“Thin railings!” Hodja Nasreddin cried out in rage, almost feeling the purse shift in his belt. “According to you, it would be enough to surround the bridge with mere twigs! You must understand that it is absolutely necessary for the railing to be thicker and stronger on one side, so the merchant will have something to grab onto if he makes a false step and begins to fall!”
“It is truth itself that speaks through your lips!” the servant exclaimed happily. “Let it be thicker on my side, and I will spare no effort and say a prayer of two hundred words!”
“How about three hundred?” Hodja Nasreddin said angrily.
They argued on the road for a long time. Occasional passers-by who heard fragments of their conversation would bow respectfully, believing Hodja Nasreddin and the pockmarked servant to be pious pilgrims who had returned from worshipping at holy sites.
When they parted, Hodja Nasreddin’s purse was half as heavy: they had decided that the bridge leading the merchant to heaven would be bordered on either side by identical railings, equal in length and strength.
“Farewell, wanderer,” said the servant. “You and I performed a pious deed today.”
“Farewell, kind, faithful, and virtuous servant, who cares so much about saving his master’s soul. Let me say also that you could probably take on Hodja Nasreddin himself in an argument.”
“Why did you mention him?” the servant pricked up his ears.
“No reason. Just came to mind,” Hodja Nasreddin replied, thinking: “Aha!… This is no ordinary fellow!”
“Perhaps you are some distant relative of his?” asked the servant. “Or do you know any of his relatives?”
“No, I have never met him. And I don’t know any of his relatives.”
“Let me confide in you,” the servant leaned down from saddle, “I am a relative of Hodja Nasreddin. I am his cousin. We spent our childhood together.”
His suspicions confirmed, Hodja Nasreddin said nothing. The servant said into his other ear:
“His father, his two brothers, and his uncle have died. You must have heard, wanderer?”
Hodja Nasreddin remained silent.
“What savagery on the part of the emir!” the servant exclaimed in a hypocritical voice.
But Hodja Nasreddin remained silent.
“All the Bukharian viziers are fools!” the servant said suddenly, trembling with impatience and greed, for the capture of freethinkers entailed a large reward from the treasury.
But Hodja Nasreddin stubbornly said nothing.
“And our luminous emir is also a fool!” said the servant. “And, in fact, we don’t even know for sure if there is an Allah in the heavens, or if he doesn’t exist at all.”
But Hodja Nasreddin remained silent, even though a caustic reply had been hanging on the very tip of his tongue for a while. His hopes dashed, the servant cursed and struck the horse with his whip, disappearing around the turn in two leaps. Everything grew quiet. Only the dust kicked up by the hooves whirled and sparkled in the still air, pierced by slanting rays of sunlight.
“Looks like I found myself a relative after all,” Hodja Nasreddin thought derisively. “The old man was not lying: there are truly more spies than flies in Bukhara. I must be more careful, for, as the ancient proverb says, the guilty tongue is chopped off along with the head.”
Thus he rode for a long time, grim one moment, as he thought of his lightened purse, and smiling the next, as he remembered the fight between the tax collector and the haughty rich man.
Chapter 5
After reaching the opposite end of the city, he stopped, entrusted his donkey to the care of a chaikhana keeper, and headed to a cookhouse without delay.
The cookhouse was cramped, smoky, and sooty, filled with noise and racket. The hot flames of the ovens illuminated the sweaty, bare-chested cooks. They hurried and shouted, pushing each other and handing out blows to the kitchen-boys, who were dashing around the cookhouse with crazed eyes, further exacerbating the congestion, the noise, and the commotion. Enormous vats covered with jittering wooden disks made bubbling noises, and a hearty steam thickened beneath the ceiling amid swarms of countless buzzing flies. Oil hissed and splashed fiercely in the gray haze, the walls of the heated braziers were aglow, and fat dripped onto the coals from the spits and burned with a stifling blue fire. They were cooking pilaf, frying kebabs, boiling offal, and baking little pies stuffed with onions, peppers, meat, and tallow; the tallow melted in the ovens and seeped through the dough, boiling with tiny bubbles. With great difficulty, Hodja Nasreddin found an unoccupied spot and squeezed in so tightly that the people he was pushing with his back and sides grunted. But no one became upset or said a word to Hodja Nasreddin, and, as for him, he did not mind at all. He had always loved the hot, crowded bazaar cookhouses, the irregular hubbub, the jokes, the laughter, the shouting, the shoving, and the friendly breathing, chewing, and champing of hundreds of people who are too busy for picky eating after a whole day of hard work: their unbreakable jaws will grind everything, be it sinew or gristle, and their cast-iron stomachs will accept anything so long as it is cheap and plentiful! Like them, Hodja Nasreddin knew how to take the edge off his hunger: without respite, he ate three bowls of noodles, three bowls of pilaf, and finally two dozen little pies, which he strained to finish, true to his rule of never leaving anything on the plate if he had already paid for it.
Then, working his elbows as hard as he could, he headed for the exit, and by the time he reached the fresh air, he was drenched with sweat. His limbs grew weak and languid, as if he had been in a bathhouse, in the hands of a hefty washer-man. Feeling heavy from the food and the heat, he headed for a chaikhana as quickly as his sluggish gait permitted. Once there, he ordered tea and stretched out blissfully on the mats. His eyes would not stay open, and quiet, pleasant thoughts were floating in his head. “I have a lot of money right now. I should put it to use and open a shop – perhaps a pottery shop or a saddle shop; I know these trades, after all. Enough wandering, already. Am I any worse or more foolish than other men that I cannot have a kind, beautiful wife and a son to carry in my arms? By the prophet’s beard, my loudmouth kid will become an inveterate scoundrel, and I will certainly try to pass all my wisdom on to him! Yes, it is decided: Hodja Nasreddin is going to change his restless life. Firstly, I must buy a pottery or saddle shop…”
He began to make calculations. A good shop cost at least three hundred tanga, while he had one hundred and fifty. He recalled the pockmarked servant with curses:
“May Allah strike that bandit blind, he took away the very half that I needed to get started!”
And once again, fortune hurried to his rescue. “Twenty tanga!” someone said all of a sudden, and then Hodja Nasreddin heard the sound of dice being tossed on a copper tray.
At the edge of the platform, near the tethering post where the donkey was tied down, several people were sitting in a tight circle, while the chaikhana keeper was standing next to them and looking over their heads.
“Gambling!” Hodja Nasreddin deduced, raising himself on one elbow. “I should take a look at it, at least from a distance. I won’t play myself, of course: I’m no fool! But why can’t a wise man have a look at fools?”
He got up and approached the players.
“Foolish people!” he whispered to the chaikhana keeper. “They are risking the last of their money hoping to acquire more. Has Muhammad not forbidden Muslims to gamble? Thank god, I am free of this harmful passion... I have to say, though, that red-headed player is really lucky: he just won four times in a row… Look, look – he wins a fifth time! O madman! He is seduced by the false specter of riches, while poverty has already dug a hole on his path. What?… He’s won a sixth time!… I have never seen such a streak of luck. Look, he is betting again! Truly, there is no end to human thoughtlessness; he cannot win all the time, after all! This is how people who come to believe in their false fortune are doomed! One ought to teach a lesson to that red-headed man. Well then, let him win a seventh time, and then I will bet against him myself, although deep in my soul I oppose all gambling and would have long prohibited it, were I the emir!…”