The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  “Thrust your head and right arm into the carcan,” he ordered.

  It was instinct and fear that made Rob pull back, but they were technically correct in interpreting it as resistance.

  They struck him until he fell and then began to kick him, as the soldiers had done. Rob could do nothing but curl himself into a ball to hide his groin and throw up his arms to protect his head.

  When they were finished savaging him, they shoved and maneuvered him like a sack of meal until his neck and right arm were positioned, then they slammed down the heavy upper half of the carcan and nailed it closed before abandoning him, more unconscious than not, to hang hopeless and helpless under the unshaded sun.

  38

  THE CALAAT

  They were peculiar stocks indeed, made of a rectangle and two squares of wood fastened in a triangle, the center of which gripped Rob’s head so that his crouching body was half suspended. His right hand, the eating hand, had been placed over the end of the longest piece and a wooden cuff nailed over his wrist, for while in the carcan a prisoner wasn’t fed. The left hand, the wiping hand, was unfettered, for the kelonter was civilized.

  At intervals he drifted into consciousness to stare at the long double row of stocks, each containing a wretch. In his line of sight at the other end of the courtyard was a large wooden block.

  Once he dreamed of people and demons in black robes. A man knelt and placed his right hand on the block; one of the demons swung a sword that was larger and heavier than an English cutlass and the hand was taken off at the wrist while the other robed figures prayed.

  The same dream again and again in the hot sun. And then a difference. A man knelt so the back of his neck was on the block and his eyes bulged at the sky. Rob was afraid they would decapitate him but they took his tongue.

  When next Rob opened his eyes he saw neither people nor demons but on the ground and on the block were fresh stains such as are not left by dreams.

  It hurt him to breathe. He had been given the most thorough beating of his life and he couldn’t tell if there were broken bones.

  He hung in the carcan and wept weakly, trying to be silent and hoping no one was watching.

  Eventually he tried to relieve his ordeal by speaking to his neighbors, whom he could just manage to see by turning his head. It was an effort he learned not to make casually, for the skin of his neck quickly rubbed raw against the wood that held him fast. To his left was a man who had been beaten unconscious and didn’t move; the youth on his right studied him curiously but was either a deaf mute, incredibly stupid, or unable to make sense of his broken Persian. After several hours a guard noticed that the man on his left was dead. He was taken away and another put in his place.

  By midday Rob’s tongue rasped and seemed to fill his mouth. He felt no urge to urinate or void, for any wastes had long ago been sucked from him by the sun. At times he believed himself back in the desert and in lucid moments remembered too vividly Lonzano’s description of how a man dies of thirst, the swollen tongue, the blackened gums, the belief that he was in another place.

  Presently Rob turned his head and met the new prisoner’s eyes. They studied one another and he saw a swollen face and ruined mouth.

  “Is there no one of whom we can ask mercy?” he whispered.

  The other waited, perhaps puzzled by Rob’s accent. “There is Allah,” he said finally. He was not himself easily understood because of his split lip.

  “But no one here?”

  “You are a foreigner, Dhimmi?”

  “Yes.”

  The man directed his hatred at Rob. “You have seen a mullah, foreigner. A holy man has sentenced you.” He appeared to lose interest and turned his face away.

  The waning of the sun was a blessing. Evening brought such a coolness as to be almost joyful. His body was numb and he no longer felt muscular pain; perhaps he was dying.

  During the night the man next to him spoke again. “There is the Shah, foreign Jew,” the man said.

  Rob waited.

  “Yesterday, the day of our torture, was Wednesday, Chahan Shanbah. Today is Panj Shanbah. And each week on the morn of Panj Shanbah, in order to attempt a perfect soul-cleansing before Jom’a, the Sabbath, Alā-al-Dawla Shah holds audience during which anyone may approach his throne in the Hall of Pillars to complain of injustice.”

  Rob couldn’t stifle the reluctant stir of hope. “Anyone?”

