The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1

by Penguin; Robert Irwin; Malcolm Lyons; Ursula Lyons

  When Harun al-Rashid heard this story from Ja‘far, he was astonished and said: ‘These accounts should be written down in letters of gold.’ He then freed the slave and provided the young man with a monthly allowance to allow him to live in comfort. He also gave him one of his own concubines and enrolled him among his intimates.

  ‘This tale, however, is not more wonderful than the story of what happened in the case of the tailor, the hunchback, the Jew, the inspector and the Christian.’ ‘What was that?’ asked the king, AND SHAHRAZAD EXPLAINED:

  I have heard, O fortunate king, that once upon a time, in the old days, in the city of China there lived a tailor, an open-handed man with a liking for pleasure and entertainment. He used to go out with his wife from time to time to see the sights. One afternoon, the two of them went early and came back home towards evening. On their way home, they found a hunchback whose strange appearance would raise a laugh even from a man who had been cheated in a bargain and which would dispel the grief of the sad. The tailor and his wife went over to look at him, and they then invited him to come home with them to keep them company that night. He agreed and accompanied them.

  Night had now fallen and the tailor went off to the market, where he bought a fried fish, together with bread, lemons and a milky dessert. On returning, he set the fish before the hunchback and they ate. His wife then took a large bit of fish and crammed it into her guest’s mouth, which she covered with her hand, telling him that he had to swallow it in one gulp. ‘And I shall not allow you time to chew it.’ The hunchback did swallow it, but it contained a solid bone which stuck in his throat and, his allotted span having come to an end, he died.

  Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say. Then, when it was the twenty-fifth night, she continued:

  I have heard, O auspicious king, that when the tailor’s wife gave the hunchback a mouthful of fish to eat, as his allotted span had ended, he died instantly. ‘There is no might and no power except with God,’ exclaimed the tailor. ‘Poor man, that he should die like this at our hands!’ ‘Why are you wasting time?’ said his wife. ‘Haven’t you heard what the poet says:

  Why do I try to console myself with the impossible,

  When I have never met a friend to bear my sorrows?

  How can one sit on a fire before it is put out?

  To sit on fire brings harm.’

  ‘What am I to do?’ asked her husband. ‘Get up,’ she said. ‘Carry the man in your arms and spread a silk covering over him. We must do this tonight, and I shall go in front, with you following behind. You are to say: “This is my son and this is his mother, and we are taking him to see the doctor.” ’ On hearing this, the tailor got up and carried the hunchback in his arms, while his wife kept saying: ‘My son, may you recover; what is paining you and where are the symptoms of smallpox showing?’ Everyone who saw them said: ‘These people have a child with smallpox.’ They continued on their way, asking for the doctor’s house, until they were directed to the house of a Jewish physician. They knocked on the door and down came a black slave girl, who opened it. When she saw a man carrying a child and accompanied by a woman, she asked: ‘What’s the matter?’ The tailor’s wife replied: ‘We have a child with us and we would like the doctor to have a look at him. Take this quarter dinar, give it to your master, and let him come down to see my sick son.’ The girl went up and the tailor’s wife came through the door and said to her husband: ‘Leave the hunchback here and then let’s make our escape.’ The tailor agreed, and propping the hunchback against the wall, he and his wife made off.

  The slave girl went to the Jew and told him: ‘There is someone at the door with a sick person. His wife is with him and he has handed me a quarter dinar for you to go down to look at him and to prescribe something suitable.’ The Jew, delighted to see the money, got up quickly and went off in the dark, but as soon as he put his foot down, he stumbled over the corpse. ‘O Ezra!’ he cried. ‘O Moses and the Ten Commandments! O Aaron and Joshua, son of Nun! I seem to have stumbled over this sick man and he has fallen down the stairs and died. How can I get the corpse out of my house?’ He carried it inside and told his wife what had happened. She said: ‘Why are you sitting there? If you wait until daybreak, then both you and I will lose our lives. We have to take him up to the roof and drop him into the house of our neighbour, the Muslim. As he is an inspector in charge of the king’s kitchens, he often brings home fat, which the cats and the rats eat. If the corpse is left there overnight, the dogs will come down from the roofs and drag it off, for they do a great deal of damage to all the stuff that he brings home.’

