Matron felt she had said enough. It was a gamble. She had nothing to put on the table but the truth.
CHAPTER 15
Crookedness of
the Serpent
THE NEWBORNS SEEMED UNREAL to Ghosh, all noses and wrinkles, as if they'd been planted in Hema's house, a lab experiment gone awry. Ghosh tried to make appropriate noises and act interested, but he found himself resenting the attention they were getting.
It was five days since Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death. He had stopped by Hema's house in the early evening before setting out to look for Stone. He'd found his Almaz there, very much at home, immersed in the task of caring for the babies, barely registering his presence. The last few days, he had been forced to make his own coffee and heat his own bathwater. Matron, Sister Asqual, Rosina, and several nursing students were there, too, fussing over the newborns. Rosina, with nothing to occupy her now that Thomas Stone was gone, had also moved over to Hema's. No one noticed when he left Hema's bungalow.
He drove first to the Ghion and the Ras hotels, then to the police headquarters where he sought out a sergeant he knew. The man had no news for him. He drove through the Piazza from one end to the other, and then, after a beer at St. George's, decided it was time to go home. His plans to leave had solidified. He had an airline ticket to Rome, then on to Chicago, leaving in four weeks. By that time, perhaps things at Missing would have settled. He couldn't see himself staying on, not now, not with Stone gone and Sister dead. But he had yet to find the courage to tell Matron or Almaz—or Hema.
It was dark when he pulled into his carport. He saw Almaz squatting by the back wall, wrapped against the cold so only her eyes showed. She was waiting for him just as she had the night Sister Mary Joseph Praise had died.
“Oh God. What now?”
She came to the passenger door, yanked it open, and climbed in. “Is it Stone?” he said. “What happened?”
“Where have you been? No, it's not Stone. One of the babies stopped breathing. Let's go to Dr. Hema's bungalow.”
THE BLUE NIGHT-LIGHT made Hema's bedroom seem surreal, like a set for a movie. Hema was in a nightdress, her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders. He found it difficult to look away.
The two newborns were on the bed, their chests rising and falling evenly, eyes closed, and their faces peaceful.
Turning back to Hema, he saw she was trembling, her lips quivering. He put his hands out, palms up, asking what had happened. By way of an answer, she flew into his arms.
He held her.
In the years he had known her, he'd seen her happy, angry, sad, and even depressed but, underneath, always feisty. He had never seen her fearful; it was as if she'd become some other person.
He tried to lead her outside of the room, his arm still around her shoulder, but she resisted. “No,” she whispered. “We can't leave.”
“What's going on?”
“I happened to be looking at them just after I put them to bed. I saw Marion breathing evenly. But Shiva …” She sobbed now, as she pointed to the child with the dressing on his scalp. “I saw his stomach rise, then it went down as he exhaled … and then nothing. I watched as long as I could. ‘Hema, you are imagining things,’ I said. But I could see him turning blue, even in this light, especially when I compared his color with Marion's. I touched him, and his arms shot out as if he was falling, and he took a deep breath. His fingers curled around my finger. He was saying, Don't leave me. He was breathing again. Oh, my Shiva. If I hadn't been standing there … he'd be gone by now.”
She sobbed into her hands, which rested on his chest. Ghosh held her, her tears making his shirt damp. He didn't know what to say. He hoped she didn't smell beer. In a moment, she pulled away, and they stood arm in arm, Almaz just behind them, gazing at Shiva.
Why had Hema taken on the naming of the babies? It felt premature. He couldn't get his lips around the names. Were the names negotiable? What if Thomas Stone showed up? And why name the child of a nun and an Englishman after a Hindu god? And for the other twin, also a boy, why Marion? Surely it was temporary, until Stone came to his senses, or the British Embassy or someone made arrangements. Hema was acting as if the kids were hers.
“Did it happen more than once?” he asked.
