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

to take that medication, which was known to totally destroy the liver. When, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the anxiety and confusion on the patient’s face, Dr. Mansour would joke with him, saying, “You should praise the Lord! The doctor was going to kill you.” At this point the patient and his family would inevitably plead with Dr. Mansour to prescribe another drug for them, so he would take the prescription sheet, resolutely cross out the first medication and then write in another (which usually was no different from the first). Then he would sigh and shake his head, as though to say, “What am I supposed to do about these ignorant doctors, dear God?” and leave exactly as he had come—calmly and politely.

Dr. Mansour would explain these interventions of his by saying “I always pass on my experience to my children” and it was in exactly the same fatherly spirit that Dr. Mansour was accustomed to destroy the hopes of the students whose theses he was supervising. Thus, after the student had worked hard for two whole years on his topic and it was approaching completion, and just as the student was starting to feel stirrings of hope that he might obtain a degree (whether a master’s or a doctorate), Dr. Mansour would always discover some fundamental flaw in the study and inform the student of this fact in a deliberate and leisurely fashion (just as you might take your time when sipping mint tea), and then calmly look at the student’s face as the frustration and despair took hold and refuse, politely and adamantly, the student’s feverish attempts to defend himself. When the student had surrendered to despondency and taken refuge in silence, Dr. Mansour would sigh, with genuine relief, and say, “Don’t try to argue about it, my boy. We have at least a year of work ahead of us.”

That year would be renewed once, and again, after which Dr. Mansour would frequently advise the student to start over with another supervisor because, quite simply, he was not happy with the study and could not agree to put his name to it. The upshot was that, in twenty years, only four students had persevered to the end and obtained a degree under Dr. Mansour’s supervision and the young doctor to whose fate it fell to have Dr. Mansour as an advisor would receive the heartfelt condolences of his colleagues, as though someone dear to him had died. A few days after his appointment, Hisham was invited by Dr. Mansour to attend an operation he was to perform. Hisham was very grateful for this attention, and he scrubbed up and entered with the doctor. The operation was to remove the gall bladder of some wretched peasant from el-Minoufiya and after this had been done, Dr. Mansour asked Hisham to sew up the wound. Hisham focused, controlled the shaking of his hands, and sewed it up as best he knew how. True, his hand was slow, but he made no mistakes, he was certain of that. Afterward, Dr. Mansour asked Hisham to come and see him in his office, invited him to sit, and told him, lighting a cigarette and observing him with the calm of an experienced hunter, “Listen, Hisham. Would you be upset if I told you you’ll never do as a surgeon?” Hisham felt fear and asked him what he meant, to which Dr. Mansour replied that being a surgeon was a matter of feeling before it was one of learning and that his long experience allowed him to judge whether the surgical sense was present in a person or not; he had made up his mind to observe him today during the operation and could assert—and for this he was very sorry—that he would never make a surgeon, for which reason he would advise him to go to some other department—internal medicine, for example, or dermatology—where everything depended on training. Hisham burst, as he was expected to, into violent, and then despairing, attempts to convince Dr. Mansour that he was still at the beginning of the road and that he would learn and improve. Dr. Mansour, however, heard Hisham out with head bowed, refused his arguments with one short sentence, then drove him with another to a further attempt to convince him, and so on, until Dr. Mansour had had his fill of Hisham’s chagrin and despair and stood up, bringing the meeting to a close by saying, in a soft well-mannered voice, “I hope to hear of your resignation in the near future. I’m sorry, but I’m acting for your own good.”

“A few minutes aren’t enough to judge me, and nobody has the authority to force me to resign,” Hisham told himself. This convinced him and he calmed down and decided to put what Dr. Mansour had said out of his mind and treat it as though it had never happened. Despite this, for weeks he would get confused whenever he was entrusted with a task during an operation; Dr. Mansour’s words would spring insistently into his mind, his hands would shake, and he would have to expend extraordinary effort not to botch things. In any case, Hisham stopped helping Dr. Mansour in his operations after that. Indeed, he started taking steps so that he wouldn’t even see him and if he caught sight of him coming down the hall, would go into a side room and busy himself with something until he had passed. Once it seemed to him that Dr. Mansour saw him, and was smiling. Hisham took to helping the other professors thereafter and was amazed to find that each of them, in his own way, treated him badly. At first, he thought that they must hate him for some reason but he soon discovered that he was not being targeted personally but that relations among everybody were bad: the head sister was always telling the other sisters off and the professors accused everybody—nursing sisters and doctors—of