The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (97 page)

“We owe a great debt,” Rob said.

His children sat at the table and stared at a man who looked like no one they had ever seen, listening in wonder as their father joined him in uttering strange blessings before they ate their food.

“After we have eaten, you may care to study with me.” Rob felt the rise of an almost-forgotten excitement. “Perhaps we may sit together and study the commandments,” he said.

The stranger peered at him. “I regret—No, I cannot!” Dan ben Gamliel’s face was pallid. “I am not a scholar,” he muttered.

Masking his disappointment, Rob took the traveler to a good place to sleep, as it would have been done in a Jewish village.

Next day he rose early. Among the things he had taken from Persia he found the Jew’s cap and prayer shawl and phylacteries and went to join Dan ben Gamliel at morning devotions.

Dan ben Gamliel stared as he bound the little black box to his forehead and wound the leather around his arm to form the letters in the name of the Unutterable. The Jew watched him sway and listened to his prayers.

“I know what you are,” he said thickly. “You were a Jew and you became an apostate. A man who has turned his back on our people and our God and given his soul to the other nation.”

“No, it isn’t so,” Rob said, and saw with regret that he had disrupted the other’s praying. “I will explain when you have finished,” he said, and withdrew.

But when he returned to summon the man to the morning meal, Dan ben Gamliel wasn’t there. The horse was gone. The ass was gone. The heavy load had been picked up and carried away, and his guest had fled rather than expose himself to the dread contagion of apostasy.

It was Rob’s last Jew; he never saw another nor spoke the Tongue again.

He felt his memory of Persian slipping from him too, and one day determined that before it abandoned him, he must translate the
Q
ā
nîin
into English so he might continue to consult the Master Physician. It took him a dreadfully long time. Again and again he told himself that Ibn Sina had written
The Canon of Medicine
in less time than it took Robert Cole to translate it!

Sometimes he regretted wistfully that he hadn’t studied all the commandments at least once. Often he thought of Jesse ben Benjamin but increasingly made peace with his passing—it
was
hard to be a Jew!—and he came almost never to speak of other times and places. Once when Tam and Rob J. were entered in the running contest that each year celebrated the feast day of St. Kolumb in the hills, he told them of a runner named Karim who had won a long and wonderful race called the
chatir.
And rarely—usually when engaged in one of the mundane tasks that marked the even rhythm of a Scot’s days, mucking the pens or moving drifted snow or hewing firewood—he would smell the cooling heat of the desert at night, or remember the sight of Fara Askari kindling Sabbath tapers, or the enraged trumpet call of an elephant charging into battle, or the breathless sensation of flying perched atop the long-legged stagger of a racing camel. But it came to seem that Kilmarnock had always been his life, and that what had happened before was a tale he had heard told around the fire when the wind blew cold.

His children throve and changed, his wife turned finer with age. As the seasons slipped by, only one thing was constant. The extra sense, the healer’s sensitivity, never abandoned him. Whether he was called lonely in the night to a bedside or hurried of a morning into the crowded dispensary, he could always feel their pain. Hastening to struggle with it, he never failed to know—as he had known from the first day in the
maristan
—a rush of wondering gratitude that he was chosen, that it was he whom God’s hand had reached out and touched, and that such an opportunity to minister and serve should have been given to Barber’s boy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Twenty-six years have passed since
The Physician
was first published. I am grateful to the many millions of people who have kept the book in print during that time by reading it in 32 languages. It is now being developed as a motion picture.

I am happy that this newest edition of
The Physician
is offered to readers of the English language, internationally and in America, by my publisher, Blanca Rosa Roca of Barcelona eBooks.

The Physician
is a story in which only two characters, Ibn Sina and al-Juzjani, are taken from life. There was a shah named Ala-al-Dawla, but so little information survives that the character of that name is based on an amalgam of shahs.

The
maristan
was depicted from descriptions of the medieval Azudi hospital of Baghdad.

Much of the flavor and fact of the eleventh century is forever lost. Where the record was nonexistent or obscured, I did not hesitate to fictionalize; thus, it should be understood that this is a work of the imagination and not a slice of history. Any errors, large or small, made in my striving to faithfully recreate a sense of time and place, are my own. Yet this novel could not have been written without the help of a number of libraries and individuals.

I am grateful to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for granting me faculty privileges to all of its libraries, and to Edla Holm of the Interlibrary Loans Office at that university.

The Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester was a valuable resource for books about medicine and medical history.

Smith College was kind enough to classify me as an “area scholar” so I might use the William Allan Neilson Library, and I found the Werner Josten Library at Smith's Center for the Performing Arts to be an excellent source of details about clothing and costumes.

Barbara Zalenski, Librarian of the Belding Memorial Library of Ashfield, Massachusetts, never failed me, no matter how much searching she faced in fulfilling a request for a book.

Kathleen M. Johnson, Reference Librarian at the Baker Library of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, sent me materials on the history of money in the Middle Ages.

I should also like to thank the librarians and libraries of Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, Clark University, the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Boston Public Library, and the Boston Library Consortium.

