by Noah Gordon
“Yes, yes.” His caftan was ripped but he was unharmed. “Who is he?”
“He is Alā-al-Dawla, Shahanshah. The King of Kings.”
Rob stared at the road down which they had departed. “What is a Dhimmi?”
“It means ‘Man of the Book.’ It is what they call a Jew here,” Lonzano said.
37
REB JESSE’S CITY
He and the three Jews parted ways two days later at Kupayeh, a crossroads village of a dozen crumbling brick houses. The detour through Dasht-i-Kavir had taken them a bit too far east, but he had less than a day’s journey west to Ispahan, while they still faced three weeks of hard travel south and a crossing of the Straits of Hormuz before they were home.
He knew that without these men and the Jewish villages that had given him haven, he wouldn’t have reached Persia.
Rob and Loeb embraced. “Go with God, Reb Jesse ben Benjamin!”
“Go with God, friend.”
Even sour Aryeh affected a crooked smile as they wished each other a safe journey, no doubt as happy to say goodbye as Rob was.
“When you attend the school for physicians you must tender our love to Aryeh’s kinsman, Reb Mirdin Askari,” Lonzano said.
“Yes.” He took Lonzano’s hands. “Thank you, Reb Lonzano ben Ezra.”
Lonzano smiled. “For one who is almost an Other you’ve been an excellent companion and a worthy man. Go in peace, Inghiliz.”
“Go you in peace.”
To a chorus of good wishes they went in different directions.
Rob rode the mule, for after the attack by the panther he had transferred his bundle to the back of the poor frightened donkey and now led the beast. He made slower time with this arrangement but excitement was rising in him and he wished to travel the last portion deliberately, in order to savor it.
It was well he was in no hurry, for it was a trafficked road. He heard the sound that pleased him so, and soon he overtook a column of belled camels, each burdened with great twin baskets of rice. He traveled behind the rearmost camel, glorying in the musical tinkling of the bells.
The forest ascended to an open plateau; wherever there was sufficient water there were fields of ripened rice and opium poppies, separated by expanses of flat, dry rockiness. The plateau in turn became white limestone hills, cast in a variety of changeable hues by sun and shadow. In several places the limestone had been deeply quarried.
Late in the afternoon the mule crested a hill and Rob looked down upon a little river valley and—twenty months after he had left London!—he saw Ispahan.
His first and predominant impression was of dazzling whiteness with touches of deep blue. It was a voluptuous place full of hemispheres and curves, with great domed buildings glittering in the sunlight, mosques with minarets like airy lances, green open spaces, and mature cyprus and plane trees. The southern quarter of the city was a warm pink where the sun’s rays were reflected from sand hills instead of limestone.
Now he couldn’t hang back. “Hai!” he shouted, and heeled the mule’s flanks. The donkey clattering behind, they swung out of line and passed the camels at a fast trot.
A quarter of a mile from the city, the trail turned into a spectacular cobblestoned avenue, the first paved road he had seen since leaving Constantinople. It was very broad, with four wide lanes separated from one another by rows of tall matched plane trees. The avenue crossed the river over a bridge that was really an arched dam creating an irrigation pool. Near a sign that proclaimed the stream to be Zayandeh, the River of Life, naked brown-skinned youths splashed and swam.
The avenue brought him to the great stone wall and a unique arched city gate.
Inside the wall were the large homes of the wealthy, with terraces, orchards, and vineyards. Pointed arches were everywhere—arched doorways, arched windows, arched garden gates. Beyond the rich neighborhood were mosques and larger buildings with vaulted domes, white and round with little points on top, as though their architects had fallen madly in love with the female breast. It was easy to see where the quarried rock had gone; everything was white stone trimmed with dark blue tile set to form geometric designs or quotations from the Qu’ran:
There is no God but He, the most merciful.
Fight for the religion of God.
Woe be unto those who are negligent at their prayer.
