Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [128]
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