The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Thereafter Mary sent invitations for all her kinfolk to meet her husband. On the appointed day the MacPhees came west through the low hills and the Tedders crossed the big river and came through the clough to Kilmarnock. They came bearing wedding gifts and fruit cakes and game pies and casks of strong drink and the great meat-and-oats puddings they loved. At the holding, an ox and a bull were slowly turning on spits over open fires, and eight sheep and a dozen lambs, and numerous fowl. There was the music of harp, pipe, viol, and trump, and Mary joined in when the women sang.

  All afternoon, during the athletic contests, Rob met Cullens and Tedders and MacPhees. Some he admired at once and others he did not. He tried not to study the male cousins, who were legion. Everywhere, men began to become drunk, and some tried to force the groom to join them. But he toasted his bride and his sons and their clan, and for the rest he put them off with an easy word and a smile.

  That evening, while the roistering was still in high progress, he walked from the buildings, past the pens and away. It was a good night, starry but still not warm. He could smell the spice of the gorse, and as the sounds of the celebration faded behind him he heard the sheep and the nickering of a horse and the wind in the hills and the rushing of streams, and he fancied he could feel taproots emerging from the soles of his feet and pushing deep into the thin, flinty soil.

  81

  THE CIRCLE COMPLETED

  Why a woman should quicken with new life, or not, was the perfect mystery. After bearing two sons and then passing five years in barrenness, Mary ripened with child following their wedding. She was careful at her work, quicker now to ask one of the men to help her with a task. The two sons trailed after her and did light chores. It was easy to see which child would be the sheepman; at times Rob J. seemed to enjoy the work, but Tam was always eager to feed the lambs and begged for a chance to shear. There was something else about him, seen first in the crude outlines he scraped into the earth with a stick, until his father gave him charcoal and a pine board and showed him how things and people might be pictured. Rob didn’t have to tell the boy not to leave out the flaws.

  On the wall above Tam’s bed hung the rug of the Samanid kings, and it was understood by everyone that it was his, the gift of a family friend in Persia. Only once did Mary and Rob face the thing they had compressed and pushed into the recesses of their minds. Watching him run after a straying ewe, Rob knew it would be no blessing for the boy to learn he had an army of foreign stranger-brothers he would never see. “We will never tell him.”

  “He is yours,” she said. She turned and held him in her arms, and between them was the thickening bulge that was to be Jura Agnes, the only daughter.

  Rob learned the new language, for it was spoken all about him and he applied himself. Father Domhnall loaned him a Bible written in the Erse by monks in Ireland, and as he had mastered Persian from the Qu’ran, he learned the Gaelic from Holy Scripture.

  In his study he hung the Transparent Man and the Pregnant Woman and began to teach his sons the anatomical charts and answer their questions. Often when he was summoned to tend a sick person or an animal, one or both of them went with him. On such a day Rob J. rode behind his father on Al Borak’s back, to a hill-croft house that stank of the dying of Ostric’s wife, Ardis.

  The boy watched as he measured out and gave her an infusion, and Rob poured water on a cloth and handed it to his son.

  “You may bathe her face.”

  Rob J. did it gently, taking great care with her cracked lips. When he was finished Ardis fumbled, taking the young hands in hers.

  Rob saw the tender smile change into something else. He witnessed the confusion of first awareness, the pallor. The starkness with which the boy thrust away her hands.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He put his arms around the thin shoulders and held Rob J. tight. “It is all right.” Only seven years old. Two years younger than he had been himself. He knew, wonderingly, that his life had completed a great circle.

  He comforted and tended Ardis. When they were outside the house, he took his son’s hands so Rob J. could feel his father’s living strength and be reassured. He looked into Rob J.’s eyes.

  “What you felt in Ardis, and the life you detect in me now … to sense these things is a gift from the Almighty. A good gift. It isn’t evil, don’t fear it. Don’t try to understand it now. There will be time for you to understand it. Don’t be afraid.”

  The color was returning to his son’s face. “Yes, Da.”

  He mounted and swung the boy up behind his saddle, and took him home.

  Ardis died eight days later. For months after that, Rob J. didn’t come to the dispensary or ask to accompany his father when he went to tend the sick. Rob didn’t urge him. Even for a child, he felt, involving oneself with the world’s suffering had to be a voluntary act.

  Rob J. tried to interest himself in herding the sheep with Tam. When that palled, he went off alone and picked herbs, hour after long hour. He was a puzzled boy.

