Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [139]
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.
CHAPTER 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