My mother had spoken.
What I didn't know then was that she had more to say.
54. Homefires
IT WAS DUSK when we landed. I had been away from Addis for seven years. The white buildings of Missing looked rounded at the edges, worn down, as if theyd been excavated in an archaeological dig but not restored.
When the taxi reached Shiva's toolshed I had the driver let me out. I told Hema to go on because I wanted to walk the rest of the way.
I stood listening once the car pulled away; the dry rustle of the leaves was like a child's hand sifting through a box of coins. The sound had lost all its menace for me. I found that dented and bent curb, which had stopped a motorcycle but not its rider. I looked down into the trees and the shadows where he fell. The spot no longer generated any dread for me. All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear. I looked out over trees to the city. The sky was a mad painter's canvas, as if halfway through the artist had decided against azure and had instead splashed ochre and crimson and black on the palette. The city was alight, glowing, but here and there it was obscured by great puffs of mist which smudged my view, like the smoke of many small battles.
I walked up the hill to the house, a thousand memories now of Shiva and me doing our three-legged race to be in time for dinner, or the two of us and Genet walking back with our school books, of Zemui coming up with his motorcycle and then coasting the last hundred yards. Up ahead I could see the figures huddled around our taxi and around Hema. Then Matron, Gebrew, and Almaz separated from the vehicle, silhouetted against the last embers of the sky, and they waited for me.
I'D BEEN BACK just three days when Matron summoned me to Casualty. A young girl with a bull-gore wound to the abdomen was exsanguinating before our eyes. The child would have died if wed tried to send her elsewhere. I took her to Operating Theater 3 at once, and found the bleeder. What followed next—cutting out damaged bowel, washing out the peritoneal cavity, fashioning a colostomy, was routine, but its effect on me was anything but. I felt I was on consecrated soil, standing on the same spot where Thomas Stone, Ghosh, and Shiva had stood, each with scalpel in hand. At the end of the surgery, when I turned to leave, weaving around the bucket and wires on the floor, I looked up and saw Shiva in the new glass that separated Theater 3 from its spanking-new mate, Theater 4. The sight took my breath away. I remembered Shiva's first words when the killing of Koochooloo's puppies prompted him to break years of silence: Will you forget if someone kills me or Marion?
No, Shiva, we'll never forget you, I said to my reflection. In saying that I think I decided my future.
AMONG SHIVA'S BELONGINGS in his room, I found a key on a key-holder shaped like the Congo. In Shiva's toolshed was a strange-looking motorcycle, with bright red, stubby fenders, a teardrop-shaped red fuel tank, handlebars that would have been called ape hangers in America, and lovely chrome wheels. Hema said that Shiva had bought the bike secondhand a few years back and that he kept tinkering with it. She said he had only ridden it late at night when there was no traffic. The udderlike engine looked very familiar, and its low rumble when I kick-started it gave away its true identity.
I operated three days a week, and when my return ticket to New York was about to expire, I did nothing.
Shiva's liver functioned beautifully in me year after year. The shots of hepatitis B immunoglobulin helped. The virus became so dormant that my blood tests showed I wasn't a carrier, and that I couldn't infect anyone. Matron insisted it was a miracle, and I had to agree.
In 1991, five years after my return, I stood by the gates of Missing just as I had when I was a child, and I watched the forces of the Tigre People's Liberation Front and other freedom fighters make their way into the city. They were dressed in the same functional shirts, shorts, and sandals of the guerrillas I had seen in Eritrea, bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, rifles in their hands. They didn't march in formation, yet their faces showed the discipline and confidence of men who believed in their cause. There was no looting, no mayhem. The only looting was by the Comrade President-for-Life, who emptied the Treasury and flew with his loot to Zimbabwe, where his fellow looter, Mugabe, gave him refuge. Mengistu was a despised figure, a blight on the nation, a man about whom to this day no one can find a good word to say Almaz said that the souls of all those he murdered were assembled in a stadium, waiting to give him a reception on his way to hell.
EVERY EVENING I checked on Matron before I went to bed. She was so tremulous and bent over with age, but her joy in life was unchanged. We would have a cup of cocoa together. Her only LP—Bach—played in the background on the small gramophone I had bought for her. She never tired of the “Gloria,” which I will always associate with her. As Id sit with her, she would look over and smile as if she always knew Id come back to the land I had once disowned. It had been Matron's wish that God might call her either during her prayers or her sleep, and He obliged. It was 1991, a few months after the President-for-Life fled; I found her in her chair, the record still spinning on her gramophone. Just the previous morning she had been supervising the planting of a new cultivar, the Rosa rubiginosa Shiva, which she had officialy registered with the Royal Society. To me it looked as if the whole city, rich and poor, turned out for her funeral. Almaz said that the streets to heaven were lined by the souls of those who were grateful to Matron, and that her throne was next to Mary's.
Almaz and Gebrew were retired and ensconced in new, comfortable quarters built for them at Missing, free to spend their time in any way they chose. I suppose it should not have surprised me that they would spend it in fasting and prayer.
The Shiva Stone Institute for Fistula Surgery with Hema as its titular head grew, as did its funding. Hema worked every day, and zealous young gynecologists from within the country, but also from other African nations, came to train and take up the cause. The Staff Probationer, whose room I had visited so many years ago, had become a skilled assistant under Shiva's tutelage, and now, with Hema's encouragement, she was a confident surgeon on her own, well suited to the painstaking task of training the young doctors who came to learn how to treat this one condition. I insisted on learning her real name, and reluctantly she told me it was Naeema. But it was not a name she ever used; she had become the Staff Probationer even to herself.
In going through Matron's papers, I discovered that the anonymous donor who had modestly funded Shiva's work for so many years was none other than Thomas Stone. Now he worked to direct other donors and foundations to support Missing.
I HAD TO WAIT till 2004 for Sister Mary Joseph Praise's message to reach me. It happened just after New Year's on the Western calendar, a time when the mimosa trees that surrounded the outpatient building had sprung their violet and yellow blooms and Missing was enveloped in the scent of vanilla.
I'd gone into the autoclave room between patients. The framed print of Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa looked slightly askew. In straightening it, I found the hook was loose. When I took the frame down to tighten the hook, I noticed the thick paper backing had come unglued at one edge. The room stayed humid because of the autoclave, and it appeared to have weakened the glue. On trying to get the backing to stick again, I spied a gossamer-thin letter paper folded and ensconced behind that backing, the lines of blue writing showing through.