The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  “Pull Da’s beard,” he said, and felt pride in the strength of the tugging.

  “Pull Da’s ears.”

  “Pull Da’s nose.”

  The same week that the child took his first tentative, unsteady steps, he also began to talk. It was no wonder that his first word was Da. The sound of the small creature addressing him filled Rob with such awed love that he found his good fortune hard to believe.

  On a mild afternoon he persuaded Mary to walk to the Armenian market with him while he carried Rob J. At the market he set the baby down near the leather booth so Rob J. could take several shaky steps toward Prisca, and the former wet nurse screamed with delight and swept the child into her arms.

  On the way home through Yehuddiyyeh they smiled and greeted this one and that, for if no woman had taken Mary into her heart since Fara had left, neither did anyone curse the European Other any more, and the Jews of the quarter had grown accustomed to her presence.

  Later, while Mary was cooking their pilah and Rob was pruning one of the apricot trees, two of the small daughters of Mica Halevi the Baker ran from the house next door and played in the garden with his son. Rob delighted in the sound of their childish shrieks and foolishness.

  There were worse people than the Jews of Yehuddiyyeh, he told himself, and worse places to be than Ispahan.

  One day, hearing that al-Juzjani was to teach a class in dissection of a pig, Rob volunteered to assist. The animal in question proved to be a stout boar with tusks as fierce as a small elephant’s, mean porcine eyes, a long body covered with coarse gray bristles, and a robust hairy pizzle. The pig had been dead for a day or so and smelled it, but it had been fed on grain and the predominant odor when the stomach was opened was of beery fermentation, slightly sour. Rob had learned that such odors were not bad or good; all smells were of interest, since each told a story. But neither his nose nor his eyes nor his searching hands taught him anything about abdominal distemper as he searched the belly and gut for signs. Al-Juzjani, more interested in teaching his class than in allowing Rob access to his pig, was justifiably irritated by the amount of time he spent grubbing.

  After the class, no wiser than before, Rob went to meet with Ibn Sina in the maristan. He knew at first sight of the Chief Physician that something untoward had taken place.

  “My Despina and Karim Harun. They have been arrested.”

  “Sit, Master, and ease yourself,” he said gently, for Ibn Sina was shaken and puzzled and old-looking.

  It was the realization of Rob’s most dreadful fears. He forced himself to ask the questions that were required and was not surprised to learn that the charges were adultery and fornication.

  Qandrasseh’s agents had followed Karim to Ibn Sina’s house that morning. Mullahs and soldiers had burst into the stone tower and found the lovers.

  “What of the eunuch?”

  For the time it takes to blink, Ibn Sina looked at him and Rob hated himself, aware of all that was revealed by his question. But Ibn Sina only shook his head.

  “Wasif is dead. Had they not killed him by stealth, they would not have gained entrance to the tower.”

  “How can we help Karim and Despina?”

  “Only Alā Shah can help them,” Ibn Sina said. “We must petition him.”

  As Rob and Ibn Sina rode through the streets of Ispahan the people turned their eyes away, unwilling to shame Ibn Sina with their pity.

  At the House of Paradise they were greeted by the Captain of the Gates with the courtesy usually shown to the Prince of Physicians, but they were ushered into an anteroom instead of the Shah’s presence.

  Farhad left them and returned presently to tell them the king regretted he could not spend time with them that day.

  “We shall wait,” Ibn Sina said. “Perhaps an opportunity will present itself.”

  Farhad was glad to see the mighty fallen; he smiled at Rob as he bowed.

  All that afternoon they waited, and then Rob took Ibn Sina home.

  In the morning they returned. Again Farhad was careful to be courteous. They were led to the same anteroom and allowed to languish, but it became clear the king wouldn’t see them.

  Nevertheless, they waited.

  Ibn Sina seldom spoke. Once, he sighed. “She has ever been as a daughter to me,” he said. And, after a time: “It is easier for the Shah to treat Qandrasseh’s bold stroke as a small defeat than to challenge the Vizier.”

