Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [276]
I knelt, too. I addressed God and Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Shiva and Ghosh—all the beings I carried with me in the flesh and in spirit. Thank you for letting me be alive, letting me see this marble dream. I felt a great peace, a sense that coming to this spot had completed the circuit, and now a blocked current would flow and I could rest. If “ecstasy” meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
My mother had spoken.
What I didn't know then was that she had more to say.
CHAPTER 54
Homefires
IT WAS DUSK when we landed. I had been away from Addis for seven years. The white buildings of Missing looked rounded at the edges, worn down, as if theyd been excavated in an archaeological dig but not restored.
When the taxi reached Shiva's toolshed I had the driver let me out. I told Hema to go on because I wanted to walk the rest of the way.
I stood listening once the car pulled away; the dry rustle of the leaves was like a child's hand sifting through a box of coins. The sound had lost all its menace for me. I found that dented and bent curb, which had stopped a motorcycle but not its rider. I looked down into the trees and the shadows where he fell. The spot no longer generated any dread for me. All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear. I looked out over trees to the city. The sky was a mad painter's canvas, as if halfway through the artist had decided against azure and had instead splashed ochre and crimson and black on the palette. The city was alight, glowing, but here and there it was obscured by great puffs of mist which smudged my view, like the smoke of many small battles.
I walked up the hill to the house, a thousand memories now of Shiva and me doing our three-legged race to be in time for dinner, or the two of us and Genet walking back with our school books, of Zemui coming up with his motorcycle and then coasting the last hundred yards. Up ahead I could see the figures huddled around our taxi and around Hema. Then Matron, Gebrew, and Almaz separated from the vehicle, silhouetted against the last embers of the sky, and they waited for me.
I'D BEEN BACK just three days when Matron summoned me to Casualty. A young girl with a bull-gore wound to the abdomen was exsanguinating before our eyes. The child would have died if wed tried to send her elsewhere. I took her to Operating Theater 3 at once, and found the bleeder. What followed next—cutting out damaged bowel, washing out the peritoneal cavity, fashioning a colostomy, was routine, but its effect on me was anything but. I felt I was on consecrated soil, standing on the same spot where Thomas Stone, Ghosh, and Shiva had stood, each with scalpel in hand. At the end of the surgery, when I turned to leave, weaving around the bucket and wires on the floor, I looked up and saw Shiva in the new glass that separated Theater 3 from its spanking-new mate, Theater 4. The sight took my breath away. I remembered Shiva's first words when the killing of Koochooloo's puppies prompted him to break years of silence: Will you forget if someone kills me or Marion?
No, Shiva, we'll never forget you, I said to my reflection. In saying that I think I decided my future.
AMONG SHIVA'S BELONGINGS in his room, I found a key on a key-holder shaped like the Congo. In Shiva's toolshed was a strange-looking motorcycle, with bright red, stubby fenders, a teardrop-shaped red fuel tank, handlebars that would have been called ape hangers in America, and lovely chrome wheels. Hema said that Shiva had bought the bike secondhand a few years back and that he kept tinkering with it. She said he had only ridden it late at night when there was no traffic. The udderlike engine looked very familiar, and its low rumble when I kick-started it gave