THE GRAY CITY
So he was the last surviving member of the Ispahan Medical Party. To think of both Mirdin and Karim beneath the earth was to suck on an infusion of rage and regret and sadness; yet, perversely, their deaths made his days sweet as a loving kiss. He savored life’s ordinary juices. A deep breath, a long piss, a slow fart. To chew stale bread when he was hungry, sleep when he was tired. To touch his wife’s clumsy girth, listen to her snore. To bite his son’s stomach until the gurgling howl of infantile laughter brought tears to his eyes.
This, despite the fact that Ispahan had become a somber place.
If Allah and the Imam Qandrasseh could bring low the hero athlete of Ispahan, then what ordinary man would now dare break the Islamic rules set down by the Prophet?
Whores disappeared and the maidans no longer were riotous at night. Mullahs patrolled the streets of the city in pairs, alert for a veil that covered too little of a woman’s face, a man slow in responding with prayer to a muezzin’s call, a refreshment-house owner stupid enough to sell wine. Even in Yehuddiyyeh, where females always were careful to cover their hair, many Jewish women began to wear the heavy Muslim veils.
Some sighed in private, missing the music and gaiety of remembered nights, but others expressed satisfaction, and at the maristan the hadji Davout Hosein thanked Allah during a morning’s prayer. “Mosque and state were born of one womb, joined together and never to be sundered,” he said.
Each morning more worshipers than ever came to Ibn Sina’s home and joined him in prayer, but now when he was through with worship the Prince of Physicians returned inside his house and wasn’t seen until it was time to pray again. He gave himself fully to grieving and introspection and didn’t come to the maristan to teach or to treat patients. Some who objected to being touched by a Dhimmi were treated by al-Juzjani, but these were not many and Rob was busy all the time now, tending to Ibn Sina’s patients as well as his own responsibilities.
One morning a skinny old man with stinking breath and dirty feet wandered into the hospital. Qasim ibn Sahdi had legs like a knob-kneed crane and a moth-eaten wisp of white beard. He didn’t know his age and he had no home because for most of his life he had made his way as a menial in one caravan after another.
“I have traveled everywhere, master.”
“To Europe, whence I came?”
“Almost everywhere.” He had no family, he said, but Allah watched over him. “I reached here yesterday with a caravan of wool and dates from Qum. On the route I was stricken with a pain like a wicked djinn.”
“Where, pain?”
Qasim, groaning, clutched at his right side.
“Has your gorge risen?”
“Lord, I am pukingly ill and know a terrible weakness. Yet as I dozed, Allah spoke, saying that nearby was one who would heal me. And when I awoke I asked people if there was a place of healing nearby and I was directed to this maristan.”
He was led to a pallet, where he was bathed and fed lightly. He was the first patient with abdominal distemper whom Rob had been able to observe in an early stage of the disease. Perhaps Allah knew how to make Qasim well, but Rob did not.
He spent hours in the library. Finally courtly Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the Keeper of the House of Wisdom, asked him what it was that he sought so assiduously.
“The secret of abdominal illness. I am trying to find accounts of ancients who opened the human belly before it was forbidden to do so.”
The venerable librarian blinked and nodded gently. “I shall try to help you. Let me see what I am able to find,” he said.
Ibn Sina wasn’t available and Rob went to al-Juzjani, who didn’t have Ibn Sina’s patience.
“Often people die of distemper,” al-Juzjani said, “but some come to the maristan complaining of pain and burning in the lower right abdomen, and the hurting goes away and the patients are sent home.”
“Why?”
Al-Juzjani shrugged and gave him an annoyed glance and would spend no more time on the subject.
Qasim’s pain disappeared too after a few days, but Rob didn’t want to release him. “Where shall you go?”
The old drover shrugged. “I shall find a caravan, Hakim, for they are my home.”
“Not all who come here are able to leave. Some die, you understand that.”
Qasim nodded seriously. “All men must die in the end.”
