“Of course they might,” said the merchant, “if the chicken had still been alive. But it had been killed and roasted, and the two eggs had been fried.”
The judge seemed inclined, even so, to rule against the merchant. And so the merchant asked for a postponement till the next day, when he’d have further evidence to submit. The judge agreed to this.
Next morning the merchant arrived and stated that Juha would be submitting the proof of his case. They waited, but Juha was very late. At last he turned up.
“Why have you been so long?” the judge shouted furiously. “Keeping us waiting like this?”
“Don’t be angry, sir,” Juha replied meekly. “I was just about to come when my partner, in some land we’re going to plant with wheat, came and asked for the seed. So I waited till I’d boiled around two big sackfuls of wheat, then I gave them to him to sow. That’s why I’m late.”
“An odd sort of excuse that is!” the judge said sarcastically. “Whoever heard of wheat being boiled before it’s sown?”
“And,” said Juha at once, “whoever heard of a roast chicken and fried eggs reproducing and multiplying so much that they’re worth the two hundred dirhams this restaurant owner’s claiming?”
The judge, taken aback, ruled in favor of the merchant.
One night, while Juha and his wife were in bed, he heard footsteps up on the roof. He woke his wife and whispered in her ear to pretend to wake him, then ask him how he’d amassed all his wealth. This she did.
“When I was young,” he told her, “I used to rob houses. And whenever I climbed up onto the roof of a house, I’d wait till the moon rose and its beams were shining down on the skylight. Then I’d grab the rays, say “Salaam, salaam” seven times, and slide down on the beams into the house. I didn’t need a rope. Once I was finished, I’d climb back up the same way. No one in the house had any idea I was there.”
The thief, hearing this, decided he’d picked up a tip that night that was even more precious than anything he might be able to steal. He waited for the moon to rise. Then, when the beams were going down into the skylight, he said “Salaam, salaam” seven times and grabbed at the beams to let himself down through. He fell to the floor and broke his ribs, whereupon Juha rushed over to him, telling his wife to light the lamp before he could escape. But the thief told him:
“Don’t have any fears, brother. As long as you’re so greatly, wondrously wise, and I’m so stupid, I won’t escape you so easily.”
Juha bought three pounds of meat and asked his wife to cook it. This she did, but she ate the meat with some of her relatives. Then, when Juha came and asked for the cooked meat, she told him the cat had eaten it while she was busy preparing other things. Juha took hold of the cat and weighed it; it was, he found, exactly three pounds.
“You cunning woman!” he said to his wife. “If this is the cat, then where’s the meat? And if this is the meat, then where’s the cat?”
A farmer presented a small rabbit to Juha, who was generous to him in return. The farmer thanked him and went off. Next day, two villagers came and awaited Juha’s hospitality. He asked them who they were, and they told him they were the neighbors of the man who’d given the rabbit. So, Juha treated them generously, and they left full of gratitude. On the third day, a group of villagers came to him, and he asked them what they wanted. They were, they said, the neighbors of the neighbors of the man who’d given the rabbit. Juha went into the house, came back with a pot of hot water, and presented it to them.
“Oh neighbors of the neighbors of the man who gave the rabbit,” he said, “this is the sauce of the sauce of the rabbit. You can have it to keep.”
Someone hired Juha, then working as a porter, to carry a container with three big bottles in it. On the way, he said, he’d teach Juha three pieces of wisdom that would stand him in good stead.
Juha started carrying the container and, when they’d gone a third of the way, asked the man to teach him the first piece of wisdom.
“If anyone tells you,” the man answered, “that it’s better to be hungry than to be full, don’t believe him.”
Juha agreed this was true. Then, when they’d gone two-thirds of the way, he asked the man to teach him the second piece of wisdom.
“If anyone tells you,” the man said, “that walking’s better than riding, don’t believe him.”
Again Juha agreed this was true. When they reached the door of the man’s house, Juha asked for the third piece of wisdom.
“If anyone tells you,” the man said, “you’ll be paid a fee for carrying these bottles, don’t believe him.”
Juha flung the container down on the ground.
“If anyone tells you,” he said, “that there’s a single bottle in there that isn’t broken, don’t believe him!”
Juha attended a banquet given by a wealthy person, and a grilled kid was set in front of him. He started eating with gusto.
“From the way you’re tearing into that,” remarked the host, who had a malicious streak, “I wonder if the poor creature’s mother ever gored you.”
“From the sympathy you’re showing for it,” Juha retorted, “people might think its mother had nursed you at her breast.”
Juha had two wives. One evening, when he was sitting with them and enjoying their company, they decided to trap him by asking which one of them he loved the best.
“I love you both the same,” he told them.
“Oh, no,” they said, “you can’t just slither out of it like that. You’re in trouble this time! Now, there’s a pool over there. Just choose which of us you’d rather drown in it. Which one of us are you going to toss in the water?”
Juha hesitated, pondering his dilemma. Finally he turned to his first wife.
