Cutting For Stone Part 7

CHAPTER 11.

Bedside Language and Bedroom Language.

ON THE MORNING of the twins' birth, Dr. Abhi Ghosh awoke in his quarters to the sound of pigeons cooing on the win-dowsill. The birds had figured in his waking dream in which he swung from the giant banyan tree outside his boyhood home in India. Hed been trying to peek at the wedding being conducted indoors, but even with the birds using their wings to wipe the windows, he couldn't see.

Now that Ghosh was awake, only the ancient banyan tree, which had stood in the shared courtyard, still felt vivid. Its branches were supported by pillarlike aerial roots which to a child appeared to have shot up from the ground instead of the other way around. Immovable through the Madras monsoons and through the dog days of summer, that tree had been his protector and guide. The cantonment near St. Thomas Mount, on the outskirts of Madras, teemed with railway and military brats; it suited a fatherless child, particularly one whose mother was too defeated by her husband's death to be of much use to her children. Anand Ghoshe, a Bengali from Calcutta, had been posted to Madras by the Indian Railways. He met his future wife, the Anglo-Indian daughter of the Perambur stationmaster, at a railway dance to which he had gone on a lark. Neither family approved of the marriage. They had two children, first a girl, then a boy. Little Abhi Ghoshe was a month old when his father died of hepat.i.tis. He grew into a self-sufficient, fun-loving child who met the world head-on. When he came of age, he dropped the e at the end of his name, because he thought it redundant, like a skin tag. In his first year of medical school, his mother died. His sister and her husband pulled away, resentful that the cantonment house came to him. His sister made it clear that he ceased to exist for her, and in time he saw this was true.

THE MORNINGS were when Ghosh felt Hema's absence from Missing the most. Her bungalow, hidden by hedges, was a shout away from his, but it was locked up and silent. Whenever she went on holiday in India, his life became unbearable because he was terrified that shed return married.

At the airport before Hema left, hed been dying to blurt out, Hema, let's get married. But he knew she would have thrown her head back and laughed. He loved her laughter, but not at his expense; he had swallowed his marriage proposal.

"Fool!" she had said before boarding when he asked her yet again if she intended to see prospective bridegrooms. "How long have you known me? Why do you keep thinking I need a groom in my life? I'll find a bride for you, I tell you what! You're the one who is matrimonially obsessed."

Hema saw his jealousy as their little joke: Ghosh played at wooing her (or so she believed), and she played her role by fending him off.

If she only knew how tormented he was by uninvited images: Hema in bridal sari weighed down with ten-sovereign gold necklace; Hema seated next to ugly groom, garlands piled around their necks like the yoke on water buffalo ... "Go ahead! What do I care?" he said aloud, as if she were there in the room. "But ask yourself, can he love you the way I love you? What's the use of education if you let your father lead you like a cow to the Brahma bull?" That led him to picture a bovine p.e.n.i.s; he groaned.

This time, when Hema's departure appeared inevitable, Ghosh did something different: he quietly mailed out applications for an internship in America. Granted, he was thirty-two years old, but it wasn't too late to start again. Mailing the envelope gave him a sense of controlling his destiny, more so when Cook County Hospital in Chicago cabled that they were sending a voucher for a plane ticket. When the letter and contract arrived, they didn't diminish his anxiety about Hema, but it did make him feel less helpless.

From the kitchen Ghosh heard the violent clang of Almaz extracting water from Mussolini. "For the sake of G.o.d, be gentle!" he called out as he did most days. The stove had three rings, but it was the bulging oven below, which resembled a certain fallen dictator's potbelly, that gave it its name. Set into its side was a metal cavity so that whenever the stove was lit, water was heated. Almaz grumbled about having to split wood, then stoke the fire in Mussolini-all for what? To make one cup of that vile powder coffee for the getta? (In the mornings Ghosh preferred instant to the semisolid Ethiopian brew.) But it wasn't the coffee he valued as much as the hot water for his bath.

