Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [39]
“You see Missing Hospital, madam?” This from Adid who peered over her shoulder.
“Missing is missing,” she said.
Near the airport an entire hillside had turned to a flaming orange from the blooming of the meskel flower which told her that the rainy season must have ended. Another hillside was covered with lean-tos and shacks of corrugated tin, the colors rust brown or a darker corrosive hue. Each shack shared a wall with its neighbor, so that collectively they looked like long irregular railway carriages that snaked across the hill, sending buds and offshoots in all directions.
THE FRENCHMAN BUZZED low over the strip so that the customs agent could get on his bicycle and shoo stray cows from the runway He circled and landed.
Cars and vans in the bile-green colors of the Ethiopian police raced up to the plane, along with every functionary of the Ethiopian Airlines staff. The cargo door was yanked open, and frantic hands rushed to unload the khat. They tossed the bundles into a VW Kombi, then into a three-wheeler van, and when those were full, they stuffed the police cars, and they all raced off, sirens sounding. Only then were the passengers allowed to disembark.
The engine of the blue-and-white Fiat Seicento whined as the six-hundred milliliter engine, which gave it its name, strained to carry Hem-latha and her Grundig. Shed personally supervised the loading of the big crate onto the roof rack.
It was a perfect sunny afternoon in Addis, and it made her forget that she was more than two days overdue at Missing. The light at this altitude was so different from Madras, suffusing what it graced rather than glaring off every surface. There was no hint in the breeze of rain, though that could change in an instant. She caught the woody, medicinal odor of eucalyptus, a scent that would never do in a perfume but was invigorating when it was in the air. She smelled frankincense, which every household threw onto the charcoal stove. She was glad to be alive, and glad to be back in Addis, but she didn't know what to make of the wave of nostalgia that overcame her, an unfulfilled longing that she could not define.
With the end of the rains, makeshift stalls had popped up selling red and green chilies, lemons, and roasted maize. A man with a bleating sheep draped around his neck like a cape struggled to see the road in front of him. A woman sold bundles of eucalyptus leaves used as cooking fuel for making injera—the pancakelike food made from a grain, tef. Farther on Hema saw a little girl pour batter on a huge flat griddle which sat on three bricks with a fire underneath. When the Injera was ready, it would be peeled off like a tablecloth, then folded once, twice, and once more, and stored in a basket.
An old woman in the black clothes of mourning stopped to assist a mother sling her baby onto her back in a pouch made out of her shama— the white cotton cloth that men and women alike wrapped around their shoulders.
A man with withered legs that were folded into his chest swung stiff armed along the dirt sidewalk. He had blocks of wood with a handle in each hand, which he planted on the ground, and then he swung his bottom forward. He moved surprisingly well, like the letter M marching down the road. Her brief absence made these sights a novelty again.