At the side, keeping an eye on the order, stood Istanbul’s guardian of peace and piety – the head of the guard, who differed from his Bukharian colleague Arslanbek only by even greater ferocity and by his extreme thinness. The inhabitants of Istanbul had long ago noticed that these two qualities seemed to reinforce each other, and they would anxiously question the palace bath attendants every week about the state of the chief’s venerable frame – if the news were grim, then all the people living near the palace would hide in their homes and not leave them unless absolutely necessary until the next bathing day. And so, this terror-inducing chief was standing to the side; his head, adorned by a turban, was sticking on his thin and long neck as if impaled on a post (many inhabitants of Istanbul would have sighed wistfully upon hearing such a comparison).
Everything was going very well, and nothing clouded the celebration or foretold any trouble. No one noticed the palace overseer, who had slipped in between the courtiers in a deft and familiar manner, approached the head of the guard, and whispered something to him. The head of the guard shuddered, his face changed, and he left hurriedly with the overseer. A minute later he returned, pale and with his lips trembling. Pushing aside the courtiers, he approached the sultan and doubled over before him in a bow.
“O great sovereign!”
“What more is there?” the sultan asked in displeasure. “Can you not keep your news about canings and dungeons to yourself even on such a pleasant day? Speak quickly!”
“O great and luminous sultan, my tongue refuses…”
The sultan grew alarmed and moved his eyebrows together. The head of the guard finished in a whisper:
“He is in Istanbul!”
“Who?” the sultan asked in a hollow voice, even though he understood right away.
“Hodja Nasreddin!”
The head of the guard pronounced the name quietly, but the courtiers had sensitive ears, and the whole garden began to rustle:
“Hodja Nasreddin! He is in Istanbul! Hodja Nasreddin is in Istanbul!”
“How do you know this?” the sultan asked. His voice was hoarse. “Who told you? How can this be, when we have in our possession a letter from the emir of Bukhara, wherein he gives us his regal word that Hodja Nasreddin is no longer alive?”
The head of the guard motioned to the palace overseer, and the latter brought in a man with a flat nose and troubled yellow eyes on a pockmarked face.
“O sovereign!” the head of the guard explained. “This man has served in the palace of the emir of Bukhara for a long time and knows Hodja Nasreddin very well. Later, he moved to Istanbul, and I hired him as a spy, which is his present occupation.”
“You saw him?” the sultan interrupted, addressing the spy. “You saw him with your own eyes?” The spy replied in the affirmative.
“But perhaps you were mistaken?”
The spy replied in the negative. He could not have been mistaken. And there was a woman riding next to Hodja Nasreddin on a white donkey.
“Why did you not seize him at once?” the sultan exclaimed. “Why did you not hand him off to the guards?”
“O luminous ruler!” the spy replied and fell to his knees, shaking. “In Bukhara, I once fell into Hodja Nasreddin’s hands, and, were it not for the grace of Allah, I would not have escaped alive. And when I saw him today on the streets of Istanbul, my vision blurred with fear, and when I had come to, he was gone.”
“Some spies you have!” the sultan exclaimed, his eyes flashing at the bowing chief of the guard. “The mere sight of a criminal leaves them trembling!”
He pushed the pockmarked spy away with his foot and retired to his chambers, accompanied by a long line of black slaves.
The viziers, officials, poets, and sages headed towards the exit as a crowd, humming worriedly.
Five minutes later, only the head of the guard remained in the garden. Staring into space with motionless, empty eyes, he lowered himself helplessly onto the marble edge of a basin and sat there for a long time, listening to the quiet splashing and babbling of the fountains in solitude. And he seemed to grow so thin and shriveled that, had the inhabitants of Istanbul seen him just then, they would have dashed every which way, losing their shoes and not stopping to pick them up.
Meanwhile, the pockmarked spy was running through the heated streets, panting, towards the sea. There, he found an Arabian ship about to depart.
The captain of the ship, who had no doubt that the man before him was an escaped bandit, demanded an outrageous price; paying without haggling, the spy ran onto the deck and hid in a dark, dirty corner. Later, when the slender minarets of Istanbul had vanished in the blue haze and a fresh breeze had filled the sails, he crawled out from his sanctuary, walked around the ship, looked every man in the face, and calmed down at last, having made sure that Hodja Nasreddin was not on board.
Since then, the pockmarked spy spent the rest of his life in constant and unceasing fear: no matter where he went, be it Baghdad, Cairo, Teheran, or Damascus, he could not manage to live there for more than three months, because Hodja Nasreddin would invariably appear in the city. Shuddering at the thought of meeting him, the pockmarked spy fled farther and farther. Here, it would be appropriate to compare Hodja Nasreddin to a mighty hurricane chasing a dry yellow leaf, tearing it from the grass and blowing it out of crevices. Thus the pockmarked spy was punished for all the evil he had done!
And on the next day, amazing and unusual events began to transpire in Istanbul! But it does not befit a man to tell of things he had not witnessed and describe lands he had not visited; with these words, we conclude the final chapter of our tale, which could serve as the beginning of a new book about the subsequent adventures of the incomparable and unrivaled Hodja Nasreddin in Istanbul, Baghdad, Teheran, Damascus, and many other famous cities…