The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  One morning he was summoned, and rode the brown horse down the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens until he came to the dusty lane leading to Ibn Sina’s handsome house. The gateman took his horse, and by the time he had walked to the stone door Ibn Sina was there to greet him.

  “It is my wife. I would be grateful if you would examine her.”

  Rob bowed, confused; Ibn Sina had no lack of distinguished colleagues who would be pleased and honored to examine the woman. But he followed him to a door leading to a stone stairway like the inside of a snail shell, and they ascended the north tower of the house.

  The old woman lay on a pallet and stared through them with dull and unseeing eyes. Ibn Sina knelt by her.

  “Reza.”

  Her dry lips were cracked. He moistened a square of cloth in rose water and wiped her mouth and face tenderly. Ibn Sina had a lifetime of experience in how to make a sickroom comfortable, but not even clean surroundings and newly changed garments and the fragrant wisps of smoke rising from incense dishes could mask the stink of her illness.

  The bones seemed almost to violate her transparent skin. Her face was waxen, her hair thin and white. Perhaps her husband was the greatest physician in the world but she was an old woman in the final stages of bone sickness. Large buboes were visible on her skinny arms and lower legs. Her ankles and feet were swollen with gathered fluids. Her right hip was largely deteriorated and Rob knew that if he were to lift the bed gown he would find that more of the advanced growths had invaded other external parts of her body just as, from the odor, he was certain they had spread to her intestines.

  It wasn’t to confirm a terrible and obvious diagnosis that Ibn Sina had summoned him. Now he knew what was required of him and he took both her frail hands in his, talking to her softly. He took longer than necessary, gazing into her eyes, which for a moment seemed to clear. “Da’ud?” she whispered, and her grip on his hands strengthened.

  Rob looked at Ibn Sina questioningly.

  “Her brother, dead these many years.”

  The vacancy returned to her eyes, the fingers clutching his grew slack. Rob returned her hands to the pallet and they withdrew from the tower.

  “How long?”

  “Not long, Hakim-bashi. I believe a matter of days.” Rob felt clumsy; the other man was far too senior to him for the standard condolences. “Is there nothing, then, that can be done for her?”

  Ibn Sina’s mouth twisted. “I am left to showing her my love with stronger and stronger infusions.” He took his apprentice to the front door and thanked him, then returned to his afflicted wife.

  “Master,” someone said to Rob.

  When he turned he saw the huge eunuch who guarded the second wife. “You will follow, please?”

  They passed through a doorway in the garden wall, the opening so small each of them had to stoop, into another garden outside the south tower.

  “What is it?” he asked the slave curtly.

  The eunuch made no reply. Something drew Rob’s glance and he looked to where a veiled face stared down at him through a small window.

  Their eyes held and then hers moved away in a swirl of veils and the window was empty.

  Rob turned to the slave and the eunuch smiled slightly and shrugged.

  “She bade me bring you here. She desired to look upon you, master,” he said.

  Perhaps Rob might have dreamed of her that night but there was no time. He studied the laws of ownership of property and, as the oil in his lamp was burning low, he heard the clopping sound of hooves that came down his street and appeared to stop outside his door.

  There was a tapping.

  He reached for his sword, thinking of thieves. It was far too late for callers. “Who is there?”

  “Wasif, master.”

  Rob knew no Wasif but thought he recognized the voice. Holding the weapon ready, he opened the door and saw he had been right. It was the eunuch, holding the reins of a donkey.

  “Were you sent by the hakim?”

  “No, master. I am sent by her, who wishes you to come.”

  He had no reply. The eunuch knew better than to smile, but there was a glint behind the grave eyes that took in the Dhimmi’s amazement.

  “Wait,” Rob said rudely, and shut the door.

  He came out after a hasty washing-up and, mounting the brown horse without a saddle, wended through the dark streets behind the huge slave, whose splayed feet dragged furrows in the dust as he rode astride the poor donkey. They plodded past silent houses in which people slept, turning into the lane whose deeper dust muffled the animals’ hooves, and then into a field that extended behind the wall of Ibn Sina’s estate.

