by Noah Gordon
He told himself he didn’t care: what were the people in the Jewish quarter to him, really?
Mirdin Askari was something else again; it wasn’t Rob’s imagination that Mirdin was avoiding him. These mornings he missed Mirdin’s big-toothed smile and comforting companionship, for Mirdin invariably presented a wooden face as he offered a brief greeting and then moved away.
Finally he sought Mirdin out, finding him sprawled in the shade of a chestnut tree on the madrassa grounds, reading the twentieth volume of Al-Hawi of Rhazes, the final volume. “Rhazes was good. Al-Hawi covers all of medicine,” Mirdin said uncomfortably.
“I’ve read twelve volumes. I’ll reach the others soon.” Rob looked at him. “Is it so bad that I’ve found a woman to love?”
Mirdin stared back. “How could you marry an Other?”
“Mirdin, she’s a jewel.”
“ ‘For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil.’ She’s a Gentile, Jesse! You fool, we’re a dispersed and beleaguered people struggling for survival. Each time one of us marries outside our faith it means the end of future generations of us. If you can’t see that, you aren’t the man I thought you to be and I won’t be your friend.”
He had been deluding himself—the people of the Jewish quarter did matter, for they had freely given him acceptance. And this man mattered most of all, for he had given friendship and Rob did not have so many friends that he could throw Mirdin away. “I’m not the man you thought me to be.” He felt a compulsion to speak, believing absolutely that he didn’t misplace his trust. “I haven’t married outside my faith.”
“She’s a Christian.”
“Yes.”
The blood drained from Mirdin’s face. “Is this a stupid jest?”
When Rob said nothing he gathered up the book and scrambled to his feet. “Miscreant! Should it be true—if you’re not mad—not only do you risk your own neck, you’ve endangered mine. If you consult Fiqh you’ll learn that by telling me, you’ve criminalized me and made me party to the deception unless I inform on you.” He spat. “Son of the Evil One, you’ve placed my children in danger and I curse the day we met.”
And Mirdin hurried away.
Day after day passed and the kelonter’s men didn’t come for him. Mirdin had not informed.
At the hospital, Rob’s marriage wasn’t a problem. The gossip that he had married a Christian woman had circulated among the maristan staff, but he was already regarded as an eccentric—the foreigner, the Jew who had gone from jail to a calaat—and this unseemly union was accepted as only one more aberration. Other than that, in a Muslim society where each man was allowed four wives, the taking of a woman caused little stir.
Nevertheless, he felt his loss of Mirdin deeply. These days he saw little of Karim, either; the young hakim had been taken up by the nobles of the court and was feted at entertainments day and night. Karim’s name was on everyone’s lips since the chatir.
So Rob was as alone with his bride as she was with him, and he and Mary settled easily into life together. She was what the house had needed; it was a warmer and more comfortable place. Smitten, he spent every spare moment with her, and when they were apart he found himself remembering pink moist flesh, the long, tender line of her nose, the lively intelligence in her eyes.
They rode into the hills and made love in the warm sulfurous waters of Alā’s secret pool. He left the ancient Indian picture volume where she would see it, and when he tried the variations the book depicted, he found she had studied it. Some of the practices were pleasing and others brought them hilarity. They laughed often and joyously on the bed mat, playing strange and sensuous private games.
He was ever the scientist. “What causes you to become so wet? You’re a well that sucks me in.”
She drove an elbow into his ribs.
But she wasn’t embarrassed by her own curiosity. “I like it so when it is little—limp and weak and feels like satin. What causes it to change? I had a nurse once who told me it became long and heavy and dense because it filled with pneuma. Do you think that’s so?”
He shook his head. “Not air. It fills with arterial blood. I’ve seen a hanged man whose rigid prick was so full of blood it was red as a salmon.”
“I haven’t hanged you, Robert Jeremy Cole!”
“It has to do with scent and sight. Once, at the end of a brutal journey, I rode a horse that was almost unable to move, so great was his fatigue. But he smelled a mare on the wind, and even before we saw the animal his organ and muscles were like wood and he was running toward her so eagerly I had to pull him back.”