  So the Jew and his wife went up to their roof, carrying the hunchback, and they then lowered him to the ground by his arms and legs, leaving him by the wall, before going off. No sooner had they done this than the inspector came home, opened the door and went up, carrying a lighted candle. He noticed a man standing in the corner under the ventilation shaft. ‘By God!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is a fine thing! It must have been a man who has been stealing my stores!’ Turning to the corpse, he said: ‘It was you who has been stealing the meat and the fat, when I thought it was the cats and dogs of the neighbourhood. I have put myself in the wrong by killing them, when all the time it was you, coming down from the roof.’ He took up a large hammer and, brandishing it, he went up to the corpse and struck it on the breast. When he found that the man was dead, he was moved with grief, and, fearing for his own life, he exclaimed: ‘There is no might and no power except with God Almighty! May God curse the fat and the sheep’s tail!’ He then added: ‘How was it that I brought this man’s life to an end with my own hand?’ The inspector looked at his victim and found that he was a hunchback. ‘Wasn’t it enough for you to be a hunchback,’ he asked, ‘that you had to become a thief and steal meat and fat? O God, the Shelterer, cloak me with Your gracious covering.’ He then hoisted the corpse on to his shoulders as the night was ending and took it out of his house. He continued to carry it until he reached the edge of the market, where he propped it up at the side of a shop at the head of an alley. He then left the corpse and made off.

  A Christian, the king’s broker, was the next to appear on the scene. He was drunk and had come out to go to the baths, realizing, in his drunkenness, that it was nearly time for matins. He went on, staggering as he walked, until, when he was near the corpse, he squatted down to urinate. Then, casting a sideways glance, he saw someone standing there. As it happened, at the beginning of that night his turban had been stolen and when he saw the hunchback leaning against the wall, he imagined the man meant to steal the one that he now had on. So he balled his fist and struck the hunchback on the neck, felling him to the ground. He called to the market watchman, and then, in the excess of his drunkenness, he set about belabouring the corpse and trying to strangle it. The watchman came up and found the Christian kneeling on the Muslim and hitting him. ‘What has he done?’ he asked. The Christian said: ‘He wanted to steal my turban.’ ‘Get away from him,’ ordered the watchman, and when the Christian had got up, he went to the hunchback and found him dead. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘this is a fine thing – a Christian killing a Muslim,’ and after having tied the Christian’s hands, he took him to the house of the wali. All the while the Christian was saying to himself: ‘O Messiah, O Holy Virgin, how could I have killed this man and how quickly he died from a single blow!’ Drunkenness vanished, to be replaced by care, and the Christian together with the hunchback spent the rest of the night until morning in the wali’s house.

  In the morning, the wali sentenced ‘the killer’ to be hanged. The executioner was ordered to proclaim his crime; a gallows was set up under which the Christian was made to stand, and the executioner came and put a rope around his neck. He was on the point of hanging him when the inspector made his way through the crowd. When he saw the Christian about to be hanged, he cleared a way for himself and then said: ‘Don’t do it; it was I who killed him.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ asked the w
ali. ‘I came home last night,’ he said, ‘and found that he had come down through the ventilation shaft and had stolen my goods, so I struck him on the chest with a hammer and he died. I carried him off to the market and propped him up in a lane nearby.’ He added: ‘Is it not enough for me to have killed a Muslim that I should kill a Christian as well? I am the one to be hanged.’ On hearing this, the wali freed the Christian and told the executioner to hang the inspector on his own confession. The executioner took the rope from the neck of the king’s broker and put it round that of the inspector, who was made to stand under the gallows.

