Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [177]
I could see clearly now. We all could see. Hema, Ghosh, Shiva were behind me, and even Genet, hearing the commotion, had dragged herself there.
There is a mathematical precision to that scene as I remember it, but there are no angles in Carr's Geometry or any other text that quite describe the slant of that neck. And no pill in the pharmacopoeia that might erase the memory. Hanging from a rafter, her head tilted on her spine, her mouth open and the tongue looking as if it had been yanked out of her throat, was Rosina.
CHAPTER 35
One Fever from Another
THE MOSSY STONE WALLS and the massive gate of Empress Menen School gave it the look of an ancient fortress. In her white socks, light blue blouse, dark blue skirt, and with no headbands, clips, or earrings, Genet was just one of the girls, blending in. Her only adornment was the St. Bridget's cross hanging from her neck. She didn't want to stand out. Her old vivacious self had died along with the corpse we took down from the rafter and buried in Gulele Cemetery.
My new ritual was to come on Saturday evenings to see Genet. She was just up the hill from the palace where General Mebratu (with Zemui at his side) took hostages and tried to bring about a new order.
Genet could have come home on weekends, but she said Missing evoked painful memories. She insisted she was happy at Empress Menen. The Indian teachers were strict but very good. Sheltered from society and from us, she worked very hard.
We entered university together for our premedical course, and the following year we entered medical school. Now out of uniform and in regular clothes, her dress and manner remained reserved and subdued. Each time I went to visit Genet in the Mekane Yesus Hostel opposite the university, I'd pray that this would be the day when the locked door to her heart opened and I might see traces of the old Genet. She was appreciative for the tiffin carrier of food Almaz and Hema sent for her, but the barrier she put up around herself remained.
I still loved her.
I wished I didn't.
We entered the Haile Selassie the First School of Medicine in 1974— only the third class to be admitted. Genet and I were paired as dissection partners on a cadaver, which was fortunate for her. Anyone else would have taken offense at her frequent absences and her failing to carry her load. I didn't think she was lazy. There was no good reason for this; something was brewing, and for once I had no clue.
OUR BASIC SCIENCE TEACHERS were very good, a mix of British and Swiss professors and a few Ethiopian physicians who graduated from the American University of Beirut and then took postgraduate training in England or America. There was one Indian: our own Ghosh. Ghosh had a title: not Assistant Professor, or Associate Professor, or Clinical Associate Professor (implying an honorary, unpaid designation), but Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Surgery.
I don't think any of us, not even Hema, realized the extent of Ghosh's scholarship during his twenty-eight years in Ethiopia. But Sir Ian Hill, dean of the new medical school, certainly did. Ghosh had forty-one published papers and a textbook chapter to his name. An initial interest in sexually transmitted illness had given way to major scholarship on relapsing fever, for which he was the world's expert, because the louse-borne variety of this disease was endemic to Ethiopia, and because no living person had observed the disease as closely.
I learned about relapsing fever as a schoolboy when Ali of the souk opposite Missing brought his brother, Saleem, to the hospital and asked me to intercede. Saleem burned with fever and was delirious. Ghosh said later that Saleem's story was typical: He'd arrived in Addis Ababa from his village with his life's belongings in a cloth strung over his shoulder. Ali found his brother a toehold in the seething, swarming docks of the Merkato, where, monsoon or not, he hauled sacks off the trucks and into the godowns. At night he slept cheek by jowl with ten others in a flophouse. In