Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [127]
“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.
CHAPTER 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.