The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Next afternoon, he went alone into Yehuddiyyeh and rode directly to his assistant’s house.

  The woman answered the door holding her child. Surprise and brief confusion showed in her face when she saw the Prince of Physicians standing on her threshold, but she recovered quickly and showed him inside with proper courtesy. It was a plain home but kept well, and it had been made comfortable, with wall hangings and rugs on the earthen floors. With commendable dispatch she placed an earthen plate of sweet seed cakes before him, and a sherbet of rose water flavored with cardamon.

  He hadn’t counted on her ignorance of the language. When he tried to talk with her it was quickly obvious that she had only a few words of Persian.

  He wanted to converse at length and with persuasion, wanted to tell her that when first he had recognized the quality of her husband’s mind and instincts, he had hungered after the large young foreigner the way a miser lusts for a treasure or a man desires a woman. He had wanted the European for medicine because it was clear to him that God had fashioned Jesse ben Benjamin to be a healer.

  “He will be a shining light. He is almost realized, but it is too soon, he is not yet there.

  “All kings are mad. To one with absolute power, it is no more difficult to take a life than to bestow a calaat. Yet if you flee now, it will be a resentment for the rest of your lives, for he has come so far, dared so much. I know he is no Jew.”

  The woman sat and held the child, watching Ibn Sina with growing tension. He tried speaking Hebrew with no success, then Turkish and Arabic in quick succession. He was a philologist and a linguist but knew few European languages, for he learned a tongue only in pursuit of scholarship. He spoke to her in Greek without response.

  Then he turned to Latin and saw her head move slightly and her eyes blink.

  “Rex te venire ad se vult. Si non, maritus necabitur.” He repeated it: The king wishes you to come to him. If you do not, your husband will be slain.

  “Quid dicas?” What do you say? she said.

  He repeated it very slowly.

  The child was beginning to fuss in her arms, but the woman paid her baby no heed. She stared at Ibn Sina, her face drained of color. It was a face like stone but he saw it contained an element he hadn’t noted before. The old man understood people and for the first time his anxiety abated, for he recognized the woman’s strength. He would make the arrangements and she would do what was necessary.

  Slaves bearing a sedan chair came for her. She didn’t know what to do with Rob J., so she brought him along; it was a happy solution, for in the haram of the House of Paradise the child was received by a number of delighted women.

  She was taken to the baths, an embarrassment. Rob had told her it was a religious obligation for Muslim women to remove their pubic hair every ten days by means of a lime-and-arsenic depilatory. Similarly, the hair of the armpits was plucked or shaved, once a week by a married woman, every two weeks by a widow, and once a month by a virgin. The women attending her stared in undisguised disgust.

  After she had been washed, three trays of scents and dyes were offered but she used only a bit of perfume.

  She was led to a room and instructed to wait. It was furnished only with a large pallet, pillows, and blankets, and a closed cabinet on which stood a basin of water. Somewhere nearby, musicians played. She was cold. When she had waited what seemed a long time, she picked up a blanket and wrapped herself.

  Presently Alā came. She was terrified but he smiled at seeing her standing cowled in the blanket.

  He waggled his finger for her to remove it, and then motioned impatiently that she was to take off the robe too. She knew she was thin compared to most Eastern females, and Persian women had gone out of their way to inform her that freckles were Allah’s just punishment on someone so shameless she did not wear the veil.

  He touched the heavy red hair on her head, lifted a handful to his nostrils. She hadn’t perfumed her hair and its lack of scent made him grimace.

  For a moment Mary was able to escape by worrying about her child. When Rob J. was older, would he remember having been brought to this place? The glad cries and soft cooing of the women? Their tender faces beaming down at him? Their hands caressing him?

  The king’s hands were still at her head. He was speaking in Persian, whether to himself or to her she couldn’t tell. She dared not even shake her head to signify she didn’t understand, lest he interpret the gesture as disagreement.

  He went straight to an examination of her body patch. He was most curious about her hair.

  “Henna?”

  She understood the single word and assured him the color wasn’t henna, in language which of course he didn’t comprehend. He pulled a strand gently through his fingertips and tried to wash out the red.

