The Physician

by Noah Gordon

To the Most Respected Reb Mulka Askari, Pearl Merchant of Masqat, Greetings.

  Your late son Mirdin was my friend. May he rest.

  We were surgeons together in India, from whence I have brought these few things, sent to you now via the kind hands of Reb Moise ben Zavil, merchant of Qum, whose caravan is bound this day for your city with a manifest of olive oil.

  Reb Moise will give to you a parchment chart showing the precise location of Mirdin’s grave in the village of Kausambi, that his bones some day may be moved if that is your wish. I also send the tefillin which daily he wound on his arm and which he told me you gave to him when he entered into minyan on reaching his fourteenth year. In addition, I send the pieces and board of the Shah’s Game, over which Mirdin and I spent many a happy hour.

  There were no other belongings with him in India. He was, of course, buried in his tallit.

  I pray the Lord may bring some measure of understanding to your bereavement and to ours. With his passing a light went from my life. He was the finest man ever I have valued. I know that Mirdin is with Adashem, and I hope that one day I may be worthy to be with him again.

  Please convey my affection and respect to his widow and stalwart young sons and inform them that my wife has given birth to a healthy son, Mirdin ben Jesse, and sends them her loving wishes for a good life.

  Yivorechachah Adonai V’Yishmorechah, May the

  Lord Bless You and Keep You. I am

  Jesse ben Benjamin, hakim

  Al-Juzjani had been Ibn Sina’s assistant for years. He had achieved greatness in his own right as a surgeon and was the most notable success among the former assistants, but all of them had done well. The hakimbashi worked his assistants hard, and the position was like an. extension of training, an opportunity to continue to learn. From the beginning Rob did far more than follow Ibn Sina about and fetch things for him, as sometimes the assistants of other great men were called upon to do. Ibn Sina expected to be consulted when there was a problem or his opinion was required, but the young hakim had his confidence and was expected to act on his own.

  For Rob it was a happy time. He lectured in the madrassa concerning wine baths for open wounds; few people attended, for a visiting physician from al-Rayy lectured that morning on the subject of physical love. Persian doctors always crowded into lectures dealing with the sexual, a curiosity to Rob, for in Europe the subject wasn’t a physician’s responsibility. Still, he attended many such lectures himself, and whether because of what he learned or despite it, his marriage prospered.

  Mary healed quickly from the birthing. They followed the prescriptions of Ibn Sina, who cautioned that abstinence should prevail between man and wife for six weeks following a birth and advised that the new mother’s pudenda should be gently treated with olive oil and massaged with a mixture of honey and barley water. The treatment worked wonderfully well. The six weeks’ wait seemed an eternity, and when it was over, Mary turned to him just as eagerly as he embraced her.

  Several weeks later, the milk in her breasts began to dwindle. It came as a shock because her supply had been copious; she had told him she had milky rivers in her, milk enough to supply the world. When she had given suck it had relieved the painful pressure in her breasts, but too soon the pressure was gone and now the pain came from hearing little Rob J.’s thin, hungry wailing. They saw that a wet nurse would be necessary, and Rob talked with midwives and through them found a strong, homely Armenian woman named Prisca who had more than enough milk for her new daughter and the hakim’s son. Four times a day Mary carried the child to the leather shop of Prisca’s husband Dikran and waited while little Rob J. took the teat. At night Prisca came to the house in Yehuddiyyeh and stayed in the other room with the two babies while Mary and Rob tried to be stealthy about lovemaking and then enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted sleep.

  Mary was fulfilled and happiness made her luminous. She bloomed with a new assurance. Sometimes it seemed to Rob that she took full credit for the small and noisy creature they had created together, but he loved her all the more.

  In the first week of the month of Shaban the caravan of Reb Moise ben Zavil came through Ispahan again on the way to Qum and the merchant delivered gifts from Reb Mulka Askari and his daughter-in-law Fara. Fara had given the child Mirdin ben Jesse six small linen garments, sewn with love and care. The pearl merchant had sent back to Rob the Shah’s Game that had belonged to his dead son.

