The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  That night he dreamed of Mary Cullen. He sat with her and knew tranquility. There was happiness on her face and he was aware her fulfillment came from him, which made him glad. She began to work embroidery and, without his understanding how or why, it turned out that she was Mam, and he experienced a rush of warmth and security he hadn’t known since he was nine years old.

  Then he awoke, hawking and spitting drily. There was sand and salt in his mouth and ears, and when he got up and walked it rubbed abrasively between his buttocks.

  It was the third morning. Rabbenu David ben Sauli had instructed Lonzano to walk east for two days and then south for a day. They had gone in the direction Lonzano believed to be east, and now they turned in the direction Lonzano believed to be south.

  Rob had never been able to tell east from south, north from west. He asked himself what would become of them if Lonzano didn’t truly know south or truly know east, or if the Kashan rabbenu’s directions weren’t accurate.

  The piece of the Dasht-i-Kavir they had set out to cross was like a small cove in a great ocean. The main desert was vast and, for them, uncrossable.

  Supposing that, instead of crossing the cove, they were heading straight toward the heart of the Dasht-i-Kavir?

  If that was the case, they were doomed.

  It occurred to him to wonder whether the God of the Jews was claiming him because of his masquerade. But Aryeh, although less than likable, wasn’t evil, and both Lonzano and Loeb were most worthy; it wasn’t logical that their God would destroy them to punish one goy sinner.

  He was not the only one entertaining thoughts of despair. Sensing their mood, Lonzano attempted to start them singing again. But Lonzano’s was the only voice raised in the refrain and eventually he stopped singing, too.

  Rob poured a sparing final portion for each of his animals and let them drink from his hat.

  What remained in his leathern bottle was about six mouthfuls of water. He reasoned that if they were nearing the end of Dasht-i-Kavir it wouldn’t matter, while if they were traveling in the wrong direction this small amount of water was insufficient to save his life.

  So he drank it. He forced himself to take it in small sips, but it was gone in a very brief time.

  As soon as the goatskin was empty he began to suffer thirst more severely than ever. The swallowed water seemed to scald him internally, followed by a terrible headache.

  He willed himself to walk but found his steps faltering. I cannot, he realized with horror.

  Lonzano began to clap his hands fiercely. “Ai, di-di-di-di-di-di, ai, di-di di, di!” he sang, and went into a dance, shaking his head, whirling, lifting his arms and knees to the rhythm of the song.

  Loeb’s eyes glinted with tears of anger. “Stop it, you fool!” he shouted. But in a moment he grimaced and joined in the singing and clapping, cavorting along behind Lonzano.

  Then Rob. And even sour Aryeh.

  “Ai, di-di-di-di-di-di, ai, di-di di, di!”

  They sang through dry lips and danced on feet that no longer had feeling. Eventually they fell silent and ceased the mad prancing, but they continued to plod, moving one numbed leg after the other, not daring to face the possibility that they were indeed lost.

  Early in the afternoon they began to hear thunder. It rumbled in the distance for a long time before it heralded a few drops of rain, and shortly afterward they saw a gazelle and then a pair of wild asses.

  Their own animals suddenly quickened. The beasts moved their legs faster and then began to trot of their own volition, scenting what lay ahead, and the men mounted the donkeys and rode again as they left the extreme boundary of the sand over which they had struggled for three days.

  The land evolved into a plain, first with sparse growth and then more verdant. Before dusk they came to a pond where reeds grew and swallows dipped and wheeled. Aryeh tasted the water and nodded. “It is good.”

  “We mustn’t let the beasts drink too much at once or they will founder,” Loeb cautioned.

  They watered the animals carefully and tied them to trees, then they drank and tore off their clothes and lay in the water, soaking among the reeds.

  “When you were in the Dasht-i-Lut did you lose men?” Rob said.

  “We lost my cousin Calman,” Lonzano said. “A man of twenty-two years.”

  “Did he fall through the salt crust?”

  “No. He abandoned all self-discipline and drank his water. Then he died of thirst.”

  “May he rest,” Loeb said.

