Issue 21

Sabahattan Ali
Translated by Daniel Koehler

Once again, I was out of work, and this time I was living off a relative who owned a private hospital in Ankara. I would timidly enter his home, which took up the top floor of the hospital, and occupy myself by reading a book in the corner. I shared the home with my relative’s spoiled children, who would go out of their way to annoy me, and my relative himself, who was forever doling out pieces of advice that began with “Degenerates like you …” My response to all of this would alternate between a forced smile and an attempt to look lost in thought.

I was eating in the house, drinking in the house, sleeping in the house, and washing my clothes in the house. After all of that, I could not ask for spending money as well. But at the same time, I needed at least a razor blade and enough money to buy a magazine every once in a while, and so I translated a few texts here and there for the doctors I saw at the hospital. For example, if a doctor was preparing for an operation on an ectopic pregnancy in the coming days, he might give me an article of five to ten pages from a twenty-volume German work called Female Physiology and Pathology. He would have me translate it for one kurus per line, so I would end up translating into Turkish from a book the size of a large dictionary for forty-eight kurus a page. On occasion, I would translate seven or eight pages from some medical journal or other for a lump sum of two-and-a-half lira. I would spend three days leafing through the pages of five or six dictionaries to find unfamiliar medical terms, and even then, doctors used to charging five or even ten lira per visit would try to haggle the price down. But one day, I settled the score. Well, actually, I settled the score as far as I was concerned, and I enjoyed a victory over them, even if only for a moment. No, that’s also not what happened. I was a spectator to their humiliation. Then again, they still did not realize that they were being humiliated, although they were somewhat taken aback. At any rate, let us move on to the story.

At that time, a certain man of influence had a problem with his eyes. Various opthalmologists in Ankara examined him, and some professors came in from Istanbul. They established that this significant fellow’s eyes were troubled by a significant condition by the name of retinal detachment. A layer had split in the eyeball, somewhere near the macula, and had come loose. They said this was a very dangerous disease,  and, until recently, an untreatable one. But five or six years ago, an attempt had been made to cure this ailment with a very sophisticated operation, and allegedly, it had been successful. Besides its sophistication, this operation was very dangerous, and it had not yet been undertaken in our country. None of the doctors in our hospital felt capable of attempting it, especially not on such an important patient, and the decision was therefore made to send for a German Jewish professor living in Istanbul. This man claimed that he had carried out this operation a good number of times in Germany, and he agreed to cure our grandee of his affliction. When our specialists and professors were satisfied that the foreign doctor would take on the task himself and assume all responsibility for it, they spared no effort in raising expertly crafted criticisms of him. I was sometimes present at their meetings in the head physician’s office; as they knew that the decision had already been made, they felt free to grumble without restraint.

“Well, pardon me, what’s this? Is there no man in this country who can carry out this operation?”

“Of course there is! They say an operation for a retinal detachment has not yet been done in Turkey. That may be true! But we all carried out this operation on numerous occasions when we were in Europe. And we’re completely up-to-date on the literature.”

“I ask you, when will this country rid itself of this sense of inferiority? We always have to choose one of those Westerners. We treat them like heroes without a second thought.”

“This professor is a good opthalmologist. I know him from Germany, and he’s a learned fellow. But he’s focused on theory. He’s particularly specialized in the field of eye surgery. I don’t know anything about the operations he’s done.”

“My good man, we wouldn’t dream of denying that foreigners make good scholars. But we have to limit them to certain activities, and we mustn’t consider them experts on everything. For example, look at so-and-so.” (Here, he mentioned another German Jewish professor.) “He is a surgeon known throughout the world. But in thoracic surgery, when it comes to laparotomy,” (that is, opening up the abdomen) “the man isn’t even able to do what our assistants do.”

“Yes, I should think not! That man really is an excellent surgeon, across the board. But that accident ruined him. If it weren’t for that, he would be unmatched. He’s as good as Sauerbruch, and what’s more, he’s young.”

“What accident?”

“Don’t you know? The poor man was a military doctor in the trenches in the Great War. Five or six men were buried under the earth after a shell fell next to them. The others all died, and they were only able to save him. Since then, he often suffers attacks. For example, in the middle of an operation, he’ll throw scissors, scalpels, and forceps into the open abdomen and then walk off.”

I was astonished by the cheerful banter between these men. What sort of heroic patient, I wondered, would undergo an operation by this accomplished doctor after learning about these attacks of his?

The German Jewish professor from Istanbul arrived in Ankara the day before the significant operation on this man of influence with his eye condition. That afternoon, two or three opthalmologists from Ankara were talking in the head physician’s office to two other professors who had previously arrived from Istanbul.

“Would you look at this arrogant fellow? He got off the train this morning, and he still hasn’t felt the need to come talk to us or ask for advice.”

“My dear chap, these people are Westerners. After he gets off the train, can we really expect him to come here without taking a bath and giving his delicate body a rest?”

“That’s not the reason, old boy. He doesn’t take us seriously, that’s the issue.”

While they were enjoying their little to and fro, I was sitting in a corner and casually leafing through the German medical journals. In one, a publication called Weekly Medical Journal, an article of some four-and-a-half pages caught my attention. The name of the article was “Some Innovations in the Field of Operations on Retinal Detachment.” I began to read it carefully. As far as I understood, the article dealt with a few technical matters and some changes in the way operations should be carried out. It had sentences like these: “The surgeon should not enter the eye from this point, but from that point. In order to lift the so-and-so layer, this number forceps should be used instead of that number forceps.”

