by Noah Gordon
She had never known her father to weep, or any man, and Rob’s convulsive shaking frightened her. “My dear. My Rob,” she murmured.
Instinctively, her free hand gently directed him until his mouth was on the nipple. He was a more tentative suckler than his son and when he drew on her and swallowed, she was vastly moved but tenderly amused: for once, part of her body was entering him. She thought fleetingly of Fara and, with no little guilt, thanked the Virgin that it had not been her husband who had been taken. The two pairs of lips on her, one tiny and the other large and so familiar, filled her with a tingling warmth. Perhaps it was the Blessed Mother or the saints working their magic, but for a time the three of them became one.
Finally Rob sat up, and when he leaned over and kissed her, she tasted her own warm richness.
“I am not a Roman,” he said.
PART SIX
Hakim
61
THE APPOINTMENT
The morning after his return Rob studied his man-child in the light of day and saw that the babe was beautiful, with deep blue English eyes and large hands and feet. He counted and gently flexed each tiny finger and toe and rejoiced in the slightly bowed little legs. A strong infant.
The child smelled like an olive press, having been oiled by his mother. Then he smelled less pleasing and Rob changed a baby’s cloth for the first time since tending his brothers and sister. Deep within him he still yearned to find William Stewart, Anne Mary, and Jonathan Carter one day. Wouldn’t it be joy to show this nephew to the long-lost Coles?
He and Mary quarreled about circumcision.
“It will do him no harm. Here every man is circumcised, Muslim and Jew, and it’s an easy way for him to be more easily accepted.”
“I don’t wish him to be more easily accepted in Persia,” she said wearily. “I wish him to be accepted at home, where men aren’t bobbed and knobbed but are left to nature.”
He laughed and she began to cry. He comforted her and then, when he could, escaped to confer with Ibn Sina.
The Prince of Physicians greeted him warmly, thanking Allah for his survival and speaking sadly of Mirdin. Ibn Sina listened with close attention to Rob’s report of treatments and amputations performed at the two battles, being especially interested in his comparisons between the efficacy of hot oil versus wine baths for cleansing open wounds. Ibn Sina showed himself more interested in scientific truth than in his own infallibility. Even though Rob’s observations contradicted what he himself had said and written, he insisted that Rob write his findings. “Also, this thing concerning wine in wounds should be your first lecture as a hakim,” he said, and Rob found himself agreeing with his mentor.
Then the old man looked at him. “I would like you to work with me, Jesse ben Benjamin. As assistant.”
He had never dreamed of this. He wanted to tell the Chief Physician that he had come to Ispahan—from so great a distance, through other worlds, surmounting so many problems—only to touch the hem of Ibn Sina’s garment.
Instead, he nodded. “Hakim-bashi, I would like that.”
Mary made no difficulty when he told her. She had been in Ispahan long enough so it didn’t occur to her that her husband could refuse such an honor, for in addition to a comfortable salary there would be the immediate prestige and respect of association with a man who was venerated like a demigod, loved above royalty. When Rob saw her joy for him, he took her into his arms. “I will take you home, I promise you, Mary. But not for a time yet. Please trust me.”
She did. Yet she recognized that if they were to remain for a longer time, she must change. She determined to make an effort to bend to the country. Reluctantly, she gave in concerning the matter of the child’s circumcision.
Rob went to Nitka the Midwife for advice. “Come,” she said, and led him two streets away to Reb Asher Jacobi the mohel.
“So, a circumcision,” the mohel said. “The mother …” Musing, he looked at Nitka through narrowed eyes, his fingers scrabbling in his beard. “An Other!”
“It doesn’t have to be a brit, with all the prayers,” Nitka said impatiently. Having taken the serious step of delivering the Other’s man-child, she slipped easily into the role of defender. “If the father asks for the seal of Abraham on the child, it is a blessing to circumcise him, isn’t it so?”
“Yes,” Reb Asher admitted. “Your father. Will he hold the child?” he asked Rob.
“My father is dead.”
Reb Asher sighed. “Will other family members be present?”