  “What are the symptoms of a man dying of thirst?”

  Lonzano was obviously offended. “I don’t wish to think on it.”

  “I ask because I’m to be a physician, and not out of curiosity,” Rob said, and saw that Aryeh was gazing at him with dislike.

  Lonzano waited a long moment and then nodded. “My cousin Calman became confused with the heat and drank with abandon until his water was gone. We were lost and every man took care of his own water. We weren’t allowed to share. After a while, he began to vomit weakly but there was no liquid to bring up. His tongue turned quite black and the roof of his mouth was a grayish white. His mind wandered, he believed he was in his mother’s house. His lips were shriveled, his teeth were exposed, and his mouth hung open in a wolfish grin. He alternately panted and snored. That night under cover of darkness I disobeyed and dripped a little water on a rag and squeezed it into his mouth, but it was too late. After the second day without water, he died.”

  They lay silent in the brown water.

  “Ai, di-di-di-di-di-di, ai, di-di di, di!” Rob sang finally. He looked into Lonzano’s eyes and they grinned at one another.

  A mosquito settled on Loeb’s leathery cheek and he slapped himself. “The beasts are ready for more water, I think,” he said, and they left the lake and finished tending to their animals.

  Next day they were back on their donkeys at dawn, and to Rob’s intense pleasure they soon found themselves passing countless little lakes surrounded by garlands of meadow. The lakes exhilarated him. The grass was as high as a tall man’s knee and had a delicious odor. It was full of grasshoppers and crickets, as well as tiny gnats that burned when they bit him and immediately left an itching welt. A few days earlier, he would have rejoiced at seeing any insect, but now he ignored the large and brilliant butterflies of the meadows while he slapped at bites and called down heaven’s curses on gnats and mosquitoes.

  “Oh, God, what is that?” Aryeh cried.

  Rob followed his pointing finger and in full sunlight he perceived an immense cloud rising to the east. He watched with growing alarm as it approached, for it looked like the dust cloud they had seen when the hot wind struck them in the desert.

  But from this cloud came the unmistakable sound of hooves, as of a great army sweeping down on them.

  “The Seljuks?” he whispered, but no one answered.

  Pale and expectant, they waited and watched as the cloud came nearer and the sound grew deafening.

  At a distance of about fifty paces there was a clatter as if a thousand practiced horsemen had reined up at a word of command.

  At first he could see nothing. Then the dust thinned and he saw wild asses, in countless number and in prime condition, and ranged in a well-formed line. The asses stared in intent curiosity at the men and the men gazed at them.

  “Hai!” Lonzano shouted, and the herd wheeled as one and renewed its flight, moving northward and leaving behind a message about the multiplicity of life.

  They passed smaller herds of asses and enormous herds of gazelles, sometimes feeding together and obviously seldom hunted, because they paid the men little mind. More ominous were the wild pigs that seemed to abound. Occasionally Rob glimpsed a hairy sow or a boar with wicked tusks, and on all sides he heard the animals grunting as they rustled and rooted in the tall grass.

  Now they all sang when Lonzano suggested it, in order to warn the pigs of their approach and prevent startling them and provoking a charge. Rob’s skin crawled
and his long legs, hanging over the sides of the little donkey and dragging through the deep grass, felt exposed and vulnerable, but the pigs gave way before the male loudness of the singing and made them no trouble.

  They came to a swift-moving stream that was like a great ditch, its sides almost vertical and rampant with fennel, and though they traveled upstream and downstream there was no easy place to cross; finally they just drove their animals into the water. It was very difficult, with donkeys and mules trying to climb the overgrown far bank and slipping back. The air was rich with curses and the sharp smell of crushed fennel, and it took them a while to complete the fording. Beyond the river they entered a forest, following a track like the ones Rob had known at home. The country was wilder than English woods; the high canopy of treetops interlocked and shut out the sun, yet the undergrowth was greenly rank and teeming with wildlife. He identified deer and rabbits and a porcupine, and in the trees were doves and what he thought was a kind of partridge.