“Yes! Once more. About thirty minutes later. Just when I was about to turn away. He exhaled … and stopped. I made myself wait. Surely he has to breathe. I held back until I couldn't stand it any longer. When I touched him he started breathing as if hed been waiting for that little push, as if he forgot. I've been here for the last three hours, too scared to even go to the loo. I didn't trust anyone else to watch, and besides I could not quite explain it to them … Thank God Almaz decided to stay to help me with the night feeds. I sent her to get you,” Hema said.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I'll watch them.”
She was back in no time. “What do you think?” she said, leaning against his arm as she dabbed her eyes with a hankie. “Shouldn't you listen to his lungs? He wasn't coughing or struggling.”
Ghosh, finger to chin, his eyes narrowing, studied the child quietly. After a long while he said, “I'll examine him thoroughly when he is awake. But I think I know what it is.”
The way she looked at him made his heart swell. This wasn't the Hema who reacted to everything he said with skepticism. “In fact, I'm sure. Apnea of the premature. It's well described. You see, his brain is still immature, and the respiratory center, which triggers each breath, isn't fully developed. He ‘forgets’ to breathe every now and then.”
“Are you sure it isn't something else?” She wasn't challenging him; like any mother, she wanted certainty from the doctor.
He nodded. “I'm sure. You were lucky. Usually apnea is fatal before anyone recognizes it.”
“Don't say that. Oh God. What can we do, Ghosh?”
He was about to tell her that there was nothing one could do. Nothing at all. If the child was lucky, it might outgrow the apnea in a few weeks. The only choice was to put these preemies on machines that breathed for them till their lungs matured. Even in England and America this was rarely done. At Missing it was out of the question.
She waited for his pronouncement. She had suspended her own breathing.
“Here is what we do,” he said, and she sighed. He was making this up. He didn't know if his plan would work. But he knew he did not have the heart to say there was nothing to be done.
“Get me a chair. One of those from the living room. Also give me some of your anklets and a pair of pliers. And some thread or twine. A clipboard or a notebook if you have one. And tell Almaz to make coffee. The strongest she can make and as much of it as she can make and tell her to fill up the thermos flask.”
This new Hema, the adoptive mother of the twins, rose at once to do his bidding, never asking why or how. He watched her dance away.
“If I knew you were that agreeable Id have asked for a cognac and a foot massage as well,” he muttered to himself. “And if this doesn't work … at least I'll have my bags packed.”
GHOSH SAT IN THE CHAIR, sipping coffee, a string wrapped around his finger, and the house silent around him. It was two in the morning. The other end of the string connected to one of Hema's anklets which he'd cut in half and looped around Shiva's foot. The tiny silver bells dangling from the anklet made a pleasant cymbal-like sound when the foot moved.
He had strapped his wristwatch to the arm of his chair. On the first page of an exercise book, he made vertical columns labeled with date and time. Shiva stirred in his sleep; the anklet sounding reassuringly. Earlier, they had fed the twins, adding one drop of coffee to Shiva's bottle. It was Ghosh's hope that caffeine, a nervous-system stimulant and irritant, would keep the respiratory center ticking. It had clearly made the infant more restless than his identical twin.
Hema slept on the sofa in the far corner of the living room, which was just beyond this bedroom. A floor lamp with a shade that they moved to Hema's room gave him light to see the page.<
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Ghosh studied the walls. A little girl in pigtails and a half sari stood between two adults. A framed picture of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, handsome and pensive, one finger on his cheek, hung opposite Ghosh's chair. He'd imagined Hema's bedroom would be neat, everything in its place. Instead, there were clothes spilling off the bed rail, a suitcase open on the floor, more clothes piled in the corner, and books and papers stacked on a chair. And just inside the bedroom door he noticed for the first time was a crate the size of a sideboard. She did it, he thought, as he leaned closer to read the writing on the outside. A Grundig, no less. The best money can buy. His own gramophone and radio had conked out a few months before.
