done three months each in internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology and now all that remained was a month of pediatrics.

Hema tracked me down by telephone in the early evening. She'd heard the news about Genet.

“Marion, come home at once.”

The tone of her voice made the air around me go still.

“Ma, are you okay? We can't help her. They may come to talk to us. You are her guardian.”

Since Ghosh's death, without the buffer of his presence, I'd become closer to Hema. She sought my advice, and I looked for time to spend with her. I felt Ghosh's hand in that.

“Marion, my love, it's not about Genet … Adid just called. The secret police are searching for a co-conspirator named Marion Praise Stone. They may be on their way there.”

Thank God for Adid's source, a Muslim in Security with a soft spot for Missing. Genet's roommate, a tiny waif of a girl who I am sure had no knowledge of the plot, spit out my name within an hour of the hijack. People will say anything when their fingernails are being ripped out.

Visions of Ghosh, his head shaved, in the Kerchele Prison yard, flashed through my mind. But the old Kerchele was a country club compared with what it was now: an overcrowded torture college, a butcher shop where enemies of the state came to their ends. Bodies and body parts were carried out in trucks every night and posed throughout the city a macabre public arts program that served to educate and edify. Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man. Headless Woman Pointing Out Orion. Traitor Holding Head in His Hands. Dead Man with Penis in His Mouth. The unifying message was clear: You're Dead If You Think of Crossing Us.

The Sergeant-President, an uncouth, barbaric man, had only one thing in common with the Emperor: hed never let Eritrea secede. He launched a full-scale military offensive, bombing Eritrean villages where rebels mingled with civilians, putting the Eritrean homeland under siege. But of course, this only served to give new energy to the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

Meanwhile, the Oromo tribes were pressing for freedom. The Tigres (who spoke a language similar to that of the Eritreans) had formed their own liberation front. The royalists around Addis Ababa, who believed in the Emperor and the monarchy, had set off bombs in government offices in the capital. The university students, once great fans of the military “committee,” were now split into those pushing for democracy and those who felt nothing short of an Albanian-style Marxism would do. Neighboring Somalia decided this was the time to press its claims on disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert that even the vultures did not want. Who said being a dictator is easy? The Sergeant-President had his hands full.

WITHOUT A WORD TO ANYONE, I slipped out of the back of the Ethio-Swedish Pediatric Hospital, leaving my car parked in its spot. I took a taxi home. I couldn't believe this was happening. What had Genet accomplished? Hijacking an Ethiopian Airlines plane was all about publicity. Yes, BBC would pay attention. It would further embarrass the Sergeant-President, but he was doing a fine job of that without any outside help. Even if Genet's act hadn't put me in danger, I'd have resented the hijack. Ethiopian Airlines was a symbol of our national pride. Foreigners raved about EA's wonderful service, its skilled pilots. Jet flights from Rome, London, Frankfurt, Nairobi, Cairo, and Bombay to Addis made it easy for tourists to visit. Then EA's regional service of DC-3s flew a daily looping, hopscotch route so that you could leave the Hilton Addis Ababa in the morning, see the castles in Gondar, the ancient obelisks in Axum, the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and be back in the Hilton lounge in Addis just when the good-time girls were drifting in trailing perfume, and the Velvet Ashantis were playing their theme song, a version of “Walk—Don't Run” by the Ventures.

Ethiopian Airlines had for years been a target for the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. But even in the Emperor's time, crack security men on board disguised as passengers ensured a near-perfect safety record until Genet's flight. On one occasion, seven Eritrean hijackers stood up and announced their intentions. The two security men picked off five of the hijackers as easily as if they were shooting tin cans off a fence at ten paces. They overpowered the sixth. The seventh locked herself up in the bathroom and exploded a grenade. The pilot landed the crippled, rudderless plane despite a gaping hole in the tail section. On another occasion, the security force overpowered a hijacker and strapped him into a first-class seat. Instead of shooting him, they bibbed him with towels and slit his throat.

That January afternoon, Genet and her pals seized the plane without a fight. Word was they had help on the inside. The security men may have turned.

