My mother and uncle came in frequently and brought me books, a radio, more flowers, and food. My mother would massage my back, pray for me, and read surehs from the Koran. A few times she insisted on staying there with me overnight but that was one rule the hospital tried to observe rigidly, otherwise the place would be filled with relatives.

I tried to read the books they brought. The effort to ease myself back into reading Persian would take my mind off the pain for a while. Mahmood Majid loaned me a couple of novels by a well-known Persian author. It was so long since I had had time to read novels. It was nice to be able to do so now. The attitude towards women, or the excessiveness of male-female love expressed in the books made me laugh out loud. But my pleasure soon would turn to despair and I would fling the book on the table and try to sleep, forget.

At times the thought of my experiments filled me with a different kind of anxiety—how pointless and frivolous it all was. What did protein in the brains of rats have to do with people’s problems and concerns? Those endless hours of research and the money spent seemed to be no more than an expensive game to keep me and others like me amused.

On the eighth day Dr. Majid came in early in the morning. His uniform was creased and his hair disheveled as if he had just gotten out of bed.

“We know what’s wrong with you” he said immediately, looking flushed.

I barely glanced at him. I was in a state near stupor. “What?”

“Nothing like what we expected—you’ve been completely on the wrong kind of medication.”

“What, what’s wrong with me?” I was suddenly aroused.

“You have an ulcer.”

“An ulcer! No, it can’t be. After all this—I don’t believe it.” Instead of relief that the illness had turned out to be something less than fatal I felt oddly disappointed.

“There’s no question about it. It shows clearly on the X-ray we took of your stomach. Sometimes the pain is projected to another part of the body. It’s just something that we didn’t expect at all and didn’t look for. And of course all that aspirin we were giving you only aggravated it.”

“All the tension of the trip must have done it,” I said defensively.

He shook his head. “It’s a very big ulcer. You must have had it for a long time—a year or two. Only the pain has been dormant.”

“I’ve had it that long?”

“You brought it with you.” He smiled. “Now you have no right to be afraid of the hospital, me, or your country. What you have is a Western disease.”

He emphasized the word, Western.

I was quiet. Suddenly there seemed to be no air in the room. I was thirty-two years old and had an ulcer.