“To wash the dead and prepare them for burial is to serve Allah. Could you do such work?”
“Yes, Hakim. For it is God’s labor, as you say,” he said solemnly. “Allah brought me here and it may be that He wishes me to stay.”
There was a small storeroom next to the two rooms that served as the hospital’s charnel house. They cleaned it out together and this became Qasim ibn Sahdi’s living quarters.
“You will take your meals here after the patients are fed, and you may bathe in the maristan baths.”
“Yes, Hakim.”
Rob gave him a sleeping mat and a clay lamp. The old man unrolled his worn prayer rug and declared the room the finest home he had ever had.
It was almost two weeks before Rob’s busy schedule allowed him to meet Yussuf-ul-Gamal in the House of Wisdom. He brought a gift of appreciation for the librarian’s help. All the vendors were displaying large, fat pistachios but Yussuf had few teeth for chewing nuts and instead Rob had bought a reed basket filled with soft desert dates.
He and Yussuf sat and ate the fruit late one night in the House of Wisdom. The library was deserted.
“I have gone back in time,” Yussuf said. “Far as I am able. Into antiquity. Even the Egyptians, whose embalming fame you know, were taught it was evil and a disfigurement of the dead to open the abdomen.”
“But … when they made their mummies?”
“They were hypocrites. They paid despised men called paraschistes to sin by making the forbidden initial incision. As soon as they made the cut the paraschistes fled lest they be stoned to death, an acknowledgment of guilt that allowed the respectable embalmers to empty the abdomen of organs and get on with their preservation.”
“Did they study the organs they removed? Did they leave behind written observations?”
“They embalmed for five thousand years, altogether eviscerating almost three-quarters of a billion human beings who had died of every ill, and they stored the viscera in vessels of clay, limestone, or alabaster, or simply threw them away. But there is no evidence that they ever studied the organs.
“The Greeks—now that was different. And it happened in the same Nile region.” Yussuf helped himself to more dates. “Alexander the Great stormed through this Persia of ours like a beautiful, youthful god of war, nine hundred years before the birth of Mohammed. He conquered the ancient world, and at the northwestern end of the Nile River delta, on a strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mareotis, he founded a graceful city to which he gave his own name.
“Ten years later he was dead of a swamp fever, but Alexandria already was a center of Greek culture. In the breakup of the Alexandrian empire, Egypt and the new city fell to Ptolemy of Macedonia, one of the most scholarly of Alexander’s associates. Ptolemy established the Museum of Alexandria, the world’s first university, and the great Alexandria Library. All branches of knowledge prospered, but the school of medicine attracted the most promising students of the entire world. For the first and only time in man’s long history, anatomy became the keystone, and dissection of the human body was practiced on an extensive scale for the next three hundred years.”
Rob leaned forward eagerly. “Then it is possible to read their descriptions of the diseases that afflict the internal organs?”
Yussuf shook his head. “The books of their magnificent library were lost when Julius Caesar’s legions sacked Alexandria thirty years before the start of the Christian era. The Romans destroyed most of the writings of the Alexandrian physicians. Celsus collected what little was left and tried to preserve it in his work entitled De re medicina, but there is only one brief mention of ‘distemper seated in the large intestine principally affecting that part where I mentioned the cecum to be, accompanied by violent inflammation and vehement pains, particularly on the right side.’ ”
Rob grunted in disappointment. “I know the quotation. Ibn Sina uses it when he teaches.”
Yussuf shrugged. “So my delving into the past leaves you exactly where you were when I began. The descriptions you are seeking do not exist.”
Rob nodded gloomily. “Why do you suppose that the only brief moment in history when physicians opened human beings came with the Greeks?”
“They did not have the advantage of a single strong God who forbade them to desecrate the work of His creation. Instead, they had all those fornicators, those weak and squabbling gods and goddesses.” The librarian spat a mouthful of date seeds into his cupped palm and smiled sweetly. “They could dissect because they were, after all, only barbarians, Hakim,” he said.