The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  But here’s what I did find—the longer I sat with the truth, the cleaner the dishes got. I turned the water as hot as I could stand it and remembered a Zen story I had read several times but never quite understood. A student visits a great Zen master, seeking enlightenment. The student knows he must let the master speak first, according to tradition, but the master does not speak. They sit in silence for a long time. Eventually, the master offers him a bowl of rice, and they eat in silence. Finally, the master speaks.

  “Have you finished eating?” he asks.

  “Yes,” says the student.

  “Now wash your bowl.”

  That’s the story. I’d always found the story unsatisfying, but now, as I scoured the drip pans from the stove, it made perfect sense. Sometimes there’s nothing else to do but wash the dishes. Simple as that. We look for bells and whistles, flash and fanfare, but when you get right down to the truth, sometimes it’s very simple.

  Years earlier I’d traveled through Alaska, telling stories, and was amazed when I visited a glacier. I’d never known what glaciers really were—vast, frozen rivers that scrape bare everything in their path, right down to the hardest stone. That’s what truth is, the stone beneath the ice.

  There was something more in the Zen story: a sense of completion. He’s finished, now he must wash his bowl. That’s what I needed—completion. Closure. To be finished.

  “YOUR HAT?” SAID LENNY, when I handed it to him. It took a moment for the look of recognition to come over his face. “It’s the one I gave you. And you’re giving it back? Why?”

  I sighed. “I’m done . . .”

  It was a late Saturday morning in November, and the air was cold and crisp. I stood on the porch, watching my breath, waiting for his response.

  He looked closely at the hat, which had faded over the years from charcoal gray to the color of ashes, with a shadow of darkness visible where the ribbon had come loose. Inside, the leather band had worn away, and the silk was tattered. He turned it over, holding it as though weighing it, then motioned me in.

  I took my place in the overstuffed chair before the stove and told him what had happened in the weeks since I’d seen him, about the cave and the dishes. When I finished he examined the hat again.

  “So, you’re giving it back, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re sure?” He held it out to me, but I didn’t take it.

  “Okay. Now what?”

  I didn’t know. I already missed the hat. It had been with me on so many journeys; it felt like an old friend. I made a slight move for it, but Lenny pulled away.

  “Nothing weighs more than a lie,” he said. “And you’ve been carrying this one around for some time.” I nodded. “And you’ve finally accepted that your days of telling stories are over, right?” Though I’d said the same thing to myself, it hurt all over again to hear the words from him. “Time to move on, right?”.

  I nodded again.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, you’re ready to begin.”

  “What?”

  “Telling stories.” The words made no sense, but his face was straight.

  “But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I can’t . . . talk.”

  “I know,” he said. “But telling stories is not about the words you say. When you have a story inside you, and an open heart, you become a conduit—the story flows through you. As for the words—” he waved a hand dismissively, “they’re merely commentary.”

  I stared at him. He made no sense. “That’s . . . ridiculous,” I finally managed.

  “Alright,” he said. Without another word, he got up and walked to the kitchen.

  I sat there waiting for several minutes, not sure whether to stay or leave. Was that it? He was through for the day? I listened for a sound from the kitchen, but heard nothing. I had just decided to leave when he called out from the kitchen.

  “Because your confusion is all that you’ve got,” he said, as though answering a question I hadn’t asked. He emerged a moment later holding a tray with a blue-and-white Chinese teapot, a cup, and a saucer. It also held his pink wineglass, filled with water. He placed the glass on the table in front of his seat and set the cup and saucer on the table in front of me. Without speaking, he began to pour my tea, which was dark and brown, very slowly and deliberately. I noticed a slight palsy in his hand as he filled the cup up to the brim. But he didn’t stop pouring. It flowed right over the top and onto the saucer.

  I waved my hands, pointing at the cup, but he didn’t stop.

  The tea flowed over the saucer and onto the table, then down onto the stone floor.

  “Lenny!” I tried to shout, but my voice cracked and faded.

  Still pouring he said, “How can you learn when your head is already full?”

  Finally I understood. It was another story, one he’d told me years before, about a Western philosopher visiting a Zen master, asking him to explain Zen. The master had responded to him just as Lenny had to me.

  “I told you the day we met,” Lenny went on, not the least concerned about the puddle of tea that flowed across the floor, “not to waste your time looking for answers.” He put down the teapot and relit his cigar, which had gone out.

  “What I’ve learned is that the answers come when they’re ready. The harder the question, the simpler the answer. For your question, it probably comes down to a single word.

  “But there’s no point in guessing. The word by itself would be meaningless. First you must learn to love the question: ‘Why did you lose your voice?’” He smiled. “Think of it as . . . a riddle.”

  Lenny had always had a thing for riddles, which he called “naked stories,” and would chew on them the way a dog will chew on an old shoe. “At the heart of every story,” he’d say, “you’ll find a riddle.” I remembered how he would spring them on me during my visits, strange riddles that made no sense. “What’s green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?” he’d once asked. I’d pondered the question for some time, then finally gave up.

  “You give up?” he said. “It’s a herring.”