He drew the blanket over his head as Almaz stagger-stepped to the bathroom, hefting the steaming cauldron. "Banya skin!" she muttered in Amharic. Amharic was all she ever spoke, though Ghosh suspected she understood more English than she let on. After emptying the cauldron into the bathtub, she finished the thought: "It must be so sickly to require washing every day. What misfortune the getta doesn't have habe-sha skin. It would stay clean without the need for all this scrubbing."

No doubt Almaz had been to church this morning. When Ghosh first came to Ethiopia, as he walked down Menelik Street, a woman across the road stopped and bowed to him and he waved back. Only later did he realize that her gesture was aimed at the church across the way. Pedestrians bobbed before a church, kissing the church wall thrice and crossing themselves before going on. If they'd been chaste, they might enter. Otherwise they stayed on the other side of the street.

Almaz was tall with oak-colored skin and a shield-shaped face. Her oval eyes sloped down to the bridge of her nose, giving her a sultry, inviting gaze. Her square chin contradicted that message, and this hint of androgyny brought her admiring looks. She had large but shapely hands, wide hips, and b.u.t.tocks that formed a broad ledge on which Ghosh believed he could balance a cup and saucer.

She was twenty-six when she came to Missing with labor pains, nine months pregnant, her cheeks flushed with pride because this baby she would carry to term, unlike all the others that had failed to take root in her womb. In the prenatal clinic visits, nursing students had twice recorded FHSH (Fetal Heart Sounds Heard) in the chart. But on the day of her putative labor, Hema heard only silence. Hema's exam revealed that the "baby" was a giant fibroid of the uterus and the FHSH nothing but a rattle in a probationer's brain.

Almaz refused to accept the diagnosis. "Look," she said, fishing out an engorged breast and squeezing forth a jet of milk. "Could a t.i.t do that if there were no child to feed?" Yes, a t.i.t could do that and more if its owner believed. It took three more months with no true signs of labor and an X-ray that showed no baby's skull, no spine, for Almaz to concede. At the surgery, which she at last agreed to, Hema had to remove both the fibroid and the uterus which it had swallowed. In the town of Sabatha they still waited for Almaz to return with the baby. But Almaz couldn't bear to go back. She stayed on and became one of the Missing People.

He heard Almaz return and the jangle of a cup and saucer. The scent of coffee made him peek from under his tent.

"Is there anything else?" she asked, studying him.

Yes, I need to tell you that I am leaving Missing. Really, I am! I can't let Hema play me like a harmonium. But he didn't say this; instead, he shook his head. He felt Almaz understood intuitively what Hema's absence did to him.

"Yesus Christos, please forgive this sinner, but he was out drinking last night," she said as she stooped to pick up a beer bottle from under the bed. Alas, Almaz was in a proselytizing mood. Ghosh felt as if he were eavesdropping on her private conversation with G.o.d. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

"Blessed St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and all the other saints," she continued in Amharic, confident he would understand, "for I prayed for master to be a new man, for him to one day give up his dooriye ways, but I was wrong, your venerable holinesses."

It was the word dooriye that tricked Ghosh into speaking. It meant "lout," "lecher," "reprobate"-and it stung him to hear that word.

"What gives you the right to address me this way?" he said, though he didn't really feel the anger his voice carried. He was about to add, Are you my wife?-but choked those words off. To his perpetual shame, he and Almaz had been intimate twice over the years, both times when he was drunk. She'd lain down, lifted, and spread, grumbling even as her hips fell into rhythm with his, but no more than she grumbled about the coffee or hot water. He'd decided that grumbling with Almaz was the language of both pleasure and pain. When they were spent she'd sighed, pulled her skirt down, and asked, "Will there be anything else?" before leaving him to his guilt.

He loved her for never holding those two episodes against him. But it had given her the license to nag him, to raise her grumbling to a steady pitch. That was her prerogative, but the saints help anyone else who addressed him in that tone; she defended him, his belongings, and his reputation with her tongue and with her fists and feet if necessary. Sometimes he felt that she owned him.

