Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [60]
“Yesus Christos, please forgive this sinner, but he was out drinking last night,” she said as she stooped to pick up a beer bottle from under the bed. Alas, Almaz was in a proselytizing mood. Ghosh felt as if he were eavesdropping on her private conversation with God. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.
“Blessed St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and all the other saints,” she continued in Amharic, confident he would understand, “for I prayed for master to be a new man, for him to one day give up his dooriye ways, but I was wrong, your venerable holinesses.”
It was the word dooriye that tricked Ghosh into speaking. It meant “lout,” “lecher,” “reprobate”—and it stung him to hear that word.
“What gives you the right to address me this way?” he said, though he didn't really feel the anger his voice carried. He was about to add, Are you my wife?—but choked those words off. To his perpetual shame, he and Almaz had been intimate twice over the years, both times when he was drunk. She'd lain down, lifted, and spread, grumbling even as her hips fell into rhythm with his, but no more than she grumbled about the coffee or hot water. He'd decided that grumbling with Almaz was the language of both pleasure and pain. When they were spent she'd sighed, pulled her skirt down, and asked, “Will there be anything else?” before leaving him to his guilt.
He loved her for never holding those two episodes against him. But it had given her the license to nag him, to raise her grumbling to a steady pitch. That was her prerogative, but the saints help anyone else who addressed him in that tone; she defended him, his belongings, and his reputation with her tongue and with her fists and feet if necessary. Sometimes he felt that she owned him.
“Why do you harass me like this?” he said, the fire gone from his voice. He knew hed never have the courage to break the news of his leaving to her.
“Who said I was talking to you?” Almaz replied.
But when she left he saw the two aspirins in the saucer with his coffee, and his heart melted. My greatest consolation, Ghosh thought, for only the hundredth time since his arrival in Ethiopia, has been the women of this land. The country had completely surprised him. Despite pictures he'd seen in National Geographic, he'd been unprepared for this mountain empire shrouded in mist. The cold, the altitude, the wild roses, the towering trees, reminded him of Coonoor, a hill station in India he'd visited as a boy. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Ethiopia, may have been exceptional in his bearing and dignity, but Ghosh discovered that His Majesty's people shared his physical features. Their sharp, sculpted noses and soulful eyes set them between Persians and Africans, with the kinky hair of the latter, and the lighter skin of the former. Reserved, excessively formal, and often morose, they were quick to anger, quick to imagine insults to their pride. As for theories of conspiracy and the most terrible pessimism, surely they'd cornered the world market on those. But get past all those superficial attributes, and you found people who were supremely intelligent, loving, hospitable, and generous.
“Thank you, Almaz,” he called out. She pretended not to hear.
IN THE BATHROOM Ghosh felt a sharp pain as he peed and was forced to cut off his stream. “Like sliding down the edge of a razor blade using my balls as brakes,” he muttered, his eyes tearing. What did the French call it? Chaude pisse, but that didn't come close to describing his symptoms.
Was this mysterious irritation from lack of use? Or from a kidney stone? Or was there, as he suspected, a mild, endemic inflammation along the passage that carried urine out? Penicillin did nothing for this condition, which waxed and waned. He'd devoted himself to this question of causation, spending hours at the microscope with his urine and with that of others with similar symptoms, studying it