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373 pages

English

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Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles-and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	17 mai 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184001754
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CUTTING FOR STONE
A NOVEL
Also by Abraham Verghese The Tennis Partner My Own Country
CUTTING FOR STONE
A NOVEL
ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright Abraham Verghese 2009
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner and A. P. Watt Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Choice from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems , revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright 1933 by The Macmillan Company. Copyright renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon Schuster Adult Publishing Group and A. P. Watt on behalf of Gr inne Yeats.
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B, A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184001754
For George and Mariam Verghese
Scribere jussit amor
And because I love this life I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when From the right breast the mother Takes it away, in the very next moment To find in the left one Its consolation.
-Rabindranath Tagore, from Gitanjali

Cutting for Stone
PROLOGUE
The Coming
A FTER EIGHT MONTHS spent in the obscurity of our mother s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.
The miracle of our birth took place in Missing Hospital s Operating Theater 3, the very room where our mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, spent most of her working hours, and in which she had been most fulfilled.
When our mother, a nun of the Diocesan Carmelite Order of Madras, unexpectedly went into labor that September morning, the big rain in Ethiopia had ended, its rattle on the corrugated tin roofs of Missing ceasing abruptly like a chatterbox cut off in midsentence. Overnight, in that hushed silence, the meskel flowers bloomed, turning the hillsides of Addis Ababa into gold. In the meadows around Missing the sedge won its battle over mud, and a brilliant carpet now swept right up to the paved threshold of the hospital, holding forth the promise of something more substantial than cricket, croquet, or shuttlecock.
Missing sat on a verdant rise, the irregular cluster of whitewashed one- and two-story buildings looking as if they were pushed up from the ground in the same geologic rumble that created the Entoto Mountains. Troughlike flower beds, fed by the runoff from the roof gutters, surrounded the squat buildings like a moat. Matron Hirst s roses overtook the walls, the crimson blooms framing every window and reaching to the roof. So fertile was that loamy soil that Matron-Missing Hospital s wise and sensible leader-cautioned us against stepping into it barefoot lest we sprout new toes.
Five trails flanked by shoulder-high bushes ran away from the main hospital buildings like spokes of a wheel, leading to five thatched-roof bungalows that were all but hidden by copse, by hedgerows, by wild eucalyptus and pine. It was Matron s intent that Missing resemble an arboretum, or a corner of Kensington Gardens (where, before she came to Africa, she used to walk as a young nun), or Eden before the Fall.
Missing was really Mission Hospital, a word that on the Ethiopian tongue came out with a hiss so it sounded like Miss ing. A clerk in the Ministry of Health who was a fresh high-school graduate had typed out the missing hospital on the license, a phonetically correct spelling as far as he was concerned. A reporter for the Ethiopian Herald perpetuated this misspelling. When Matron Hirst had approached the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing, he said, as if he d proved Pythagoras s theorem, the sun s central position in the solar system, the roundness of the earth, and Missing s precise location at its imagined corner. And so Missing it was.
N OT A CRY or a groan escaped from Sister Mary Joseph Praise while in the throes of her cataclysmic labor. But just beyond the swinging door in the room adjoining Operating Theater 3, the oversize autoclave (donated by the Lutheran church in Zurich) bellowed and wept for my mother while its scalding steam sterilized the surgical instruments and towels that would be used on her. After all, it was in the corner of the autoclave room, right next to that stainless-steel behemoth, that my mother kept a sanctuary for herself during the seven years she spent at Missing before our rude arrival. Her one-piece desk-and-chair, rescued from a defunct mission school, and bearing the gouged frustration of many a pupil, faced the wall. Her white cardigan, which I am told she often slipped over her shoulders when she was between operations, lay over the back of the chair.
On the plaster above the desk my mother had tacked up a calendar print of Bernini s famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila. The figure of St. Teresa lies limp, as if in a faint, her lips parted in ecstasy, her eyes unfocused, lids half closed. On either side of her, a voyeuristic chorus peers down from the prie-dieux. With a faint smile and a body more muscular than befits his youthful face, a boy angel stands over the saintly, voluptuous sister. The fingertips of his left hand lift the edge of the cloth covering her bosom. In his right hand he holds an arrow as delicately as a violinist holds a bow.
Why this picture? Why St. Teresa, Mother?
As a little boy of four, I took myself away to this windowless room to study the image. Courage alone could not get me past that heavy door, but my sense that she was there, my obsession to know the nun who was my mother, gave me strength. I sat next to the autoclave which rumbled and hissed like a waking dragon, as if the hammering of my heart had roused the beast. Gradually, as I sat at my mother s desk, a peace would come over me, a sense of communion with her.
I learned later that no one had dared remove her cardigan from where it sat draped on the chair. It was a sacred object. But for a four-yearold, everything is sacred and ordinary. I pulled that Cuticura-scented garment around my shoulders. I rimmed the dried-out inkpot with my nail, tracing a path her fingers had taken. Gazing up at the calendar print just as she must have while sitting there in that windowless room, I was transfixed by that image. Years later, I learned that St. Teresa s recurrent vision of the angel was called the transverberation, which the dictionary said was the soul inflamed by the love of God, and the heart pierced by divine love; the metaphors of her faith were also the metaphors of medicine. At four years of age, I didn t need words like transverberation to feel reverence for that image. Without photographs of her to go by, I couldn t help but imagine that the woman in the picture was my mother, threatened and about to be ravished by the spear-wielding boy-angel. When are you coming, Mama? I would ask, my small voice echoing off the cold tile. When are you coming?
I would whisper my answer: By God! That was all I had to go by: Dr. Ghosh s declaration the time I d first wandered in there and he d come looking for me and had stared at the picture of St. Teresa over my shoulders; he lifted me in his strong arms and said in that voice of his that was every bit a match for the autoclave: She is CUM-MING, by God!
F ORTY-SIX AND FOUR YEARS have passed since my birth, and miraculously I have the opportunity to return to that room. I find I am too large for that chair now, and the cardigan sits atop my shoulders like the lace amice of a priest. But chair, cardigan, and calendar print of transverberation are still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has. Being in that unaltered room propels a thumbing back through time and memory. The unfading print of Bernini s statue of St. Teresa (now framed and under glass to preserve what my mother tacked up) seems to demand this. I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.
W E COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.
I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. What is the hardest thing you can possibly do? she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. Why must I do what is hardest?
Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for Three Blind Mice when you can play the Gloria ?
How unfair of Matron to evoke th