“I could have died! It was my case. How could I have dropped it? When? Where? As luck would have it, the case turned out to have slipped from my hand just as the young man happened by; he picked it up and … but I’ve already told you that part, what more is there to say? I climbed out of the cab, shook his hand, and said, ‘I don’t know how to thank you. May God give you health and happiness. Thank you, thank you ever so much!’
“ ‘Don’t mention it,’ he says to me.
“ ‘How can I not mention it?’ I say. ‘You’ve saved my life. You’ve done such a good deed that no reward in the whole world would be big enough. Just tell me what I owe you. Speak up, don’t be shy.’
“ ‘But if it’s really the good deed you say it is,’ he says, seeing me reach into my pocket, ‘why should I sell the rights to it for money?’
“Well, when I heard that, I took that young man and actually gave him a kiss. ‘God Himself will reward you for what you’ve done,’ I said. ‘Please come with me now, though, and at least let me treat you to a glass of wine and some food.’
“ ‘A glass of wine,’ he said, ‘I’ll have with pleasure. Why not?’
“And so we both climbed into the cab and I told the driver to forget about the station and take us to a good restaurant instead. When we got there I asked for a private booth for two, ordered a fine meal from the waiter, and began to chat with my companion. Not only had he saved my life, he was, I now saw, an extremely likable young man with an attractive face and deep, dark, earnest eyes — in short, a peach of a fellow. And bashful to beat the band! I kept having to tell him not to be embarrassed to ask for whatever he craved without worrying about the cost. And whatever he ordered, of course, I asked the waiter to bring twice as much of. We ate and drank like kings. Not, God forbid, that we were drunk. That isn’t like a Jew. But when I was feeling just a little balmy I said to him, ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done for me? I’m not even talking about the cash value of what you found, although we should both only be worth what I owe for it. My life belongs first to God and then to my creditors. And you’ve saved not only it but my honor as well, because if I had come home without this case, my creditors would have thought it was just a diamond dealer’s trick. (Pocketing the goods and crying “thief” is something we dealers have a name for!) The one thing left for me to do would have been to buy a rope and hang myself from the nearest tree. To your health!’ I said. ‘God grant your every wish! Be well, and let me give you one more kiss, because I really have to be off.’ And, saying goodbye to the young fellow, I paid the bill and reached for my case—what case? What young fellow? There wasn’t a sign of either.
“At that point I fainted dead away.
“As soon as I was revived, I promptly lost consciousness again. It was only when I came to a second time that I began to scream so loud that the whole Yehupetz police force came running. I promised them a fat reward and they took me with them to every thieves’ den in town, to every underworld rathole — but my young man was nowhere to be found. By now I was thoroughly exhausted and at the end of my tether. I went back to my lodgings, lay down on the bed there, and wondered how to take my life. By hanging? With a knife? Or by throwing myself in the Dnieper? As I was trying to decide, there was a knock on the door. Who is it? It was someone come to take me to the police station. My fine feathered friend had been caught — and with the goods still on him!
“Is there any need to tell you how I felt when I saw my case with all the diamonds in it? Before I knew it, I had blacked out once more. (That’s something I have a way of doing.) When I came around this time, I went over to the young man and said to him, ‘I simply don’t understand it. Please, explain it to me before I go crazy: where’s the logic in first running after me with my case and refusing to take even a cent for it, and then, the minute my back is turned, walking off with it again? Why, my whole life was in it, it was everything I had in the world! You almost ruined me. I was a hair’s breadth away from putting an end to it all!’
“He looked at me, that young man did, with those earnest brown eyes of his and said as calmly as you please, ‘What does one thing have to do with the other? A good deed is a good deed, but stealing is my profession.’
“ ‘Young man,’ I said to him, just exactly who are you?”
“ ‘Who am I?’ he said. ‘I’m a Jewish thief with a house full of children and the worst luck you ever saw. Not that I’ve chosen a hard line of work — I’m just a total bungler. Don’t think I’m complaining. Stealing, thank God, is no problem. The problem is getting caught. That’s where I never have luck.’
“Only when I was already on the train did it occur to me what an ass I had been. For a pittance I could have bought that thief his freedom. Why should I have been his Waterloo? Let someone else have it on his hands …
“Could I interest you in some reasonably priced diamond earrings? Here, let me show them to you. Stones like these you’ve never even seen in a dream — they’re something extra-special, let me tell you …”
(1910)
FATED FOR MISFORTUNE
Taking his time as if weighing each word, a cultivated, rather worried-looking Jew with a broad, pale, wrinkled forehead, a good black Sabbath frock coat, and a hat with a wide silk ribbon around it told the following story about himself:
“If you’re fated for misfortune, there’s no place you can run to. You can try eighteen different ways to escape it — none of them will do any good. Take me, for example: I’m a quiet, peaceable Jew who minds his own business, never makes a fuss, and hates being in the public eye. I’ll do anything to avoid being made president of the synagogue, or the godfather at a circumcision, or the guest of honor at a wedding, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …
“Well, just listen to what happened anyway. One day a Jew died in our town. We called him ‘Menashe-Goy,’ because he was, God forgive me, a simple soul. He couldn’t read or write, he didn’t know a Hebrew letter from the sign of the Cross, he was barely able to recite a few prayers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …
“In short, he was a real Simple Simon, but a decent fellow and honest to the core; his word of honor was sacred to him, and the next man’s money — sacrosanct. Was he ever stingy with his own, though! He would rather have given up his eyeteeth than a penny. He spent his whole life accumulating more and more, and he was still going strong when suddenly he upped and died. Well, dead is dead — and since that’s what Menashe now was, I was approached with the suggestion that, as he had left behind no small amount of money, plus some outstanding loans, plus some other assets, plus some property, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and as there was no one to manage it all — she, his widow, being only a woman and his children being too small (there were five of them, four boys and a girl) — I should agree to be their fiduciary, that is, their guardian. Of course, I wouldn’t hear of it. Their fi-who-ciary? What did I need it for?… But that only made them pester me more. ‘How,’ I was asked, ‘can you possibly refuse when you’re the only one in town who can be trusted,’ etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. ‘Don’t you realize what a crime it is to let such wealth go unmanaged? What will the poor children, the four little boys and the girl, have left when they grow up? What are you so afraid of? Be the fi-who-ciary, and let the widow, their mother, be the fi-who-ciary-ess!’ I did my best to beg off: what did they want from my life? What kind of fi-who-ciary would I make when I didn’t even know how to spell it? That just added fuel to the fire, though. How could I, and what kind of person was I, and where was my sense of duty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …