The Years of Rice and Salt (52 page)

“Your work seems very different from Chinese medicine,” one of the others said. “We were hoping you might speak to us about the differences between their theory and yours.”

Ismail shook his head, fingering through these vestiges of his former existence. He would not have said he had written so much. Perhaps there were multiple copies even on this shelf.

“I have no theories,” he said. “I have only noted what I have seen.” His face tightened. “I will be happy to speak with you about whatever you like, of course.”

The abbess said, “It would be very good if you would speak to a gathering about these things; there are many who would like to hear you, and to ask questions.”

“My pleasure, of course.”

“Thank you. We will convene tomorrow for that, then.”

A clock somewhere struck the bells that marked every hour and watch.

“What kind of clock do you employ?”

“A version of Bhaskara's mercury wheel,” Bhakta said, and led Ismail by the tall building that housed it. “It does very well for the astronomical calculations, and the Kerala has decreed a new year using it, more accurate than any before. But to tell the truth, we are now trying horologues with weight-driven mechanical escapements. We are also trying clocks with spring drives, which would be useful at sea, where accurate timekeeping is essential for determining longitude.”

“I know nothing of that.”

“No. You have been attending to medicine.”

“Yes.”

The next day they returned to the hospital, and in a large room where surgeries were performed, a great number of monks and nuns in brown and maroon and yellow robes sat on the floor to hear him. Bhakta had assistants bring several thick wide books to the table where Ismail was to speak, all of them filled with anatomical drawings, most Chinese.

They seemed to be waiting for him to speak, so he said, “I am pleased to tell you what I have observed. Perhaps it will help you, I don't know. I know little of any formal medical system. I studied some of the ancient Greek knowledge as it was translated by Ibn Sina and others, but I never could profit much from it. Very little from Aristotle, somewhat more from Galen. Ottoman medicine itself was no very impressive thing. In truth, nowhere have I found a general explanation that fits what I have seen with my own eyes, and so, long ago I gave up on all hypothesis, and decided to try to draw and to write down only what I saw. So you must tell me about these Chinese ideas, if you can express them in Persian, and I will see if I can tell you how my observations match with them.” He shrugged. “That's all I can do.”

They stared at him, and he continued nervously: “So useful, Persian. The language that bridges Islam and India.” He waggled a hand. “Any questions?”

Bhakta herself broke the silence. “What about the meridian lines that the Chinese speak of, running through the body from the skin inward and back again?”

Ismail looked at the drawings of the body she turned to in one of the books. “Could they be nerves?” he said. “Some of these lines follow the paths of major nerves. But then they diverge. I have not seen nerves crisscrossing like this, cheek to neck, down spine to thigh, up into back. Nerves generally branch like an almond tree's branches, while the blood vessels branch like a birch tree. Neither tangle like these are shown to.”

“We don't think meridian lines refer to the nerves.”

“To what, then? Do you see anything there when you do autopsies?”

“We do not do autopsies. When opportunity has allowed us to inspect torn bodies, their parts look as you have described them in your letters to us. But the Chinese understanding is of great antiquity and elaboration, and they get good results by sticking pins in the right meridian points, among other methods. They very often get good results.”

“How do you know?”

“Well—some of us have seen it. Mostly we understand it from what they have said. We wonder if they are finding systems too small to be seen. Can we be sure that the nerves are the only messengers of motion to the musculature?”

“I think so,” Ismail said. “Cut the right nerve and the muscles beyond it will not move. Prick a nerve and the appropriate muscle will jump.”

His audience stared at him. One of the older men said, “Perhaps some other kind of energy transference is happening, not necessarily through the nerves, but through the lines, and this is needed as much as the nerves.”

“Perhaps. But look here,” pointing at one diagram, “they show no pancreas. No adrenal glands either. These both perform necessary functions.”

Bhakta said, “For them the crucial organs are eleven, five yin and six yang. Heart, lungs, spleen, liver, and kidneys, they are yin.”

“A spleen is not essential.”

