Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [188]
Freud, I knew, wrote that one only became a man the day one's father died.
When Ghosh died, I stopped being a son.
I was a man.
CHAPTER 37
Exodus
WHEN I LEFT ETHIOPIA two years after Ghosh died, it had nothing to do with Ghosh's deathbed wishes. It wasn't about finding Thomas Stone and healing his pain. It wasn't because the Emperor had been deposed by a creeping military rebellion, or that the armed forces “committee” that took power had been reduced by infighting and murder to one mad dictator, an army sergeant, a man named Mengistu, who'd eventually make Stalin look like an angel.
Rather, I left on Wednesday, January 10, 1979, the day news spread through the city like influenza that four Eritrean guerrillas posing as passengers had commandeered an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 707 and forced it to fly to Khartoum, Sudan. One of the four was Genet. That morning she'd been a medical student, albeit one who had fallen three years behind. By evening, she was a liberation fighter.
I was a doctor at long last, an intern finishing up my last rotation. I'd done three months each in internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology and now all that remained was a month of pediatrics.
Hema tracked me down by telephone in the early evening. She'd heard the news about Genet.
“Marion, come home at once.”
The tone of her voice made the air around me go still.
“Ma, are you okay? We can't help her. They may come to talk to us. You are her guardian.”
Since Ghosh's death, without the buffer of his presence, I'd become closer to Hema. She sought my advice, and I looked for time to spend with her. I felt Ghosh's hand in that.
“Marion, my love, it's not about Genet … Adid just called. The secret police are searching for a co-conspirator named Marion Praise Stone. They may be on their way there.”
Thank God for Adid's source, a Muslim in Security with a soft spot for Missing. Genet's roommate, a tiny waif of a girl who I am sure had no knowledge of the plot, spit out my name within an hour of the hijack. People will say anything when their fingernails are being ripped out.
Visions of Ghosh, his head shaved, in the Kerchele Prison yard, flashed through my mind. But the old Kerchele was a country club compared with what it was now: an overcrowded torture college, a butcher shop where enemies of the state came to their ends. Bodies and body parts were carried out in trucks every night and posed throughout the city a macabre public arts program that served to educate and edify. Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man. Headless Woman Pointing Out Orion. Traitor Holding Head in His Hands. Dead Man with Penis in His Mouth. The unifying message was clear: You're Dead If You Think of Crossing Us.
The Sergeant-President, an uncouth, barbaric man, had only one thing in common with the Emperor: hed never let Eritrea secede. He launched a full-scale military offensive, bombing Eritrean villages where rebels mingled with civilians, putting the Eritrean homeland under siege. But of course, this only served to give new energy to the Eritrean People's Liberation Front.
Meanwhile, the Oromo tribes were pressing for freedom. The Tigres (who spoke a language similar to that of the Eritreans) had formed their own liberation front. The royalists around Addis Ababa, who believed in the Emperor and the monarchy, had set off bombs in government offices in the capital. The university students, once great fans of the military “committee,” were now split into those pushing for democracy and those who felt nothing short of an Albanian-style Marxism would do. Neighboring Somalia decided this was the time to press its claims on disputed territory in the Ogaden Desert that even the vultures did not want. Who said being a dictator is easy? The Sergeant-President