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That was part of the problem Reuven had been having in adjusting: pretending to know less than he did. The other part lay in the patients themselves. He burst out, “What do I do about the little old men who come in every other week when there’s nothing wrong with them? What I want to do is boot them out on the street, but I don’t suppose I can.”
“No, not really,” Moishe Russie agreed. “Oh, you could, but it wouldn’t do you much good. They’d come back anyhow: either that or they’d go bother some other doctor instead.”
“I’ve been looking over the files,” Reuven said. “Looks like we’ve got some patients other doctors have run off.”
“I’m sure we do,” his father said, nodding. “And they have some of ours, too-I try to be patient, but I’m not Job. Sometimes all the little old men and women really want is for someone to tell them, ‘Don’t worry. You’re really all right.’ And”-he grinned at Reuven-“you’re a hero to a lot of them, you know?”
Reuven shrugged in some embarrassment. “Yes, I do know. I don’t think it’s worth making a fuss over.”
“I know you don’t, but you have to remember: you grew up here in Jerusalem, not in Warsaw or Minsk or Berlin,” Moishe Russie said. “Being a Jew is easy here. It wasn’t so easy back in Europe, believe me. And a Jew who walks away from something important so he doesn’t have to go worship the spirits of Emperors past”-he used the language of the Race for the phrase-“deserves to have people notice.”
“If we had advertisements, you could use it in them: ‘genuine Jewish doctor,’ I mean,” Reuven answered. “But it doesn’t make me any smarter. If it does anything, it makes me stupider.”
His father shook his head. “It may make you a little more ignorant, but not stupider. And it makes you honest. That’s important for a doctor.”
Reuven snorted. “If I were honest, I’d tell those people to geh kak afen yam.”
“Well, you can’t be a hundred percent honest all the time.” Moishe Russie chuckled, but then sobered. “And the other thing to remember is, you can’t take anything for granted. Just the other day, I found a lump in Mrs. Berkowitz’s breast. She’s been coming in here three, four times a year for the past ten years, and I never noticed anything worse than varicose veins wrong with her up till then. But you have to be careful.”
“All right,” Reuven said. By the unhappy expression on his father’s face, he suspected that Moishe Russie wished he’d found the lump sooner. Knowing his father, he’d probably been kicking himself ever since he did discover it. Reuven continued, “And it feels strange to have a chaperone of some sort in the room whenever I examine a woman, even if she’s older than the Pyramids.”
“You have to be careful,” his father repeated, this time in a different tone of voice. “I know a couple of men who ruined their careers because they weren’t. Why take chances when you don’t have to.”
“I don’t,” Reuven answered, knowing his father would land on him like an avalanche if he did. “It still seems like something out of the Middle Ages, though.”
“Maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real,” Moishe Russie said. “Our Arab colleagues have a harder time with it than we do. Sometimes they can’t touch their female patients at all. They have to do the best they can by asking questions. If they’re lucky, they get to ask the woman. If they’re not, they have to ask her husband.”
“Yes, I know about that,” Reuven said. “There’s a fellow named Nuqrashi who resigned from the college about the same time I did. He’s back in Baghdad now, I suppose, getting his practice going. I wonder if he’s having those kinds of troubles.”
“Worse troubles than those in Baghdad nowadays,” his father said. “Sometimes they spill over here, too. If I never hear anybody shouting ‘Allahu akbar!’ again, I won’t be sorry.” Moishe Russie’s eyes went far away. “Not long after we first came to Palestine, I tried to help a wounded Arab woman in the streets of Jerusalem, and an Arab man thought I was going to violate her. He did change his mind when he realized what I was doing, I will say that.”
“What happened to her?” Reuven asked.
His father looked bleak. “She bled to death. Torn femoral artery, I think.”
Before Reuven could answer that, the receptionist tapped on the door and said, “Dr. Russie-young Dr. Russie, I mean-Chaim Katz is here for his appointment. He’s complaining about his cough again.”
