addressing no one in particular and shaking her head.
“Let's go then!” Akbar ordered.
“Give us a break. ... Can’t we sit for a few more minutes?” Fatemeh begged without trying to conceal or suppress her own discouragement. “How about thing, that voting business again?” she asked Javad. But the response from Javad was only, “Not this time. I'm afraid he's right. We have to move on. The second guide is waiting for us out there.”
“We'll wait for you guys up on the pass,” Akbar said with a spirit of compromise.
“This man is bleeding! The poor man is in pain. He needs help,” Fatemeh said, pointing at the man with the gauze wrapped around his head that had withdrawn from the group. A line of blood ran down the side of his face from under the gauze. Javad rose, walked to him, touched his head and said, “Let me open the bandage and see, Dr. Omid.” The wounded man was startled hearing someone address him as doctor.
“You know each other?” Fatemeh asked.
“I know Dr. Hassan Omid. I don't think he knows me. After all, he was our ambassador to several countries.” Javad spoke in a queer flat tone but with the absence of any malice. Without waiting for the wounded man's permission, he gently untied the knot and unrolled the blood-soaked gauze. “My God, your ear is missing!” Javad said with horror that also registered on his face. Fatemeh looked with disgust at Dr. Omid's wound. She turned her face away immediately.
“What happened to you?” Javad asked inquisitively.
“Three men broke into my room last night. They robbed me and cut off my ear,” Dr. Omid moaned, without going into more detail.
“My God, what terrible things we do to each other these days!” Rayan said, trying to help. Rasol rushed to his backpack and took out a box, opened it, brought out a bottle and a roll of unused fresh gauze. “Let's wash the wound first,” he volunteered.
“Are you a doctor?” Javad questioned him politely.
“No, but I had some training in taking care of wounds.”
The signs of infection on the side of the man’s head, where his ear was supposed to be, made the wound repulsively hard to look at. Patiently, Rasol washed the wound carefully, brought out a tube of antibiotic cream, gently rubbed it on the wound, bandaged it again, and wrapped the man’s head with fresh gauze. He then gave him two small bottles of pills and said, “Take two of these pills when you feel pain and two a day of the other ones for your infection.”
“I've been taking some pills, thank you.”
“Most probably those are for pain. These two are for the infection.”
“Thank you,” Omid said.
Hassan Omid was feeling better about the fact that no one embarrassed him further by questioning him about his injury. But the anguish caused by the certainty that everyone knew him and that the ghosts of his past would most certainly follow him to his grave, compounded his physical pain. There was something quite strange, rather ambiguous about the feeling that suddenly came over him. It was the first time he seriously questioned his own identity. He was almost certain that he wasn’t Dr. Hassan Omid and no longer even wanted to be identified with such a name. The fictitious title of doctorate that was surely an enormous asset in the past, which had aided him and helped him in achieving his goals, now sounded hollow – excessive hard-to-carry baggage, a liability and no longer useful.
“How do you expect this man to walk with his open wound? Fatemeh asked Akbar, pointing at Dr. Omid’s head.
“Fatemeh is absolutely right. ... He will bleed again,” Rayan said firmly.
“We must wait here for a while,” Javad said authoritatively.
“The man will bleed to death, and you will be responsible for it,” Fatemeh told Akbar.
“All right. We take a break,” Akbar gave in.
With his eyes closed, Dr. Omid began to take a tour of his past.
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