The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  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.

  Rob 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.”

  He looked away. “Now she is buried and he is consumed. So that he sends old friends from him, and every day he walks the city alone, bestowing gifts to the poor.”

  “Hakim,” Rob said gently.

  Al-Juzjani stared.

  “Hakim, shall I see you to your home?”

  “Foreigner. I would like you to leave me now.”

  So Rob nodded and thanked him for the wine, and then he went away.

  Rob waited a week and then rode to the house in full daylight and left his horse with the man at the gate.

  Ibn Sina was alone. His eyes were at peace. He and Rob sat together comfortably, talking sometimes, and sometimes not.

  “Were you already a physician when you wed her, Master?”

  “I became hakim at sixteen. We were wed when I was ten, the year I memorized the Qu’ran, the year I began the study of healing herbs.”

  Rob was awed. “At that age I was struggling to become a faker and a barber-surgeon.” He told Ibn Sina how Barber had apprenticed him as an orphaned boy.

  “What had been your father’s work?”

  “A carpenter.”

  “I know of European guilds. I had heard,” Ibn Sina said slowly, “that in Europe there are very few Jews and they are not allowed in the guilds.”

  He knows, Rob thought in anguish. “A few are allowed,” he muttered.

  Ibn Sina’s eyes seemed to pie
rce him gently. Rob couldn’t rid himself of the certainty that he was undone.

  “You yearn so desperately to learn the healing art and science.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Ibn Sina sighed, nodded, looked away.

  No doubt, Rob noted with relief, his fear had been mistaken; for soon they talked of other things.

  Ibn Sina recalled the first time he had seen Reza as a boy. “She was from Bukhara, a girl four years older than I. Our fathers were tax collectors both, and the marriage was amicably arranged save for brief difficulty because her grandfather objected that my father was an Ismaili and used hashish during holy worship. But presently we were wed. She was steadfast all my life.”

  The old man turned his eyes on Rob. “You still have the fire in you. What do you want?”

  “To be a good physician.” The kind only you make, he added silently. But he believed Ibn Sina understood.

  “You are already a healer. As for worthiness …” Ibn Sina shrugged. “To be a good physician, you must be able to answer an unanswerable riddle.”

  “What is the question?” Rob J. asked, intrigued.

  But the old man smiled in his sorrow. “Perhaps one day you may discover it. That is part of the riddle,” he said.

  47

  THE EXAMINATION

  On the afternoon of Karim’s examination, Rob went through his customary activities with special energy and attention, attempting to divert his mind from the scene he knew would soon take place in the meeting room just off the House of Wisdom.

  He and Mirdin had recruited Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the kindly librarian, as their accomplice and spy. While going about his duties in the library Yussuf was able to witness the identities of the examiners. Mirdin waited outside for the news, which he promptly brought to Rob.

  “It is Sayyid Sa’di for philosophy,” Yussuf had told Mirdin before hurrying back inside for more. That wasn’t bad; the philosopher was difficult but would not go out of his way to fail a candidate.

  But from then on, the news was terrifying.

  Nadir Bukh, the autocratic, spade-bearded legalist who had failed Karim on his first examination, would test for the law! The mullah Abul Bakr would question on matters of theology, and the Prince of Physicians himself would examine on medicine.

  Rob had hoped that Jalal would sit on the board for surgery, but Rob could see Jalal at his usual duties, tending to patients; and presently Mirdin came rushing in and whispered that the last member had arrived and it was Ibn al-Natheli, whom none of them knew well.

  Rob concentrated on his work, helping Jalal put traction on a dislocated shoulder, using a clever device of ropes of Jalal’s own design. The patient, a palace guard who had been thrown from his pony during a game of ball-and-stick, finally lay like a wild animal in rope restraints, pop-eyed with the sudden release from pain.

  “Now you will lie for several weeks, at ease while others struggle with the onerous duties of soldiering,” Jalal said cheerfully. He directed Rob to administer astringent drugs and to order an acid diet until they could be certain the guardsman had not developed inflammation or a hematoma.

  The binding of the shoulder with cloths, not too tight but sufficient to restrain movement, was Rob’s last chore. When he was finished he went to the House of Wisdom and sat and read Celsus, trying to hear what was being said in the examining room and gaining only the unintelligible murmur of voices. Finally he abandoned the effort and went to wait on the steps of the medical school, where presently he was joined by Mirdin.

  “They are still inside.”

  “I hope it is not drawn out,” Mirdin said. “Karim isn’t the sort who can deal with too long a testing.”

  “I am not certain he can deal with any testing. He puked for an hour this morning.”

  Mirdin sat beside Rob on the steps. They spoke about several patients and then lapsed into silence, Rob scowling, Mirdin sighing.

  After a longer time than they would have thought possible, Rob stood. “Here he is,” he said.

  Karim threaded his way toward them through the clusters of students.

  “Can you tell from his face?” Mirdin said.

  Rob couldn’t, but well before Karim reached them, he shouted the news. “You must call me hakim, clerks!”

  They charged down the steps.

  The three of them embraced, danced, and shouted, pummeling one another and making such a row that Hadji Davout Hosein, passing, showed them a face pale with indignation that students of his academy should behave in such a fashion.