He loved her so, she was worth any loss. Still, his heart leaped one evening when a familiar figure appeared at their door and nodded a greeting.
“Come in, Mirdin.”
Presented to the visitor, Mary looked at Mirdin curiously; but she provided wine and sweet cakes and left them almost at once, going to feed the animals with the wise instinct he already cherished.
“You’re truly a Christian?”
Rob nodded.
“I can take you to a distant town in Fars where the rabbenu is my cousin. If you request conversion by the learned men there, perhaps they’ll agree. Then there would be no reason for lies and deceits.”
Rob looked at him and slowly shook his head.
Mirdin sighed. “If you were a knave you would agree at once. But you’re an honest and faithful man as well as an uncommon physician. That’s why I can’t turn my back on you.”
“Thank you.”
“Jesse ben Benjamin isn’t your name.”
“No. My true name is—”
But Mirdin shook his head warningly and held up his hand. “The other name mustn’t be spoken between us. You must remain Jesse ben Benjamin.”
He looked at Rob appraisingly. “You’ve blended yourself into Yehuddiyyeh. In some ways you rang false. I told myself it was because your father was a European Jew, an apostate who strayed from our ways and neglected to pass his birthright to his son.
“But you must remain constantly alert lest you make a fatal error. Uncovered, your deceit would bring a terrible sentence from a mullah’s court. Doubtless, death. If you should be caught, it might imperil the Jews here. Though your deception is no fault of theirs, in Persia it’s easy for the innocent to suffer.”
“Are you certain you want to become involved with so much risk?” Rob asked quietly.
“I’ve thought it out. I must be your friend.”
“I’m glad.”
Mirdin nodded. “But I have my price.”
Rob waited.
“You have to understand what you pretend to be. There’s more to being a Jew than donning a caftan and wearing your beard a certain way.”
“How shall I gain this understanding?”
“You must study the Lord’s commandments.”
“I know the Ten Commandments.” Agnes Cole had taught them to each of her children.
Mirdin shook his head. “The ten are a fraction of the laws that make up our Torah. The Torah contains 613 commandments. These are what you must study, along with the Talmud—the commentaries dealing with each law. Only then will you see the soul of my people.”
“Mirdin, that’s worse than Fiqh. I’m being smothered by scholarship,” he said desperately.
Mirdin’s eyes glinted. “It’s my price,” he said.
Rob saw he was serious.
He sighed. “Be damned. All right.”
Now for the first time Mirdin smiled. He poured himself some of the wine and, ignoring the European table and chairs, sank to the floor and sat with his legs folded beneath him. “So let us begin. The first commandment is, ‘Thou shalt be fruitful and multiply.’ “
It occurred to Rob that it was exceedingly pleasant to see Mirdin’s warm, homely face here in his house. “I’m trying, Mirdin,” he said, grinning at his friend. “I’m doing the best I can!”
52
SHAPING JESSE
“Her name is Mary, like Yeshua’s mother,” Mirdin told his wife in the Tongue.
“Her name is Fara,” Rob said to Mary in English.
The two wives studied each other.
Mirdin had brought Fara to visit, along with their brown-skinned little boys, Dawwid and Issachar. The women couldn’t converse, lacking common language. Nevertheless, soon they were communicating certain thoughts amid giggling, hand signals, eye-rolling, and exclamations of frustration. Perhaps Fara became Mary’s friend at her husband’s command but from the start the two women, dissimilar in every way, shared a bond of mutual esteem.
Fara showed Mary how to pin up her long red hair and cover it with a cloth before leaving the house. Some of the Jewish women wore veils in the Muslim style but many simply covered their hair, and that single act made Mary inconspicuous. Fara guided her to market stalls where the produce was fresh and the meat good, and pointed out merchants to be avoided. Fara taught her to kasher meat, soaking and salting it to remove excess blood. And how to place meat, capsicum powder, garlic, laurel leaves, and salt in a covered earthen pot which was then heaped with hot coals and allowed to bake slowly all through the long shabbat to become spicy and tender, a delectable dish called shalent that became Rob’s favorite meal.