  “But a herring isn’t green.”

  “So, you could paint it green.”

  “And a herring doesn’t hang on the wall.”

  “You could nail it up.”

  “But a herring doesn’t whistle.”

  “Ah!” he said, triumphantly. “That, I added to make it difficult.”

  The riddles were absurd, but I’d always laughed. Now, here he was again, talking riddles, as though they were filled with meaning.

  “That’s the way it works,” he said, swirling the water around in his wineglass. “Usually, the answer is right there, in front of your face, so obvious you can’t see it. And you never will, until you’re up to your neck in the question.” He blew out a puff of smoke. “But until that day, you’re just sifting through sand.”

  “Sand?” I was lost.

  He nodded. “Like the border guard. Do you know the story?”

  STORY ORIGIN: AUSTRIA

  The Border Guard

  There was once a Swiss guard who worked at the border of Austria. He had worked there for many years and took a great deal of pride in his work.

  One morning an Austrian man arrived at the border, riding a bicycle. On the front of the bike was a basket filled with sand. Another guard might have simply waved him through, but the Swiss guard did not. Instead, he brought out a special comb he kept for just such a purpose and began to sift through the sand in the basket. You see, he suspected the Austrian might be a smuggler. Finding nothing but sand, however, he waved the man through.

  The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that. Though he never found anything, he kept on looking, day after day, for thirty years. Finally, one day, the Swiss guard spoke to the Austrian man. “I must ask you a question,” he said, “that has been on my mind many years. This is my last day of work. Today I shall retire. And all these years, I suspect you have been a smuggler. N
ow I ask you, for I must know—are you indeed a smuggler?”

  The Austrian man hesitated, and the Swiss guard reassured him. “Do not worry—I give you my word of honor that I will not prosecute you. But I must know.”

  “‘Very well,” said the Austrian. “Then I will tell you—I am indeed a smuggler.”

  “Ah-ha!” said the guard. “I knew it! But each day I look through your basket and find nothing but sand. Tell me, please, what have you been smuggling?”

  “Bicycles.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Border Guard

  “IT’S THE HARDEST THING TO DO,” Lenny said, pacing and waving his cigar. “See what’s right in front of your face. God knows, I’ve spent most of my life looking for enlightenment on tops of mountains and now, here I am, right back where I started. The whole thing is a circle.” To underscore this point, he tried to blow a smoke ring, which failed.

  “Tell me,” he said, “do you know how Michelangelo was chosen to paint the Sistine Chapel?” I had no idea. “He won a contest. The Pope had decided that the ceiling of the chapel must be painted by the greatest artist alive. Remember, this was during the Renaissance, and there were plenty of great artists around—Botticelli, Donatello, Leonardo. He sent bishops around Italy to collect one sample showing the very best work of each artist. Finally they got to the famous Michelangelo. He could have given them any one of his works of art, all magnificent. Instead, when he heard what they wanted, he took out a large, blank canvas and a piece of charcoal. As they watched, he drew a large circle on the canvas and handed it to the bishops.

  “They didn’t know what to make of it, but they took it back to the Pope, along with the rest. He examined the artworks again and again, but kept finding himself drawn back to the circle—there was something curious about it. Finally, he could look at no other paintings, just the circle. He measured it and discovered, to his shock, that it was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

  “That’s what life is—a perfect circle. And it is our task to draw it, again and again, on a vast, blank canvas. There’s nothing more complicated and nothing more simple. You start at one point, go around, and eventually get back to the same point.” With his right index finger, he slowly traced a circle in the air.

  “The hard part comes when you’re in the middle. You don’t know what to do, which way to go, forward or backward. It’s like the guy who starts to swim across the river—he gets halfway, decides it’s too far, so he swims back. But you see, in life, there’s no turning back.”

  He opened the door to the stove, and I felt a sudden rush of heat from the fire. He picked up the poker and pushed the logs around. I thought he was going to add another log, but instead he reached over to the table, picked up the hat, and tossed it into the stove. On impulse I jerked forward to grab it, then stopped myself. Using the poker he shoved it in farther, then closed the door.

  I sat transfixed, watching through the glass as the flames surrounded my hat. Slowly it began to smolder, filling the stove with a blue smoke, before the crown suddenly burst into flames.

  I watched it for several minutes, then looked up at Lenny staring at the flames, his face looking as sad as I felt.

  “Letting go,” he said softly. “That’s what life is all about. We’re born with fists clenched, holding tight. Yet we die with our hands open.” He reached out his right hand, palm up. “We have to get good at dying, so we do it a little each day.”

  We sat in silence, staring into the stove, where not a trace of the hat remained. “Tell me,” he finally said, “have you ever heard the story of Cortez and the first thing he did when he reached the New World?”

  Still staring at where my hat had been, I was almost too dumbfounded to respond. But I did know the story—I’d often told it.

  “He burned his ships. Every single one of them,” Lenny said. “And do you know why?”

  I nodded, glad to know the answer to at least one question. “So his . . . men would . . . not turn . . . back.”