"Why do you hara.s.s me like this?" he said, the fire gone from his voice. He knew hed never have the courage to break the news of his leaving to her.

"Who said I was talking to you?" Almaz replied.

But when she left he saw the two aspirins in the saucer with his coffee, and his heart melted. My greatest consolation, Ghosh thought, for only the hundredth time since his arrival in Ethiopia, has been the women of this land. The country had completely surprised him. Despite pictures he'd seen in National Geographic, he'd been unprepared for this mountain empire shrouded in mist. The cold, the alt.i.tude, the wild roses, the towering trees, reminded him of c.o.o.noor, a hill station in India he'd visited as a boy. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Ethiopia, may have been exceptional in his bearing and dignity, but Ghosh discovered that His Majesty's people shared his physical features. Their sharp, sculpted noses and soulful eyes set them between Persians and Africans, with the kinky hair of the latter, and the lighter skin of the former. Reserved, excessively formal, and often morose, they were quick to anger, quick to imagine insults to their pride. As for theories of conspiracy and the most terrible pessimism, surely they'd cornered the world market on those. But get past all those superficial attributes, and you found people who were supremely intelligent, loving, hospitable, and generous.

"Thank you, Almaz," he called out. She pretended not to hear.

IN THE BATHROOM Ghosh felt a sharp pain as he peed and was forced to cut off his stream. "Like sliding down the edge of a razor blade using my b.a.l.l.s as brakes," he muttered, his eyes tearing. What did the French call it? Chaude p.i.s.se, but that didn't come close to describing his symptoms.

Was this mysterious irritation from lack of use? Or from a kidney stone? Or was there, as he suspected, a mild, endemic inflammation along the pa.s.sage that carried urine out? Penicillin did nothing for this condition, which waxed and waned. He'd devoted himself to this question of causation, spending hours at the microscope with his urine and with that of others with similar symptoms, studying it like the p.i.s.s-pot prophets of old.

After his first liaison in Ethiopia (and the only time he'd not used a condom), he had relied on the Allied Army Field Method for "post-exposure prophylaxis," as it was called in the books: wash with soap and mercuric chloride, then squeeze silver proteinate ointment into the urethra and milk it down the length of his shaft. It felt like a penance invented by the Jesuits. He believed the "prophylaxis" was partly behind the burning sensations that came and went and peaked on some mornings. How many other such time-honored methods out there were just as useless? To think of the millions that the armies of the world had spent on "kits" like this, or to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

There was nothing like a personal experience to tilt a man toward a specialty, and so Ghosh had become the de facto syphilologist, the venereologist, the last word when it came to VD. From the palace to the emba.s.sies, every VIP with VD came to consult Ghosh. Perhaps in the county of Cook in America, theyd be interested in this experience.

AFTER HE BATHED and dressed, he drove the two hundred yards to the outpatient building. He sought out Adam, the one-eyed com-pounder, who, under Ghosh's tutelage, had become a natural and gifted diagnostician. But Adam wasn't around, and so he went to W. W. Gonad, a man of many t.i.tles-Laboratory Technician, Blood Bank Technician, Junior Administrator-all of which were to be found on a name tag on his oversize white coat. His full name was Wonde Wossen Gonafer, which he'd Westernized to W. W. Gonad. Ghosh and Matron had been quick to point out the meaning of his new moniker, but it turned out that W.W. needed no edification. "The English have names like Mr. Strong? Mr. Wright? Mr. Head? Mr. Carpenter? Mr. Mason? Mrs. Moneypenny? Mr. Rich? I will be Mr. W. W. Gonad!"

He was one of the first Ethiopians Ghosh had come to know well. Outwardly melancholic, W.W. was nevertheless fun-loving and ambitious. Urbanization and education had introduced in W.W. a gravitas, an exaggerated courtliness, the neck and body flexed, primed for the deep bow, and conversation full of the sighs of someone whose heart had been broken. Alcohol could either exaggerate the condition or remove it entirely.

Ghosh asked W.W. to give him a B12 shot; it was worth a try-even placebos had some effect.

