Friendly Fire by Alaa Al Aswany

Author:Alaa Al Aswany
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hisham worked as he had never worked before. He was on the job every day from seven in the morning to midnight, and on operation days (Sundays and Wednesdays) he would spend the night at the department. When he came home exhausted, he was supposed to find one or two hours in which to review his work for his master. The result was that he didn’t get more than four hours sleep a night. His body grew thin, his face pale, and permanent dark rings formed around his eyes. His mother noticed how irritable he was and reproached him frequently for his excessive smoking. At his insistence, she would wake him every day at daybreak, almost weeping out of pity for his weak, exhausted body. Hisham’s hard work did not, however, hurt him. What kept him awake was the thought that his hard work might go for nothing. He had a clear well-defined goal in mind—to become one of the great surgeons. Because he was aware that these days would decide his whole future, he was prepared, were there time enough, to double his efforts and, believe it or not, he managed to work with Dr. Bassiouni for a whole year without any disasters. He would go in to see him twice a week to show him the operation schedule and each time Hisham would approach Dr. Bassiouni exactly as we might a live electrical wire, or a gas valve that has to be fixed, meaning that he would extend his hand with the papers and retreat to avoid any impending explosion. Dr. Bassiouni, however, to Hisham’s amazement, never exploded. Needless to say, things did not pass without a few special forms of address (Hisham’s was usually ‘pig’) but this was a trifle.

Though Dr. Bassiouni caused Hisham no problems, others brought him a wide variety, and here we should mention that Dr. Bassiouni’s department included four other professors, not one of whom enjoyed the same celebrity or authority. Dr. Mansour, for instance had graduated one year after Dr. Bassiouni and like him had a doctorate from America; like him too, he was a skilled surgeon. For reasons that were hard to fathom, however, and as is often the case in life, he did not have the same charisma, and while the presence of Dr. Bassiouni, with his strange appearance, had an effect on people, Dr. Mansour, despite the care he took to wear a three-piece suit summer and winter, resembled, at best, a middle-ranking bureaucrat, meaning that while with his graying hair, his glasses, his good manners, and his soft voice, he was undeniably a respectable person, he was also never anything more than that. Thus there was no great stream of patients to his clinic, since patients usually prefer to contract with a famous surgeon as the latter must obviously be more skilled or how else would he have become famous? And as Dr. Mansour had more free time, it had become his habit to spend most of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.