  A look I can only describe as shock came over his face. I thought he might be having a second heart attack, but then I noticed him shaking his head. He sighed, the shock giving way to disappointment.

  “What’s the . . .” I began.

  “Don’t do that,” he finally said. “Ever.”

  “What . . .”

  “Even if you’ve heard the story a thousand times, never assume you know it. And never tell the ending.”

  I nodded, though I still did not understand.

  “Because you never know what that story may bring. And there’s no telling what you might miss.” He stared at me, and it felt as though he was searching for something inside me.

  “So,” he said. “You still haven’t answered my question. Are you going to?”

  “What?”

  “Not what, why. Do you know why you want to tell stories?”

  I stared at him, with no idea what he was talking about. I had said nothing about wanting to tell stories. Then it came to me. He was talking about that afternoon, nearly twenty years before, when I’d first knocked on his door. But he’d spoken as though no time had passed.

  “Because without an answer, we’re stuck,” he said. “When you have one, come back.”

  AGAIN, LENNY HAD spun me around. I had come to tell him that I was finished with storytelling, only to have him say that this was the beginning. I had come to him with an answer and he had responded with yet another question, this one dredged up from the distant past.

  Why had I wanted to tell stories? I tried to remember. It was a question I had been asked dozens of times before, by audiences, reporters, and people I met, when they learned I was a storyteller. I had a dozen stock answers, but now all of them seemed shallow and glib.

  The truth was that I had been telling stories for as long as I could remember, starting with the ones I’d told my mother. There were other stories before those, but I had not wanted to hear them. They came from my grandmother, a large, pale woman with white hair and a look of terror on her face. Some mornings we would awake to find her lying asleep on the AstroTurf on the front porch of our house, with a plate of blintzes at her side. She looked so peaceful there, always dressed in the same dress, brown with white polka dots, covering her puffy body, glasses folded at her side. We would step over her on our way to school, careful not to wake her, because if we woke her, she would begin to scream.

  “Where’s your father? The gas men! You have to do something! They follow me! They throw gas at me!”.

  “Grandma, there are no gas men.” We would say. “There’s no such thing.”

  “They chase me! They throw gas at me!”

  We’d try to reason with her. “You can’t throw gas.”

  “Shah!” she would say. “Where’s your father?”

  Her hair had been white since the day she’d left Poland, as a teenager. Before that, it had been blonde. But something had happened to her that day, my father had said, in the Kraków train station. He did not know what it was, other than that it involved two Cossacks and a sum of money, and she had barely escaped alive. But, according to the story, she had awoken on the train the next morning and found that her hair was completely white. The hair color—and the fear—stayed with her until the day she died. Twice she had been locked up in insane asylums, in Cleveland and Chicago, and twice she had escaped, to follow my parents to California. Fearful as she was for her own life, she was terrified for my father’s. She believed her food would save him. That’s why she brought the blintzes; she was convinced my mother was trying to poison my father.

  For me and my brothers, the poisoning idea was the strangest thing of all. Our mother wouldn’t hurt anyone, ever, nor speak an unkind word, under any circumstance. The idea of her poisoning anyone was laughable, or would have been, had my grandmother not believed it. She would call us on the phone, sometimes ten or fifteen times a day. If my mother answered, my grandma would hang up, but if my brothers or I answered, she would start to scream.
>
  “Your mother—she’s a murderer! She’s killing my Bobby!” She would start to cry, leaving us holding the phone, wondering what to do.

  “You have to hang up,” my father explained. “She’s sick. Just hang up. And whatever you do, don’t tell her what’s happening in our house or where I’m working.”

  Each time my father got a new job, my grandmother would find out where he worked. Then she would call his boss and tell him about the poisoning and the gas men. She would do this day after day, until finally, they fired him.

  She wasn’t always crazy. There were times when she could be lucid and sweet, even grandmotherly. Then there would be no talk of gas men, and she would have us over to her apartment, where we would sit on her blue velvet couch eating her homemade blintzes with sour cream and strawberry jam. I wanted to love my grandmother and tried not to think of the craziness, but only of the blintzes, which I looked forward to as a special treat. Then, one night, we went to her apartment, and when she brought out the blintzes, something seemed wrong. My father sniffed at them, cut one open, and began to yell.

  “Mom, what the hell are you doing?” He was furious. “Mothballs! You put mothballs inside the blintzes! Are you trying to kill us?” She said nothing, but stood there, shaking in fear. We never ate blintzes there again.

  These, then, were the first stories I heard—ravings of gas men, poisonings, and death, tales tainted by madness and mothballs.

  STORY ORIGIN: IRAQ

  The Appointment

  Once, in Baghdad, there lived a merchant who sent his servant to the marketplace to buy supplies. While there, the servant looked up, only to see Death staring at him, pointing.

  In fear, the servant dashed back to his master’s house.

  “Master!” he begged. “You must save me! Just now, in the marketplace, I saw Death, staring at me! What can I do?”

  The master thought quickly.

  “Take my horse and ride as quickly as you can to the city of Samarra. You will arrive by nightfall, and there you may hide, so Death will not find you.”