“Oh, I would so like to talk with her, to ask her questions and tell her things!” Mary said to Rob.
“I’ll give you lessons in the Tongue.”
But she would have none of the Jews’ language or the Persians’. “I’m not quick with foreign words, as you are,” she said. “It took years for me to learn English, and I had to work like a slave to gain command of Latin. Will we not go soon to where I may hear my own Gaelic?”
“When the time is proper,” he said, but he made her no promise of when that would be.
Mirdin undertook to manage Jesse ben Benjamin’s reacceptance by Yehuddiyyeh.
“Jews since King Solomon—no, before Solomon!—have taken Gentile wives and survived within the Jewish community. But always they’ve been men who made it clear through their daily living that they continued to cleave to their people.”
At Mirdin’s suggestion it became their custom to meet twice a day for prayer in Yehuddiyyeh, for shaharit in the morning at the little synagogue called the House of Peace, which Rob favored, and for ma ‘ariv at day’s end in the House of Zion Synagogue near Mirdin’s home. Rob found it no hardship. He had always gained tranquility from the swaying and reverie and rhythmic chanted prayer. As the Tongue grew ever more natural to him, he forgot that he came to the synagogue as part of a disguise and sometimes he felt that his thoughts might reach God. He prayed not as Jesse the Jew or as Rob the Christian, but as one reaching for understanding and comfort. At times this happened while he said a Jewish prayer but he was as likely to find a moment of communion in a relic from his boyhood; sometimes, while all about him men babbled blessings so ancient they may well have been used by a Judean carpenter’s son, he petitioned one of Mam’s saints or prayed to Jesus or to His mother.
Gradually, fewer glares were directed at him, and then none, as the months passed and those in Yehuddiyyeh became accustomed to the sight of the big English Jew holding a fragrant citron and waving palm branches in the House of Peace Synagogue during the harvest festival of Sukkot, fasting alongside the others at Yom Kippur, dancing in the procession that followed the scrolls in celebration of the Lord’s giving the Torah to the people. Yaakob ben Rashi told Mirdin it was obvious that Jesse ben Benjamin was seeking to atone for his rash marriage to an alien woman.
Mirdin was shrewd and knew the difference between protective coloration and total commitment of a man’s soul. “I ask one thing,” he said. “You must never allow yourself to be the tenth man.”
Rob J. understood. If religious folk waited for a minyan, the congregation of ten male Jews that would allow them to worship in public, it would be a terrible thing to deceive them for the sake of his illusion. He made the promise promptly, and he was always careful to keep it.
Almost every day, he and Mirdin made time to study the commandments. They used no book. Mirdin knew the precepts as oral law. “It’s generally agreed that 613 commandments can be gleaned from the Torah,” he said. “But there’s no agreement on their exact form. One scholar may count a precept as a separate commandment, another scholar may count it as part of the previous law. I’m giving you the version of the 613 commandments that was passed down the long generations of my family and taught me by my father, Reb Mulka Askar of Masqat.”
Mirdin said 248 mitzvot were positive commandments, such as the directive that a Jew must care for the widow and the orphan, and 365 were negative commandments, such as the admonition that a Jew must not accept a bribe.
Learning the mitzvot from Mirdin was more enjoyable than Rob’s other studies because he knew there would be no examinations. He enjoyed sitting over a cup of wine and listening to the Jewish law, and he soon found that their sessions helped him in his study of Islamic Fiqh.
He worked harder than ever but savored his days. He knew that life in Ispahan was far easier for him than for Mary. Though he returned to her eagerly at the end of each day, every morning he left her for the maristan and the madrassa with a different kind of eagerness. That was the year of studying Galen and he immersed himself in descriptions of anatomical phenomena he couldn’t see by looking at a patient—the difference between arteries and veins, the pulse, the working of the heart like a constantly squeezing fist pushing blood from it during systole, then relaxing and refilling with blood during diastole.
