Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [133]
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