  “Anyone. Even a prisoner may demand to be brought to place his case before the Shah.”

  “No, you must not!” a voice bawled from the darkness. Rob couldn’t tell from which carcan the sound came.

  “You must put it out of your mind,” the unknown voice said. “For the Shah almost never reverses a mufti’s judgment or a sentence. And the mullahs eagerly await the return of those who waste the Shah’s time with a wagging tongue. It is then that tongues are taken and bellies are ripped, as this devil surely knows, this evil son of a bitch who gives you false advice. You must place your faith in Allah and not in Alā Shah.”

  The man on his right was laughing slyly, laughing as if caught out in a practical joke.

  “There is no hope,” the voice said from the darkness.

  His neighbor’s mirth had turned into a paroxysm of coughing and wheezing. When he caught his breath the man said viciously, “Yes, we may look for hope in Paradise.” No one spoke again.

  Twenty-four hours after Rob was placed in the carcan he was released. He tried to stand but fell, and lay in agony as blood reentered his muscles.

  “Go,” a guard said finally, and kicked at him.

  He struggled to his feet and limped out of the jail, hurrying from that place. He walked to a great square with plane trees and a splashing fountain from which he drank and drank, surrendering to a thirst without end. Then he plunged his head into the water until his ears rang and he felt that some of the prison stink had been washed away.

  Ispahan’s streets were crowded and people glanced at him as they passed.

  A fat little vendor in a tattered tunic was fanning flies from a pot cooking on a brazier in his donkey cart. The aroma from the pot brought such a weakness it gave Rob a fright. But when he opened his purse-pocket, instead of sufficient funds to keep him for months, it contained one small bronze coin.

  He had been robbed while unconscious. He cursed bleakly, not knowing whether the thief had been the pockfaced soldier or a jail guard. The bronze coin was a mockery, a wry joke on the thief’s part, or perhaps it had been left through some twisted religious sense of charity. He gave it to the vendor, who ladled out a small portion of a greasy rice pilah. It was spicy and contained bits of bean and he swallowed it too quickly, or perhaps his body had been overtaxed by deprivation and sun and the carcan. Almost at once he cast up the contents of his stomach into the dusty street. His neck was bleeding where it had been tormented by the stocks and there was a pounding behind his eyes. He moved into the shade under a plane tree and stood there thinking of green England, his own Horse and cart with money beneath the floorboards and Mistress Buffington sitting next to him for company.

  The crowd was denser now, a flood of people flowing through the street, all headed in the same direction.

  “Where are they going?” he asked the food vendor.

  “To the Shah’s audience,” the man said, staring askance at the battered Jew until Rob moved away.

  Why not? he asked himself. Did he have another choice?

  He joined in the tide that swept down the Avenue of Ali and Fatima, crossed the four-laned Avenue of the Thousand Gardens, turned into the immaculate boulevard marked Gates of Paradise. They were young and old and in-between, hadjis in white turbans, students in green turbans, mullahs, beggars whole and maimed and wearing rags and cast-off turbans of all colors, young fathers holding babies, porters bearing sedan chairs, men on horseback and on donkeys. Rob found himself trailing a dark-caftaned gaggle of Jews and hobbled just behind them, an errant gosling.

  They passed through th
e small coolness of an artificial woods, for trees were not plentiful in Ispahan, and then, although they were still well within the town walls, past numerous fields on which sheep and goats grazed, separating royalty from its city. Now they approached a great green lawn with two stone pillars at either end like portals. When the first house of the royal court came into view Rob thought it the palace, for it was larger than King’s House in London. But there was house after house of the same size, mostly built of brick and stone, many with towers and porches and each with terraces and extensive gardens. They passed vineyards, stables, and two racing tracks, orchards and gardened pavilions of such beauty he wanted to leave the crowd and wander in the perfumed splendor, but knew it was doubtless forbidden.

