Cutting for Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

volcanic rock. Pushcarts loaded impossibly high with bananas, with bricks, with melons, and even one carrying two lepers weaved through the pedestrian traffic. A veiled, stooped old woman walked by with a smoldering charcoal stove on her head. No one glanced at this strange sight, saving their stares instead for the brown-skinned nun walking in their midst. Her uncovered face made her feel stark naked.
    After an hour during which she felt her skin puffing up like dough in an oven, after being directed this way and that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise arrived before a tiny door at the end of a slitlike passage. On the rock wall was a pale outline of a signboard recently removed. She offered a silent prayer, took a deep breath, and knocked. A man yelled in a hoarse voice, and Sister Mary Joseph Praise interpreted the sound as invitation to enter.
    Seated on the floor next to a shiny balancing scale, she saw a shirtless Arab. All around him, reaching to the ceiling, were great bales of bundled leaves.
    The hothouse scent stifled her breathing. It was a new scent for her, this scent of khat: partly cut grass, yet with something spicier behind it.
    The Arab's beard was so red with henna she thought hed bled into it. His eyes were lined like a woman's, reminding her of depictions of Salahuddin, who'd kept the Crusaders from taking the Holy Land. His gaze took in the young face imprisoned in the white wimple, and then those hooded eyes fell to the Gladstone bag in her hand. A heave of his body produced a vulgar laugh through gold-trimmed teeth, a laugh which he cut off when he saw the nun was about to collapse. He sat her down, sent for water and tea. Later, in a mixture of sign language and bastardized English, he communicated to her that the Belgian nun who'd lived there had died suddenly. When he said that, Sister Mary Joseph Praise began shivering again, and she felt a deep foreboding, as if she could hear death's footsteps rustling the leaves in that hothouse. She carried a picture of Sister Beatrice in her Bible, and she could see that face in her mind's eye, now metamorphosing into a death mask, and then to Anjali's face. She forced herself to meet the man's gaze, to challenge what he said. Of what? Who asks “of what” in Aden? One day you are well, your debts are paid, your wives are happy, praise Allah, and the next day the fever gets you, and if it opens your skin up to the heat which your skin has fought off all these years, you die. Of what? Of what doesn't matter. Of bad skin! Of pestilence! Of bad luck, if you like. Of good luck, even.
    The building was his. Green khat stalks flashed in his mouth as he spoke. The old nun's God had been unable to save her, he said, looking up to the ceiling and pointing, as if He were still crouching there. Sister Mary Joseph Praise's eyes involuntarily followed his gaze, before she caught herself. Meanwhile, his muddy eyes dropped from the ceiling to her face, to her lips, and to her bosom.

    IF I KNOW THIS MUCH about my mother's voyage, it's because it came from her lips to the ears of others and then to mine. But her tale stopped in Aden. It came to an abrupt halt in that hothouse.
    What is clear is that she embarked on her journey with faith that God approved of her mission and would provide for and protect her. But in Aden, something happened to her. No one knew what exactly. But it was there that she understood that her God was also a vengeful and harsh God and could be so even to His faithful. The Devil had shown himself in Sister Anjali's purple, contorted death mask, but God had allowed that. She considered Aden an evil city, where God used Satan to show her how fragile and fragmented the world was, how delicate the balance between evil and good, and how naïve she was in her faith. Her father used to say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” She felt pity for Saintly Amma, whose dream of enlightenment for Africa was vanity that cost Anjali's life.
    For the