Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [246]
Soon a lovely Ethiopian lady came cautiously down the stairs, careful not to snag her heels. She said over her shoulder to the Somali, “Why is that silly boy letting the baby goat out at this hour? One of these days I'll run over it.” Her golden-brown hair had red streaks, and it was cut in a perky, asymmetrical style that revealed her neck. She wore a maroon pinstriped blazer over a white blouse and skirt.
The Queen, for there was little doubt that this was she, bowed in our direction while continuing on to an office next to the kitchen. She stopped abruptly. She turned as if she had seen a vision and she stared. I was in my suit, my tie loosened—did I look that out of place? Within the confines of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, all the tribes of Abraham were represented and I felt no more foreign than my patients or the staff. Now, as I attracted her attention, and that of the others there, I felt like a ferengi again.
“Praise God, praise His Son,” the Queen said, her hands on her cheeks. She shifted her tinted glasses to her forehead, revealing eyes that were wide open in astonishment. I looked behind me; could she be talking to someone else? Her expression, at first quizzical, now turned joyous, showing brilliant white and perfect teeth. “Child, do you not know me?” she said, coming close, her rose-scented attar preceding her.
I came to my feet, still puzzled.
“I pray for you every day,” she said in Amharic. “Don't tell me that I have changed that much?”
I towered over her. I was tongue-tied. She had been a mother and I a boy when I first met her.
“Tsige?” I said at last.
She lunged toward me, kissed my cheeks, held me at arm's length to better examine me, then pulled me to her to bump cheeks again and again. “My God, Blessed Mary and all the saints, how are you? Is it you? Endemenneh? Dehna ne woy? How are you? Can this be you? Praise God that you are here …”
After six years in America, it was only at that moment, standing in that yellow house, in her arms, cut grass under my feet, that I felt at ease in this land, felt my guard come down and the muscles in my belly and neck relax. Here was someone from my past, from my very street, someone whom I liked and with whom I had always felt a bond. I kissed her cheeks as vigorously as she kissed mine: Who would stop first? Not I.
Tayitu peered in from the kitchen. Two other women looked over the upstairs rail. Our fellow diners stopped to watch. They were displaced people, just like us, and they understood all too well these kinds of reunions, these moments when a piece of your old house comes floating by in the river.
“What are you doing here?” Tsige said. “You mean you didn't come to see me?”
“I came to eat. I had no idea! I've been living in New York for six years. I'm here just for the day. I'm a doctor now. A surgeon.”
“A surgeon!” She gasped, falling back, clasping her hands to her heart. Then she kissed the back of my wrists, first one, then the other. “A surgeon. You brave, brave child.” She turned to our audience and in the tones of a cantor she continued, still in Amharic, “Listen, all you unbelievers, when he was a little boy, and when my baby was dying, who took me to the right place in the hospital? It was he. Who called the doctor, who was his father, to see my child? He did. Then who was it who stayed with me as my baby fought for life? No one but him. He was the only one by my side when my little baby died. No one else was there for me, if only you knew …” The tears streamed down her face, and in an instant the mood in the room went from the joy of reunion to profound sadness, as if those two emotions were invariably linked. I heard sympathetic clucks and tsks from the men, and Tayitu blew her nose and dabbed at her good eye, while the other two women wept