As he readied the syringe, W.W. made clucking noises. "You must be sure to always use prophylactics, Dr. Ghosh," he said and immediately turned sheepish, because W.W. was hardly one to proffer such advice.

"But I do. After that first time I've never had unrubberized intercourse. Don't you believe me? That is why I don't understand this burning some mornings. And you, sir? Why don't you use a condom, W.W.?"

Gonad wore heel lifts that made him walk with an ostrichlike pelvic tilt. He teased his hair into a lofty halo that would one day be called an Afro. Now, he pulled himself to his full five foot one and said haughtily, "If I wanted to make love to a rubber glove I would never have to leave the hospital."

IF GHOSH HAD BEEN AWARE that at this very moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise was in distress in her quarters, he'd have rushed to help; it might have saved her life. But at that point no one knew. The probationer had yet to deliver her message, and when she did, she failed to tell anyone how sick Sister was.

Ghosh made leisurely rounds with the ward nurse and the probationers. He pointed out a sulfa rash to the newest probationers, removed ascitic fluid from the belly of a man with cirrhosis. The outpatient clinics then took most of the day, except for a formal lecture to the nursing students on tuberculosis. Keeping busy helped him forget about Hema, who should have been back two days ago. He could think of only one explanation for her delay, and it depressed him.

In the late afternoon, Ghosh drove out of Missing. He missed by a few minutes the hue and cry when Thomas Stone carried Sister Mary Joseph Praise out of the nurses' hostel.

HE PARKED near the towering Lion of Judah, a landmark for the area near the railway station. Carved out of blocks of gray-black stone, with a square crown on its head, that cubist lion resembled a chess piece. The eye slits beneath the low brow stared across the plaza; the sculpture gave this part of town an avant-garde sensibility.

Ghosh stepped into the chromed and lacquered world of Ferraros, where a haircut cost ten times as much as at Jai Hind, the Indian barbershop. But Ferraros, with its frosted-gla.s.s window and red-and-white-striped barber's pole, was rejuvenating. The mirrored walls, the necklace of globe lights, the oxblood leather chair with more k.n.o.bs and chrome levers than Missing's operating table-you could only get this at the Italian establishment.

Ferraro, dazzling in his collarless white smock, was everywhere: behind Ghosh to slip off his coat, alongside him as he led him to the chair, then in front of him to slip on the gown. Ferraro chatted in Italian and it didn't matter that Ghosh knew only a few words; the conversation was offered as background music, not requiring a response. He felt at ease with the older man. "Beware of a young doctor and an old barber" went the saying, but Ghosh thought both he and Ferraro were in good hands.

Ferraro had soldiered in Eritrea before becoming a barber in Addis. Had they shared a common language, there was much that Ghosh would have asked. He'd have loved to hear about the 1940s typhus epidemic during which some brilliant Italian official decided to douse the whole city with DDT, getting rid of lice and the typhus. How had the Italians handled VD in the troops who couldn't possibly have confined themselves to the six Italian ladies in Asmara who were the official garrison puttanas?

He felt an urge to confide in Ferraro, to tell him how his chest ached with jealousy; how he was leaving the country because of a woman who didn't take his love seriously. Ferraro made a soft clucking noise, as if he had intuited the problem and its gender; easing the chair into a reclining position was Ferraro s first step to finding a solution. Neither man could have guessed that at that moment Sister Mary Joseph Praise's heart had stopped beating.

Ferraro gently draped the first hot towel around Ghosh's neck. When the last towel was in place, blotting out all light, Ferraro fell tactfully quiet. Ghosh heard him tiptoe to where he'd parked his cigarette, and then the sound of his exhaling smoke.

If I could have a valet, this would be my man, Ghosh thought. One never doubted for a moment that it was Ferraro s destiny to be a barber; his instincts were perfect; his baldness was inconsequential.

