The oldest profession in the world raised no eyebrows, even with Hema. Shed learned it was futile to object—it would have been like taking exception to oxygen. But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.
On the main road Hema saw a work crew of grinning, dark-skinned, big-boned Gurages supervised by a laughing Italian overseer. The Gur -age were southerners with a well-deserved reputation for being hardworking and willing to take on what the locals wouldn't. Gebrew, when he needed extra hands at Missing, would simply step out of the front gate and yell “Gurage!” though of late, that could be seen as insulting, so it was safer to shout “Coolie!”
The crew was barefoot but for the overseer and one man who had squeezed into ill-fitting plastic shoes, having cut holes in them for his big toes. By all rights Hema should have been incensed by this sight of black laborers and a white overseer, and she wondered why she wasn't; maybe it was because the Italians who stayed behind in Ethiopia after it was liberated were so easygoing, so ready to mock themselves, that they were hard to resent. Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals. Or maybe that was just the way of being that they found worked best in their circumstance. Hema saw the laborers stand still as soon as the overseer turned away. A snail's pace, but nevertheless, schools, offices, a grand post office, a national bank, were coming up to match the grandeur of Trinity Cathedral, the Parliament Building, and the Jubilee Palace. The Emperor's vision of his European-style African capital was taking shape.
PERHAPS IT WAS BECAUSE the Emperor was still on her mind, and because her taxi was at the intersection where, in place of the string of shops, there once stood a gallows, but suddenly Hema was thinking about a scene that haunted her.
It was at this very spot in 1946 that she and Ghosh, in their first months in Addis, had come upon a crowd blocking the road. Standing on the running board of Ghosh's Volkswagen, Hema had seen a crudely constructed frame and the three dangling nooses. A modified Trenta Quattro with military markings had pulled up. Three handcuffed Ethio pian prisoners on the flatbed were hauled to their feet. The men were coatless, but otherwise, in their shirts, shoes, and pants, they looked as if theyd been interrupted while having dinner.
An Ethiopian officer in Imperial Bodyguard uniform read from a piece of paper and tossed it aside. Hema watched, fascinated, as he put the noose over each head and positioned the knot to one side, behind the ear. The condemned seemed resigned to their fate, which was in itself a form of extreme bravery. The bearing of a tall older man made Hema certain the prisoners were military. This graying but upright prisoner spoke to the Imperial Bodyguard officer who inclined his head to listen. He nodded, and removed the noose. The prisoner then leaned over the truck and held his handcuffed wrists out to a weeping woman. She removed a ring from his finger and kissed his hand. The prisoner stepped back, looked down like an actor searching for his mark onstage, then bowed to this executioner, who returned the gesture and replaced the noose with the delicacy of a husband garlanding his new bride.
Hema didn't understand what she was seeing, not then anyway. She half believed it to be a form of theater. The violence of what followed— the truck roaring away, the thrashing forms, the awkward and impossible angle of head on chest, the mad rush of onlookers to tear off the dead men's shoes—was less disturbing than the idea that she was living in a country where such things could take place. Sure, she'd seen brutality cruelty, in Madras, but they took the form of neglect and indifference to suffering, or they took the form of corruption.
The event left Hema sick for days. She contemplated leaving Ethio pia. There'd been nothing about it in the Ethiopian Herald, no comment the government wished to make. The men had been planning revolution, so people said, and this was the Emperor's response. He was keeping a fragile country on course.
Hema had never forgotten the reluctant executioner, a handsome man, his temples forming a sharp angle with his brow so his head was shaped like a hatchet. His nose was flattened at its base as if from an old fracture. She remembered his stately bow to the condemned before he carried out his orders. Shed felt pity and even respect for him. The conflict between his duty and his compassion was revealed by that gesture. Had he refused to follow orders, his neck would have been stretched. Hema was sure he'd acted against his conscience.
Maybe this is what keeps me in Addis all these years, Hema thought, this juxtaposition of culture and brutality, this molding of the new out of the crucible of primeval mud. The city is evolving, and I feel part of that evolution, unlike in Madras, where the city seems to have been completed centuries before I was born. Did anyone but my parents notice that I left? “Why don't you stay in India? There are so many poor women who die needlessly here in Madras,” her father had said halfheartedly on this visit. “You want me to give free service to the poor from this house?” she said. “If not, then get me a job. Let the City Corporation hire me, or the Government Medical Service. If my country needs me, why is it that they don't take me?” They both knew the answer: jobs went to those willing to grease palms. She sighed, causing the taxi driver to look over. She was reliving the pain of saying good-bye to her parents yet again.
The sight of barefoot peasants carrying impossible head loads and horse-drawn gharries plying the roads maintained the aura and mystique of this ancient kingdom that almost justified the fabulous tales of Prester John, who wrote in medieval times of a magical Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim lands. Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here Hema felt she'd tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had traveled back to an earlier epoch. The power filtered down from His Majesty to the Rases, the Dejazmaches, and the lesser nobility and then to the vassals and peons. Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?
AT ABOUT TWO in the afternoon, her taxi pulled up to the chukker-brown gates of Missing, a world unto itself.
The rock wall enclosed the hospital grounds and hid the buildings. Eucalyptus towered over the wall, and where there was no eucalyptus there were firs and jacaranda and acacia. Green bottle shards poked up from the mortar at the top of the wall to dissuade intruders—robbery and petty theft were rampant in Addis—though the sight of roses lapping over the wall softened this deterrent. The wrought-iron gate covered with sheet metal was normally kept closed, and pedestrians were admitted through the smaller, hinged door in the gate. But now the big gate was wide open, as was the pedestrian flap.
Inside, Hema saw that Gebrew's sentry hut door and shutter were also open, and when they crested the hill, she could see that every visible window and door in Missing's outpatient building was open, too; in fact, she could see Gebrew, the watchman (who happened to be a priest), in the process of propping open the woodshed door with a rock.
Spotting the taxi, he came running, his army surplus overcoat flapping, his white priest's turban dwarfing his small face, his fly wand, cross, and beads clutched in one hand. He seemed to be trying to shoo the taxi away. Gebrew was a nervous chap given to rapid speech and jerky movements, but he was far more agitated than was his norm. He looked stunned to see her, as if he'd never expected her to come back.