The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  “Reb Lonzano?”

  Zevi nodded. “Yes, it may be that Reb Lonzano is the answer.” Not far away an altercation broke out between drovers and someone called his name. He grimaced. “Those sons of camels, those diseased jackals! I have no time now, you must come back after this caravan has departed. Come to my office late in the afternoon, in the hut behind the main hostelry. All things may be decided then.”

  When he returned a few hours later he found Zevi in the hut that served as his retreat in the caravanserai. With him were three Jews. “This is Lonzano ben Ezra,” he told Rob.

  Reb Lonzano, middle-aged and the senior, was clearly the leader. He had brown hair and a brown beard that hadn’t yet grayed, but any youthfulness gained thereby was offset by his lined face and serious eyes.

  Both Loeb ben Kohen and Aryeh Askari were perhaps ten years younger than Lonzano. Loeb was tall and lanky and Aryeh stockier and square-shouldered. Both had the dark, weather-beaten faces of traveling merchants but they kept them carefully neutral, awaiting Lonzano’s verdict concerning him.

  “They are tradesmen bound for their home in Masqat, across the Persian Gulf,” Zevi said, and then turned to Lonzano. “Now,” he said sternly, “this pitiable one has been brought up like a goy, all unknowing in a far-away Christian land, and he needs to be shown that Jews can be kind to Jews.”

  “What is your business in Ispahan, Jesse ben Benjamin?” Reb Lonzano asked.

  “I go there to study, to become a physician.”

  Lonzano nodded. “The madrassa in Ispahan. Reb Aryeh’s cousin, Reb Mirdin Askari, is a student of medicine there.”

  Rob leaned forward eagerly and would have asked questions, but Reb Lonzano would suffer no diversions. “Are you solvent and able to pay fair portion of the expenses of travel?”

  “I am”.

  “Willing to share work and responsibilities along the way?”

  “Most willing. In what do you trade, Reb Lonzano?”

  Lonzano scowled. Clearly, he felt that the interviewing should be directed by him, not at him. “Pearls,” he said unwillingly.

  “How large is the caravan with which you travel?”

  Lonzano allowed the barest hint of a smile to twitch the corners of his mouth. “We are the caravan with which we travel.”

  Rob was confounded. He turned to Zevi. “How can three men offer me protection from bandits and other perils?”

  “Listen to me,” Zevi said. “These are traveling Jews. They know when to venture and when not. When to hole up. Where to go for protection or help, any place along the way.” He turned to Lonzano. “What say you, friend? Will you take him along, or will you not?”

  Reb Lonzano looked at his two companions. They were silent and their bland expressions didn’t change, but they must have conveyed something, for when he looked back at Rob he nodded.

  “All right, you are welcome to join us. We leave at dawn tomorrow from the Bosporus slip.”

  “I’ll be there with my horse and wagon.”

  Aryeh snorted and Loeb sighed.

  “No horse, no wagon,” Lonzano said. “We sail on the Black Sea in small boats, to eliminate a long and dangerous land journey.”

  Zevi placed a huge hand on his knee. “If they are willing to take you, it is an excellent opportunity. Sell the horse and wagon.”

  Rob made up his mind, and nodded.

  “Mazel!” Zevi said in quiet satisfaction, and poured red Turkish wine to seal their bargain.

  From the caravanserai he made straight for the stable, and Ghiz gasped when he saw him. “You are Yahud?” “I am Yahud.”

  Ghiz nodded fearfully, as if convinced that this magician was a djinni who could alter his identity at will.

  “I have changed my mind, I shall sell you the wagon.”

  The Persian threw him a sullen offer, a fraction of the cart’s worth.

  “No, you shall pay a fair price.”

  “You may keep your frail wagon. Now, should you wish to sell the horse …”

  “I am making you a gift of the horse.”

  Ghiz narrowed his eyes, trying to see danger.

  “You must pay a fair price for the wagon, but the horse is a gift.”

  He went to Horse and rubbed her nose for the last time, thanking her silently for the faithful way in which she had served him. “Bear this in mind always. This animal works willingly but she must be fed well and regularly and kept clean so she is never afflicted with sores. If she is in health when I return here, all will go well with you. But if she has been abused …”

  He held Ghiz’s gaze, and the stableman blanched and looked away. “I shall treat her well, Hebrew. I shall treat her very well!”

