The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  He wandered slowly, enjoying the sights and sounds. He passed two men arguing over the price of a pair of shoes, as bitterly as enemies. Others were joking, shouting at one another. It was necessary to talk loud in order to be heard.

  On the other side of the market he passed through the arched gate and wandered down close, narrow bystreets, then descended a winding and rugged declivity to a large district of wretched houses, irregularly built, divided by small streets with no attempt at uniformity. Many of the houses were attached to one another, but here and there a house was set apart, with a small garden; although these were humble by English standards, they stood out from the neighboring structures as though they were castles.

  Ispahan was old, but Yehuddiyyeh seemed much older. The streets were convoluted, and from them ran alleys. The houses and synagogues were of stone or ancient brick that had faded to a pale rose. Some children led a goat past him. People stood in groups, laughing and talking. Soon it would be time for the evening meal, and the cooking smells from the houses made his mouth water.

  He wandered through the quarter until he found a stable, where he arranged for the animals’ care. Before he left them he cleaned the claw scratches on the donkey’s flank, which were healing nicely.

  Not far from the stable he found an inn run by a tall old man with a handsome smile and a crooked back, named Salman the Lesser.

  “Why the Lesser?” Rob couldn’t refrain from asking.

  “In my native village of Razan my uncle was Salman the Great. A renowned scholar,” the old man explained.

  Rob rented a pallet in a corner of the large sleeping room.

  “You wish food?”

  It enticed him, small pieces of meat broiled on skewers, thick rice that Salman called pilah, small onions blackened by the fire.

  “Is it kasher?” he asked cleverly.

  “Of course it is kasher, you need not fear to eat it!”

  After the meat Salman served honey cakes and a pleasing drink he called a sherbet. “You come from afar,” he said.

  “Europe.”

  “Europe! Ah.”

  “How did you know?”

  The old man grinned. “The way you speak the language.” He saw Rob’s face. “You’ll learn to speak it better, I’m certain. How is it to be a Jew in Europe?”

  Rob didn’t know how to answer, then he thought of what Zevi had said. “It’s hard to be a Jew.”

  Salman nodded soberly.

  “How is it to be a Jew in Ispahan?”

  “Oh, it’s not bad here. The people are instructed in the Qu’ran to revile us, and so they call us names. But they’re accustomed to us and we’re used to them. There have always been Jews in Ispahan,” Salman said. “The city was started by Nebuchadnezzar, who, according to legend, settled Jews here after taking them prisoner when he conquered Judea and destroyed Jerusalem. Then, nine hundred years later, a shah named Yazdegerd be came enamored of a Jewess who lived here, name of Shushan-Dukht, and made her his queen. She made things easier for her own people, and more Jews settled in this place.”

  Rob told himself he couldn’t have chosen a better disguise; he could blend in among them like an ant in an anthill, once he had learned their ways.

  So that after dinner he accompanied the innkeeper to the House of Peace, one of the dozens of synagogues. It was a square building of ancient stone whose cracks were filled with a soft brown moss, though there was no dampness. It had only narrow loopholes instead of windows, and a door so low that Rob had to stoop to enter. A dark passage led to the interior, where lamps showed pillars supporting a roof too high and dark for his eyes to make it out. Men sat in the main portion, while women worshiped behind a wall in a small recess at the side of the building. Rob found it easier to perform the ma’ariv worship in the synagogue than in the company of only a few Jews on the trail. Here there was a hazzan to lead the prayer and an entire congregation to mumble or sing as each individual chose, so he joined in the swaying with less self-consciousness about his poor Hebrew and the fact that often he couldn’t keep up with the prayers.

  On the way back to the inn, Salman smiled at him shrewdly. “Perhaps you would like some excitement, a young man such as yourself, eh? At night here the maidans, the public squares in the Muslim sections of the city, come alive. There are females and wine, and music and entertainments such as you cannot imagine, Reb Jesse.”

  But Rob shook his head. “I should like that, another time,” he said. “Tonight I keep my head clear, for tomorrow I transact a matter of the utmost importance.”

