The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  Rob continued to stand and gaze respectfully, but within himself he turned from the court and began to do his lessons, silently reviewing. The four elements: earth, water, fire and air; the qualities recognized by touch: cold, heat, dryness, and moisture; the temperaments: sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and saturnine; the faculties: natural, animal, and vital.

  He pictured the separate parts of the eye as Hunayn listed them, named seven herbs and medications that were recommended for agues and eighteen for fevers, even recited several times the first nine stanzas of the Qu’ran’s third sura, entitled “The Family of ‘Imran.”

  He was becoming pleased with this preoccupation when it was interrupted, and he saw that Khuff was engaged in a tight exchange of words with an imperious white-haired old man on a nervous chestnut stallion.

  “I am presented last because I am of the Seljuk Turks, a deliberate slight to my people!”

  “Someone must be last, Hadad Khan, and this day it is Your Excellency,” the Captain of the Gates said calmly.

  In a high fury, the Seljuk attempted to move the large horse past Khuff and ride to the throne. The grizzled old soldier chose to pretend that the steed and not the rider was at fault. “Ho!” Khuff shouted. He grasped the bridle and struck the horse sharply and repeatedly across the nose with his baton, causing the animal to whinny and step back.

  Soldiers controlled the chestnut as Khuff helped Hadad Khan to dismount with hands that were not overly gentle, and walked the ambassador to the throne.

  The Seljuk performed the ravi zemin perfunctorily and in a shaking voice offered the greetings of his leader, Toghrul-beg, presenting no gifts.

  Alā Shah said no word to him, but dismissed him coldly with a wave of his hand, and the proceedings were done.

  Save for the Seljuk ambassador and the shitting lion, Rob thought the court had been exceedingly dull.

  It would have pleased him to make the little house in Yehuddiyyeh better than it had been when Alā Shah bestowed it on him. The work would have taken a few days at most, but an hour had become a precious commodity, and so the windowsills went unrepaired, the cracked walls remained unplastered, the apricot trees were not pruned, and the garden was rank with weeds.

  From Hinda, the woman merchant in the Jewish market, he bought three mezuzot, the little wooden tubes containing tiny rolled parchments of Scripture. They were part of his disguise; he affixed them to the right-hand post of each of his doors, no less than one handbreadth from the top, as he remembered mezuzot had been placed in the Jewish houses of Tryavna.

  He described what he wanted to an Indian carpenter and drew sketches in the earth, and with no difficulty the man made him a rough-hewn olivewood table and a pine chair in the European style. He bought a few cooking utensils from a coppersmith. Otherwise, he bothered so little about the house he might have been living in a cave.

  Winter was coming. The afternoons were still hot but the night air that drifted through the windows turned raw, announcing the change in season. He found several inexpensive sheepskins in the Armenian market and bedded in them gratefully.

  On a Friday evening, his neighbor Yaakob ben Rashi the shoemaker prevailed upon Rob to come to his home for the Sabbath meal. It was a modest but comfortable house, and at first Rob enjoyed the hospitality. Naoma, Yaakob’s wife, covered her face and said the blessing over the tapers. The buxom daughter, Lea, served the good meal of river fish, stewed fowl, pilah, and wine. Lea mostly kept her eyes modestly downcast, but several times she smiled at Rob. She was of marriageable age and twice during the dinner her father made careful hints about a sizable dowry. There seemed to be general disappointment when Rob thanked them and left early to return to his books.

  His life developed a pattern. Daily religious observance was compulsory for madrassa students but Jews were allowed to attend their own services, so each morning he went to the House of Peace Synagogue. The Hebrew of the shaharit prayers had become familiar but many of them were still as untranslatable as nonsense syllables; nonetheless, the swaying and chanting was a soothing way to begin his day.

  Mornings were taken up by lectures in philosophy and religion that he attended with grim purposefulness, and a host of medical courses.

  He was getting better at the Persian language, but there were times during a lecture when he was forced to ask the meaning of a word or an idiom. Sometimes the other students explained but often they didn’t.

  One morning Sayyid Sa’di, the philosophy teacher, mentioned the gashtagh-daftaran.

  Rob leaned toward Abbas Sefi, who sat next to him. “What is gashtagh-daftaran?”

  But the plump medical clerk merely cast him an annoyed look and shook his head.

  Rob felt a poke in his back. When he turned he saw Karim Harun on the stone tier behind and above him. Karim grinned. “An order of ancient scribes,” he whispered. “They recorded the history of astrology and early Persian science.” The seat next to him was empty and he pointed to it.

  Rob moved. From then on, when he attended a lecture he looked about; if Karim was there, they sat together.

  The best part of his day was the afternoon, when he worked in the maristan. This became even better in his third month at the school, when it was his turn to examine new patients. The admission process amazed him with its complexity. Al-Juzjani showed him how it was done.

  “Listen well, for this is an important task.”

  “Yes, Hakim.” He had learned always to listen well to al-Juzjani, for almost at once he had known that, next to Ibn Sina, al-Juzjani was the best physician in the maristan. Half a dozen people had told him al-Juzjani had been Ibn Sina’s assistant and lieutenant most of their lives, but al-Juzjani spoke with his own authority.

  “You must make note of the patient’s entire history, and at first opportunity you will review it in detail with a senior physician.”

  Each ill person was asked about his occupation, habits, exposure to contagious diseases, and chest, stomach, and urinary complaints. All clothing was removed and a physical scrutiny was done, including appropriate inspection of sputum, vomit, urine, and feces, an assessment of the pulse, and an attempt to detect fever by the warmth of the skin.

  Al-Juzjani showed him how to run his hands over both the patient’s arms at the same time, then both legs, then each side of the body together, so that any defect, swelling, or other irregularity would be revealed because it felt different from the normal limb or side. And how to strike the patient’s body with sharp, short blows of the fingertips in an attempt to discover illness by hearing an abnormal sound. Much of this was new and strange to Rob, but he quickly became familiar with the routine and found it easy because he had worked with patients for years.

  His difficult time began early in the evening, after he had arrived back in his house in Yehuddiyyeh, for that is when the battle began between the need to study and the need to sleep. Aristotle proved to be a sapient old Greek and Rob learned that if a subject was captivating, studying changed from a chore to a pleasure. It was a momentous discovery, perhaps the single thing that allowed him to work as doggedly as necessary, for Sayyid Sa’di quickly assigned him readings from Plato and Heraclitus; and al-Juzjani, as casually as if he were requesting another log on the fire, asked him to read the twelve books dealing with medicine in Pliny’s Historia naturalis—“as preparation for reading all of Galen next year”!

  There was constantly Qu’ran to memorize. The more he consigned to his memory, the more resentful he became. Qu’ran was the official compilation of the preachings of the Prophet, and Muhammed’s message had been essentially the same for years on end. The book was repetition upon repetition, and filled with calumny against Jews and Christians.

  But he persevered. He sold the donkey and the mule so he wouldn’t have to spend time tending and feeding them. He ate his meals quickly and without pleasure, and frivolity had no place in his life. Each night he read until he could read no more, and he learned to put minuscule amounts of oil in his lamps,
so they would burn themselves out after his head dropped into his arms and he slept over his books at the table. Now he knew why God had given him a great, strong body and good eyes, for he taxed himself to the limit of his endurance as he sought to make himself a scholar.

  * * *

  One evening, aware only that he could study no more and must escape, he fled the little house in Yehuddiyyeh and plunged into the night life of the maidans.

  He had grown accustomed to the great municipal squares as they were during the day, sunbaked open spaces with a few people strolling or curled asleep in a patch of shade. But he found that by night the squares became seamy and alive, riotous celebrations jam-packed with the males of common-class Persia.