  But he had complete trust in his father, and the day came when Rob J. ran after Rob as he was riding out of the farmyard. “Da! May I go with you? To tend the horse and such?”

  Rob nodded and pulled him up behind the saddle.

  Soon Rob J. began coming to the dispensary sporadically and his instruction resumed; and when he was nine years old, at his own request he began to assist his father every day as apprentice.

  The year after Jura Agnes was born, Mary gave birth to a third male child, Nathanael Robertsson. A year later there was the stillbirth of a boy who was christened Carrik Lyon Cole before burial, and then two difficult miscarriages in succession. Though she was still of childbearing age, Mary didn’t become pregnant again. It grieved her, he knew, for she had wanted to give him many children, but Rob was content to see her gradually regain her strength and spirit.

  One day when his youngest child was in his fifth year, a man in a dusty black caftan and bell-shaped leather cap rode into Kilmarnock, leading a laden ass.

  “Peace unto you,” Rob said in the Tongue, and the Jew gaped at the language and answered, “Unto you, peace.”

  A muscular man with a great, unkempt brown beard, skin burnt by travel, and exhaustion pulling at his mouth and making lines in the corners of his eyes. He was Dan ben Gamliel of Rouen, and a long way from home.

  Rob saw to his beasts and gave him water in which to wash and then set before him unforbidden foods. He found his own grasp of the Tongue was poor, for a surprising amount had slipped away from him, but he made the blessings over the bread and the wine.

  “Are you then Jews?” Dan ben Gamliel said, staring.

  “No, we are Christians.”

  “Why do you do this?”

  “We owe a great debt,” Rob said.

  His children sat at the table and stared at a man who looked like no one they had ever seen, listening in wonder as their father joined him in uttering strange blessings before they ate their food.

  “After we have eaten, you may care to study with me.” Rob felt the rise of an almost-forgotten excitement. “Perhaps we may sit together and study the commandments,” he said.

  The stranger peered at him. “I regret—No, I cannot!” Dan ben Gamliel’s face was pallid. “I am not a scholar,” he muttered.

  Masking his disappointment, Rob took the traveler to a good place to sleep, as it would have been done in a Jewish village.

  Next day he rose early. Among the things he had taken from Persia he found the Jew’s cap and prayer shawl and phylacteries and went to join Dan ben Gamliel at morning devotions.

  Dan ben Gamliel stared as he bound the little black box to his forehead and wound the leather around his arm to form the letters in the name of the Unutterable. The Jew watched him sway and listened to his prayers.

  “I know what you are,” he said thickly. “You were a Jew and you became an apostate. A man who has turned his back on our people and our God and given his soul to the other nation.”

&
nbsp; “No, it isn’t so,” Rob said, and saw with regret that he had disrupted the other’s praying. “I will explain when you have finished,” he said, and withdrew.

  But when he returned to summon the man to the morning meal, Dan ben Gamliel wasn’t there. The horse was gone. The ass was gone. The heavy load had been picked up and carried away, and his guest had fled rather than expose himself to the dread contagion of apostasy.

  It was Rob’s last Jew; he never saw another nor spoke the Tongue again.

  He felt his memory of Persian slipping from him too, and one day determined that before it abandoned him, he must translate the Qānîin into English so he might continue to consult the Master Physician. It took him a dreadfully long time. Again and again he told himself that Ibn Sina had written The Canon of Medicine in less time than it took Robert Cole to translate it!

  Sometimes he regretted wistfully that he hadn’t studied all the commandments at least once. Often he thought of Jesse ben Benjamin but increasingly made peace with his passing—it was hard to be a Jew!—and he came almost never to speak of other times and places. Once when Tam and Rob J. were entered in the running contest that each year celebrated the feast day of St. Kolumb in the hills, he told them of a runner named Karim who had won a long and wonderful race called the chatir. And rarely—usually when engaged in one of the mundane tasks that marked the even rhythm of a Scot’s days, mucking the pens or moving drifted snow or hewing firewood—he would smell the cooling heat of the desert at night, or remember the sight of Fara Askari kindling Sabbath tapers, or the enraged trumpet call of an elephant charging into battle, or the breathless sensation of flying perched atop the long-legged stagger of a racing camel. But it came to seem that Kilmarnock had always been his life, and that what had happened before was a tale he had heard told around the fire when the wind blew cold.