  That night he didn’t sleep but tossed and turned, wondering whether Ibn Sina was a man with whom one could talk easily.

  In the morning he found a public bath, a brick structure built over a natural warm spring. With strong soap and clean cloths, he scrubbed himself free of the accumulated grime of travel, and when his hair had dried he took a surgical knife and trimmed his beard, peering at the reflection in his polished steel square. The beard had filled out, and he thought he looked a proper Jew.

  He wore the better of his two caftans. Setting his leather hat squarely on his head, he went into the street and asked a man with withered limbs to direct him to the school for physicians.

  “You mean the madrassa, the place of teaching? It is next to the hospital,” the beggar said. “On the Street of Ali, near the Friday Mosque in the center of the city.” In return for a coin the lame man blessed his children down to the tenth generation.

  It was a long walk. He had opportunity to observe that Ispahan was a place of business, for he glimpsed men laboring over their crafts, shoemakers and metalsmiths, potters and wheelwrights, glass blowers and tailors. He passed several bazaars in which goods of all sorts were sold. Eventually he came to the Friday Mosque, a massive square structure with a splendid minaret on which birds fluttered. Beyond it was a marketplace with a preponderance of bookstalls and small eating places, and presently he saw the madrassa.

  On the outer perimeters of the school, nestled among more bookshops placed to serve the needs of the scholars, were long, low buildings that contained living quarters. Around them children ran and played. Young men were everywhere, most of them wearing green turbans. The madrassa buildings were constructed of blocks of white limestone, after the manner of most of the mosques. They were widely spaced, with gardens in between. Beneath a chestnut tree heavy with unopened spiky fruit, six young men sat on folded legs and gave their attention to a white-bearded man who wore a sky-blue turban.

  Rob drifted close to them. “… Socrates’ syllogisms,” the lecturer was saying. “A proposition is logically inferred to be true from the fact that two other propositions are true. For example, from the fact that, one, all men are mortal, and, two, Socrates is a man, it can be logically concluded that, three, Socrates is mortal.”

  Rob grimaced and moved on, touched by doubt; there was much he didn’t know, too much he didn’t understand.

  He paused before a very old building with an attached mosque and lovely minaret to ask a green-turbaned student in which building medicine was taught.

  “Third building down. Here, they teach theology. Next door, Islamic law. There is where they teach medicine,” he said, pointing to a domed building of white stone. It was so slavishly similar to the prevailing architecture of Ispahan that ever after Rob was to think of it as the Big Teat. Next to it was a large one-story building whose sign proclaimed it to be the maristan, “the place for sick people.” Intrigued, instead of entering the madrassa he walked up the maristan’s three marble steps and through its wrought-iron portal.

  There was a central courtyard containing a pool in which colored fish swam, and benches under fruit trees. Corridors radiated from the courtyard like the rays of the sun, with large rooms off each corridor. Most of the rooms were filled. He had never seen so many ill and injured people gathered in one place, and he wandered in amazement.

  The patients were grouped according to affliction: here, a long room filled with men wh
o suffered from fractured bones; here, victims of fevers; here—he wrinkled his nose, for clearly this was a room reserved for patients with diarrhea and other diseases of the excretory process. Yet even in this room the atmosphere wasn’t as oppressive as it might have been, for there were large windows, with the flow of air impeded only by light cloths which had been stretched over the windows to keep insects away. Rob noted slots at the tops and bottoms of the casements so shutters could be slipped into place during the winter season.

  The walls were whitewashed and the floors were of stone, which was easy to clean and made the building cool compared to the considerable heat outside.

  In each room, a small fountain splashed!

  Rob paused before a closed door, held by the sign on it: dar-ul-maraftan,“abode of those who require to be chained.” When he opened the door he saw three naked men, their heads shaved and their arms bound, chained to a high window from iron bands fastened around their necks. Two sagged, asleep or unconscious, but the third man stared and began to howl like a beast, tears wetting his slack cheeks.

  “I am sorry,” Rob said gently, and left the maniacs.