GHOSH EMERGED in a cloud of aftershave. Driving away, he took in the sights as if for the last time: up the steep slope of Churchill Road and past Jai Hind to the traffic light where a balancing act between accelerator and clutch was required before the light turned green. He turned left and went past Vanilal's Spice Shop, Vartanian's Fabrics, and stopped at the post office.

The leper child who staked out this territory where foreigners abounded had blossomed into a teen seemingly overnight. Her perky b.r.e.a.s.t.s pushed through her shama while the cartilage of her nose had collapsed to form a saddle nose. He put a one-birr note into her clawed hand.

He turned at the sound of castanets. A listiro, bottle caps threaded onto a nail on his shoe box, looked up at him. Ghosh stood against the post office wall along with a half-dozen other men who were smoking or reading the paper while listiros worked like bees at their feet. The Italians are responsible for this, too, Ghosh thought: people getting their shoes shined more often than they bathe.

It was starting to drizzle, and the listiro's elbows flew like pistons. On the nape of the boy's neck, Ghosh noticed a patch of albino-white skin. Surely not the collar of Venus? So young, and already with scars of healed syphilis? Venereum insontium-"innocently acquired" syphilis- was still in the textbooks, though Ghosh didn't believe in such a thing. Other than congenital syphilis where the mother infected the unborn child, he believed that all syphilis was s.e.xually acquired. He'd seen five-year-olds at play mimicking the act of copulation with each other and doing a good job of it.

A sudden cloudburst sent Ghosh scrambling to his car. The rain washed off a coat of ennui that had enveloped the Piazza. The streetlights came on and reflected off the chrome of pa.s.sing cars. The Amba.s.sa buses turned a vivid red. On the rooftop of the three-story Olivetti Building (which also housed Pan Am, the Venezia Ristorante, and Motilal Import-Exports) the neon beer mug filled up with yellow lager, foamed over in white suds, then went dark before the cycle started again. That sign had been a source of such wonder when it was first put up. The barefoot men driving their sheep into town for Meskel festival had stopped to watch the show, knotting up traffic as the herd got away from them.

AT ST. GEORGE'S BAR, rain dripped off the Campari umbrellas onto the patio. It was packed inside with foreigners and locals who felt the ambience worth the prices. The gla.s.s doors held in a rich scent of can-noli, biscotti, chocolate ca.s.sata, ground coffee, and perfume. A gramophone blended into the chatter of voices, the tinkle of cups and saucers, and the sharp sounds of chairs sc.r.a.ping back and gla.s.s smacking on Formica-topped tables.

He had just sat down at the bar when he saw Helen's reflection in the mirror-she was seated at a far corner table. She was shortsighted and probably wouldn't see him. Her fair features were striking against her jet-black hair. She was paying no attention to her companion, who was none other than Dr. Bach.e.l.li. Ghosh's instinct was to leave at once, but the barman stood waiting, so he asked for a beer.

"My G.o.d, Helen, you are beautiful," Ghosh muttered to himself, studying her reflection. St. George's didn't employ bar girls, but it had no objections to the cla.s.sier women coming in. Helen's legs were crossed under her skirt, the skin of her thighs white as cream. He remembered those generous glutei that obviated any need for a supporting pillow. A mole on her jawline added to her distinction. But why was it the prettiest half-caste girls-the killis, as they were often called, though the term was derogatory-put on this air of being above it all and bored?

Bach.e.l.li, his silk kerchief flowing out of his cream coat and matching his tie, appeared much older on this night than his fifty or so years. His carefully sculpted pencil mustache and his expression of equanimity cigarette in hand, bothered Ghosh because he saw in it his own inertia, the thing that had kept him in Africa so long. Ghosh was fond of Ba ch elli; the man was not a great physician, but he knew his limits in medicine, though he didn't always know his limit in alcohol.