Periodically he would glance at the child, make sure the little chest was moving. After what felt like half an hour, he yawned, looked at his watch, and was astonished to find that only seven minutes had passed. My God, this is going to be difficult, he thought. He finished his cup of coffee and poured a second.
He stood and circled the room. On one shelf was a bound set of books. GREAT WORLD CLASSICS SERIES was stamped in a gold imprint. He picked one volume and sat down. The book was beautifully bound, in a leathery cover, and had gold-trimmed pages that looked as if they had never been opened.
AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, he went to wake Hema. In sleep she looked like a little girl, both hands together and tucked under one cheek. He gently shook her, and she opened her eyes, saw him, and smiled. He held out the cup of coffee.
“My turn?” He nodded. She sat up. “Did he stop breathing?”
“Twice. There was no doubt about it.”
“God. Oh God. I wasn't imagining it, was I? We're so lucky I saw that first one.”
“Drink this, then wash your face and come to the bedroom.”
When she returned he gave her the thread running to the anklet, the notebook with the pen clipped to it. “Whatever you do, don't lie on the bed. Stay in this chair. It's the only way to stay awake. I've been reading, which really helps. I look up at the end of every page. If I hear the anklet move, then I don't look up and I keep reading. When he stopped breathing, I tugged at the anklet and he started right back up. Little fellow just forgets to breathe.”
“Why should he have to remember? Poor baby.”
HEMA HAD HARDLY SETTLED in the chair when she heard a strange noise. It took her a second to realize that it was the sound of Ghosh snoring. She tiptoed to where he was on the sofa, dead to the world, looking like a big teddy bear. She covered him with the blanket which had slipped to the floor, and she returned to her vigil. The snoring reassured her. It told her she was not alone. She picked up the book Ghosh had been reading.
She'd bought the set of twelve books from a staffer at the British Embassy who was returning home. She was ashamed not to have read even one. Ghosh had put a bookmark on page ninety-two. Had he really come that far? Why did he pick this book? She turned to the first page:
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?
She read that opening sentence three times before she understood what it might be about. She looked at the title of the book. Middlemarch. Why couldn't the writer be clear? She read on, only because Ghosh had managed to keep reading. Little by little, she found herself immersed in the story.
THE NEXT MORNING, as Ghosh made rounds, he wondered if the Colonel made it back to his garrison in Gondar without incident. If the Colonel had been arrested, or hanged, would news ever reach Missing? The Ethiopian Herald never wrote about treason, as if it were treasonable to report treason.
After looking in on his patients, Ghosh unearthed an incubator from one of the storage sheds behind Matron's bungalow. Ghosh was Missing's de facto pediatrician. In the early years he'd fashioned an incubator for premature babies. After the Swedish government opened a pediatric hospital in Addis Ababa, Missing sent all the very premature babies there and put the incubator away.
Despite its delicate construction with glass on four sides and a tin base, the incubator was still intact. He had Gebrew hose it off, dust it for fleas, put it in the sunlight for a few hours, then rinse it again with hot water. Ghosh wiped it down with alcohol before setting it up in Hema's bedroom. No sooner had he stepped back to admire it than Almaz walked around it three times making thew-thew sounds, stopping short of actually spitting. “To ward off the evil eye,” she explained in Amharic, wiping her lip with the back of her forearm.
“Remind me never to invite you into the operating theater,” Ghosh said in English. “Hema?” he said, hoping she would weigh in. “Antisepsis? Lister? Pasteur? Are you no longer a believer?”
“You forget I am postpartum, man,” she said. “Warding off spirits is much more important.”
The twins lay swaddled next to each other like larvae, sharing the incubator, their skulls covered with monkey caps and only their wizened, newborn faces showing. No matter how far apart Hema put them, when she came to them again, they would be in a V, their heads touching, facing each other, just as they had been in the womb.
SOME NIGHTS as he took his shift by the sleeping infant, exhausted, fighting sleep, he talked to himself. “Why are you here? Would she do this for you?” The old resentments made his jaw tighten. “You silly bugger, you allowed yourself to succumb to her spell again?” Why did he lack the willpower to say what must be said?
