The plot was well laid, and when I now review these events and details in tranquility, I am possessed by admiration for their skill and careful planning.
Truly, they’d set things up perfectly. At the investigation, Shaaban said that he didn’t know me and that there was no preexisting hostility between us. He said he had seen me going into the building the previous night but had been afraid to question me as he had realized that I was under the influence of alcohol and was afraid I might harm him. He denied emphatically—as did the residents, owner, and doorkeeper of the building—that a German girl lived there. Similarly, Yusri Mustafa (the owner of the office and the bald man with the gray suit) accused me in his deposition to the investigation of being insane and denied that any German girl had ever worked in his office. Even the waiter from the Semiramis bar, when summoned by the police, said that I had spent the evening in the bar the previous day and that I had drunk a lot but denied that a foreign girl had been with me. He emphasized that I had arrived alone and left alone, at half-past one in the morning. When the investigator asked him if he had noticed anything abnormal about me, he replied that he had noticed that I was talking to myself in English in a loud voice and laughing but that at the time he had considered the matter quite normal, attributing it to my extreme drunkenness.
15
The circle closed tight around me. There wasn’t a single gap through which I could escape. All of them—all of those who knew my worth and were infuriated by my superiority—conspired against me. Everyone who hated me and whom I despised, Dr. Sa‘id and Shaaban and the waiter, even my mother and Huda and my aged grandmother—all of them had united to prevent a recognized danger that would have crushed them had I become united with Jutta, I who had drawn close and seen. They conspired and succeeded and then they isolated me in a special place, dressed me in special clothes, and tightened their grip upon me, and I could find no alternative to surrender, at which point they pretended to be sorry for me, and now they visit me and bring me roses and boxes of chocolate. They talk to the doctor about me and draw expressions of anxiety and pleading on their faces, then tell me goodbye with a glance that reassures them that I will never be able to slip from their clutches, and leave.
The Kitchen Boy
FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON, intelligence is associated in people’s minds with brightness of eye, and anyone who wants to prove he’s brilliant stares into others’ faces, focusing on their eyes. This way, they may witness for themselves how brightly his own flash and the inordinate acumen with which they shine. Hisham’s eyes, on the other hand, did not shine at all, and were small too. Similarly his brown complexion, unremarkable features, meager body, and natural tendency toward shyness and introspection made him appear simply one of those undifferentiated thousands who throng the streets and buses. As soon as Hisham began to speak, however, you would be amazed, because he would grasp what you were saying immediately and comment on it before you’d finished. Then he’d fall silent and quietly smile, as though apologizing for having left you behind. They say—though God knows how true this is—that Hisham learned to speak very early and that before he was three years old he knew how to wind the old Grundig tape reel, put it in place on the machine, thread it, and finally press the button to make the music come out. Because Hisham and I were at the same secondary school, I myself had the opportunity to observe his talents, which carried everything before them. Hisham wasn’t one of those who would plod away at his studies for hours and hours; he would understand the lesson in class and read it once at home, after which he might do a few exercises. Then he would effortlessly achieve the highest marks. In math, he’d often stand up and explain to us, in his quiet voice, how he had solved a problem that had defeated us all, and when he had finished and the teacher had thanked him, we would stare at him, in admiration or with envy. He, however, hated being the object of attention, so he’d busy himself by searching for his pencil, or lean back and start a conversation with the student sitting behind him. Hisham came first in the school in the Secondary General exam. He wanted to go into engineering but his mother wept and pleaded with him in the name of his dead father, reminding him that he was her only child and that all her hopes were pinned on his becoming a doctor, and Hisham submitted and spent five years studying medicine, during which he maintained the highest marks. They say that his grasp of the material at his oral exam extracted the grudging admiration of even the grimmest and most savage of the examiners, and they also say that after Dr. Mandour, the celebrated professor of anatomy, had finished examining Hisham, he stood up, went over to him, shook his hand, and ordered him a cold drink (a gesture of respect rarely granted anyone by the great professor). Because Hisham was so outstanding (but also because he wasn’t the son of a professor at the university or a relative of a minister), he placed twentieth in his class on graduating.