  And then a structure so formidable, and at the same time so sweepingly graceful that he didn’t credit it, all breast-shaped roofs and girded battlements on which sentries with glittering helms and shields paced beneath long colored pennants that fluttered in the breeze.

  He plucked at the sleeve of the man in front of him, a stocky Jew whose fringed undergarment peeped from his shirt. “What is the fortress?”

  “Why, the House of Paradise, home of the Shah!” The man peered at him worriedly. “You are bloodied, friend.”

  “Nothing, a small accident.”

  They poured down the long approach road, and as they drew near he saw that the main section of the palace was protected by a wide moat. The drawbridge was raised, but on the near side of the moat, next to a plaza that served as the palace’s great portal, was a hall through whose doors the crowd entered.

  Inside was a space half as large as the Cathedral of St. Sofia in Constantinople. The floor was marble; the walls and the lofty ceilings were stone, cleverly chinked so daylight softly illuminated the interior. It was the Hall of Pillars, for next to all four walls were stone columns, elegantly wrought and fluted. Where each column joined the floor, its base had been carved into the legs and paws of a variety of animals.

  The hall was half filled when Rob arrived, and immediately people entered behind him, pressing him in among the party of Jews. Roped-off sections left open aisles down the length of the hall. Rob stood and watched, noting everything with a new intensity, for his time in the carcan had impressed upon him that he was a foreigner; actions that he would think of as natural the Persians might consider bizarre and threatening, and he was aware his life might depend on correctly sensing how they behaved and thought.

  He observed that men of the upper class, wearing embroidered trousers and tunics and silk turbans and brocaded shoes, rode into the hall on horseback through a separate entrance. Each was halted approximately one hundred and fifty paces from the throne by attendants who took his horse in return for a coin, and from that privileged point they proceeded on foot among the poor.

  Petty officials in gray clothing and turbans now passed among the people and called out requests for the identities of those with petitions, and Rob made his way to the aisle and laboriously spelled out his name to one of these aides, who recorded it on a curiously thin and unsubstantial-looking parchment.

  A tall man had entered the raised portion at the front of the hall, on which sat a large throne. Rob was too far away to see detail, but the man wasn’t the Shah, for he seated himself at a smaller throne below and to the right of the royal place.

  “Who is that?” Rob asked the Jew to whom he had spoken previously.

  “It is the Grand Vizier, the holy Imam Mirza-aboul Qandrasseh.” The Jew looked at Rob uneasily, for it had not gone unnoticed that he was a petitioner.

  Alā-al-Dawla Shah strode onto the platform, undid a sword belt, and placed the scabbard on the floor as he took the throne. Everyone in the Hall of Pillars performed the ravi zemin while the Imam Qandrasseh invoked the favor of Allah upon those who would seek justice of the Lion of Persia.

  At once the audience began. Rob could hear clearly neither the supplicants nor the enthroned, despite the hush that suddenly fell. But whenever a principal spoke, his words were repeated in loud voices by others stationed at strategic locations in the hall, and in this way the words of the participants were faithfully brought to all.

  The first case involved two weather-beaten shepherds from the village of Ardistan, who had walked two days to reach Ispahan to bring their dispute before the Shah. They were in fierce disagreement over the ownership of a new kid. One man owned the dame, a doe that had long been barren and unreceptive. The other said he had readied the doe for successful mounting by the male goat and therefore now claimed half-ownership of the kid.

  “Did you use magic?” the Imam asked.

  “Excellency, I did but reach in with a feather and make her hot,” the man said, and the crowd roared and stamped its feet. In a moment the Imam indicated that the Shah found in favor of the feather wielder.

  It was an entertainment for most of those present. The Shah never spoke. Perhaps he conveyed his wishes to Qandrasseh by signal, but all questions and decisions appeared to come from the Imam, who did not suffer fools.

  A severe schoolteacher, with his hair oiled and his little beard cut to a perfect point, and dressed in an ornate embroidered tunic that looked like a rich man’s castoff, presented a petition for the establishment of a new school in the town of Nain.