Smiling, I took the journal and walked over to the doctors.

“Gentlemen, have a look at this,” I said. “There’s an article here which might interest you.”

They grabbed the journal from my hands and huddled around it, trying to piece together the meaning. The German they had learned from their trips of a few months wasn’t enough for them to understand the article, but they had clearly formed an opinion about its substance and decided on its importance regardless, as one of them turned to face me. “Translate this by this evening!” he said.

“I’ll do my best, but I’ll need two hundred lira from you,” I said.

One of the doctors looked me in the face, wondering if I was joking. He was used to paying me no more than five lira to translate articles like this one, even the most difficult ones. He realized I was serious.

“Are you some sort of fool?” he said.

“You’re right, I’ve been the fool plenty of times. And if you don’t mind, now that you have your back to the wall, I will be settling the score.”

As if to heat up the bidding, I then picked up the magazine, read them a few passages from the article and sketched out the rough meaning. “You’re going into the operating theatre tomorrow, you’d best know this,” I said. Having decided that there was no need to discuss the matter further with me, four or five of them hunched over the article and tried to help each other understand some of it. But when I explained to them, with that wicked grin of mine, that every translation of theirs was off the mark, they took up the negotiation again. After my relative who owned the hospital intervened on the side of the doctors, I agreed to translate the article by the evening in exchange for a hundred lira. I took fifty lira in advance, went up to my room on the top floor, and immediately set to work.

As always, I used five or six dictionaries to look up the medical terms, first in French, and then in Turkish. I finished the translation close to one in the morning, at which point the doctors were playing bezique in the doctors’ mess. I walked over to them, and they began listening intently as I translated the article. They amended some of the words and phrases to fit the medical terms. Then, they gathered together to read the translation word by word and quarrel amongst themselves.    

The importance of the article was clear from their chatter, and one of them made a suggestion. “Well,” he said, “let’s give this to the professor so he doesn’t slip up tomorrow!”

However, one of the professors interjected. He was a swarthy man, and his enormous nose extended to his lower lip.

“I should think not!” he said in his gruff voice. “Wouldn’t this distinguished professor know all of this? He should. I say we let him show us his skill tomorrow.”

The others looked knowingly at each other. After discussing amongst themselves for a while, they went their separate ways.

The next morning, they were gathered in the head physician’s office again. This time, the Jewish professor was also with them. Every time he moved, or even opened his mouth, he seemed fearful of offending those around him. Even if an assistant asked him an unimportant question, he would turn to the assistant, attempt a conciliatory expression, and sheepishly rub his hands together, all while talking at length in an imploring voice.

The operation was scheduled for the afternoon. The only topics of discussion were the details of retinal detachment and the difficulty of the operation. The doctor spoke shabby Turkish, and the Turkish doctors’ French and German were even worse, so I often had to chime in. The swarthy professor with the long nose had clearly decided it was his turn, as he spoke up with his harsh, gruff voice. “Er, Herr Professor,” he said, “as we are operating on the left eye, which region will you enter from?”

After that, a peculiar quarrel broke out. The Turkish doctors asked pointed questions based on the article they had read and memorized the evening before. The Jewish professor explained to them the techniques that had traditionally been used for operations for retinal detachment, but every time he did, the Turkish doctors responded with protests drawn from the article.

This poor man had been forced to leave house and home and settle here after undergoing unimaginable horrors, and it was clear that he still carried the scars of that terror. With an agility that belied his diminutive, aged frame, he tried to answer everyone, turning from one to the other. “Oh, please don’t be offended! I will answer as you wish,” his graciousness seemed to say, but to the point that it appeared odd. “What do you think, Doctor?” one of the Turkish doctors would say. “Holding the layer with those forceps poses such-and-such problems. Wouldn’t it be better to use such-and-such numbered forceps?” The old professor would eagerly nod in assent. “Yes, yes, that’s absolutely right!”

However, I could not help but notice that these interactions did not confuse him, and he remained unruffled. In fact, a satisfied smile began to spread across his face. I was irritated that the Turkish doctors were pestering this man on the basis of knowledge that they had gained ten or fifteen hours before, so I had retreated to the edge of the room, but now, curious, I approached them again. By now, the German professor was quite clearly taking pleasure in agreeing to their objections. Eventually, he briefly placed his hand on the shoulder of a young, plump, blue-eyed doctor who had lost his hair. This was the doctor who had been interrogating him most mercilessly.

“Oh, you cannot imagine how pleased I am that you’ve reached these conclusions about surgery on retinal detachment,” he said. “Everyone agrees that this dangerous operation is very difficult, and unfortunately, the techniques used until now have not always been successful. New methods were needed. You’re absolutely correct, absolutely correct.” Then, he lowered his voice and scanned the men around him one by one.

“And you see, working seriously on this topic leads to the same correct conclusions. After much trial and error, I decided that we need to change the way we conduct operations on retinal detachment. In fact, in today’s operation, I will do exactly that.”

The Turkish doctors exchanged glances. The glint of victory was in their eyes, but they seemed baffled by the lack of constancy on the part of this alleged world-renowned expert.

“I wrote about all of this in the latest issue of Weekly Medical Journal,” he added. His manner was as timid and bashful as before, and he was now drawing out his words. “But as you know, as Jews, we are not allowed to put our names on the articles!” he said.