by Mark Helprin
“At this I imagined as best I could that he was a branch on a long timber which awaited trimming before being sawed into logs. How many tens of thousands of times I had knocked off those thick branches with one stroke of my ax. But it was different with a man. I had never killed a man, and I found that I could not move. I was paralyzed. Then I realized that I could not fool myself into imagining that he was a branch to be severed, because he clearly was a man. So I thought, This is a man, not a tree, and I am going to kill him. I was afraid, and I knew that the minute I reached for my sword all hell would break out. I knew that if I hesitated they would kill me, and that if I did nothing they would kill me. This made me so angry that I pulled out my sword and with the most powerful stroke I had ever given (and the fastest), ten times as powerful as was necessary, I simply cut him in half.
“I dropped my sword immediately and grabbed the lower half of his body, throwing it with all my might over into the gorge. Meanwhile his brother had begun firing his rifle and had hit my donkey, who went down on one knee. I could not stand the idea of having the body of the man I had just killed next to me, so at further risk of losing all the gold and my life I picked it up and sent it flying in a wide arc into the gorge. It seemed to hang motionless at the top of the arc, and since the other had stopped firing in his horror at this I had time to grab the faltering donkey and pull him back onto the path. Then the big brother began to fire many bullets, quite accurately I must admit, but they all went into the poor dead animal in front of me. He was smart though, because he began firing into the rocks, which broke into shrapnel and bloodied me all up. I took a silver bowl and some trays from the sack and put it over my head and them over my body, remaining there quite comfortably for another half hour eating lamb and pears and wincing at each shot and ricochet. Then he stopped, thinking either that I was dead, or that if I were not he wasn’t going to change the situation.
“I looked at him through a little space between the donkey’s neck and the ground, and I cannot adequately describe what I saw. I was not afraid of him until that point, because I had planned to stay there until dark and then carry the treasure to the army station. Were he to move back to where I had begun he would have given me an hour’s head start, during which I could easily get to the army base. Were he to wait until dark, the darkness would shield me from his fire. I knew he could not go forward for fear that the troops ahead would kill him, so you see I had turned what they believed to be their great advantage, the safety of the gorge, into my great advantage. And I was unafraid, until I looked under the curve of the donkey’s neck and saw big brother.
“What had been a simple ordinary bandit was suddenly something most different. I could not believe my eyes, and rubbed them. His eyes were red circular coals, but made of fur, and they flashed and glowed. His chin had extended until it looked like the flat wooden pallet bakers use for taking bread out of the oven, and he was foaming at the mouth. Up and down the rock walls sparks flew, and as he gesticulated and mouthed the words of evil animals a hot wind came through the crevasse, and hot drops of rain, and then thunder. The wind, at least it seemed to me, was trying to blow the donkey’s body off the path. The more big brother danced and fumed, the higher the wind became and the more the donkey moved bit by bit, almost imperceptibly. After a while big brother seemed to get tired, the wind died down, and darkness began to fall. Then he seemed to be like a bandit again, with the almost pitiful exaggerated half-bearded chin, and he called out to me: I am going to hunt you down and cut your throat with a razor. I will follow you anywhere on earth, in these mountains, on the seas, in cities, anywhere. I will strike when you think you are safe and comfortable. I can walk through walls—nothing can keep me out—and when I cut your throat I will be laughing and wild with pleasure, and you will be frozen like a board, unable to move as the razor glides. I can do that. You know me, and your life will be far worse than your death, which will be a well of terror.
“Well, I don’t scare that easily, so when darkness fell I cut the treasure from the donkey and pushed him off the ledge, as if to bury him. I heard a hissing of air as he fell into the blue-black darkness. Then, even though it was dark, I almost ran over that path all the way to the army station. I dared not tell them what had happened for fear that they would go mad (those peasant soldiers living alone on mountaintops were really crazy, believe me), but they took me in for a night.
“You don’t believe that they were really crazy? They spent hours slapping each other’s faces. They moaned and whimpered like dogs. They used to go around on stilts to scare away devils. This is not crazy?”
By this time it was dark: no more light came in through the louvres, and the old man had been talking into the night for longer than he thought. Yacov reached out to touch him as if to make sure he were really there, then got up to turn on the light, which blinded them both. Surely this was something his father had imagined long ago on a terrifying day and night in the mountains, and yet even if not entirely consistent, it was convincing. With the excitement of a fool who knows one small thing, Yacov asked his father, “If he were really the Devil, why could he not have flown across the gorge on the wind and killed you with his teeth, or have sent a snake from above to poison you?”
“He wasn’t the Devil. He was only a half devil, perhaps the son of the Devil and a human woman. He had powers, but they were limited. That is why he has grown old, and why I was able to beat him. Very few men, at least not the likes of me, can beat the Devil. But one of his sons, well, that’s different.”
“How can you be sure he knows you are here?”
“Because he is here.”
“Well, I think we should wait and see what happens. Maybe it’s nothing at all. Maybe we are dreaming.”
“Of course my son,” said Najime, “of course we’ll wait, that’s part of it.” He expected the weeks to pass, and they did.
