“When is that going to be?”

“In a couple of days,” he said.

Then Manijeh took me to the room, where I was to stay, a large room, with a wrought iron bed, shiny olive-green walls, and matching green curtains. In a corner stood a refrigerator, a table, and two chairs. The air felt hot and stifling. She turned on a ceiling fan and looked around as if to inspect the room.

“We have only four rooms for private care—they used to be for doctors to sleep in—that’s why there’s a refrigerator here.” She rubbed her finger on the table and held it before me. “Look at the dust. You’d think no one had stayed here for years. Well, probably no one has.”

“Where do most patients stay?”

“In the ward. That’s what most of them can afford. We have these rooms, a small ward, and a large clinic.”

I realized that I had not even asked the price of the room. “How much is it a night here?”

“About $30, I think.”

I nodded. At least the cost was not staggering.

“Go to bed now. I’ll be back with some medicine for you in a minute.”

I looked at the sheets, almost expecting to find a bug there as I had in the hotel room, but the sheets were clean with that soft blue color from bleach.

I got into my own nightgown and lay in bed. I tried to think of Tony, of my experiments in the laboratory, but the past was hard to grasp. I tried to think of the future but it seemed devoid of meaning. Only my illness—the pain, the uncertainty, and the idea of being in that remote and rather primitive hospital—had a hold on me.

Manijeh came back with the medicine and water. The medicine was a white powder on a folded piece of wax paper.

“What’s that?” I asked, looking at it suspiciously. It reminded me of a medicine I once took as a child.

“It’s just a pain killer,” she said. “Like aspirin—only this is much stronger.”

Reluctantly I put the powder in the back of my mouth and drank a full glass of water. A bitter taste trickled down my throat for a long time.

Manijeh turned off the light before leaving. I tried to sleep but a fly caught in the dark buzzed frantically, keeping me awake. Then two cats began to fight somewhere, making angry, shrill cries. Finally I could hear intermittent moans. I assumed it was the woman I had seen dragged along the corridor, and I kept imagining her as a translucent body with dark lines of cancer branched out through it. Then I thought of my own body that way with the painful spots shining in dark blood, red or dismembered and scattered on different tables with students poring over the pieces, the way I had practiced on dead animals when I had been a student. The slightly putrid smell, the cold slimy touch. At first that part of biology had almost turned me against the subject but gradually I had gotten used to it. Now I could dissect a frog, a rabbit, a mouse—my hands steady.