The truck reaches Shuwayfat. With the engine running, it tips its load onto the garbage mound and continues on its way.
Dr. Marwan Bitar, a sixty-five-year-old surgeon, was head of Surgery at the German Hospital in Beirut for the longest time. He stopped practicing in 1973 after his hands grew unsteady, and now he’s a forensic pathologist-a semi-retirement of sorts, and a lucrative one. He doesn’t like this work: handling corpses and conducting autopsies, and then having to write up his findings. Still, Dr. Bitar has convinced himself that it makes no difference whether it’s a corpse or not, it’s just the same as performing a surgical operation. After all, a patient under general anesthesia is like a corpse, he feels nothing. The difference though is the blood. In an operation, the scalpel is for real, but here, it’s like nothing; there’s no blood, no responsibility, you can cut a corpse up any which way you like, and mistakes are not an issue.
“I have a fail-safe job,” Dr. Bitar tells his son, Ghassan, who became a gynecologist. Dr. Bitar advised him against that specialization, but the boy went ahead and did as he pleased.
“Son, how can you sleep with a woman after that?”
“I manage. Work is one thing and sex is another.”
The boy has become well-known and wealthy. After only eight years in practice, he owns an entire apartment block in Ramlet al-Bayda, while he, Dr. Bitar, who’s been working for over thirty years now, has no more to show for it than that lousy old building in Kantari, which is full of refugees. There are rumors that Ghassan has come by all that wealth in a rather unsavory manner, doing abortions. They say he does them on request: the woman comes to the clinic, asks him to do it, and he goes right ahead without the slightest hesitation — nor the slightest bit of shame or fear of the Good Lord! Of course, Dr. Bitar hasn’t ascertained any of this for himself, he’d rather not know whether his son is an abortionist or not — as far as he’s concerned, Ghassan’s free to do as he pleases and may God forgive him. Still, the boy hasn’t married. And it’s got to be due to his line of work.
“You haven’t married because you feel nothing but disgust for women,” the old man tells his son, reminding him that he’d warned him, but Ghassan just laughs.
“I sleep with the whole of womankind! After I give her the anesthetic, I have sex with the woman before carrying out the operation. Medically speaking, it’s helpful — having sex with a pregnant woman before an abortion is helpful. I sleep with her and she feels nothing, I operate and she pays. Instead of having to pay for it, I do what I feel like and get paid for it. So why get married?”
“God forbid!” Dr. Marwan Bitar can’t believe his ears. “You’re not serious?”
“Sure I am. Why not? Look at it this way: she’s asleep and feels nothing, so it’s not like she’s being unfaithful to her husband. And anyhow, most of them aren’t married. Sex is like food, father, it’s of little consequence!”
“God forbid!” Dr. Bitar exclaims once more. “You’re making it all up.”
But Ghassan just laughs.
He’s got to be lying, though. It’s just not possible. Medicine is a sacred calling; a medical practitioner takes an oath to honor his profession. In ancient times, priests were the medical practitioners, treating both the body and the spirit. And that’s the way it should be. Medicine wasn’t debased until it became just another job. But it’s a sacred mission, and Dr. Bitar simply can’t believe that his son does those things. No, no, it can’t be possible. He must be making it up, look how he just laughs. But why hasn’t he married? I’ll find you a girl, Dr. Bitar tells him, time and again. But Ghassan just makes fun of him.
“Those days are over, Dad,” he says.
He’s right, of course. But why doesn’t he marry the way people do now, for love? Go out with a girl and then marry her. He doesn’t have a girlfriend and he’s never brought a girl home with him when he visits. And besides, why won’t he live at home? He says he prefers living alone, but a bachelor’s house is like a devil’s den, Dr. Bitar is sure of that. Not much he can do about it but offer his advice, which the boy disregards in any case.
As for this revolting job of his, dissecting corpses, that is. . well… What to say, but al-hamdulillah that the war broke out as it’s more or less spared him from having to continue with it. Forensic pathologists aren’t needed these days: everything’s fallen apart, people are killed and tossed into their graves just like that, no autopsy, no nothing. No more phone calls in the middle of the night, no more officers requesting his presence. So he sits at home doing nothing.
Once in a while, Dr. Bitar goes over to the American University Hospital to visit his former student, Dr. Saleem Idreess, now head of Surgery. Dr. Bitar trained him personally and he’s become an excellent surgeon. Whenever he goes to see him though, Saleem grumbles about the chronic shortage of doctors.
“They’ve all left! Sometimes a surgeon will perform ten operations in one day! Occasionally more than that; the doctors are exhausted!”
And when he asks Dr. Bitar about his new line of work, the old surgeon tells him there’s not much to do nowadays.
“Forensic pathologists don’t have much of a role to play anymore. The courts are closed and no one needs us.”
Once Dr. Bitar put a proposal to him. He suggested that dissections could be carried out on some of the corpses that are brought into the hospital from the fighting.
“It would certainly be better than working on corpses that have been preserved in formaldehyde, the way we used to when you were still a student. It would allow the medical students to see for themselves spinal cord injuries, cranial traumas, liver ailments, all manner of things.”
But he was stunned by Dr. Saleem’s answer.
“They’re of absolutely no value to us, those corpses. Nowadays, we train our students on the real thing: they participate in real-life surgical operations. You know how it is, we get a lot of hopeless cases, and we let the students practice on them. Some of them even do brain surgery, and you know how difficult that is.”
“What’s that you’re saying?”
“Dear Dr. Marwan, you’re from the old school. We have new training methods nowadays.”
“But that’s criminal,” Dr. Bitar replied. “It’s illegal. I didn’t teach all those years for you to end up doing this sort of thing! It’s a complete violation of our professional ethic. A surgeon’s not a butcher, Saleem. God is my witness, butchers are less barbaric!”
Dr. Bitar left the hospital and never went back. He won’t visit Saleem anymore. . that man’s no student of his, he’s just a common criminal. . how can they let students play around with people’s brains and organs like that, even if they are hopeless cases… and anyhow, there aren’t any hopeless cases. Doctors do everything in their power and the rest is up to the Good Lord. It’s an act of blasphemy against the Creator. What a generation!
And so it was that Dr. Bitar spent all his time at home. The phone no longer rang for him and he no longer went out. Doctors nowadays aren’t what they used to be. . Where are the likes of the famous Prussian doctor who could diagnose a patient’s ailment just by looking at him? This new generation doesn’t know a thing!
The war’s over, that’s what people are saying. But where are the authorities? Every sort of army in the country but the legitimate one. . Still, at least work has picked up again and he is getting paid 500 lira for every report he produces. It’s better than nothing. . How he wishes he were in charge though: he’d have brought out the gallows and hanged all those doctors! But in charge he isn’t, and 500 lira is better than nothing: the building doesn’t bring in a piaster anymore, it’s full of refugees and he won’t take money from Ghassan, he couldn’t, not from his own son.