  It was the sort of track Barber would have liked, he thought, and wondered how the Jews would react if he were to blow the Saxon horn.

  They had rounded a curve in the track and Rob was taking his turn in the lead when his donkey shied. Above them, on a large branch, crouched a wildcat.

  The donkey reared and behind them the mule caught the scent and screamed. Perhaps the panther could sense overwhelming fear. As Rob scrabbled for a weapon the animal, which appeared monstrous to him, sprang.

  A bolt, long and heavy and fired with tremendous force, slammed into the beast’s right eye.

  The great claws raked the poor donkey as the cat crashed into Rob and unseated him. In a moment he was stretched on the ground choking on the muskiness of the cat. The animal lay athwart him so that he was facing the hindquarter, noting the lustrous black fur, the matted arsehole, and the great right rear paw that rested inches from his face, with obscenely large, swollen-looking footpads. The claw somehow had been ripped recently from the second of the four toes, which was raw and bloody and indicated to him that at the other end of the cat there were eyes that were not dried apricots and a tongue that was not red felt.

  People came out of the forest. Nearby stood their master, still holding his longbow.

  The man was dressed in a plain red calico coat quilted with cotton, rough hose, shagreen shoes, and a carelessly wound turban. He was perhaps forty years old, with a strong build, erect bearing, short dark beard, aquiline beak of a nose, and a killer’s light still in the eyes as he watched his beaters pulling the dead panther off the huge young man.

  Rob scrambled to his feet, trembling, willing himself to control his bowels. “Catch the fucking donkey,” he demanded of no one in particular. Neither the Jews nor the Persians understood, for he had spoken in English. At any rate the donkey was turned back by the strangeness of the woods, in which perhaps other dangers lurked, and now returned to stand and quiver like her owner.

  Lonzano came to his side and grunted in recognition. Then everyone was kneeling in the prostration rite that later was described to Rob as ravi zemin, “face upon the ground,” and Lonzano pulled him down without gentleness and made certain, with a hand on the back of his neck, that his head was properly lowered.

  The sight of this instruction gained the hunter’s attention; Rob heard the sound of his footsteps and then glimpsed the shagreen shoes, stopped a few inches from his obeisant head.

  “It is a large dead panther and a large untutored Dhimmi,” an amused voice said, and the shoes moved away.

  The hunter and the servants bearing his prey departed without another word, and after a time the kneeling men rose.

  “You are all right?” Lonzano said.

  “Yes, yes.” His caftan was ripped but he was unharmed. “Who is he?”

  “He is Alā-al-Dawla, Shahanshah. The King of Kings.”

  Rob stared at the road down which they had departed. “What is a Dhimmi?”

  “It means ‘Man of the Book.’ It is what they call a Jew here,” Lonzano said.

  37

  REB JESSE’S CITY

  He and the three Jews parted ways two days later at Kupayeh, a crossroads village of a dozen crumbling brick houses. The detour through Dasht-i-Kavir had taken them a bit too far east, but he had less than a day’s journey west to Ispahan, while they still faced three weeks of hard travel south and a crossing of the Straits of Hormuz before they were home.

  He knew that without these men and the Jewish villages that had given him haven, he wouldn’t have reached Persia.

  Rob and Loeb embraced. “Go with God, Reb Jesse ben Benjamin!”

  “Go with God, friend.”

  Even sour Aryeh affected a crooked smile as they wished each other a safe journey, no doubt as happy to say goodbye as Rob was.

  “When you attend the school for physicians you must tender our love to Aryeh’s kinsman, Reb Mirdin Askari,” Lonzano said.

  “Yes.” He took Lonzano’s hands. “Thank you, Reb Lonzano ben Ezra.”

  Lonzano smiled. “For one who is almost an Other you’ve been an excellent companion and a worthy man. Go in peace, Inghiliz.”

  “Go you in peace.”

  To a chorus of good wishes they went in different directions.

  Rob rode the mule, for after the attack by the panther he had transferred his bundle to the back of the poor frightened donkey and now led the beast. He made slower time with this arrangement but excitement was rising in him and he wished to travel the last portion deliberately, in order to savor it.