As my taxi drove through the Merkato, I took in the familiar sights. Could this be the last time I passed this way, the last time I smelled the hops from the St. George's brewery on this road? A woman with her hair in cornrows, Eritrean style, flagged my taxi down. “Lideta, please,” she said, naming her destination.

“Lideta, is it?” the driver said. “Why don't you take a plane, sweetheart?” Her face fell, then turned hard. She didn't bother to argue. She just turned away.

“Those bastards better lay low tonight,” the driver said to me, since I clearly wasn't one of them. “Look,” he said, waving his hand at the pedestrians on both sides. “They're everywhere.” There were thousands of Eritreans in Addis Ababa—people like the Staff Probationer, like Genet. They were administrators, teachers, university faculty, students, government workers, and officers in the armed forces, executives in telecommunications, waterworks, and public health, and legions of others who were just common folk. “They drink our milk and eat our bread. But in their homes tonight, you know they're butchering a sheep.”

Since the military took power, many Eritreans I knew, including some physicians and medical students, had gone underground to join the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.

The news in the capital was that the situation in the north of Ethio pia around Asmara had turned against the Sergeant-President. The Eritrean guerrillas ambushed military convoys at night and disappeared in daylight. I'd seen grainy photos of these fighters. Dressed in their trademark sandals, khaki shorts and shirts, they had the daring, the conviction, and the passion of patriots fighting their occupiers. The conscripted Ethiopian soldiers in their jeeps and tanks, weighted down with helmets, combat boots, jackets, and weaponry, were confined to the main roads. How could they find an enemy they couldn't see, in a countryside where they didn't speak the language and couldn't tell civilians and sympathizers from guerrillas?

As my taxi approached Missing's gates, I saw Tsige stepping out of her Fiat 850 in front of her bar. She'd prospered these last few years, buying out the business next door, adding a kitchen, a full restaurant, and hiring more bar girls to serve customers. Upgrades to the furniture, two foosball machines, and a new television set made her bar the equal of the best in the Piazza. Tsige owned one taxi, and when we last spoke she'd told me she was looking for a second. She never failed to encourage me, to tell me how proud she was of me and that she prayed for me every day. Now, as I saw her lovely stockinged leg emerge from the car, I had a great urge to stop and say good-bye, but I couldn't. This was her land, too, and I hoped that unlike me she'd never have a need to flee.

MISSING'S MAIN GATE was wide open. This was Hema's prearranged signal that the coast was clear for me to come home.

When you have just minutes to leave the house in which you've spent all your twenty-five years, what do you take with you?

Hema had my diplomas, certificates, passport, a few clothes, money, bread, cheese, and water packed in a roomy Air India shoulder bag. I wore sneakers and layers of clothes against the cold. I threw in a cassette which I knew had both the slow and fast “Tizita” on it, but left the cassette player behind. I contemplated taking Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine, or Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, but with each book weighing about five pounds, I didn't.

We left on foot, a small convoy heading to the side wall of Missing, but first I insisted we go by the grove where Ghosh and Sister Mary Joseph Praise were buried. I walked with my arm around Hema. Shiva assisted Matron. Almaz and Gebrew had gone ahead. I felt Hema's body trembling.

At Ghosh's grave, I took leave of him. I imagined how he would have tried to cheer me up, make me look at the bright side—You always wanted to travel! Here's your chance. Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels. I kissed the marble headstone and turned away. I didn't dwell at my birth mother's grave. If I wanted to say good-bye to her, this wasn't the place. I hadn't visited the autoclave room for more than two years. I felt a pang of guilt, but it was too late to go there now.

At the wall, Hema held me. She laid her head on my chest, and the tears were flowing freely, in a way that I'd only seen at Ghosh's death. She couldn't speak.

Matron, a rock of faith in moments of crisis, kissed me on the forehead and said simply, “Go with God.” Almaz and Gebrew prayed over me. Almaz handed me a kerchief tied around a couple of boiled eggs. Gebrew gave me a tiny scroll that I was to swallow for protection— I popped it into my mouth.

