Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [16]
THE PROBATIONER IN Operating Theater 3 on the day of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's labor and our birth was a pretty—no, a beautiful— young Eritrean girl. Sadly, her humorless intensity, the dedication she showed to her training, made people forget her youth and her looks.
The probationer hurried off to find my mother, not pausing to question the propriety of the message she carried to Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Stone, of course, would never have imagined the message might be hurtful. As is so often the case with shy yet talented people, Stone was generally forgiven what Dr. Ghosh called his social retardation. The glaring gaps that in a bowel repair could have been fatal were overlooked when they occurred in such a personality; they weren't an impediment to him, only an irritation to others.
At the time of our birth the probationer was not yet eighteen, with a tendency to confuse penmanship and keeping a neat medical record (and thereby pleasing Matron) with the actual care of patients.
Being seniormost of the five probationers in Missing's nursing school had been a matter of pride for her, and most days she managed to push to the back of her mind the fact that her seniority was only because she was repeating her year, or, as Dr. Ghosh put it, because she was “on the long-term plan.”
Orphaned as a child by smallpox, which had also left a faint lunar landscape on her cheeks, the probationer had from a young age addressed her self-consciousness by becoming excessively studious, a trait encouraged by the Italian nuns, the Sisters of the Nigrizia (Africa), who raised her in the orphanage in Asmara. The young probationer displayed her studiousness as if it were not merely a virtue but a God-given gift, like a beauty spot or a supernumerary toe. What promise she'd shown in those early years, sailing through church school in Asmara, skipping grades, speaking fluent official Italian (as opposed to the bar-and-cinema version spoken by many Ethiopians, in which prepositions and pronouns were dispensed with altogether), and able to recite even her nineteen-times table.
You could say the probationer's presence at Missing was an accident of history. Her hometown of Asmara was the capital city of Eritrea, a country which had been an Italian colony from as far back as 1885. The Italians under Mussolini invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea in 1935, with the world powers unwilling to intercede. When Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler, his fate was sealed, and by 1941, Colonel Wingate's Gideon Force had defeated the Italians and liberated Ethiopia. The Allies gave Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia a most unusual gift: they tacked on the very old Italian colony of Eritrea as a protectorate of newly liberated Ethiopia. The Emperor had lobbied hard for just this, so that his landlocked country could have the seaport of Massawa, not to mention the lovely city of Asmara. The British perhaps wanted to punish the Eritre-ans for their long collaboration with the Italians; Eritrean askaris, thousands of them, were part of the Italian army and had fought their black neighbors and died alongside their white masters.
For the Eritreans to have their lands handed to Ethiopia was an unimaginable wound, akin to giving liberated France to England merely because the people of both countries were white and ate cabbage. When, a few years later, the Emperor annexed the land, the Eritreans at once began a guerrilla war for their liberation.
But there were some advantages to Eritrea being part of Ethiopia: the probationer won a scholarship to the country's only nursing school in Addis Ababa, at Missing Hospital, the first young person from Eritrea to be so rewarded.