  In a moment he took off his single loose cotton garment. His arms were muscular and he was thick in the waist, with a protruding, hairy belly. His entire body was hairy. His pizzle seemed smaller than Rob’s and darker.

  In the sedan chair on the way to the palace she had had fantasies. In one, she had wept and explained that Christian women were forbidden by Jesus to perform this act outside of marriage; and as though it were a story about one of the saints, he had taken pity on her tears and, out of kindness, had sent her home. In another vision, having been forced into this to save her husband, she had been freed to enjoy the most lascivious physical release of her lifetime, a ravishment by a supernatural lover who, although able to command the most beautiful women in Persia, had selected her.

  Reality resembled neither imagining. He examined her breasts, touching the nipples; perhaps the coloring differed from those he was accustomed to. The chill air had made her breasts hard but they didn’t maintain his interest. When he pushed her to the mat she silently begged the help of the blessed Mother of God whose namesake she was. She was an unwilling receptacle, kept dry by fear and anger at this man who had come close to ordering the death of her husband. There were none of the sweet caresses with which Rob warmed her and turned her bones to water. Instead of being a vertical stick Alā’s organ was drooping and he had difficulty in pushing into her, resorting to olive oil that he splashed irritably on her instead of himself. Finally he squeezed greasily inside and she lay with her eyes closed.

  She had been bathed but discovered he had not. He wasn’t vigorous. He seemed almost bored, grunting softly as he worked. In a very few moments he gave an unroyal little shudder for so large a man and a disgusted moan. Then the King of Kings pulled out with a small sucking of oil and strode from the room without a word or a glance.

  She lay in sticky humiliation where he had left her, not knowing what to do next. She would not allow herself to weep.

  Eventually she was called for by the same women and taken to her son. She dressed hurriedly and scooped up Rob J. Sending her home, the women placed a rope bag of green melons in the sedan chair. When she and Rob J. reached Yehuddiyyeh she thought of leaving the melons in the road, but it seemed easier to carry them into the house and let the sedan chair go on its way.

  The melons in the marketplaces were poor, because they were stored in caverns throughout the Persian winter and many spoiled. These were in excellent condition and perfectly ripe when Rob returned from his mission to Idhaj, and they proved to have an uncommonly fine flavor.

  64

  THE BEDOUI GIRL

  Strange. To enter the maristan, that cool, sacred place with its stinks of illness and its rough medicinal smells and groanings and cries and bustling sounds, the song of the hospital. It still made Rob catch his breath, still made his heart pound to enter the maristan and find trailing behind him, like baby geese following their mother, a gaggle of students.

  Following him, who not long before had trailed others!

  To stop and allow a clerk to recite a history of affliction. Then to approach a pallet and speak with the patient, watching, examining, touching, smelling out disease like a fox snuffling to find an egg. Trying to outwit the fucking Blac
k Knight. At length, to discuss the sick or injured person with the group, receiving opinions often worthless and absurd but sometimes wonderful. For the clerks, a learning; for Rob, an opportunity to mold these minds into a critical instrument that analyzed and proposed treatment and rejected and proposed again, so that sometimes as a result of teaching them he reached conclusions that otherwise would have eluded him.

  Ibn Sina urged him to lecture, and when he did, others came to hear him but he never was truly at ease before them, standing and sweating earnestly while discoursing on a subject he had carefully reviewed in the books. He was aware of how he must look to them, bigger than most and with his broken English nose, and aware of how he sounded, for now he was fluent enough with the language to be conscious of his accent.

  Similarly, because Ibn Sina demanded he be a writer, he fashioned a short article on the wine treatment of wounds. He labored over the essay but took no joy from it even when it was finished and transcribed and placed in the House of Learning.

  He knew he must pass on learning and skills, as these things had been passed to him, but Mirdin had been wrong: Rob did not want to do everything. He would not fashion himself after Ibn Sina. He had no ambition to be philosopher and educator and theologian, no need to write or preach. He was forced to learn and seek so he could know what to do when he must act. For him, the challenge came each time he held a patient’s hands, the same magic he had first felt when he was nine years old.