“. . . Then the six yang organs are gall bladder, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, bladder, and triple burner.”

“Triple burner? What is that?”

She read from the Chinese notations by the drawing: “They say, ‘It has a name but no shape. It combines the effects of the organs that regulate water, as a fire must control water. The upper burner is a mist, the middle burner a foam, the lower burner a swamp. Thus top to bottom, corresponding to head and upper body, middle from nipples to navel, lower the abdomen below the navel.”

Ismail shook his head. “Do they find it in dissections?”

“Like us, they rarely do dissections. There are similar religious barriers. Once in their Sung dynasty, about year 390 in Islam, they dissected forty-six rebels.”

“I doubt that would have helped. You have to see a lot of dissections, and vivisections, with no preconceptions in mind, before it begins to come clear.”

Now the monks and nuns were staring at him with an odd expression, but he forged on as he examined the drawings. “This flow through the body and all its parts, do they not mean blood?”

“A harmonious balance of fluids, some material, like blood, some spiritual, like jing and shen and qi, the so-called Three Treasures—”

“What are they, please?”

“Jing is the source of change,” one nun said hesitantly, “supportive and nutritive, like a fluid. ‘Essence' is another Persian word we could use to translate it. In Sanskrit, ‘semen,' or the generative possibility.”

“And shen?”

“Shen is awareness, consciousness. Like our spirit, but a part of the body too.”

Ismail was interested in this. “Have they weighed it?”

Bhakta led the laughter. “Their doctors do not weigh things. With them it is not things, but forces and relationships.”

“Well, I am just an anatomist. What animates the parts is beyond me. Three treasures, one, a myriad—I cannot tell. It does seem there is some animating vitality, that comes and goes, waxes and wanes. Dissection cannot find it. Our souls, perhaps. You believe that the soul returns, do you not?”

“We do.”

“The Chinese also?”

“Yes, for the most part. For their Daoists there is no pure spirit, it is always mixed with material things. So their immortality requires movement from one body to another. And all Chinese medicine is strongly influenced by Daoism. Their Buddhism is mostly like ours, although again, more materialist. It is chiefly what the women do in their older years, to help the community, and prepare for their next life. The official Confucian culture does not speak much of the soul, even though they acknowledge its existence. In most Chinese writing the line drawn between spirit and matter is vague, sometimes nonexistent.”

“Evidently,” Ismail said, looking at the meridian-line drawing again. He sighed. “Well. They have studied long, and helped living people, while I have only drawn dissections.”

They continued. The questions came from more and more of them, with comments and observations. Ismail answered every question as best he could. The movement of the blood in the chambers of the heart; the function of the spleen, if there was one; location of the ovaries; shock reactions to amputation of the legs; flooding of punctured lungs; movement of the various limbs when parts of the exposed brain were prodded with needles: he described what he had seen in each case, and as the day wore on, the crowd sitting on the floor looked up at him with expressions more and more guarded, or odd. A pair of nuns left quietly. As Ismail was describing the coagulation of the blood after extraction of teeth, the room went completely silent. Few of them met his eye, and noticing that, he faltered. “As I said, I am a mere anatomist . . . We will have to see if we can reconcile what I have seen with your theoretical texts . . .” He looked hot, as if he had a fever, but only in his face.

Finally the abbess Bhakta rose to her feet, stepped stiffly to him, and held his shaking hands in hers. “No more,” she said gently. All the monks and nuns rose to their feet, their hands placed together before them, as in prayer, and bowed toward him. “You have made good from bad,” Bhakta said. “Rest now, and let us take care of you.”

So Ismail settled
into a small room in the monastery provided for him, and studied Chinese texts freshly translated into the Persian by the monks and nuns, and taught anatomy.

One afternoon he and Bhakta walked from the hospital to the dining hall, through hot and muggy air, the premonsoon air, like a warm wet blanket. The abbess pointed to a little girl running through the rows of melons in the big garden. “There is the new incarnation of the previous lama. She just came to us last year, but she was born the very hour the old lama died, which is very unusual. It took a while for us to find her, of course. We did not start the search until last year, and immediately she showed up.”

