The Physician by Noah Gordon

Author:Noah Gordon [Gordon, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-06-05T05:00:00+00:00

40

AN INVITATION

Rob was awakened each morning by the rising sun glinting through his chamber’s narrow window, reflected golden off the tile roofs of Yehuddiyyeh’s crazily leaning houses. People appeared in the streets at daybreak, the men going to morning prayers in the synagogues, the women hurrying to tend stalls in the market or to shop early for the best produce of the day.

In the house next door to the north lived a shoemaker named Yaakob ben Rashi, his wife Naoma, and their daughter Lea. The house to the south was occupied by a bread baker named Micah Halevi, his wife Yudit, and three small children, all females. Rob had lived in Yehuddiyyeh only a few days before Micah sent Yudit to Rob’s house to deliver a round, flat loaf for his breakfast, still warm and crisp from the oven. Everywhere he went in Yehuddiyyeh, people had a kind word for the foreign Jew who had won the calaat.

He was less popular in the madrassa, where the Muslim students never called him by name and took open pleasure in addressing him as Dhimmi, and where even the Jewish students called him “European.”

If his experience as a barber-surgeon wasn’t generally admired, it was still useful in the maristan, where within three days it was apparent that he could bandage, bleed, and set simple fractures with a skill equal to a graduate of the school. He was relieved of the chore of collecting slops and given duties that more directly involved the care of sick people, and that made his life a little more bearable.

When he asked Abul Bakr which of the one hundred and fourteen suras of the Qu’ran were the important ones, he couldn’t get an answer. “All are important,” the fat mullah said. “Some are more important in the eyes of one scholar, others are more important to another scholar.”

“But I can’t be graduated from this place unless I have memorized the important suras! If you don’t tell me which they are, how am I to know?”

“Ah,” the theology lecturer said. “You must study Qu’ran, and Allah (exalted is He!) will reveal them.”

He felt the weight of Mohammed on his back, the eyes of Allah on him always. Everywhere he turned in the school, there inescapably was Islam. A mullah sat in every class to make certain Allah (great and mighty is He!) was not profaned.

Rob’s first class with Ibn Sina was an anatomy lesson at which they dissected a large pig, forbidden to Muslims as food but permitted for study.

“The pig is a particularly good anatomy subject, because its internal organs are identical to man’s,” Ibn Sina said, deftly cutting away the skin.

This one was full of tumors.

“These smooth-surfaced growths are likely to cause no harm. But some have grown so fast … see, like these—” Ibn Sina said, tipping the heavy carcass so they could better observe, “—that clumps of flesh have crowded against one another like the sections in a head of cauliflower. The cauliflower tumors are deadly.

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