If my eyes were dry, it was because I couldn't believe this was happening. As I looked at my send-off party I felt such hatred for Genet. Perhaps Eritreans in Addis were slaughtering sheep and toasting her tonight, but I wished she could see this snapshot of our family as it was torn apart, all because of her.

It was time to say good-bye to Shiva. I'd forgotten what it felt like to hold him, what a perfect fit his body was to mine, two halves of a single being. Ever since Genet's mutilation, we'd slept separately except for a brief period around Ghosh's death. Once Ghosh died, I returned to his old quarters, leaving Shiva in our childhood room. Only now did I recognize the severity of the penance I'd enforced by sleeping apart. Our arms were like magnets, refusing to disengage.

I pulled my head back and studied his face. I saw disbelief and a bottomless sadness. I was strangely pleased, flattered to get such a reaction from him. I'd seen this only twice before: on the day of Ghosh's arrest and on the day of Ghosh's death. Our parting at Missing's wall was a kind of death, his expression said. And if it was so for him, it was for me, too. Or should have been.

There was a time, ages ago, it seemed, when we could read each other's thoughts. I wondered if he could read mine. I'd postponed this moment, this reckoning with him. It was the deal I'd made with Genet, but I felt no need to honor that now. Now, my mind expressed itself.

Shiva, do you see how deflowering Genet, a biological act as far as you were concerned, led to all this? It led Rosina to kill herself, led Genet to stray from us? It led to this moment where I hate the woman I hoped to marry? Even now Hema thinks that I set all this in motion, that I did something to Genet.

Do you see how you betrayed me?

This good-bye is like cutting off my body.

I love you as I love myself—that is inevitable.

But I can't forgive you. Perhaps in time, and only because that's what Ghosh wanted. In time, Shiva, but not now.

We stood at the foot of the ladder which Gebrew had placed against Missing's east wall.

Shiva handed me a cloth bag. In the darkness it was impossible to see, but I thought I recognized the shape and the color of his dog-eared copy of Gray's Anatomy and below that a pristine copy of some other heavy book. I was about to remonstrate. I bit my tongue. In giving me his Gray's, Shiva sacrificed a piece of himself, the most valuable thing he owned that was removable and portable.

“Thank you, Shiva,” I said, hoping it didn't sound sarcastic. I now had two bags instead of one.

Gebrew slung burlap sacks on top of the bottle shards that crested the wall. I climbed over. On the other side was the road that I'd always seen from my bedroom window but never explored. It was a view that I thought of as pastoral, idyllic, a road disappearing into the mist and mountains to a land of no worries. Tonight it looked sinister.

“Good-bye,” I called one last time, touching my hand to that moist wall, the living, breathing exoskeleton of Missing. Inside, a chorus of voices so dear to me, they who were the beating heart of Missing, called out, wished me Godspeed.

A hundred yards away, a truck sat idling. It carried stacks of re treaded tires. The driver helped me climb onto the bed, where a tarp had been strung over and under tires to make a small cave. Adid had water, biscuits, and a pile of blankets placed there. He had arranged my escape but under the aegis of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. The EPLF had become the common path to leave Ethiopia, particularly if you planned to do it from the north and if you were willing to pay.

The less said about my cold, bumpy, seven-hour ride to Dessie, the better. After a night in a Dessie warehouse, where I slept on a regular bed, and a second night where we rested in Mekele, on the third day of out northern journey we reached Asmara, the heart of Eritrea. The city Genet had loved so much was under occupation. The Ethiopian army was visible in force, tanks and armored cars parked at key junctions, checkpoints everywhere. We were never searched, since the driver's papers showed the tires we carried were to supply the Ethiopian army.

I was taken to a safe house, a cozy cottage surrounded by bougainvil-lea, where I was to wait until we could make the trek out of Asmara and into the countryside. The furniture was just a mattress on the living room floor. I couldn't venture out to the garden. I thought I'd be in the safe house for a night or two, but the wait stretched out to two weeks. My Eritrean guide, Luke, brought me food once a day. He was younger than me, a fellow of few words, a college student in Addis before he went underground. He suggested I walk as much as I could in the house to strengthen my legs. “These are the wheels of the EPLF,” he said, smiling, tapping his thighs.