“Only my wife. There are no other family members here. I’ll hold the child myself.”
“A time of celebration,” Nitka said gently. “Would you mind? My sons Shemuel and Chofni, a few neighbors …”
Rob nodded.
“I’ll attend to it,” Nitka said.
Next morning she and her two burly stonecutter sons were the first to arrive at Rob’s house. Hinda, the disapproving merchant from the Jewish market, came with her Tall Isak, a gray-bearded scholar with bemused eyes. Hinda was still unsmiling but she brought a gift, a swaddling garment. Yaakob the Shoemaker and Naoma, his wife, gave a flagon of wine. Micah Halevi the Baker came, his wife Yudit carrying two large loaves of sugared bread.
Holding the sweet little body supine in his lap, Rob had doubts when Reb Asher cut the foreskin from the tiny penis.“May the lad grow in vigor—of mind and body—to a life of good works,” the mohel declared, as the baby shrieked. The neighbors lifted bowls of wine and cheered, and Rob gave the boy the Jewish name Mirdin ben Jesse.
Mary hated every moment. An hour later when everyone had gone home and she and Rob were alone with their child, she wet her fingers in barley water and touched her screaming son lightly on the forehead, the chin, and one earlobe and then the other.
“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I christen you Robert James Cole,” she said clearly, naming him for his father and his grandfather.
After that, when they were alone she called her husband Rob, and it was the child to whom she referred as Rob J.
To the Most Respected Reb Mulka Askari, Pearl Merchant of Masqat, Greetings.
Your late son Mirdin was my friend. May he rest.
We were surgeons together in India, from whence I have brought these few things, sent to you now via the kind hands of Reb Moise ben Zavil, merchant of Qum, whose caravan is bound this day for your city with a manifest of olive oil.
Reb Moise will give to you a parchment chart showing the precise location of Mirdin’s grave in the village of Kausambi, that his bones some day may be moved if that is your wish. I also send the tefillin which daily he wound on his arm and which he told me you gave to him when he entered into minyan on reaching his fourteenth year. In addition, I send the pieces and board of the Shah’s Game, over which Mirdin and I spent many a happy hour.
There were no other belongings with him in India. He was, of course, buried in his tallit.
I pray the Lord may bring some measure of understanding to your bereavement and to ours. With his passing a light went from my life. He was the finest man ever I have valued. I know that Mirdin is with Adashem, and I hope that one day I may be worthy to be with him again.
Please convey my affection and respect to his widow and stalwart young sons and inform them that my wife has given birth to a healthy son, Mirdin ben Jesse, and sends them her loving wishes for a good life.
Yivorechachah Adonai V’Yishmorechah, May the
Lord Bless You and Keep You. I am
Jesse ben Benjamin, hakim
Al-Juzjani had been Ibn Sina’s assistant for years. He had achieved greatness in his own right as a surgeon and was the most notable success among the former assistants, but all of them had done well. The hakimbashi worked his assistants hard, and the position was like an. extension of training, an opportunity to continue to learn. From the beginning Rob did far more than follow Ibn Sina about and fetch things for him, as sometimes the assistants of other great men were calle
d upon to do. Ibn Sina expected to be consulted when there was a problem or his opinion was required, but the young hakim had his confidence and was expected to act on his own.
For Rob it was a happy time. He lectured in the madrassa concerning wine baths for open wounds; few people attended, for a visiting physician from al-Rayy lectured that morning on the subject of physical love. Persian doctors always crowded into lectures dealing with the sexual, a curiosity to Rob, for in Europe the subject wasn’t a physician’s responsibility. Still, he attended many such lectures himself, and whether because of what he learned or despite it, his marriage prospered.
Mary healed quickly from the birthing. They followed the prescriptions of Ibn Sina, who cautioned that abstinence should prevail between man and wife for six weeks following a birth and advised that the new mother’s pudenda should be gently treated with olive oil and massaged with a mixture of honey and barley water. The treatment worked wonderfully well. The six weeks’ wait seemed an eternity, and when it was over, Mary turned to him just as eagerly as he embraced her.
