Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [43]
It was then that Gebrew said, “Oh, madam! This is what I have been trying to tell you. Baby is stuck! The baby. And Sister! And the baby!”
She did not understand. She'd never seen him so worked up. She smiled and waited.
“Madam! Sister is borning! She is not borning well!”
“What? Say again?” Perhaps being away and not hearing Amharic had made her misunderstand.
“Sister, madam,” Gebrew said, alarmed that he didn't seem to be getting through, and thinking volume and pitch might help, though what came out was a squeak.
“Sister” in Missing always referred to Sister Mary Joseph Praise, for the only other nun there was Matron Hirst, who went by Matron, while all the other nurses were addressed as Nurse Almaz or Nurse Esther, and not Sister.
To Hema's astonishment, Gebrew was crying, and his voice turned shrill. “Passage is closed! I tried everything. I opened all the doors and windows. I split open a chicken!”
He clutched his belly and strained in a bizarre imitation of parturition. He tried English. “Baby! Baby? Madam, baby?”
What he tried to convey was clear enough; there was no mistaking it. But it would have been difficult for Hema to believe it in any language.
CHAPTER 7
Fetor Terribilis
THE DOORS TO THE OPERATING THEATER burst open. The probationer shrieked. Matron clutched her chest at the sight of the sari-clad woman standing there, hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring.
They froze. How were they to know if this was their very own Hema, or an apparition? It seemed taller and fuller than Hema, and it had the bloodshot eyes of a dragon. Only when it opened its mouth and said, “What bloody nonsense is Gebrew talking? In God's name, what is going on?” did their doubts vanish.
“It's a miracle,” Matron said, referring to the fact of Hema's arrival, but this only further confused Hema. The probationer, her face flushed and her pockmarks shining like sunken nailheads, added, “Amen.”
Stone stood and unfurrowed his brows at the sight of Hema. Though he didn't say a word, his expression was that of a man who, having fallen into a crevasse, spotted the bowline lowered from the heavens.
Hema, recalling this event many years later, said to me, “My saliva turned to cement, son. A sweat broke out over my face and neck, even though it was freezing in there. You see, even before I digested the medi cal facts, I'd already registered that smell.”
“What smell?”
“You won't find it any textbooks, Marion, so don't bother looking. But it's etched here,” she said, tapping her head. “If I chose to write a textbook, not that I have any interest in that kind of thing, I'd have a chapter on nothing but obstetric odors.” The smell was both astringent and saccharine, these two contrary characteristics coming together in what she'd come to think of as fetor terribilis. “It always means a labor room catastrophe. Dead mothers, or dead babies, or homicidal husbands. Or all the above.”
She couldn't believe the amount of blood on the floor. The sight of instruments lying helter-skelter—on the patient, next to the patient, on the operating table—assaulted her senses. But most of all—and shed been resisting this—she couldn't accept the fact that Sister Mary Joseph Praise, sweet Sister, who should have been standing, gowned, masked, and scrubbed, a beacon of calm in this calamity instead lay all but lifeless on the table, her skin porcelain white and her lips drained of all color.
Hema's thoughts became dissociated, as if they were no longer hers but instead were elegant copperplate scrolling before her in a dream. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's left hand lying supine on the table drew Hema's eye. The fingers were curled, the index finger less so, as if she'd been pointing, when sleep or coma overcame her. It was a posture of repose that one rarely associated with Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Hema's eyes would be drawn to that hand repeatedly as the hour unfolded.
The sight of Thomas Stone brought her back to her senses and galvanized her. Seeing Stone