  He came to a hall of surgical patients and had to resist the temptation to stop at each pallet and lift the dressings to examine the stumps of amputees and the wounds of the injured.

  To be exposed to this many interesting patients every day, and to be taught by great men! It would be like spending one’s early life in the Dasht-i-Kavir, he thought, and then discovering that you owned an oasis.

  The sign on the doorway to the next hall was too much for his limited Persian, but as he entered it was easy to see that it was devoted to the diseases and injuries of the eye.

  Nearby, a stalwart male nurse quailed before a tongue-lashing.

  “It was a mistake, Master Karim Harun,” the nurse said. “I thought you told me to remove the bandages of Eswed Omar.”

  “You donkey’s prick,” the other man said in disgust. He was young and athletically slender, and Rob saw with surprise that he wore the green turban of a student, for his manner was as assured as that of a physician who owned the hospital floor he trod. He wasn’t in any way feminine but was aristocratically handsome, the most beautiful man Rob had ever seen, with glossy black hair and deep-set brown eyes that flashed with anger. “It was your mistake, Rūmi. I told you to change the dressings of Kuru Yezidi, not those of Eswed Omar. Ustad Juzjani couched the eyes of Eswed Omar himself and ordered me to see that his bandages weren’t disturbed for five days. I passed the order to you and you failed to obey it, you shit. Therefore, if Eswed Omar should fail to see with the utmost clarity, and should the wrath of al-Juzjani fall on me, I’ll slit your fat ass like a roast of lamb.”

  He noticed Rob, standing there transfixed, and scowled. “What is it you want?”

  “To speak with Ibn Sina about entering the school for physicians.”

  “Doubtless you do. But the Prince of Physicians isn’t awaiting you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must go to the second floor of the building next door and see Hadji Davout Hosein, the deputy governor of the school. The governor is Rotun bin Nasr, distant cousin of the Shah and a general in the army, who accepts the honor and never comes to the school. Hadji Davout Hosein administers, it is he you must see.” The student named Karim Harun then turned back to the nurse with a scowl. “Now, do you think you can change Kuru Yezidi’s dressings, O you green object on a camel’s hoof?”

  At least some of the medical students lived in the Big Teat, for the shadowy first-floor corridor was lined with tiny cells. Through an open door near the stairway landing Rob saw two men who seemed to be cutting a yellow dog that lay on the table, perhaps dead.

  On the second floor he asked a man in a green turban to direct him to the hadji and was ushered, ultimately, into the office chamber of Davout Hosein.

  The deputy governor was a small, thin man, not yet old, who wore an air of self-importance, a tunic of good gray stuff, and the white turban of one who has made his way to Mecca. He had little dark eyes and on his forehead a very distinct zabiba bore witness to the fervor of his piety.

  After they had exchanged salaams he listened to Rob’s request and studied him narrowly. “You’ve come from England, you say? In Europe? … Ah, what part of Europe is that?”

  “The north.”

  “The north of Europe. How long did it take you to reach us?” “Not quite two years, Hadji.”

  “Two years! Extraordinary. Your father is a physician, a graduate of our school?”

  “My father? No, Hadji.”

  “Hmmm. An uncle, perhaps?”

  “No. I shall be the first physician in my line.”

  Hosein frowned. “Here we have scholars descended from long lines of physicians. You have letters of introduction, Dhimmi?”

  “No, Master Hosein.” He felt rising panic. “I am a barber-surgeon, I already have had some training …”

  “No references from some of our distinguished graduates?” Hosein asked, astounded.

  “No.”

  “We don’t accept for education any person who appears.”

  “This isn’t a passing fancy. I have traveled a terrible distance because of my determination to be trained in medicine. I have learned your language.”

  “Poorly, I may say.” The hadji sniffed. “We do not simply train in medicine. We do not produce tradesmen, we fashion educated men. Our students learn theology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astrology, and jurisprudence as well as medicine, and upon being graduated as well-rounded scientists and intellectuals they may take their choice of careers in teaching, medicine, or the law.”

  Rob waited with a sinking feeling.

  “Surely you must comprehend? It is impossible.”