The streets were full of turbaned men, but no women. He passed a huge open square; and then, perhaps half a mile later, another. He relished the sounds and the smells. It was unmistakably a municipium, a large warren of humanity such as he had known as a boy in London, and for some reason he felt it right and fitting to be riding slowly through this city on the north bank of the River of Life.
From the minarets male voices, some of them distant and thin, others near and clear, began to call the faithful to prayer. All traffic ceased as men faced what was apparently southwest, the direction of Mecca. All the men in the city had fallen to their knees, caressing the ground with their palms and dropping forward so their foreheads were pressed into the cobbles.
Rob stopped the mule and alighted out of respect.
When the prayers were done he approached a man of middle age who was briskly rolling up a small prayer rug he had taken from his nearby oxcart. Rob asked how he might find the Jewish quarter.
“Ah. It is called Yehuddiyyeh. You must continue on down the Avenue of Yazdegerd, until you come to the Jews’ market. At the far end of the market there is an arched gate, and on the other side you will find your quarter. You cannot miss it, Dhimmi.”
The place was lined with stalls that sold furniture, lamps and oil, breads, pastries giving off the scent of honey and spices, clothing, utensils of every sort, vegetables and fruits, meats, fish, chickens plucked and dressed or alive and squawking—everything necessary to material life. He saw displays of prayer shawls, fringed garments, phylacteries. In a letter-writer’s booth an old man with a lined face sat hunched over inkpot and quills, and a woman told fortunes under an open tent. Rob knew he was in the Jewish quarter because there were women vending in the stalls and shopping in the crowded market with baskets over their arms. They wore loose black dresses and their hair was bound in cloths. A few had face veils, like Muslim women, but most did not. The men were dressed like Rob, with full, bushy beards.
He wandered slowly, enjoying the sights and sounds. He passed two men arguing over the price of a pair of shoes, as bitterly as enemies. Others were joking, shouting at one another. It was necessary to talk loud in order to be heard.
On the other side of the market he passed through the arched gate and wandered down close, narrow bystreets, then descended a winding and rugged declivity to a large district of wretched houses, irregularly built, divided by small streets with no attempt at uniformity. Many of the houses were attached to one another, but here and there a house was set apart, with a small garden; although these were humble by English standards, they stood out from the neighboring structures as though they were castles.
Ispahan was old, but Yehuddiyyeh seemed much older. The streets were convoluted, and from them ran alleys. The houses and synagogues were of stone or ancient brick that had faded to a pale rose. Some children led a goat past him. People stood in groups, laughing and talking. Soon it would be time for the evening meal, and the cooking smells from the houses made his mouth water.
He wandered through the quarter until he found a stable, where he arranged for the animals’ care. Before he left them he cleaned the claw scratches on the donkey’s flank, which were healing nicely.
Not far from the stable he found an inn run by a tall old man with a handsome smile and a crooked back, named Salman the Lesser.
“Why the Lesser?” Rob couldn’t refrain from asking.
“In my native village of Razan my uncle was Salman the Great. A renowned scholar,” the old man explained.
Rob rented a pallet in a corner of the large sleeping room.
“You wish food?”
It enticed him, small pieces of mea
t broiled on skewers, thick rice that Salman called pilah, small onions blackened by the fire.
“Is it kasher?” he asked cleverly.
“Of course it is kasher, you need not fear to eat it!”
After the meat Salman served honey cakes and a pleasing drink he called a sherbet. “You come from afar,” he said.
“Europe.”
“Europe! Ah.”
“How did you know?”
The old man grinned. “The way you speak the language.” He saw Rob’s face. “You’ll learn to speak it better, I’m certain. How is it to be a Jew in Europe?”
Rob didn’t know how to answer, then he thought of what Zevi had said. “It’s hard to be a Jew.”
Salman nodded soberly.
“How is it to be a Jew in Ispahan?”
“Oh, it’s not bad here. The people are instructed in the Qu’ran to revile us, and so they call us names. But they’re accustomed to us and we’re used to them. There have always been Jews in Ispahan,” Salman said. “The city was started by Nebuchadnezzar, who, according to legend, settled Jews here after taking them prisoner when he conquered Judea and destroyed Jerusalem. Then, nine hundred years later, a shah named Yazdegerd be came enamored of a Jewess who lived here, name of Shushan-Dukht, and made her his queen. She made things easier for her own people, and more Jews settled in this place.”
