Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [155]
“Stigmata” in my religion class at LT&C meant the nail wounds, the cuts from the crown of thorns, the gash made by the spear of Longinus in Christ's flesh. But Ghosh used the word to mean the flesh signs of a disease. In the Piazza he had once pointed out the stigmata of congenital syphilis in a listless boy who was squatting on the sidewalk: “Saddle nose, cloudy eyes, peg-shaped incisor teeth …” I read about the other stigmata of syphilis: mulberry molars, saber-shinned tibias, and deafness.
All the infants in the croup room appeared related because they all had the stigmata of rickets to a greater or lesser degree. They were wizened, bug-eyed, with big foreheads.
Ghosh put the child in the crude oxygen tent fashioned out of a plastic sheet. “The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets,” he said to me under his breath. “It's the cascade of catastrophes.”
Ghosh took Tsige aside, his Amharic surprisingly fluent as he explained what was going on. He cautioned her to keep breast-feeding “no matter what you hear from anyone else.” When Tsige said the child was hardly sucking, he said, “Still, it will comfort him because he will know you are there. You're a good mother. This is hard.” Tsige tried to kiss Ghosh's hand when he left, but he'd have none of it.
“I'll try to check on this baby later,” Ghosh said on his way out. “We have a vasectomy tonight. Dr. Cooper from the American Embassy is coming to learn. Would you bring over a sterilized vasectomy pack from the operating theater? And plug in the sterilizer in my quarters?”
I stayed in the croup room with Tsige, because I sensed that she had no one else. Her infant looked no better. I thought of the shops on Churchill Road and how I'd seen tourists stop there, thinking it was a flower shop or flower market, only to find that the “flowers” were wreaths. Then they noticed the shoe-box-size coffins, just for infants.
Tears streamed down Tsige's face—she could see her baby was the sickest one there. The other mothers withdrew as if she were bad luck. At one point I held her hand. I searched for words of comfort but realized I didn't need any. When her baby began grunting with each breath, Tsige cried on my shoulder. I wished Genet were with me—whatever she was doing in Asmara surely couldn't be as meaningful as this. Genet said she wanted to be a doctor—for a smart kid growing up at Missing, perhaps it seemed inevitable. And yet Genet had an aversion to the hospital and had no interest in following Ghosh or Hema around. Even if she were in Addis, I couldn't see her sitting here with Tsige.
AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Tsige's child died. It had been like watching a slow drowning. The effort of breathing ultimately proved too much for that tiny chest.
At once the staff nurse ran out in the rain to the main hospital, just as she'd been instructed to do. She gestured for me to follow, but I stayed put. A parent's grief needed a scapegoat, and parents were occasionally moved to violence, to exacting retribution on those who'd tried to help. I knew I had nothing to fear from Tsige.
Half an hour later, Tsige held the shrouded body in her arms, ready for his voyage home. Belatedly, the other mothers gathered around Tsige. They raised their mouths to the heavens, the veins on their necks forming cords. Lulululululu, they cried, hoping their lament might weave some protection around