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

everything he does—extremely strange. Thus if he finds a car parked in his private parking space, he at once orders that its four tires be deflated and then leaves (we may imagine the subsequent difficulties faced by the owner of a car with four flat tires) and if he catches sight of a ward orderly making tea beside the patient’s family, he pounces forthwith upon the teakettle and flings it out of the window (it isn’t important on whose head the kettle may land; that is the problem of the person passing by in the street). And if the doctor enters the sterilization room and finds that the brush he uses to scrub his hands isn’t clean, he will right away hurl it in the face of the nursing sister, and he really does hurl it, meaning that the sister may get her head cut open. (This happened once with a new sister; the others knew from experience how to avoid these flying objects.) And in the operating theater, during those terrifying minutes when the fate of a person lying anaesthetized and with their insides exposed is decided and the doctor’s assistants are whispering in dread, the sweat pouring off them in spite of the air conditioning, the doctor—and he alone—remains unflappable, his high-pitched voice rising as he curses the families of those he is working with and insults them with a variety of sentences all of the same structure, as when he says, “Drain the blood, you animal!” or “Call that sewing, you ape?” The surprising thing is that the one insulted—be it surgeon or sister—rather than paying attention to the insult will focus all his thoughts on correcting the mistake. In fact, the doctor doesn’t insult his assistants only when angry: he also curses them out when he is pleased and wants to give praise. Thus, at the end of an operation he may say to one of them, “You’re a real ass as a surgeon, but you did good work tonight.”

Thus, in the doctor’s private language the meanings of the insults are changed and the names of animals are employed in the same way that we ordinary mortals might, in our language, use “you.”

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 day in the department, which he would roam, observing what went on from a distance, and always intervening at the appropriate time. He would, for example, wait until a doctor had prescribed a certain medication for a patient and, as soon as he caught sight of the expression of gratitude in the patient’s eyes or heard the patient’s family thanking the doctor, would approach and ask the doctor in a low voice what he had prescribed, then give a smile of private (but nevertheless observable) sarcasm and announce to him that what he had prescribed was totally wrong (it never happened that Dr. Mansour found that any doctor had got it right). Nor would Dr. Mansour omit to explain in a clear and audible voice the complications that would follow if the patient were