There were two surprises in my meager luggage. What I thought was a cardboard base at the bottom of the Air India bag that Hema packed was instead a framed picture. It was the print of St. Teresa that Sister Mary Joseph Praise had put up in the autoclave room. Hema's note taped to the glass explained:

Ghosh had this framed in the last month of his life. In his will he said that if you ever left the country, he wanted this picture to go with you. Marion, since I can t go with you, may my Ghosh, Sister Mary, and St. Teresa all watch over you.

I caressed the frame, which Ghosh's hands must have touched. I wondered why he'd taken so much trouble, but I was pleased. It was my talisman for protection. I had not said good-bye to her in the autoclave room, and it turned out I didn't need to, because she was coming with me.

The second surprise was the book under Shiva's precious Gray's Anatomy. It was Thomas Stone's textbook, The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Surgery. I'd never known such a book existed. (Later I learned that it went out of print a few years after our birth.) I turned the pages, curious, wondering why I'd never seen this before and how it came to be in Shiva's possession. And then, suddenly, there he was in a photograph that occupied three-fourths of the page, staring out at me, a faint smile on his lips: Thomas Stone, MBBS, FRCS. I had to close the book. I rose and got some water, took my time. I wanted to compose myself and look at him on my own terms. When I opened the page again, I noticed the fingers, nine of them, instead of ten. I had to admit the similarity to Shiva and therefore to me. It was in the deep-set eyes, in the gaze. Our jaws were not as square as his and our foreheads were broader. I wondered why Shiva had put it in my hands.

The book looked brand-new, as if it had hardly been opened. A bookmark placed on the copyright page said, “Compliments of the Publisher.” The bookmark had been pressed between the pages for so long that when I peeled it off a pale rectangular outline remained.

On the back of the bookmark was written:

My mother had penned this note a day before our birth and her death. Her clear writing, the even letters, retained a schoolgirl's innocence. How long had Shiva posessed the book and bookmark? Why give it to me? Was it so that I'd have something from my mother?

To get in shape, I'd pace around the house, hauling the bag with books on my shoulder. I read Stone's textbook during those two weeks. At first I resisted it, telling myself it was dated. But he had a way of conveying his surgical experience in the context of scientific principles that made it quite readable. I studied the bookmark often, rereading my mother's words. What was in the letter she had left for Stone? What would she have been saying to him just one day before we, her identical twin boys, would arrive? I copied her writing, imitating the loops.

One day when Luke brought my food, he said we'd leave that night. I packed one last time. The two books had to go with me; I couldn't abandon either one, though my Air India bag was still very heavy.

We set out after curfew. “That's why we waited,” Luke said, pointing skyward. “When there's no moon it is safer.”

He led me down narrow paths between houses, and then along irrigation ditches, and soon we were away from the residential areas. We crossed fields in the pitch-dark. I sensed hills in the distance. Within an hour, my shoulder hurt from the bag, even though I positioned it in different ways. Luke insisted on transferring some items from my bag to his knapsack. He looked shocked at the sight of the books, but said nothing. He took the Gray's.

We walked for hours, stopping only once. At last, we were in the foothills, climbing. At four-thirty in the morning, we heard a soft whistle. We met up with a troop of eleven fighters. They greeted us in their trademark fashion: shaking hands while bumping shoulders back and forth, saying, “Kamela-hai” or “Salaam.” There were four women, sporting Afros just like the men. I was shocked to recognize one of the fighters: it was the firebrand, the student with the bovine eyes whom I had encountered in Genet's hostel room. On that occasion hed stormed out contemptuously. Now, recognizing me, he sported a lopsided grin. He shook my hand with both his. His name was Tsahai.

The fighters were exhausted, but uncomplaining, their legs white with dust. They carried a heavy gun which they had dismantled into several large pieces.

Tsahai brought something over to me. “High-protein field bread,” he said. It was a ration which was of the fighters’ own invention, but it tasted like cardboard. He rubbed his right knee as he spoke, and it looked to me as if it was swollen with fluid. If it was sore, he said nothing about it.

We avoided the topic of Genet. Instead he described how earlier that night they'd ambushed an Ethiopian army convoy as it tried a rare night patrol. “Their soldiers are scared of the dark. They don't want to fight and they don't want to be here. Morale is terrible. When we shot the lead vehicle, the soldiers jumped out, forgetting to shoot, just running for cover. We had the high ground on both sides. Right away they screamed that they were surrendering, even though their officer was ordering them to keep fighting. We took their uniforms and sent them on foot back to the garrison.”

Tsahai and his comrades had siphoned gas from the trucks, then hid the one working vehicle in the bush, stuffed with uniforms, ammunition, and weapons to be retrieved at another time. The real prize was the heavy gun and shells which they brought with them, everything carried on foot.

WE SET OFF after fifteen minutes. Before daybreak we reached a well-hidden, tiny bunker carved out of the side of a hill. I didn't think I was capable of walking as far as I had. It helped that my fellow walkers carried five times my load without complaint.

Luke and I stayed in the bunker. The others hurried on to a forward position, risking daylight and being spotted by the roaming MiG fighters because there was some urgency to reassemble the gun.

I slept until Luke woke me. My legs felt as if a wall had collapsed on them. “Take this,” he said, giving me two pills and a tin mug of tea. “It's our own painkiller, paracetamol, manufactured in our pharmacy.”

I was too tired to do anything but swallow. He made me eat some more of the bread, and I slept again. I awoke with less pain, but so stiff I could hardly get off the floor. I took two more of the paracetamol pills.

Five fighters arrived to escort us onward when it turned dark. One of them had a partially withered leg: polio, I knew. Seeing his swinging, awkward gait, his gun serving as a counterbalance, made it impossible for me to think of my own discomfort.

The second march was half as long as the first, and gradually my legs loosened. We arrived long before dawn at some scruffy hills. A narrow trail led to a cave, its entrance completely hidden by brush and by natural rock. Wooden logs framed the opening. A steep wooden ramp went down to more rooms, deep within. The trail on the outside led to other caves up and down the hill, all the openings cleverly concealed.

I was taken inside to a stall. I removed my shoes, and fell asleep on a straw pallet. It felt luxurious. I slept till late afternoon. Luke walked me around. I was stiff again, but he seemed fine. The base was empty of fighters because of a major operation going on elsewhere.

I suppose I should have admired these fighters, who could flit through the dust like sandflies. I should've admired their resourcefulness, their ability to manufacture their own intravenous fluid, their own sulfa, penicillin, and paracetamol tablets stamped out by a handpress. Hidden in these caves and invisible from the air or ground was an operating theater, a prosthetic limb center, hospital wards, and a school. The degree of sophistication in those surroundings was even more impressive for being so spartan. The quiet discipline, the recognition that the tasks of cooking, caring for children, sweeping the floors were as important as any other, convinced me that they would one day prevail and have their freedom.

I watched a fighter relaxing outside the bunker. The sun filtering through the acacia tree formed a changing mosaic of light on her face and on the rifle across her lap. She hummed to herself as she scanned the skies with binoculars, looking for MiGs, which were flown by the Rus sian or Cuban “advisers” to Ethiopia. America had long supported the Emperor, but it withdrew its support of Sergeant-President Mengistu's regime, halting weapons and parts sales. The Eastern Bloc stepped in to fill the void.

The fighter, who was about our age, reminded me of Genet in the way she arranged her limbs, in the ease with which she occupied her body. Despite the lethal weapon in her hand, her movements were delicate. She wore no makeup, and her feet were dusty and callous. Seeing her I was grateful for one thing: my Genet dream was gone forever and good riddance. Id been so stupid to sustain a one-sided fantasy for so long. The honeymoon in Udaipur, our own little bungalow at Missing, raising our babies, setting off to the hospital in the morning, doctors working side by side … It would never happen. I never wanted to see her again. And I probably never would. She was surely in Khartoum, still basking in the glory of her daring operation. There was no going back to Addis for her either. Soon she would join these fighters, live in these bunkers, and fight alongside them. I hoped I would be long gone by then. I resented having to be in their camp at all, even more having to turn to her comrades for help.