Richard M. Jakowski, V.M.D., Animal Pathologist at the Tufts-New England Veterinary Medical Center, in North Grafton, Massachusetts, compared the internal anatomy of pigs and humans for me, as did Susan L. Carpenter, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the National Institute of Health, in Hamilton, Montana.

Over a period of several years, Rabbi Louis A. Rieser of Temple Israel of Greenfield, Massachusetts, answered question after question about Judaism.

Rabbi Philip Kaplan of the Associated Synagogues of Boston explained the details of kosher slaughtering to me.

The Graduate School of Geography at Clark University furnished me with maps and information about the geography of the eleventh-century world.

The faculty of the Classics Department at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, helped me with several Latin translations.

Robert Ruhloff, blacksmith at Ashfield, Massachusetts, informed me about the blue patterned steel of India and introduced me to the blacksmiths’ journal,
The Anvil’s Ring
.

Gouveneur Phelps of Ashfield told me about salmon fishing in Scotland.

Two of my former literary agents, Patricia Schartle Myrer and Eugene H. Winick, provided encouragement. It was Pat Myrer’s suggestion that I write about the dynasty of a single family over many generations, a suggestion that led to the writing of the other two books of the Cole trilogy,
Shaman
and
Matters of Choice
.

Herman Gollob was an ideal editor and made the original publication of this book a meaningful experience.

For the original publication of this novel, more than a quarter of a century ago, Lise Gordon helped to copy-edit the manuscript and Jamie Gordon and Michael Gordon gave me love and moral support, and their warmth and spirit are unchanged.

Then and to this day, Lorraine Gordon has provided criticism, sweet reason, steadiness and love. In my eighty-sixth year, and in the sixty-first year of our marriage, I am exceedingly grateful for her presence in my life.

Noah Gordon

Dedham, Massachusetts

May 3, 2012

N
OAH
G
ORDON

This book is dedicated with love to Lorraine Gordon, Irving Cooper, Cis and Ed Plotkin, Charlie Ritz, and the lovely memory of Isa Ritz
.

P
ART
O
NE
COMING HOME

April 22, 1864

1

JIGGETY-JIG

The
Spirit of Des Moines
had sent signals ahead as it approached the Cincinnati depot in the coolness of dawn, detected by Shaman first as a delicate trembling barely perceived in the wooden station platform, then a pronounced shivering that he felt clearly, then a shaking. All at once the monster was there with its perfume of hot oiled metal and steam, charging toward him through the gloomy gray half-light, brass fittings gleaming in the black-dragon body, mighty piston-arms moving, the pale smoke cloud belching skyward like the spout of a whale and then drifting and trailing in dissolving tatters as the locomotive slid to a halt.

Inside the third car only a few of the hard wooden seats were empty, and he settled himself on one of them as the train shuddered and resumed its progress. Trains were still a novelty, but they involved traveling with too many people. He liked to ride a horse alone, lost in thought. The long car was crammed with soldiers, drummers, farmers, and assorted females with and without small children. The crying of the children didn’t bother him at all, of course; but the car was redolent with a combination of stink—stale stockings, soiled nappies, poor digestions, sweaty and unwashed flesh, and the fug of cigars and pipes. The window seemed designed to be a challenge, but he was large and strong and finally succeeded in raising it, an act that quickly proved an error. Three cars ahead, the tall stack of the locomotive cast forth, in addition to smoke, a mixture of soot, live and dead cinders, and ash, swept backward by the speed of the train, some of it finding its way through the open window. Soon an ember had set Shaman’s new coat to smoking. Coughing and muttering in exasperation, he slammed the window closed and beat his coat until the spark was dead.

Across the aisle, a woman glanced at him and smiled. She was about ten years older than he, dressed fashionably but sensibly for traveling in a gray wool dress with a hoopless skirt trimmed in blue linen to highlight her blond hair. Their eyes met for a moment before her glance returned to the tatting shuttle in her lap. Shaman was content to turn away from her; mourning wasn’t a period in which to savor the games between men and women.

He had brought an important new book to read, but each time he tried to become engrossed in it, his thoughts returned to Pa.

The conductor had worked his way down the aisle behind him, and Shaman’s first knowledge of his presence was when the man’s hand touched
his shoulder. Startled, he looked up into a florid face. The conductor’s mustache ended in two waxed points and he had a graying ginger beard that Shaman liked because it left his mouth clearly visible. “Must be deef!” the man said jovially. “I’ve asked you three times for your ticket, sir.”

Shaman smiled at him, at ease because this was a situation he had met again and again, all his life. “Yes. I
am
deaf,” he said, and handed the ticket over.

He watched the prairie unroll outside his window, but it wasn’t something to keep his attention. There was a sameness to the terrain and, besides, a train flashed past things so fast they barely had time to register on his consciousness before they were gone. The best way to travel was on foot or on horseback; if you came to a place and you were hungry or had to piss, you could just turn in and satisfy yourself. When the train came to that kind of place, it vanished in an instant blur.