Chicago

wondering how to carry it out. Suddenly another idea occurred to her: she performed her ablution, opened the holy Qur’an, and recited the Chapter of Yasin, then performed the prayer for guidance and followed it with supplications. As soon as she lay her head on the pillow she was fast asleep. In her sleep she saw her father, Ustaz Muhammadi, wearing his fancy blue wool suit that he wore on important occasions (such as visits to or by the minister or graduation parties at the school). Her father stood in the garden in front of the main door of the histology department where she studied. His face was clean-shaven and without wrinkles, his lucent eyes gleamed, and his hair was thick jet-black without a single gray hair, which made him appear twenty years younger. He kept smiling at Shaymaa and whispering to her in his affectionate voice, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave you, ever. Come.” Then he held her by the hand and pulled her gently until she entered through the department door with him.

Shaymaa woke up in the morning at peace with herself, her misgivings totally gone. She said to herself, “This is a true vision from God Almighty to give me strength in my difficult task.” She believed that the dead lived with us but that we didn’t see them. Her father had visited her in her sleep to encourage her to continue her studies, and she wasn’t going to let him down; she would forget her sorrows and cope with her new life. She felt profound relief now that she had made up her mind. So, she decided to celebrate. She had certain rituals she was used to performing with her two sisters on happy occasions. She began by making the well-known paste of sugar and lemon juice on the stove, and then she went into the bathroom and sat, naked, on the edge of the bathtub and began to remove unwanted hair from her body. She enjoyed that repeated, fleeting, delightful pain caused by plucking the hair from the skin. She followed that by a long, warm bath during which she gave every part of her body a rubbing that refreshed and liberated her.

A few minutes later, Shaymaa stood in the kitchen enacting a purely Egyptian scene: she put on a flannel gallabiya with a pattern of little flowers and a pair of khadduga slippers with a wide face and four intersecting straps, which were her favorite because they were easy on her toes and gave them freedom of movement. She let her long, soft wet hair cascade down her shoulders and decided to enjoy everything she loved to do. She put in the cassette player Kadhim al-Sahir’s song “Do You Have Any Doubt?” of which she was so fond that she recorded it three times on the same cassette tape so she wouldn’t have to rewind it. Kadhim’s voice boomed out and Shaymaa began to dance to the tunes and, at the same time, slide bell peppers, one by one, into a frying pan of boiling oil to make her favorite dish, Alexandria-style moussaka. Little by little she became completely absorbed in the act and began to roam all over the kitchen, dancing and singing with Kadhim as if performing on stage, then going back to the stove to slide in a new pepper. When Kadhim sang “My Murderess Is Dancing Barefoot,” Shaymaa extended her feet and threw off her khadduga slippers into the corner of the kitchen. When Kadhim asked his beloved, “Where’d you come from? How did you come here? And how did you storm my heart?” she became so ecstatic that it occurred to her to perform a dance move that used to earn great admiration from her girlfriends in Tanta. She suddenly got down on her knees, raised her arms, and began to rise slowly, shaking her waist and jiggling her breasts. This time she slid in two peppers at once, and when they hit the boiling oil the impact produced a great bang and released thick plumes of smoke. For a moment she imagined hearing something like an alarm. But she dismissed at that moment anything that might spoil her good mood and began another dance move: she extended her arms, as if getting ready to embrace someone, then began to move her breasts forward and backward while standing in place. When she picked up another pepper to drop it into the oil, at that very moment, she experienced a horrifying nightmare. She heard a loud bang, after which the door of her apartment was forcibly opened. Some huge men surrounded her, shouting in English things that she did not understand. One of the men jumped toward her and hugged her hard, as if he wanted to carry her off the ground. She didn’t resist because she was too shocked until she felt his strong hands clasping at her back and she smelled a putrid smell after her face got caught in his black leather coat. It was only then that she realized the enormity of what was happening and she channeled all her strength to her hands to push off that stranger and began to let loose a stream of very loud, piercing screams that reverberated throughout the building.