Rob told himself he couldn’t have chosen a better disguise; he could blend in among them like an ant in an anthill, once he had learned their ways.
So that after dinner he accompanied the innkeeper to the House of Peace, one of the dozens of synagogues. It was a square building of ancient stone whose cracks were filled with a soft brown moss, though there was no dampness. It had only narrow loopholes instead of windows, and a door so low that Rob had to stoop to enter. A dark passage led to the interior, where lamps showed pillars supporting a roof too high and dark for his eyes to make it out. Men sat in the main portion, while women worshiped behind a wall in a small recess at the side of the building. Rob found it easier to perform the ma’ariv worship in the synagogue than in the company of only a few Jews on the trail. Here there was a hazzan to lead the prayer and an entire congregation to mumble or sing as each individual chose, so he joined in the swaying with less self-consciousness about his poor Hebrew and the fact that often he couldn’t keep up with the prayers.
On the way back to the inn, Salman smiled at him shrewdly. “Perhaps you would like some excitement, a young man such as yourself, eh? At night here the maidans, the public squares in the Muslim sections of the city, come alive. There are females and wine, and music and entertainments such as you cannot imagine, Reb Jesse.”
But Rob shook his head. “I should like that, another time,” he said. “Tonight I keep my head clear, for tomorrow I transact a matter of the utmost importance.”
That night he didn’t sleep but tossed and turned, wondering whether Ibn Sina was a man with whom one could talk easily.
In the morning he found a public bath, a brick structure built over a natural warm spring. With strong soap and clean cloths, he scrubbed himself free of the accumulated grime of travel, and when his hair had dried he took a surgical knife and trimmed his beard, peering at the reflection in his polished steel square. The beard had filled out, and he thought he looked a proper Jew.
He wore the better of his two caftans. Setting his leather hat squarely on his head, he went into the street and asked a man with withered limbs to direct him to the school for physicians.
“You mean the madrassa, the place of teaching? It is next to the hospital,” the beggar said. “On the Street of Ali, near the Friday Mosque in the center of the city.” In return for a coin the lame man blessed his children down to the tenth generation.
It was a long walk. He had opportunity to observe that Ispahan was a place of business, for he glimpsed men laboring over their crafts, shoemakers and metalsmiths, potters and wheelwrights, glass blowers and tailors. He passed several bazaars in which goods of all sorts were sold. Eventually he came to the Friday Mosque, a massive square structure with a splendid minaret on which birds fluttered. Beyond it was a marketplace with a preponderance of bookstalls and small eating places, and presently he saw the madrassa.
On the outer perimeters of the school, nestled among more bookshops placed to serve the needs of the scholars, were long, low buildings that contained living quarters. Around them children ran and played. Young men were everywhere, most of them wearing green turbans. The madrassa buildings were constructed of blocks of white limestone, after the manner of most of the mosques. They were widely spaced, with gardens in between. Beneath a chestnut tree heavy with unopened spiky fruit, six young men sat on folded legs and gave their attention to a white-bearded man who wore a sky-blue turban.
Rob drifted close to them. “… Socrates’ syllogisms,” the lecturer was saying. “A proposition is logically inferred to be true from the fact that two other propositions are true. For example, from the fact that, one, all men are mortal, and, two, Socrates is a man, it can be logically concluded that, three, Socrates is mortal.”
Rob grimaced and moved on, touched by doubt; there was much he didn’t know, too much he didn’t understand.
He paused before a very old building with an attached mosque and lovely minaret to ask a green-turbaned student in which building medicine was taught.
“Third building down. Here, they teach theology. Next door, Islamic law. There is where they teach medicine,” he said, pointing to a domed building of white stone. It was so slavishly similar to the prevailing architecture of Ispahan that ever after Rob was to think of it as the Big Teat. Next to it was a large one-story building whose sign proclaimed it to be the maristan, “the place for sick people.” Intrigued, instead of entering the madrassa he walked up the maristan’s three marble steps and through its wrought-iron portal.