  Throughout the second day they sat in the House of Paradise. Gradually they understood that, despite the eminence of the Prince of Physicians and the fact that Karim was Alā’s favorite, the king would do nothing.

  “He is willing to concede Karim to Qandrasseh,” Rob said bleakly. “As though they were playing the Shah’s Game and Karim is a piece that will not be grievously missed.”

  “In two days there will be an audience,” Ibn Sina said. “We must make it easy for the Shah to help them. I will make public request that the king grant them mercy. I am the woman’s husband and Karim is the beloved of the people. They will roar to support my request to save their hero of the chatir. The Shah will allow it to appear that he grants mercy because of the will of his subjects.” If this happened, Ibn Sina said, Karim might be given twenty strokes and Despina beaten and sentenced to confinement for life in her master’s house.

  But as they left the House of Paradise they came upon al-Juzjani, who had been awaiting them. The master surgeon loved Ibn Sina as much as any man. Out of that love, he brought him bad news.

  Karim and Despina had been taken before an Islamic court. Testimony had been given by three witnesses, each an ordained mullah. Doubtless to avoid torture, neither Despina nor Karim had attempted to offer a defense.

  The presiding mufti had sentenced each of them to death on the following morning.

  “The woman Despina will be decapitated. Karim Harun will have his belly ripped.”

  They gazed at one another in dismay. Rob waited for Ibn Sina to tell al-Juzjani how Karim and Despina yet might be saved, but the old man shook his head. “We cannot avert the sentence,” he said heavily. “We can only make certain their end is merciful.”

  “Then there are things to be done,” al-Juzjani said quietly. “Bribes to be paid. And instead of the medical clerk in the kelonter’s prison we must substitute a physician we trust.”

  Despite the warmth of the spring air, Rob was chilled. “Let it be me,” he said.

  That night he was sleepless. He rose before dawn and rode the brown horse through the dark city. At Ibn Sina’s house he half expected to see the eunuch Wasif in the gloom. There was neither light nor life in the tower rooms.

  Ibn Sina gave him a jar of grape juice. “It is heavily infused with opiates and a powder of pure hempseed called buing,” he said. “Herein lies the risk. They must drink a lot of it. But if either of them drinks too much to walk when they are summoned, you shall die with them.”

  Rob nodded to show he understood. “God’s mercy.”

  “God’s mercy,” Ibn Sina said. He was chanting from the Qu’ran before Rob left the room.

  At the prison he told the sentry he was the physician and was given an escort. They went first to the women’s cells, in one of which a woman could be heard alternately singing and sobbing.

  He was afraid the terrible sound came from Despina but it didn’t; in a tiny cell, she waited. She was unwashed and unperfumed and her hair hung in lank locks. Her small, finely made body was clad in a dirty black garment.

  He set down the jar of buing and went to her and lifted her veil.

  “I have brought something for you to drink.”

  To him she would ever after be femina, a combination of Anne Mary his sister, Mary his wife, the whore who had serviced him in the carriage on the maidan, and every female put upon by the world.

  There were unshed tears in her eyes but she refused the buing.

  “You must drink. It will help you.”

  She shook her head. Soon I will be in Paradise, the fearf
ul eyes begged him to believe. “Give it to him,” she whispered, and Rob bade her goodbye.

  The footsteps echoed as he followed the soldier along a corridor, down two short flights of stairs, into another stone tunnel and then another tiny cell.

  His friend was pale.

  “So, European.”

  “So, Karim.”

  They embraced, holding each other hard.

  “Is she …?”

  “I’ve seen her. She is well.”

  Karim sighed. “I hadn’t talked with her for weeks! It was just to hear her voice, you understand? I was certain I wasn’t followed, that day.”

  Rob nodded.

  Karim’s mouth trembled. Offered the jar, he grasped it and drank deeply, finishing two-thirds of the liquid before handing it back.

  “It will work. Ibn Sina mixed it himself.”