Hisham was appointed a resident in General Surgery, an outcome with which he was genuinely pleased. When his mother got the news (she was peeling potatoes in front of the television at the time), she was thrilled and gave whoops of joy, then wept, blessed the Lord, and performed two prayer prostrations in thanks to Him. She quickly spread the news by telephone to relatives and friends, got dressed, and went out to buy sherbet and pastries. When the first people, some neighbors, arrived to offer their congratulations, his mother (who had now assumed the grave and dignified air befitting the mother of a surgeon) related to them how Hisham hadn’t made any effort to win the appointment; on the contrary, it was they who had insisted on appointing him, in view of his excellence. And on the second day, when more well-wishers came, the mother recounted a whole dialogue that had taken place between the chairman of the surgery department and her son in which the former had urged Hisham to agree to work with him, while Hisham had asked for a chance to think it over, as he wasn’t quite sure.
Hisham knocked on the door, opened it a little, politely, and advanced a very short distance into the room. Dr. Bassiouni, the chairman of the department, was sitting talking with three members of the teaching staff. When Hisham appeared, they paused and looked at him attentively, and he felt his heart beating hard. He took a deep breath, smiled in a politely friendly way, and said, “Good morning.”
They didn’t answer but went on looking. Having to explain his presence, he said, “Hisham Fakhri, the new resident, sir.”
“Wait outside,” was the chairman’s perfunctory response, after which he resumed his conversation with the professors. Hisham left and started pacing the hall. He smoked three cigarettes. When the professors emerged from the chairman’s office, he repeated everything he had done the time before, starting with knocking on the door and introducing himself, since Dr. Bassiouni had, in the few minutes that had elapsed, completely forgotten about him.
“Listen, my boy. Do you know what your job in the department here is?”
Hisham was at a loss for a reply.
“Your job here is that of the kitchen boy,” said the chairman, breaking out into quick, repeated bursts of laughter and playing with his long sideburns. Hisham was on the verge of laughing too, out of politeness, but fortunately an inner voice warned him against doing so.
“Do you know what the kitchen boy is, in the kitchen? He’s the boy who collects the onion peelings and washes down the tiles and gets it in the neck from the cooks. There you have it: the resident in surgery is precisely the kitchen boy in the kitchen.”
Hisham nodded. The chairman continued, “You will do what we tell you to do. Be careful not to object or complain. Everything has its price. You want to become a surgeon? Then you have to pay the price, just as we all did—in sweat and toil, abuse and insults. And three years from now, if I like you, I will sign with this very hand the decision appointing you an assistant lecturer at the university. If, on the other hand, I do not like you, I will dispense with your services and you will go back to the Ministry of Health to do donkey work, just like the rest of the donkeys there.”
At this point it seemed to
occur to the chairman that Hisham had taken up too much of his time and he glowered, and shouted at him in a sudden fury, “Enough! On your way! Go do the paperwork with personnel!”
Dr. Bassiouni is too well known to require introduction. He is Chairman of the Department of General Surgery and likewise of the Arab Surgeons Association, and member of dozens of international medical associations. In addition to all this he is a public figure whose views on the economy are published in the newspapers and who is invited to appear on television during Ramadan to tell us about his favorite dishes. And Dr. Bassiouni is above all—and let us not forget this—an exceptional surgeon, who has made his incontestable mark in the annals of surgery. Being all of this, he is, naturally, different from you and me—we the lusterless ordinary people, devoid of any value or talent. The fact is that Dr. Bassiouni is as odd as he is exceptional and skilled and his strange ways attract curiosity and comment, not to mention fear and admiration. In the August heat, for example, Dr. Bassiouni will wear a short-sleeved shirt like any other citizen, but—inevitably—he will wear around his neck a tie so long that it reaches to below his belt. No one knows why he insists on the tie when he is not wearing a jacket. Nor does anyone know what the point is of this tie being so long. In addition, he chooses clothes of bright clashing colors that he seems to have chosen deliberately to not match (though they say that he acquired this practice during his stay in America). And while it is accepted that one should let his sideburns grow a little, Dr. Bassiouni has gone to excessive lengths in this respect, draping his face with long gray sideburns that extend from below his ears and give him the appearance of a nineteenth-century English lord, or a Greek grocer from Alexandria. Despite which, his general appearance, with his sideburns, flashy colors, small bald patch, short, stout body, and rapid, irritable movements is not without good looks and certainly gives no hint of his sixty years.
