Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [40]
A herd of mules overladen with firewood trotted along, their expressions docile and angelic in the face of the whipping they were getting from the barefoot owner who ran with them. The taxi driver leaned on his horn. Despite the high whine of the engine, the taxi managed only to crawl along like another overburdened beast.
A lorry carrying sheep, the poor animals so crowded together they could hardly blink, overtook them. These were the lucky animals being carried to slaughter. Before Meskel, the feast celebrating the finding of Christ's cross, huge herds of sheep would arrive in the capital, the animals wobbly from exhaustion, barely surviving this march to the feast table. Then, in the days after Meskel, one neither heard nor saw any sheep. Instead the skin traders walked the streets and alleys shouting, “Ye beg koda alle!”—”The sheep's hide whoever has!” A household would hail him, and after some haggling, he'd drape another skin over the ones that he was already shouldering and resume his cry.
Suddenly Hemlatha noticed children everywhere as if they'd been invisible all these years. Two boys were racing their crude metal hoops, using a stick to guide and push, weaving this way and that and making motorcar noises. A toddler with railroad tracks of snot connecting nose to lip watched with envy. Its head had been shaved to leave a traffic-island tuft in front; Hema was told when she first came to Ethiopia that this strange haircut was so that if God chose to take that child (and He took so many), the tuft gave Him a handle by which to lift it to heaven.
The child's mother stood outlined by the bead curtain of a buna-bet— coffeehouse—though it was really a bar, offering things more potent than coffee. At night the bar would glow within from the tube lights, painted green, yellow, and red, and the woman, transformed by that hour, would offer drinks and her company. An espresso machine on a zinc bar established the class of an establishment—this was a legacy of the Italian occupation. The woman's flat eyes fell on the cab, then on Hema, and her expression hardened as if she had seen a competitor. She lifted her gaze to the strange container on the taxi's roof, and then she looked nonchalantly away as if to say, I'm not the least bit impressed. She might be an Amhara, Hema thought, with that walnut skin, the high cheekbones. She is so pretty. Probably a friend of Ghosh. A comb was stuck in her hair as if she were taking a break from teasing it into shape. Her legs shone from Nivea. She might even swallow a dab or two of Nivea now and then, in the belief it lightened the complexion. “For all I know, it works,” Hema said, though she shuddered at the thought.
Between the newer cinder-block buildings were huts, the wattle walls unpainted and revealing their sticks, straw, and mud. All it took was a pole stuck in the ground with an empty can inverted over the top to say, This, too, is a buna-bet, and though we don't have an espresso machine, and though we sell homebrewed tej and talla instead of bottled St. George beer, we offer the same services as the other.
The oldest profession in the world raised no eyebrows, even with Hema. Shed learned it was futile to object—it would have been like taking exception to oxygen. But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.
On the main road Hema saw a work crew of grinning, dark-skinned, big-boned Gurages supervised by a laughing Italian overseer. The Gur -age were southerners with a well-deserved reputation for being hardworking and willing to take on what the locals wouldn't. Gebrew, when he needed extra hands at Missing, would simply step out of the front gate and yell “Gurage!” though of late, that could be seen as insulting, so it was safer to shout “Coolie!”
The crew was barefoot but for the overseer and one man who had squeezed into ill-fitting plastic shoes, having cut holes in them for his big toes. By all rights Hema should have been incensed by this sight