He told himself that once the infant, this Shiva, was over its breathing problem, he would leave. Knowing Hema, when she no longer had to rely on him, things would be back to where they had always been. Since Harris's visit, it was unclear if the Houston Baptists would continue their support. Matron wouldn't give her opinion.
For two weeks he and Hema kept a vigil over Shiva, getting help in the daytime, but reserving the night for themselves. They had finished Middlemarch in a week and it had given them plenty to discuss. He picked Zola's Three Cities Trilogy: Paris next, and that they both found absorbing. Shiva's episodes of apnea decreased from more than twenty a day to two a day and then ceased. They extended their vigil into a third week, just to be on the safe side.
Hema's sofa was too small for a man of Ghosh's proportions, and seeing him scrunched up there, she felt grateful to him and conscious of his sacrifice. It would have surprised her to know how much he relished occupying the space that she'd just vacated, and covering himself with a blanket still scented with her dreams. The jingling of Shiva's ankle bracelet filtered into his sleep, and one night he dreamed that Hema was dancing for him. Naked. It was so vivid, so real, that the next morning, he hurried to Cook's Travel, waited till they opened, and canceled his ticket to America. He did it before he had any coffee—or a chance to second-guess himself.
MATRON WAS INCREASINGLY STOOPED, her face more weathered in the aftermath of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death. She spent her evenings at Hema's—everybody did—but she didn't protest when Ghosh and Hema sent her back to her quarters by eight, accompanied by Koochooloo. That dog had become protective of Matron, and since the other two nameless dogs often followed Koochooloo, Matron had an entourage with her.
Two weeks after they buried Sister, Gebrew saw a barefoot coolie walk by with his right arm in a long cast, the elbow straight at his side. Worse still, the man was so sleepy he staggered and was in danger of breaking his head, not to mention his other arm. Gebrew felt terrible because it was he who had directed the coolie to the Russian hospital when he showed up at Missing with a fracture. The Russian doctors loved injecting barbiturates no matter what ailed you, and since their patients loved the needle, no one left the Russian hospital unsedated. Gebrew knew from his years at Missing that a broken forearm had to be cast in a neutral and functional position, with the elbow flexed to ninety degrees, the forearm midway bet
ween pronation and supination, even though he knew none of those terms. He escorted the unsteady coolie to the casualty room where, after Ghosh looked at the X-ray, the orderlies reapplied the cast. At that moment, though none of them quite realized it, Missing officially reopened for business.
Hema refused to leave the infants. She claimed she was no longer a doctor, but a mother. She was the kind of mother who was fearful for her children, who loved being with them and was unwilling to part from them. The two mamithus—Stone's Rosina and Ghosh's Almaz—took turns sleeping on a mattress in her kitchen, and were ready to help.
With Stone gone or dead, and Hema a full-time mother, once the gates opened, the burden on Ghosh was huge. Matron hired Bachelli to run the morning outpatient clinics where the great majority of Missing's patients were seen. This allowed Ghosh the freedom to operate when he could, and to concentrate on the patients admitted to the hospital.
SIX WEEKS AFTER Sister Mary Joseph Praise's death, the gravestone arrived, hauled up by donkey cart. Hema and Ghosh went to see it levered into place. The mason had carved a Coptic cross on the stone. Below it he had etched letters he copied from the paper Matron had given him:
Matron arrived, short of breath and agitated. The three of them stood there, studying the strange lettering. The mason looked on, hoping for a commendation. Matron let out a sigh of exasperation.
“I don't suppose he can do much about that now,” Matron said, and gave the man a nod. He gathered his crowbars and gunnysacks and led his animal away.
“I was thinking,” Hema said, her voice hoarse. “That inscription should read, ‘Died at the hands of a surgeon. Now safe in the arms of Jesus.’ “
“Hema!” Matron protested. “Custody of the tongue.”
“No, really,” Hema said. “A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.”