  It was well he was in no hurry, for it was a trafficked road. He heard the sound that pleased him so, and soon he overtook a column of belled camels, each burdened with great twin baskets of rice. He traveled behind the rearmost camel, glorying in the musical tinkling of the bells.

  The forest ascended to an open plateau; wherever there was sufficient water there were fields of ripened rice and opium poppies, separated by expanses of flat, dry rockiness. The plateau in turn became white limestone hills, cast in a variety of changeable hues by sun and shadow. In several places the limestone had been deeply quarried.

  Late in the afternoon the mule crested a hill and Rob looked down upon a little river valley and—twenty months after he had left London!—he saw Ispahan.

  His first and predominant impression was of dazzling whiteness with touches of deep blue. It was a voluptuous place full of hemispheres and curves, with great domed buildings glittering in the sunlight, mosques with minarets like airy lances, green open spaces, and mature cyprus and plane trees. The southern quarter of the city was a warm pink where the sun’s rays were reflected from sand hills instead of limestone.

  Now he couldn’t hang back. “Hai!” he shouted, and heeled the mule’s flanks. The donkey clattering behind, they swung out of line and passed the camels at a fast trot.

  A quarter of a mile from the city, the trail turned into a spectacular cobblestoned avenue, the first paved road he had seen since leaving Constantinople. It was very broad, with four wide lanes separated from one another by rows of tall matched plane trees. The avenue crossed the river over a bridge that was really an arched dam creating an irrigation pool. Near a sign that proclaimed the stream to be Zayandeh, the River of Life, naked brown-skinned youths splashed and swam.

  The avenue brought him to the great stone wall and a unique arched city gate.

  Inside the wall were the large homes of the wealthy, with terraces, orchards, and vineyards. Pointed arches were everywhere—arched doorways, arched windows, arched garden gates. Beyond the rich neighborhood were mosques and larger buildings with vaulted domes, white and round with little points on top, as though their architects had fallen madly in love with the female breast. It was easy to see where the quarried rock had gone; everything was white stone trimmed with dark blue tile set to form geometric designs or quotations from the Qu’ran:

  There is no God but He, the most merciful.

  Fight for the religion of God.

  Woe be unto thos
e who are negligent at their prayer.

  The streets were full of turbaned men, but no women. He passed a huge open square; and then, perhaps half a mile later, another. He relished the sounds and the smells. It was unmistakably a municipium, a large warren of humanity such as he had known as a boy in London, and for some reason he felt it right and fitting to be riding slowly through this city on the north bank of the River of Life.

  From the minarets male voices, some of them distant and thin, others near and clear, began to call the faithful to prayer. All traffic ceased as men faced what was apparently southwest, the direction of Mecca. All the men in the city had fallen to their knees, caressing the ground with their palms and dropping forward so their foreheads were pressed into the cobbles.

  Rob stopped the mule and alighted out of respect.

  When the prayers were done he approached a man of middle age who was briskly rolling up a small prayer rug he had taken from his nearby oxcart. Rob asked how he might find the Jewish quarter.

  “Ah. It is called Yehuddiyyeh. You must continue on down the Avenue of Yazdegerd, until you come to the Jews’ market. At the far end of the market there is an arched gate, and on the other side you will find your quarter. You cannot miss it, Dhimmi.”

  The place was lined with stalls that sold furniture, lamps and oil, breads, pastries giving off the scent of honey and spices, clothing, utensils of every sort, vegetables and fruits, meats, fish, chickens plucked and dressed or alive and squawking—everything necessary to material life. He saw displays of prayer shawls, fringed garments, phylacteries. In a letter-writer’s booth an old man with a lined face sat hunched over inkpot and quills, and a woman told fortunes under an open tent. Rob knew he was in the Jewish quarter because there were women vending in the stalls and shopping in the crowded market with baskets over their arms. They wore loose black dresses and their hair was bound in cloths. A few had face veils, like Muslim women, but most did not. The men were dressed like Rob, with full, bushy beards.