  His children throve and changed, his wife turned finer with age. As the seasons slipped by, only one thing was constant. The extra sense, the healer’s sensitivity, never abandoned him. Whether he was called lonely in the night to a bedside or hurried of a morning into the crowded dispensary, he could always feel their pain. Hastening to struggle with it, he never failed to know—as he had known from the first day in the maristan—a rush of wondering gratitude that he was chosen, that it was he whom God’s hand had reached out and touched, and that such an opportunity to minister and serve should have been given to Barber’s boy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Twenty-six years have passed since The Physician was first published. I am grateful to the many millions of people who have kept the book in print during that time by reading it in 32 languages. It is now being developed as a motion picture.

  I am happy that this newest edition of The Physician is offered to readers of the English language, internationally and in America, by my publisher, Blanca Rosa Roca of Barcelona eBooks.

  The Physician is a story in which only two characters, Ibn Sina and al-Juzjani, are taken from life. There was a shah named Ala-al-Dawla, but so little information survives that the character of that name is based on an amalgam of shahs.

  The maristan was depicted from descriptions of the medieval Azudi hospital of Baghdad.

  Much of the flavor and fact of the eleventh century is forever lost. Where the record was nonexistent or obscured, I did not hesitate to fictionalize; thus, it should be understood that this is a work of the imagination and not a slice of history. Any errors, large or small, made in my striving to faithfully recreate a sense of time and place, are my own. Yet this novel could not have been written without the help of a number of libraries and individuals.

  I am grateful to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for granting me faculty privileges to all of its libraries, and to Edla Holm of the Interlibrary Loans Office at that university.

  The Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester was a valuable resource for books about medicine and medical history.

  Smith College was kind enough to classify me as an “area scholar” so I might use the William Allan Neilson Library, and I found the Werner Josten Library at Smith's Center for the Performing Arts to be an excellent source of details about clothing and costumes.

  Barbara Zalenski, Librarian of the Belding Memorial Library of Ashfield, Massachusetts, never failed me, no matter how much searching she faced in fulfilling a request for a book.

  Kathleen M. Johnson, Reference Librarian at the Baker Library of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, sent me materials on the history of money in the Middle Ages.

  I should also like to thank the librarians and libraries of Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, Clark University, the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Boston Public Library, and the Boston Library Consortium.

  Richard M. Jakowski, V.M.D., Animal Pathologist at the Tufts-New England Veterinary Medical Center, in North Grafton, Massachusetts, compared the internal anatomy of pigs and humans for me, as did Susan L. Carpenter, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the National Institute of Health, in Hamilton, Montana.

  Over a period of several years, Rabbi Louis A. Rieser of Temple Israel of Greenfield, Massachusetts, answered question after question about Judaism.

  Rabbi Philip Kaplan of the Associated Synagogues of Boston explained the details of kosher slaughtering to me.

  The Graduate School of Geography at Clark University furnished me with maps and information about the geography of the eleventh-century world.

  The faculty of the Classics Department at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, helped me with several Latin translations.

  Robert Ruhloff, blacksmith at Ashfield, Massachusetts, informed me about the blue patterned steel of India and introduced me to the blacksmiths’ journal, The Anvil’s Ring.

  Gouveneur Phelps of Ashfield told me about salmon fishing in Scotland.

  Two of my former literary agents, Patricia Schartle Myrer and Eugene H. Winick, provided encouragement. It was Pat Myrer’s suggestion that I write about the dynasty of a single family over many generations, a suggestion that led to the writing of the other two books of the Cole trilogy, Shaman and Matters of Choice.

  Herman Gollob was an ideal editor and made the original publication of this book a meaningful experience.

  For the original publication of this novel, more than a quarter of a century ago, Lise Gordon helped to copy-edit the manuscript and Jamie Gordon and Michael Gordon gave me love and moral support, and their warmth and spirit are unchanged.

  Then and to this day, Lorraine Gordon has provided criticism, sweet reason, steadiness and love. In my eighty-sixth year, and in the sixty-first year of our marriage, I am exceedingly grateful for her presence in my life.

  Noah Gordon

  Dedham, Massachusetts

  May 3, 2012

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Noah Gordon has had outstanding international success. The Physician, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.” Shaman was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author’s other novels—The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice, and The Winemaker—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon’s novel, The Last Jew, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.

 

 

 
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