  It was the last time Mary wept for Fara. When she had dried her eyes, Rob set up Mirdin’s figures on the board and taught her the game. After that, they played often. He didn’t expect much, for it was a warriors’ game and she was but a woman. But she learned quickly and would capture one of his pieces with a whoop and battle cry that would have been credible in a Seljuk marauder. Her swift skill in moving a king’s army, if unnatural in a female, nevertheless wasn’t a great shock, for he had learned long since that Mary Cullen was an extraordinary creature.

  The advent of Ramadan caught Karim unprepared, so intent upon sinfulness that the purity and shriving implicit in the month of fasting seemed impossible to achieve and too painful to contemplate. Not even the prayers and the fasting could banish his thoughts of Despina and his unflagging yearning for her. Indeed, because Ibn Sina spent several evenings a week in various mosques and breaking the fast with mullahs and Qu’ranic scholars, Ramadan provided a secure time for the lovers to meet. Karim saw her as often as ever.

  During Ramadan, Alā Shah too was diverted by prayer meetings and other demands on his time, and one day Karim had an opportunity to return to the maristan for the first time in months. Happily, it was a day when Ibn Sina was away from the hospital, caring for one of the members of the court who was down with fever. Karim knew the taste of guilt; Ibn Sina always had treated him fairly and well, and he had no desire to spend time with Despina’s husband.

  The visit to the hospital was a cruel disappointment. Medical clerks followed him through the halls as usual—perhaps even in greater number than before, for his legend had grown. But he knew none of the patients; anyone he had treated here was either dead or long since recovered. And though once he had walked these halls with a sure confidence in his own skills, he found himself fumbling as he asked nervous questions, uncertain of what he was looking at in patients who were the responsibilities of others.

  He managed to survive the visit without making himself out to be a fool, but he had the grim awareness that unless he could spend time in the true practice of medicine, the abilities he had gained so painfully through many years soon would be gone.

  He had no choice. Alā Shah had assured him that what lay ahead for them both would make medicine seem pale by comparison.

  That year Karim didn’t run in the chatir. He hadn’t trained and he was heavier than a runner should be. He watched the race with Alā Shah.

  The first day of Bairam dawned even hotter than the day when he had won, and the race was very slow. The king had renewed his offer of calaat to anyone who could repeat Karim’s feat and finish all twelve laps of the city before Final Prayer, but it was clear that no one would run 126 Roman miles that day.

  It developed into a race by the fifth lap, dwindling to a struggle between al-Harat of Hamadhān and a young soldier named Nafis Jurjis. Each of them had set too quick a pace the previous year and had ended the race in collapse. Now, to avoid this, they ran too slowly.

  Karim shouted encouragement to Nafis. He told Alā that this was because Nafis had survived the Indian raids with them. In truth, although he liked the young soldier, it was because he didn’t want al-Harat to win, for he had known al-Harat as a child in Hamadhān, and when they met Karim still sensed his contempt for Zaki-Omar’s bum boy.

  But Nafis wilted after collecting his eighth arrow and the race was al-Harat’s alone. It was already late afternoon and the heat was brutal; sensibly, al-Harat signaled that he would finish the lap and claim his victory.

  Karim and the Shah rode the final lap well ahead of the runner so they
could be at the finishing line to greet him, Alā on his savage white stallion and Karim astride his head-tossing Arabian gray. Along the route Karim’s spirits rose, because the people knew it would be a long time, if ever, before a runner ran another chatir such as he had run. They embraced him for this with roars of joy, and for being a hero of Mansura and Kausambi. Alā beamed, and Karim knew he could look upon poor al-Harat with benevolence, for the runner was a farmer of poor land and Karim soon would be Vizier of Persia.

  When they passed the madrassa he saw the eunuch Wasif on the hospital roof and next to him the veiled Despina. At sight of her Karim’s heart leaped and he smiled. It was better to go by her like this, on a priceless horse and dressed in silk and linen, than to stagger past stinking of sweat and blind with fatigue!

  Not far from Despina a woman without a veil grew impatient with the heat and, removing her black cloth, shook her head as if in imitation of Karim’s horse. Her hair fell and fanned forth, long and billowing. The sun glinted in it gloriously, revealing different shades of gold and red. Next to him he heard the Shah speak.

  “It is the Dhimmi’s wife? The European woman?”

  “Yes, Majesty. The woman of our friend Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “I thought it must be she,” Alā said.

  The king watched the bareheaded female until they had ridden past her. He asked no further questions, and soon Karim was able to engage him in conversation concerning the Indian smith Dhan Vangalil and the swords he was making for the Shah with his new furnace and forge behind the stables of the House of Paradise.

  62

  AN OFFER OF REWARD

  Rob continued to start each day at the House of Peace Synagogue, partly because the strange mixture of chanted Jewish prayer and silent Christian prayer had become pleasing and nurturing.

  But mostly because in some strange way his presence in the synagogue was the fulfillment of a debt he owed to Mirdin.

  Yet he was unable to enter the House of Zion, Mirdin’s synagogue. And though scholars sat daily and argued the law at the House of Peace, and it would have been a simple matter to suggest that somebody tutor him in the eighty-nine commandments he hadn’t examined, he hadn’t the heart to finish that task without Mirdin. He told himself that five hundred and twenty-four commandments would serve a spurious Jew as well as six hundred and thirteen, and he turned his mind to other things.

  The Master had written on every subject. While a student, Rob had had a chance to read many of his works on medicine, but now he sampled other kinds of writing by Ibn Sina and felt ever more in awe of him. He had written on music and poetry and astronomy, on metaphysics and Eastern thought, on philology and the active intellect, and commentaries on all the books of Aristotle. While a prisoner in the castle of Fardajān he wrote a book called Guidance, summarizing all the branches of philosophy. There was even a military manual, The Management and Provisioning of Soldiers, Slave Troops, and Armies, which would have served Rob well if he had read it before going to India as a field surgeon. He had written on mathematics, on the human soul, and on the essence of sorrow. And again and again he had written about Islam, the religion given him by his father and which, despite the science that permeated his being, he was able to accept on faith.

  This is what made him beloved of the people. They saw that despite the luxurious estate and all the fruits of royal calaat, despite the fact that the learned and glorious men of the world came to seek him out and plumb his mind, despite the fact that kings vied for the honor of being recognized as the Master’s sponsor—despite all these things, even as the lowliest wretch among them, Ibn Sina raised his eyes heavenward and exclaimed:

  La ilaha illa-l-Lah;

  Muhammadun rasulu-l-Lah.

  There is no God but God;

  Mohammed is the prophet of God.

  Each morning before First Prayer a crowd of several hundred gathered in front of his house. They were beggars, mullahs, shepherds, merchants, poor and rich, men of every sort. The Prince of Physicians carried out his own prayer rug and worshiped with his admirers, then when he rode to the maristan they walked alongside his horse and sang of the Prophet and chanted verses from the Qu’ran.

  Several evenings a week pupils gathered at his house. Customarily there were medical readings. Every week for a quarter of a century al-Juzjani had read aloud from Ibn Sina’s works, most frequently from the famous Qānūn. Sometimes Rob was asked to read aloud from Ibn Sina’s book entitled Shifa. Then a lively discussion period would follow, a combination drinking party and clinical debate, often heated and sometimes hilarious but always illuminating.

  “How does the blood get to the fingers?” al-Juzjani might cry in despair, repeating a clerk’s question. “Do you forget Galen said the heart is a pump that sets the blood into motion?”

  “Ah!” Ibn Sina would interject. “And the wind sets a sailing ship into motion. But how does it find its way to Bahrain?”

  Frequently when Rob took his leave he was able to glimpse the eunuch Wasif standing hidden in the shadows near the door to the south tower. One evening Rob slipped away and went to the field behind the wall of Ibn Sina’s estate. He wasn’t surprised to find Karim’s gray Arabian stallion tethered there, tossing his head impatiently.

  Walking back to his own unhidden horse, Rob studied the apartment atop the south tower. Through the window slits in the round stone wall the yellow light flickered and teased, and without envy or regret he recalled that Despina liked to make love by the light of six candles.

  Ibn Sina inducted Rob into mysteries. “There is within us a strange being—some call it the mind, others the soul—which has great effect on our bodies and our health. I first saw evidence of this as a young man in Bukhārā, when I was beginning to be interested in the subject that led me to write The Pulse. I had a patient, a youth of my own age called Achmed; his appetite had flagged and he had lost weight. His father, a wealthy merchant of that place, was distressed and begged for my help.