Just a week ago, Ghosh had been shocked to see Bach.e.l.li drunk and singing the "Giovinezza," goose-stepping down the middle of the road in the heart of the Piazza. It was near midnight, and Ghosh had stopped his car then and tried to get him off the street. Bach.e.l.li became loud and boisterous, screaming about Adowa, which was enough to get him beaten up if he persisted. Bach.e.l.li was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in 1934; he was a young officer again in the 230th Legion of the National Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in 1896. At Adowa, ten thousand Italian soldiers, with as many of their Eritrean askaris, poured down from their colony to invade and take Ethiopia. They were defeated by Emperor Menelik's barefoot Ethiopian fighters armed with spears and Remingtons (sold to them by none other than Rimbaud). No European army had ever been so thoroughly thrashed in Africa. It stuck in the Italian craw, so that even men who weren't born at the time of Adowa, like Bach.e.l.li, grew up wanting vengeance.

Ghosh didn't understand any of this till he came to Africa. He hadn't realized that Menelik's victory had inspired Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa Movement, and that it had awakened Pan-African consciousness in Kenya, the Sudan, and the Congo. For such insights, one had to live in Africa.

The Italians never forgot their humiliation, and so on the next try, some forty years later, Mussolini took no chances; his motto was Qualsi-asi mezzo!-win by any means. The monkey-maned Ethiopian hors.e.m.e.n with leather shields and spears and single-shot rifles found the enemy was a cloud of phosgene gas that choked them to death, Geneva protocol be d.a.m.ned. Bach.e.l.li had been part of that. And looking at Bach.e.l.li's face, so flushed with liquor and pride, as he did his victory march in the Piazza, Ghosh had realized it must have been Bach.e.l.li's proudest moment.

Ghosh sat trying to be inconspicuous at the bar, but watching the couple in the mirror. When Ghosh first met Helen, he'd fallen madly in love with her-for a few days. Every time Helen saw him she'd say, "Give me money, please." When he asked for what, she'd blink and then pout as if the question were unreasonable. She'd say, "My mother died," or "I need abortion"-whatever came into her head. Most bar girls had hearts of gold and eventually married well, but Helen's heart was of baser metal.

Poor Bach.e.l.li was smitten by Helen and had been for years, even though he had a common-law Eritrean wife. He gave Helen money. He expected and accepted her selfishness. He called her his donna delin-quente, offering the mole on her cheek as proof. Ghosh meant to ask Bach.e.l.li if he actually believed anything in Lombroso's abominable book, La Donna Delinquente. Lombroso's "studies" of prost.i.tutes and criminal women uncovered "characteristics of degeneration"-such things as "primitive" pubic hair distribution, an "atavistic" facial appearance, and an excess of moles. It was pseudoscience, utter rubbish.

Ghosh slipped out abruptly without finishing his beer, because suddenly the idea of making small talk with either of them that evening was intolerable.

THE AVAKIANS WERE LOCKING UP their bottled-gas store, and beyond their shop the lights of the Piazza, the transitory illusion of Roma, came to an end. Now it was all darkness, and the road ran past the long, gloomy, fortresslike stone wall that held up the hillside. A gash in the moss-covered stones was Sba Dereja-Seventy Steps-a pedestrian shortcut to the roundabout at Sidist Kilo, though the steps were so worn down that it was more a ramp than stairs, treacherous when it rained. He drove past the Armenian church, then around the obelisk at Arat Kilo- another war monument at a roundabout-past the Gothic spires and domes of the Trinity Cathedral and then the Parliament Building, which took its inspiration from the one on the banks of the Thames. At the Old Palace, because he was not quite ready to head home, he turned down to Casa INCES, a neighborhood of pretty villas.

He wasn't in the mood for the Ibis or one of the big bars in the Piazza that employed thirty hostesses. He saw a simple cinder-block building up ahead. It appeared to be part.i.tioned into four bars. There were hundreds of such places all over Addis. A soft neon glow showed from two doorways. A plank forded the open gutter. He chose the door on the right, pushing through the bead curtain. It was, as he had suspected given the size, a one-woman operation. The tube light had been painted orange, creating a womblike interior, exaggerated by the frankincense smoking on the charcoal brazier. Two padded bar stools fronted a short wooden counter. The bottles on the shelf on the back wall were impressive-Pinch, Johnny Walker, Bombay gin-even if they were filled with home-brewed tej. His Majesty Haile Sela.s.sie the First, in Imperial Bodyguard uniform, gazed down from a poster on one wall. A leggy woman in a swimsuit smiled back at His Majesty from a Michelin calendar.

