Cutting For Stone Part 31

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

William Yeats, "The Choice"

CHAPTER 38.

Welcome Wagon.

CAPTAIN GETACHEW SELa.s.sIE-no relation to the Emperor- piloted the East African Airways 707 that flew me out of Nai robi. I heard his calm voice twice during the abbreviated night. I had a new respect for his line of work, which brought him closer to G.o.d than any cleric. He was the first of three pilots who carried me through nine time zones.

Rome.

London.

New York.

THE RITUAL OF IMMIGRATION and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining? I pa.s.sed into marbled hallways, up and then down escalators and into a cavernous receiving area which, even with two planes disgorging pa.s.sengers, looked half empty. There was no one to herd us from one spot to the next.

Before I knew it, I was out of the sterile, hushed incubator of Customs. The automatic doors swished shut behind me as if to seal out the contamination of the cacophonous crowd outside, held back by a metal barrier.

A Ghanaian woman, whose flowered gown and headcloth had made her look so regal when she boarded in Nairobi, walked out from Customs beside me. We were both exhausted, dazed, unprepared for the sea of faces scrutinizing us. We stood there, manila X-ray folders (a requirement for immigration which no one checked) clutched awkwardly, baggage straps crisscrossing our chests, wide-eyed like animals coming off the Ark.

What struck me first was that the locals were of all colors and shapes, not the sea of white faces I had expected. Their lewd, inquisitive gazes traveled over us. In the cross fire of bewildering new scents, I picked up the Ghanaian woman's fear. She pressed close to me. Men in black suits held up signs on which they had printed names. Their gazes were flat, like overseers taking the measure of the Ghanaian woman's pelvis, noting the gap between her first and second toe which everyone knows is the only reliable gauge of fecundity. I had a vision of the Middle Pa.s.sage, of blacks shuffling down the gangplank, shackles clinking while a hundred pairs of eyes probed their flanks, their biceps, and studied the exposed flesh for yaws, which was the Old World syphilis. As for me, I was n.o.body, her eunuch. She dropped her bag, she was so rattled.

It was while bending down to help her that I saw the sign in the hand of a swarthy brown-eyed man. He held it at waist level, as if he didn't want to be identified with the liveried sign holders. His bush shirt hung out over baggy white pajama pants. Brown sandals on sockless feet completed his outfit. The letters on his sign could have spelled MARVIN or MARMEN or MARTIN. The second word was STONE.

"Is that supposed to say 'Marion'?" I asked.

He surveyed me from top to bottom, and then he looked away as if I weren't worth a reply. The Ghanaian woman gave a cry of recognition and rushed away to family.

"Excuse me," I said, stepping into the man's line of sight. "I'm Marion Stone. For Our Lady of Perpetual Succour?"

"Marion is girl!" he said, his accent guttural and raw.

"Not this one," I said. "I'm named after Marion Sims, famous gynecologist?"

There was (according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) a statue of Marion Sims in Central Park, at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue. For all I knew, it was a landmark for taxis. Though Sims started off in Alabama, his success with fistula surgery brought him to New York City, where he opened the Woman's Hospital and then a cancer hospital, which later was named Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

"Gynecology should be woman!" he rasped, as if I'd broken a fundamental rule.

"Well, Sims wasn't and neither am I."

"You are not gynecologist?"

"No, I meant I'm not a woman. And yes, I'm not a gynecologist."

He was confused. "Kis oomak," he said, at last. I knew enough Arabic to understand that he'd just invoked a gynecological term that made reference to my mother.

THE BLACK-SUITED DRIVERS led their pa.s.sengers to sleek black cars, but my man led me to a big yellow taxi. In no time we were driving out of Kennedy Airport, heading to the Bronx. We merged at what I thought was dangerous speed onto a freeway and into the slipstream of racing vehicles. "Marion, jet travel has damaged your eardrums," I said to myself, because the silence was unreal. In Africa, cars ran not on petrol but on the squawk and blare of their horns. Not so here: the cars were near silent, like a school of fish. All I heard was the whish of rubber on concrete or asphalt.

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our giant African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration, of the super-organism. It's a sound I believe that only the new immigrant hears, but not for long. By the time I learned to say "Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism.