There was a central courtyard containing a pool in which colored fish swam, and benches under fruit trees. Corridors radiated from the courtyard like the rays of the sun, with large rooms off each corridor. Most of the rooms were filled. He had never seen so many ill and injured people gathered in one place, and he wandered in amazement.
The patients were grouped according to affliction: here, a long room filled with men who suffered from fractured bones; here, victims of fevers; here—he wrinkled his nose, for clearly this was a room reserved for patients with diarrhea and other diseases of the excretory process. Yet even in this room the atmosphere wasn’t as oppressive as it might have been, for there were large windows, with the flow of air impeded only by light cloths which had been stretched over the windows to keep insects away. Rob noted slots at the tops and bottoms of the casements so shutters could be slipped into place during the winter season.
The walls were whitewashed and the floors were of stone, which was easy to clean and made the building cool compared to the considerable heat outside.
In each room, a small fountain splashed!
Rob paused before a closed door, held by the sign on it: dar-ul-maraftan,“abode of those who require to be chained.” When he opened the door he saw three naked men, their heads shaved and their arms bound, chained to a high window from iron bands fastened around their necks. Two sagged, asleep or unconscious, but the third man stared and began to howl like a beast, tears wetting his slack cheeks.
“I am sorry,” Rob said gently, and left the maniacs.
He came to a hall of surgical patients and had to resist the temptation to stop at each pallet and lift the dressings to examine the stumps of amputees and the wounds of the injured.
To be exposed to this many interesting patients every day, and to be taught by great men! It would be like spending one’s early life in the Dasht-i-Kavir, he thought, and then discovering that you owned an oasis.
The sign on the doorway to the next hall was too much for his limited Persian, but as he entered it was easy to see that it was devoted to the diseases and injuries of the eye.
Ne
arby, a stalwart male nurse quailed before a tongue-lashing.
“It was a mistake, Master Karim Harun,” the nurse said. “I thought you told me to remove the bandages of Eswed Omar.”
“You donkey’s prick,” the other man said in disgust. He was young and athletically slender, and Rob saw with surprise that he wore the green turban of a student, for his manner was as assured as that of a physician who owned the hospital floor he trod. He wasn’t in any way feminine but was aristocratically handsome, the most beautiful man Rob had ever seen, with glossy black hair and deep-set brown eyes that flashed with anger. “It was your mistake, Rūmi. I told you to change the dressings of Kuru Yezidi, not those of Eswed Omar. Ustad Juzjani couched the eyes of Eswed Omar himself and ordered me to see that his bandages weren’t disturbed for five days. I passed the order to you and you failed to obey it, you shit. Therefore, if Eswed Omar should fail to see with the utmost clarity, and should the wrath of al-Juzjani fall on me, I’ll slit your fat ass like a roast of lamb.”
He noticed Rob, standing there transfixed, and scowled. “What is it you want?”
“To speak with Ibn Sina about entering the school for physicians.”
“Doubtless you do. But the Prince of Physicians isn’t awaiting you?”
“No.”
“Then you must go to the second floor of the building next door and see Hadji Davout Hosein, the deputy governor of the school. The governor is Rotun bin Nasr, distant cousin of the Shah and a general in the army, who accepts the honor and never comes to the school. Hadji Davout Hosein administers, it is he you must see.” The student named Karim Harun then turned back to the nurse with a scowl. “Now, do you think you can change Kuru Yezidi’s dressings, O you green object on a camel’s hoof?”
At least some of the medical students lived in the Big Teat, for the shadowy first-floor corridor was lined with tiny cells. Through an open door near the stairway landing Rob saw two men who seemed to be cutting a yellow dog that lay on the table, perhaps dead.
On the second floor he asked a man in a green turban to direct him to the hadji and was ushered, ultimately, into the office chamber of Davout Hosein.