What little floor s.p.a.ce remained held a table and two chairs. Here the barmaid sat with a customer who held her hand; the man seemed intent on keeping her attention. Just when Ghosh decided there was no point in staying, she wrenched her hand free, sc.r.a.ped her chair back, stood, and bowed. High heels to show off her calves. Dark polish on her toenails. Very pretty, he thought. The smile seemed genuine and suggested a better disposition than Helen's. The other man pushed sullenly past Ghosh and left without a word.

The land of milk and honey, Ghosh thought. Milk and honey, and love for money.

Now she and Ghosh traded how-are-yous and I-am-wells, bowing, the deep excursions diminishing till the last few were mere inclinations of the head. Ghosh eased onto the bar stool as she circled behind the counter. She was perhaps twenty, but with big bones, and the fullness of her blouse suggested she had mothered at least one child.

"Min the tetalehf she asked, thrusting her finger at her mouth, in case he didn't understand Amharic.

"I deeply regret that I drove your admirer away. Had I known he was here, or how much he cared for you, I could never have intruded on such a tryst."

She gasped with surprise.

"Him! He wanted to keep that one beer going till daylight without buying me one. He is from Tigre. Your Amharic is better than his," she said, gushing, relieved that it would not be a night of sign language.

Her gauzy white cotton skirt ended just below her knees. The colorful border was repeated on the piping of the blouse, and again in the frill of the shama over her shoulders. Her hair was straightened and permed, a Western do. A collar of tattoos in the form of closely s.p.a.ced wavy lines made her neck look longer. Pretty eyes, Ghosh thought.

Her name was Turunesh, but he decided to call her what he was in the habit of calling all women in Addis: Konjit, which meant "beautiful."

"I'll have blessed St. George's. And please serve one for yourself. We must celebrate."

She bowed her thanks. "Is it your birthday, then?"

"No, Konjit, even better." He was about to say, It is the day that I have freed myself from the chains of a woman who has deviled me for over a decade. The day I have decided my sojourn in Africa ends and America awaits.

"It is the day I have set eyes on the most beautiful woman in Addis Ababa."

Her teeth were strong and even. A rim of upper gum showed when she laughed. She was self-conscious about this because she brought her hand to her mouth.

Something inside him melted at the sound of her happy laughter, and for the first time since waking that morning, he felt almost normal.

When he first arrived in Addis Ababa he'd sunk into a deep depression. He considered leaving at once because he'd found that he'd completely misunderstood Hema's intentions in sending for him. What he thought was the triumphant conclusion of a courtship that began when they were interns in India turned out to be in his head alone. Hema thought she was just doing Ghosh (and Missing) a favor. Ghosh hid his embarra.s.sment and humiliation. It was the time of the long rains and that alone was enough to make a man kill himself. The Ibis in the Piazza saved him. He'd been looking for a drink and was attracted by an entrance with an arch of ivy that was festooned with Christmas lights. He could hear music from within and the sounds of womanly laughter. Inside, he thought hed died and returned as Nebuchadnezzar. In those Ibis women-Lulu, Marta, Sara, Tsahai, Meskel, Sheba, Mebrat- and in the sprawling bar and restaurant that occupied two floors and three enclosed verandas, he found a family. The girls welcomed him like a long-lost friend, restoring his good humor, encouraging the joker in him, always happy to sit with him. Feminine good looks were as abundant as the rain outside; skin tones ranged from cafe au lait to coal. The few half-caste women at Ibis had white or olive-toned skin and blue-brown, or even green, eyes. The coming together of races generally produced the most exotic and beautiful fruit, however the core was unpredictable and often sour.