The silhouette of this most famous city-the twin exclamation marks at one end, King Kong's climbing toy in the middle-was familiar. Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, the Empire Theater, and Cinema Adowa had seen to that. My hubris was to think I understood America from such movies. But the real hubris I could see now was America's and it was hubris of scale. I saw it in the steel bridges stretching out over water; I saw it in the freeways looping over one another like tangled tapeworms. Hubris was my taxi's speedometer, wider than the steering wheel, as if Dali had grabbed the round gauge and pulled its ears. Hubris was the needle now showing seventy miles per hour, or well over one hundred and ten kilometers per hour, a speed unimaginable in our faithful Volkswagen-even if we'd found a suitable road.

What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing Id ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow.

The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.

Memory.

I WAS ALONE in my hemisection of Mr. K. L. Hamid's cab, my luggage next to me, and a scratched Plexiglas part.i.tion between us. Two strangers, isolated and distant, in a car so broad that the backseat alone could have held five humans and two sheep.

My muscles were tense because of our speed, worrying about a child drying cow patties on the hot tarmac or the cow or goat that surely would wander into the road. But I saw no animals, no humans except in cars.

Hamid's bullet-shaped head was covered with tight black swirls. On the laminated license next to the meter, the camera had caught his shock and surprise. The whites of his eyes showed. I convinced myself it was a picture taken on the day he landed in America, the day he saw and felt what I saw.

Which was why Hamid's discourtesy so wounded me. He wouldn't look my way. Perhaps when one has driven a taxi for a long time, the pa.s.senger becomes an object defined by destination and nothing else, just as (if one isn't careful) patients can become the "diabetic foot in bed two" or the "myocardial infarction in bed three."

Did Hamid think that if he looked I'd want his rea.s.surance? Did he think I'd seek his explanation of every sight along the way so as to a.s.suage my fears? He would have been right.

In that case, I said to myself, Hamid's silence must be instructive! An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now. That was his message. That was the point of his rudeness: Find your backbone, or be swallowed whole.

I smiled now, relaxing, letting the scenery rush by. It was exhilarating to have arrived at this insight. I slapped the seat. I voiced my thoughts.

"Yes, Hamid. Screw your courage to the sticking place," I said aloud, invoking Ghosh, who never got to see what I was seeing, never heard the superorganism. How joyfully he would have embraced this experience.

Hamid jerked back at the sound of my voice. He glanced at me in the mirror, then away, then back again. Eye contact for the first time! Only now did he seem to acknowledge he was carrying something other than a sack of potatoes.

"Thank you, Hamid!" I said.

"What? What you say?"

"I said, 'thank you.' "

"No, before that!"

"Oh, that. It's Macbeth," I said, leaning forward to the Plexiglas, overeager for conversation. "Lady Macbeth, actually. My father used to say that to us all the time. 'Screw your courage to the sticking place.' "

He was silent, his gaze flitting from road to rearview mirror. Finally he burst out.

"You insult me?"

"Beg your pardon? No. No! I was merely talking to myself. It is as-"

"Screw me? Screw you!" he said.

My mouth fell open. Was it possible to be so completely misunderstood? His face in the mirror said indeed it was. I sank my neck back and shook my head in resignation. I had to laugh. To think that Ghosh-or Lady Macbeth-would be so misinterpreted.

Hamid still glared at me. I winked at him.

I saw him reach into the glove compartment. He pulled out a gun. He brandished it, showing me its different aspects through the dirty Plexiglas, as if he were trying to hawk it to me, or prove to me that it was in fact a gun, not a cheap plastic toy, which is what it looked like.

"You think I joke?" he said, a wicked energy taking over his face, as if the object in his hand made him not a joker but a philosopher.

I didn't mean to add fuel to the fire. I don't see myself as foolhardy or brave. But I found this little revolver pathetic and I simply didn't believe, indeed I was certain, he couldn't possibly use it. It was hilarious. I knew guns. I'd made a crater in a man's belly with one twice that size. I had buried gun and owner in a swamp (from which he still threatened to rise every night). Just four months ago, I had operated on rebels felled by guns. This popgun of his on this day, in the context of America, where cars stayed in lanes, where Customs never opened your bags, seemed like a prop, a cosmic joke. Could I not have had a proper American driver? Failing that, at least a gun that Dirty Harry wouldn't have been embarra.s.sed to hold? Why escape Addis, flee Asmara, get out of Khartoum, and abandon Nairobi, only to face this?

Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be d.a.m.ned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing. I'd reached that point with Hamid. My body was shaking with laughter. Fatigue, jet lag, and disorientation contributed to my finding this so funny.

Hamid's use of the verb "screw" was quite different from s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g one's courage to the sticking place. His saying that word made me think of that story which had circulated when I had more pimples than common sense, more curiosity than sound s.e.xual knowledge. It was the myth of the beautiful blonde and her brother whom one might meet at the airport when landing in America. They offered you a ride, took you home for a drink, at which point the brother brandished a weapon and said, "Screw my sister or you will die!" Long after I knew the story to be ridiculous, it retained its charm as a comic fantasy. Screw my sister or you will die! Here I was, well after the tale had slipped my mind, newly landed in America, and, sure enough, a man brandished a gun. I wished I could have shared the moment with Gaby, the schoolmate who first reported the story to me. A perverse impulse in me made me now repeat the phrase we schoolboys loved to say to each other, a challenge, a veiled threat, even though I was laughing hard: "Brother, put away the gun, I'll screw your sister for free." I don't know if he picked up the change in my tone and mood, or even if he heard me. Perhaps he just decided that my kind of lunacy wasn't to be toyed with. In any case, he had a change of heart.

THE WROUGHT-IRON GATES of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour were wide open. Dr. Abramovitz, the chief of surgery, was supposed to interview me at 10:00 a.m. My plan was to finish my interview, take another taxi to Queens, and then look for a hotel in which to get over my jet lag. I had interviews lined up in the next few days in Queens, Jersey City, Newark, and Coney Island.

A man with LOUIS embroidered on his blue overalls approached just as Hamid's taxi pulled out of the gate.

"Lou Pomeranz, Chief Caretaker of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour," he said, gripping my hand. A soft pack of Salems showed in his breast pocket. He was barrel-chested and top-heavy. "Do you play cricket?"

"Yes."

"Batsman or bowler?"

"Wicketkeeper and opening batsman." That was Ghosh's legacy to me.

"Good! Welcome to Our Lady. I hope you'll be happy," Mr. Pomeranz said. He thrust a sheaf of papers at me. "Here's your contract. I'll show you to the interns' quarters and you can sign. This silver key is for the main door. The gold key is for your room. This is your temporary identification badge. When Personnel take your mug shot, you'll get a permanent badge."

He took off with my suitcase and I followed. "But ...," I said, juggling the stuff in my hands to reach for the letter in my coat pocket. I showed it to him. "I don't want to mislead you. I am only here for my interview with Dr. Abramovitz."

"Popsy?" He chuckled. "Naw! Popsy don't interview no one. You see the signature?" He tapped on my letter as if it were a piece of wood. "That's really Sister Magda's writing." He looked back at me and grinned. "Interview? Forget about it. Taxi was prepaid. Cost you an arm and a leg otherwise. You're hired. I gave you the contract, didn't I? Yerhired!"

I didn't know what to say. It was Mr. Eli Harris of the Houston Baptists who suggested I apply to specific hospitals in New York and New Jersey for an internship in surgery. Eli Harris clearly knew what he was doing, because as soon as I applied, a telegram had arrived in Nairobi from Popsy (or perhaps it was from Sister Magda) inviting me to interview. A letter and brochure followed. Every hospital Harris suggested had also replied promptly, within a few days.

"Mr. Pomeranz. Are you sure I am hired? Your internship must be compet.i.tive. Surely many American medical students apply to be interns here?"

Louis stopped in his tracks to look at me. He laughed. "Ha! That's a good one, Doc. American medical students? I wouldn't know what they look like."

We rounded a dry fountain, streaked with pigeon droppings. It resembled the magnificent one depicted in the brochure, but the bronze monsignor who was the centerpiece leaned precariously forward. The monsignor's features were worn down like the sphinx's. Also not in the brochure was the iron rod wedged between the rim of the fountain and the monsignor's waist to keep him from falling over. It looked as if the monsignor was using his blessedly long phallus for support.