Chapter 2

The University of Illinois is one of the largest schools in the United States. It is divided into several campuses: the Medical Center on the west side comprises the medical colleges. The nonmedical colleges are in other parts of the city. The Medical Center started in the 1850s with modest means then developed and expanded, like everything in Chicago, at a very fast rate, until it became a huge self-contained town on thirty acres, occupying more than a hundred buildings that constitute the medical school, pharmacology school, school of dentistry, nursing, library branches, and the administration. In addition there are movie theaters, theaters, athletic facilities, giant stores, and a free local transit system working around the clock.

The University of Illinois Medical School is one of the largest in the world and has one of the oldest histology departments, housed in a modern five-story building surrounded by a large garden, in the middle of which is a bronze bust of a man in his fifties who seems to stare into space with big, tired, dreamy eyes. On the pedestal the following words are inscribed in large letters: “The great Italian scientist, Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), founder of histology. He started it and we are here to finish the job.” This fighting tone epitomizes the spirit of the department. As soon as you enter through the glass door, you feel you’ve left the world with its preoccupations and noise and found yourself in the sanctum of science. The place is very quiet with soft, light music coming from the internal public address system. The lighting is uniform, designed to be comfortable for the eyes, not distracting and not tied to time outside. Dozens of scientists and students are in constant motion.

The word histology has its origins in a Latin word meaning “the science of tissues,” the science that uses the microscope to study living tissues. It constitutes the basis for medicine because discovering a cure for any disease always starts with the study of the normal, healthy tissues. Despite histology’s extreme importance, it is neither popular nor lucrative. A histologist is most likely a physician who chooses to forgo specializations that bring fortune and glory (like surgery or gynecology) to spend his life in a cold, closed lab, bent over a microscope for long hours, his utmost hope to discover an unknown element of a microscopic cell about which no one will ever hear. Histologists are unknown soldiers who sacrifice fame and fortune for science and, with time, acquire the characteristics of craftsmen (like carpenters, sculptors, and palm leaf weavers): a comfortable, staid sitting style, heft in the lower body, few words, the power of observation, and a scrutinizing gaze. They are also distinguished by patience, calm, clarity of thinking, and a great ability to concentrate and reflect. The department is comprised of five professors ranging in age from fifty to seventy. Each of them attained his post after years of constant, arduous work. Their days are very tight and their calendars busy for weeks, and because they have so much research to do, they have to spend all their time in the lab. Other than on weekends, they rarely have the chance to talk. In the weekly departmental meetings they usually make their decisions quickly to save time. Hence what happened last Tuesday is considered out of the ordinary.

The departmental meeting came to order and the professors sat in their usual seats: Dr. Bill Friedman, the chairman, at the head of the table with his mostly bald head, white complexion, and meek features that make him look more like an honest, hardworking paterfamilias. To his right sat the two Egyptian-American professors, Ra’fat Thabit and Muhammad Salah, then the statistics professor John Graham, with his heavy build, light white beard, gray, always disheveled hair, and small round glasses behind which gleam intelligent, skeptical eyes. He has a faint, sarcastic smile and a long pipe that never leaves his mouth, even though it was not lit because smoking was not permitted at the meeting. Graham bears a considerable resemblance to the American writer Ernest Hemingway, which always elicits humorous comments from his colleagues. On the other side of the table sat George Roberts, whom they call “the Yankee” because everything about him is stereotypically American: blue eyes, shoulder-length blond hair, casual attire, a broad, strong, athletic body, and sculpted muscles indicating strict regular exercise, a habit of putting his feet up on the table in the face of people he is talking to, licking his fingers while eating, and a soda can always in his hand, from which he takes a small sip then shrugs his shoulders and speaks in a twang harking back to Texas, where he grew up before coming to Chicago. There remained the oldest and most prolific professor, Dennis Baker, silent, wearing simple, clean clothes that are always slightly wrinkled, perhaps because he couldn’t find the time to iron them properly. He is tall, and his old body is taut and firm. He is completely bald, his big eyes sometimes radiating with a piercing glance, gleaming so much as to display a mysterious authority. Dennis Baker’s colleagues tease him by saying that he uses speech just like a driver uses a car horn: only when absolutely