  A gate in the wall took them close to the door of the south tower. The eunuch opened the tower gate and, bowing, motioned for Rob to go on alone.

  It was like the fantasies he had had on a hundred nights while lying alone and aroused. This dark stone passage was twin to the stairway in the north tower, circling like the whorls of a nautilus shell, and when he emerged at the top he found himself in a commodious haram.

  In the lamplight he saw that she waited on a large cushioned pallet, a Persian woman who had prepared herself to make love, her hands and feet and cunnus red with henna and slick with oil. Her breasts were a disappointment, scarcely larger than a boy’s.

  Rob removed her veil.

  She had black hair, also treated with oil and pulled back tight against her round skull. He had imagined the forbidden features of a Queen of Sheba or a Cleopatra and was startled to find instead a haunting young girl with a trembling mouth that she now licked nervously with a flick of pink tongue. It was a heart-shaped, lovely face with a pointed chin and a short, straight nose. From the thin right nostril dangled a small metal ring just large enough to admit his little finger.

  He had been in this country too long: her uncovered facial features were more exciting to him than her shaven body.

  “Why are you called Despina the Ugly?”

  “Ibn Sina decreed it. It is to fool the Evil Eye,” she said as he sank to the pallet beside her.

  Next morning he and Karim studied Fiqh again, the laws of marriage and divorce.

  “Who makes the marriage settlement?”

  “The husband makes the marriage contract and presents it to the wife, and he writes the mabr, the amount of the dowry, into the agreement.”

  “How many witnesses are needed?”

  “I don’t know. Two?”

  “Yes, two. Who has the greater rights in the haram, the second wife or the fourth wife?”

  “All wives have equal rights.”

  They turned to the laws of divorce, and the grounds: barrenness, shrewish behavior, adultery.

  Under Sharī’a, the penalty for adultery was stoning, but this had given way, two centuries before. An adulterous woman of a rich and powerful man might still be executed in the kelonter’s jail by beheading, but the adulterous wives of the poor often were given a severe striping with a cane and then divorced or not, depending upon the husband’s wishes.

  Karim had little trouble with Sharī’a, for he had been raised in a devout household and knew the laws of piety. It was Fiqh that haunted him. There were so many laws, about so many things, that he knew he couldn’t remember them all.

  Rob thought about it. “If you can’t recall the exact wording of the Fiqh, then you should turn to Sharī’a or Sunna. All the law is based on the sermons and writings of Mohammed. Therefore, if you can’t remember the law, give them an answer from religion or from the life of the Prophet and perhaps they will be satisfied.” He sighed. “It is worth trying. And in the meantime we’ll pray, and memorize as many of the laws of the Fiqh as we are able.”

  Next afternoon at the hospital he followed al-Juzjani through the halls and paused with the others at the pallet of a skinny little rat of a boy, Bilāl. Close by sat a peasant with dumb, accepting eyes.

  “Distemper,” al-Juzjani said. “An example of how colic can suck the soul. What is his age
?”

  Cowed but flattered to be addressed, the father ducked his head. “He is in the ninth season, lord.”

  “How long ill?”

  “Two weeks. It is the side sickness and has killed two of his uncles and my father. Terrible pain. Come and gone, come and gone. But three days ago it came and did not leave.”

  The nurse, who addressed al-Juzjani fawningly and doubtless wished they would finish with the child and move on, said he had been fed only sherbets of sweetened juices. “Everything he swallows, he spews or shits.”

  Al-Juzjani nodded. “Examine him, Jesse.”

  Rob pulled down the blanket. The boy had a scar under the chin but it was fully healed and not part of his illness. He placed a palm on the thin cheek and Bilāl tried to move but didn’t have the strength. Rob patted his shoulder.

  “Hot.”

  He ran his fingertips slowly down the body. When he reached the stomach, the boy screamed.

  “The belly is soft on the left and hard on the right side.”

  “Allah tried to protect the site of the distemper,” al-Juzjani said.

  As gently as possible Rob used his fingertips to outline the area of pain from the navel across the right half of the abdomen, regretting the torture he produced each time he pressed the belly. He turned Bilāl and they saw that the rectum was red and tender.

  When he had replaced the blanket he took the small hands and heard the old Black Knight laughing at him again.

  “Will he die, lord?” the father asked matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” Rob said, and the man nodded.

  Nobody smiled at the opinion. Since they had returned from Shīrāz, Mirdin and Karim had told certain stories that had been repeated. Rob had noticed that now no one hooted when he dared to say somebody would die.

  “Aelus Cornelius Celsus has described the side sickness in his writings and should be read,” Hakim al-Juzjani said, and turned to the next pallet.

  When the last patient had been visited, Rob went to the House of Wisdom and asked Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the librarian, to help him find what the Roman had written of the side sickness. He was fascinated to learn that Celsus had opened the bodies of the dead to advance his knowledge. Still, there wasn’t much knowledge of this particular complaint, which Celsus described as distemper in the large intestine near the cecum, accompanied by violent inflammation and pain on the right side of the abdomen.

  When he was through reading, he went again to where Bilāl lay. The father was gone. A stern mullah perched over the boy like a great raven, intoning from the Qu’ran while the child stared at his black robes, his eyes stark.

  Rob pulled the pallet so the little one was looking away from the mullah. On a low table the nurse had left three Persian pomegranates round as balls, to be eaten with the evening meal, and he took them now and popped them one at a time until he had them flowing over his head from hand to hand. Just like olden days, Bilāl. He was a very unpracticed juggler now but with only three objects there was no trouble and he made the fruits play tricks.

  The boy’s eyes were as round as the flying objects.

  “What we need is melody!”

  He didn’t know any Persian songs and he required something lively. There emerged from his mouth Barber’s raucous old dolly song.

  “Your eyes caressed me once,

  Your arms embrace me now …

  We’ll roll together by and by

  So make no fruitless vow!”

  Not a suitable song for a child to die by, but the mullah, glaring at his antics in disbelief, was supplying solemnity and prayer while Rob supplied some of the joyousness of life. They didn’t understand the words at any rate, so there was no disrespect. He gave Bilāl several choruses and then saw the child leap into a final convulsion that arched his small body into a bow. Still singing, Rob felt the final pulse flutter into nothingness in Bilāl’s throat.

  He shut the eyes, cleaned the snot from the nose, straightened and bathed the body. He combed Bilāl’s hair and tied the jaw closed with a cloth.

  The mullah still sat cross-legged, chanting from the Qu’ran. His eyes glared: he was able to pray and hate at the same time. Doubtless he would make complaint that the Dhimmi had committed sacrilege, but Rob told himself that the report would not show that just before he died, Bilāl had smiled.

  Four nights out of seven the eunuch Wasif came for him and he stayed in the tower haram until the early hours of morning.

  They gave language lessons.

  “A prick.”

  She laughed. “No, your lingam. And this, my yoni.”

  She said they were adequately matched. “A man is either as a hare, a bull, or a horse. You are as a bull. A woman is either as a deer, a mare, or an elephant, and I am as a deer. That is good. It would be difficult for a hare to bring joy to an elephant,” she said seriously.

  She was the teacher, he the student, as if he were a boy again and had never made love. She did things he recognized from the pictures in the book he had bought in the maidan and a number that weren’t depicted in the book. She showed him kshiraniraka, the milk-and-water embrace. The position of the wife of Indra. The auparishtaka mouth congress.

  In the beginning he was intrigued and delighted as they progressed through the Turnabout, the Knocking at the Door, the Coition of the Blacksmith. He became cranky when she tried to teach him the proper sounds to make when coming, the choice of sut or plat as substitution for the groan.

  “Do you never simply relax and fuck? It is worse than memorizing Fiqh.”

  “It is more pleasurable after it is learned,” she said, offended.

  He was unaffected by the reproach in her voice. Also, he had decided that he liked women to keep their hair.

  “Isn’t the old man sufficient?”

  “He was more than enough, once. His potency was famous. He loved drink and women, and when the mood was on him he would do a snake. A female snake,” she said, and her eyes glittered with tears as she smiled. “But he hasn’t lain with me for two years. When she became very sick, he stopped.”

  Despina said she had belonged to Ibn Sina all her life. She had been born to two of his slaves, an Indian woman and a Persian who had been his trusted servant. Her mother died when she was six. The old man had married her at her father’s death, when she was twelve, and had never freed her.

  Rob fingered her nose ring, symbol of her slavery. “Why has he not?”

  “As his property as well as his second wife, I am doubly protected.”

  “What if he were to come here now?” He thought of the single stairway.

  “Wasif stands below and would divert him. Besides, my husband sits next to Reza’s pallet and doesn’t let go of her hand.”

  Rob looked at Despina and nodded and felt the guilt that had been growing without his knowledge. He liked the small and beautiful olive-skinned girl with tiny breasts and a plump little belly and a hot mouth. He was sorry about the life she led, a prisoner in this comfortable jail. He knew Islamic tradition kept her shut up most of the time within the house and the gardens and he didn’t blame her for anything, but he had come to love the shabby old man with the magnificent mind and the big nose.

  He got up and began to put on his clothing. “I would be your friend.”

  She wasn’t stupid. She watched him with interest. “You’ve been here almost every night and have had your fill of me. If I send Wasif in two weeks’ time, you will come.”

  He kissed her on the nose just above the ring.

  Riding the brown horse slowly home in the moonlight, he wondered whether he was a great fool.

  Eleven nights later, Wasif knocked at his door.

  Despina was almost right, he was powerfully tempted and wanted to nod in agreement. The old Rob J. would have hurried to reinforce a story that for the rest of his life could have been pulled forth whenever men tippled and bragged—of how he had gone to the young wife again and again while the old husband sat in another part of the house.

  R
ob shook his head. “Tell her I can’t come to her any more.”

  Wasif’s eyes glittered beneath great, black-dyed lids, and he smiled scornfully at the timid Jew and rode his donkey away.

  Reza the Pious died three mornings later as the muezzins of the city chanted First Prayer, a suitable time for the ending of a religious life.

  In the madrassa and the maristan people spoke of how Ibn Sina prepared the woman’s body with his own hands, and of the simple burial, which he had allowed only a few praying mullahs to attend.

  Ibn Sina didn’t come to the school or the hospital. No one knew where he was.

  A week after Reza’s death, one evening Rob saw al-Juzjani drinking in the central maidan.

  “Sit, Dhimmi,” al-Juzjani said, and signaled for more wine.

  “Hakim, how is the Chief Physician?”

  It was as if the question was unasked. “He thinks you are something different. A special clerk,” al-Juzjani said resentfully.

  If he were not a medical clerk, and if al-Juzjani were not the great al-Juzjani, Rob would have thought the other man jealous of him.

  “If you are not a special clerk, Dhimmi, you will reckon with me.” Al-Juzjani fixed him with a shining stare, and Rob realized the surgeon was quite drunk. They fell silent as the wine was served.

  “I was seventeen years old when we met in Jurjān. Ibn Sina was only a few years older, but Allah! It was like looking straight into the sun. My father struck the bargain. Ibn Sina was to apprentice me in medicine, I would be his factotum.”

  Al-Juzjani drank reflectively. “I attended him. He taught me mathematics, using the Almagest as text. And he dictated several books to me, including the first part of The Canon of Medicine, fifty pages every golden day.

  “When he left Jurjān I followed, to half a dozen places. In Hamadhān, the Amīr made him vizier but the army rebelled and Ibn Sina was thrown into prison. At first they said they’d kill him, but he was released—the lucky son of a mare! Soon the Amīr was tormented by colic and Ibn Sina cured him, and the vizierate was given to him a second time!

  “I stayed with him whether he was a physician or a prisoner or a vizier. He had become as much my friend as my master. Every night pupils would gather in his house, while by turns I read aloud from his book called Healing and someone else read from the Canon. Reza made sure we always had good food. When we were finished we drank lots of wine and went out and found women. He was the merriest of companions and played the way he worked. He had dozens of beautiful cunts—perhaps he fucked remarkably, as he did everything else better than most men. Reza always knew but she loved him anyway.”