  The wagon had been his only home for these many years. And it was like saying goodbye to the last of Barber.

  It was necessary to leave most of its contents, a bargain for Ghiz. He took his surgical instruments and an assortment of medicinal herbs. The little pine grasshopper box with the perforated lid. His arms. A few other things.

  He thought he had exerted discipline, but he was less certain the following morning when he carried a great cloth bag through the still-dark streets. He reached the Bosporus slip as light was graying, and Reb Lonzano looked sourly at the bundle that bowed his back.

  They were taken across the Bosporus Strait in a teimil, a long, low skiff that was little more than a hollowed tree trunk that had been oiled and outfitted with a single pair of oars manned by a sleepy youth. On the far shore they were landed at Uskudar, a town of shacks clustered along the waterfront, facing slips whose moorings were crowded with boats of all sizes and descriptions. To Rob’s dismay he learned that they faced an hour’s walk to the little bay where the boat was moored that would take them through the Bosporus and along the coast of the Black Sea. He shouldered his ponderous bundle and followed after the other three men.

  Presently he found himself walking alongside Lonzano.

  “I have heard from Zevi what happened between you and the Norman at the caravanserai. You must keep a tighter rein on your temper, lest you endanger the rest of us.”

  “Yes, Reb Lonzano.”

  At length he heaved a sigh as he shifted his bag.

  “Is anything wrong, Inghiliz?”

  Rob shook his head. Holding his bundle on his aching shoulder as the salt sweat ran into his eyes, he thought of Zevi and grinned.

  “It is hard to be a Jew,” he said.

  Finally they reached a deserted inlet and Rob saw, bobbing on the swell, a wide, squat cargo vessel with a mast and three sails, one large and two small.

  “What sort of boat is that?” he asked Reb Aryeh.

  “A keseboy. A good boat.”

  “Come!” called the captain. He was Ilias, a homely blond Greek with a sun-darkened face in which a gap-toothed grin gleamed whitely. Rob thought him too indiscriminating a businessman, for already waiting to board were nine shaven-headed scarecrows with no eyebrows or lashes.

  Lonzano groaned. “Dervishes, Muslim begging monks.”

  Their cowls were filthy rags. From the girdle of rope tied around each waist hung a cup and a sling. In the center of each forehead was a round dark mark like a scabby callus; Reb Lonzano told Rob later that it was the zabiba, common to devout Muslims who pressed their heads into the ground during prayer five times a day.

  One of them, perhaps the leader, placed his hands to his breast and bowed to the Jews. “Salaam.”

  Lonzano returned the bow. “Salaam aleikbem.”

  “Come! Come!” the Greek called, and they waded into the welcoming coolness of the surf to where the boat crew, two youths in loincloths, waited to help them up the rope ladder into the shallow-draft keseboy. There was no deck or structure, simply an open space taken up by the cargo of lumber, pitch, and salt. Since Ilias insisted that a center aisle be left to allow the crew to manipulate the sails, little room remained for the passengers, and after their bundles had been stowed, the Jews and the Muslims were jammed together like
so many salt herrings.

  As the two anchors were lifted the dervishes began to bellow. Their leader, whose name was Dedeh—he had an aged face and, in addition to the zabiba, three dark marks on his forehead that appeared to have been made by burning—threw back his head and cried into the sky, “Allah Ek-beeeer.” The drawn-out sound seemed to hover over the sea.

  “La ilah illallah,” chorused his congregation of disciples.

  “Allah Ek-beeer.”

  The keseboy drifted offshore, found the wind with much flapping of her sails, and then moved steadily eastward.

  * * *

  He was jammed in between Reb Lonzano and a skinny young dervish with a single burn mark on his forehead. The young Muslim smiled at him presently and, digging into his pouch, came up with four battered bits of bread, which he distributed to the Jews.

  “Thank him for me,” Rob said. “I don’t want any.”

  “We must eat it,” Lonzano said. “Otherwise they will take grave offense.”