  One morning a girl named Sitara was brought into the maristan by her father, a bedoui tentmaker. She was very sick, nauseous and vomiting and racked by terrible pain in the lower right part of her rigid belly. Rob knew what was wrong but had no idea how to treat the side sickness. The girl groaned and could barely answer but he questioned her at length, seeking to learn something that might show him the way.

  He purged her, tried hot packs and cold compresses, and that night he told his wife about the bedoui girl and asked Mary to pray for her.

  Mary was saddened by the thought of a young girl stricken as James Geikie Cullen had been stricken. It brought to mind the fact that her father lay in an unvisited grave in Ahmad’s wadi in Hamadhān.

  Next morning Rob let blood from the bedoui girl and gave drugs and herbs, but all he did was to no avail. He saw her turn febrile and glassy-eyed and begin to fade like a leaf after frost. She died on the third day.

  He went over the details of her short life painstakingly.

  She had been healthy prior to the series of painful attacks that had killed her. A twelve-year-old virgin who had reached her womanly bleeding but recently … what had she in common with a small male child and his middle-aged father-in-law? Rob could see nothing.

  Yet all three had been killed in precisely the same way.

  The breach between Alā and his Vizier, the Imam Qandrasseh, became more public at the Shah’s audience. The Imam was seated on the smaller throne below Alā’s right hand, as was customary, but he addressed the Shah with such cold courtesy that his message was clear to all who attended.

  That night Rob sat in Ibn Sina’s home and they played at the Shah’s Game. It was more a lesson than a contest, like a grown man playing with a child. Ibn Sina seemed to have thought out the entire game in advance. He moved the pieces without hesitation. Rob could not contain him but perceived the need for planning ahead, and this foresight quickly became a part of his own strategy.

  “Small groups of people are gathered in the streets and in the maidans, speaking softly,” Rob said.

  “They become worried and confused when the priests of Allah are in conflict with the lord of the House of Paradise, for they fear the quarrel will destroy the world.” Ibn Sina took a rukh with his horseman. “It will pass. It always passes, and those who are blessed will survive.”

  They played for a time in silence and then he told Ibn Sina of the death of the bedoui girl, recounting the symptoms and describing the two other cases of abdominal distemper that haunted him.

  “Satira was my mother’s name.” Ibn Sina sighed. But he had no explanation for the girl’s death. “There are many answers we have not been given.”

  “They will not be given unless we seek them out,” Rob said slowly.

  Ibn Sina shrugged and chose to change the subject by relating court news, disclosing that a royal expedition was being sent to India. Not raiders this time, but merchants empowered by the Shah to buy Indian steel or the ore from which to smelt it, for Dhan Vangalil did not have any steel left to make the patterned blue blades that Alā valued so highly.

  “He has told them not to return without a full caravan of ore or hard steel, if they must go to the end of the Silk Road to get it.”

  “What is at the end of the Silk Road?” Rob asked.

  “Chung-Kuo. An enormous country.”

  “And beyond that?”

  Ibn Sina shrugged. “Water. Oceans.”

  “Travelers have told me that the world is flat and is surrounded by fire. That one can venture only so far before dropping into the fire that is Hell.”

  “Travelers’ babble,” Ibn Sina said scornfully. “It is not true. I have read that outside the inhabited world all is salt and sand, like the Dasht-i-Kavir. It is also written that much of the world is ice.” He gazed pensively at Rob. “What is beyond your own country?”

  “Britain is an island. Beyond it is an ocean and then Denmark, the land of the Northmen from which our king came. Beyond that, it is said there is a land of ice.”

  “And if one goes north from Persia, beyond Ghazna is the land of the Rus—and beyond that is a land of ice. Yes, I think it true that much of the world is covered with ice,” Ibn Sina said. “But there is no fiery Hell at the edges, for thinking men have known always that the earth is round as a plum. You have voyaged on the sea. When sighting a distant oncoming ship, the first thing seen on the horizon is the tip of the mast, and then more and more of the craft as it sails over the curved surface of the world.”