  “When I examined Achmed I could see nothing wrong. But as I tarried with him a strange thing occurred. My fingers were on the artery in his wrist while we chatted in friendly fashion about various towns in the area of Bukhārā. The pulse was slow and steady until I mentioned the village of Efsene, where I was born. Then there was such a tremolo in his wrist that I became frightened!

  “I knew that village well, and I began to mention various streets, to no great effect until I came to the Lane of the Eleventh Imam, whereupon his pulse quickened and danced again. I no longer knew all the families in that lane, but further questioning and prodding produced the information that on that street lived Ibn Razi, a worker in copper, and that he had three daughters, the eldest of whom was Ripka, very beautiful. When Achmed spoke of this female, in his wrist the fluttering reminded me of an injured bird.

  “I spoke to his father, saying that healing for him lay in marriage with this Ripka. It was arranged and came to pass. Shortly thereafter, Achmed’s appetite returned. When last I saw him, some years past, he was a fat and contented man.

  “Galen tells us that the heart and all the arteries pulsate with the same rhythm, so that from one you can judge of all, and that a slow and regular pulse signifies good health. But since Achmed, I have found that the pulse also may be used to determine the state of a patient’s agitation or peace of mind. I have done so many times, and the pulse has proven to be The Messenger Who Never Lies.”

  So Rob learned that, in addition to the gift that allowed him to gauge vitality, he could monitor the pulse to garner information about the patient’s health and mood. There was ample opportunity to practice. Desperate people flocked to the Prince of Physicians seeking miracle cures. Rich or poor, they were treated the same, but only a few could be accepted as patients by Ibn Sina and Rob, and most were turned over to other physicians.

  Much of Ibn Sina’s clinical practice consisted of the Shah and valued members of Alā’s entourage. Thus one morning Rob was dispatched to the House of Paradise by the
Master, who informed him that Siddha, the wife of the Indian swordmaker Dhan Vangalil, was ill with a colic.

  As translator Rob sought out the services of Alā’s personal mahout, the Indian named Harsha. Siddha proved to be a pleasant, round-faced woman with graying hair. The Vangalil family worshiped Buddha, so the prohibition of aurat did not apply and Rob could palpate her stomach without worrying about being denounced to the mullahs. After examining her at length he determined that her problem was one of diet, for Harsha told him that neither the smith’s family nor any of the mahouts was furnished with a sufficient supply of cumin, turmeric, or peppers, spices to which they had been accustomed all their lives, and on which their digestions were dependent.

  Rob set the matter right by personally seeing to the distribution of the spices. He had already won the regard of some of the mahouts by tending to the battle wounds of their elephants, and now he won the gratitude of the Vangalils as well.

  He brought Mary and Rob J. to visit them, hoping that the mutual problems of people transplanted into Persia would serve as a basis for friendship. Alas, the sympathetic spark that had ignited immediately between Fara and Mary didn’t reappear. The two women eyed one another uncomfortably with rigid politeness, Mary trying not to stare at the round black kumkum painted in the middle of Siddha’s forehead. Rob didn’t bring his family to visit the Vangalils again.

  But he returned to them alone, fascinated by what Dhan Vangalil could accomplish with steel.

  Over a shallow hole in the ground Dhan had constructed a smelting furnace, a clay wall surrounded by a thicker outer wall of rock and mud, the whole girdled with bands of sapling. It stood the height of a man’s shoulders and a pace wide, tapering to a slightly narrower diameter at the top to concentrate the heat and reinforce the walls against collapse.

  In this oven Dhan made wrought iron by burning alternating layers of charcoal and Persian ore, pea to nut size. Around the oven a shallow trench had been dug. Sitting on the outer lip with his feet in the trench, he operated bellows made from the hide of a whole goat, forcing precisely controlled amounts of air into the glowing mass. Above the hottest part of the fire, ore was reduced to bits of iron like drops of metal rain. They settled through the furnace and collected at the bottom in a blob-like mixture of charcoal, slag, and iron, called the bloom.