Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [151]
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.
CHAPTER 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