  “The old man you worship. Often I dreamed of poisoning him so I could have her.”

  “Every man has wicked thoughts. You wouldn’t carry them out.” For some reason it seemed vital that Karim should know this before the narcotic took effect. “You understand?”

  Karim nodded. Rob watched closely, fearful he had drunk too much buing. If the infusion worked quickly, a mufti’s court would reconvene to kill a second physician.

  Karim’s eyes drooped. He remained awake but chose not to talk. Rob stayed with him in silence until finally he heard footsteps approaching.

  “Karim.”

  He blinked. “Is it now?”

  “Think of winning the chatir,” Rob said gently. The footsteps stopped, the door opened; they were three soldiers and two mullahs.” Think of the happiest day of your life.”

  “Zaki-Omar could be a kindly man,” Karim said. He favored Rob with a small, vacant smile.

  Two of the soldiers took his arms. Rob followed directly behind them, out of the cell, down the stone corridor, up the two flights of stairs, into the courtyard where the sun smote a brassy blow. The morning was soft and beautiful, an ultimate cruelty. He could see Karim’s knees buckle as he walked but any observer would think it was caused by fear. They went past the double row of carcan victims to the blocks, scene of his nightmares.

  Something awful already lay next to a black-gowned form on imbrued ground, but the buing cheated the mullahs; Karim did not see her.

  The executioner seemed scarcely older than Rob, a short, beefy man with huge arms and indifferent eyes. His strength and skill and the keenest whetted blades were what Ibn Sina’s money had bought.

  Karim’s eyes were glazed as the soldiers brought him forward. There were no goodbyes; the executioner’s stroke was swift and certain. The point came up into the heart and brought death at once as the wielder had been bribed to do, and Rob heard his friend make a sound like a loud discontented sigh.

  It was left to Rob to see that Despina and Karim were carried from the prison to a cemetery outside the city walls. He paid well for prayer to be chanted over both new graves, a bitter irony: the praying mullahs were found among those who had witnessed the deaths.

  When the funeral was over, Rob finished the infusion that remained in the jar and allowed the brown horse to carry him back unguided.

  But as they neared the House of Paradise he reined up and studied it. The palace was particularly beautiful that day, its colorful pennons streaming and fluttering in the spring breeze and the sun glittering on the guidons and halberds and making dazzle of the sentries’ weapons.

  He could hear Alā’s voice. We are four friends… We are four friends…

  He shook his fist. “UN-WOR-THYYYY!”

  The sound rolled toward the wall, reaching and startling the sentries.

  Their officer came down to the outermost guard. “Who is it? Can you tell?”

  “Yes. I believe it is the hakim Jesse. The Dhimmi.”

  They studied the figure on the horse, observing him shaking his fist once more, noting the wine jar and the horse’s slack reins.

  The officer knew the Jew as one who had stayed behind the returning force of Indian raiders to tend the wounds of soldiers. “His face is full of drink.” He grinned. “But he is not a bad shit, that one. Let him be,” he said, and they watched the brown horse carry the physician toward the city gates.

  66

  THE GRAY CITY

  So he was the last surviving member of the Ispahan Medical Party. To think of both Mirdin and Karim beneath the earth was to suck on an infusion of rage and regret and sadness; yet, perversely, their deaths made his days sweet as a loving kiss. He savored life’s ordinary juices. A deep breath, a long piss, a slow fart. To chew stale bread when he was hungry, sleep when he was tired. To touch his wife’s clumsy girth, listen to her snore. To bite his son’s stomach until the gurgling howl of infantile laughter brought tears to his eyes.

  This, despite the fact that Ispahan had become a somber place.

  If Allah and the Imam Qandrasseh could bring low the hero athlete of Ispahan, then what ordinary man would now dare break the Islamic rules set down by the Prophet?

  Whores disappeared and the maidans no longer were riotous at night. Mullahs patrolled the streets of the city in pairs, alert for a veil that covered too little of a woman’s face, a man slow in responding with prayer to a muezzin’s call, a refreshment-house owner stupid enough to sell wine. Even in Yehuddiyyeh, where females always were careful to cover their hair, many Jewish women began to wear the heavy Muslim veils.