  “Are there not already two schools in the town of Nain?” Qandrasseh asked sharply.

  “They are poor schools taught by unworthy men, Excellency,” the teacher replied smoothly. A small murmur of disapproval arose from the crowd.

  The teacher continued to read the petition, which advised the hiring of a governor for the proposed school, with such detailed, specific, and irrelevant requirements for the position that a tittering occurred, for it was obvious the description would fit only the reader himself.

  “Enough,” Qandrasseh said. “This petition is sly and self-serving, therefore an insult to the Shah. Let this man be caned twenty times by the kelonter, and may it please Allah.”

  Soldiers appeared flourishing batons, the sight of which made Rob’s bruises throb, and the teacher was led away, protesting volubly.

  There was little enjoyment in the next case—two elderly noblemen in expensive silk clothing who had a mild difference of opinion concerning grazing rights. It prompted what seemed an interminable soft-voiced discussion of ancient agreements made by men long dead, while the audience yawned and whispered complaints about the ventilation in the crowded hall and the aching in their tired legs. They showed no emotion when the verdict was reached.

  “Let Jesse ben Benjamin, a Jew of England, come forward,” someone called.

  His name hung in the air and then bounced echo-like through the hall as it was repeated again and again. He limped down the long carpeted aisle, aware of his filthy torn caftan and the battered leather Jew’s hat that matched his ill-used face.

  At last he approached the throne and performed the ravi zemin three times, as he had observed to be proper.

  When he straightened he saw the Imam in mullah black, his nose a hatchet imbedded in a willful face framed by an iron-gray beard.

  The Shah wore the white turban of a religious man who had been to Mecca, but into its folds had been slipped a thin gold coronet. His long white tunic was of smooth, light-looking stuff worked with blue and gold thread. Dark blue wrappings covered his lower legs and his pointed shoes were blue embroidered with blood-red. He appeared vacuous and unseeing, the picture of a man who was inattentive because he was bored.

  “An Inghiliz,” observed the Imam. “You are at present our only Ingbiliz, our only European. Why have you come to our Persia?”

  “As a seeker of truth.”

  “Do you wish to embrace the true religion?” asked Qandresseh, not unkindly.

  “No, for we already agree there is no Allah but He, the most merciful,” Rob said, blessing the long hours spent under the tutelage of Simon ben ha-Levi, the scholarly trader. “It is written in the Qu’ran, ‘I will not worship that which you worship, nor will
you worship that which I worship … You have your religion and I my religion.’”

  He must be brief, he reminded himself.

  Unemotionally and keeping his language spare, he recounted how he had been in the jungle of western Persia when a beast had sprung upon him.

  The Shah seemed to begin to listen.

  “In the place of my birth, panthers do not exist. I had no weapon, nor did I know how to fight such a creature.”

  He told how his life had been saved by Alā-al-Dawla Shah, hunter of wildcats like his father Abdallah Shah who had slain the lion of Kashan. The people closest to the throne began to applaud their ruler with sharp little cries of approbation. Murmurs rippled through the hall as the repeaters passed the story out into the crowds who were too far from the throne to have heard it.

  Qandrasseh sat motionless but Rob thought from his eyes that the Imam was not pleased with the story nor the reaction it drew from the crowd.

  “Now hasten, Inghiliz,” he said coolly, “and declare what it is that you request at the feet of the one true Shah.”

  Rob took a steadying breath. “Since it is also written that one who saves a life is responsible for it, I ask the Shah’s help in making my life as valuable as possible.” He recounted his futile attempt to be accepted as a student in Ibn Sina’s school for physicians.

  The story of the panther had now spread to the far corners of the hall, and the great auditorium shook under the steady thunder of stamping feet.

  Doubtless Alā Shah was accustomed to fear and obedience but perhaps it had been a long time since he had been spontaneously cheered. From the look of his face, the sound came to him like the sweetest music.