The horse was delivered to the Cadi, and Bou Akas and the cripple retired.
The next day, not only the parties immediately interested but also a great number of the curious were present in Court.
The Cadi followed the order of precedence observed the first day. The taleb and the peasant were summoned.
“Here,” said the Cadi to the taleb, “here is your wife; take her away, she is really yours.” Then turning toward his chiaous, and pointing out the peasant, he said, “Give that man fifty strokes on the soles of his feet.”
The Sheik’s case was now called, and Bou Akas and the cripple approached.
“Could you recognize your horse among twenty horses?” inquired the Judge of Bou Akas.
“Yes, my lord judge,” replied Bou Akas and the cripple with one accord.
“Then come with me,” said the Judge to Bou Akas, and they went out.
Bou Akas recognized his horse among twenty horses.
“Very well,” said the Judge. “Go and wait in Court, and send me your adversary.”
Bou Akas returned to the court, and awaited the Cadi’s return.
The cripple went to the stable as quickly as his bad legs would allow him. As his eyes were good, he went straight up to the horse and pointed it out.
“Very well,” said the Judge. “Rejoin me in Court.”
The Cadi resumed his seat on his mat and everyone waited impatiently for the cripple, who in the course of five minutes returned out of breath.
“The horse is yours,” said the Cadi to Bou Akas. “Go take it from the stable.” Then addressing his chiaous and pointing out the cripple he said, “Give that man fifty strokes of the bastinado on the back.”
On returning home the Cadi found Bou Akas waiting for him.
“Are you dissatisfied?” he inquired.
“No, the very reverse,” answered the Sheik, “but I wished to see you, to ask by what inspiration you render justice, for I doubt not that your other decision was a correct as the one in my case.”
“It is very simple, my lord,” said the Judge. “You observed that I kept for one night the woman and the horse. At midnight I had the woman awakened and brought to me, and I said to her, ‘Replenish my inkstand.’ Then she, like a woman who had performed the same office a hundred times in her life, took my inkglass, washed it, replaced it in the stand, and poured fresh ink into it. I said to myself immediately, ‘If you were the wife of the peasant you would not know how to clean an inkstand; therefore you are the taleb’s wife.’ ”
“Be it so,” said Bou Akas. “So much for the woman, but what about my horse?”
“Ah, that is another thing, and until this morning I was puzzled.”
“Then the cripple was not able to recognize the horse?” suggested Bou Akas.
“Oh, yes, indeed, he recognized it.”
“Well?”
“By conducting each of you in turn to the stable I did not wish to ascertain which one would recognize the horse, but which one the horse would recognize! Now, when you approached the horse it neighed; when the cripple approached the horse it kicked. Then I said to myself, ‘The horse belongs to him who has the good legs, and not to the cripple.’ And I delivered it to you.”
Bou Akas pondered for a moment, and then said, “The Lord is with you; it is you who should be in my place. I am sure, at least, that you are worthy to be Sheik, but I am not so sure that I am fit to be Cadi.”
92
A Cool Swim on a Hot Day
Fletcher Flora
Suddenly awake, he opened his eyes in a glare of morning sun. The glare was blinding and painful, and so he closed his eyes again quickly and lay without moving in the soft shadows behind his lids. He could hear a clock ticking in the room. He could hear a cardinal singing in the white light outside. Something seemed to be scratching at his brain. The remembrance of something.
And then he remembered. He remembered the night and the night’s shame. The focus of the night was Ellen’s face. The sound of the night was Ellen’s voice. The face was cold and scornful, remote and strange. The clear and precise articulation of the voice was more appropriate to proud defiance than to a confession. Lying and remembering, fixed in despair, he held to the slender hope that he remembered a dream.
After a few minutes, needing to know, he got up and walked across the room and into a bathroom and through the bathroom into a room beyond. Ellen was lying on her bed in a gold sheath. He had put her there himself, he remembered, after shooting her. Ankles neatly together and one hand folded upon the other below her breasts. The hands covered with a definitive gesture of modesty, as if it were something intimate or obscene, the small hole through which her life had slipped out and away between her fingers. He had removed her shoes.
So it was not a dream. He had killed her indeed in the shameful night, and there on the floor where he had dropped it was the gun he had killed her with. He looked at the gun and back at her. Oh, golden wanton. Oh, sweet and tender harlot wife. Having killed her, having laid her out neatly on a quilted satin cover, he had gone to sleep in his clothes in his own room. But this was an oversimplication and therefore a distortion. He had not merely gone to sleep. He had withdrawn, rather, into a deep and comforting darkness in which, if nothing was solved or made better, everything was at least suspended and grew no worse. He had slept soundly.
Now, of course, he was awake and faced with the necessity of doing something, and what he must do was perfectly apparent. The loaded gun was there, and he was there, and he had now, since last night, not only the negative motivation of not wanting particularly to live, but also the positive one of wanting and needing to die. But there was no urgency in it. He felt a kind of indolence in his bones, a remarkable lassitude. Walking over to the gun on the floor, he bent and picked it up and put it in a side pocket of his jacket, in which he had slept. He stood quietly, with an air of abstraction, watching Ellen on the bed. In his heart was a movement of pain which he fancied for a moment that he could hear faintly, like the dry rustle of cicada wings. Turning away, the gun in his pocket, he went out of the room and out of the house and began walking down the street in a tunnel of shade that breached the bright day.
He had no destination. He did not even have a particular purpose in leaving the house, except that he was not quite ready to die and felt compelled to do something, almost anything, until he was. He had a vague notion that he might walk into the country and kill himself there in some quiet spot, or perhaps, after a while, he might return to the house and kill himself in the room with Ellen, so that they might later be found together. This was an enormous problem, where finally to kill himself, and at the moment he felt in no way capable of coping with it. His mind was sluggish, still fixed in the gray despair to which he had wakened, and now, besides, his head was beginning to throb like a giant pulse, measuring the cadence of his heart.
It was a very hot day. A bright, white, hot day. Heat shimmered on the surface of the street in an illusion of water. The sun was approaching the meridian in the luminous sky. The shimmering heat had somehow entered his skull, and all at once he was very faint, hovering precariously on the verge of consciousness while the gaseous world shifted and wavered and threatened to fade away. He had left the tunnel of shade and was now hatless in white light, the sun beating down directly upon his head.
Still walking, he pressed a hand across his eyes, recovering in darkness, and when he removed his hand at last, looking down at his feet, he was filled with wonder to see that his feet were bare. On the tip of the big toe of the left foot was a small plastic bandage, signifying that the toe had been lately stubbed. The bare feet were making their way on a gray dirt road. The dirt was hot and dry and powdery, rising in little puffs of dust at every step and forming a kind of thin, gray scum on faded blue denim.