He was taken from apprenticeship to Jalal and turned from the bonesetter’s retractors, couplers, and ropes to the surgeon’s inventory of tools, for he was assigned to al-Juzjani.
“He dislikes me. All he allows me to do is clean and sharpen instruments,” he complained to Karim, who had spent more than a year in al-Juzjani’s service.
“It’s the way he starts each new clerk,” Karim said. “You mustn’t be discouraged.”
It was easy for Karim to talk about patience these days. Part of his calaat had been a large and elegant house, from which he now ran a practice consisting largely of the families of the court. It was fashionable for a nobleman to be able to remark casually that his physician was Persia’s hero-athlete, Karim of the chatir, and he attracted patients so swiftly that he would have been prosperous even without the prize money and stipend he had been awarded by the Shah. He blossomed out in expensive raiment and came to their house bearing generous gifts, delicacies of food and drink, and once even a thick Hamadhān rug to cover their floor, a wedding gift. He flirted with Mary with his eyes and said outrageous things to her in Persian which she declared that she was grateful not to comprehend, but she soon became fond of him and treated him like a naughty brother.
At the hospital, where Rob might have expected Karim’s popularity to be more restrained, it was not. Clerks clustered about and followed after him as he tended his patients, as though he were the wisest of the wise, and Rob couldn’t disagree when Mirdin Askari grinned and remarked that the best way to become a successful doctor was to win the chatir.
On occasion al-Juzjani interrupted Rob’s work to ask the name of the instrument being cleaned, or its use. There were many more instruments than Rob had used as a barber-surgeon, surgical tools specifically designed for special tasks, and he cleaned and sharpened rounded bistouries, curved bistouries, scalpels, bone saws, ear curettes, probes, little knives for opening cysts, drills for removing foreign bodies lodged in bone …
Al-Juzjani’s method made sense after all, for at the end of two weeks, when Rob began to assist him in the maristan operating room, the surgeon had but to mutter a request and Rob could select the proper tool and hand it over at once.
There were two other surgical clerks who already had apprenticed under al-Juzjani for months. They were allowed to operate on uncomplicated cases, always to the master’s caustic comments and close criticism.
It took ten weeks o
f assisting and observing before al-Juzjani would allow Rob to make a cut, even under supervision. When the opportunity came, it was to remove the index finger of a porter whose hand had been crushed beneath a camel’s hoof.
He had learned by watching. Al-Juzjani always applied a tourniquet, using a thin leather thong similar to the ones employed by phlebotomists to raise a vein prior to bleeding. Rob tied the tourniquet deftly and performed the amputation without hesitation, for it was a procedure he had done many times through the years as a barber-surgeon. Always he had worked impeded by blood, however, and he was delighted with al-Juzjani’s technique, which allowed him to make a flap and close the stub without wiping and with scarcely more than a drop of ooze.
Al-Juzjani watched closely with his usual scowl. When Rob had finished the surgeon turned away without a word of praise, but neither had he growled nor pointed out a way that would have been better, and as Rob cleaned the table after the operation he felt a glow, recognizing a small victory.
53
FOUR FRIENDS
If the King of Kings had made any moves to curtail the powers of his Vizier as a result of the disclosures Rob had made, they were invisible. If anything, Qandrasseh’s mullahs seemed to be more ubiquitous than ever, and more stringent and energetic in their zeal to see that Ispahan reflected the Imam’s Qu’ranic view of Muslim behavior.
Seven months had gone by without a royal summoning. Rob was content that this was so, for between his wife and his medical training, his hours were too few.
One morning, to Mary’s alarm he was called for by soldiers, as on the previous occasions.
“The Shah wishes you to ride with him this day.”
“It’s all right,” he assured his wife, and went with them. At the great stables behind the House of Paradise he found an ashen-faced Mirdin Askari. When they conferred, they agreed that behind their summoning was Karim, who had come to be Alā’s favorite companion since gaining athletic celebrity.