Several weeks later, the milk in her breasts began to dwindle. It came as a shock because her supply had been copious; she had told him she had milky rivers in her, milk enough to supply the world. When she had given suck it had relieved the painful pressure in her breasts, but too soon the pressure was gone and now the pain came from hearing little Rob J.’s thin, hungry wailing. They saw that a wet nurse would be necessary, and Rob talked with midwives and through them found a strong, homely Armenian woman named Prisca who had more than enough milk for her new daughter and the hakim’s son. Four times a day Mary carried the child to the leather shop of Prisca’s husband Dikran and waited while little Rob J. took the teat. At night Prisca came to the house in Yehuddiyyeh and stayed in the other room with the two babies while Mary and Rob tried to be stealthy about lovemaking and then enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted sleep.
Mary was fulfilled and happiness made her luminous. She bloomed with a new assurance. Sometimes it seemed to Rob that she took full credit for the small and noisy creature they had created together, but he loved her all the more.
In the first week of the month of Shaban the caravan of Reb Moise ben Zavil came through Ispahan again on the way to Qum and the merchant delivered gifts from Reb Mulka Askari and his daughter-in-law Fara. Fara had given the child Mirdin ben Jesse six small linen garments, sewn with love and care. The pearl merchant had sent back to Rob the Shah’s Game that had belonged to his dead son.
It was the last time Mary wept for Fara. When she had dried her eyes, Rob set up Mirdin’s figures on the board and taught her the game. After that, they played often. He didn’t expect much, for it was a warriors’ game and she was but a woman. But she learned quickly and would capture one of his pieces with a whoop and battle cry that would have been credible in a Seljuk marauder. Her swift skill in moving a king’s army, if unnatural in a female, nevertheless wasn’t a great shock, for he had learned long since that Mary Cullen was an extraordinary creature.
The advent of Ramadan caught Karim unprepared, so intent upon sinfulness that the purity and shriving implicit in the month of fasting seemed impossible to achieve and too painful to contemplate. Not even the prayers and the fasting could banish his thoughts of Despina and his unflagging yearning for her. Indeed, because Ibn Sina spent several evenings a week in various mosques and breaking the fast with mullahs and Qu’ranic scholars, Ramadan provided a secure time for the lovers to meet. Karim saw her as often as ever.
During Ramadan, Alā Shah too was diverted by prayer meetings and other demands on his time, and one day Karim had an opportunity to return to the maristan for the first time in months. Happily, it was a day when Ibn Sina was away from the hospital, caring for one of the members of the court who was down with fever. Karim knew the taste of guilt; Ibn Sina always had treated him fairly and well, and he had no desire to spend time with Despina’s husband.
The visit to the hospital was a cruel disappointment. Medical clerks followed him through the halls as usual—perhaps even in greater number than before, for his legend had grown. But he knew none of the patients; anyone he had treated here was either dead or long since recovered. And though once he had walked these halls with a sure confidence in his own skills, he found himself fumbling as he asked nervous questions, uncertain of what he was looking at in patients who were the responsibilities of others.
He managed to survive the visit without making himself out to be a fool, but he had the grim awareness that unless he could spend time in the true practice of medicine, the abilities he had gained so painfully through many years soon would be gone.
He had no choice. Alā Shah had assured him that what lay ahead for them both would make medicine seem pale by comparison.
That year Karim didn’t run in the chatir. He hadn’t trained and he was heavier than a runner should be. He watched the race with Alā Shah.
The first day of Bairam dawned even hotter than the day when he had won, and the race was very slow. The king had renewed his offer of calaat to anyone who could repeat Karim’s feat and finish all twelve laps of the city before Final Prayer, but it was clear that no one would run 126 Roman miles that day.
It developed into a race by the fifth lap, dwindling to a struggle between al-Harat of Hamadhān and a young soldier named Nafis Jurjis. Each of them had set too quick a pace the previous year and had ended the race in collapse. Now, to avoid this, they ran too slowly.
