Friendly Fire, Alaa Aswany [10 ebook reader .TXT] 📗

answer but went on looking. Having to explain his presence, he said, “Hisham Fakhri, the new resident, sir.”

“Wait outside,” was the chairman’s perfunctory response, after which he resumed his conversation with the professors. Hisham left and started pacing the hall. He smoked three cigarettes. When the professors emerged from the chairman’s office, he repeated everything he had done the time before, starting with knocking on the door and introducing himself, since Dr. Bassiouni had, in the few minutes that had elapsed, completely forgotten about him.

“Listen, my boy. Do you know what your job in the department here is?”

Hisham was at a loss for a reply.

“Your job here is that of the kitchen boy,” said the chairman, breaking out into quick, repeated bursts of laughter and playing with his long sideburns. Hisham was on the verge of laughing too, out of politeness, but fortunately an inner voice warned him against doing so.

“Do you know what the kitchen boy is, in the kitchen? He’s the boy who collects the onion peelings and washes down the tiles and gets it in the neck from the cooks. There you have it: the resident in surgery is precisely the kitchen boy in the kitchen.”

Hisham nodded. The chairman continued, “You will do what we tell you to do. Be careful not to object or complain. Everything has its price. You want to become a surgeon? Then you have to pay the price, just as we all did—in sweat and toil, abuse and insults. And three years from now, if I like you, I will sign with this very hand the decision appointing you an assistant lecturer at the university. If, on the other hand, I do not like you, I will dispense with your services and you will go back to the Ministry of Health to do donkey work, just like the rest of the donkeys there.”

At this point it seemed to occur to the chairman that Hisham had taken up too much of his time and he glowered, and shouted at him in a sudden fury, “Enough! On your way! Go do the paperwork with personnel!”

Dr. Bassiouni is too well known to require introduction. He is Chairman of the Department of General Surgery and likewise of the Arab Surgeons Association, and member of dozens of international medical associations. In addition to all this he is a public figure whose views on the economy are published in the newspapers and who is invited to appear on television during Ramadan to tell us about his favorite dishes. And Dr. Bassiouni is above all—and let us not forget this—an exceptional surgeon, who has made his incontestable mark in the annals of surgery. Being all of this, he is, naturally, different from you and me—we the lusterless ordinary people, devoid of any value or talent. The fact is that Dr. Bassiouni is as odd as he is exceptional and skilled and his strange ways attract curiosity and comment, not to mention fear and admiration. In the August heat, for example, Dr. Bassiouni will wear a short-sleeved shirt like any other citizen, but—inevitably—he will wear around his neck a tie so long that it reaches to below his belt. No one knows why he insists on the tie when he is not wearing a jacket. Nor does anyone know what the point is of this tie being so long. In addition, he chooses clothes of bright clashing colors that he seems to have chosen deliberately to not match (though they say that he acquired this practice during his stay in America). And while it is accepted that one should let his sideburns grow a little, Dr. Bassiouni has gone to excessive lengths in this respect, draping his face with long gray sideburns that extend from below his ears and give him the appearance of a nineteenth-century English lord, or a Greek grocer from Alexandria. Despite which, his general appearance, with his sideburns, flashy colors, small bald patch, short, stout body, and rapid, irritable movements is not without good looks and certainly gives no hint of his sixty years.

Dr. Bassiouni has never gotten married, a fact which, according to one interpretation, is attributable to his faithfulness to an old love that ended painfully. On the administrative side, it is well known that the doctor’s department is one of the best organized at el-Qasr el-Aini Hospital, and this is true even though the doctor—with the exception of operating days—spends less than an hour there each day, after which he leaves in a hurry for his clinic, downtown. His absence from the department does not, however, mean that he is unaware of what goes on there and he often summons to his office people (from the most senior professor to the lowest resident), in order to rebuke or congratulate them on things they may have done while he was away, though to this day nobody has found out how the doctor knows what goes on when he isn’t there. There is much speculation, of course, but it is truly difficult to be sure that any given person is the source of his information, and the results are amazing, for the physicians in the department work, talk, and laugh as though the doctor were with them. Two of them may, for example, differ—may, indeed, become excited and angry—over the history of how the doctor obtained his doctorate or from which American university he obtained it (even though it is no business of either of them) but they will be certain that whatever they say, like everything else that happens in the department, will be reported to the doctor in detail; and if things are like this when the doctor is not there, just imagine how they are when he is.

Indeed. When the doctor appears, everyone devotes the same energy to doing his work well as he does to staying alive, for the doctor is not given to idle talk. He punishes the wrongdoer whoever he may be and his punishments are immediate and also—like