“His soul moved from man to woman?”

“Apparently. The search certainly looked among the little boys, as is traditional. That was one of the things that made identifying her so easy. She insisted on being tested, despite her sex. At four years of age. And she identified all of Peng Roshi's things, many more than the new incarnation usually can do, and told me the contents of my final conversation with Peng, almost word for word.”

“Really!” Ismail stared at Bhakta.

Bhakta met his gaze. “It was like looking into his eyes again. So, we say that Peng has come back to us as a Tara bodhisattva, and we started paying more attention to the girls and the nuns, something of course that I have always encouraged. We have emulated the Chinese habit of inviting the old women of Travancore to come to the monastery and give their lives over to studying the sutras, but also to studying medicine, and going back out to care for those in their villages, and to teach their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

The little girl disappeared into the palm trees at the end of the garden. The new moon sickled the sky, pendant under a bright evening star. The sound of drumming came on a breeze. “The Kerala has been delayed,” Bhakta said as she listened to the drums. “He will be here tomorrow.”

The drumming became audible again at dawn, just after the clock bells had clonged the coming of day. Distant drums, like thunder or gunfire, but more rhythmic than either, announced his arrival. As the sun rose it seemed the ground shook. Monks and nuns and their families living in the monastery poured out of the dormitories to witness the arrival, and the great yard inside the gate was hastily cleared.

The first soldiers danced in a rapid walk, all stepping together, taking a skip forward at every fifth step, and shouting as they reversed their rifles from one shoulder to the other. The drummers followed, skipping in step as their hands beat their tablas. A few snapped hand cymbals. They wore uniform shirts with red patches sewn to the shoulders, and came circling in a column around the great yard, until perhaps five hundred men stood in curved ranks facing the gate. When the Kerala and his officers rode in on horseback, the soldiers presented their arms and shouted three times. The Kerala raised a hand, and his detachment commander shouted orders: the tabla players rolled out the surging beat, and the soldiers danced into the dining hall.

“They are fast, just as everyone said,” Ismail said to Bhakta. “And everything is so together.”

“Yes, they live in unison. In battle they are the same. The reloading of their rifles has been broken down into ten movements, and there are ten command drumbeats, and different groups of them are coordinated to different points of the cycle, so they fire in rotating mass, to very devastating effect, I am told. No army can stand up to them. Or at least, that was true for many years. Now it seems the Golden Horde are beginning to train their armies in similar ways. But even with that, and with modern weapons, they won't be able to withstand the Kerala.”

Now the man himself dismounted, and Bhakta approached him, bringing Ismail along. The Kerala waved aside their bows, and Bhakta said without preamble, “This is Ismail of Konstantiniyye, the famous Ottoman doctor.”

The Kerala stared at him intently, and Ismail gulped, feeling the heat of that impatient eye. The Kerala was short and compact, black haired, narrow faced, quick of movement. His torso seemed just a touch too long for his legs. His face was very handsome, chiseled like a Greek statue.

“I hope you are impressed by the hospital here,” he said in clear Persian.

“It is the best I have ever seen.”

“What was the state of Ottoman medicine when you left it?”

Ismail said, “We were making progress in understanding a little of the parts of the body. But much remained mysterious.”

Bhakta added, “Ismail has examined the medical theories of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and brought what was useful in them to us, as well as making very many new discoveries of his own, correcting the ancients or adding to their knowledge. His letters to us have formed one of the main bases of our work in the hospital.”

“Indeed.” Now the Kerala's gaze was even more piercing. His eyes were protuberant, their irises a jumble of colors, like circles of jasper. “Interesting! We must speak more of these things. But first I want to discuss recent developments with you alone, Mother Bodhisattva.”

The abbess nodded, and walked hand-in-hand with the Kerala to a pavilion overlooking the dwarf orchard. No bodyguard accompanied them, but only settled back and watched from the yard, rifles at the ready, with guards posted on the monastery wall.