“I’ve just remembered, my dear,” he said. “You learned to swim some years back, didn’t you?”
A man hit Juha from behind in the middle of the street, looking to make fun of him. Juha grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him in front of the judge. The man claimed he’d mistaken Juha for a friend of his, someone he often joked with in this heavy-handed way. Juha, though, refused to accept his apology.
The judge knew the offender personally and wanted to spare him any punishment. The best thing to do, he declared, was for Juha to hit the man in the same way, or else agree to take ten dirhams from him by way of compensation. Juha couldn’t resist the lure of the money, and the judge asked the man if he had it with him.
The offender saw what the judge was driving at. He didn’t, he said, have the money with him, but he’d go home and bring it back right away. The judge gave him permission to leave, and he didn’t return. After a long wait, Juha got wise to the judge’s ruse. He came up close to the judge, as if to whisper in his ear, then gave him a mighty slap. As he left, he said:
“If by any chance the man comes back with the money, then I hereby waive it in your favor.”
An irritating man asked Juha to lend him his donkey to carry out some tasks. Juha’s donkey was very dear to him, and he knew, if the donkey struggled under its load or stumbled along the way, that this fat man would probably heap curses and damnation on donkey and owner alike.
So, Juha told him, with apologies, that another friend had borrowed the donkey earlier, to help with his own tasks. The man had no option but to accept the excuse. Then, just as he was leaving, the donkey started braying in the courtyard of the house.
The man was furious.
“Are you telling me, Juha,” he inquired sarcastically, “that the donkey isn’t here, and yet there it is, braying inside?”
Juha decided to cap the man’s cheek with something even cheekier.
“Take it easy, friend,” he said. “I’ve had my say and the donkey’s had his. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, accepting the donkey’s say-so and calling an old gray-bearded man a liar?”
When Juha’s wife passed away, he married a widow, who regularly brought up the merits of her late husband. And, to spite her, he in his turn w
ould recount the numerous merits of his late wife.
Finally he grew tired of all this. One night, when they were sleeping, he kicked her out of bed and she fell onto the floor. Furious, she went to complain to her father.
“I hope you won’t judge me too harshly,” Juha told him. “There are four of us sleeping in the same bed: my late wife and myself, and your daughter and her late husband. There isn’t room in the bed for four, so your daughter rolled out on the floor. Surely you can’t blame me for that?”
Juha was critically ill.
“Go and put on your smartest clothes and most attractive makeup,” he told his wife. “Then come back here to me.”
“How can I leave your side,” she asked, “when you’re here on your deathbed? Do you think I’m ungrateful or weak-willed?”
“No, my dear,” Juha said. “You missed my meaning. I can see the angel of death hovering over me. Perhaps if he saw you in your splendid clothes, and looking so attractive, he might leave me and take you instead!”
Juha visited the city’s governor and told him he’d composed a poem in his praise; if the governor so wished, he’d recite it. The governor agreed, but, when he’d heard it, decided he didn’t like it. He accordingly presented Juha with a donkey’s saddle, which Juha placed on his own back, then left.
As he was leaving the palace, the governor’s wife happened to meet him and asked what it was he was carrying on his shoulder.
“My lady,” Juha answered, “I recited, to our lord the governor, my most splendid poem in his praise. And he presented me with his most splendid piece of clothing.”
The prince of the country (encouraged by the flattery poured out on him by countless people) always claimed he was a poet; indeed the foremost poet in the region. One day, after he’d recited one of his poems, his entourage started heaping praise, striving to point out the wondrous points of rhetoric and the mastery embodied in the poem—all except Juha, who said nothing.
“Didn’t you like it?” the prince asked him. “It’s a literary masterpiece surely!”
“I don’t see any mastery there,” Juha answered.
The prince, furious, ordered Juha to be shut up in the stable, and there he stayed for a whole month.
On a later occasion the prince composed another poem and recited it when Juha was present. Juha quickly rose and made to leave, but the prince stopped him.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To the stable, my lord prince!” Juha answered.
54
Juha the Fool
[Sometimes, in sharp contrast to the anecdotes of the previous section, Juha emerges rather as the fool, or as the butt of humorous situations.]
Juha sent his son to buy him some grapes, but the son was away so long that Juha lost patience. When the boy finally came back, with the grapes, Juha asked him about the figs.
“But,” the son said, “you didn’t ask me to get any figs.”
“When I send you to do one thing for me,” Juha instructed him, “you ought to do two!”
Sometime after this, Juha fell ill and told his son to fetch a doctor. So the son brought a doctor and another man along with him.
“Who’s this second fellow?” Juha asked.
“Didn’t you tell me,” the son answered, “that, whenever you ask me to do one thing, I ought to do two? So, I brought you the doctor, and, if he cures you, that’s fine. If he doesn’t, I brought the gravedigger, too.”
One morning Juha went to the marketplace and bought a donkey. Then he started back home, leading the donkey behind him on a rope. Two thieves followed him, and one of them untied the rope from the donkey’s neck and put it around his own, while the other one took off with the donkey. Juha, meanwhile, was quite unaware of what was happening.
