Escape From Paradise. Majid MD Amini

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.