  Everyone appeared to be talking and laughing at once, producing a clamor louder than several Glastonbury Fairs. A group of singing jugglers used five balls and were droll and adept, making him want to join them. Muscular wrestlers, their heavy bodies gleaming with animal grease to make it difficult for opponents to gain a hold, struggled while onlookers screamed advice at them and made wagers. Puppeteers performed a lewd play, acrobats leaped and somersaulted, hucksters of a variety of food and wares vied for the passing trade.

  Rob stopped in a torchlit bookstall, where the first volume he examined was a collection of drawings. Each sketch showed the same man and woman, cleverly depicted in a variety of lovemaking positions he had never met even in his imagination.

  “The entire sixty-four in pictures, master,” the bookseller said.

  Rob hadn’t the slightest idea what the sixty-four were. He knew it was against Islamic law to sell or own pictures of the human form because Qu’ran said Allah (exalted is He!) was the one and only creator of life. But he was captivated by the book and bought it.

  He went next to a refreshment place where the air was thick with babble and ordered wine.

  “No wine. This is chai-khana, a tea house,” the effeminate waiter said. “You may have chai or sherbet, or rose water boiled with cardamons.”

  “What is chai?”

  “Excellent drink. It comes from India, I think. Or perhaps it is carried to us down the Silk Road.”

  Rob ordered chai and a dish of sweetmeats.

  “We have a private place. You wish a boy?”

  “No.”

  When the refreshment came the drink was very hot, an amber-colored liquid with a flat, mouth-puckering taste; Rob couldn’t decide whether he liked it, but the sweetmeats were very good. From the upper galleries of the arcades near the maidan came plangent melody, and when he looked across the square he saw that the music was being played on polished copper trumpets eight feet long. He sat in the dimly lighted chai-khana, gazing out at the crowd and drinking chai after chai, until a storyteller began to regale the patrons with a tale of Jamshid, the fourth of the hero kings. Mythology attracted Rob not much more than pederasty, and he paid the waiter and wove his way through the crowd until he was at the edge of the maidan. For a while he stood and watched the mule-drawn carriages that were driven slowly around and around the square, for he had heard of them from other students.

  Finally he hailed a well-kept coach with a lily painted on its door.

  Inside, it was dark. The woman waited until the mules had begun to draw the carriage before she moved.

  Soon he could see her well enough to know that the plump body was old enough to have mothered him. During the act he liked her, for she was an honest whore; she made no simulations of passion or pretense of enjoyment, but cared for him gently and with skill.

  Afterward, the woman pulled a cord, signifying completion, and the pimp on the box drew the mules to a halt.

  “Take me to Yehuddiyyeh,” Rob called. “I’ll pay for her time.”

  They lay companionably in the swaying coach. “What are you called?” he asked.

  “Lorna.” Well trained, she didn’t ask his name.

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “Well met, Dhimmi,” she said shyly, and touched the tightened muscles in his shoulders. “Why are these like knots of rope? What do you dread, a great young man like you?”

  “I fear I’m an ox when I must be a fox,” he said, smiling in the dark.

  “You are no ox, as I have learned,” she said drily. “What is your trade?”

  “I study in the maristan, to be a physician.”

  “Ah. Like the Chief of Princes. My own cousin has been his first wife’s cook as long as Ibn Sina has been in Ispahan.”

  “You know his daughter’s name?” he said after a moment.

  “There is no daughter, Ibn Sina has no children. He has two wives, Reza the Pious, who is old and sickly, and Despina the Ugly, who is young and beautiful, but Allah (exalted is He!) has blessed neither woman with issue.”

  “I see,” Rob said.

  He used her once more in comfortable fashion before the carriage reached Yehuddiyyeh. Then he directed the driver to his door and paid them well for making it possible for him to go inside and light his lamps and face his best friends and worst enemies, the books.

  42

  THE SHAH’S ENTERTAINMENT

  He was in a city and surrounded by people but it was a solitary existence. Each morning he came into contact with the other clerks, and each evening he left them. He knew that Karim and Abbas and some of the others lived in cells at the madrassa and he assumed that Mirdin and the other Jewish students lived somewhere in Yehuddiyyeh, but he had no idea what any of their lives were like away from the school and the hospital. Much like his own, he supposed, filled with reading and study. He was too busy to be lonely.

