Karam Doss remained silent, finished the sterilization carefully, and turned toward Jack with his hands raised and his frowning face flushed with anger, looking more like a wise Coptic priest about to dumbfound the wicked with the truth, and said calmly, “Listen, son, I’ve worked very hard for thirty years so that I can have the right to listen to whatever I like in the operating room.”
He advanced a few steps in a manner fraught with meaning, then pushed the door leading to the operating room with his foot and said before disappearing behind it, “You can find a place in another surgery team if you like.”
THERE IS NOTHING IN KARAM Doss’s life except surgery; it is his job and his great pleasure at the same time. Very simply, he is a workaholic. He has a few friends that he rarely has the time to see. His only pleasure, next to surgery, is a few glasses of whiskey and a good book. He is over sixty and is still unmarried because he doesn’t have the time for all that.
He told his students (when they complained about working long hours) his story about the beautiful Italian woman he met twenty years earlier. They had gone out more than once and they had a good relationship, but it so happened that whenever he was about to sleep with her, he would be called for an emergency. Then there was that one night when things were proceeding as well as could be hoped for: he went with her to her apartment, where they had dinner, had a few drinks, took off their clothes, and actually started to make love. Suddenly his pager emitted that abominable buzz. Karam jumped up, getting off her, then started putting on his clothes in no particular order and began to apologize to her, using moving language about it being his duty to save the life of a person who needed him right away. But he was surprised that she hurled a whole dictionary of Italian insults at him and his parents. Then she got so angry that she started chasing him like a furious, ferocious tigress, which made him run for his life as she threw everything in the room she could lay hands on at him. Dr. Karam would laugh heartily whenever he related the story, but his face would turn serious again as he advised young surgeons, “If you fall in love with surgery, you won’t be able to love anything else.”
Karam Doss’s life, however, despite his loneliness, was not without exciting events, the strangest of which had happened a few years earlier. One evening, as he was about to leave his office after a hard day, he heard the fax machine turn on. He extended his hand to close the office door, intending to read the fax in the morning, but he changed his mind, turned on the light, and took the sheet from the fax machine and read the following:
From:
The office of the minister of higher education in Egypt
To:
Professor Karam Doss, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
Re:
We have a sick university professor who is in urgent need of an operation to change several arteries. Please indicate whether you can take him at the earliest opportunity. Please respond promptly so we can take necessary measures.
Name of patient:
Dr. Abd al-Fatah Balbaa
Karam stared at the fax for about a minute then put it in his pocket and left. He drove home, exerting great effort to stay focused. On the balcony overlooking his large garden he poured himself a drink, then opened the fax and reread it slowly. What was happening? What an extraordinary coincidence! It was as if he were watching an Egyptian soap opera. Dr. Abd al-Fatah Balbaa himself had succumbed to heart disease and was asking him in particular to save his life? He smiled sarcastically and little by little found himself laughing out loud. Then he started thinking again: Who said that was a coincidence? The Lord didn’t do things by chance. What was happening was quite fair and logical. Was he not wronged? Was he not persecuted? Didn’t he feel he had no worth and no dignity? Didn’t he cry and kneel before Jesus, the savior? The Lord was now righting the wrong. The man who one day told him he couldn’t be a surgeon, the one who ruined his future in Egypt and doomed him to a life of total exile, was now sick and begging him to save his life. He thought: Well, Mr. Balbaa, if you want me to perform the surgery, first we have to settle our old score. How many times do you have to apologize? A hundred times? A thousand times? What good will that do now? When he finished his third glass he had made up his mind. He was not going to perform the operation on Balbaa. Let him find another surgeon. Let him die. We all are going to in the end. He was going to decline the operation and his response should be cold and extremely overbearing. He formulated this reply:
Professor Karam Doss cannot perform the operation on patient Balbaa because his schedule is overbooked with urgent cases for months and he has no room for a new patient.
He started typing the letter on the computer but suddenly got up, as if he had remembered something. He stood reluctantly in the middle of the room, and then walked over slowly toward the cross. He knelt down and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in sincere humility. He whispered in a trembling voice, “O, Father, not my will, but thine. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.”
He remained kneeling, his eyes closed for some time, then he got up and opened his eyes, as if he had awakened from sleep. He sat in front of the computer and found himself