Dr. Bassiouni has never gotten married, a fact which, according to one interpretation, is attributable to his faithfulness to an old love that ended painfully. On the administrative side, it is well known that the doctor’s department is one of the best organized at el-Qasr el-Aini Hospital, and this is true even though the doctor—with the exception of operating days—spends less than an hour there each day, after which he leaves in a hurry for his clinic, downtown. His absence from the department does not, however, mean that he is unaware of what goes on there and he often summons to his office people (from the most senior professor to the lowest resident), in order to rebuke or congratulate them on things they may have done while he was away, though to this day nobody has found out how the doctor knows what goes on when he isn’t there. There is much speculation, of course, but it is truly difficult to be sure that any given person is the source of his information, and the results are amazing, for the physicians in the department work, talk, and laugh as though the doctor were with them. Two of them may, for example, differ—may, indeed, become excited and angry—over the history of how the doctor obtained his doctorate or from which American university he obtained it (even though it is no business of either of them) but they will be certain that whatever they say, like everything else that happens in the department, will be reported to the doctor in detail; and if things are like this when the doctor is not there, just imagine how they are when he is.
Indeed. When the doctor appears, everyone devotes the same energy to doing his work well as he does to staying alive, for the doctor is not given to idle talk. He punishes the wrongdoer whoever he may be and his punishments are immediate and also—like everything he does—extremely strange. Thus if he finds a car parked in his private parking space, he at once orders that its four tires be deflated and then leaves (we may imagine the subsequent difficulties faced by the owner of a car with four flat tires) and if he catches sight of a ward orderly making tea beside the patient’s family, he pounces forthwith upon the teakettle and flings it out of the window (it isn’t important on whose head the kettle may land; that is the problem of the person passing by in the street). And if the doctor enters the sterilization room and finds that the brush he uses to scrub his hands isn’t clean, he will right away hurl it in the face of the nursing sister, and he really does hurl it, meaning that the sister may get her head cut open. (This happened once with a new sister; the others knew from experience how to avoid these flying objects.) And in the operating theater, during those terrifying minutes when the fate of a person lying anaesthetized and with their insides exposed is decided and the doctor’s assistants are whispering in dread, the sweat pouring off them in spite of the air conditioning, the doctor—and he alone—remains unflappable, his high-pitched voice rising as he curses the families of those he is working with and insults them with a variety of sentences all of the same structure, as when he says, “Drain the blood, you animal!” or “Call that sewing, you ape?” The surprising thing is that the one insulted—be it surgeon or sister—rather than paying attention to the insult will focus all his thoughts on correcting the mistake. In fact, the doctor doesn’t insult his assistants only when angry: he also curses them out when he is pleased and wants to give praise. Thus, at the end of an operation he may say to one of them, “You’re a real ass as a surgeon, but you did good work tonight.”
Thus, in the doctor’s private language the meanings of the insults are changed and the names of animals are employed in the same way that we ordinary mortals might, in our language, use “you.”
