One day I felt I was falling ill – my head was heavy, my legs ached, and I had chills. “You have a bad cold,” the doctor said, after feeling my pulse. “Lie down on the floor.” I lay down on my stomach on the rug. He sat down next to me and… I can hardly describe what I felt when Mukhitdin massaged me. He began with my lower back. His fingers, obviously tender (a doctor-pulsologist takes good care of his fingers), first gave me the feeling of warmth. Then more and more energy began to stream into my body. But as the healer moved his fingers to my spine, those tender fingers turned to iron. They moved down my spine. Each vertebra, each nerve could feel them. It was impossible to tolerate – I wriggled and bellowed like a young bull. Mukhitdin chuckled, “Put up with it, put up with it. You’ll feel better soon.” Then a new torture began. After putting my left arm on my back, the tabib propped my shoulder up with his knee from below. My shoulder blade opened slightly like the valve of a mollusk. That was where, under my left shoulder blade, the doctor stuck his fingers. More pain, a massage performed inside there. After doing that, the doctor’s fingers went to my right shoulder blade. “Pleura… thorax… blood circulation…” the tabib mumbled, giving me brief explanations of his manipulations. “Well, do you still have chills?” Not at all! I felt healthy. I felt warm blood running through my arteries. I enjoyed the peace, but at that moment the tabib interrupted my pleasure, grabbed me by the skin in the middle of my forehead with his fingers and began to pull it until a crunching sound was heard. After all those procedures, it seemed quite bearable to be rubbed from head to foot with melted sheep’s fat overnight. After perspiring profusely overnight, I woke up in the morning as if born anew. Judging by the familiar symptoms, I would have stayed in bed with a cold for a week.
It’s needless to explain that Yura and I were absorbed in the mysterious world of non-traditional medicine while helping the doctor and attending his sessions with patients. We were more and more convinced of its broad opportunities, which were for some reason brushed aside by contemporary diagnosticians who worked with the help of machines and chemical substances.
Taking advantage of the doctor’s every free minute, we asked him numerous questions. I added a bookcase to our dining room, which also served as the living room and the library, and filled it with medical literature, beginning with ancient authors, such as Hippocrates and obviously Ibn Sina. The tabib taught us there, referring to one book or another. We naturally understood that those brief lessons would not turn us into physicians, but our desire to become physicians grew with each passing day. And we were happy as we began to understand certain things.
The doctor usually brought dried herbs from Namangan. He had chosen them at random for he didn’t know which of them he would need. It happened that he didn’t have the required ones. One time, the doctor brought the most essential herbs. “We’ll buy the rest of them here,” he said. Chinese traditional medicine is also called Eastern. Many people confuse it with Ibn Sina’s medicine, though herbal healing and the similarity of general notions are something that ties them together.
One day, Yura and I went to buy herbs at Chinatown pharmacies.
New York as is known is a multi-cultural city. Each ethnic group, like a swarm of bees, lives in its “beehive.” There is African-American Harlem, Little Italy, Hispanic Corona, Indian Jackson Heights, a few Chinatowns – in Manhattan and other boroughs of New York. There are also Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean neighborhoods. Russian-speaking Little Odessa came into being in Brighton Beach. My countrymen, the Bukhara Jews, were densely settled on many streets in Queens. In my opinion, Manhattan's Chinatown remains the most colorful, not losing its ethnic appearance in this motley community. There are thousands of small stores and shops with red and gold signs, houses with curved roofs, pedestrians with high cheekbones and slanted eyes everywhere. You don’t often hear English spoken here and not everyone understands it… That brings to mind a joke – an old woman from Russia who lived in Brighton Beach is indignant as she visits a store. “We’ve been here for six years, but they still don’t speak Russian!” The Chinese in Chinatown feel at home without “us” and “them.”
As we expected difficulties in communication in Chinatown, we brought along a botanical dictionary, but little good came of it. As we pointed to the name of an herb, a pharmacist answered us something, or was he asking us something? We didn’t know which. Next time we brought the doctor along. He, like me, didn’t know Chinese, nor did he speak English, but that didn’t impede him. The pharmacist put samples of dry and ground herbs and seeds on the counter. Mukhitdin knew almost all of them, and if any of them were unfamiliar, he sniffed and even tasted them.
American drug stores sell all sorts of goods, including medicines. There are real pharmacies in Chinatown. We liked one of them in particular where the science of Eastern medicine reigned. Herbs, seeds, and fruits were arranged in hundreds of cedar boxes with stickers on the shelves. Pharmacists in white overalls understood us immediately; they knew English well.
By the way, an interesting incident happened in that pharmacy. While Yura and I packed the herbs into bags, the doctor watched the pharmacist who was mixing herbs according to a prescription. The prescription was naturally written in Chinese characters. “Judging by your friend’s attention to what I’m doing, he has a good understanding of herbs,” the pharmacist noted. We translated it to Mukhitdin. He chuckled and said that the pharmacist was putting together a combination of herbs for an asthma patient with a cold.
“Your friend must be a physician! Pulse diagnostics!” the pharmacist exclaimed. And he complained, looking at the tabib, “I have a mysterious pain in my side.” We translated. Mukhitdin nodded and took the pharmacist’s wrist. After feeling his pulse for a few moments, aided by gestures, he began to explain to us in Russian the reason for the pain. I don’t remember his explanation, but obviously, after we translated it into English, the diagnosis seemed so convincing to the pharmacist that he ran to bring the owner of the pharmacy to introduce the tabib to him, and they both tried to persuade Mukhitdin to work at the pharmacy as a doctor’s assistant… Strange people!
The basement of my house was stuffed with herbs by the time of the tabib’s departure. Yura and I had to turn this storage place into a pharmacy – to put all the herbs in cans, attach stickers, writing not only the names of the herbs but also their qualities. That was a hard job. The difficulty began with the names of the herbs. Not all the herbs had Latin names. Some of the herbs brought by Mukhitdin only have Uzbek names, such as kupeishak, devnechak, tomirdori… Some have folk names. For example, Adonis is called either goritsvet, starodubka, or chernogorka in different parts of Russia. And it’s called baichechek in Asia. Senna leaves are also called Alexandrian leaf or pointed-leaf cassia… We had to record all the names.
The tabib asked us to write down the qualities of all the herbs according to "The Canon" of Ibn Sina and in light of contemporary notions. Out of ignorance, I first thought that it wouldn’t be difficult. I had a copy of "The Canon." I would buy the encyclopedia of curative herbs, and I would do it. I got depressed after opening a few encyclopedias, for I didn’t find many of the plants, fruits and seeds from our pharmacy in their pages. I rushed to Mukhitdin to find out what was wrong. It turned out that plants used in folk healing that hadn’t undergone clinical tests were not considered curative officially and had not been included in the list of 300,000 plants that had Latin names. So, it was Mukhitdin, our walking encyclopedia, who told me about the qualities of those herbs.