  He comprehended almost two years.

  Turning his back on Mary Cullen.

  Sweating under the burning sun, shivering in glacial snows, beaten by storm and rain. Through salt desert and treacherous forest. Laboring like a bloody ant over mountain after mountain.

  “I will not leave without speaking with Ibn Sina,” he said firmly.

  Hadji Davout Hosein opened his mouth but saw something in Rob’s eyes that made him close it. He paled and nodded quickly. “Please to wait here,” he said, and left the room.

  Rob sat there alone.

  After a time, four soldiers came. None was as large as he but they were muscular. They carried short, heavy wooden batons. One of them had a pocked face and kept smacking his baton into the meaty palm of his left hand.

  “What is your name, Jew?” the man with the pocked face asked, not impolitely.

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “A foreigner, a European, Hadji said?”

  “Yes, from England. A place a great distance from here.”

  The soldier nodded. “Did you not refuse to leave at Hadji’s request?”

  “That is true, but—”

  “It is time to leave now, Jew. With us.”

  “I will not leave without speaking with Ibn Sina.”

  The spokesman swung his baton.

  Not my nose, he thought in anguish.

  But blood began to pour at once, and all four of them knew where and how to use the clubs with economic efficiency. They hemmed him in so he couldn’t swing his arms.

  “To hell!” he said in English. They couldn’t have understood but the tone was unmistakable, and they hit harder. One of the blows cracked him above the temple and he was suddenly dizzy and nauseated. He tried at the very least to succeed in being sick in Hadji’s office chamber but the pain was too great.

  They knew their job very well. When he was no longer a threat, they stopped using the batons in order to beat him very skillfully with their fists.

  They made him walk out of the school, one of them supporting him under each arm. They had four large brown horses tethered outside and they rode while he staggered between two of the beasts. Whenever he fell, which happened three times, one of t
hem dismounted and kicked him hard in the ribs until he got to his feet. It seemed a long walk but they went just beyond the madrassa grounds to a small brick building, shabby and unprepossessing, part of the lowest branch of the Islamic court system, as he would learn. Inside there was only a wooden table, behind which sat a cross-looking man, bushy-haired, full-bearded, and wearing black clerical robes not unlike Rob’s caftan. He was in the process of opening a melon.

  The four soldiers led Rob to the table and stood respectfully while the justice used a dirty fingernail to scrape the seeds from the melon into an earthen bowl. Then he sliced the melon and ate it slowly. When it was gone he wiped first his hands and then the knife on his robe and turned toward Mecca and thanked Allah for the food.

  Having finished praying, he sighed and looked at the soldiers.

  “A crazy European Jew who has disturbed the public tranquility, mufti,” the soldier with the pocked face said. “Taken on complaint of Hadji Davout Hosein, against whom he threatened violent deeds.”

  The mufti nodded and dug a bit of melon from between his teeth with a fingernail. He looked at Rob. “You are not a Muslim, and you are accused by a Muslim. The word of an unbeliever may not be accepted against one of the faithful. Do you have a Muslim who will speak in your defense?”

  Rob tried thickly to talk but no sound came, though his legs buckled with the effort. The soldiers yanked him erect.

  “Why do you behave like a dog? Ah, well. An infidel, after all, unused to our ways. Therefore, it requires mercy. You shall hand him over to be kept in the carcan at the discretion of the kelonter,” the mufti told the soldiers.

  It added two words to Rob’s Persian vocabulary, which he pondered as the soldiers half dragged him from the court and again herded him between their mounts. He guessed correctly on one of the definitions; though he didn’t know it then, the kelonter, whom he supposed to be some kind of jailkeeper, was the provost of the city.

  When they arrived at a great and grim jail, Rob thought that carcan surely meant prison. Inside, the pockfaced soldier turned him over to two guards who hustled him past forbidding dungeons of foul dankness, but they emerged finally from the windowless dark into the open brilliance of an inner court where two long lines of stocks were occupied by groaning or unconscious human misery. The guards marched him along the line until they came to an empty device, which one of them unlocked.