Hisham worked as he had never worked before. He was on the job every day from seven in the morning to midnight, and on operation days (Sundays and Wednesdays) he would spend the night at the department. When he came home exhausted, he was supposed to find one or two hours in which to review his work for his master. The result was that he didn’t get more than four hours sleep a night. His body grew thin, his face pale, and permanent dark rings formed around his eyes. His mother noticed how irritable he was and reproached him frequently for his excessive smoking. At his insistence, she would wake him every day at daybreak, almost weeping out of pity for his weak, exhausted body. Hisham’s hard work did not, however, hurt him. What kept him awake was the thought that his hard work might go for nothing. He had a clear well-defined goal in mind—to become one of the great surgeons. Because he was aware that these days would decide his whole future, he was prepared, were there time enough, to double his efforts and, believe it or not, he managed to work with Dr. Bassiouni for a whole year without any disasters. He would go in to see him twice a week to show him the operation schedule and each time Hisham would approach Dr. Bassiouni exactly as we might a live electrical wire, or a gas valve that has to be fixed, meaning that he would extend his hand with the papers and retreat to avoid any impending explosion. Dr. Bassiouni, however, to Hisham’s amazement, never exploded. Needless to say, things did not pass without a few special forms of address (Hisham’s was usually ‘pig’) but this was a trifle.
Though Dr. Bassiouni caused Hisham no problems, others brought him a wide variety, and here we should mention that Dr. Bassiouni’s department included four other professors, not one of whom enjoyed the same celebrity or authority. Dr. Mansour, for instance had graduated one year after Dr. Bassiouni and like him had a doctorate from America; like him too, he was a skilled surgeon. For reasons that were hard to fathom, however, and as is often the case in life, he did not have the same charisma, and while the presence of Dr. Bassiouni, with his strange appearance, had an effect on people, Dr. Mansour, despite the care he took to wear a three-piece suit summer and winter, resembled, at best, a middle-ranking bureaucrat, meaning that while with his graying hair, his glasses, his good manners, and his soft voice, he was undeniably a respectable person, he was also never anything more than that. Thus there was no great stream of patients to his clinic, since patients usually prefer to contract with a famous surgeon as the latter must obviously be more skilled or how else would he have become famous? And as Dr. Mansour had more free time, it had become his habit to spend most of the day in the department,
which he would roam, observing what went on from a distance, and always intervening at the appropriate time. He would, for example, wait until a doctor had prescribed a certain medication for a patient and, as soon as he caught sight of the expression of gratitude in the patient’s eyes or heard the patient’s family thanking the doctor, would approach and ask the doctor in a low voice what he had prescribed, then give a smile of private (but nevertheless observable) sarcasm and announce to him that what he had prescribed was totally wrong (it never happened that Dr. Mansour found that any doctor had got it right). Nor would Dr. Mansour omit to explain in a clear and audible voice the complications that would follow if the patient were to take that medication, which was known to totally destroy the liver. When, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the anxiety and confusion on the patient’s face, Dr. Mansour would joke with him, saying, “You should praise the Lord! The doctor was going to kill you.” At this point the patient and his family would inevitably plead with Dr. Mansour to prescribe another drug for them, so he would take the prescription sheet, resolutely cross out the first medication and then write in another (which usually was no different from the first). Then he would sigh and shake his head, as though to say, “What am I supposed to do about these ignorant doctors, dear God?” and leave exactly as he had come—calmly and politely.
Dr. Mansour would explain these interventions of his by saying “I always pass on my experience to my children” and it was in exactly the same fatherly spirit that Dr. Mansour was accustomed to destroy the hopes of the students whose theses he was supervising. Thus, after the student had worked hard for two whole years on his topic and it was approaching completion, and just as the student was starting to feel stirrings of hope that he might obtain a degree (whether a master’s or a doctorate), Dr. Mansour would always discover some fundamental flaw in the study and inform the student of this fact in a deliberate and leisurely fashion (just as you might take your time when sipping mint tea), and then calmly look at the student’s face as the frustration and despair took hold and refuse, politely and adamantly, the student’s feverish attempts to defend himself. When the student had surrendered to despondency and taken refuge in silence, Dr. Mansour would sigh, with genuine relief, and say, “Don’t try to argue about it, my boy. We have at least a year of work ahead of us.”
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