  Some sighed in private, missing the music and gaiety of remembered nights, but others expressed satisfaction, and at the maristan the hadji Davout Hosein thanked Allah during a morning’s prayer. “Mosque and state were born of one womb, joined together and never to be sundered,” he said.

  Each morning more worshipers than ever came to Ibn Sina’s home and joined him in prayer, but now when he was through with worship the Prince of Physicians returned inside his house and wasn’t seen until it was time to pray again. He gave himself fully to grieving and introspection and didn’t come to the maristan to teach or to treat patients. Some who objected to being touched by a Dhimmi were treated by al-Juzjani, but these were not many and Rob was busy all the time now, tending to Ibn Sina’s patients as well as his own responsibilities.

  One morning a skinny old man with stinking breath and dirty feet wandered into the hospital. Qasim ibn Sahdi had legs like a knob-kneed crane and a moth-eaten wisp of white beard. He didn’t know his age and he had no home because for most of his life he had made his way as a menial in one caravan after another.

  “I have traveled everywhere, master.”

  “To Europe, whence I came?”

  “Almost everywhere.” He had no family, he said, but Allah watched over him. “I reached here yesterday with a caravan of wool and dates from Qum. On the route I was stricken with a pain like a wicked djinn.”

  “Where, pain?”

  Qasim, groaning, clutched at his right side.

  “Has your gorge risen?”

  “Lord, I am pukingly ill and know a terrible weakness. Yet as I dozed, Allah spoke, saying that nearby was one who would heal me. And when I awoke I asked people if there was a place of healing nearby and I was directed to this maristan.”

  He was led to a pallet, where he was bathed and fed lightly. He was the first patient with abdominal distemper whom Rob had been able to observe in an early stage of the disease. Perhaps Allah knew how to make Qasim well, but Rob did not.

  He spent hours in the library. Finally courtly Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the Keeper of the House of Wisdom, asked him what it was that he sought so assiduously.

  “The secret of abdominal illness. I am trying to find accounts of ancients who opened the human belly before it was forbidden to do so.”

  The venerable librarian blinked and nodded gently. “I shall try to help you. Let me see what I am able to find,” he said.

  Ibn Sina wasn’t available and Rob went to al-Juzjani, who didn’t have Ibn Sina’s patience.

  “Often people die of distemper,” a
l-Juzjani said, “but some come to the maristan complaining of pain and burning in the lower right abdomen, and the hurting goes away and the patients are sent home.”

  “Why?”

  Al-Juzjani shrugged and gave him an annoyed glance and would spend no more time on the subject.

  Qasim’s pain disappeared too after a few days, but Rob didn’t want to release him. “Where shall you go?”

  The old drover shrugged. “I shall find a caravan, Hakim, for they are my home.”

  “Not all who come here are able to leave. Some die, you understand that.”

  Qasim nodded seriously. “All men must die in the end.”

  “To wash the dead and prepare them for burial is to serve Allah. Could you do such work?”

  “Yes, Hakim. For it is God’s labor, as you say,” he said solemnly. “Allah brought me here and it may be that He wishes me to stay.”

  There was a small storeroom next to the two rooms that served as the hospital’s charnel house. They cleaned it out together and this became Qasim ibn Sahdi’s living quarters.

  “You will take your meals here after the patients are fed, and you may bathe in the maristan baths.”

  “Yes, Hakim.”

  Rob gave him a sleeping mat and a clay lamp. The old man unrolled his worn prayer rug and declared the room the finest home he had ever had.

  It was almost two weeks before Rob’s busy schedule allowed him to meet Yussuf-ul-Gamal in the House of Wisdom. He brought a gift of appreciation for the librarian’s help. All the vendors were displaying large, fat pistachios but Yussuf had few teeth for chewing nuts and instead Rob had bought a reed basket filled with soft desert dates.