Meanwhile, stories had been spreading about the newcomer. It seems he had arrived from nowhere with a large wagon full of the finest avocados. Since avocados were out of season, he sold them at a very high price and was almost immediately transformed from beggar to prosperous merchant. When people asked him, as they did, where he had gotten so many thousands of avocados he said that his brother had a farm in the desert, where it was so hot that he could grow anything he wanted year round, even at night. It was said that beggars were envious of him, a beggar become rich, and so spread stories such as the one asserting that he sold avocados from his wagon for two weeks day and night and never seemed to run out.
A hundred men threw themselves at his feet and begged to buy this wagon. He picked the richest of them all and told him to run and get his daughter. When the man returned with the beautiful young girl she went wild with desire for the hideous old man and asked for his wrinkled hand in marriage. With tears in his eyes, the father gave consent. They were married the next day. Twenty-five minutes after the wedding feast the father died suddenly of what an autopsy later revealed as starvation.
The stranger then moved into the family house, sold it that evening at a great profit even though everyone knew the city was about to tear it down to build a melon exchange, and pooled his considerable assets to buy up all the salt in Tel Aviv. This was considered a foolish move, until several days later when news came from the south that the country’s salt mines had become filled with hot poisonous gas from fissures in the earth. The salt merchants got together and put all their capital into a large order of Turkish salt to be brought on a ship they purchased as a consortium. News came that the ship had been sunk by the Lebanese. The stranger bought what remained of their businesses for practically nothing, and went to the docks to meet the ship, which had not been sunk, but had doubled in size.
From this point, his dealings became unknown to the people of Ha Tikva, except that it was known that he had somehow gained control of the area’s crime. Every robbery, every drug transaction, every prostitute, fell ultimately under his direction. He caused otherwise friendly murd
erers to fight among themselves, shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders. Dancers pulled their muscles. Hats would not fit on old men who had worn them for thirty years. Honest citizens would suddenly kick a police officer, and when brought to trial full of regret and shame, find themselves able to speak only Japanese.
Something was wrong in Ha Tikva. It became the topic of conversation at all the tables and in all the cafes. A man suggested to his friends that the strange things which happened were only a concealment and distraction in the case of the stranger who had arrived and done so well so suddenly. “You know, you may have a point there,” said one of them just before the house collapsed, from termites said the newspaper, even though the house was made of stone.
The stranger was not to be seen, except on Friday nights, when a uniformed Cossack drove him through the streets in a lacquered red car. They invariably stopped in front of the house of Najime the Persian, the old sawyer, where the stranger sat from eight-thirty to nine-fifteen turning his feet to the front and then to the back again and again, and laughing a very ugly laugh that made children run to their mothers and rats race into their darkest tunnels—only to crash headlong against one another.
Najime stood slightly bent in back of the closed wood louvres, looking calmly at big brother from the mountain pass of a quarter of a century before. Yacov begged to be allowed to shoot him. “That is not the way,” said Najime, “either the gun would explode, or you would miss and kill a friend. You see, he has undoubtedly grown in powers, but so have I. Like you, I probably would have wanted just to go and shoot him, and maybe then, when he and I were younger, I would have had a fair chance. But a young man is no match for him now. Look at all he has done and can do. He can kill effortlessly, but he must kill me as he said he would because I would not fear otherwise. And because he must kill me that way, he will not allow himself to be killed beforehand. So put your gun away. Either he will come here, or 1 will go to him. But I must think about this, because if I am right he has become so skillful in evil that we may even be dealing with the Devil himself. Anyway, this is beyond you, Yacov, because it calls for the strength of the past, the power of memory, the resolve of an old man’s history, and because you are stupid.
“I have one advantage. I am not afraid. I must beat him down if only for the sake of the people of Ha Tikva. Even if I lose he may leave of his own will, but there is no guarantee. Now let me think about it, as if I were trying to find a way to move a large timber through a small door of a little house. Let me think for a while.”
Najime walked every day to the seaside, and stayed there from noon to evening, smoking his pipe and staring at the white foam of the waves and their curling, like his smoke. He knew that an idea of victory could come either deliberately or on the air. But he knew also that ideas of victory which seem to travel on the air alight always on the shoulders of those who have been laboring in thought.
So for a week he left every day, descending the stairs and walking across crowded boulevards, past great white ruins in the old part of the city, which was being leveled and cleared. But one morning as he and Yacov both were shaving in front of a copper bowl filled with boiling water, he clenched his fist around the razor, lifted his eyes, and said, “Aha! I did it once, and now I’ll do it again!” He began to dance around the room, singing, jumping, and prancing, because he had solved his problem.
“Wonderful!” said Yacov, “What are you going to do?”
“Shut up!”
“Why shut up? I’m your son. Tell me.”
“Shut up. I’ll tell you, assuming that I’m alive, by tomorrow night.”