After a while Juha happened to look behind him and saw a man there in place of the donkey.
“Where’s the donkey?” he asked, astonished.
“I’m the donkey,” the thief answered.
“How’s that?” demanded Juha.
The thief explained.
“I was ungrateful to my mother,” he said, “and so she put a curse on me—she prayed the Almighty would turn me into a donkey. Next morning I woke up to find I really had been turned into one. And she took me off to the marketplace and sold me to the man you just bought me from. It seems, God be praised, that I’m now back in my mother’s favor and blessing. I’ve been turned into a human being again.”
“All power is in the Almighty,” Juha observed. “How could I have used you, when you were human all the time? Off you go now.”
With that, Juha untied the rope from around the thief’s neck. “Now,” he warned the man, “don’t upset your mother again! God will compensate me for my loss.”
A week later he went to the marketplace to buy a donkey, and there was the same one he’d bought the week before. He went up to it.
“You ill-omened donkey!” he whispered in its ear. “You’ve been ungrateful to your mother again, after I warned you not to be. You deserve everything that’s happened to you!”
Two imbeciles were walking along a road. “Let’s each make a wish,” one of them said.
The first man said he wished he had a thousand sheep, and the second said he wished he had a thousand wolves.
“Why’s that?” asked the first man.
“So my wolves can eat your sheep,” answered the second.
The first man, furious, began heaping abuse on the second, who gave as good as he got in return, till finally they came to blows.
At this point Juha happened to pass by, with two jars of honey on the back of his donkey, and he asked what the matter was. When they told him, he unloaded the two jars of honey and spilled their contents out on the ground.
“May God,” he said, “shed my blood as I’ve spilled this honey, if you aren’t a pair of imbeciles!”
Juha married a woman who was very fat, and he was afraid she’d be too strong for him and do him harm. One day, when she was chasing after him with a cane in her hand, he hid under the bed, where she was too fat to follow him.
“Come here after me,” he yelled, feeling safe at last. “If you’re man enough!”
“I heard the most extraordinary yelling and din in your house,” a neighbor told him. “It sounded like a quarrel, and then as if something went clattering down the stairs.”
“Well,” Juha said, “there was a bit of a quarrel between me and my wife. She hit my cloak, and it fell on the floor, then clattered down the stairs. That’s what made all the noise.”
But how, his neighbor inquired, could a cloak make such a noise?
“Brother,” Juha answered, “don’t be so fussy over every little detail. I was inside the cloak!”
Juha was trying vainly to sell a cow he had. A broker in the marketplace saw him and offered to sell it for the usual fee. Juha agreed, and the merchant promptly started crying out details of the cow, noting all its various uses and good qualities, including the fact that it was six months pregnant. The cow was swiftly sold.
Sometime after, matchmakers came to Juha’s house to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage to a particular suitor. As they were expanding on his daughter’s good qualities, he remembered the one that had led his cow to be sold so quickly.
“She’s everything you see, and more,” he told the matchmakers. “On top of everything else, she’s six months pregnant!”
55
The Logic of Juha
[Special category of anecdotes featuring “Juha the fool” involves the use, by Juha, of an extraordinary, twisted logic. The following anecdotes, some of them not unlike certain kinds of modern surreal humor, illustrate this “logical” process.]
One day Juha rode to the marketplace on his donkey. He bought some vegetables, put them in the saddlebag, then, flinging the saddlebag over his shoulders, he mounted the donkey and rode off.
“Why,” a friend asked him, “don’t you put the saddlebag on the donkey’s back? T
hat way you won’t have the work of carrying it yourself.”
“Have a fear of God, man!” Juha retorted. “Isn’t it enough that I’m riding this poor donkey? Do you want me to tire it out carrying the saddle- bag, too?”
Juha was digging in the ground outside the city of Kufa, and an acquaintance of his passed by.
“What’s the matter, Juha?” the man asked. “Why are you digging?”
“I buried some money here in the desert,” Juha said, “but I can’t find the spot.”
“Well,” said the other man, “you should have marked it.”
“I did,” replied Juha. “It was right in the shade of a cloud up there in the sky. And now the shade’s completely gone.”
Juha was searching for his lost donkey, muttering the whole time: “Praise be to God!”
“Why do you keep saying that?” people asked him.
“I’m praising God I wasn’t riding my donkey,” he said. “If I had been, I would have been lost, too.”
“Which is more useful,” someone asked Juha, “the sun or the moon?”
He didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“The moon,” he answered firmly. “No question about it.”
“Why’s that?” they asked.
“Because,” he answered, “the sun rises during the day, when you don’t need it. But the moon comes out in the dark. And that’s when you need it.”
He was taking along ten donkeys and riding one of them. It occurred to him to count them, and he found there were only nine. So, he got down and started looking for the tenth donkey. Then, before he remounted, he counted them again and found there were ten.
Classical Arabic Stories Page 21