But of all the qualities of the women he met in Addis, the most important was their acquiescence, their availability. For months after his arrival in Addis, well after his discovery of the Ibis and so many other bars like it, Ghosh was celibate. The irony of that period was that the one woman he wanted rejected his advances, while all around him were women who never said no. He was twenty-four and not totally inexperienced when he arrived in Ethiopia. The only intimacy hed ever had in India was with a young probationer by the name of Virgin Magdalene k.u.mar. Shortly after their three-month affair ended, she left her order and married a chap he knew (and presumably changed her name to Magdalene k.u.mar).

"Hema, I am only human," he murmured now as he did every time he thought he was being unfaithful to her.

He reached across and felt the flesh under Konjit's ribs, pinching up a skin fold.

"Ah my dear, should we send for dinner? We need to put flesh on you. And sustenance for what we are about to do tonight. It is, I will confess to you, my very, very first time."

Had she been an older woman (and many one-woman bars were run by older women who had saved money for their own place after working somewhere grand like the Ibis), he would have used a different tone, one that was less direct, more courtly-a gentler form of flattery. But with her, he had settled on the naughty schoolboy approach.

When she reached to feel his hair, rub his scalp, Ghosh purred with contentment. On the radio the m.u.f.fled tw.a.n.g of a krar repeated a six-note riff from a pentatonic scale that seemed common to all Ethiopian music, fast or slow. Ghosh recognized the song, a very popular one. It was called "Tizita;" there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant "memory tinged with regret." Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.

"Your skin is beautiful. What are you? Banya?" she asked.

"Yes, my lovely, I am indeed Indian. And since nothing about me other than my skin is beautiful, you are gracious to say so."

"No, no, why do you say that? I swear on the saints I wish I had your hair. I can't get over your Amharic. Are you sure your mother is not habesha?"

"You flatter me," he said. Hed learned a little Amharic in the hospital, but it was only through tte--ttes like this that he became fluent. He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath ... The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. "Really, I only know the Amharic of love. If you sent me outside to buy a pencil, I wouldn't be able to do it, for I lack those words."

She laughed and again tried to cover her lips. Ghosh held her hands, and so she drew her lower lip up as if to hide her teeth, a gesture he found nubile and touching.

"But why hide your smile? ... There. How beautiful!"

Much, much later, they retired to the back room; he closed his eyes and pretended, as he always did, that she was Hema. A most willing Hema.

THE MIST WAS inches off the ground when he emerged, and it had brought with it a funereal silence and bone-chilling cold. He took a leak by the roadside. A hyena laughed, whether at his action or his equipment he couldn't be sure. He spun around and saw lupine retinas shining from the trees beyond the first set of houses. He ran while trying to zip up, unlocked his car, and jumped in. He quickly started the engine and moved off. A peeing man had to worry about more than hyenas. Shiftas, lebas, madjiratmachi, and all sorts of villains were a threat after midnight, even in the heart of the city and near paved roads. Just the previous month, two men had robbed, raped, and then cut off an Englishwoman's tongue, thinking its absence would prevent her from tattling. Another victim of a robbery had his b.a.l.l.s cut off-a common enough practice- in the belief that he would have no courage left to extract revenge. They were the lucky ones. The rest were simply murdered.

THE GATES OF MISSING were wide open when he got back, which was strange. He pulled up to his cottage, slid the car into the open-sided shed. As his lights shone on the rock wall, he slammed the brakes, terrified by what he saw: a ghostly white figure rose from a squat to stand before his headlights, the eyes reflecting back a shimmering red, just like the hyena's eyes. But this was no hyena, but a weeping, bereft Almaz who had clearly been waiting for him.

"Hema, Hema, what have you done," he muttered to himself, convinced that the worst had happened and Hema had returned married. Why else would Almaz stay so late except to tell him this? She and the whole world knew how he felt about Hema. The only person who didn't know was Hema.

The ghostly figure ran over to the pa.s.senger side, opened the door, and climbed in. Bowing her head and in the most formal tone and without meeting his eyes, she said, "I am sorry to bring you bad news."