NOW THAT I WAS about to turn thirteen, I was aware that for Matron, Bachelli, and Ghosh, and for Missing Hospital, the rainy season meant the croup, diphtheria, and measles season. There was no letup in the work.
One morning, as I went down to the gate, umbrella in hand, I saw a woman coming up the hill to Missing, rivulets of water pouring off her umbrella. She looked frightened. I recognized her; she worked in one of the bars in the cinder-block buildings opposite Missing. Some mornings I saw her looking much as she did now, a plain and pleasant face, wearing a homely cotton skirt and top. Id also seen her at night, her hair teased out, wearing heels, jewelry, elegant clothes, and looking glamorous.
She asked me for directions. Her name was Tsige, I learned later. I heard the muted, glottic, honking cough coming from the infant slung to her back in a shama, papoose fashion. It was a sound like the cry of a gander, and for that reason, I bypassed Casualty and took Tsige directly to the croup room. The croup room was at other times the diarrhea/ dehydration room. A lab bench ran along the four walls, its surface covered with red rubber sheets. A curtain rod at head height circled the room and intravenous bottles were suspended from this. In a pinch, Missing could resuscitate up to sixteen or even twenty infants packed side by side on that bench.
The baby's eyes were screwed shut, the fingers curled, the tiny translucent nails leaving marks in the palm. The rise and fall of the little chest seemed too fast for a four-month-old. The nurse found a scalp vein and hooked up an intravenous drip. Ghosh arrived and quickly examined the little fellow. He let me listen with his stethoscope: it seemed impossible for such a tiny chest to be so full of squeaks, whistles, wheezes, and rattles. Over the left side, the heartbeat was so rapid I couldn't imagine how such a pace could be sustained. “You see these bowed legs, the lumpy bossing of the forehead?” Ghosh said. “And the hot-cross-bun pattern on the top of the skull? These are the stigmata of rickets.”
“Stigmata” in my religion class at LT&C meant the nail wounds, the cuts from the crown of thorns, the gash made by the spear of Longinus in Christ's flesh. But Ghosh used the word to mean the flesh signs of a disease. In the Piazza he had once pointed out the stigmata of congenital syphilis in a listless boy who was squatting on the sidewalk: “Saddle nose, cloudy eyes, peg-shaped incisor teeth …” I read about the other stigmata of syphilis: mulberry molars, saber-shinned tibias, and deafness.
All the infants in the croup room appeared related because they all had the stigmata of rickets to a greater or lesser degree. They were wizened, bug-eyed, with big foreheads.
Ghosh put the child in the crude oxygen tent fashioned out of a plastic sheet. “The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets,” he said to me under his breath. “It's the cascade of catastrophes.”
Ghosh took Tsige aside, his Amharic surprisingly fluent as he explained what was going on. He cautioned her to keep breast-feeding “no matter what you hear from anyone else.” When Tsige said the child was hardly sucking, he said, “Still, it will comfort him because he will know you are there. You're a good mother. This is hard.” Tsige tried to kiss Ghosh's hand when he left, but he'd have none of it.
“I'll try to check on this baby later,” Ghosh said on his way out. “We have a vasectomy tonight. Dr. Cooper from the American Embassy is coming to learn. Would you bring over a sterilized vasectomy pack from the operating theater? And plug in the sterilizer in my quarters?”
I stayed in the croup room with Tsige, because I sensed that she had no one else. Her infant looked no better. I thought of the shops on Churchill Road and how I'd seen tourists stop there, thinking it was a flower shop or flower market, only to find that the “flowers” were wreaths. Then they noticed the shoe-box-size coffins, just for infants.
Tears streamed down Tsige's face—she could see her baby was the sickest one there. The other mothers withdrew as if she were bad luck. At one point I held her hand. I searched for words of comfort but realized I didn't need any. When her baby began grunting with each breath, Tsige cried on my shoulder. I wished Genet were with me—whatever she was doing in Asmara surely couldn't be as meaningful as this. Genet said she wanted to be a doctor—for a smart kid growing up at Missing, perhaps it seemed inevitable. And yet Genet had an aversion to the hospital and had no interest in following Ghosh or Hema around. Even if she were in Addis, I couldn't see her sitting here with Tsige.
AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Tsige's child died. It had been like watching a slow drowning. The effort of breathing ultimately proved too much for that tiny chest.
At once the staff nurse ran out in the rain to the main hospital, just as she'd been instructed to do. She gestured for me to follow, but I stayed put. A parent's grief needed a scapegoat, and parents were occasionally moved to violence, to exacting retribution on those who'd tried to help. I knew I had nothing to fear from Tsige.
Half an hour later, Tsige held the shrouded body in her arms, ready for his voyage home. Belatedly, the other mothers gathered around Tsige. They raised their mouths to the heavens, the veins on their necks forming cords. Lulululululu, they cried, hoping their lament might weave some protection around their infants.
I walked with Tsige to the gate. There she turned to me, her eyes full of pain. We held each other's gaze for what seemed like a long time. She bowed, then carried her bundle away. I felt so sad for her. Her baby's suffering had ended, but hers had just begun.
DR. COOPER ARRIVED promptly at eight that evening in an embassy staff car, just as the patient, a Polish gentlemen, pulled up in his Kombi.
Ghosh had learned the technique of vasectomy as an intern, and he'd learned directly from Jhaver in India, whom he spoke of as “the maestro of male nut clipping who is personally responsible for millions of people not being here.” The operation was a novelty in Ethiopia, and now expatriate men, particularly Catholics, came to Ghosh in increasing numbers for an operation that was uncommon or unavailable in their countries.
“I have a proposition for you Dr. Cooper. I shall teach you the vasectomy, and once you are proficient, you can pay me back by doing a vasectomy on a VIP patient.”
“Do I know him?” Cooper asked.
“You are talking to him,” Ghosh said. “So you see I have a vested interest in seeing you are superbly trained. My assistant, Marion, will help me judge your skills. Marion, not a word to Hema—you either, Cooper—about my plans, please.”
Cooper had a stiff brush cut and overlapping square teeth that looked like Chiclets. His American accent was sharp, jarring to the ear, but offset by the way he drawled out his words, by his relaxed, affable manner, as if he'd never had an unpleasant moment in his life and did not expect to.
“See one, do one, teach one. Raaaiyt, old buddy?” Cooper said.
“Indeed, yes,” Ghosh said. “It is easy to do, but harder than it looks. Some preliminaries, Dr. Cooper. I tell the patient to use an enema the night before, because nothing makes them more tense than being constipated. Warm milk and honey mixed together and put into an enema bag held shoulder high is what I recommend.”
“Does it work?”
“Does it work? Let me put it this way: if the patient happens to be drinking a whiskey and soda, it'll suck the glass right out of his hand.”