  The rest of the day and the evening became a time they would remember for the remainder of their days.

  “You must come to my rooms for refreshment,” Mirdin said.

  It was the first time he had asked them to his home, the first time they opened their private worlds to one another.

  Mirdin’s quarters were two rented rooms in a joined house hard by the House of Zion Synagogue, on the other side of Yehuddiyyeh from Rob’s neighborhood.

  His family was a sweet surprise. A shy wife, Fara: short, dark, low-arsed, steady-eyed. Two round-faced sons, Dawwid and Issachar, who clung to their mother’s robes. Fara served sweetcakes and wine, obviously in readiness for the celebration, and after a number of toasts the three friends went forth again and found a tailor who measured the new hakim for his black physician’s robes.

  “This is a night for the maidans!” Rob declared, and at eventide they were in a dining place overlooking the great central square of the city, eating a fine Persian meal and calling for more of a musky wine which Karim scarcely needed, being drunk on physicianhood.

  They dwelled over each question of the examination, and each answer.

  “Ibn Sina kept asking me questions about medicine. ‘What are the various signs obtained from sweat, candidate?… Very good, Master Karim, very complete … And what are the general signs that we use for prognosis? Will you now discuss proper hygiene for a traveler on the land and then on the sea?’ It was almost as though he were aware that medicine was my strength and the other fields my weakness.

  “Sayyid Sa’di bade me discuss Plato’s concept that all men desire happiness, which I am grateful, Mirdin, that we studied so completely. I answered at length, with many references to the Prophet’s concept that happiness is Allah’s reward for obedience and faithful prayer. And that was one danger dealt with.”

  “And what of Nadir Bukh?” Rob asked.

  “The lawyer.” Karim shuddered. “He asked me to discuss the Fiqh regarding punishment of criminals. I couldn’t think. So I said that all punishment is based on the writings of Mohammed (may he be blessed!), which declare that in this world we all depend upon one another proximately, though our ultimate dependence is always on Allah now and forever. Time separates the good and pure from the evil and rebellious. Every individual who strays will be punished and every one who obeys will be in complete consonance with God’s Universal Will, on which Fiqh is based. The command of the soul thus rests wholly with Allah, who works to punish all sinners.”

  Rob was staring. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know now. I didn’t know then. I saw Nadir Bukh chewing the answer to see if it contained meat he hadn’t recognized. He seemed about to open his mouth to demand clarification or ask further questions, in which case I should have been doomed, but then Ibn Sina asked me to expound upon the humor of blood, whereupon I gave back his own words from the two books he has written on the subject, and the questioning was over!”

  They roared until they wept, and drank and drank again.

  When finally they could drink no more they staggered to the street beyond the maidan and hailed the donkey coach with the lily on the door. Rob sat in the driver’s seat with the pimp. Mirdin fell asleep with his head in the ample lap of the whore named Lorna, and Karim rested his head upon her bosom and sang gentle songs.

  Fara’s quiet eyes were round with concern when they half-carried her husband into his rooms.

  “He is ill?�
�

  “He is drunk. As are we all,” Rob explained, and they returned to the coach. It carried them to the little house in Yehuddiyyeh, where he and Karim dropped to the floor as soon as they were inside the door, falling asleep in their clothes.

  During the night he was awakened by a quiet rasp of sound and knew Karim was weeping.

  At dawn he was awakened again, by the rising of his visitor.

  Rob groaned. He should not drink at all, he thought gloomily.

  “Sorry to disturb. I must go and run.”

  “Run? Why, on this of all mornings? After last night?”

  “To prepare for chatir.”

  “What is chatir?”

  “A footrace.”

  Karim slipped out of the house. There was the slap-slap-slap as he began to run, a receding sound, soon gone.

  Rob lay on the floor and listened to the barking of cur dogs that marked the progress of the world’s newest physician, roaming like a djinn through the narrow streets of Yehuddiyyeh.

  48

  A RIDE IN THE COUNTRY

  “The chatir is our national footrace, an annual event almost as old as Persia,” Karim told Rob. “It’s held to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the month of religious fasting. Originally—so far back in the mists of time that we’ve lost the name of the king who sponsored the first race—it was a competition to select the Shah’s chatir, or footman, but through the centuries it has drawn to Ispahan the best runners of Persia and elsewhere and taken on the qualities of a great entertainment.”

  The course began at the gates of the House of Paradise and wound through the streets of Ispahan for ten and one-half Roman miles, ending at a series of posts in the palace courtyard. On the posts were hung slings, each containing twelve arrows and assigned to a specific runner. Every time a runner reached the posts he took an arrow from his sling and placed it in a quiver on his back, then he retraced his steps for another lap. Traditionally the race began with the call to First Prayer. It was a grueling test of endurance. If the day was hot and oppressive, the last runner to remain in the race was declared the winner. In races run during cool weather men sometimes finished the entire twelve laps, 126 Roman miles, usually collecting the final arrow some time after Fifth Prayer. Although it was rumored that ancient runners had achieved better times, most ran the course in about fourteen hours.