The next morning, Najime arose and put on his best clothes. It was the day before a holiday and many people were dressed for the occasion even then. He wore an old double-breasted pin stripe suit, the stripes hardly visible, the cloth rough, deep, and blue. On his head he carried a Greek straw hat with a chocolate brown band, and in his belt under the coat was the knife he had brought from Persia. The handle was of leather washers, unusual for such a good knife since it deserved an ornamental grip. But in commissioning it Najime had not wanted that. The finest quality leather had become smooth and black over the years from the oil of his hand. A heavy nickel guard, curved inward, made it seem like a small sword. The blade itself was about a foot long, double edged only a few inches back from the tip in a fluted curve. It was cast from the best Swedish steel, which the smith had purchased from a Russian. Najime had sharpened it over the years, and especially carefully the night before. He had spent a good deal of his life sharpening blades. The knife was so sharp that he feared for the scabbard.
“Goodbye Yacov my son. I am going to the synagogue, and then to the barber.” He winked.
Najime left and crossed the street, nodding and greeting as was his custom; alert as a young man hunting in the mountains he stood and prayed by the side of the road, since they were cleaning the synagogue. “Dear God, help me to know evil and to fight it. Help me to resist it, not that I would be evil myself, but that one of its principal parts is to appear as right and proper. And that is something I have wanted to discuss for a long time, but later. I am going, I believe, to do what you would have me do. Although I have not heard from you about this it seems the right thing to do.”
He came to the street of the barber shop and walked toward it, adjusting his knife. Once inside he went directly to one of the old chairs and sat down, asking for a shave. The barber, a little Moroccan, began to lather Najime’s face, already as cleanly shaven as a man’s face could be. Najime had taken pains to do that just an hour before. The barbers manner was casual but somehow very mechanical and automatic, as if he were teaching young barbers. He then went to the razor drawer, picked out a very large razor with a transparent ice-blue handle, and began to sharpen it.
Within the white cloth Najime drew his knife, and as the barber approached with a look of boredom and sleep, Najime jumped from the chair, teeth exposed, the two sides of his mustache raised, and with a tremendously loud cry (the kind that used to go from one mountaintop to another), he stabbed the barber deep in his heart, pushing the knife right up to the hilt.
The other barbers and customers froze while their coworker and barber of many years staggered in a half-circle, and then fell face down on the floor. Najime dropped back into the chair, feeling like a man who has just beaten the Devil. While the police were summoned, a soldier who had witnessed the incident through the window entered the shop and pompously trained his rifle on Najime, who had an angelic look.
The police came. They handcuffed Najime to the chair, and began to write in their books the statements of all concerned. The barbers stated that this man had come to their shop and killed Amzaleg, who was a third owner. They then described the killing in great detail, gesticulating, and glancing now and then at the body for fear of offending it with the color of their portraiture. Najime was silently shaking his head no. To everyone in the shop (by that time about 350 people, various animals, hawkers and vendors of every description, prostitutes plying their trade, entertainers, musicians, etc., etc.), he looked like a madman from an entirely different civilization.
A policeman turned to him and said, “What do you mean, shaking your head no like that?”
Najime replied, “That man is not their friend Amzaleg. Amzaleg is probably in bed with stomach trouble.” The two remaining barbers looked at one another, confirming the presence of a madman. “He,” continued Najime, “is an old enemy of mine from Persia who swore to kill me with a razor, and that was what he was about to do.”
“Nonsense!” screamed the two remaining barbers like twins. “That is Amzaleg, our friend and partner.”
“Turn him over,” said Najime, hardly able to wait until it was done. And when it was done, the long, flat, half-bearded chin was not that of Amzaleg the Moroccan barber, but of the big brother on the mountain.
“Incredible,” said the two barbers in unison.
Later, after he had been released by the police,
Najime went home under what seemed to be lighter and cooler skies. Ha Tikva was awakening from a week of hard work and about to await the sunset and fine food of the holiday. It felt as though there were going to be a rainstorm, although there was not going to be one. Yacov was inside, having heard out the window of all the strange events in the barber shop. When his father came in and took off his coat, the son was reverentially silent. But seeing that the older man was in a good frame of mind, to say the least, he cautiously asked, “How did you know he was the barber?”
“Well,” said Najime, “as a precautionary measure I shaved this morning as cleanly as I could, and that seemed to make no difference to this ‘barber.’ But that was just a precaution, for any barber might have been tired, and overlooked it.”
“Then how did you know he would be there?”
“I didn’t know for sure, but I took a chance. You see, he vowed to kill me with a razor, and I have never been to a barber in my life. Therefore, if I went to a barber, it would have to be him. That is Devil’s conduct, and I have encountered it before. My suspicion was confirmed when I noticed that he had no wedding ring. Every barber in Israel wears a wedding ring. And then, I could feel his presence the way sheep in mountains can feel the approach of a hunter. I have spent a lifetime waiting. I have won.”
And both father and son heard the bakers screaming, “It rises! It rises!” about their newly baked bread. For during the previous few weeks the bread in Ha Tikva Quarter had not risen. Najime was left to spend the rest of his life pondering on whether he had beaten the Devil or just the Devils son, and thinking about the clear air of his mountains and the championships he had been born to take in sawing, chopping, and many village games.
BECAUSE OF THE WATERS OF THE FLOOD