“Thanks, Yetta.” Reuven got to his feet. As he started for the examination room, he glanced back at his father, who was lighting a cigarette. In disapproving tones, he said, “Katz would do a lot better if he didn’t smoke like a chimney. As a matter of fact, you’d do better, too.”
Moishe Russie looked innocent. “I’d do better if Katz didn’t smoke? I don’t see that.” He inhaled. The end of the cigarette glowed red.
“Funny,” Reuven said, though he thought it was anything but. “You know what the Lizards have found out about what tobacco does to your lungs. They think we’re meshuggeh for using the stuff.”
“Among other reasons they think we’re meshuggeh.” His father breathed out smoke as he spoke. He looked at the cigarette between his index and middle fingers, then shrugged. “Yes, they’ve found out all sorts of nasty stuff about tobacco. What they haven’t found is how to make somebody quit using the stuff once he’s got started.” He raised an eyebrow. “They haven’t figured out how to make themselves stop using ginger, either.”
That struck Reuven as more rationalization than reasoned defense, but he didn’t have time to argue-not that arguing was likely to make his father stub out that cigarette and never smoke another one. All he said was, “You can’t be having as much fun with tobacco as the Lizards do with ginger.” Moishe Russie laughed.
In the examination room, Chaim Katz was working a cigarette down to a tiny butt and coughing between puffs. He was about sixty, stocky, bald, with a gray mustache and tufts of gray Hair sprouting from his ears. “Hello, Doctor,” he said, and coughed again.
“Hello?” Reuven pointed to an ashtray. “Will you please put that out and take off your shirt? I want to listen to your chest.” He reached for his stethoscope, which hung beside his father’s. Even as he set the ends in his ears, be knew he wouldn’t be hearing everything he might. The Race had electronically amplified models.
He didn’t need anything fancy, though, to dislike what he heard in Chaim Katz’s chest. He marveled that the older man got any air into his lungs at all: wheezes and hisses and little whistling noises filled his ears. “Nu?” Katz said when he put the stethoscope away.
“I want you to make an appointment with Dr. Eisenberg for a chest X ray,” Reuven told him. Back at the medical college, he could have sent the man for an X ray then and there, and learned the results in a few minutes. Unfortunately, t
hings weren’t so simple here. “When I see the film, I’ll have a better idea of where we stand.” I’ll find out whether you’ve got a carcinoma in there, or just a running start on emphysema.
“That’ll be expensive,” Katz complained.
Reuven said, “How expensive is being sick, Mr. Katz? You’ve had this cough for a while now. We need to find out what’s going on in there.” The stocky little man made a sour face, but finally nodded. He put on his shirt, buttoned it, and pulled out the pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket. Reuven pointed to them. “You’ll probably get some relief if you can give those up. They don’t call them coffin nails for nothing.”
Chaim Katz looked at the cigarettes-a harsh Turkish blend-as if just consciously noticing he was holding them. He stuck one in his mouth and lit it before answering, “I like ’em.” He took a drag, then continued, “All right, I’ll talk to Eisenberg. Tell your old man hello for me.” Out he went, leaving a trail of smoke behind.
With a sigh, Reuven ducked into his own office-smaller and a good deal starker than his father’s-and wrote up the results of the examination. He was just finishing when the telephone rang. He looked at it in mild surprise; his father got most of the calls. “Miss Archibald for you,” Yetta said.
“Put her through,” Reuven said at once, and then switched from Hebrew to English: “Hullo, Jane! How are you? So you still remember me even though I escaped? Do you remember me well enough to let me take you to supper tomorrow night?”
“Why not?” she said, and laughed. Reuven grinned enormously, though she couldn’t see that. She continued, “After all, you’re a man of money now, with your own practice and such. Since you’ve got it, why shouldn’t you spend it on me?”
Had he thought she meant that in a gold-digging way, he would have hung up on her. Instead, he laughed, too. “Only goes to show you haven’t had a practice of your own yet. How are things back there?” He still longed for news, even after severing himself from the medical college.
“About what you’d expect,” Jane answered. “The Lizards keep muttering about Tosevite superstitions.” She dropped into the language of the Race for the last two words. “I don’t think they expected nearly so many people to resign.”