  He finished Rob off on the game board by trapping his king, almost absentmindedly, and then summoned a slave to bring wine sherbet and a bowl of pistachios. “Do you not recall the astronomer Ptolemy?”

  Rob smiled; he had read only enough astronomy to satisfy the requirements of the madrassa. “An ancient Greek who did his writing in Egypt.”

  “Just so. He wrote that the world is round. Suspended beneath the concave firmament, it is the center of the universe. Around it circle the sun and the moon, making the night and the day.”

  “This ball of a world, with its surface of sea and land, mountains and rivers and forests and deserts and places of ice—is it hollow or solid? And if it is solid, what is the nature of its interior?”

  The old man smiled and shrugged, in his element now and enjoying himself. “We cannot know. The earth is enormous, as you understand, who have ridden and walked over a vast piece of it. And we are but tiny men who cannot burrow deeply enough to answer such a question.”

  “But if you were able to look within the center of the earth—would you?”

  “Of course!”

  “Yet you are able to peer inside the human body, but you do not.”

  Ibn Sina’s smile faded. “Mankind is close to savagery and must live by rules. If not, we would sink into our own animal nature and perish. One of our rules forbids the mutilation of the dead, who will one day be rescued from their graves by the Prophet.”

  “Why do people suffer from abdominal distemper?”

  Ibn Sina shrugged. “Open the belly of a hog and study the puzzle. The pig’s organs are identical to the organs of man.”

  “You are certain of this, Master?”

  “Yes. So it has been written since the time of Galen, whose fellow Greeks would not let him cut up humans. The Jews and the Christians have a similar prohibition. All men share this abhorrence of dissection.” Ibn Sina looked at him with tender concern. “You have overcome much to become a physician. But you must practice your healing within the rule of religion and the
general will of men. If you do not, their power will destroy you,” he said.

  Rob rode home gazing at the sky until the points of light swam before his eyes. Of the planets he could find only the moon and Saturn, and a glowing that might have been Jupiter, for it shed a steady brilliance amidst the starry glittering.

  He realized Ibn Sina was not a demigod. The Prince of Physicians was simply an aging scholar caught between medicine and the faith in which he had been piously reared. Rob loved the old man all the more for his human limitations but he had a sense of being somehow cheated, like a small boy realizing the frailties of his father.

  When he reached Yehuddiyyeh he was reflective while he saw to the needs of the brown horse. Inside the house Mary and the child were asleep, and he undressed with quiet care and then lay awake, thinking on what might cause distemper of the abdomen.

  In the middle of the night Mary awoke urgently and ran outside, where she retched and was ill. He followed; obsessed by the disease that had taken her father, he was aware that vomiting was its first sign. Though she objected, he examined her when she reentered the house, but her abdomen was soft and there was no fever.

  At last they returned to their pallet.

  “Rob!” she called at length. And again: “My Rob,” a cry of distress, as from a nightmare.

  “Hush, or you will wake him,” he whispered. He was surprised, for he hadn’t known her to have bad dreams. He stroked her head and comforted her, and she pulled him to her with a desperate strength.

  “I’m here, Mary. I’m here, O my love.” He spoke soft, quiet things to her until she calmed, endearments in English and Persian and the Tongue.

  Once again a short time later she started but then she touched his face and sighed and cradled his head in her arms, and Rob lay with his cheek on his wife’s soft breast until the sweet slow thudding of her heart pulled him also into his rest.

  65

  KARIM

  The warming sun drew pale green shoots out of the earth as spring surged into Ispahan. Birds flashed through the air carrying straw and nesting twigs in their beaks, and the runoff gushed from brooks and wadis into the River of Life, which roared as its waters rose. It was as if Rob had taken the hands of the earth into his own and could feel nature’s boundless, eternal vitality. Among other evidences of fertility was Mary’s. Her nausea continued and worsened, and this time they didn’t need Fara to tell them she was pregnant. He was delighted but Mary was moody, quicker to show irritation than heretofore. He spent more time than ever with his son. The little face lighted when Rob J. saw him, and the baby crowed and wriggled like a tail-wagging puppy. Rob taught him to yank at his father with joy.