That night I woke to the sounds of MiGs overhead and bombs dropping far away, but close enough for us to hear the rumble. Also the fainter thuds of artillery. No lights were allowed anywhere near the mouth of the cave.

Luke said that a massive raid had just been completed on a weapons and fuel depot. It had included Tsahai and the group of fighters we met on the first night. They had penetrated using a stolen army truck. Once inside, they set charges, but their comrades outside had been surprised by a reinforcement convoy that attacked them from the rear. It had not gone exactly as planned. Nine guerrillas including Tsahai were dead and many more wounded. The Ethiopians’ losses were much larger and the fuel depot partially destroyed. Our casualties would arrive at the cave by early morning.

I woke to voices, the activity and urgency unmistakable. I heard moans and sharp cries of pain. Luke took me to the surgical ward.

“Hello, Marion,” a voice said. I turned to see Solomon, whod been my senior in medical school. Hed gone underground as soon as he finished his internship. I remembered him as a chubby, well-fed intern. The man before me had hollow cheeks and was as lean as a stick.

I followed Solomon, stooping down in a low-ceilinged tunnel where stretchers were arranged in pairs on the floor, triaged so that those most in need of surgery were closest to the operating theater at the end of the tunnel. The entrance to the theater was a cloth curtain.

The wounds were ghastly. One barely conscious man whispered last instructions into the ear of a friend, who hovered over him, writing furiously. Intravenous fluid and blood bottles dangled from hooks embedded in the cave walls. The attendants worked squatting next to the stretchers.

Solomon said hed gone close to the battlefront for this mission. “Usually I stay here. We resuscitate at the battlefield. Intravenous fluid, control bleeding, antibiotics, even some field surgery. We can prevent shock just like the Americans in Vietnam. Only we don't have their heli copters.” He slapped his thighs. “These are our helicopters. We carry our wounded by stretcher.” He scanned the room. “That man over there needs a chest tube,” he said, indicating with his head. “Please do it. Tumsghi will help you. I'll go ahead to the theater. That comrade cannot wait.” He pointed to a pale soldier lying near the curtain with a bloody pad over his abdomen. He was conscious, but barely, breathing rapidly.

The fighter who needed the chest tube whispered “Salaam” when I squatted by him. The bullet had entered his triceps, then his chest, and miraculously missed the great vessels, the heart, and the spine. When I tapped with my bunched fingers above his right nipple it was dull, quite unlike the boxy, resonant note on the left. Blood had collected around the lung in the pleural space, compressing the right lung against the left lung and the heart in the confined cavity of the chest. Working just behind his right armpit, I injected lidocaine and anesthetized the skin, then the edge of the rib and deeper into the pleura, before making an inch-long cut with a scalpel. I pushed a closed hemostat into my incision till I felt it pop through the resistance of the pleura. I put my gloved finger into the hole, sweeping around to ensure space for the chest tube—a rubber hose with openings at side and tip—which I fed into the hole. Tumsghi connected the other end to a drainage bottle with water in it, so that the tube emerged under the water level. This crude underwater seal prevented air going back into the chest. Already dark blood was emerging, and the soldier's breathing improved. He said something in Tigrinya and pulled off his oxygen. Tumsghi said, “He wants you to give his oxygen to someone else.”

I joined Solomon in the operating theater in time to see his patient come off the table. The man's chest didn't move. There was about a five-second silence. One of the women, fighting back tears, knelt and covered his face.

“Some things are beyond us,” Solomon said quietly. “He had a laceration to the liver. I tried mattress sutures. But he also had a tear to the inferior vena cava where it goes behind the liver. It kept oozing. I couldn't stop it unless I clamped the inferior vena cava, which would kill him. You remember Professor Asrat used to say that injuries to the vena cava behind the liver are when the surgeon sees God? He used to say things like that that I didn't understand. I understand now.”