Karim shouted encouragement to Nafis. He told Alā that this was because Nafis had survived the Indian raids with them. In truth, although he liked the young soldier, it was because he didn’t want al-Harat to win, for he had known al-Harat as a child in Hamadhān, and when they met Karim still sensed his contempt for Zaki-Omar’s bum boy.
But Nafis wilted after collecting his eighth arrow and the race was al-Harat’s alone. It was already late afternoon and the heat was brutal; sensibly, al-Harat signaled that he would finish the lap and claim his victory.
Karim and the Shah rode the final lap well ahead of the runner so they could be at the finishing line to greet him, Alā on his savage white stallion and Karim astride his head-tossing Arabian gray. Along the route Karim’s spirits rose, because the people knew it would be a long time, if ever, before a runner ran another chatir such as he had run. They embraced him for this with roars of joy, and for being a hero of Mansura and Kausambi. Alā beamed, and Karim knew he could look upon poor al-Harat with benevolence, for the runner was a farmer of poor land and Karim soon would be Vizier of Persia.
When they passed the madrassa he saw the eunuch Wasif on the hospital roof and next to him the veiled Despina. At sight of her Karim’s heart leaped and he smiled. It was better to go by her like this, on a priceless horse and dressed in silk and linen, than to stagger past stinking of sweat and blind with fatigue!
Not far from Despina a woman without a veil grew impatient with the heat and, removing her black cloth, shook her head as if in imitation of Karim’s horse. Her hair fell and fanned forth, long and billowing. The sun glinted in it gloriously, revealing different shades of gold and red. Next to him he heard the Shah speak.
“It is the Dhimmi’s wife? The European woman?”
“Yes, Majesty. The woman of our friend Jesse ben Benjamin.”
“I thought it must be she,” Alā said.
The king watched the bareheaded female until they had ridden past her. He asked no further questions, and soon Karim was able to engage him in conversation concerning the Indian smith Dhan Vangalil and the swords he was making for the Shah with his new furnace and forge behind the stables of the House of Paradise.
62
AN OFFER OF REWARD
Rob continued to start each day at the House of Peace Synagogue, partly because the strange mixture of chanted Jewish prayer and silent Christian prayer had become pleasing and nurturing.
But mostly because in some strange way his presence in the synagogue was the fulfillment of a debt he o
wed to Mirdin.
Yet he was unable to enter the House of Zion, Mirdin’s synagogue. And though scholars sat daily and argued the law at the House of Peace, and it would have been a simple matter to suggest that somebody tutor him in the eighty-nine commandments he hadn’t examined, he hadn’t the heart to finish that task without Mirdin. He told himself that five hundred and twenty-four commandments would serve a spurious Jew as well as six hundred and thirteen, and he turned his mind to other things.
The Master had written on every subject. While a student, Rob had had a chance to read many of his works on medicine, but now he sampled other kinds of writing by Ibn Sina and felt ever more in awe of him. He had written on music and poetry and astronomy, on metaphysics and Eastern thought, on philology and the active intellect, and commentaries on all the books of Aristotle. While a prisoner in the castle of Fardajān he wrote a book called Guidance, summarizing all the branches of philosophy. There was even a military manual, The Management and Provisioning of Soldiers, Slave Troops, and Armies, which would have served Rob well if he had read it before going to India as a field surgeon. He had written on mathematics, on the human soul, and on the essence of sorrow. And again and again he had written about Islam, the religion given him by his father and which, despite the science that permeated his being, he was able to accept on faith.
This is what made him beloved of the people. They saw that despite the luxurious estate and all the fruits of royal calaat, despite the fact that the learned and glorious men of the world came to seek him out and plumb his mind, despite the fact that kings vied for the honor of being recognized as the Master’s sponsor—despite all these things, even as the lowliest wretch among them, Ibn Sina raised his eyes heavenward and exclaimed:
La ilaha illa-l-Lah;
Muhammadun rasulu-l-Lah.
There is no God but God;
Mohammed is the prophet of God.