  “It is made of a noble flour,” the dervish said easily in Persian. “Truly an excellent bread.”

  Lonzano glared at Rob, doubtless peeved because he didn’t speak the Tongue. The young dervish watched them eat the bread, which tasted like solidified sweat.

  “I am Melek abu Ishak,” the dervish said.

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  The dervish nodded and closed his eyes. Soon he was snoring, which Rob saw as a sign of his wisdom, for traveling in a keseboy was exceedingly dull. Neither the seascape nor the nearby land ever appeared to change in any detail.

  Still, there were things to think about. When he asked Ilias why they hugged the shoreline, the Greek smiled. “They cannot come and get us in shallow water,” he explained. Rob followed his pointing finger and saw, far out, tiny white puffs that were the great sails of a ship.

  “Pirates,” the Greek said. “They hope perhaps we’ll be blown out to sea. Then they would kill us and take my cargo and your money.”

  As the sun grew higher a stench of unwashed bodies began to dominate the atmosphere in the boat. Much of the time it was dissipated by the sea breeze but when it wasn’t, it was markedly unpleasant. He determined that it came from the dervishes and tried to lean away from Melek abu Ishak, but there was no place to go. Still, there were advantages to traveling with Muslims, for five times a day Ilias brought the keseboy to the shore in order to allow them to prostrate themselves in the direction of Mecca. These intervals were opportunities for the Jews to have hurried meals ashore or to scurry behind bushes and dunes to empty bladders and bowels.

  His English skin had long since been tanned on the trail, but now he felt the sun and the salt curing it into leather. As night fell the absence of the sun was a blessing, but sleep soon threw the sitters from their perpendicular positions and he was pinned between the dead weights of a noisily slumbering Melek on his right and an oblivious Lonzano on his left. When finally he could take no more he used his elbows and received fervent imprecations from both sides.

  The Jews prayed in the boat. Rob put on his tefillin each morning when the others did, winding the leather strip around his left arm the way he had practiced with the rope in the barn at Tryavna. He wrapped the leather around every other finger, bending his head over his lap and hoping no one would notice he didn’t know what he was doing.

  Between landings, Dedeh led his dervishes in prayer afloat:

  “God is greatest! God is greatest! God is greatest! God is greatest!”

  “I confess that there is no God but God! I confess that there is no God but God!”

  “I confess that Mohammed is the Prophet of God! I confess that Mohammed is the Prophet of God!”

  They were dervishes of the Order of Selman, the Prophet’s barber, sworn to lives of poverty and piety, Melek told Rob. The rags they wore signified renunciation of the luxuries of the world. To wash them would indicate abnegation of their faith, which explained the stink. The shaving of all body hair symbolized removing the veil between God and his servants. The cups carried in their rope belts were a sign of the deep well of meditation, their slings were to drive away the devil. The burns in the forehead aided in penitence, and they gave bits of bread to strangers because Gabriel had brought bread to Adam in Paradise.

  They were on ziaret, pilgrimage to the saintly tombs in Mecca.

  “Why do you wind leather about your arms in the morning?” Melek asked him.

  “It’s the Lord’s commandment,” he said, and he told Melek of how the order was given in the Book of Deuteronomy.

  “Why do you cover your shoulders with shawls when you pray, sometimes but not always?”

  He knew too few answers; he had picked up only superficial knowledge from observing the Jews of Tryavna. He fought to conceal his agony at being questioned. “Because the Ineffable One, Blessed be He, has instructed us to do these things,” he said gravely, and Melek nodded and smiled.

  When he turned away from the dervish he saw that Reb Lonzano was studying him with his heavily lidded eyes.

  35

  SALT

  The first two days were calm and easy, but on the third day the wind freshened and produced a heavy sea. Ilias skillfully maintained the keseboy between the dangers of the pirate ship and the pounding surf. At sunset sleek dark shapes rose from the blood-colored waters and curved and lunged alongside and under their boat. Rob shuddered and knew genuine fear, but Ilias laughed and said they were porpoises, harmless and playful creatures.

  By dawn the swells rose and fell in steep hills and seasickness returned to Rob like an old friend. His retching was contagious even to hardened sailors and soon the boat was filled with sick and heaving men praying in a variety of languages for God to put an end to their misery.

  At the worst of it Rob begged to be abandoned ashore, but Reb Lonzano shook his head.

  “Ilias will no longer stop to allow the Muslims to pray on land, for here there are Turkoman tribes,” he said. “Any strangers they don’t kill are made their slaves, and in each of their tents are one or two mistreated unfortunates who are in chains for life.”

  Lonzano told the story of his cousin who, along with two strapping sons, had attempted to move a caravan of wheat into Persia. “They were taken. They were bound and buried up to their necks in their own wheat and left to starve, not a pretty way to die. Finally the Turkomans sold the wasted bodies to our family for Jewish burial.”

  So Rob stayed in the boat and thus, like a series of bad years, passed an interminable four days.

  Seven days after they had left Constantinople, Ilias piloted the keseboy into a tiny harbor around which were clustered some forty houses, a few of them rickety wooden structures but most built of sun-hardened clay blocks. It was an inhospitable-looking port, but not to Rob, who ever after would remember the town of Rize with gratitude.

  “Imshallah! Imshallah!” exclaimed the dervishes as the keseboy touched the dock. Reb Lonzano recited a blessing. With darkened skin, a thinner body, and a concave belly, Rob leaped from the boat and walked carefully over the heaving earth away from the hated sea.

  Dedeh bowed to Lonzano, Melek blinked his eyes at Rob and smiled, and the dervishes went away.

  “Come,” Lonzano said. The Jews plodded as though they knew where they were going. Rize was a sorry place. Yellow dogs ran out and barked at them. They passed giggling children with sores in their eyes, a slatternly woman cooking something over an open fire, two men asleep in the shade as close as lovers. An old man spat as they went by.

  “Their main business is selling livestock to people who arrive by boat and continue through the mountains,” Lonzano said. “Loeb has a perfect knowledge of beasts and will buy for all.”

  So Rob gave over money to Loeb, and presently they came to a small hut next to a large pen containing donkeys and mules. The dealer was a wall-eyed man. The third and fourth fingers of his left hand were missing and in removing them somebody had done a crude job, but he had stumps that were useful
to him as he pulled halters, separating the animals for Loeb’s inspection.

  Loeb didn’t bargain or fuss. Often he scarcely seemed to glance at an animal. Sometimes he paused to check eyes, teeth, withers, and hocks.

  He proposed to buy only one of the mules and the seller gasped at his offer. “Not enough!” he said angrily, but when Loeb shrugged and walked away, the sullen man stopped him and accepted his money.

  At another dealer’s they bought three animals. The third dealer they visited took a long look at the beasts they led and nodded slowly. He separated animals from his herd for them.

  “They know each other’s stock and he sees that Loeb will take only the best,” Aryeh said. Soon all four members of the Jewish party had a tough, durable little donkey for riding and a strong mule to serve as pack animal.

  Lonzano said they were only one month’s travel from Ispahan if all went well, and the knowledge gave Rob new strength. They spent a day traversing the coastal plain and three days in foothills. Then they were in the higher hills. Rob liked mountains, but these were arid and rocky peaks where foliage was sparse. “It is because most of the year there is no water,” Lonzano said. “In the spring there are wild and dangerous floods and then the rest of the time it is dry. When there is a lake, it is likely to be salt water, but we know where to find sweet water.”

  In the morning they prayed, and afterward Aryeh spat and looked at Rob in contempt. “You don’t know shit. You are a stupid goy.”

  “You are the stupid one and you speak like a swine,” Lonzano told Aryeh.

  “He doesn’t even know how to lay on the tefillin!” Aryeh said sullenly.

  “He has been brought up among strangers and if he doesn’t know, this is our opportunity to teach. I, Reb Lonzano ben Ezra ha-Levi of Masqat, shall give him some of the ways of his people.”

  Lonzano showed Rob how to lay on the phylacteries correctly. The leather was wound three times around the upper arm, making the Hebrew letter shin, then it was wrapped seven times down the forearm and across the palm and around the fingers in such a way as to spell out two more letters, dalet and yud, forming the word Shaddai, one of the Unutterable’s seven names.