  He was about to be hanged when, all of a sudden, the Jewish doctor came through the crowd, shouting to them and to the executioner: ‘Don’t do it! It was I and I alone who killed him. I was at home last night when a man and a woman knocked at my door bringing with them this hunchback, who was sick. They gave my servant girl a quarter of a dinar. She told me about them and handed me the money, but it turned out that the pair had brought the hunchback into the house, left him on the stairs and gone off. I came down to look at him, but in the darkness I tripped over him and he fell down to the bottom of the stairs, killing himself on the spot. My wife and I carried him up to the roof and lowered him into the ventilation shaft of this inspector, who lives next door to us. The man was dead, but when the inspector came and found him in his house, he took him for a thief and struck him with a hammer so that he fell to the ground, leaving the inspector to think that he had killed him. Isn’t it enough for me to have unknowingly killed one Muslim that I should knowingly be responsible for the death of another?’

  When the wali heard this, he told the executioner to release the inspector and to hang the Jew. The executioner took him and put the rope round his neck, but at that the tailor came through the crowd and told him to stop: ‘It was I and I alone who killed the man. Yesterday I went out to see the sights, and in the evening I met this hunchback, drunk and singing at the top of his voice to his tambourine. I invited him home and bought a fish, which we sat down to eat. My wife took a piece of it and making it into a mouthful, she crammed it into his gullet where a bit of it stuck, killing him instantly. Then my wife and I took him to the Jew’s house. The servant girl came down and opened the door for us, and I told her to tell her master that a woman and a man were at the door with a sick person and to ask him to come and look at him. I gave her a quarter of a dinar and while she went up to her master, I carried the hunchback to the head of the stairs and propped him up there, after which my wife and I went away. The Jew came down and tripped over the hunchback and thought that he had killed him. Is that right?’ he asked the Jew. ‘Yes,’ said the Jew, at which the tailor turned to the wali and said: ‘Release the Jew and hang me.’

  When the wali heard what he had to say, he was astonished by the whole affair, which he said should be recorded in books. Then he told the executioner to release the Jew and to hang the tailor on his own confession. ‘I’m tired of this,’ complained the executioner. ‘I bring one man forward and put another one back and no one gets hanged.’ Then he put the rope round the tailor’s neck.

  So much for these people, but as for the hunchback, the story goes that he was the king’s fool and that the king could not bear to be parted from him. After getting drunk, he had left the king and had been away all night. As he was still not back by midday the next day, the king asked some of his courtiers about him, and they replied: ‘Master, his dead body was brought to the wali, who ordered his killer to be hanged. Then a second and a third person arrived, each of them claiming to have killed him and each telling the wali the reason for it.’ When the king heard this, he called to his chamberlain, telling him to go to the wali and to fetch him all those concerned.

  When the chamberlain went there, he found the executioner about to hang the tailor. ‘Don’t do it!’ he shouted, and he told the wali what the king had said. He then brought everyone, the wali, the tailor, the Jew, the Christian and the inspector, and had the corpse of the hunchback carried along with them. When the wali stood before the king, he kissed the ground and told him what had happened to each of them – but there is nothing to be gained from repetition. The king himself was filled with amazement and delight at the story, and gave orders that it should be recorded in letters of gold. He then asked those present whether they had ever heard anything more astonishing than the story of that hunchback.

  At that, the Christian came forward and said: ‘Your majesty, if you give me leave, I will tell you of something that happened to me which was more remarkable, stranger and more entertaining than the story of the hunchback.’ When the king told him to produce his story, HE SAID:

  King of the age, I came to these lands as a trader and it was fate that brought me to you. I was born in Cairo and am a Cairene Copt. I was brought up there and my father was a broker. He died when I had reached manhood and I took his place as a broker. One day when I was sitting there, up came a most handsome young man, wearing splendid clothes and riding on a donkey. When he saw me, he greeted me and I rose as a mark of respect. He then produced a kerchief in which there was a quantity of sesame. ‘How much would an ardabb of this be worth?’ he asked. ‘A hundred dirhams,’ I replied. ‘Bring donkey men and grain measurers and go to Bab al-Nasr and then on to Khan al-Jawali, where you will find me,’ he instructed.

