“ ‘Call no man happy until he dies,’ “ he said. Before I could tell if that was a smile or an expression of sadness on his face, he nodded and walked away.
48. Five Fingers
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the first Sunday of every month, I would ring Hema at her bungalow. It was seven o'clock, Monday morning, Addis time. The rates were best at this hour, but since Almaz, Gebrew, and sometimes Matron came on before Hema, it could still be a long and expensive call. Ever since Hema delivered Mengistu's—sorry, Comrade Mengistu's—child, we no longer worried about the secret police eavesdropping on us; besides, they were preoccupied with real enemies. Mengistu Haile Mariam, Strength of Mary, Secretary General of the Council of Peasants and Workers, Chairman of the Military Council of Socialist Ethiopia, President-for-Life of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Peoples of Ethiopia, General in Command of the Bureau for Armed Struggle Against Imperial Aggression in Tigre and Eritrea, had adopted an Albanian style of Marxism. The upper and middle classes and even the working poor had their houses confiscated and land taken away. But favors to Mengistu and particularly favors to his wife weren't forgotten; Missing's medicines and supplies were not held up in the Customs godown, and there were no palms to grease.
As I dialed Hema's number that Sunday, I pictured my Missing family watching the clock, coffee cups in their hands, waiting for the phone to ring from a continent none of them had seen. Almaz picked up the receiver, with Gebrew leaning in, both of them suddenly shy and self-conscious. Their side of the conversation consisted of repeated Ende-menneh? Dehna-ne-woy?—How-are-you? Are-you-well, then?—until these godparents of mine were satisfied that their lij, their child, was all right. They told me they kept me in their prayers, fasted for me. “Pray that I'll see you soon and may God take care of you and your health,” I said. Matron was just the opposite, chatty and spontaneous, as if we had run into each other in the corridor outside her office.
I had reported to Hema my first sighting of Thomas Stone. Shed listened without comment, and she must have smiled when she heard of her son breaking and entering Thomas Stone's apartment. I didn't censor information for her benefit; surely, Thomas Stone was no longer the threat he'd once been to her when we were minors. When I had told her about placing the bookmark on Stone's desk as my calling card, I had read from Hema's silence that she'd known nothing about Shiva's having The Expedient Operator: A Short Practice of Tropical Surgery. I surmised from that and later confirmed from Matron that Hema had made every attempt to banish the book from Missing; she'd never wanted me or Shiva to see his work, much less a picture of him.
“I had dinner with Thomas Stone, Ma,” I said when she came on the line. “I ate injera for the first time in well over a year.” She was miffed to learn that Ghosh had a message for Stone—I read that in the fact that she said nothing. When I told her just what Ghosh had wanted me to say to Stone, I heard a vigorous honk on her kerchief. The message said more about Ghosh and his selflessness than it did about Thomas Stone. I asked if she knew about the bookmark or a letter that accompanied it. She didn't.
“Maybe Shiva knows,” I said. “Can I speak to him?”
She called out his name, a summons I had heard so many times since I was a child. I heard Shiva's reply, and could judge from its echo that it had come from our childhood room. While I waited, I heard Hema asking Matron about the bookmark; her “No!” told me it was news to her.
THE TELEPHONE WAS NEVER a comfortable instrument in Shiva's hands. He was fine, the fistula work was going very well, and no, he knew nothing about any missing letter.
“Do you remember the bookmark, Shiva, and the reference to a letter?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But you're saying there was no letter in the book?”
“No letter.”
“How did you get the book, Shiva?”
“Ghosh gave it to me.”
“When?”
“When he was dying. He wanted to talk with me about many things. This was one. He said he'd taken the book from Thomas Stone's quarters on the day we were born. He had kept it. He wanted me to have it.”
“Was that the first time you'd seen the textbook or seen a picture of Thomas Stone?”
“Yes.”
“Did Ghosh mention a letter from Sister Mary—our mother—to Stone?”
“No, he didn't.”
“Did he say why he wanted you to have the book?”
“No.”
“When you saw the bookmark and the reference to the letter, did you go back and ask him?”
“No.”
I sighed. I could have stopped there, but I had come this far. “Why not?” I asked.
“If he wanted me to have the letter, he would have given it to me.”
“Why did you give me the book, Shiva?”
“I wanted you to have it.”
There was no annoyance in Shiva's voice; his tone was no different than when we began—I wondered if he'd picked up the irritation in mine. Shiva was right: there either was no letter, or Ghosh had the letter and had his reasons for destroying it.
I was about to say good-bye. I knew better than to expect my brother to ask about my health or my welfare. But he took me aback by saying, “How are your operating theaters?” He wanted to know about the layout, how far away the autoclave and the locker rooms were, and was there a sink outside each room, or one common scrubbing area. I gave him a detailed picture. When I was done, I waited. Once again, he surprised me: “When are you coming home, Marion?”
“Well, Shiva … I have four more years of residency.”
Was this his way of saying he was sorry for everything that had happened? That he missed me? Did I want that from him? I wasn't sure, so all I added was, “I don't know if it is safe for me to come, but if it is, I'd love to come a year or so from now … Why don't you come visit here?”
“Will I be able to see your operating theaters?”
“Sure. We call them operating rooms here, not theaters. But I can arrange for you to see them.”
“Okay. I'll be there.”
Hema came back on the line. She was in a chatty mood, reluctant to let me go. Listening to her lilting voice, I was transported back to Missing Mean Time, as if I were sitting by the phone under Nehru's photograph and looking across the room at the portrait of Ghosh which consecrated the spot where he spent so many hours listening to the Grundig.
When I hung up I felt despair: I was back in the Bronx, my walls bare but for the framed Ecstasy of St. Teresa. My beeper, silent till then, went off. In answering its summons, I slipped the yoke back around my neck; indeed, I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the crises that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears—the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home. Then in four weeks, it was time to dial Missing again. Were these phone calls just as difficult for Hema? I wondered.
In a letter after our call, Hema said that shed checked with Bachelli, Almaz, and even W. W. Gonad to see if they had heard of Ghosh or Sister leaving a letter behind, but no one had. She told me that Shiva's application for an exit visa to come visit me was held up by the government; he was asked to provide affidavits to show he had no debts in Ethiopia, and moreover that I had no debts for which he might be responsible. She said she would remind Shiva to work on the visa. Reading between the lines, I knew and she knew that Shiva had lost interest.