"Mr. Pomeranz-"

"I know. It does look like his p.e.c.k.e.r," he said, wheezing. "We're going to get around to it."

"That wasn't what-"

"Call me Louis."

"Louis ... are you sure you have the right person? Marion? Marion Stone?"

He stopped. "Doc, take a look at the contract, wouldja?"

My name was on the top line.

"If that's who you are, that's who I was expecting."

A thought clouded his face. "You pa.s.sed your ECFMG, didn't ya?"

The exam of the ECFMG-Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates-established that I had the knowledge and credentials to pursue postgraduate training in America.

"Yes, I pa.s.sed."

"So what gives? ... Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. Don't tell me those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in Coney Island or Jersey got to you? Did they mail you a contract? Sons of b.i.t.c.hes! I've been telling Sister Magda we should be doing that. Send out a contract sight unseen. The taxi was her idea, but it's not enough." He came up close to me. "Doc, let me tell you about those places. They're terrible." Louis was short of breath, his nostrils flaring. His rheumy eyes narrowed. "I'll tell you what," he said. "Give you the corner room in the interns' quarters. Has a small balcony. How's that?"

"No, no, you see-"

"Was it the Lincoln-Misericordia folks? Harlem? Newark? You shopping around to get the best deal?"

"No, I a.s.sure you-"

"Look, Doc, let's not play games. You just tell me yes or no, do you want an internship here?" His hands were on his hips, his chest heaving up and down.

"No, I mean yes ... I do have interviews in other places ... This is my first stop. But frankly ... I thought it would be difficult to get an internship ... Id love to ... Yes!"

"Good! Then sign the bleeding contract, for the love of Mary, and I'm not even Catholic."

I signed, standing by the fountain.

"Welcome to Our Lady, Doctor," Louis said, relieved, grabbing the contract and shaking my hand. He gestured expansively at the buildings around us. "This is the only place I've worked. My first job when I left the service ... and probably my last. I've seen docs like you come and go. Oh, yeah. From Bombay, Poona, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Karachi, you name it. Never had one from Africa before. I thought you'd look different. Let me tell you, we worked them all hard. But they gave us their best. They learned a lot here. I love 'em all. Love their food. They even got me to love cricket. I'm nuts about it. Listen, baseball has nothing on cricket. My boys are out there now," he said, pointing over the walls. "Raking in the dough in Kentucky or South Dakota-wherever they need docs bad. Dr. Singh sent me a plane ticket to fly to El Paso for his daughter's wedding. He comes to see me if he's in New York. We have an Old Boys Eleven that plays us every year. The Old Boys built us a new cricket pitch and batting nets. They're proud to be 'Pee Esses'-Perpetual Suckers is what we call our alums. They'll drive up here in fancy cars. I tell them, 'Don't put on airs for me. I remember when you didn't know your a.s.s from your elbow. I remember when we could hardly understand a word you said. Now look at you!' "

I was impressed by what I could see of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. The hospital was L-shaped, the long limb seven stories high, overlooking the street, a wall separating it from the sidewalk. The short limb was newer and just four stories high with a helicopter parked on top. The tiled roof of the older section sagged between the chimneys while the middle floors pushed out gently like love handles. The decorative grille under the eaves had oxidized to a bile green, old corrosion ran down the brick like mascara, parallel to the drainpipes. A lone gargoyle jutted out on one side of the entrance, its twin on the other side reduced to a faceless nub. But for me, fresh from Africa, these were not signs of decay, merely the dusting of history.

"It's grand," I said to Mr. Pomeranz.

"It's not much, but it's home," Mr. Pomeranz said, gazing at the building with obvious affection.

Undoubtedly, there were other hospitals that were newer and bigger, at least as depicted in their brochures. But you couldn't trust a brochure, I was discovering.

Fifty yards to the side of the hospital stood the two-story house staff quarters to which he led me. On the gla.s.s door to its lobby, someone had taped a handwritten sign in thick black felt-tip pen on yellow legal paper.

India Versus Australia, 2nd Test At Brisbane