  He spent only twelve weeks admitting new patients to the hospital, then he was assigned to something he loathed, for apprentice physicians took turns servicing the Islamic court on days when sentences were carried out by the kelonter.

  His stomach roiled the first time he returned to the jail and walked past the carcans.

  A guard led him to a dungeon where a man lay tossing and moaning. Where the prisoner’s right hand should have been, a hempen cord bound a coarse blue rag to a stump, above which the forearm was dreadfully swollen.

  “Can you hear me? I am Jesse.”

  “Yes, lord,” the man muttered.

  “What is your name?”

  “I am Djahel.”

  “Djahel, how long since they took your hand?”

  The man shook his head in bewilderment.

  “Two weeks,” the guard said.

  Removing the rag, Rob found a packing of horse dung. As a barber-surgeon he had often seen dung used in this way and he knew it was seldom beneficial and perhaps was harmful. He shook it off.

  The top of the forearm next to the amputation was ligated with another piece of hemp. Owing to the swelling, the cord had sunk into the tissue and the arm was beginning to turn black. Rob cut the cord and washed the stump slowly and carefully. He anointed it with a mixture of sandalwood and rose water and packed it in camphor in place of the dung, leaving Djahel groaning but relieved.

  That was the best part of his day, for he was led from the dungeons to the prison courtyard for the beginning of the punishments.

  They were much as he had witnessed them during his own confinement, save that while in the carcan he had been able to retreat into unconsciousness. Now he stood stonily among mullahs who chanted prayers while a muscular guard lifted an oversized curved sword. The prisoner, a gray-faced man who had been convicted of fomenting treason and sedition, was forced to kneel and lay his cheek against the block.

  “I love the Shah! I kiss his sacred feet!” the kneeling man screamed in a vain attempt to avert the sentence, but no one answered him and the sword was already whistling. The blow was clean and the head rolled to come to rest against a carcan, the eyes still protruding in anguished fear.

  The remains were removed and then a young man who had been caught with another’s wife had his belly opened. This time the same executioner wielded a long, slim dagger, a ripping from left to right that efficiently s
pilled the adulterer’s bowels.

  Fortunately, there were no murderers, who would have been drawn and quartered, then set out to be consumed by dogs and carrion birds.

  Rob’s services began to be required after the minor punishments.

  A thief who was not yet a man soiled himself in his fright and pain as his hand was taken. There was a jar of hot pitch but Rob didn’t need it, for the force of the amputation sealed the stump, which he had only to wash and dress.

  He had a messier time with a fat, weeping woman who had been convicted of mocking the Qu’ran for the second time and thus was deprived of her tongue. The red poured through her hoarse, wordless screaming until he succeeded in pinching off a blood vessel.

  Within him there was a lush blossoming of hatred for Muslim justice and Qandrasseh’s court.

  “This is one of your most important tools,” Ibn Sina told the medical students solemnly. He held up the urine glass, which he had told them was properly called a matula. It was bell-shaped, with a wide, curved lip designed to catch urine. Ibn Sina had trained a glass-blower to make the matulae for his doctors and students.

  Rob had known that if urine contained blood or pus, something was wrong. But Ibn Sina already had lectured for two weeks on urine alone!

  Was it thin or viscous? The subtleties of odor were weighed and discussed. Was there the treacly hint of sugar? The chalky smell that suggested the presence of stones? The sourness of a wasting sickness? Or merely the rank grassiness of someone who has eaten asparagus?

  Was the flow copious, which meant the body was flushing out the disease, or sparing, which could signify that internal fevers were drying up the system’s fluids?

  As to color, Ibn Sina taught them to look at urine with an artist’s eye for the palette, twenty-one nuances of color, from clear through yellow, dark ocher, red and brown, to black, showing the various combinations of contenta, or undissolved components.