In time, the doctors at Alalayli’s hospital came to believe they were incapable of treating any body other than their client’s. It was simple enough to announce they’d retired or taken new jobs in distant provincial hospitals; the problem was with friends and relatives, casually requesting advice or calling up with medical emergencies. The real issue wasn’t Alalayli’s unbreakable rule, which stated that any doctor caught treating anybody other than him would be dismissed with extreme prejudice (the word prejudice being in no way metaphorical, since Alalayli had the means to exact revenge, to do damage, to imprison people if he so chose). No, the problem was that all the staff, Ashraf included, gradually came to feel that they were the property of Alalayli’s hospital; or that, more precisely, they realized the one thing that made the idea of introducing their diagnoses and scalpels into the lives of ordinary people bearable, was the sheer range of these people, their diversity and profusion. It was this profusion that allowed a doctor to feel an error here might be put right there; gifted them the scrupulous equivocation of the soldier in an execution squad, who can’t know if the fatal bullet is chambered in his gun or that of the man next to him. A doctor might legitimately wonder, did he kill the patient, or was it someone—something—else? But here, where there was only one patient, one life at stake, there was no washing your hands of responsibility, no escaping the knowledge that you’d killed.
Thoughts which filled his head as he made his way to and from the hospital, turning them over as he sat at his desk, reading up on the patient he might never see—he came to believe that these thoughts were his secret, and his alone. Trapped behind the walls of this silent, green-corridored palace, he felt like a stranger in the company of others.
But all that changed the day he heard whispers about a stranger in their midst. A young woman named Sherine who both belonged there and didn’t. The rumors said that she was Alalayli’s daughter. Then he saw her: flitting past him down the corridor, a bird barely touching to earth. To Ashraf, it seemed as if some ghostly breeze stirred her hair, lifting it out behind her. And as she neared the exit a thin young man stood up. He didn’t seem to belong to her world at all, yet he followed her out.
The same whispers brought Ashraf the young man’s name—Salaam—and his story.
6