The next patient had a belly wound. Solomon systematically sorted out what to me looked like an impossible and dirty mess. He pulled out the small bowel, identified several perforations which he oversewed. The spleen was ruptured and so this was removed. The sigmoid colon had a ragged tear. He cut out the segment, and then brought the two open ends to the skin in a double-barrel colostomy We irrigated the abdomen vigorously, left drains in place, and did a sponge count. The field looked so neat compared with its condition when we started. Solomon must have read my mind. He held up his hands to show me his stubby fingers and his hammer thumbs: “I wanted to be a psychiatrist.” Over the eight hours, that was the only time I saw him smile behind the mask.

We amputated five limbs. The last two procedures we performed were burr holes in the skulls of two comatose patients. We used a modified carpenter's drill. In the first we were rewarded by blood welling out from just under the dura where it had collected, pressing on the brain. The other patient was agonal, his pupils fixed and dilated. The burr hole produced nothing. The bleeding was deep inside the brain.

Two days later, I took leave of Solomon. There were dark rings under his eyes and he looked ready to fall over. There was no questioning his purpose or dedication. Solomon said, “Go and good luck to you. This isn't your fight. I'd go if I were in your shoes. Tell the world about us.”

This isn't your fight. I thought about that as I trekked to the border with two escorts. What did Solomon mean? Did he see me as being on the Ethiopian side, on the side of the occupiers? No, I think he saw me as an expatriate, someone without a stake in this war. Despite being born in the same compound as Genet, despite speaking Amharic like a native, and going to medical school with him, to Solomon I was a ferengi— a foreigner. Perhaps he was right, even though I was loath to admit it. If I were a patriotic Ethiopian, would I not have gone underground and joined the royalists, or others who were trying to topple Sergeant Men-g istu? If I cared about my country, shouldn't I have been willing to die for it?

We crossed the Sudan border by early evening. I took a bus to Port Sudan, and then Sudan Airways to Khartoum. In Khartoum I was able to call a number Adid had provided to let Hema know I was safe. Two days in sweltering Khartoum felt like two years, but at last I flew to Kenya.

IN NAIROBI, Mr. Eli Harris, whose Houston church had been the pillar of Missing's support for years, had arranged room for me at a mission clinic. Matron and Harris had made these arrangements by cable. I found the work in the small outpatient clinic difficult, as I was certain that many things were getting lost in translation. In my free time, I studied for the exams that I had to take to begin postgraduate training in America.

Nairobi was lush and green like Addis Ababa, the grass pushing up between pavement tiles as if the jungle seethed underneath the city ready to take over. Nairobi's infrastructure and sophistication dwarfed that of Addis. One could thank the years of British rule for that, and, though Kenya was independent, many Brits lived on there. And Indians: in some parts of Nairobi you could imagine you were in Baroda or Ahmedabad with sari emporiums ten to a street, chat shops everywhere, the pungent scent of masala in the air, and Gujarati the only language spoken.

At first I spent my evenings in the bars, drowning my sorrows and listening to benga music and soukous. The jazzy Congolese and Brazilian rhythms were uplifting, full of optimism, but when I retired to my room, afloat in beer, my melancholia was always worse. Other than the music, Kenyan culture made no impact on me. The fault was mine. I resisted the place. Thomas Stone had come to Nairobi when he fled Ethiopia with his demons chasing him. It was another reason I was disinclined to stay.

I called Hema on a schedule, dialing different friends’ houses every Tuesday night. Things were no better, she said. Were I to come back, I'd still be in danger.

So I stayed in my room and studied every waking minute. I passed the American medical equivalency exams two months later, and immediately presented myself to the American Embassy for my visa. Again, Harris had eased my way.

I was righteous: if my country was willing to torture me on suspicion, if it didn't want my services as a physician, then I disowned my country. But the truth is that by this time I knew that I wouldn't return to Ethiopia, even if things were suddenly rosy again.

I wanted out of Africa.

I began to think that Genet had done me a favor after all.