  He then went on his way, leaving me with the kerchief containing the sample. I went round the buyers and got a price of a hundred and twenty dirhams for an ardabb, after which I took four donkey men and went to find the young man waiting for me. When he saw me, he went to the storeroom, opened it and cleared out its contents. We measured them and they amounted to fifty ardabbs, totalling five thousand dirhams. The young man told me: ‘You can have ten dirhams in every ardabb as your brokerage fee, so take the fee and keep four thousand five hundred dirhams for me. When I have finished selling my goods, I will come and collect it.’ I agreed to this, kissed his hand and left him, having made a total profit of a thousand dirhams that day.

  After a month’s absence, the young man turned up and asked me for his money. I got up and, after greeting him, I asked if he would care to have something to eat in my house, but he refused and told me to have the money ready so that he could go off and collect it on his return. He then left and I fetched the money and sat waiting for him. He stayed away for a month and then when he came back, he asked where it was. I got up, greeted him and again invited him to eat with me, but again he refused and told me to have the money ready for him to take when he returned. When he had gone, I went and fetched it and sat waiting for him and again he stayed away for a month. ‘This young man,’ I said, ‘is the perfection of liberality.’

  A month later, he came riding on a mule, splendidly dressed and looking like the moon on the night when it comes to the full. It seemed as though he had emerged from the baths, with his face like the moon, red cheeks, radiant brow and a mole like a speck of ambergris, as the poet says:

  Sun and moon have met in the same zodiac sign,

  Rising with supreme beauty and good fortune.

  This beauty shows us why men envy them;

  How lovely they are when the call of joy rings out.

  Beauty and grace complete their charms,

  Which intelligence adorns and modesty distinguishes.

  God be praised; how wonderful is His creation!

  His wishes with regard to His creation are what He carries out.

  When I saw him, I got up, kissed his hand and called down blessings on him. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘are you not going to take your money?’ ‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked. ‘I shall finish my business and then take it from you,’ after which he turned away. ‘By God,’ I said, ‘when he comes next, I must offer him hospitality because I have made a fortune out of trading with his dirhams.’

  It was at the end of the year that he came, wearing clothes even more splendid than before, and I swore to him that he had to stay with me and taste my hospitality. ‘On condition that whatev
er you spend on me comes out of the money that you are holding for me,’ he replied. I agreed to this and made him sit down, while I went and prepared the necessary food, drink, and so on, which I then presented to him, inviting him to eat in the Name of God. He went to the table and stretched out his left hand, after which he ate with me. This surprised me, and when we had finished, I washed his hand and gave him something to dry it with. We then sat down to talk, after I had offered him some sweetmeats. ‘Sir,’ I said to him, ‘you would relieve me of a worry were you to tell me why you ate with your left hand. Is there perhaps something in your other hand that causes you pain?’ When he heard this, he recited:

  Friend, do not ask what burns within my heart,

  Lest you should bring to light my sickness.

  Not of my own free will have I kept company with Salma

  In place of Laila, but necessity has its own laws.

  He then took out his right arm from his sleeve and there I could see that the hand had been amputated from the arm. This astonished me, but he told me: ‘Don’t be astonished and don’t say to yourself that it was out of pride that I used my left hand to eat with you. There is a remarkable reason for the loss of my right hand.’ When I asked him what that was, he explained: ‘You must know that I come from Baghdad and my father was one of the leading men of that city. When I grew up, I heard pilgrims, travellers and merchants talking about Egypt. That made a lasting impression on me, and so when my father died, I took a large quantity of money and prepared trade goods, consisting of fabrics from Baghdad and Mosul, all of which I loaded up before setting out. As God had decreed, I arrived safely in this city of yours.’ Here the young man broke into tears and recited: