2.19.6
Dawn had hardly broken before he was on his donkey and making his way to one of his friends. When he met with him, he told him, “I have a request to make of you.” “Ask away,” said the other. “On condition that you don’t refuse me,” he said. When the other replied, “I shall devote all my effort, God willing, to fulfilling it,” he took his hand to seal their agreement. Then he told him, “I want you to succeed me with regard to my wife.” “Have you decided to quit Egypt and leave your wife behind?” the man asked him. “No,” he said. “You’ll succeed me while I’m still here.” Offended, the man asked, “Has some doubt got into you as to whether I am truly your friend, making you seek covertly to uncover my innermost thoughts and private affairs?” At this, the man made a clean breast of the matter and urged him to go with him. When they arrived, the deal was contracted in the presence of both husband and wife, and everyone was content, the man calling in daily from that time on at “the caliphal palace.”661
2.19.7
Things went on this way for a while. Then, when the wife grew bored with the man, the way women do — a situation made apparent to him through her showing a lack of enthusiasm at the sight of him on one occasion and making of excuses on another — he in turn divulged her secret to a friend, the way men do. The latter followed the well-beaten path of others of his ilk, started playing court to her, and took the place of the first. Then she grew bored with him, and he told on her, and another came along, and she accepted him, and then another and another, until they’d become a mighty company. At this, her first lovers returned to her too, and she busied herself changing and exchanging until the doctor’s house came to resemble nothing so much as a watering hole. In the beginning, the affair acquired no notoriety with the neighbors because they thought that all those people were coming to be treated for some illness. Later, however, it got out, because the doctor took a second home outside the country in which to spend the summer and left his wife in the first, where the visitors continued to come and go just as before, so people caught on.
2.19.8
Now, at the very time when all these good folk had been turning up to avail themselves of that cold feast, the poor Fāriyāq had been frequenting the doctor’s house to give his son lessons and receive treatment, and, as a result, everyone suspected that he was one of those visitors, a sin they will carry round their necks till the Day of Judgment,662 for he was hors de combat and wasn’t up to doing anything anyway.663 He went on like that for a while without seeing any improvement from the treatment, as though the doctor wanted to drag out the time till he’d finished teaching his son. Consequently, the Fāriyāq cut short his visits, sought treatment with another, and was cured.
2.19.9
While this was going on, he traveled to Alexandria on some business and there met with a righteous Bag-man, who asked him to go back to Cairo with him to teach some pupils in his house, and this he did, though he was interested only because the Bag-men are prompt in paying those who work for them. During this period too, it occurred to him to study prosody, so he embarked on a reading of Sharḥ al-Kāfī (The Commentary on the Kāfī)664 under Shaykh Muḥammad. He barely had time to finish the book before plague broke out in Cairo. At this the Lord caused the Bag-man to feel extreme concern for his own life — out of a desire to ensure the preservation of the Bag-men’s interests, as he claimed — and he decided, as a result, to put a little distance between him and the trap that had been dug so he wouldn’t find himself buried inside it, thus resulting in a loss that would have inflicted on other Bag-men like him intolerable grief, which would in turn have led to the loss of yet others, for they hold it as a firm belief that extreme sorrow leads to death. He therefore put the Fāriyāq with the graduate Baguettes plus a clever man who had experience in preventive treatment of the bubonic infection, and then gathered to him his own and fled to Upper Egypt, details to follow in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 20: MIRACLES AND SUPERNATURAL ACTS
2.20.1
The aforementioned Bag-man had living with him a fresh-faced, comely serving girl from his own country. When he resolved to flee, he decided to leave her in his house to look after his things, refusing to take her with him because he was married to a woman less beautiful than she, it being the custom in the lands of the Franks for maids to be, for the most part, superior to their mistresses in form and beauty, though inferior in knowledge and education. It therefore occurred to the wife that, should she fall into the trap before he did, her husband might take the little maid into his bed and find her more to his liking. She recalled too that the first thing a girl learns from her mother before she gets married is how to prevent anything that might lead her husband to do without her, in her presence or in her absence, which is why most Frankish women give their husbands their pictures, even if they be ugly, to wear inside their shirts, or locks of their hair, even if it be red, to wear in a ring.
2.20.2
Then another issue arose, to wit, that if the maid stayed on in the house alone, she would be exposed to the danger of someone climbing the wall to get at her by night, in which case the unthinkable would come to pass, and the once cold oven be heated, broken would be the bone that once was set and turned again the tide that had retreated, the well once dug would be choked with silt, and what had been stored would be depleted, the fallow would be turned, the spells that had protected deleted, the seam that had been sewn would be unpicked, the pinhead stand erect, the pipe once narrow be rebored, the grain spilt from the silo where it once was stored, the swift, headstrong she-camel be broken to the rein, the golden table cleft in twain, the cairn o’erthrown, the trumpet blown, and, as a result, the hornet’s stinger torn. He therefore saw fit, after first raising his hands to the Almighty in prayerful invocation, to add to her as reinforcement a thin little chit of a man of his country, in the belief that he’d be incapable of performing any of the acts that have drawn in their wake the preceding plethora of rhymes. This is one of a number of scandalous misconceptions that have become widespread, namely that people generally think, without first checking with women or taking their testimony into account, that the thin man isn’t up to what the fat man can do; they’d be well advised not to be so opinionated.
2.20.3
The thin man thus stayed with the maid in the utmost felicity. As for the Baguettes, the one who’d bagged them up (i.e., the one who’d raised them) entrusted their care to that clever man and instructed him to forbid them to leave the house and not to let any of their relatives enter to see them and to employ a man to buy them what they needed from the outside and to accept nothing from him until he had washed it in vinegar, censed it with wormwood, and done the other things that Franks conventionally do to keep away whatever may bring the plague. This agent was a famous scholar of his nation who had, at the beginning of his life, been an infidel, without belief in any religion, despite which he was of noble character and excellent morals. His unbelief, however, had stood in the way of his making a living, and he’d been forced to join sides with the Bag-men of his country, who, delighted at his having found his Saviour, bestowed upon him every favor. His lighthearted spirit now turned somber and became prey to devilish insinuations and delusions to the point that, in the end, he believed himself capable of performing extraordinary acts and miracles, for a chance to practice which he was always on the lookout.